One of the goals of this blog is to seek an understanding of what’s not working in today’s church, at least from the standpoint of evangelism. The letter to the Laodiceans, for example, is useful for suggesting areas to look at.
One of the things that came up there, for example, is the prevalence of legalism today. In the letter, Jesus’ direction to buy white clothing could be interpreted as being a move away from legalism, suggesting that legalism was one of the things causing the Laodiceans to be lukewarm.
However, I did not define “legalism”, and it would be helpful to think through that at least a little.
In the New Testament, the clearest use of the term was to refer to the Old Testament Law, the Torah. Paul wrote about the error of believing that obedience to the Torah was the key to being saved. Instead, he taught that faith in Christ was key, that the Law was a kind of pointer to our need for Him.
This wasn’t an entirely new idea, because in the Old Testament, prophets pointed out that even performing a good sacrifice, for example, wasn’t acceptable if the people’s hearts weren’t right.1
Now, Christians today generally don’t follow the Torah, or believe it to be a key part of salvation, but the idea of following rules still exists in other forms. It can start by thinking of the Bible as a sort of rule book, with a list of dos and don’ts that must be followed.
For example, it’s possible to believe we must dress properly for church in order to be acceptable to God, perhaps even that He will punish us somehow for not doing so. There are many variations on this theme, but the most extreme version may be to believe that we need to perform certain actions in order to ensure our salvation. Someone may believe that they need to tithe or they won’t go to heaven, for example.
Usually, though, this sort of legalism doesn’t go so far that Christians worry about their own salvation.
It seems much more common for us to believe that other people’s behaviors affect their salvation. It’s easy to find examples of Christians condemning someone else’s actions so strongly as to say that, unless they change their actions, they cannot be saved. This causes Christians to focus on the actions of unsaved people, rather than their relationship with God.
I think this is a very clear example of modern legalism, in which we revert to the idea that obedience to some sort of law, such as the Bible as a rulebook, is necessary for salvation. In that view, trusting in Jesus might also be needed, of course, but it’s not enough without following the rules.
So when I talk about legalism in this blog, I’m talking mainly about this last perspective, that some sort of rule following is necessary to be saved, and especially when this view is presented to people outside the faith.
- See, Hosea 6:6, Isaiah 1:10-17, Amos 5:21-24, Micah 6:6-8. ↩︎
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