Trading legalism for
pietism is really no improvement, we are no longer under the power of the law, and no longer slaves to sin, we still can and do fall
short of perfection, in fact, Romans 7 gives us a pretty clear picture of the kind of abject failure that results from trying to live a pious life under our own power.
Their
pietism, which I confused with Lutheranism, early made me restive, not least because of my precocious reading of Britannica articles on evolution and Gibbon's Decline and Fall (my father's library was
short on comic books).