Confession and Consultation: A Subtle Analogy

A friend comes to you and confesses, "I did something wrong. . ." and this wrong thing may range a wide spectrum: from an unintended neglect to an intentional act, from harming one's self to harming another, from a minor sin (if there is such a thing) to a grave, moral offense. . . What would you say? How would you react? Should your reaction depend on the weight of the offense? Should it depend on who was wronged? Should you consider whether it was intentional or not? Does it matter which friend was confessing?

Before you say anything, I think these things are worth considering:

1. The person is confessing (James 5:16). They have began to recognize and agree that what they did was wrong. They likely already feel remorse. 
2. Confession is hard. It is exposing one's flaws, and insecurities. It is revealing one's heart, rendering one vulnerable. 
3. The person chose to tell you, of all people. They regard you as someone they can talk to. They trust you.

Questions About Legalism

I don't think I understand the concept of legalism. According to John Piper, it is a certain attitude about the Law, a heart issue: it is pursuing the Law with some other engine than faith. I suppose it is what they refer to as trying to earn your salvation by being good in the belief that being good is what saves-- as if God requires it in exchange for salvation, as if it were a price to pay. 

But the question remains, what does it mean to pursue the Law by faith? If one pursues the Law not in order to earn God's favor but just in the desire to live as commanded, a desire to follow, is it safe to say that the person is on the right track?

GotQuestions presents another possible meaning of legalism: the demand of a strict literal adherence to rules and regulations. I understand this to be a lot like legal positivism, the theory in jurisprudence stating that law as written is absolute, followed word-for-word, as if simply a matter of pure semantics. I suppose this is considered an error in so far as it reveals an attitude like that of the Pharisees, an attitude that is essentially opposed to grace. Underlying their demand for strict compliance was the belief that it is works that save, that we have to deserve our salvation.

So then, what does this entail regarding obedience to Law? Are Christians not supposed to follow everything commanded in Scripture? Are we allowed to say "hindi naman kailangan e" about certain laws, like that about the Sabbath? Is there indeed such as a thing as 'optional commands'? How are we to choose which of them to strictly abide and which to be lax about? Is it even a matter of choice? Is it legalism, then, to feel indignant when one deems that a brother/sister in Christ failed to act according to what the Law states? Is it legalism to feel frustrated that there is so much disagreement in these matters? 

Some Christians discourage the performance of a practice if one does not feel the Spirit's leading, as it is the Spirit that one ought to follow to avoid legalism. But what does this even mean? Is obedience then just a matter of "feeling like it"? Are we only to help one another when we feel like it? Are we excused from following when we don't feel inclined to do so? Is forcing one's self to be kind to an enemy being legalistic? Is sharing the gospel out of obligation rather than feeling inclined to being legalistic? Is limiting to the minimal requirement what one follows being legalistic?

Pastor John writes

Discipline is not legalism. Hard work is not legalism. Acting against carnal impulses is not legalism. They may be. But they may also be the torque of the engine of faith running on the fuel of the Spirit to the glory of the grace of God in a self-centered and undisciplined world.

But this still does not clarify much.

Is asking these very questions being legalistic? Can not wanting to be legalistic itself be legalistic?

Cure vs. Treat: An Anecdote

Back in college, some of my philosophy classes conducted “objective” exams. That is, they asked identification/enumeration questions, instead of essay ones, but you can protest and defend your answer if it is different from the answer key.

There’s this one particular item that still haunts me to this very day. It’s a question about an analogy between something in philosophy and medicine. I don’t remember the exact question, but I remember the answer: cure the patient. I wrote treat the patient and it was marked wrong. People asked. The instructor reasoned that treating someone is not the same as curing someone. Treating someone was more like how you treat others, she said, and she was looking to the removal of the disease, as what the word ‘cure’ means. This was enough to appease the complainants. But she was wrong.

She forgot to account that a word may have several meanings, and treat does have different meanings. We had been using the word equivocally. In fact, in medical jargon, the word treatment is used a lot more than cure.

I knew this all along, but I never said anything.

A Case for Feelings in Faith and Medicine

A good doctor is not merely someone who can diagnose accurately and cure diseases, but someone who treats the person behind the disease. As the usually quoted aphorism goes, a physician

cures sometimes, relieves often, comforts always.

Medicine is not just the science that aims to eliminate illnesses, it is the art of communicating with people in the manner that addresses their interests. To me, this second part is more than a job. It is a command, the way of life to which I am called:

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Phil 2:3-4

Reconsidering Mr. Tan's Faith

A few months ago, I wrote about the concept of faith that Amy Tan acquired from her parents, saying that both concepts of her mother and father assume that God’s will is to grant our wishes. Her mother was Chinese, who heavily believed in the Chinese concept of luck. Her father was a minister who wrote this as his definition of faith in his own journal:

Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.

I said that what Mr. Tan meant by “something we want” is exactly that, something we want, our own self-centered desires. But after reading this article about George Müller, I started to think that maybe I’ve misunderstood what Mr. Tan really meant, as I was reading him only through Amy’s interpretation. Perhaps I’ve harshly scrutinized what he said based on strict semantics-- an elitist error that merely intellectualizes, instead of seeking to understand or be understood-- when I should’ve looked first at the context. And here was the context: