Modern day Pharisees?
This is our series of articles analyzing David Bernard's position on holiness. You are on the page that is in bold. Click on the links to go to a particular chapter:
- Links to Bernard's other books
- An analysis of Bernard's ''Essentials of Holiness''
- A response to Bernard's views on women's hair
- A response to Bernard's views on makeup and women's adornment
- A response to Bernard's views on women wearing pants
- Does Speaking in Tongues Prove You're Saved?
- Is baptism necessary for salvation?
- Modern day Pharisees?
When examining the teachings of the the UPCI and the Message, one cannot help but to refer to the comments of Alan Hirsch relating to the Pharisees.
Who were the Pharisees?
Viewing the Pharisees as cartoonish, mustache-twirling villains; rather, they were highly sincere, dedicated, and exemplary religious people. They were fiercely zealous, meticulous tithers, and upheld a strict moral code. Theologically, they were remarkably sound: they firmly believed in the full authority of Scripture, the reality of miracles, and the resurrection. They were also deeply missional, willing to cross land and sea to win a single convert, and they prayed arduously.
Jesus actually affirmed many of their theological beliefs. But despite their excellent theology, the Pharisees ultimately lost their way because their rigid religious system mutated into a barrier against God. Hirsch calls this toxic process "pharisization"—a state where believers hide behind rules and substitute cold moralism for an authentic relationship with God.
The Pharisees' bad traits included:
- Theological arrogance: They fell in love with their own system of interpretation, using intellectualism to objectify truth and domesticate the radical demands of Scripture so that it fit their comfortable lifestyles. Their doctrine became so hard-set that it blinded them to what God was actually doing in their midst.
- Selective judgment of sin: They hyper-focused on "sins of the body" (such as sexual brokenness) while completely ignoring or harboring "sins of the spirit" (like greed, pride, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy).
- Deadly self-preservation: Ultimately, their devotion to their system caused them to murder Jesus. The chilling reality is that it was these fine, upright, devoted religious people who were the most intent on putting Jesus on the cross because he threatened their religious status quo.
Jesus's interactions with the Pharisees provide a stark contrast between their sterile moralism and true biblical holiness. The Pharisees believed holiness meant strict separation from anything or anyone unclean. In contrast, Jesus demonstrated a redemptive, world-embracing, missional holiness that actively engaged the world to liberate it.
Jesus exhibited an "in-your-face kind of holiness" that completely reversed religious expectations. His brand of holiness was so inviting, earthy, and magnetic that prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, and social outcasts clamored to be near him, feeling no condemnation in his presence. Conversely, Jesus reserved his harshest, most offensive critiques—calling them hypocrites, snakes, and whitewashed tombs—for the religious elite. He explicitly warned against the "yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy," condemning their inauthentic lives where their behavior did not match their stated beliefs.
For believers today, the Pharisees serve as a living, cautionary mirror. To live faithfully, Christians must read the Gospels with the uncomfortable self-awareness that we are the Pharisees.
We learn from Jesus that true holiness is not about a list of negative rules (what not to do) or retreating into a "safe" religious subculture. Instead, we must avoid reducing Jesus to a tame moral teacher who simply hands out rules; we must follow the wild, subversive Messiah. To live a holy life, we must abandon a religion of "ethical codes and pious rituals" and instead embrace radical grace, engaging with broken and marginalized people just as Jesus did, treating them with shocking tenderness rather than judgment.
If we look for a modern equivalent to their specific brand of devoted, morally upright spirituality, Hirsch suggests it is the "Bible-believing Christians . . . the evangelicals!". Modern evangelicals are particularly susceptible to this trap, often using theological gymnastics to domesticate radical scripture while prioritizing external rules over spiritual humility. Ultimately, the source functions as a provocative challenge to the church, questioning whether religious communities today would embrace the real Jesus or reject him for disrupting their established status quo.
If Jesus showed up in your church?
If the real, untamed Jesus showed up at a modern evangelical church today, the congregation would likely reject him and try to eliminate his influence.
He recounts posing this exact scenario—"What would we do with Jesus if he turned up at our churches?"—while teaching at a seminary in the American Bible Belt. One student answered with heart-stopping honesty: "We would probably kill him!". This response is disturbingly true because the radical, reforming Jesus portrayed in the Scriptures simply does not mix with domesticated religion, and his arrival would ensure that "sparks would fly".
Would a UPCI church or Message church genuinely embrace Jesus or would try to kill his influence because he disrupted their comfortable religious status quo?
UPCI and Message churches are the devoted, morally upright, "Bible-believing" communities of today. Ultimately, it was these highly sincere religious people who put Jesus on the cross to protect their established religious system. UPCI and Message followers could easily fall into the exact same trap as the Pharisees.
The observations above are pulled directly from the following books:
- Frost, Michael, and Alan Hirsch. ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008).
- Hirsch, Alan, and Debra Hirsch. Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010).
- Hirsch, Alan, with Rob Kelly. Metanoia: How God Radically Transforms People, Churches and Organizations From the Inside Out (Cody, Wyoming: 100 Movements Publishing, 2023)
- Frost, Michael, and Alan Hirsch. The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003)