Except that's not the right title for this. It's not this one or that one. It's grace or nothing; grace or death. What I mean is, I was thinking about a great video I saw recently which talked about how important young men are for churches, and how feckless and wandering most young men are--and it's true for me too. All too often I am self-absorbed and just interested in my own tiny circle of interests (even religious ones), easily self-pitying, passive, not going and tackling and making war on the challenges of the day. And the interviewer was rightly condemning this very pervasive tendency in American young men, and I was right there with him as I listened, condemning myself and all the other young male cowards with him.
But then I thought, What if I were a pastor and I had a 20-something male who was into video games and porn and not much else, and I started to pound him and tell him to get his act together, and become a noble and valorous warrior? (I say that last phrase without any irony whatsoever.) If I were to morally exhort him that way, two results are possible: (1) He would fail to change and improve. (2) He would succeed to change and improve. Both options lead to death.
If #1 happens, shame would be added to sin, and he probably would be inclined to hide from further contact with the church.
If #2 happens, he would turn into a Pharisee. Moral exhortation made outside of the larger controlling context of grace and the gospel, if heeded and acted upon by its audience, produces Pharisees. When that now-improved young man saw others struggling, he would have no compassion on them--he'd just say, 'Pull yourself up by your bootstraps like I did!' And if somehow he did succeed in changing outside of grace, it would involve some kind of self-violence in which he cut off some part of himself or did some kind of damage to himself. I've known some fundamentalists who were moral in a sense, but sort of inhuman, toward themselves and others.
Moral exhortation outside of the context of the gospel has very dangerous results, whether it succeeds or fails.
From Scatterings
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