My article from this week's edition of the Rockford Squire:
Among present-day churches, one can find plenty of contentious topics. No need to list them now, but I often hear from pastors who are being criticized for being too lenient about a certain teaching or practice or too strict about another. This isn’t a problem unique to our present experience, though. It was found even in the early Church while the New Testament was still being written.
Two of St. Paul’s letters actually
address each end of this spectrum. At
the Church of Galatia, Paul had proclaimed the Gospel, and a congregation
arose. However, after Paul’s departure,
other teachers followed him in and deceived the people. He had proclaimed that Christ died for the
sins of the world and forgives sins by grace—as a free gift. The false teachers attempted to convince the
people that to be “real Christians,” they needed to also follow the Old
Testament law.
In Corinth, the trouble wasn’t with too many laws, but with disregard for the
law. The Corinthians didn’t just experience
the struggle common to all Christians to overcome sin, but they went above and
beyond in order to find new and creative ways to break God’s law. Paul had proclaimed the same Gospel here, but
the people of that congregation chose to use it as an excuse to disregard the
law entirely.
One congregation added to God’s command and burdened the conscience of Christians with laws God Himself never imposed on them. The other ignored or defended behavior that was clearly immoral even apart from Scripture, using grace as an excuse to follow their own desires. Paul demonstrated to both churches that they had been deceived and were following something other than the truth. He admonished the Corinthians to correct their excesses, while encouraging the Galatians to throw off the excesses that had been imposed upon them.
The appropriateness of St. Paul’s
correction did not flow from being a middle way between the extremes, but
instead from the fact that it was objectively true and both extremes had
departed in opposite directions from what was written in Scripture and what was
proclaimed to them. When the Apostles
held a council about many of these controversial matters (Acts 15), they did
not seek to satisfy one side or the other, or even to compromise between the
two, but only to be faithful to what they had received from Christ. Likewise, the resolution of present-day
controversy is not in appeasing one extreme or the other, or even finding a
compromise between them, but rather in proclaiming no more and no less than the
words of our Lord given through His Apostles in Scripture.
