The Seduction of Extremes
In reading Pastor Erick's recent posting titled, Falling Off the Horse, I was reminded of a book that I read two years ago titled, The Seduction of Extremes. In this book Peter Kurowski starts off with the same story of the drunken peasant saying,
"...man, by nature, is like a drunken peasant riding on a horse. He rides a few yards and falls into a ditch on the right. After a rude lesson on gravity, he gets back up and rides a little farther only to fall next in the ditch on the left. Right. Left. Right. Left. All the way along, the zigzagging drunk continues this right/left fall-guy routine. We never do find out if the poor chap made it back home."
Not only do we clumsily fall to the right and the left, it seems as if we are pulled or as Kurowski would put it, seduced, to an extreme position.
Kurowski, talks about the two extremes of legalism and lawlessness in the metaphor of a seductress. He says that Lady Lawlessness and Lady Legalism, "lead to self-worship. Each is an opposite in one way but a clone in another." He goes on to say that both of these seductive extremes are used by the devil to, "pull people away from God's most dramatic display of love in history--the cross."
In the spiritual realm Lady Legalism is, "...the narcissistic notion that human beings earn our way to heaven in some measure by fulfilling the law of God. ..a radical close-mindedness that detests change, lives by the Law and is severely judgmental and suspicious of all not so minded." Whereas Lady Lawlessness is a, "....do-your-own-thing declarations of independence. ...a radical openmindedness that opposes structure of all kinds, scoffs at tradition, is antinomian if not libertine, and worships change for the sake of change."
Kurowski comments on Luther's perspective on this subject saying, "he [i.e. Luther] recognized a theology of the cross that engendered attacks from all sides even though it was God's greatest display of love. For the legalist, the cross destroys the illusion that we can do something apart from God thus rendering God less than almighty. For the person bent on lawlessness, the cross says 'look how awful all lawlessness is that the holy Son of God must suffer so for the sin of mankind!' With the deepest of convictions, Luther believed this message alone could bring about the needed changes in the church, in culture, and in individual lives." Kurowski goes on to say, "Nothing has changed. Only through a paradoxical vision from a meaty, mighty, majestic gospel can the love of the absolute paradox, Jesus Christ, keep societies from being seduced by the self-centered, self-flattering nudity of Lady Legalism and Lady Lawless; the poster prostitutes of secularism."
In summary, "...the core paradoxical teaching of justification should signal how a gospel-centered disposition will eschew all extremes. It frees people from the curse of the law (Gal. 3:10); from eternal death (Rom. 6:23); from the tyranny of the devil (Eph. 6:12-13, Col. 1:13); and frees us to live lives in step with freedom (Gal. 5:1).
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