I think the swing has done great good: American Christianity has indeed suffered under man-centered readings of the Bible which offer all law and no gospel, all duty and no delight, all rules and no relationship. And yet the ease with which I just tossed off those three slogans points to the pendulum problem: any time a movement reaches the slogan-generating stage, people will go trampling over necessary nuances to grab their party’s banners and wave them at their enemies. Pretty soon the pendulum picks up so much speed that it whooshes way past plumb.

The American evangelical church likes to ride pendulum swings. I’m not talking about the revolving door of theologically vapid church marketing gimmicks. I mean things that you and I do. You know, us: the kind of people who read Bible software blogs, who take biblical study and doctrine seriously.

In the most recent issue of Themelios—a theological journal you can get for free in Logos—Dane Ortlund helps us arrest one particularly powerful pendulum swing. His article, “Reflections on Handling the Old Testament as Jesus Would Have Us: Psalm 15 as a Case Study,” addresses the “remarkable resurgence of Christocentric interpretation,” an “impulse to resist moralistic and graceless readings” of Scripture. The relatively recent popularity of biblical theology and of “gospel-centeredness” are also part of this particular pendulum swing.

I think the swing has done great good: American Christianity has indeed suffered under man-centered readings of the Bible which offer all law and no gospel, all duty and no delight, all rules and no relationship. And yet the ease with which I just tossed off those three slogans points to the pendulum problem: any time a movement reaches the slogan-generating stage, people will go trampling over necessary nuances to grab their party’s banners and wave them at their enemies. Pretty soon the pendulum picks up so much speed that it whooshes way past plumb.

That’s why we need Dane Ortlund to sit us down and put our noses into Psalm 15, a small poem which is “at first sight…a straightforwardly gospel-vacuous Old Testament text.” If someone today were to write a hymn with these words, the “Moralism” banner would get whipped out instantly on Twitter:

O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent?
Who shall dwell on your holy hill?

He who walks blamelessly and does what is right
and speaks truth in his heart;

who does not slander with his tongue
and does no evil to his neighbor,
nor takes up a reproach against his friend;

in whose eyes a vile person is despised,
but who honors those who fear the LORD;
who swears to his own hurt and does not change;

who does not put out his money at interest
and does not take a bribe against the innocent.

He who does these things shall never be moved.

This psalm says nothing about Jesus, and little (if anything?) about divine grace. It basically tells us to do good stuff and not do bad stuff. And this yields two opposite pendulum-swing interpretations of this psalm, Ortlund says: “crass moralizing” and “strict Lutheranizing.”

Pendulum Swing Interpretations

On the one hand, an interpreter may crassly ignore human depravity and the necessity of Christ’s saving work, reading the moral demands in this psalm as an indication that people are capable of obedience if they’ll just put their minds to it, no grace needed.

On the other hand—and this is so insightful—a “strict Lutheranizing” may produce:

a hyper-focus on one’s inability to perfectly discharge the summons of the text. This is the hermeneutical tunnel-vision that reads every imperative in terms of the second use of the law, the law as a mirror in which one sees one’s own moral inability. It functions out of a dour anthropological pessimism. It is the refusal to maintain a distinction between meaningful if imperfect obedience, on the one hand, and perfect obedience on the other hand. Instead, sinful depravity and sinless perfection are the only two moral categories in play. This approach has difficulty retaining a category for, say, Noah in the Old Testament, or Simeon in the New: each of whom, while sharing in humanity’s fallenness more generally, is described as a righteous, godly man (Gen 6:9; Luke 2:25). (79–80)

That’s Bible study gold. We read the Bible because we want to apply Scripture to our lives; we all want to come away changed. We shouldn’t swing over and high-five Pelagius, assuming we can all change ourselves; neither should we swing over into a hard determinism in which our original sin makes “meaningful if imperfect obedience” (gold! gold!) impossible. Noah and Simeon were not sinless, but they still received “praise from God” (1 Cor 4:5) for their moral uprightness.

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