Tag: legalism

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Between the Scylla of Shut Down and the Charybdis of Open Up

Between the Scylla and the Charybdis
Johann Heinrich Füssli – Odysseus in Front of Scylla and Charybdis

Christians have historically navigated between the Scylla of legalism and the Charybdis of license. The Bible begins with the Book of Genesis, and God basically gives Adam and Eve one simple “law” to obey. Do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They disobeyed him and thus began mankind’s odyssey.

Scylla of Legalism

As we move further into the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, there is a proliferation of laws. As Father Longenecker (2014) explains, “For the first time obeying a law code was the way to make God happy.” Perhaps it was also a way for Moses and Aaron to keep an unruly, disobedient and ungrateful caravan of freed Hebrew slaves from angering God and from exhausting them any more than they had.

Then comes Paul and Christianity. Longenecker says, “Unfortunately, the law is not enough, and St Paul unlocked the riddle by telling us that the whole reason for the law was not to make us good enough, but to show us that we could never be good enough. The Christian religion was another innovation. Instead of living by the law, we are called to live by faith in a dynamic relationship with God.”  

Charybdis of License

Most people, even Christians, might ask: what does it mean to be “called to live by faith in a dynamic relationship with God”? It does not provide any real guidance. Although Christians have forgotten or ignored much of the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments continue to have a simplicity and practicality that is conducive to obedience. It is much easier to follow laws if one can actually remember them. License on the other hand requires no memorization and no restraint. Its potential destructiveness is also obvious.

Scylla of Shut Down and the Charybdis of Open Up

Today, as we debate the Scylla of shut down and the Charybdis of open up the economy, we would do well to remember that the safest passage in this crisis is navigating between the two extremes. The left seems to lean toward shutting down, maintaining stay-at-home orders, and the right seems to lean toward opening up, returning to normal.

There are economic consequences to maintaining restrictions that are too strict that go well beyond the stock market but affect ordinary people in real and painful ways. We need to be sensitive to the financial precariousness of their lives and understand that their economic vulnerabilities can quickly develop into other problems, such as domestic violence, child abuse, inescapable poverty and debt.

On the other hand, no restrictions at all would almost certainly exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus, which would bring with it not just illness and death but also economic ramifications, as people would be required to go to work and would feel compelled to do so even if they were feeling unwell.  

This is not a matter of right versus left, legalism or license, shutting down or opening up. It is a matter of assigning proper weight to the risks associated with veering too much in one direction or the other and finding the correct middle path. Jesus’s perfect navigation between the extremes of legalism and license is often underappreciated. He never actually lowered the standards or diluted “the law.” In many respects, he raised them. However, he simultaneously extended tremendous compassion and generosity.

We would do well to adopt his approach to the extent we could – strict but compassionate. Ideally, our government would have acted faster and with more preparation and planning, in particular, making sure that we had adequate tests and medical equipment and were tracing any people suspected of having come into contact with the virus. They would have had to follow stricter self-isolation guidelines, i.e. quarantine, while the remainder of the population could have continued life under a laxer set of preventive measures. Alas, neither competence nor compassion can be found in the present administration.    

My Brother’s Keeper

For the rest of us, let us live in faith in God and in each other. Let us be our brother’s keeper and think of others’ interests as well as our own. Let us remember that some among us are more vulnerable to sickness and death while others are more vulnerable to poverty, which can also lead to sickness and death. Let us not judge others for their particular fears or frustrations, but instead let us pray that our leaders will arrive at a reasonable set of guidelines that avoids both the health and economic dangers to the greatest extent possible.

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Serving Mammon and Selling the Faith Down River

Faith
Photo: Ian Espinosa on Unsplash

It is not about right or left. It is not about socialism or capitalism. It is not about power or money. It is not about politics or culture. It is about the faith – Christianity. If one proclaims to love Jesus, this prioritization would show in various aspects of the person’s life.

When practiced, evangelical Christianity focuses on Scripture, a personal relationship with Jesus who is to be the center of one’s life, accepting Jesus as one’s savior and being born again. The orientation is not supposed to be toward controversial topics, legalism, economics or political positions and persons. It is about one’s relationship with God, in particular the Son of God, plain and simple.

The end of the Constantinian bargain was good for the faith, and the separation of church and state should be respected. In the more recent past, this separation has reverted to an unholy alliance between church, particularly within evangelical Christianity, and state, in this case, the Republican Party.

Huntington (2020) argues that this unfortunate trajectory was triggered by the election of John F. Kennedy, not out of fear of his Catholic faith but of losing influence, power and a hold on the American culture that they thought was veering into a liberal abyss.

The Start of the Faith’s Decline

He writes, “Kennedy’s speech has been cited innumerable times as one of the clearest calls for a separation of church and state, not to mention religious liberty. But, religious conservatives conceived of an America in which Protestant Christianity formed a central, immutable core. Thus, they fought to keep church and state separate while creating their own right-wing blend of religion and politics. They accomplished this by preaching Christian nationalism at the pulpit, organizing campaigns through conservative religious groups, and coordinating their actions with the faith-friendly business community. Eventually, when pressed by broader societal change, Protestant and Catholic conservatives joined forces with the Republican Party, forming a national pan-Christian movement to wage war against political and religious liberalism.”

To state the obvious, it is blatant hypocrisy to practice the very thing one condemns, the intertwining of church and state, and attempting to evangelize the faith while prioritizing power and money will likely be unsuccessful, which the data seem to support. Also, I would argue that this affinity between what is termed the “Christian right” and the Republican Party is now primarily about power and money and less about cultural changes such as the growth of secularism.

Dishonoring the Faith

Balmer (2020) states, “Socialism, they argue, is somehow antithetical to Christianity. Some have even argued that capitalism is sanctioned in the scriptures. Jerry Falwell, one of the founders of the Religious Right, declared that ‘the free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs,’ and his son, Jerry Falwell Jr. recently said, ‘I believe in Jesus’ teachings to do what’s in the best interest of the corporation.’

Clearly, these evangelicals have never read the Acts of the Apostles. ‘All the believers were one in heart and mind,’ Acts 4:32 reads. ‘No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.’”

I would argue that they have heard of and read Acts, but they do not really care about Jesus or Scripture, but themselves. They have become corrupt and power hungry. The serve mammon – not the Lord. They hold their Bibles high not to evangelize the truth and the way but to obfuscate their sins and their self-serving manipulation and exhortation of theology in superficial gestures of piety.

Segal (2015) writes, “But is money more spiritually dangerous than theology? The answer may be trickier than we think, especially within the numbing comfort of a proudly affluent and educated American church. Money is a tangible, countable, often visible god. Theology, on the other hand — if it is cut off from truly knowing and enjoying God himself — can be a soothing, subtle, superficially spiritual god. Both are deadly, but one lulls us into a proud, intellectual, and purely cosmetic confidence and rest before God. Theology will kill you if it does not kindle a deep and abiding love for the God of the Bible, and if it does not inspire a desire for his glory, and not ultimately our own.”

Jesus said, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). The question is: Who do you serve? Honor with your lips and your heart or else it is not honoring but dishonoring the faith.