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A Personal Journey, 4: The Blasphemy of Legalism

Rules are Cruel

The most pernicious and un-Christian way that Christians use Scripture is as a rulebook. This is legalism, and it goes against the very spirit of the teachings of Jesus and of Paul, both of whom were intense critics of any use of Scripture or religious observance as a way of putting barriers between God and human beings.

This “rulebook” thinking is cruel at its core. While I was at that rural Virginia church, the 1991 PCUSA Report on Human Sexuality was released. The report was confusing, because the presenters themselves could not agree, and therefore presented a “majority” report and a “minority” report. The majority report was reflective of Nelson’s “Embodiment” theology and very open-minded–arguably too open-minded–to variations in sexual behavior. The minority report presented a more conservative, but not unsympathetic, perspective on human sexuality; but even it grudgingly argued for the possibility of “union ceremonies” for lesbian and gay couples.

I led a week-long workshop on the sexuality reports. What I got was a peculiar and uncomfortable insight into the systemic dysfunction of the church I served. At one point, in a group discussion, a church member smugly held forth on the “perversity” and “deviancy” of homosexuality, and its corrupting influence, while another couple whom he’d known his whole life sat in stiff silence because their son, a child of the church, was a gay man.

I confronted him. “You know that people in this very group are the parents of a gay man,” I challenged him. “How can you possibly justify being so cruel?”

Jesus vs. The Legalists

Jesus was especially good at revealing the underlying cruelty of such behavior, as when He was questioned about divorce in Mark 10:2-12. “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” he is asked. “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.”

(Having grown up in the South, and not simply read but lived Flannery O’Connor, I can’t help but think “put her away” means “claim she’s hysterical and commit her to a state mental hospital.”)

Jesus responds directly: “For your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment.”

J.B. Phillips’ translation puts it beautifully: “‘Moses gave you that commandment,’ returned Jesus, ‘because you know so little of the meaning of love.'”

In other words, Moses allowed you to divorce so easily because he knew that us men, of the male variety, are cold-hearted jerks.

(The full law, in Deuteronomy 24: 1-4, says shockingly that a man can divorce a woman ‘if she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her,’ which was often interpreted at the time as she burned the meal or was no longer attractive to him!)

Note that in this answer, Jesus actually UNDERMINES Mosaic authority. One could say He is undermining Mosaic Law, but this is deeper. He’s saying, Moses himself didn’t get it right. He’s saying, sometimes Scripture gets it wrong!

Rules vs. Reasons

Jesus then refers them, not to the rules, but to the principles that underlie the rules, principles laid forth from creation. The guiding principle, he says, is that “the two shall become one,” and “therefore what God has joined together, let no one put asunder.”

Jesus is challenging them to do what is right based on foundational principles of faithful living, not on rules and regulations that create a barrier between human and human and make it easy to justify cruelty. It’s one of the ways that He is challenging God’s people to live in The New Age, the Age of The Kingdom of God, as it was predicted in Jeremiah: 31: 33: “I will put my Law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

What God requires of us is love, not excuses for cruelty. In fact, that is the ultimate blasphemy of legalistic interpretations of Scripture: they become excuses for cruelties that can only be justified because they are done in the name of God. Look at Westboro Baptist Church and the like, who can somehow justify their cruel protests at the funerals of dead soldiers by claiming they are acting in the name of God because Scripture says gays shouldn’t be in the military. The ONLY way that thinking people who say they believe in love can rationalize such behavior is by claiming God wants them to do it.

And that is the great blasphemy of legalism, pure and simple: to associate God’s name with unconscionable cruelty to human beings.

NEXT: Legalism vs. Incarnational Theology at St. Stephen Presbyterian Church