Mark Labberton:
A voice that many of you will know is that of Russell Moore, our guest on Conversing today. Russell currently serves as the editor in editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. He’s the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is called Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call For Evangelical America that was published by Penguin. He previously served as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, a position from which he’s stepped down after great tension and difficulty in serving at that time in that role because of the division that is so characteristic of both Christianity and our national life. It’s a great joy to have him and an honour. He’s a bright and thoughtful brother in Christ, and a person whose creativity and faithfulness and discipline has mattered a great deal to me and I think to many, many people. Russell, thank you so much for joining us today on Conversing.
Russell Moore:
Oh, glad to. Thanks for having me.
Mark Labberton:
You and I are in interesting parallel roles. I, having been the president of Fuller Seminary for a decade, and you in your role currently as the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, two organizations that were founded at roughly the same time. They were founded out of a lot of the same kind of passion for an integration of faith and life in all of its implications, mid-century, post-World War II, an era of many, many evangelical organizations being founded. But I would say that what CT and Fuller have always had in common is literally some common founders, but it’s also had in common a desire to try to be organizations that are committed to reflective consideration of the faith that’s primary text, the scriptures, it’s desire for the world that knows Christ to be strengthened and encouraged by the ministries of our work and for the world that doesn’t yet know Christ to be perhaps stimulated, challenged, served, and reached in some way or another by the distinct means that each of our two organizations have had.
Now, we find ourselves at this moment in American evangelical history where so much of what was presumed at the time that our two organizations were founded feels to me at least I think to you as a time of tremendous brokenness, disarray, chaos, pain. Yes, the gospel is still alive and well in the world. God is still faithful and good and just, and all kinds of wonderful things are happening, and we agonize daily over all the things that are happening badly or not happening at all. So our conversation in the first part to just be focused really on how we are each thinking about these things, how you’re thinking about them, how you’re thinking about them at CT, but also how you’re thinking about them in a broader than CT lens. So why don’t you just start, if you were to just be as candid as you’re prepared to be about how you would describe the context in which you think CT is serving and I’ll try to do the same in the context of Fuller.
Russell Moore:
Well, I think if you look at when both of the institutions were founded, some things were very different and some things rhyme. And so, what’s very different is a number of things. But one of those things being, we were, as you said, coming out of World War II, you had a world and a church that had seen two horrific global wars and had seen unparalleled evil in the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. And so, you had people all across the religious spectrum and the political spectrum who were agreed at least on that in the broader terms. And a lot of that time after World War II led to a lot of religious reconsiderations. I mean, I think of my grandfather was blown out of a tank by the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge and came back. He went an unbeliever, came back really feeling his mortality and searching for answers, and ended up at a revival meeting where he came to know Christ.
And that was a story that I think a lot of people face. So you had that kind of unity on the one hand. But what I think is similar is you had this false choice being presented to Christians, which was to say, okay, the fundamentalist modernist controversy, which had happened over the fundamentals of the faith, is the Bible true? Is Jesus really alive? Those sorts of questions, the choice had been made, the choice had been given, or a lot of people perceived it as you either go with an ever narrowing, ever quarrelsome group of fundamentalists or you liberalize into what was then becoming mainline Protestantism. And what Billy Graham and Carl Henry and several others said was, “No, that’s not the choice.” And looked for some historical parallels with the Great Awakenings, with the Wesley brothers, with Whitfield, with others, and did something that was new in that sense.
I have right behind me, Billy Graham bobblehead and right next to him, Martin Luther King. They’re very different, but they’re similar in the sense that we now, everybody mostly likes Billy Graham and most Americans see Martin Luther King as a good guy. That was not true when either of them were actually in the prime of what they were doing. And so, Billy Graham was using new media, new technologies, preaching an old gospel, but doing it in some very different ways. And I think in some ways, that’s a similar moment we’re in right now where people are realizing, oh, the old alliances and categories aren’t holding anymore, so we need to look for, not something new, but we need to look for something older than that. And I think that’s where we are.
Mark Labberton:
Right. I think that’s well put. One of the things that I think is interesting about the history of evangelicalism since the mid-20th century is the fact that of course it’s never really had literally a head. There’s not a thing, a body like for example, the National Association of Evangelicals, nor a denomination or a single leader or an organizational structure or even a formal network that would be considered to be the holders of the whole. And one of the challenges that I think that’s being faced right now is that evangelicalism seems to me to be in a great crisis for many different reasons, which I want to have you discuss in just a minute. But out of that crisis, then it becomes extremely difficult to figure out what can be done and how it can be done and where the leverage points are. And so, first, describe how you see the state of Evangelicalism in America, and if you do see it as a movement in crisis, what is that crisis?
Russell Moore:
It’s definitely a movement in crisis. And I think there are two primary reasons. The first is the shadow side of the success of the evangelical movement, which is the entrepreneurialism of it as you talked about. There’s not a that can be calcified and do air traffic control. In one sense, evangelicalism isn’t anything at all. It’s just a way to put a category around a certain kind of Christian, and that can be described in different ways, but I think gets at the hub of it, it is an emphasis upon the personal. You must be born again. The personal, in relation to scripture, there must be a personal interaction with a truthful scripture. Every believer is to be on mission. I mean, all of those things I think are emphasized in the personal. And the reason that evangelicalism in all of its forms was able to thrive is because when you had revival preachers, I don’t know who the revival preacher was that my grandfather heard when he came to Christ, but he didn’t have to do paperwork. Nobody probably even sent him. He felt called by God, went, put up a brush arbor and preached.
Well, God used that and in dramatically good ways, but every strength does have a weakness to it and a shadow side to it. And that entrepreneurialism can easily come into a market-driven reality. And I think a lot of what we have seen over the past 50 years is a furthering of that market driven mentality, which means when the market changes, the movement has to move along with it. And the second thing I think is boredom. I think the fundamental problem in American life right now is the very thing that evangelicalism first sought out to answer, which is lifelessness and deadness. I think there are all kinds of reasons for that in the church and outside the church, but that sense of deadness causes people to try to find something to replace it and something to give a little jolt of life, which is one of the reasons why we’ve had great, actually, Trinitarian controversies in evangelicalism from time to time over the last 10 years.
I can’t think of a single church that has split over the Trinity. I can’t think of a single church that has split over Christology. Most of the arguments have to do with politics and related cultural issues because that’s what people really care about and what they really think often is important. And I think the reason for that is downstream from the actual presenting issues.
Mark Labberton:
So go downstream with this.
Russell Moore:
Well, I think that we are in the midst of a great tumult with a move to a digital economy. And by that, I don’t just mean a money economy, but our entire lives being upended and changed in all kinds of ways that has, as its result, this sense of alienation and dehumanization, we can simultaneously think of ourselves as gods and as sets of data and algorithms. I mean, all of that happening at once. And the speed of change and of life is such right now that in previous generations of the church, you could have people who could see things around the corner and start preparing people to know how to deal with them. I mean, a lot of what we do and have done in youth ministry and so forth is say, “These are the things that you are going to have to be facing. Let’s get ready to talk about them now.”
Now, we’re at a time where that happened so quickly that the time period, I mean, when I was teaching ethics at the seminary level, one of the things I would do is to try to have a final exam question that was something they had never thought about. So they weren’t just going to look for the right answers and to complicate it. So these are 15, 20 years ago, they’re answering questions about AI and those sorts of things. And at the time, what the students would say is, “Oh, it’s this strange science fictiony sort of question.” Well, now we’re at a time where the time period between that and well, what are you going to do is nothing. So there’s no way that you could have really prepared a group of people.
When you look at, for instance, if you went back in time 30 years ago and said to a group of the youth ministry leaders, college of ministry leaders, what do you think will be some of the biggest challenges being faced? They would talk about some things that are, but I bet they would get one thing in particular very wrong. I think they would think, well, we’re going to have a lot of increasing and loosening sexual behavior. And if you came back and said, “Actually, rates of premarital sex are dropping dramatically here,” they might think, oh, that’s good news. And then you say, “What we do have is a mental health crisis in which there are sexual morality problems, but they’re completely different than what you’re thinking.”
And you have high rates of depression and anxiety driven by a piece of glass that everybody carries in his or her pocket that can connect that person with all of the information in the entire world. That would’ve sounded like an interesting science fiction scenario. Now, we’re at a time where you have parents and churches and others and teenagers who are saying, “This is awful. I don’t know what to do.” But there is nothing to do because it’s everywhere and it’s ubiquitous. That’s I think part of what has led us to this place.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, I was reminded that apparently this week is the 100th anniversary of the invention and use of the microphone. And I think that’s just an interesting feature of technology to focus on since we usually think about other things. But obviously, this very moment that we’re having right now is only possible because of microphones, and without microphones, so much else that we could imagine and point to in the world would simply have been utterly different, whether we’re thinking in musical terms of course, or whether we’re thinking in spoken word context or obviously now internet context. It’s just extraordinary how life is defined by the screen, but also by the microphone. And one of the things we could say, I think, about the crisis of evangelicalism is that evangelical, great awakening preachers were people who didn’t have microphones, but who in some cases had extraordinary voices. I think especially of someone like George Whitfield who had the capacity along with Wesley and others to speak to vast audiences without any technological-
Russell Moore:
Spurgeon.
Mark Labberton:
… support. Spurgeon. And yet, of course, evangelicalism’s growth has utterly depended on the microphone, especially as we come into a more contemporary context. It’s unimaginable without the microphone in fact because it feels like it’s been a driving tool of so much. And yet the microphone that evangelicalism now has in the culture, which is loud, and I would say the dials are askew because the sound that evangelicalism is evoking in so many quadrants is a sound that is hostile and grating and brash and arrogant. And while you and I know that that’s not universally true at all, and that there are countless examples of something that’s really different, the nature of the microphone is that that grating evangelicalism can easily take the stage. And in many cases, certainly for many secular people, that is the only sound that’s being emitted by evangelicalism.
And so, I guess I’m curious, when you take the crisis, as you’ve described it, and you add to it that way that evangelicalism that is about sharing the news, but the good news is so clouded with distorted noise, it’s extremely hard for some people to even imagine considering a good news. Just interact with me about how does all that come together in your own view?
Russell Moore:
Well, I think that what we’re seeing right now is a secularization of some patterns that were already there. And by secularization I don’t mean non-religious. In many cases, it’s even more, but by secularization I mean that it’s patterning itself and basing itself off of movements happening in the world and in history, not in scripture. So if you look back, say 30, 40 years ago, if somebody wanted to draw a huge crowd in a community, you wanted to have a revival meeting, you want to have a huge crowd there, a really easy way to do that was to say, “I’m going to be talking about in times prophecy.” And the people who were able to successfully do that were not the people who were saying, “Okay, here’s what the Bible says and here’s what we don’t know and the vision of the end could be at any moment, so we need to be ready, but we don’t…”
Those weren’t the people are listening to. What they’re wanting to hear is Gog and Magog is the Soviet Union. Gorbachev is the beast of Revelation 13, all of these different correspondences because that’s what people are already interested in and you have this feeling of we are right here at the brink of everything, we’re part of it, and that was the state of Israel is established in 1948. That means I have on my shelf back there 88 reasons why Jesus will return by 1988. Those sorts of things.
Then, you would have another kind of evangelicalism that could really appeal to people by talking about practical issues of marriage and family. We can tell you how to live a life where your marriage is good, your children are well-behaved, you can do those sorts of things. Jesus will get you there. Now, we’re in an attention economy and a secularized context where even people who are very extremely religious in their zeal and in their arguments are patterned after that. And that kind of economy drives extremism. Because in order to get attention, I mean, and that’s the other thing, if you look at what has happened over the past several years, we don’t have a lot of, as much as people criticize evangelical celebrity culture and so forth, we don’t have a lot of evangelical preacher celebrities right now. I mean, in the way that we have for a long time.
The way that people get attention at this point is to say something shocking on a social media platform so that people will attack you for that, and that will then drive the attention metrics up. Well, we can easily say, “Well, that’s just the internet. It’s not real life.” But the world we’re living in now, real life takes on the characteristics of the internet. And that has changed us dramatically in ways that I just don’t think we understand. And that’s especially true when you’ve got very different psychologies at work often.
And so, your, for lack of a better word, normies are the ones who really do want, they’re not wanting to kick anybody out, they’re not wanting to have any sort of a fight, and they don’t understand those that Amanda Ripley would call conflict entrepreneurs. They don’t understand the strategy, what’s behind it, the psychology. And so, they think, well, if we just give them what they want right now, then they’ll relax and get on board and we can carry on with the great commission together. And that’s not how it works. And that’s why we’ve ended up where we are in a lot of ways.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Going back to our founding and our institutions, which are obviously two distinct institutions who share many things in spirit and even in some details, though we have different missions, we have different audiences, we have different purposes in our fundamental existence, and yet we’re simpatico in broad brush, we’re deeply simpatico. And at the same time, as we were saying earlier, there’s no fulcrum from which to try to bring about a larger, deeper, wider conversation that could be imaginable. And there’s all kinds of contributing factors to that, which would be an interesting thing to explore another time.
But at the moment, I’m just curious when you think of the landscape and the challenges that are before us, and at least for me, I will be candid to say that I feel like we’re in a multi-generational disaster that is unfolding in relationship to the church in general, in relationship to Christianity in general, in relationship to evangelicalism in particular. And because I’m confident in who God is and what God has done in Christ and what the role of the Holy Spirit is in our ongoing world and lives, this does not drive me to despair, but it certainly drives me to utter perplexity about what is the role of human agency, and not least in the life of the church, not pretending that we supplant what God alone can do, but as people who are committed to being ambassadors of a gospel of good news in a world where it’s hard to hear that or understand that even inside the church.
How do you understand the sociological reality that we’re facing and what imagined, I don’t know if you know quite what word, collaborations, partnerships, networks, et cetera, whatever language we might want, movements would be another word that you think about, or is that even the right question to be asking in this time? Is it really primarily other things, would you say?
Russell Moore:
I often quote Wendell Berry in a comment that he made to a group of environmental activists in which he said, “You mistakenly think that the solution has to be at the same scale as the problem, and that a big scale problem requires a big scale solution.” And that’s almost never the case. The big scale problem requires a multitude of very small, in many cases, almost imperceptible, if you think of Jesus’s language of yeast, which works both ways, “But where the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod,” he says, “and the kingdom of God is like leaven working its way through those small things.”
And I think you add to that, the way that the world has changed. So for instance, Seth Godin will talk about how we tend to think, I mean, think of the biggest musical talents that we have in the world right now, and you think about how many people are at a Taylor Swift concert or a Beyonce concert or something like that. It’s nothing compared to the Beatles. And why? Because you had these uniform sorts of platforms where you’re going to listen to what’s on the radio, and if you’re going to see something, you’re going to see it when it’s scheduled on one of three networks. That has completely changed and upended to the point that Saturday Night Live had its 50th anniversary here a couple of weeks ago. The difference between when that show started when everyone had to be there altogether as a country and take these little catchphrases to the time when most of the people who see a Saturday Night Live sketch are seeing it in a clip on YouTube or on Instagram or TikTok or somewhere that somebody has clipped out. That’s just a very, very different world.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Diffusion.
Russell Moore:
And so, I think we’re at a moment right now where a lot of times what evangelicals will say to me is, “Can you give us some hope?” And I always, my antennae go up when somebody says that because usually they mean one of two things. They mean give us the playbook, we do this, we do this, we do this, and we are back to Billy Graham or whatever the picture is that they have of normality, or they mean give us reassurance that this is just all going to work itself out. That’s not hope. I mean, the scripture defines hope that is seen is not hope. Instead, there’s suffering that creates endurance, endurance that creates character, character that creates hope, and hope does not put to shame.
And so, the kind of perplexity that we have right now, I see as a, I started to say a sign, but it is an adulterous generation that seeks for a sign. We have the sign of Jonah, but it’s an indication I think of something good because that’s exactly where we have to be is in a state of perplexity of what is happening and we can’t… I mean, you think of Ezekiel before the dry bones, that classic scene that we often point to when we think of revival. I mean, the first step of that is God having Ezekiel saying to Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” And getting the answer, I don’t know, you know. That’s how the spirit works, and that’s the way Jesus is. So often, he’s putting people in the situation where they have to step back and say, “I don’t know,” or, “I don’t want to say what’s next.” I mean, I think that’s the way the spirit works, and we ought to embrace that rather than to allow it to drive us to despair.
Mark Labberton:
So given that, how then would you place directly continuing that very theme? Then, what is the work of CT right now?
Russell Moore:
Right now, what CT is doing is giving a vision of a kind of Christianity that is focused on new birth, is connected to a global church. I mean, I think of often we have these little intramural debates about what an evangelical is, and if we should use the word, I was teaching this class for a semester of the University of Chicago in the Institute of Politics there. None of the students really had any religious background at all. And I had Tim Keller come in with me one day and the student, they didn’t know who he was, they didn’t know anything about that. And one of them said, “You keep saying evangelical Christian. Why do you want to use that word when it’s so tarred with all of these associations?” And Tim’s response was to say, “Well, because most of us are in Africa and Asia and Latin America. And the North Americans don’t get to choose what we’re called just because we’ve wrecked the brand.”
And the student just said, “Fair enough,” and sat down. And I thought about that a lot after and thought the most important word in that answer is us and redefining who the us is, who the we are. And that’s a good bit of the task that we have. And I think the other part of it is what’s happening now is that you have all kinds of people, we focus a lot on the fact that over the last 10 years or so, we have so much division and polarization, so many friendships broken up, so many churches split, so many families rendered apart and all that is true.
We also have though people who are finding each other, who never thought they had anything in common and are realizing we actually do because we want a Christianity that isn’t a means to some other end. It’s not a way to get our candidates elected. It’s not a way to sell stuff. We simply want Jesus as revealed in scripture and that’s what we want to see. Those people are finding each other, and our job is to help that along, help them to find each other and help them to have ways of actually reflecting on what’s happening around them that takes a longer-term view. And by longer-term, I mean trillions of years view.
Mark Labberton:
When I looked then at CT in this period, what I see is a wider and more varied cast of characters that you’re drawing from voices that you’re seeking to feature, types of narratives that you’re willing to tell, issues that I have not always been on the pages of CT. And is that a manifestation of what you’ve just been saying or am I seeing things?
Russell Moore:
No, I think that’s right. And I think one reason for that is, I mean, for instance, when CT was reporting on the Ravi Zacharias scandal or any of these scandals that have erupted in evangelicalism, Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, for instance, what will often happen is there will be people who will say, “Well, don’t tell that because that’s going to give to people a bad vision of Jesus.” And our understanding of that though is 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul’s saying two things at the same time. “We don’t operate out of cunning,” he says. “We don’t peddle God’s word and we appeal directly to the conscience,” Paul says, “and we unveil and we point to the glory of God reflected in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Both of those two things, they’re inextricably linked because what we have right now, there are so many people, they’re being used constantly as an algorithm. They’re surrounded by propaganda on all kinds of sides. And what they’re asking is is anybody going to level with me and tell me the truth? We think that’s a key part of what happens is telling the truth, but that’s not the only part. The other part is to say, “Here’s the glory of what it means to be in Christ and what that looks like.”
I mean, I think of Karl Barth who went through this time of major disillusionment when he saw his teachers signing a statement backing Kaiser’s militarism and nationalism in World War I, led him to reconsider all kinds of things and then is often quoted when he said, “During the reign of Hitler, we want to preach the gospel as though nothing has happened.” You see, if people look at that completely out of context, they say, “Oh, well, he’s saying ignore the fact that this is going.” He’s actually saying the complete opposite. He’s saying the church is being co-opted and used by forces alien to it, and there have to be people who are free from that to actually appeal to the genuine gospel and to remind people that God is God. And I think that’s a key part of-
Mark Labberton:
It is, yeah, it’s a great quote from Barth. So using that Barth quote, one of the gifts and challenges then becomes freedom. How do you find freedom in order to be able to see that “nothing’s changed?” So how do you cultivate freedom in your own life? And then how do you, as editor-in-chief of CT, cultivate freedom in your readers?
Russell Moore:
I think one of the major challenges to a freedom is loss of attention. And I think that’s one of a piece that I did right after the election because I was getting all kinds of people saying wherever they were politically, it didn’t really even matter, but who were saying, “I just can’t deal with the every day drama of everything,” is to say, “Look, you cannot get into a place of apathy,” and saying, “It doesn’t matter what happens to my country or to my world or to my church or whatever,” you can’t get to that, but you also, you owe the church in the world your attention, and that means to cultivate it.
And I found myself looking with fresh eyes again at a quote that Thomas Merton had given literally in a monastery where he had said, I have to be free from the constant whorl. And what he meant at the time was the radio, which is nothing compared to what we have, because my attention is necessary for me to be able to serve and to give. And I find when I am talking to young Christians, 10 years ago, the questions all would’ve been sort of predestination, sexuality, those sorts of controversial questions first. Now, among the first questions I get is how do I pray and how do I read the Bible when I can’t focus, I can’t get attention. And that’s for all of us right now. And I think that is a major step toward freedom, is to cultivate and to guard a sense of attentiveness.
Mark Labberton:
And to not read the Bible only through the lens of the latest podcast that you may have listened to or the news that you might’ve come across. I’m very challenged by what you’re saying, and I have spent actually a fair amount in this last year reflecting on the parable that you referred to earlier of the yeast because it’s the absolute inversion. At the time that Jesus spoke it, it was the inversion of anything that could have been called kingdom-like. Obviously, it’s in a context where kingdom only referred to Rome and was dominating an oppressive and overpowering in every possible way. And then Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is like yeast that gets kneaded and it’s invisible, it’s missable, it’s insignificant, and it’s transformative.”
And somehow, holding onto that requires the attentiveness that you’re describing it. You don’t do that in, you don’t make bread, yeast bread, inattentively. It’s an act of attention and deliberateness, and it’s a process of waiting and it’s a process of time, and it’s not a presumption of instantaneousness and many things that are built into the moment that we live in, but it also subverts time by saying it’s going to take the time that it’s going to take and that there is a work here that will be invisible to our eyes, but a chemistry that will be by God’s grace, transformative.
And so, I do think one of the most challenging things from my point of view about this moment is time itself, because the urgency seems so great, the daunting threat and the chaos of daily life and headlines and activities and late night memes and whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. And in the middle of all that, to hold on to a longer view of time, a deeper sense of groundedness, without giving up a sense of urgency as though you’re just going to become passive or quietistic instead of being still an activist. So how do you then hold onto this freedom that we’re describing in a way of connected disconnectedness or disconnected connectedness or something? How do you hold onto that and also practice an activism that each person’s conscience needs to lead them to engage and not disengage in this time?
Russell Moore:
Well, I think a couple things. The first is there’s, in the new book that Nicholas Carr has, Superbloom, and talking about digital technology, he ends it by saying every person has to have an act of willful excommunication, which is to say, here are the areas of belonging that I’m not going to, or the ways of connection that I’m not going to give my life to in order to justify myself or to find out who I am. I also think, I mean, I’m teaching at my church now through the book of Revelation, and one of the things that’s striking to me about the book of Revelation, it deals head on and directly with all of the pretenses of the Roman Empire that you mentioned. Talks about conquering is one word people translate it as or overcoming, but completely redefines it.
So it’s not conquer Rome by stopping them from doing what you’re afraid they will do to you. And instead you overcome by not becoming like that. And all the way through to you have this picture of the ones who are on the thrones are those who were beheaded. Now that makes absolutely no sense. It is so contrary to everything that we would ordinarily think. And you’ve got this word that’s coming to these churches saying, Babylon, this world system that’s out there, it is going to fall and in a single hour, and it’s not going to teeter downward. In a single hour, it’s going to fall. That’s not yours to do. What is yours to do is to overcome through the blood of the lamb and the word of your testimony.
And that I think is something that ought to ultimately free us from fear, but also free us from this sense of, and I’m as guilty or more guilty than anybody I know about this, of wanting to know, okay, let me get ready for what’s next. So I mean, I think about Book of Daniel, which I spent a lot of time in because I’m teaching through Revelation and they’re so dependent. You get to the end of the Book of Daniel, and he’s giving a picture of what is the greatest crisis to that point that the people of God had ever faced, an abomination that makes desolate, and he says, “Seal all this up for now.” The people who will need to hear it will hear it. And Daniel says, “Yeah, but what’s going to happen?” And the very end of the book is, don’t worry about that. You’re going to be standing in the end, but don’t worry about the rest of it. That’s really contrary to the way a lot of us would want this if we were designing our own gospel and becoming our own God.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Well, as you say, the two books of Daniel and Revelation are so intertwined, but that to me, the theological high point of chapter three and Daniel, when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are being forced by Nebuchadnezzar to bow down and worship the golden statue, and that extraordinary moment that says, “Oh, Nebuchadnezzar…” I often add, you silly little man, but in any case, the text says, “Oh, Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to give you a defence in this matter. We’re completely unhooked by the game that you’re claiming should dominate and control our lives.”
And I think living an unhooked life right now in that sense, an unhookedness from voices and powers that are clamoring for every possible attention and adoration really are the very things that we need to not be hooked by and to be able to find and be grounded in living our life in a way that is grounded by a reality that is much greater than the dramas of a political state or a political moment. And certainly, I mean, that is the foreshadowing of what you’re describing in the Book of Revelation so beautifully. Are we at a confessing church moment, do you think, or are we, by which I’m referring to the Protestant movement in the German church that really tried to stand against the winds of conformity of the Lutheran church in Germany in the Nazi days, or is that a misapplied comparison?
Russell Moore:
No, I think we are. And one of the things that is striking about going back and reading actually what happened with the confessing church, I mean, we often, or people tend to think of the confessing church was this large group of Christians, who from the very beginning, refused to yield to Hitler. Well, that’s not the case. I mean, you had a wide spectrum of people, and one of the things that you can see is there are some people, who from the very beginning, Barth and Bonhoeffer and Käsemann and some others from the very beginning saw where all of this was going and said, “Nein,” to varying degrees.
Then, you had a lot of other people for whom there were these moments where suddenly there was a shock of recognition. I mean, for some people it was the requirement of Aryan ancestry for church membership. For others, it was the government taking over the structures of the church there, all of these breaking points for different people. I think we’re at a time when the placid sort of I’ve come to Christ and I’m part of a church and I just go on, that’s not here right now. And I would love to be wrong about that, and I hope to be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am.
Mark Labberton:
It seems to me that that’s interlinked with, at least from a human point of view, interlinked with the noted absence of particularly influential preachers who are actually preaching the Bible, not just advocating for a political vision and holding up that countervailing vision that had obviously happened in the confessing church. Is it a four or five alarm fire that we’re facing, or is that being melodramatic?
Russell Moore:
No, I don’t think it’s being melodramatic at all. I think that you can see all over the world authoritarian movements using religion in various kinds, and they always have, because I mean, you think of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. David Bentley Hart, Eastern Orthodox theologian said very directly the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is a Satanist. And what he meant by that is that he’s taking the credibility and the authority of the name of Jesus Christ and giving that over to the murder of innocent people and the kidnapping of children and the propping up of an authoritarian regime and all of those things. And that is literally third temptation of Christ stuff. Because what happens is, and you can see this also at the local church level, if you think of all of these authoritarian church systems that have been seen lately, if you can have religion in order to say, if you don’t conform, your problem is not just with everybody else. It’s not just exile. And it’s not just that we can hurt you, it’s that you are stepping out against God.
And the hollowing out of that is the most dangerous part about this moment. It’s Galatians 1 and 2, when Paul says, “I didn’t yield to the false teachers for a moment so that the gospel would be preserved for you.” There’s a future that we have a responsibility for, and part of the responsibility that we have is to conserve the gospel. That’s not a plaything of any political ideology or movement, and certainly not the plaything of people who would use it in order to harm and to abuse. That has to be conserved.
Mark Labberton:
Right. I completely agree. And that’s where, while there’s no single scapegoat and there’s no particular need even to suggest that there should be or there needs to be identified as single scapegoat, but there are movements that feel as though they’re related to the deep distraction of this time. One of them is Christian Nationalism, and the other one in my mind is the New Apostolic Reformation, which in distinct ways, slightly overlapping, but in distinct ways, are movements, which to me are deeply distracting even though each is claiming that they’re actually the ones most authentically and truthfully naming what is most important. Do you want to comment about either of those movements?
Russell Moore:
Well, with New Apostolic Reformation, you have a very attractive form of power because you can have leaders who can claim to be speaking directly from God in an unmediated sort of way. That is, when God does that, that’s wonderful. But when one is speaking and he is not, it is worse than bad. And with Christian Nationalism, what you really have with, I mean, people argue back and forth with Christian Nationalism, my little definition of it is it’s the use of Christian symbols and imagery for an ethnic or national or political identity. What it is doing it is the Bizarro Evangelicalism. So it is taking the very thing that evangelicalism is about and doing the exact reverse, which is to say, if you can get external conformity, then you have righteousness.
I mean, so you see this with, for instance, we saw this at a smaller scale in a lot of communities where you would have people who would say, “Go to their city council, outlaw this mosque that’s here.” And the reason they would give is because Islam is not the true religion, it’s going to take people to hell. Well, outlawing the mosque does not eradicate Islam. It causes people to pretend to be Christians in order to survive. That is not the new birth. And as a matter of fact, if Jesus is right, that is worse. A sense of external conformity or, George MacDonald talked about, there’s nothing as deadening as handling the outside of holy things, and that’s the mode.
But when you have a loss of confidence in the new birth, and when you actually have lost your affection for the Bible itself and for the gospel itself, then you’re going to move into what really matters. I mean, to go back to Barth in Germany called blood mysticism, that’s where it always inevitably leads, because what is not of the spirit is of the flesh. And what the flesh wants is I want to protect my own and I want to succeed on the basis of the same categories of success that the devil defines. That’s deadly to democracy. It’s deadly to people. It’s deadly, but it’s deadly to the witness of the church.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes. Russell, I recently had a chance to interview Jonathan Rausch about his new book, Cross Purposes, and it’s a book that you and I have both read and a book that we each appreciate in our own ways. It’s a gentle pleading with urgency and huge desire as an atheist, as a Jew for the Church of Christ in the United States, the body of Christ in the United States, to live its identity. Comment on that book and the exhortation that he gives, and how does that intersect with the kind of “confessing church” that in a certain way, I heard him encouraging.
Russell Moore:
Well, he talks about in the book at the very beginning, what he calls the worst article that he ever wrote in 2003. The interesting thing is that I don’t even remember what I was Googling having to do with Jonathan Rausch. And up came an article I wrote in 2003, which I have absolutely no memory of, castigating Jonathan Rausch, who at that time I did not know at all for his article on what we need is Apatheism, where people are just completely apathetic to theism. He now says, “I was wrong to see that.” And I see in both of those cases, you have somebody who didn’t at the time see Christianity for what it at least claims to be and thought, this is all just going to go into the dustbin of history anyway. Let’s just get it further along down the road.
And then, you had somebody like me, who, although probably theologically on anything addressed in that article, I would be exactly where I was in 2003. I did it as somebody who I’m sure at the time simply saw Jonathan Rausch as a byline rather than somebody now that I know and can have really blunt, honest conversations. And what’s unique about that, I think, is that as time has gone on, I think when you have an atheist such as Jonathan and Christian like me, sometimes what you do when you’re talking to each other is you’re keeping a guard up because you want to make sure that you’re putting the best foot of your viewpoint and protecting-
Mark Labberton:
Your kin.
Russell Moore:
Yeah. And actually, it was Keller who, I mean, Keller’s the one who introduced me in a meaningful way to Jonathan. And one of the things, and he talked about this, I think he talked about this on my podcast maybe somewhere else, where he said, when Tim said to him about the odyssey problem of evil, he said, “I can get 80% of the way there to explaining the problem of evil, but the other 20% I don’t have.”
Well, I mean you would not do that if what you’re trying to do is spin. But he instead is saying, “I trust Jesus. I know God. I don’t know all of these answers.” And Jonathan has gotten to the point where he will say, “I just think I’m colorblind to what some of you can see, and I wish I could.” We wouldn’t say that if all you’re doing is dueling. So it’s what we were talking about before within the church, it’s also happening, I think, within America where you have people who are saying, “Wait, wait, wait. We have big issues that we disagree on, but we agree together that we ought to have a constitutional republic and we ought to have the freedom to be able to have those debates.” And I think what you see in what Jonathan is doing with that is simply asking for Christians to be who we say we are. And that’s not that big of an ask. It’s a shame it has to be coming from an unbeliever.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Well, it doesn’t only, of course, come from an unbeliever, but it does come from you, it comes from CT, it comes from many different voices. But I think getting it heard back to the microphone, getting it heard at the depth and honesty and candor that it needs to be heard at is something that really is a spirit-led reality. And there are so many unseen things that are happening in the midst of what we see and obviously hear.
And I just want to say for me, Russell, that I have expressed about you before, which is just that I have enormous regard for you, incredible gratitude for your voice and for the way that you have courageously led and served for the challenges that you have faced personally and professionally since the last time you were on conversing. And for me, the ongoing faithfulness of your journey is one that does then call me. It calls many other people to live into the identity of who we’re really meant to be in Christ individually and collectively as Christ’s body. So thank you for all you’re doing. Thank you for what you’re currently doing with CT, and thank you for our friendship and for this opportunity to talk today about things that I think really matter about the state of the American church and the crisis that we’re facing.
Russell Moore:
Well, I’m grateful for you and for modeling what Lewis talked about with Learning in Wartime, in a crazy time in the world, training up a new generation to go out and proclaim the old, old story is a monumental task, and I’m grateful for it. Been an honour to be with you on the show today.
