When Williams insists, “your cheatin’ heart will tell on you” he says something very true about the conscience that God has placed inside every human being.

Part of the fabric that God has designed to point men and women to the gospel is this conscience, which testifies to the individual what they know to be true about God, about sin, about judgment and obedience. And while this conscience is individual, on the Last Day this same conscience will bear witness to every human being’s deeds in the flesh. If you have a conscience, one day at judgment your heart “will tell on you.”

In terms of this song, Hank Williams may not be right in the short term. The cheatin’ heart of the woman he loved may not tell on her in this life. But ultimately, her heart will tell on her, and so will yours. So in this week’s episode we’ll talk about this conscience, and how Jesus answers the accusing heart.

Today I launched a new semester of my Doctrine of the Last Things class, with the showing of a clip from the movie The Planet of the Apes.

The clip my students watched was in the closing moments of the 1968 film, as Charlton Heston is fleeing a civilization in which gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutangs rule over non-verbal, animal-like human beings. Up to this point, Heston’s character assumes he’s on another planet, one that has evolved differently from life on earth. The final scene though tells the shocking truth.

Heston sees the Statue of Liberty in ruins, up to her torso in mud and sand. It’s then that he realizes he hasn’t traveled through space, but through time. He sees the wreckage of a civilization lost.

Contrast the ending of the 1968 film with the ending of the 2001 remake. In a similar attempt at a twist climax, the protagonist (this time, Mark Wahlberg) escapes the ape planet in his space ship, crash-landing in Washington D.C., skipping across the mall past the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool, to land right in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Like Heston, Wahlberg is horrified by a national monument gone awry. In his case, it’s the Lincoln Memorial—with Lincoln’s face a chimpanzee. Wahlberg learns to his terror he hasn’t escaped at all.

And then, of course, there’s the most recent Planet of the Apes film, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), starring James Franco. In this version, the apes are genetically mutated by a well-meaning scientist seeking a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. The hyper-intelligent apes escape, begin reproducing and lash back against their human perfecters. Again, the closing scene is meant to be chilling—the redwood trees of northern California filled with primates staring out over the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco Bay.

All three of these movies, I insisted to my students, are about the intersection of eschatology with contemporary fears.

In the 1968 version, the era is worried about nuclear holocaust, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union are engaged in a high-stakes Cold War. By the remake in 2001, society’s fears focus on the more imperceptible threats of domestic and international terrorism, and of the loss of society from within. The 2011 film focuses on the fear of a future in which our technological prowess and our good intentions turn on us.

All three present a dystopian future in which our worst apprehensions are realized. That’s an eschatology, and a dark one.

The same point could be made with virtually every film and art genre. In the background or in the foreground, there’s a purpose, a goal, that’s either hopeful or tragic. Even in the realm of romantic dramas, there’s either a utopian goal (the “happily ever after”) or a dystopian end (the tragedy of love lost). But, whatever the genre, we have to live in light of the future.

As I went around the room with my students, I asked what their home churches had taught about the ultimate things: heaven, hell, kingdom, and so on. Most of them said their churches were reluctant to say much at all, beyond generalities. Many of their churches, it seems, were fearful to talk much about eschatology to keep from indulging in those speculative end-times enthusiasts we’ve all encountered.

But eschatology and discipleship in the church is kind of like sex education in the home. Just because you don’t talk about sex with your kids doesn’t mean they will grow up ignorant of sex. It means they’ll hear about sex from somewhere else.

Just because you don’t preach and teach about the Christian vision of the future, that doesn’t mean your church is void of eschatology. It means your church is picking up an eschatology from somewhere else, sometimes from the local cineplex.

A Christian vision of the future proves the dystopian movies to be right, in some sense. There’s a fire being kindled somewhere, and not even the Statue of Liberty can withstand it. But, after that, there’s the kind of new creation that makes everything new.

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On a more typical day-a day in which the question of such illness would have been a more abstract reality-I doubt there would have been anything less than consensus. Of course, these future pastors would have asserted, Jesus assumed everything about human nature, except for sin.

But this wasn’t an abstract question. These students were still reeling not just from the discomfort of the stomach flu, but also from its indignity. They had been wracked with vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and chills. They still smarted from the sense of having no control over the most disgusting of bodily functions.

So when I asked this question, these ministers of the gospel hesitated. The stomach virus wasn’t just awful; it was undignified. And thinking of Jesus in relation to the most foul and embarrassing aspects of bodily existence seemed to them to be just on the verge of disrespectful, if not blasphemous.

Why is it so hard for us to imagine Jesus vomiting?

The answer to this question has to do, first of all, with the one-dimensional picture of Jesus so many of us have been taught, or have assumed. Many of us see Jesus either as the ghostly friend in the corner of our hearts, promising us heaven and guiding us through difficulty, or we see him simply in terms of his sovereignty and power, in terms of his distance from us. No matter how orthodox our doctrine, we all tend to think of Jesus as a strange and ghostly figure.

But the bridging of this distance is precisely at the heart of the scandal of the gospel itself. It just doesn’t seem right to us to imagine Jesus feverish or vomiting or crying in a feeding trough or studying to learn his Hebrew. From the very beginning of the Christian era, those who sought to redefine the gospel argued that it doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as really flesh and bone, filled with blood and intestines and urine. It doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as growing in wisdom and knowledge, as Luke tells us he did. Somehow such things seem to us to detract from his deity, from his dignity.

But that’s just the point.

The very beginning of the Christ story itself tells us that part of the sign of the Messiah is that he is wrapped in cloths (Lk. 2:12). Why do you wrap cloths around a baby? For the same reason you might diaper your infant, or wrap her up in a blanket. The point is to keep the baby warm, and to keep him dry from waste. From the very beginning Jesus is one of us, sharing with us a human nervous system, a human digestive system, and as we’ll see every aspect of human nature.

It didn’t seem right to the world to imagine the only begotten of the Father twisting in pain on a crucifixion stake, screaming as he drowned in his own blood. This was humiliating, undignified. That’s just the point. Jesus joined us in our humiliation, our indignity.  In this Jesus is, the Scripture tells us, not ashamed to call us brothers (Heb. 2:11).

I thought intensely about this as I was asked to read, and write a foreword, for my friend Patrick Henry Reardon’s new book on the humanity of the Lord Christ, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ (Thomas Nelson). This is the best contemporary treatment of this subject I’ve ever seen.

This book prompted me to think and to ponder. But, more than that, this book prompted me to pray and to worship, to see the Jesus it is so easy for me to forget: the Jesus who was really and truly one of us, so that we might be, with him, the heirs of the Father and the children of God. The one who took on every aspect of our flesh and blood in order to redeem us from the power of the devil (Heb. 2:14-15).

Reflecting on the humanity of Jesus always drives me to see what I’ve missed in my own humanity. Too often, we’re tempted to excuse our own bitterness, our rage, our lust, our envy, our factiousness as “only human.” The mystery of Christ shows us that such things aren’t human at all, but satanic. We define humanity in light of our brother, in light of the alpha and omega point of humanity-Jesus of Nazareth.

Reflecting on our Lord’s humanity can drive you to the Jesus you might have forgotten or, might never have seen. It can also propel you with longing-for the day spike-scabbed hands wipe away your tears as you hear a northern Galilean accent introduce himself as your Lord, as your King, but also as your brother.

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A couple of months ago, I posted a question about an ethical dilemma a recently engaged woman is facing. She just found out that her spouse to-be has had “ongoing struggles with pornography.” She isn’t sure what to do, or how to make sure the issue is sufficiently addressed. You gave your thoughts on the issue, and here are mine.

Dear Engaged and Confused,

Far too many women are watching “The Notebook” or “Twilight” for indicators on what kind of man they should marry. Instead, you probably should watch “The Wolf Man.”

Have you ever seen any of those old werewolf movies? You know, those in which the terrified man, dripping with sweat, chains himself in the basement and says to his friends, “Whatever you do, no matter what I say or how I beg, don’t let me ought of there.” He sees the full-moon coming and he’s taking action to protect everyone against himself.

In a very real sense, that’s what the Christian life is about. We all have points of vulnerability, areas of susceptibility to sin and self-destruction. There are beings afoot in the universe who watch these points and who know how to collaborate with our biology and our environment to slaughter us.

Wisdom means knowing where those weak points are, recognizing deception for what it is, and warring against ourselves in order to maintain fidelity to Christ and to those God has given us.

What worries me about your situation is not that your potential husband has a weakness for pornography, but that you are just now finding out about it. That tells me he either doesn’t see it as the marriage-engulfing horror that it is, or that he has been too paralyzed with shame.

What you need is not a sinless man. You need a man deeply aware of his sin and of his potential for further sin. You need a man who can see just how capable he is of destroying himself and your family. And you need a man with the wisdom to, as Jesus put it, gouge out whatever is dragging him under to self-destruction.

This means a man who knows how to subvert himself. I’d want to know who in his life knows about the porn and how they, with him, are working to see to it that he can’t transgress without exposure. I’d want to know from him how he plans to see to it that he can’t hide this temptation from you, after the marriage.

It may mean that the nature of his temptation means that you two shouldn’t have computer in the house. It might mean that you have immediate transcription of all his Internet activity. It might be all sorts of obstacles that he’s placing in his way. The point is that, in order to love you,  he must fight (Eph. 5:25; Jn. 10), and part of that fight will be against himself.

Pornography is a universal temptation precisely because it does exactly what the satanic powers wish to do. It lashes out at the Trinitarian nature of reality, a loving communion of persons, replacing it with a masturbatory Unitarianism.

And pornography strikes out against the picture of Christ and his church by disrupting the one-flesh union, leaving couples like our prehistoric ancestors, hiding from one another and from God in the darkness of shame.

And pornography rages, as Satan always does, against Incarnation (1 Jn. 4:2-3), replacing flesh-to-flesh intimacy with the illusion of fleshless intimacy.

There’s not a guarantee that you can keep your marriage from infidelity, either digital or carnal, but you can make sure the man you’re following into it knows the stakes, knows how to repent, and knows the meaning of fighting the world, the flesh, and the devil all the way to a cross.

In short, find a man who knows what his “full moon” is, what it is that drives him to vulnerability to his beastly self. Find a man who knows how to subvert himself, and how to ask others to help.

You won’t find a silver bullet for all of this, but you just might find a gospel-clinging wolf man.

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When most people think of Carl Henry, they tend to think of his magnum opus, the six-volume “God, Revelation, and Authority,” which dealt with the major philosophical and theological challenges to Christian theism and the biblical canon. Some remember his work as a pioneer, along with Billy Graham, in the explosion of the post-World War II evangelical movement. From his place as a founding faculty member at Fuller Seminary to his role as first editor of “Christianity Today” and beyond, Henry was the intellectual godfather of the cause. But, in my view, “Uneasy Conscience” is what matters most for us these days.

Just after World War II, Henry, then a young rising star in the Christian firmament, issued a jarring manifesto calling for a theologically-informed and socially-engaged evangelicalism. Henry warned that American Christianity, on the Right and on the Left, was headed for irrelevance, toward being the equivalent of a wilderness cult. His agenda wasn’t simply an updating of style and presentation (although he had written a book on church publicity). The issues at root were about misguided views on the kingdom of God.

He was right. And he still is.

Henry was concerned about two fronts: detached fundamentalism and social gospel liberalism. The liberals, Henry insisted, had replaced the gospel with a political program. Instead of seeing the primary mission of the church in terms of God’s reconciling work in Christ to forgive sins, the liberals were busy grinding out policy papers on nuclear policy. Liberals saw the kingdom as a program for public righteousness, often enacted legislatively.

At the other extreme, though, Henry warned, conservatives over-reacted to the social gospel. They spoke of the kingdom of God, but acted as though it were wholly future. These conservatives embraced an otherworldly vision of salvation, that was mostly about getting souls to heaven at death. They held to an inordinately spiritual vision of the church, in which the church’s mission was about merely “spiritual” matters such as evangelism and addressing personal morality.

By severing social concerns from the gospel, the conservatives had, Henry warned, conceded these issues to liberal Protestants and, ultimately, to their more radical successors. Neither side, Henry argued, understood the “already” and “not yet” tension of the kingdom of God, a tension that was about more than how we view the last things. It is about also how we see salvation and the church.

In 1947, an evangelical consensus on the kingdom seemed impossible. After all, the coalition of conservative Protestants was united around the “fundamentals” of biblical inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, personal regeneration, and so forth. But these evangelicals often couldn’t agree about how such questions even as whether the Sermon on the Mount applies to believers today or only to Israel in a future millennial kingdom.

Remarkably, that has changed. In the years since, evangelical theology has embraced, at near universal consensus levels, a vision of the kingdom that is both “already and not yet.” The kingdom understandings that previously kept fundamentalists isolated have now been corrected by a more biblical portrait of the church, and the cosmic scope of salvation. This provides the basis for a renewed and biblically informed evangelical public theology. While the theory has developed in positive ways, though, Henry’s primary issue remains. Without a holistic vision of the kingdom of God, evangelicals will continue to split up the gospel in ways that can make Jesus unrecognizable to the culture around us. While there are few arguments these days about whether the Lord’s Prayer applies to the church age or whether the church is “Plan B” in the purposes of God, other, similar confusions remain.

On the one hand, the tactics of the old social gospel liberals have been inherited, ironically enough, by the Religious Right. Once again, in many quarters, a political program has replaced the gospel. Just listen to Christian talk radio for an hour and see where the emphasis is.

On the other hand, there is still a growing body of Christians who speak as though the kingdom is either wholly future or wholly spiritual. Look at the ongoing efforts to divide concern for evangelism from a concern for justice, the mission of the church in caring for people’s souls from caring for their bodies. There are rarely prophecy charts involved anymore, but it is, at heart, the same old dispensationalist hermeneutic involved, seeking to “rightly divide” the parts of Jesus’ ministry that apply to us now from those that will only apply later.  In some cases, there is outright suspicion about “kingdom talk” at all, for fear that “kingdom” is a stalking horse for doing away with the gospel.

When evangelicals contrast the “gospel” with the “kingdom,” we are right back at Scofield, without even knowing it. And, as in Henry’s day, this means that concern for poverty, family stability, homelessness, orphan care, racial reconciliation, and a host of other concerns will then be filled in by those who deny the central truths of the gospel. And that’s a shame.

Henry’s “Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism” is perhaps the most important evangelical book of the twentieth-century. It is just as relevant as it was in 1947, and should be read again by all those with a serious commitment to applying a kingdom vision to every aspect of life. The kingdom Jesus inaugurated spoke to the whole person, to spiritual lostness, to physical sickness, to material poverty, to the need for community. A church that joins Jesus in preaching the kingdom will too. We need that reminder every generation, perhaps especially now. The evangelical conscience is, after all, still uneasy after all these years.

(Originally posted at Q Ideas)

As the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision approaches, most Christians recognize, and rightly so, the loss of millions of unborn human lives. What we often forget is the second casualty of an abortion culture: the consciences of countless men and women.

Too often, pastors and church leaders assume that, when talking about abortion, their invisible debating partner is the “pro-choice” television commentator or politician. Not so. Many of the people endangered by the abortion culture aren’t even pro-choice.

In your congregation this Sunday, and in the neighborhoods around you right now, there are women vulnerable to abortionist propaganda, not because they reject the church but because they’re afraid they ‘ll lose the church. Pregnant young women are scared they will scandalize church people when they start to show, so they keep it secret. Parents are fearful their pregnant daughter, or their son’s pregnant girlfriend, will prompt the rest of the congregation to see them as bad families.

As they keep all of this secret from the Body of Christ, many of them fall prey to the false gospel of the abortion clinic. “We can take care of this for you,” these people say. “And it will all go away.”

Moreover, there are thousands of men and women in our churches who have aborted their children, or urged the abortion of their grandchildren. Bearing the shame of this, they keep it secret. And in the concealment, the satanic powers accuse them: “We know who you are; you’re a murderer, like us.”

Every time pastors and church leaders speak, they are speaking, at least potentially, to these men and women, the aborting and the abortionists. Many of these people don’t argue that the “fetus” is a “person.” Their consciences testify to that, and they’re either tortured by this or violently trying to sear over that persistent internal message.

The answer, for the church, is to preach the gospel to the conscience.

For many evangelicals, to “preach the gospel” seems to be obvious and ineffective because they think this means to, by rote, prompt people to accept Jesus and go to heaven. But the gospel speaks right where the abortion culture is in slavery, to the conscience.

For one thing, those guilty of this silent atrocity often don’t think we’re talking to them. For some, the demonic structures have helped them to conceal this secret, and to convince them the safest thing to do is to try to forget it altogether. Others are so burdened down by guilt, they really don’t believe they are included in the “whosoever will” of our gospel invitations.

Speak directly to these people. To the woman who has had the abortion. To the man who has paid for an abortion. To the health care worker who has profited off of tearing apart the bodies of the young and the consciences of their parents.

Speak clearly of the horror of judgement to come. Confirm what every accusing conscience already knows: clinic privacy laws cannot keep all this from being exposed at the tribunal of Christ. When the Light shines, there’s not enough darkness in which to hide and cringe.

But don’t stop there.

Proclaim just as openly that judgment has fallen on the quivering body of a crucified Jesus—accused by Satan, indicted by the Law, enveloped by the curse.

An abortion culture knows that hell exists, and they know judgment waits (Rom 2:14-16). Agree with them, but point them to the truth that God is not simply willing to forgive them. Show them how in Christ God is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26).

The woman who has had the abortion needs to know that, if she is hidden in Christ, God does not see her as “that woman who had the abortion.” He hasn’t been subverted from sending her to hell because she found a gospel “loophole.” In Christ, she’s already been to hell.

And, in the resurrected Christ, God has already told her what he thinks of her: “You are my beloved child and in you I am well-pleased.”

The consciences around us don’t believe what they’re telling themselves. They’re scared and accused. Shine the light in the eyes of their consciences. Prophetically. All for justice, legally and culturally, for the unborn. But don’t stop there.

After all, the spirit of murder doesn’t start or end in the abortion clinic (Matt. 5:21, 15:19; Jn. 8:44; Acts 9:1; Rom. 1:29; Jn. 3:15). And the blood of Christ has cleansed the consciences of rebels like all of us.

Warn of hell, but offer mercy. Offer that mercy not only at the Judgment Seat of Christ, but in the small groups and hallways of your church.

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Several of us were lamenting the miserable shape of the church, about so much doctrinal vacuity, vapid preaching, non-existent discipleship. We asked Dr. Henry if he saw any hope in the coming generation of evangelicals.

And I will never forget his reply.

“Why, you speak as though Christianity were genetic,” he said. “Of course, there is hope for the next generation of evangelicals. But the leaders of the next generation might not be coming from the current evangelical establishment. They are probably still pagans.”

“Who knew that Saul of Tarsus was to be the great apostle to the Gentiles?” he asked us. “Who knew that God would raise up a C.S. Lewis, a Charles Colson? They were unbelievers who, once saved by the grace of God, were mighty warriors for the faith.”

Of course, the same principle applied to Henry himself. Who knew that God would raise up a newspaperman from a nominally Lutheran family to defend the Scriptures for generations of conservative evangelicals?

The next Jonathan Edwards might be the man driving in front of you with the Darwin Fish bumper decal. The next Charles Wesley might be a misogynist, profanity-spewing hip-hop artist right now. The next Billy Graham might be passed out drunk in a fraternity house right now. The next Charles Spurgeon might be making posters for a Gay Pride March right now. The next Mother Teresa might be managing an abortion clinic right now.

But the Spirit of God can turn all that around. And seems to delight to do so. The new birth doesn’t just transform lives, creating repentance and faith; it also provides new leadership to the church, and fulfills Jesus’ promise to gift his church with everything needed for her onward march through space and time (Eph. 4:8-16).

After all, while Phillip was leading the Ethiopian eunuch to Christ, Saul of Tarsus was still a murderer.

Most of the church in any generation comes along through the slow, patient discipleship of the next generation. But just to keep us from thinking Christianity is evolutionary and “natural” (or, to use Dr. Henry’s term “genetic”), Jesus shocks his church with leadership that seems to come like a Big Bang out of nowhere.

Whenever I’m tempted to despair about the shape of American Christianity, I’m reminded that Jesus never promised the triumph of the American church; he promised the triumph of the church. Most of the church, in heaven and on earth, isn’t American. Maybe the hope of the American church is right now in Nigeria or Laos or Indonesia.

Jesus will be King, and his church will flourish. And he’ll do it in the way he chooses, by exalting the humble and humbling the exalted, and by transforming cowards and thieves and murderers into the cornerstones of his New City.

So relax.

And, be kind to that atheist in front of you on the highway, the one who just shot you an obscene gesture. He might be the one who evangelizes your grandchildren.

To Taylor Eugene Moore,

You certainly made last Sunday memorable.

I was just about to preach when I noticed your mother wasn’t in her normal pew at our church. I slipped out during the offering and found her in the foyer. She told me she was in labor, but planned to wait until I preached to let me know. I thought that was insane, asked our minister of music to preach, and whisked your mother away to the hospital. A few hours later, you were here.

As you grow older, you’ll notice that your four brothers all have biblical names: Benjamin, Timothy, Samuel, Jonah. You won’t find your name in the Bible, but, still, it’s really important to us. You were named for former United States Congressman Gene Taylor of the great State of Mississippi, a man for whom your Dad used to work a long time ago. There are all sorts of reasons we chose that name.

For one thing, you probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him. I was working on Gene’s 1992 re-election campaign when my cousin suggested I pursue a high school senior named Maria Hanna (I was only three years older so it’s not as creepy as it sounds). I thought I was too busy, but the congressman thought otherwise. He liked her, and goaded me along to ask her out. I did, from our campaign headquarters in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi.

My courtship with your mother took place in a whirlwind of campaign events as I stumped with Gene through VFW halls and seafood festivals and county fairs all over south Mississippi. Gene was re-elected (63 percent of the vote) and your mother and I married. The congressman was right about her, more than I could have ever predicted.

But, more importantly, your name is about something we thought was true about you.

Early on in your unborn life, a doctor told us he thought you would have Down Syndrome. He turned out to be wrong, but we didn’t know that until you were born. Sadly, you probably won’t meet a lot of kids with Down Syndrome because so few of them ever make it to birth these days, so you might not even understand what that is.

When the doctor told us this, your mother and I looked at each other and knew right away that you would be a gift: Down Syndrome or not. Your worth and your value wouldn’t be in whether or not this age saw you as having “power” or “success,” but instead based on your bearing the image of the God who made you and who loves you.

Now, this is all bound up in what your mother and I believe about the gospel. We believe that the kingdom long promised came to us in a Son who took on human nature, was executed in weakness, and was raised by the power of God. He has put together a reign made up of people who don’t meet this world’s expectations of what it means to “count.”

But that basic Christian conviction crystallized for me, in a unique way, while working with Gene Taylor. He consistently and holistically believed that human dignity matters, matters for the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the unborn.

We were part of a political party with a great old heritage of “standing up for the little guy,” but that often lost its way in doing so: on slavery, on Jim Crow, and, ultimately, on legal protection for the unborn.

A generation ago, people from our state were “pro-choice” on whether states could oppress people because of the color of their skin. A man named Hubert Humphrey famously said there could be no state’s right to dismantle human rights. There’s a long fall from that to today, when candidates for national office pledge allegiance to Planned Parenthood in doing the same thing to people based on their stage of development.

I hope, by the time you read this, that you don’t “get” that, any more than I could “get” separate water fountains for black and white people. I hope, by the time you read this, that there are two pro-life parties, though I fear it might be two “pro-choice” parties instead.

I remember some folks offering Gene a lot of money to change positions on that awful injustice called “abortion.” Gene said, “Well, I’m not going to do that and, if I did, I’d go into this campaign with a lot of money but my wife wouldn’t vote for me, and she would be right not to.”

I left politics a long time ago for something I think is more important: preaching the kingdom of God. But I’m still shaped in all sorts of ways by Gene Taylor. He didn’t fit into easy categories of ideology, and he never sold out his conscience. He just did what he thought was right and didn’t care how “eclectic” that made him. I’ve tried to be the same way.

Last year, your mother and I went (and you, too, in the womb) back to our hometown to see your namesake lose his re-election campaign. But I was proud to see him, all the way to the end, saying the same things he said from the start of our little grassroots effort back in 1989, “liberty and justice for all, including the unborn.”

I suppose I would always have been pro-life, because that’s how I was raised and I’m part of a tribe of evangelicals that haven’t lost the commitment to that, at least as it pertains to abortion. But I think my time with that Roman Catholic Blue Dog congressman taught me to cherish human dignity in a way I never would have if it had just been part of some checklist of ideas. For him, it wasn’t just that taking life was wrong; I knew that. There was something though about the exuberance with which he talked about all life as gift.

And that’s what your life is.

You don’t have Down Syndrome, that’s true. The doctor was wrong, just like the doctors were wrong when they told us we’d never have children.

But maybe some day you’ll have something else. Maybe you’ll get sick or get hurt, or maybe you’ll wander away from what your mother and I will try to teach you. You’ll still be loved, and you’ll still have a place to come home to. You’re accepted for life.

You interrupted our Sunday, but you haven’t interrupted our lives. Every time we call your name, Taylor Eugene, we’ll remember one important place we learned how true that is.

I played a cow in my first-grade Christmas pageant, and I had more lines than the kid who played Joseph. He was a prop, or so it seemed, for Mary, the plastic doll in the manger, and the rest of us. We were just following the script. There’s rarely much room in the inn of the contemporary Christian imagination for Joseph, especially among conservative Protestants like me. His only role, it seems, is an usher—to get Mary to the stable in Bethlehem in the first place and then to get her back to the Temple in Jerusalem in order to find the wandering 12-year-old Jesus.

But there’s much more to the Joseph figure.

Real Father

When we talk about Joseph at all, we spend most of our time talking about what he was not. We believe (rightly) with the apostles that Jesus was conceived in a virgin’s womb. Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father; not a trace of Joseph’s sperm was involved in the formation of the embryo Christ. No amount of Joseph’s DNA could be found in the dried blood of Jesus peeled from the wood of Golgotha’s cross. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit completely apart from the will or exertion of any man.

That noted, though, we need to be careful that we don’t reduce Joseph simply to a truthful first-century Bill Clinton: “He did not have sexual relations with that woman.” There’s much more to be said. Joseph is not Jesus’ biological father, but he is his real father. In his adoption of Jesus, Joseph is rightly identified by the Spirit speak­ing through the Scriptures as Jesus’ father (Luke 2:41, 48).

Jesus would have said “Abba” first to Joseph. Jesus’ obedience to his father and mother, obedience essential to his law-keeping on our behalf, is directed toward Joseph (Luke 2:51). Jesus does not share Joseph’s bloodline, but he claims him as his father, obeying Joseph perfectly and even following in his voca­tion. When Jesus is tempted in the wilderness, he cites the words of Deuteronomy to counter “the flaming darts of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16). Think about it for a moment—Jesus almost certainly learned those Hebrew Scriptures from Joseph as he listened to him at the woodworking table or stood beside him in the synagogue.

Difficult Deed

Our contemporary cartoonish, two-dimensional picture of Joseph too easily ignores how difficult it was for him to do what he did. Imagine for a minute that one of the teenagers in your church were to stand up behind the pulpit to give her testimony. She’s eight months pregnant and unmarried. After a few minutes of talking about God’s working in her life and about how excited she is to be a mother, she starts talking about how thankful she is that she’s remained sexually pure, kept all the “True Love Waits” commitments she made in her youth group Bible study. You’d immediately conclude that the girl’s either delusional or lying.

When contemporary biblical revisionists scoff at the virgin birth of Jesus and other miracles, they often tell us we’re now beyond such “myths” since we live in a post-Enlightenment, scientifically progressive information age. What such critics miss is the fact that virgin conceptions have always seemed ridiculous. People in first-century Palestine knew how babies were conceived. The implausibility of the whole thing is evident in the biblical text itself. When Mary tells Joseph she is pregnant, his first reaction isn’t a cheery “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” No, he assumes what any of us would conclude was going on, and he sets out to end their betrothal.

But then God enters the scene.

When God speaks in a dream to Joseph about the identity of Jesus, Joseph, like everyone else who follows Christ, recognizes the voice and goes forward (Matt. 1:21-24). Joseph’s adoption and protection of Jesus is simply the outworking of that belief.

Same Faith

In believing God, Joseph probably walked away from his reputation. The wags in his hometown would probably always whisper about how “poor Joseph was hoodwinked by that girl” or how “old Joseph got himself in trouble with that girl.” As the stakes grew higher, Joseph certainly sacrificed his economic security. In first-century Galilee, after all, one doesn’t simply move to Egypt, the way one might today decide to move to New York or London. Joseph surrendered a household economy, a vocation probably built up over generations, handed down to him, one would suppose, by his father.

Again, Joseph was unique in one sense. None of us will ever be called to be father to God. But in another very real sense, Joseph’s faith was exactly the same as ours. The letter of James, for instance, speaks of the definition of faith in this way: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (1:27). James is the one who tells us further that faith is not mere intellectual belief, the faith of demons (2:19), but is instead a faith that works.

James shows us that Abraham’s belief is seen in his offering up Isaac, knowing God would keep his promise and raise him from the dead (2:21-23). We know Rahab has faith not simply because she raises her hand in agreement with the Hebrew spies but because in hiding them from the enemy she is showing she trusts God to save her (2:25). James tells us that genuine faith shelters the orphan.

What gives even more weight to these words is the identity of the human author. This letter is written by James of the Jerusalem church, the brother of our Lord Jesus. How much of this “pure and undefiled religion” did James see first in the life of his own earthly father? Did the image of Joseph linger in James’s mind as he inscribed the words of an orphan-protecting, living faith?

It’s a shame that Joseph is so neglected in our thoughts and affections, even at Christmastime. If we pay attention to him, though, we just might see a model for a new generation of Christians. We might see how to live as the presence of Christ in a culture of death. We might see how to image a protective Father, how to preach a life-affirming gospel, even in a culture captivated by the spirit of Herod.

This post originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition Blog on December 15, 2011, under the title, “Father to God, Model for Us.”

In addition, this will be the last broadcast of “The Cross and the Jukebox” of 2011. But we will be back in early January with more conversation about roots, music, and religion.

Hitchens expected this moment, of course, but he anticipated, wrongly, a blackness, a going out of consciousness forever. Many Christians today are sadly remarking on what it is like for Christopher Hitchens to be now opening his eyes in hell.

We might be wrong.

The Christian impulse here is exactly right. After all, Jesus and his apostles assured us that there is no salvation apart from union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection, a union entered into by faith. And Hitchens not only rejected that gospel, he ridiculed it, along with the very notion of anything beyond the natural order. The Christian Scriptures are clear: there is a narrow window in which we must be saved, the time of this present life, and after this there is only judgment (2 Cor. 6:1-2; Heb. 9:27).

But I’m not sure Christopher Hitchens is in hell right now. It’s not because I believe there’s a “second chance” after death for salvation (I don’t). It’s not because I don’t believe in hell or in God’s judgment (I do). It’s because of a sermon I heard years ago that haunts me to this day, reminding me of the sometimes surprising persistence of the gospel.

Fifteen or so years ago, I heard an old Welsh pastor preach on Jesus’ encounter with the thieves on the cross. The preacher paused to speculate about whether the penitent thief might have had any God-fearing friends or family members. If so, he said, they probably would never have known about the terrorist’s final act, his appeal to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Lk. 23:42). They never would have heard Jesus pronounce, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43).

These believing family members and friends would have assumed, all their lives, that this robber was in hell, especially dying as he did under the visible judgment of God (Deut. 21:22-23). They would have been shocked to meet this man in the kingdom of God. “We thought you were in hell,” they might have said, as they danced around him in the heavenly places.

That sermon changed everything for me about the way I preach funerals for unbelievers. Now, deathbed conversions are very rare. Typically, a conscience is so seared by then, so given over to the darkening of the mind, that the gospel rarely is heard. We shouldn’t count on last-second repentance.

But, however rarely, it does happen, and who knows? Perhaps you have relatives who, in the last seconds of breath, breathed out a silent prayer of repentance and faith. You might be as surprised as the thief’s believing cohort.

And, who knows? Christopher Hitchens heard the gospel enough, often while debating believers. Maybe the seed of the Word might have embedded in his heart somewhere and maybe, just maybe, it broke through sometime in the night, as he gasped for last breath.

Christopher Hitchens was a blasphemer, true enough, and a nasty character. Aren’t we all, in our different ways. Christ Jesus came for nasty characters like us. And the same blood of Jesus that can deliver us from wrath could do the same for Hitchens had he, if he, at any point, embraced it. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, and, if he did, then Christopher Hitchens’s past atheism would be no barrier to communion with God. It would be, like my sin, crucified with Christ, buried, and remembered no more.

I don’t know about Christopher Hitchens, about what happened in those last moments, but I do know that, if he had embraced it, the gospel would be enough for him. I know that because it’s enough for me, and I’m as deserving of hell as he is.

Hell is real and judgment is certain. The gospel comes with a warning that it will one day be too late. But, as long as there is breath, it is not yet too late. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens, like so many before him, persisted in his rebellion to the horror of the very end. But maybe not. Maybe he stopped his polemics and cried out, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

I don’t know. But I do know that the gospel offers forgiveness and mercy right to the edge of death’s door. And I know that the kingdom of God is made up of ex-thieves, and ex-murderers, and ex-atheists like us.

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Doctoral Seminar

• Alan F. Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (Doubleday, 2004)
• Charles E. Hill, Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity, 2^nd ed. (Eerdmans, 2001)
• Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho (Catholic University of America, 2003)
• N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3, Christian Origins and the Question of God (Fortress, 2003)
• Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Eschatology: Divine Drama (Westminster/John Knox, 2002)
• Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1994)
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Fortress, 1996)

Masters-Level Course

Required Reading

• Anthony A. Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994)
• George Eldon Ladd, The Presence of the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974)
• C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (HarperOne, 2001)
• Richard J. Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002)
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Hope of the Church (HarperOne, 2008)

Fiction (Students pick one of these to read)

• Margaret Atwood, A Handmaid’s Tale (Anchor, 1998) [Feminist Apocalyptic]
• Edward Abbey, Good News (Plume, 1980) [Secular Environmental Apocalyptic]
• Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of Earth’s Last Days (Tyndale House, 1996) [Dispensational Evangelical Apocalyptic]
• C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (HarperTrophy, 1994) [Mere Christian Apocalyptic]
• Michael O’Brien, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (Ignatius, 1998) [Roman Catholic Apocalyptic]
• Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971) [Southern Literary Catholic Apocalyptic]

Recommended Reading

• Gregory A. Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997)
• Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992)
• Robert G. Clouse, The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1977)
• Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Hendrickson, 2003)
• Russell D. Moore, The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004)
• Jeffrey Burton Russell, Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven and How We Can Regain It (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Jerry L. Walls, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford University Press, 2002)

The song “If We Make It through December” is a sad reflection on that reality, written from the perspective of a father worried about his standing as provider at Christmastime. I think “If We Make It through December” actually has more to do with the Christmas stories of people in our communities and in our churches than, say, “Jingle Bells” does. I also think it has more to do with the Christmas Story too. Joseph of Nazareth faced the same gut-wrenching crisis that the man in Haggard’s does. In adopting Jesus and marrying Jesus’ Blessed Mother, Joseph plunged himself into economic peril. In this episode of the Cross and the Jukebox, we’ll look at what this means for us and for the families to whom we hope to be the presence of Christ.

I was a teenage Satanist. No, I’ve never stood in a pentagram of blood and I’ve never joined a coven. The signs of my Satanism are yellow highlights in an old King James Bible my grandmother gave me when I was twelve. I looked through that Bible not long ago, and I could almost immediately identify by every highlighted text what was going on in my life at the time.

The highlight over “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13) was there because I worried that I’d never pass geometry. I passed, barely, but, despite the presence of Christ, I still can’t tell you the difference between a trapezoid and a polygon. Plus, I misunderstood that verse, which speaks of contentment in all circumstances (including a Mississippi public school math classroom) rather than a “you can do it” encouragement.

When I see the highlight over the verse “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that I will do” (Jn. 14:13), I know that then I was praying for God to cause that girl in my homeroom class to pay attention to me. I would ask for this and then I would repeat the clause “in Jesus’ name…in Jesus’ name…in Jesus’ name” as though this would bind God to his promise. He didn’t grant me this, and, man, am I glad.

The highlight over 1 Samuel 16:7 (”Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature…for the Lord seeth not as man seeth, but the Lord looketh on the heart”) was because I was then, and am now, a little cricket of a man, and I was hoping to grow tall enough if not to be considered for the basketball team then at least to be taller than that girl in homeroom. That didn’t happen either.

Now there is nothing wrong with praying through the Bible, of course. And there’s nothing wrong with asking for God to resolve those things that worry you. That’s what Jesus commands us to do. But those highlights remind me how dominated my life was at that time by worry and anxiety.

I was not at all what anyone would consider proud or arrogant (at least I don’t think so, but that may just be my pride and arrogance keeping me from seeing it). But at the root of all my worry was a form of hubris and lust for power. Yes, I was praying, but my prayers were simply a cap on all my worrying. And my worrying was about keeping my little kingdoms secure and within my grasp. When they weren’t I was agitated, if not outraged.

I write all that as though it were past tense.

If I could see the highlights in my own spinning mind, my own worried psyche, I’d find that I haven’t really grown (spiritually as well as physically) as much since then as I’d like to think.

Sometimes Satan’s pull to pride in our lives isn’t so much what we’re basking in as what we’re worrying about. Our anxiety often reveals a refusal to trust God’s fatherly providence. And, whenever we start ignoring that, there’s always a devil along to adopt us, to promise us bread instead of stones, fish instead of snakes. We don’t recognize the reptilian voice, but we look into our future, or into our Bibles, and wonder nonetheless, “Has God really said?”

Jesus though was free from the devil worship of worry and anxiety. He understood his Father’s care for him, and that exaltation would come along at “the proper time” (1 Pet. 5:6), a time not of his choosing.

Jesus tells us that even by looking at the natural world, the ecosystem of birds and plants and fields, we can see an icon of God’s inheritance for us. “Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these,” he says (Matt. 6:29).

We don’t need to grasp for power or glory or security. God is freely preparing us for all this. Because of this, we are free to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt. 6:33).

I’m pulled to worry right now. You probably are, too. Stop and pray; fall back in your Father’s power and wisdom, and recognize that behind that anxiety there’s something with a forked tongue.

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Indeed, a primary problem in our culture and in our churches isn’t that women aren’t submissive enough to men, but instead that they are far too submissive.

First of all, it just isn’t so that women are called to submit while men are not. In Scripture, every creature is called to submit, often in different ways and at different times. Children are to submit to their parents, although this is certainly a different sort of submission than that envisioned for marriage. Church members are to submit to faithful pastors (Heb. 13:17). All of us are to submit to the governing authorities (Rom. 13:1-7; 1 Pet. 2:13-17). Of course, we are all to submit, as creatures, to our God (Jas. 4:7).

And, yes, wives are called to submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:22; 1 Pet. 3:1-6). But that’s just the point. In the Bible, it is not that women, generally, are to submit to men, generally. Instead, “wives” are to submit “to your own husbands” (1 Pet. 3:1).

Too often in our culture, women and girls are pressured to submit to men, as a category. This is the reason so many women, even feminist women, are consumed with what men, in general, think of them. This is the reason a woman’s value in our society, too often, is defined in terms of sexual attractiveness and availability. Is it any wonder that so many of our girls and women are destroyed by a predatory patriarchy that demeans the dignity and glory of what it means to be a woman?

Submitting to men in general renders it impossible to submit to one’s “own husband.” Submission to one’s husband means faithfulness to him, and to him alone, which means saying “no” to other suitors.

Submission to a right authority always means a corresponding refusal to submit to a false authority. Eve’s submission to the Serpent’s word meant she refused to submit to God’s. On the other hand, Mary’s submission to God’s word about the child within her meant she refused to submit to Herod’s. God repeatedly charges his Bride, the people of Israel, with a refusal to submit to him because they have submitted to the advances of other lovers. The freedom of the gospel means, the apostle tells us, that we “do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1).

Despite the promise of female empowerment in the present age, the sexual revolution has given us the reverse. Is it really an advance for women that the average high-school male has seen images of women sexually exploited and humiliated on the Internet? Is it really empowerment to have more and more women economically at the mercy of men who freely abandon them and their children, often with little legal recourse?

Is this really a “pro-woman” culture when restaurant chains enable men to pay to ogle women in tight T-shirts while they gobble down chicken wings? How likely is it that a woman with the attractiveness of Henry Kissinger will obtain power or celebrity status in American culture? What about the girl in your community pressured to perform oral sex on a boyfriend, what is this but a patriarchy brutal enough for a Bronze Age warlord?

In the church it is little better. Too many of our girls and young women are tyrannized by the expectation to look a certain way, to weigh a certain amount, in order to gain the attention of “guys.”

Additionally, too many predatory men have crept in among us, all too willing to exploit young women by pretending to be “spiritual leaders” (2 Tim. 3:1-9; 2 Pet. 2). Do not be deceived: a man who will use spiritual categories for carnal purposes is a man who cannot be trusted with fidelity, with provision, with protection, with the fatherhood of children. The same is true for a man who will not guard the moral sanctity of a woman not, or not yet, his wife.

We have empowered this pagan patriarchy. Fathers assume their responsibility to daughters in this regard starts and stops in walking a bride down an aisle at the end of the process. Pastors refuse to identify and call out spiritually impostors before it’s too late. And through it all we expect our girls and women to be submissive to men in general, rather than to one man in particular.

Women, sexual and emotional purity means a refusal to submit to “men,” in order to submit to your own husband, even one whose name and face you do not yet know. Your closeness with your husband, present or future, means a distance from every man who isn’t, or who possibly might not be, him.

Your beauty is found not in external (and fleeting) youth and “attractiveness” but in the “hidden person of the heart” which “in God’s sight is very precious” (1 Pet. 3:3-4). And it will be beautiful in the sight of a man who is propelled by the Spirit of this God.

Sisters, you owe no submission to Hollywood or to Madison Avenue, or to those who listen to them. Your worth and dignity cannot be defined by them. Stop comparing yourselves to supermodels and porn stars. Stop loathing your body, or your age. Stop feeling inferior to vaporous glamor. You are beautiful.

Sisters, there is no biblical category for “boyfriend” or “lover,” and you owe such designation no submission. In fact, to be submissive to your future husband you must stand back and evaluate, with rigid scrutiny, “Is this the one who is to come, or is there another?” That requires an emotional and physical distance until there is a lifelong covenant made, until you stand before one who is your “own husband.”

Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as unto the Lord. Yes and Amen. But, women, stop submitting to men.

Just reading that in the type in front of you probably has some of you angry. Let me help you see why that is, and, in so doing, why caring for those with AIDS is part of the gospel mandate given to us in the Great Commission.

The statement that Jesus has AIDS startles some of you because you know it not to be true. Jesus, after all, is the exalted son of the living God. He has defeated death in the garden tomb, and defeated it finally. Jesus isn’t weak or dying or infected; he’s triumphant and resurrected.

Yes.

Yes, but, what we’re often likely to miss is that Jesus has identified himself with the suffering of this world, an identification that continues on through his church. Yes, Jesus finishes his suffering at the cross, but he also speaks of himself as being “persecuted” by Saul of Tarsus, as Saul comes after his church in Damascus (Acts 9:4).

Through the Spirit of Christ, we “groan” with him at the suffering of a universe still under the curse (Rom. 8:23,26). This curse manifests itself, as in billions of other ways, in bodies turned against themselves by immune systems gone awry.

That’s why the church is to suffer, continually, with Christ as we take his presence into the darkness of a fallen creation. The Apostle Paul says, then, “I rejoice then in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24).

Some of Jesus’ church has AIDS. Some of them are languishing in hospitals right down the street from you. Some of them are orphaned by the disease in Africa. All of them are suffering with an intensity few of us can imagine.

Some of you are angered by the statement I typed above because you think somehow it implicates Jesus. After all, AIDS is a shameful disease, one most often spread through sexual promiscuity or illicit drug use.

Yes.

Yes, but those are the very kinds of people Jesus consistently identified himself with as he walked the hillsides of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem, announcing the kingdom of God. Can one be more sexually promiscuous than the prostitutes Jesus ate with? Can one be more marginalized from society than a woman dripping with blood, blood that would have made anyone who touched her unclean (Luke 8:40-48)? Jesus touched her, and took her uncleanness on himself.

AIDS is scandalous, sure. But not nearly as scandalous as a cross.

At the crucifixion stake, Jesus identifies himself with a sinful world (including the scandal of my sin). He was seen to be cursed by God (Deut. 21:23; Gal. 3:13). This is why it seemed so reasonable to the shouting crowds to curse him as a false Messiah, because only those rejected by God would ever be hanged on a tree. And that’s why the apostle Paul had to repeatedly insist that he was not “ashamed” of the cross. At Golgotha, Jesus became sin (though he never knew it himself) by bearing the sins of the world (2 Cor 5:21). Now that’s scandalous.

Moreover, some of you are angry because you believe that the statement I typed above is an affront to the dignity of the ruler of the universe. He doesn’t have some immune deficiency disease; he’s ruling from the right hand of God.

Yes.

Yes, but we cannot see Jesus only in his Head but also in his Body, also in his identification with those he calls “the least of these, my brothers” (Matt. 25:40). Jesus isn’t right now hungry, is he? He isn’t naked, is he? He isn’t thirsty, is he? He isn’t in jail, is he? Well, yes, he is…in the nakedness, hunger, thirstiness, and imprisonment of his suffering brothers and sisters around the world.

When we stand in judgment, we’ll stand, Jesus tells us, accountable for how we recognized him in the trauma of those who don’t seem to bear the glory of Christ at all right now. We see Jesus now, by faith, in the sufferings of the crack baby, the meth addict, the AIDS orphan, the hospitalized prodigal who sees his ruin in the wires running from his veins.

I wonder how many of us will hear the words from our Galilean emperor, “I had AIDS and you weren’t afraid to come near me.”

And so, if we love Jesus, our churches should be more aware of the cries of the curse, including the curse of AIDS, than the culture around us. Our congregations should welcome the AIDS-infected, and we shouldn’t be afraid to hug them as we would hug our Christ. Our congregations should be on the forefront of missions to AIDS-ravaged regions of the world. Our families should be willing to welcome those orphaned by this global scourge.

Through it all, we should be insistent in gospel proclamation. To those whose blood has become their own enemy, we should announce blood they know not of, the blood of One who can cleanse them of all unrighteousness, just as it cleansed us (1 Jn. 1:7); the blood of One who is forever immune to sin and death and hell (Jn. 6:53-56).

Jesus loves the world, and the world has AIDS. Jesus identifies himself with the least of these, and many of them have AIDS. Jesus calls us to recognize him in the depths of suffering, and there’s AIDS there too.

Jesus has AIDS.

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A version of this article originally ran on December 1, 2009.

Haggard has since repudiated the central message of this song, but I don’t think this song relates merely to the events of the 1960s, about what was going on in America at that time. Instead, I think “Okie from Muskogee” can teach us about our so-called “culture wars,” and what it means to have a kind of pride born of a “persecution complex”—but not the kind of persecution that comes along with believing in the gospel.

Often the people against whom we protest aren’t those who really threaten us at all. Often the people against whom we rage are the ones for whom we are to have pity. A kind of “Okie from Muskogee” mentality, in the end, is not far from any one of us. But the gospel calls us to something else altogether.

Some of you will be visiting family members who are contemptuous of the Christian faith and downright hostile to the whole thing.

Others are empty nest couples who now have sons- or daughters-in-law to get adjusted to, maybe even grandchildren who are being reared, well, not exactly the way the grandparents would do it. Still others are young couples who are figuring out how to keep from offending family members who are watching the calendar, to see which side of the family gets more time on the ledger. And others are new parents, trying to figure out how to parent their child when it’s Mammonpalooza at Aunt Judie’s house this year.

And, of course, there’s just always the kind of thing that happens when sinful people come into contact with one another. Somebody asks “When is the baby due?” to an unpregnant woman or somebody blasts your favorite political figure or…well, you know.

Here are a few quick thoughts on what followers of Jesus ought to remember, especially if you’ve got a difficult extended family situation.

1.) Peace. Yes, Jesus tells us that his gospel brings a sword of division, and that sometimes this splits up families (Matt. 10:34-37). But there’s a difference between gospel division and carnal division (see 1 Cor. 1, e.g.). The Spirit brings peace (Gal. 5:22), and the sons of God are peacemakers (Matt. 5:9). Since that’s so, we ought to “strive for peace with everyone” (Heb. 12:14).

Often, the divisiveness that happens at extended family dinner tables is not because an unbelieving family member decides to persecute a Christian. It’s instead because a Christian decides to go ahead and sort the wheat from the weeds right now, rather than waiting for Judgment Day (Matt. 13:29-30). Yes, the gospel exposes sin, but the gospel does so strategically, in order to point to Christ. Antagonizing unbelievers at a family dinner table because they think or feel like unbelievers isn’t the way of Christ.

Some Christians think their belligerence is actually a sign of holiness. They leave the Christmas table saying, “See, if you’re not being opposed, then you’re not with Christ!” Sometimes, of course, divisions must come. But think of the qualifications Jesus gives for his church’s pastors. They must not be “quarrelsome” and they must be “well thought of by outsiders” (1 Tim. 3:3,7). That’s in the same list as not being a heretic or a drunk.

Your presence should be one of peace and tranquility. The gospel you believe ought to be what disrupts. There’s a big difference.

2.) Honor. The Scripture tells us to fear God, to obey the king, and to honor (notice this) everyone (1 Pet. 2:17). If your parents are high-priests in the Church of Satan, they are still your parents. If cousin Betty V. does Jello shots in her car, just to take the edge off the cocaine, well, she still bears the imprint of the God you adore.

You cannot do the will of God by opposing the will of God. That is, you can’t evangelize by dishonoring father and mother, or by disrespecting the image-bearers of God. Pray for God to show you the ways those in your life are worthy of honor, and teach your children to follow you in showing respect and gratitude.

3.) Humility. Part of the reason some Christians have such difficulty with unbelieving or nominally believing extended family members is right at this point. They see differences over Jesus as being of the same kind (just of a different degree) as our differences over, say, the war in Afghanistan or the future of Sarah Palin or the Saints’ winning streak this year.

Often the frustration comes not because of how much Christians love their family members as much as how much these Christians want to be right. Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann and the perpetual outrage machine on TV may value the last word, but we can’t.

Jesus never, not once, seeks to prove he is right, and he was accused of being everything from a wino to a demoniac. He rejects Satan’s temptation to force a visible vindication, waiting instead for God to vindicate him at the empty tomb.

Often Christians veer toward Satanism at holiday time because we, deep down, pride ourselves on knowing the truth of the gospel. The rage you feel when Uncle Happy says why “many roads lead to God” might be more about the fact that you want to be right than that you want him to be resurrected.

Plus, we often forget just how it is that we came to be in Christ in the first place. This wasn’t some act of brilliance, like being accepted into Harvard or some exertion of the will, like learning to put a Rubik’s cube together in 20 seconds. “What do you have that you did not receive,” the Apostle Paul asks us, “And if you received it, then why do you boast as though you didn’t receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:6-7)

Satan wants to destroy you through his primal flaw, pride (1 Pet. 5:7-9; 1 Tim. 3:6). He doesn’t care if that pride comes through looking around the family table and figuring out how much more money you make than your second cousin-in-law or whether it comes by your looking around the table and saying, “Thank you Lord that I am not like these publicans.” The end result is the same (Prov. 29:23).

Unless you’re in an exceptionally sanctified family, you’re going to see failing marriages, parenting crises, and a thousand other shards of the curse. If your response is to puff up as you look at your own situation, there’s a Satanist at your family gathering, and you’re it.

4.) Maturity. The Scripture tells us that if we follow Jesus we’ll follow the path he took: that’s through temptation, to suffering, and ultimately to glory. Often we think these testings are big, monumental things, but they rarely are.

God will allow you to be tested. He’ll refine you, bring you to the fullness of maturity in Christ. He probably won’t do it by your fighting lions before the emperor or standing with a John 3:16 sign before a tank in the streets of Beijing. More likely, it will be through those seemingly little places of temptation—like whether you’ll love the belching brother-in-law at the other end of the table who wants to talk about how the Cubans killed JFK and how to make $100,000 a year selling herbal laxatives on the Internet.

Some of the tensions Christians face at holiday time have nothing to do with outside oppression as much as internal immaturity on the part of the Christians themselves.

I’ve had young men who tell me they feel treated like children when they go home to see their extended families. Their parents or parents-in-law are dictating to them where to go, when, and for how much time. Their parents or parent-in-law are hijacking the rearing of their children (”Oh, come on! He can watch Die Harder! Don’t be so strict!”). Some of these men just give in, and then seethe in frustration.

Sometimes that’s because the extended family is particularly obstinate. But sometimes the extended family treats the young man like a child because that’s how he acts the rest of the year. Don’t live financially and emotionally dependent on your parents or in-laws, passively dithering in your decisions about your family’s future, and then expect them to see you as the head of your house.

Be a man (if you are one). Make decisions (including decisions about where, and for how long, you’ll spend the holidays). Teach and discipline your children.Your extended family might not like it at first, but they’ll come to respect the fact that you’re leaving and cleaving, taking responsibility for that which has been entrusted to you.

5.) Perspective. Remember that you’ll give an account at the resurrection for every idle (that means seemingly tiny, insignificant, unmemorable) thought, word, and deed. At the Judgment Seat of the Lord Christ, you’ll be responsible for living out the gospel in every arena to which the Spirit has led you… including Aunt Flossie’s dining room table.

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A version of this article originally ran on December 20, 2009.

One of the reasons this is hard for us is because we too often assume forgiving a trespasser means allowing an injustice to stand. This attitude betrays a defective eschatology. At our Lord’s arrest (Matt. 26:47-54), Jesus told Peter to put his sword back into his sheath not because Jesus didn’t believe in punishing evildoers (think Armageddon). Jesus told Peter he could have an armada of angelic warriors at his side (and one day he will). But judgment was not yet, and Peter wasn’t judge.

That’s the point.

When we forgive, we are confessing that vengeance is God’s (Rom. 12:19). We don’t need to exact justice from a fellow believer because justice has already fallen at the cross. We don’t need to exact vengeance from an unbeliever because we know the sin against us will be judged in hell or, more hopefully, when the offender unites himself to the One who is “the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 Jn. 2:2).

A prisoner of war who forgives his captor or a terminated pastor who forgives a predatory congregation, these people are not overlooking sin. Nor are they saying that what happened is “okay” or that the relationships involved are back to “normal” (whatever that is). Instead they are confessing that judgment is coming and they can trust the One who will be seated on that throne.

You don’t have to store up bitterness, and you don’t have to find ways of retaliation for what’s been done to you. You can trust a God who is just. If you won’t forgive, if you refuse to rest in God’s judgment without seeking to retaliate, it doesn’t matter what your evangelistic tracts and prophecy charts say. When it comes to the gospel and the to the end times, you’re just another liberal.

You find yourself far away from this ethics class, twenty years from now in your ministry, serving a church in south Florida. Pablo is a man you met, with his wife Hannah, after they attended a small-group Bible study in the home of a family in your church. Both of them, after hearing you explain the gospel, were convicted of sin and, after several weeks of conversation, both announced they were ready to confess Jesus as Lord and to follow him in baptism.

Before the baptism, though, Pablo approaches you to say that he’s not sure he meets the requirements for Christian baptism. He’s not sure he’s a repentant sinner. He sees himself as guilty, he is sorry for his sins against God and others, and he wants the forgiveness that comes through Jesus’ bloody cross, the new life that comes from Jesus’ empty tomb.

But there’s something that kindles fear in him.

Pablo tells you he is an undocumented worker, what some would call an “illegal immigrant.” Years ago he left conditions in El Salvador that, due to famine there, led him to near starvation. Moreover, he worked, like others in his village, for a multinational plantation where he was physically beaten and sexually abused. There were no other options for him, as the only employers in the country were made up of similarly exploitative companies. He slipped into this country undetected and has since lived with an artificial Social Security number he purchased on the black market, enabling him to work in this country.

Pablo’s employer knows his immigration status, but operates with a “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy when it comes to such questions about his workers. Indeed, several outside financial consultants say that, without such labor, this employer’s business would be financially unfeasible and would have to close, since there is not a sufficient employee base among native-born Americans willing to work in such a job.

The employer is Tyler Rogers, also a member of your church, one of your most Christlike people in the congregation, and he teaches the Bible in a large Tuesday night small group. It was at his family’s house that you met Pablo and Hannah, since he had been sharing the gospel with them for months and inviting them to hear more through your church.

The United States immigration policy is, if anything, more restrictive than it was when you were in ethics class at Southern Seminary. No longer can a green card be obtained by marrying a U.S. citizen, so Pablo’s marriage to Hannah is irrelevant to his immigration status. According to current law, if Pablo turns himself in, or is caught, he will face immediate deportation to El Salvador, along with a penalty making him ineligible to apply to entrance to the United States for no less than ten years.

Moreover, returning to El Salvador and applying for immigration is a process that takes, in the best of scenarios, ten years from start to finish. An admission of illegal status, plus a return to El Salvador, would mean crushing poverty, possible starvation, and almost certain bodily harm in dangerous working conditions. It would also mean being separated from Hannah for ten to twenty years.

Pablo and Hannah have three children: an eleven year-old girl, a six year-old boy, and a two year-old girl. Hannah is also pregnant with their fourth child, due next Spring.

Pablo has, since arriving in the United States, been sending a portion of his paycheck back to El Salvador, to his elderly mother who is caring for Pablo’s nieces and nephews since Pablo’s brother was killed due to the unsafe working conditions in the factory and his brother’s wife abandoned the children. Without this money, Pablo fears the children, two of whom are babies, and his mother would starve to death.

Pablo wants to do what Jesus would have him to do, to be a godly man. What do you advise him to do? If you advise him to turn himself in or to return to El Salvador, how do you square that with the biblical mandate that one who “does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8)? Can you really, from that point forward, consider yourself “pro-family” or “pro-orphan” or even “pro-life”?

If you advise him to stay with his family, how is he keeping the biblical mandate to “obey the governing authorities” (Rom. 13:1)? How also is he avoiding the sin of bearing false witness, about himself and his legal status? Can you baptize Pablo? After all, is he really showing repentance from sin?

What do you do or say, if anything, about Tyler and his employment practices? If nothing, then why not?

How do you equip the congregation to understand how to deal with this situation, and what implications does it have for how you respond to the mission field where God has placed you, with a large and growing community of undocumented Latin American workers, many of whom need to hear and believe the gospel, and are watching how you respond to this family.

Walk through each step of ethical reflection, showing why you reject some options and why you embrace others. Ground your answer in Scripture, the gospel, the Christian tradition, natural law, and common grace. Think through the implications of your answer in each situation for unintended consequences, and show how those can be ethically resolved.

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First, I’d recommend this article co-written by my friends, Danny Akin and Albert Mohler, entitled, “The Salvation of the ‘Little Ones.’”

At the level of teaching and discipling young children, there are a couple of really good curricula that I think some of y’all may enjoy: Children Desiring God and Treasuring Christ Curriculum (material that, as I’ve written before, isn’t afraid of blood).

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Dylan, Thornbury says, “does a very good job listening in to where a society or a culture is, and standing alongside of it without representing any one political perspective.” Together we talk about how “The Times They Are a-Changin’” has something of a somber tone, a tone of judgment. We discuss how youth culture revolts against the status quo of the previous generation.

And Thornbury also gives his rationale as to why fans of “classic country music” should listen to Bob Dylan—who, I should add, was a good friend of Johnny Cash.

My sons will soon be awake, dressing for church, but by “church” they have very different mental images than those that shaped me. To me, a church still ought to smell like that one, like a mixture of new carpet and old lady. I still hear those Fanny Crosby gospel songs playing in my head, and I still can feel myself marching through the front doors, flag in hand, for the Vacation Bible School pledges, the closest thing we had to a liturgy or a calendar of the Christian year.

My sons don’t have any idea how big a deal this church is for me. They’ve visited but to them it was just one more church, except unusual in that Daddy wasn’t preaching. But to me it was everything. And to them, though they’ll probably never know it, it will mean everything too.

I sit down at night to read the Bible to them, and I guess they assume I just sprung into existence knowing and believing that ancient book. But I didn’t. I learned those King James memory verses there in Woolmarket’s Sunday school rooms. And there I learned to here in them the ring of truth. I pray with my sons at night and they probably assume I just always knew to do so. But it was there, at Woolmarket Baptist Church, from those people where I first heard prayers, sometimes standing over offering plates or sick lists. My sons hear me preach every week, but it was in that little pulpit that I preached my first sermon, six minutes, covering the whole canon, followed by a round of vomiting (mine, not, that I know of, the congregation’s, though I wouldn’t blame them).

My sons will go to church this morning, but the people at Woolmarket Baptist Church taught me to want to have a church to come home to.

In a very real sense, my boys are being reared by the church in which we are now members. But they’re also being reared by a church full of people they’d never recognize, many of whom are now dead.

Sometimes we tend to think of “church” generically as a synonym for Christians, some invisible blob of everyone who believes the same facts about Jesus or who follows the same principles from the first century. Yes, the church is the transnational, transgenerational Body of Christ, the redeemed of all of the ages. But the church expresses itself in this age in local, palpable gatherings of believers in covenant with one another.

I don’t idealize Woolmarket Baptist Church. There were not only those worship services and prayer gatherings; there were also business meetings that more closely resembled “Question Time” in the British House of Commons than anything from the New Testament, except when they resembled a round of mixed martial arts. But the churches at Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, and Antioch were riddled with carnality and hypocrisy too, as was the church at Jerusalem who is the mother of us all. Nonetheless, through it all, Jesus was there.

Spiritually speaking, my Father, the God of Jesus Christ, is perfect; my Mother, that local church, was not. But she loved me, and, in her own frail way, she told me the truth.

One day my children will, if the Lord wills, have children of their own. Their children will ask them, “Where did you come from?” I hope they take them to this big congregation in Louisville where they learned to see the gospel in visual form. But I hope too that they’ll take those children to see a little red brick church in coastal Mississippi. They don’t know a soul there, but that church helped raise them too.

Happy anniversary Woolmarket Baptist Church. This son rises up to call you blessed.

But the questions that Clapton asks in his song are not only related to children who have died. “Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?” is a question about which many people wonder—believers and unbelievers alike.

I think it’s a shame that the teaching in our churches has been so deficient that we have a kind of isolated, staring-into-a-bright-light concept of heaven. The Scriptures present something different, something better. The new creation, the Bible tells us, is exactly that—a creation, with relationships, with service, with love, a kind of resumption of the present, and all with King Jesus at the center.

The gospel is able to take even weak and momentary connections and make them mature, and ongoing, in kingdom come. And there will be no tears there (Rev. 21:4). In the meantime, our lives will be characterized by suffering, and weeping. And that ought to drive us to compassion, and love.

On that day, many years ago, I was a young kid walking alone under a starry sky in my hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. I was grappling with who I was and what my life would mean. And there, looking up into the vault of space up there overhead, I trusted a Stranger in the Night to forgive me, and to take me wherever he wanted. The gospel wasn’t new to me, and the teachings of Jesus weren’t new to me. Years and years of Sunday school and Baptist Training Union and Vacation Bible Schools were all back there. But, somehow, I just knew at that moment that the central point of all those things was true: the gospel. It was as though I heard a voice.

The reason I write this is because my story isn’t at all typical of most Christians I know, and many kind of feel guilty about that. Many believe if they really have embraced the gospel, they ought to have a moment, a date, they can point to as the instant they passed from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.

Sometimes our churches reinforce this misunderstanding. Preachers talk about assurance of salvation as though it were about remembering a past experience, and doing a mental autopsy on the sincerity of that. The people we allow to give “testimonies” in our churches and in our publications all seem to have a dramatic tale to tell.

That’s not what the gospel is about.

In our culture, we make a big-to-do about birthdays. Other cultures don’t. I could ask you right now, “When were you born” and you could probably tell me month, date, and year. But how do you know that? It’s because there were people there, usually your parents, who could tell you that information. You don’t remember emerging from the birth canal (and that’s probably a very good thing).

Other people, in other cultures at other times, don’t recognize dates but seasons. They might not know what day on the weekly calendar or what year in the solar calendar they were born. But do they then question whether they are alive? Of course not. How do you know if you were in fact born? You look to see if you’re alive…now.

It’s no accident that Jesus compares entrance into the kingdom of God to physical birth. There is a kind of helplessness that we experience in the biology and history of our births. No one can boast about an easy delivery. No one should feel guilty about prompting a Caesarean section. The important thing is that you’re here.

The same is true for the gospel. Some of you were brought to Christ suddenly and dramatically. Your past life as a prostitute or a drunk or a warlord gave way to a radically different direction as a disciple. In that, your situation is quite similar to the Apostle Paul’s. Others of you, though saved just as truly in some point in time, aren’t able to identify that time. Your memory is of a slow realization of the gospel, and you can’t necessarily pinpoint when you were converted in that time-frame. Your situation sounds more like that of Paul’s disciple Timothy. The point of the gospel isn’t celebrating an experience; it’s believing a Man who is your crucified, resurrected, reigning Life.

It’s important to mark dates as ways of prompting thanksgiving. If you know when you met Jesus, set up an Ebenezer of remembrance in your mind and be grateful. If not, be thankful for life in Christ and mark other dates when He showed himself real and faithful to you.

The crucial matter isn’t whether you remember when the Shepherd pulled you out of the thorn bushes. Maybe you were barely conscious. The critical thing is whether you hear His Voice, maybe somewhere out there in the dark in front of you, calling you forward, right now.

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2. They assume people’s problem is that they don’t know about judgment. But the Bible says they do. All of us have embedded within us a conscience that points us to the Day of Judgment (Rom 2:15-16). We have a “fearful expectation of judgment” (Heb 10:27). The problem is we block it out of our minds, diverting ourselves with other things. The problem isn’t that lost people don’t hate hell enough. It’s that they don’t love Christ. Hell is the Abyss they run into in their flight from him.

3. They abstract judgment from the love of God. I know most “Judgment Houses” present the gospel at the end. But in the Bible the good news doesn’t come at the end. The prodigal son leaves the father’s house, but the father is eager to receive him back (Luke 16:11-31). The awful news of God’s judgment is always intertwined in Scripture with the message of the gospel of a loving, merciful God. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).

4. They abstract judgment from the glory of God. The prophet Isaiah doesn’t see that he’s “undone” first by the horror of judgment. He sees it in light of the glory of God’s presence (Isa 6:1-6). The Apostle John tells us the glory Isaiah saw was Jesus of Nazareth (12:41). When we preach Jesus, the glory of God breaks through (2 Cor 4:6). Some people recoil at that light; some people run to it (John 3:19-21).

5. It’s hard to cry at a Judgment House. But Jesus does when thinking about judgment (Matt 23:37). And so does the Apostle Paul, pleading with sinners to be saved (2 Cor 5:20). These evangelistic tools though are meant to take on the feel of a “haunted house,” a place of thrill-seeking and festivity. It’s hard to convey the gravity of the moment in such a way.

6. The Holy Spirit doesn’t usually like to work that way. Pop quiz: How many people do you know who came to know Christ through the witness of a friend? How many do you know who came to know Christ through faithful parents? How many are in Christ due to the week-to-week preaching of Christ in a local church? Probably a lot, right?

Okay, now answer this: How many people do you know who came to know Christ through a Halloween “Judgment House” or “Hell House”? If you know one, you’re outpacing me, and everyone I’ve ever talked to about this. The Holy Spirit tends to work through the preaching of Christ (Rom 10:17). That’s how he points the world to sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8).

7. They’re easier to pull off than talking to people. Can people be saved through Judgment Houses? Sure. I have a colleague who was saved at a Stryper heavy metal concert in the 1980s.  Are the intentions behind them good? Absolutely. If you have a Judgment House and it’s enabling you to share Christ, have at it with blessings on you.

But the fact remains that most lost people in your neighborhood are going to be saved the same way people have always been saved, by Christian people loving them enough to build relationships, invite them to church, share the gospel, and witness to Christ. The problem is that for many Christian’s that’s scarier than a haunted house.

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This commentary was originally posted on October 31, 2008.

On this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” I argue that the central thrust of this song is the question of friendship. Friendship is an easy, ephemeral thing in contemporary American culture, in which “friends” are often made by clicking an icon. This song, though, shows both the risks and the glories of what it means to be friends.

We take a look at that glory and that tragedy in this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox.”

Your Skeleton is Safe: Signs of Hope in a Cross-Bearing Life from Southern Seminary on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Your Skeleton is Safe: Signs of Hope in a Cross-Bearing Life” (John 19:16-36), was originally preached at Alumni Chapel at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Thursday, August 25, 2011. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Dear Dr. Moore,

In the middle of my premarital counseling with our pastor, I found out that my fiance has had, what he calls, ongoing struggles with pornography. I was kind of floored by this because I hadn’t known anything about it until now. One of the things that drew me to this man was his call to gospel ministry.

I remember your question you answered earlier about finding out about a future spouse’s past, but this, to me, is a little further down the road in the process and more is immediately at stake. Can you help me know what to do? Should I just go forward, or what? How will I know that this is sufficiently addressed? And I don’t have much time because the wedding is right around the corner.

Sincerely,
Engaged and Confused

1 Samuel 4:1-22 from Southern Seminary on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Repentance, Not Rebranding: The Horrible Mercy of Owning Your Shame” (1 Sam. 4:1-22), was originally preached at Alumni Chapel at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Thursday, October 13, 2011. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Last week while speaking at Princeton I had a chance to sit on the firing line with my favorite professor of jurisprudence, Robert P. George. He’s not just a brilliant legal theorist and the leading voice on natural law and ethics in the nation, he also knows more about country music than I do. And plays Banjo.

We spoke at the James Madison Program’s event, “Faith in America: The Role of Religion in the Public Square.” We talked about evangelicals and politics, the centrality of the church, natural law, the meaning of sola Scriptura—and even, briefly, the extent of the atonement.

You can watch the video of our conversation, posted above (with permission from the James Madison Program). You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which is posted above, as well.

If you want your “dream baby,” do not adopt or foster a child: buy a cat and make-believe. Adopting an orphan isn’t ordering a consumer item or buying a pet. Such a mindset hurts the child, and countless other children and families. Adoption is about taking on risk as cross-bearing love.

For years, I’ve called Christian churches and families to our James 1:27 mandate to care for widows and orphans in their distress, to live out the adoption we’ve received in the gospel by adopting and fostering children. At the same time, I’ve maintained that, while every Christian is called to care for orphans and widows, not every Christian is called to adopt or foster. As a matter of fact, there are many who, and I say this emphatically, should not.

Love of any kind brings risk, and, in a fallen world, brings hurt. Simeon tells our Lord’s mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, that a sword would pierce her heart. That’s true, in some sense, for every mother, every father. Even beyond that, every adoption, every orphan, represents a tragedy. Someone was killed, someone left, someone was impoverished, or someone was diseased. Wrapped up in each situation is some kind of hurt, and all that accompanies that. That’s the reason there really is no adoption that is not a “special needs” adoption; you just might not know on the front end what those special needs are.

We live in a time in which our commitments have become the opportunity often for simply a narcissistic self-realization. Weddings have become events for planners and photographers putting on what seems to be a state dinner honoring the “love of the couple.” Children often become props in a life of parents who are seeking to grasp whatever they believe the world owes them. It’s easier to pull off that kind of an illusion of self-centrality with your engagement photos and wedding party than it is with children, though. Children are alive. Children are persons, with individuality that can’t ultimately be suppressed. Children, of all sorts, are, by definition, unpredictable. Children shatter your life-plan. Adoption certainly does.

It’s worth it.

But Jesus tells us we ought to know that a king going into battle must measure his troops, a tower-builder must count the expenses of the project (Lk. 14:28-31). Those who see adoption as a warm, sentimental way of having a baby are mistaken and dangerous. There are far too many who plunge in without counsel, without a commitment to fidelity no matter what. They search around for a baby who fits their specifications. And babies never fit your specifications…at least not when they grow up.

If what’s behind all of this isn’t crucified, war-fighting, eyes-open commitment, you are going to wind up with a child who is twice orphaned. He or she will be abandoned the first time by fatherlessness and the second time by the rejection of failing to live up to the expectations of parents who had no business imposing such expectations in the first place.

We need a battalion of Christians ready to adopt, foster, and minister to orphans. But that means we need Christians ready to care for real orphans, with all the brokenness and risk that comes with it. We need Christians who can reflect the adopting power of the gospel, which didn’t seek out a boutique nursery but a household of ex-orphans who were found wallowing in our own blood, with Satan’s genes in our bloodstreams.

If what you like is the idea of a baby who fulfills your needs and meets your expectations, just buy a cat. Decorate the nursery, if you’d like. Dress it up in pink or blue, and take pictures. And be sure to have it declawed.

But the way of Jesus doesn’t look wise to the world. That’s paradox, and that’s mystery. And it’s the gospel.

In today’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox” I talk with my favorite singer-songwriter, Michael Card, about his song, “God’s Own Fool.” It’s a song that stays with me all the time, because it’s a song that indicts me in a lot of ways. It’s a song that’s changed me, and is constantly changing me; it’s a song that helped crucify my rationalism.

It’s true, as Mike sings: “The power of paradox opens your eyes, and blinds those who say they can see.”

According to Sarah Pulliam Bailey in Christianity Today, Robertson addressed the controversy over his advice to a questioner to his 700 Club television program by telling the man he could divorce his wife in order to date another woman. Robertson said he was merely “saying, adultery is not a good thing, and you might as well straighten your life out, and the only way to do it is to kind of get your affair with your wife in order.”

This is nonsense.

Robertson did not, in fact, say that. He said, “I know it sounds cruel, but if he’s going to do something he should divorce her and start all over again.”

Robertson now says he would never advise anyone to leave a sick spouse, but he doesn’t repent of the previous statement. He simply says he was focusing on the “specific case” and not advice for “the whole world.” He said he envied a Catholic priest because the priest’s confessional counsel is “all kept secret” whereas when he has “somebody asking me for advice, it spreads worldwide and it’s misunderstood.”

First of all, Robertson’s advice didn’t “spread worldwide.” No one was tapping his phone or hacking his email account. It was broadcast. Robertson is a broadcaster with a television program using satellite technology to see to it that his advice gets carried across the world. That’s the problem.

More problematic, though, was Robertson’s flippant response to the abhorrent theology behind the whole issue.

“And remember, they come to me asking for specific advice and I give them specific advice about their condition, not for the world. I’m not giving a theological (defense); I’m not John Calvin giving the Institutes of the Christian Religion.”

To tell a man to stay with his sick wife, that to divorce her or leave her because of her illness, is, in every situation, wrong, is not some abstract point of doctrine. No one was asking Robertson to, on his feet, explain the Molinist account of providence or to answer a tricky ethical dilemma about lying to save the lives of others. This question was about the most basic sign of the gospel, the union between Christ and his church. One doesn’t even need to know any Scripture beyond John 3:16 to intuit the spirit of antichrist in the notion of abandoning a suffering spouse.

If one can’t answer a question that basic to the Christian faith, with clarity and conviction, one shouldn’t teach first-grade Sunday School, much less broadcast one’s spiritual guidance to the whole world.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Robertson’s comments on divorce and Alzheimer’s here, and later had the opportunity to speak to the issue on CNN, which you can watch here.

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First of all, the mission of the church is the mission of Jesus. This mission doesn’t start with the giving of the Great Commission or at Pentecost. The Great Commission is when Jesus sends the church to the world with the authority he already has (Matt. 28:18), and Pentecost is when he bestows the power to carry this commission out (Acts 1:8).

The content of this mission is not just personal regeneration but disciple-making (Matt. 28:19). It is not just teaching, but teaching “them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:20).

This mission is not inconsistent with what we have seen already in the life of Jesus. His mission is defined by Old Testament expectation (for instance, Ps. 72), and in the gospel accounts in terms of redemptive love for the whole person, both body and soul. From the literally embryonic moments of the Incarnation, such terms are present in Mary’s prayer about the coming of her Messiah (Lk. 1:46-55), and then in Jesus’ own inaugural words about his kingdom’s arrival (Lk. 4:18-19).

This mission is summed up in the gospel as a message of reconciliation that is both vertical and horizontal, establishing peace with both God and neighbor. The Scripture tells us to love neighbor “as yourself” (Lk. 10:27-28).

This is not simply a “spiritual” ministry, as the example Jesus gives us is of a holistic caring for physical and economic needs of a wounded person, not to mention the transcending of steep ethnic hostilities. As theologian Carl F.H. Henry reminded evangelicals a generation ago, one does not love oneself simply in “spiritual ways” but holistically.

Of course, Jesus’ ministry would be about such things. After all, the Bible shows us, from the beginning, that the scope of the curse is holistic in its destruction—personal, cosmic, social, vocational (Gen. 3-11) and that the gospel is holistic in its restoration—personal, cosmic, social, vocational (Rev. 21-22).

Moreover, the biblical prophetic witness consistently speaks in such terms. Is Ahab’s acquisition of Naboth’s land (1 Kings 21:1-19) a matter of personal sin or social injustice? Well, it was both. Was the sin of Sodom a conglomeration of personal sins or societal unrighteousness? It was both (Gen. 18:26; Ezek. 16:49).

The prophets never divided up issues of righteousness as neatly as we do in the “personal” and the “social.” Isaiah speaks of God’s judgment both on personal pride and idolatry (Isa. 2:11) and the “grinding” of the faces of the poor (Isa. 3:14-15). Onward to Joel and Micah and Malachi right through John the Baptist the witness is the same.

The new covenant church continues this witness. Even after the public ministry of Jesus, his apostolic church continues a message of both personal justification and interpersonal justice. James directs the churches of the dispersion both in terms of their personal speech (Jas. 3:1-12) and the unjust treatment of wage-earners (Jas. 5:1-6).

James defines “pure and undefiled religion” as that which cares for the widows and orphans (Jas. 1:27). Of course he does. His brother already has (Matt. 25:40).

For those who might seek to pit James against Paul, the New Testament allows no such skirmish, either on personal redemption or on ministry to the vulnerable. When they received Paul, the apostles, Paul says, were concerned, of course, that he proclaims the correct gospel but also that he remember the poor. This was, Paul testifies, “the very thing I was eager to do” (Gal. 2:10).

So how does the church “balance” a concern for evangelism with a concern for justice? A church does so in the same way it “balances” the gospel with personal morality. Sure, there have been churches that have emphasized public justice without the call to personal conversion. Such churches have abandoned the gospel.

But there are also churches that have emphasized personal righteousness (sexual morality, for instance) without a clear emphasis on the gospel. And there are churches that have taught personal morality as a means of earning favor with God. Such also contradicts the gospel.

We do not, though, counteract legalism in the realm of personal morality with an antinomianism. And we do not react to the persistent “social gospels” (of both Left and Right) by pretending that Jesus does not call his churches to act on behalf of the poor, the sojourner, the fatherless, the vulnerable, the hungry, the sex-trafficked, the unborn. We act in the framework of the gospel, never apart from it, either in verbal proclamation or in active demonstration.

The short answer to how churches should “balance” such things is simple: follow Jesus. We are Christians. This means that as we grow in Christlikeness, we are concerned about the things that concern him. Jesus is the king of his kingdom, and he loves whole persons, bodies as well as souls.

Christ Jesus never sends away the hungry with, “Be warmed and filled” (Jas. 2:16). What he says, instead, as he points to the love of both God and neighbor, to the care of both body and soul, is: “You go, and do likewise” (Lk. 10:37).

This column was originally posted at The Gospel Coalition site.

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So when my friend John Mark Reynolds (an Eastern Orthodox dispensationalist; and I thought I was eclectic!) asked me to write an essay on Calvin for his new volume on the great books, I hesitated. But Calvin is more important than the coffee shop debates over the extent of the atonement and how many elders can dance on the head of a pulpit. So, here’s what I had to say about Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion:

If today John Calvin were discovered alive and in suspended animation, frozen in a block of ice somewhere in the French Alps, most people probably wouldn’t consider this good news. After all, the unfrozen Calvinist lawgiver rarely is thought of as the kind of figure modern audiences would want to drag back up.

His writings don’t have the wink-of-the-eye puckish grin that even his contemporary Martin Luther seems to sometimes communicate in his many writings. Moreover, Calvin, although associated with some bland but commendable features such as hard work and thrift, is mostly known for all kinds of awful things: such as burnings at the stake and the predestination of people to hell.

Calvin is too important, though, to leave him frozen in caricature, and he’s too significant to leave him simply to his tribe of theological partisans. John Calvin—most significantly in his Institutes of the Christian Religion—offers insight to all in the Christian tradition, including those who consider themselves the furthest away from “Calvinism.”

The Institutes was written first in 1536, with the final version completed in Latin in 1559. Calvin, a French convert from Catholicism to the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, quickly established himself as the early protest movement’s most influential theologian. While those who have never read Calvin firsthand often assume the volume is obsessed with speculative notions about divine sovereignty and the order of God’s decrees of election and reprobation, the excerpt in this volume better represents something of the tone and substance of the Reformer’s thought.

The initial sentence of the volume establishes a core theme in Calvin’s work: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” At first glance, this statement might seem to be exactly what one might expect from one so often associated with coldly cerebral Christian rationalism and abstract speculation. But the discussion Calvin begins on “knowledge” in this work is far more complex, and far more engaging, than that.

First of all, Calvin here is setting the context for a vision of all of life as theological. By this, I don’t mean merely that Calvin believes there is what some would call a Christian “worldview,” a theologically informed way of thinking about all aspects of existence. Calvin means more than this. He means that every human being is, by definition, a theologian. Every “word”—that is, every means a person has for making sense of his reality—is inescapably a “word about God,” a theology.

For Calvin, this truth is grounded above all in the creaturely nature of humanity. Referencing the Apostle Paul’s speech to the Athenians at Mars Hill, Calvin notes that it is in the Creator God, by necessity, that every human person “lives and moves” (Acts 17:28). For Calvin, the universal impulse of humanity to worship gods or ideologies or themselves is hardly a coincidence of evolution. The sense of the divine is embedded in all human persons, as part of the image of God itself. This awareness is activated by the icon of God’s glory present in the created cosmos all around us. If we do not acknowledge this primal reality, we simply cannot apprehend ourselves as we really are, or the universe as it really is.

For Calvin, it is not simply that all persons ought to be able to realize that there is a God, if they were only to pay careful enough attention to the evidences for his existence. It is instead that all persons do, immediately, recognize this. Moreover, they recognize not only the existence of God, but they recognize, personally, the God who is. So why is there not a universal worship of the God in whom Calvin believes, the God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the God of Jesus of Nazareth?

This is where Calvin’s view of sin emerges. Again, Calvin is often misrepresented as having a gloomy, world-denying pessimism about humanity. Some of his followers throughout the centuries have yielded to this caricature of the Reformer. But Calvin’s view of sin isn’t censorious or cranky. Instead this doctrine explains why worship is so difficult for humanity as it is. It is not, in Calvin’s view, that we sin because we believe the wrong things. It is instead that we believe the wrong things because we sin.

In other words, human persons, in our fallenness, crave our own autonomy—the illusion that we are gods to ourselves. In order to protect this delusion, and remain free from our Creator, we convince ourselves of what deep in our consciences we cannot deny—the reality of God, his moral law, the coming judgment.

Calvin here, echoing Paul, anticipates some of the psychological theories of centuries later in presenting a picture of the role the affections play in shaping the way we think. Sigmund Freud may have been quite wrong about many things, but who can deny the fact that human persons are motivated by more than merely rational impulses but also by an often dark and nearly incomprehensible psychic undertow? Calvin would root this in the fallen nature of the human condition. In order to know God and to know ourselves, Calvin insists, we must face this ghostly truth.

This is hardly a “pessimistic” picture, though, in the larger mosaic of Calvin’s thought. Human persons can rightly read the cosmos, and ourselves, through the revelation God has disclosed in the person of Jesus Christ and in the “spectacles” of the Scriptures.

Calvin’s view of revelation, and of knowledge as fundamentally a question of worship, grounds the importance in Protestant Christianity of preaching and widespread reading and study of the Bible in the languages of the people. This Christian tradition, as it expanded in missionary movements and revivalist awakenings, shaped much of the trajectory of modern European and American thought.

As you read Calvin’s Institutes, you will probably find points of disagreement, perhaps even major disagreements. But you will probably—whatever your religious communion—find the insights of a mind shaped by immersion in the Scriptures, in the church fathers, in Western classical thought. And you will find behind that a man who recognized something of what it meant to be a creature, and to look in worship and humility for the Creator in whom he lived and moved.

The above is adapted from a contribution I made to The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization, edited by John Mark Reynolds.

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It was not so from the beginning, and there are signs that we’re heading back to the future. There’s something refreshing and real about worship music that emerges in the context of, well, worship, flowing out of the life of a real, palpable local church.

My friend Bobby Gilles, along with his wife Kristen, are doing their part to recover an ecclesial, rooted sense of worship. Over at their new website, which I recently learned about, “My Song in the Night,” the Gilles seek to equip our churches for worship by, for example, teaching people to write their salvation testimony, giving people guidance on writing songs, and pointing site visitors to a number of other resources.

I’m thankful for Bobby and Kristen’s genius and creativity, and hope you’ll check out their site. I hope it will help you—and your church—to seek to tap into the gifts in your church, and to empower them for the building up of the whole Body.

Their song is about vigilante justice, about a desire to see wrongs righted. Days after we’ve commemorated the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I think it’s worth our stopping to think together: why is that we—even those who don’t know Christ—desire justice? Why is it that even those who’ve never heard the gospel preached possess some standard of right and wrong?

And why is it that we, when we are wronged, want to lash out and seek some form of vengeance—if only the kind of vengeance that keeps in mind a record of wrongs? And why is it that we, when wrongs are righted, want to celebrate and rejoice?

In this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we address such questions—and how Jesus answers them all.

Few Christians take Robertson all that seriously anymore. Most roll their eyes, and shake their heads when he makes another outlandish comment (for instance, defending China’s brutal one-child abortion policy to identifying God’s judgment on specific actions in the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, or the Haiti earthquake). This is serious, though, because it points to an issue that is much bigger than Robertson.

Marriage, the Scripture tells us, is an icon of something deeper, more ancient, more mysterious. The marriage union is a sign, the Apostle Paul announces, of the mystery of Christ and his church (Eph. 5). The husband, then, is to love his wife “as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25). This love is defined not as the hormonal surge of romance but as a self-sacrificial crucifixion of self. The husband pictures Christ when he loves his wife by giving himself up for her.

At the arrest of Christ, his Bride, the church, forgot who she was, and denied who he was. He didn’t divorce her. He didn’t leave.

The Bride of Christ fled his side, and went back to their old ways of life. When Jesus came to them after the resurrection, the church was about the very thing they were doing when Jesus found them in the first place: out on the boats with their nets. Jesus didn’t leave. He stood by his words, stood by his Bride, even to the Place of the Skull, and beyond.

A woman or a man with Alzheimer’s can’t do anything for you. There’s no romance, no sex, no partnership, not even companionship. That’s just the point. Because marriage is a Christ/church icon, a man loves his wife as his own flesh. He cannot sever her off from him simply because she isn’t “useful” anymore.

Pat Robertson’s cruel marriage statement is no anomaly. He and his cohorts have given us for years a prosperity gospel with more in common with an Asherah pole than a cross. They have given us a politicized Christianity that uses churches to “mobilize” voters rather than to stand prophetically outside the power structures as a witness for the gospel.

But Jesus didn’t die for a Christian Coalition; he died for a church. And the church, across the ages, isn’t significant because of her size or influence. She is weak, helpless, and spattered in blood. He is faithful to us anyway.

If our churches are to survive, we must repudiate this Canaanite mammonocracy that so often speaks for us. But, beyond that, we must train up a new generation to see the gospel embedded in fidelity, a fidelity that is cruciform.

It’s easy to teach couples to put the “spark” back in their marriages, to put the “sizzle” back in their sex lives. You can still worship the self and want all that. But that’s not what love is. Love is fidelity with a cross on your back. Love is drowning in your own blood. Love is screaming, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

Sadly, many of our neighbors assume that when they hear the parade of cartoon characters we allow to speak for us, that they are hearing the gospel. They assume that when they see the giggling evangelist on the television screen, that they see Jesus. They assume that when they see the stadium political rallies to “take back America for Christ,” that they see Jesus. But Jesus isn’t there.

Jesus tells us he is present in the weak, the vulnerable, the useless. He is there in the least of these (Matt. 25:31-46). Somewhere out there right now, a man is wiping the drool from an 85 year-old woman who flinches because she think he’s a stranger. No television cameras are around. No politicians are seeking a meeting with them.

But the gospel is there. Jesus is there.

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I probably quote that at least once a semester in Christian ethics class here at Southern Seminary, not only because it’s pithy but because it is so true. Dunn, longtime head of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission and the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, was nothing if not quotable. The other famous (or infamous) quote from him that comes to mind is his one sentence defense of “soul freedom”: “Ain’t nobody but Jesus going to tell me what to believe.”

Love him or hate him, Dunn was a powerful force in Baptist life in the twentieth-century, and a new book seeks to set him in historical and theological context. Aaron Douglas Weaver’s James M. Dunn and Soul Freedom, just published by Smyth and Helwys, is that book, and it’s well worth reading.

Weaver, easily the most gifted young historian of the moderate Baptist movement, crafts a winsome and engaging narrative and, unlike many historians, refuses to ignore theological analysis of his subject. I think Weaver will be a major force in Baptist historical scholarship in the next generation, precisely because of his analytical ability and his gift for prose.

Weaver is, of course, sympathetic; at times, I think, overly so. He, for example, treats Dunn’s anti-Catholicism quite gently, and argues unconvincingly that Dunn’s argument that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor is remaining neutral on the pro-life/pro-choice debate. That aside, the book should be read not only by Dunn’s sympathizers but by those of us who are theologically conservative as well. Here there are a number of lessons to be learned.

First of all, enough time has passed for conservatives to appreciate some genuinely commendable facets of Dunn’s work. He was right to argue that separation of church and state is a Baptist distinctive worth preserving, even when he stretched the definition beyond what most of us would agree with. He was right to assert that the Supreme Court decision (Smith v. Oregon) that removed the “compelling interest” test with regard to religious liberty is dangerous.

He was right to oppose the government underwriting religion in such ways as state-written “non-denominational” prayers and funding for religious initiatives (which, as we’ve seen, ultimately cut the evangelistic and Christocentric heart out of those initiatives). And, perhaps above all, Dunn was right to warn of what a Christless civil religion does to the witness of the church, which is to freeze it into something useless if not satanic.

Here, though, is where the warning for us all comes in. Dunn was not exempt from the pull toward a civil religion and a politicized faith. It is fair enough to say that some of Dunn’s critics opposed him with an uncritical Reaganism rather than with a gospel-centered theology. But Dunn consistently showed an unwillingness to break from his own partisan commitments too.

On the issue of abortion, for instance, Dunn refused to call for the protection of unborn human life. Why not? His principle of “soul freedom” gave a theological basis for the right of a woman to choose to abort her child. But what about the question of the personhood of the fetus, what of his or her “soul freedom”? After all, “soul freedom” wouldn’t mean the freedom of a white supremacist to lynch would it? Of course not. Can a corporate executive claim the “soul freedom” to pollute a water stream? No. Can a magistrate claim the “soul freedom” to whip a dissenter for refusing to baptize his baby or to preach without a license? Leland and Backus would say, “no.” So would, come to think of it, Smyth and Helwys.

If there is only one person involved, soul freedom is an easy rallying cry (as was, and is, “states’ rights”). If there are two (which even most abortion-rights advocates would admit now, while still defending the priority of the woman’s choice), then soul freedom doesn’t answer the question. Dunn saw the limits of “soul freedom,” and courageously so, when it came to issues of segregation, economic predation (including the state lottery system), and so on. It’s a tragedy he couldn’t see it here.

This book demonstrates why Dunn succeeded where he did, with some genuine pluck and courage. It also shows why he failed to lead Southern Baptists where he wanted to go. Some of that is due to the cultural and social and theological factors in the Convention at the time. Some of that is because of Dunn’s acerbic disposition and his all-too-often refusal to transcend partisanship. Matching reflexive Reaganism with reflexive anti-Reaganism tends to dilute a prophetic witness.

Resurgent conservatives should see in this book where both Dunn, and we, have succeeded and failed. Our witness is often compromised by politicians who seek to use us (just as, arguably, Bill Clinton used Dunn and his allies). Our leaders want to adopt whole-cloth the agendas of those with whom we might agree on some transcendent issues. Politicians seek to co-opt our religious figures for “prayer rallies.” Our religious figures prognosticate on partisan elections, with thinly-veiled endorsements of candidates, often in shockingly carnal terms. And we don’t even notice that our neighbors see what we’re really after: power. We also don’t notice that our neighbors are wondering: if we’re this easily duped by political maneuvering, how can we be trusted to talk about the question of the resurrection from the dead?

I don’t agree with James Dunn’s anti-creedalism. Neither does he. “Ain’t nobody but Jesus” is a creed. Jesus, after all, refers to someone, and there’s some theological content there. I don’t agree with Dunn’s theological liberalism, and I think he was all too willing to mute his “prophetic” witness when it came to his political allies.

But I agree with him on the big picture, if not always in the details, that the church is too important to be tied up with the state. The temptation for all of us is to want to be “Theo.” There’s no arguing with that.

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And, man, is it dangerous.

In this week’s episode (below) of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we take a look at another song by Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue.” This is a lighter song of Cash’s—certainly not on the level of a song we examined last week, “Hurt”—but I don’t think the issue in the song is merely of a father’s naming his son “Sue” in order that he might grow up to be “tough” and “mean.” The key matter isn’t just the name. It’s that the father left. The son had to prove himself a man, without a father there to affirm that manhood.

This song, I think, ought to prompt a question about what it means to affirm a holistic masculinity, in which manhood is defined in terms of Jesus Christ, and not the other way around. Listen in, and join the conversation.

In light of Michele Bachmann’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, I found myself asked that question again in recent days in an interview with Christianity Today’s women’s blog “Her.Meneutics.” I think the question is a good one, and is more complicated than it first appears, to both sides.

Take the particular personalities off the table, whether Clinton, Palin, or Bachmann (who are all relatively polarizing for reasons, I think, other than gender). On the face of it, there is no contradiction since Scripture teaches that the church, not the world, is presently the outpost of the new creation. The state in this age doesn’t—and can’t—reflect God’s kingdom purposes in the way that the church or a family can.

I would gladly vote for someone to be my president who disagrees with me on whether or not infants can be baptized. I wouldn’t want that same person to be my pastor, because we will have to decide together who and how to baptize. The Kuyperian principle of “sphere sovereignty” is helpful here.

The best articulation of sphere sovereignty I’ve ever seen is in Richard Mouw’s new book on Abraham Kuyper. Mouw uses the example of a woman who is a college dean and an elder at her local church (I know, I know, but it’s his illustration, not mine). Her son works for her, and misuses college property for nefarious ends. Mouw shows how she must deal with him in different ways. As dean, she fires him. As elder, she seeks to restore him. As mother, she loves him unconditionally and gives him a place to stay.

There are other issues afoot here though. Although critics are wrong to say that Christians are inconsistent in applying different standards to church and public square, they are right to say that there’s something odd in Christian people celebrating the political warrior-princess motif.

Unfortunately, American evangelicals have too often longed for a secular authority to serve as a spiritual leader, and political professionals have been all too willing to exploit this by teaching candidates to parrot evangelical-sounding phrases and “testimonies.” In such cases, political leaders become totem-like for evangelicals. An attack on a candidate who identifies with “us” is an attack on “us” or, worse, on Jesus. That’s unhealthy, regardless of whether the politician is male or female.

In the case of evangelical over-identification with political partisanship, though, there can be a subtle shifting in what it means to define a woman’s life, or a man’s, as a “success.” There is quite a bit of inconsistency in evangelical complementarians talking about a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Pet. 3) while cheering Ann Coulter’s latest sarcastic barbs.

I’m not all that worried about the gender of our political candidates, precisely because, relatively speaking, the political arena just isn’t all that important when compared to the church. What is important is the way our political passions often shift the way we view the mission of the church, and even what we expect in our homes.

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Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some big and important issues involved in discussions about election, calling, sovereignty, human responsibility, etc. It’s just that, all too often, it seems to me that these debates are so intense for reasons other than just fidelity to Scripture.

The Dungeons and Dragons clubs came to mind because those guys, at least in my junior high school, seemed to be obsessed with something that seemed to have no relevance at all to their lives, or to anyone else’s. But D&D became their identity. Because it mattered, they mattered. This was by no means restricted to these folk, and to their video-gaming or skateboarding cousins. It’s the same phenomenon in the people for whom a sports team became a personal obsession. The win or loss of my team is a personal victory, because it is totemic of who I am.

I fear that, all too often, our theological debates fall precisely into this category. We fight them so fiercely because there’s so little at stake in the way we view them. The professional Calvinist in his Internet forum sees a reluctance to embrace effectual calling as a personal attack, as a rejection of him. The anonymous-letter writing anti-Calvinist sees in the Calvinist a repudiation of his own background, of the kinds of churches and methods that led him to Christ. Rather than seeking to understand each other, and love one another with a convictional empathy, we claw and bite one another. That’s because, all too often, what we want is to be right, rather than to build up one another in the faith.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with debating issues of importance. The Body of Christ needs open-Bible conversations between Calvinists and Arminians, dispensationalists and amillennialists, Baptists and paedo-baptists. But theological debate can’t be a form of entertainment. And it sure can’t be a means of proving myself to be worth listening to. Within the broad parameters of great old Christian orthodoxy, there’s room to differ, and to learn, without hearing a rejection (sometimes only a temporary rejection) of my point as a rejection of me.

That’s the issue I take up in a new article, “Table Manners: The Welcoming Catholicity of Closed Communion” in the 25th anniversary issue of Touchstone Magazine: A Journal of Mere Christianity. The issue is always a hard one, because it’s so personal. Would I really turn C. S. Lewis away from the Lord’s Table just because he was sprinkled instead of immersed?

You can read the article here, and you can subscribe to the magazine here.

Even those who know next to nothing about Johnny Cash may still know him as “The Man in Black.” Cash sings: “I’d love to wear a rainbow every day / And tell the world that everything’s OK / But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back / ‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.”

In some of his other songs, as well, Cash sings about this dark side of life, of the vacuity of human existence. Perhaps this honesty is what has made him stand out to a youth culture that is nervously aware of death, a growing cadre of kids out there who are frankly bored by Lady Gaga’s latest attempt to shock American sensibilities. What they are shocked by instead is this gravelly-voiced man, telling them, from beyond the grave, what they already suspect—the shallow kingdoms of this age are headed for a stunning collapse.

Particularly relevant to these youth is Cash’s rendition of the song “Hurt,” which was written and originally performed by the band Nine Inch Nails. Cash’s haunting music video for the song features faded film shots of his youthful glory days—complete with the images of friends and colleagues, once at the height of their fame, who are now dead. As the camera pans Cash’s wizened, wrinkled face, he sings about the awful reality of death and the vanity of fame: “What have I become? My sweetest friend / Everyone I know goes away in the end / You could have it all / My empire of dirt / I will let you down, I will make you hurt.”

Whereas, the Nine Inch Nails delivered “Hurt” as straight nihilism, Cash gives it a twist—ending the video with the scenes of crucifixion, which, for Cash, was (and still is) the only answer to the inevitability of suffering and pain.

The video of “Hurt” communicated exactly what the dying Cash seemed to understand, echoing Solomon of old: wealth, celebrity, fame, all of it is vanity in the maw of the grave. By contrasting images of the young celebrated Cash with images of the old, gasping, arthritic Cash, his “House of Cash” closed down and boarded over, the video turned then to what Cash saw as the only real alternative to his empire of dirt: the cross of Christ Jesus.

But when I listened to the CD I thought the most interesting aspect of the Dixie Chicks’ music, that album no less than those in the past, had nothing to do with politics. Listening to the lyrics of these young women, one can hear something sad and pitiful and spiritually searching: an intense longing for home.

In this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we take a look at the Dixie Chicks’ song, “Long Time Gone,” a song in which the group sings about what it meant to run away to Nashville to find success and fame. In this song, there’s a wistfulness for the land they left. But, as we talk about in the podcast, they’re not alone in that wistfulness.

I wonder if the gospel seems so irrelevant to contemporary Americans precisely because so many of us have forgotten what it means to come home, or even to have a home.

I’ve written here before about what an influence the singer-songwriter Michael Card has had on my life and theology. In this week’s episode, Mike joins me in the studio to talk about the only song of his that I don’t like.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the song isn’t beautiful; it is. It’s not that it’s not lyrically brilliant; it is. It’s just that, as a father, I find it painful to listen to. A while back, I mentioned something of this in a sermon called “You Are Not Your Gift,” a lesson I’ve started learning from Michael. And, I’m afraid, I’ve still a long way to go. In that sermon, as in much of what I preach, I am the villain to be confronted, the criminal to be crucified.

Mike’s song is about his father, a doctor, who, as Mike put it, never really learned to separate who he was from what he did, himself from his gift. It’s a song about a good man who didn’t quite know how to love his son, and a son who didn’t quite know how to find his Dad.

I think in this conversation there are some good thought-provoking moments for fathers, and for those who have suffered in some way and are not sure how to get past all that now.

You are not your gift.

Some time ago, I critiqued the genre of “Christian romance novels,” and came under a lot of criticism for it (mostly by Christian romance novelists). I was amazed that some of the criticisms attacked me for things that are actually the opposite of what I believe. Some assumed I was saying that fiction was wrong because it’s “not true.” Hardly! I read more fiction than I do non-fiction, if you exempt the Bible from consideration, and I consider it, most often, truer than anything in the world. Some also assumed that I thought one should only write about explicitly Christian themes, and that human love is not worthy of the Christian pen. God forbid.

I think fiction is good, necessary, and God-glorifying. I teach my theology students to read good fiction for the sake of their preaching, if for no other reason. Those without the imagination to read fiction usually lack the imagination to hear the rhythm and contours of Scripture, much less to peer into the mysteries of the human heart. I just think schlocky fiction does just the opposite of all of that. I also think human love is a more than worthy subject of writing, including Christian writing. I just think it should be done with authenticity and honesty, and should look at love, not the hormonal utopia our culture has taught us to long for. I can think of no better contemporary example of doing this well than Hannah Coulter.

This book is a testimony of a woman widowed, twice, once by war. There are several ways the book is counter-cultural in classic Berry style. First of all, the book is indeed a romance, but written from the perspective of a seventy year-old woman. This isn’t the kind of book in which the elderly woman sees her life in the past tense, back there in the romance of youth. No, the novel honors her voice as a real human being, deserving of being heard. She isn’t an “old lady,” but a person whose character deepens as the years go by.

Second, the book roots love in place and community. Again, this is a central emphasis of Berry’s, and it is nowhere clearer than here. So much of our cultural concept of “love” is about the couple alone and their “feelings for one another.” This shows up in the isolated and unhealthy patterns of courtship we see all around us. For Hannah, though, love isn’t simply about her husband and her, and it certainly isn’t about their private emotional world. She reminisces:

“The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.”

The book also provides beautiful insight into the darker aspects of human existence and, particularly, of what it means to be a man. I find gut-wrenching and convicting Hannah’s comments on her son Caleb who left the farm to pursue a Ph.D. and a career out there in the big world:

“He didn’t love farming enough to be a farmer, much as he loved it, but he loved it too much to be entirely happy doing anything else. He is disappointed in himself. He is regretful in some dark passage of his mind that he thinks only he knows about, but he can’t hide it from his mother. I can see it in his face as plain as writing. There is the same kind of apology in him that you see in some of the sweeter drunks. He is trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.”

That’s some insight into the human psyche, and it’s written with a biblical sense of poignant longing. It reaches something we often know, but just can’t describe or name. As Hannah puts it, “People know more about each other than what they tell each other.”

True. Read (or listen to) Hannah Coulter. You’ll find yourself in a far distant land, and you’ll long for the distance to close.

Image Credit.

A pastor on the West Coast emailed me to say that a couple in his church had listened to the audio version of Adopted for Life, and felt God calling them to adopt. The process led to a situation in which, this week, a young woman will give birth to a little boy, and has made an adoption plan for this couple to become his parents. The pastor asked if I’d write a letter to this boy, for when he’s old enough to start asking questions about his adoption and what it means. I’ve changed his name, but this is what I wrote.

Dear Micah,

Let me start this letter by acknowledging that I don’t know you. I don’t even know whether to refer to you as “Micah” or “Tyler,” since I don’t know whether your parents will call you by your first or middle name. Maybe you’ll end up with a nickname, or, by the time you’re grown, go by “M.T.” or something else. I don’t know, because I don’t know you. Your parents read a book I wrote, and their pastor told me about them, and about you.

But, since you are days away from being born, no one knows you, yet. Your life story is just starting, and there are lots of people who are excitedly waiting for you, most especially your new parents who have been praying for you for a long time. We love you ahead of time.

But, come to think of it, I can’t really say that no one knows you yet, because Someone does. In the years to come, you will probably have hard times of wondering who you are and where you fit. Everybody has such times, some of us a lot. You might be tempted to think that these hardships are because you were an “adopted” kid.

Don’t believe it.

You are no accident. This universe is vaster and more mysterious than you can imagine, and at the heart of it, I believe, there’s a personal Being we call “God.” With millions of people all over the world, and for thousands of years, I believe this God revealed himself in a man named Jesus who taught us to call this God, with him, “Father.”

Jesus had a secret, a secret people wondered about for ages until he showed us just, relatively speaking, a little while ago. He’s not just any other man. In fact, he’s One with his Father from before the universe was. The whole cosmos was patterned after him, and meant to be his. Human beings were made especially to model what Jesus is like, but, long ago, our ancestors, and all of us with them, were taken captive by a spirit-predator, and we’ve only known the slavery of following our own impulses right to the grave. The universe we were meant to rule doesn’t recognize us anymore as what we were meant to be, the children of God.

But Jesus was free of that death sentence. His life lined up exactly with what his Father wanted. He walked into this demon-haunted age, and showed himself to have power over the wicked spirit-beings, and over the curse itself. Then he stood in our place and bore everything we dread the most, and everything we don’t even know enough to dread: suffering, temptation, accusation, abandonment by friends and family, alienation from God, and death itself.

But none of these things were strong enough to hold Jesus in their grip. Because he had nothing to hide from his Father, he was the first person in history to walk out of the grave and into newness of life.

This God of Jesus Christ decided your story. He purposed that you would be born to your birthmother, and that she would have the courage and the love to give you life. He willed that you would be adopted into this family of a mom and dad who love you. He made sure that there was the kind of emptiness in their life that they would yearn to seek after you, right at the time he would bring you to them. And he put you in a family that believes the good news of the old story I’ve told to you above.

My prayer for you is that you see how fervently you are loved. Your birth-mother loved you, or you wouldn’t be here to read this. Your parents love you, and always will, no matter what. Even more importantly, the God who formed you loves you enough to show you in your own life a picture of what he wants for all of us: to be adopted, for life, into his family.

I pray that one day, when you’re old enough, you’ll sense a kind of discontent with your life. I pray you’ll see that this is not because of your circumstances, and it’s certainly not because you were adopted. It’s because you, like all of us, will be a sinner in need of mercy, a spiritual orphan in need of a Father. And I pray that you’ll look to the story your parents believe. I pray you’ll look to Jesus’ bloody cross as hell enough for you, to Jesus’ empty tomb as life enough for you. I pray you’ll learn, if nothing else, to say two things: “Jesus is Lord” and “Abba, Father.” I promise you, he will be there to receive you, to rejoice over you. He always is.

Again, I don’t know you yet. But I look forward to meeting you one day, as your brother. If not in your next one to one hundred years of life, then in the trillions more we have before us in a new creation in Christ. I hope you’ll be there with me with a bustling, uncountable number of ex-orphans like us. It’s only then that you, and I, fully will know what it means to be adopted, adopted for life.

Blessings for a life of peace, joy, and, above all, love,

Russell

As I thought about the Americanization of my sons’ ice cream habits, I thought for a minute about everything else that has changed. These boys, once malnourished and alone in an orphanage, are now members of a family. They hear every day the gospel of Jesus Christ and go to bed every night knowing they are loved. But, right now as I type this, there are 250,000 children, just like Ben and Timothy were, institutionalized in Russian orphanages and group homes. This week brought a glimmer of good news for them.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov signed an accord permitting American citizens to continue to adopt from the former Soviet state. The adoption process there has been threatened for some time due to, most prominently, the shocking abuse of a Tennessee mother who sent her son, adopted from Russia, back alone on a plane because he had “psychological problems.”

On the one hand, this and other high profile cases of abuse are rare and atypical. Judging Russian adoption on the basis of cases like this would be something like judging American biological parenting on the basis of the Casey Anthony case. On the other hand, cases of such wanton abuse were signals to Russian officials of what could possibly go wrong.

It’s good news that the U.S. and Russia have reached this accord. The agreement, according to news reports, provides stricter reporting standards from social workers and adoption agencies to Russian officials after adoption, and it restricts adoption to adoption agencies accredited by the Russian government.

Both steps are not only reasonable, but just. Those of us who care about orphan care shouldn’t want adoption to be easy. We should want it to take as long as necessary to ensure the best interest of the children involved.

But although this move is good news for Russia’s orphans, allowing more of them to become members of families, it is not the best possible news. The best possible news would be the end for the need for any kind of accord because the orphanages of Russia would be empty. Adoption is an important but secondary aspect of orphan care. The first priority is to keep families together, and to alleviate the conditions (poverty and substance addiction, chief among them) that create fatherlessness in the first place.

But, in the meantime, the orphans are there, in a country with very little adoption culture. If international adoption were restricted or outlawed, the stakes are awful to contemplate.

Even with adoption possible, mass numbers of Russian orphans never make it out of the orphanage, until their eighteenth birthday when they are “aged out,” and suddenly on their own. These children, with a background of trauma, non-existent family support systems, and no preparation for independent life, turn typically to a life of drug abuse, prostitution, and suicide.

We in the Moore family have a stake in this. Two of us are Russian by birth; the rest of us are Russian by adoption. When Ben and Timothy came into our home, the rest of us were tied, inextricably, with what the Apostle Paul would call our “kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:3).

But, more than that, all of us have a stake in this. The orphans of the world, whether in Russia or India or Alabama, are among the most vulnerable imaginable. And Jesus has identified the “least of these” as his brothers and sisters (Matt. 25:40). When we care for them, we care for him.

So take a moment to pray for the orphans and widows. Remember particularly the hundreds of thousands of little ones looking out the windows of Russian orphanages today, wondering if their future is with a family or trembling alone on a sidewalk. And pray that many, many of them will soon be eating ice cream with a Mom and a Dad.

Photo Credit: Devin Maddox