In the late-modern West we live in a time of license. Restraint seems to have disappeared. Thus, lacking almost any external guides, we should be cautious. Here are some things to consider. Does it edify or does it tear down? Does it encourage? Will it lead one toward godliness or away from it?

How do we think about hanging out with the guys (i.e., friends) and glorifying God simultaneously? This is a more difficult question than it might seem.

We have two dangers: license and legalism. First, let’s think about the latter. Those Christians who’ve been raised in or influenced by fundamentalism, the holiness tradition, or pietism are familiar with the kinds of purely man-made rules developed by Christians to make sure that no one ever sins.

The Pharisees called these types ofostensibly well-intended rules, “a fence around the law.” To keep believers from coming close to transgressing the 613 laws of the Torah (e.g., don’t break the sabbath) they set up rules that went beyond God’s. They established the number of steps one could take on the Sabbath before one broke the Sabbath. They ruled that if one fell into a ditch on the Sabbath their counsel was to leave him there since he shouldn’t have been out walking on the Sabbath in the first place. This is why Jesus’ Sabbath miracles were so offensive. They had reversed things by making man for the Sabbath where our Lord said the Sabbath is for man (Mark 2:27). It’s easy to make up rules and to impose them as a standard of piety.

In the early church Christians fled to the deserts in search of sanctity and communion with God. Before long enough joined that whole societies of monks were formed and societies need rules and vows. The piety of the medieval church was arguably dominated by monastic rules, vows, and an elaborate church order (canon law) that had virtually no basis in God’s Word. The entire church fell into what Martin Luther called a Babylonian Captivity of man-made theology, piety, and practice.

The Apostle Paul published the charter of Christian liberty against just this sort of error:

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath.1 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

If with Christ you died to the basic principles of the world (στοιχείων), why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations—“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting will worship (ἐθελοθρησκίᾳ) and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh (Col 2:16–23 revised from the ESV).

The answer the legalism is not license. The answer to legalism is to reassert the sufficient, clear, sole, unique authority of God’s Word (sola Scriptura) against rules and regulations without positive warrant in God’s Word. The legalists sought to bind the Colossian Christians to a combination of legalism and false spirituality.

Where the legalists sought to reimpose the Mosaic religious calendar (hence “new moon or a sabbath”) and religious experience (visions, angels), Paul points them to Christ. What the legalists offered was in substance nothing more than what he calls stoichea, the sense of which is disputed but which arguably refers, in this instance, less to Greco-Roman philosophies than to legalism itself, i.e.., the idea either of presenting one’s self to God on the basis of law keeping (in justification) or of regulating the Christian life on the basis of human laws (sanctification).

Paul here condemns both aspects of legalism. It’s almost as if Paul was looking ahead to the coming centuries when Biblical, Christ-centered theology, piety, and practice would be grossly corrupted by the very things he described.

The opposite error, of course, often comes in reaction to the first. Those who’ve been raised or affected by legalism react by fleeing to license. In the course of throwing off man-made rules for the Christian life Christians sometimes turn to license, i.e., they give to themselves permission to whatever they will and call it Christian liberty. The temptation opposite of  legalism is antinomianism, the rejection of the objective, revealed moral law of God. Of course, people rarely own up to antinomianism and they are just as rarely consistent in it.

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