It's about time Dr. Moore.

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Main Library

I couldn't help notice this story.  The source is RawStory, a hard left propaganda news magazine, but I checked to make sure it was accurate, and it appears it is.  Dr. Russell Moore is disavowing the label "Evangelical".  He is doing so because of Trump and those Evangelical leaders willing to throw all pretense of consistent standards under the bus in order to support Trump at all costs.

This amazes me, and I'll tell you why.  Believe it or not, Dr. Moore was a classmate of mine back in seminary in the 90s. We sat next to one another more than once.  He was part of the Mohler Revolution, when Dr. R. Albert Mohler turned Southern Seminary around from a moderately conservative Baptist seminary to a hard right, almost quasi-fundamentalist, Calvinist institution.  Dr. Moore, along with the awesome Dr. Greg Thornbury, were two of the main students who supported Dr. Mohler and, by extension, were supported by Dr. Mohler and the new establishment.

There were some of the students - like me - who were opposed to politicizing the term Evangelical.  As many flagrantly sided against Bill Clinton, but turned a blind eye toward politicians like Newt Gingrich, or used Evangelical as a term in other ways to divide the sheep and the goats, all while strutting under the label 'Evangelical', we became increasingly bothered by its use as a political wedge, rather than a sincere theological term.

That went over as well as you can imagine.  In fact, attempting to do anything in the seminary - including something as pure as gathering to witness and evangelize - without embracing the proper use of the term became nearly impossible.  If you weren't properly incorporating the term "Evangelical", then you weren't going anywhere.  And it was the likes of Dr. Moore (then just Russ Moore) who were staunch defenders of that approach.  Those who refused to play ball eventually found themselves standing outside the windows where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth, or at least compromised opportunities to minister.

So it's nice to see, after 20 years, some have finally come around to where many of us were all along.  But then, that was a problem with Evangelical Christianity in the day.  So politicized had it become, that nothing but grabbing the latest trend became the norm, then trying to twist and turn traditional orthodox Christianity to make it fit.  In fact, to be honest, all Dr. Moore is doing today is just riding the latest wave.  This is really, in the end, nothing more than what was done in the 90s.  When it was vogue to be Evangelical, then it was Evangelical Ho! Now it isn't.  And now it's not. 

One of the endearing traits I find in pre-Reformation Christianity is a happy tendency for the deep roots of the faith to avoid being pulled up by the storms of the latest, hippest.  Oh sure, you'll have people try.  You'll have bishops, priests, laypeople, yourself, and dare I say popes, who will grab the latest whirlwind.  But the roots of the faith are too deep, and too resistant.  If you're paying attention, you stop and realize just how futile it is to imagine that everything the Faith has always stood for somehow, miraculously, conforms to the latest that I happen to prefer in my own comfortable slot of history.

See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.   Colossians 2.8

The Pope and the Russian Patriarch will meet

The news is abuzz about this historic meeting, as it should be.  But let's not start picking out curtains any time soon.  One of the strange tendencies we Christians have is perpetually seeing the best in things, no matter what the evidence.

I don't mean we shouldn't hope.  Of course we should hope.  And I don't mean we shouldn't be glad about this first step.  But let's not go giddy .  I've talked to enough Orthodox Christians now to realize that full reconciliation between East and West won't happen until Catholics do something about the whole Papal Infallibility thing.  That's the crux.

There are other issues and disputes of course. And it will be interesting to see how they are resolved.  Caution, however, is needed.  The world is changing, and we're starting to come to a point, even in the pre-Protestant traditions, where some may not want to change these unchangeable doctrines, but will move to make them less relevant in the name of getting along and coexisting.

That happened in Evangelical Protestantism in the 90s and early 00s.  One of the things that helped me, and especially my wife, became Catholic was the era of Warren.  Rick Warren that is.  Long before he made millions with his book The Purpose Driven Life, he was sending shock waves through ministry circles with a little book titled The Purpose Driven Church.  The theme of his first book was that no matter what your tradition, no matter what your doctrines, no matter what your liturgy, if you followed a certain set of principles for marketing and promoting your ministry, you could have tens of thousands in your church.  

It was playing off of the Seeker Sensitive phenomenon that was pushed to the max by Willow Creek in Chicago in the late 70s.  That church famously grew by going around and asking people what they did and didn't like about church.  They compiled the answers, and built their church around the majority answers.  And they built it to the tune of thousands and thousands of members in only a few years. 

Warren did the same, but with more sophistication and a broader willingness to set aside doctrinal and ecclesiastical teachings. You could be high or low liturgy, Calvinist or Arminian, Free Baptist or High Episcopalian.  It just didn't matter.  What mattered was following his strategies and his ideas based on marketing and promoting a business and you could have a huge, dynamic church. In Protestant circles, by the early 00s, ministers were splitting between those who accepted this idea that Baptism was merely something with which we could agree to disagree, and those who still felt those issues - doctrine, teaching, theology, ethics - were unchangeable and the foundations upon which a church should be built, no matter what the numbers.

So as the Pope and the Patriarch meet, I hope it signals a news beginning.  I hope it is the first of many steps that will bring East and West back together.  But I don't want it to be by setting aside doctrines that are essential, and have always been taught as essential, just for the sake of 'Can't we all coexist?'  Find ways to work together, find ways to accommodate.  Heck, be willing to actually change.  But don't keep them as an essential doctrinal on one hand, and then set them on the shelf as no big deal just to avoid conflict on the other hand.  That ends up making them nothing more than our happy opinions.  The tendency in Evangelical Protestantism to follow that path has led to the modern Evangelical churches that are rooted on nothing historically and stand for nothing other than fun youth groups and happy praise music and feeling good about being swell people.  Catholics and Orthodox should aim higher.

Liberal Presbyterians endorse gay marriage

And demonstrate a massive problem with Protestantism.  After all, who's to say they are wrong?  When one sees the splits away from the historic faith as practice and agreed upon almost from the time of the earliest Christian writings, the same teachings practiced by those of the orthodox confessions of the Nicene Creed, one does have to ask 'how is it you are right for ditching these teachings, but not those over there?'  It was something I pondered as an Evangelical pastor.

True, it could be argued that the Church has never been at ease in the face of new challenges from outside.  But there is something that keeps the Faith from going too far no matter how much stretching is done by its adherents.  In Protestantism, however, it can go as far as you wish. Just branch off with your own denomination.  I knew mainline Protestants who questioned the existence of a personal God, or who openly endorsed Gnostic teachings.  Why not?  Why are they wrong when Protestants who reject, say, the sacramental nature of Baptism or the Eucharistic celebration practiced for almost 2000 years are not likewise wrong?  By what authority can they say?

Sure, this is just the typical fawning over liberalism that factions in the Faith have always done.  Whenever there is a new, hip movement, there are always those who wish to conform.  For every zealot or pharisee, there are at least three Hellenists who jump on the latest.  This is simply the most recent example.  But in the end, some will have a pillar, an anchor that will eventually bring things back to balance, however briefly.  While those without a clear standard to point to will only be able to watch as one after another, split and breach will occur until endless hundreds of varieties exist, and those bearing little resemblance to the root from which they originally sprung.

When I see Catholics trying to salvage what they can from the victorious Left

I'm reminded that the Protestant Reformation was, ultimately, a very Catholic event.  After all, like early Christians were Jews, early Protestants were Catholics.  And the Catholic Church they grew up in was a Church trying desperately to navigate the sweeping changes in thought and scholarship and society that were taking Europe by storm, including, but not limited to, that phenomenon known as Humanism.  That was crucial for shaping the worldview that allowed for a Protestant approach to Christianity.

Of course Catholics blame the Protestants without necessarily taking responsibility for the societal milieu in which the Church existed at the time, as well as the varying degrees to which the Church allowed for and flirted with the changes taking place.  That seems to be a Catholic thing: allow for any vague level of accommodations to whatever is happening outside the walls of the Church, and then blame anything bad that happens as a result on everyone but the Church for dabbling with it in the first place.

So when I see a post on a blog praising some non-clearly defined expression of feminism, sure.  Why not.  Is everything to do with feminism bad?  No.  But nor is everything to do with Capitalism.  Yet you'd not know either of those things to hear both Pope Francis, and a growing number of Catholics scrambling to keep up with the changes going on in the world today, just like those who scrambled centuries ago to keep up with the latest, hippest in the 14th and 15th centuries.

And when Catholics run beyond these vague and invisible barriers between acceptable and not?  Well, it won't be the Church's fault, that's for sure.

Protestants have poisoned the world

So says Mark Shea.  As the ship continues to sink into the abyss, Mark throws away yet one more shard of his former life and finally declares that while some Protestants are no doubt lovely people, the Reformers were evil liars who poisoned humanity.  Did the Reformation bear some fruit?  Yes, as did Judas Iscariot's betrayal of Christ!  This is a far cry form Mark Shea, c. 2005, who admitted the flaws of Protestantism, and its errors, while still holding up important recognition of the Church's own culpability at the time, as well as the positive witness that Protestants have brought to the world. 

I get that the individualized interpretive base upon which Protestant reformers leaned on is now a cancer in the post-modern world of relativity.  But here's the thing folks.  The Protestant Reformers were, for lack of a better word, Catholics.  The Catholic Church had stood over the very environment out of which humanism and its influence on the Reformers grew.  Again, nothing wrong with pointing out the fundamental flaws, esp. the fundamental flaw, of the Reformation.  But be honest.  The mechanisms were already in place in a world where there was only One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.  A lesson for those who act like what the Church has no responsibility for teaching its flock, or what the latest Pope is saying is no big deal.  Just shut up and obey.  It didn't work in the 16th century.  I don't see it doing well today.

The Jimmy Carter Study Bible

Yeah, really.  One of our nation's worst presidents has published his own study Bible.  Boy, I love Protestantism.  Given his degeneration into a leftist fundamentalist who sees anyone who doesn't conform to mandatory group think conformity before the infallible dogmas of liberalism as stupid, evil, racist, terrorist wannabes, it's not going to take much to imagine what his interpretations of Holy Scripture will be.  The man who, of late, has become a burden for his own party by declaring that anyone who doesn't obey The One is a racist, shows why, even when I see problems in the Catholic Church and its history, I still go to bed and rest well at night knowing I get my teachings from higher sources than politicians with axes to grind.

The Crystal Cathedral could now become an actual Cathedral

Turns out the Crystal Cathedral, which has been dying a slow, agonizing financial death, is selling out to the Catholic Diocese of Orange County.  Yep, it's true.  Hard to believe, almost.  Rev. Schuller was the epitome of 'Jesus meets super-duper big and successful religion' that dominated much of the last half of 20th century Protestantism.  The movement had roots going back to the evangelism and missions movements in the 19th century.  It received its biggest boost from its most famous and beloved adherent, Billy Graham. 

By the 70s and 80s, when 'Church Growth' studies began to be taught in seminaries, it was clear that a growing number of Protestant leaders, and subsequently Protestant believers, were equating Large with Successful ministries.

By the time I was in ministry in the 1990s, it was clear that the most important thing a pastor could do was 'grow his church'.  And that didn't mean spiritually.  It meant more baptisms, more memberships, bigger congregations.  This attitude came out of the closet with Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church (the precursor to his more famous and successful The Purpose Driven Life).  In this book, concerns over doctrine, theology, and worship styles take a back seat to marketing strategies, sales techniques, and business practices for building that ideal mega-church.  With such a prominent pastor giving the green light, it was now possible for church leaders and ministers to admit what had been percolating under the surface for some time. 

That is, we wanted to get rid of all these pesky doctrinal divisions and differences that splintered Protestantism into hundreds, if not thousands, of competing sects.  The idea wasn't too come up with one single agreed upon ecumenical dogma.  No.  We simply began letting folks know it wasn't that big a deal.  Just as Mark Lowry, of Bill Gaither fame, would assure his denominationally mixed audiences that 'someone is going to be wrong', now we simply let folks know it didn't matter, it was more like opinions really. 

Baptism saves?  Baptism is merely symbolic?  Doesn't matter.  God preordains those to be saved or damned?  God allows free will for everyone to accept or reject His Grace?  Doesn't matter.  Pop music or classical hymnody?  Doesn't matter.  What matters is getting enough fannies in those pews to make it necessary to build bigger buildings and bigger gymnasiums family life centers.  I once quipped, with a not-too-subtle Freudian reference, that too many Protestants today judge a pastor by the size of his gymnasium.

But I was a kazoo in an orchestra of tubas.  Most wanted, and would work for, that Crystal Cathedral sized ministry, late 20th century style.  And in many ways, it all went back to a church started in a drive in theatre.  Now, it's done.  When Dr. Schuller fired his own son because his son wanted to, you know, preach more from the Bible, you figured it had jumped the shark.  Schuller's own fluffy, cotton candy 'just be excellent to one another, and believe in yourselves' gospel (years before Smilin' Joel Osteen), was never going to survive a population of seekers who, uninformed though they might be, still had the idea that God's first priority wasn't helping us live a wealthy, American lifestyle above all things; a population growing increasingly cynical of the idea that materialism and narcissism were the answers to the Divine question. And now, the tree has born its final fruits.

Robert Bell fumbles and TIME drops the ball

Robet Bell's much publicized book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, has been the stuff of hot debate in recent weeks.  In short, he has decided that the doctrine of Hell is wrong.  When people ask why I moved to the historic Christian faith of the Catholic/Orthodox traditions, I give you Robert Bell.  Protestantism suffers from the fundamental flaw: Who gets to say what the eternal truths of the universe are?  I'm not talking new moral teachings or reflections on old ethical standards, some of which can, in all honesty, be informed by new revelations and discoveries and insights in the course of human history.  I'm talking a fundamental building block of the Faith itself.  Bell has said hell just isn't what it used to be.  And I defy any traditional Protestant minister who disagrees to explain by what authority he or she disagrees.

And yet, when this debate hits the MSM, you get pieces like this one over at TIME.com.   Basically TIME, in this case featuring Bill Saporito, illustrates the time honored proverb that the press understands less about religion than donkeys do about physics.  The 'article' falls back on the old skeptic's stereotype that religion is all about people using hell to scare folks into their pews so that someone can live the high life most people only dream about.  Really.  Read the article.  According to TIME, the only reason the doctrine of hell exists is to scare people into giving money.  Sometimes I wish journalists would just go away, but then we need someone to tell us what Lindsay Lohan is up to.

For my part, I ignore just about anything the media has to say about religion, unless it's an actual live interview with a religions leader.  And then I take it at half face value.  By the way, we all know about Blaise Pascal's famous mathematical preference for believing in God.  That doesn't mean the doctrine came from Pascal's calculator.  And speaking of using doctrines to make money, maybe next time we can examine some media outlets deliberately promoting false data and information in order to increase dwindling readerships.

Sometimes I miss Protestant singing

I don't mean to be, well, mean.  But since I've been a Catholic, I admit there are times when I miss the old Protestant, particularly the old time Evangelical, hymnals.  It just seems like folks in our parish - in fact in just about every parish I've visited so far - are scared to sing.  Oh some do, and it's not a slight at those who don't.  Perhaps it's because the music issue just has a single line for the main melody in each song.  Protestant hymnals broke those babies into four parts, and you could take your pick.  Even if the congregation wasn't trained - and God love them, you had those you could tell weren't - there was still that harmonizing that not only flushed out the depth of a hymn, but almost seemed to encourage a more robust vocalizing on the part of the singers.  I'm sure having a music leader in front of the congregation, which was common in all but the tiniest churches, didn't hurt either.

Again, I'm not fussing.  I love various parts of Catholic music, the chant, the better parts of the traditionally rich and powerful hymns of yesteryear.  And I certainly had things to say about the superficial and shallow trend that many newer songs in the Protestant world were following.  But sometimes, I admit I would like to hear a good old four part singing of some of the greater hymns of Protestantism.  You hear those, and you can't help but feel moved in the Spirit.  Especially if it's one of the all-time greats like this gem, famously penned in the midst of tragedy and despair:
It Is Well With My Soul

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Refrain:
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life,
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.

But Lord, 'tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!
Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul.

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.
Horatio Spafford

Jim Swilley: CNN's latest Superstar

Why? That's not difficult.  Because he is the leader of a mega-church who has recently left his wife and admitted he is gay.  That's the key, by the way.  He left his wife, dissolved his marriage, threw that last vestige of archaic values in the trash heap.  Unlike Ted Haggard, he put his sexual orientation above all things.  He affirmed the importance of the individual above everything as priority one, all other priorities rescinded, all other considerations secondary.  That last part is important for advancing modern 'progrssivism', which Jim Swilley's church appears intent on doing.

As for CNN, don't expect questions about his church's doctrines.  CNN is probably peopled largely with post-Western secular progressives who know less about theology and religious doctrine than I do about nuclear physics.  If they even care at all.

The point about this is CNN continuing to advance the homosexual juggernaut.  Obviously CNN, like all news outlets, is advocacy based.  Whether FOX, NBC, MSNBC (obviously), or CNN, it's the agenda that matters.  CNN's recent exploitation of teenagers who committed suicide, throwing any non-gay considerations or victims under the bus and focusing in disproportionate ways only on those who were gay, is an example of were advocacy can start to develop a foul reek. 

For his part, Jim Swilley will be interviewed, focused upon, celebrated, and given carte blanche over the next few weeks.  Cases of hatred or mean spirited attacks from those who oppose Jim Swilley will be paraded across their screens, with never a sincere, serious, and mature discussion on the various issues involved.  Viewers will hear nothing about The Church in the Now except it is a mega-church.  But I will say this.  CITN is not alone, and the development of the post-denominational mega-churches, and the increasing power and influence they have on the here today, gone later today face of Protestant Christianity, is one of the driving forces behind my movement back into the historic Catholic Faith.

Hour of Power no more?

The Crystal Cathedral is going bankrupt. Financially that is. It had already hit bankruptcy, theologically speaking, some years ago. When Robert Sr., who distilled the Gospel down into a modern American Zig Ziglar seminar, canned his own son for daring to suggest they should spend more time focused on what the Bible actually teaches, you knew it wasn't long for the world. The article suggests other mega-churches are having the same financial problems, though doesn't give any particulars. Not surprising. But the Crystal Cathedral, standing as a testimony to the inevitable decline that the essence of Protestantism seems destined to follow, has finally seen its finances go where its message went sometime ago.