Moderation is not what it's cracked up to be. . .

As I have often said, Lutherans love the muddy middle.  Moderation in all things.  Even moderate sinning has become the familiar explanation of Luther's admonition to sin boldly.  Moderation is not really much of a principle for our piety or our lives in Christ.  No one mistook Jesus for a moderate.  He was zealous in ways that made even His disciples uncomfortable.  We have made moderation into what it was never meant to be -- a life principle, a liturgical principle, and a justification for occasion indulgence.  There must be something better than “moderation in all things.”  In fact, there are a ton of things that deserve something more than moderation.  Should your love for your spouse and children be moderate?  Should your pursuit of what is good and right and true be moderate?  Should your defense of life be moderate?  Should your relationship to the Church be moderate?  Of course not.  In these things we are not to be moderate at all but zealous.  What benefit is there to balance self-love and love for others?  For a lukewarm piety that is occasionally hot and cold but mostly tepid?  For love which is tentative and has limits?  No, there are plenty of things that should not be moderated in our lives.  We have in this the testament of the saints who were not moderate people or even temperate.  They bordered on the extreme and their zealotry is uncomfortable to us. 

Among the cardinal virtues, temperance (the equivalent of the Lutheran principle of moderation) is not first but last.  Before moderation and temperance must come prudence.  Prudence is an old word that should be rescued from dusty bound volumes wasting away on unvisited library shelves.  It means carefulness, discretion, and humility. Prudence is the ability to govern and discipline oneself, not to be overcome by emotion or whim or desire but to judge your emotions and your actions by a higher standard.

Prudence gives way to justice.  The virtue of justice conditions prudence by an external standard -- how does it impact others? Where justice is concerned only with the righteousness of the thought or act, prudence adds in the question of who might be harmed by it?  Then comes fortitude -- the strength to bear the burden of righteousness and virtue.  Those who bear up under the cost of character are not weak but the strongest of strong.  Virtue almost always has a cost to it.

Sin curved everything inward, toward the judgment of the self.  The way we incline toward moderation can reflect this -- when everything is relative except the preservation of what we want and what makes us happy.  We are most immoderate about that.  Sin loves the muddy middle of moderation.  We get to decide when is enough and we get to decide when the cost is too much or the rewards too little.  The mortification of the flesh must be for something more than self-improvement.  It must be for the sake of God Himself.  Our denial of desire is not for the sake of us but for the sake of another -- for the sake of and in response to God's own self-denial.  We too often judge the cost on the basis of what we want and what we have deemed important enough.  Moderation is not strictly an end but a principle used in the process of getting what we want and this destroys whatever virtue is left in moderation.

A half-hearted pursuit of holiness produces a half-hearted repentance.  It is easy to employ moderation to minimize the damage sin has done just as it is easy to employ moderation to minimize the striving for what is good, holy, righteous, pure, just, beautiful, and merciful.  God is not interested in being one of many boarders in the hotel of the heart.  He is jealous -- jealous for us.  He wants all of us and in His most immoderate love He is willing to take even our sins and death that we might be His own and live under Him in His kingdom without end.  In that sense, moderation must be dealt with carefully or it becomes an excuse for keeping as much a safe distance from Him as it in keeping a safe distance from the extreme of evil.