The Ethic of Moral Compromise: What the Pharisees Could Teach the Church of England

Feb 15, 2017 by Jill

by Rollin Grams, Bible and Mission

Introduction

Mainline denominations in the west in the twentieth century orchestrated their own demise. The twenty-first century will only be the denouement. Their implosion is due to their willful embrace of theological and moral compromise. Such compromise manifested itself in magisterial reversals of orthodox teaching. On ethical issues, they entailed the reversal of views on divorce and remarriage, abortion, premarital sex, and homosexuality. The result was an inability to bear witness to the righteousness of the Kingdom of God in an increasingly secular world–a failure of mission. The mainline denominations still speak of a ‘Jesus movement’ or evangelism and church growth, but their great compromise with the world was only a matter of paving their own path to irrelevance in a cultural context that increasingly needed a relevant Church witness. Compromise was something Jesus addressed as well in his ministerial conflict with the Pharisees, and from this engagement we can learn an important lesson.

Jesus’ Kingdom Righteousness and the Pharisees’ Ethic of Compromise

Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God was a direct attack on the moral compromise of religion in his day. One cannot compromise the moral demands of God while claiming to live under God’s reign. Such compromise, however, was the very stuff of Pharisaism. For this reason, Jesus called them hypocrites–actors.

Jesus says to his disciples,

Matthew 5:20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

The Pharisees are misrepresented if they are presented as unloving legalists. That may be so in some respects, but their main problem was their crafting of an ethic of compromise. They used the Law in ways to avoid God’s higher demand of a righteousness of the heart. In a strange twist, the Law’s letter was used to avoid its intent. Love is not the undoing of demand but is itself a higher demand. As Jesus says,

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