God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck
— Sunday, August 29th, 2010 —
A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.
The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.
If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.
Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, of course, is that Mormon at the center of all this. Beck isn’t the problem. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s brilliant, and, hats off to him, he knows his market. Latter-day Saints have every right to speak, with full religious liberty, in the public square. I’m quite willing to work with Mormons on various issues, as citizens working for the common good. What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the “Tea Party” or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States.
It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.
Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.
Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.
Leaders will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our Christian superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other Christian celebrities are seen to be courageous for fighting their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their movements.
Where there is no gospel, something else will fill the void: therapy, consumerism, racial or class resentment, utopian politics, crazy conspiracy theories of the left, crazy conspiracy theories of the right; anything will do. The prophet Isaiah warned us of such conspiracies replacing the Word of God centuries ago (Is. 8:12–20). As long as the Serpent’s voice is heard, “You shall not surely die,” the powers are comfortable.
This is, of course, not new. Our Lord Jesus faced this test when Satan took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth, and their glory. Satan did not mind surrendering his authority to Jesus. He didn’t mind a universe without pornography or Islam or abortion or nuclear weaponry. Satan did not mind Judeo-Christian values. He wasn’t worried about “revival” or “getting back to God.” What he opposes was the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected for the sins of the world.
We used to sing that old gospel song, “I will cling to an old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown.” The scandalous scene at the Lincoln Memorial indicates that many of us want to exchange it in too soon. To Jesus, Satan offered power and glory. To us, all he needs offer is celebrity and attention.
Mormonism and Mammonism are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and another way to approach him. An embrace of these tragic new vehicles for the old Gnostic heresy is unloving to our Mormon friends and secularist neighbors, and to the rest of the watching world. Any “revival” that is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ is a “revival” of a different kind of spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 Jn. 4:1-3).
The answer to this scandal isn’t a retreat, as some would have it, to an allegedly apolitical isolation. Such attempts lead us right back here, in spades, to a hyper-political wasteland. If the churches are not forming consciences, consciences will be formed by the status quo, including whatever demagogues can yell the loudest or cry the hardest. The answer isn’t a narrowing sectarianism, retreating further and further into our enclaves. The answer includes local churches that preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and disciple their congregations to know the difference between the kingdom of God and the latest political whim.
It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.
And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.
Of Christ and Katrina, Five Years Later
— Friday, August 27th, 2010 —
I always feared seeing my hometown turn into Armageddon, and five years ago, sure enough, that’s just what happened. As a small child, I would sit in the pews of my church and imagine, as our pastor flipped through one apocalyptic scenario after another in his prophecy charts, what our town—Biloxi, Mississippi, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico—would look like after the seals of the Book of Revelation had been opened, after all hell broke loose on the world as we knew it.
When I’d mention such things, the Southern Baptist adults around me would try to comfort me with the details of our then-trendy 1970s pop-dispensationalist eschatology: “Don’t worry about that, honey; the Rapture of the church will have happened by then, and you won’t be here to see it.”
That really didn’t comfort me, though, as much as they thought it would. Yes, my raptured soul would be safely sequestered in heaven, while tsunamis and locusts and horse-riding specters ravaged our hometown, but it would still be gone, washed away in a flow of blood and debris. I would be exiled from it. And home would be taken away from me—forever.
I knew I wasn’t supposed to think that way. This world is not our home, you know. We are citizens of heaven, resident aliens here for a vapor. But, still, the idea of my little beachfront community buried beneath the collapse of unbelieving civilization was hard to take, so I tried not to think about it, focusing instead on the scenarios the preachers actually talked about: the sudden evaporation of New York or Washington or Hollywood or Rome, all those Babylons that, we were told, were exalting themselves against God, and corrupting our values with prayerless schoolrooms and primetime soap operas and heavy metal music and nuns (though with a half-Catholic family, I never believed that last part).
I outgrew the dispensationalism (while holding onto the gospel underneath it all), but I still lived to see my hometown face an apocalypse. And rather than watching it all helplessly from a cloud in heaven, I had to watch it all, even more helplessly, on CNN.
Why Conservative Evangelicals Should Thank God for Clark Pinnock
— Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 —
I was sad to see Gregory Boyd’s announcement that his fellow theologian Clark Pinnock has died. Clark Pinnock led me to faith in Christ. Now, it’s true, I never met Pinnock until many years after I came to know Jesus. But the gospel I believed came through preachers who were trained by Clark Pinnock. More than that, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination would never have turned back to biblical inerrancy had it not been for a man who would later reject the concept.
At my home church in coastal Mississippi, two of the most significant pastors in my young life were trained at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the 1960s. There they sat in the classroom of an impressive young scholar, Pinnock, who was willing to challenge the bureaucratic morbidity of his adopted denomination. Pinnock, concerned that Southern Baptists like other Baptists before them were sliding into theological liberalism, presented a strong case to his students for the complete truthfulness of the Scriptures. More than that, he presented an overall narrative of God’s work in Christ Jesus that many students found compelling. Beyond the classroom, Pinnock’s students were zealous, pressing the gospel in some of the roughest parts of the French Quarter and beyond.
My boyhood pastors were only a small part of Pinnock’s audience during his short time at New Orleans Seminary. A list of his former students during that time is amazing to anyone with any grasp of the history of Southern Baptists and the inerrancy controversy: Paige Patterson, Jerry Vines, Adrian Rogers, and on and on. I cannot think of a single figure of crucial importance in the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention who is more than two steps away from Pinnock’s direct influence.
Pinnock didn’t stay long, of course, at New Orleans Seminary or within the mainstream of conservative evangelicalism. In the 1970s, he began to question his previous understanding of biblical inspiration. At a conference on biblical inerrancy, one of Pinnock’s former students, Adrian Rogers, lamented the trajectory of his professor. Rogers responded to Pinnock’s argument that evangelicals should unite around our common commitment to forgivness through the “shed blood of Jesus Christ” rather than around a common understanding of Holy Scripture. Rogers wondered how long such a commitment would last.
“Many existential theologians today and in the recent past have concluded that the whole concept of blood atonement is repugnant to modern civilized man and that the biblical materials on blood atonement represent unfortunate syncretistic accretions from Israel’s pagan neighbors,” Rogers said. “How do you know as an evangelical certainty that they are not correct, Dr. Pinnock? I suggest that your belief in blood atonement is more a function of your conservative past than of your current philosophical and theological methodologies.”
Rogers, of course, was prophetic on this point. Pinnock moved from doubting the verbal inspiration of Scripture to questioning the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy from almost every vantage point. He led the short-lived movement toward “open theism,” questioning the historic church’s belief that God knows everything, including the future free decisions of his creatures. He abandoned his belief that conscious faith in Christ is necessary for salvation, and began to see the Spirit at work in the other world religions. He denounced the concept of everlasting punishment as cruel and contrary to the nature of God. Unhinged from Scripture and tradition, Pinnock became the vanguard of evangelical innovation on doctrine after doctrine after doctrine. That’s lamentable.
But, as we remember Clark Pinnock, he should be more to us, especially those of us on the more conservative side of evangelical Christianity, than simply a parable of doctrinal downgrade. Adrian Rogers was probably right that Pinnock’s remaining evangelical commitments may have been more a result of his conservative past than his later trajectory, but let’s give thanks for that past.
As I write this, I’m about to go into a classroom to teach 150 future pastors and missionaries. We’re in an institution committed to biblical authority and the centrality of the gospel. This would not be possible if Clark Pinnock hadn’t taught Adrian Rogers and Paige Patterson and Jerry Vines. And I can’t help but wonder if my boyhood pastors hadn’t had such a vision of truth and gospel laid out for them by that young Canadian, would I have ever heard the gospel?
“Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God,” the Scripture says. “Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:7). Sometimes the outcome of a life isn’t what we would have hoped for, and sometimes there are many parts of a man’s life that we can’t imitate. But we can still give thanks that the word of God was taught, clarified, held forth, even by a man with whom we disagree.
I’m here because of some lectures a good man delivered in a classroom on Gentilly Boulevard in New Orleans, Louisiana. He may have regretted some of those lectures, but I’m thankful for them. Let’s pray for the Pinnock family and let’s thank God for the good things God did through him. Let’s remember that the last chapter of a man’s life isn’t written in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, but in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
That’s good news for sinners like us.
The Power of Words (Proverbs 1:1-7)
— Thursday, August 12th, 2010 —
The Power of Words (Proverbs 1:1-7) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.
This sermon, “The Power of Words: Wisdom, Counsel, and Decision Making” (Proverbs 1:1-7), was originally preached on Sunday, July 25, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.
Should I Marry My Non-Christian Pregnant Girlfriend?
— Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 —
Below is the latest “Questions and Ethics” query. Help me answer this question by telling me your thoughts in the comments. I’ll weigh in later. And remember to send me your real-life ethical dilemma to questions@russellmoore.com.
Dear Dr. Moore,
Man, have I messed up. I’m a Christian, but I walked away from the Lord and got involved with a non-Christian girl. I think I love her. She is sweet and we get along, but she’s not a believer. We got involved in some stuff, sexually, that we shouldn’t have (and I was the one persuading her to do it). Before long, I became convicted about the sexual sin and about being unequally yoked with an unbeliever. I broke off our relationship.
I just heard from her though, and she is pregnant, with my baby. So here’s my question. Do I marry this girl, and become unequally yoked or do I not marry and have my child be born into a family in which his or her parents aren’t married to each other?
I know I’ve really messed up. I’m just trying to figure what to do now, to keep from making it worse.
A Shotgun Sinner
Shut Up (Proverbs 6:12-19)
— Thursday, August 5th, 2010 —
Shut Up (Proverbs 6:12-19) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.
This sermon, “Shut Up” (Proverbs 6:12-19), was originally preached on Sunday, July 18, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.
The Power of Words (Proverbs 4:1-27)
— Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 —
The Power of Words (Proverbs 4:1-27) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.
This sermon, “The Power of Words” (Proverbs 4:1-27), was originally preached on Sunday, July 11, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.
Anne Rice Hasn’t Betrayed You
— Friday, July 30th, 2010 —
Yesterday the Internet was abuzz with news that Anne Rice has renounced Christianity. The best-selling vampire novelist, who professed faith in Christ several years ago and has since written several books about Jesus and her conversion, publicly quit Christianity on her Facebook page. There’s a real opportunity here that hinges on how we respond to this, or, rather, how we respond to her.
Anne said that she was leaving Christianity because she just couldn’t be “anti-gay, anti-feminist” and so forth. The response was immediate, especially on Christian forums and comments on blogs and on various other forms of media.
Anne Rice is, at best, our sister-in-Christ who is going through a dark night of the soul. She is, at the very least, someone who has encountered something of the light of Christ, is drawn to it, and is now “kicking against the goads.” In either case, she is not our enemy.
Anne’s case is a little unique because she’s a national celebrity. She has a Facebook page that people pay attention to. But she’s really not all that different to the ex-prisoner, now following Christ, who told me not long ago that he’s contemplating giving it all up and going back to cocaine and prostitutes. Of course he is. We are walking through a time of temptation and wilderness, in which there’s a struggle in the air for every Christ-branded psyche.
But the church cannot see rejection of Christ as some kind of personal reproach or, worse yet, an ideological declaration of war. We have to love our prodigal sons and daughters so that if and when the dark night of the soul is over they have a place to come home to.
Anne says she still loves Jesus but she doesn’t love Christianity. Yes, I know that it is impossible to love Jesus without loving his church. I’ve preached that for years, and I still believe it. But can’t you see how someone could wrestle against that? I am thankful that I had been a Christian long enough to have gained some kind of maturity before I saw just how vicious “Christianity” can be.
I think it ought to instruct us here as to how Jesus handled situations like these. Jesus was fierce in his denunciation of those with power, including religious and ecclesial power. He never shied away from confronting personal sin in anyone, including the wounded and vulnerable, but he did in a completely different way. Think of the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, the demonized villagers, and on and on. Jesus never snuffs out that smoldering wick, never breaks that bruised reed. And it’s because he loves.
Yes, Anne Rice has renounced Christianity. Maybe it’s a permanent move away from the gospel, showing that she never quite made it all the way into communion with Christ. If so, let’s represent Christ and continue to point her to the Jesus she finds in some way mystifying. It could be that Anne is a Christian who is having a wave of doubt and rejection. So did the Apostle Peter, who also renounced Christianity and, as a matter of fact, cursed Jesus personally in the process. But when Jesus finds Peter in Galilee (right back on the fishing boats where he’d been called from in the first place!), he never even mentions the incident at the fireside.
A lot of us (and I include myself in this) are a lot like James and John in the Christ-rejecting village. We want to call down fire from heaven on the opponents of Christianity (Lk. 9:51-54). That seems so prophetic and Christian and it also happens to confirm us to be right. Jesus’ response to this zeal ought to stop us in our tracks: “Jesus turned and rebuked them. And they went on to another village” (Lk. 9:56).
Anne Rice hasn’t rejected you. Anne Rice hasn’t betrayed you. Would you pray for her, and for the other smoldering wicks and about-to-bolt potential prodigals in your church (and maybe in your home)? It could be Anne has been deeply hurt by what she has seen in Christianity. Or it could be that, like Jesus’ disciples, the closer she’s drawing to Christ, the more she is made uncomfortable by it. Let’s love her.
Jesus’ disciples, and Peter again, after all, were ready, it seems, to “quit Christianity” when on the Galilean lakeshore after he said some disturbing things. Jesus asked Peter, “Will you also go away?” But, at the end of it all, Peter had to confess, “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn. 6:66-67).
Maybe Anne Rice will conclude the same thing. In the meantime, let’s not demonize the prodigal daughter. Let’s give her room to come home, if and when she wants. Let’s not verify her experience of angry, raging Christians.
Maybe it will take a vampire novelist to teach us that Light stings sometimes, when you’re coming out of darkness.
Is It Wrong to Display a Picture of Robert E. Lee? My Response
— Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 —
Back before I went on this extended hiatus (finishing up this new book), I received a question from a reader about whether it was ethical and neighbor-loving to display a picture of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. You can read his query here, along with comments from other readers about what he should do. Below are my thoughts on the situation.
Dear Not-a-Neoconfederate,
As I write this, I can see on my wall the flag of my home state of Mississippi, and I’m deeply conflicted about it. The flag represents home for me. I love Christ, church, and family more than Mississippi, but that’s about it. Still, the flag makes me wince because emblazoned on it is the Confederate Battle Flag, which was used so often in my home state, and elsewhere, as an emblem of backlash in support of the ugly epoch of Jim Crow. I supported a referendum changing the flag in 2001, but the voters of the state kept the old flag design by a vote of 65 to 35 percent. The more I think of it, the more I believe my conflicted feelings about that flag aren’t all that unusual for a Christian.
When it comes to Robert E. Lee, I can’t agree with those who would equate this picture with one of Adolf Hitler. Virtually every biography, by his contemporaries and future historians, would commend the General for his personal character and his sacrificial leadership. As biographer Roy Blount Jr. demonstrates Lee’s views on race were, in some ways, much more progressive than those of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and other Northerners.
Lee, like many in the army he led, saw himself as fighting, not for slavery, but for home. This doesn’t mean they were right, but it does mean that an easy caricature isn’t possible. Based on Lee’s own writings, he sounds much like an antiwar American who, nonetheless, when drafted, fights for his country.
The question is complicated more by the home for which Lee was fighting. As a localist Agrarian-leaning political type, I agree with a good bit the Vanderbilt scholars of I’ll Take My Stand found commendable in some isolated economic/cultural aspects of the antebellum South, especially compared to the whirl of the industrial rootlessness that came after. But the agrarians, right as they were on so much, were still too close, I think, to the Civil War to see the moral enormity of the slavery question.
But the Confederate States of America was constitutionally committed to the continuation, with protections in law, of a great evil.
The idea of a human being attempting to “own” another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That hardly needs to be said these days, thankfully, but we ought to remember just what was at stake. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over created things but he is not given dominion over his fellow image-bearing humans (Gen. 1:27-30). The southern system of chattel slavery was built off of things the Scripture condemns as wicked: “man-stealing” (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor, the destroying of family ties, and on and on and on.
In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism mostly of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the spurious “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). The abolitionists were right.
So what should a pro-civil rights son of the Confederacy do with the memory of those who fought for a Lost (in more ways than one) Cause?
Several comments on the original post pointed out how tainted virtually all history is. Yes, Lee fought for slavery, but so did the American Founders, in writing in allowances for it into the American Constitution. Does the picture of Thomas Jefferson I have in my study endorse his theological liberalism and his slave-holding or does it recognize his far-sighted commitments to human dignity and religious liberty? Does the bust of Theodore Roosevelt endorse his Darwnism or his awful views on eugenics?
The problem with a simple view of history is that it leads to a totemic use of historical figures. Some have romanticized, for instance, the American Founders in a way that doesn’t allow an honest conversation about the real problems there. Fourth of July sermons that treat Jefferson and Franklin and Adams as exemplars of evangelical Christianity aren’t really defending the gospel, nor are they honoring those founders. They are simply not treating persons as persons, turning them into slogan-supporting icons instead. The same thing is true with the cult of the Confederacy that has emerged in the last century, except often in much more malevolent forms. The Confederate dead have become a kind of cultural short-hand for white supremacy and racial resentment. It is a long drop indeed from Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Wallace and David Duke.
The fetishistic use of historical figures is precisely what leads to the kind of “absolute good vs. absolute evil” characterizations we often see among Christians in the way they view current leaders. Why did so many evangelicals send around email forwards with the urban myth that the then-President of the United States had led a little girl to pray to receive Christ on a rope line? It’s because so many wanted to think of this political leader as a spiritual leader too.
That’s the kind of hagiography that led to George Washington’s cherry tree inability to tell a lie. Well, George Washington was a great man, but he was also a liar. And so am I, and so are you. Unless there was a star shining over Washington’s birthplace (and there wasn’t), then Romans 3:10-19 applies to him as well as to all of us.
But this messy historical ambiguity ought not to surprise those who are being shaped by the Bible. Think of the brutal honesty with which the Scriptures give us the sins and foibles of our fathers in the faith, while honoring them just the same. Think of the very sinful, conniving picture we get of Jacob in Genesis and then think of the fact that he is commended in Hebrews 11 as a man of faith. Think of the genealogy of our Lord Jesus, filled as it is with scoundrels. And we know they were scoundrels because the Bible tells us so.
The Christian isn’t called to a rootless, ahistorical existence. We are commanded to show honor to our fathers and mothers (Exod. 20:12). That doesn’t mean hagiography. Jesus pointed out that his fathers had died in the folly in the wilderness (Jn. 6:49). Peter pointed out that the revered David was now just a pile of bones, and thus at least one sin short of a Messiah (Acts 2:29-35). This means we have a skeptical honor that recognizes both the good graces God has given to sinful men and women, and the fact that even the best among us is a sinner.
Should you keep up that picture of Lee, with his quote about what it means to be a gentleman? I don’t know. I can’t tell you one way or the other because what’s more important than a single picture is the general ethos of a home. Years ago, I had an African-American civil rights activist friend with a portrait of Lee in his home, and I never questioned whether he might be a Klansman. I have a portrait in my office of Fannie Lou Hamer, who supported the Equal Rights Amendment (I think), but I don’t think anyone sees that picture as an apologetic for feminism.
The issue is love of neighbor and the mission of Christ. That’s why the Apostle Paul refuses to lay down simple rules about eating vegetables or eating meat (Rom. 14:1-23). If that picture would hinder your being able to show hospitality and love with your brothers and sisters of every background and race, take it down.
But, if you keep it up on the wall, let it be, like every historical portrait, a warning.
I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1841 Mississippi instead of 1971 Mississippi that I’d have been leading slave escapes. I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1941 Mississippi that I’d have been singing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington. And maybe I would have.
But a gentleman as devoted to character as Robert E. Lee, who had thought long and hard about the evils of slavery, was so conditioned by his time that he couldn’t see past his blind spot. So what makes me think that I could have escaped a similar blind spot? And what is so common in our culture right now that we can’t even see it, as we think we’re serving the Lord?
Jesus addresses something of this when he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrite! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets’” (Matt. 23:29). Those are chilling words for one whose bloodline has come down from the slave-holding South through the Jim Crow oppression to the present day.
As I look at that Mississippi flag, I can’t demonize it. I’m grateful for the people, the family, the place it represents. But I wince at the symbol that was used to enslave the little brothers and sisters of Jesus, to bomb little girls in church buildings, to terrorize preachers of the gospel and their families with burning crosses on front lawns by night.
All that ought not to prompt a pretending that you come from somewhere other than where you’ve come. That would be ingratitude. It ought instead simply to lead you to say, “I am a man of unclean lips, and I come from a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6:5).
None of us is free from a sketchy background, and none of our backgrounds are wholly evil. The blood of Jesus has ransomed us all “from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:18), whether your forefathers were Yankees, Rebels, Vikings, or whatever. The gospel also then frees us to give honor to whom honor is due (Rom. 13:7), without the pretense that any human being is without sin or dishonor.
Robert E. Lee was a complicated figure, a sinful rebel (in more ways than one) who bore the image of God. And so are we. Lee was gifted in commendable ways even as he used those gifts sometimes in ways that ought to horrify. So do we. We ought to be honest, in both directions, about Lee and about our neighbors and ourselves. And that ought to cause us to search out our own lives for that hidden sin, that secret hatred, that conforming to the pattern of this age that we don’t see and don’t think to ask about. Ultimately, no matter how we seek to whitewash our heritage or our personal stories, we’ll only conquer it all at the resurrection from the dead. Until then, we watch our hearts, pray for wisdom, work for justice, and love our neighbor.
Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day.
What’s your ethical dilemma? Send me an email at questions@russellmoore.com
Patriotism and the Gospel
— Monday, July 12th, 2010 —
This lesson on “Patriotism and the Gospel” was originally taught on Sunday, July 4, 2010 at the Kingdom First Bible fellowship of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.
