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.

Christian Retailing and the Great Commission

— Thursday, July 27th, 2006 —

Guest-hosting the “Albert Mohler Program” today, I interviewed Alan Wolfe of Boston College about the shape of contemporary Christian retailing. Wolfe, an unbeliever, told me he finds the kind of “stuff” he sees at venues such as the International Christian Retail show to be indicative of an anemic American evangelical subculture.

Wolfe said in no certain terms that he does not want Christians to “witness” to him about the gospel, but, nonetheless, he sees in Christian T-shirts, breath-mints, and boy bands the reality that Christians don’t want to witness to him anyway. Wolfe said that he cannot imagine an unbeliever coming to faith through, say, a Christian bumper-sticker on the car in front of him. Buying the stuff gives Christians an easy conscience that they are carrying the Great Commission without ever having to verbally and relationally engage their unbelieving neighbors.

Another Minister for President?

— Thursday, July 27th, 2006 —

Columnist Molly Ivins argues that she has the key to the hearts of religious voters, at least when it comes to the presidential election in 2008: Bill Moyers. Moyers, a former Southern Baptist minister now affiliated with the United Church of Christ, can bring, Ivins thinks, liberal fire and moral clarity to the presidential race.

Ivins writes:

“Bill Moyers has been grappling with how to fit moral issues to political issues ever since he left Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and went to work for Lyndon Johnson in the teeth of the Vietnam War. Moyers worked for years in television, seriously addressing the most difficult issues of our day. He has studied all different kinds of religions and different approaches to spirituality. He’s no Holy Joe, but he is a serious man. He opens minds–he doesn’t scare people. He includes people in, not out. And he sees through the dark search for a temporary political advantage to the clear ground of the Founders. He listens and he respects others.”

Bill Moyers is indeed a serious man, and he does have experience. He was, remember, a major adviser to President Johnson and on Ross Perot’s shortlist for Vice President in 1992. Still, I wonder how Moyers helps the political left with the religious vote?

Skull and Bones: The New Happy Face?

— Thursday, July 27th, 2006 —

The skull and bones was once a fearsome image, warning us of deadly danger on poison containers, waving fearsomely from atop pirate ships. Now it’s just trendy.

According to the New York Times, the skull image is everywhere in contemporary youth fashion trends, so much so that it now evokes hipness more than fear.

Why Evangelicals Support Israel

— Thursday, July 27th, 2006 —

With bombs bursting over Nazareth, much attention has been paid to the high level of support for Israel from America’s conservative Protestants. For some secular observers, it is assumed that this is because each of these evangelicals and fundamentalists has a copy of The Jerusalem Post in one hand and Left Behind in the other.

This is far from the truth of the matter.

Yes, many American evangelicals are dispensationalist, and some even believe that the current strife in the Middle East is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, perhaps even the Road to Armageddon. But not every conservative Protestant supportive of Israel does so because he believes in a future restoration of the Israelite theocracy. Many of us can agree on Israel’s right to defend herself, even if we disagree about who, biblically speaking, the “Israel of God” really is.

A Theistic Evolutionist Turns Off the Light

— Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 —

Does theistic evolutionism lead to atheism? If I were to say that, I would be accused (with justification) of an overheated argument. But what if America’s leading theistic evolution proponent says it, about himself?

Howard J. Van Till of Calvin College is the most lauded and prolific defender of theistic evolution among American evangelicals. He authored the monumental work defending a Christian “integration” with Darwinism, The Fourth Day (Eerdmans), and penned the chapter on theistic evolution for Three Views on Creation and Evolution (Zondervan).

Van Till has long argued that there is no fundamental disagreement between the Scriptures (rightly understood) and evolution through natural selection (rightly understood). Now he’s changed his mind.

Work, Business, and the Kingdom of Christ

— Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 —

A Christian businessman emailed me yesterday to inquire about recommended reading on the issue of Christianity and the workplace. This brother is currently reading, and enjoying, Wayne Grudem’s Business for the Glory of God: The Bible’s Teaching on the Moral Goodness of Business (Crossway).

To Grudem, I would add Carl Henry’s excellent discourse on work and the image of God in his Christian Personal Ethics (now, sadly, out of print). I would also recommend David Hegeman’s superb book, Plowing in Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture (Canon). Hegeman demonstrates that labor is not a result of the Fall, but that vocation is restored in Christ. This means the faithful truck driver or auto mechanic or cabbage farmer or stockbroker is pointing to something that will be true of us in the New Earth.

How Do You Want to Die?

— Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 —

In light of this week’s national conversation about the “new frontiers” open to us through experimentation on the corpses of abandoned babies (or, as we prefer to say, “embryonic stem cell research”), I was drawn again to a convicting word by agrarian poet-philosopher Wendell Berry:

“Science can teach us and help us to resist death, but it can’t teach us to prepare for death or to die well.

“The question of how you want to die is somewhat fantastical but nonetheless it is one that all the living need to consider, one that belongs to the issue of health, and one that health science can’t answer.

“Do you want to die at home with your people ‘in blessed peace around you,’ which is the death Tiresias foresaw for Odysseus and the one Homer seems to recommend?

“Or do you want to die in the hands of the best medical professionals wherever they are?

“Such questions may seem irrelevant until you realize that they define two very different lives.”

Christian Colleges and Academic Esteem

— Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 —

This morning’s New York Times features a story about continuing tensions between Southern Baptist state conventions and the colleges they support. The article focuses in on the recent agreement between Georgetown College in Kentucky and the Kentucky Baptist Convention (KBC) to part ways. As the Times reports, the separation was shepherded through the process by Georgetown president Bill Crouch and my friend and colleague Hershael York, then the president of the KBC.

While the article highlights Baptist struggles over this issue, the same article could be written, with different details, about virtually any segment of American Christianity. Should (small o) orthodox Christians fund and promote a “progressive” university, whose faculty oppose the most significant things the conservative churchgoers believe? Does a confessional Christian identity mean the end of academic integrity?

Unborn in the USSR

— Friday, July 21st, 2006 —

Vladmir Putin is worried. And it doesn’t have anything to do with his weird kiss of a five year-old on the campaign trail. Instead, it has to do with the fact that there aren’t nearly as many five year-olds as there used to be in Mother Russia.

In the July 31 issue of The American Conservative, economist Pavel Kohout takes up the declining population of the Russian Federation. Kobout argues that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians “seemingly prefer consumption to child bearing and rearing.” Kohout asks why the demographic charts are plummeting, even with material prosperity going up since the downfall of the Evil Empire.

Kohout places the blame on the rise of dual-income careerism in Russia, along with the vast cultural changes that accompanied the demise of the Iron Curtain.

Babies 4 Us

— Thursday, July 20th, 2006 —

Quite surprisingly, sexual revolutionary Andrew Sullivan applauds George W. Bush for vetoing the bill funding embryonic stem cell research. Sullivan writes:

“I respect the case of those who favor it; but, when push comes to shove, I’m with Bush on this. It took political courage to take this stand. And the morality it reflects - a refusal to treat human life as a means rather than as an end - deserves respect even from its opponents.”

If only the same kind of moral clarity had been seen by the “pro-life” senators and House members who decided degrading the dignity of unborn human life is fine, as long as we can benefit from parts of their corpses.

Ultimately, however, this has little to do with legislation in the United States Congress, or with the President’s veto. It has to do with an American culture in which human beings are, as Sullivan points out, a means to an end: economically, sexually, or politically. The first defense against a culture of death isn’t legal protection for the defenseless (although we need that). The first step is to create churches that dignify human life because they sanctify Christ who shares a common human nature with us, even with those among us we like to call “blastocysts.”

HT: Rod Dreher.