The new Pharisees

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

I liked a text The Reduction of Orthodoxy by Jonah Paffhausen and mapped it to non-orthodox language and removed some ballast:

There is a temptation to reduce church, especially among young male converts, to a rational system of doctrines and dogmas, canons and rituals. We get all excited about the new things we are learning, and about how far superior they are to secular and non-Christian philosophy. But these things, doctrines, dogmas, canons and so forth, are there in order to support one primary purpose: the transformation of our souls in theosis, in short, salvation. Just because you have the right doctrine, pure dogmas and strict observance of the canons does not mean that you are deified.

In fact, the great spiritual fathers all say that knowledge puffs up, inflates our ego, and inflames our passions. These things will not save you. They are the context for the spiritual struggle but are not its content. If we judge others, condemn others, criticize others and generally exalt ourselves, we are simply the new Pharisees. You can have perfect obedience to all the rules, and if you do not love your neighbour, they condemn you. You can fast perfectly, and if you judge and criticize your neighbour, you condemn yourself. If you judge and criticize the Atheists, Muslims, Roman Catholics or the Protestants and their faith, and decide they are all going to hell, you have condemned yourself.

It is not for us to judge anyone else’s faith or salvation. We need to worry about ourselves, and our own salvation. We must not only mercilessly persecute hypocrisy within ourselves, but any kind of arrogance, selfishness, self-centeredness, and egotism. Otherwise, we make the truth into a lie, because we take what is good and holy, and use it to not only destroy others, but inflate our own egos. If you don’t have love, St Paul says, you are a sounding gong or clanging cymbal.

Okay that sounds like a good advice, I’m doing my best to follow it for myself. But what about judging institutions? I am also a software analyst, and I see how the church works and how she fails, and I have some ideas about what we might try to change. And during more than 30 years of my life I had the naivety to believe that church professionals are interested in my ideas. And last year I decided to stop my naive eagerness. And I wonder where is the borderline between humbleness and indifference?