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Bible Dictionaries
Formalism
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or As thought needs language and soul needs body, so the spirit of religion can maintain, manifest and propagate itself, can relate itself to its environment, only as it is embodied in external form. It takes intellectual form in doctrines and creeds; its emotional necessities create forms of worship; its social instincts express themselves in ecclesiastical organization and sacramental rites, in all its instruments and symbols of corporate action. Hence arises inevitably the danger of formalism: the ‘form of godliness’ (2 Timothy 3:5) may persist after the power which originally created it has evaporated, and it may be inherited or adopted by those who have never had experience of the inward reality. Formalism in this proper sense of the word is to be distinguished from hypocrisy (the consciously fraudulent assumption of the externals of religion), and other varieties of unreality in religion. The typical formalist is the angel of the church in Sardis, of whom it is written: ‘Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead’ (Revelation 3:1). Unlike his Laodicean neighbour, who is ‘neither cold nor hot,’ he sets a high value upon the Christian name, and firmly believes that to do so is to be earnestly Christian, lie mistakes zealous performance of acts of worship for real devotion, and punctilious orthodoxy for living conviction. He sincerely respects the badges and expressions of spiritual life, believes them to be necessary and effectual unto salvation, while he is ignorant of, and without desire for, the reality which they express. He is a ‘well without water’ (2 Peter 2:17).
In the apostolic writings formalism of various kinds is detected and rebuked.
1. The substitution of religious observances for religious reality.-(a) Such observances may he sacramental, belonging to the prescribed ritual; and to these the danger of formalism always attaches in a high degree, the performance of the ritual act being always regarded by the unspiritual man as setting him in a right relation to God. Thus St. Paul accuses the Jews of formalism with regard to circumcision (Romans 2:25-29), admonishing them that ‘he is not a Jew who is one outwardly … circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter,’ Otherwise it is become ‘uncircumcision,’ a falsehood against which the virtue of the unprivileged Gentile will rise up in judgment. In St. Paul’s controversy with the Judaizers, the issue was between a legal and a spiritual conception of religion rather than between formalism and reality. Yet the latter element also was involved, and is emphasized by his repeatedly contrasting both circumcision and un-circumcision with the inward essence and ethical manifestation of Christianity-‘a new creature’ (Galatians 6:15), ‘faith that worketh by love’ (Galatians 5:6), ‘keeping the commandments of God’ (1 Corinthians 7:19). Here with deep insight St. Paul places ‘uncircumcision’ on the same footing with ‘circumcision.’ If the advocates of freedom supposed that there was any virtue in uncircumcision per se, they were only substituting one fetish for another. As there are persons who make a convention of unconventionally, so in religion repudiation of form may become only a different species of formalism.
(b) Not only ritual or sacramental acts, but all observances which are labelled ‘religious,’ even those which are most directly designed for instruction and edification, are exposed to the same danger. Having exhorted his readers to ‘receive with meekness the implanted word,’ St. James (James 1:21-25) hastens to preclude the notion that such ‘hearing,’ as a mere opus operatum, has any religious value. Without ‘doing’ it is no less barren of good result than a cursory glance at one’s own image in a mirror (cf. Romans 2:13). Closely akin to this formalism of ‘hearing’ is that which substitutes fluent religious talk for religious conduct (James 1:26-27). The pure undefiled θρησκεἱα the true Christian cultus, is to ‘visit the widows and the fatherless in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.’
2. The formalism of Intellectual orthodoxy.-The classical passage is James 2:14-26 Signifying by ‘faith’ not the vital spiritual act, but the orthodox confession which is its proper ‘form,’ the writer vigorously declares that such faith, ‘if it have not works,’ is dead in itself (James 2:16), a body uninhabited by the quickening spirit (James 2:26). St. Paul advances even beyond this position when (1 Corinthians 13:2) he asserts that one may have ‘all faith, so as to remove mountains,’ yet if it he ‘without charity, he is nothing.’ The First Epistle of St. John is occupied with the exposure of intellectual formalism (for though the Gnostic tenets, against which it is directed, are regarded as the rankest heterodoxy, the principle is the same), To imagine that we ‘know God,’ while not keeping His commandments (James 2:4-6), or that we are ‘in the light,’ while hating our brother (James 2:9); to credit ourselves with ‘knowing Christ’ in whom is no sin, while continuing in the practice of sin (James 3:6), is to stand convicted of being a ‘liar.’ Only he who loves can know God, who is Love (James 4:8).
3. Formalism within the ethical domain.-While religious observances and credal orthodoxy are always to be submitted to the test of ethics, the last hiding-place of formalism is within the ethical domain itself. There is the formalism to which the possession of a high moral ideal stands for high morality. This is scathingly rebuked by St. Paul in Romans 2:17-24. The typical Jew gloried in the lofty moral standards of Ins race, ‘resting upon the law,’ ‘approving the things that are excellent’; but according to the Apostle’s indictment be too often regarded an enlightened sense of duty as the goal rather than as the starting-point of moral life. It is a still subtler formalism when the ethical impulse exhausts itself in lofty and generous sentiment, or in clothing such emotion with appropriate verbiage (James 2:15-16). This possibility is suggested, with a touch of delicate irony, in 1 John 3:16-18, where the law of self-sacrificing brotherhood is first stated in its highest terms-‘We ought to lay down our lives for the brethren,’ and then, lest any one should mistake the emotion awakened by such magnificent expressions of duty for the discharge of duty itself, the issue is brought down to the pedestrian level of the everyday use of ‘the world’s goods’ for the relief of the need that is before one’s eyes. Here, again, St. Paul is still bolder (1 Corinthians 13:3), pointing out that conduct may fill out to the utmost the ‘form’ of self-sacrifice (‘If I give all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned’), and yet lack the inward reality. Ethical reality is attested not by the sensational exploit, but by that ‘walking in love’ which is so inimitably described in the following verses.
Literature.-A. Whyte, Bunyan Characters, i. [1895] 132, 271, Bible Characters: ‘Out Lord’s Characters,’ 1902, pp. 150, 248; Stopford A. Brooke, The Fight of Faith, 1877, p. 51; John Foster, Lectures3, 1853, i. 131ff; J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, new ed., 1868, i. 21, 124, iv. 66; A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart, I886, p. 226; J. B, Mayor, The Epistle of St. James3, 1910; Robert Law, Tests of Life, 1909, pp. 208ff., 231ff., 279ff.
Robert Law.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Formalism'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/f/formalism.html. 1906-1918.
