If you read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), you must realize how far short you fall of that standard. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). How is that working for you?

A less dramatic and less dynamic antithesis than Islam to the living God revealed in the Bible is a Christianity-lite or moralism. However, moralism is equally dangerous as a false gospel, however insipid and harmless it may seem, since it, too, denies the gospel. Moralism takes many forms, but they all center on the ability of man to please God through good works. It is the default position of many Americans who believe in God and have some acquaintance with Christianity, but not with the living God and his gospel. The theologian H. Richard Neibuhr (1894-1962) memorably described theological liberalism (one form of moralism) in 1937 this way: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”[1]

Moralism assumes that God exists and has a moral standard. That is correct. However, moralism incorrectly teaches that God’s moral standard is within our ability to reach, which is wrong. Moralism takes Jesus more as a moral example than as Savior and Lord. He is the great teacher of morality.

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