In attempting to determine what simplicity might look like in the marketplace, we are accepting a massive assignment, one fraught with difficulties. We are now moving out of the realm of interpretation and into the realm of application, and that is always risky business. No longer is our primary question “What does the Bible say?” We must now concentrate on the question, “What does the Bible say to us?” As you know, we have been working on this second question all along, but it now becomes the center of our attention. It is wise to begin such a difficult task by setting forth some foundational building blocks which will undergird our effort.
The first such overarching principle is the necessity of precision without legalism. No one knows more keenly than I the grave danger in giving specific outward application to simplicity. How do you address such a wide variety of people with different needs and vastly different circumstances?
Some have large families, others have small families or no children. Still others are single. Some children have unusual needs that increase significantly the demands of time and money. The needs of teenagers are different from the needs of children.
We come from varying backgrounds. Some grew up during the depression, and felt keenly the evil of too little. Others grew up in post-World War II affluence, and felt keenly the evil of too much. It is not hard to see why the accumulation of possessions would be called prudent by the first group and hoarding by the second.
We are different emotionally. One needs privacy, another thrives on crowds. One is sensitive to beauty and symmetry, another has no interest in such matters. One person may need a variety of new wallpaper or paint, while another person could not even tell you the color of the living room after five years.
Different jobs make different demands. The president of the university where I teach needs a larger house than I do. He regularly entertains groups of forty to fifty people; I panic if we top six. Some jobs are so publicly oriented that absolute privacy in the home is a psychological necessity.
There is also the problem of personal bias. In issues such as these it is always easy for an author to ride a favorite hobby horse or grind the proverbial axe. At the least, you can be assured that I am keenly aware of the problem of personal prejudice and desire very much to avoid it.
That is not all. We also have the difficulty of the changing culture and world scene. We cannot—we must not—live in isolation from our world. What was a prophetic expression of simplicity in one generation may become only quaint in the next. Time changes issues and we dare not close our eyes to that fact if we hope to be redemptive.
And most dangerous of all is our tendency to turn any expressions of simplicity into a new legalism. How quickly we calcify what should always remain alive and changing. How soon we seize upon some externalism in order to judge and control others. How much we like these nice easy ways to determine who is in and who isn’t, who has it and who doesn’t.
Is it any wonder that we struggle and strain in an attempt to express exterior simplicity? Unquestionably, this enterprise is fraught with many pitfalls and dangers.
But we must not shrink back from our task. We must risk the danger of legalism, because to refuse establishes a legalism in defense of the status quo. Until we become specific we have not spoken the word of truth that liberates.
The writers of Scripture repeatedly took the risk of being specific. Over and over they fleshed out the meaning of simplicity with frightening precision. The difficulty with such precision is obvious: the specific application to one culture and time is seldom transferable to another culture and time. Peter forbade braided hair and wearing of robes because in his day those things were signs of ostentatious elitism (I Pet. 3:3). Few today would bat an eyelash at the rather ordinary practice of braiding hair, and no one even wears the lavish Roman robe. We understand that he spoke to the particular issues of his day, our task is to discern what constitutes ostentatious elitism today, and speak to that situation.
The Old Testament forbade the charging of interest on loans because it was viewed as an unbrotherly exploitation of another’s misfortune (Deut. 23:19). In a world of soaring inflation, the question of unbrotherly exploitation could just possibly go the opposite direction—the person who gives a loan without interest may be the one being exploited. Be that as it may, the issue we must struggle with is how we can care for one another today without exploitation.
The law of gleaning was a compassionate piece of legislation appropriate for the Palestinian agrarian culture, whose principal source of livelihood was small family-owned farms. A tender, gracious command, but totally irrelevant for today. The poor are concentrated in our cities and could not possibly get to the farms to glean the grain. Who would want to legalistically attempt to enforce this divine command today? No, we understand that it was a specific and appropriate application of the law of love in that society. Our task is to discover specific and appropriate ways to care for the poor and defenseless today.
Therefore, let us dare to be specific and at the same time always remember that the exterior expression we give to simplicity today may not be appropriate tomorrow. Our task is to walk the narrow path of precision without legalism.
