THE BASE MODELS: HERE ARE THE RULES

Deuteronomy 7:12

If you heed these ordinances, by diligently observing them, the Lord your God will maintain with you the covenant loyalty that he swore to your ancestors…

Matthew 5:17-20

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Another form of discipling is to bring people into the faith community and then instruct them in the ways of that community through the explication of moral codes, rite, ritual, and a systemic belief. This form of discipling assumes that one of the major draws of the community is a rationalization of and a direct response to the seeming chaos of human existence. That comes through a codification of faith. Here are the rules, live by them, and you will be part of the faithful. 

As our scripture reference above indicates, such a move is as old as Moses (probably older, really). Human life is confusing. We are often in a complete muddle as we deal with the conundrums and nagging problems of modern existence. How do we know what is actually the right way to live? How can know what is good or bad? Are there clear guidelines for the meaningful life? Are there set standards for knowing what is right and wrong? Are there set benchmarks for recognizing the valuable and worthy life? As with Moses, some faith communities look to scripture to find these standards, rules, guidelines, and answers, then delineate what they believe to be the proper course for human life. They take to heart Jesus’ own teaching in the Sermon on the Mount—Jesus did not come to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfill it. Therefore, the commandments God set down on Sinai are still in effect in Christ. So why not keep them, use them, and live by them?

In contemporary American Christianity, such an approach saw a major resurgence in direct response to the cultural revolution of the 1960s. As the culture turned toward a more open, more libertarian, and more chaotic mode, some within the church pushed back with a new moralism. No, anything does not go! No, there are standards! Yes, there is an authoritative guide for life. The public responded. Evangelicalism became the fastest growing element in American Protestantism, even becoming the only growing element in the 1990s. People were drawn to the simplicity of the proclamation—complex issues could be dealt with at a base level. People were drawn to the directness of the witness—you can do this, but you can’t do that. It was an embrace of what seems like commonsense--if you do this, there will be consequences, good or bad, depending on the goodness or badness of what you do. That was easy enough to live by. It eased the ethical wrangling of other approaches to faith. Things gained clarity. 

As we read the New Testament, we see the need for any faith community to have a set of dogmas by which to live. Part of faith is accepting that there are standards by which one will live in accord with what one believes about God and God’s expectations for human life. Every faith community will need to wrestle at some point with what exactly it is that makes it a faith community and that differentiates it from all other community groups. Codifying immediately outlines for any newcomer what is expected and what to expect. Romans was really no less than St. Paul’s outline for such thinking. The Sermon on the Mount is a synapsis of what the earliest church of Jesus believed. As Presbyterians, this thought explains why we have a Book of Confessions, offering historical outlines through major shifts in human culture that set the standards for our belief. Anyone who wonders what we believe need only look to our confessions.

However, this approach to discipling comes with some inherent dangers.

First, clarity is good, oversimplification is not. One of the drawbacks in this approach is that it works well if one’s life is decent and in order, but as soon as things get messy, the code begins to lose its power. It is all right to live by a black-and-white morality until one’s own life goes gray. Your church declares homosexuality a grievous sin, then your child comes out—now what? You live as faithfully to rites and rituals as you can, showing up for church, praying daily, studying the Bible, serving in ministries to the community, but then comes the cancer diagnosis that wasn’t supposed to be part of the consequences—now what?  Life is complex. Life is ordered chaos (cf. Gen. 1). Simple answers are not always the best answers in light of complexity and chaos. Context will complicate things, and we need to be flexible enough to deal with context. 

Second, standards are fine, judgmentalism not so much. Another drawback is that such an approach to being in a faith community draws definitive lines in the sand of human life. Some are in, others are out—now what? Too many have been grievously hurt by being condemned by a faith community’s open and outright rejection and condemnation of them for living outside the parameters of the faith code. Jesus encountered this pain in his time as he walked among the unclean—those rejected by the faith community as beneath contempt. Jesus’ response was to lift the code to a higher level of inclusion by sticking steadfastly to the root beneath the code—love of God; love of neighbor. Too many churches fail to make that move, turning away would-be adherents through judgment. The Gospel of Love gets drowned out by a negative allegiance to self-defined righteousness. 

Which leads to a third danger—resurgent Pharisaism. The Pharisees were good and faithful Jews who earnestly believed that if God gave Israel the Torah, then God intended for Israel to obey the 600+ commandments held therein. They sought to be perfectly obedient to the Law. They constantly ran afoul of Jesus who always mitigated the literal meaning of the Law with its foundational core of embodied compassion. Base obedience tends toward being superficial. You may not murder anyone, but neither do you love them, and for Jesus, that love is more vital and more essential than the fact that no murder happened. Churches practicing a codified school of discipleship run the risk of elevating the rulebook above the God they seek to serve. God lives; God is free; God is never still; but a code fixes everything in place. There is no freedom to flex. So, we find St. Paul, Pharisee, murdering followers of Jesus because the code trumped God. 

Interestingly, the wave of growth for codified Christianity flatlined in the early 21st Century. The seeming lack of inclusion and tolerance turned off the next generation rising to faith decisions. Judgmentalism and division were seen as hypocritical responses to Jesus, the man embodying the inclusivity and compassion of God.

The key to this type of discipling, then, is constant vigilance for the reason for the code in the first place. If we read Leviticus, we discover that it really is no more and no less than an outline for life lived by love for God and love for one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. Obedience must always be tempered with that compassionate care for one another. What is the most loving response to another person? What will communicate Christ’s compassion clearly and directly in any given situation? Answering those questions serves as a guard. It allows for an openness in which the rules can be amended to match the ever-creating, ever-moving presence of God, as God seeks to find and welcome every human being breathing.