DID YOU KNOW?
A prominent professor and long-time member of Alcoholics Anonymous cautioned his distinguished colleagues about works, righteousness and legalism: Why the attack on the doctrine of the Four Absolutes? We need to think back to the basic gospel proclamation which was at the heart of the original evangelical message, the good news announced by the Apostle Paul in Romans 3:28, “that we are justified by faith alone, and not works of the law.” The vain effort to save ourselves by performing works of the law is called “legalism” or “works righteousness.”
This is an issue where Frank Buchman, former Lutheran Minister and Oxford Group founder, if he had been a little more orthodox, he would have seen the danger. The insistence upon avoiding any kind of legalistic system which might threaten the priority of the gospel message took the central place in all the great orthodox Lutheran creedal statements. To Martin Luther, the founder of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, this was the very essence of Protestantism. The task of the reformers, as Luther saw it, was to preach once again the great gospel message proclaimed in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, and to restore the knowledge of the saving truth that we are justified by faith and grace alone, and not by works of the law. The gospel message had been obscured and falsified, by Luther’s time, by the narrow rule-bound nominalist theologians who had taken over the Catholic universities of Europe by the fourteenth century, and destroyed the foundations of the true Catholic faith with their authoritarian and absolutist doctrines. In fact, no decent Roman Catholic priests who became the leaders of the early Lutheran Church attempted to undo the damage the nominalists had done by preaching once again that lost message of faith and grace.
The Four Absolutes, however worthy they are in intent, are a return to a morality based on rules, and the attempt to justify ourselves by works of the law. If we become trapped into trying to save our souls by following even rules as these, we forfeit salvation through grace, and will find ourselves in a position where the only way we will be able to find salvation, is through following these four rules perfectly. The problem here is that, in this fallen world, as the Apostle Paul puts it just a few verses earlier in Romans 3:10, “There is no one righteous, no not one,” not in that absolutist kind of sense. Trying to follow moral absolutes breeds either chronic depression or continual hypocrisy.
The only way to keep from eventually collapsing into the depressive side of this psychological dilemma, with its sense of total failure and despair, is to practice massive denial so that we can keep pretending to ourselves that we actually are following these Absolutist rules in our lives. The word hypocrite (an ancient Greek word which Jesus used frequently in the New Testament when he was referring to people of this sort) meant an actor on stage. Once we have put on the right costume and makeup, we can climb up on the stage and pretend to be Hamlet or Ophelia, a cowboy or a princess, a pirate or a dance hall girl. All of those roles, of course, are make-believe and pretend. If we play our parts skillfully enough, the audience will applaud and we will have obtained our great reward. But pretending to be King Midas does not give us countless chests of gold and pretending to be Merlin the magician does not make us a sorcerer in an enchanted forest or give us the power to pull a magic sword from a giant stone. To be continued
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