Antinomianism & Legalism

So, tonight we changed gears a little bit.
We have for the last couple weeks been talking about kind of historic doctrinal heresies,
and tonight we’re going to move into a different category.
So at some point in the early church’s history,
certainly by the Reformation,
the heretic term makes a comeback in the Reformation.
There are a couple of people that are burned at the stake on both sides,
from the Catholics and from the Protestants,
but the heresy thing kind of wanes a little bit through the history
of the church, and then we talk more about heretical ideas than things that are classified
probably as heresy.
And so, tonight we’re going to talk about things that have really been present.
At one point they had names,
but when we stopped using their names,
they didn’t really go away.
The ideas continued,
and they’re a little bit less theological,
though they have theology
in them, and they’re a little more practical,
things people argued over that had a,
I would say, more practical aspect than some of what we have been talking about.
So to get there,
we revisit this idea that we brought up last week of Gnosticism,
and one of the tenets of Gnosticism was that,
at least Gnostic Christianity,
this idea that we’re set free from the natural world.
We are released from worldly affairs by the secret knowledge and in Christian Gnostic circles,
the secret knowledge of Christ.
And so one of the questions right away that kind of grows up from Gnosticism,
but we see it in Christianity as well,
is what do we do with the law?
When we get to the New Testament,
they’re asking questions about the Mosaic law,
about Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, what do we do with Jewish law?
And there are differences of opinion on that.
You know, we read that Peter and Paul got sideways with one another because Peter was
part of a group that was advocating that Gentile Christians had to be circumcised,
they had to keep diet laws.
Well, Paul argues his case and wins the day,
essentially, but even in the letter that then
gets written to the Gentiles,
it says you don’t have to be circumcised,
but abstained from blood and strangled animals.
So there’s still some idea that there are these laws that have to be followed.
Let me read a couple of verses,
maybe Paul’s most famous verse is from the first chapter,
first verse of the sixth chapter of Romans,
when he says, “What should we say?
Should we go on sinning that grace may increase?”
And then you put that across from a verse like 1 Corinthians 10,
the 23rd verse,
which reads,
“Everything is permissible,
but everything is not beneficial.
Everything is permissible,
but not everything is constructive.”
So you have this idea that’s kind of growing up in the early church,
that freedom means free to do, essentially, whatever you want.
In other words,
if we are set free from sin in Christ,
if Christ destroys sin,
then there’s no tally.
There’s no rules.
All bets are off.
There is no sin anymore.
And legalism, then, is the pushback that we have to keep the Old Testament law,
that we have to keep the diet laws,
that we have to keep circumcision.
And we see that in this conversation with Peter and Paul.
What do we do with non-Jews who are now going to be Christians?
How Jewish do they have to be in order to enter into the community?
We see that in the tension between verses in Paul and then the book of James.
For instance, in Ephesians,
Paul writes,
chapter 2, 8 through 10, “We are saved by grace and
not by works, so that no one can boast.
We are saved in Christ Jesus to do the works that God set for us ahead of time to do.”
But we are saved by grace,
not by works.
Then you look at James,
who says,
“You see that it is not just our faith that justifies
us, but our works as well.”
And James in several different places.
What good is it if you have faith but you have no works?
You have no deeds.
Can you be saved by such a faith?
And the implied answer from James is no,
you can’t.
So then we have to talk about,
are they saying something different or not?
And this tension is in the early church.
You have people on both sides of this.
You have legalists who want Christians to follow the entire law.
And then you have these freedom people who says,
“There is no law.
There is basically nothing we have to do anymore,
because grace sets us completely
free from that.” And that continues for a long time.
So in Martin Luther’s day,
there is a man named Agra Cola,
is his last name.
He is a good friend of Luther’s.
They grow up in the same community.
They end up teaching together in Wittenberg.
And the main question that is on his plate is,
are good works required?
Is a Christian required to do good work?
And Luther says,
“Yes,
you are saved by grace,
but once you are saved,
it is the expectation
of God, it is the demand of God that you do godly things.
You are required to do good work.”
Agra Cola says, “No,
grace is enough without works.
You are set free from the law completely.
You are not required to do anything.”
And Luther gives this idea a name,
anti-nomianism,
which is kind of a mouthful.
Anti- means no,
and namis is law.
So Luther begins calling these people the anti-nomians.
And he and Agra Cola kind of part company.
He writes a couple of articles about him,
takes him to task for a few things.
Agra Cola leaves, goes somewhere else, where he ends up being forced to repent of his ideas.
But once they are out there,
they are out there.
And his theory is,
his logic is, that if good works don’t help you be saved,
then bad works don’t threaten your salvation.
If you don’t get credit for the good ones,
you don’t get punished for the bad ones.
That’s what he understands grace to mean.
And in his defense,
originally it wasn’t permissiveness.
In other words, he wasn’t saying,
“Get out there and do a bunch of bad stuff.”
But once he cracks that door open,
that’s where people went.
He wasn’t making the case that you should,
but a lot of people then came and took his stuff and said,
“You know what?
We can pursue whatever we want.”
And one of the quotes he left is,
“Faith is perfectly capable of existing without works.”
In other words, faith can be faith,
genuine faith, and have nothing to validate it,
have no work to validate it,
which is not the strain of Christianity that has generally held today.
So this thing called antinomianism catches on.
And Calvin and Luther,
several of the other reformers,
they use this word a lot.
Interestingly enough,
some of their enemies are using it against them.
Calvinists originally get called antinomians because of Calvin’s teachings on grace.
But they’re saying,
“You don’t need works.
Works don’t matter.”
Centuries later, a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer would call this cheap grace.
And I’ll read you the quote,
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance,
baptism without church discipline,
communion without confession.
Cheap grace is grace without discipline,
grace without the cross,
grace without Jesus Christ
living and incarnate.” So historically,
the church has called this a heretical idea.
This guy, Agricola, wasn’t branded a heretic,
he wasn’t burned at the stake or anything like that.
But this idea, the church has said,
this is a bad way to think.
It’s a bad idea to say that once you’re a Christian,
you don’t have to pay any attention
to the instructions God has given the people.
Now, well,
yeah,
I’ll circle around to the other side in a minute.
But we have always said,
the main thrust of the church has always said,
there are things God expects of us.
Those things don’t earn grace.
But once we are in grace,
we are expected to live accordingly.
And you know,
you know this, if your mom or dad ever said,
you know, don’t embarrass our family,
act like you’ve been in public before,
this kind of stuff.
The idea is if you’re a part of this group,
you’re going to act accordingly.
When I traveled as a football player,
our coaches expected us not to look like a bunch of knuckleheads.
The idea was we were representatives,
we were ambassadors of the program and the school
by extension, the coaches,
and we should act and look accordingly.
So that’s where the church has kind of lived.
This idea of freedom is one that the church has said can be dangerous.
And we’ll circle back to this,
but I want to talk about the other side so we can talk about the balance.
On the other side,
you had a group in the late 200s called the Donatists.
The late 200s to the early 300s.
This was a group that was very concerned,
if you remember your church history from the
200s up to about the 300s,
there’s some significant persecution in the church.
By the 300s, it’s getting better for Christians,
but up until that time,
it’s fairly dangerous in some circles to be a Christian,
including being put to death,
being put in the Colosseum,
being burned, being put on the cross,
being beheaded, all that stuff.
Well, the question came in the church,
when things settled down a little bit,
people started coming back into the church who had laid low when it was dangerous.
And these people were called traitors,
traitors.
In other words, when it was dangerous to be a Christian,
they disappeared,
right?
If somebody came and put a sign,
anyone here next Sunday goes to prison,
then we’d know who was serious by who came,
right?
Or we’d change church time or something, we’d do something.
But they were concerned that these people had backslid,
and some of them were priests.
And so then they had this question,
what happens if my child was baptized by a priest,
and then that priest renounced his faith so he didn’t have to go be killed?
And this group thought,
well, then the baptism didn’t count.
All the sacraments that that priest did,
or the works that that Christian did,
they’re invalid.
They no longer count.
So your child wasn’t baptized.
The closest thing we’d say now is,
what do you do with the work that a priest has done,
and then that priest is convicted of inappropriate behavior with children?
Were they a real priest or not?
What if that priest baptized your child?
Is your child legitimately baptized?
Given that in the long run,
it looks like that priest at very best was a bad priest.
And at worst,
wasn’t a very Christian person at all.
So the Donatists believed that that was invalid.
The rest of the church,
I think to their credit,
said even a bad leader performing a sacrament
in the name of Christ performs a valid sacrament.
So they didn’t re-baptize.
They didn’t invalidate everything that happened under that person.
But the Donatists were very rigorous,
and they believed that the church had to be extremely pure,
that the church should be a collection of saints,
which is a word that means “holy
ones.” So they had very high moral expectations.
They had very steep punishments and penance for sins.
In 409,
they are declared heretics,
and they sort of fade out of existence,
but their ideas stick with us.
There’s another group in that same time frame.
They’re called the Ebionites.
And the Ebionites are a Christian Jewish sect of the early church.
And they say,
“In order to be Christian, Jesus is Jewish.
Jesus ate Jewish food.
Jesus kept Jewish holidays.
Jesus did Sabbath.” You have to do all that.
If you’re going to follow Jesus,
you follow all of the Jewish rights and legal codes.
This too,
in the mid-300s,
is declared herecieved by the church fathers.
And this one fades out fairly quickly because,
let’s face it, that stuff’s all hard,
and people didn’t want to do it.
And so by 400 or so,
that’s pretty much gone.
But these are the forerunners of a trend that we would call in the church “legalism.”
And though we’ve never called it heresy,
it has at many times been a bad idea and a difficult
tendency in the church.
It’s really more of a practice than a theological belief,
and the practice is that it elevates law over grace.
It tends to minimize forgiveness and maximize accountability.
And it demands moral behavior,
not simply as reflective of Christians,
but required of Christians.
So legalism is essentially to boil the gospel down to rules and regulations,
which is called nominism,
but we know it far more frequently as legalism.
And very few Christians will call themselves legalists.
It’s not a term that a lot of people would apply to themselves most likely,
but they do tend
to the conservative side of the Christian spectrum.
Essentially, it’s Phariseeism.
It’s rules at the expense of faith or people.
At its worst,
it works righteousness.
It has often accented withdrawing from the world,
not having anything to do with the culture.
There was a time in the church,
even in the Protestant church,
Presbyterian church, where in order to have communion,
one had to have a token.
The elders and the pastors would go and essentially interview people.
So I would go to the Williams house and sit down with them and say,
“Have you been arguing?
Have you crossed anybody?
Have you done anything you shouldn’t have done?”
And if I believed that they said no,
then I’d give them a token,
and then they could turn that
token in and have communion.
On the other hand,
if they came to my house and I said,
“Yeah, I’m fighting with my neighbor,
and I took some stuff out of his yard,
and I’m not going to give it back until he apologizes,”
then they’d say, “Okay, no communion token for you.
You’re not ready.
You can’t have communion.”
And so we have some of this in our history, in our background.
It also comes up sometimes in regard to tithing.
If you’re not doing 10 percent,
that’s not okay.
At worst,
it is to be saved by our works,
and at best,
it’s adding a pretty heavy yoke on people.
So I was trying to think of some examples of legalism that I know from my own experience,
and maybe my favorite,
I had a serious conversation with someone.
Well, I should say they were serious.
I wasn’t particularly serious.
But I remember a conversation in which a person with deep sincerity was either riding with me
or was aware that if I think I can get away with it,
I’ll speed when I drive.
If I think I’ll get caught,
I won’t.
But I take the speed limit as,
you know,
here’s the number that if you get caught,
it’s going to cost you.
But I don’t take it as sin.
I don’t take it as ethical, moral failure.
And the person I was talking to was,
I think, deeply offended and said to me,
“It is absolutely a sin for a Christian to disobey a speed limit.”
That is disobedience to the governing powers that are over you,
and that is sinful.
Not bad, not wrong.
Sinful.
Like I need forgiveness for speeding.
And I said, “Not a chance.” No, I mean,
no way.
Some other legalistic things that I’m aware of.
I had a conversation with someone who said that if it’s not the King James,
it’s not the Bible.
I want the Bible Jesus had,
the King James Bible.
And that’s the only Bible that you could read from.
People who said you couldn’t be a true Christian if you smoked or drank.
That true Christians wouldn’t engage in those behaviors.
In fact, I had a friend who is a Baptist pastor,
and when he was an intern at a church,
there was a lady kind of going on about drinking and it being sinful.
And he said, trying to be helpful, “Well, you know,
Jesus and the disciples drank wine.” And she said,
“Yes, and I would think more of them if they hadn’t.”
[laughter]
Dancing,
wearing particular clothing,
music,
tattoos,
and yeah,
cards was one.
Michael was telling me about cards.
I didn’t know that cards was one of them.
I haven’t run into cards.
And in fairness, there are valid points to that.
I mean, there are places we should talk about what kind of dancing we do and what kind of clothing.
I’ve got two daughters.
The clothing thing, I get it.
But music,
what you put into your mind, in your ears,
what it says, tattoos,
is this wise or not?
Those are all valid points,
but to argue that they are somehow inherently moral points
or religious points is to lean this direction,
I would say, somewhat strongly.
Another one that you all will be very aware of,
those of you particularly with some maybe local connections,
Sabbath,
what’s allowed on Sunday and what isn’t.
Can you mow your yard?
Can you make a lunch?
Can you go get groceries?
Can you do anything?
What’s acceptable and what is, again,
and the language is,
sinful.
And legalism has been a deep part of our country’s religious history.
Puritanism and conservatism,
it tends to live on the right-hand side of the spectrum.
Antinomianism tends to live on the left-hand side of the spectrum.
But it is a dangerous tendency we’ve had to try and draw fixed boundaries where there are probably only guidelines.
And remember when we started this study,
we talked about heresy being the tendency to want to remove tension in something.
Instead of standing in the middle and trying to do justice to two sides of an issue,
heresy tends to elevate one and flatten the other.
So in the case of legalism,
we take law and we raise it up as ultimate,
as perhaps inordinately important.
In the case of antinomianism, we take grace,
we take freedom,
and we lift that perhaps higher than it should be, flattening law.
So let me stop there and ask if there are any thoughts or questions on these,
and then we’ll finish up with a discussion about the middle ground.
Comments, questions, thoughts?
In your experience,
which is more prevalent?
Legalism?
No question.
Permissiveness has not been…
I do think we live in a permissive…
One of the ways we exercise this concept of freedom is permissiveness,
culturally.
And that’s not in the church,
so I kind of took you out of the way.
It’s not not in the church.
You could go through lots of examples,
divorce,
what kind of music,
music at all, for that matter.
What kind of music?
She’s no longer with us,
so I can tell the story.
We had a church member who often said,
“The day that a drum set comes in,
I’m gone.”
And I think, lucky for all of us,
she was gone before that happened.
But, I mean,
the idea…
I will leave my faith community because they’re going to play drums.
That’s not in here.
I haven’t found it in here,
right?
That’s a personal opinion.
Oregon versus piano,
carpet versus tile.
I mean,
the danger of legalism is twofold.
One, it does elevate rules,
but secondly, it gives me a wonderful platform to enforce my opinion
and to validate and voice my opinion.
Sometimes about things that maybe are opinion,
like Christians shouldn’t speed.
Well, let’s talk about that.
Is that disobeying the government?
Right, I mean, that’s probably a thing we could talk about,
but to declare it for yourself and others
that feels different to me.
That feels like, “Whoa,
thou shalt not.” Done.
Anything else?
Comments, questions?
How about driving with a couple of mirrors?
That’s…
yeah. Where that is there.
Don’t do it, Mark.
I haven’t had a couple of hours.
That’s a good question,
Mark. I mean,
clearly that’s unwise.
We can even say stupid.
Dangerous.
Sinful.
Sinful.
Your speeding is as much a possibility of a crash…
Oh, I disagree.
I think statistically impaired driving is more dangerous than fast driving.
But again,
we’d be kind of splitting hairs at that point.
I think that’s a good question.
Clearly there is a line somewhere in our issues
where we move from bad practice to ungodly practice.
How we define that line is sort of in the conclusion here.
Michael has an answer for us.
But I do think the connection between both of those poles,
which speaks to that point,
the thing that’s exact same about both of these
is where you locate the judgment.
Who is the judger?
I just made up a word.
Who’s the judge?
Who’s the one doing the judging?
That is you.
In the case of legalism,
you’re determining what is and is not in bounds.
In the case of antinomianism,
you’re the one who gets to determine the extent to which you go.
Both of those, you are the judge.
And fundamentally,
as Christians,
sin is determined not by the sinner
but by the one who created and redeems and judges.
And so that’s why I think you can make the argument
that Paul doesn’t turn against law
when he tells the Corinthians to give priority
to your brothers and sisters in Christ.
What he’s saying is you need to judge your action
based upon the community.
What is and is not helpful for the outbuilding of the faith?
And so I think you can make the argument
that Reverend Lovell speeding on his way to Sioux City
doesn’t break down the faith of the congregation, to my knowledge.
But the idea of a member of First Presbyterian Church,
who’s a–and I don’t mean that as a member,
like a card-carrying member.
That’s not what I mean.
I mean a person in the fold,
right?
Someone who is seeking to be fashioned in the image of Christ,
being in the newspaper with a mugshot
for driving under the influence,
that doesn’t reflect well on the being in Christ’s image.
How about that same item in the paper
about the preacher that speeded?
[laughter]
Wait, what paper do you read?
I didn’t know that was in there.
I don’t want– [laughter] There is.
Under sirens.
Yeah.
Well, I grew up in a community
that was a very American church
because it might lead to dancing.
[laughter]
[laughter]
Yeah,
dancing has been– there have been hard-fought battles over dancing.
[laughter]
And women wearing pants.
And I think one of the struggles of legalism
is that it can get tricky to sort out
what is theological from what is cultural.
The idea, right, that women shouldn’t wear pants
because then they’re trying to be male,
which is going against the created order.
Somebody established that idea.
That’s a cultural kind of idea.
So, though it gets couched in theological language,
it doesn’t seem like a particularly theological idea.
At least,
I think a community could say that.
The thing that has always kind of made me nervous about legalism
is for whatever reason,
we don’t have a lot of record of Jesus arguing with these people.
We have lots of instances of Jesus arguing with these people.
Now, I will say Paul jumps in here once in a while.
There’s a passage in Corinthians where the Corinthians,
who really thought because of Jesus,
all bets are off,
they had a man living with his mother-in-law
in a kind of a sketchy situation,
and Paul says,
kick them out of church.
Anybody who wants to read Paul as fuzzy and anything goes
just hasn’t read very much of what he wrote.
Paul says, no, that’s unacceptable,
and you can’t tolerate it.
So, there clearly are instances where there’s line.
So, then I think the question,
as we live out our faith,
is how do we find ourselves navigate both of these?
I think we could agree that on either end of the spectrum,
there’s danger.
So, how do we maintain that place in the middle
where there is some tension?
Where there is accountability,
and there is freedom.
There are things we would be willing to say are absolute musts and absolute must-nots.
There are things that are right,
and there are things that are wrong.
There are other things we would say,
I’d do it this way,
you do it that way.
We have a difference of opinion,
but it’s not a moral difference.
It’s not a theological difference.
You like hymns?
I like songs.
You like short sermons?
I like really long sermons.
So, how do we balance our accountability and our freedom?
How do we live between lots of rules,
some of which are arbitrary,
and no concept of what’s right and wrong?
Where do we find that middle?
And I think in some case,
it comes down to Biblical guidance versus Biblical literalism.
When we try to read the Bible as a rule book,
we are going to inevitably end up down here.
When we try to take the principles,
teachings, and directions of the Scripture
and incorporate them into our freedom to discover where the limits are,
then it seems to me we’re being guided by the best of our tradition in regard to the Scripture.
I can’t get off the hook for not loving my neighbor.
Well, my neighbor’s a Democrat,
a Republican, a Muslim,
a homosexual,
a whatever,
a Broncos fan.
I don’t have to love my neighbor because he’s always going to run into the truth of Scripture.
You’re never going to sell that argument to the guy who said, “Love your neighbor.”
You’re just not.
So, how do we be guided by the truth of Scripture?
How do we come to see our works as an expression of salvation?
We live in a tradition that said Christians should absolutely be doing Christian things
and trying really hard not to do non-Christian things.
We agree on that.
We may not agree on exactly where the line is between Christian and non-Christian.
We may have to sort that out.
But we’ve always said as Presbyterians,
it matters what we do.
It matters how we talk.
It matters how we spend.
It matters the kind of behaviors we exhibit and the kind of choices we make.
Because we belong to Christ and what we say and do should reflect that reality.
Not so that we’ll get saved,
but because we are already saved.
We’re not trying to earn grace.
We’re trying to live out grace.
And grace, I tried to say this this morning and I found myself coming back to it this afternoon.
Grace leads to gratitude and then gratitude leads to gestures, to actions.
We receive grace.
We are thankful for that grace.
And because we are thankful,
it changes,
it influences how we behave.
So to fixate on what we have to do or what we can’t do threatens grace
because that makes it about the law and not about the Savior.
And we do better when we keep our eyes here.
We do better when we put the blinders on either side of this and this is our focus.
He is our focus.
Christ does set us free from the law.
Paul tells us we’re no longer under the judgment of the law.
We are under grace.
But the law acts as our guide.
The law acts as a map.
Do not worship idols.
Do not kill.
Do not steal.
Do not commit adultery.
Honor your mother and father.
You could go right down the list.
The moral law particularly acts as a map for us.
A picture of what this life looks like and what we see in Christ.
And so then the law rather than becoming irrelevant or stick becomes a guideline.
It becomes direction.
And I think at our best we’ve lived there.
There aren’t, in my experience, maybe your experience is different.
There aren’t a ton of legalistic Presbyterians.
There are some,
but in general we can’t hold a candle to the Southern Baptists and some of our more conservative friends.
Legalism has been a little bit more their struggle,
though we’ve had our days with it certainly.
But generally speaking,
I find that Presbyterians perhaps struggle a little more with the idea that
we don’t have to do anything that we can choose,
that we can set our direction,
that I’m free to do or not do basically what I please.
And that has some danger in it as well.
So let me stop there.
I feel like I’ve been talking too much a lot.
So what do you got?
Comments, questions,
thoughts?
Yes, sir.
What was the verse in the Bible?
I’m sorry.
I think it was Paul,
but I’m not sure he was talking about,
I think it was eating something that would be offensive to the people around you.
So Paul,
in regard to some of these conversations,
he introduces a middle,
again I would say middle ground.
He said this idea of weaker and stronger,
and I almost wish he would have used different words,
but the idea essentially is I’m free to eat whatever I want.
But if I’m going to eat something that offends you,
who may come with a more legalistic thing,
then I shouldn’t do that.
I shouldn’t do something I know harms your conscience even if it doesn’t harm mine.
And the beauty of that is that Paul takes accountability away from what I can and can’t do,
and puts it in relationship with other people.
What is my responsibility to this new Christian who is a teetotaler if he sees me drinking a beer?
Well, if I know that bothers him,
then I won’t do it.
I will,
until we can have that conversation,
or until I’m not going to flaunt that in front of him because it offends his conscience.
And Paul introduces this idea of being accountable to one another as a middle ground,
kind of a third way,
and it’s pretty helpful.
In fact,
he goes so far as to say at some point,
if eating meat offends someone,
I’ll never eat meat again.
In other words, if I think I’m going to harm other people’s faith,
then I just won’t do it.
But that’s a conversation you can only have in the middle ground.
I mean, again,
you kind of need to be in the messy part
to sort that out.
You need to be in relationship.
Anything else?
Well, it pops to my mind why you’re saying that,
Chris, because maybe one of the reasons why this is hard to find traction is the debate over ideology and food.
Everybody was on the same page that that had meat,
right?
The idea is that Paul’s argument was Jesus Christ is Lord,
so the idols that they sacrificed the food to clearly aren’t gods.
But everyone who was worried about the idolatry was worried about that as being a real thing.
In a world in which so much of our spirituality is personal preference,
it becomes a little bit harder.
In other words, I
don’t eat meat.
That’s my personal preference.
Well, is that the same as shying away from it because of idolatry?
I mean, we don’t have the same kind of religious conviction,
and yet we still have all these personal preferences.
So it does muddy the waters in terms of, for Paul,
he can say, “Well, I’m not going to eat meat.”
But he didn’t mean just because you’re a vegetarian.
I mean, there are deep spiritual significance there,
and that’s maybe harder for us to find traction in a day where it seems bold to have a million different personal preferences.
And so this whole conversation takes place in 1 Corinthians 8,
and toward the end,
Paul says this, “Be careful,
however,
that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak.”
And you could say just as easily here,
“To your brother or sister.
For if someone with a weak conscience sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple,
won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols?
So the weak brother for whom Christ died is destroyed by your knowledge.
When you sin against your brother this way,
you wound the weak conscience,
and you sin against Christ.
Therefore,
if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin,
I will never eat meat again so that I will not cause him to fall.”
Michael is exactly right that that’s a very specific,
but this entry verse,
“Be careful that exercising your freedom does not become a stumbling block,” is, I think,
new ground in the faith.
The idea that alongside of right and wrong,
there is this middle path that is relational,
that is accountable to others,
and that right or wrong may not be in the act itself,
but in the acts impact on someone else.
And that, I think, is helpful.
It’s messier because you don’t have a clear rule book,
but I think it’s better.
And I think it’s more faithful,
though more difficult.
Anything else?
The clear rules are,
“Thou shalt not kill.” I was drafted.
Yeah.
So then what?
The Church has had lots of conversations on what “thou shalt not kill” means.
Historically,
it has been translated,
when there were issues,
it has been translated “murder.”
So that the soldier doing their job was generally not considered to be breaking the commandment,
though not every place in the Church has agreed with that.
The Seventh-day Adventists, for example,
are very strict pacifists who take that verse literally.
But it has often been translated,
or at least interpreted to mean,
“Thou shalt not murder.”
That makes sense.
I dropped out of the faith instead.
Well,
yeah.
I don’t know that it has to be one or the other.
But I never got to that point.
I know lots of Christians in the military who,
to some degree, either do or don’t struggle with that very question.
I didn’t know what I would do at that point.
And personally, I’ve never been in that situation.
Well, I don’t know what it is.
Yeah,
I wish nobody was.
But I think that it’s good that we have those difficult…
I think it’s good that’s not an easy matter.
That
the Christian put in harm’s way,
to some extent, to keep others out of harm,
wrestle with that idea of taking a life.
That shouldn’t be of no consequence.
It didn’t seem to be in the Old Testament.
No, the Old Testament generally…
It never applied to enemies.
Yeah.
It was most often murder.
I mean,
it was eye for eye unless the eye belonged to somebody that wasn’t in your tribe.
Yeah.
I came from a very legalistic background
as my story literally attests.
When I first came to the Presbyterian Church here,
because I was dating a Presbyterian,
it was like a breath of crochet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know,
I’m a lifelong Presbyterian,
and so I’m attracted to the space to sort that out for myself and within community.
And so for me,
this middle ground is far more attractive than the options.
I think the benefit of legalism for people is that it feels safe and it feels clear.
It’s a black and white list.
It’s yes, it’s no.
There’s not gray.
There’s not maybe.
It’s,
you play cards?
No.
You dance?
No.
Not, do you do this dance or that dance,
or what do you mean?
It feels safe, I think, to people,
the idea that there’s clearly right and wrong.
My experience,
though, is just while there is a good deal of black and white,
I find that there’s equally as much gray.
But that’s my bent,
and that doesn’t bother me.
I think part of the task of the faith is to sort our way through that gray.
Well, thanks for hanging in there.
I can’t remember what next week is.
More heresy.
There’s more.
We’re good at creating more.
Alright, thanks, y’all.