"Not one of us" is being far more charitable than you might think

Mark Galli tries to be whimsically philosophical about the recent Camping caper.

I once had an aunt with a serious case of schizophrenia. She thought one of her daughters came to her on a beam of light from the moon. She also had rages of temper and threatened to kill her children. Things got so bad, she had to be hospitalized for a time, and then medicated for years.

One day I was driving through the community where she lived, Bryte (just over the river from Sacramento), because my mother spent a large part of her childhood there. I was with my wife and my father; I had asked my dad to explain everything he knew about my late mother's life there—where she lived, the gas station she was born in, and other such lore. We were hoping to do a drive by, wanting to avoid my Aunt Julie at all costs. But as we drove down her street, we spotted a man shouting for help from a rooftop. It appeared his ladder had fallen over. So my dad got out of the car and propped the ladder up against his house.

As fate would have it, this man's house stood next to my aunt's house, and before my dad could make a safe escape, out popped Aunt Julie, "Bob? Bob Galli!? What are you doing here? What a wonderful surprise!"

And before you know it, we were in Aunt Julie's house, sipping coffee and soft drinks, listening to her strange and wonderful stories.

We have a fair number of Aunt Julies in the church, don't we? People who tell strange and wonderful stories about the end of the world. Those who in a crazy burst of [Islamophobia] burn the Koran. Those who are sincerely confused about what type of prosperity the gospel promises. Those on the left and the right who equate their politics with divine politics. Those who are in love with their self-righteousness more than God. Maybe some readers think this author and Christianity Today are crazy aunts!

In any event, each of us has to put up with crazy aunts in the family called the church. Just when we think we can pass them by on the other side of the road (like the priest and the Levite tried to pass by the mugged victim), they come running toward us with a smile and a warm greeting. Or they drop in unexpectedly at our church. Or they make headlines—and this just after we've pulled off a program that's done a pretty good job of making God or the church look cool again.

We're tempted at such moments to distance ourselves from them. To push them away. To lock them out. We're likely to mock them so that others will know we're not like them. In short, we disown them. We say, "They're not one of us."

The problem is that they very much are one of us. They are naming the name of Jesus, proclaiming loyalty to him first and foremost. Often they are making substantial sacrifices of fame or fortune to do what they feel God is calling them to do. And they don't care, because they believe they are doing it for Jesus.

I don't want to be as harsh on Mark as some in the comment section at Christianity Today have been. But I do believe, in this instance, he is stretching the limits of charity and failing to use proper discernment. Harold Camping is not merely a crazy "Aunt Julie" with whom we, the church, must learn to live. He is a self-appointed teacher of false doctrines who has placed himself outside the discipline and accountability of the church. He has gone so far as to claim the church has been under the rule of Satan since 1988 and that all of its ministers are servants of Satan. This is going a little further off the reservation than the average, run of the mill heretic. It is on a par with the Pharisees who said Jesus was casting out demons "by the prince of demons." Jesus responded to such scoffing with a stern rebuke which included a warning about being "guilty of an eternal sin" (Mark 3.22-30).

There is no need for false humility in restraining oneself from stating forthrightly that Camping is "not one of us." He chose himself to disown the church and refuse the discipline of those in authority. No such person can be "doing it for Jesus," no matter how convinced he is in his own deluded mind. To say the church is of Satan is to say Christ is of Satan.

Upon the Harold Camping's of the world, the Word of God has already pronounced sentence.

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. (1 John 2.19)

Moreover, the term used for those who "went out from us" is . . . antichrist (1 John 2.18)! Given the choice, it is far more charitable simply to say Harold Camping is "not one of us." When a man has placed himself outside the authority of the church, there is really nothing else we can say about him to the world upon which has inflicted himself.