Blog Archive
for July, 2007
Historical Connections Between Southern Baptists and Evangelicals
— Monday, July 9th, 2007 —
Keep Reading...Blood, Gore, and Global Warming
— Monday, July 9th, 2007 —
Those of us who lived through the 1980s have not forgotten the rush of “relief concerts” that followed the USA for Africa “Live-Aid” concert for famine relief in Ethiopia. On the heels of “We Are the World,” Willie Nelson organized “Farm Aid” to provide relief for foreclosing family farms. Other musicians put together concerts for various causes, from opposition to South African apartheid to third world debt relief. The 1980s are back, but the issues are bigger than saving the children or saving the farmers. We’re rocking to save the whole planet.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concert this weekend demonstrates something of how culturally popular the crusade against global warming can be. The truth really isn’t all that inconvenient for most Americans, because the “solution” to global warming seems so abstract and distant that few Americans can picture how exactly fixing the problem would change their lives at all, beyond listening to concerts and watching Al Gore documentaries. I am hopeful, however, about this debate, precisely because it is, at its heart, deeply theological.
I am a conservative and a conservationist. I may be to the left of most of my fellow Southern Baptists on environmental issues. I believe government has a role in restraining corporate America from poisoning our eco-system, just as government has a role in restraining corporate America from poisoning our culture. I believe in wetlands protection, in the national parks system, and in most of the environmental laws passed since the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s. I am horrified to see woodlands and forests mown down to put up another Home Depot, and believe there ought to be common-sense zoning laws to keep Outback Steakhouse and Wal-Mart from taking over the countryside like so much kudzu. And yet, I am disturbed by the ideology behind much of the religious rhetoric behind the global warming debate.
Keep Reading...Does Male Headship Lead to Violence Against Women?
— Saturday, July 7th, 2007 —
You may have seen her when she dropped her fourth-grade son off at Vacation Bible School. Maybe she slips in to the Sunday morning worship service, and disappears right after the final Amen. Maybe she’s the checkout lady you left a gospel tract with last week. Or maybe she’s the head of your congregational women’s ministry. And maybe you’d never know that the long-sleeve blouse in July isn’t just for modesty, but to cover bruised skin.
Right now, while you’re reading this, there is a woman, probably in your neighborhood, who was beaten last night by her husband or, even more likely, live-in boyfriend. And this is an abomination in the sight of a holy God.
Tougher penalties of law are necessary and overdue. Communities and neighborhoods that know one another well enough to discern when something is awry at the Jones’s are essential. Most important are churches that call men to sacrificial headship, hold predatory men to account, and exalt the dignity of women.
The Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has posted online a short editorial I wrote on the question of whether biblical male headship leads to abuse. You can access it here.
Our problem is not that we have believed too much about what Scripture teaches about male headship or the godly submission of wives. The problem is that we’ve ignored these Spirit-given truths, and cut ourselves off from a Word of God which calls on men both to recognize women as “weaker vessels” (who can be hurt, and who need protection) and as “heirs with you of the grace of life” (1 Pet 3:7 ESV).
Keep Reading...Independence Days: Race, Conscience, and the Spoken Word
— Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 —
For the younger American generations, the figures of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s often fit into one of two categories. Either they are so mythical as to be unreal (Martin Luther King, Jr., is a beatific saint, and George Wallace is a villain from a Saturday morning cartoon) or they are seen simply as the equivalent of today’s often clownish race activists (Al Sharpton on one side, David Duke on the other).
Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1965 (Baylor University Press, 2006) is a collection of primary sources from the civil rights movement, including sermons, speeches, and essays. The volume demonstrates the ways in which religion fueled and inspired the civil rights movement by inspiring real men and women, with human flaws and human heroism, to change the way things are.
Davis Houck, a communications professor at Florida State University, and David E. Dixon, a political scientist at St. Joseph’s College, assemble speeches from such famous figures as King, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Aaron Henry, along with others (black and white) whose pleas for racial impartiality might otherwise be lost to history.
Keep Reading...Sunday Morning Comin’ Down
— Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 —
As of yesterday, I know why the most depressing sound on earth to me is the sound of CBS News’ 60 Minutes stopwatch.
As a child and a teenager, Sundays were a blur of activity. Sunday school assembly at 9:30 AM, Sunday school at 9:45, worship service at 11:00, Training Union (then Church Training, then Discipleship Training, then whatever they called it next) at 6, worship service at 7, and then some kind of youth group activity after the service. Often I was running late for Training Union and would catch, as I was leaving the house, the intro to 60 Minutes with that stopwatch ticking away. To this day, I cringe when I hear that sound.
Yesterday, guest-hosting the “Albert Mohler Program,” I invited historian Craig Harline on the program to talk about his new book, Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl (Doubleday). Harline spoke of something called “Sunday neurosis,” a sense of profound sadness that comes over some people on Sunday. It’s the type of melancholy one hears in Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down.” Because the routine is disrupted, one falls into an adrenalin-starved mild depression. But the opposite is also true, he says; there are some people who so love Sunday, for whatever reason, that they are mildly depressed at the thought of ending. For Harline, there’s a lot bound up in these disparate reactions to a day.
Harline’s overall thesis is that, “as the world changes, Sunday changes.” He demonstrates this through medieval, Reformation, and Puritan debates over the Sabbath, 20th century skirmishes over “blue laws,” and the contemporary scene of an American culture in which sports, both amateur and professional, will have no gods before them on the First Day.
Keep Reading...Alma’s Mater
— Monday, July 2nd, 2007 —
My editorial in this month’s Touchstone on the violent hypocrisy of some “peace and justice” evangelicals is online at the magazine’s website. Also available online is David Mills’ article on the irrelevance of “relevant preaching.” David’s piece is a provocative article, sure to spark some conversation among preachers. If you don’t subscribe, you can do so here.
Greg Boyd Changes His Mind
— Monday, July 2nd, 2007 —
Greg Boyd has changed his mind.
No, he’s not recanting his belief that God doesn’t know the future and sometimes loses at the hands of the evil powers. I wish it were so, since every time I read Boyd, the 60 percent of the material with which I agree so strongly, mostly his warfare motif of Scripture arguments found in his book God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict, makes me throw up my hands and yell, “Why can’t you be orthodox on the doctrine of God…and atonement…and gender…and…” well, you get the point.
Rather, Boyd’s giving up on the gap theory.
For years, the open theist has been the most prominent advocate of the “gap” theory, the idea once held by C.I. Scofield, W.A. Criswell, and others, that Genesis 1:2 and following describes the restoration of an earth made “formless and void” by the rebellion of the evil angels. The “gap” allowed for Boyd both an ancient universe and the good creation described by Genesis 1 and 2. But now, on his blog, Boyd says he’s changed his mind.
Keep Reading...
