Does the end justify the means?

The pursuit of “results” frequently drives people to do bizarre things. They drink water upside down to cure hiccups, hit household appliances to make them work again, spoil children with rewards to elicit good behavior—sometimes it seems as if people will do anything to get the outcome they want.

That is the essence of pragmatism. Its concern is not the soundness of the method but what the method produces. To the pragmatist, the end always justifies the means.

That kind of approach is obviously flawed—even for menial tasks. But when introduced into the church, the consequences are disastrous.

The Precursor of Pragmatism

I am convinced that pragmatism poses precisely the same subtle threat to the church in our age that modernism represented a century ago. Modernism was a movement that embraced higher criticism (an approach to Scripture that discards the notion that the Bible is God’s Word) and liberal theology while denying nearly all the supernatural aspects of Christianity. But modernism did not first surface as an overt attack on orthodox doctrine.

The earliest modernists seemed concerned primarily with interdenominational unity. They were willing to downplay doctrine for that goal because they believed doctrine was inherently divisive and a fragmented church would become irrelevant in the modern age. To heighten Christianity’s relevance, modernists sought to synthesize Christian teachings with the latest insights from science, philosophy, and literary criticism. Modernism began as a methodology but soon evolved into a unique theology.

Modernists viewed doctrine as a secondary issue. They emphasized brotherhood and experience and de-emphasized doctrinal differences. Doctrine, they believed, should be fluid and adaptable—certainly not something worth fighting for. In 1935 John Murray gave this assessment of the typical modernist:

The modernist very often prides himself on the supposition that he is concerned with life, with the principles of conduct and the making operative of the principles of Jesus in all departments of life, individual, social, ecclesiastical, industrial, and political. His slogan has been that Christianity is life, not doctrine, and he thinks that the orthodox Christian or fundamentalist, as he likes to name him, is concerned simply with the conservation and perpetuation of outworn dogmas of doctrinal belief, a concern which makes orthodoxy in his esteem a cold and lifeless petrification of Christianity.^[1]John Murray, “The Sanctity of the Moral Law,” Collected Writings of John Murray, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976), 1:193.

When harbingers of modernism began to appear in the late 1800s, few Christians were troubled. The most heated controversies in those days were relatively small backlashes against men like Charles Spurgeon—men who were trying to warn the church about the threat. Most Christians—particularly church leaders—were completely unreceptive to such warnings. After all, it wasn’t as if outsiders were imposing new teachings on the church; these were people from within the denominations—and scholars at that. Certainly they had no agenda to undermine the core of orthodox theology or attack the heart of Christianity itself. Divisiveness and schism seemed far greater dangers than apostasy.

But whatever the modernists’ motives were at first, their ideas did represent a grave threat to orthodoxy, as history has proved. The movement spawned teachings that decimated practically all the mainline denominations in the first half of the twentieth century. By downplaying the importance of doctrine, modernism opened the door to theological liberalism, moral relativism, and rank unbelief. Most evangelicals today tend to equate the word modernism with full-scale denial of the faith. It is often forgotten that the aim of the early modernists was simply to make the church more “modern,” more unified, more relevant, and more acceptable to a skeptical modern age.

Just like the pragmatists today.

A Dangerous Friendship

Like the church of a hundred years ago, we live in a world of rapid changes—major advances in science, technology, world politics, and education. Like the brethren of that generation, Christians today are open, even eager, for change in the church. Like them, we yearn for unity among the faithful. And like them, we are sensitive to the hostility of an unbelieving world.

Unfortunately, there is at least one other parallel between the church today and the church in the late nineteenth century: Many Christians seem completely unaware—if not unwilling to see—that serious dangers threaten the church from within. Yet if church history teaches us anything, it teaches us that the most devastating assaults on the faith have always begun as subtle errors arising from inside the body itself.

Living in an unstable age, the church cannot afford to be vacillating. We minister to people desperate for answers, and we cannot soft-pedal the truth or extenuate the gospel. If we make friends with the world, we set ourselves at enmity with God. If we trust worldly devices, we automatically relinquish the power of the Holy Spirit.

These truths are repeatedly affirmed in Scripture: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James. 4:4). “Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).

“The king is not saved by a mighty army; a warrior is not delivered by great strength. A horse is a false hope for victory; nor does it deliver anyone by its great strength” (Psalm 33:16–17). “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, and trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but they do not look to the Holy One of Israel, nor seek the Lord!” (Isaiah 31:1). “‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

The whole point about Israel’s being a light to the world (Isaiah 42:6; 49:6) is that they were supposed to be different. They were explicitly forbidden to imitate the Gentiles’ manner of dress, grooming, foods, religion, and other aspects of the culture. God told them, “You shall not do what is done in the land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you; you shall not walk in their statutes” (Leviticus 18:3). And as Martyn Lloyd-Jones pointed out, “Our Lord attracted sinners because He was different. They drew near to Him because they felt that there was something different about Him. . . . And the world always expects us to be different. This idea that you are going to win people to the Christian faith by showing them that after all you are remarkably like them, is theologically and psychologically a profound blunder”^[2]Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, (Grand Rapids, MI.: Zondervan, 1971), 140.

It is precisely by compromising its distinctness that the church loses the power of its testimony. The Lord has promised to work through the proclamation of His Word by His holy people, and if that is sacrificed on the altar of friendship with the world, then the church might be filled with bodies, but only as a spiritual graveyard.

Pragmatism may appear to bear much fruit, but that is only an illusion. It is a suicidal endeavor that uses the devil’s tools to do God’s work. Its effectiveness is limited to the superficial realm, and its effects ravage the spiritual health of the church.

The pragmatic approach is, and always has been, a serious threat to the church. It is now so ubiquitous that much of the church’s modus operandi can be identified as pragmatic. It is baked into the church’s subconscious. This fact increases the need to fight, and weed out, the influence of the world—not utilize it for the sake of so-called ministry.

If we are to be vessels “for honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21), then we must cleanse ourselves from these things and follow the Lord’s pattern for His church. We’ll consider how worldliness endangers that very task next time.

(Adapted from Ashamed of the Gospel.)