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.

The Kingdom of God in the Wal-Mart Breakroom: Poverty, Partiality, and the Peril of a Gentrified Ministry

— Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 —

A sermon by Russell Moore from James 2:1-9, Alumni Memorial Chapel, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, August 24, 2006. An MP3 audio file is available here. Southern Seminary chapel messages for the entire semester, including President Mohler’s series on the Ten Commandments, will be available here.

South Park Conservatives and the Religious Right

— Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 —

In the New York Times this morning, columnist John Tierney argues that the Republican Party is losing the hip, urban, libertarian voting bloc, dubbed “South Park Republicans” after the profane animated television program. Attending a Reason magazine conference, Tierney cites Andrew Sullivan and Reason editor Nick Gillespie, who argues that the culturally libertarian youth vote is as likely to show up for the GOP in this fall’s elections as Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is to join the Village People.

Of interest to those of us who are not libertarians, South Park devotees, or Republican partisans is Tierney’s assessment of the strange relationship between the libertarians and religious and social conservatives.

Billy Graham (Still) Believes the Bible

— Monday, August 28th, 2006 —

I know I am not the only one who was thrilled to see Newsweek magazine devote a cover story titled “A Pilgrim’s Progress” to evangelist Billy Graham in its August 14th issue. After a lifetime of preaching the gospel, Graham has shown grace, grit, and faithfulness in the pulpit and in his personal life. I also know that I am not the only one who was saddened to read Newsweek editor Jon Meacham reporting in the article that Graham allegedly had moved away from his commitments to biblical inerrancy and to the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation.

In the September 4 edition of Newsweek, Billy Graham speaks for himself in a letter to the editor. Graciously, Graham commends Meacham for seeking to “understand how my thinking on certain issues has changed over the years.” Still, Graham says, more clarity is needed.

In the letter, Graham says directly: “As I grow older, my confidence in the inspiration and authority of the Bible has grown even stronger. So has my conviction that only Christ can give us lasting hope, hope for this life and hope for the life to come. As the Bible says in John 3:16, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’”

The Seven Interesting Sins

— Monday, August 28th, 2006 —

At Books and Culture, Stephen Prothero examines the Oxford University Press book series on the seven deadly sins. Though the volumes vary, Prothero notes that most of them tend to turn toward advocacy of the ways in which the particular sin mentioned has received bad press.

Prothero writes:

“Flannery O’Connor, the sin-obsessed novelist of the once sin-obsessed South, wrote, “The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way.” The Seven Deadly Sins series was written for this modern reader. But what has been lost as sin has been sacrificed to freedom?

The Kingdom of God in the Wal-Mart Break Room: Poverty, Partiality, and the Perils of a Gentrified Christianity

— Thursday, August 24th, 2006 —

The Myth of the Female Pastor

— Monday, August 21st, 2006 —

Several years ago when I was serving as a Baptist Press correspondent from the site of the Baptist Women in Ministry gathering, I noticed a glaring absence in a room of moderate-to-liberal Baptist women committed to women in the pastorate. The absence was women who were actually serving in the pastorate. I commented at the time to a colleague there with me that if an alien spacecraft were to abduct the gathering, there would hardly be a hospital chaplain left in the Southeast. Clinical Pastoral Education-licensed chaplains were there in large numbers, as were counselors and various other church staff positions. But pastors were few and far between.

Today Albert Mohler looks at the hard data and concludes that Baptists across the spectrum don’t disagree on women in the pastorate. They disagree on the idea of women in the pastorate. But the research of two Baptist feminists shows that moderate and liberal Baptist churches just don’t call women as pastors either in great numbers, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.

Proverbs and the Unity of the Bible

— Friday, August 18th, 2006 —

My copy arrived today of Tremper Longman’s new commentary on Proverbs in the Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms. I have been looking forward to this precisely because Longman is one of the few Old Testament commentators in contemporary evangelical life to understand that the point of the Proverbs, and the rest of the Old Testament Scriptures, is Jesus of Nazareth.

I haven’t read the entire commentary yet, but I am very pleased by Longman’s introduction to his method of interpretation.

Live Strong, Lance Armstrong

— Friday, August 18th, 2006 —

Guest Commentary by Jedidiah Coppenger

What do I have in common with Lance Armstrong? He’s an international celebrity, a champion bicyclist, and a world-renowned philanthropist who has devoted his resources and his fame to fighting cancer, a cause most closely associated with the yellow “Live Strong” bracelets. And he’s an atheist who has rather publicly ridiculed the Christian faith. I’m a Southern Baptist seminary student. But for a few days this summer I found myself with Lance (and 15,000 other bikers) bicycling across Iowa. For seven days, there we were: a group of rookies, some seasoned veterans, and one superstar.

It might be hard to imagine the excitement of riding alongside Lance Armstrong. Just imagine playing basketball with Michael Jordan. When my brother and I saw Lance Armstrong coming up behind us, we couldn’t believe we were tearing through the Iowa countryside side-by-side with the man himself.

Jimmy Carter and the Fundamentalists

— Friday, August 18th, 2006 —

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Jimmy Carter is still the first face that pops in my head when I hear the words “President of the United States.” I can still remember the pride and joy in my kindergarten heart when one of us, a Southern Baptist from the Deep South, was elected President. I think he’s a genuinely honest and humble public servant, although I disagree with him significantly on some crucial issues.

It is hard not to be disappointed then in the way President Carter framed the issues in response to questions from the German magazine, Der Spiegel. When asked to describe the relationship between conservative Christianity and public policy, President Carter said this:

Evangelicals and the Pill

— Friday, August 18th, 2006 —

This morning’s Wall Street Journal looks at the evangelical Protestant attitude toward contraception. Mostly, the piece notes, they love it: 88 percent according to a Harris poll support birth control.

Still, the author, a professor at Wheaton College, notes the very recent history of such views among Protestants and acknowledges an evangelical minority holding to the older vantage point on contraception, citing Sam and Bethany Torode’s Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception and Albert Mohler’s qualified rejection of the contraceptive culture.

As it happens, however, the Torodes are not Protestants anymore (having converted to Orthodoxy), nor are they opposed to all forms of contraception anymore. This may make the case stronger that opposition to contraception is alien to contemporary American evangelical thought. The WSJ concludes that the debate is far from over: