In one sense, I am happy to affirm the existence of carnal Christians if, by that, you mean Christians who are battling the flesh. I don’t mind affirming that because that is every Christian. The only other type of person is not a non-carnal Christian, it is a spiritually dead pagan. Christians are those who have been made regenerate by the Spirit and, with his help, seek to follow Jesus and battle the flesh. Everybody else is simply in the flesh, carnal altogether, and therefore not Christian at all but spiritually dead.

If by “carnal Christian” you essentially mean someone who professes faith in Jesus and is saved yet seems to love the world so much their profession is not matched in any way by their lifestyle, I do not recognise that as any sort of biblical category. If James 2 is teaching anything at all, it is that a profession that is not matched by how we live, indeed is undermined by how we live, then our profession is not worth the air into which it is uttered. That is to say, it is a false profession. It is a position we find in 1 John 4 and, indeed, throughout the teaching of Jesus (e.g. Matthew 25 and the parable of the sheep and goats) and the rest of the New Testament.

But, some will say, what about the parable of the sower. There are four types of ground that represent four different kinds of people. They are (so the reasoning goes) those who reject the gospel altogether, those who profess faith but fall away, those who continue in the faith but are “carnal” and those who are active, keen Christians. Surely this teaches that some are carnal Christians?

Well, no. No it doesn’t.

The key to understanding the parable of the sower is that only one kind of soil produces any fruit. The end value of the seed that fell among thorns is precisely the same value as the seed that fell on rocky ground and the seed that fell on the path. None of these soils leads to growth or fruit. That happens only to the seed on good soil.

It also bears working our way through the various things Jesus has to say in his teaching about fruit. The line is always that trees that produce no fruit are useless and good only for burning in fire. Trees that produce bad fruit are similarly good for nothing. Jesus’ essential line – and this is consistently taught throughout the New Testament – is no fruit, no salvation.

A profession of faith is not what saves a person; a profession of faith is one outward sign of the work of regeneration by the Spirit that saves us. That outward profession is evidenced as genuine when it is marked by fruit of the Spirit (there’s that word again) and works empowered by the Spirit. These are all evidences of the saving, regenerative work of the Holy Spirit in the elect. Someone who professes faith but shows no further evidence of the Spirit at work in their life, indeed openly and unrepentantly sins in defiance of the Spirit, is simply making a profession. But we are not saved by our profession; we are saved by God himself at work in us.

The parable of the sower, then, is not showing us that carnal Christians exist (at least, not in the way commonly understood by that term). The parable of the sower is showing us four kinds of people, three of whom are not saved. It is showing that those who reject the word, those who fall away and those who continue to profess faith but produce no fruit in keeping with regeneration and repentance are not Christians. It is showing us that genuine believers produce fruit and only genuine believers have been made regenerate by the Spirit.

So do carnal Christians exist? Yes, kind of. All Christians battle the flesh. There are carnal Christians and there are non-Christians. But does the parable of the sower teach there are carnal Christians, saved but just not very keen? No. That isn’t a biblical category. There are Christians who produce fruit in keeping with faith in Jesus and there are non-Christians. The parable of the sower shows us nothing different to the parable of the sheep and the goats. There are saved and unsaved, and that is it. What the parable of the sower shows us is that those who are saved produce fruit. Where there is no fruit in keeping with the Christian gospel, no matter what a person may say, they are no more a Christian than a person who rejects the gospel altogether.