Moore to the Point
By Russell D. Moore. Russell D. Moore serves as the teaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. In addition, Dr. Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Find sermons and other resources to help Christians engage the culture from a biblical worldview at www.russellmoore.com.

What Stephen King Taught Me About Repentance

— Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 —

Before you start judging me, I don’t read Stephen King’s horror books, and never have (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In the past year, though, I did read, for the second time, King’s insightful little book on writing, called On Writing.

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)

— Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 —

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.

Fathered with Christ (Matt 3:13-4:1)

— Thursday, June 24th, 2010 —

This sermon, “Fathered with Christ” (Matt 3:13-4:1), was originally preached on Sunday, June 20, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Christ and Katrina: Five Years Later

— Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 —

The July/August issue of Touchstone features my article “Christ and Katrina.” You can read it here. The article, recognizing the fifth anniversary of the worst natural disaster in American history, is less about the hurricane itself than it is about a Christian view of home and homecoming.

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).

Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience

— Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 —

I’ve left my hometown lots of times. But never like this.

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.

Should We Marry If We’re Theologically Divided? My Response

— Thursday, May 13th, 2010 —

A while back I posted a question from Calvin, a Reformed dispensationalist fundamentalist, and Aimee, a Pentecostal, who have fallen in love and want to get married. Their question is too long to repost, but you can find it here. Y’all gave a spirited round of responses. Here are my thoughts on the question.

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).

Loving My Invisible Neighbor

— Monday, May 10th, 2010 —

It’s easy for me to love my neighbor. It’s easy, that is, as long as my neighbor is invisible.

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?

Nostalgia Smells

— Saturday, May 8th, 2010 —

With Mother’s Day upon us, Salon magazine set out to show us why we (most of us, anyway) like our mother’s cooking. They interviewed a neurologist who explained, in evolutionary terms, why people are drawn to the familiar, and how tastes are set in one’s childhood, tastes that set the trajectory of one’s entire life. What I found most interesting though were the neurologist’s comments on smell and nostalgia.

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.”

Walker Percy: Twenty Years Later

— Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 —

Twenty years ago—May 10, 1990—the corpse of the writer Walker Percy was pulled from his bed. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of that moment, then and now, is the absence of the smell of gunpowder.

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.