WHY GETTING RID OF ERLC HEAD RUSSELL MOORE IS A BAD IDEA

Russell Moore

If the intent of investigating ECRL leader Russell Moore is (as I hope) to work for peace and unity in the SBC, then good (though the use of the term "investigate" may be rather poorly chosen). If the intend is really to unseat Moore for opposing Trump, then that's bad. I think it is important to oppose such an action for a number of reasons.

First, the candidacy of Donald Trump was a problematic one that a number of prominent Christian leaders struggled with. One may think for example, of John Piper's article "How to Live Under and Unqualified President." And then there was Wayne Grudem's disorienting on--again, off-again, endorsement of Trump, and this, remember, was the same Wayne Grudem who had published in 2010 the magisterial work, Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture. Trump's candidacy threw even Grudem a curve ball.

Secondly, many well respected conservative writers also expressed the same kind of moral concerns about Trump's candidacy as Moore did. We may think, for example, of Thomas Sowell and Jonah Goldberg, while other conservative writers who supported Trump have at the same time felt free to criticize Trump at particular points or on particular policies. To fail to do so would represent a level of blind allegiance that is not consistent with being a true conservative and even less consistent with being a Biblical Christian.

Third, Southern Baptists need to leave a little room for their leaders to be wrong especially where they would readily give a pass to other Southern Baptist leaders who say equally wrong things that were more to their liking. A commitment to this would serve as a deterrent against rushing to, as it were, take God's work into our own hands, and force outcomes that we imagine God would be pleased with.

Nothing I have seen Moore say was more wrong than similar erroneous or inapt statements I have heard being made by a number of other Southern Baptist Leaders, including even, for example, such luminaries as Al Mohler (1) and Richard Land.(2) But then this should not surprise us since, as James said, "we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body."(James 3:2). Whenever a man has to speak much in public, there will be mistakes.

Its scarcely biblical to carefully compile "record of wrongs," (contrary to 1 Cor 3:50), lengthy lists of supposed "serious" "dangerous" (but really quite petty) errors when someone offended you, when, if you were honest, you know you would not do it if they made similar errors while saying something you liked. As an example of such pettiness we may ask whether it was really so heinous, for example, that Moore cooperated in a project with someone who suggested that “animals may very well be co-inheritors with us of the new creation”? I mean the suggestion didn’t even come from Moore himself, but from someone else. But would it have been that big a deal, such an obvious deal breaker, if he had made the suggestion?

Fourth, Moore simply never said some of the offensive things he was accused of saying. A case in point is Will Hall’s claim that Moore “has even declared the Bible Belt (a map marked in Southern Baptist red) as populated by ‘almost Christianity’ a kind of 'God-and-Country civil religion that prizes cultural conservatism more than theological fidelity.'” Such a blanket dismissal of the entire Bible Belt would of course be shockingly offensive to Southern Baptists. But that’s not what Moore said. In the context Moore said that “almost Christianity” took different forms in different cultural settings, and in the passage Hall misquotes, Moore was describing what almost Christianity looked like in the Bible Belt, while also describing almost Christianity in other parts of the country looking different. The phrase “Almost Christian” was also used by John Wesley, the First Great Awakening preacher, as a title for a sermon based on what Agrippa said to the Apostle Paul in Acts 26:28: “You almost persuade me to become a Christian.”’

Fifth, the formula, “not voting for Trump is a vote for Hillary,” which was pressed more and more strongly as election day approached, is not an obviously biblical position. A precedent for voting for neither, is found, for example, in the 19th century evangelist Charles G. Finney’s response concerning how a Christian should vote in case where both leading candidates supported slavery:

“As for voting for either of the two great party candidates, on a strongly pro-slavery platform, that question in my mind is easily settled. I can do no such thing. Sooner shall I cut off my own right hand than suffer it to drop a vote for such men standing on such platforms.” (“Guilt Modified by Ignorance—Anti-Slavery Duties,” Oberlin Evangelist 14.17/ n.s. 11,17 [Aug 18, 1852]:131).

And then finally, sixth, much of what Moore says, when carefully considered, is just what the Church needs to hear. __________

1. As when Mohler said "the Jesus of the Book of Mormon is not the only begotten Son of God".  Actually  the Book of Mormon calls Jesus the "only begotten" nine times (2 Nephi 25:12; Jacob 4:5 (cf. Heb. 11:17-19), 11; Alma 5:4, 9:26, 12:33, 34, 13:5, 9). Joseph Smith liked John 1:14 and included variations of it in the Book of Mormon.  When Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon his view of the Godhead was much closer to the Biblical view than when he would later interpret Jesus's being consider as the "only begotten" of the Father in a quite different sense, as only begotten in the flesh, through the direct union of the of God the Father's exalted physical body and the human body of his spirit daughter the Virgin Mary. At no other time did God, who you remember was an exalted man in Mormon theology, have a child through an ordinary human woman. It is n this sense that the later Joseph Smith thought of Jesus as the "only begotten of the Father." This is the current LDS view as well, although not often described so baldly.
2. As when Land said "The foundational doctrine of Mormonism is that God is eternal but Jesus is not."  That describes the Jehovah's Witnesses view of God and Jesus, but not Mormonism's view.