Lost on the Nomian Way

by

August 3, 2022

I once taught in the theological school where, and I quote an evangelical theological journal from back in the late 80s, “the way in which a person peeled a boiled egg could be seen as a sign of their spiritual maturity.” 

Thus at every faculty meeting we reviewed why students were not meeting our exacting standards with regard to behavior or doctrine. And we considered how we could rework the structure of our courses, or our rules, or our overall curriculum to make sure that it never happened again. 

We were true nomians, or as we’re also known, Methodists, believing that if we could tweak the order and the rules just one more time we could somehow overcome the problem of human nature.

It was really pretty amazing that a group of people who had studied theology and scripture at a high-level couldn’t see that this probably wasn’t going to work. We had all read the Bible, after all.

Rules work when they regulate, when they create the orderly expectations that allow humans to live their lives more fruitfully and without having to continually renegotiate every form of human interaction. But rules cannot insure that humans will behave and believe properly. Rules cannot create either fidelity or righteousness. 

Nor, by the way, does the rejection of rules, or antinomianism, create freedom. It just creates chaos. 

Ultimately both nomianism and anti-nomianism fail because they take the rules too seriously. One equates them with God‘s ordering of creation, the other with the evil oppression of human freedom. In reality the rules are just the usual well intentioned but often ineffective human effort to self-regulate. It is an effort we are obliged to make as God’s stewards of ourselves and creation. It’s an effort that needs to be questioned and sometimes rejected because we are not God. Our law, our Discipline is neither a virtue nor vice, it’s just all we’ve got.

Unfortunately the myth took hold early in Methodism, and runs deep in our veins, that a book of rules, a Discipline, could actually turn people into disciples. Wesley himself may have believed it, although he lived to see its failure. 

It hasn't worked. It never will. Worse, and this is the biggest problem with nomianism, we begin to believe that people will come to Christ because of our righteousness rather than the righteousness of Christ. Nomian or anti-nomian, we conflate conformity (or resistance) to doctrinal and moral standards with evangelistic effectiveness, and thus claim that success comes from our attitude toward the law. We begin to believe that what the world needs is either firm morality and orthodox belief or resistance to oppressive rules.

And of course when we fail we believe it must be because we are associated with those who have the wrong approach to the law. They are dragging us down. 

We all take this thing called the Discipline far too seriously, flinging out claims and counter claims about the rules and what they are or will be at one another. We have more ecclesial lawyers (and lawyers in general) than evangelists. We act as if somehow a fight over the rules, which was exactly what the teachers of the law wanted in order to distract Jesus from his mission, will make us effective witnesses to God's love. 

It is a peculiarly modern Methodist nonsense, and every church and every pastor and every minute of time sucked into disputes about the law and the making of the rules is another opportunity wasted to share the love of God in Christ. How odd, that a movement which began when John Wesley walked out the door and into the fields to preach the gospel has now retired to cloister (soon to be cloisters) to argue about the law. 

The Rev. Dr. Robert A. Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education and Director, Center for Evangelism at United Methodist-related Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. This post is republished from his blog, The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact the author via his blog.