When it comes to culture, new things are often just old things dressed for the times. That’s good news: we seldom have to be as innovative as we think in addressing the evils of the day. If we look back, we see a way forward. That’s what I’ve noticed about cancel culture. Cancel culture has infiltrated (sometimes even permeated) vast regions of Christian thought and behavior. The evidence is all over social media—if we even need to look that far. We have plenty of evidence in our own hearts. But no matter where we find the evidence, we can be thankful that Jesus Christ addressed cancel culture once and for all. He crushed it, like the serpent’s head, under his holy heel.
Cancel Culture and the Pharisees
As an equation, cancel culture is simple: break one moral or religious code, and you’re shut out of a community. A blunder in part equals a rejection of the whole. And when accepted members of the community become outsiders, they largely remain so. Once an outsider, always an outsider. This is an ancient phenomenon. It is the value of truth or purity at the expense of grace.
Cancel culture is the value of truth or purity at the expense of grace.
This is what Jesus encountered in the scribes and Pharisees of his own day. Just look at his harsh critiques of them:
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, 3 so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, 6 and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues 7 and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others.” (Matt. 23:1–7)
The scribes and Pharisees operate on an exclusion principle: set out the plain teaching of Moses, and then exclude anyone who doesn’t keep the law. This principle pushes some people down and others up. First, They “tie up heavy burdens” for others, but they have no interest in actually walking next to sinners on the journey to grace-given holiness. That’s “not their thing.” Their exclusion principle lies behind their frequent jabs at Jesus for spending time with “tax collectors and sinners” (Matt. 9:10–13; 11:19; Mark 2:15–17; Luke 5:29–32; 15). Why is he hanging out with people who are down? Why linger with the lowly?
Second, because the scribes and Pharisees are on the “right” side of this exclusion principle, they feel self-righteous, puffed up like spiritual sails in the breeze (1 Cor. 4:6). They are the law keepers and the truth speakers. They herald the oracles of God as the holy ones (Lev. 11:44). They actually believe that they have spiritual reasons to look down on others.
Now, aside from the obvious bigotry and hypocrisy, what’s the problem with the exclusion principle? Why does Jesus seem to deal so harshly with the scribes and Pharisees? Jesus gives at least two answers in Matthew 23: (1) They are not who they say they are, and (2) they are blind.
First, the religious elites of Jesus’s day claim to be holy. But they’re not holy; they’re hypocrites (Matt. 23:2, 13, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29). They claim to be wise. But they aren’t wise; they’re foolish (23:17). Spiritually speaking, these people are 100% confident and 0% competent. They are faux experts in looking godly but true masters at being phony. And if a culture is full of people running around and claiming to be one thing when they are, in fact, another, that’s very dangerous. It has the potential to mislead entire communities. Jesus won’t have that.
Second, the religious elites are blind. Jesus calls the scribes and pharisees “blind guides” (v. 16, 24). He also calls them “blind fools” (v. 17). The same Greek word, tuphlos, is used throughout. This is the same word Matthew uses when narrating Jesus’s healing of men who are physically blind (9:27–28; 12:22; 15:30–31; 20:30; 21:14). This begs the question: In what sense are the pharisees and scribes blind?
Physically, of course, they can see. And even in matters of spiritual and ethical importance, they are more than capable of having clear vision as students of the law of Moses—God’s lucid revelation of truth and his moral code of holiness that opposes ethical evil. So, in a spiritual and ethical sense, the scribes and pharisees can see. But then why does Jesus call them blind on multiple occasions (see also Matt. 15:14)? It must be because they are refusing to see something. They are wilfully choosing blindness. To what? To Jesus Christ, who is the fulfillment of all Old Testament messianic prophecies. Jesus is the truth (John 14:6) in the flesh, the yes and amen to all of God’s promises (2 Cor. 1:20). He’s standing right in front of them . . . and they can’t, they won’t see him. They are fully responsible for this blindness. That’s why Jesus pronounces woe on them. They have chosen to be spiritually blind to God’s truth and ethically blind to the evil of rejecting God’s word.
We don’t only need something that reveals; we need someone who heals.
This is where the cancel culture of Judaism leads when it comes to character formation: people who (1) don’t know who they truly are, and (2) are blind and yet trying to lead others. In this Judaic cancel culture, Jesus delivers a message that should make us shudder when we do any sort of introspection: Truth is not enough; it must be bound to grace. Knowing the moral law, or in the Christian context “sound theology,” is not the end-all. We don’t only need something that reveals; we need someone who heals. We don’t just need a head bandage by choosing the “right theological camp”; we need heart surgery (Ezek. 36:26) performed by the Spirit of God, who then walks with us to recovery until we see Christ face to face. Regenerating and healing grace is what we need, along with mercy (Matt. 9:13; Mark 2:17) for our countless shortcomings. And the scribes and Pharisees hated that message. They hated it so much that they killed Jesus for it.
But God had planned it this way (Acts. 2:22–24). He knew it would happen—that blind hypocrites would nail the Son of God to a ruddy cross. And what’s more: that they would think they were doing something good and godly in the process! Yet God still sent his Son. Grace still came embodied. It is Jesus Christ, and him alone, full of grace and truth (John 1:14), who shatters the exclusion principle at the base of cancel culture. Grace says, “You all have fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Everyone is in need of help. Everyone needs Spirit-given vision, not just before they believe but all the way to the end of life. They need such vision to see themselves truly in light of the God who gives himself for us. Jesus asked his disciples—the ones who should have been able to see him with crystal clarity—“Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? (Mark 8:18) Like the disciples, even after coming to know Christ, we struggle with blindness, deafness, and fading memories.
From Jesus’s rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees, we learn something critical for our own cultural context: if we love the truth so much that we begin to operate based on the exclusion principle regarding other Christians, then we’ve lost sight of grace. And if we’ve lost sight of grace, we’ve lost sight of God. We have stopped seeing Christ, full of truth and grace. That’s no small blunder.
Theological Cancel Culture
How does all this apply to cancel culture infiltrating Christian theology? I’ve already given a general response to that, but it may help to hone in on a particular example. On social media, there’s a group of Christians whom I call the “Faux Theology Police,” the FTP. These are people who pride themselves on doctrinal soundness, who search for every theological blunder, and who make a point of warning other people about who all the false teachers and heretics are. Ironically, s of these people have little theological training, especially when compared to those who have served in ministry and academia for decades. That’s why I call them “faux theology police.” Their depth of theological understanding might be as shallow as a rain puddle, but they’d have you believe that they captain their own ship on the theological seas. I wonder what a paraphrase of Matthew 23:1–7 would look like for them . . .
The theological police “trust in salvation by grace alone through Christ alone,” and so observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach grace, but do not practice it. They tie up heavy doctrinal arguments hard to comprehend, but they themselves are not willing to help people move from the head to the heart. They showcase theological acumen only to be seen by others. They make their profiles sharp and their criticism cutting, and they love the praise of followers and being called “not woke” by their peers.
The message of Matthew 23 for the FTP is simple: you are not truly who you say you are, and you are blind. You boast of salvation by grace alone but have trouble showing grace to your toddler. You tout your complex metaphysics but have no interest in teaching Sunday school to children.
Keep in mind, I’m a Westminster Confession-adhering Presbyterian, passionate about John Calvin and the doctrine of depravity. I love theology, and I cherish carefulness of thought, doctrinal circumspection, and confessional orthodoxy. I know firsthand how unbiblical teachings ruin human lives and crumble church walls. We should, we must, be zealous for the truth of God. But zeal for God’s truth cannot ever trump the centrality and beauty of God’s grace.
In the world of social media, that might mean acknowledging that more is happening in someone’s life than the one theological misstep they took. And other things in your own life and in the immediate world around you are more important than your fervent attempts to warn the whole world about the dangers of someone else’s theology. People are more than their ideas, more than their professed theology. And all of us are inconsistent. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be vigilant about our theology or the theological trends of our time. Far from it! But it does mean we need to keep truth and grace bound together, just as they are in the person of Christ.
Much of this will fall on deaf ears. There will still be tweets and posts about how so-and-so went woke on the doctrine of man or turned heretical on the doctrine of God, how one theologian obviously doesn’t affirm God’s immutability anymore. It’s all out there. And there will continue to be those who, in the midst of knowing that Christians need equal measures of truth and grace, will still treat grace as a sub-category of truth. But we all know deep down that being “gracious” involves far more than shouting the truth louder and longer. It takes more creativity than that, more effort. You won’t right the theological world with a post on X condemning the latest heretic.
Tend Your Garden
I’ve come to see theology as garden-tending. Everyone’s garden has weeds. We do our best to see them and pull them out, with the help of those who love us and want a sound garden for our souls. But no gardener is truly good who spends a majority of his time looking for weeds in other people’s soil. In the process, it just makes more weeds grow in your own. And some of those weeds, like the crawling thistle that crops up in our garden, hurt to pull.
Let us tend our gardens. It’s good and healthy for the body of Christ to help each other pull weeds now and then. But those in our culture who do this out of genuine love for others are far and few between. We need more God-loving gardeners, and fewer people on the FTP.
