Is Antilegalism the New Legalism?
Forgetting the Power of Grace to Empower Works
Beware the perpetual fear of “legalism” where there is little actual danger of legalism.
The Devil moves in unmysterious ways. He is ever telling us to do the opposite of what God says (cf. Gen. 3:1). In these confused times of ours, it seems the fear of legalism has become the new “Law” that is imposed upon the Church.
“Don’t care too much about what you do,” says the enemy, “lest you end up looking like ‘the Pharisees’!” Ironically enough, this temptation seems to work especially well on those most zealous to guard their reputations in the eyes of others. In order to not-look-like-legalists such people may go to strenuous lengths to ensure people don’t look like they’re applying Word of God to their lives like they really mean it.
The Applicability Problem
At its most extreme, this renders grace perpetually “unapplicable” to our lives other than by repeating our perpetual relief that we “don’t have to do anything to impress God”. Our incessant repetition of this to ourselves can become little more than a therapeutic balm to console us in our perpetual sloth or cowardice.
This is why many evangelicals routinely ignore swathes of even New Testament passages which seem to tell us to do things. Anything that is “applied” in any specific way to one’s life is immediately seen as a potential “enemy” of grace, as though you must be thereby “deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (Gal. 1:6).
Any time we hear Paul saying, “Do this!” or “Don’t do that!” we are quick to cry, “But what about the context!” There may well be legitimacy for some specific exhortations to apply differently in different contexts (“greet one another with a holy kiss”, “wear head coverings”, “honour widows who are truly widows”, “drink also a little wine for your stomach,” “anoint the sick with oil,” etc.) even if there is almost certainly far more contemporary applicability for such things than we usually think.
Ultimately, we end up acting as though such esoteric commands (as well as far more straightforward commands) are not really there in the New Testament at all, or are only really there for historical curiosity. Soon enough we find we’ve scurried ourselves away from the very exhortations which the apostles - the ones who told us about the Gospel of grace - seemed to think we needed not only to hear, but to do.
This, remember, was Jesus’ conclusion to the sermon on the mount where he told the parable of the man who built his house on the sand being he who “hears these words of mine and does not do them” (Matt. 7:26). It’s a concern that seems to run in the family, as Jesus’ own brother also said: “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” (Jam. 1:22).
It is indeed a “deception” that the fact that what we do does not save us (Eph. 2:8-9) renders what we do arbitrary or meaningless. No Christian will ever put it like that, but they often treat swathes of life decisions (things they do or don’t do) as though this was the case. “Everything except outright sin is up for grabs, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a legalist!”
The Antilegalistic Lens
This is why evangelicals are often quick to be suspicious of leaders who seem to tell people to do those very things we read in the New Testament, as though they really are there in Scripture, as though we really are told to do them. For some, this knee-jerk “antilegalism” reaction is due to the background they've had, the authoritarianism they've seen/heard/experienced which understandably left them cold and genuinely oppressed, perpetually scrabbling to impress their disapproving father in the sky.
Experience is a powerful thing. Such experiences seem to give such people a lens beyond which they cannot see, even when the Bible plainly teaches things which contradict it. But for most today, I suspect it's simply more convenient to cry “legalism!” than face up to the implications of taking God at His Word in the ways the apostles seemed to tell us to.
In reality, Paul proclaims the Gospel of grace not only in reference to what we’re saved from, but what we’re saved to:
"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." (Eph. 2:8-10)
Much like the misguided “antiracism” of intersectional ideology today, where to question it is to invoke the charge of being “pro-racism”, to question “antilegalism” will often invoke the charge of being “pro-legalism”. Again, the irony is that a perpetual “antilegalism” lens truly does become legalistic.
It induces a new anxiety in the believer and a new unspoken “rulebook” about what can/can’t be said/done in order to preserve “grace” which go far beyond the Old Covenant confusions Paul saw among the Galatians (Gal. 4:9-10)
It inhibits the freedom of the believer to do what God calls them to do and to exhort others to do likewise (cf. Phil. 3:17; 1Cor. 4:16)
It hinders our understanding of grace from bringing the life and good works which God intends to bring in and through it (cf. Eph. 2:10).
Different Hills for Different Times
There are times and contexts, of course, when legalism truly is a frontline hill-to-die-on issue for the evangelical church. Terry Virgo is perhaps the UK evangelical leader who most encompasses the message of grace. His well-known books include Enjoying God’s Grace and God’s Lavish Grace (which, somewhat appropriately, is currently in the top 3 “most gifted” Christian books on Amazon…).
Early on in my time at Cliff College, I had Terry in to speak at the annual festival on the topic of grace (of course…). I still vividly remember sitting next to his wife, Wendy, during the sermon, and she was visibly responding to his message - a message she must’ve heard hundreds of times - as though hearing it for the first time. It was a great reminder of how we really are meant to continue rejoicing in and enjoying the grace of God - not merely allowing it to become “routine”.
As Terry says in his autobiography, No Well-Worn Paths:
“When I first caught a glimpse of the truth of the grace of God it was almost too good to be true. I felt like the early disciples when they heard that Jesus had risen the dead. ‘They could not believe it for joy’ (Luke 24:41). I felt the same. I could hardly comprehend that all my striving to be acceptable was unnecessary and that feelings of condemnation could be a thing of the past.”
One of the ways, ironically, that grace is no longer enjoyed is by repeating our need for it in perpetuity and to the detriment of all else God has said about (and to) us. This is how the “idea” of grace can become a new kind of “law” where all that might not seem immediately “gracious”, immediately freeing, immediately pleasant or delightful - wherever God might “require” anything of you at all - is seen as potentially legalistic, inevitably binding one back to the condemnation of Law.
It’s important to note that, for Virgo, the rediscovery of grace in his own life - and consequently, in the lives of many others - was received as an antidote to the legalism that characterised the evangelicalism of the 1960s and 70s.
“Indeed, condemnation used to be the norm in evangelical circles and I always remember the heavy atmosphere of guilt that one encountered in prayer meetings, the opening part of which often consisted of people confessing their failure and need of forgiveness. Today, it is hard to remember the sense of oppression that used to rest on evangelical believers and how prayer meetings were often a place for sharing that sense of failure corporately.”
No doubt the enemy will seek to undo us any way he can get away with it. But it would seem that an overly fearful and trepidatious approach to God - to the extent that one feels condemned by God, or unaccepted as one of God’s true children if one does not “do enough” for him, hardly appears to be the central issue for the Church today.
Rather, it would seem that most hand-raising evangelical churches are “grace-heavy” (if such a concept exists). Most veer upon antinomianism without realising it, displaying a functional disdain for God’s Law, based on the notion that - because we are forgiven - God doesn’t really care whether or not we obey him, and whether or not we do anything for him.
The Cheapening of God’s Judgement
Today, we are more prone to take verses like “It was for freedom that we were set free…do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1) as liberating us to be “our best self”, to “live the dream”, to “be all you want” and many other postmodern individualistic mantras. This is at least one reason why “charismatic” Christianity - once held at arm’s length by the mainstream Church as something of a strange, exotic plant - now finds itself widely accepted in the ecclesial garden.
God has certainly been mightily at work through the charismatic renewal - including the recovery of grace in the life of the Church - but a “cultured” charismaticism has certainly also crept in on the coattails of postmodern self-expressive individualism. “The Spirit” suddenly becomes a rhetorical guarantor for what we want or feel at any given moment, whether or not “the Word” says otherwise.
Most evangelicals would likely be horrified to think they act as though God doesn’t care (specifically) about what they do or don’t do, and would vehemently deny it. But regardless of how they would describe why they do (or don’t do) what they do (or don’t do) in their day-to-day lives, few would see what they do in terms of dutiful obedience to God’s holy law, or the upholding of his righteousness.
Many Christians essentially believe that God does not (or cannot) oppose what they do because he has been forever placated. Many have taken that once-controversial line from In Christ Alone (“the wrath of God was satisfied”) as a statement of God’s general checking-out of his role as judge, as though he no longer cares what we do (as long as it’s not really bad).
This means they end up believing God is in favour of whatever they happen to prefer. He becomes the “gentle parent” who happily allows his children to set the agenda for their discipleship and sanctification (if they ever get around to sanctification) and would never dream of “disciplining” them (regardless of the fact that Heb. 12:5-11 literally tells us that the fact God disciplines us is how we know we’re his true children!).
We can see how this very easily sows the seeds either for indolent aberrations such as what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” or for progressive rhetorical heresies such as what the LGBT-imperialists of our time call “outrageous grace”.
We have come to see the very idea that God wants to shape you as a potter shapes clay (cf. Jer. 18:6, Rom. 9:19-23, 2Tim. 2:10) as being ungracelike, as inevitably ushering in a return to being “under law” rather than “under grace”. Where people needed to be liberated from a meritorious approach to works of the law, it now seems that the necessary “revolution” must involve a recovery of the inherent goodness of God’s Law and statutes (cf. Psalm 119).
This is a generation that has not known Terry Virgo’s struggles against stultifying evangelical legalism. Such struggles may well continue to rear their head from time to time, but what the present generation struggles with is not joyless duty but in their inability to see duty as their delight, their allergic reaction to applicatory practice of the Word of God in home, church, and society.
A People of Grace, a People of Action
A few weeks ago I noticed Terry Virgo posting about the work of his son, Ben, with Christian Heritage London, in which Ben spoke of Charles Spurgeon, the great preacher of nineteenth-century London, as “a great man of action”.
Spurgeon was indeed “a great man of action” who knew that God's gracious action to save us had great purpose for all the kingdom action God wants to do through us:
"The lazy-bones of our orthodox churches cry, 'God will do His own work'; and then they search out the softest pillow they can find, and put it under their heads, and say, 'The eternal purposes of God will be carried out: God will be glorified.' This is all very fine talk, but it can be used with the most mischievous design. You can make opium out of it, which will lull you into a deep and dreadful slumber, and prevent your being of any kind of use at all."
Spurgeon said this of the “hyper-Calvinists” of his day, who held an excessively rigid belief in God’s sovereignty. But it could just as easily be applied to the “hyper-Pietists” of our day. Many evangelicals love to laud the legacies of Spurgeon's “action” whilst simultaneously retreating from the front lines of action into “Gospel-centred” closets where they tentatively pray “Thy kingdom come...” whilst secretly hoping God doesn't call them to do anything about it “on earth”.
As a good reader of the Puritans, Charles Spurgeon - who was as truly Gospel-centred as they come - knew the Gospel is meant to move not only our heads and hearts but also our hands and feet. Because Jesus died for us, we live for Him. He gave His life for us, that we might lose our lives and gain true life in Him:
"I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." (John 10:9-10)
Christians are saved by grace not so that we might perpetually cower from the thief but that we might live so abundantly that we reclaim what the thief has stolen, rebuild what he has destroyed, and proclaim life to the dead.
And if we really want to walk in the abundant freedom of this life, there are all sorts of things God would have us do about it.