While the religious experts focused on clarifying boundaries, Jesus focused on what lies at the center.
Why do Christians, who are called to be holy, settle for being weird?
In his commentary on Romans, British scholar James D. G. Dunn noted that in the apostle Paul’s day, an inordinate amount of rabbinic writing focused on three aspects of the law: circumcision, Sabbath keeping, and dietary regulations. That is odd. No devout first-century rabbi would have said that these areas were the heart of the law. The heart of the law was clear: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5). So why the remarkable emphasis on circumcision, Sabbath keeping, and eating habits?
To explain this, Dunn refers to what sociologists might call boundary markers. Boundary markers are highly visible, relatively superficial practices that serve to distinguish people inside a group from those outside. So if you pull up next to a 1960s VW van plastered with peace signs and bumper stickers that read “Make love, not war,” navigated by a driver with long hair, granny glasses, and love beads, you know with whom you are dealing.
If on the other side is a BMW piloted by a hair-moussing, Rolex-wearing, Brie-tasting, chardonnay-sipping 30-year-old, you know his group as well.
Religious groups, perhaps even more than other kinds, tend to want to distinguish themselves from outsiders. So the religious experts of Paul’s day spent a great deal of time focusing on boundaries. These practices received the lion’s share of attention—not because they were so important in themselves, but because they became litmus tests for determining who was inside and outside the people of God. This was a “boundary-oriented approach” to the spiritual life.
While the religious experts focused on clarifying boundaries, Jesus focused on what lies at the center of faithful life. When asked about the essence of the law, Jesus’ response went immediately to its heart: Love God, love people (Mark 12:29). Likewise, when he was asked about why his disciples did not follow the ritual handwashing customs of the Pharisees, Jesus pointed out the source of true dirt: the human heart (Mark 7:1-23).
Consistently in the New Testament we see the spiritual life determined by what is at the center, not by the boundaries. It was a “centered approach” to Christian life.
This explains why so many of the conflicts between the religious experts and Jesus and Paul revolved around issues of Sabbath, eating, and circumcision. Jesus was not simply differing with them on applications of the law. He was threatening the foundation of their very understanding of themselves as the people of God.
Narrowing religious devotion to the boundaries is a constant temptation for people of faith. Those who take following God seriously want to believe it makes a difference—that it makes them different. And if they are not becoming manifestly more loving, they will almost inevitably find some markers to prop up their belief that they are different.
In certain kinds of churches, for instance, the pastor might be resentful or bitter, but as long as the church is “going well,” his ministry will not be seriously threatened. However, should he smoke one cigarette in the parking lot while greeting members after a service, he would create an uproar. Why? No one would argue that smoking a single cigarette was a worse sin than a lifetime of resentment. It is because cigarette smoking can serve as a kind of boundary marker.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH JAZZ?
The list of such markers varies from generation to generation. The Christian college I attended in the late 1970s still had in effect a rule against listening to jazz. It had been established in the early-twentieth century when abstaining from jazz had been a significant boundary marker. Fifty years later no one was willing to rescind it for fear of appearing to compromise. We were free to listen to punk or heavy metal, but Louis Armstrong was off-limits. On Sundays, the tennis courts were locked up, but for some reason the volleyball court was accessible. (As a tennis player, I always maintained that volleyball was the more worldly of the two sports, as it was more closely associated with California and was often played on the beach.)
Boundary markers are as likely to exist in liberal as in conservative traditions. The shape they take may be different—the mandatory embracing of certain “correct” political views, the use of feminine language to refer to God—but the underlying dynamic is the same.
Of course, there are certain issues that will inevitably and appropriately become divisive between those who choose to follow Christ and those who don’t. Jesus made precisely this point about his own ministry when he said he came to bring not peace but a sword, “to set a man against his father” (Matt. 10:34-35). Followers of Christ must take positions on issues—sexual morality, the existence of moral absolutes, the rejection of materialism and militarism—at odds with culture.
But I make a distinction between moral standards and boundary markers. The Bible, for example, teaches that sexual intimacy is to be reserved for heterosexual marriage. To make this assertion will generate visible disagreement between those who affirm it and those who don’t.
That does not in itself make it a boundary marker, at least in the sense I use the term. Boundary markers may involve legitimate moral issues (sexual ethics) or not (dietary customs or card playing). Something becomes a boundary marker when it is seized upon by those in the group as a way to reinforce a sense of superiority and to exclude others.
We see this dynamic at work in Jesus’ teachings on sexual ethics, especially when they are contrasted with those of many of the religious leaders who opposed him. When they brought Jesus the adulterous woman in John 8, he affirmed the moral standard against adultery. But he went on to show that adultery—while a moral standard—was not to be used as a boundary marker to separate morally superior nonadulterers from inferior adulterers. It was this kind of attempt to twist a moral standard into a boundary marker that Jesus addressed when he spoke of the one who looks at “a woman lustfully” as already committing adultery with her in his heart (Matt. 5:28). His point was not that lust is as damaging as adultery. It was that human fallenness in regard to sexuality is universal. Technical avoidance of adultery does not justify an attitude of moral superiority and the impulse to exclude.
Followers of Jesus must proclaim God’s moral standards for human sexuality. But when we couch revealed truth in taunting language (as in the anti-gay rights placard that reads “The Bible Says God Created Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve”), we fail to communicate that the great gap in the Bible is not between those who hold correct and incorrect ideological positions; it is between sinful creatures and a holy God. We risk turning a moral standard into a boundary marker.
Wherever it is found, the search for boundary markers (or legalism, to give it a more familiar name) manifests itself in two ways. First, it involves taking an inappropriate stand on an issue (“playing cards is morally wrong,” for instance). Second, it emphasizes the performance or avoidance of certain behaviors—which may even be biblically sanctioned, but which is limited and selective. It leaves out other, far more central matters. It is driven by the need to demonstrate that those who follow this code are the ones truly favored by God.
This tendency to focus on boundary markers has affected us in a number of ways. One of the worst is that it trivializes holiness.
The trivialized substitute for holiness can be both exhausting and intimidating, on the one hand, and unchallenging and trivial, on the other. This is what author Stephen Mosley had in mind when he wrote about our tendency to become “a ‘peculiar people’ set at odd angles to the world rather than being an attractive light illuminating it. … [This substitute] calls out rather feebly. It whines from the corner of a sanctuary; it awkwardly interrupts pleasure; it mumbles excuses at parties; it shuffles along out of step and slightly behind the times. … It’s often regarded by our secular contemporaries as a narrow, even trivial, pursuit. Compared to, say, efforts to achieve world peace and end world hunger, preoccupations with jewelry [or] foul language … don’t seem very earthshaking.”
This is something of what Jesus had in mind when he said our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees—a statement that must have astounded his hearers. The Pharisees’ problem was not that they were not working hard enough, but that they were working on the wrong front. Although they attended to the boundaries, they neglected the center and thus were light years away from the heart of God. (“You tithe mint, rue, and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God,” Jesus charged in Luke 11:42.) When Jesus said our righteousness must exceed that of these religious leaders, he was actually setting the bar remarkably low. True righteousness is precisely what they had hardly any of.
THE TEMPTATION TO EXCLUDE
A boundary-marker approach to faith also enshrines and promotes a desire for exclusivism.
Who cannot understand the appeal? Schools, country clubs, restaurants, and gated communities are all sold on the basis of being “exclusive.” But the gospel is introduced to establish the most radically inclusive community in the history of this divided planet.
Dunn argues that Paul’s primary critique of the abuse of the law in Romans was not that people were trying too hard to be good or to accumulate moral credit. It was that the law had been turned into a weapon to exclude “religious have-nots” from the people of God. The result was that the very people who thought they were demonstrating great righteousness were, in fact, growing hearts more hardened and unloving than the pagans they were coming to despise.
George Barna writes about how communities of faith can degenerate into clannish subcultures that actually (albeit unconsciously) erect boundaries that feel impenetrable to outsiders: “Survey data show that most Americans believe that you cannot tell a born-again Christian from nonbelievers because there is no difference in the way they live. The only distinction, people say, is that Christians are more religious, more fanatical, or more close-minded. There is no widespread sense that the religious experience of Christians has changed the fabric of our thinking or the nature of our lifestyles.”
By contrast, a centered approach to Christianity focuses on what is at the heart of God’s will for human life. It forces me constantly to ask, “Is Christ my Lord? Is he at the center of my life? Am I coming to love and live more and more as he would if he were in my place?”
This may be humbling and even threatening, for it might involve the admission that when it comes to really loving God and people, I am not much ahead of (or may even be behind) people who possess little or no religious faith. Primary is the question of orientation: Are you oriented toward or away from the center? This, too, explains much of the conflict between Jesus and his opponents. Jesus may have been dealing with someone who was manifestly far outside the boundaries—a prostitute, say, or a tax-collector. But the moment such a one turned, became oriented toward the center (“converted” is the Bible’s word for it), Jesus declared him or her to be inside the people of God. At the same time, religious experts who spent every waking moment trying to respect the boundaries were declared by Jesus to be further outside than harlots and traitors. The wonder is they didn’t kill him sooner.
In our day, however, we too rarely frame the invitation to Christianity the way Jesus did. To a large extent, we have replaced “Follow me” with “Are you clear about how to get into heaven when you die?” The inevitable consequence is that “following” is considered desirable but optional—like snow tires and rear-window defoggers. We think in the categories of “heaven-bound” and “hell-bound,” which tend to be static. We tend to have disputes centered on clarifying the boundaries—like what are the “minimal requirements” for getting into heaven.
I once read a poem titled “I Stand Near the Door.” It expressed the notion that those who go too far into Christianity become less and less able to love those who pass by outside. They become immersed in a subculture, in its vocabulary and style. The writer decides not to go too far in and stands near the door.
As an expression of what happens when religion becomes a boundary-oriented subculture, the poem makes a point. However, in response to the call to follow Jesus, there is no such thing as going “too far in.” In fact, it is those who go furthest in—to the center of the kingdom, to the heart of the faith—who end up, like Jesus himself, closest to the door.
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John Ortberg is pastor of Horizons Community Church in Diamond Bar, California.
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