Well I agree it can be hard to tell the difference between someone saying they're a Christian and someone that is actually trying to be Christlike and even those that are trying to be Christlike do not all agree on what is Christlike. And I admit that alot of the Bible is open to subjectivity.
There's even more to it than that, though. I had a roommate once, for example, who was a
serious bible-thumper, and he believed that being a Christian did not require one to make any attempt to be Christlike; all that was required in his view was to believe in Christ, no behaviors, actions, or deeds of any kind needed.
An excellent demonstration of this was the fact that he was in a serious relationship with a woman at the time, and they had started discussing marriage. Some years before they had met, he had had a vasectomy, but he had never disclosed that to her, and as part of their marriage discussions, it came out that she wanted to have children (and she would not have been willing to adopt). She also told him that she wanted to start trying right then, rather than waiting until after marriage. So he stopped wearing the condoms that he had been using as part of his deception about having been fixed, and they started "trying to have a baby". When some months went by and no pregnancy occurred, she started asking him to see a doctor to "find out what was wrong", and he told her "had a low sperm count". She kept urging him to seek fertility treatment and couldn't understand why he was so reluctant to do so.
Our other roommate kept engaging him in long conversations, trying to make him see that he did not have the right to make this decision unilaterally for her, and he kept shrugging it off and saying that she simply didn't need to know. In other words, it wasn't even that he was doing something wrong and was aware that what he was doing was wrong -- that would have been bad enough as it was -- it was that he was lying to this woman about being sterile
and thought that there was nothing wrong with him doing so.
I personally can easily see how many Christians, upon hearing this story, would probably insist that he was not a Christian at all, and while I would definitely not be concerned to argue the point, I would also say, as I said in my previous post, that as an atheist, I wouldn't have had the right to say the same thing.
If they are not doers of the word then there is really no evidence they truly believe what they say they believe.
I'm inclined to agree, although I do wonder what my roommate would have said in response to that.
And do you guys have any criteria at all that you can apply to seperate those that walk the walk from those that merely talk the talk?
Not really, especially not inasmuch as nobody agrees on what "the walk" is, and some, such as my ex-roommate, would claim that there isn't a walk at all.
