Interesting piece in Leadership Journal on the new fight among evangelicals over alcohol.

What is more dangerous, the enticing substance you wish to control through quarantine or the enticing substance which is your faith in the power of quarantine?

A church planter in Atlanta who works the web diligently posted this piece on his blog about the drastic measures they take to avoid moral failure.

Some of the responses he got from this posting surprised me. (Real life is always more surprising than my imaginary life.)

I wrote this response to his posting. It seems to apply here as well.

Very interesting discussion. We are free in Christ and if you find these steps helpful then you should pursue them. Part of pursuing them is to explain to people why you take these steps which is also appropriate. From that you of course also take the commentary and perspectives of those who disagree or are upset by them, as was seen in this discussion. Moral failure of a sexual nature is a problem and good steps can help.

Thoughtful Christians have long noted, however, that sin is not so easily dealt with through external constraints, in fact sometimes the way those remedies are pursued in fact tempt us in other ways.
Does the heightened profile of safeguards in this one area create an implicit hierarchy of sin? You take elaborate steps to safeguard from sexual sin, but what about gossip or gluttony?

Some have noted that the contrast of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, was not between the irreligious (younger brothers of Luke 15) and the religious, but rather between the religious (older brothers of Luke 15) and Christ followers. The point of the lesson was not so much to drive followers into tithing salt and pepper, but into realizing the insufficiencies of their resources in beating this enemy and therefore driving them to rely on God’s grace. Recipients of God’s revelation have had a peculiar history with that revelation. Some thought that devotion to God should best be expressed by hedging that law in order to be extra sure they didn’t break it. Jesus didn’t follow them into the tradition of the elders (which in fact Jesus contrasted and critiqued in the Sermon on the Mount). Galatian believers undoubtedly imagined that if believing was good, then being very circumspect about the Old Covenant would be better. Paul disagreed.

I guess I don’t have a problem with the individual choices we make, and measures we choose as disciples to honor God and shun sin. That’s certainly all good. But how do we talk about it? Faith in measures and standards that develop into a contemporary evangelical “tradition of the elders” may find a way of becoming a kind of sin that threatens our relationship with Christ at a deeper level than even an adulterous affair.