The story told in this song is one of working class despair, and one of boredom—one that leads people to all kinds of methods of escape. Whether it’s “Mama hooked on Mary Kay,” or “Daddy hooked on Mary two doors down,” the cycle of life for these people is itself like a merry go ‘round—it’s just the same thing over and over again.

And yet, what is at the root of all this boredom?

Listen with me to this song, as we discuss where this boring nihilism comes from, and how the gospel can undo it.

I think it’s important, though, to consider how both the Calvinist and Arminian streams in Christian life bring important emphases together when it comes to one of the most important questions of our time: religious liberty.

John Leland was a Baptist evangelist in the revolutionary era, who agitated Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to include constitutional guarantees of religious liberty. He railed against the Anglican state churches, with their restrictions on gospel preaching. He did so for theological reasons. At one time, he defined his theology as one that preaches “the doctrines of sovereign grace with a little of what is called Arminianism.”

I think both traditions, and the in-between place, have some things to contribute to our defense of a free church in a free state.

Many of our early Baptist forebears were thoroughgoing Arminians, defining the freedom of the human will in libertarian terms. These include such heroes as Thomas Helwys, who fought against the government’s mistaken belief that it could overrule the conscience.

Sometimes people caricature Arminians, and those who share some convictions with them. The Arminian tradition doesn’t believe that the human will is naturally free in this fallen era. They believe that God graciously empowers human beings with the freedom to choose. In fact, much of what some Christians call “Arminianism” is instead the sort of manipulative, emotional revivalism they’ve seen or heard about somewhere. Arminians are, above all people, opposed to manipulation.

They believe, after all, that the human will must make a free decision to follow Jesus or to walk away. That means a clear presentation of what the gospel entails, with all the “cost-counting” that Jesus tells us about. This must be a personal, free decision, and can’t be outsourced to or vetoed by some emperor or bishop or bureaucrat.

The Arminian tradition in Baptist life is committed to religious liberty because of their commitment to free decision. Because God has created every conscience free, they say, no church or no state can compel someone to act contrary to conscience. This is an important point, that ought to serve as a reminder even for those who don’t agree on the theological details.

After all, all Christians, whatever our theological system, affirm that all of us will stand in judgment. We will have no government agency, no denominational entity, standing there with us. We will stand with our consciences, and we can stand only with one Advocate, one Mediator. With that the case, no government has the authority to impede God’s purposes in readying us to give an account on that day.

The Calvinist tradition also has much to contribute to religious liberty. While many in the Reformed tradition have had an awful record when it comes to soul freedom, from Geneva to the Puritan colonies of New England, the same is not true in the Calvinistic wing of the Baptist tradition. Many, including the English Particular Baptists and American Calvinist Baptists such as Isaac Backus were stalwart defenders of religious liberty. Why?

Well, like the Arminians, Calvinists are easy to caricature. Some assume they believe the will is like a computer program operated by God, or that the gospel isn’t freely offered to all people. Evangelical Calvinists believe in the free offer of the gospel to all people, just as they believe in the universal command of the law of God. They believe that, left to ourselves, we will all run away from the law and we will all run away from the gospel. We see the light of Christ, and we hide because, in our sin, we don’t want to meet our God.

The Calvinist doctrine of effectual calling means that the Spirit works through preaching to overturn the power of the devil, to liberate our wills so that we can see the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ. God doesn’t overpower our wills; he frees us from occupation by the deceiving demonic powers.

This too has religious liberty implications, that again all Christians, even those who disagree on the theological details, should affirm. The Spirit convicts of sin; Caesar doesn’t. That means one can’t coerce faith into being or out of being with the threat of punishment, regardless of whether one is an Islamic ayatollah or a secularist parliament.

Some Baptists and other Christians agree with the Arminians more on the “how” questions of salvation. Some Baptists and other Christians agree more with the Calvinists. Lots of others are somewhere in the middle. We all agree on the “what” questions of salvation and the “why” questions of salvation. Most importantly we all agree on the “who” question of salvation: Jesus Christ crucified.

We will seek to search the Scriptures on everything God has told us. But we’re not that far apart. And even when we disagree, we can listen to the important emphases that each tradition brings, emphases that are grounded in God’s word and God’s gospel.

We all believe in God’s sovereignty and we all believe in human freedom, though we differ on the qualifications of both. But when the government tries to be the ultimate sovereign, or to coerce free consciences, we know to stand against that, and for another kingdom, together.

In this episode of the “Moore to the Point” audio program, I welcome bioethicist Jennifer Lahl, the founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network to discuss this difficult issue. Mrs. Lahl is an expert when it comes to surrogacy and is a winsome voice for how to think about ethical issues from a biblical perspective.

I think this bill is bad for women, and bad for kids. Commercial surrogacy severs procreation from the one flesh union. Commercial surrogacy also commodifies women and children. There are some things that shouldn’t be for sale, and the womb is one of those things. Women and children aren’t objects to be commercialized, but persons to be respected.

I hope that Governor Jindal vetoes this bill. In the meantime, the issue of surrogacy has given Jennifer Lahl and I the opportunity to talk about a broader question: How do our churches deal with infertility in a way that responds both to the hurt of infertile couples and also to the ethical implications of fast-changing technologies?

Listen to the program, and let us know how you think our churches should address the ongoing biomedical revolutions.

Five years ago today my oldest son, Benjamin, was born. Five years ago on June 19th my middle son, Timothy, was born. I missed both days. I didn’t send out any “It’s a Boy” notices. I didn’t deliver flowers to my wife. I don’t even know what I was doing on those days in May and June of 2001, except probably writing away on my dissertation. It’s not that I was a deadbeat dad five years ago. I just wasn’t a dad. I missed my sons’ births because I didn’t know they were born.

As a matter of fact, five years ago today a baby was born but his name wasn’t Benjamin. It was Maxim. Five years ago a few weeks from now, another baby was born but his name wasn’t Timothy. It was Sergei. The two of them languished in a Russian orphanage for over a year until the Lord directed our steps to their nursery door and on to the Russian courthouse where we adopted them, and changed their names.

This morning Benjamin came bounding down the stairs, jumping up and down with excitement that he is now five. He and Timothy couldn’t go to sleep easily last night. We could hear them chattering upstairs in their bunkbeds about a birthday cake, presents, Steak and Shake, and Chuck E. Cheese. But all I could think about was that first birthday, the one I missed. I don’t know what Benjamin and Timothy looked like when they were born. I don’t know whether anyone held them, or whether they were just washed and placed in a filthy crib. I don’t know what their newborn cries sounded like.

But I do know that five years ago I was feeling sorry for myself. After years of infertility and miscarriages, it was only my faith, not my sight, that told me that God was for me and not against me. I probably prayed that day for the gift of children, maybe while I was ordering coffee and writing another rough draft of a dissertation chapter. Little did I know that my prayers were being answered, despite my lack of trust in my Father.

I have written and preached elsewhere about what becoming father to Benjamin and Timothy taught me about the doctrine of adoption. But, on these fifth birthdays, I’m also keenly aware of what the Scripture tells us about the relationship between adoption and suffering. Even as Paul instructs the Roman congregation that they have inherited the spirit of adoption, he reminds them that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom 8:18).

Five years ago I didn’t know that the greatest joys of my life were already here, and yet not quite here. I didn’t know that the Lord was using the suffering of an empty cradle to teach me what it means to love two sons more than I ever would have known possible. Perhaps I need to be reminded of that when I allow the worries of the present age to overshadow the glory that is to come. Perhaps I need to be reminded that while I bemoaned my situation five years ago, my children were waiting all the while. And, right now, as I consider the worries of the present age, there’s an empty tomb in Jerusalem, the first installment of the glorious kingdom of Christ.

I love Benjamin Jacob Moore and I love Timothy Russell Moore. I don’t love them any more than I love Samuel Kenneth Moore (who some might clinically call a “biological” child). But in my love for these two, I sense something more of the Father’s love for me. They once were lost, but now they’re found.

Tonight you won’t find me in my library or behind a pulpit. You can find me at Steak and Shake, and at Chuck E. Cheese. You can find me watching one thrilled little boy open up his presents (Don’t tell him but it’s a bow and arrow set), while another little boy wonders aloud how many more days until he opens his. And if you notice that plastic birthday hat on my head, just know: that’s my theologian’s cap. It has taught me more about my God than the tasseled, formal hat on my shelf ever has.

Happy birthday Benjamin and Timothy. I missed the first one. But I’ll never miss another.

In his new (and groundbreaking) intellectual biography of Abraham Kuyper, historian James Bratt examines Kuyper’s interaction with the challenges of modern secularism, especially in his later travels abroad, including to the United States. Kuyper recognized a loss of authentically Christian identity in the so-called “Christian” countries of Europe and North America.

As a theologian, a church leader, a newspaperman, and an elected official who had served in Parliament and as Prime Minister, Kuyper had a wide-angled lens on cultural forces. Kuyper saw two “lords” at work in the spirit of the age around him, contesting the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The first lord, Bratt explains, was Mammon, which he defines as “a thorough absorption in getting and spending within the horizon of the material world.” Kuyper saw this form of idolatry as worse than the golden calf of Israel’s wilderness folly. The calf, after all, was an unapproved image of God, but contemporary worship of Mammon entailed “the displacement of God altogether,” in the quest for more as a religion all its own.

The second lord was more intriguing to me: Art. Kuyper recognized the organic connection between art and religion, both for good and for ill. This creative impulse still attracted a “spiritual aristocracy” seeking a “small mystical oasis” in the “materialistic wilderness.” Kuyper’s point here is strikingly prescient. After all, what gives a sense of transcendence and even communion in the postmodern era if not the arts, especially music and film?

After we have disenchanted nature, seeing beauty but without an overarching Logos behind it, we can still recognize creativity and teleology in art. And in recognition of this beauty, we can find a sense of communion with one another.

Bratt writes that Kuyper saw the dangerous combination of “Art as captured by Mammon.” Here the two combined to a “commercialized, lowered, prostituted, feeding the mass compulsion for excitement, excess, and the erotic.” In this, Bratt contends that Kuyper was hitting close to explaining the contemporary rise of Madison Avenue as a cultural force, “the marriage of Art and Mammon that is commercial advertising.”

Here’s where Abraham Kuyper has something to say to Don Draper.

Mad Men is successful for many reasons, the first of them being that it features compelling human stories compellingly told. But, behind that, there’s a captivation with something that explains our predicament. Don Draper doesn’t just sell illusions; he is one. He is living with a stolen identity, and a secret past. He is driven to success, Mammon, and he does so by his vast creativity, Art.

The end result is an emptiness that he seeks to fill with forbidden sex and dangerous substances. This isn’t just a bad life; it’s a disappointing religion. Resources and creativity with no ultimate goal lead to a hollow man without meaning.

This is true not only personally but corporately. Don’s firm chases the opportunity to create ads for a car company. When they do, the clashing egos and ambitions lead to a Darwinian struggle, leaving the band of creatives red in tooth and claw.

Kuyper’s warning is a good one, and not only for our fictional television anti-heroes. When we have dismantled every authority over our lives, we are left often to the authority of those who pretend not to be authorities at all. They sell to us what we crave, promising us dominion without limit, and they let us think that it was our idea all along.

In the end, the high places of Canaan and of Madison Avenue leave us falling alone. We become mad, and we dwell among a people of mad men. But it needn’t be this way.

Resources and creativity have meaning, and they are good. Abraham Kuyper was right to teach us this, that the image of God is a cultural force. Our resources  and creativity are meant to make us Christlike, servant rulers with a mission larger than ourselves, larger than the universe itself.

Left to their own, money and creativity are very jealous gods. But, if we listen, behind them, behind every square inch of them, we can hear a Galilean voice whispering “Mine.”

By that, I don’t mean whether your church has a position on the definition of marriage, or whether your people are ready to express their opinions or vent their outrage on social media or talk radio. All that’s easy. The question is whether our churches are ready to create marriage cultures that matter, regardless of the cultural moment.

In a few weeks, my denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, will gather in Houston for our annual meeting. If you’re coming, you’re invited to a special conversation about reclaiming a marriage culture in troubled times, sponsored by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

I’ll be joined by my friends, pastors David Platt and J.D. Greear, women’s ministry leader Susie Hawkins, and Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. We’ll talk about how you can get your congregation ready to think through the next fifty years of discipleship on marriage.

I have argued for years that our churches aren’t an embassy of biblical ethics in a land of sexual revolution. The embassy is aflame, and the sexual revolutionary flag is waving atop our consulate. We’ve surrendered on marriage in too many ways: on its permanence, on fidelity, and even too many times on its nature rooted in sexual complementarity. Just because we’re not marrying two grooms or two brides, yet, doesn’t mean we’re standing firm on marriage.

We’ll talk about how to disciple people toward Ephesians 5, not toward a cultural ideal (even if that cultural ideal is “traditional”). We’ll talk about how to protect your church from religious liberty incursions that come along with marriage redefinition. We’ll discuss how to explain the changing cultural conversation to children and to teenagers. We’ll discuss how to preach these issues. And we’ll talk about practical matters your people will ask. Is it okay to attend a same-sex marriage since Jesus ate with tax-collectors? Should a Christian florist deliver flowers to such a wedding? What should we do about the divorces in our churches right now?

Join us in Houston at the George R. Brown Convention Center, on Tuesday, June 11 at 7:00 am, in the General Assembly Theater on Level 3. We’ll have breakfast, fellowship, and some good conversation. And maybe we’ll ignite something of a marriage revolution of our own.

Mother’s Day is a particularly sensitive time in many congregations, and pastors and church leaders often don’t even know it. This is true even in congregations that don’t focus the entire service around the event as if it were a feast day on the church’s liturgical calendar. Infertile women, and often their husbands, are still often grieving in the shadows.

It is good and right to honor mothers. The Bible calls us to do so. Jesus does so with his own mother. We must recognize though that many infertile women find this day almost unbearable. This is not because these women are (necessarily) bitter or covetous or envious. The day is simply a reminder of unfulfilled longings, longings that are good.

Some pastors, commendably, mention in their sermons and prayers on this day those who want to be mothers but who have not had their prayers answered. Some recognize those who are mothers not to children, but to the rest of the congregation as they disciple spiritual daughters in the faith. This is more than a “shout-out” to those who don’t have children. It is a call to the congregation to rejoice in those who “mother” the church with wisdom, and it’s a call to the church to remember those who long desperately to hear “Mama” directed at them.

What if pastors and church leaders were to set aside a day for prayer for children for the infertile?

In too many churches ministry to infertile couples is relegated to support groups that meet in the church basement during the week, under cover of darkness. Now it’s true that infertile couples need each other. The time of prayer and counsel with people in similar circumstances can be helpful.

But this alone can contribute to the sense of isolation and even shame experienced by those hurting in this way. Moreover, if the only time one talks about infertility is in a room with those who are currently infertile, one is probably going to frame the situation in rather hopeless terms.

In fact, almost every congregation is filled with previously infertile people, including lots and lots who were told by medical professionals that they would never have children! Most of those (most of us, I should say) who fit into that category don’t really talk about it much because they simply don’t think of themselves in those terms. The baby or babies are here, and the pain of the infertility has subsided. Infertile couples need to see others who were once where they are, but who have been granted the blessing they seek.

What if, at the end of a service, the pastor called any person or couple who wanted prayer for children to come forward and then asked others in the congregation to gather around them and pray? Not every person grappling with infertility will do this publicly, and that’s all right. But many will. And even those too embarrassed to come forward will be encouraged by a church willing to pray for those hurting this way. The pastor could pray for God’s gift of children for these couples, either through biological procreation or through adoption, whichever the Lord should desire in each case.

Regardless of how you do it, remember the infertile as the world around us celebrates motherhood. The Proverbs 31 woman needs our attention, but the 1 Samuel 1 woman does too.

A version of this commentary originally ran on May 5, 2011.

I want to live long enough to be a burden to my children.

I heard a Christian thinker I respect say that years ago, and it embedded in my mind, shocking as it is to our sensitivities. After all, isn’t this the shocking reverse of the received wisdom we hear, and say, all the time? Isn’t it selfish to want to be a burden to one’s children?

This sentence came to mind again this weekend when reading this article in The Guardian by Giles Fraser. Fraser writes that he is not enamored with the pain and indignity of death. But caring for others, and being cared for, is love. We are not “brains in vats,” he notes but persons who live in communities and families.

None of us want to be an undue burden to anyone, of course. I certainly wouldn’t want my children, when I’m elderly, to have to suffer in caring for me in the throes of dementia or cancer or paralysis. But when I peel that back further, in my case, the real issue for me is simple: pride.

I want to be the strong provider/protector/dignified image of myself as husband and father. I want to live on with the image in my loved one’s memories of me as in my prime. I don’t want the humiliation of having to be cared for in my weakness, or the fearfulness of having to trust someone else to attend to my needs. I want to be a man, but I don’t want to be a helpless baby in need of parents or a helpless elder in need of my children.

I’m not alone.

Simon Peter of Galilee was happy to serve his Rabbi and lord, Jesus. He was happy to preach and to heal and to cast out demons, to organize events and to camp out all over the countryside. In the fullness of time, he was willing to sword-fight anyone who tried to arrest his King. But when Jesus kneeled before him with a towel and water, Peter flinched. “You shall never wash my feet,” Peter said (Jn. 13:8).

This seems to be humility, doesn’t it? Peter doesn’t want his Messiah to serve him, but instead the reverse. But this isn’t humility. Peter doesn’t want the humiliation of being the served one rather than the server. He doesn’t want the indignity of his filth being seen and touched and washed away.

I’m the same way. I love being the answer to problems. But when I need other people, I am reminded that I am not alone. I am not the solution. I am not the Messiah.

That’s why God gave us a life-cycle, from dependence to dependence. We don’t pay our parents or interview them or recruit them. They are just there when we are born, and we are helpless. And, at the end, despite all our technology, there is something right about falling back on the kindness of friends and family, who are motivated not by our ability to pay them back but by love and fidelity and community.

And that’s why God gives us the church. No person is a church to himself, but is by definition in need of others, with gifts he or she doesn’t have. The church is an organism, a Body. Without dependence on others, we don’t have a Body but an organ in a jar, to be studied or collected or destroyed as medical waste.

In the Body of Christ, there are not people who have burdens and people who don’t. We are to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2). We are all a burden to be borne, just in different ways.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and go wherever you wanted,” Jesus told Peter, “but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go” (Jn. 21:18).

That’s humiliating. That’s pride-destroying. That’s the way of Christ. It was there for Peter. It will be there for me. It will be there for you. But it is not our path alone. Jesus himself went to the humiliation of the cross. He was a “burden” to his mother, who had to watch him drown naked in his own blood. He was a “burden” to the the owner of his borrowed tomb. He was a “burden” to his women friends, who anointed his dead, bloated, bloodied corpse with spices. Who wants one’s friends to see that?

He was no burden. He was loved. He is Love.

I hope my children never have to sacrifice for their father when I’m elderly. But, if they do, I pray I’ll be Christlike enough to crucify my pride and receive their love. And I pray that I’ll be learning to love, and to be loved, all along the way.

George Jones has died, and I am afraid a lot of people will think he was a hypocrite. George Jones was no hypocrite. He was the troubadour of the Christ-haunted South. The raw emotion, and even whispers of torture, in his voice can teach American Christianity much about the nature of sin and the longing for repentance.

Jones is easy to caricature as a hypocrite, to be sure. He performed some of the greatest songs in country music history. I would fight anyone, metaphorically speaking, who denies that “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is the greatest country song of all time, but Jones was known for more than his songs. His failed marriages, most notably from fellow country music star Tammy Wynette, and his life-long skirmish with substance abuse, were always in the headlines. Few people knew of George Jones who did not immediately think of the anecdote of his riding a lawn mower to the liquor store after the authorities, and his long-suffering wife, took away his freedom to drive a car.

Jones did what any public relations-savvy entertainer would do. He owned his brand. After fans were upset by a series of canceled shows, due to Jones’ drunkenness, he played up the image as “No Show Jones.” He sang light songs about drunkenness and divorce, such as “White Lightning” in which he referred to whiskey (in some live concert versions) as “Baptist corn squeezing.”

Jones and Wynette teamed up for several songs. He knew that most of his fans would identify “He Stopped Loving Her Today” with Wynette, always thought of in country music fans’ minds as the first couple of the Grand Ole Opry, right along with June Carter and Johnny Cash.

But Jones did not present a light picture of his frailties. His songs demonstrated that he did not think of these things as frailties at all, as our therapeutic culture would have us to do. Yes, Jones sang with a wink in his eye often about liquor and pills and loneliness and divorce, but then he would turn around and sing of these things as Hell. The raw emotion of Jones’ vocal chords communicated the anguish of a father who has lost his family in “Grand Tour,” as he takes a stranger through every room in the house, including the empty nursery where the baby of a broken home once lay.

Yes he could sing about alcohol in a playful song comparing his love to the smoothness of Tennessee whiskey, the sweetness of strawberry wine, but he would then sing of living his life “Still Doing Time” in a “honky-tonk prison.” He would sing honestly of his prison to alcoholism as a result of his broken relationships: “If Drinking Don’t Kill Me, Her Memory Will.” This is not a glorification of alcohol; it is the scratchings against the door of a man in pain.

Some may see hypocrisy in the fact that Jones sang gospel songs. The same emotion with which he sang of drunkenness and honky-tonking, he turned to sing of “Just a Little Talk with Jesus Makes Things Right.” He often in concerts led the crowd in old gospel favorites, such as “Amazing Grace” or “I’ll Fly Away.” But I don’t think this is hypocrisy. This is not a man branding himself with two different and contradictory impulses. This was a man who sang of the horrors of sin, with a longing for a gospel he had heard and, it seemed, he hoped could deliver him. In Jones’ songs, you hear the old Baptist and Pentecostal fear that maybe, horrifically, one has passed over into the stage of Esau who, as the Bible puts it, “could not find repentance though he sought it with tears.”

I’m not sure whether Jones sought repentance with tears, but he certainly sang of the longing for it with a quavering voice. In that sense, Jones communicated exactly what Flannery O’Connor wrote of when she spoke of a “Christ-haunted South,” a region with a ubiquitous gospel, but without the ubiquity of gospel power. Jones communicated what all of us, left to ourselves, seek to suppress. Life without Christ is leading us to a lonely grave. This is why of all of Jones’ corpus, I find most powerful his rendition of “The Cup Of Loneliness,” a song about Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane. This song still speaks to the hellishness of hedonism. I was struck a couple of seasons back when the television series Mad Men ended an episode about the dissipation about the same sorts of things Jones always sang about, with this song playing over the closing credits.

George Jones is dead. He stopped loving her today. They’ll place a wreath upon his door, and soon they’ll carry him away. That’s true. Call Jones a genius; he was. Call Jones honest; he was. Call Jones tortured; he was. Call Jones lonely; he was.

But don’t call him a hypocrite.

This post originally appeared at the First Things’”On the Square” blog. Cross-posted with permission.

This week Shai was in town, making his way through the country on The Black Out Circuit tour, and I couldn’t wait to have him in the studio. In this episode of “The Cross & the Jukebox,” Shai and I talk about the prosperity gospel, why it’s dangerous, and why it shows up in so many places, including in America’s theological export to the African continent. We talk about how the prosperity gospel isn’t just on TBN, but lurks within every heart, including too often mine and, I’ll bet, yours.

Listen to this episode of “The Cross & the Jukebox” and let me know about any songs that you would like us to examine in the weeks and months to come.

I need your help.

On June 1st, I will start as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Shortly thereafter, we’ll be unveiling a brand new podcast, dealing with cultural, social, and political issues from a gospel and kingdom perspective. This will be talk that seeks to get behind the issues to the deeper questions of the meaning of life and the mission of the people of God. That will mean talking about everything from human cloning to wedding ceremonies, from orphan care and religious liberty to Mad Men TV to hip-hop music.

Here’s where I need your help.

What should we call it?

I’ve got some ideas, since I like to title things. But I’ll bet you’ve got better ideas. Submit your top pick to title my new show here or email me at questions@russellmoore.com. The winner will get a cool reward and my permanent indebtedness of gratitude.

This sermon, “The Weight of Twelve Stones: Reflections on a Grateful Goodbye” (Josh. 4:1-24), was originally preached at Alumni Chapel at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Tuesday, April 16, 2013. This was Dr. Moore’s final chapel sermon as Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore here.

The song, part of Paisley’s new album Wheelhouse, has provoked controversy in media outlets around the country, with some suggesting the song is hokey and some suggesting it’s actually racist.

I don’t think Brad or LL are in any way racists of any sort. I just think the song awkwardly trivializes the real issues it raises, making it the musical equivalent of Michael Scott’s “diversity day” presentations on a rerun of The Office.

But I could be wrong. And that’s why I pulled in a pastor/scholar/author I respect, Thabiti Anyabwile. I love Thabiti’s work across the board, but I thought of him particularly because some of the issues raised in this song are remarkably similar to a recent conversation he had with pastor Douglas Wilson about the legacy of the Civil War.

In this episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” Thabiti and I have a conversation about a wide range of topics spinning out of this song. We talk about Paisley, why LL Cool J is on this song, the Confederate Battle Flag, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, personal and structural sin, and the place of the gospel in a theological anthropology.

I’m glad Brad and LL gave us an occasion to have this fun and important conversation. But, still, I say listen to “Famous People” or “Mama Said Knock You Out,” both of which are far superior songs to “Accidental Racist.”

Join us this week as we talk about racism, accidental and intentional, and let me know what you think.

I know you don’t believe in in vitro fertilization, but my wife and I found it was a good solution to our infertility problem. We created multiple embryos, and carried two to term. We cannot afford any other children, so another round of pregnancies is not an option. Our quiver’s full. My conscience is bothering me a little, though, since we banked a number of other fertilized embryos, just in case the first round didn’t take. Do we have any responsibility for these embryos?

Sincerely, A Stressed Dad

Dear Stressed,

Your quiver’s fuller than you think.

You’re right that there are complex ethical questions regarding IVF, and I’d be happy to have that discussion later. Once IVF has been done, though, the issues are simple, even if the consequences are complex.

In a Christian vision of reality there is no such thing as an “almost person,” which is what we think with the abstraction of “fertilized embryos.” Someone is either a human person, and therefore my neighbor, or not. You do not have “frozen embryos.” You have children, frozen in this cruelly clinical world of suspended animation.

It is one thing to decide you can’t afford to have children, before you conceive children, just as it is one thing to decide you can’t afford to marry, before you marry. You’re married though, and you’ve conceived children. You have an obligation to them. The one who does not care for his own household is, the Apostle Paul says, “worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8).

This doesn’t mean your game-plan is easy. There’s a cross to take up here. The path from frozen storage to birth is difficult, whether through bearing those children or making an adoption plan for them into loving families. But these are not things; these are persons, worthy of love and respect and sacrifice.

I’d advise you to meet with some respected spiritual advisers, to look at your situation and come up with a map to take responsibility for your children. The first step is to start thinking of them that way, not as your “embryos” or a project to be managed, but as your children, your neighbors, and the “least of these,” who bear the image of our Lord Jesus.

Your conscience might seem to be a nuisance to you; it does to all of us sometimes. But a nagging conscience can be a sign of grace. It might be that what you are hearing is a happy foretaste of obedience to Christ, as you hear his voice saying, “I was frozen and you remembered me.”

The Gosnell case is stomach-turning. Testimonies in court point to a sadistic man who would sever the spines of babies, in and out of the womb. They tell of a man so cold-blooded that he would keep the feet of unborn children as trophies of his evil. They speak of a man who would prey upon the poorest and most vulnerable women in his community in order to destroy their lives and those of their children. It’s hard to think of the gospel in the midst of all that evil.

But that’s just the point.

In the crucifixion narrative of Jesus, the gospel writers tell us that he was not hanged alone. On either side were thieves. That word “thief” has, I fear, taken the edge off of this scene for many contemporary Westerners. When we think “thief” we tend to imagine a shoplifter at Wal-Mart or a burglar cracking a safe. In this context, though, “thief” communicated a murderous terrorist, feared and reviled by all. Jesus in his crucifixion identified himself with the worst and most violent of sinners, even in terms of the geography of his death.

The one criminal responded the way most of us, left to ourselves, would. He didn’t want repentance but deliverance. He taunted Jesus to rescue him, not from his sin itself but from the consequences of it. This is what Gosnell is seeking, to defend himself in court and escape prosecution. The one we have come to know as “the thief on the cross”, acknowledged the justice of his sentence, and pleaded for mercy. He identified himself with Jesus as King: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

The gospel isn’t a mere matter of God exempting people from consequences. We could understand such pardons, handed out for cosmic misdemeanors or victimless crimes. The gospel comes to those who are the horrible, the damned.

How could this murderous doctor walk in every day to a chamber of horrors and do what he did? How could his nurses and assistants suppress the screams of these children, the spattering of blood? They do so by suppressing the conscience and walling over the embedded revelation of the justice of God. They pretend as though there will be no reckoning, no Judgment Seat, that somehow all of this can be kept secret, that they can take these secrets with them to the grave.

The gospel, though, reveals the justice of God. Sin cannot be hidden, and judgment cannot be escaped. The cries of the oppressed, the orphaned, the murdered, are heard, and their Redeemer is strong. Justification isn’t a matter of waving away consequences. It’s a matter of self-crucifixion, of embracing the judgement of God and agreeing with his verdict. And, in Christ, it’s a matter of being joined to another, one against whom no accusation can stand.

The Gosnell case is horrific. It ought to revolt us and to turn our stomachs and to shock our consciences. But Kermit Gosnell’s criminality is one of degree, not of kind. Left to ourselves, we would all be given over the kind of cruelty and rage he displayed. Our hope, and his, cannot be in simply evading consequences. After all, the worst consequence facing Kermit Gosnell is not that he be executed or imprisoned. The worst consequence facing Kermit Gosnell is that he be handed over to being Kermit Gosnell.

If we minimize God’s justice, and ignore the evil here, we eclipse the gospel. But there’s another danger too. Many Christians are rightly upset that the media have ignored the Gosnell trial. Our internal media do the same thing, with our own cosmic crimes against God. Our hope isn’t in indulgence but in the kind of mercy that crucifies and resurrects.

The Kermit Gosnell story is one of severed spines and seared consciences. A gospel of justification without justice cannot picture a holy God. A gospel of justice without justification ultimately leaves us all without hope before the tribunal of God. The gospel of Jesus Christ speaks of both justice and justification, and brings them together in a Man drowning in his own blood at the Place of the Skull.

And on either side of him, there were thieves.

Why could Jesus sleep so peacefully through a life-threatening sea-storm, and yet is awake all night in the olive garden before his arrest, crying out in anguish? Why are the disciples pulsing with adrenaline as the ship is tossed about on the Galilee Lake, but drifting off to slumber as the most awful conspiracy in human history gets underway?

Peter, James, and John rebuke Jesus for falling asleep on the boat: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk. 4:38) Jesus rebukes them for falling asleep as he prays before the cross: “Could you not watch one hour?” (Mk. 14:37)

Jesus isn’t the anxious sort. He tells us, remember, to be anxious for nothing, to take no thought for tomorrow (Matt 6:25-34). So why is he awake all night, “greatly distressed and troubled” (Mk. 14:33). In the storm, Jesus dismisses the disciples’ terror with a wave of the hand. In the garden, he screams, with loud cries and tears (Heb. 5:7), until the blood vessels in his face explode.

It is because Jesus knows what to fear. Jesus knows to fear not him who can kill the body, but instead Him who can cast both body and soul into hell (Matt. 10:28). Jesus doesn’t fear the watery deeps, which can be silenced by his voice. But he knows that is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Danger doesn’t keep Jesus awake; the judgment of God does.

The disciples are just the opposite, and I fear I am too. They are worried about relatively meaningless things, things that need only to be given over to the attention to Jesus. But they are oblivious to the cross that overhangs the cursed world around them, and within them.

I lose sleep quite often over the things Jesus tells me I should not worry about: my life, my possessions, my future. Such is not of the Spirit. Why is it easier for me to worry about next week’s schedule, and to lose sleep over that, than over those around me who could be moments away from judgment? Why am I more concerned about the way my peers judge my actions than about the Judgment Seat of Christ?

The Spirit of Jesus joins us to him in his Gethsemane anguish. We groan with him for the revealing of the sons of God, for resurrection from the dead (Rom. 8:23-27). We like him, through the Spirit, come to terms with the crosses we must carry. And, through it all, we cry with him, “Abba, Father!” (Mk. 14:36; Rom. 8:15).

The next time you find yourself unable to sleep due to worry, ask whether you’re in the Galilee waters or the Gethsemane garden. Ask yourself whether your wakefulness is of the weakening flesh or the awakening Spirit.

A version of this article originally ran on April 21, 2011.

Guest post by Baptist Press

Russell Moore has been elected as the next president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

The ERLC’s board of trustees approved Moore, currently dean of the school of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in a special, called meeting Tuesday (March 26) at a Nashville hotel.

Moore, 41, a native of Biloxi, Miss., will be the eighth president of the entity charged by Southern Baptists with addressing moral and religious freedom issues. With a background in government, the pastorate and seminary training, he already is well-known as a commentator from a Southern Baptist and evangelical Christian perspective on ethics, theology and the culture.

“I am honored and humbled to be asked to serve Southern Baptists as ERLC president,” Moore said. “I pray for God’s grace to lead the ERLC to be a catalyst to connect the agenda of the kingdom of Christ to the cultures of local congregations for the sake of the mission of the Gospel in the world.”

Moore’s election means he will be only the second ERLC president in the last quarter of a century. He will succeed Richard Land, who will retire upon the completion of 25 years leading the entity.

“I am delighted that the Holy Spirit has led the ERLC’s trustees to Dr. Russell Moore as the commission’s next president,” Land said. “Dr. Moore is a godly Christian minister, a devoted husband and father, and a convictional, committed Baptist. His excellent academic preparation, combined with his keen mind and his tender heart for God and His people, make him a person uniquely suited to serve our Savior and Southern Baptists in this crucial role at such a critical moment in our nation’s history.

“I join the trustees and ERLC staff in committing to pray for Russell and his dear family as he prepares to assume the tremendous responsibilities of the ERLC presidency,” Land said.

Moore will begin his new responsibilities June 1. At that time, Land will become the entity’s president emeritus, an honor bestowed on him by trustees in September.

The ERLC trustees’ seven-person presidential search committee, chaired by Barry Creamer of Criswell College in Dallas, recommended Moore to the full board after a seven-month process.

“After praying, planning, meeting and working for months to find the man we believe God would have lead the ERLC, we are blessed by the board’s election of Russell Moore today and confident that God will use his message to impact churches and the public marketplace of ideas for what is right, true and desperately needed today,” said Creamer, Criswell’s vice president of academic affairs.

Moore has served since 2004 as dean of the school of theology and senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He joined the faculty in 2001 as professor of Christian theology and ethics and continues in that role.

He was preaching pastor at a campus of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville from 2008-12. While a student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Moore was associate pastor at Bay Vista Baptist Church in Biloxi, Miss.

Before attending seminary, Moore served for four years as an aide to pro-life Democratic Congressman Gene Taylor of Mississippi.

Moore and his wife Maria are the parents of five sons.

Moore is a leading voice in the growing pro-adoption movement among evangelicals. His 2009 book — “Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches” — has played a significant role in that cause and he is a frequent speaker at adoption conferences.

On his blog, in written commentaries, in speeches and in news media interviews, Moore comments frequently on a range of issues and the Christian Gospel’s impact on them. These include abortion and other sanctity of life matters, race relations, marriage, pornography, politics and popular culture.

Government, academic and church leaders applauded Moore’s selection in written statements.

“His presence of mind and keen insights as a theologian and pastor are such that his work has not only benefited me personally, but many who serve our nation in public life,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican. “I have never read anything by Russell Moore that did not leave me with a strong impression that this was a man who could speak carefully and powerfully to the public square.”

Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. said, “He will provide a public voice Southern Baptists will follow and the secular world will respect. … The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary will greatly miss him, as will I, but we congratulate Southern Baptists on the wisdom of their choice. Russell Moore was made for this position of leadership, and for this hour.”

SBC Executive Committee President Frank S. Page, whose Ph.D. is in ethics, said, “Welcome, Dr. Moore to the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. As an ethicist myself, I am always concerned about this particular area of our ministry. I am delighted that someone with Dr. Moore’s cultural awareness and concern for God’s people has been appointed to such a post for such a time as this. I encourage all Southern Baptists to pray for him during this time of transition, for the need has never been greater.”

Popular author and Southern California mega-church pastor Rick Warren said he “can think of no one more qualified in experience, in temperament, in passion, and in doctrine to represent us as Southern Baptists on the most critical ethical issues of our day, and on the all-important issue” of religious freedom.

Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said Moore “has uniquely prepared himself spiritually, theologically, academically, and politically for just such a moment as this. Placing a leader with the right convictions, a razor-sharp mind, and a moral compass that will not fail paints a bright picture for Southern Baptists’ future.”

In addition to his book on adoption, Moore has written two other books, “Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ” and “The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective.” He has three other books scheduled to be published, including one on marriage and one on abortion. Moore also has edited and contributed to other books.

He has served four times on the Resolutions Committee at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, including as chairman in 2010.

Land, who was 41 when he became head of the entity in 1988, led the transformation of the ERLC during the convention’s theological resurgence, moving the commission in a more conservative direction on such issues as abortion. He announced his retirement as ERLC president in July 2012.

In addition to Creamer, other ERLC trustees on the presidential search committee — all members of Southern Baptist churches — were Kenda Bartlett, executive director of Concerned Women for America in Washington, D.C.; Kenneth Barbic, a lobbyist with the Western Growers Association in Washington, D.C.; Lynne Fruechting, a pediatrician in Newton, Kan.; Ray Newman, executive director of Georgia Citizens Action Project in Atlanta; and Bernard Snowden, family life pastor at Antioch Baptist Church in Bowie, Md. ERLC trustee chairman Richard Piles, who appointed the search committee, was an ex officio member. Piles is pastor of First Baptist Church in Camden, Ark.

In addition to its Nashville office, the ERLC has an office in Washington, D.C.

More information on Moore, including a full list of endorsements, is available at http://erlc.com/moorepresskit.

Is reading fiction a waste of time?

I’ve found that most people who tell me that fiction is a waste of time are folks who seem to hold to a kind of sola cerebra vision of the Christian life that just doesn’t square with the Bible. The Bible doesn’t simply address man as a cognitive process but as a complex image-bearer who recognizes truth not only through categorizing syllogisms but through imagination, beauty, wonder, awe. Fiction helps to shape and hone what Russell Kirk called the moral imagination.

My friend David Mills, now executive editor at First Things, wrote a brilliant article in Touchstone several years ago about the role of stories in shaping the moral imagination of children. As he pointed out, moral instruction is not simply about knowing factually what’s right and wrong (though that’s part of it); it’s about learning to feel affection toward certain virtues and revulsion toward others. A child learns to sympathize with the heroism of Jack the Giant Killer, to be repelled by the cruelty of Cinderella’s sisters and so on.

When you think about it, that’s how the Scriptures often work. The Proverbs, for instance, paint a vivid picture of the revolting tragedy of adultery (Proverbs 7). Jesus doesn’t simply speak about God’s forgiveness in the abstract. He tells a story, the prodigal son, designed to shock (a son who would spurn his inheritance) and to elicit sympathy and identification. The apostles do the same thing. They employ literary, visual language meant to appeal not just to the intellect but to the conscience through the imagination. Think of the Apostle Paul’s language of “laboring until Christ is formed in you,” or his use of literary themes in the OT (“fruit of the Spirit,” and so on).

Fiction can sometimes, like Nathan the prophet’s story of the ewe lamb, awaken parts of us that we have calloused over, due to ignorance or laziness or inattention or sin. One night, in the car on my way home, I was talking by telephone to my eighty-six year-old grandmother. She was telling me a story about the last time she saw my grandfather alive. She told me about feeling the coldness of his feet as she changed his socks in his hospital bed, about how his eyes were focused on her, though he couldn’t speak. She talked about how, when the nurses told her she had to leave, she kissed him, told him she loved him, and that she could feel him watching her as she left the room, for the last time. I knew she had lost my grandfather. I know that people die. I know “Husbands love your wives” (Ephesians 5).

But that story awakened something in me. It prompted me to hold my wife with a special tenderness when I walked in the door. I had imagined what it would be like to say goodbye to her in that way, and, suddenly, all the daily pressures of kids and bills and house repairs and travel just seemed to fit in a bigger context. Fiction often does the same thing. When I read Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illych, I gain an imaginative sympathy with something I might avoid in the busyness of life: what it’s actually like to die. When I read Wendell Berry’s stories of Henry County, Kentucky, I can gain insight on what it would be like to face losing a family farm in the Great Depression. This fiction gives a richer, bigger vision of human life.

What’s more is that fiction is, I think, very helpful for those who are called to preach and teach (which, at least in terms of bearing witness to Christ is true of all of us). Fiction helps the Christian to learn to speak in ways that can navigate between the boring abstract and the irrelevant mundane. It also enables you to learn insights about human nature. I’ve never had a problem with drug addiction. I can’t imagine why on earth anyone would take meth. Reading stories of life in Eastern Kentucky and about the motivations behind a meth addict can teach me to address those things biblically, and to see where I have similar idolatry that would be just as incomprehensible to someone else.

I would say that fiction, along with songwriting and personal counseling, are the most constant ways that God teaches me empathy. It’s easy in evangelical Christianity to assume that everyone who opposes us or disagrees with us is simply to be verbally evaporated as an enemy to be destroyed. But no false teaching and no wrong direction has any power unless it appears to someone to be good. Jesus teaches us that those who hand over the disciples to be killed will “think themselves to be doing the will of God.” Almost everyone is the hero in his or her own personal narrative.

People don’t think of themselves the way super-villains do in some old cartoon, rubbing their hands together and plotting “the reign of eeeee-vil in the world. Ha ha ha ha!” Fiction helps people honestly present those internal stories that people tell themselves, things they won’t disclose in, say, a debate or a non-fiction monograph arguing for their way of life. In fiction, a Darwinist can show you what it’s like to be scared that you’re living a meaningless life in a meaningless universe, but he can also show you where he finds those things, like awe and love, that he can only ultimately find in God.

But, finally, good fiction isn’t a “waste of time” for the same reason good music and good art aren’t wastes of time. They are rooted in an endlessly creative God who has chosen to be imaged by human beings who create. Culture isn’t irrelevant. It’s part of what God commanded us to do in the beginning, and that he declares to be good. When you enjoy truth and beauty, when you are blessed by gifts God has given to a human being, you are enjoying a universe that, though fallen, God delights in as “very good.”

You can read my response here, and weigh it along with the others. I said “no,” that I didn’t think firing her was the right way to go. I wanted here to give a fuller sense of why I think the way I do. I believe the issue is bigger than the particulars of this court case.

First of all, I’m no anti-dentite. I have nothing but commendation for the dentist for recognizing, early on, his point of temptation. The first step in overcoming temptation is finding one’s own points of vulnerability and finding the way of escape Holy Scripture promises us is there (1 Cor. 10:13). The dentist is right to take action in his life as soon as he realized he is hot-for-hygienist and he is right that his marriage is more important than his practice.

If the hygienist were pressing for a relationship or actively seeking to be sexually provocative, I think he has the right to fire her, if she won’t end it. That’s unprofessional behavior and puts him in a situation in which it is impossible for either of them to do their jobs. It would be a kind of reverse sexual harassment.

But, if not, I think there are other means for keeping his integrity intact.

He could have acted to his own economic hurt, rather than to hers. I know of Christian professionals who cut their own salaries in order to hire more than one staff member, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. He could have made sure that he was only in the office when there were others there, or, when that was impossible, his wife or a friend would accompany him.

Jesus said “If your eye offends you, gouge it out.” He didn’t say “If you find your neighbor’s eyes are too sexy, gouge them out.” It isn’t a just society when women are hired only if they meet certain standards of “sexiness,” as in our “Mad Men” celebrated recent past. It also isn’t a just society if women are fired because some man finds them attractive on those same terms.

At the root of this is, I fear, a kind of misogyny which identifies women themselves as the problem rather than one’s own lust and self-control. That’s not what the Bible teaches.

What would happen if this standard were enforced on a wide scale? What happens when, for instance, a new hygienist gets a new hairstyle and a new pair of glasses and, suddenly, the dentist starts noticing her in a new way? Is she fired too? And what happens across the board when women can be fired at will by men who can simply proclaim, “You’re too sexy for this office.”

The dentist is right to maintain his marriage and his integrity, but I think there are better, more just ways of doing that.

Remember to send me your real-life ethical dilemma at questions@russellmoore.com.

The movie is set up to appeal to adventure-seeking children (and their parents): lots of action, scary giant creatures, death-defying leaps into the air, even a fairy-tale romance between a princess and a scrappy up-from-nothing farm-boy. The movie retains the scrappy little guy versus the behemoth narrative, with its “the bigger they are, the harder they fall” lesson, so often associated with David the biblical giant-killer.

But the movie misses, I think, the element that made the old stories so compelling in the first place. The movie obscures the way Jack, in the old stories, usually defeated the giants: not just with grit and luck and determination, but with trickery.

Jack’s power over the giants in the stories was using his wits to trick the giant into hubristically doing something foolish: walking into a trap, slitting his own stomach, and so on.  Often the giants were undone by engaging in some sort of competition, where they assumed they had an upper hand due to their supernatural strength. The giants were never so much over-powered as they were outwitted. In most cases, the giants’ own powers were turned against them, in a way that brought them to ruin.

I missed this in the film, because it made for a more boring, conventional story. I also missed it because I think this sort of giant-killing is intrinsic to the story behind all stories.

The giants of Scripture, the “men of great renown” as Genesis puts it, are part of a larger conspiracy in the biblical text. Goliath himself is a warrior for the Philistines, who are seeking to wipe out God’s covenant people, a line that works its way all the way to Bethlehem. Behind all of that is a cosmic skirmish, John the Revelator shows us: a dragon seeking to devour a baby, whose inheritance it is to rule the nations (Rev. 12:1-5).

And how does God defeat evil? He does so with power, yes, but with a different sort of power than brute force. Jesus casts out demons, and binds the strong man that he may plunder his house. But this isn’t simply by raw sovereignty. Jesus’ power is attached to a moral authority. He, as the only sinless son of Eve, has the right to rule over the spirits. This is why the dark beings are so terrorized by his presence.

But it is not only by this sort of Spirit power that God defeats evil; it is also through wisdom. Paul announces that God does not conform to the “wisdom of this age.” The wisdom of the powers is evident from the beginning of the biblical storyline in a snake who is “more cunning” than any of the other creatures. God doesn’t combat this cunning with a ignorant force but instead with a counter-creaturely Spirit wisdom in Christ. In so doing, he traps the wise and the discerning, and undoes them in their own wisdom and discernment.

Satan cunningly seeks to destroy Job; God turns this around into a revelation of God’s good sovereignty. He seeks to starve Israel to death in Canaan; God uses Joseph’s slavery to bring about the exodus, the prototype of the gospel itself. The devil seeks to oppress the apostle with a “thorn in the flesh”; God uses the thorn to cultivate humility.

And, of course, the powers of darkness conspire to crucify. Their plans mysteriously turn around and crush their own heads, as the crucified and resurrected Christ redeems the world through Golgotha’s hill and Joseph’s tomb.

At the end, we see embodied in Jesus of Nazareth both the power of God and the wisdom of God. We see in the church not only the power to reconcile, but the “manifold wisdom of God” (Eph. 3:10) in doing it this way.

I don’t expect to see the gospel in a children’s story on the movie screen, but I do hope to see a good story. The old Jack tales, with the interplay of unexpected wisdom with unexpected power, are better stories than the deus ex machina stuff of the screenwriter. That’s because they’re rooted in our embedded human longing for a wisdom and a power that’s more than special effects.

Cash remained—to the day of his death—a subject of almost morbid curiosity for a youth culture that knows nothing of “I Walk the Line.” At the 2003 awards show, 22-year-old pop sensation Justin Timberlake, beating Cash for the video award, demanded a recount. Why would twenty-something hedonists revere an old Baptist country singer from Arkansas?

In one sense, the Cash mystique was nothing new. For the whole length of his career, onlookers wondered what made him different from the rest of the Hollywood/Nashville celebrity axis. Much of it had to do with the “man in black” caricature he cultivated. Cash joked that fans would often say to him, “My father was in prison with you.” Of course, Cash never served any serious jail time at all, but he could never shake the image of a hardened criminal on the mend. People really seemed to think that he had “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

That’s probably because of just how authentic and evocative his songs of prison life were. “Folsom Prison Blues,” for instance, just seems to have been penned by someone lying on a jailhouse cot listening to a train whistle in the night: “There’s probably rich folks eating in a fancy dining car/ They’re probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars/ Well, I know I had it coming/ I know I can’t be free/ But those people keep a’movin’, and that’s what tortures me.”

The prison imagery seemed real to Cash because, for him, it was real. He knew what it was like to be enslaved, enslaved to celebrity, to power, to drugs, to liquor, and to the breaking of his marriage vows. He was subject to, and submissive to, all the temptations the recording industry can parade before a man. He was a prisoner indeed, but to a penitentiary of his own soul. There was no corpse in Reno, but there was the very real guilt of a lifetime of the self-destructive idolatry of the ego.

It was through the quiet friendships of men such as Billy Graham that Cash found an alternative to the vanity of shifting celebrity. He found freedom from guilt and the authenticity of the truth in a crucified and resurrected Christ. And he immediately identified with another self-obsessed celebrity of another era: Saul of Tarsus. He even authored a surprisingly good biography of the apostle, with the insight of one who knows what it is like to see the grace of Jesus through one’s own guilt as a “chief of sinners.”

Even as a Christian, Cash was different. He sang at Billy Graham crusades and wrote for Evangelical audiences, but he never quite fit the prevailing saccharine mood of pop Evangelicalism. Nor did he fit the trivialization of cultural Christianity so persistent in the country music industry, as Grand Old Opry stars effortlessly moved back and forth between songs about the glories of honky-tonk women and songs about the mercies of the Old Rugged Cross.

To be sure, Cash’s Christian testimony is a mixed bag. In his later years, he took out an ad in an industry magazine, with a photograph of himself extending a middle finger to music executives. And yet there is something in the Cash appeal to the youth generation that Christians would do well to emulate.

Other Christian celebrities tried—and failed—to reach youth culture by feigning teenage street language or aping pop culture trends. How successful, after all, was Pat Boone’s embarrassing attempt at heavy metal—complete with a leather outfit and a spiked dog collar?

Cash always seemed to connect. When other Christian celebrities tried to down-play sin and condemnation in favor of upbeat messages about how much better life is with Jesus, Cash sang about the tyranny of guilt and the certainty of coming judgment. An angst-ridden youth culture may not have fully comprehended guilt, but they understood pain. And, somehow, they sensed Cash was for real.

The face of Johnny Cash reminded this generation that he has tasted everything the youth cultures of multiple decades have to offer—and found there a way that leads to death. In a culture that idolizes the hormonal surges of youth, Cash reminds the young of what pop culture doesn’t want them to know: “It is appointed to man once to die, and after this the judgment.” His creviced face and blurring eyes remind them that there is not enough Botox in all of Hollywood to revive a corpse.

Cash wasn’t trying to be an evangelist—and his fellow Bible-belt Evangelicals knew it. But he was able to reach youth culture in a way the rest of us often can’t, precisely because he refused to sugarcoat or “market” the gospel in the “language” of today’s teenagers.

One of Cash’s final songs was also one of his best, an eerie tune based on the Book of Revelation. His haunting voice, filled with the tremors of approaching hoof-beats, sang the challenge: “The hairs on your arms will all stand up/ At the terror of each sip and each sup./ Will you partake of that last offered cup?/ Or disappear into the potter’s ground/ When the Man comes around?”

Cash’s young fans (and his old ones too) may not have known what he was talking about, but they sensed that he did. They recognized in Cash a sinner like them, but a sinner who mourned the tragedy of his past and found peace in One who bore terrors that make Folsom Prison pale in comparison.

A version of this article originally ran on February 25, 2012.

I have long suspected that many Christians dread not just death but heaven. We won’t admit that, of course. Our hymnody, of whatever era, is filled with songs about the joy of the afterlife, and “what a day of rejoicing that will be.” We’re glad we’re not going to hell or to oblivion. But most of our songs and sermon mentions are about that first few moments in heaven: when we see Jesus, when we’re reunited with our loved ones, and so on. It’s like the happy ending of the story. And that’s the problem.

The gospel tells us that Satan keeps unbelievers bound by fear of death (Heb. 2:14-15). Believers, too often, dread death also, though not as much from fear as from boredom. We see the story of our lives as encompassing this span of seventy or eighty or a hundred years. The life to come is our “great reward” in “the afterlife.”

But just think about that word “afterlife.” It assumes eternity is an endless postlude to where the action really happens. It’s “after.” Our “reward” happens after we’ve lived our lives. Here’s why this language matters.

Imagine a couple referring to their marriage as their “after-love.” They explain to you that years ago they met, fell in love, and married. The years since are their “after-love” years, since they follow their falling in love with each other. You would, no doubt, ask whether they still loved each other and, if so, why they would relegate their lives together now as “after” anything, and why they seem to put their “love” in the past tense.  You would think they were downgrading marriage and missing out on joy by talking like that.

And you’d be right.

Too many Christians see the hope of resurrection life as a capstone on their lives now. We implicitly assume that our focus in the new creation is a backward focus on our lives as they are now.

We talk about all the questions we’ll ask about why this or that happened. We never think about whether we’ll be too busy to care about that, just like we’re too busy in the prime of our careers to ask our kindergarten teacher why she had snack time after recess rather than before. We talk about our reunion with loved ones, but even they often implicitly have a past focus.

A high school reunion can be fun. You catch up with old friends, and remember good and bad times. But the focus is usually on “remember when” and “whatever happened to” conversations. That’s great for an hour or four, but four trillion years of that would be hell. That’s not what Jesus promised us. He promised us life.

If we miss this, then we become just like those with no hope. We talk about our “bucket lists” of what we have to do before we’re gone since “you only live once.” We worry about our future and we nurse grudges because we fear our lives can be ruined by circumstances instead of by sin. We essentially move into the same old “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you shall die” except that we cap it with “…and then you’ll stand around with your loved ones singing songs and staring at a light for a quadrillion years and then some.”

God forbid.

Your eternity is no more about looking back to this span of time than your life now is about reflecting on kindergarten. The moment you burst through the mud above your grave, you will begin an exciting new mission—one you couldn’t comprehend if someone told you. And those things that seem so important now—whether you’re attractive or wealthy or famous or cancer-free—will be utterly irrelevant in the face of an exhilarating new purpose, one that you were prepared for in this era but one that is far more than a mere sequel to your best life now.

Let’s talk about eternity. But it’s no mere “afterlife.” Instead let’s start thinking of this little puff of time, the next eighty or so years, as what it is: the pre-life.

For more on why I think our vision of the future life is important, see my article “A Purpose-Driven Cosmos” in the February 2012 issue of Christianity Today.

The same sort of pessimistic vision often shows up in the preaching and teaching of the church. Cultural progressives claim the arc of history is on their side, moving toward sexual revolution, family redefinition, and so on. Christians sometimes speak as though we believe them, that the future is dark and scary. This is why our narrative about the world around us is that it’s slouching toward Gomorrah.

I think the biblical vision is more complicated, and brighter, than that.

On this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we’ll listen to Merle Haggard’s ask “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?”. As we do, we’ll ask why people want to answer pessimism with nostalgia and whether there’s another, better, way for the people of Christ.

As a Baptist Christian, I disagree with Rome on many things, of course, and some of those things relate to the nature of the Petrine ministry, the relationship of the Bishop of Rome to the rest of the church, the merging of civil and ecclesial power, and so on. It might surprise previous generations of Protestants, though, that one of the primary emphases of the Vatican in the last generation has been on the dignity and liberty of the human person.

When the world was threatened by Soviet totalitarianism, Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, communicated a vision of human flourishing and freedom that sparked resistance movements in his native Poland, throughout occupied Eastern Europe, and to the rest of the world. Benedict, then a cardinal, worked internally to root out Marxist mash-ups with Catholicism in the so-called “liberation theology” movements of Latin America and elsewhere.

Since assuming the papacy, Benedict has called for a counter-witness to the bloody persecution of Christians by Islamic authoritarian regimes in Africa and the Middle East, to the church-outlawing police states of China and North Korea, and to the soul-decaying secularism of Western Europe and, increasingly, the United States of America.

Benedict has countered the sexual revolution with an Augustinian view of the meaning of human personhood. A human person, he has reminded the world, is not a machine. We are not merely collections of nerve endings, that spark with sensation when rubbed together. Instead a human person is directed toward a one-flesh union, which is personal and spiritual. Destroying the ecology of marriage and family isn’t simply about tearing down old “moralities,” he has reminded us, but about a revolt against the web of nature in which human beings thrive.

And Benedict has stood against the nihilism that defines human worth in terms of power and usefulness. He has constantly spoken for those whose lives are seen as a burden to society: the baby with Down syndrome, the woman with advanced Alzheimer’s, the child starving in the desert, the prisoner being tortured. These lives aren’t things, he has said, but images of God, and for them we will give an account. When society wants to dehumanize with language: “embryo,” “fetus,” “anchor baby,” “illegal alien,” “collateral damage,” and so on, Benedict has stood firmly to point to the human faces the world is seeking to wipe away.

As Protestant Christians, we will disagree with this Pope, and with the next one, on all sorts of things. Here we stand, we can do no other; God help us. But let’s pray the next Pope, like this one, will remember what it means to be human, and will remind the rest of us when we forget.

Dement describes herself as an agnostic, but she grew up in a Pentecostal Christian home in Arkansas. Her mother, a believing Christian, seems to shape her art to this day, which is why there are so many songs in her repertoire about Mom, and about God.

One of my favorite of her songs is the one we’ll listen to today, called “Let the Mystery Be.” Don’t be fooled by the lyrics. While it sounds like, simply, a relativist’s plea for dogmatic Christians to abandon their certainties and leave her alone, I think there’s more here. Let’s listen to Iris Dement, and then talk about what it means to live a life story that is, to us, a mystery.