We are so good at being legalists. One minute we’re the “older brother” in our Lord’s parable, resentful of the father’s lavish grace showered on the prodigal son; the next minute we cast ourselves as the younger brother’only, unlike him, lording the father’s indulgence over our brother’s head. To reverse the roles in another parable, gospel-liberated heirs can be, rather ironically, like the Pharisee who prayed (at least in my version), “Lord, I thank you that I am not like this Pharisee. I know that I’m totally depraved and am justified by grace alone. I’m so glad I ‘get it”of course, thanks to you alone (sort of).”
One way of asserting this superiority, waving the “I’m-one-of-those-who-get-it” flag, is to turn the taboos of our past on their head. We’ve discovered liberty in “things indifferent,” adiaphora, or things not identified in Scripture as sins. Don’t get me wrong; this liberty is precious. In fact, Calvin went so far as to call it “an appendix to justification.” As he said, to bow the neck to a yoke of slavery in practice is to deprive oneself and others of the joy of the gospel. Yet, as the Reformer also observed from Paul, love is the rule. Because of the weaker brother or sister, we restrain our liberty; but we will not surrender that freedom for which Christ died to those who would exercise tyranny over consciences.
What’s interesting in the Lord’s parable is that the prodigal son never once expressed superiority toward his older brother. The father had enough love and forgiveness to go around for both brothers’enough to unite them in fraternal bonds. We’re all on a long road to maturity. The problem is that when I behold the holy and generous Father, I can only confess with Isaiah, “I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.”
Not that long ago, there was a shared culture of propriety. Even unbelievers who swore like a sailor with their buddies on a fishing trip held their tongues in check around women and children, and they weren’t foul-mouthed in business meetings. Today, however, there is a culture of baseness. The lowest forms of cultural expression have become the most pervasive, tearing down the dividers between “appropriate there, but not here.” Even middle-aged people sometimes try to mimic the youth culture. We see this not only in the sloppy dress that has now become de rigueur, but also in church services that borrow from the trivial banalities of pop culture’as if pop culture could authentically convey the riches of Christ from generation to generation. Even pastors sometimes say they use foul language in the pulpit as a missional device, but the justification sounds eerily familiar, like that of the shock-jock looking for ratings. It lacks discernment. And when it involves swearing while speaking in Christ’s name, it’s sacrilegious. Most non-Christians I know understand that. They’re not impressed by preachers who share their sex life in vivid detail; it sounds like someone who just discovered that sex isn’t a sin.
“Oh, Grow Up!”
In the pendulum swinging between making a rule and breaking a rule, what we’ve lost is wisdom or prudence. There are some rich words in the older Christian vocabulary that tag along with these pregnant terms. One is circumspection, from the Latin compound meaning literally “looking around”: the art of using one’s own judgment (discernment) to apply general biblical teaching and common sense in specific contexts where there is no universally applicable biblical rule.
It’s all about growing up. When we’re children, we learn the basic words, teachings, stories, and rules of God’s Word. Then we look for connections and ask questions about what we believe and why we believe it. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle: focusing on the pedals and steering without falling off. Or learning to play the piano: focusing on the placement of our hands and looking at the notes on the page. Then we press on to maturity, where we’re actually riding the bike, attending directly to the road rather than the pedals, and actually playing the music instead of focusing on our fingers and the notes. Growing up into Christ is a lot like that.
Legalism causes problems because it keeps us from growing up, from going on to that stage where we’re practicing the faith we profess. It keeps us looking at our fingers and the notes. How far can I go with my girlfriend? What’s the line I can’t cross in doing my taxes? These are the sorts of questions the Pharisees asked Jesus. And yet it is also motivated by a kind of self-indulgence (antinomianism). It’s no longer about loving God and neighbor, but about making a rule or breaking a rule: How far can I go in selfishness before I get zapped?
If we are drawn to the lowest forms of culture, we shouldn’t be surprised when even non-Christians respond, “Is that all you can sing?” or “Are your vocabulary, life experience, and imagination so limited that you have to shock people with vulgarity?” Even in areas where we’re free, there is wisdom. And in any case, Christians are not free to violate standards of propriety that Scripture does in fact directly condemn.
In Reformed circles, it’s often called the “cage phase”: that familiar introductory period when neophyte Calvinists ought to be held in a medium-security facility to ensure the safety of others and themselves. Not only is there the obvious theological revolution that occurs and generates a certain excitement, as well as a sense of being let down by one’s churched background; there is, for many of us who came from fundamentalist or evangelical circles, a newfound Christian liberty. Where once the little legalist inside us loved to wave the flag of superiority by parading our dedication to rules not found in Scripture, we now do the same by parading our liberties. A cigar and a beer aren’t just a cigar and a beer, but banners unfurled for all to see. It’s just legalism of a different sort. In either manifestation, it’s childish.
Growing in wisdom is a lot more difficult. It’s like becoming a vintner, an artist, a musician, or an athlete: it takes time, attention, meditation, and art. It requires submitting to expertise’something we as Americans especially shy away from in our egalitarian culture where everybody is as competent as the next person.
“The Charioteer of all Virtues”
Not surprisingly, most of the references to prudence in Scripture are found in Proverbs. Prudence is distinguished from wisdom as a species is from its genus. If wisdom is the general capacity for evaluating and following the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (which, Proverbs tells us, begins with theology’i.e., the fear of God), then prudence is that particular exercise of wisdom that involves discrimination. One does not need to exercise discretion in deciding whether to love God and one’s neighbor. Discretion is required, however, when deciding on a vocation for that aim, in the week’s bustling priorities, and how best to fulfill it. You can’t learn to ride a bike just from reading a manual; you have to do it, informed by a biblical outlook and common sense, and when you fall you have to get back on and ride.
Here the specific context, not the general rule, guides moral reasoning: “I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge and discretion” (Prov. 8:12). One is expected not only to do prudent things, but prudent things are also done by a prudent person. The goal of character, Christian or otherwise, is to develop habits of picking up on both general biblical wisdom and particular, immediate contexts. We know a prudent person when we see one: “A fool’s wrath is known at once, but a prudent man covers shame” (Prov. 12:16). “The heart of the prudent acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge” (Prov. 18:15). If our only categories are “right” and “wrong,” then we will miss opportunities to develop a moral conscience’the character of a prudent person. This isn’t just about Christian practice, but also the wisdom that goes with the grain of our created nature.
In Phaedrus, Plato calls prudence “the charioteer of all virtues,” but Aristotle develops this notion in a direction that many regard as remarkably consistent with Scripture. And why not? Aren’t we talking about civic righteousness and common grace? Even Luther, who generally disliked Aristotle, said he was “very good in the area of moral philosophy” (Luther’s Table Talk, #411). In Book 2 of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes virtue as being of two kinds: intellectual, formed by teaching (experience plus time); and moral, formed by habit. He writes that in Greek, ethike “is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit).” People become builders by building, musicians by playing, and so forth. Aristotle emphasizes the fact that we are responsible not only for our actions, but also for our lives’our character, who we are, and who we become. Again, we’re not in the realm here of redemption, but of common grace. Our culture today is starving for this sort of moral discourse, especially when the idea that we are passively shaped by our environment is so rife.
I think Aristotle would tell a mother who is worried about her children engaging with questionable movies or books or hanging out with the wrong crowd, “Give them an alternative prize.” In other words, it is at least in part up to us as parents to provide an environment where Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are known and experienced in depth. If they are gripped by the truth, they will less likely believe the latest lie. If they become intimate with what is good, noble, and worthy of respect, they will be less inclined toward the shallow narcissism that feeds immorality in the first place. If they are familiar with the lives of great men and women who were shaped by integrity and wisdom, they will at least have something with which to contrast the trivial characters they see promoted in the culture. (By the way, this doesn’t mean moralistic novels that expunge the R-rated scenes, but rather great literature, music, and art that trains us toward excellence.) We and our children will only come to recognize the inferiority of what is ugly by being familiar with what is beautiful. Prudence is thereby molding character in such a manner that even where there is not a specific rule or defined expectation in a given situation, they will be able to size things up and make a mature decision. A rule-oriented existence usually stunts the moral growth of people and communities.
Granted, this is more difficult. It would be great if wisdom were just a matter of acquiring information and applying it. That’s how a lot of people actually think about discipleship: it’s something you can get out of a catalogue. But you can’t buy it; it’s not on sale anywhere. In our modern culture, calculative or instrumental reason (what Aristotle calls techne or “know-how”) has swallowed the horizon. You can’t do an Internet search on “winemaking” or buy a kit and think you’ll give a renowned winery like Stag’s Leap a run for its money. The difference between pop culture and serious culture is not “common person” versus “elitist,” but values dominated by consumption versus creation, distraction versus attentiveness, and passing fancy versus caring.
“The Tender Reed Do Not Break”
The Puritans were brilliant at “cases of consciences.” These were fat volumes of ministerial counsel in concrete, specific circumstances. It was neither “situation ethics” nor Kant’s categorical imperative (“Act in such a way that you would decree that act as a universal law”). Most cases that pastors face aren’t answered in black-and-white laws that can be applied universally. In some extreme cases, divorce is counseled, while in others not; the difference is the specific set of circumstances. A wise person has to understand the situation by asking questions, evaluating, and spending time on the matter, while also seeking the advice of others in similar positions of spiritual authority. As Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin explain the approach, “The prudent person is aware that although the final end of human life is fixed by divine providence, the means to achieving that end are ‘of manifold variety according to the variety of persons and situations'” (The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 68, 130).
The Puritans’ goal was to educate the conscience, drawing on both the light of nature and the light of grace. Anglican and Puritan divine William Perkins’s Whole Treatise of Cases of Conscience (1606) represents a major contribution. He begins by saying that such an exercise is essential since many Christians struggle with a heavy sense of guilt and “have either growne to phrensie and madness or els [sic] sorted unto themselves fearfull ends, some by hanging, some by drowning.”
Godliness surely requires meditation on God’s revealed Word: his law and his gospel. Indeed, Scripture informs every aspect of our lives. It provides us with a new framework for interpreting everything. And yet, many of our daily decisions’which collectively shape our habits into a certain kind of character’are nether required nor rejected by Scripture. At this point, we gather as much as we can from general revelation, common sense, contexts, and examples to inform godly judgment. This is where we must resist the easy path of either making new laws or breaking the taboos to show our liberty. Look around and let love prevail.
