Pharisee upgrade

(Sorry for the following rant, but I had first-hand contact with some postmodern pathogens today.)

Most people are probably familiar with the Pharisee version 1.0 stereotype. These people examine everyone around them with a microscope to see if others live up to a standard of behavior. The standard can be, "Don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew, and don't go with women who do" and others rules of the same ilk.

But it seems Pharisee version 2.0 is available as well. Today, there is overwhelming pressure to not take a stand on anything for fear of offending anyone. The bywords are, "Don't judge me. God accepts me just the way I am and you should, too". Therefore, no one can say anything negative about anything. Even in our language we dance around the word sin by calling things issues. "So-and-so has an issue with authority." Maybe So-and-so really has the sin of rebellion, but God forbid that we would dare say that. I'm not talking about gossip. I'm talking about not being afraid to call a spade a spade. How many times have you heard, "Well, that may be true for you, but it isn't for me." ? Doesn't that defy the meaning of the word true?

Perhaps one set of rules is just being exchanged for another. Version 2.0 comes in a more subtle package. It may be just as, if not more, intolerant than version 1.0. because of its insistence for nothing but complete toleration.

I will let David Wells and Martyn Lloyd-Jones say it better than I can:

(This quote is in reference to the events of 9/11.)
The word Evil returned to people's vocabulary. In a culture strongly influenced by postmodern thought, of course, Evil is conceptually absent Indeed, prior to this event, the moral majority in America was made up of those who do not believe in moral absolutes. In the absence of enduring standards of right and wrong, in all places and times, we are, unfortunately, stripped of our ability to speak of Good and Evil. Good and Evil contract. In the absence of absolutes, these words go no deeper than our feelings about our personal circumstances, be they pleasant or unpleasant, satisfactory or boring. And what is good for one may not be good for another. But how could Americans, or anyone else, speak of this appalling attack without recourse to a language about Evil which goes far beyond saying what they simply disliked? In view of the carnage that had been wrought, there was a deep need to speak of what is enduringly, eternally wrong. This, however, turned out to be no easy matter because the postmodern conceptual cloud cover had not been dispersed. If the word Evil peppered talk about these events, it was also the case that the great majority in America had no framework in which Evil had its place.

The language of evil had become a verbal necessity after September 11, but it remained a cultural and conceptual difficulty. That was the case all too evident a year later when signs were popping up all over the cultural landscape suggesting that outrage over the attack was out of order. For example, the National Education Association advised teachers to offer no value judgments to their students on the occasion of the anniversary of the attacks, and the bishops of the United Methodist Church declared that all violence fell into the same moral category, thereby making no distinction between those who used violence to attack and those who used it in self-defense. Without moral absolutes, the business of making moral judgments becomes impossible, although few seemed to see the anomaly that was at work: that those who take the position that judgments should not be rendered on behavior are, often unbeknownst to themselves, also taking a moral position.

Above All Earthly Powers, David Wells, pg 3 & 4. (emphasis mine)

But as religion was allowed to sink into the background, and even into oblivion, and men thought that they could live by morality alone, degeneration set in rapidly. Emil Brunner has said that this is so definite as to be capable of statement as a law of life in which there are distinct steps and stages. He puts it thus: "The feeling for the personal and the human which is the fruit of faith may outlive for a time the death of the roots from which it has grown, but this cannot last very long. As a rule the decay of religion works out in the second generation as moral rigidity and in the third generation as the breakdown of all morality. Humanity without religion has never been a historical force capable of resistance. Even today, severance from the Christian faith, whenever it has been of some duration, works out in the dehumanization of all human conditions. 'The wine of life has been poured out'; the dregs alone remain."

The Plight of Man and the Power of God, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, pages 29-30. (emphasis mine)