When people make their comments about how Jesus “stood up to the religious establishment of his day” and try to use that as a parallel to the exvangelical/deconstructing practices of questioning the prevailing views on fundamental Christian doctrine today, they end up missing the actual parallel.
The religious establishment today is secularism. The people in power right now are what fundies like me would call “modern paganism.” They are the figures who laugh at and shame anyone holding to a 6-day view of creation, or a literal resurrection. They react with shock and disgust at anyone who doesn’t hold to their doctrines of left-ward political activism and their humanistic liturgical calendar. They are the Pharisees of today, and they pretend that Jesus is on their side — the Jesus that affirmed the authority of scripture, the Jesus that taught about a real hell, a real resurrection, a literal Adam, and affirmed and celebrated every jot and tittle of God’s Old Testament Law. Wait, not that Jesus.
They push the virtues of government schooling, even though the classroom has been proven to be the complete opposite of an environment conducive to learning. They accept darwinism by default, and then steal from the Christian worldview in order to legislate their morality — a morality that makes zero sense within an atheistic, evolutionary worldview. They bully and guilt-trip people, exactly as the Pharisees of Jesus’ time did. They ignore parts of the law they don’t like and enforce parts that don’t exist, all so they can claim to be the most virtuous. Like white-washed tombs, they are clean and pretty on the outside, but full of death, toxicity, and self-absorption on the inside.
But I don’t say all this so that Christians can feel better about being “the good guys.” Jesus never called out the Phrarasees in order to make his friends feel better about themselves. He called them out because they should have known better. And yet he told his followers, ”unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God.” Jesus’ followers knew better than anyone that they were sinners, and his life was spent teaching them how they would be saved.
