The physics of the pendulum
Picture an old grandfather clock in a quiet hallway. Its long brass pendulum swings steadily: tick, tock, tick, tock. Now give that pendulum a hard shove to the right. It does not simply glide back to the center and stop. It races right past the middle and sways just as far to the left. Left to its own momentum, a pendulum never rests at either extreme; it finds peace only when it hangs still at the center, held by gravity and its fixed point.
The church behaves in much the same way. Push her too far toward one side of a truth and she does not gently settle into balance, she swings. Often for a whole generation toward the opposite error, and then back again, wounding people at both ends of the arc. And here is the crucial thing the clock teaches us: the pendulum comes to rest not by being frozen in place, but by being held. Balance is not the absence of force; it is the fixed point that keeps opposing pulls in tension so that the weight can finally hang still.
Everything we have explored in this series of articles has circled one central conviction: the truths of God usually come to us in pairs. Grace and truth. Sovereignty and responsibility. Shrewdness and innocence. Empathy and discernment. We are tempted, always, to seize one and let the other fall, and the moment we do, the swinging begins. This article gathers those threads together and names the mechanism behind so much of the church’s pain. If the earlier parts examined the tensions one by one, this one shows what happens when we refuse to hold them: we do not simply land in a single error and stay there quietly. We swing. Understanding that swing, and why only a held tension can stop it, is the key to escaping it.
Joshua is warned by God: “Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.” – Joshua 1:7
And in the book of Ecclesiastes, the wisest man who ever lived gives this timeless instruction: “Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise—why destroy yourself? Do not be overwicked, and do not be a fool—why die before your time? It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. Whoever fears God will avoid all extremes.” – Ecclesiastes 7:16–18
These passages serve as divine safeguards against the human tendency to swing from pole to pole in self-righteous zeal and overcorrection. “Overrighteous” describes the extreme of rigid legalism that destroys joy and crushes people under humanly imposed standards. “Overwicked” describes the opposite swing into moral license and foolishness that leads to spiritual ruin. The wise path, Scripture says, is to “grasp the one and not let go of the other.” God-fearing people refuse to live at the poles but remain grounded in the tension.
Yet history and contemporary church life show how rarely we heed this wisdom. When we reject tension the pendulum swings, and the consequences are painful.
The psychology of extremes: why we crave the poles
“Avoid both extremes.” – Ecclesiastes 7:18 GNB
Why do extremes draw us so powerfully? The answer lies in our fallen human nature and the cultural pressures surrounding us. Each pole offers something that feels satisfying, even if it is ultimately destructive.
- The “overrighteous” extreme (strict, high-expectation cultures): In the early church, some Jewish believers swung toward “over righteousness” by insisting Gentile converts must follow the full Mosaic law (Acts 15). This legalistic extreme threatened to destroy the gospel of grace. The apostles corrected it at the Jerusalem Council, but the pendulum has kept swinging ever since. This extreme appeals because it provides clarity, behavioral conformity, and a sense of moral superiority. In a chaotic world, strict rules create an illusion of security. It feeds our desire for measurable progress: “If I follow these rules, I know I am pleasing God.” This resonates especially in times of cultural decay when the church needs to be distinct.
- The “overwicked” extreme (permissive, low-expectation cultures): Appeals for the opposite reason: it offers friction-free acceptance, emotional relief, and cultural relevance. In an age that prizes individual autonomy, a “come-as-you-are-and-stay-as-you-are” approach feels like grace. Low expectations lower the bar for belonging: no awkward confrontations, no demands for discipleship, no risk of offending. It promises freedom from guilt, though it delivers spiritual stagnation.
The same pattern repeats in other biblical tensions. A hyper-emphasis on God’s sovereignty feels comforting because it removes the weight of personal responsibility. Conversely, a hyper-emphasis on human effort feels empowering because it gives us a heroic role in the story. In every case, an extreme simplifies life. It allows us to grasp one half-truth tightly while releasing the other.
The zealot’s slide
There is a deeper and more sobering pattern hidden in all of this. The people most powerfully drawn to one extreme are often the ones most likely to end up at the other. This sounds backwards, but it is what we see again and again. The zealous legalist, crushed by years of impossible standards, rarely drifts into gentle balance—they swing all the way into license, as though to punish the system that wounded them. The disillusioned progressive, weary of endless accommodation, rarely settles in the middle but recoils into hard certainty, hungry at last for something solid to stand on.
Yet the swing is not always a neat 180-degree leap from pole to pole. Some who start near the center drift further toward conservative conviction when culture or church life feels unsteady. Others who begin only slightly progressive can be radicalized leftward, trading a soft discontent for an all-consuming ideology. Still others, already conservative, do not reverse direction at all: they double down and leave for tighter, more separatist communities. In each case the same appetite is at work: the hunger for a simpler, more total answer. The pendulum does not have to travel the full arc to leave the center behind.
Why does this happen? Because the appetite that drives a person to an extreme is usually not an appetite for that particular truth at all; it is an appetite for certainty, intensity, and totality. For a single answer big enough to swallow every question. A person with that appetite will take an all-or-nothing answer wherever it can be found. So when one pole finally fails them, and every pole eventually fails, (because half-truth cannot bear the weight of reality over time), they do not conclude that extremes are the problem. They conclude that they simply chose the wrong extreme. And so they leap to the opposite one, carrying the very same all-or-nothing temperament across with them. The same hand that shoved the pendulum hard to the right now shoves it just as hard to the left. Spirit-formed character resists these swings best, but extremists are most vulnerable.
This pattern is well documented across human behavior:
- Political science demonstrates that public opinion functions like a “thermostat,” lurching back and forth in response to policy extremes rather than settling at rest (Wlezien, 1995; Stimson, 1991) [i].
- Psychological research shows that ideological extremists on both the left and right share identical underlying cognitive rigidity and binary all-or-nothing thinking (Zmigrod et al., 2020) [ii]
- As Eric Hoffer observed in The True Believer, the zealot slides from one extreme movement to its polar opposite far more easily than they adopt nuanced moderation. (Hoffer, 1951) [iii].
In the church, this explains why the loudest voice at one pole sometimes becomes the loudest voice at the opposite pole a decade later. The convert to rigid certainty and the convert to sweeping license are frequently the same kind of person at two stages of one unhealed swing. It also explains why simply arguing someone off an extreme so rarely works. Unless the underlying craving for a simple, total, effort-free answer is healed, they will not walk calmly to the center, but sprint past it to the other side. Only the awe of God, which trains us to hold two truths at once, can catch the pendulum and bring it to rest.
Living in the tension: anchored in Christ
Every pendulum swing leaves casualties. Strict, high-expectation cultures wound the conscience and repel the broken. Permissive, low-expectation cultures wound the soul and leave sin unchecked.
The solution is not to find a comfortable middle ground of compromise, but to fear God and stay in the tension. It means leading with both tenderness and truth-telling. It means pursuing both personal holiness and God’s grace. It means making disciples and bringing them to maturity. Fortunately, we already have these tensions modelled for us in Jesus himself. The one who is full of grace and truth, who is both Lion and Lamb, who neither breaks the bruised reed nor leaves the Pharisee unchallenged.
The fixed point: avoiding the extremes
| Divine tension | Extreme (Pole 1) | Extreme (Pole 2) | Held in tension (the center) |
| Grace and truth (John 1:14) | Rigid legalism / performance-based acceptance | Cheap grace / “come as you are and stay as you are” | Full of grace and truth: acceptance that transforms, truth that restores |
| Sovereignty and responsibility | Fatalism / “God will do it all, so I need not act” | Self-reliant activism / “It all depends on me” | Trust God’s rule while working diligently as responsible stewards |
| Empathy and discernment | Uncritical affirmation / emotional enmeshment | Cold judgmentalism / harsh detachment | Compassionate presence that still names reality and calls to repentance |
| High expectation and low expectation (Eccl 7:16–18) | Over-righteous / crushing standards & measurable perfection | Over-wicked / permissive licence & spiritual stagnation | Grasp holiness and mercy; fear God and avoid both extremes |
| Holiness and welcome | Exclusive purity culture that repels the broken | Inclusive affirmation that leaves sin unchallenged | Holy welcome: a community that receives sinners and leads them to repentance |
| Conviction and compassion | Stern dogmatism that wounds | Sentimentality that never confronts | Tender truth-telling: love that protects the weak and guards the truth |
The church that embraces divine tension will look strange to a polarized world, and that is exactly as it should be. We are not called to the left swing or the right swing. We are called to the narrow way, holding both arms of God’s truth tightly in faith, humility and awe.
[i] Wlezien, C. (1995). The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending. American Journal of Political Science, 39(4), 981–1000.
[ii] Zmigrod, L., Rentfrow, P. J., & Robbins, T. W. (2020). The role of cognitive rigidity in political ideologies: theory, evidence, and future directions. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 34–39. (Popular treatment: Zmigrod, L., 2025, The Ideological Brain.)
[iii] Hoffer, E. (1951). The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper & Row.
