I am currently most concerned with how this viewpoint that christianity and moralism are synonyms affects the art that Christians produce and partake in. Go read Ezekiel 23 and then try to tell me that Christians can only create and view art that is “safe for the whole family” and pretends evil doesn’t exist.

“Well, I didn’t kill anyone today; but I didn’t do that last week, either.”

That is something solid to measure.

“Well, I didn’t wish anyone hurt today, like I did a few weeks ago.”

Still, this is a solid measure, though of something less obvious to the eyes. To say, by looking at my heart, that this is a natural action (flowing from the Spirit within) and not a contrived or forced action is sometimes hard for us as humans. And so we do have moralists who take the name “Christian” but never take more than a skin, a costume, a badge of description.

That seems counterintuitive at first, with all the strict “Do”s and “Don’t”s of legalism, and all the difficult restrictions that they place on our activities. But really, it’s simple to live that way, because we simply erect imaginary lines, and say “As long as you don’t cross these lines, and as long as you stay within the permitted area, you are doing good. You are impressing God and man.”

It requires no heart change, no self-examination or conviction, no growth. That’s why Jesus was saying things that seemed utterly foreign to the Pharisees. They were highly trained professionals whose entire life work was making the following of the rules increasingly strict and complicated, and boasting proudly at how righteous they were by staying completely within the seemingly impossible guidelines they had created.