My religious education was paradoxical and nonsensical.

I was raised confessionally Lutheran, but I guess that American Lutheranism on the conservative side has been shot through with an evangelistic obsession with anti-legalism and an allergy to anything that could potentially smell like works righteousness, even if that allergy produces nonsense and strange mental gymnastics. The message was therefore that the church and it's traditions are self-trivializing.

This type of reading, alongside the New Perspective strain, makes it more livable and forthright. As Griffin writes, the law becomes the trellis of the Christian mode of hebraic faith, on which to grow a genuine desire for God.

Seems legit.