There is a great divide between piety, which is true godliness, and pietism, which is a lie about the nature of true godliness. You have heard us disparaging pietism many times, and you can count on hearing it many more times. Pietism is the erection of a false standard of holiness, one that is generally sentimental, smarmy and resentful, and which is then applied to the Church by its dogmatic enthusiasts.
Piety is simply glad obedience to the example of Christ found in the Scriptures, the way God gave them to us. True piety is unsettling, and this is one of the central reasons why pietists resent it. But pietists resent piety in the name of holiness, godliness, and “standards,” which is why we have to be very careful.
Pietism wants to reduce the way of death and resurrection to decent, middle-class values, family-friendly stuff. Pietism is the G-rated gospel.
I just said that we have to be very careful with this, and here is why. We tend to assume that the pietists, the Pharisees, have an excess of righteousness, and that the libertines, the antinomians, have a gross deficiency of it. And so, hearing this, we assume that true piety is something like Aristotle’s golden mean, walking the center line between immorality on the one hand, and excessive righteousness on the other.
The problem with this is that it grants too much to the pietist. His problem is not too much righteousness, but rather that he is unrighteous. Jesus said that we would not see the kingdom unless our righteousness surpassed that of the Pharisees. Pietism is condemned by its own profession—it leads directly to impiety and all manner of ungodliness. Pietism is to be rejected because it is corrupt.
Pietist homes may have rejected all kinds of things—cards, movies, slang, spicy foods, fiction, and all the rest of it, but these same homes are filled with anger, self-importance, lust, and ungodly abuse. Pietism is a white-washed tomb.