I don’t think I’ll ever understand the impulse towards perfectionism; not in light of the Gospel, that is. And yet it is rampant, especially as given non-stop expression on “Christian social media” (I’m mostly thinking of X/Twitter). There are always these extremes on a continuum. There are those who think to be anti-legalist is to be progressive and loose to everything. On the other hand, there are those who think to be holy (saved) is to be legalistic to the point that all of what they say about others never applies to them; as if they have perfectly arrived; as if they just are one of the elect and everyone else is reprobate, or at least highly suspect. But both centers stem from the same type of “meism.” As if the human agent is the determiner, on either side, of what is good, and beautiful, and free. This, I take to be, the perfectionist impulse; which really is just a performative mood wherein a person, one way or the other, simply must assert their own self-contrived standing before God and others. Either they assert their “freedom,” or they assert their ”legalism”; both being given ground by the homo incurvatus in se.
We aren’t saved based on being so-called “free” or so-called “constrained by our obedience.” We are justified before God because He who knew no sin assumed our unrighteousness that we might become the righteousness of God in Him; it is because of His poverty that we are made rich in the beautiful garments of righteousness which He has robed us with. All our righteousness is like filthy rags; that doesn’t end once we become Christians. We live, moment-by-moment, afresh anew, by His righteousness for us; by His re-creating for us and in us and with us. We remain simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’), as such, we live by His mercy and grace as He always lives to make intercession for us.
Are there standards of righteousness and holiness that we bear witness to as Christians? Yes, but this by the Holy Spirit in Christ in us, and not just against the broken world out there, but the broken world “in here,” in our own fallen and broken hearts. We ought to call out unrighteousness and evil, exposing the darkness with the light of God’s Word, but in so doing we really are only exposing our own wretched hearts, outwith Christ’s heart for us. This ought to at least humiliate us to the point that we remain obedient, even to the death of the cross. And the ground of this obedience is funded by God’s eternal life of humility for us, as He freely chose to become us in the humanity of Jesus Christ (Deus incarnandus). We certainly do have freedom in Christ, but it is a freedom circumscribed by being for God, and not for ourselves. It is a freedom to be holy as He is holy. It is a freedom to bear witness to the world that the Son has set us free, free indeed.
I’m not suggesting that we ought to be looking for some type of balance between being libertine or legalistic. I am suggesting that we abandon that whole paradigm altogether. God’s righteousness in Christ confronts us in the living color of His flesh and blood life for us in Jesus Christ; indeed, as He continuously breathes and hovers over us, from within, by the Holy Spirit. His work is ‘out of nothing’ (ex nihilo), which means that our daily lives are totally contingent upon His Word and Way, and not ours. There is nothing inherent to this world system that supplies us with the sustenance we require to live in the free life that God has brought us into by yoking Himself with us in His freedom for us in Christ. We have a new creation life that comes from outside of us, as an ‘alien life,’ as if manna falling from the heavens in the morning dew each and every day. This freedom, this righteousness we have been given through union with Christ, and thus participants in the triune life Godself, is not a possession of ours, as if a self-possession; we, instead, are a possession of this righteousness’s. This cannot be stressed enough: our lives, as Christians, as human beings, are fully and continuously, moment-by-moment, contingent on God’s Logos. We bring nothing to this arrangement except our dissolute selves, which the Creator, the Sustainer, indeed, the Father in His eternal relationship with the Son, has entered into, in the Son’s assumption of flesh, taking the depth of our fallenness, which He alone can see, into the bones and marrow of His humanity, allowing that to have its final and just result in the human life lived in obedience unto the Father, finally eventuating in death, even death on a cross. We couldn’t and cannot do that. It takes the homoousios Theanthropos (GodMan) to do that for us. And while that event, in itself, is once and for all, it is an event that has ‘perfect tense’ reality insofar that we gain our reality before God, continuously, as events-in-happening, moment-by-moment, through God’s reality for us in His Melchizedekian life as the Son of David, our High Priest, who sits at the right hand of the Father always living to make intercession for those who will inherit His eternal life.
Since our lives are contingent in the above way, we have no space for boasting except in the fact that our God is indeed the living and triune God who has not left us as orphans. This ought to change the way we approach the world, others, and ourselves. We, as Luther was wont to say (paraphrase), “are beggars all.”