Tim Keller, commenting on Jesus’s parable of the lost sons, when the father entreats the older brother:
[Jesus] is addressing the religious leaders who are going to hand him over to the Roman authorities to be executed. Yet in the story the elder brother gets not a harsh condemnation but a loving plea to turn from his anger and self-righteousness. Jesus is pleading in love with his deadliest enemies.
He is not a Pharisee about Pharisees; he is not self-righteous about self-righteousness. Nor should we be. He not only loves the wild-living, free-spirited people, but also hardened religious people.
Friedrich Nietzsche—obviously operating from an opposing worldview than Keller—offered a similar warning in 1886 about becoming what you critique:
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
