Time for a New "Bloudy Tenent"?

Roger Williams's most famous work is entitled (in part, and you can thank me for sparing you the whole thing) The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience.

A story in today's New York Times (see here) reports that President Barack Obama intends to reverse regulations protecting pro-life doctors and hospitals from persecution for the cause of their consciences. Let us pray that something might happen to his conscience to remind him how atrocious it is to persecute someone for mere adherence to the sixth commandment.

Really, this case is not even about whether one is pro-life or pro-abortion. I support the participation of our nation in just wars, but I also support the liberty not to take up arms that we give those with conscientious objections to war. Surely our pro-abortion President and the other pro-abortion elements in our society can reach down deep into themselves and find some way to extend this same sort of protection to medical professionals?

Maybe we need some modern-day Roger Williamses to make that argument convincingly and take it to the people?

Obama, God, and the State of the Union

Some will cheer; some will weep; some will wonder why anyone keeps up.

With last night's speech it has become clear that the day of frequent reference to God in presidential speeches is over. Apart from the obligatory benediction at the end, there was no mention of the Lord in the (non-)State of the Union address.

This represents not only a departure from the era of President Bush, but also a departure from the pro-religious tone that we saw in candidate-Obama as early as his 2004 DNC speech in Boston.

Some Honest Realism I Appreciate

A recent post by Timmy Brister (see here) has been critiqued (see here and here) as attempting to place a non-existent wedge between so-called "Baptist Identity" and "Great Commission Resurgence" ideas in the SBC. I do not regularly follow Mr. Brister's blog, so I only discovered his post after seeing the controversy. Although I agree that Brister is attempting to separate that which belongs together, I actually want to commend something that I read in his post.

Brister said: "…the heroes of my generation are, in large part, found outside the SBC rather than those inside the SBC."

I believe that Brister is absolutely correct with regard to the circles in which he travels. From the context, I conclude that both Brister and I are in agreement that this situation spells trouble for the future relationship between those he has in mind and the SBC. The part where we differ, I imagine, is that Brister takes this situation as indicative of problems with the SBC, while I take it as indicative of problems with him and his cohort at least as much as it highlights problems in our convention.

What I find most refreshing, encouraging, and honest about Brister's sentiment is the contrast between his statement and the autohagiography that Dr. Steve McKinion recently posted (see here) extolling the walking-on-water virtues of the "third generation" of descendants of the Conservative Resurgence. See the contrast in these two statements:

McKinion: [The third generation, in apparent contrast to all their predecessors in the SBC,] have taken seriously the admonition not to look to men but to look to Jesus.

And again, Brister's statement

…the heroes of my generation are, in large part, found outside the SBC rather than those inside the SBC

Brister is right and McKinion is wrong.

To be fair, McKinion did later list a group of men to whom these third-generation people are listening, but apparently he sees their relationship with Piper as far different from their "grandparents'" relationship with Rogers or Vines or Criswell. The essay genuinely reads as though McKinion has discovered an entire generation of pastors who are entirely free from avarice, ambition, eisegesis, and an undue affection for hairspray. In them the hopes and dreams of the radical reformation are finally realized—a pure, direct connection with the teachings of Jesus.

I think that I can see the color of McKinion's glasses from all the way over here in Texas. His essay would have been much stronger had he been able to see weaknesses in this generation about which he is so enthusiastic. When we can't see our own weaknesses, we have no hope of growing.

I teach people from the same generation as McKinion. They're good people. They have strengths (passion, idealism, love for the Lord). They have faults (I've encountered some who aren't bothered by a little Modalism here and there, who think that penal-substitution makes too much of a meanie out of God, etc.). Do these strengths and weaknesses really belong to generations, per se? Most of the strengths of the new generation, if they aren't apparent to Dr. McKinion in his observation of our 40-to-80-year-old pastors today, might possibly have been more evident in those same pastors back when they were in seminary, don't you think? Perhaps some of the exciting things that Dr. McKinion and I see in seminary students today are not so much a facet of which generation they are in, but are part-and-parcel of being a seminary student just starting out in ministry? Dr. McKinion and I have not been teaching long enough to have seen generation-after-generation come through the classroom, so we have the disadvantage of not having lived long enough to make sound comparisons from our own experiences.

Brister's observation, on the other hand, is undeniably accurate. Prone just as much to hero-worship as their predecessors, a generation of Southern Baptists is upcoming whose heroes are not Southern Baptists—perhaps not Baptists of any stripe. As a historian (a.k.a. knower of past Baptist secrets), I know that the Baptist "heroes" of a century ago were no better qualified for heroism than are our leaders today. They were real men and women with real faults. Furthermore, because I really do believe in the depraving effects of the Fall, I presume that the men listed by McKinion and intimated by Brister are also walking about on feet of clay too often unseen by their throngs of admirers. In other words, there is nothing to prevent this generation from having Southern Baptist heroes, but they have chosen to admire people outside our convention. This is our zeitgeist.

Mark my words: This is a big deal. The implications of these facts for the future of our convention are as yet unseen.

Was Jesus a Racist? Is Miguel De La Torre a Christian?

(HT: Dr. Thomas White for bringing this article to the blogging world's attention.)

File this one away with…OK, I admit that I don't even have a category in which to file this one. Under 'R' for Rank Heresy? Or, unfortunately, under 'A' for Associated Baptist Press? It's far less my business than it would be if this were in Baptist Press (and I'm thankful to say that I can't even imagine that happening), but ABP really needs to take down this tripe. I think we all know that there are false teachers and purveyors of heresy out there, but does ABP really want to be in the business of providing them with a platform? Until we left BGCT, our church was helping to fund things like this. It sure helps my conscience to know that now we are not at all responsible for the dissemination of the views of Miguel De La Torre and those like him.

You can read for yourself: Miguel De La Torre's latest opinion piece on ABP is entitled "Was Jesus a Racist?" His answer to the title question becomes pretty clear in the piece.

Do I Have to Claim This on My Tax Return?

My blog is worth $51,373.14.
How much is your blog worth?

I just thought that all you bloggers out there would enjoy this. Somebody has concocted some cockamamie system for calculating a monetary value for your blog.

Why I'm Buying

I haven't changed my retirement portfolio at all, even though my Internal Rate of Return for 2008 was around negative-38% overall. Here are my reasons:

1. I felt good about my asset allocation before all of this happened, and I have no reason to believe that any other allocation is going to perform any better in the future.

2. I have a portfolio that has tracked well with the overall market.

3. I really don't want to retire for another thirty years, if then.

4. If the stock market goes back up in thirty years, then I'm buying on the cheap, and will be doing GREAT for having stayed the course now.

5. If the S&P does not go up for thirty straight years, my retirement portfolio will be among the least of my worries. In such a circumstance, we'll be facing worldwide chaos. I'll be poor, but so will you and everybody else.

An Exemplary Pastor

When I was an impressionable tween, my home church (First Baptist Church, Lake City, Arkansas) lost one beloved pastor and gained a new one. As many pastoral transitions are, the period was somewhat tumultuous. The pastor whom we called became a cherished mentor, and his sons became my dear and lifelong friends. He served at FBC Lake City throughout my Junior High and High School years, and well into my further education.

He had taken a cut in pay to come to FBC Lake City, but came anyway because he believed that God had called him there. He worked hard. During his ministry at the church, a heavy snowfall caused structural damage leading to the condemnation of the sanctuary. This man hammered more nails, cut more boards, and hung more sheet rock on the new facility than did anyone in the congregation. He visited the sick. He witnessed to the lost. He kindled a warm fellowship at the church. He worked hard at preaching and teaching.

After his tenure at Lake City came to an end, he moved back to Mississippi, where he continues to this day (far past retirement age) to serve as a pastor of tiny country churches. If he has uttered a curse word in the past thirty years, I didn't hear it (even if I knew some people in the church worthy of one or two such syllables!). He never embarrassed the church. He never caused anyone to doubt his morality. If people ever criticized him, they did so to suggest that he was too good, too cautious not to offend or to cause anyone to cast aspersions on the Lord and His church. He has spent a lifetime living cautiously and wisely.

But, God never called him to a large church.

Pastor Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle has been the focus of Southern Baptist headlines this week. If Pastor Driscoll has made mistakes, we ought to be gracious about them. I have faults. You have faults. We all make mistakes. If unwholesome words come out of his mouth, we ought to be gracious about that. If his church's web site will lead you to pornography in three or four clicks, then we ought to realize that they may not realize that—that they don't create the content of the sites to which they link. Clearly this is a man who wants to proclaim the gospel to people, and like all of us, he meets that task with personal foibles intact and in the way.

But here's the thing: A great many Southern Baptists and some of our institutions have come to the conclusion that people like Pastor Driscoll are exemplary pastors, while my former home pastor is not. This conclusion is put on display by the fact that Driscoll is invited to speak at seminary conferences, is featured in media coverage, is extolled by SBC trendsetters, etc., ad nauseum. My former home pastor and the thousands like him never were and never will be.

How big your church is and how "cool" you are—that's what some segments of our convention value. Respectfully, I wish to submit that these are the wrong values. And thus, the question before us is not whether Pastor Driscoll ought to be tarred and feathered. He shouldn't be. But neither should we be putting him up before ministers-in-training as an exemplary pastor. The line of people more qualified than he for that honor is far too long, and far too many of them have gone completely unrecognized.