The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.

If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.

Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, of course, is that Mormon at the center of all this. Beck isn’t the problem. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s brilliant, and, hats off to him, he knows his market. Latter-day Saints have every right to speak, with full religious liberty, in the public square. I’m quite willing to work with Mormons on various issues, as citizens working for the common good. What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the “Tea Party” or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States.

It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.

Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.

Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

Leaders will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our Christian superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other Christian celebrities are seen to be courageous for fighting their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their movements.

Where there is no gospel, something else will fill the void: therapy, consumerism, racial or class resentment, utopian politics, crazy conspiracy theories of the left, crazy conspiracy theories of the right; anything will do. The prophet Isaiah warned us of such conspiracies replacing the Word of God centuries ago (Is. 8:12–20). As long as the Serpent’s voice is heard, “You shall not surely die,” the powers are comfortable.

This is, of course, not new. Our Lord Jesus faced this test when Satan took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth, and their glory. Satan did not mind surrendering his authority to Jesus. He didn’t mind a universe without pornography or Islam or abortion or nuclear weaponry. Satan did not mind Judeo-Christian values. He wasn’t worried about “revival” or “getting back to God.” What he opposes was the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected for the sins of the world.

We used to sing that old gospel song, “I will cling to an old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown.”  The scandalous scene at the Lincoln Memorial indicates that many of us want to exchange it in too soon. To Jesus, Satan offered power and glory. To us, all he needs offer is celebrity and attention.

Mormonism and Mammonism are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They offer another Lord Jesus than the One offered in the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and another way to approach him. An embrace of these tragic new vehicles for the old Gnostic heresy is unloving to our Mormon friends and secularist neighbors, and to the rest of the watching world. Any “revival” that is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ is a “revival” of a different kind of spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 Jn. 4:1-3).

The answer to this scandal isn’t a retreat, as some would have it, to an allegedly apolitical isolation. Such attempts lead us right back here, in spades, to a hyper-political wasteland. If the churches are not forming consciences, consciences will be formed by the status quo, including whatever demagogues can yell the loudest or cry the hardest. The answer isn’t a narrowing sectarianism, retreating further and further into our enclaves. The answer includes local churches that preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and disciple their congregations to know the difference between the kingdom of God and the latest political whim.

It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.

And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.

(Image Credit)

When I’d mention such things, the Southern Baptist adults around me would try to comfort me with the details of our then-trendy 1970s pop-dispensationalist eschatology: “Don’t worry about that, honey; the Rapture of the church will have happened by then, and you won’t be here to see it.”

That really didn’t comfort me, though, as much as they thought it would. Yes, my raptured soul would be safely sequestered in heaven, while tsunamis and locusts and horse-riding specters ravaged our hometown, but it would still be gone, washed away in a flow of blood and debris. I would be exiled from it. And home would be taken away from me—forever.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to think that way. This world is not our home, you know. We are citizens of heaven, resident aliens here for a vapor. But, still, the idea of my little beachfront community buried beneath the collapse of unbelieving civilization was hard to take, so I tried not to think about it, focusing instead on the scenarios the preachers actually talked about: the sudden evaporation of New York or Washington or Hollywood or Rome, all those Babylons that, we were told, were exalting themselves against God, and corrupting our values with prayerless schoolrooms and primetime soap operas and heavy metal music and nuns (though with a half-Catholic family, I never believed that last part).

I outgrew the dispensationalism (while holding onto the gospel underneath it all), but I still lived to see my hometown face an apocalypse. And rather than watching it all helplessly from a cloud in heaven, I had to watch it all, even more helplessly, on CNN.

Divided by Camille

When I was growing up, hurricanes were like fall revival meetings: cyclical as the seasons themselves, lots of buzz beforehand, but rarely amounting to much at all. A few hurricanes hit, tearing up the yard, uprooting our climbing trees, and leaving us without power or water for weeks at a time. It was kind of an adventure. My little brother would literally jump around the yard in excited anticipation. Some adventurous rakes would always plan hurricane parties on the beach—while the older people shook their heads in disapproval.

Every time a hurricane came through, though, the generation before us would start chattering about “Camille,” the big, devastating hurricane that wiped out the Coast in 1969, two years before I was born. Our parents and grandparents divided history into “before Camille” and “after Camille.” To us, Camille was as distant as the Great Depression. One explained why my grandmother canned so much food every year in her storage shed, and the other explained why she cried whenever the weatherman announced a hurricane watch.

I expected a normal, run-of-the-mill hurricane when my parents told me, in August of 2005, that another one was forecast. “Dad, why don’t y’all come up here with us, during the storm,” I offered, though I knew in advance what his response would be. “Only wimps and Yankees evacuate,” he said (which is an adequate answer, perhaps, for why my ancestors lost the Civil War).

What I didn’t know was that the most horrible natural disaster in American history was building strength somewhere out there in the Gulf. And my hometown was her prey.

Like Babylon

Most of the news reports focused on the levees breaking in New Orleans, and rightly so, since the engineering failure that devastated that great and indispensable American city—and the political, social, cultural, and economic aftermath—is an ongoing national crisis. But Katrina didn’t hit New Orleans—she merely released her apocalyptic horsemen out into the Crescent City. She hit the coastline of Mississippi, just over the Louisiana border, and afterwards, nothing would ever be the same.

For a week I didn’t know if my parents and grandmother and other relatives were alive or dead. I watched the images on television, pacing the floors as I saw landmark after landmark wiped off the map. The mausoleums in some of the graveyards are said to have opened, with coffins and bodies floating down the streets.

But the round-the-clock cable networks didn’t prepare me for seeing my post-Katrina hometown with my eyes for the first time. My boyhood prophecy charts prepared me more.

After the National Guard allowed traffic into the disaster area, I drove down Highway 90, along the Gulf, with my wife. I pulled the car over to cry, and to vomit. Houses of family and friends: gone. Churches I’d heard and preached the gospel in: gone. Most of the landmarks of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood: gone. And thousands of my fellow Coastians (and New Orleanians): devastated. The strewn brick and rotting fish and jagged trees all lay there in the coastal sun like a decomposing corpse.

Some people said it looked like Hiroshima after the bombing. My thought instead, conditioned by my fundamentalist background, was that it looked like Babylon after the fall of the Beast. It was like the end of the world I used to worry about, just a couple miles down the road from there. And, in some ways, it was.

Little Apocalypses

Katrina reminded me that my home church was right about the apocalypse, even if wrong about the details. Scripture continually speaks of the Day of the Lord—that time in history when all the established order is shaken like ripe figs from the tree (Nahum 3:12) by the judgment of Yahweh. And it speaks of glimpses of that Day of the Lord coming repeatedly through history, as nations war against nations and earthquakes and signs in the heavens rattle the dwellers of earth. These are, Jesus tells us, “but the beginning of the birth pains” (Matt. 24:8).

The use of apocalyptic language for the destruction of Katrina is tricky, complicated by all the craziness that accompanies any disaster these days. Of course, the hired-gun prophecy experts on Christian television were on hand to embarrass the church, as usual, with pronouncements that this was God’s judgment for some sin of the people there (usually the casino industry on the Coast or, more typically, the hedonism, sexual and otherwise, of New Orleans). And it wasn’t just the right-wing fringe. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., sounded like a mirror image of Pat Robertson when he suggested that the governor of Mississippi’s opposition to a global climate-change treaty had something to do with the disaster. Such is, of course, nonsense.

The Christian gospel refuses to flatten out the little apocalypses of history into the same kind of “sheep and goats” clarity as the final Apocalypse. Jesus refuses to blame the falling of the tower at Siloam on the personal sin of those suffering there. But Jesus doesn’t avoid talking about ultimate Apocalypse either. He rejects a personal sin-disaster correlation but then says: “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:4–5).

Unnatural Disasters

The apocalypses we experience now—whether in Katrina-struck America or earthquake-devastated Haiti or tsunami-ravaged Asia—remind us that this present order isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. The CNN meteorologists can explain the hurricane only in terms of barometric pressure and water temperatures. We know, however, that at its root this natural disaster isn’t natural at all. It is creation crying out, “Adam, where are you?”

The Psalmist reminds us that God originally put all things under the feet of Adam (Psalm 8:6). But the writer of Hebrews reminds us that we do not yet see all things under the feet of humanity (Heb. 2:8), although we do see a crucified and resurrected Jesus (Heb. 2:9). Whereas Jonah the sinner could only still the storm by throwing himself into its midst, Jesus exercises dominion over the winds and the waves with his voice. Mark testifies that the boat’s occupants remarked: “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41).

The Apostle Paul likewise reminds us that the creation itself groans under the reign of sin and death, waiting for its rightful rulers to assume their thrones in the resurrection (Rom. 8:20–23). The storms and the waves are one more reminder that the “already” has not yet been replaced by the “not yet.”

The Scripture says that in our fallenness we intuitively want to deny even the possibility of ultimate apocalyptic judgment—whether in reference to the first watery apocalypse or the fire to come next time. In these last days, the Apostle Peter tells us, scoffers will say: “Where is the promise of his coming?” Unbelief will always point, he says, to the fact that “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:3–4). That’s why Jesus says the final cosmic Katrina will come as “in the days of Noah”—unexpectedly in the midst of feasting and working and marrying and giving in marriage (Matt. 24:36–55).

Baptismal Warning

The tragedy of a groaning cosmos right now isn’t because God is a capricious king. It’s because he is allowing these chaotic upheavals to warn us that the order we so want to hold onto isn’t stable, that the ruler of this world is judged—and his kingdom will ultimately be shaken and replaced. Because we know the end is coming, the Spirit prompts us to learn to groan along with the cosmos (Rom. 8:22–23).

Perhaps the right kind of biblical apocalypticism was proclaimed less in our prophecy charts than in our baptisteries. As Baptist Christians we believed (and I still do) that baptism is immersion. But too often we seemed to forget that this immersion was a sign of judgment, and of the sureness of death. Our baptism proclaims that we are drowned beneath the watery curse of death, buried with Christ, but also raised with him (Rom. 6:3–6). As the tribe of Noah is brought safely through the waters and into a new creation, “baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you” (1 Peter 3:20).

The people of my hometown have seen, in a sense, a “baptism” of their entire world, beneath the waters of a violent sea. They—and I—will probably never hear the parable of the house built on the rock the same way again. And they—and I—will probably find something all the more sobering about the warning that Jesus will baptize this universe next not with cleansing water, but with purifying fire (2 Peter 3:7).

Loss of Home

But Katrina also reminded me what was wrong with the Evangelical apocalypticism of my boyhood.

We always seemed to love “home” too much to really believe it. The culture around us revolted against Southern Evangelical eschatology with songs like Hank Williams Junior’s “If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie (I Don’t Want to Go).” We’d respond by singing of “Sweet Beulah Land,” that we were “kind of homesick for a country, to which I’ve never been before.” But the heaven we spoke of, and sang about, and imagined, looked an awful lot like Dixie, too. We were rooted people, despite all our prophecy charts and gospel songs.

The grief I experienced after Katrina was nothing like that of those who had stayed—including most of my family—relocated to FEMA trailers, their homes a pile of rubble, their jobs “raptured” away with the fleeing businesses. My pain was more psychic. Some would say it was the loss of nostalgia. I’d see it more as the loss of home.

The worst part of my post-Katrina visit wasn’t the wreckage. The worst part, for me, was that, driving down the most familiar piece of ground for me on this earth, I didn’t know where I was.

Biloxi was always where I could return to, if only for a few days, and find things always the same. Sure, things would change in a micro-evolutionary way: a new pier built over here, a new dollar store on the corner over there.

But the beachfront mansion Beauvoir would always be there, right where Confederate president Jefferson Davis had built it. Right there would be the magnolia trees my brothers and I climbed through, pretending to be pirates. Right there would be the Winn-Dixie grocery store where I’d worked my way though high school. Right there, the mall where I first saw the bashful young girl who would later be my wife. Right there, the seafood restaurant overlooking the beach where we’d had our first date. And right there, at the end of that pier, the spot where I first realized I wanted to ask her to marry me.

It’s all gone now. And it’s not coming back.

Loss of the Past

Not knowing where I was, on Highway 90, gave me a jarring sense of a loss of the past. I feel it still. Five years later, most everything that can be reconstructed has been. There are shiny new high schools and malls. But you can’t rebuild a beachfront antebellum house or a hundred-year-old church. Instead, Biloxi is now dotted with (even more) casinos, (even more) Waffle Houses, and (even more) Wal-Marts and Best Buys.

I understand now what Elizabeth Spencer wrote, in another day, in her memoir Landscape of the Heart:

If I could have one part of the world back the way it used to be, I would not choose Dresden before the firebombing, Rome before Nero, or London before the Blitz. I would not resurrect Babylon, Carthage, or San Francisco. Let the Leaning Tower lean and the Hanging Gardens hang. I want the Mississippi Gulf Coast back the way it was before Hurricane Camille, that wicked killer which struck in August 1969.

Now Southerners are a nostalgic people, and this shows up in our literature, from Thomas Wolfe to William Faulkner to Eudora Welty to Anne Rice. Mississippi writer Willie Morris writes about an Ole Miss student who, after encountering a cosmopolitan, Eastern prep school graduate at a party at Harvard, remarked: “For the first time in my life, I understood that not all Americans are from somewhere.”

But, it seems to me, this isn’t just a Southern thing or a small-town Midwestern thing. Rootedness is an essential aspect of human flourishing. It reminds us that we are creatures; we are from somewhere.

A Rooted Messiah

As fallen image-bearers, we’re all drawn toward the primal sin of the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). We want either to idolize our roots—to make them ultimate (see, for instance, the satanic power of the Aryan myth of the Nazis or the racial supremacist views of the Ku Klux Klan or the Black Panther Party)—or to transcend our rootedness, to see ourselves as gods who aren’t fashioned from any particular piece of ground.

In his novel Andy Catlett, Wendell Berry writes of the young Kentuckian who wishes to get away from his upbringing, to create his own identity, and to be as “ancestorless” as the first man. But the first man wasn’t “ancestorless.” He was, the Bible says, the “son of God” (Luke 3:38). And he wasn’t from nowhere. He was molded from the mud and given a home in a specifically noted place, in the east and defined around the rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates (Gen. 3:10–14).

When God in Christ Jesus recapitulates the human story—and thereby redeems the world—he does so with a “rooted” Messiah. Yes, the Son of God transcends human time and space. He was with the Father and the Spirit in love and glory “before the world was” (John 17:5). But in his Incarnation, Jesus identifies himself with a tribe, with a genealogy, with a hometown—even one that isn’t thrilled about his preaching (Luke 4:24). He, Scripture tells us, “went and lived in a city called Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled: ‘He shall be called a Nazarene’” (Matt. 2:23).

Some of Jesus’ contemporaries rejected him because of this rootedness: “But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from” (John 7:27). They were quite mistaken. It is “the Beast” who is from nowhere, “rising out of the sea” (Rev. 13:1), representing humanity in its origins-denying self-exaltation (Rev. 13:18). Our Lord Jesus, on the other hand, is from “the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations” (Is. 9:1). We know where this Man comes from.

Perhaps if we were less embarrassed by our rootedness, we might see something glorious in it despite all the ways we have perverted it (and Mississippians, as we know, have seen how love of roots can be drawn into the spirit of anti-Christ).

It seems to me that the Christian Platonism of C. S. Lewis is more resonant with biblical eschatology than the Christian apocalypticism of C. I. Scofield. Lewis would have been derided by the old dispensationalists as rejecting a “literal” view of the end—one without an earthly millennial kingdom or a “future for Israel.” But Lewis was no cosmopolitan. Yes, he craved heaven, for the great “northernness” he could see in the vast sky above him, but he tied that craving to a longing experienced first in nostalgia—for the changing seasons, for the stories of childhood, for the experience of home.

In the last of his Narnia books, Lewis shows us his vision of the end. It is not an escape from creation or a flight from the past. It is instead a more “real” Narnia, of which the older Narnia was but a shadow. Life in this present Narnia comes to a close, but it isn’t “over.” It is a preparation for life in a new Narnia, in which the longings of home come to fruition, ever expanding into eternity.

Redeemed & Restored

Five years after Katrina, my hometown has changed. There seems to be a roughness there I never knew before. The confluence of coastal Cajuns, old southern families, and Vietnamese immigrants, with Deep South manners and the rhythms of Mississippi, made for a certain kind of sweetness. The co-existence of Roman Catholic Lenten fish fries and Southern Baptist revival meetings furthered a sense of “mere Christianity,” even as it often showed just how nominal and shallow both could be. The Coast seems more rugged now, more grown-up in the most tragic sense. The Coast (and with it, New Orleans) seems more like William Faulkner than John Kennedy Toole these days. It’s my favorite place on earth, but there’s a deep brokenness there.

As I am editing this article—written months before—my hometown is bracing for another wave of crisis. An oil rig catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the greatest environmental disaster in American history, means an enormous blob of crude petroleum gushing from the ocean’s floor now threatens to cover the beaches and marshes of the Gulf Coast, smothering the sea-life and birds and possibly making extinct the fishing, seafood, and tourism industries that have created and sustained not just the economy but the culture itself. As I write these words, I have no idea how badly this will turn out, but it feels much worse than Katrina—a slow-motion Katrina with no eye of the storm.

The people of my hometown have seen a little apocalypse. They’re not the first, and they won’t be the last. But five years later, we should all remember that “natural disasters,” ultimately, are neither natural nor disastrous.

My hometown isn’t there anymore. But then again, it never really was. The hope after Katrina is not for civil defense and architectural rebuilding. It is for that little stretch of pine-dotted coastland, and with it the entire created universe, to be redeemed and restored in Christ. There will come a day when the curse is reversed, and the Gulf Coast, along with the entire cosmos, fully reflects the glory of a resurrected Messiah. And John sees in his vision that, on that day, “the sea was no more” (Rev. 21:1). He also sees that, in the Holy City, “nothing unclean will ever enter it” (Rev. 21:27).

Jesus of Nazareth can bring down Babylons, yes, and Jerusalems too. But Jesus can also drive evil spirits into the sea. He can turn back the sea itself with a clearing of his throat. And even as he teaches us that those who follow him must leave “houses and lands” (Mark 10:28–29), he promises us that we’ll receive “a hundredfold” of such in him.

One day, we will all see the rubble of all of our places and people, our principalities and our power. And we’ll grieve, as we should, for the past worlds that have birthed us. But then, the gospel tells us, we’ll see a new city, coming down out of heaven to resurrect a universe in which the wrathful sea has finally been turned back.

“What is that?” one of us might ask.

“That’s the New Jerusalem,” we might hear a familiar Galilean voice say. “Our hometown.”

“Christ & Katrina” first appeared in the July/August, 2010 issue of Touchstone.

At my home church in coastal Mississippi, two of the most significant pastors in my young life were trained at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the 1960s. There they sat in the classroom of an impressive young scholar, Pinnock, who was willing to challenge the bureaucratic morbidity of his adopted denomination. Pinnock, concerned that Southern Baptists like other Baptists before them were sliding into theological liberalism, presented a strong case to his students for the complete truthfulness of the Scriptures. More than that, he presented an overall narrative of God’s work in Christ Jesus that many students found compelling. Beyond the classroom, Pinnock’s students were zealous, pressing the gospel in some of the roughest parts of the French Quarter and beyond.

My boyhood pastors were only a small part of Pinnock’s audience during his short time at New Orleans Seminary. A list of his former students during that time is amazing to anyone with any grasp of the history of Southern Baptists and the inerrancy controversy: Paige Patterson, Jerry Vines, Adrian Rogers, and on and on. I cannot think of a single figure of crucial importance in the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention who is more than two steps away from Pinnock’s direct influence.

Pinnock didn’t stay long, of course, at New Orleans Seminary or within the mainstream of conservative evangelicalism. In the 1970s, he began to question his previous understanding of biblical inspiration. At a conference on biblical inerrancy, one of Pinnock’s former students, Adrian Rogers, lamented the trajectory of his professor. Rogers responded to Pinnock’s argument that evangelicals should unite around our common commitment to forgivness through the “shed blood of Jesus Christ” rather than around a common understanding of Holy Scripture. Rogers wondered how long such a commitment would last.

“Many existential theologians today and in the recent past have concluded that the whole concept of blood atonement is repugnant to modern civilized man and that the biblical materials on blood atonement represent unfortunate syncretistic accretions from Israel’s pagan neighbors,” Rogers said. “How do you know as an evangelical certainty that they are not correct, Dr. Pinnock? I suggest that your belief in blood atonement is more a function of your conservative past than of your current philosophical and theological methodologies.”

Rogers, of course, was prophetic on this point. Pinnock moved from doubting the verbal inspiration of Scripture to questioning the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy from almost every vantage point. He led the short-lived movement toward “open theism,” questioning the historic church’s belief that God knows everything, including the future free decisions of his creatures. He abandoned his belief that conscious faith in Christ is necessary for salvation, and began to see the Spirit at work in the other world religions. He denounced the concept of everlasting punishment as cruel and contrary to the nature of God. Unhinged from Scripture and tradition, Pinnock became the vanguard of evangelical innovation on doctrine after doctrine after doctrine. That’s lamentable.

But, as we remember Clark Pinnock, he should be more to us, especially those of us on the more conservative side of evangelical Christianity, than simply a parable of doctrinal downgrade. Adrian Rogers was probably right that Pinnock’s remaining evangelical commitments may have been more a result of his conservative past than his later trajectory, but let’s give thanks for that past.

As I write this, I’m about to go into a classroom to teach 150 future pastors and missionaries. We’re in an institution committed to biblical authority and the centrality of the gospel. This would not be possible if Clark Pinnock hadn’t taught Adrian Rogers and Paige Patterson and Jerry Vines. And I can’t help but wonder if my boyhood pastors hadn’t had such a vision of truth and gospel laid out for them by that young Canadian, would I have ever heard the gospel?

“Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God,” the Scripture says. “Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:7). Sometimes the outcome of a life isn’t what we would have hoped for, and sometimes there are many parts of a man’s life that we can’t imitate. But we can still give thanks that the word of God was taught, clarified, held forth, even by a man with whom we disagree.

I’m here because of some lectures a good man delivered in a classroom on Gentilly Boulevard in New Orleans, Louisiana. He may have regretted some of those lectures, but I’m thankful for them. Let’s pray for the Pinnock family and let’s thank God for the good things God did through him. Let’s remember that the last chapter of a man’s life isn’t written in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, but in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

That’s good news for sinners like us.

The Power of Words (Proverbs 1:1-7) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “The Power of Words: Wisdom, Counsel, and Decision Making” (Proverbs 1:1-7), was originally preached on Sunday, July 25, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Dear Dr. Moore,

Man, have I messed up. I’m a Christian, but I walked away from the Lord and got involved with a non-Christian girl. I think I love her. She is sweet and we get along, but she’s not a believer. We got involved in some stuff, sexually, that we shouldn’t have (and I was the one persuading her to do it). Before long, I became convicted about the sexual sin and about being unequally yoked with an unbeliever. I broke off our relationship.

I just heard from her though, and she is pregnant, with my baby. So here’s my question. Do I marry this girl, and become unequally yoked or do I not marry and have my child be born into a family in which his or her parents aren’t married to each other?

I know I’ve really messed up. I’m just trying to figure what to do now, to keep from making it worse.

A Shotgun Sinner

Shut Up (Proverbs 6:12-19) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Shut Up” (Proverbs 6:12-19), was originally preached on Sunday, July 18, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

The Power of Words (Proverbs 4:1-27) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “The Power of Words” (Proverbs 4:1-27), was originally preached on Sunday, July 11, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Anne said that she was leaving Christianity because she just couldn’t be “anti-gay, anti-feminist” and so forth. The response was immediate, especially on Christian forums and comments on blogs and on various other forms of media.

Anne Rice is, at best, our sister-in-Christ who is going through a dark night of the soul. She is, at the very least, someone who has encountered something of the light of Christ, is drawn to it, and is now “kicking against the goads.” In either case, she is not our enemy.

Anne’s case is a little unique because she’s a national celebrity. She has a Facebook page that people pay attention to. But she’s really not all that different to the ex-prisoner, now following Christ, who told me not long ago that he’s contemplating giving it all up and going back to cocaine and prostitutes. Of course he is. We are walking through a time of temptation and wilderness, in which there’s a struggle in the air for every Christ-branded psyche.

But the church cannot see rejection of Christ as some kind of personal reproach or, worse yet, an ideological declaration of war. We have to love our prodigal sons and daughters so that if and when the dark night of the soul is over they have a place to come home to.

Anne says she still loves Jesus but she doesn’t love Christianity. Yes, I know that it is impossible to love Jesus without loving his church. I’ve preached that for years, and I still believe it. But can’t you see how someone could wrestle against that? I am thankful that I had been a Christian long enough to have gained some kind of maturity before I saw just how vicious “Christianity” can be.

I think it ought to instruct us here as to how Jesus handled situations like these. Jesus was fierce in his denunciation of those with power, including religious and ecclesial power. He never shied away from confronting personal sin in anyone, including the wounded and vulnerable, but he did in a completely different way. Think of the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, the demonized villagers, and on and on. Jesus never snuffs out that smoldering wick, never breaks that bruised reed. And it’s because he loves.

Yes, Anne Rice has renounced Christianity. Maybe it’s a permanent move away from the gospel, showing that she never quite made it all the way into communion with Christ. If so, let’s represent Christ and continue to point her to the Jesus she finds in some way mystifying. It could be that Anne is a Christian who is having a wave of doubt and rejection. So did the Apostle Peter, who also renounced Christianity and, as a matter of fact, cursed Jesus personally in the process. But when Jesus finds Peter in Galilee (right back on the fishing boats where he’d been called from in the first place!), he never even mentions the incident at the fireside.

A lot of us (and I include myself in this) are a lot like James and John in the Christ-rejecting village. We want to call down fire from heaven on the opponents of Christianity (Lk. 9:51-54). That seems so prophetic and Christian and it also happens to confirm us to be right. Jesus’ response to this zeal ought to stop us in our tracks: “Jesus turned and rebuked them. And they went on to another village” (Lk. 9:56).

Anne Rice hasn’t rejected you. Anne Rice hasn’t betrayed you. Would you pray for her, and for the other smoldering wicks and about-to-bolt potential prodigals in your church (and maybe in your home)? It could be Anne has been deeply hurt by what she has seen in Christianity. Or it could be that, like Jesus’ disciples, the closer she’s drawing to Christ, the more she is made uncomfortable by it. Let’s love her.

Jesus’ disciples, and Peter again, after all, were ready, it seems, to “quit Christianity” when on the Galilean lakeshore after he said some disturbing things. Jesus asked Peter, “Will you also go away?” But, at the end of it all, Peter had to confess, “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn. 6:66-67).

Maybe Anne Rice will conclude the same thing. In the meantime, let’s not demonize the prodigal daughter. Let’s give her room to come home, if and when she wants. Let’s not verify her experience of angry, raging Christians.

Maybe it will take a vampire novelist to teach us that Light stings sometimes, when you’re coming out of darkness.

Dear Not-a-Neoconfederate,

As I write this, I can see on my wall the flag of my home state of Mississippi, and I’m deeply conflicted about it. The flag represents home for me. I love Christ, church, and family more than Mississippi, but that’s about it. Still, the flag makes me wince because emblazoned on it is the Confederate Battle Flag, which was used so often in my home state, and elsewhere, as an emblem of backlash in support of the ugly epoch of Jim Crow. I supported a referendum changing the flag in 2001, but the voters of the state kept the old flag design by a vote of 65 to 35 percent. The more I think of it, the more I believe my conflicted feelings about that flag aren’t all that unusual for a Christian.

When it comes to Robert E. Lee, I can’t agree with those who would equate this picture with one of Adolf Hitler. Virtually every biography, by his contemporaries and future historians, would commend the General for his personal character and his sacrificial leadership. As biographer Roy Blount Jr. demonstrates Lee’s views on race were, in some ways, much more progressive than those of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and other Northerners.

Lee, like many in the army he led, saw himself as fighting, not for slavery, but for home. This doesn’t mean they were right, but it does mean that an easy caricature isn’t possible. Based on Lee’s own writings, he sounds much like an antiwar American who, nonetheless, when drafted, fights for his country.

The question is complicated more by the home for which Lee was fighting. As a localist Agrarian-leaning political type, I agree with a good bit the Vanderbilt scholars of I’ll Take My Stand found commendable in some isolated economic/cultural aspects of the antebellum South, especially compared to the whirl of the industrial rootlessness that came after. But the agrarians, right as they were on so much, were still too close, I think, to the Civil War to see the moral enormity of the slavery question.

But the Confederate States of America was constitutionally committed to the continuation, with protections in law, of a great evil.

The idea of a human being attempting to “own” another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That hardly needs to be said these days, thankfully, but we ought to remember just what was at stake. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over created things but he is not given dominion over his fellow image-bearing humans (Gen. 1:27-30). The southern system of chattel slavery was built off of things the Scripture condemns as wicked: “man-stealing” (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor, the destroying of family ties, and on and on and on.

In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism mostly of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the spurious “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). The abolitionists were right.

So what should a pro-civil rights son of the Confederacy do with the memory of those who fought for a Lost (in more ways than one) Cause?

Several comments on the original post pointed out how tainted virtually all history is. Yes, Lee fought for slavery, but so did the American Founders, in writing in allowances for it into the American Constitution. Does the picture of Thomas Jefferson I have in my study endorse his theological liberalism and his slave-holding or does it recognize his far-sighted commitments to human dignity and religious liberty? Does the bust of Theodore Roosevelt endorse his Darwnism or his awful views on eugenics?

The problem with a simple view of history is that it leads to a totemic use of historical figures. Some have romanticized, for instance, the American Founders in a way that doesn’t allow an honest conversation about the real problems there. Fourth of July sermons that treat Jefferson and Franklin and Adams as exemplars of evangelical Christianity aren’t really defending the gospel, nor are they honoring those founders. They are simply not treating persons as persons, turning them into slogan-supporting icons instead. The same thing is true with the cult of the Confederacy that has emerged in the last century, except often in much more malevolent forms. The Confederate dead have become a kind of cultural short-hand for white supremacy and racial resentment. It is a long drop indeed from Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Wallace and David Duke.

The fetishistic use of historical figures is precisely what leads to the kind of “absolute good vs. absolute evil” characterizations we often see among Christians in the way they view current leaders. Why did so many evangelicals send around email forwards with the urban myth that the then-President of the United States had led a little girl to pray to receive Christ on a rope line? It’s because so many wanted to think of this political leader as a spiritual leader too.

That’s the kind of hagiography that led to George Washington’s cherry tree inability to tell a lie. Well, George Washington was a great man, but he was also a liar. And so am I, and so are you. Unless there was a star shining over Washington’s birthplace (and there wasn’t), then Romans 3:10-19 applies to him as well as to all of us.

But this messy historical ambiguity ought not to surprise those who are being shaped by the Bible. Think of the brutal honesty with which the Scriptures give us the sins and foibles of our fathers in the faith, while honoring them just the same. Think of the very sinful, conniving picture we get of Jacob in Genesis and then think of the fact that he is commended in Hebrews 11 as a man of faith. Think of the genealogy of our Lord Jesus, filled as it is with scoundrels. And we know they were scoundrels because the Bible tells us so.

The Christian isn’t called to a rootless, ahistorical existence. We are commanded to show honor to our fathers and mothers (Exod. 20:12). That doesn’t mean hagiography. Jesus pointed out that his fathers had died in the folly in the wilderness (Jn. 6:49). Peter pointed out that the revered David was now just a pile of bones, and thus at least one sin short of a Messiah (Acts 2:29-35). This means we have a skeptical honor that recognizes both the good graces God has given to sinful men and women, and the fact that even the best among us is a sinner.

Should you keep up that picture of Lee, with his quote about what it means to be a gentleman? I don’t know. I can’t tell you one way or the other because what’s more important than a single picture is the general ethos of a home. Years ago, I had an African-American civil rights activist friend with a portrait of Lee in his home, and I never questioned whether he might be a Klansman. I have a portrait in my office of Fannie Lou Hamer, who supported the Equal Rights Amendment (I think), but I don’t think anyone sees that picture as an apologetic for feminism.

The issue is love of neighbor and the mission of Christ. That’s why the Apostle Paul refuses to lay down simple rules about eating vegetables or eating meat (Rom. 14:1-23). If that picture would hinder your being able to show hospitality and love with your brothers and sisters of every background and race, take it down.

But, if you keep it up on the wall, let it be, like every historical portrait, a warning.

I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1841 Mississippi instead of 1971 Mississippi that I’d have been leading slave escapes. I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1941 Mississippi that I’d have been singing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington. And maybe I would have.

But a gentleman as devoted to character as Robert E. Lee, who had thought long and hard about the evils of slavery, was so conditioned by his time that he couldn’t see past his blind spot. So what makes me think that I could have escaped a similar blind spot? And what is so common in our culture right now that we can’t even see it, as we think we’re serving the Lord?

Jesus addresses something of this when he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrite! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets’” (Matt. 23:29). Those are chilling words for one whose bloodline has come down from the slave-holding South through the Jim Crow oppression to the present day.

As I look at that Mississippi flag, I can’t demonize it. I’m grateful for the people, the family, the place it represents. But I wince at the symbol that was used to enslave the little brothers and sisters of Jesus, to bomb little girls in church buildings, to terrorize preachers of the gospel and their families with burning crosses on front lawns by night.

All that ought not to prompt a pretending that you come from somewhere other than where you’ve come. That would be ingratitude. It ought instead simply to lead you to say, “I am a man of unclean lips, and I come from a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6:5).

None of us is free from a sketchy background, and none of our backgrounds are wholly evil. The blood of Jesus has ransomed us all “from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:18), whether your forefathers were Yankees, Rebels, Vikings, or whatever. The gospel also then frees us to give honor to whom honor is due (Rom. 13:7), without the pretense that any human being is without sin or dishonor.

Robert E. Lee was a complicated figure, a sinful rebel (in more ways than one) who bore the image of God. And so are we. Lee was gifted in commendable ways even as he used those gifts sometimes in ways that ought to horrify. So do we. We ought to be honest, in both directions, about Lee and about our neighbors and ourselves. And that ought to cause us to search out our own lives for that hidden sin, that secret hatred, that conforming to the pattern of this age that we don’t see and don’t think to ask about. Ultimately, no matter how we seek to whitewash our heritage or our personal stories, we’ll only conquer it all at the resurrection from the dead. Until then, we watch our hearts, pray for wisdom, work for justice, and love our neighbor.

Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day.

What’s your ethical dilemma? Send me an email at questions@russellmoore.com

In the book I came across an anecdote I’d highlighted the first time around that I’d forgotten about. King writes about how he came to see that he had a drinking problem. He denied it at first, he writes, because he could continue to work and be productive, something, he thought, drunks can’t do. King continues:

“Then, in the early eighties, Maine’s legislature enacted a returnable-bottle-and-can law. Instead of going into the trash, my sixteen-ounce cans of Miller Lite started going into a plastic container in the garage. One Thursday night I went out there to toss in a few dead soldiers and saw that this container, which had been empty on Monday night, was now almost full. And since I was the only one in the house who drank Miller Lite…”

It suddenly dawned on King: “I’m an alcoholic, I thought, and there was no dissenting opinion from inside my head…I was, after all, the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing (at least until that night) that I was writing about myself.”

So far as I know King doesn’t claim to be a Christian, and his “recovery” isn’t exactly what the Bible presents as repentance. Nonetheless, the image of something as mundane as a recycling bin full of cans prompting a life-change prompted me to think about the goodness of God in such things, in my own life.

I’m finishing up writing a book on temptation right now, and have been thinking a lot about how hard it is for me to see my own temptations, much less my outright sins. They’re just too close so they seem “normal.”

Drunkenness isn’t my particular point of weakness, but I sure have lots of others. And this anecdote reminded me of how many times God has used something minor to arrest my attention. It usually isn’t a cross in the sky or a vision on the road. But I’ll hear someone speak and think, “Oh man, that sounds like me, and I don’t want to be like that.” Or a conversation will prompt me to think about some stupid parenting maneuver I’ve been attempting. Or my son will pretend to be “Daddy,” and I’ll think, “Hey, that’s not how I want to be remembered by my boys.” Or I’ll stop in the middle of my self-pity and whining to see a sunset that will remind me how good God is to let me view it. And so on.

I’d imagine you can think of similar things in your own life, uncanny little moments that turn you around, back toward the goal of Christ. That’s discipline, though not what we typically think of when we think of discipline. These moments are moments of gentle kindness. And God’s kindness is meant “to lead you to repentance” (Rom. 2:4).

Blessed Are the Ignorant (1 Sam 28:1-25) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Blessed Are the Ignorant” (1 Sam 28:1-25), was originally preached on Sunday, June 27, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

It was a painful article to write, in many ways, especially since, after I wrote the article, my hometown was hit with now the worst man-made catastrophe in American history, a kind of slow-motion Katrina.

But thinking this through left me with a sense of hope and worship and peace. We do not yet see all things under his feet, it is true, but we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor (Heb. 2:8-9).

Dear Dr. Moore,

I’m a young minister in Texas, and a faithful reader of your stuff. Here’s my problem. In my home, I have on the wall a painting of General Robert E. Lee. Underneath is his quote on the definition of a gentleman. A close Christian brother and I have been in a kind of an intense debate about it.

My friend agrees with me that General Lee actually personally condemned slavery. But he thinks history’s representation of Lee (fighting for the Confederacy with all the accompanying issues of human slavery) could make my display of this painting a stumbling block to the cross, citing Paul’s letters to the Corinthians.

What do you think?

Not a Neo-Confederate

Sure, I’ve teared up as I’ve left family and friends for a while, knowing I’d see them again the next time around. And, yes, I cried every day for almost a year in the aftermath of a hurricane that almost wiped my hometown off the map. But I’ve never left like this, wondering if I’ll ever see it again, if my children’s children will ever know what Biloxi was.

As I pass that sign on Highway 90 telling me I’m leaving Biloxi, I can look out behind the water’s horizon and know there’s a Pale Horse there. A massive rupture in the ocean’s floor is gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, with plumes of petroleum great enough to threaten to destroy the sea-life there for my lifetime, if not forever. Everything is endangered, from the seafood and tourism industries to the crabs and seagulls on the beach to the churches where I first heard the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is more than a threat to my hometown, and to our neighboring communities. It is a threat to national security greater than most Americans can even contemplate, because so few of them know how dependent they are on the eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico. This is, as one magazine put it recently, Katrina meets Chernobyl.

I am leaving this morning, but I am leaving changed.

Someone once described Roe vs. Wade as the “Pearl Harbor” of the evangelical pro-life conscience. Pearl Harbor is an apt metaphor. Before that date of infamy, foreign policy isolationism seemed to be a legitimate American option. The “America First” committees and some of the most influential figures in the United States Congress argued that Hitler’s war was none of our concern. We should tend to ourselves, and we could deal with whomever won in Europe and the Pacific when all the dust had settled.

After Pearl Harbor, the shortsightedness, and indeed utopianism, of isolationism was seen for what it was. After Roe, what seemed to be a “Catholic issue” now pierced through the consciences of evangelical Protestants who realized they’d not only been naive; they’d also missed a key aspect of Christian thought and mission.

For too long, we evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment.

We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin.

Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”

The Scripture gives us a vision of human sin that means there ought to be limits to every claim to sovereignty, whether from church, state, business or labor. A commitment to the free market doesn’t mean unfettered license any more than a commitment to free speech means hardcore pornography ought to be broadcast in prime-time by your local network television affiliate.

Caesar’s sword is there, by God’s authority, to restrain those who would harm others (Rom. 13). When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed.

We’ve seen the issue of so-called “environmental protection” as someone else’s issue.

In our era, the abortion issue is the transcendent moral issue of the day (as segregation was in the last generation, and lynching and slavery before that). Too often, however, we’ve been willing not simply to vote for candidates who will protect unborn human life (as we ought to), but to also in the process adopt their worldviews on every other issue.

Moreover, we’ve seen some of the theological and ideological fringes in the environmentalist movement, fringes that enabled us to see them as not “with us,” and, frankly, to enable us to make fun of the entire question as a silly enterprise. But perhaps the void is being filled by leftists and liberals and wannabe liberal evangelicals simply because those who ought to know better are off doing something else. Working with our secular progressive neighbors on, for instance, saving the Gulf no more compromises the evangelical witness than our working with feminists to combat pornography or with Latter-day Saints to protect marriage.

We’ve had an inadequate view of human life and culture.

What is being threatened in the Gulf states isn’t just seafood or tourism or beach views. What’s being threatened is a culture. As social conservatives, we understand…or we ought to understand…that human communities are formed by traditions and by mores, by the bond between the generations. Culture is, as Russell Kirk said, a compact reaching back to the dead and forward to the unborn. Liberalism wants to dissolve those traditions, and make every generation create itself anew; not conservatism.

Every human culture is formed in a tie with the natural environment. In my hometown, that’s the father passing down his shrimping boat to his son or the community gathering for the Blessing of the Fleet at the harbor every year. In a Midwestern town, it might be the apple festival. In a New England town, it might be the traditions of whalers or oystermen. The West is defined by the frontier and the mountains. And so on.

When the natural environment is used up, unsustainable for future generations, cultures die. When Gulfs are dead, when mountaintops are removed, when forests are razed with nothing left in their place, when deer populations disappear, cultures die too.

And what’s left in the place of these cultures and traditions is an individualism that is defined simply by the appetites for sex, violence, and piling up stuff. That’s not conservative, and it certainly isn’t Christian.

Finally, we’ve compromised our love.

A previous generation of evangelicals had to ask the question, “Is the fetus my neighbor?”

As I’ve seen the people I love, who led me to Christ, literally heaving in tears, I’ve wondered how many other communities have faced death like this, while I ignored even the chance to pray. The protection of the creation isn’t just about seagulls and turtles and dolphins. That would be enough to prompt us to action, since God’s glory is in seagulls and turtles and dolphins (Gen. 6-9; Isa. 65).

Pollution kills people. Pollution dislocates families. Pollution defiles the icon of God’s Trinitarian joy, the creation of his theater (Ps. 19; Rom. 1).

Will people believe us when we speak about the One who brings life and that abundantly, when they see that we don’t care about that which kills and destroys? Will they hear us when we quote John 3:16 to them when, in the face of the loss of their lives, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Who is my neighbor?”

I’m leaving Biloxi today, with tears in my eyes. But I’ll be back. I’ll be back whether the next time I see this place it’s a thriving seacoast community again or whether it’s an oil-drenched crime scene. But I pray I’ll never be the same.

Dear Calvin and Aimee,

I’m tempted to start by saying your question has me singing a version of a great song as “Pentecostal Woman, Calvinistic Man, We Get Together Every Time We Can…” But I won’t do that, because that would be wrong.

First off, you’re not in danger of what the Scripture calls being “unequally yoked” (2 Cor. 6:14), since that passage is clearly about a joining of “righteousness with lawlessness…light to darkness…Christ to Belial.” You are both, it sounds like, godly people trusting in the blood of Christ and received by faith into the kingdom of God through the Holy Spirit.

Now, just because you can, morally, marry is no sign that you, wisely, should. Here are some questions to help you think it through ethically.

If you, Calvin, equate Calvinism or dispensationalism with the gospel, don’t marry Aimee. If you, Aimee, equate baptism with the Holy Spirit or the freedom of the will with the gospel, don’t marry Calvin. None of these things are to be equated with the gospel of Christ. The questions are important, no doubt, and Scripture speaks to them. But the gospel is both simpler and bigger than these systems.

That’s why, despite all our disagreements, an Arminian charismatic can recognize a Reformed cessationist as a brother or sister in Christ, and vice-versa. Pentecostals who know Christ and Bible Church folk who know Christ both participate in “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5). We must typically be in different churches because in order to carry out a congregational mission, we must agree on the specifics of what what the mission is. That doesn’t mean we disagree on the gospel itself.

In order for a marriage to work, you will have to go into it assuming that the other will never change positions on these things. Now, you probably will grow closer together on these things. As committed Christian couples go from their parents’ homes to forming a new family (Gen. 2:24), they tend to grow in doctrinal unity as well as marital unity as they learn and are discipled together.

But you must assume, Calvin, that she will end her life believing in speaking in tongues and you must assume, Aimee, that he will end his life believing the reverse. If you are marrying thinking you will “change” the other, it will be better for both of you to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with each other (Prov. 21:9).

If the two of you marry, God has called Calvin to spiritually lead the home (Eph. 5:23, 25-28; 1 Cor. 11:3). Aimee, if you see Calvin as spiritually immature because he hasn’t experienced the “baptism of the Holy Ghost,” do not marry him. He will be leading you spiritually, and if you can’t respect him, as he is, move on. If you would plan to whisper to your children, “Don’t tell Daddy but really serious Christians get slain in the Spirit…” then call off the engagement.

Calvin, if you secretly think of Aimee’s background as nothing more than ridiculous “man-centered” “holy-rolling,” don’t marry her. She will be, if the Lord wills, the mother of your children, training them up in the sacred writings (2 Tim. 3:15). Your headship isn’t raw force of argument. It is modeled after the way our Lord Christ loved his church, cleansing her “by the washing of water with the word” (Eph. 5:25). How did our Lord Jesus do that with a foundation stone of his church, the Apostle Peter? By kneeling to serve, while teaching (Jn. 14:1-20). You must do likewise (and I would say the exact same thing if the roles here were reversed).

I would also say that a common congregation is essential. If you marry, you will be a one-flesh union. A church isn’t simply a place to go to learn about stuff and pool money for missions. The church becomes your identity, with you as one part of the larger body (1 Cor. 12:12-31). Aimee, if you believe being a part of Calvin’s church, and to do so without seeking to change it, would be a binding of your conscience, don’t marry him. If you believe exercising the gifts as you see them trumps other considerations, this will not be a happy marriage for you.

Many of the churches in Calvin’s tradition would probably gladly receive Aimee as a member, but many would restrict certain roles to her, especially teaching roles, because of her doctrinal beliefs at this point. Some of them, I don’t know, might even exclude Calvin from such roles. Count the cost, based on the worst possible scenario, not the best. If the two of you knew that you could never, say, teach Sunday school or direct the youth camp, would you still want to be with one another? If you ever desire any kind of formal ministry or missionary service together, this could be disqualifying. Is this worth all of that risk to you?

Calvin, if you marry, you’re going to be called to self-sacrifice, to love Aimee as your own flesh (Eph. 5:28-29). That doesn’t mean joining a Pentecostal church. It does mean looking for a place where your wife can be nourished spiritually. Aimee, if she’s the kind of woman she seems, will probably be willing to learn from your pastors and worship in our common Spirit together. I don’t know what kind of church you attend, but there might be some “incidental” factors that are more cultural than theological that actually may be even more of a sticking point than you think.

Someone from a Pentecostal background is probably going to wilt under a steady worship diet of slow, organ-dirge renditions of “How Sweet and Awful Is the Place” (and I’m with you on that one, sister). If you marry, you will have to take the same account of her spiritual growth and vibrancy as you take physically for your own heart or pancreas function.

You’re not necessarily predestined to heartbreak. If you’ve counted the costs laid out above, if you’re able to receive one another in the gospel, if you’re able to be unified in your church life and your child-rearing, if Aimee’s willing to follow cheerfully, if Calvin’s willing to lead self-sacrificially, then I now pronounce you husband and wife. Wait, that’s not what you asked me to do.

I wish you both happiness and joy, and love. Tongues, they will cease (1 Cor. 13:8), and so will the arguments about when tongues will cease. But “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13).

By that I mean to ask, have you noticed how abstract and ethereal so much of our Christian rhetoric is on virtually every topic?

Some Christians rattle on and on about “The Family” while neglecting their kids. Some Christians “fight” for “social justice” by “raising consciousness” about “The Poor” while judging their friends on how trendy their clothes are. Some Christians pontificate about “The Church” while rolling their eyes at the people in their actual congregations. Some Christians are dogmatic about “The Truth” while they’re self-deceived about their own slavery to sin.

I think that’s a tendency for most of us, in some way or another. We affirm all the right things, whether in Christian doctrine or Christian practice, even fight with one another about them. But it’s all just up there in the abstract. These things are “issues,” not persons.

“The Family” never shows up unexpected for Thanksgiving or criticizes your spouse or spills chocolate milk all over your carpet; only real families can do that. “The Poor” don’t show up drunk for the job interview you’ve scheduled or spend the money you’ve given them on lottery tickets or tell you they hate you; only real poor people can do that. “The Church” never votes down my position in a congregational business meeting or puts on an embarrassingly bad Easter musical or asks me to help clean toilets for Vacation Bible School next week; only real churches can do that. “The Truth” never overturns my ideas and expectations; only the revelation of God in Christ does that.

As long as “The Family” or “The Poor” or “The Church” or “The Truth” are abstract concepts, as long as my interaction is as distant as an argument or as policy, then they can be whoever I want them to be.

The Spirit warns us about this. Jesus lit into the Pharisees for “fighting for” the Law of God while ignoring their financial obligations to their parents, all under the guise of their religious advocacy (Mark 7:10-12).

And James, particularly, shows us the difference between “fighting” for a cause, and loving people. “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” (James 2:15-16). “Be warmed and filled” is advocacy; “get in here” is love.

If our love is for invisible people, is it any wonder they’re dismissing an incredible gospel?

I suppose that’s because I’m right now in my hometown where I’m experiencing a lot of that. I walk down the beach and the salt air takes me back to my childhood. I walk into an old independently-owned drugstore (and there aren’t a lot of them) and it smells just like it did when I was running back to the comic book turnstile as a six year-old. I visited my home church the other day and it smells just like it did in 1976, a combination of new carpet fiber and old lady perfume.

The neurologist explained the diversity in how Americans experience this. He pointed to studies that show that Americans everywhere tend to be made nostalgic by the smell of baked goods. But, beyond that, “people from the East coast describe the smell of flowers as making them nostalgic for childhood. In the South it was the smell of fresh air, and in the Midwest it was the smell of farm animals. On the West coast it was the smell of meat cooking or meat barbecuing.”

The neurologist said that studies also show that smell nostalgia has everything to do with when you were born, not just where.

“For people born from 1900 to 1930, natural smells made them nostalgic for their childhood—trees, horses, hay, pine, that sort of thing. People born from 1930 to 1980 were more likely to describe artificial smells that make them nostalgic for childhood—Playdoh, Pez, Sweet Tarts, Vapo rub, jet fuel.”

Percy’s father and grandfather both ended their lives in suicide. The writer who is, arguably, best considered to be Percy’s literary heir, John Kennedy Toole, was dead by his own hand before Percy ever read the manuscript of his then-unpublished genius comedy, Confederacy of Dunces.

Percy’s writings are filled with a sense of melancholy, a melancholy that critics often tie together with his so-called “existentialist” themes.

But, twenty years ago, Percy went to be with his Lord, as a Christian bearing the ravages of sickness—not as a suicide statistic. Why?

Others have sought to argue that the difference for Walker Percy was medical or sociological or even historical (he didn’t bear as directly the regional loss of honor that came with the South’s defeat in the Civil War or the global loss of innocence that came with World War I). These probably all—in God’s providence—played a role, but more significant, I think, is Percy’s Christian appropriation of the interplay between life and death, hope and despair.

“Death makes honest men of all of us,” says a character in one of Percy’s novels. “It makes people happy to tell the truth after a lifetime of lying.”

Perhaps it was Percy’s lifetime exposure to death—as a childhood victim of suicide and as a doctor trained to serve bodies in progressive bondage to decay—that enabled the writer to speak honestly about the cultural and spiritual suicide all around us.

Much of what we see around us today Walker Percy already wrote about, because he saw them coming from his little room in Covington, Louisiana, long before they arrived. Current debates over embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and the attempt to bio-chemically alter human nature through medicines designed to numb sadness and to deaden guilt, they’re all there in Percy’s fiction. Thanatos Syndrome-like scientists are still feverishly at work in the search for a chemically-accessible Eden. Environmental degradation, political polarization, it’s all there in Percy.

And yet, Percy’s apocalyptic writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, sounds so much different than the faux-apocalypticism of so much contemporary Christian “culture war” rhetoric. It’s direct, yes, about human sin and human guilt. He wasn’t writing to raise money from those who would love to have a “your future is bright” imprimatur for the way things are.

But there’s a hopefulness there. Part of that is because Percy was writing for the human conscience, not to raise direct-mail money from the outraged.

But, more than that, I think Percy’s distinctiveness is partly because he always saw himself as a statistic that didn’t happen. Percy didn’t regard himself, like the praying Pharisee in Jesus’ story, as “above” the temptations he saw destroying his neighbors, and even his most loved ones. Percy walked, and wrote, as one who had received grace.

Perhaps it is appropriate for those who loved his life and work to thank God for giving us such a quirky prophet. Perhaps this month, twenty years after his death, would be a good time for those of us who have been shaped by Percy’s writings to give a copy of one of his books to a younger Christian. By my lights, The Moviegoer is the best of Percy’s fiction, and Signposts in a Strange Land is the best collection of his essays. The collection of letters between Percy and his best friend, the unbelieving but brilliant historian Shelby Foote, is also a good place to start to understand Percy the man.

Read some Percy. Then thank God for the good doctor’s reminder to us that even when there is a wasteland everywhere around us, there is love in the ruins still.

Some conservatives, and some conservative evangelicals, act as though “environmentalism” is by definition “liberal” or even just downright silly. Witness a lot of the evangelical rhetoric across social media on Earth Day a while back: mostly Al Gore jokes and wisecracks about cutting down trees or eating endangered species as a means of celebration.

Do some environmentalists reject the dignity of humanity? Yes. Do some replace the reverence for creation with that due the Creator? Of course. This happens in the same way some do the same thing with reverence for economic profit or any other finite thing.

There’s nothing conservative though, and nothing “evangelical,” about dismissing the conservation of the natural environment. And the accelerating Gulf crisis reminds us something of what’s at stake.

The incoming tsunami of oil isn’t just about the beaches, although that will be environmentally and economically catastrophic. Just as problematic is the creeping of the oil into the inland estuaries and marshes and waterways. The crisis could potentially destroy the eco-systems of birds, shrimp, oysters, and other lifeforms.

Does God care about baby shrimp? I would argue, yes; God cares for the sparrow that falls to the ground (Matt. 10:29). But, even if you disagree with me on that, consider how God loves those who are “of more value than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:30).

Shrimpers here in Biloxi are mourning the potential loss of more than just an industry but a way of life handed down, at least to some of them, from multiple generations before them. If shrimping collapses, so does tourism, apart from the in and out predation of the casinos dotting the shoreline.

Just as significant, though, are the ways the balance of ecology affects people in ways we never consider or notice, until it’s threatened. God gave his image-bearing humanity dominion over the natural creation (Gen. 1:28). But this isn’t a pharaoh-like dominion; it’s a Christ-like dominion. Humans aren’t made of ether; we’re made of Spirit-enlivened mud. We come from the earth, and we must receive from the earth what we need to survive, in the form of light from the sun, oxygen from plants, and food from the ground.

God knows that we need the natural creation (what we so reductionistically call an “environment”). He exults in it throughout the Psalms and in his speech to Job about his mysterious ways. Jesus continually retreats into the silent places of the mountains and the hills and the deserts, sometimes in the fellowship of only the wild beasts (Mark 1:13). We are built to recognize God in the creation (Rom. 1:18-21), and we need more than just what we can pave over and build in order to flourish.

This is why the Scriptures speak of eternal life in the metaphor of a river that causes the waters to teem with life, with many kind of fish, and vegetation thriving on the banks (Ezek. 47:9-12). This is why one aspect of Jesus’ kingship is to make the waters teem with fish, right in the presence of his commercial fishermen disciples (John 21:3-8), And this is why the Scriptures consider it an apocalypse when the waters are poisoned, and the sea-life is gone (Rev. 8:8-9).

We need the creation around us, including the waters and all they contain, because we are not gods. We are creatures who thrive when we live as we were made to live. We exercise dominion over the creation not only when we use it, but also when we conserve it for the generations who will come after.

So pray for the Gulf Coast, that the oil wouldn’t devastate a people and a land already devastated by so much. As you do, remember: real conservatives protect what God loves.

A Gospel That Will Get You Arrested: Preparing Our Children to Be Persecuted (Acts 25:22-26:8) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “A Gospel That Will Get You Arrested: Preparing Our Children to Be Persecuted” (Acts 25:22-26:8), was originally preached on Sunday, April 25, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Dear Dr. Moore,

We are a couple thinking about whether we should marry. We love each other, and we love Jesus. We’ve been dating a while now, get along great, and everyone in our lives thinks we are made for each other. We agree, except for one thing.

One of us is a longtime member of a conservative evangelical (some would say “fundamentalist”) Bible church. The church is five-point Calvinist in the way it understands salvation, baptistic in the way it understands the church, dispensationalist in the way it understands the end-times, and definitely is not charismatic in any way in understanding the Holy Spirit. This one of us (just call me “Calvin”) agrees with my church’s doctrine. The doctrines of grace are really important to me in the way I understand God’s sovereignty in salvation, and in every aspect of my life, but I’m not one of those guys who beats every one over the head with Reformed theology.

One of us is a longtime member of an Assemblies of God church, and a convinced Pentecostal. I (just call me “Aimee”) speak in tongues, privately and sometimes in church services. I’m not an “evangelist” for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and I don’t think speaking in tongues makes a person any more holy or mature than any other Christian. I just think that’s what the Bible teaches. I also think salvation is a free choice, and that somebody can choose to stop being a Christian and, then, lose his salvation. That’s what my boyfriend says makes me a “five-point Arminian,” although I’d never heard that language before.

In case you misunderstand, we’re not arguing about this. It almost never comes up. We talk a lot about Jesus and a lot about the Bible, but, probably out of love for each other, we don’t bring up speaking in tongues, miraculous healing, or predestination! Here’s our question: should we marry?

We know it’s not right to marry an unbeliever (we agree on that part of 1 Corinthians!). But is it okay to marry a fellow believer in another denomination? If we do marry, should we continue to go to our separate churches? Is that unsubmissive of Aimee to follow her conscience to be in a church that doesn’t, as she sees it, “forbid to speak in tongues” (1 Cor. 14:39)? And when there are children, what should we do then: raise them in the Bible church or in the Pentecostal church, or carry them back and forth?

We really love each other, and want to be married. We also want to do what is honoring to the Lord and we don’t want to marry if it’s wrong or if it will hurt the other. We both are really interested in what you’ll have to say.

Quizzically Yoked, Calvin and Aimee

In this talk, I tell our students why I believe there is a single, very public Second Coming of Jesus, after the final “shaking of all things” in tribulation. I also tell them why I love the folks who disagree with me on that (including the people who led me to Christ). And, finally, I tell them I’m happy to be wrong.

Dear Dr. Moore,

My wife has been hurt horribly by a secret no one knows but her parents and me.

Years ago, when she was shortly out of high school, she was brutally raped by a man she had known since childhood. For various reasons, she didn’t report it at the time (I know that was a mistake, and she does too). The man later raped again and, ultimately, committed suicide. After her rapist’s death, it started to be known in our small hometown that he had done this before, many times, including the molestation of minor children. That’s in the past, but we’ve got a real ethical dilemma in our present and in our future.

This rape resulted in a pregnancy. During this time, she and I started dating and we were both convinced (and still are) that abortion is wrong, so she carried her baby to term. We married, and have raised this child together. He is nine years-old. He’s gentle, loving, and a delight to me. I couldn’t love him any more if I were biologically his dad. He recently professed faith in Jesus and was baptized.

Here’s my problem. He doesn’t know. I know from reading Adopted for Life that you think children should know about their adoption from the very beginning. Whether you’re right or wrong, that’s just not what we did. He only knows me as his Dad. Maybe even more important, we just don’t know how to tell him he was conceived in rape.

I don’t think a nine year-old could understand that. I’m not sure he’ll ever be able to understand that, without it shaping the way he thinks about himself. Might it even lead him to think that he’s genetically “predisposed” to that kind of behavior himself (whether rape or suicide or whatever)?

So here’s my question. Is it my Christian obligation to tell my son about the circumstances of his birth or is it my obligation to protect him from that knowledge? If I do need to tell him, at what age and how?

In Christ,

Agonized Dad

Dear A.D.,

I am sorry to hear of this horrible hurt that your family, particularly your wife, have been through. This won’t be easy. Here’s what I think your ethical obligations are.

You’re to pattern your fatherhood after another, an already existing eternal Fatherhood of God (Eph. 3:15). But our Father in the heavenly places also adopted his children after a horrific tragedy (Rom. 8; Gal. 4; Eph. 1). Model your parenting of your son through this after the way our Father has parented us.

Yes, you must be honest. God honestly speaks to his children about the circumstances of their backgrounds, whether back there in Ur or back there in Egypt or back there in the “power of the air.” You must not hide this from your son. Imagine what it would be like if he were to find this information out from someone other than you. He would then wonder whether everything in his life is fraudulent and illusory.

Having said that, you must not “exasperate your son” (Eph. 6:4) with knowledge he can’t handle. A nine year-old lacks the maturity to understand this horror in its fullness.

Our Father God doesn’t tell us everything he has to say to us as soon as he announces the gospel after the Fall (Gen. 3:15). He speaks for thousands of years “in many times and in many ways” until finally in “these last days” he speaks to us in Christ (Heb. 1:1-2). It isn’t until the “fullness of time” that God reveals the mystery of Christ in a way not known to the previous generations of prophets (Gal. 4:4; Eph. 3:5). But God did, in all those times, reveal Christ. When we received the full revelation of the mystery, everything else he said tied together in Christ.

You must do the same, preparing your son to be able to see himself apart from the circumstances of his conception.

I’d start by, as the years go by, telling stories about children who came from an evil parent or an evil situation. Take time to find these themes, and not just in Bible stories (Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker will do, if that’s what your son likes), and teach the truth of Scripture that one isn’t biologically determined toward his forefathers’ sin. Point out all the evil and treachery in Jesus’ family line, evil and treachery that didn’t implicate him in the least.

In your son’s life, show him all the ways he resembles you, and tell him why: because a son learns to be like his father by watching his father (John 5:19).

Start out, very soon, by telling your son, when you tell him his adoption story, that he was born after a lot of hurt and a lot of pain, but that God brought good (your son) even out of some of the most tremendous times of hurting. You don’t need to go beyond that, for now. But start showing your son how God continually brings blessing out of curse, even out of sin.

When you determine that your son has the maturity to receive this knowledge, tell him. Expect him to be hurt by this news. There is no easy way to take it, for all kinds of reasons. Honor your wife in this. Show your son what a hero she was in protecting and loving her son. Point out all the ways he is like her.

Assure him that, despite the human horror of his conception, he’s not an accident. God watched out for his mother, and for him, by seeing to it that he would have a father who would love him and raise him.

And then tell him what your Father has told you in Christ: “You are my beloved son, and with you I am well pleased.”

Do you have an ethical question? Send it to me at questions@russellmoore.com. I’ll keep it anonymous and change all the identifying details.

Happy Daze: How to Avoid Apostolic Christianity, and Never Really Miss It (Acts 24:22-27) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Happy Daze: How to Avoid Apostolic Christianity, and Never Really Miss It” (Acts 24:22-27), was originally preached on Sunday, April 18, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Reclaiming Our Testimony (Acts 21:37-22:31) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Reclaiming Your Testimony” (Acts 21:37-22:31), was originally preached on Sunday, April 11, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Good News for Future Corpses (Col 3:1-4) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Good News for Future Corpses” (Col 3:1-4), was originally preached on Sunday, April 4, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

And I want to cry.

The news reports are appalling, to be sure. A grandmother in Tennessee reportedly placed a child adopted from a Russian orphanage on a plane bound for the former Soviet Union, sending him back because the family allegedly said they couldn’t deal with his disturbed emotional state and alleged potential for violence. The Russian government and the Russian people are outraged, and want to see to it this will never happen again.

There are several things Christians ought to keep in mind and, more importantly, in prayer here.

First of all, we should pray for this child, and for his family. We, of course, don’t know much about this situation beyond what we see in the news, but that’s enough to know this is a catastrophe. It is horrific any time a child is orphaned. It is even more horrific when a child is twice-orphaned.

There is no defense, and no excuse, for the actions this family took. If there were emotional or behavioral problems, there are legitimate mechanisms in place to work through those things with the assistance of counselors or social workers, even through the agency by which the family was formed in the first place.

We should also pray, and pray fervently, that God would change the hearts of the Russian government officials, that they would not allow this tragedy to further harm the already endangered orphans of Russia.

Sadly, this American family’s actions may well have catastrophic implications. This case, along with one or two others, has given impetus to a nativist Russian nationalism already uncomfortable with international adoption.

At one level, I can understand this. Imagine if the United States collapsed into a hodgepodge of independent and impoverished states and American children were being adopted by citizens of a Cold War triumphant USSR. Add to that, a high profile case of this kind of neglect, and this impulse can be whipped into a frenzy.

The stakes are high. Families who were poised to be formed through adoption are now suddenly on hold, in a “diplomatic limbo” of waiting. “An estimated 3,500 Russian children are in some stage of the adoption process with 3,000 American families,” reports the New York Times, citing the Joint Council on International Children’s Services.

The very fact that this horrible situation is getting such coverage all over the world right now is precisely because it is such an anomaly. There have been more than 50,000 U.S. adoptions from Russia since 1991, with adopting parents carefully screened and the Russian government receiving reports back from the post-adoption home studies. The stories of abuse are rare, much rarer than domestic abuse rates in virtually any country.

It would be quite different if there were a vibrant adoption culture in the former USSR. This is not the case. Adoption is extremely rare in Russian culture. The very few families who adopt, and children who are adopted, are often stigmatized.

The leftover effects of Communist materialism matched with the instability of the new economy have resulted in a skyrocketing abortion rate along with orphanages filled with abandoned infants and
children. The children who are not adopted languish in these orphanages until they are old enough to be thrown out, defenseless, into society, where they often find few options beyond the Russian military, prostitution, or suicide.

The Russian orphanage where my wife and I found our sons, then Maxim and Sergei, was the most heartbreaking place I have ever been. Its sights and smells and sounds come back to me every day.

But, even more so, before my mind’s eye every day are the faces of the children we couldn’t adopt. The little girl who peered around the door frame every day as we visited our then-future sons in their room. What happened to her? What will happen to those like her, and like my sons, who are waiting now for homes and families, someone to love them and feed them and hug them?

Until now, my hope has been that Christians from America, Canada, Germany, France, or somewhere may have adopted them, to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. If the anti-adoption Russians get their way, I fear that these children will be sentenced to institutions, never to find families.

There are other Maxims and Sergeis, sitting day and night in cribs somewhere in Russia. Let’s pray that the Russian people make the right decisions for them. And let’s pray for the providence of the One who promises to be a Father to the fatherless. This situation isn’t just a human interest tragedy. And it’s not just a foreign policy issue.

Russia’s orphans aren’t foreigners to those of us who’ve been adopted into the family of Christ. They’re Jesus’ little brothers and sisters (Matt 25:40). He won’t forget them.

And neither can we.

My television’s going to stay off for awhile. I don’t want my boys to overhear this horrible scenario and wonder if, God forbid, they might ever be put back on a plane to Russia. I don’t want them to know, yet, that they live in a world so dark that such things can happen. Maybe you could turn your television off too, just for a little while, and pray for the orphans of Russia.

In his “Pastoral Ponderings” email, Reardon notes the Apostle John’s mention in his resurrection account that the kerchief which had been on Jesus’ face “not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself” (John 20:7). Reardon writes:

“That instant of the Resurrection of Jesus was the most decisive moment in the history of the world. It was the event of deepest importance for every human being who ever lived. It was the supreme kairos. The Law and the Prophets were fulfilled in that moment, and the existence of the human race took on an utterly new meaning.

“What, however, was the first thing Jesus did when the Resurrection life came surging into His body? The simplest and plainest thing imaginable: He reached up, pulled the kerchief from His face, folded it, and set it aside, as though it had been a napkin used at breakfast.”

Reardon concludes by writing this:

“The universal Christ, the eternal Word in whom all things subsist, was still the same Jesus, to whom an act of elementary neatness came naturally. He spontaneously did what He would likely have done in any case, much as another man might unconsciously scratch his ear, or yet another look around for a stick to whack the weeds with as he walked along.

“The risen Lord was the same Jesus His friends had always known. He had just returned from the realm of hell, where He trampled down death by death. He was on the point of going forth as a giant to run His course. He was about to begin appearing to His disciples, providing them with many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.”

“Nonetheless, He was still the same person, whose instinctive habits remained identical. First, He took a moment to fold the kerchief He had used, and only then did He stride out to change the direction of history and transform the lives of human beings.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever given any thought to the face kerchief in that empty tomb before. But this word prompted me to pray, and to thank God for a Messiah who is not just Christ but Jesus. He is a Person, with practices and habits. He can be known.

Praise be to God for the Christ of the folded napkin.

So writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in the concluding chapter of his massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The history ends with a chapter on “culture wars,” the ways Christianity is experiencing change and tumult as it enters the twenty-first century. In the conclusion, MacCulloch traces out many of the controversies one might expect: from the challenges to Orthodoxy in a post-Soviet world to the Anglican sexual debates to the American fights over abortion and secularism and liberalism.

One of the primary changes in Christianity the historian sees, however, would probably surprise most Americans as being a “culture war” issue at all: cremation and burial.

Increasing rates of cremation in the West, MacCulloch writes, are surprising because cremation “is the abandonment of a key aspect of Christian practice since its early days.” MacCulloch demonstrates that a primary feature of the early Christian church was as “burial club.” He shows how “universally archaeologists are able to detect the spread of Christian culture through the ancient and early medieval world by the excavation of corpse burials oriented east-west.”

The historian also shows the roots of contemporary cremation in protest against historic creedal Christianity, including, in its modern form, by Italian liberal nationalists.

MacCulloch, no conservative, establishes that the unanimous voice of the church, in every sector, was for burial over against cremation, and concludes the traditionalist case (that cremation is a pagan practice inconsistent with historic Christianity) is “unanswerable.”

For MacCulloch, there are several implications of the skyrocketing cremation rates. The first is that the theological and doxological claims against it, once held with unanimity, are not even discussed by cremation proponents. Arguments instead focus on public health, cost (and I would add the American evangelical response: “why not?”).

“The removal of a corpse’s final parting from a church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to a crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death” is a liturgical evolution of massive proportions, MacCulloch suggests.

Moreover, he argues, cremation also has profound doctrinal implications.

“Death is not so much distanced as sanitized and domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society,” he writes. “The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’ve written here in Touchstone and here in Christianity Today about why I oppose (with the twenty centuries of the great cloud of witnesses) the practice of cremation, and here (again in Touchstone) about why burial is so essential to Christian witness.  I’m not interested (right now) in re-debating that. I just find it interesting that this new history marks out the cremation move as a significant shift. I agree.

Sometimes the “culture wars” that really matter aren’t the ones you’re screaming about with unbelievers in the public square; they’re the ones in which you’ve already surrendered, and never even noticed.

Problem is, death seems normal to us. Darwinian naturalism, along with most contemporary philosophies, assumes that death is the natural ending point to life. The Christian gospel insists otherwise, seeing death as an alien invader of the cosmic order, a curse from the Edenic fall, and a strategy of an enemy spirit to crush God’s image-bearing humanity (Heb. 2:14-15).

In Scripture, death is personified as itself an enemy, indeed the final enemy to be placed under the feet of a triumphant King Jesus (1 Cor. 15:24-26).

Death in all its forms, from animal predation to “natural” disasters to “old age” expiration, all point to the cold truth that God is not ruling the cosmos through his human mediators in the way he intended at the start.

In the present age, all people still grow old, get sick, and die. There is a sundering of the body from the soul, a violent act that tears at God’s original creational purpose of breathing his life into the man of the dust (Gen. 2:7). When a man dies, his flesh reverts back to the dust of the earth, a seeming contradiction of God’s creation.

There is one Man, however, who does not owe death as the wages of sin. He cannot be accused by the ruler of this age, because He alone has an untroubled conscience before the tribunal of God. He’s not a corpse anymore.

The resurrection of Jesus is the first wave of a counter-revolution that will turn back death’s tyranny and satanic rule forever.

Death isn’t natural at all.

Skull Place: Curse and Blessing in the Gospel of Christ (Gal 3:10-14) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Skull Place: Curse and Blessing in the Gospel of Christ” (Gal 3:10-14), was originally preached on Sunday, March 28, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

In the resurrection account of John, the apostle includes these words of our Lord, right after Jesus reveals himself to Mary as resurrected: “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (Jn. 20:17).

Stop reading this, and just think about that for a minute.

Jesus’ first words as a resurrected man weren’t about theology. They weren’t about philosophy. They weren’t the cerebral doctrinal formulations some of us like, or the practical “life tips” others of us prefer. He wasn’t talking about predictions of the end of the age, or denunciations of his enemies, or even the canonical context of resurrection.

Instead, his first words were about sending this beloved woman, his sister, on a mission to tell something to his “brothers.”

Those words are being formed by a tongue that only days earlier had stuck to the roof of his mouth in dehydration as he screamed out for his Father. Those words are coming through teeth that days earlier were scraping together as they were pummeled by Roman fists. Those words are spoken by a mouth that just hours before was a mass of dead tissue, discarded in a Middle Eastern hole in the ground. Hear what he says.

Remember: these men he calls “brothers” were at that very moment sniveling in exile. They were, at best, cowards and, at worst, passive insurrectionists against the kingdom he’d proclaimed. They were hiding in a room somewhere, listening for soldiers’ feet. They’d walked away from Christ and him crucified. They were ashamed of the gospel.

But he wasn’t ashamed of them.

Jesus calls them his “brothers,” a word the Old Testament Scriptures refers to as the fellow people of God, one’s kinsmen by blood and by covenant. He speaks of his Father as their Father, his God as their God. These unfaithful and fearful disciples, so quick to return to the fisherman’s nets where Jesus found them in the first place, had no reason to approach a holy Creator as their God, much less to call him “Father.” After all, they’d abandoned his purposes, his plan, and, above all, his Son.

But Jesus keeps the story he’d told them earlier of the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to search out for that one wandering animal. I bet they never dreamed they’d be the one, and not the ninety-nine.

They (and we) are Jesus’ brothers. And, if so, then his Father is our Father; his God is our God. He is not ashamed.

But that’s hard to believe, especially for folks who are wrestling with the memories of their own failures and disappointments, maybe from fifty years ago or maybe from a split-second ago.

This Easter season take time to remember what those words must have sounded like from a grave-triumphant Christ, and how liberating they are two thousand years later. Jesus took on everything from blushing skin to firing adrenal glands to sweating pores to a dying gasp because he “had to made like his brothers in every respect” (Heb. 2:17).

And, speaking of us, our Lord Jesus—the only One in the universe with the natural-born right to cry out “Abba”—is “not ashamed to call them brothers” (Heb. 2:11).

Ultra-modern blood tests and pre-modern vampire myths get at something the Christian Scriptures already tell us about reality: The life is in the blood. Immediately after walking off the Ark into a new creation, the patriarch Noah is commanded not to eat the blood of animals, blood that is said to be “the life of the flesh” (Gen. 9:4).

The seriousness with which Yahweh takes blood is carried over into the Mosaic Law, in which God warns the Israelites against the eating of blood. He tells them the blood is “the life” of the animal, and thus is to be treated as holy, and that blood is to be handled reverently since it is the means of atonement (Lev. 17:10–16). This prohibition is no mere “shadow” of Israelite ceremony.

It is repeated in the Jerusalem Council’s instruction to Gentile believers as an “essential” (with abstaining from fornication) of Christian practice (Acts 15:28–29).

Blood in Scripture carries with it the implication of morality, of dependence on the life-giving of Yahweh. After the Fall, righteous Abel approaches God not through vegetation—the result of the human vocation to till the ground—but through the veil of bloodied flesh, the recognition that all is not as it is intended to be (Gen. 4:1–7).

When Abel is felled by his brother, his blood is said to cry out from the field itself (Gen. 4:10). When the Holy One of Israel wishes to remind Pharaoh that he is a man and not a god, he turns Pharaoh’s life-giving Nile River into blood itself (Ex. 7:17–25).

The Apostle John sees the same judgment on a self-worshiping humanity, content to revel in its independence from God. The waters they so need become blood before them (Rev. 8:8).

Moreover, the New Testament insists that in the Incarnation, Jesus shares with us more than our body type. He shares with his brothers “flesh and blood,” the very essence of human nature (Heb. 2:14–15). It is not just that Jesus once had a blood type; he still does.

The blood of Jesus is everywhere present in the New Testament as a reminder of precisely what our horror films and AIDS education films and Darwinian nature documentaries already intuit: that life is a bloodbath. The Old Testament is built on rivers of animal blood, mounds of blood-drained carcasses.

But not simply a bloodbath; all these scenes point toward the ultimate Passover Lamb, who will approach the heavenly places not with the blood of goats and bulls, but with his own blood (Heb. 9:12). The intercession of Christ, and the life of his Church, isn’t simply about a set of doctrines or an ethical mandate. It all comes down to blood.

Christians sometimes see John 6 as a text to be avoided due to its divisiveness. Evangelicals don’t want to sound “too Catholic,” and Catholics don’t want to end up in another discussion of whether the body eaten and the blood drunk refer to the Mass or to faith in Christ. This is an important question, and one about which we should continue to contend strongly with one another.

But let us not lose the shocking nature of Jesus’ call to the crowds at Galilee. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” Jesus says (John 6:53), not just to a generic mob but to those trained from childhood not to eat even the blood of meat.

Jesus offends us with our own blood—reminding us that what runs through our veins will one day run cold—and telling us that in order to live, we must be united to the lifeblood of another, a blood spilled for rebels like us.

Songs like “Power in the Blood” or “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” or “Are You Washed in the Blood?” are still sung in some places, but fewer and fewer, and there aren’t many newer songs or praise choruses so focused on blood. The Cross, yes; redemption, yes; but blood, rarely. We’re eager to speak of life, but hesitant to speak of blood.

And this is not only a Protestant phenomenon. Roman Catholics—centered as they are on the Eucharist—often seem to go out of their way to speak of the “real presence” of Jesus in the elements, without going so far as to mention that this presence is believed to be that of his body and blood, as well as soul and divinity. Even Catholic communion hymns, I’m told, prefer terms like “the Cup” to “the Blood.”

The eclipse of blood in American Christianity has quite a bit to do, I suspect, with American prosperity.

The “blood medleys” once so popular in Evangelical hymnals evoke something of the blue-collar, socially marginalized origins of conservative American Protestantism. To sing “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb” often seems too much of a reminder to upwardly mobile suburban professionals that their religion has “redneck” roots. (A Catholic writer suggests that this is also true of the reaction to traditional Catholic piety in the suburban churches filled with the successful descendants of immigrants.)

At the same time, these churches want to relate the gospel to a non-Christian culture. Often, we do so by being as antiseptic as possible: with gleaming restrooms and shiny foyers, with churches designed to look like malls, complete with information booths and coffee kiosks. We assume that making Christianity clean and bright will remove the sting of offense from the gospel.

More “sophisticated” churches avoid the subject of blood, although less sophisticated ones retain enough of the old ways to talk about blood but also to trivialize it. T-shirts ape beer commercials (”This Blood’s For You”) or the tattoo culture (“My Life Was Saved by Body Piercing”).

Some of this is the result of the lingering sting of liberal Christian hostility toward a “slaughterhouse religion.” Some of it is the result of an age that fears blood, but doesn’t know why. Some of it is the result of our ignorance, as we think that “blood” is just another metaphor, one we can easily replace.

And yet, bloodless Christianity leaves a void. Could it be that the lack of emphasis on blood in Evangelical Protestant churches at least partially explains why Baptists and Methodists and Pentecostals who otherwise would have little to do with Roman Catholic imagery found themselves openly weeping in movie theaters as they viewed The Passion of the Christ? Did they need to remember that “with his stripes we are healed” (Is. 53:5)?

Our embarrassment over the bloodiness of Christianity often results in blood atonement being presented in our catechism and discipleship of believers in an attenuated, abstract sort of way. Less and less often do ordinary believers hum to themselves songs about the blood of Jesus. Less and less often do small children memorize Scripture passages about the blood of Christ.

We assume that we first convince unbelievers to follow Jesus—and then we explicate the meaning of his blood, when we think they’re ready for this specialized theological knowledge. But how do we address consciences indicted by the ancient Accuser of Eden—some of them tortured by the knowledge that they have shed innocent blood themselves—without pointing them to the only means of conquering him, “the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 12:10–11)?

We assume that we teach young Christians how to live, to abstain from sexual immorality and greed and pugilism, before we move to something as seemingly arcane as blood sacrifice. And yet, Scripture assumes that personal morality is built on the knowledge that we were bought “with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:19).

We assume that we build “community” in our churches before we address something as raw and potentially alienating as the shedding of blood. And yet, the community we share—bearing with all of one another’s faults and transcending our petty ethnic and cultural prejudices—comes only through the recognition that we share a common condemnation as sinners, but, as we will still confess to our Christ in the heavenly places, “you were slain, and with your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). Shared life is based on shared blood.

Even the vampires in our popular fiction know that. That’s what makes our bloodless Christianity all the more ironic. We believe we’re more in tune with unbelievers around us, but they’re talking constantly about blood, from pharmaceutical advertisements to horror films, from vampire romance novels to AIDS and DNA testing.

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century revivalist tradition gave the Church a valued psalter of “blood medleys.” Some of them could be done better musically and lyrically, and some even theologically. But let us never be embarrassed by our emphasis—in song, in public prayer, in evangelism, in discipleship, and in preaching—on the blood of Jesus.

There is power—wonder-working power—in the blood. Our culture already sees that. They’re simply looking in the wrong veins.

The March 22 issue of Towers has a bit of a twang in its tune. The most recent issue of the Southern Seminary newspaper spotlights country music, including its relationship to the Southern Baptist Convention; its impact on, and reflection of, American culture; and connections to the country music world. Below is an interview on country music I did with Jeff Robinson.

How long have you been a country music fan?

Russell D. Moore: I have always listened to country music. Probably my earliest memories are of being in the living room with my parents and grandparents listening to an eight track with a compilation of the best of the Grand Ole Opry. I listened to that eight track all through elementary school, high school and college. When the eight track wore out it was a major loss. One of the best gifts anyone has ever given me was when my wife, Maria, just a few years ago, found the LP of that album and had it transferred onto a CD. Now I have that on my Ipod. It has everybody from Chet Atkins to Kitty Wells to the Carter family.

Besides that, country music was all over our house and our community in south Mississippi. I have always liked country music, but I kind of kept quiet about it (when I left Mississippi) because I was going off into the big wide world. I was in Washington, D.C., listening to George Jones, but nobody ever knew what was playing in my earbuds, so eventually, I just said, “I am who I am.”

Who are your favorite country artists and why?

Moore: I love Merle Haggard. He has an honesty about him that led Johnny Cash to say once, “You have lived the life that I have pretended to live.” Haggard really has lived a life of pain and there is a great deal of honesty and character that comes through in what he has to say.

I like George Jones. I think Jones is a unique song writer and as a vocalist is inimitable. I like Loretta Lynn. Some musicians of any genre tend to write songs when they are younger and then play and perform throughout their career the songs they wrote when they were young, but Lynn, by contrast, continues all through her career to come up with good new songs. On this relatively new album, Van Lear Rose, she has this song, “I Miss Being Mrs. Tonight,” about losing her husband. It is a powerful, haunting song. Lynn is a complicated musician in a lot of ways and has a life story that is rooted in music.

I like the Carter Family, Ralph Stanley, of course Johnny Cash for the whole span of his career. I like Kris Kristofferson’s songwriting, but don’t like him as a singer. One of my favorite albums is Willie Nelson sings Kris Kristofferson. I like Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Charlie Pride is one of my favorites. He is a fellow Mississippian. I like Hank Williams; it’s hard to get better lyrical poetry than “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Of the newer artists, I like a lot of Alan Jackson’s stuff and I also like Brad Paisley.

What is it that draws you to country music?

Moore: Number one, country music is rooted. I’m not talking about the new stuff, but the old country music. There is a Nashville sound and a Bakersfield sound that has really been lost in American culture. Everything is just kind of homogenized. Don Williams sings, “Good Old Boys Like Me” and he sings, “I learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news.” All of American art is moving in that direction of having a sameness and people who aren’t from anywhere.

Country music is not like that. There are unique regional sounds and there also is an autobiographical lyrical experience in country music, so that Lynn is singing as a coal miner’s daughter and Cash is singing as a man in black. In some other forms of music, there’s more of a branding. In country music, at least in the genuine article, it’s really not; it is really a recognition that a life is a narrative and I like that.

Theologically, what might Christians find attractive about country music?

Moore: Country music recognizes sin and redemption even from people who are lost. Many of these artists are lost, but they are lost in a different kind of way. Country music tends to bypass, at least a little bit, self-justification. Whereas in some other genres of music you can have sin consistently glorified with no consequences, country music rarely does that. There is a lot of singing about sin but it is always sin that has some hope of redemption or some recognition of judgment - the sowing and reaping and consequences.

Somebody asked me one day, “How can you listen to people singing who you know use drugs and participate in drunkenness?” Because people use drugs and people get drunk and country music, with some exceptions, is recognizing the full complicatedness of sin. Think of “Ring of Fire” (by Johnny Cash) for instance. June Carter Cash is writing this talking about adultery kind of on the front end of adultery. This isn’t a glorification of adultery; it is a real representation of what adultery feels like - “bound by wild desire, love is a burning thing” - I think that is authentic.

I think a Christian ought to be able to resonate with that because it is formed out of at least a memory of something that came from Scripture. I think the way love is presented in country music is very different from pop music, which is adolescent hormonal (love) only. People joke about country music being a bunch of songs about how my woman left me and there is a lot of that in there. But there is also a lot about middle-aged and elderly people in love. You will never find a top 40 song about elderly people in love or about elderly people falling out of love, but in country music you do have that and I think that’s the way it ought to be. In pop music, what you typically have is, “I want to love you all night long,” or “I’m going to love you forever,” but it’s kind of abstractly forever. Country music is more, “We can’t make the house payment, but we’re going to stay together until we are dead.”

On one hand, George Jones sings “Wrong’s What I Do Best” and he’s right, and then on the other hand, Hank Williams sings, “I Saw the Light.” Both sin and grace seem to abound in country music. Do you think country music has both of them mostly right?

Moore: I don’t have any evidence that Hank ever knew the Lord, but he seemed to halfway want to know the Lord. In “I Saw the Light” and in his Luke the Drifter stuff, you have a longing for redemption. It’s almost Augustine (saying), “give me chastity, but not yet.” You see what redemption is, but you know that you’re not ready for it. I think that’s present in country music. If somebody could just understand what is going on in, “I Saw the Light,” or if they could just understand how Willie Nelson can sing Amazing Grace and then move right into “Whiskey River,” I think they would be much more missiologically-equipped than they are by listening to happy-clappy Christian music.

Americans are said to live within a contradiction in which a deep religiosity exists alongside a fairly pronounced ethical Antinomianism and many see country music as reflecting that paradox. Do you agree with that?

Moore: Yes, but I don’t think it’s American, I think it’s Southern Baptist. Most of the country music that we hear is coming from a person who has either been redeemed through a Southern Baptist version of Christianity or damned by a Southern Baptist version of Christianity. So, all of the best aspects of Southern Baptist “Just As I Am” revivalism are present in country music - the idea that no one is too far for redemption, the idea of new beginnings, being born again - all those are present in country music. But you also have the carnal, “Jesus is my Savior but not my Lord,” unregenerate person, keeping the hypocrisy hidden under the church attendance — all that is present too. Even from artists who are not Baptists, but are growing up in a Bible Belt South, where, as one sociologist put it, “Baptists are the center of gravity,” we (Southern Baptist culture) created country music for both good and for ill.

How has country music affected the SBC and how has the SBC affected country music?

Moore: When you look at the trajectory of country music as coming out of the South, it became more and more commercial and more and more “showy” and consumerist. So did the SBC. Whether there is a direct link or whether common cultural factors were impacting both the Grand Ole Opry and the SBC remains to be seen, but both follow a similar trajectory. County music started as a group of people who were largely despised as ignorant hillbillies and rednecks, but who are playing the music that arises out of their experience and speaking to that experience. Country music was not even welcomed in Nashville at the beginning; the cultural elites of Nashville hated the idea of being identified with country music because they saw it as backward. But country music spoke so well to the experience of common people, that it became commercially viable and then commercially profitable and the more commercially profitable it became, the more mainstream it became in the culture and the more mainstream it became in the culture, the more like the rest of the culture it became and the more then it was shaped by that commercial success.

The SBC has the exact same trajectory. It starts with a group of people who are cut off from the established churches, seen as backward, but able to speak to common people with the simplicity of the Gospel, and able to speak so well that the SBC becomes successful. The more successful the churches become, the more consumerist and elite they become and the less powerful. Why do people like to listen to Cash on American VI or American V when he is singing, “Hurt?” It’s because it is a dying man. You don’t see a strong, sober picture of a man facing death. Instead you have the authenticity of somebody whose voice is raspy and who is dying. The difference between Cash and Rascal Flatts is the difference between a prophetic, marginalized Baptist witness and the slick packaged product of Southern Baptist success.

Bloody Words (Acts 20:17-38) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Bloody Words” (Acts 20:17-38), was originally preached on Sunday, March 21, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Dear Dr. Moore,

My wife has been hurt horribly by a secret no one knows but her parents and me.

Years ago, when she was shortly out of high school, she was brutally raped by a man she had known since childhood. For various reasons, she didn’t report it at the time (I know that was a mistake, and she does too). The man later raped again and, ultimately, committed suicide. After her rapist’s death, it started to be known in our small hometown that he had done this before, many times, including the molestation of minor children. That’s in the past, but we’ve got a real ethical dilemma in our present and in our future.

This rape resulted in a pregnancy. During this time, she and I started dating and we were both convinced (and still are) that abortion is wrong, so she carried her baby to term. We married, and have raised this child together. He is nine years-old. He’s gentle, loving, and a delight to me. I couldn’t love him any more if I were biologically his dad. He recently professed faith in Jesus and was baptized.

Here’s my problem. He doesn’t know. I know from reading Adopted for Life that you think children should know about their adoption from the very beginning. Whether you’re right or wrong, that’s just not what we did. He only knows me as his Dad. Maybe even more important, we just don’t know how to tell him he was conceived in rape.

I don’t think a nine year-old could understand that. I’m not sure he’ll ever be able to understand that, without it shaping the way he thinks about himself. Might it even lead him to think that he’s genetically “predisposed” to that kind of behavior himself (whether rape or suicide or whatever)?

So here’s my question. Is it my Christian obligation to tell my son about the circumstances of his birth or is it my obligation to protect him from that knowledge? If I do need to tell him, at what age and how?

In Christ,

Agonized Dad

Post your responses to this question below. If you have an ethical dilemma, send it to me at questions@russellmoore.com. I’ll protect your anonymity, may change some details or merge it with other similar questions into a single case study.

That’s not in the Bible.

But sometimes I wonder if I think it is.

The United States House of Representatives just passed a health care reform bill that I and lots of other Christians opposed. Such legislation should concern us. There are some bad consequences for the weakest and most vulnerable among us, principally unborn children. But should it also concern us that so many of us are talking today about how afraid we are?

Is it a problem that some of us who are tranquil as still water about biblical doctrine and ecclesial mission are red-faced about Nancy Pelosi and the talking heads on MSNBC? Is it a problem that some who haven’t shared the gospel with their neighbors in months or years are motivated to vent to strangers on the street about how scary national health care will be?

It’s not that I think Christians should be disengaged from issues of justice (God forbid!). It’s just that I wonder if we wouldn’t represent Christ and his kingdom better if we did it with a certain tranquility of Spirit, a tranquility that signals we’re not afraid of the rise and fall of temporal kingdoms and their policies.

The words “do not fear” and “don’t be afraid” are among the most common phrases on the lips of our Lord—in both Old and New Testaments—and on the lips of his angelic messengers. I wonder why?

Isn’t it because “perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn. 4:18)? Isn’t it because we “did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear” (Rom. 8:15)? Isn’t it because the Spirit prompts us not to “fear anything that is frightening” (1 Pet. 3:6)?

In fact, the Holy Spirit through King David, in a context far more frightening than that of our own, calls us to “fret not yourself because of evildoers” who will soon pass but “trust in the Lord and do good” (Ps. 37:1-3).

Here’s why this matters.

Most of us don’t preach “hellfire and brimstone” sermons anymore, on hell and God’s judgment. But hellfire is exactly what Jesus said we should fear. “And do not fear the ones who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” our Lord tells his disciples. “Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).

Jesus not only teaches this; he lives it. Jesus doesn’t fear the crowds attempting to stone him. He doesn’t cower before Pilate. He isn’t afraid of the Sanhedrin. He’s confident and tranquil, even when he’s being arrested. But when he faces drinking from the cup of judgment of his Father, he sweats drops of blood.

If we were half as outraged by our own sin and self-deception as we are by the follies of our political opponents, what would be the result? If we rejoiced as much that our names are written in heaven as we do about such trivialities as basketball brackets, what would be the result?

So if what you’re afraid of is a politician or a policy or a culture or the future of Western civilization, don’t give up the conviction but give up the fear. Work for justice. Oppose evil. But do it so that your opponents will see not fear but trust, optimism, and affection.

“So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13).

Fear God and, beyond that, don’t be afraid.

Too Quiet a Riot: Why It’s Good News When Your Idols Fight Back (Acts 19:21-40) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Too Quiet a Riot: Why It’s Good News When Your Idols Fight Back” (Acts 19:21-40), was originally preached on Sunday, March 14, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

In his volume, St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Washington University in St. Louis, lays out a compelling portrait of Patrick, the theologian-evangelist. In accomplishing this, Freeman attempts to reconstruct Patrick’s cultural milieu—that of a world that had “ended” with the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. This collapse of Roman power had unleashed savagery in the British Isles, as thieves and slave-traders were unhinged from the restraining power of Caesar’s sword. Patrick’s ministry was shaped by this new world, not least of which by Patrick’s capture and escape from slavery.

Freeman helpfully retells Patrick’s conversion story, one of a mocking young hedonist to a repentant evangelist. The story sounds remarkably similar to that of Augustine—and, in the most significant of ways, both mirror the first-century conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Freeman helpfully reconstructs the context of local religion as a “business relationship” in which sacrifice to pagan gods was seen as a transaction for the material prosperity of the worshippers. Against this, Patrick’s conversion to Christianity was noticed quickly, when his prayers of devotion—then almost always articulated out loud—were overheard by his neighbors.

The rest of the narrative demonstrates the ways in which Patrick carried the Christian mission into the frontiers of the British Isles—confronting a hostile culture and institutionalized heresy along the way. With this the case, the life of Patrick is a testimony to Great Commission fervor, not to the Irish nationalism most often associated with the saint. As a matter of fact, Freeman points out that Patrick’s love for the Irish was an act of obedience to Jesus’ command to love enemies and to pray for persecutors.

This biography gives contemporary evangelicals more than a pious evangelist to emulate. It also reconstructs a Christian engagement with a pagan culture, in ways that are strikingly contemporary to evangelicals seeking to engage a post-Christian America.

Patrick’s context was a Celtic culture deeply entrenched in paganism, led by the native earth religion of the Druid priests. This is especially relevant in an era when pseudo-Celtic paganism is increasingly en vogue in American and European pagan movements. Freeman sweeps away the revisionist historical claims of the Druid revivalists: there was no “golden age” of equality among the sexes within the Druid cult, for example. Instead, Freeman shows that Patrick’s Christianity actually brought harmony among the genders with his teaching that women were joint-heirs with Christ.

Any evangelical seeking to kindle a love for missions among the people of God will benefit from this volume’s demonstration that the Great Commission did not lie dormant between the apostle Paul and William Carey. Patrick’s love and zeal for the Irish may also inspire American evangelicals to repent of our hopelessness for the conversion of, say, the radical Islamic world—which is, after all, no more “hopeless” than the Irish barbarians of Patrick’s era.

Dear Dr. Moore,

I am a young single Christian woman. I made a commitment at a very young age to remain sexually chaste, and I’ve done so. I have dated other boys, but always just in groups in a very casual setting. Now, however, I am seeing a young Christian man who seems great in every way. We have dated for about a month, and I really like him. He treats my family (my father is deceased but my mother and sisters live near me) great, and all my friends like him.

Here’s my question. I am wondering what his sexual past looks like, in order to know what I’m getting into. Has he been with other women, sexually? If so, how many and in what way? Has he ever had a problem with pornography? With every week that goes by, I’m more and more in love with him, and I’m afraid to keep getting my hopes up only to have them dashed when we’re right at the point of marriage.

I’m not saying that any particular information would necessarily kill the relationship, but I’d sure like to know something about this to know what I’m getting myself into. It sure seems awkward, though, to say, “So tell me about your sex life?” Would that be forcing too much intimacy too soon? Is it right for a woman to be so forward with a man who’s not her husband? Do I ever need to know this?

My question: should I ask him about his past? If so, how should I ask it, and at what point in the relationship?

True Love Waiting

Dear True,

First of all, I agree with you that this is something important for you to know, should this man become your husband. His body and his sexuality, the Bible says, will belong to you (1 Cor. 7:4). Moreover, the sexual union is not, whatever our broken culture might try to think, simply a neurological or even emotional response. The sexual union, mysteriously, forms a personal union (1 Cor. 6:16). Your husband’s “past” will, in a very real sense, become part of your story too.

Having said that, though, this question can be very dangerous for you, at this point. As you seem to recognize, dating is about discerning whether someone would be a good prospect for marriage. I’ve seen several budding relationships wrecked by a “DTR” (”define the relationship” talk) about such matters that formed, prematurely, an inappropriate emotional intimacy.

I do not think, at this time, you need to delve into the details (or lack thereof) of his past. What’s important for you to know is how he views sexual immorality. A man who will brush off past fornication as “no big deal” from which he’s “moved on” is a man with a conscience trained to do the same thing with future adultery.

I would recommend asking this man what his convictions are about protecting himself, and his future marriage, from sexual immorality. You might ask him how he would counsel his son to flee pornography or other forms of immorality. I think you’ll be able to gauge a lot from the wisdom and gravity (or lack thereof) he displays.

As the discernment process continues, though, your need to know further will expand. By that time, you will know more about the character and trajectory of this man.

There’s a really critical peril here though.

On the one hand, a man who glibly dismisses his past immorality is dangerous, for your future marriage and your future children.

On the other hand, your dismissing him automatically on the basis of immorality is also dangerous. If he is repentant, seeing his past sin as hell-deserving but crucified, then you should receive him (all else being equal), just as you have been received.

You are not “owed” a virgin because you are. Your sexual purity wasn’t part of a quid pro quo in which God would guarantee you a sexually unbroken man. Your sexual purity is your obligation as a creature of God. And you have rebelled at other points, and been forgiven. If you believe the gospel, you believe the gospel for everyone, and not just for yourself.

If your future husband is repentant, and forgiven, and yet you are “tortured” by the thoughts of his past, then the issue for you is one of personal pride and a refusal to see oneself as a gospel-forgiven sinner.

The issue for you with your future husband is discerning whether there are ongoing patterns, whether he agrees with God about the severity of this sin, and whether he has been cleansed from it by Golgotha Hill blood and Garden Tomb power.

Jesus was a virgin. His Bride wasn’t. He loved us anyway.

Do you have an ethical question? Send it to me at questions@russellmoore.com. I’ll keep it anonymous and change all the identifying details.

This sermon, “You Are Not Your Worldview: Finding the Freedom to Let the Faith Defend Itself” (2 Corinthians 4:1-6), was originally preached at Alumni Chapel at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Thursday, March 4, 2010.

Great Commission Humility, Great Commission Power (Acts 18:24-28) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Great Commission Humility, Great Commission Power” (Acts 18:24-28), was originally preached on Sunday, February 28, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

If I had to give a theme to the weekend, the theme would be “freedom,” a concept that is increasingly important to me. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, the Apostle Paul tells us, there is freedom (1 Cor. 3), and there was a sense of gospel freedom everywhere here, and in all sorts of ways.

Here’s what stood out to me from the weekend (in no particular order):

1.) Being with people I love, co-laborers in the orphan care movement, and listening to what God is doing. We’d sit at tables, all of us with children we’ve adopted, and talk about some of the peculiar challenges that come to adopting families. Then we’d listen to one another about what we’re seeing as needed work in the area.

At one point, I sat at the table and looked at Dan Cruver and Justin Taylor and Jason Kovacs and Maridel Sandberg and Tera Melber and Timothy Jones and so forth and so on, I thought about how much I love each one of these people and their ministries. It is evident in all these faces that God is doing something remarkable for the sake of the children of the world.

The unity of the Spirit was very evident. Many of us are quite different, different personalities, different churches, different theological nuances. The mission of Christ for the least of these, though, brought us together. That was glorious.

2.) Praying for one another, and for orphans and families and churches. On Friday night, the chapel floor here was filled with people on their knees, seeking the face of God, with brothers and sisters laying hands on them and praying. People hugged one another, encouraged one another, and (to that point) total strangers cried as they prayed for new friends.

I was able to pray with people who are infertile and grieving, with people who are thinking about whether God is calling them to adopt, with people who are discouraged about the prospects of starting orphan ministries. One man sought prayer in repentance for being an orphan maker, having abandoned his wife and children years earlier through divorce.

There was a freedom in prayer. It wasn’t “habbity-habbity-habbity, in Jesus name, Amen.” Broken people and hopeful people were crying out “Abba.”

3.) Andrew Peterson. Andrew Peterson is my second-favorite Christian musician, right after Michael Card. He still is, despite the fact that he made fun of country music right to my face, on Johnny Cash’s 78th birthday. He made up for it by wearing the “CASH” T-shirt I gave him the second day of the conference. I cannot overestimate how much I resonate with Andrew’s emphasis on Christ-shaped imagination, a theme that pours through his music. His rendition of “The Good Confession (I Believe)” always leaves me in tears, reflecting on how the gospel got from the white rocks of Caesarea Phillip to the blue carpet of Woolmarket Baptist Church, for me and in time.

4.) Lizette Beard. Lizette works for Ed Stetzer at LifeWay Research. She was in my first class I ever taught at Southern Seminary. She was adopted when she was a baby, and gave her testimony. Trust me; when the audio comes out, you will want to hear this. Lizette is one of the most gifted communicators I’ve ever heard. Everyone loved her presentation, especially adoptive families (and I’m including Maria and me) who were encouraged not to try to be “perfect.” Many people asked me after if she has “video series” and other such resources. LifeWay, you are missing an opportunity if you don’t unleash this gift! She’s got a lot to say, and she says it really, really well.

5.) Spending time with David and Heather Platt. Maria and I love the Platts, are grateful for what God is doing with them at Brook Hills, and thoroughly enjoyed talking about the joys and challenges of raising ex-Soviets in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. David’s sermon (on Ruth and Naomi) was jaw-rattling powerful. His and Heather’s humility and “normality” even more so.

6.) Working with my colleagues Dan Dumas, Jeff Dalrymple, and Robbie Sagers. Without any of these guys the conference never could have happened. And I’ll admit, I was a doubter. I said from the very beginning, “This is the first year, we’ll have twenty people. Let’s just meet in my office this time.” I was amazed to see the chapel packed with people singing and laughing and praying together. The conference was organized as expertly as any I’ve ever seen, with the events planning team pulling it off with excellence and Christlikeness. And Dan Dumas is a phenomenal crowd-motivator. We had a memorable time serving together, like nothing I’ve experienced in years.

7.) Secret conversations. One of my favorite things about the conference were all the “Nicodemus stage” folks I’d talk to. These are people who just aren’t sure about adoption or foster care or orphan ministry. They’re intrigued but not yet there. Some of them have one spouse who is there, and another who is not. For many of these folks, AFL2010 was a “safe place” where they could talk to people they may never see again and just “check it out” and pray. I think God is going to bless that.

I am thankful for brothers and sisters I love who worked so hard with me on this conference. And I’m thankful for all the men and women and children I now know and love as a result of this past weekend. I came home, and cried with thanksgiving that God is good enough to me to let me participate in this.

Dear Dr. Moore,

I am a young single Christian woman. I made a commitment at a very young age to remain sexually chaste, and I’ve done so. I have dated other boys, but always just in groups in a very casual setting. Now, however, I am seeing a young Christian man who seems great in every way. We have dated for about a month, and I really like him. He treats my family (my father is deceased but my mother and sisters live near me) great, and all my friends like him.

Here’s my question. I am wondering what his sexual past looks like, in order to know what I’m getting into. Has he been with other women, sexually? If so, how many and in what way? Has he ever had a problem with pornography? With every week that goes by, I’m more and more in love with him, and I’m afraid to keep getting my hopes up only to have them dashed when we’re right at the point of marriage.

I’m not saying that any particular information would necessarily kill the relationship, but I’d sure like to know something about this to know what I’m getting myself into. It sure seems awkward, though, to say, “So tell me about your sex life?” Would that be forcing too much intimacy too soon? Is it right for a woman to be so forward with a man who’s not her husband? Do I ever need to know this?

My question: should I ask him about his past? If so, how should I ask it, and at what point in the relationship?

True Love Waiting

Okay, readers. What do you think? And, one more thing, how would your answer differ to her, if at all, if she were a man and the roles here were reversed?

Philippi Prison Blues: Finding Freedom in Gospel and Mission (Acts 16:25-34) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Philippi Prison Blues: Finding Freedom in Gospel and Mission” (Acts 16:25-34), was originally preached on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

How, he wondered, could I support this kind of adoption when I am opposed (and I am, strongly) to in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor assisted reproduction, and other technologies that violate the one-flesh union and the relationship between love and procreation. The same thing, he argued, is going on here with a donor embryo being implanted in an adopting mother’s womb.

First of all, there is no such thing as a “donor embryo.”

Someone can donate sperm or ovum or even a heart or a liver, but no one can “donate” an “embryo.” No one can “own” an “embryo.” An “embryo” isn’t a thing; he or she is a “who.” Our Lord Jesus is the pinnacle of the image of God (Heb. 1:1-3). He was an “embryo” (Luke 1:42-43). The “embryonic” John responded to our Lord’s “embryonic” presence in precisely the same way he responded to his adult presence on the banks of the Jordan River.

These so-called “snowflakes” are brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus are stored in cryogenic containers in fertility clinics as the “extras” of IVF projects. They already exist, and they already exist as persons created in the image of God.

And there are Christians called to adopt them, to bring them to birth through pregnancy, and to raise them in love. To be sure, the numbers of children who can be adopted in this way are a microscopic percentage of the whole. And the numbers even of those who can be safely brought to birth is even smaller.

Isn’t this simply an embrace of the kind of “Brave New World” Frankenstein technology we elsewhere lament?

No.

Adopting parents are not complicit in the “production” (I shudder to type such a horrible word in reference to a human creature) of these children. Again, the children are already conceived. The adopting parents are no more endorsing the technologies involved than parents adopting from an unwed mother are endorsing fornication or adultery.

Embryo adoption also doesn’t carry with it the violence to the one-flesh union that comes with surrogacy or sperm donation, in which one spouse’s genetic material is joined with a stranger’s.

Embryo adoption would be problematic if the adoptions themselves became a further commodity in the buying and selling transactions of the reproductive technology business or if these adoptions were a widespread incentive for couples to justify the decision to “create” and freeze additional embryos. This is not, though, presently the case and doesn’t appear to be likely to become so anytime soon.