Before beginning, I should clarify that I’m referring strictly to believers within the body of Christ who believe Paul’s Gospel in this article, and not to believers within the Israel of God who instead believe and obey the Gospel of the Kingdom. If you aren’t familiar with the difference, please read this article: Things that differ
Over the years, there’s been a lot of discussion (and even disagreement) between members of the true body of Christ as to what a true believer needs to actually believe in order to truly be considered a believer, meaning a member of said body of Christ (and yes, there are qualifications as far as what one has to believe when it comes to being able to be considered a believer — which should be obvious based simply on the definition of the word “believer” itself — since otherwise every single human who ever lived would be a believer and a member of the body of Christ). Thankfully, what most (rightly) recognize is that, in order to be considered a believer, one has to believe what Paul called his Gospel as recorded in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 (“For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures”), based on what he said in verses 1 and 2 of that chapter (“Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain”).
Unfortunately, a number of people I do consider to be members of the true body of Christ seem to think that as long as someone believes the words in those two verses (again, verses 3 and 4 of 1 Corinthians 15) are true, then they are indeed a true believer and a member of the body of Christ. The problem with this idea is that basically every single person within Christendom believes that those words themselves are true (be they an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist or a Roman Catholic or a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon, to name just a few of the thousands of the denominations that the nearly 2.4 billion people who believe these words are true are a part of), and hence they would then all be true believers and members of the body of Christ if that’s all that was required of them.
Now, I know that very few members of the true body of Christ actually believe that there are approximately 2.4 billion people alive within the body today, which means nearly every one of them understands that there must be more of a requirement to what one has to believe in order to be considered a true believer than just that. And they’re correct, because the requirement isn’t just believing that the words themselves are true; one also has to understand what the words in those two verses actually mean in order to really be able to be said to truly believe the words (or, at the very least, they have to believe the truths that are contained within those two verses, which means someone who doesn’t necessarily understand the truths about those two verses that I’m laying out in this article, but who does still believe the truths themselves based on other passages of Scripture, would still be a true believer and a member of the body of Christ), because, again, every one of those nearly 2.4 billion people are all in the body of Christ if that weren’t the case.
To put it simply, there are three qualifications for being able to be said to really believe these two verses, and three qualifications alone, which are: A) belief that all humanity is guaranteed future salvation based solely on the fact that Christ died for our sins (which means we’re saved apart from anything we do or choose to do), B) belief that Christ ceased to exist as a conscious being when He was buried, and C) belief that He rose again the third day means He was resurrected from the dead in the same physical — albeit now immortal and (also now) glorified — body three days after His death.
To expand on that a little, one has to believe in the salvation of all humanity apart from any actions or choices anyone makes, be it a “free will” choice or even a predestined choice, in order to be a member of the body of Christ, as I explained in the following article (and if you are at all skeptical about this claim, please, please, please read this whole article, and read it carefully): For our sins
Second, they can’t believe that Jesus Christ is Almighty God, or believe in the immortality of the soul, and be a believer (well, technically, they can’t believe in the immorality of Christ’s soul, since the immortality of our souls isn’t mentioned in those verses either, but it seems unlikely that we would have immortal souls — which we don’t— if Jesus Christ Himself didn’t), as I explained in this article (and like the last claim, if you’re at all skeptical about this one, please read this whole article too, and read it just as carefully): He was buried
And finally, they have to believe in an actual, physical resurrection of Christ’s dead body after 3 days — and not that His body remained dead and that He now exists simply as a glorified ghost somewhere — and be a believer (this particular point is why Paul wrote the first part of 1 Corinthians 15 in the first place, after all).
It’s not just trying to be generous about who is a believer by trying to allow for some to be members of the body despite not believing in the salvation of all, or despite believing in the Trinity (or Modalism) or the immortality of the soul, that’s a problem, however. There’s also the opposite problem, which is that some believers are now instead trying to limit membership to people based on qualifications that aren’t listed in those two verses. For example, a few people seem to be claiming that one has to believe in the pre-existence of Christ in order to be a true believer, while a few others are claiming that belief in the pre-existence of Christ actually disqualifies someone from being a true believer. Regardless of which side of the debate over Christ’s pre-existence happens to be correct, you won’t find anything about this topic mentioned anywhere in verses 3 and 4 of 1 Corinthians 15, which means there’s no basis for either of these assertions.
Another group claims that anyone who believes that “free will” exists can’t be in the body of Christ. And while it’s true that “free will” doesn’t exist, and it’s also true that belief in salvation based on a “free will” choice would definitely disqualify someone from membership in the body, the term “free will” also isn’t mentioned in these two verses, so we have to be careful not to read too much about belief in “free will” when it’s not connected with salvation into them, or else we’re guilty of adding to Scripture, as I explained in this article: Can a member of the body of Christ believe in “free will”?
In addition, certain people from the same group who say that belief in the existence of something called “free will” can’t join the body also claim that it’s actually “justification by faith” that one has to believe in if they want to be able to be said to be a true believer (and that “justification by faith” is somehow what Paul actually meant by “Christ died for our sins”) — as I discussed in that For our sins article I already mentioned above — even though you won’t find the words “justification” or “faith,” or even the concept of believing in justification by faith, in those two verses. What they’re failing to realize when making this claim is that verses 3 and 4 are only talking about general salvation — which is the salvation of all humanity — and not the special salvation connected with membership in the body of Christ that verses 1 and 2 are referring to, which means that anyone making this claim is actually guilty of adding to Scripture too. Basically, Paul is saying in verses 1 and 2 that anyone who believes his Gospel will be saved, referring to the special salvation that includes membership in the body of Christ, and he then went on to explain what his Gospel is in verses 3 and 4, part of which includes the general salvation, which is the salvation of all humanity based on Christ’s death for our sins (and not based on justification by us having faith that the Gospel is true, which is only a part of the special salvation of verses 1 and 2; and again, if you haven’t understood yet that this means one must believe in the salvation of all humanity in order to be considered a member of the body of Christ, please read that article, which I’ll link to again here: For our sins).
And so, we need to be extremely careful about calling people unbelievers based on things that aren’t listed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 specifically. Those are the only two verses we can base whether someone is a true believer or not on — as true as other passages are — and those three qualifications are really the only three qualifications one can refer to in order to differentiate between a believer and an unbeliever. Pretty much anything at all that is added to these three qualifications is adding requirements that aren’t included in Scripture, and doing so would put one on extremely shaky ground (outside of certain clarifications, such as the correct definitions of words in those verses, for example).
As for why I’m so adamant that it’s only those two verses we can base this on, it’s because they’re the only verses that Paul said the special salvation is based on (when he wrote verses 1 and 2 — and we know that he had to be talking about the special salvation in those two verses based on his belief in the general salvation of all humanity that he taught all throughout the rest of his epistles, as well as based on his statement in those two verses that one who believes his Gospel as recorded in verses 3 and 4 is indeed saved, which means that someone who doesn’t believe his Gospel isn’t saved, confirming that there have to be two different types of salvation being referred to in these four verses: one which requires a person to believe something specific — his Gospel — and one which happens apart from anything any of us might believe), and because without limiting it to those specific verses that Paul himself based it on in his epistles, anyone could then take any verse from any of his epistles and claim that someone has to understand what that verse means as well and truly believe it in order to enjoy the special salvation, even though there’s no verse connected with it where Paul also claims that one has to believe it in order to be a member of the body of Christ. And aside from the fact that there would be no scriptural basis for any of us to claim such an additional requirement exists, not to mention how it could also lead us into schisms with groups making all sorts of assertions about what someone has to believe (or disbelieve) in order to be considered a true member of the body (as has already happened in certain cases), it would also mean that there are no verses anywhere in Scripture that definitively lay out what one does have to believe in order to be considered a believer (despite the fact that verses 1 and 2 of 1 Corinthians 15 tell us that verses 3 and 4 of the same chapter are those verses), which would leave it up to all of us to simply guess which verses in Paul’s epistles one has to truly understand and believe in order to be saved (okay, yes, some people might point to Romans 10:9-10, but that passage is actually about salvation under the Gospel of the Kingdom rather than Paul Gospel, as I explained in this article: Confessing and believing).
So I’m calling on all members of the true body of Christ to stick with what Paul actually said one has to believe in order to enjoy the special salvation, and to stick with the logical interpretation of those two verses as I explained above (and in the articles I linked to), because avoiding doing so has led to nothing but confusion for so many, and it’s time for us to come to a unity of the faith, especially when it comes to Paul’s Gospel.