A new Phariseeism?

“Keep your eyes open,” said Jesus to his disciples, “and be on the guard against the ‘yeast’ of the Pharisees!...I told you to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees.” Then they grasped the fact that he had told them to beware of the influence of the teaching of the Pharisees. (The Gospel According to Matthew 16:11-12)

The Pharisees were a group of men who were noted for their arrogant religiosity which manifested itself in a self-righteous and rigid upholding of what they perceived as unimpeachable doctrine and practice. However, as Jesus pointed out, this was doubly dangerous because this not only gave an excuse to the Pharisees to refuse to seek the Kingdom of Heaven and the knowledge of God as revealed by His Spirit, but these barriers stopped everyone else from entering, even when they were desiring.

In the above incident from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus went to great lengths to explain to his disciples that the religious rulers of the time were teaching incorrect ideas about God. Jesus used the image of ‘yeast’ because just as a little leaven in flour can produce an even larger amount of bread, so too can a little incorrect teaching destroy accurate understanding of God, which will inevitably and, perhaps, completely draw us away from Him.

Today, there is a reappearance of the attitude to God that characterised this ancient sect, but with a wholly more insidiously corrupt teaching. Jesus warned the common people that despite the Pharisees speaking with the authority of Moses, their actions must be ignored. Today, however, the new Pharisees refuse even Moses, preferring to overturn him “through intellectualism or high-sounding nonsense [which is] stuff at best founded on men’s ideas of the nature of the world and disregards Christ.” What is being presented as the correct gospel and understanding of the Creator is in fact the reintroduction of the leaven of Gnostic-packaged Aristotelianism. The former is a belief that this material world, to all intents, displays an ontological independence from the heavenly realms, while the latter states, somewhat similarly, that any natural thing (e.g. a man, tree or dog) has the reason for its existence within itself. Not only are these heresies devoid of biblical warrant, they also are slanderous imputations against God’s character.

The official website of Sydney Anglicanism contains a forum for discussing ideas and contemporary issues. On the longest thread, titled ‘Making Peace with Evolution’, several pillars of the Sydney Diocese have made attacks against traditional and orthodox arguments, both biblical and extra-biblical, for the existence of the One and True God. I want to analyse several of these in this brief address.

The Reverend Gordon Cheng is a regular contributor to this thread. The underlying and tacit philosophical assumption in his argument is Calvin’s interpretation of Romans 1. In his Institutes Calvin stands in direct opposition to both the spirit and literal take of what Paul so clearly has laid out. Calvin writes that,


In vain for us, therefore, does Creation exhibit so many bright lamps lighted up to show forth the glory of its Author. Though they beam upon us from every quarter, they are altogether insufficient of themselves to lead us into the right path. Some sparks, undoubtedly, they do throw out; but these are quenched before they can give forth a brighter effulgence. Wherefore, the apostle, in the very place where he says that the worlds are images of invisible things, adds that it is by faith we understand that they were framed by the word of God (Heb. 11:3); thereby intimating that the invisible Godhead is indeed represented by such displays, but that we have no eyes to perceive it until they are enlightened through faith by internal revelation from God. When Paul says that that which may be known of God is manifested by the creation of the world, he does not mean such a manifestation as may be comprehended by the wit of man (Rom. 1:19); on the contrary, he shows that it has no further effect than to render us inexcusable (Acts 17:27). (Institutes 5:14)


In short, Calvin, like Gordon, claimed that in observing the natural objects of this world that God made, it is impossible to come to an understanding that He either exists or that these objects evidence the worker of a designer. In order to sustain this argument, Calvin elsewhere injected two premises: there is no longer any analogy between the human mind and God’s due to the effects by sin on noetic function, and because man is incapable of searching after Him there is a preordained elect whom God chooses. In other words, man is so reprobate that we can’t reason after God. Thus, in Gordon’s words, “looking at the world using observation and reason teaches me precisely nothing and tempts me into idolatry.”

However, Gordon (and many other Sydney Anglicans) extend Calvin’s [erroneous] justification by adding that there are things in the world that [seemingly] either weren’t produced by God or that God apparently failed to fulfil his responsibility as Creator and thus they were created imperfectly or with an inherence of malevolence. Gordon finds solace in David Hume’s scepticism and attacks Paley’s theistic arguments. The Design Argument doesn’t work, Gordon writes, because,

“the universe [contains] decaying rats, bubonic plague, gall bladders and koalas whose pouches are at exactly the right angle for their baby koalas to fall out and bop themselves on the head.”

From these observations of the natural world – and others, obviously – Gordon concludes that all someone could possibly grasp is that there may be “a god who is not very competent, or 2 warring gods, or maybe a whole army of gods who do OK in some areas and in other areas just keep undoing each others efforts.” In fact, Gordon continues, people will never conclude that there is only 1 Creator God because the creation can reveal “endless possibilities”. Neither Paul, nor David nor Christ thought this.

Another contributor to the thread, Luke Stevens (actually the moderator), in ridiculing Christians who hold to the orthodoxy of an historical, brief and God-directed creation, wrote that young earth creationists are “parasite[s] that fed off the host (Christian faith) and can quite possibly kill the host if [they] die too.” The gist of this is very much like Gordon’s argument which claims that a young earth creation argument “requires a supernatural element to work.” That is to say, observation of the created order cannot, must not, indicate that naturalistic processes are insufficient to explain the existence of these objects. They are not saying that God did not create the natural order: they are presenting the far more inimical and disingenuous idea that there is nothing in the created order that serves as demonstrable evidence that God created. By invoking this philosophy they have closed the [intellectual] curtain across the heavens realities and barred the mind’s access to God.

Accompanying this philosophy is a circular enthymeme. Both these men have defended the position that for Christianity to work all explanation of the creation cannot be linked to God unless it comes directly from the Bible. In other words, a creationist argument can never prove the existence of God because the only way it could is if there were “supernatural” evidence for Him, and because there is none, creationism fails. The only way it could work is if God provided revelation and because he has done so in the Bible, then we have no use for creationist arguments just in case they indeed do provide any evidence.

A friend of mine commented well on such attitudes: “Today’s theology is still on the other side of the Copernicus revolution.” By this he meant that while science has had its revolution, the theological musings behind beliefs such as these Sydney Anglican ones demonstrably evince an Aristotelian worldview. The whole corpus of Sydney Anglican apologetics on creation reveal that a bleak Aristotelian mindset has resurfaced.

The God of Aristotle (and of the Gnostics) was one who was effectively, like the Creator of Sydney Anglicanism, divorced from the world; from the world’s perspective, the world, too, held no detectable connection to God. This is because Aristotle’s God was no Divine Craftsman. His God (actually an unmoved Mover) never imposed thought concepts upon matter, and thus, unlike, for example, unnatural things that men made, signs of a transcendent intelligence directly interfacing with matter were not revealed by inspection of the natural order. Logically, then, if we cannot reasonably abduct from the natural artefacts of the world that there is a creative and purposive activity anterior to the artefacts themselves, then it is not unreasonable to conclude, with Aristotle, that the cause of the artefacts must be found in the artefacts. In other words, both the elementary principle and the cause of teleology of natural objects were, for Aristotle, in each object themselves itself rather than ontologically prior to, and imposed upon, the object. Aristotle’s account of how natural objects came to be ultimately provided gives no reason to look beyond the natural things themselves because the principle of generation and existence, the forms, resided in the objects themselves: these forms were eternally their own, and the objects’, ontology.

This is logically played out in Gordon’s odd belief that koala pouches function poorly because he thinks they’re positioned the wrong way around which causes baby koalas to fall out to the ground. (In making a comment like that I could conclude that Gordon spends far too much time in his office at St Matthias Press rather than taking an occasional walk in the bush and noticing that it certainly isn’t raining baby koalas; however, since this is one of the recently created furphies of the non-bush-walking atheist evolutionary clan, I suggest he’s being reading too much evolutionary anti-creationist material, something he seems to, judging by his voluminous unempirical statements on the thread, incline his ear toward on a regular basis.) Since Gordon, by this comment, has admitted that God really didn’t have a hand in the design of the koala pouch – how could He if the pouch is ineptly conceived! – then it must have arisen by the outworking of processes which God had applied none of his creative wisdom to. In other words, the koala pouch arose from processes which are ultimately found in or attached themselves to the thing itself or to matter the pouch consist of. This is pure Aristotelian philosophy. Gordon, by this comment, has attempted to drag science back to the Dark Ages.

Gordon criticises the Intelligent Design Movement (“ID”) because it “essentially posits a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ theory”. He believes that there is no epistemic justification for concluding from close observation of the world that naturalistic processes are insufficient to bring objects into existence, thus completely misunderstanding the very point of the ID movement. If there is no warrant for this, then the epistemic justification to conclude that naturalistic processes are sufficient to explain the objects of the world is established. That being established, they are hard pressed to explain who God is, because God’s chief credential in his relationship with us, is that he is Creator, and a ‘real’ creator, not an imaginary one. In this context it is significant to contemplate Paul’s reliance on Genesis 1-3 in his theology: grounded in the real world of contiguous space-time action by God for us!

Consequently, except for an espousal of a fideism of Kierkegaardian-like proportion (Gordon Cheng invokes Anselm and believes that “it’s not reason and observation being used to establish faith”), understanding that God created intelligently is not possible for these Sydney Anglicans because the cause of the particulars of creation is relocated away from God into placed in nature. This is a full-blown Aristotelian pagan worldview.

All this would be far too obviously non-Christian for some Sydney Anglicans to come out and boldly proclaim. To compensate for the direction that such would lead, some retreat to and invoke their pet escapist clause, namely, “God’s ways are above ours”. Or, with scant nuanced difference, they have, sounding much like their despised charismatic brethren and thus completely unaware of the irony, attacked the creationist for thinking with “human reason”, whatever that means.

However, as it inevitably will, their anti-ID explanation argument takes the form of one in which the fundamental operatives are chance, or non-intelligence, operating on and within matter, in concert with the accumulation of extraordinary amounts of time, as Archbishop Peter Jensen has favoured. In order to potentially attain to some success with this latter option they must equivocate on what “chance” means and unreasonably fashion it to include God’s being able to utilise an a-ontological ontology. After all, they must “reason”, can’t God do anything, including using a zero to produce something?

So this possibility that God, using chance, or ateleology, somehow (it’s never explained how!), fashioned life and the cosmos, over eons is in some Sydney Anglican quarters enthusiastically embraced as the only real possibility. As I pointed out on the thread (for which I and other Christians were abused and mocked for!), commonsense and many years of observing students lend support to the concept that intelligent beings cannot help but act intelligently. To argue that a supremely intelligent being would, for no good reason, surrender His mind and act unintelligently, thus acting in complete contrariness to His character is not just a dangerous “idea” but a vacuous one. As well, intelligent beings leave evidence that they acted intelligently because that’s the nature of intelligent operation.

If God cannot be seen, if His works cannot truly reveal His purposive and intelligent acts, then the possibility that non-intelligence may have operated in place of intelligence remains a possibility. Furthermore, by usurping the principle of God’s active and demonstrable incorporation of mind engaging with matter with non-mind, the cause of creation is no longer traced to God, but to the creation itself. This, apart from revealing a crude paganism, aligns itself with Aristotle’s perception of the world.

Sydney Anglicanism has gone to great lengths to sever the evidence for God’s acting in the creation. By removing intelligence, logos, from being the observable principle, they have emptied the cosmos of Christ the Creator. All this runs against what the late A.E. Wilder Smith detailed in his books and lectures. With a perspicuous cogency he addressed the attempts by people to persuade that their theology could somehow explicate complexity as arising through chance-time:

It’s maintain[ed] that chance reactions produced the huge amounts of raw information necessary for gene function upon which natural selection then worked. That is, in effect, that the chance randomising forces of nature worked against the chance randomising forces of nature to produce masses of order and information on which natural selection then worked. In other words chance, worked on by natural selection pressure, reverses its classical randomisation role and becomes the producer of derandomisation, that is, of endogenous information and teleonomy. We are asked, that is, to believe that chance, worked upon and sorted out by natural selection, produces information and then stores it endogenously to give internal teleonomy....Basically, we are being asked to believe that natural selection worked on chance to neutralize randomness just as thought works on chance to produce selective direction out of the no direction of randomness. For thought is selective and produces direction and order of no direction and disorder. Natural selection has thus, in the Darwinian scheme, replaced thought selection in sorting out order from no order, thus to generate information. (A.E. Wilder-Smith, God: To be or not to be?, A Critical Analysis of Monod’s Scientific Materialism, Telos-International, Neuhausen-Stuttgart, Germany, 1975, p. 76.)

For the true Christian, however, as Paul emphasises, it is Christ who is “both the first principle and the upholding principle of the whole scheme of creation.” (Colossians 1:17) As Jesus Christ “is always the same, yesterday, today and for ever” (Hebrews 12:8), the replacing of Jesus the Intelligent Creator, by unintelligence, slowness of action and errors, is one example of “various peculiar teachings” that we are warned to not be carried away by (Hebrews 12:9). It was Paul’s desire that we “do not conform to this world, but that we be transformed by the renewing of one’s mind” (Romans 12:2). When Sydney Anglicans propose that God acts differently to other intelligent agents and that the creative acts of God mimic, and thus are indistinguishable from, atheistic and pagan concepts of the natural order, then they are asking us to be transformed by this world and not by God’s Spirit transforming our understanding. Moreover, they are undoing a basic element of God’s creation: that man is made in his image, and thus is commutative with him: i.e. can communicate and shares rationality, amongst other things. Their doctrine would disconnect God from man in the most fundamental way and make God into the deist conception: not the one in Christ reconcilling himself to the world!

I began this by setting out Jesus’ teaching about the dangers of false teaching from people who have secured for themselves positions of authority. Jesus’ use of a metaphor only serves to underscore the very real danger that Christians today see in the doctrine that Sydney Anglicanism espouses. Sydney Anglicanism actively promulgates a pagan worldview by encouraging the belief that God acts, by its adherence to evolution, unintelligently. Furthermore, by its ridicule of the logical proposition that the proof of intelligent activity, and thus its detection, in the world is from a being who acts rapidly and perfectly, Sydney Anglicanism has proscribed the non-Christian from being able to reason from the created order to the Creator, or at the very least, reason from the creation, albeit fallen, to the non-credibility of naturalistic ontologies: thus opening them to the Gospel (which if we followed Paul in Acts 17, we could discuss with them). This is the leaven of the new Pharisees. Its desire is to keep the common people from entering the Kingdom of Heaven. As Jesus warned, beware!


My son, if…you incline your ear to wisdom, and apply your heart to understanding; yes, if you cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding, if you seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures; then you will…find the knowledge of God. (Proverbs 21-5)