Great article by Russell
Moore: Why Impostors Love the Church
Recently,
I read a book that kept me awake a couple of nights. It was about “Clark
Rockefeller,” and the scare quotes are important. The man was neither “Clark”
nor “Rockefeller.” He was a German immigrant who crafted an identity as an heir
of one of America’s wealthiest dynasties. He married, fathered a child, and was
involved in fraud, theft, and maybe even murder. And no one ever knew, until
the very end.
What
made me squirm was the fact that the fake Rockefeller’s inroad to all his
deception was churches and relationships, particularly with women. He would
make the connections he needed in local congregations, and he would charm the
women there.
At
the same time, he would parasitically imitate the men, watching and mirroring
back to them their convictions and opinions, even the inflections of their
voices. But behind all of that, there was nothing real but a predatory
appetite.
The
New Testament warns us, of course, about spiritual impostors. Sometimes, these
“wolves” are there to introduce subtly false doctrine. But just as often, it
seems, these spiritual carnivores hold to true doctrine, at least on the
surface. But they use this doctrine and service for predatory ends. The sons of
Eli, for instance, use their priestly calling to co-opt the fat of the offering
and to lay with the women at the altar (1 Sam. 2). Virtually every New
Testament letter warns us about the same phenomenon (e.g., 2 Pet. 2; Jude).
But
why, when there is so much opportunity for debauchery out there in the world
around us, do such people choose the church?
First
of all, I think it's because deception can look a lot like discipleship. A
disciple is like a son learning from his father, Jesus tells us. The student
resembles his teacher. That’s good and right. But the satanic powers turn all
good things for evil. A spiritual impostor can mimic such discipleship when
he’s, in fact, just “casing the joint,” watching the mores, learning the
phrases, mimicking the convictions. It can seem like the passing down of the
faith when, in reality, it’s an almost vampiric taking on of another identity,
all for the sake of some appetite or other.
Second,
I think it’s because these impostors are looking for something they can’t find
in bars and strip clubs. Many of them “feed” off innocence itself. The Apostle
Paul, therefore, warns of those who “creep into households, taking captive weak
women burdened down with sins.” (2 Tim. 3:6) The impostors are able to gain
power over the weak not only by deceiving them but also by morally compromising
them.
Often
these victims are drawn, for reasons good and bad, to spiritual authority. The
impostor mimics this authority, sometimes with a precision almost to the point
of identity theft. But he uses it to defile, sapping away what seems to them to
be innocence as a vampire would lap up blood.
Finally,
the church often draws such impostors because of a perversion of the Christian
doctrine of grace. The Christian gospel offers a complete forgiveness of sin,
and not only that, a fresh start as a new creation. But both Jesus and the
Apostles warn us that this can easily be perverted into a kind of anti-Christ
license. Faith is not real without repentance, and faith is not like that of
the demons, simply assenting to truth claims. Faith works itself out in love.
Faith follows after the lordship of King Jesus. Faith takes up a cross.
But
a notion of “grace” apart from lordship can provide excellent cover for
spiritual impostors. That’s why virtually every sex predator I’ve heard of
compares himself, or is compared by one of those on whom he’s preying, as a
latter-day King David. This is often the case even while this person continues
to run rampant in his sin against the Body of Christ. Those who seek to hold
accountable, or even just to warn the flock, are then presented as “unmerciful”
or “graceless” or unwilling to help along the “struggling.”
This
often leads to a church that then loses its ability to be the presence of
Christ. The church, desiring to be seen to be merciful, loses any aspect of the
merciful ministry of Christ because we don’t do what he called us to do: to
tend the flock of God. Or we are so burned over by the presence of predators
among us that we lose the ability to trust anyone. Yes, there is Demas, and
yes, there is Alexander the Coppersmith. But there’s Timothy and Titus, too.
Moreover,
the presence of impostors can cause us to lose confidence in the church itself.
But how can that be when Jesus warns us from the very beginning that we must be
watchful of this. The Apostolic Word gives us confidence that spiritual
predators, like Pharaoh’s magicians, “will not get very far.” (2 Tim. 3:9)
There’s
nothing more enraging than the sound of a lamb bleating in a wolf’s mouth. But
the Shepherd is coming.
