Legalism: Old and New Perspectives
March 11, 2013 by Scot McKnight
Over
the years my own thinking about legalism has become more nuanced but I want to
map out what legalism is in the context of the New Testament. After years of
teaching Galatians and pondering legalism in Paul’s mind, I’m convinced many
get confused about what the word “legalism” means. Thus, folks say “That’s
legalism!” So some rubble needs to be cleared out first. Recently I’ve seen the
word “legalism” referred to the commands of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as
if giving a commandment is tantamount to legalism, and on top of that as if the
Torah of Moses is just a big bold case of legalism itself. Far from the truth.
Time to think about legalism again.
How do you define
legalism? What is a good illustration of legalism for you?
Legalism is not believing
in the importance of law or rules or authorities; it is not rules themselves;
legalism is not even following kosher laws. More often than not, this sort of
definition of legalism — equating it with rules — often comes from someone who
has been told to do something they don’t want to do. (As a teenager telling her
parents that a 10pm curfew is “legalism.”)
So what is it? It depends
on which person you ask — and that’s such an important thing to realize.
For the Old Perspective,
legalism is the human effort to justify himself/herself before God on
the basis of works; this means Pharisees and Judaism as a whole was marked by
legalism, so Paul’s beef with “works of the law” is a beef with Judaism as a
whole, and (once we get into some forms of later Protestant thinking) anything
in the Torah is legalism.
For the New Perspective,
“legalism” – a word not often used by New Perspective folks – would be those
Mosaic laws that distinguish Jews from Gentiles, like Sabbath and circumcision
and kosher laws, and that are used to demand that a Gentile become a Jew, or
adopt the Mosaic Torah, in order to complete one’s salvation.
My big sketch of the
meaning of legalism is this:
Legalism is any practice
or belief that is added to the gospel that compromises the sufficiency of
Christ as Savior and jeopardizes the adequacy of the Spirit in moral guidance.
Secondarily, then, legalism demands that one adopt a group’s special markers in
order to be fully acceptable to God.
Legalism then is the
charge against you or me, often sensed at the deepest level, that we are not
accepted by God in Christ and indwellt by the Holy Spirit.
Read more at: Read more at
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/03/11/legalism-old-and-new-perspectives/#jgMSSzvIU6EGTgkB.99
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