A tweet from John Pavlovitz said:
“Conservative Christians clutching their pearls at people of conscience disrupting their worship gathering to call out hypocrisy and abuses of power remind us again that they have no interest in emulating Jesus or reading the Gospels. He literally turned the tables over, dummies…”
Pavlovitz says that conservative Christians are outraged at “people of conscience disrupting their worship….” but says Jesus would have done the same thing. According to Pavlovitz then, this demonstrates conservative Christians have no interest in either: 1) emulating Jesus, or 2 ) reading the Gospels.
So let’s actually read the Gospel story, found in Mark 11:15-17 (and Matt 21:12-13).
“On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, 16 and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. 17 And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”
Jesus says explicitly why He flipped the tables in the temple: it had been turned into a “den of robbers”. While it doesn’t explicitly say what the “robbery” was, it’s implied that the money exchange took advantage of people.
Jesus then clarifies what the temple, and by extension the church, is supposed to be about by saying “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations”. The proper point of the temple, and the church by extension, is a place of worship and prayer.
Given that Jesus defines the church specifically as a house of prayer/worship, and the protesters were, in Pavlovitz’s own words, “disrupting their worship”, Pavlovitz has inadvertently proven that the protesters, however righteous they might consider themselves and their cause, were the ones violating Jesus’ words in the invasion of the church to protest.
There is a similar mis-framing that since Jesus was against the religious authorities, therefore Jesus must have been against organized religion. This is incorrect according to the Bible. I present James 1:27. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
So clearly, if there is a “religion that God accepts as pure and faultless…”, Jesus can’t be against religion per se, he must then, be against only an impure and faulty version of it.
I am a born-again Christian, and I attend an Evangelical church. We too have a common saying that “we’re not religious, we have a relationship with Jesus”. The idea is that we see Christianity not as a series of religious obligations, but as a relationship with God. Even so, the wording is sloppy, and as I see it, unbiblical.
Returning to Pavlovitz’s tweet: “Conservative Christians clutching their pearls at people of conscience disrupting their worship gathering to call out hypocrisy and abuses of power remind us again that they have no interest in emulating Jesus or reading the Gospels. He literally turned the tables over, dummies…“
I can address some of what he charges. Do “conservative” Christians really have no interest in emulating Jesus or reading the Gospels?
I should probably address this first: there are a lot of gatherings that call themselves “Christian”, many of which believe not only radically different things, but in some instances mutually exclusive doctrines. In many instances, denominational differences are matters of emphasis- one denomination might push one aspect more than another. In some cases, denominational differences are matters of church governance structures. But some of the rifts are much more foundational. Some churches believe the Bible is the written Word of God and is to be treated as such. Others believe the Bible is a set of guidelines, from which principles can be deduced, but it isn’t to be treated as the literal Word of God. The breadth of beliefs that call themselves “Christian” is very large.
Pavlovitz is calling out “conservative” Christians, by which I’m assuming he means politically conservative, but that is often accompanied by exegetically conservative approaches too.
Pavlovitz, from his own website, is clearly a more liberal Christian, and he is clearly antagonistic towards conservatives.
Even though I come from only one small slice of the Christian church, since I call myself a Christian, I’ll just talk in the “we” since I’m a part of the larger Church.
Is it true that we don’t have any interest in emulating Jesus? Well, I’d like to say I try, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m a miserable failure. And I wish I could say it’s just the occasional mistake, but that’s not true either. Sometimes I just blatantly disregard what I know the Bible says. I wish I was better, and I keep confessing and asking for forgiveness, but still, I’m sad to report, I’m still a total failure.
Do I read the Gospels? Yes, I do. I’ve read the entire bible through, and I’m on my 22nd time through right now. I read as much of the Old Testament as I could in Hebrew. I’ve read the entire Bible through in Italian twice. I’ve done book studies on every one of the New Testament books. Does that mean I follow it perfectly? Nope.
One thing I do want to say, which I’ll admit has only been my experience: almost all the Christians I’ve ever known are people trying to be good. The thing with following Jesus is, Jesus was perfect. If you want to fault me for not following Jesus, you’re right, I’m a failure. Of the Christians I’ve known in church, I’ve not met many that are as self-righteous as I hear they are. I’ll grant, your mileage may vary because I don’t know all the same people that you do. So maybe you actually know ONLY hypocritical Christians… I can’t say, I’m not you.
In fact, a word about this charge of hypocrisy too. We get charged with being hypocrites a LOT. I see hypocrisy as saying I do one thing, and doing the opposite. Most Christians believe the Bible is the Word of God and the things it says are true. The moral principles it spells out are the ideal and they’re what we believe would be true and right. But it doesn’t always mean we manage to do the ideal. I can both believe that lying is bad, and also occasionally lie. So that makes me a hypocrite. But seriously anyone who is never a hypocrite doesn’t have any external standards at all. And if your only standard is doing whatever you want, well, you’ll avoid being a hypocrite, but probably end up being even worse.
So back to the Christians not being good people. This is true. The church is full of us “not good” people. In fact, that’s why most of us are there in the first place, because we became aware of the fact that were so “not good”, that we were doomed without Jesus paying the price for our sin. That’s the message of the gospel after all. I am a sinner, and that sin has separated me from a perfect, holy God. That sin will require my banishment from God’s presence when I die, and that place will be hell. I couldn’t save myself from my sin, since being in God’s presence requires perfection. So God sent His own son Jesus to take the penalty of my sin on Himself at the cross. But not only did Jesus die for my sin, He also rose again, so that I can have new life. Every actual Christian must accept this as the heart of salvation: you have to know you’re a sinner, and you have to have accepted Jesus as savior. The church then is full of people who have looked at their lives and seen that they weren’t good enough, and that they need salvation. The church (the actual church-meaning the believers that make up the church, not just those that attend services) is necessarily filled with these people- sinners saved by grace.
So 1) the church is filled with not-good people who generally know they personally aren’t good; 2) they will still try and proclaim the things they believe to be good and true according to what they believe the Bible says.
And of course there are serious disagreements as to what exactly the Bible says, or means. But if comes across as really bad-faith to say that people just don’t care about what Jesus says simply because they have different politics than you.