Christ Our Righteousness
Chapter 8 - The Deadly Peril of Formalism
Interwoven all through the instruction given by the Spirit of prophecy regarding the great importance of receiving, experiencing, and proclaiming the gracious truth of Righteousness by Faith, we find impressive warnings concerning the great peril of formalism. COR 75.1
Righteousness by Faith is not formalism. The two are direct opposites. Righteousness by Faith is an experience, a reality. It involves a complete transformation of the life. He who has entered into this new life has experienced deep contrition, and has made sincere, heartfelt confession and repudiation of sin. With his divine Lord, he has come to love righteousness and hate iniquity. And being justified,-accounted righteous by faith,-he has peace with God. He is a new creature; old things have passed away; all things have become new. COR 75.2
Formalism is vastly different. It is of the head, and deals with externals. It stops with the theory of religion. It goes no deeper than the form and the pretense. Hence it is like salt without savor. It is a joyless, loveless religion, for it does not bring peace, assurance, and victory. Formalism springs from and thrives in the natural heart, where it has its root. It is one of those subtle, all-pervading evils which the Redeemer came to uproot and eliminate from the human heart. COR 75.3
Formalism has always been a real peril to the church. A Christian writer of modern times has referred to this subtle peril as follows: COR 76.1
“The gospel of externalism is dear to the human heart. It may take the form of culture and moralities; or of ‘services’ and sacraments and churchly order; or of orthodoxy and philanthropy. These and such things make themselves our idols; and trust in them takes the place of faith in the living Christ. It is not enough that the eyes of our heart should have once seen the Lord, that we should in other days have experienced ‘the renewing of the Holy Ghost.’ It is possible to forget, possible to ‘remove from Him that called us in the grace of Christ.’ With little change in the form of our religious life, its inward reality of joy in God, of conscious sonship, of fellowship in the Spirit, may be utterly departed. The gospel of formalism will spring up and flourish on the most evangelical soil, and in the most strictly Pauline churches. Let it be banned and barred out never so completely; it knows how to find entrance, under the simplest modes of worship and the soundest doctrine. The serried defense of Articles and Confessions constructed against it will not prevent its entrance, and may even prove its cover and intrenchment. Nothing avails, as the apostle says, but a constant ‘new creation.’ The life of God in human souls is sustained by the energy of His Spirit, perpetually renewed, ever proceeding from the Father and the Son. ‘The life that I live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.’ This is the true orthodoxy. The vitality of his personal faith in Christ kept Paul safe from error, faithful in will and intellect to the one gospel.”-G. G. Findlay, in his exposition of “The Epistle to the Galatians” (Expositor’s Bible), pp. 42, 43. COR 76.2
The warnings of the Spirit of prophecy deal with this peril in its many phases, as the following extracts clearly indicate: COR 77.1