Hesitant as I am to raise this issue again, given the heated discussion it prompted last time, I still think it is an important one to talk about (in fact, the flurry of comments seem to indicate that). The question initially revolved around what beliefs people need to share in order to have fellowship with one another. This, in turn—and quite naturally, I think—brought the discussion around to what one needs to believe in order to be saved.

I was reading Martyn Lloyd-Jones' biography on the plane yesterday and was interested to find his perspective on the issue. In the 1950s, he dealt quite frequently with the question of whom to have fellowship with and whom to partner with in the work of the gospel. The religious climate in England in that time was, to say the least, not good, and Lloyd-Jones found evangelicals hard to come by. For this reason,

[Lloyd-Jones] was utterly opposed to making the theology which he believed to be true Calvinism a requirement for fellowship among Christians. For an 'orthodoxy' which prided itself on its exclusiveness he had not the slightest sympathy. He knew that a Christian, dependent on the death of Christ alone for salvation and trusting the Word of God, may have a very limited understanding of how God's grace came to him: 'What an impudence it is,' he says in one place, 'for any of us to expel or withdraw from a fellow sinner saved by the same grace because we believe that his deductions about how grace works are defective as compared with our deductions.' Accordingly...he was ready to give assistance to a number of agencies which did not endorse some of his most deeply held convictions. And he likewise sought to maintain friendships with Christian leaders...whose sympathies were much closer to the Arminian side of evangelicalism (194).

According to the conclusions of my previous post on this matter, you will know that I am in agreement with Lloyd-Jones here. I remain unconvinced that the conditions of Christian fellowship should be more restrictive than what he alludes to here (in light of Romans 10:9, among others). In our mission to further the gospel of Jesus Christ, there is simply too much at stake to draw the lines any sharper than this (Matt. 9:37).