Legalism

I recently wrote a brief defense of the importance of personal effort (or “trying harder”) in God’s gracious design to transform His saints. My central claim was that we put ourselves at odds with the NT if we understand or teach the dynamic of sanctification in a way that devalues or strongly cautions against hard work.

But that doesn’t mean emphasizing hard work has no attendant hazards.

Bob Hayton wrote of one of these pitfalls in a post: Particular Pitfalls of Independent Baptists: Performance-Based Sanctification.

Work hard, feel good; blow it and feel terrible. Where is the confidence in God’s grace in this model? The secret to living victoriously for Christ is gritting your teeth, doing more, and not doing the things you shouldn’t do. Try, try, try. Harder, harder, harder! Don’t quit. Keep going. We say that salvation is by grace, but growing in Christ is about the will power, the commitment and the determination.

This can lead to despair or a terrible form of pride.

The solution Bob advocates (citing Terry Rayburn and Tim Kellar, in part) is to reject trying harder, and focus exclusively on faith. Several Reformed leaders have emphasized a similar perspective in recent years (with a burst of back and forth on the Web beginning in the summer of 2011, see the table posting tomorrow), Tullian Tchividjian and Sean Lucas among them.

My purpose here is to explore the problem Bob and others have described. Perhaps we can come to more fully understand it.

“The Christian life was a treadmill, and I was constantly picking up the pace, pushing myself harder and harder. But like a treadmill, there was no destination, no arrival point that signaled the end of all that pushing. There was just … effort.” (116)

With these words Jinger Duggar Vuolo summarizes, in her new book Becoming Free Indeed, what life was like growing up in a family that adhered to the teachings of Bill Gothard.

In 1956 Humphrey Bogart starred in one of quirkier movies, a comedy titled We’re No Angels. The year is 1895, it’s Christmas morning, and Bogart and two others are convicts on Devil’s Island, the notorious French penal colony. They escape that awful place and make their way to a coastal city in French Guiana and plot their next move.

“Christian liberty.”

What does that bring to your mind? Perhaps you’re thinking of those Facebook debates over the Christian’s use of alcohol or arguments over personal standards. Perhaps it conjures bitter memories of judgmental Christians and legalistic churches.

What if, when we thought of Christian liberty, it brought to mind ideas such as “love,” “God’s glory,” and “service”?

Religious “Legalism” with a capital “L” is heresy. It’s the belief that one’s personal virtue and obedience to religious norms or standards merits God’s favor and/or salvation. This “do-it-yourself” religion is antithetical to the gospel of Christ and the Bible’s grace-based religion. “For by grace you have been saved through faith,” writes the apostle Paul. He goes on to remark, “This is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8).