As Jesus says, "you will know them by their fruit", the fruit being sanctification.
Actually, that was not what Jesus was talking about, at least not directly. He was talking about false prophets:
quote:
Matthew 7
15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's
clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes
of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a
corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither [can]
a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn
down, and cast into the fire.
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
The
Matthew 7:20 Test cuts both ways. One day I had lunch with a friend from church, Gary. He told me how for many years he used to be a fundamentalist Christian. He found that he had to turn a blind eye to the every-day facts-of-life that directly contradicted his religious beliefs. Every day he had to engage in ever-increasing levels of self-delusion until it just became too much for him. So one day he finally decided to perform the Matthew 7:20 test on Christianity. OK, some things were good, but a lot more things were bad. Of course, Jesus didn't leave any wiggle-room, now did he? Just one evil fruit is enough to condemn Christianity as a false theology ... and he found many more than just one. So now Gary is, as he expressed it, "an atheist and thorough humanist", which he finds so much more spiritually fulfilling than when he was a Christian.
A possibly interesting side-discussion which could be carried on to your own recent thread,
The False Dichotomy of Natural and Spiritual, concerning both whether an atheist and "thorough humanist" could be spiritually fulfilled, and whether "spiritual" need necessarily be considered something supernatural.
Similarly, one of the problems I have with certain Christian theologies (ie, all the fundamentalist, evangelical, and conservative denominations that I know of) is their zealous embracing of "creation science", which is a carefully (well, kind of carefully) constructed deception and the thoroughly unethical and dishonest conduct of so many creationists that I have observed and encountered for the past three decades. They are the fruits of their tree and, since they are evil, that means that their tree is also evil and must be hewn down and cast into the fire. Jesus' words, not mine, if one is to believe the Bible, which I assume that you do. Remember, no wiggle-room.
So many different theologies. So many different ideas of who is saved and who isn't. I read a piece of religious fiction (a sci-fi/speculative-fiction novel on religious themes,
Only Begotten Daughter) which advanced an interesting idea on the subject. When Satan brings Jessica to Hell, She discovers that everybody is there, except for four people in all of history (including her own father -- She was, after all, born through an act of Immaculate Conception). Jesus was not among them, having gone to Hell to minister to the people there. He was horrified when he learned of the religions that had been based on him.
But the interesting idea put forward was that if any religion were to teach that someone was to go to Hell because he was of a particular group/religion, then he went there. And when you take all religions' teachings into account, it's found that everybody is damned to Hell. So, as the French say,
Soit! ("So be it!"; for non-francophones, it sounds like "swat!" ... just so you can say it if you'd like).
So then, which theology are we to believe? Of course, each person would believe that his own theology is the only true one. And indeed, for most of my aware life, I have repeatedly heard the same argument: "All these different religions, but only one is true." Like the theist as compared to the atheist, wherein the theist disbelieves in only one fewer god than does the atheist, this view is not necessarily accurate. All theologies, after all, are human inventions, the Word of Man. Feable, fallible attempts by fallible humans to divine the Divine ... or at least to attempt to determine the truth about the supernatural, something about which we humans cannot observe or directly learn anything (objections thereto should be directed to my own thread,
So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY), which asks directly how we are supposed to practice the scientific method with supernaturalistic hypotheses, a question that in 225 messages (several of them being me bumping the thread for an answer) had never produced an answer.
My own answer to which theology is the One True Theology is that none of them are. All theologies, by their very nature, get something wrong and so cannot be the One True Theology which, like the Good Tree of the Matthew 7:20 Test, must be absolutely (not in the sense of fundamentalist practice, but rather actually absolutely) and totally True. Yet at the same time that all theologies are false, they are also all true (with the possible exception of a rare few), because they at least get
something right. Even the fundamentalist theologies, difficult to believe though that may be. That is, insofar as they honestly try to ask the right questions -- in my own church and Gary's current one, a catch-phrase is "To Question is the Answer."
Each theology, each group, claims to know or to be able to determine who will be saved and who will not. Except for those groups for whom that is not a question (eg, Universalists). Torturing isolated Bible phrases will not yield the answer.
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