Someone joked that the religion in which we were raised was a form of abuse. It was - but not the kind of overt abuse characterised by churches that abuse. It was an abuse far more hidden and subtle than that because it was disguised as a special revelation from God.
FAKE HOLINESS Legalism looks on the surface like godliness. Possibly thousands of people still mistake it as such because it takes the form of moralism/legalism. But this is really a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil posing as the gospel of Jesus Christ. The life-dulling nature of forms of the knowledge of good and evil posing as spirituality is that they attribute evil to things that are not evil whole glossing over things that are.
SLAVERY The nature of this abuse is that those captured in its web mistake it for a way of earning salvation. A way of the kind that Jesus came to abolish in His person so that we would have life in His name. Christian versions of the knowledge of good and evil appear credible because of their black and white emphasis on morality – mainly sexual - since that can be the most personal and guilt producing kind. In this obfuscation social evils can be passed over, ignored and rationalised under a cloud of religio-political ideology of the kind that is antithetical to real life.
SANCTIFIED ROBBERY Any Christian doctrine based on distortion and privileged reasoning robs people of life because an addiction to non-truth as a way of life is the way of death. We should not be surprised when it is revealed that long held erroneous views sincerely held are clung to rather than rejected and repented of. People like the opiates in which they live because they provide a degree of comfort even as they cripple the life. It is an abuse to knowingly promote non-gospels as if they are something special when the effect of them is to dull the mind and kill the spirit of those so imprisoned.
ANY ABUSE IS EVIL Douglas Campbell observes that, “It is of course quite right ..to point to the unacceptability of tyrannical and abusive relationships and to the unacceptability of coercion. Forcing people to act is profoundly disrespectful to their personhood, and liberals are right to protest against this.” We must agree that manipulating people into belief in non-gospels is probably more pernicious than outright coercion. This is not the living way of real Godliness and making people of the lie is equally as evil.
NO COERCION IN CHRIST “But Jesus followers learn this same truth from the incarnation and from the loving relationality that God destined us for and draws us into. Loving relationships do not coerce. Love is offered and received freely. And we learned from God, furthermore, that the solution to abusive and broken relationships is courageous interventions to restore and heal relationships, along with the provision of nurturance in covenant by those who love us - not no relationships at all or occasional relationships carefully limited by contracts and conditions. These will heal nothing and no one.” (1)
CONSEQUENCES Two inferences may be made from these remarks. Jesus warned that those who degrade these little ones can expect judgment. Little ones may be those who are not clever enough to see through error. Or those who have made the mistake of believing those they should not have trusted. The other truth is that legalisms do not protect against sin or make us sons/daughter of God but workers and slaves as Paul warns in Galatians. If our Christian teaching is so specious that we cannot employ the smartest and brightest as Truth-Tellers, but are forced to rely on leaders who are naïve and challenged enough not to distinguish between a gospel of life and gospel of lies – we have not shot ourselves not in the foot but in the head. We are ‘keepers of the lame’.
(1)Douglas Campbell. Pauline Dogmatics. The Triumph of God’s Love. P 211.