I am currently reading a fine book on the Pharisees. The author, Tom Hovestol, is doing a really good job describing the Pharisees as they actually were, where they came from, what their goals were, and how much they resemble modern evangelicals. Although the book is coming from an unexpected quarter (Moody Press), it is clear from the argumentation and footnotes that Hovestol is indebted to N.T. Wright and others in the NPP movement.
But in the midst of all the good stuff, there is unfortunately one confusion that comes up regularly in this discussion. That is a confusion on the nature of caricatures. A good cartoonist is one who tells the truth by exaggerating the truth. A certain political figure does not really have a nose that long, or jowls that wobbly, or whatever. But a good caricaturist captures something by means of the exaggeration, something that cannot be captured any other way. But when we discover that it is an exaggeration, or line-drawn overstatement, we do not get back to the strict truth by insisting on mug-shot photography from here on out. Rather, if we are wise, we see the truth in the exaggeration. That is what it is there for.
Confronted with a caricature, there are two mistakes we can make. One is if we, with a wooden simple-mindedness, come to believe that the caricature is actually a photograph. This is the mistake made by those Christians that Hovestol chides, those who believe the Pharisees were unmitigated ecclesiastical orcs. But the other mistake is the one that I have been trying to identify among NPP sympathizers (among whom some count me, depending on the subject). This is the mistake of believing that the caricatures are simply “inaccurate.” The Pharisees were “not really like that.”
The danger of this (of course) is that the original caricaturist of the Pharisees was the Lord Jesus, and He was the one trashed their reputation until the end of the world. We may balance this caricature with other things we are taught in Scripture (e.g. the numerous examples of godly or thoughtful Pharisees), but we have no authority to reverse or back away from the caricature. And one of the reasons why so many modern evangelicals are hostile to satire and caricature and polemical hyperbole is that they instinctively know that, scripturally speaking, were a true prophet of God to show up, they would be the principal target of choice.
When we realize (as we ought to) how much we modern evangelicals have in common with the Pharisees, this should not make us think that they should be rehabilitated, but rather that we should be more strictly condemned, and that the Lord’s savage generalizations could be justly applied to us as well. It should not make us (with a pietistic and sentimental mien) increasingly “dubious” about the “propriety” of “polemical generalizations” in “respectable academic discourse.” The only reason for such “doubt” is to cover our white little evangelical hinder parts. Kirkegaard once commented on how scholars gravitate toward commentaries on Scripture in just the same way a little boy might pad his breeches to keep from feeling the switch.