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.

First of all, the memory of Rosa Parks ought to remind us that she didn’t live in what we refer to as “the civil rights era,” as though racial justice was achieved and can now be ignored. True, the awful state oppression against African-Americans, both north and south, was knocked down with legislative triumphs in areas of public accommodations, employment non-discrimination, and voting rights. Thank God. But racial reconciliation is never a finished project, at least not between Eden and Armageddon.

Beyond that, Christians especially ought to reflect on what Rosa Parks’ civil disobedience reminds us about our life together in society.

When Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat, she was affirming an ancient truth of the reality of natural law.

The bus boycott, sparked by her, was a revolt against an unjust law. Mrs. Parks, and the activists she motivated, never argued the law wasn’t supported by the majority. They argued the law was wrong. As Martin Luther King Jr. also communicated in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” civil law rests on a broader foundation of a law that is written in the heart, a law that transcends human cultures and majoritarian whims.

That natural law, embedded in the conscience, is the reason the power of the state, any state, is limited. Herod had some legitimate authority as ruler, but it was, as John the Baptist pointed out, “not lawful” that he should have another man’s wife (Matt. 14:4). Caesar had the legitimate authority to wield the sword against evildoers, an authority the Scriptures affirmed (Rom. 13:1-7), but he had no authority to dictate worship (Rev. 13:16-18). The temple leaders had a legitimate authority, an authority Jesus affirmed(Matt. 23:2-3), but they had no authority to forbid the preaching of the gospel (Acts 4:18-20).

The natural law stands above human law, and gives its legitimacy. The law maintains order precisely because it is not the arbitrary expression of a ruler or of a mob. The law must give an account to a more ultimate Lawgiver. That’s why Jesus, in his famous discourse on Caesar’s coin, distinguishes between duty that must be rendered to government and that which must be rendered to God.

Rosa Parks’ protest also affirms the persistence of natural rights.

When she refused to give up her seat, deprived to her on the basis of her skin color, Mrs. Parks defied a law that based human dignity on some devilish idea of white supremacy. This idolatry was encoded in law and embedded in culture. White children were taught not to give a lady like Rosa Parks the recognition of the title “Mrs.” or “Ma’am.” And the legal code designated what water fountains she could use and where she could sit.

Mrs. Parks, though, believed the old American creed that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” That Jeffersonian principle is grounded in a concept of dignity older than the Enlightenment, the concept of a common human race made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). This is why God, the Bible says, “shows no partiality” (Deut. 16:19; Acts 10:34; Rom. 2:11).

All human beings reflect his image, and are worthy of respect. And no human being is a god, with the power to exercise dominion over human nature itself. Human dignity isn’t “purchased” by voting power, commercial wealth, sexual attractiveness, natural ability, or anything else.

Finally, Rosa Parks pointed to the sacrifice of neighbor-love.

In refusing to give up her seat, Mrs. Parks wasn’t struggling for her own position. She did so on behalf of millions of others, many yet unborn. There’s a difference, in a truly Christian ethic, in fighting for our own prerogatives and in working for justice for others. Jesus calls us to give up the cloak, to walk the extra mile, to turn the cheek (Matt. 5:38-42). And yet, he also led the Apostle Paul to appeal to his rights as a Roman citizen not to be prosecuted for preaching the gospel (Acts 16:37-39). Why? It was because the issue wasn’t Paul’s personal comfort but the advance of the church as a whole.

Rosa Parks was a great heroine who deserves our honor. But let’s not consign her to the museum. Her heroism still speaks, and points to some old, old truths that are needed in a new century.

Koch discussed his abortion position in a fascinating co-written book on faith and public life with John Cardinal O’Connor. As a man who likes a good title, this one works for me: “His Eminence and Hizzoner: A Candid Exchange.” In the book, Koch described his commitment to legal abortion, using all the standard arguments. He commented on the “shrill” tactics of some pro-lifers in marches and demonstrations.

But he took a very different tone when he described one prominent right-to-life activist: a nurse named Jean Head.

What impressed him most of all whenever the nurse came to persuade him, back when he was a United States Congressman, to support efforts to protect the unborn, she brought him roses.

Koch said he was amazed by the way Head would listen to his position and then calmly lay out her arguments for why he should change his mind, and his vote. Koch said he told her that the roses mystified him because he knew that if he ever changed his position on abortion, the abortion-rights lobby would be “crazed with anger.” They wouldn’t bring him roses, he said, but instead might send him cactuses.

Koch never, so far as I know, switched his position on abortion. But I can’t help but see in this pro-life activist’s example something noble and Christlike. There are always those who capitulate and call this “civility.” And there are always those who see listening to one’s opponents as itself a capitulation.

This woman, though, didn’t back down in her efforts to persuade. And that’s just the point. The roses weren’t a sign of weakness but of mission. She didn’t just want to make a point but to change a mind and a heart.

Her kindness was a signal of her confidence in the rightness of her position. It was also a sign of her consistency. She believed unborn children and their mothers were made in the image of God, and thus deserving of love and protection, regardless of stage of development, disability, or “wantedness.” Every person bore the full dignity of humanity, and was worthy of respect and honor.

She showed this by lobbying for the rights of the unborn, and she showed it by treating her opponent as a person, not as a cartoon villain to be vaporized.

That example won’t often get on cable news: sound and fury will do that. But persistence, and persistently kind witness, will stick in the memory and in the imagination.

Who knows whether some wavering congressman in the next office over, or some staffer accepting the delivery, were moved to rethink an issue because of the steely, courageous kindness of this activist?

Johnny Cash and then later the late Chuck Colson changed the way many Christians thought about prisons and prisoners. They didn’t idealize prisoners, the way some social progressives did, and they didn’t downplay criminal justice. But they called us to think anew about what Jesus meant when he said “I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt. 25:36).

By way of joining in the remembrance of Cash’s historic performance, I thought we’d listen this week to both “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Mercy Seat.” As we listen, let’s think afresh about what it means for us as Christians to join Jesus in his mission of reaching out to the guilty and the hardened with the news that is intended to set the captive free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But don’t stop there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This commentary is based off an earlier version published here in 2012

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

But, in my view, his little book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) was his best, and it well could be a road map to the future.

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

He was right. And he still is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This commentary is based off an earlier version published here in 2012

Now, this lady probably didn’t consciously think of herself as a white supremacist. She almost certainly didn’t think of herself as subversive of the gospel itself. She never thought about the hypocrisy of holding the two contradictory worldviews together in her mind. She probably didn’t see how her dehumanizing of African-Americans was a twisted form of Darwinism rather than biblical Christianity.

She wasn’t alone.

On the question of civil rights in the American Christian context, there is little question that, with few exceptions, the “progressives” were right, often heroically right, and the “conservatives” were wrong, often satanically wrong. In the narrative of the dismantling of Jim Crow, conservatives were often the villains and progressives were most often on the side of the angels, indeed on the side of Jesus.

The question is not whether the progressives won the argument or whether they should have won the argument; the question is why they were persuasive, ultimately, on this point (and almost no other) to their more conservative brothers and sisters. The turnaround is striking, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in my denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where a generation ago most conservative leaders were segregationists.

Some, of course, will claim cynically that conservative evangelical leaders, like some national politicians, don’t play with racial demagogy anymore because such appeals don’t “work” anymore in 21st century America. Nobody wants to be seen as a racist. Well, okay, but, even if one accepts that argument, why is it true that a segregationist would be barred (and rightly so) from speaking at the SBC Pastors’ Conference of 2013 and wouldn’t be at the SBC Pastors’ Conference of 1950? Isn’t it because the people wouldn’t tolerate it? Well, why the change? It must be more than just changing American culture since conservative evangelicals have been in the throes of a much-hyped “culture war” on all sorts of issues since the 1960s?

Why is civil rights no longer a “culture war” issue? Why were the voices of the civil rights pioneers persuasive, not only to mainstream America but to conservative Christians as well? Some might argue it is because the culture has changed. But the culture has changed just as much (if not more so) on the question of gender and sexual issues, after three waves of feminism and a sexual revolution, but not so for traditionalist Catholics and confessional Protestants.

The reason SBC progressives, and the larger civil rights movement, were persuasive was because of the mode of their argument. The progressives, as scholar David Chappell shows in his book Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, appealed to biblical orthodoxy and missionary zeal in their arguments, not simply to the arc of historical progress.

This is true at the macro level—think of the King James Version of the Bible woven so intricately into the themes of Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons. It is also true at the micro level. SBC civil rights advocates—from Foy Valentine to T.B. Maston to Henlee Barnette—argued from decidedly conservative biblical concepts.

The civil rights movement struggled on multiple fronts. In the political sphere, leaders such as King pointed out how the American system was inconsistent with Jeffersonian principles of the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Politically, Americans had to choose: be American (as defined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) or be white supremacist; you can’t be both. King and his compatriots were right.

But the civil rights movement was, at core, also an ecclesial movement. King was, after all, “Rev. King” and many of those marching with him, singing before him, listening to him, were Christian clergy and laity. To the churches, especially the churches of the South, the civil rights pioneers sent a similar message to the one they sent to the governmental powers. You have to choose: be a Christian (as defined by the Scripture and the small “c” catholic apostolic tradition) or be a white supremacist; you can’t be both. They were right here too.

How can white supremacy be true, they would argue, if humanity is made from “one blood” in the creation of Adam? How can one segregate evangelistic crusades if the cross of Christ atones for all people, both white and black? If God personally regenerates repentant sinners, both white and black, how can we see people in terms of “race” rather than in terms of the person? If we send missionaries across the seas to evangelize Africa, how is it not hypocrisy not to admit African-Americans into church membership?

The biblical power of the argument is true, regardless of whether all the civil rights pioneers, in the SBC and out of it, believed in biblical orthodoxy.

Many did. See the faithful heroine Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County, Misssissippi, for example. If Baptists had a means of canonization, I’d support it for her. I still claim the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as my partisan home, and I say expand the “freedom” to the unborn as well as the born, even though the party doesn’t exist anymore.

But regardless of personal faith, the civil rights heroes indicted conservative hypocrites, prophetically, with the conservatives’ own convictional claims. And, as Jesus promised, “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”

The arguments for racial reconciliation were persuasive, ultimately, to orthodox Christians because they appealed to a higher authority than the cultural captivity of white supremacy. These arguments appealed to the authority of Scripture and the historic Christian tradition.

This authority couldn’t easily be muted by a claim to a “different interpretation” because racial equality was built on premises conservatives already heartily endorsed: the universal love of God, the unity of the race in Adam, the Great Commission and the church as the household of God.

With this the case, the legitimacy of segregation crumbled just as the legitimacy of slavery had in the century before, and for precisely the same reasons. Segregation, like slavery, was shown to be what all human consciences already knew it to be: not just a political injustice or a social inequity (although certainly that) but also a sin against God and neighbor and a repudiation of the gospel. Regenerate hearts ultimately melted before such arguments because in them they heard the voice of their Christ, a voice they’d heard in the Scriptures themselves.

Conservative Christians, and especially Southern Baptists, must be careful to remember the ways in which our cultural anthropology perverted our soteriology and ecclesiology. It is to our shame that we ignored our own doctrines to advance something as clearly demonic as racial pride. And it is a shame that sometimes it took theological liberals to remind us of what we claimed to believe in an inerrant Bible, what we claimed to be doing in a Great Commission.

A version of this article originally ran on January 18, 2010.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a joy to preach the whole counsel of God. And I love the truth of human dignity and the image of God in all persons. But it makes me sad.

I don’t hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I think it, somehow, unbiblical. No, indeed. The entire canon throbs with God’s commitment to the fatherless and to the widows, his wrath at the shedding of innocent blood.

I don’t hate it because I think it’s inappropriate. Just as every Lord’s Day should be Easter, with the proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus, and Christmas, with the announcement of the Incarnation, so every Lord’s Day should highlight the worth and dignity of human life.

I hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I’m reminded that we have to say things to one another that human beings shouldn’t have to say. Mothers shouldn’t kill their children. Fathers shouldn’t abandon their babies. No human life is worthless, regardless of skin color, age, disability, economic status. The very fact that these things must be proclaimed is a reminder of the horrors of this present darkness.

One year on Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, as I opened the Bible to preach, I looked out and caught the eye of my sons. I prayed that their children wouldn’t have to hear a sermon against abortion and euthanasia. I prayed that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren would grow up in an age when abortion is, as the Feminists for Life organization put is some years ago, not just illegal but unthinkable.

I prayed for my (yet to be conceived but not yet to be conceived of) great-grandchildren that a Sanctity of Human Life Sunday would seem as unnecessary to them as a Reality of Gravity Emphasis Sunday.

I hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I’m reminded that as I’m preaching there are babies warmly nestled in wombs who won’t be there tomorrow. I’m reminded that there are children, maybe even blocks from my pulpit, who’ll be slapped, punched, and burned with cigarettes before nightfall. I’m reminded that there are elderly men and women languishing away in loneliness, their lives pronounced to be a waste.

But I also love Sanctity of Human Life Sunday when I think about the fact that in our churches there are ex-orphans all around, adopted into loving families. I love to reflect on the men and women who serve every week in pregnancy centers for women in crisis. And I love to see men and women who have aborted babies find their sins forgiven, even this sin, and their consciences cleansed by Christ.

We’ll always need Christmas. We’ll always need Easter. But I hope, please Lord, someday soon, that Sanctity of Human Life Day is unnecessary.

A version of this article originally ran on January 18, 2009.

In the January 2013 issue of Vanity Fair, Rock is interviewed by fellow comedian (and the magazine’s guest editor of the issue) Judd Apatow about how his comedy has changed over the years. Apatow asked Rock whether having a wife and kids alters his comedy, since Rock is no longer a young single man anymore, but a guy with family responsibilities moving toward middle age.

Rock said his family transformed his comedic instincts, “but only in the best way” since his life as husband and father gives him “weight and authority” and makes him “closer to the audience because the audience is married and has kids.” But, most interestingly, Rock declares that now that he is married he knows more about women than do single men.

“Single guys have girlfriends,” Rock said. “Girlfriends are always auditioning, always on their best behavior. Wives are like Supreme Court justices; they do whatever…they want.”

On the one hand, this is a standard comedic trope, reaching back to Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife, please” or Rodney Dangerfield’s “Don’t get no respect” or “The Honeymooners” episodes. But, behind that, there’s something true, and even beautiful.

Rock identifies that there’s something fundamentally different between a “relationship” and a marriage, and that difference is, among other things, permanence. Why does the wife, unlike the girlfriend, in Rock’s joke “do whatever she wants”? It’s because she has the security of knowing her relationship isn’t tenuous. She’s here to stay.

Comedian/essayist Ben Stein, in one of his advice books, recommends that one see his or her marriage as a campaign for a dream job, with the spouse as the one vote needed to elect. That’s good advice, I suppose, but I like Rock’s image better, if we’re going to find political metaphors.

The Supreme Court, after all, can do some things that puzzle or even outrage people. Think of all the fury summed up in words of Supreme Court cases behind culture wars in America, from the founding until now. And yet the Supreme Court abides. Even when the Court outrages the populace, we don’t legislate it out of existence, because we can’t. To do so would be to walk away from the Constitution, from the Republic itself.

Marriage is indeed like that. A president goes through exhaustive research to “vet” a potential Supreme Court justice, and the stakes are high when the U.S. Senate takes up its role in confirming the justice. The stakes are high because the appointment is for life. Speak now, or forever hold your peace.

Bracket for a moment our convictions about sexuality. Even on its own terms, cohabitation doesn’t “prepare” couples for marriage. Without the security of permanence and fidelity a “relationship” is wholly different from a marriage. As a matter of fact, “dating” isn’t a preparation for marriage either, beyond the level of discovering whether this couple have a reason not to marry.

Moreover, the Supreme Court metaphor makes sense of one of the clearest truths of marital wisdom. A marriage in which either husband or wife hold the nuclear codes of divorce, just in case, is a marriage in which the couple cannot psychologically give themselves to one another as “one flesh.”

That’s what is most sad about the divorce culture in Western civilization. In previous days, what drove a man or woman crazy about the other person would be taken into account before the marriage, to be sure. Can I live with his messiness? Can I wake up every morning to her voice?

But once married, the thought for most people was “what are you going to do?” You lived with all the peeves and annoyances, and eventually learned to ignore them because, well, what are you going to do? You’re married for life, and so you can live happily or unhappily, but you’ll do it together. That doesn’t lead to misery but to contentment and the cultivation of love.

There are, of course, times when a marriage traumatically is ripped asunder, by unrepentant immorality or abandonment or abuse, just as there are times when a Supreme Court must be impeached. But that’s a constitutional crisis, not the normal state of affairs.

For a man to really know a woman, and for a woman to really know a man, they must be given to each other, with nothing held back. That requires the security and permanence of “till death do us part.”

Christians have spent a lot of time talking about how communication can lead to permanence. And that’s true. When a couple speaks freely and honestly, and cleaves to one another, a marriage is stabilized. But we need also to speak about how permanence leads to communication. When a couple has nothing to fear from one another, including the fear of leaving, they open up with their secrets, their doubts, their frustrations, their lives. They are, emotionally, naked and not afraid. They’re not campaigning for anything, but are confirmed to each other for life. Chris Rock is right, about that.

Here’s why this matters. The statement Giglio made that was so controversial is essentially a near-direct quotation from the Christian Scriptures. Unrepentant homosexuals, Giglio said (as with unrepentant sinners of all kinds) “will not inherit the kingdom of God.” That’s 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. Giglio said, “it’s not easy to change, but it is possible to change.” The Bible says God “commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30), the same gospel, Giglio says, “that I say to you and that you would say to me.”

The Christian faith in every expression has held for 2000 years that sexual immorality is sinful. This same Christian faith has maintained, again in every branch, that sexual expression outside of conjugal marriage is sin. And the Christian faith has maintained universally that all persons are sinners and that no sinner can enter the kingdom without repentance. This is hardly new.

The “shock” with which this so-called “anti-gay” stance is articulated by the Left is akin to the Pork Producers Association denouncing a Muslim imam’s invitation because he is “anti-agriculture” due to Koranic dietary restrictions.

In fact, by the standards of this controversy, no Muslim imam or Orthodox Jewish rabbi alive can pray at a presidential inauguration.

When it is now impossible for one who holds to the catholic Christian view of marriage and the gospel to pray at a public event, we now have a de facto established state church.  Just as the pre-constitutional Anglican and congregational churches required a license to preach in order to exclude Baptists, the new state church requires a “license” of embracing sexual liberation in all its forms.

Note, this now doesn’t simply exclude harsh and intemperate statements or even activism. Simply holding the view held by every Roman pontiff and by every congregation and synagogue in the world until very recent days is enough to make one “radioactive” in public.

As citizens, we ought to insist that the President stand up to his “base” and articulate a vision of a healthy pluralism in the public square. Notice that the problem is not that this evangelical wants to “impose his religion” on the rest of society.  The problem is not that he wants to exclude homosexuals or others from the public square or of their civil rights. The problem is that he won’t say that they can go to heaven without repentance. That’s not a civil issue, but a religious test of orthodoxy.

As Christians, we ought to recognize that the old majoritarian understanding of church/state relations is outmoded. Our situation today is not to hold on to some form of American civil religion. Our situation today is more akin to the minority religions of America’s past: colonial Baptists, nineteenth-century Baptists, early twentieth-century Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are appealing simply for the right to exist at all, in the face of an established religion armed with popular support and, in the fullness of time, state power.

It turns out we’re circling around to where we should have been all along: with the understanding that religious liberty isn’t “toleration” and separation of church and state isn’t secularism.

We don’t have a natural right to pray at anyone’s inauguration. But when one is pressured out from a previous invitation because he is too “toxic” for simply mentioning once something universal in the Christian faith, we ought to see what we’re looking at: a state church.

And as one old revolutionary-era Baptist said, as he went in and out of prison for preaching: “There is nothing so offensive to an established church than the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

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On the one hand, yes, as the article points out, there have been some real gains in protections for the unborn in some important arenas. And public polling data does demonstrate, rather consistently, that younger people are more willing to identify themselves as being “pro-life” than are their mothers’ generation. This is due partly to sonogram and other technologies that make it harder and harder to maintain that the “fetus” is a clump of impersonal tissue. Whenever evangelical Christians see polls like this, we tend to see some triumphalist rhetoric about how “we’re winning.”

I think it’s more complicated than that.

Yes, it’s a win just that the concept of “pro-life” is still alive. The abortion rights movement probably assumed that forty years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion that the issue would be as settled as school integration or women’s suffrage. It’s still a controversy, and the pro-life side hasn’t been sidelined by history.

And it’s true that there have been some gains in the numbers of doctors who, for conscience reasons, are unwilling to go along with the lie that abortion is “health-care.”

That said, we must remember that the large numbers of self-identified pro-life people might itself in some instances be an indicator of just how embedded the abortion rights culture is in American life.

Here’s why.

It’s easy to identify as “pro-life” when one sees nothing really at stake. For forty years, legal abortion has been securely anchored in American law. Even after the rise of the Religious Right, two Reagan Administrations and three Bush Administrations, abortion is legal everywhere in the United States. With this the case, it is easy for Americans to see the debate as a matter of theory rather than a matter of policy.

I remember having a discussion once with friends about what side I would have taken on the Vietnam war had I been alive in the 1960s. That’s an easy coffee shop discussion to have because I don’t have a draft notice in the mail. I’m not on a campus being mentored by an anti-war professor. I’m not a Cambodian farmer or a south Vietnamese shrimper in danger of being murdered by the Khmer Rouge or the Vietcong.

There are all sorts of politicians who have identified as “pro-life” when all that meant was casting relatively symbolic votes. Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer and former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus, for example, were reliably pro-life, until they were presented with legislation restricting abortion in meaningful ways in their states. At that point, they shifted.

I’m afraid the same is true on the individual level. A feminist leader once said that most Americans are pro-life with three exceptions: rape, incest, and “my situation.” When the teenage daughter is pregnant, the theory is abandoned and bloodthirsty pragmatism rules. I fear this feminist is all too right.

Pharaoh was pro-immigrant until the Israelites threatened what he wanted. The first Herod Administration was pro-Messiah until the actual Messiah threatened his throne. The second Herod Administration was fine with desert prophets until one meddled with his “adult entertainment.” Lots of people are pro-life and pro-child until the lives of children become personally inconvenient.

Does that mean that I, as a pro-lifer, am pessimistic about the future of our engagement on this issue. Not at all.

I just think that we must have a realistic view about how ingrained the abortion-rights worldview is in our culture. We are on the lookout for the ways in which the death culture seeks to circumvent the state of the debate through pernicious new technologies and through the more subtle changes in culture that make children seem to be burden rather than blessing. Knowing the persistence of the abortion culture shows us what we’re up against, but it doesn’t sap our spirit.

The cause of the unborn will triumph, ultimately, because Jesus is alive and justice will win. Until then, polls go up and polls go down. We advocate for life, whether “winning” or not, because life isn’t a government grant or an act of charity granted by the “choice” of another human being.

And we struggle for the protections we can gain for our unborn neighbors as we seek to cultivate a long-term vision of the dignity of all human life in our churches and communities.

To paraphrase the radical curmudgeon Edward Abbey, I am an optimist in the long-run, and by “long-run” I mean the next 5,000 years.

Until then, we work, we plead, we stand, whether we look like winners or not.

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In the most recent issue of Touchstone magazine, I argue that the loss of the words “fornicate” and “fornication” implicitly cedes the moral imagination to the sexual revolutionaries because the words “fornication” and “premarital sex” aren’t interchangeable.

Fornication isn’t merely “premarital.” Premarital is the language of timing, and with it we infer that this is simply the marital act misfired at the wrong time. But fornication is, both spiritually and typologically, a different sort of act from the marital act. That’s why the consequences are so dire.

Fornication pictures a different reality than the mystery of Christ presented in the one-flesh union of covenantal marriage. It represents a Christ who uses his church without joining her, covenantally and permanently, to himself. The man who leads a woman into sexual union without a covenantal bond is preaching to her, to the world, and to himself a different gospel from the gospel of Jesus Christ. And he is forming a real spiritual union, the Apostle Paul warns, but one with a different spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 Cor. 6:15, 19).

This is important because the Scripture makes clear that “fornicators will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10; Rev. 21:8). The language of “premarital sex” can enable a conscience to evade repentance. After all, if the problem is one merely of “timing” or of “waiting” then the problem is resolved once one is married. The event was in the past.

This makes fornication even more dangerous, in this sense, than adultery. Both fornication and adultery are acts of infidelity. But a man who has committed adultery, if he is repentant, understands something of how he’s broken trust, attacked a covenant. He can see that even when his wife has forgiven him, he must invest years in rebuilding trust. He can understand why his wife concludes that if he’ll cheat with one woman, why would he not cheat with another? He must work to show himself faithful.

The fornicator can be deceived into thinking that marriage has solved the problem. He doesn’t see the ongoing nature of the problem. Often he finds it difficult to lead his wife spiritually, or to fully gain her trust. The root problem is a sin committed together, driving the couple apart.

Moreover, she knows, especially if he professed to be a Christian before the marriage, that his libido is stronger than his conscience. If he’s able to justify his fornication, he will justify his adultery. They are not two separate things, but two different phases of the same thing: immorality in contrast to the self-giving and uniting covenant of marriage.

We ought not to be ashamed of the Christian language of “fornication,” but instead to be ashamed of fornication itself.

That doesn’t make us more censorious. When we speak honestly, we are able to speak with more liberating power to sinners, including sexual sinners, in our streets and sidewalks and pews. The blood of the cross can cleanse any sin, but no one comes to the cross without repentance. When we speak bluntly and honestly we lead people to the cross—to repent, not just to rebrand.

Read the whole article at Touchstone here.

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1. Christians, Let’s Honor the President

The American people have decided that Barack Obama should have a second term. And, behind them, in the mystery of providence, God has decided that Barack Obama would be re-elected. So how should Christians respond to our once and future President?

2. School Shootings and Spiritual Warfare

Violence against children is not just tragic—it’s satanic. Throughout history the evil one has lashed out against children because they remind the satanic powers that a Child uproots their reign. The Incarnation, we must remember, was an act of war—the entry of the prince of peace who will crush the skull of the ancient murderer of Eden. We grieve in the midst of these tragic deaths, then, and we also pray for the returning of Mary’s Son who will crush the head of the serpent.

3. Pat Robertson vs. the Spirit of Adoption

For too long, we’ve let our leaders replace the cross with an Asherah pole. Enough is enough. A worldview that views people primarily in terms of their worth or usefulness is not a Christian one.

4. Should Christians Boycott Starbucks?

As those who’ve been vindicated by the resurrection of Christ, we don’t need to be vindicated by the culture. The argument behind a boycott assumes that the “rightness” of a marriage definition is constituted by a majority with power, but that’s exactly what we’re arguing against. We won’t win the argument about marriage by bringing corporations to the ground in surrender. We’ll engage this argument when the outside world begins to see marriages among Christians that are distinctly different—and proclaim the meaning behind marriage, the covenant union of Christ and his church.

5. Why Zombies Matter

The next time you see the trailer for a zombie film, or see the picture of a walking corpse on the cover of a novel, remember that that was your story once too. The biblical story of the Fall of humanity is one of a humanity that comes under the sway of death by obeying the appetite. Yet Jesus offers instead life, and that abundantly, as we eat of his flesh, drink of his blood, and share in his triumph over the accusing slavemaster.

6. Halloween and Evangelical Identity

A friend of mine once explained the difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals by saying, “An evangelical is a fundamentalist who watches The Office.” In this lighter piece, I tried my hand at explaining the spectrum of Protestantism, with tongue in cheek, using Halloween as a Rorschach test.

7. Should I Divorce If I’m Miserable?

With “Christian” pastors and counselors who counsel irreconcilable differences as legitimate grounds for Christians to divorce, who needs demons? Short-term fidelity has everything to do with long-term happiness—the long-term for the believer being trillions and trillions of years reigning with Christ.

8. The Next Billy Graham Might Be Drunk Right Now

Jesus has promised that he will build his church—but he hasn’t promised us that he would build using only those currently in our churches. Let’s remember, those whom God may use to start the next great revival may still be a pagan. The next Billy Graham may be drunk somewhere on Times Square tonight. So, on the one hand, let’s relax. And on the other hand, let’s share the gospel all the more boldly, knowing that God will build his church.

9. Mother’s Day and the Infertile

Mother’s Day is a particularly sensitive time in many congregations, and pastors and church leaders often don’t even know it. 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.

10. Let’s Rethink Our Holly-Jolly Christmas Songs

Are Christmas song boring? That’s what I heard one man say: “Christmas is boring because there’s no narrative tension. It’s like reading a book with no conflict.” That may be true of some Christmas songs, but let’s remember the Christmas songs of the church. We have a rich and complicated and often appropriately dark Christmas hymnody. We can sing of blessings flowing “far as the curse is found,” and of the one who came to “free us all from Satan’s power.”

The jokes are pinging around social media and the television networks about the so-called Mayan apocalypse, based on a reading of a Mayan calendar ending on December 21 of this year. Of course, no one but the most obviously gullible people actually worried about this. And these were the same people who still had stored-up water and canned goods for the Y2K apocalypse from 1999.

I think there’s something we ought to pay attention to here that can help us read why Christianity seemed so incredible in the first-century, and why it still seems so incredible now. Our forefathers, the apostles of our Lord Jesus, looked to the world like the Mayan apocalypse hawkers.

The Apostle Peter wrote to the churches that scoffers would come, saying “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4). The ongoing normalcy of the world seems to be an indicator that everything has always been this way, and always will be. The expectation of a returning, triumphant Christ seemed to be just as ridiculous as the Mayan calendar.

Peter acknowledged this, but pointed to the same event our Lord Jesus pointed to earlier: the flood of Noah. Unlike the prophecy charts of all the pagan nations and the Christian television evangelists, the kingdom of God doesn’t come with, as Jesus put it, “signs to be perceived.”

Jesus said this age will whir on and on, seeming as though God has forgotten the just and overlooks the wicked. As in the days of Noah, we’ll have weddings and funerals, and on and on it will go. Until, suddenly - everything changes (Matt. 24:36-44).

There’s something embedded in the human conscience that knows there’s a day of reckoning. In the heart God has implanted a witness to the coming judgment (Rom. 2:13-16). I think that’s why we take note of old prophecies of the end, wherever they come from, and why every culture tells stories, sings songs, makes movies and television shows about the end of it all.

The Mayans were wrong about the calendar. But they weren’t wrong that the arc of history is headed toward something cataclysmic. That’s a word of judgment. God sees and knows and will call to account. But it’s also, for the people of Christ, a word of promise. God hasn’t forgotten you. Jesus hasn’t left you as an orphan. Yes, it seems to have been a long time from the Roman empire to the digital age. But a thousand years is as a day, and a day as a thousand years (2 Pet. 3:8).

And even the delay is a sign of God’s goodness and kindness. Every morning the sun comes up is another opportunity for the lost to be welcomed home by the God who is “patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).

Today’s probably not the end of the age, and we ought to have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, the coming of Jesus isn’t the end of anything, but the start of a new earth liberated from the reign of death. So we ought to groan, “Come Lord Jesus.” On the other hand, the delay means there’s still room for more.

This man wasn’t talking about the hustle and bustle of the holidays, or about the stresses of family meals or all the things people tend to complain about. What he hated was the music.

This guy started by lampooning Sting’s Christmas album, and I found myself smiling as I browsed because he is so right; it’s awful. But then he went on to say that he hated Christmas music across the board. That’s when I started to feel as though I might be in the presence of the Grinch. You know, when every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small, would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing; they’d stand hand-in-hand. And the Who’s would start singing. The sour old green villain didn’t like that.

But then this man explained why he found the music so bad. It wasn’t just that it was cloying. It’s that it was boring.

“Christmas is boring because there’s no narrative tension,” he said. “It’s like reading a book with no conflict.”

Now he had my attention.

I’m sure this man had thought this for a long time, but maybe he felt freer to say it because we were only hours out from hearing the horrifying news of a massacre of innocent children in Connecticut. For him, the tranquil lyrics of our Christmas songs couldn’t encompass such terror. Maybe we should think about that.

Of course, some of the blame is on our sentimentalized Christmas of the American civil religion. Simeon the prophet never wished anyone a “holly-jolly Christmas” or envisioned anything about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But there’s our songs too, the songs of the church. We ought to make sure that what we sing measures up with the, as this fellow would put it, “narrative tension” of the Christmas story.

The first Christmas carol, after all, was a war hymn. Mary of Nazareth sings of God’s defeat of his enemies, about how in Christ he had demonstrated his power and “has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate” (Lk. 1:52). There are some villains in mind there.

Simeon’s song, likewise, speaks of the “fall and rising of many in Israel” and of a sword that would pierce the heart of Mary herself. Even the “light of the Gentiles” he speaks about is in the context of warfare. After all, the light, the Bible tells us, overcomes the darkness (Jn. 1:5), and frees us from the grip of the devil (2 Cor. 4).

In a time of obvious tragedy, the unbearable lightness of Christmas seems absurd to the watching world. But, even in the best of times, we all know that we live in a groaning universe, a world of divorce courts and cancer cells and concentration camps. Just as we sing with joy about the coming of the Promised One, we ought also to sing with groaning that he is not back yet (Rom. 8:23), sometimes with groanings too deep for lyrics.

The man in the bookstore knew that reality is complicated. There’s grit, and there’s tension. Without it, Christmas didn’t seem real to life. It’s hard to get more tense than being born under a king’s death sentence (Matt. 2:16), and with an ancient dragon crouching at the birth canal to devour you (Rev. 12:4). But this man didn’t hear any of that in Christmas. I’m glad I overheard him.

We have a rich and complicated and often appropriately dark Christmas hymnody. We can sing of blessings flowing “far as the curse is found,” of the one who came to “free us all from Satan’s power.”

Let’s sing that, every now and then, where we can be overheard.

ABC News is reporting that the ruling United Russia Party is threatening to ban all U.S. adoptions in retaliation for President Obama signing into law sanctions for Russia’s abysmal record on human rights. In order to defend their horrifying lack of respect for human dignity, some Russian bureaucrats are willing to sacrifice the lives of their own children, languishing by the thousands in orphanages as we speak.

This would be no issue, of course, if the orphanages of Russia were empty. That’s what we should pray and hope for, everywhere.

Adoption is an important but secondary aspect of orphan care. The first priority is to keep families together, and to alleviate the conditions (poverty and substance addiction, chief among them) that create fatherlessness in the first place.

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

Even with adoption possible, mass numbers of Russian orphans never make it out of the orphanage, until their eighteenth birthday when they are “aged out,” and suddenly on their own.

These children, with a background of trauma, non-existent family support systems, and no preparation for independent life typically turn to a life of drug abuse, prostitution, and suicide.

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

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

So take a moment to pray for the orphans and widows. Remember particularly the hundreds of thousands of little ones looking out the windows of Russian orphanages today, wondering if their future is with a family or trembling alone on a sidewalk.

In a few hours, I’m going to hug my Russian-born sons, and I’m going to pray that many now where they once were will know, soon, what it’s like to have a mom and a dad and, best of all, a capital-F Father.

In the hours after the shooting, Jewish political and cultural commentator John Podhoretz called attention to a concept most Americans don’t like to think about at Christmastime, if ever: hell. Podhoretz noted the heightened iniquity of child sacrifice in the Hebrew Scriptures’ denunciation of the god Moloch. Moloch, of course, was a blood-thirsty deity who demanded his followers to pour out the lives of their children. The valley of this atrocity was called Gehenna. Jesus pointed to Gehenna when he told us about hell.

Throughout the history of the universe, evil has manifested a dark form of violence specifically toward children. Not only did the Canaanite nations demand the blood of babies, but the Bible shows where at points of redemptive crisis, the powers of evil have lashed out at children. Pharaoh saw God’s blessing of Israelite children as a curse and demanded they be snuffed out by the power of his armed thugs. And, of course, the Christmas narrative we read together this time of year is overshadowed by an act of horrific mass murder of children. King Herod, seeing his throne threatened, demands the slaughter of innocent children.

Jesus was not born into a gauzy, sentimental winter wonderland of sweetly-singing angels and cute reindeer nuzzling one another at the side of his manger. He was born into a war-zone. And at the very rumor of his coming, Herod vowed to see him dead, right along with thousands of his brothers. History in Bethlehem, as before and as now, is riddled with the bodies of murdered children.

Why?

There are more factors at work here than just impersonal psychology and sociology. “The course of this world,” we’re told, is driven along by “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). And behind all of that is a bloody skirmish. Satan is, Jesus tells us, a “murderer from the beginning” because he hates life itself. And he hates the life of children, particularly, because they picture something true about Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus showed his disciple John that behind the particulars of history there’s another, darker, story going on. Jesus showed the picture of a woman giving birth to a child, with a dragon crouching before her to devour the baby (Rev. 12:4). When the woman and her child escaped, the dragon “became furious with the woman and went out to make war on the rest of her offspring” (Rev. 12:17), and has done so ever since.

Satan hates children because he hates Jesus. When evil destroys “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40, 45), the most vulnerable among us, it destroys a picture of Jesus himself, of the child delivered by the woman who crushes the head of our reptilian overlord (Gen. 3:15). The demonic powers know that the human race is saved, and they’re vanquished, by a child born of woman (Gal. 4:4; 1 Tim. 2:15). And so they hate the children who bear his nature.

Violence against children is also peculiarly satanic because it destroys the very picture of newness of life and dependent trust that characterizes life in the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:4). Children are a blessing, and that enrages the horrifying nature of those who seek only to kill and to destroy (Jn. 10:10).

The satanic powers want the kingdoms of the universe, and a child uproots their reign.

Let’s not offer pat, easy answers to the grieving parents and communities in Connecticut. We don’t fully understand the mystery of iniquity. We don’t know why God didn’t stop this from happening. But we do know what this act is: it’s satanic, and we should say so.

Let’s grieve for the innocent. Let’s demand justice for the guilty. And let’s rage against the Reptile behind it all.

As we do so, let’s remember that Bethlehem was an act of war. Let’s remember that the One born there is a prince of peace who will crush the skull of the ancient murderer of Eden. Let’s pray for the Second Coming of Mary’s son. And, as we sing our Christmas carols, let’s look into the slitted eyes of Satan as we promise him the threat of his coming crushed skull.

The mystery of evil is a declaration of war on the peace of God’s creation. The war goes on, but not for long. And sometimes the most warlike thing we can say, in an inhuman murderous age like this one, is “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”

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When you listen to Christmas music, there are lots of songs about our Lord’s mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary: not just “Ave Maria” but CCM/pop stuff along the lines of “Mary, Did You Know” and so on. But Christmas music, like Christian churches, tends to ignore Joseph.

This week on “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we listen to a song that speaks, somewhat at least, to Joseph’s life as adopting father. This version of “It Wasn’t His Child” is sung by Trisha Yearwood. Let’s talk about why this song, and so many of us, see Joseph the way we do, and what that has to do with our understanding of fatherhood, of sacrifice, and of the gospel.

Evangelicals and Roman Catholics rightly noted the incongruity of the nation’s largest abortion provider using an ancient Christian holiday to promote abortion rights. The give-and-take over this card was a quick controversy, forgotten once all the wrapping paper and tinsel were put away for the season.

But the card made me think of Joseph, and how this obscure Middle Eastern laborer could show 21st-century Christians how to celebrate Christmas in a culture of death?

For too long, Christians have concentrated almost exclusively on what we do not believe about Joseph.

We rightly insist that he was not the birth-father of Jesus. Mary, a virgin, conceived the Messiah through the power of the Holy Spirit, with no biological contribution from a man (Luke 1:34-35). And yet, there is so much more that Scripture has to say about Joseph.

In his adoption of Jesus, Joseph is rightly identified as Jesus’ father (Luke 2:41,48). Indeed, Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ roots in Abraham and David through the line of Joseph. It is through Joseph that Jesus is a legal heir to the covenant promises of the Old Testament. It is through Joseph’s legal fatherhood of Jesus that the “hopes and fears of all the years” find their realization in the final son of Abraham, son of David and son of Israel. Jesus did not share Joseph’s DNA, but he claimed him as his father, obeying Joseph perfectly and even following in his vocation. Joseph, after all, was perhaps the first to hear the word “Abba” in the babbling of the Nazarene infant.

With full legal rights to abandon Mary and her unborn child — perhaps to a fate worse than death — Joseph obeyed the Father in becoming a father. When Herod — the Roman Empire’s precursor to “Planned Parenthood” — sought the destruction of the infants, Joseph shielded this child from the murderous rage of infanticide (Matthew 2:13-18). In his obedience, Joseph demonstrated what his other son would later call “pure and undefiled” religion, the kind that cares for the fatherless and the abandoned (James 1:27).

It is here that Joseph is perhaps a model for a new generation of Christians. In a culture captivated by the spirit of Herod, could it be that God is calling our churches to follow the example of Joseph? This might mean a battalion of new church-sponsored crisis pregnancy centers, able and equipped to provide an alternative for confused young women who might otherwise listen to the slick but deadly propaganda of the Planned Parenthood profiteers. It may mean pastors prophetically calling on Christians to oppose the abortion culture by actually rescuing babies through adoption.

It will mean Christian parents willing to open their hearts and their homes to unwanted infants — infants that Planned Parenthood would like to see carried out with the medical waste. It might mean that, next year, there will be one more stocking at the chimney at your house — a new son or daughter who escapes the abortionist’s knife to find at your knee the grace of a carpenter’s Son.

Planned Parenthood thinks “Choice on Earth” is the message of Christmas. Maybe it is in a Christmas culture more identified with the shopping malls than with the churches. But maybe this year Christians should follow the footsteps of the “other” man at the manger.

And maybe this year, as we gather to read the angel’s proclamation to the shepherds, we can remind a miserable generation that there is something more joyous than “choice.”

This post has been adapted from a piece that originally appeared at Baptist Press on December 12, 2012, under the title, “Joseph of Nazareth Meets Planned Parenthood.”

I am an evangelical Christian, and I work as a wedding photographer. By conscience, I hold to an orthodox view of human sexuality, with all that entails. I’ve been asked to photograph a same-sex wedding service (legal in my state), and I’ve said no. I wonder if I did the right thing.

After all, this is a business, providing a service. Would it be right for me to refuse to serve a gay couple if I owned a restaurant? I don’t think so.  If a same-sex marriage isn’t a marriage at all (as the historic Christian view teaches), then how is this different from just photographing people at a birthday party or community festival (in which case it wouldn’t matter what’s happening with them sexually).

Moreover, I’m not sure that photographing an event is an endorsement of that event. I have photographed weddings of people who were divorced (and I didn’t investigate the background), people who were probably cohabiting, people who were most likely unequally yoked to one another, and so on.

So I’m kind of caught. My conscience bothers me because I turned this couple down, and my conscience will bother me if I photograph this wedding. What do you think?

The Wedding Photographer

Dear WP,

You’re right that this situation is more complicated than whether to serve someone at a restaurant (yes) regardless of that person’s sexual or marital situation. I would also argue that the situation is very different from photographing some other event, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the clients’ sexual or marital context. The fact that this is a wedding means there’s a different moral question for you.

You are also right that your role as a wedding photographer is different from an officiating minister, a member of the wedding party, or even an invited guest. All of those people are part of the wedding itself, the assembled witnesses who affirm the lawfulness of the union and pledge to hold the couple accountable for their vows.

If you were, say, a photojournalist for a news service, there to report on the first same-sex marriage in your state, for instance, there would be no issue for your conscience. As a wedding photographer, though, you are in a third place between participant and neutral observer.

A same-sex wedding is different, I think, from the other problematic marriages you mentioned, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, while a biblical view of marriage would see that such people (fornicators, believers to unbelievers, unlawfully divorced, etc.) should not get married, and that the church has no authority to marry them, we also would affirm that such people, when married, actually are married. A pastor who joins a believer to an unbeliever bears an awful responsibility for doing something wrong, but the end result is an actual marriage.

The same-sex marriage differs not in terms of morality, but in terms of reality. It is not that homosexuality is some sort of wholly different or unforgivable sexual sin. It’s that the historic Christian view of marriage means that without sexual complementarity there is no marriage at all.

More than that, you are right to note that your situation takes place at a moment of concerted cultural revisionism on the question of marriage as conjugal union. A same-sex wedding service right now is not merely personal, but, whether the couple intends this or not, political, with all sorts of corresponding questions.

Your conscience is conflicted right now, but suppose there’s in the near future an evangelical or Roman Catholic or Muslim photographer whose conscience would be morally opposed to participating at all in a same-sex marriage ceremony. There’s a real question as to whether the civil state will penalize this person’s conscientious objection, at least in some parts of the country. And a state that will do that has over-stepped its authority.

I would say that the decisions you’ll make, generally, as a wedding photographer will correspond often with the Corinthian dilemma of whether to eat meat that had been offered to idols (1 Cor. 8).

The Apostle Paul says, first of all, that the idols don’t represent real gods (1 Cor. 8:4), in the same way that you would argue that a wedding without a bride or a groom isn’t really a marriage. If something’s put before you, the apostle writes, eat it to the glory of God, no questions asked.

But, the apostle says, if the food is advertised as sacrificed to idols abstain from it for the sake of the consciences of those around you (1 Cor. 8:7-9).  This is the difference between investigating a doughnut shop owner’s buying habits before eating there and stopping in for doughnuts when the sign out front flashes: “Eat here and support our owner’s cocaine and prostitutes habit.”

You need not investigate as a wedding photographer whether the wedding you are photographing is Christ-honoring. But when there is an obvious deviation from the biblical reality, sacrifice the business for conscience, your own and those of the ones in your orbit who would be confused.

That said, don’t be mean.

The couple asking you to do this wedding aren’t your enemies (Eph. 6:12). They are made in the image of God and are loved by him, and so should be loved by us. As orthodox Christians we don’t believe this leads to the happiness they’re looking for, but we must stand with kindness as well as with conviction. Tell the couple that you wish them well, but that you have beliefs about marriage that won’t allow your conscience to participate in this way. Thank them for asking you but recommend a photographer who can click away with a clear conscience.

The book is called My Ideal Bookshelf. The volume asks notable people in a variety of fields, from Malcolm Gladwell to Judd Apatow to Rosanne Cash, to imagine a bookshelf with the books that made a mark on their lives. With each page-long essay, there’s a drawing by artist Jane Mount of the bookshelf.

I’m not even a third of the way through the book, but it was worth the price by the third or fourth page. The essays and the drawings give a little window of insight into the lives of each of the contributors. The book made me wonder what the ideal bookshelves would look like of lots of people who matter to me, but who aren’t in this volume.

It also made me think about the books that have been important to me along the way. And it made me remember what one of my favorite writers said to me just a couple of years ago, “Isn’t it funny how you meet just the right people at just the right time, have just the right conversations at just the right time, and happen upon just the right books at just the right time?”

That is an amazing thing, and it’s what we in the Body of Christ call “providence.”

If you like books and people, and how the two interact, pick up a copy of this little book.

And, in the meantime, what books would be on your ideal bookshelf?

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Flipping through magazines on an airplane the other day, I found myself sighing with irritation. An advertisement for Budweiser was tagged with the headline, “Silent Nights are Overrated.” A few minutes later, in a second magazine, I came across an ad for a high-end outdoor grill, which read: “Who says it’s better to give than to receive?”

My first reaction was one that I’ve critiqued in others, to take some sort of personal, or at least tribal, offense: “Would they advertise in Turkey during Ramadan with the line, ‘Fasting is Overrated?’ or by asking in India, ‘Who says everything is one with the universe?’”

I was missing the point—and that matters.

Every year about this time, there’s a lot of hubbub about a so-called “war on Christmas.” In some instances, there are legitimate questions of religious liberty involved and complicated church/state questions that we ought to be concerned about. More commonly, though, the outrage is directed toward the commercial marketplace, for replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” and so on.

As Christians, we ought to recognize that a militant pull toward what Richard John Neuhaus called a “naked public square” is bad for people of any and all religious traditions. But there’s a difference between, for instance, standing against a school system penalizing a child for writing “Merry Christmas” on her “holiday card” and the kind of huffing and puffing we do when commercial marketers don’t “get” our Christian commitments.

I should have thought about the fact that the advertising agencies behind this beer company and this grill corporation are trying to sell products, not to offend constituencies. Taking shots at any group’s religious beliefs isn’t good economics, and that’s just the point. I’m willing to bet whoever dreamed up these ad campaigns didn’t “get” at all that they might be making fun of Jesus Christ.

Madison Avenue probably didn’t trace through that the song “Silent Night” is about the holy awe of the dawning Incarnation in Bethlehem. It’s just a Christmas song, part of the background music in our culture this time of year. Saying it’s overrated probably didn’t feel any more “insensitive” to these copywriters than making a joke about, say, decking the halls or reindeer games or Heat Miser and Cold Miser.

And they probably never thought about the fact that the statement “It is better to give than to receive” is a quotation from Jesus (Acts 20:35). It probably just seems like a Benjamin Franklin-style aphorism. It’s the same kind of thing that happens when someone says “scarlet letter” without recognizing Hawthorne or “to be or not to be” while not knowing the difference between Hamlet and Shrek.

We ought not to get outraged by all that, as though we were some protected class of victims. We ought to instead see the ways that our culture is less and less connected with the roots of basic knowledge about Christianity. Many, especially in the culture-making wing of American life, see Christmas in the same way they see Hanukkah. They know about Menorahs and dreidels, but not about the Maccabean fight.

That ought not make us angry. It ought to instead give us an opportunity to understand how we look to our neighbors. They see us more in terms of our trivialities than in terms of the depths of meaning of Incarnation and blood atonement and the kingdom of Christ. They know something about “Silent Night,” just as they know something about “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” What they don’t recognize is the cosmos-shifting mystery of Immanuel as God with Us.

All that means is that we need to spend more time lovingly engaging our neighbors with the sort of news that shocks angels and redirects stargazers and knocks sheep-herders to the ground. That it seems increasingly strange is all the better—because it is strange. A gospel safe enough to sell beer and barbecue grills is a gospel too safe to make blessings flow, far as the curse is found.

Christmas, then, isn’t about a fight for our right to party. It’s a reminder that we, like every generation before us, live in a “land of deep darkness” (Isa. 9:2). The darkness isn’t overcome by sarcasm or personal offense or retaliatory insults. The light of Bethlehem shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not, cannot, will not overcome it.

And that’s enough.

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Domestic abuse, particularly wife abuse, is a fairly persistent theme in country music, especially in recent years. Two songs immediately come to mind, both of which focus on the murder of an abusive man, though they could hardly be more different in tone.

Martina McBride in “Independence Day” sings from the perspective of a daughter who lived through her father’s drunken beating of her mother, and through her mother’s killing of her father. In this song, she doesn’t condone the murder, but she says this was the only way her mother could find to be free of his tyranny.

The Dixie Chicks, on the other hand, pick up a similar storyline, but in a kind of dark comedic format. In their song “Goodbye Earl,” they present two friends who, “Thelma and Louise-style,” murder their abuser, and realize that life goes on just fine because Earl was “a missing person who nobody missed at all.”

As I think about it, I don’t really think these songs are about calling women to murder the men who abuse them. I don’t think that’s the case with film representations along similar lines, such as The Burning Bed. It seems to me that the murder is a stand-in metaphor for the utter helplessness victims of domestic violence feel. After all, a woman who cannot see how, economically, she can walk away from an abusive relationship can feel as though she is trapped in a life sentence with no way out.

This week, listen with me to these two songs. And as we do so, let’s reflect on what it means for the church to listen to the desperation of victims of violence and provide a place of refuge, escape, and healing for these sisters of ours, and their children.

And, sure enough, at the theater, there were lots of adolescent girls lined up to see the latest in the “Twilight” series. In fact, the “Breaking Dawn Part 2″ film was the top-grossing movie in America last weekend, as expected. The vampire romance series, in both book and movie genres, reaches its demographic effectively.

As I thought about all of those girls lined up to watch this movie, I remembered a commenter several years ago who posted on this site to this interesting article from Wired magazine about unfortunate lessons girls learn from the New Moon film (then just released, and just as popular) and the rest of the Twilight books and movies.

These start with:

“1. If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence.”

These “lessons” move on to darker, abuse-enabling themes, such as:

“7. It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you.”

I don’t think this is unique (at all) to the Twilight series, but this is an area to which we ought to pay more attention. It’s also an area where Christians and some feminists can agree, at least on diagnosing the problem. Images given to our girls and young women often mask a pagan and predatory patriarchy, one in which female worth is seen satanically in terms of sexual availability and attractiveness to men.

The answer isn’t just to “deconstruct” these images, in whatever format they come. The answer means providing a compelling counter-narrative about the glory of womanhood. That’s about more than just picking better books and watching better movies (although that might be a good start).

What do you think?

Should we encourage our daughters to read and watch the “Twilight” series and other related books and films? If so, how do you teach them to avoid some of the pictures of femininity and masculinity encoded there? If not, how do you discern what’s harmless fluff entertainment and what’s not?

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We must teach from our pulpits, our Sunday school classes, and our Vacation Bible Schools that women are to be cherished, honored, and protected by men. This means we teach men to reject American playboy consumerism in light of a Judgment Seat at which they will give account for their care for their families. It means we explicitly tell the women in our congregations, “A man who hits you has surrendered his headship, and that is the business both of the civil state in enacting public justice and of this church in enacting church discipline.”

Church discipline against wife-beaters must be clear and consistent. We must stand with women against predatory men in all areas of abandonment, divorce, and neglect. We must train up men, through godly mentoring as well as through biblical instruction, who will know that the model of a husband is a man who crucifies his selfish materialism, his libidinal fantasies, and his wrathful temper tantrums in order to care lovingly for a wife. We must also remind these young men that every idle word, and every hateful act, will be laid out in judgment before the eyes of the One to whom we must give an answer.

In the public arena, Christians as citizens should be the most insistent on legal protections for women. We should oppose a therapeutic redefinition of wife abuse as merely a psychological condition. And we should call on the powers-that-be to prosecute abusers of women and children in ways that will deter others and make clear society’s repugnance at such abuse.

Whatever our views on specific economic policies, we must recognize that much economic hardship of women in our age is the result of men who abandon their commitments. We should eschew obnoxious “welfare queen” rhetoric and work with others of goodwill to seek economic and social measures to provide a safety net for single mothers and abused women in jeopardy. We should join with others, including secular feminists, in seeking legal protections against such manifestations of a rape culture as sexual harassment, prostitution, and sex slavery.

An abusive man is not an over-enthusiastic complementarian. He is not a complementarian at all. He is a pathetic aping perversion of Adamic leadership. He rejects male headship because he rejects his role as provider and protector. As the culture grows more violent, more consumerist, more sexualized and more misogynistic, the answer is not a church more attenuated to the ambient culture, whether through a hyper-masculine paganism or through a gender-neutral feminism.

Instead, the answer is a truly counter-cultural church, a church that calls men to account for leadership, a leadership that cherishes and protects women and girls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Often the frustration comes not because of how much Christians love their family members as much as how much these Christians want to be right. The professional Left and Right cable-TV and talk-radio pontificators may value the last word, but we can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sanneh puts Bell in historical context of Christian thought on hell, from Origen to Jonathan Edwards to D. L. Moody. He notes Bell’s crisis of faith and redirection toward questioning Christian orthodoxy on eternal judgment. But the journalist writes, as an aside, that “the doctrine of hell doesn’t necessarily hamper recruitment, despite the fears of liberals.”

“From a certain perspective the idea of a punitive Hell can seem oddly comforting,” Sanneh writes. “An affirmation that suffering is real, and that God is good enough to save you from it.”

The New Yorker recognizes Bell’s apologetic motive in this “strategic project” of Bell’s, “designed to make Christianity more inviting to people who might reject it out of repugnance for the doctrine of hell.”

But the journalist identifies a major problem here:

“When Bell talks this way, he can sound an awful lot like the theological liberals of the twentieth century: scholarly reformers, idealistic but slightly smug, who were shown up by the preachers they derided as ‘extreme fundamentalists.’”

“Given the recent history of mainline Protestants, it’s unclear that a more liberal theology would be healthy for the evangelical movement,” The New Yorker article concludes, noting the vibrancy of Pentecostalism and other forms of supernatural gospel religion. “Throughout American history, the most successful church movements have not been the ones that kept up with contemporary culture, but the ones that were confident enough to tug hard against it.”

The New Yorker and we may have different concepts of what “success” ought to look like, but that’s a perceptive observation.

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Many of us have some disagreements with the President. As a conservative Christian, I believe unborn children have certain inalienable rights, including the right to life, and I wish President Obama would work to protect them. I believe freedom of conscience is the preeminent right in a civil society, and the Administration’s incursions on religious liberty are troubling. I don’t plan to back down one bit on these matters, even as our forefathers Isaac Backus and John Leland relentlessly stood up to the founding generation of leaders on behalf of religious freedom and human dignity.

We are going to disagree with the President on some (important) things; there will be other areas where we can work with the President. But whether in agreement or disagreement, we can honor. Honor doesn’t mean blanket endorsement.

I am always amazed by those Christians who will dispute the command to honor, arguing that “kings” in our system are the people, and therefore we’re called to honor the Constitution but not elected officials. But the Scripture doesn’t command honor simply for the ultimate authority (which is, of course, ultimately God, in any case). Humanly speaking, the ultimate political authority in the New Testament context was the Emperor. And yet, the Apostle Peter specifically calls the people of Christ not only to show submission to the emperor “as supreme” but also to “governors” (1 Pet. 2:13-14). The Apostle Paul calls on the churches to pray and to show thanksgiving for “kings” (plural) and for “all who are in high positions” (1 Tim. 2:1-2).

Paul imitated this when he showed due respect to the governor Felix, referring to him with the honorific title “his Excellency, the governor” (Acts 23:26), even as he appealed his way up through the political process of the Roman Empire of his time. Paul showed thanksgiving for Felix, despite his part in a system with which Paul disagreed at some important points, for his “reforms” for the common good.

Behind that is a more general command to “honor everyone” (1 Pet. 2:17), to pray for “all people” (1 Tim. 2:1). We are to not only pay our taxes but give “respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” (Rom. 13:7).

Christians, above all people, should pray for and show respect for our President and all of our elected officials. After all, unlike those who see politics as ultimate, we recognize that our political structures are important, but temporal, before an inbreaking kingdom of Christ. We don’t then need to be fomented into the kind of faux outrage that passes for much of contemporary political discourse. And, unlike those who see history as impersonal or capricious, we see behind everything a God who is sovereign over his universe.

So let’s pray for President Obama. Let’s not give ourselves to terms of disrespect, or every crazy conspiracy theory that floats across the Internet.

That doesn’t mean slavish obedience. In a democratic republic, the President and the Congress govern by the consent of the governed. We appeal to our elected officials, and lobby them for the common good, expressing disagreement when we must. But we do this, as Paul does before Felix and Agrippa, with respect and honor, even as he seeks to persuade them of the need for religious liberty and as he preaches “righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment” (Acts 24:25).

However we voted in the election, let’s pray for God to bless our President. We can pray for him to be granted wisdom and health. We can pray that God would prosper his good ideas, and change his mind on his bad ideas. Moreover, we can teach our children to respect our President, starting with referring to him as “President Obama” or “Our President,” not as “Obama” or “the guy our parents voted against” or what have you.

There’s a time to vote. There’s a time to campaign. And there’s a time to petition. But, through it all, let’s be the people who, even as we speak with conviction, are marked by kindness and respect. When we have to differ with President Obama, let’s do that, with backbone. But let’s make sure we do all this with honor, with respect, with prayer, and, most of all, with love.

Let’s render unto Caesar, as free people with natural rights. Because we know as believers that we will eternally say “Jesus is Lord,” we can as citizens temporally say, “Hail to the chief.”

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It’s not that we don’t have the data to know what happens when sexually-forming minds are exposed to pornography. And it’s not that we don’t know the kind of pull to temptation, especially among young males, that comes with the promise of sexual “fulfillment” with the illusion of anonymity. It’s not that we don’t know, moreover, the way that unsavory characters use the Internet to troll for naive children to exploit.

Why would you put your child in a situation of that kind of peril?

Given what we know about a.) sexually developing adolescents and pre-adolescents and b.) the Internet itself, it is impossible to rank unrestricted access to the World Wide Web in a category with watching television or freely roaming the neighborhood. This is more like sending your adolescent male to spend the night in an adult movie theater because you trust him not to look up from his Bible, or allowing your daughter to grow marijuana in her room because she likes the bud as decoration.

This is astounding not primarily because it militates against the higher standards of  Christian parenting but because it militates against the natural ordering of human parenting itself.

Jesus, in describing the Fatherhood of God, told the crowd that no one, even being evil, would give his son a serpent when he asked for a fish (Matt. 7:10). Why not? It’s because natural affection impels a father to seek to protect his child from something harmful.  In this case, we see a culture, even among Christians sometimes, that’s quite willing to give a child a serpent, as long as he really wants it, and we think he’s trustworthy as a snake-charmer.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the digital revolution is largely a good thing, and I think children need to be raised up to use technology as a gift for dominion. But there’s too much at stake to turn a child loose, with no boundaries, with a technology that could psychically cripple him or her (and his or her future family), for a lifetime and thereafter.

What do you think are some wise practical guidelines for helping parents make decisions about using technology, without turning their children over to the cyber-wilderness?

In the New York Times, columnist Amy Wilentz reminds us why zombies scare us, and why we can’t help but watch through our clenched hands covering our eyes.  The zombie myth is rooted in something quite real, and quite terrifying. The zombie stories emerged in a Caribbean context of brutal slavery. The zombie’s horror is that he is, she writes, a slave forever. After all, if even death cannot free you, you can never be free.

That’s exactly the point, and here’s why it should matter to Christians.

Zombies are horrifying not simply because they’re mean and aggressive. They are horrifying because they represent what ought to repulse us: the rotting decay of death. But they still walk. And, beyond that, they still crave. In their search for human brains, they are driven along by their appetites, though always under the sway of a slavemaster’s will.

That’s our story.

The biblical story of the Fall of humanity is one of a humanity that comes under the sway of death by obeying the appetite. God places a fiery sword around the Garden of Eden, Genesis tells us, so that the primeval humans wouldn’t eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. Why? It’s because God didn’t want to consign humanity to a never-ending existence of this kind of walking death. He sentences us to the curse of death so that, ultimately, we can be redeemed.

The gospel tells us that, apart from Christ, we were walking in the flesh, that is slavishly obeying our biological impulses and appetites without the direction of the Spirit. As such, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). But we weren’t inert. We instead, though dead, “walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). We were walking dead slaves.

And, in our death, our appetites weren’t silenced but instead drove us along. This walking death, the Apostle Paul writes, was driven along as we “carried out the desires of the body and the mind” (Eph. 2:3).

Caribbean people could resonate with the horror of zombies because they knew what it was like to be enslaved by evil people, with no hope of escape. And maybe our culture pays attention to zombies because we know what it is like to be dead inside, but unable to find peace, unable to stop walking.

The gospel doesn’t just extend our lives forever into eternity. That’s what we, left to ourselves, think we want. The rich young ruler asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life, but Jesus points out that he wants to eternalize his present state rather than to be hidden in the life of Jesus himself. That’s a zombie walk, and Jesus loves us too much for that.

Jesus offers instead life, and that abundantly, as we eat of his flesh, drink of his blood, share in his triumph over the accusing slavemaster.

So let’s have some sympathy for the zombies. And next time you see the trailer for a zombie film, or see the picture of a walking corpse on the cover of a novel, remember that that was your story once too.

And “evangelical” includes, for some people, everyone from J.I. Packer to T.D. Jakes to Brian McLaren. That can get confusing, especially to those on the outside of our circles.

A few years ago, a friend of mine, the inimitable John Mark Reynolds, attempted to explain, simply, some of the differences for our friends on the outside of conservative Protestantism. Picking up on the old definition, “An evangelical is a fundamentalist who likes Billy Graham,” Reynolds said, “An evangelical is a fundamentalist who watches The Office.”

I tried my hand at explaining the spectrum, with tongue in cheek, using Halloween as a Rorschach test. I posted it over at the First Things group blog. Here goes.

An evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up for Halloween.

A conservative evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up for the church’s “Fall Festival.”

A confessional evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up as Zwingli and Bucer for “Reformation Day.”

A revivalist evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up as demons and angels for the church’s Judgment House community evangelism outreach.

An Emerging Church evangelical is a fundamentalist who has no kids, but who dresses up for Halloween anyway.

A fundamentalist is a fundamentalist whose kids hand out gospel tracts to all those mentioned above.

The forum “The Pastor and Politics,” held on Wednesday, October 24, 2012, was designed to help students think through the relationship between ministry and politics in light of the upcoming presidential election. Dr. Moore was interviewed by Andrew Walker, from the Heritage Foundation.