The Demand For Perfection in the Church
R. J. Rushdoony
It is understandable that, in a time of decadence, many people will long for and demand perfection in the church, but it is neither right nor moral. To expect perfection this side of heaven is unwarranted. Our life here is to be one of growth in grace, sanctification, and community. Christians are required by Scripture to be forbearing one of another. Paul tells us that we “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called” only if we walk “with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love” (Eph. 4:1-2; Col. 3:13). Yet we find the “super-saints” ready to create divisions over things we are never told to fight about: counseling programs, psalm singing, dress codes, attendance at evening services and prayer meetings, and so on and on. There is no mandate for any division over these things. Too many zealots believe that man’s controls can do better than the working of the Holy Spirit. They substitute zeal for faith and intemperance for patience.
Over the years, I have counseled, with poor results, many zealous persons thus: “You can never convert anyone by spitting in his face,” but too many seem to believe that the Holy Spirit inspires them to spit!
We have only to read the epistles of Paul, James, and John to realize how weak and sinful the early church was. The Corinthian and other churches would be consigned to hell by our current perfectionists! But the apostles and their successors made the early church a world-conquering power.
The churches which have stressed perfection have become stagnant, not growing, churches. They become authoritarian and substitute controls for sanctification. They split groups, and then themselves split again and again as they refine subtle points of doctrine in a way which would exclude the apostles! When I was young, there was a presbytery bitterly and evenly divided over a disagreement on lapsarianism. Not surprisingly, they made the faith a mockery, and the churches finally went modernist. I have, over the years, written and told people that lapsarianism is wrong, whether infra-, supra-, or sublapsarianism, because it posits a time sequence in the mind of God, a blasphemous assumption. Too often, self-styled champions of the faith have discredited it more than its enemies. In all circles of the churches and theologies, the perfectionists are insistent, “My will be done, because I know the mind of God.” If we are Christians, “we are members one of another” (Eph. 4:25), not judges.
Heresy is holding to an opinion that differs from revealed truth. But what happens when we take something which we believe is revealed, or which is revealed, but which is not a doctrine of the triune God nor of salvation and then use it to condemn and to bludgeon others, and to divide Christ’s church? Are we not then Pharisees if we insist that what is important to us is equally important to the triune God? Again and again, groups stressing to the point of division practices and doctrines not essential to salvation have become irrelevant to Christ. They have become castaways, laid up on a shelf as not usable. Is there no fear of God in their eyes that they rend His Church?
The Pharisees were the most moral, best educated, and the finest people of their day, but they ended up rejecting the Christ. The Pharisees are with us still.
Used with permission from “Chalcedon Report.” No. 351, October, 1994, Chalcedon Report, P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251
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