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“Everybody Thinks There's a Pattern”
Categories: M. W. Bassford, Meditations
Since I started blogging about five years ago now, I’ve been exposed to a wide range of religious commentary on my blog feed and Facebook page. Some of it has been thoughtful and enlightening; some of it, um, gives me the opportunity to engage with ideas with which I disagree. In the latter category, I would put the following commentary on my instrumental-music sermon, forwarded by a reader:
While I don’t agree with instruments in worship, this line of thought is legalism.
1. Take a concept (follow the pattern)
2. Seek to find the guidelines (command, example, necessary inference) within the NT that backup the concept
3. Make it law
4. Impose that law on everyone else
5. Ridicule others that don’t follow your concept
Pharisees did it ALL the time.
There are certainly some questions that come to mind when I read this (“Other than the conviction that it’s unlawful, why on earth would one disagree with instruments in worship?”). However, rather than chasing those bunny trails, I want to address the main critique: that interpreting the Bible in order to discover a pattern of right conduct is legalism.
The thing is, though, that literally everybody who is a Christian will, at least to some degree, interpret the Bible in order to discover a pattern of right conduct. There are certainly those who pick and choose the parts of the Bible they like with all the fussiness of a three-year-old at a vegetable buffet, but even those people will point to some things in the Bible and say, “You have to do that.”
For instance, let’s say that I wanted to found the First Aryan Church of Christ (note to readers: I do not actually want to do this; it’s an illustration.). I know that Jesus was white like me (I’ve seen the pictures!), I don’t like Jews and black people much, so I’m going to start me up a church where folks like that aren’t welcome.
I’m pretty sure that if I advanced my scheme to self-professed Christians all across the religious spectrum, I wouldn’t get, “Hey, bro; you do you.” I’d get an indignant, “You can’t do that!” I’d hear about how we’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, I’d hear about how there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ, and so on.
All of those arguments, though, would take the form described above. They would presume the existence of a Scriptural pattern for people to follow, use command, example, and inference to interpret Scripture (we have to infer that Galatians 3:28 is about black people too), and define that interpretation as binding on others.
Everybody (nearly everybody, anyway) agrees that we need to follow the teachings of Jesus and His apostles when it comes to racism. Why, then, are the teachings of Jesus and His apostles not relevant, indeed central, when it comes to worshiping Him? How do you distinguish between reasoning from the Scripture in Galatians 3:28 and reasoning from the Scripture in Colossians 3:16?
“Legalism” is an epithet to conjure with these days, but it doesn’t boil down to anything more than, “You’re doing what I do with some passages to other passages where I don’t think you should.” Here, I think, is where we find the genuine Pharisee: not in the one who zealously seeks to follow the whole law of God, but in the one who honors some parts while neglecting others.
Unless, of course, Matthew 23:23 isn’t one of those Scriptures we’re supposed to reason from.
