“If a woman doesn’t cry out when she’s raped, God holds her equally guilty with her attacker.”

Bill Gothard states this outright in Wisdom Booklet 36; hundreds of people, most of them well-meaning Christians, read and accepted it. I was one of them.

I wrote this series for Recovering Grace to give a glimpse into the long, intensive re-education that conditioned us to accept Gothard’s word as God’s, no matter what that word was.

My previous posts explain how Gothard created a culture in which we had to follow certain rules or suffer serious punishment. How did that not raise blazing red flags among us? We were Christians who knew that the Bible specifically warned us against living according to the law, not grace.

Well, actually, we knew all about salvation through Christ alone, our need for grace, and eschewing legalism. Gothard never avoided those topics.

He just redefined them.

Gothard states in many places that salvation is by faith in Christ, and only Jesus can save us from the eternal consequences of sin. He doesn’t equivocate at all. In Wisdom Booklet 18, Gothard says, “In reality, we are all sinners and only able to achieve righteousness by God’s grace.” (pg. 736, first edition)

The kicker in this sentence is the word “grace.”

Although there are many ways to define grace, a universally accepted meaning is “God’s approval that we don’t have to earn.” Most respected Christian theologians teach this view. In fact, three brands of Christianity that don’t agree on much at all — the Catholic Catechism (Roman Catholic), the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (Anglican) and the Westminster Catechsim (Calvinist) — all agree on this understanding of grace.

We are sinners, but God in his grace reaches out to us and picks us up. We don’t have to fulfill any requirements first before God extends his favor to us.

That’s not Gothard’s definition of grace. Ever since the Basic Seminar, he has said,

“The success of our lives is entirely related to how much grace God gives us. Grace is the desire and power to do God’s will. (Philippians 2: 13)”

As an aspect of grace, “the desire and power to do God’s will” is all right. Using it the all-encompassing basic definition creates a problem. It changes God’s grace from his unearned approval to a divine super-serum that allows us to obey him better.

And this is the part where we talk about “legalism.”

Legalism in Christianity is generally understood to be two things:

1. Keeping certain rules in an attempt to attain salvation;

2. Keeping certain rules in an attempt to maintain rightness with God.

If we understand grace as “God’s favor we don’t earn,” then it doesn’t make sense that we should have to keep rules to get his blessing and avoid his punishment. As the Book of Common Prayer explains, “God gives his grace freely, and enables me to receive it. Everything I do should be in response to God’s love and grace made known in Christ…”

But that view doesn’t fit in with Gothard’s idea of “staying under authority” or risk God’s wrath. In Wisdom Booklet 18, he addresses the charge that he taught legalism.

First of all, he defines legalism as, “A violation of God’s intent for a law by misapplying the law.” (pg. 737, first edition) That’s a classic Gothard definition—twelve words that sound good but make no sense whatsoever without another hundred words to explain them.

After a long discussion of the circumcision controversy in the book of Galatians, Gothard states, “Legalism refers to the false doctrine of trying to earn or maintain salvation by keeping the Law. It does not refer to God’s command for Christians to live holy and Godly lives.” (pg. 739, first edition)

He repeats his claim a few pages later: “As Christians, God desires that we live in harmony with His principles by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can enjoy the temporal benefits which keeping the Law provides.” (pg. 742, first edition)

In other words, if you’re trying to earn your salvation through keeping the Law (definition #1), that’s wrong. But God still expects us to keep his Law to enjoy “temporal benefits” (definition #2).

Gothard built his case on Matthew 5:17, in which Jesus says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I come not to destroy, but to fulfill.”

Gothard explained that Jesus fulfilled the Law’s requirements, and through him we, too, are accounted as having perfectly fulfilled the Law. But that didn’t mean the Law was invalidated in any way—God still expected us to live by what he commanded in the Old Testament.

Most of us studying this Wisdom Booklet weren’t theologians; we trusted Gothard to illuminate Scripture for us. He anticipated objections that no one can keep the Law perfectly except Jesus. “The power to keep the principles of the Law is experienced by the grace of God…” (pg. 744, first edition)

Remember grace? “The desire and power to do God’s will.” God gives us grace so we can keep his law.

If anyone said that Christians didn’t have to keep Old Testament Law, or God didn’t specifically command women to avoid “eye traps,” or that he didn’t speak only through authorities, Gothard reminded us:

“The most obvious way to despise a fellow Christian who is seeking to live by a stricter standard is to call him a legalist.” (pg. 738, first edition)

To dare to think of Gothard as a “legalist,” then, was to reveal my own inferior faith and petty disdain.

After 47 pages of trying to follow his logic—while also “studying” God’s laws for harvest schedules, the French Revolution, algebraic equations, and how the Jewish months corresponded to the development of a baby in the womb—well, we just accepted it all.

We struggled to keep all the rules in a desperate attempt to please God—hoping that he would give us more grace to keep all the rules.

But at least we had Mr. Gothard to assure us that it wasn’t legalism.

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES
An ATI Education: Introduction
An ATI Education, Chapter 1: Under the Umbrella
An ATI Education, Chapter 2: Is It Just Me?
An ATI Education, Chapter 3: Thou Shalt Not Trap the Eye
An ATI Education, Chapter 5: We the People Under Authority
An ATI Education, Final Chapter: Guilty Silence