T4G: Observations and Reflections: (Part 2)

Al Mohler has been a convenient target of fundamentalist ire in the degrees of separation game ever since he chaired a crusade (that excluded Roman Catholics and liberal Protestants) for a prominent evangelist a few years ago. Through that decision and a conversation with a fundamentalist leader in which he is said to have claimed that he would do it again, Mohler became a nifty link in a chain that stretches between folks like John MacArthur and the Pope. This is important to the fundamentalist doctrine of separation because it enables everyone from the Mohler on down the chain to MacArthur and beyond to be labeled a "disobedient brother" from whom we must separate.

Now, anyone who has read this blog for any length of time can pretty well guess whether I think chairing this crusade was a good idea. Would it stun you if I said that there are plenty of non-(movement)fundamentalists who share that opinion? Nevertheless, this dead horse is hardly worth beating any more than it already has been.

What all this has to do with T4G is the fact that I gained a tremendous appreciation for Mohler and what God has used him to accomplish, as we gathered near his home turf. Never mind the fact that he's one of the most articulate speakers you'll ever encounter. Never mind the fact that he has an uncanny ability to distill abstract concepts into simple statements—a veritable walking sound byte. Never mind the fact that he's addressing the kinds of issues that only fundamentalists talked about for decades—except he's doing it much more thoughtfully and biblically than (most) fundamentalists were doing back then.

The simple fact that crystallized in my mind was that Al Mohler was 33 years old when he became the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993. In 1993, Southern was infested with rank theological liberalism in the faculty and the student body. What Mohler accomplished at that age in steering such a large ship back to theological conservatism is simply stunning. It made liberals so mad that they had to make a movie about it, levying all kinds of accusations of power politics and opportunism.

Now, I don't have any way to judge what Mohler's motivations have have been at any point in his life, least of all in 1993. I do know this: We're supposed to judge teachers by their works, not just their words. Maybe we who have not shed the blood and dripped the sweat that Mohler has in the spiritual battle of recovering a theological institution can find it in ourselves to grant a healthy recognition of what has been accomplished, even when we do find specific choices to criticize.

He was 33 years old. Just think about that for a minute.

Wishing I Were There

Here's a blog worth following for the next couple weeks. I'm sure your prayers would be appreciated.

This Should Make for an Interesting Scene at the Bema

You know what I mean—that day in the future when our lives are replayed for all to see on the ultimate HD big-screen. As imaginative as this book must be, I think I'll wait for the movie version.

HT: Lumpy

Fun on Planes with Cameras and Blogs

My friend Ken decided to stage his big coming out party on the SoloFemininity blog on the plane ride back from this weekend's New Attitude conference.

Feel free to post a brief congratulatory note to Ken here. I'll be sure that he sees them. No last names, please. He has a phobia.

"Don't Waste Your Cancer" (A Reprise)

Today I'll attend the funeral of a long-time family friend. In fact, the older children in this family are the first friends I can ever remember outside my own extended family. Although I wish this day had come years from now, I'm glad that the holiday weekend allowed me to be nearby.

On this day my mind is inescapably drawn to John Piper's recent piece, "Don't Waste Your Cancer." These friends of mine have not, are not, and will not. They've offered plain evidence that Piper's words are grounded in biblical truth and divine grace that is sufficient even when the treatment is not.

"Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory . . ."

Was this your day yesterday?

"Must Be a Legal Resident to Enter"

Seldom do I squawk about specific political issues, but every now and then elected representatives will do something so amazingly ridiculous and stupid that I can't restrain myself. Such is the case with the immigration bill the Senate passed Thursday.

The simple fact is that this bill does incomprehensible things like permit illegal aliens to receive Social Security benefits when they pay taxes through SSNs that they've stolen. It gives employers of illegal aliens shelter from prosecution when they've cheated on their taxes. The list goes on and on. The one conservative senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, published a list of these and other reasons for voting against the bill.

The bottom line is that the kinds of contests you find on cereal boxes and run on local radio stations' cheesy promos now have more stringent standards for entering--"must be a legal resident to enter"--than the United States Senate has for our national borders.

Here are a few of the Senate's conservative "posers" that are the chief culprits in this debacle: Brownback, DeWine, Frist, Graham, Hagel, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Voinovich, Warner.

Bloggers vs. Traditional Religious Authority Structures

Interesting article on the impact of religious blogging here (HT).

Now, thanks to Web logs (called blogs) and other Internet postings, critics in every faith tradition are getting a hearing far beyond the synagogue, church or mosque parking lot. Forced to listen because others are, religious leaders are responding in ways that show how religious authority is shifting in the 21st century.

All authority structures deriving power from beliefs or creeds are getting tested, it seems, as bloggers match wits with established vessels of information. The news media provide a case in point. The hastened retirements of CBS News anchorman Dan Rather and New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines were attributed at least in part to bloggers who showcased information that proved more accurate than what appeared in news reports.

In religion, bloggers well-versed in Scripture and church rules as well as in offering personal testimonies are challenging official policies and winning followers of their own. Traditional authorities, meanwhile, are seeing problems and opportunities alike in the new milieu. How they respond depends to a large degree on what their respective theologies say about the value of voices from the proverbial peanut gallery.

Mohler on the Evil of Prohibiting Inter-Racial Marriage

Al Mohler delved into racial discrimination in his radio program last Monday in a discussion of how same-sex marriage advocates are trying to claim the same protections from discrimination as are guaranteed based on ethnicity. In other words, they say (and have for some time) that homosexuality is equivalent to race and deserves equal protection. In this context, Mohler had some strong words for the seriousness with which we ought to view racial discrimination:

We as a society rightly celebrate the fact that [racially discriminatory laws] are gone, and we rightly look back with horror and embarrassment that they ever had existed because we now understand as a society that discrimination on the basis of skin color is morally abhorrent. It is a scandal to God's purpose in creation . . . We understand that discrimination on the basis of race is not only wrong, it's evil, but not only evil, it's illegal.

He also alluded briefly to the Bob Jones University inter-racial dating policy that caused BJU to lose its tax exempt status in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling:

I believe it was a morally abhorrent position. I believe it was wrong because it created a scandal for the gospel on the wrong line of discrimination. It's a university that in so many ways has stood for the truth. But in this case, it was a policy that led to a scandal, and it was a scandal that became a national issue, and there was litigation, and Bob Jones University was stripped of its tax exempt status because of that policy.

This issue has been beaten to death in the fundamentalist blogosphere, so I'm not particularly interested in re-hashing the facts pertaining to BJU. What I'm wondering is if anyone would disagree with Mohler when he says that racial discriminatory policies in general and this policy in particular are evil and morally abhorrent. Some of the conversations on which I've eavesdropped seem to have nimbly skipped the central issue in an attempt to defend BJU's right to the policy and the fact that it no longer exists.

So how about it? Does anybody still think these kinds of policies weren't evil and abhorrent in fundamentalist culture, even if they should have been constitutionally protected?

This was a terrific show. Mohler had a great guest and did some concise analytical work on how same-sex marriage opens Pandora's box to all sorts of eventual perversions of marriage in his discussion of the Mary Cheney interview that I alluded to last week.

Abstinence Pledges Fail

Here's a great article by Lauren Winner on the failure of teenagers' abstinence pledges (free registration required). This article might contain more truth than the NYT usually prints in a month.

Winner's thesis is that "Christians concerned about the rampant premarital sex in our communities need to rethink, rather than simply defend, young people's abstinence pledges."

Here's the point that I think we Christians too often miss:

Pledgers promise to control intense bodily desires simply by exercising their wills. But Christian ethics recognizes that the broken, twisted will can do nothing without rehabilitation by God's grace. Perhaps the centrality of grace is recognized best not in a pledge but in a prayer that names chastity as a gift and beseeches God for the grace to receive it.

Winner's solution?

Perhaps pledges for chastity need to be made not only by the individual teenager. Perhaps we also need pledges made by the teenager's whole Christian community: we pledge to support you in this difficult, countercultural choice; we pledge that the church is a place where you can lay bare your brokenness and sin, where you don't have to dissemble; we pledge to cheer you on when chastity seems unbearably difficult, and we pledge to speak God's forgiveness to you if you falter. No retooled pledge will guarantee teenagers' chastity, but words of grace and communal commitment are perhaps a firmer basis for sexual ethics than simple assertions that true love waits.

In other words, the disease is proud individualism and self-centeredness, not hormones. The solution is the grace of God and the power of the Spirit in the community of the church, not a signature on a piece of paper.