The Steely Backbone of the School of Jerry Falwell

I have a confession to make.

In my late preteen years, when forced to tag along on my mother's grocery shopping trips, I (an avid reader) used to kill time at the magazine rack. Here's the confession part: On those occasions I used to read Mad Magazine.

In 1982 I distinctly recall picking up an episode of Mad Magazine that contained a satirical "interview" with Jerry Falwell. The interview was not as bad as Hustler's infamous counterpart that portrayed Falwell as confessing to furtive erotic fixations upon his mother. It was nevertheless trash...absolute trash, and I knew as much even as a twelve-year-old. I confess that I laughed anyway, and I continued to read the magazine.

I'm thankful that God has granted me the gift of maturing spiritually somewhat (although not nearly as much as I would like) in the intervening years since I was twelve. No longer am I at all inclined to fill my mind with such garbage. I find it repugnant.

I think I would have found it repugnant in 1982 if somehow, at that tender age, I had possessed the slightest inkling of how difficult it must have been to withstand the continual assault directed toward Jerry Falwell by those who made themselves his foes. Everything that could be attacked about the man was attacked. People questioned his motives, lampooned his convictions, and dedicated their lives to his destruction.

Not that it all was entirely the fault of his accusers. We all have feet of clay, don't we? I can recall several times when Falwell wound up retracting, at least partially, something that he had said. He made several public apologies. He apologized when he called South African Bishop Desmond Tutu a "phony" (see here). He apologized for his remarks immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks (see here). Down through the years he issued many clarifications and many apologies. None of these trivialities blunted the force of his overall message, nor did his supporters, his organization, or his family ever allow these distractions to draw their attention away from the things that mattered in his ministry.

Considering all of this, I find it comical to observe bloggers thinking that, by turning up a little blogging heat upon Dr. Ergun Caner, they are going to be able to unseat him from his position at the helm of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. I'm not going to name the bloggers and I'm not going to link to their posts, because I have no desire to be responsible for driving any traffic in that direction. But it appears to me that, just because Ergun has apologized and clarified a thing or two and because they are so ravenously going after him, they think that school of Jerry Falwell is going to cower under their attacks and boot Ergun out the door. The school that Jerry built? The people who weathered the onslaught of vicious attacks from the entire leftish establishment of media and government for more than 30 years? These people are going to bow to the pressure of bloggers in bathrobes? I'm just not seeing it. They may get a few hits every day, but these bloggers have neither the writing skills that Alfred E Newman had nor the audience that Tinky-Winky had.

So, like a seasoned palm tree in the Florida keys, the school that Jerry built will sway with the howling winds that blow from people who are never going to be a friend to Liberty under any circumstances, and in the end the school's steely backbone will hold intact as it always has, and the truth will continue to sound forth from Lynchburg.

Comfortable, but Not Very Helpful

Ancient is the temptation to attempt to make God in our own image, rather than to content ourselves with our being made in His. In light of that fact, Elton John's declaration that "Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man" is neither original nor surprising, heretical as it is (see here). It is the quintessence of self-worship and self-absorption to take sentences that one might well have written about oneself, swap out one's own name for the name of God, and feel very comfortable with all that we share in common with our favorite deity.

Of course, the real Jesus—the Jesus who actually lived in Judea 2,000 years ago and whose life is recorded in the gospels—must make Mr. John quite uncomfortable. He makes me uncomfortable. If He doesn't make you uncomfortable, then you're either not reading the New Testament or you're not reading it seriously.

And yet, no matter how much Mr. John may derive greater enjoyment from a Jesus of his own making, the remainder of Parade Magazine's interview with him shows clearly how much he needs an encounter with the real Jesus.

He needs the real Jesus because in spite of every conceivable advantage in his life, he's found nothing but heartache. His homosexual profligacy didn't satisfy him:

I'd always choose someone younger. I wanted to smother them with love. I'd take them around the world, try to educate them. One after another they got a Cartier watch, a Versace outfit, maybe a sports car. They didn't have jobs. They were reliant on me. I did this repeatedly. In six months they were bored and hated my guts because I'd taken their lives and self-worth away. I hadn't intended to.

Along with sexual perversion came chemical addictions, which also consumed his soul and left him with nothing:

Just about every relationship I ever had was involved with drugs. It never works. But I always had to be with someone, good or bad, otherwise I didn't feel fulfilled. I'd lost the plot.

. . . . . . . .

For some people a gram of cocaine can last a month. Not me. I have to do the lot, and then I want more. At the end of the day, all it led to was heartache

Underneath and around these perversions and addictions—leading to them and growing out of them—Elton John slumps under the burden of his own guilt. He has chosen the old path of seeing whether he can accrue enough good works to make his own atonement for his sins:

I set up my foundation because I wanted to make amends for the years I was a drug addict.

How much money will it take? How many good works? Who gets to read the scales?

I'm so thankful for Emir and Ergun Caner. We've seen two Muslims profess faith in Jesus Christ here at this little rural Texas church thanks to the witness and pastoral advice of Emir Caner. They are so right when they tell us about the brutality of the scales versus the beauty of God's grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ. But this message of grace is not a message for Muslims alone. The world is full of Elton Johns, toting around counterfeit Jesuses, all very comfortable to them, but no help at all. And all the while, "Jesus , the Mighty to Save" is not far away at all, and is their only hope.