“This is the foundation of a freely bestowed righteousness, when we are stripped of a righteousness of our own.” 1
John Calvin
Last week, many Christians reacted in shock at popular pastor and author Joshua Harris’ announcement that he and his wife of over 20 years were separating, then, at his subsequent announcement a week later that he had left the Christian faith.
Harris is known for his popular book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which led to the popularization of courtship and what has been called “purity culture” amongst evangelical Christians. Although it rightly encouraged sexual purity in Christian singles, purity culture has been criticized for its legalistic emphasis in following rules without having a foundation in God’s grace for sexual sinners. Instead of helping Christians live gospel-centered lives of faithfulness in male/female relationships, it created a culture where your worth as a potential marriage partner was in your performance in the area of sexual and relational purity, not in your standing as a person redeemed in Jesus, creating a culture of shame instead of grace. In 2018, he released the documentary I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye, where he retracted the original ideas that he promoted, recognizing the damage it had done in people’s lives.
Days after his separation announcement, progressive Christian publication Sojourners posted an interview Harris gave with them in February, giving an eye-opening window into his eventual abandonment of the faith that he used to preach.
He details that his questions about his book began after his church became embroiled in controversy over its handling of child sexual abuse where they attempted to deal with the matter internally without reporting it to the police. He explains that he and the pastoral team realized there was “a lot of legalism and really unhealthy patterns” in the church. This tied heavily into his book where he claimed that there was one godly way to do relationships. He realized that through his handling of the abuse in the church that he didn’t have all the answers that he thought he did.
These realizations led Harris to a saddening conclusion. Instead of replacing a rules-centered system with a grace-centered system, he reveals in his interview that he is questioning not only the Christian sexual ethic, but the entire Christian faith itself. Although he recognizes the unhealthy aspects of the Sovereign Grace church leadership structure and purity culture, he is unable to disassociate it from his faith.
He states, “I was starting to get all this criticism for purity culture, and I was kind of like, well, what’s the alternative?” To him, the only alternative is to adopt the world’s openness towards sex outside of marriage and homosexuality, which is something he cannot reconcile with his faith. Thus, he claims, “It’s almost easier for me to contemplate throwing out all of Christianity than it is to keeping Christianity and adopting it in these different ways…Rethinking some of these things and having my faith look so specific for so long that now as I’m questioning those specifics, it feels like I’m questioning my entire faith.” Unable to disassociate the law-centered system from his faith, Harris ultimately abandoned it in the intervening months.
This interview reveals Harris’ confusion of how the law and the Gospel relate. Harris fails to see how the Gospel gives freedom to us because we cannot obey the law and instead conflates the two – that part of the Gospel is obedience to the law, something that places burdensome shackles on someone, as he has come to realize.
When faced with stories such as Harris’, we must look to Paul’s message to the Galatians, as their situation is very similar to his.
Paul writes, “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.'” (Galatians 3:10). This interview highlights how true this verse is when one places oneself under the law instead of under the grace of God. Years of ministry with its attendant failures and the observation of the burdensome effects of purity culture revealed to Harris the impossibility of following these standards. We cannot keep the standards set by purity culture. When we believe that our performance is an indicator of how pleased God is with us, the weight of our failures will crush us, bringing down the curse of the law. We see that it is impossible to keep it and that we cannot please God in this area. As Paul explained, “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ…because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16).
Even though we are keenly aware of our failures, there is still hope! What does the following verse say? “Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for ‘The righteous shall live by faith'” (Galatians 3:11). Only through simple faith in Christ can we be saved, not through our failed works. This is why he said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come not to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Although we are incapable of keeping God’s law, God still requires it of us. This is why we need a Savior to do what we could not. Christ bore the penalty of our sin and gave us his righteousness so that we could stand before God without sin, fulfilling the obligations of the law on our behalf. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). There is nothing else to do but place our faith in the only one who can save us. Everything else that we must do has already be done. As Martin Luther explains, “We must know that we are nothing. We must understand that we are merely beneficiaries and recipients of the treasures of Christ.”2
When we are set free from our sin and the burden of the law, we are set free to obey God in a completely new way. In Paul’s letter to the Roman church, he writes, “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God…But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:4, 6).
This verse trumpets the freedom that we have in Christ. Not only are we free from the curse of condemnation from our lawbreaking, we are also free from the curse that comes from our failed attempts to keep it. Instead, by becoming our righteousness, Christ frees us to follow him out of love because of the amazing love he has shown us. We obey, not to earn a right standing with God, but because we have a right standing with God. The evidence of a heart that is truly changed by the power of the Gospel is a heart that desires to put sin to death and become ever more obedient to Christ. As one commentator explains,”Our new relationship with Christ enables us—and requires us—to produce those character traits, thoughts, and actions that will be ‘for God’s glory.'”3 Instead of obedience being a burden, obedience becomes a joy, being freed from the condemnation of the law.
We should pray that Harris, and others like him, come to an understanding of the amazing beauty of the true Gospel. In the Gospel, you are not “dirty” or “damaged goods” because of your sexual sin, as claimed by purity culture. God isn’t watching you with his clipboard to check on your performance to decide whether you’re worthy enough of his grace. You are not worthy, and can never do enough to please him, which is why Jesus came to die for sinners like us.
Through Christ, you are a precious child of God, cleansed from your sin, who has a new heart and new desires. Having been freed from the burden of the law, we are now free to live a life pleasing to God because we love the one who saved the unworthy. This is what is accomplished in the Gospel – something that the law can never do for us.
- John Cavin, Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, trans. William Pringle (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 70.
- Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Theodore Graebner (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1949), Kindle Locations 940-941.
- Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996), 418.