Russell D. Moore's Blog

A pastor friend told me last week that he had church members enraged with him when he suggested from the pulpit that we ought to pray for the salvation of Islamic State terrorists. The people in his church told him that he ought to be calling for justice against them, given their brutal murder of Christians, not for mercy.

I thought about my friend a few days ago when these murderous fiends beheaded 21 of our brothers and sisters in Christ because they refused to renounce the name of Jesus. I was not just angry; I was furious. Can such fury co-exist, though, with the Sermon on the Mount (Mat. 5-7)?  When we pray about such evil, how should we pray?

The complexity of the Christian calling in the world was seen even in social media. One friend of mine posted that the slaughter of Christians overseas calls for the world’s only remaining superpower to take action. Another said, quoting singer Toby Keith, that it was time to “light up their world like the Fourth of July.” To that, I say, “Amen.” Another friend, a former student of mine posted, “Oh, that there might be an ISIS Saul standing there now, holding the cloaks, whose salvation might turn the Arab world upside down with the gospel!” To that I say “Amen,” too.

These are not contradictory prayers.

Jesus says to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us (Mat. 5:44). The Spirit of Jesus in the prophets and in the apostles also tells us that those who turn a blind eye to the killing of others are wrong. The fact that we feel contradictory praying both for justice against the Islamic State and for salvation for Islamic State terrorists is partly because we fail to distinguish between the mission of the state in the use of the temporal sword against evildoers (Rom. 13:4) and the mission of the church in the use of the sword of the Spirit against sin and death and the devil (Eph. 6). But that’s not, I think, the main problem.

The main problem is that we sometimes forget that we are called to be a people of both justice and justification, and that these two are not contradictory.

It sounds awfully spiritual, at first blush, to say that we should not pray for the defeat of our enemies on the field of battle. But that’s only the case if these enemies are not actually doing anything. This terrorist group is raping, enslaving, beheading, crucifying our brothers and sisters in Christ, as well as other innocent people. To not pray for swift action against them is to not care about what Jesus said we should seek, what we should hunger and thirst for, for justice. A world in which murderous gangs commit genocide without penalty is not a “merciful” world but an unjust horror show.

As Christians, we ought to be, above all people, concerned with such justice. We not only have the common grace standing of caring about stopping murder and injustice, rooted in the image of God and the law written on the heart. We also have the personal implication here. It’s our household being wiped out in the Middle East, the very place where our church started. For us, this isn’t a matter of “they;” it’s a matter of “us.”

At the same time, praying for the salvation of our enemies, even those committing the most horrific of crimes, is not a call to stop praying for justice against them. The cross, after all, is not forgiveness in a contemporary therapeutic sense—in which one is merely absolved of wrongdoing as though it were all a misunderstanding. No, that’s precisely the Apostle Paul’s point in the Book of Romans.

The gospel does not say, “Don’t’ worry about it; it’s okay.” The gospel points us to the cross where sin is absorbed in a substitute. God’s righteous condemnation of sin is there. He does not, and cannot, enable wickedness. And God’s mercy is there in that he is the One who sends his Son as the propitiation for sin. He is both “just and the justifier of the One who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). The gospel doesn’t leave sin unpunished. Every sin is punished, either a the Place of the Skull, in Christ, or in the judgment of hell, on one’s own.

The thief on the cross—a Middle Eastern terrorist by Rome’s standards—in his act of faith did not believe that his salvation exempted him from justice. He confessed that his sentence was justice, and that he was receiving “the due reward for our deeds” (Lk. 23:41) even as he cried out to Jesus for merciful entrance into the kingdom of Christ (Lk. 23:42).

We ought, indeed, to pray for the gospel to go forward, and that there might be a new Saul of Tarsus turned away from murdering to gospel witness. At the same time, we ought to pray, with the martyrs in heaven, for justice against those who do such wickedness. Praying for the military defeat of our enemies, and that they might turn to Christ, these are not contradictory prayers because salvation doesn’t mean turning an eye away from justice. We can pray for gospel rootedness in the Middle East, and we can pray to light up their world like the Fourth of July, at the same time.

We are, after all, the people of the cross.

This August we release my new book, Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel (B&H). This book is a vision for Christian social engagement in an era in which Christianity is increasingly strange. I think we should own the strangeness, because it’s the freakishness of the gospel that changes things.

In the book, I argue that the church is, if we ever were, a moral majority no more. We are, on our best days, a prophetic minority, rooted in the gospel of the kingdom. This minority status doesn’t mean siege mentality. The prophetic word, after all, uproots and rebuilds. The new era before us, though, gives us the opportunity to toss aside some aspects of our past that never reflected the gospel in the first place: starting with our bargain-basement prosperity gospel.

We are not ambassadors of “traditional values.” We are stewards of the mystery of the gospel.

The book argues that the kingdom of God should set our priorities, that the kingdom should reorient the cultures of local congregations to speak to the outside world, and that a holistic mission ought to define our engagement. This kingdom-culture-mission framework drives us then to a distinctively Christian vision of human dignity, of religious liberty, and of family integrity.

The kingdom doesn’t just change what we say, though; it changes how we say it. We speak with convictional kindness because we are not enraged losers. We are more than conquerors in Christ. The Christian church, then, should be confident, hopeful, and future-directed. We should march triumphantly into the future. We pledge allegiance where we can and where we ought. We render unto God and we render unto Caesar, but we don’t forget the difference between the two. We are Americans best when we are not Americans first.

The future will be challenging. Hucksters and heretics can’t withstand it. But the gospel of the kingdom can. We’re not in Mayberry anymore, and we never were. But the gospel didn’t emerge in Mayberry. It came rocketing out of a Roman Empire in which nothing could be stranger than the idea of a crucified Messiah. Onward Christian strangers.

You can pre-order the book from Barnes and Noble here.

As today marks the forty-second anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, most Christians recognize, and rightly so, the loss of millions of unborn human lives. What we often forget is the second casualty of an abortion culture: the consciences of countless men and women.

Too often, pastors and church leaders assume that, when talking about abortion, their invisible debating partner is the “pro-choice” television commentator or politician. Not so. Many of the people endangered by the abortion culture aren’t even pro-choice.

In your congregation this Sunday, and in the neighborhoods around you right now, there are women vulnerable to abortionist propaganda, not because they reject the church but because they’re afraid they ‘ll lose the church. Pregnant young women are scared they will scandalize church people when they start to show, so they keep it secret. Parents are fearful their pregnant daughter, or their son’s pregnant girlfriend, will prompt the rest of the congregation to see them as bad families.

As they keep all of this secret from the Body of Christ, many of them fall prey to the false gospel of the abortion clinic. “We can take care of this for you,” these people say. “And it will all go away.”

Moreover, there are thousands of men and women in our churches who have aborted their children, or urged the abortion of their grandchildren. Bearing the shame of this, they keep it secret. And in the concealment, the satanic powers accuse them: “We know who you are; you’re a murderer, like us.”

Every time pastors and church leaders speak, they are speaking, at least potentially, to these men and women, the aborting and the abortionists. Many of these people don’t argue that the “fetus” is a “person.” Their consciences testify to that, and they’re either tortured by this or violently trying to sear over that persistent internal message.

The answer, for the church, is to preach the gospel to the conscience.

For many evangelicals, to “preach the gospel” seems to be obvious and ineffective because they think this means to, by rote, prompt people to accept Jesus and go to heaven. But the gospel speaks right where the abortion culture is in slavery, to the conscience.

For one thing, those guilty of this silent atrocity often don’t think we’re talking to them. For some, the demonic structures have helped them to conceal this secret, and to convince them the safest thing to do is to try to forget it altogether. Others are so burdened down by guilt, they really don’t believe they are included in the “whosoever will” of our gospel invitations.

Speak directly to these people. To the woman who has had the abortion. To the man who has paid for an abortion. To the health care worker who has profited off of tearing apart the bodies of the young and the consciences of their parents.

Speak clearly of the horror of judgement to come. Confirm what every accusing conscience already knows: clinic privacy laws cannot keep all this from being exposed at the tribunal of Christ. When the Light shines, there’s not enough darkness in which to hide and cringe.

But don’t stop there.

Proclaim just as openly that judgment has fallen on the quivering body of a crucified Jesus—accused by Satan, indicted by the Law, enveloped by the curse.

An abortion culture knows that hell exists, and they know judgment waits (Rom 2:14-16). Agree with them, but point them to the truth that God is not simply willing to forgive them. Show them how in Christ God is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26).

The woman who has had the abortion needs to know that, if she is hidden in Christ, God does not see her as “that woman who had the abortion.” He hasn’t been subverted from sending her to hell because she found a gospel “loophole.” In Christ, she’s already been to hell.

And, in the resurrected Christ, God has already told her what he thinks of her: “You are my beloved child and in you I am well-pleased.”

The consciences around us don’t believe what they’re telling themselves. They’re scared and accused. Shine the light in the eyes of their consciences. Prophetically. All for justice, legally and culturally, for the unborn. But don’t stop there.

After all, the spirit of murder doesn’t start or end in the abortion clinic (Matt. 5:21, 15:19; Jn. 8:44; Acts 9:1; Rom. 1:29; Jn. 3:15). And the blood of Christ has cleansed the consciences of rebels like all of us.

Warn of hell, but offer mercy. Offer that mercy not only at the Judgment Seat of Christ, but in the small groups and hallways of your church.

—–

You can download the ERLC’s Sanctity of Human Life Sunday bulletin insert here.

A previous version of this article was published January 22, 2013.

The Supreme Court announced today that they are taking cases on whether same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. Effectively, this means that the highest court in the land will decide, this year, whether marriage, as defined for thousands of years, will exist in our country any longer. Here’s what we should keep in mind.

First of all, this is not something we should shrug off. Marriage isn’t merely a matter of personal import or private behavior. States recognize marriage for a reason, and that reason is that sexuality between a man and a woman can, and often does, result in children. The state has an interest in seeing to it that, wherever possible, every child has both a mother and a father. The state doesn’t create this reality. It merely recognizes it, and attempts to hold husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, accountable to their vows and to their responsibilities. In every aspect of the Sexual Revolution, from the divorce culture to cohabitation to casual sex to the abortion revolution, children have borne the burden.

If the Court finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, we will have a generation of confusion about what marriage is, and why it matters. Beyond that, we have already seen that the Sexual Revolution isn’t content to move forward into bedrooms and dinner tables. The Sexual Revolution wants to silence dissent. The religious liberty concerns we are grappling with already will only accelerate.

We should pray that the Supreme Court does not take upon itself a power it doesn’t have: to redefine an institution that wasn’t created by government in the first place. But we shouldn’t wring our hands in fear, or clench our fists in outrage.

The worst-case scenario is that the Court hands down a Roe v. Wade style redefinition of marriage. Marriage in the minds of the public will change, but marriage as a creation reality won’t change at all. Jesus has taught us that marriage is essentially male and female, and that such is grounded not in government fiat but in God’s creation (Matt. 19:4; Mk. 10:6).

The Sexual Revolution, with or without the Supreme Court, cannot keep its promises. People will be disappointed, and, ultimately, in search of something more permanent, more ancient. We must be the people who can preserve the light to the old paths.

This will mean articulating a Christian vision of marriage. We will be forced to spell out things we could previously assume. That’s not a new situation. The New Testament epistles had to do the same thing, for the people of God within a sexually-lost Roman Empire. In the past, we’ve assumed that most people aspire to the same sorts of marriages and families we aspire to. We can no longer assume that. We must spell out why marriage matters, in light of who we are as men and women and in light of the gospel mystery of Christ and his church (Eph. 5).

Moreover, we must embody a Christian vision of marriage and sexuality. This will mean churches that reclaim marriage from the ambient culture in the seriousness with which we perform weddings and in the accountability local churches expect from couples to keep their vows. The undisciplined churches of the past generation acted as though the culture could keep marriages together, with just some preaching and encouragement from us. This led to the chaos we too often see in our own pews, with marital abandonment, unbiblical divorce, and more. Outsourcing marital expectations to the culture will now mean that our marriages preach a different gospel, one that upends the cosmic mystery of Christ. We cannot afford to dispense with the gospel.

Marriage is resilient. God created it to be so. The Supreme Court could make a decision that hurts a lot of people. I pray not. But if they do, let’s be a church that can carry the gospel to hurting people. Let’s articulate and embody a Christian vision of marriage. If we’re out of step with the culture, we should ask why we haven’t been so all along.

The Supreme Court may or may not do their job. We must make sure, no matter what, that we do ours.

Here’s my annual end-of-the-year roundup of the best books I read this year. Let me start with my caveats. These aren’t all 2014 books, though most of them are; they’re just books I happened to read this year. These are the books that happened to stir my thinking this year. They’re in no particular order.

How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James K.A. Smith (Eerdmans)

When I first picked up this slim volume, I assumed it was a sort of Cliff’s Notes to Taylor’s A Secular Age, something I could give to friends and students who wouldn’t necessarily want to read Taylor’s wardrobe-sized volume. I was wrong. Smith here interacts with Taylor, to be sure, but the end result is not a summary but rather a piercing analysis of the state of secularism, and what it means for culture.

The reason this matters for everyone, not just those interested in philosophy and cultural criticism, is contained in Smith’s opening illustration of a church planter who moves from the Bible Belt to an “unchurched” urban region. He is equipped with all the answers to the questions non-religious people have. Then he realizes that they don’t have any questions for him. They don’t have gaps in their mental maps, but rather they have different maps.

The phenomenon Smith is describing here is exactly on target, and is what I’ve called the shift from a Nicodemus culture in North America (where externally religious people are, at least some of the time, coming by night to ask questions) to a Woman at the Well culture (where people outside the church culture aren’t asking questions, at first, because they see nothing missing).

This book isn’t a jeremiad on how everything is snowball-to-hell since America lost God. He offers, in conversation with Taylor, a way for Christians to better address the culture by finding the “thin” places in secularizing lives, those points that are haunted by the longing for transcendence.

This book is a slow read, not because it’s dull but because it takes a while to ponder each paragraph. But it’s worth it, especially for pastors, missionaries, and parents.

Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

Speaking of haunting and the longing for transcendence, this little book, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, demonstrates these with grit and beauty. The book is about a man dying, struck as he passes with memories of his childhood and of his father. It contains what I think just might be the best and most evocative description of a man dying since Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Consider these sentences: “When he imagined inside the case of that clock, dark and dry and hollow, and the still pendulum hanging down its length, he felt the inside of his own chest and had a sudden panic that it, too, had wound down. When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart. When he realized that the silence by which he had been confused was that of all of his clocks having been allowed to wind down, he understood that he was going to die in the bed where he lay.”

Such sentences are throughout. The book prompted me to ponder my own death, not in a morbid way but in a biblical sense of “counting my days” with a sense of gratitude for life, and for remembrance.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore (Knopf)

My wife knows that the two major crushes of my childhood were Lynda Carter and Amy Grant. Amy Grant’s a story for another day, but Lynda Carter was the actress who played Wonder Woman in the television series about the Amazon warrior-princess. At the time, I thought she’d make an excellent pastor’s wife. I don’t know about Lynda Carter, but Wonder Woman might have a difficult adjustment to the born-again life.

Several years ago, I preached a sermon at Southern Seminary on the “gender wars,” and opened by talking about William Moulton Marston, the inventor of Wonder Woman. He was an expert in Greek mythology, and patterned her partly after the goddess Diana (or Artemis, in Greek mythology). Marston was also an early feminist pioneer, who thought a woman superhero would subdue male violence. Wonder Woman was, after all, from an island without men and thus without war or crime. Moreover, he was a professor of psychology and the inventor of the lie detector. Thus, Wonder Woman had a magic lasso that made whoever was bound with it tell the truth. It is no accident, then, that Wonder Woman was an icon of second-wave feminism, appearing on an early cover of Ms. Magazine.

But it’s also no accident that one of the biggest disappointments feminists have with Wonder Woman is the way she is repeatedly objectified as a sex object. This is true in recent controversies over comic books and graphic novels, and has been the case for a long while. The theme song to the television series of my childhood included the words, “In your satin tights, fighting for your rights, and the old red, white, and blue.”

This book explores the cultural history of this figure, tying her to the feminist and sexual revolutions in ways I did not even know. Marston, it turns out, was a key part of the story of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. And he was what folks today would call a “polyamorist.”

The book is an important reminder, to Christians, about the powerful mythological and cultural forces behind the gender and sexual revolutions from which we dissent. Ephesians 5 wasn’t written in a vacuum, after all, but in an Ephesus world-renowned for its worship of Artemis. The gospel was threatening because it displaced not just religion and culture of the place but also the economy. The silversmiths led the riots because they were making a living selling figurines of Artemis (Wonder Woman action figures, if you will). The gospel broke through all of that, and restored some real wonder to womanhood, and some meaning to manhood too.

America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation by Grant Wacker (Harvard)

What a book. I think it is hard for those of us who have lived in the Billy Graham era to recognize just how significant this time has been in the history of the church, as God has used this North Carolina voice to call so many to faith in Christ. This volume traces the life of Graham, and fits his ministry in the context of American cultural, political, and religious history.

The book beautifully depicts the courage of Graham, one who drew detractors both from the Left (Reinhold Niebuhr and the mainline liberals) and from the Right (Bob Jones and the fundamentalists). Of special note is Graham’s fight against racism and Jim Crow. Graham saw the racist structure of the South of his day to be a gospel matter, and he was willing to defy the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council and the southern evangelical establishment as a result. On this and other issues, Wacker notes, Graham “confronted his friends more often than his enemies.”

Graham’s model is about far more than a “successful ministry,” or an evangelism strategy. He modeled courage, conviction, and integrity. He wasn’t a hypocrite or a heretic or a hack. The fact that this is unusual in American religious life ought to make us weep. But this book will remind us to rejoice in the fact that we were alive to see God work in this remarkable way through this remarkable man.

Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—-Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist by Karen Swallow Prior (Thomas Nelson)

Karen Swallow Prior is one of those writers whose work I always love. She writes with precision and with passion but also with lyrical beauty. And she writes as one bearing authority, not as one of the scribes. This book is about a figure, Hannah More, who is probably unknown to most of you. I knew next to nothing about her, other than her association with William Wilberforce, before I read the galley draft of this book. The story is riveting.

Prior explores how More led the fight against the slave trade, for education for women, for the humane stewardship of animals, and for the advance of the gospel. In an era when too many want to chop up the mission of the church, severing “gospel” from “justice,” the life of More is a welcome antidote, and her story is told here in an example of biography at its best.

Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness by Richard B. Hays (Baylor University Press)

I remember once hearing an evangelical Old Testament professor tell his students that the writer of Hebrews would get a D minus in this professor’s hermeneutics class. I heard of another telling his class that after reading Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Trypho, the professor agreed with Trypho. The idea that the biblical text has no overall coherent message is perfectly consistent for liberalism, but has no place in a theology that sees that the Bible is not simply the work of human authors but is also the Word of God. And God’s Word to humanity is centered on Christ and him crucified.

This book is vibrantly on point. Hays demonstrates how each of the gospel writers, with their differing emphases, are understood in light of the Old Testament. He further demonstrates that the Old Testament itself is understood in light of the whole Bible, a Bible that points to Christ Jesus and the gospel. If we read any text in the Bible without reference to Jesus, we are missing the context, a context of the whole canon as Christian Scripture. And if we read anything in the life or teaching of Jesus apart from the Old Testament, we are missing the context. Jesus is the embodiment, after all, of Israel and of Israel’s story.

Hays is also exactly right that the gospels call us to what he calls a “conversion of the imagination,” requiring a Christian poetic sensibility that knows how to recognize allusion, irony, parable, and paradox.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

What Walker Percy is to Kierkegaard, and what John Updike is to Barth, Marilynne Robinson is to Calvin. She imports Calvin’s sense of God and the world into twentieth-century Iowa, and she does so with the sort of craftsmanship that makes the world she creates linger in the reader’s mind long after the book is shelved.

This volume is the third in a series, after Gilead and Home, looking at many of the same events through three different sets of eyes. This volume is from the point of view of a woman from a horrible life-story trying to find her way into the world of Midwestern American Christianity. The book is never preachy or simplistic, but deals honestly with the human condition, a condition that is both bearing the dignity of God’s image and the weight of fallen depravity.

The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning by Jonathan Sacks (Schocken)

I picked up this book after spending some time with the author, the retired Chief Rabbi of Great Britain. I don’t agree with everything in this book, of course. Rabbi Sacks disagrees with the Apostle Paul about the “tragic” nature of the Fall (and I’m with Paul). But I found it catalyzing my thinking more than anything I had read in a long time.

Sacks takes issue with the vision of contemporary naturalism that human beings are accidental products of biology, floating along in an accidental universe. The book is at its best when Sacks writes of what makes human lives meaningful, in terms of relationships and rootedness and purpose.

The book is also a good model of writing persuasively. Sacks is not simply presenting slogans for his “side.” He presents alternative views fairly, and seeks to address those who disagree, to ask them to consider that life might be more than matter, that humanity might be more than biology.

Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders by Denise Spellberg (Vintage)

I am surrounded by John Leland, the Revolutionary-era Virginia Baptist preacher and freedom fighter. My office here in Washington DC is named Leland House, with paintings of and books by Leland all over. His thought is formative on my own about why religious liberty matters and what freedom of conscience ought to mean. I carried this book onto an airplane expecting to read about Jefferson, and I did, but there in the midst was my old friend Leland.

The book addresses Jefferson’s vision of how religious liberty would function for Muslims (or “Turks” as they were then most often called) in the future of America. Islam provides an interesting test case for the author since Muslims were hardly an interest group in the new republic. The question of religious freedom as it relates to Islam then is a question of what convictions undergirded Jefferson’s commitment to religious liberty. The author develops this, at least partly, in dialogue with the Baptist tradition, going all the way back to English Baptist Thomas Helwys and continuing through the preaching and activism of Leland.

I smiled as I recognized that familiar old voice of the fiery preacher Leland. The book notes Leland’s hatred of human slavery. “Wretched religion, that pleads for cruelty and injustice,” he wrote. “If Christian nations were nations of Christians, these things would not be so.” Because he advocated for religious liberty for everyone, not just for those who had the majority of votes, Leland was sometimes lumped in with Jefferson and Locke as an “infidel.” Leland’s response was one I think all of us in ministry would do well to emulate. He said, “May the Lord increase my faith and make me more holy, which will be the best refutation of the libel.”

Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, compiled by Charles Moore (Plough)

“Christ has not appointed assistant professors but followers.”

Kierkegaard’s writing is rich in content but can be tough ploughing for many. This book is an amazing compilation of hard-hitting, devotionally-catalytic writings from the Melancholy Dane. I was delighted as I started reading this book that I could give it out to friends who would enjoy it and benefit from it. It wasn’t long though before I found myself laughing out loud at insights, convicted of my own sin, and driven to prayer. This is one of the best devotional books I’ve read in years.

Bonus Book:

The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night by Peter Spier (Doubleday)

I enjoyed reading this book to my toddler son before bedtime many nights. The illustrations are vivid and memorable, and the story jaunts along following a fox through his night hunting all the way back to the den with his wife and cubs. My son liked it, and I think I liked it more than he.

Sometimes I learn a lot from conversations I was never intended to hear. This happened once as I was stopping by my local community bookstore. It’s a small, quiet store, so it was impossible not to eavesdrop as I heard a young man tell his friend how much he hated Christmas. And, you know what, the more he talked, the more I understood his point.

This man wasn’t talking about the hustle and bustle of the holidays, or about the stresses of family meals or all the things people tend to complain about. What he hated was the music.

This guy started by lampooning Sting’s Christmas album, and I found myself smiling as I browsed because he is so right; it’s awful. But then he went on to say that he hated Christmas music across the board. That’s when I started to feel as though I might be in the presence of the Grinch. You know, when every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small, would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing; they’d stand hand-in-hand. And the Who’s would start singing. The sour old green villain didn’t like that.

But then this man explained why he found the music so bad. It wasn’t just that it was cloying. It’s that it was boring.

“Christmas is boring because there’s no narrative tension,” he said. “It’s like reading a book with no conflict.”

Now he had my attention.

I’m sure this man had thought this for a long time, but maybe he felt freer to say it because we were only hours out from hearing the horrifying news of a massacre of innocent children in Connecticut. For him, the tranquil lyrics of our Christmas songs couldn’t encompass such terror. Maybe we should think about that.

Of course, some of the blame is on our sentimentalized Christmas of the American civil religion. Simeon the prophet never wished anyone a “holly-jolly Christmas” or envisioned anything about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But there’s our songs too, the songs of the church. We ought to make sure that what we sing measures up with the, as this fellow would put it, “narrative tension” of the Christmas story.

The first Christmas carol, after all, was a war hymn. Mary of Nazareth sings of God’s defeat of his enemies, about how in Christ he had demonstrated his power and “has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate” (Lk. 1:52). There are some villains in mind there.

Simeon’s song, likewise, speaks of the “fall and rising of many in Israel” and of a sword that would pierce the heart of Mary herself. Even the “light of the Gentiles” he speaks about is in the context of warfare. After all, the light, the Bible tells us, overcomes the darkness (Jn. 1:5), and frees us from the grip of the devil (2 Cor. 4).

In a time of obvious tragedy, the unbearable lightness of Christmas seems absurd to the watching world. But, even in the best of times, we all know that we live in a groaning universe, a world of divorce courts and cancer cells and concentration camps. Just as we sing with joy about the coming of the Promised One, we ought also to sing with groaning that he is not back yet (Rom. 8:23), sometimes with groanings too deep for lyrics.

The man in the bookstore knew that reality is complicated. There’s grit, and there’s tension. Without it, Christmas didn’t seem real to life. It’s hard to get more tense than being born under a king’s death sentence (Matt. 2:16), and with an ancient dragon crouching at the birth canal to devour you (Rev. 12:4). But this man didn’t hear any of that in Christmas. I’m glad I overheard him.

We have a rich and complicated and often appropriately dark Christmas hymnody. We can sing of blessings flowing “far as the curse is found,” of the one who came to “free us all from Satan’s power.”

Let’s sing that, every now and then, where we can be overheard.

A version of this article originally ran on December 18, 2012.

Russell Moore and Dan Darling discuss the ethics of the Serial podcast and whether Christians should listen to it or not.

I’m looking for a new team member to work closely with me in communications.

If you’re someone who enjoys reading in theology, culture, politics, and ethics and enjoys working in the areas of social media and digital platforms, I’d love to hear from you.

You can check out the formal job description here. If you’re interested, you can email a resume to my chief of staff Daniel Patterson at dpatterson@erlc.com.

I’m looking for someone that is detail-oriented, organized, and interested in our work in applying the gospel to everyday life. The job includes research, editing, pitching ideas within our communications strategy, and managing writing projects and a website.

This is a position that might be one that someone is interested in for a few years, but may also be one that someone with a passion for the work could serve in for much longer. I love working with a team that is relentlessly fast-paced and focused, but all the while joyful and committed to serving the church with gospel-focused resources, events, and publications.

What I need is somebody that would like to work in this environment, who is organized, self-starting, and eager to bring a kingdom-oriented theological framework to bear on our engagement with the key issues of our day

We work hard, but have a great time doing so at the ERLC. So if you’re interested, let me know.

The mood in Ferguson, Missouri, is tense, after a grand jury decided against indicting a police officer for the killing of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown. The tension ought to remind us, as the church, that we are living in a time in which racial division is hardly behind us. That reality ought to motivate us as citizens to work for justice, but also as the church to seek to embody the kingdom of Christ.

We haven’t as of yet sorted through all the evidence the grand jury saw and we don’t know precisely what happened in this nightmarish incident. What we do know is that the Ferguson situation is one of several in just the past couple of years where white and black Americans have viewed a situation in starkly different terms. White Americans tend, in public polling, to view the presenting situations as though they exist in isolation, dealing only with the known facts of the case at hand, of whether there is evidence of murder. Black Americans, polls show, tend to view these crises through a wider lens, the question of whether African-American youth are too often profiled and killed in America. Whatever the particulars of this case, this divergence ought to show us that we have a ways to go toward racial reconciliation.

One of the things I’ve learned over the past year is that nothing brings out more hate mail, nothing, than when I say that too many black kids are being shot in America. Often this hate mail is accompanied by the sort of neo-Confederate rhetoric that I would have thought would have died out, at least in its explicit form, a long, long time ago. That’s just mail, with no real harm. I cannot imagine what it would be to worry about the physical safety of my sons. We have come a long way toward racial justice in this country, but we shouldn’t be deceived. The old zombie of Jim Crow still moves about.

So what should we do? In the public arena, we ought to recognize that it is empirically true that African-American men are more likely, by virtually every measure, to be arrested, sentenced, executed, or murdered than their white peers. We cannot shrug that off with apathy. Working toward justice in this arena will mean consciences that are sensitive to the problem. But how can we get there when white people do not face the same experiences as do black people?

The answer for the Body of Christ starts with a robust doctrine of the church lived out in local congregations under the lordship of Christ. The reason white and black Americans often view things so differently is because white and black Americans often live and move in different places, with different cultural lenses. In the church, however, we belong to one another. We are part of one Body.

The reason African-Americans tend to speak out against racial profiling and disparate sentencing is because often they can imagine their own sons or brothers or nephews in that place. As those in Christ, we have the same family dynamic at work, regardless of whether we are black or white, Jew or Gentile. In the church, a black Christian and a white Christian are brothers and sisters. We care what happens to the other, because when one part of the Body hurts, the whole Body hurts.

Consciences are not simply shaped by ideas. They are shaped by affections. As sociologist Robert Nisbet pointed out last century, soldiers aren’t motivated to fight chiefly by the patriotic speeches of their commanders but by their sense of unity and camaraderie with their fellow fighters. They are a band of brothers. The same should be true, except infinitely more so, within the church. That’s why the early church saw to it that they listened to the Greek widows who felt ignored in the distribution of food (Acts 6), and why the largely Gentile churches were included in an offering for the relief of the church in Jerusalem.

In order to get there, we will need churches that are not divided up along carnal patterns of division—by skin color or ethnicity or economic status. We will need churches that reflect the manifold wisdom of God (Eph. 3:10) in the joining together of those who may have nothing else in common but the image of God, the blood of Christ, and the unity of the Spirit. When we know one another as brothers and sisters, we will start to stand up and speak up for one another.

That doesn’t mean that every situation will have an immediate resolution. We will still live in a fallen world, in which the justice system will sometimes discover wrongdoing and sometimes won’t. But it will mean that we will go a long way toward reflecting in our churches the united kingdom of Christ more than divided states of America.

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I disagree with President Barack Obama’s decision to act unilaterally on immigration policy. I am for immigration reform, for all sorts of reasons that I have outlined elsewhere. The system we have is incoherent and unjust. I have worked hard to try to see the system changed, and will continue to do so. It’s because of my support for immigrants and for immigration reform that I think President Obama’s executive actions are the wrong way to go.

Read the entire article at Time Ideas