Dressing Wounds Lightly
Biblical Remedy and Condemnation for Therapized Christianity
“They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace.”
— Jeremiah 6:14
In the B’rit Chadashah, Yahushua and the Apostles state the problem thusly:
1) The Divine Council is corrupted, and the whole world is under the sway of the evil one.
2) Men imagine vain things and rule unjustly.
3) Because of sin, this world is full of trouble, with narrow ways full of strife, deception, injustice, temptation, and death; whereas Yah offers a path to abundant life in the age to come.
4) Those who love God are enemies of the world system.
5) The church is infiltrated by wolves, false teachers, hirelings, and the self-interested, who corrupt its leadership and doctrines.
6) Those who endure to the end, following the teachings of Yahushua, will be granted life.
7) The Churches are full of those who call Yahushua “Lord” and yet do not know him.
8) Yahushua will cast off all those who work iniquity.
9) In the meantime, we are to bear each other up in love and maintain a system of ecclesiastical accountability, discipline, and corrective disassociation from members who do not submit to judgement from valid church structures, which are charged with adjudicating disputes according to what is written, rather than traditions of men.
In the modern therapized Church culture, the problem is stated as, roughly:
1) Everyone is broken and spiritually immature.
2) Jesus Christ is Lord of the Earth.
3) Because of sin, we all die, we are all kept from proper understanding of love in Christ.
4) Those who love God are empowered to love properly, selflessly.
5) The church is the place we go for community, to share divine love.
6) Those who believe in Jesus will have eternal life.
7) The world is full of people who heard of Jesus but do not trust him to give them eternal life or believe that he is God, who died for them to free them from sin, which keeps them from the pattern of love they perceive and expect in the church, which is judgement free.
8) Jesus accepts all who come to him, therefore the Christian is to accept all who come to him, loving his enemies and forgiving all trespasses.
9) Until he returns, we are to refrain from judgement and condemnation of others, but we are supposed to condemn the self to crucify ourselves and be more like Christ.
The modern model is produced by distortions of the original model.
1) Rather than seeing an authority/legitimacy issue, sin is moved into the self.
2) Christ is seen as ruler rather than the priest who left to prepare the way and entrusted to mankind the enterprise of God (the vineyard of the parables), which allows all things to be done according to his will on earth too early.
3) Sin, accordingly, is made out to be a lack of inner peace about circumstances as much as any external event.
4) Love is defined as selflessness without regard to proper moral standards, human moral reasoning, healthy attachment operations within the psyches of men, or the Precepts and Statutes of God.
5) The wolves, hirelings, selfish, ambitious, vain, unlearned, and unstable people of charisma and certain clever philosophies (Colossians 2:8) have exchanged certain truths for comforting lies about how to love our neighbors.
6) Mere belief has been made dispositive rather than foundational; works have been rendered vain rather than the fruit of a living faith (James 2:17).
7) Obedience to Christ, therefore, is about belief and rejecting one’s opportunities to judge the world (1 Corinthians 6:1-6)
8) Yahushua will, by this reasoning, cast off those who never accepted his identity as God-Messiah, while those who judge others, being sinners themselves, are at risk of being cast off for failing to forgive.
9) The Church’s role is to spread unconditional love and teach each other how to heal and not have any self-serving interest, even if the Law, being weak and ineffective toward proper spiritual formation (at least, this is how Paul is twisted), calls an action sin, even if that sin was worthy of death under Moses.
So, which is right? How can we know?
The church needs to answer this, because if X is condemned but a pastor says, “We should forgive all who do X and allow the perpetual practice of X because Christ forgave us,” which answer we choose determines who suffers and how; and which answer we choose determines our datum for how we identify statuses, determine standings, anchor disputes, assign authority, duties, and obligations, and how judgement is rendered in any case both as a matter of church discipline and of individual moral-causative reasoning.
It determines directions of control.
Meanwhile, the therapized model covertly does enact certain controls by asking questions such as, “Are you bitter? Are you forgiving? Are you controlling? Are you healed? Are you holding onto resentment?” rather than ask moral questions such as, “What was the immoral act? Do you want repair or vengeance? How can the church with its current soft power address this issue? How can we prevent this wrong through doctrinal development, scriptural re-evaluation, and education?”
We cannot determine whether someone's insistence upon something is wrongful “control” until we've determined whether he possesses legitimate authority or a legitimate claim concerning that thing. We cannot determine whether refusing reconciliation is vindictive until you've established the offender's status and what repentance requires. We cannot determine whether jealousy is pathological until we've determined whether something actually belongs exclusively to the jealous party. We cannot determine whether an expectation is selfish merely by observing that satisfying it benefits the person holding it. We also cannot legitimately call everything being grieved an idol. To do so is to charge someone with idolatry. Unsubstantiated charges are not loving.
Therapized analysis can reverse causal attribution:
A commits X against B.
B becomes distressed because of X.
B's distress becomes the presenting problem.
B's psychological characteristics are investigated to explain the distress.
B is instructed to change so that X produces less distress.
A's X consequently becomes background circumstance.
This moves causation from “X wounded B” toward “something within B made X wounding.”
This is victim-blaming.
Under an accountability model:
A's conduct toward B will be evaluated against an external moral standard; A may be required to repent, repair, cease, restore, or accept changed standing.
Under the therapized model:
A's conduct toward B causes B to experience distress; B's distress is evaluated; B may be required to forgive, release, heal, detach, relinquish expectations, or reconsider his motives.
The first is restorative; the second potentially justifies the wrong and immunizes the wrongdoer.
Which system we pick determines whether control is exercised upon the victim or the offender, the key problem naturally being: how do we identify offense and victimhood according to Scripture?
The Ultimate Remedy: Repairing the Individual
For all the therapy-coding of modern sermons and beliefs, the original therapeutic value of the faith was in the restoration of the individual to God. “The Law was added because of sin… [to confine] everyone under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe… to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.” (Galatians 3:19-24)
The whole of this passage of Galatians rests on the word for ‘justified,’ δικαιωθῶμεν (dikaiothomen) [G1344], and how it is implicated. There are two readings:
1) The person is set into right alignment with God
2) The person is declared innocent, regardless of truth
The natural question is, which is the goal of God? Is He more interested in transforming people by the renewing of their minds so that they abandon their sins, persevere in righteousness, and become sanctified; or that the unjust do not face consequences? Is this justification a means of preserving a man by fiat, or is proper justification a means of rendering a person properly-aligned with God so that fiat is no longer required?
Hebrews 12:10 gives the end plainly:
“He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.”
Rearranged, combining the Scriptures, in order that we may be Holy, as He is Holy, because he loves us, He chastises us as a father chastises his son, for He is Our Father. The justification mentioned by Paul must be transformative rather than declarative and transubstantiative by mere fiat. There is more to support this reading:
Romans 6:22:
“But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to Elohim, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.”
Romans 8:3-4:
“…He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Torah might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Ruach.”
Hebrews 12:7-8:
“Elohim deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.”
2 Timothy 3:16-17:
“All Scripture is inspired by Elohim and beneficial for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of Elohim may be fully capable, equipped for every good work.”
Consider the following: “Scripture cannot be broken.”
Matthew: 5:1718, 17:12, 24:35, 26:24, 26:54, 26:56
Mark: 9:12, 13:31, 14:21, 14:49
Luke: 16:17, 18:31, 21:33, 22:37, 24:25-27, 24:44
John: 10:35
Therefore, if these books are considered scripture, and they are general canon, then each verse informs the other. Therefore, if the telos of the Torah is, in one place, to teach us how to be righteous, then it is for teaching righteousness in every case. It cannot be in even one instance to merely condemn us so that we accept someone else’s deeds as qualifying for our record. Stated another way, no interpretation of one passage can assign Torah a function that contradicts a function Scripture positively assigns it elsewhere. If it is said to do two things, it does both, even if a certain reading can insist on only one of the functions. Condemnation may be one operation of Torah; it cannot therefore be made its ultimate therapeutic end, and what kind of remedy is condemnation? And if God is training us up in righteousness, how is actionless belief sufficient for that transformation? It cannot be so.
When a man steals or slaughters an ox, he must pay back fivefold (Exodus 22:1); but the ultimate remedy of the Law is that a man sees his sin as true error, despises it, and cuts the behavior clean off from himself. The therapeutic value of the Law is repentance and transformation of the offender. The therapized type, in contrast, produces ascetically-disciplined victims. We either put on Christ in terms of function, or we merely wear his righteousness to hide from God, as if it were possible, that we are unregenerate; or we realize that fig leaves are not as pleasing to God as oneness with Him in whom there is no sin.
If we expect God to judge justly, then so, too, ought we to judge justly; but in order to judge, we must remove load-bearing beams from our eyes (Matthew 7:5).
The physician must provide the proper diagnosis and the commensurate remedy. All have sinned and fallen short of God, but is He able to heal human beings? If the Torah is not burdensome, and if sin is the sickness that separates us from Him, and being separated from Him is the cause of darkness and stumbling, then we should draw near, stop sinning (and sin is transgression of the law), and practice righteousness as taught by the Torah until it becomes easy and natural. We must do, and then we will understand (Exodus 24:7).
So, the universal medicine of Christ is the secret food: the scriptures from which he constantly preached and argued. The cure-all is not snake oil, but the oil of endurance.
The therapized model is, “The offender is accepted; therefore stop condemning him.”
Yahuwah’s model says, “The offender is accepted precisely so that he can submit to correction.”
Therefore, if we are adopted so that He may correct us, will we refuse the correction while insisting upon adoption and inheritance? If so, we become like those who only wanted food from our Lord in John 6:26. “You seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate some of the loaves and were filled.” Are you merely seeking earthly bread, or the words of Elohim as food?
None of this renders Yahushua unnecessary, nor is there any such implication considering the full canon. Regarding the full telos of Christ, the fulfiller of the Torah, the scale must shift from the individual to the cosmic problem, just as he left the earth and entered the heavenly spaces. There is a capability of Christ, the immortal, sinless, faithful human representative, that is beyond what the blood of bulls and the hands of the Levites could accomplish. “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” (Hebrews 10:4) That larger priestly remedy is beyond the scope of this paper. Here the narrower point is that whatever Mashiach accomplishes cosmically does not negate the stated purpose of divine instruction within the individual: correction, training in righteousness, sanctification, and ultimately participation in the holiness of Elohim (John 17). May we all be One with Him.
The Legal Fiction of a Lazy Soteriology
Suppose we provisionally grant the that forensic justification is unnecessary, and the justification key to salvation is merely the adoption of Yahushua’s perfect record. If there is no requirement to generate a better record – and we should ask what evaluates the record: the New Testament authors routinely cite the Torah of Moshe – there exists, then, this question with its perverse and obverse incentives:
“Is that declaration of the subject’s righteousness according to the works only of Yahushua the remedy or that which enables the true remedy?”
Let’s ask the apostles.
Romans 6:1–23 — old man dies; newness of life; obedience; sanctification; eternal life.
Romans 8:1–14 — Torah's requirement fulfilled in those walking according to Ruach.
Romans 12:1–2 — transformation through renewal of mind.
1 Corinthians 5 — church judges its own and removes wickedness.
1 Corinthians 6:1–11 — saints adjudicate; unrighteous behavior excludes from Kingdom; “such were some of you.”
1 Corinthians 7:10–11 — even separation doesn't automatically dissolve marital obligation.
Galatians 5–6 — grace/freedom cannot become flesh; conduct still has Kingdom consequences.
Ephesians 2:8–10 — not saved by works, yet created for good works.
James 1–2 — hearing without doing is self-deception; faith without works is dead.
1 John 2–3, 5 — knowing Elohim is evidenced by obedience; sin is anomia; commandments aren't burdensome.
Hebrews 12 — adoption entails discipline producing holiness.
The argument from the above section is not that δικαιόω (dikaioō) simply means transformation. The point is that the meaning and function of this key Christian term cannot be determined in isolation from what the apostles say justification is meant to produce. Even if δικαιόω is used declaratively in a particular passage – Yah declaring or accounting the believer righteous – it does not follow that the declaration itself exhausts the salvific action. The apostles repeatedly expect the person so justified to be corrected, renewed, sanctified, and transformed into a new pattern of life. Thus, the lexical question remains relevant, particularly where δικαιόω can carry a broader sense of being set right; but the argument does not depend upon proving that transformation is contained within the word itself. Whether declaration and transformation are both implicated in justification, or whether the declaration enables the subsequent transformation, the stated telos remains the same: the production of a righteous person through the Torah, Yahushua’s mission, and the corrective and administrative work of the Church.
The most direct proof, saved for the end of this section, is that James makes the answer explicit:
James 2:24: a man is dikaioutaiἐξ ἔργων (by/from works), οὐκἐκ πίστεως μόνον (not by/from faith alone).
James 2:22 supplies the process: Abraham's faith was working with his works (synergei), and through the works the faith was completed/perfected (eteleiōthē). So the natural next question for your paper becomes:
It is therefore invalid simultaneously to insist that Sha’ul intended justification to be merely declarative and that he agrees with Ya’akov. Whatever The Way understood justification to entail, it cannot exclude the works explicitly implicated by Ya’akov. Nor can justification describe only the beginning of the process, for at that point no work has yet been produced, no transformation manifested, and no evidence offered. Ya’akov addresses precisely this problem earlier in the chapter:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless?
This is the problem-answer set at hand as provided by Ya’akov. He expects the believer to produce an outcome with his faith.
The same man gave the decision of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15:
“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”
The practice of The Way was clearly to have the gentiles abstain from certain disqualifying practices while they learned to perform the works demanded by Yahuwah in the Torah. These same acts are tied to justification in James 2, which means that if Sha’ul in in agreement with Ya’akov – and this doctrinal agreement between apostles is a foundational assumption of typical Christian theologians – and Sha’ul should not be interpreted as advocating for the declarative-justification-only view. Man is indeed not saved by faith alone, but by a living faith as evidenced by its works.
The rejection of this clear fact produces a horrid result in the ecclesia.
The New Legalism of Counter-Torah “Safety”
The therapized model accuses the accountability model of legalism while imposing its own laws:
You must forgive.
You must release.
You must not judge.
You must not demand consequences.
You must relinquish expectations.
The distress of victimhood according to Moshe is then often turned into a problem within the claimant. This runs totally contrary both to Yahushua’s procedural description in Matthew 18 and Paul’s insistence on church governance rather than secular governance in 1 Corinthians 5-6. Rather than seeing a wrong done from an offender to a victim, the act is often seen as probative of a spiritual flaw within the victim/claimant, and that spiritual insistence upon “their own will” as opposed to God’s will, is offloaded both onto their moral-spiritual ledger (the claimant is wrong to be upset) and to the ledger of God as being the Soverign who either caused or allowed whatever wrong has occurred, and deemed something that the victim needs to “give over to God.” “[God’s] will be done one earth” moves from prayer to theological assumption.
This new legalism (and calling it “not law” does not make it not of legal force within the ecclesial domain) does not abolish the law, but rather transfers the duties involved in legal disputes, causing judgements grossly contrary to what would be expected by Moshe, Yahushua, Sha’ul, Ya’akov, Yahuchanon, and Kepha. Such action is indeed the equivalent of saying to someone injured, “Go in peace; be whole,” while doing nothing to assist them.
This new legalism is not merely something inside the church. The moral-legal passivity of the church and the general unwillingness to engage in the secular extension of the church’s authority, which is to train the saints up in righteousness so that they know how the standards of God, know how to judge, know how to argue, know how to vote, and are willing to export the true law into world causes the excess of everything contrary to the actual Will of God, which is that we routinely discuss his law, precepts, commandments, statutes, ways, and wisdom, so that we can not only affect the moral compasses of those within the church in the context of the church, but also that the same moral conscience follows them out of the assembly and into the world where it affects the consciences of others.
Justice as Evangelism
In Deuteronomy 4, Moshe tells the people:
“See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as Yahuwah my Elohim commanded me, that you are to do these things in the land where you are entering to take possession of it. So keep and do them, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is Yahuwah our Elohim whenever we call on him, or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgements as righteous as this whole Torah which I am setting before you today?”
Notice what Moshe said would evangelize the Canaanites:
1) The wisdom and understanding of the people
2) The nearness of Yahuwah, that he answers when called upon
3) Statutes and judgements so righteous
“ In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” – Matthew 5:16
“Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” – 1 Peter 2:12
“Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life. And then I will be able to boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor in vain.” – Philippians 2:15-16
Ecclesial justice and individual righteousness, both of which are according to the Torah, will impress the people. After all, which law was kept that brought people all over the world to Christ? Surely, it was not a law unwritten that we have discovered recently, but rather a written law known to be authoritative to the Jews of his day, which is to say not the oral Torah but the written Torah – the statutes given through Moshe in the wilderness and the judgements pronounced by the prophets.
Telos as a Test for Grace
If “grace” produces a church that won't judge what Scripture commands it to judge, won't discipline whom Scripture commands it to discipline, won't require restitution/repentance, and transfers the resulting burden onto the injured party, then that doctrine has defeated the purpose Scripture assigns to grace, discipline, Torah, ecclesia and good works.
A remedy that prevents its intended outcome cannot be the intended remedy.
We are, therefore, presented with three models of a justifying faith in the grace of God as revealed through Yahushua:
1) Antinomian Declarative Model: We come to believe the fact, perhaps also by conviction of the heart, that Yahushua is the Mashiach, a righteous man killed because of our sins, and by believing this, our records are wiped perpetually clean and we are freed from the burden of the law; therefore, we can go on sinning and merely preach this universal acceptance of souls unto God that they might believe similarly and inherit eternal life, being spared from the judgement to come
2) Semi-transformative Model: By faith, the sinner is justified through the righteousness and work of Mashiach rather than his own works. Good works properly follow salvation as its fruit, but neither constitute nor preserve the believer's justified standing.
3) Transformative Model: We come to believe that we have sinned according to the Law of Moshe, realize that change is required (adaptive justification), priestly intercession by Yahushua is needed to make us clean before God, by which cleansing we can go to the Father and He will forgive us our sins so that we can walk in a newness of life, which is to say in a new pattern, having put to death the old functional ontology (“old man”) and been “raised to life” in the new pattern.
Only one of these models necessarily satisfies the telos: a body of believers that can judge according to an objective, written moral standard approved by Yahushua and the shaliachim, so that they might be a peculiar people who partake not of the ways of the heathen and capture the attention of the lost so that these lost people can plainly see that they are set apart from the world and devoted to a god whose laws and wisdom are superior.
The argument now becomes, “which model of righteousness and grace, which method of soteriology, produces a man like Yahushua.”
The method of determination is necessarily, “which was the standard by which Yahushua lived?”
Whatever law Yahushua actually kept was the same law Moshe said would convince the world of the superior righteousness and wisdom of Yahuwah. This is necessarily, then, some law recognizable to Moshe, who lived in the middle east during the late bronze age. It will, therefore, likely be peculiar to a 21st century westerner. It cannot be something invented after Moshe died, nor can it be something invented after Yahushua ascended.
Model 1, the Antinomian Declarative Model, provides no ecclesial justice.
Model 2, the Semi-Transformative Mode, is much more sophisticated because it is designed to absorb objections by keeping the issue in tension. Defensive machinery is fully developed against making any particular act of obedience necessary. It permits transformation while prohibiting it normatively; we can’t insist upon compliance with the law that we know is valid, but insisting upon it is also deemed a spiritual issue. It can only convict the individual, but it cannot inform us in the handling of disputes; we can obey it, but we cannot insist that others do the same. Thus, Torah may survive as private devotional preference while being denied its function as a common standard of judgment.
The problem is not that this model is never valid: it is valid precisely at the beginner stage at which many remain. While new believers are meant to drink milk (Hebrews 5:12–14), they are also meant for solid food; and this belief passively keeps the believer stuck by not insisting upon transformation.
Model 3 leaves time for transformation because it always has. There is no necessary dialectic between antinomianism and rigorism in which grace must be preserved by weakening the normative force of righteousness. Transformative grace resolves the apparent tension. A man may truly sin without his sin becoming permissible; he may truly be guilty without his guilt becoming irreversible; he may truly repent without repentance being merely forensic; and he may truly be forgiven without forgiveness rendering his future conduct irrelevant. He may repent, be cleansed, be transformed by the renewing of his mind, cast off the deeds of the old man, and walk thereafter in newness of life.
The relevant question is therefore not whether a justified man can sin, but what Yahuwah intends to happen when he does; and this question applies to both people in a dispute.
Sometimes, the remedy of God is forgiveness between the parties.
Sometimes, the proper remedy is restitution.
Sometimes, the remedy can be separation, exile, or capital punishment.
The remedy is seldom to repair the social peace by insisting that a wronged party must bear the wrong – or worse, that he was never wronged – but to repair people and relationships according to the nature of the wrong and the remedy prescribed by God.
