Saturday, May 24, 2008

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

James 1:1-12

I preached this sermon on James 1:1-12 while serving as interim pastor at First Baptist Church of Madisonville, TX. And here is a custom song by Philip paralleling the message of the passage.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

My Biggest Problems with the Evangelical Manifesto

First, whatever it does, it does not manifest. Read it. It is a document riddled not even simply with visions and revisions, but with direction changes which serve no purpose greater than either obfuscating or ameliorating the sting of direct criticisms of the evangelical right. What purpose is there to adding “Although we cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman…” to the call for “an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as
abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life” if not simply to avoid sounding as if equating issues of poverty with abortion would reduce abortion’s significance as an issue—which it would do, of course, since part of abortion’s significance (as an issue, not an act) is that it is held uniquely significant as a fully consummated step toward becoming (or being) a culture of death. This document is twenty pages long in order to cloud what could have been a clear call for Evangelicals to embrace the morality of Leftists in American politics.
Second, as indicated in the previous sentence, the “Manifesto” is an effort to make Leftist moral claims more acceptable as Evangelical causes of the day. Whether it is because some signatories or contributors actually hold those positions, such as the Environmentalist’s disdain for capitalism and the free market, or simply because they wish to create a better bridge to a generation which responds negatively to the message of the right, there is little doubt that it is the desire to put alternative moral issues on the table which puts this document on the table. The contest between the free market and socialism in U.S. politics is not just pragmatic. The value of the free market is as surely rooted in Christian respect for the individual (played out in this case as negative rights) as is the call in the "Manifesto" for a Civil Public Square.
Third, and almost inevitably apparent from the call for the Civil Public Square, the document is hypocritical. The claim of the document is that “Evangelicalism must be defined theologically and not politically; confessionally and not culturally.” Now, there is no reason to assume that defining Evangelicalism, especially in terms non-Christians can understand, must be theological rather than political, and certainly no reason to hold the two as exclusive—not in a world where non-Christians are present and where they play just as great or greater a role in defining terms as believers do. But that is not the problem with this claim. The problem is that this “Manifesto” does exactly what it proscribes. It defines part of what Evangelicals stand for as a call for the Civil Public Square. It is a call for a uniquely Western, indeed, American form of political state. It is not French, where the square is “naked”; and it is not Muslim, where the square is “sacred”, using “Manifesto” terms. It is blatantly American. So the “Manifesto” identifies Evangelicals with the value of a Civil Public Square and promotes that cause univocally--a distinctly political position--while berating the identification of Evangelicals with a moral value of no less significance, the recognition that the law’s discounting of unborn children is morally untenable.
If the framer’s of the “Manifesto” wish other causes could find the same moral imperative in Christian values that abortion and family issues have found, then they should work to attach not just a generic issue, like environmentalism, to Christian values, but a specific solution to that issue. It is not enough to say the doctrine of Creation requires good stewardship. The political issues are about whether it is better to promote environmentalism with nuclear power or with vegetable oil, and so forth; not about whether to promote the environment at all. And it is ridiculous--yes, ridicule-worthy--to compare an argument between nuclear power and vegetable oil with the issue of discounting the lives of the unborn, or of the elderly for that matter.
Hopefully, this opinion is now manifest.