Theologically speaking, legalism and lawlessness are equal and opposite errors, equal and opposite deviations from the gospel of grace. Lawlessness says that our actions don’t matter (although almost no one applies that consistently); legalism says they’re all that matters. Grace says, “Yes, they matter, but you’re using the wrong ruler.”
The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.
Heh. No one who is legalistic applyes that consistently either 🙂
I would love to see you unpack this post and put it in context. It sounds like more is going on than what you typed out.
In an unrelated note, I fixed/reworked the virtue ethics paper. It should be much less painful to read now.
Ahh, good.
I would say that I know legalists who apply that as consistently as one can expect a human being to apply anything; but even the most antinomian or relativist sort still has things they believe firmly are right or wrong. It’s the difference between individual and systemic inconsistency.
As for more going on–well, it’s a large subject, no question; no doubt I’ll keep coming back to it.
Having said that, of course, I realize that you’ve already expanded on these ideas in a previous post I hadn’t read down to yet. Ah well.
What I was getting at is that legalism, especially of the Biblical type, is (IMO) unavoidably internally contradictory. I’d go ahead and say that you can’t possibly approach it that way and be consistent. But you’re right to say that relativism also has its standards – which good relativists work into what they espouse 🙂
Actually, it’s the other way around–this one came out of that one. And I’d say that legalism is less internally contradictory, taken all in all–I think its defects tend to lie elsewhere; but it’s an important point, that the flight from grace to legalism doesn’t really succeed in producing a fully rationally coherent faith, even though it initially appears that it does.
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