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1 John 4:20 If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? 21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.
Civil resistance is a method of conflict through which unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated methods (strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and many other tactics) to prosecute a conflict without directly harming or threatening to harm an opponent. Sometimes called nonviolent resistance, unarmed struggle, or nonviolent action, this form of political action is now a mainstay across the globe.
Scripture warns believers of hypocrisy—called the “leaven of the Pharisees”—and its potential to spread quickly in the church. Outwardly appearing as devout religion, this legalism hides destructive pride, idolatry, and even apostasy. Unfortunately, pharisaism is still a problem among evangelicals today. How does Jesus instruct the church to recognize and defeat one of its deepest theological issues?
In recent years, we've seen an increase in the number of Christians who are "deconstructing" their faith—critically analyzing Christianity and the church and finding that it falls short. Many end up leaving behind the beliefs and commitments they formerly held. While many have written on how to reverse this trend.
Chenoweth, Erica. Civil Resistance (What Everyone Needs To Know?) (p. xix). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
In June 2006, I stumbled into the study of nonviolent resistance as a skeptic. 1 Like many others in my field of international relations, I was concerned primarily with questions about why people pursue political violence— terrorism, communal violence, civil war, and insurgency— and how to contain it. Most of us start from the assumption that people turn to violence because it works. Numerous examples from history suggest that violence is the only way to seriously contest power— and that violence often pays. The French Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and many other examples suggest that armed insurrection by militarily inferior forces has often defeated powerful states. But that summer I attended a workshop organized by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict that introduced me to civil resistance, its theoretical and strategic dimensions, and the ways people power movements had accomplished in many cases what violent rebellion could not. The books and articles we read made the claim— sometimes implicit, other times explicit— that civil resistance was as effective or even more effective than armed struggle in achieving major political concessions.
Reeves, Michael (2023-01-10T22:58:59.000). Evangelical Pharisees: The Gospel as Cure for the Church's Hypocrisy . Crossway. Kindle Edition.
Chapter 1 Beware of the Leaven
What is the most urgent need of the church today? Better leadership? Better training? Healthier giving? Orthodoxy? Moral integrity? Each of these are undoubtedly needs, but underneath them all lies something even more vital: gospel integrity. In Luke 12, when thousands had gathered together to hear Jesus, he began to say to his disciples first, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” (v. 1). That might have been unsurprising had he been warning the people as a whole, but he said it to his disciples first, to those who had already left all and followed him. Clearly, hypocrisy—a lack of integrity in both head and heart—was a danger even for them. Matthew records Jesus saying to his disciples, “Watch and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matt. 16:6). Seeing this, J. C. Ryle commented that Christ “foresaw that the two great plagues of His Church upon earth would always be the doctrine of the Pharisees and the doctrine of the Sadducees.”1 So it is not that Pharisaism was the only threat to the church that Jesus foresaw, but it was perhaps the primary one. Pharisaism, after all, is the sort of heartless formal religion that marks the first subtle step in the spiritual decline of a church before it ever slides into outright apostasy. It is the perpetual internal menace we can overlook as we dissect and bemoan the failure of others.
McKnight, Scot; Phillips, Tommy Preson (2024-10-14T23:58:59.000). Invisible Jesus: A Book about Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Deconstruction is a rising trend in most American evangelical churches. Deconstructors themselves are sidelined, silenced, and sabotaged. For the most part, pastors and churches have been treating deconstruction as a symptom of a lack of information, a lack of discipleship, or rebellion against God. Perhaps we are looking at something new in Christianity—an upheaval that cannot be solved by a sermon series or even by a book cowritten by a Bible scholar and a pastor. We believe something bigger is happening in the church, something that will continue to grow and that we dare not ignore. We believe deconstruction is a prophetic movement resisting a distorted gospel. It is not a problem; it is a voice. And we need to listen to what it is saying to the church. At the heart of the rise of deconstruction is a loss of trust and confidence in the clergy. A significant Gallup Poll measuring the shift among people’s trust in clergy concluded that in 1983, 64 percent of people trusted them. Two years later, in 1985, that number grew to 67 percent. But by 1990, it had dipped to 55 percent and by 1993 to 53 percent. We have seen no rebound from the 1990s to the present day. In 2009, the number dropped to 50 percent, hitting 36 percent by 2021. Today, approximately one in three persons in America trusts a clergyperson.