Friday, January 18, 2008
Freedom and Legalism
Matt Anderson wrote recently about "Christian freedom" and legalism. This was followed up by an excellent post by Randy Thomas with a corporate perspective. Said Matt:
There is a deep and abiding lesson in this observation - we are limited, we are incapable, we are even unreliable. In sum, we are inadequate. It is our failure to realize, acknowledge, and act in presumption of this one essential fact that creates all the problems described here.
People do not want to hear about there inadequacies, that does not mean we are off the hook not telling them. It is, after Christ, the fundamental fact of our faith. It is slowly leaving our liturgy, well if you have a liturgy, it is leaving our preaching, it is leaving our very consciousness. And yet, look here at the consequences. They extend not just to personal behavior, they extend to thought, action, personal and corporate, and even into our theology. It changes the very face of who we are as Christians.
Matt and Randy have pointed out one of the great problems we face these days, and they have done so well. But we need to remember it is just a symptom. If we don't we will just find a whole new way to make a mess of things.
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But as Karl Barth points out near the end of his Commentary on Romans, those who trumpet their Christian freedom are often no stronger than the ‘weaker brothers’ whose legalism they abhor. Commenting on Romans 14:16-18, he writes:What strikes me about this discussion and many others on where we, or the church, go wrong, is our inability to deal with it all. We tend to focus on a specific problem, try to fix it and in the effort create other, sometimes bigger problems. In this instance we have a fight against legalism producing libertine problems. In other places we see a focus on one member of the Trinity excluding valuable action by the others. We see near worship of scripture rather than Who scripture describes. And so it goes....The strength of the strong is confronted by an iron barrier. We now stand before the krisis of what we think to be our freedom, of the freedom in which we rejoice as our good. But it is good only when it is the freedom of the Kingdom of God. Do we understand this? Is our freedom nothing but the freedom which God takes to Himself in our doing or in our not doing? Or is it a freedom which we take to ourselves in His name? Or do we perceive that our freedom is important only when it demonstrates His freedom? Or do we suppose our freedom to be in itself important? In displaying our strength, are we anxious that—righteousness and peace and joy should be made known unto men? Or are we, in fact, in the end concerned with—eating and drinking?
There is a deep and abiding lesson in this observation - we are limited, we are incapable, we are even unreliable. In sum, we are inadequate. It is our failure to realize, acknowledge, and act in presumption of this one essential fact that creates all the problems described here.
People do not want to hear about there inadequacies, that does not mean we are off the hook not telling them. It is, after Christ, the fundamental fact of our faith. It is slowly leaving our liturgy, well if you have a liturgy, it is leaving our preaching, it is leaving our very consciousness. And yet, look here at the consequences. They extend not just to personal behavior, they extend to thought, action, personal and corporate, and even into our theology. It changes the very face of who we are as Christians.
Matt and Randy have pointed out one of the great problems we face these days, and they have done so well. But we need to remember it is just a symptom. If we don't we will just find a whole new way to make a mess of things.
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