I came across a snarky joke made by a psychologist and, since it wasn’t aimed at me, I could laugh rather than be defensive. Someone wrote to Carl Jung, who created a whole approach to counseling others, asking Jung for life advice. Jung replied, “Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way….If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.”
Before the Pope, there were the Pharisees. They invented elaborate extras to make sure a man had a rule for every decision. “This is how you make God happy, we’re just sure of it. Of course, it’s not exactly what the Lord said.”
In some ways, this is better than what the legit pagans had. As Tom Holland points out in his book Dominion, even the Greeks knew that if a law wasn’t transcendent, men would make laws to the hurt of others. The problem was, there wasn’t agreement on what the gods required. And “unlike those of mortal origin, were not written down: it was precisely their lack of an author which distinguished them as divine.” This would be perpetual confusion.
Man-made and human-determined standards of virtue and righteousness become weapons of manipulation and condemnation. The followers of such standards become mobs, and those who dislike the standards can mob-back. There is no shortage of little popes.
As Christians we know that God has given His Word, and He’s put His law on the hearts of men (Romans 2:15). Paul depended on this transcendent truth with immanent application, and then looked forward to the day when, “according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Romans 2:16).
The standard is found in the gospel; there we learn about the living God and about His requirements for living. The gospel calls out our actual sins, and it calls us to only Savior. Submit to no substitutes, no matter how white and pointy the hat (or lab coat).