Are we Pharisees?

This particular online dictionary I use to help met with my alternative language (i.e. English) defines a Pharisee as "A hypocritically self-righteous person." As such, a modern-day pharisee is somebody who is overly pious, pompous and a person who leads a different live than the one he (or she) claims to lead.

My current revelation (sort-of) came when I was reading Ron Martoia's book ("Static") again. It is such a challenging book that one needs to re-read it a few times to grasp the significance of his thinking. I concur with a lot of his sentiments. He actually got me thinking on our religious legacy. Being reformed, I know that we tend to accentuate the law as a rule of gratitude (Heidelberg Catechism). Thus we have become quite legalistic in our approach to life and sin, and I think it is a characteristic shared with other church traditions as well.

One of the things Martoia successfully argued was the fact that a different understanding of the biblical description of sin and humankind's fall from grace before God is possible. When I read through the gospels and then Paul's writings I always think why we tend to generalise their ethics into rules and laws. And then it hit me - also because Martoia wrote about our need of the Old Testament back story to understand Jesus' ministry - we, as contemporary Christian church inundated with the Christendom Paradigm, have more in common with the Jewish religious establishment of Jesus' time than we have with the gentile converts of Paul, who forever changed the face of the Jewish church. We are non-ethnic Jews in our faith system.

I am currently researching for a study on the use of the word testify ("marturia") in the gospel of John, and it strikes me that Jesus' debates with the Jewish establishment was more about law and oppression and the freedom from a legalistic faith-system than it was about the Jewish faith as such.

I think it can be perceived as revolutionary to declare that the church became a faith system dictated by laws and rules, but ... it can help us to discover our Pharisaical legacy (not the metaphorical sort, but the legacy left by our Jewish-Christian foreparents) in the process of reclaiming the church as Jesus intended it to be, can't it?