MORALISM & LEGALISM
____________________________________
Moralism Turns to Legalism
Many sincere Christians would define
Christianity as an association of moral beings making moral choices to create a moral community. That might serve as a definition of a self-governing social unit, but it is woefully inadequate as a definition of Christianity.
Morality attempts to suppress the unacceptable (called “evil”) and establish the acceptable (called “good”) by humanly defined and self-determined standards of acceptability. God alone is good (cf. Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19), and the character of goodness can only be derived from Him (cf. III John 11).
Christianity is not morality.
Christianity is not a believe-right, do-right religion based on behavioral conformity to acceptable codes of conduct. The Christian life is not an externally applied process of behavior modification based on “do this” and “don’t do that,” “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.”
Religion often emphasizes the responsibility of the adherent to overcome sin by the reformative self- disciplines of the renunciation of bad habits and resolution to live in accordance with the defined “good.”
The words of Charles G. Finney are pointedly poignant:
Many ministers and leading Christians give perfectly false instruction upon the subject of how to overcome sin. The directions that are generally given on this subject amount to this: “Take your sins in detail, resolve to abstain from them, and fight against them, if need be with prayer and fasting, until you have overcome. Set your will firmly against a relapse into sin, pray and struggle, and resolve that you will not fall, and persist in this until you form the habit of obedience and break up all your sinful habits.” To be sure it is generally added: “In this conflict you must not depend on your own strength, but pray for the help of God.” In a word, much of the teaching, both of the pulpit and the press, really amounts to this: Sanctification is by works, and not by faith.
Now, what is resolved
against in this religion of resolutions and effort to suppress sinful and form holy habits? Do we produce love by resolution? Do we eradicate selfishness by resolution? No, indeed.
. . . To eradicate selfishness from the breast by resolution is an absurdity . . . All our battling with sin in the outward life, by the force of resolution, only ends in making us whited sepulchers. All our battling with desire by the force of resolution is of no avail . . . and will only end in delusion. . . . Away with this religion of resolution! It is a snare of death.12
A common moralistic technique
for dealing with sinfulness is suppressionism – self-enacted attempts to push down, subdue, and restrain the selfish desires of the “flesh.” Our selfishness patterns will never be kept down by self-will, which is the foundational premise of all selfishness. Suppression lapses into masochism and annihilationism in the common attempts to “die to self,” and to “crucify self.” It has been noted that self- crucifixion is impossible – though it might be possible to hammer the spike in one hand, there is no way to pin down the remaining hand, which remains free to facilitate selfishness.
The premise of self-generated right and moral behavior is rampant in the contemporary church. Hardly a sermon is preached that does not advocate commitment, dedication and consecration to better Christian living, to a “purpose driven life.” This evangelical humanism that self-confidently promotes a self-righteousness by the self-action of Christian ability is a miscarriage, an abortion of God’s grace.
Legalism
Though law was superseded by grace in the new covenant of Jesus Christ, there is a constant tendency and temptation among Christians to revert to a law- based paradigm of behavior. “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness” (Rom. 10:4), because the external codification of behavioral rules and regulations has been superseded by “God’s law written upon our hearts” (Jere. 31:33; Heb. 8:10; 10:16).
The indwelling dynamic
of the life of Jesus Christ becomes the provision for manifesting divine character. Christ within the Christian is the inner “law of liberty” (James 1:25; 2:12), allowing the Christian to live in the freedom of grace.
Despite the glorious freedom of Christian grace, there is a natural tendency to fall back into the false security of a legal system that tells us exactly what we should and should not do. Christian religion devises a “Christian law” that proscribes Christian command- ments of acceptable behavior. This is the “Romans Seven Syndrome,” the fallacy of constructing and submitting to law-strictures that are impossible to maintain.
Paul states the frustration
of every Christian trying to keep the guidelines of “Christian law.” “The good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do not wish . . . Wretched man that I am!” (Rom. 7:19,24). Paul recognized, though, what every Christian is obliged to recognize: “If I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me” (Rom. 7:20,21).
Those sin-patterns of selfish action and reaction in our fleshly desires are present in our soul, but they do not constitute who we are, our spiritual identity.
Despite the behavioral conflict between the indwelling Spirit of Christ and the “flesh” patterns (Gal. 5:17), the Christian is not obliged to engage in the self-effort of self-righteousness in attempting to overcome the “indwelling sin” and live righteously.
“Thanks be to God”
(Rom. 7:25), Paul exclaims, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). The Christian need not experience any condemnation for the inability to live the Christian life by the fallacious “independent self” with its false premise of Christian ability by self-effort, for “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:2).
“What the law could not do, weak as it was through the self-effort of the flesh” (Rom. 8:3), the indwelling Spirit of Christ now accomplishes in the expression of the grace of God. Every Christian must come to this realization if they are to appreciate the victory that is theirs in Christ Jesus.
Next:
Confessionalism...
Dr. James Fowler | IOM Staff Writer
*All of the images on this page are live links.
