Moore to the Point
By Russell D. Moore. Russell D. Moore serves as the teaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. In addition, Dr. Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Find sermons and other resources to help Christians engage the culture from a biblical worldview at www.russellmoore.com.

Karl Barth and the Cartoon Jesus

— Monday, July 31st, 2006 —

I just read Westminster/John Knox’s new Barth for Armchair Theologians. I expected not to like it, given my sharp theological differences with the author, John R. Franke (the inheritor of Stanley Grenz’s mantle as chief theologian of the postmodernist evangelical left). I was surprisingly impressed with the text of the book. Franke presents Barth’s views fairly, succinctly, and winsomely. As the book’s title claims, Franke makes Barth accessible to laypeople who want the gist of the theologian’s thought without reading all of the Dogmatics for themselves.

What revolted me was not any pomo-evangelical theology from Franke. It was instead the drawings W/JK commissioned to illustrate the text. I do not object to visual representations of Jesus. But the cartoon Jesus representations in this book cross every conceivable line.

Moore Briefly Noted

— Monday, July 31st, 2006 —

Of note today…

Jim Smith at the Florida Baptist Witness writes of new SBC President Frank Page, “All I Am Saying Is, Give Page a Chance.” Now that Jim Smith is familiar with 1960s peace protest songs, what’s next? Can a “Make Love, Not Warren” editorial against the Purpose Driven Pastor’s support for the Evangelical Climate Change Initiative be far behind?

Speaking of climate change, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance released its statement disputing claims that human activity is the cause of global warming.

Gary Ledbetter at the Southern Baptist Texan says the Battle for the Bible isn’t anywhere near over. The reason many Southern Baptists seem dazed and confused over basic issues such as the necessity of baptism for church membership is clear, he says. Most of us haven’t heard a sermon on such issues in over thirty years.

Katrina Cage Fight?

— Monday, July 31st, 2006 —

He’s probably the mildest-mannered man I’ve ever known. I never once saw him lose his temper or even move in that direction, even in a really tense 1992 re-election campaign. I’m ashamed to say I once thought his niceness was a campaign liability. Even so, my old boss, United States Congressman Gene Taylor is in the middle of a fiery sparring match in the press with ex-FEMA head Michael Brown over the federal government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina relief.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Brown in an interview with Playboy (just read the Los Angeles Times piece) called the congressman “a little twerp” for questioning his competence in a United States House of Representatives hearing. Gene responded by saying that Brown is “an incompetent fool and everybody in south Mississippi knows it.”

The Myth of the Apolitical Evangelical

— Sunday, July 30th, 2006 —

This morning’s New York Times features a front-page story on the members who have left Woodland Hills Church in suburban St. Paul over Pastor Greg Boyd’s denunciation of “politics.”

Some of the things Boyd renounces in the article are well worthy of renunciation. Some churches have too closely aligned the Kingdom community with one particular nation-state or political party, that is true. But the article also leaves murky, as does Boyd’s new book on the subject, how the church plans to challenge prophetically such social and state-sponsored evils as abortion. If Pastor Boyd wants his church not to be seen as “Republican,” many of us can agree with him. If he wants his church to be silent on theological issues, such as abortion and religious liberty, that the ambient culture deems “political,” then he is now just what he fears about the flag-waving megachurch pastor down the street: a dupe for the powers-that-be.

Rob Bell Has Left the Building

— Saturday, July 29th, 2006 —

I just returned from a trip over to Indianapolis. No, it wasn’t for a race. Robbie Sagers bought tickets for the final stop of the Rob Bell “Everything Is Spiritual” tour and thought it would be a great idea to see it for ourselves.

Bell, the author of the bestseller Velvet Elvis, is one of the most popular pastors in the “emerging church” movement in contemporary evangelicalism. This tour has been described by some in the mainstream media as analogous to the beginnings of the Billy Graham crusades.

Moore on this later.

The Future Is NOW

— Saturday, July 29th, 2006 —

The National Organization for Women (NOW) celebrated forty years of “herstory” last week at a gathering in Albany, New York. Two correspondents from the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) note that the future doesn’t look all that promising for feminism, given the average age of the attendees and the shopworn 1970s sound of the rhetoric.

Charlotte Allen reports on the meeting for the Wall Street Journal, while Allison Kasic does the same for the Weekly Standard.

Both see the Joan Baez feminism of the NOW gathering to be a signal that the movement is losing steam.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

— Friday, July 28th, 2006 —

On the online version of the Weekly Standard, Jim Tonkowich of the Institute for Democracy and Religion, sums up the current tumult in the mainline Protestant denominations with a T-shirt slogan he saw at the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA): “I’m Making It Up As I Go.”

Tonkowich explains that the fissures in the oldline denominations are about more than politics. They’re instead about two rival notions of how to view reality itself. And, he warns us, this isn’t just a problem for liberal denominations.

Sex Education and the Social Order

— Friday, July 28th, 2006 —

We’re not going to gain a consensus on whether or how to teach sex education in America’s public schools. That’s the conclusion of University of California at Berkeley sociologist and law professor Kristin Luker in her new book, When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex, and Sex Education, Since the Sixties (Norton).

Luker summarizes her thesis in this way:

“I suspect that sexual liberals and conservatives, like their counterparts in the larger political world, will never agree because each side gives priority to something different. It’s a cliche, but as other researchers have found, political conservatives tend to value stability and liberty while political liberals tend to value equality, and this finding applies to the sexual realm as well.”

Luker, rightly I think, points out that divergent views of sexual liberals and sexual conservatives when it comes to sex education are about more than sexual morality, and about more than the rights of parents to protect their children from the sexual revolution. Instead, the two sides inevitably view the purpose of the public school system differently, because they have differing views of hierarchy and the social order.

Leon Morris, RIP

— Friday, July 28th, 2006 —

John Mark Reynolds has a good obituary of the recently deceased New Testament scholar Leon Morris. Reynolds writes:

“It seems like every five years or so the church goes through another wave of criticism in which influential pastors, Bible scholars, or theologians breathlessly announce that they've looked into the matter and discovered that the death of Christ isn't the main thing after all. The most recent such outbreak was messily entangled with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and featured movie reviews which started by critiquing the movie (fair enough) but soon enough devolved into dismissals of the centrality of Christ's crucifixion for the Christian faith. These demotions of the cross always bring out the latent fundamentalist in me, who it turns out is always hiding just under the urbane theological veneer, humming "The Old Rugged Cross" and hearing the echo of a prophetic sermon in the Foursquare Church of my upbringing in the seventies: ‘Just wait and see,’ warned the preacher, ‘they'll find a way to take the blood out of the Bible. The devil can't stand that blood.’ Don't get me started. Instead, get Leon Morris started. “

As Ezekiel Said, “Roll Tide”

— Friday, July 28th, 2006 —

Speaking of Christian retailing, my friend Tim Ellsworth at Union University sent along to me the latest example of Christian merchandise: college sports Bible T-shirts. On his blog, Tim tells about an Alabama company, BibleSports.net, that now markets these shirts.

University of Alabama fans can get a shirt that, quoting Ezekiel 20:29, reads on the front: “Then I said to them, what is this HIGH PLACE you go to?” On the other side, it says, “It is called BAMAh to this day.” Auburn fans can buy a shirt with a citation from the Proverbs: “The way of an EAGLE in the sky.” The Auburn shirt is, of course, orange and the Alabama shirt, red.