Introduction

The key to defining legalism is patience. To merely call it salvation by works is like saying a poisoned well is simply water. Technically true, perhaps, but missing what makes it deadly. Legalism is the distortion of the law. The problem, though, is not the law, since the law is good if one uses it lawfully (1 Tim. 1:8). The problem is the tendency of the human heart to twist God’s good gifts into tools for self-righteousness.

This began in the Garden of Eden, where the problem was a distortion of God’s law. Sin was in the world before God’s law was given (Rom. 5:13). But, to Adam, the law was the problem, so he transgressed it by his unwillingness to guard the garden and his wife from the serpent. Eve also thought the law a problem, so she transgressed it by obeying the delight in her eyes rather than God’s wise command (Gen. 3:6). All this was facilitated by Satan’s legalism. In eldritch form, the serpent appeared and distorted the law by making them think the law was bad when used lawfully, but good when broken. By the time Satan was through, Eve thought God’s law was a contract with conditions to be fulfilled rather than the promises of a covenant graciously given to grant abundant life.

The distortion of law in the Garden of Eden reveals that legalism is a mindset as much as it is an action. It makes a blueprint of rules rather than grace. More troubling, it defines God’s essential character as that of enforcing peccadillos rather than bestowing life. In the Garden, this meant viewing God's prohibition of eating from the tree as an arbitrary restriction rather than loving protection. It’s a fundamental redefinition of God as a tyrant concerned with petty control rather than a Father concerned with paternal care. This was Eve’s mistake. Her response to God’s manifold gifts was that of a pouting child who wanted the one thing that would destroy her. So, her distortion of the law was, fundamentally, a distortion of God’s generous character. This is the mindset of legalism, to exchange the truth about God’s gracious character for the lie that God is a rule-making bureaucrat.

What does a person with a legalistic mindset look like? In seventeenth-century New England, one minister thought his wife died as punishment for enjoying sex with her too much, as if he could earn God’s blessing by denying himself lawful pleasure.¹ This is a legalistic mindset and it leads people to obey God out of the dread of wrath rather than the renewal of forgiveness (Ps. 130:4). It’s a mindset not motivated by the love of God (1 Jn. 4:8), but the fear of judgment. It’s a mindset that sees God as an avenging Judge rather than a compassionate Father (Ps. 103:13). It’s a mindset that contemplates the terrible majesty of God to the exclusion of his merciful character (1 Pt. 1:3). Regarding doctrine, the legalist operates with a legal spirit, a rigidness that allows for no differentiation of application. Toward man, he is under the influence of an imperious temper. He sees life, love, and happiness through a legal frame rather than a spiritual one. Thus, one way to define legalism is a preference for law over grace, not just in salvation, but in all things. It’s the exaltation of red tape rather than resurrection life.

Differing Conceptions of the Law

In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Christian encounters two companions, Formalist and Hypocrisy, men supremely confident in their prospects for salvation. They had followed ancient custom with meticulous care, obeying laws and ordinances as conscientiously as any pilgrim who ever walked the Way. Christian was not impressed. He identified four fundamental differences that separated their approach from his own, differences that would prove decisive at the gate of the Celestial City.

First, mere obedience to laws and ordinances counted for nothing when one had entered the path through the wrong door. The method of entry mattered as much as the journey itself. Second, Christian wore a coat given to him by the Lord of the Place, a garment that had replaced his former rags. When he arrived at the city gate, the Lord would recognize him by this distinctive covering. Third, Christian bore a mark upon his forehead, placed there by the Lord on the very day his burden had fallen away. This, too, would serve as identification. Fourth, Christian carried a roll, a source of comfort during his travels along the Way, something to sustain him through the inevitable difficulties of the journey.

Formalist and Hypocrisy possessed none of these gifts. For all their punctilious observance of religious custom, they lacked the essential marks of authentic pilgrimage. Christian and the legalists may share a common vocabulary. But because Christian’s works are grounded in Christ, and the legalist's are not, they have a different conceptuality of law and obedience.²

What is the difference, exactly? The difference is not that one has a law while the other does not. The difference is that the legalist substitutes man’s law for God’s law, binding the conscience in man-made details. In other words, the problem of the legalist is that they refuse to obey the right law in the right way. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Mt. 23:23). Jesus’ rebuke is not because they tithed mint, dill, and cumin. He rebuked them because they kept these peripheral laws while ignoring the central ones. They refused to keep the weightier part of the law. Their legalism was a lack of proportion.

What does proper proportion look like? Jesus says, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:20). So, Christians must be more scrupulous than the Pharisees, meaning they must make the central parts of the law truly central. The Pharisees' captious external observance of some of the law doesn’t cover for their neglect of the weightier parts. The righteousness required for the Kingdom must exceed Pharisaical righteousness. It begins in the heart and then becomes external (Mt. 23:25f). It must be done for God’s glory, not man’s praise (Mt 6:16). It must be rooted in love for God and man (Mt. 22:34-40; 1 Cor. 13:1-5). And, it can only happen through the divine grace of the Holy Spirit (Ex. 36:26f; Jn. 15:4f; Rom. 8:3-4; Gal. 5:16; Phil. 2:12f) grounded in the obedience of Christ (Rom. 5:19; 1 Cor. 1:30; Gal. 2:20). The legalist is one who mistakes the scaffold for the cathedral. They devote themselves to the temporary framework, never realizing it’s supposed to be removed so the real building, built by Christ (Mt. 16:18; Heb. 3:3-4), might be seen.

Legalism is a Christological Mistake

Legalism is a Christological mistake that usually takes one of two forms. The first form is to create a false dilemma of choosing between God’s holiness and God’s love. Evangelicals affirm both in word, but struggle to hold them together. These two attributes of God, in the evangelical consciousness, drift apart. So one attribute is prized over the other. When God’s love is prized over holiness, the result is a God who is politically correct, changing with each cultural movement, and endlessly tolerant, accommodating to the demands of each new group. When God’s holiness is prized over love, the result is a God who outsources divine vengeance to the angriest group.

It’s a failure to see that God’s love is in constant relation to his holiness. To elevate one attribute over the other is to end up with neither. It’s a mistake to think one divine attribute necessarily compromises the other. The legalistic mindset says, “Either (A) God is holy and rejects me because of my imperfections, or (B) God is loving and rejects justice by overlooking sin. Therefore, I must balance the attributes through my performance.” This mindset fails to see how the cross harmonizes love and holiness such that Christ’s love is expressed in self-sacrifice and God’s holiness is satisfied through substitutionary punishment.

The second form is to chop the power of Christ’s death and resurrection in half. It is when grace has only enough power to save someone from their sin, but not enough power to resurrect them to a new life of the Spirit (Rom. 7:6). Legalism is the failure to accept God’s grace, all of God’s grace, including the new life accomplished by Jesus’ death and resurrection. People who accept the power of Jesus’ death but deny the power of his resurrection tend to make rule upon rule to preserve them from further sin. When one denies the immediate power of Christ’s resurrection, they have to find a workaround to keep from sinning. Thus, the reliance upon self-made rules rather than Spirit-empowered obedience to God’s law. Rules create spiritual security. But it’s a fraud, a sham. The outcome is a redefinition of the gospel itself because it reduces God’s love to that which can forgive but not heal.

The solution is found in the doctrine of divine simplicity, which teaches that God is not composed of parts. God’s attributes of love and holiness are not separate. They are not two sides of the seesaw competing for balance. God is his attributes. His love is holy-love. His holiness is loving-holiness. God’s simple divine essence is not a composite. God's justice, mercy, love, holiness, wisdom, and power are all the same simple reality viewed from different angles. Which means, no attribute can be exercised at the expense of another. God does not approach any person in any situation and choose to be either loving or holy. The cross of Christ is not God’s love overriding his holiness. His resurrection is not his holiness eclipsing his love. In the gospel of Christ, the One True God acts simultaneously, and perfectly, holy and loving.

How can concern for legalism lead to licentiousness?

It is no surprise that attempts to flee legalism often result in dialectical transformation toward the opposite of what was intended. Concern for legalism can lead to licentiousness (i.e., the idea that Christians have a license to sin because God’s grace will cover it) in one of two ways. The first way is the presumption of grace, creating nonchalance about obedience. It’s the assumption that you can go on sinning because God’s grace abounds (Rom. 6:1), as if the enormity of God’s grace invites rampant sinning (Rom. 6:1). But God’s grace doesn’t mean you are free to continue in your sin (Rom. 6:2). God’s grace can’t lead to a life of sin (Rom. 6:2). Why not? Because Christians are those who have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3), which means that in some crucial sense, when Christ died, God’s people died. And when Christ rose, God’s people rose. Because of their union with Christ’s death and resurrection, believers are set off to become in practice what they are in Christ, namely, dead to sin and alive to God. The presumption of grace misunderstands the kind of life that grace produces. According to Romans 6:22, grace produces a life that leads to eternal life, “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.” Eternal life is the outcome of sanctification, which is the outcome of being set free from sin (Rom. 6:11, 13).

The second way that concern for legalism leads to licentiousness is spiritual slothfulness, which rejects the eye-gouging intensity with which Christians must resist personal sin (Mark 9:42-50). Spiritual slothfulness mischaracterizes a strategy for obedience as legalism. For example, Christians are not allowed to lust. That is a command from the Lord (Mt. 5:27-30). So, what will you do to obey the Lord and fight temptation? What is your Spirit-empowered strategy for obeying that command? The answer may differ from one Christian to the next, but whatever the answer, it isn’t legalism. Or, consider how gluttony is a sin, but eating hamburgers is not. Imagine two men. Smith understands moderation, and he eats a hamburger from time to time. Smith needs no extra rules to battle gluttony. Jones, on the other hand, cannot eat a hamburger without eating six more. He needs stricter rules limiting his access to hamburgers. These stricter rules are not necessarily legalism.

In Scripture, the stricter rules used by Jones go by several names. Jesus calls these rules eye-plucking and hand cutting (Mk. 9:42-50). James and Peter call it resisting the devil (James 4:7; 1 Pt. 5:8f). Paul calls it fleeing (2 Tim. 2:22; 1 Cor. 10:14). When a Christian makes no provision for the flesh (Rom. 13:14), that is not legalism. When a Christian is “wise as serpents” in their battle with sin, that is spiritual warfare, not legalism. Prudential wisdom means implementing the practical wisdom of the Proverbs, recognizing personal weaknesses, and facing the reality of temptation. Prudential wisdom does not mean (A) believing these rules contribute to justification, (B) imposing your rules to bind another’s conscience, (C) treating violations of the prudential rules as equivalent to breaking God’s law, or (D) using external compliance as the sole measure of maturity.

Legalism and licentiousness are more similar than different. They are both fleshly ways of living. Oliver O’Donovan notes that the goal of the Christian life is not to find the golden mean between legalism and license. He says, “Such an approach could end up by being only what it was from the start, an oscillation between two sub-Christian forms of life. A consistent Christianity must take a different path altogether, the path of an integrally evangelical ethics which rejoices the heart and gives light to the eyes because it springs from God’s gift to mankind in Jesus Christ.”³ Legalism and license both commit the same error: rejection of God’s law. Jesus said that the Pharisees' selective obedience was disobedience, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of man” (Mk. 7:8). Their heads were full of man-made minutia, and their hearts were empty of grace.

God’s Commands and Man’s Additions

Where are you spiritually strong? Where are you spiritually weak? What habits need to be formed in light of these strengths and weaknesses? These are not the questions of legalism, but of restraint, moderation, and common sense in the pursuit of virtue. Deuteronomy 4:2 says, “You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you.” Deuteronomy 12:32, “Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it.” So, there is a distinction between God’s binding commands and human additions. Scripture alone determines what is binding on the Christian conscience. Prudential rules must be free, flexible, and creative, but not treated as equally authoritative as God’s Word. That would be adding to the Word of God.

Yet, Christians are also commanded to make no provision for the flesh (Rom. 13:14). So, they should develop habits, methods, and rules to help obey what God requires. The problem is when Christians say their own personalized program of prevention is required by God for each person. Consider two examples. The first is a drunk who takes a personal vow of sobriety, while understanding that others are permitted to drink. He has not added or taken away from God’s word (Ps. 104:14-15). What has he done? He has created a pathway to obey God’s command (Eph. 5:18). He has made no provision for the flesh. The second example is a person trying to obey Scripture’s command to be hospitable (Rom. 12:13; Heb. 13:2; 1 Pt. 4:9). He makes a plan to show hospitality, but in his zeal, he makes his specific plan, technique, and frequency of hospitality mandatory for other Christians. What has he done? He has added to God’s Word and loaded people with burdens too heavy to bear (Mt. 23:4).

These distinctions matter

Evangelicals are raised hearing “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian,” “Praying doesn’t make you a Christian,” “Providing for your family doesn’t make you a Christian,” “Honesty doesn’t make you a Christian.” So then, what is being a Christian? The twenty-first-century evangelical answers that you must do nothing but believe in Jesus. If life isn’t going well, if sin crowds out love, if suffering strikes, then the solution is to do nothing but believe in Jesus more. The less you do, the more you are justified. Evangelicals, then, take offense at any notion that they should do anything. When a preacher calls them to obey the Lord, and gives them the spiritual resources to do so—Spirit, Word, Sacrament, prayer, repentance—the only response left is to point and cry, “Legalism!”

Evangelical theology regards legalism as the biggest temptation to sin. Then, when you examine the lives of many evangelicals, there is a staggering amount of pornography, apathy, greed, cowardice, bitter politics, and banal screen time. These two things are substantially incommensurate. In other words, the problem, if we must generalize, is not that Christians have turned their prudential rules into justification. The problem is their lives are characterized by sin rather than righteousness, which is repeatedly warned against in Scripture (1 Cor. 6:9f; Gal. 5:19-21; Eph. 5:3-5; 1 John 3:6-9; Rev. 21:8). “Gospel-Centered” evangelicals have let loose the vices under the guise of exterminating the arch-vice of legalism. In so doing, they’ve made wisdom look guilty and sin look innocent.

The church should oppose false teaching, including legalism. But it must refute falsity on a biblical basis rather than a reactionary one. The curious thing about many evangelicals is that they believe grace is strong enough to justify, but too weak to sanctify. Throughout the history of the church, things like the Rule of St. Augustine, the Rule of St. Basil, and the Rule of Saint Benedict were uncontroversial. They were regarded as legitimate, structured approaches to Christian living that weren’t grace-obstructing legalism, but grace-informed holiness. We must return to the simplest of biblical truths: Having a practical framework for spiritual discipline is not legalism.

Conclusion

The problem of legalism is that it’s all imperative and no indicative. However, the solution to legalism is not all indicative and no imperative. If righteousness is not a thing but a person (1 Cor. 1:30), then the law is not a justifier apart from the only Righteous person. The graciousness of Christ is that he accepts the sincere but imperfect obedience of believers. This isn’t possible for one justified by law. Neither is it possible for one who has dispensed with the law. The Christian life is not a hopeless attempt to obey the Father. Rather, the Father, because of the mighty work of Christ’s death and resurrection, sees our sincere obedience as righteousness (Rom. 1:17), walking blamelessly in the commands of God (Lk. 1:6).

Other Articles

https://trinityreformedkirk.com/collection/symbiotic-kinship-converging-the-complex-bond-of-faith-and-works

https://trinityreformedkirk.com/collection/thirty-theses-about-good-works

https://trinityreformedkirk.com/collection/the-obedience-of-faith

Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.

Footnotes

¹ Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 102.

² John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Banner of Truth, 2005), 39f.

³ Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Leicester: Apollos, 1996), 12.