What is the most urgent need of the church today? Better leadership? Better training? Healthier giving? Orthodoxy? Moral integrity? Each of these are undoubtedly needs, but underneath them all lies something even more vital: gospel integrity.
In Luke 12, when thousands had gathered together to hear Jesus, He began to say to His disciples first: “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” (v1). That might have been unsurprising had He been warning the people as a whole, but He said it to his disciples first, to those who had already left all and followed Him.
Hypocrisy – a lack of integrity in both head and heart – was a danger even for Jesus’ disciples. Pharisaism is the sort of heartless formal religion that marks the first subtle step of spiritual decline. It is the perpetual internal menace we can overlook as we dissect and bemoan the failure of others.
It is easy to laugh at the idea that Pharisaism might be an ongoing problem for the church. Nobody today is a self-avowed, card-carrying Pharisee, after all. Yet while hypocrisy may be a hidden and quiet problem, it is not a slight one. Cloaked by impressive performance and words that profess the gospel of grace, it can lurk in the hearts of the most ardent “gospel-centred” folk as much as those who can clearly articulate justification by faith alone or maintain a confession of faith. For hypocrisy is a denial of the gospel, a sin that for all its subtlety is more essentially hellish than the sins of the flesh the hypocrite so swiftly condemns.
What the Pharisees show us is that Pharisaism is not just the crankiness that comes with a hardening of the spiritual arteries. First and foremost, it is a theological issue. The Pharisees were as they were and acted as they did because they denied the gospel. Their mercilessness, love of applause, and trust in themselves all flowed from a refusal to listen to Scripture, a refusal to receive a righteousness not their own, and a refusal to see their need for a new heart. Their character was a manifestation of their theology.
The theological roots of sickness in the church (being roots) often remain unseen. So it was in the years running up to the Reformation. In the late middle ages, many saw a need for church reform. Yet, for most, the solution was quite simple and superficial: give the church a good, moral scrub. Clear up the abuses, wash away the bad behaviour, and all would be well. What made Martin Luther so different was his appreciation of the depth of the problem. A truly transformative reformation and renewal of the church, he saw, required dealing with the theological causes of the trouble. Likewise today: the moral deficiencies and spiritual dryness that Christians bemoan have roots. Our need is not just for moral integrity but gospel integrity.
Orthodox belief is vitally important, but it is not exactly the same as gospel integrity. For it is possible to have dead orthodoxy, or an orthodoxy that is only skin-deep: to affirm the truth on paper but deny it in the heart and in practice. Integrity, on the other hand, requires that the truths we formally confess are embraced such that they affect and change us. Integrity is found where the head and the heart are aligned.
We can maintain a facade of orthodoxy but without integrity. We can profess the language of grace but deny its nature by a prickly, severe manner or disdain for the weak. And the fact that the gospel of grace can be denied in such subtle ways only emphasises what an elusive problem we are dealing with.
Being a matter of both head and heart, the leaven of the Pharisees cannot be cured with a mere call to orthodoxy. Christian integrity involves more than knowledge. Yet Pharisaism was – and remains – a primarily theological issue. More than the head is involved, but not less.
