In my time in the Southern Baptist Convention, i remember folks who held to the view that the words of Jesus (in the older Bibles, these words are printed in red to set them off from the other words) were more important, represented a higher teaching, and were more fundamental to Christianity than the words elsewhere. They usually represented a more liberal strain of Christianity. In the fight over Scripture’s inspiration among Southern Baptists, those who stood against the folks who advocated verbal plenary inspiration always had a kind of interpretive grid. In fact, in the Baptist Faith and Message, the closest thing to a creed/confession that Southern Baptists officially have, in the 1963 version, there was one particular line in Article I, speaking of the Scriptures, which said: “The criterion by which the Bible is
to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.” Well, the self-proclaimed “moderates” (really, those who wanted to dismiss the whole idea of inerrancy and infallibility) always would take hold of that phrase (as anti-creedal as they always claimed to be) and would drive it home that we must interpret the Bible through Jesus and his words.

Well, apparently, Tony Campollo is one of those guys. I guess i shouldn’t be all that surprised at the fact. He’s not Southern Baptist (he’s American Baptist), but he still fits that same bill. These folks are called, not surprisingly, “Red Letter Christians,” and Campollo really puts this whole way of looking at the Bible forward in his book Letters to a Young Evangelical.

The way this came up was by reading a kind of “rebuttal” of sorts that Stan Guthrie wrote about the whole concept and the political ideas that come across from that kind of thinking (invariably left-leaning, politically), and he takes Campollo to task personally about it. It’s actually a very balanced and gentle critique that makes excellent points not only about that hermeneutic, but it’s own blindness to see that those ideas are politically ideological, and really politically motivated before they are religiously informed, even if they claim otherwise. Campollo gives an answer to Guthrie’s critique (and gives away the farm, if you ask me). It’s a really interesting read.

Really the point of contention between politically left-leaning Christians and politically right-leaning Christians is not whether you’re for protecting the environment, seeing equality and social justice, stopping the slaughter of infant children in the protection of the womb, or even wanting to feed and clothe the destitute. The real point is whether it is the job of the government to accomplish those things. This is where even a good healthy dose of political separation of Church and State is proper, and it is also the place where a healthy view of the truth of all Scripture equally would help people realize that Scripture itself has a bunch to say about the limitation of the powers of the government to enforcing the most basic moral principles to keep society in proper order. That’s their delegated task from God—not to control the Church, not to co-opt the Church, and not to leave off doing its own job by trying to tell the Church what to do and how.  Apparently, though, politically liberal Christians seem to think that it is the job of the government to do that. And that means that, ironically enough, all the Christians who talk about the government enforcing equal rights, government feeding the poor and providing them with healthcare, government doing anything other than enforcing common morality and maintaining order in society, they are the ones who advocate a defacto combining of Church and State.

The real clincher for me in this discussion, especially where RLCs are concerned, is the marked lack of anything from the mouth of Jesus that tells us that it is the job of government to enforce his teaching or that the Christian purpose should be so to influence the government as to do the job of the Church. It’s just funny to me that people who put so much stock in the words of Jesus (to be clear, Jesus’ words are absolutely important, but just as important as all other words of Scripture) above all else would ignore the silence of Jesus in directing that the government be as closely involved in what they seek to see done. It simply strikes me as a kind of laziness: wanting something done, but wanting someone to do it for you—that’s really an indemic problem in the Church today, anyway.

This article from New York Magazine by Naomi Wolf is a must-read for every one in our culture, especially Christians, more especially pastors, and most absolutely especially those of us pastors who have had personal run-ins with pornography in its various forms growing up and becoming men. We have to come to grips with how that has affected us and what it implicitly taught us. Plus, we need to understand that this effect isn’t only from watching internet porn, reading Playboy, or ordering the Spice Channel, but rather it comes just as much from “softer” versions of pornographic images in our culture—from TV to movies. And more than anything, we need to be sure to become resensitized to it so that our sons and daughters don’t face the difficulties that we face because of this ever-present monster that has further perverted our minds (as if fallen sinners needed more help!).

For my part, i think Wolf is half right. Yes, as a result of pornography, we have less intimacy, and greater (unrealistic, really) expectations from women to men (and also from men to women, if we’re to be honest about it). We have, as a result, people who are lonely, and have terrible times in being intimate.

However, that is not the only effect that we see. Just as well caused by the ubiquity of pornographic images in our culture at large is the greater need to become “extreme” in order for some men and women to be sexually satisfied and gratified. This has led to a certain S&M sub-culture that takes a certain sexual gratification in physical abuse and hatefulness. This has led some men who think this way to ignore the pragmatic consideration of finding a mate who shares those predilictions, and cause them, many times, simply to seek out others upon whom to act out their violent fantasies—i.e., victims to rape and ravage in order to gratify themselves. Pornography has a tendency, just as any other additction, to cause a person to build up a certain tolerance to it, and so, after a while, it takes more and more (or more extreme forms of the same) to have anything like the same effect—borrowing from economics, this phenomenon is called the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Not only, though, has it indeed made *SOME* men more ravenous toward women (who could deny that?), it has also bred a culture that cannot be satisfied in the wife of one’s youth. We see all around us the longing to be fulfilled sexually. It isn’t *ONLY* the technologizing of relationships and the relationalizing of technology that has led to a lack of intimacy among real people, it is also the familiarity with the overt promiscuity of the porn culture and the idealism that looks for the “perfect” sexual partner that has led to a culture not even of serial monogamy but really of defacto polygamy and polyandry (it is that, even if traditional marriage has been ignored and avoided, and it must be if the Apostle Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 6 [esp. v. 16] mean anything), with young adults thinking that the only way to find what they are trained by these images to look for is to “experiment” with sex and sexual partners—whether you’re already married or not.

In other words, the porn culture has not only made people in its wake emotionally numb, physically overstimulated (and then understimulated), and intimately divided from one another, it has caused the sex drive to become monstrous in some (to the point of seeing the rape and ravaging of women as the only way to fulfill their desires), and it has also caused the rampant fornication, homosexuality, and adultery in our society today. Worst of all, it has caused a broader phenomenon in our culture that causes people to think that their every fantasy needs to be fulfilled, regardless of how outlandish or unhealthy, and regardless of whom it hurts. That general selfishness must be connected with the inherently self-centered and selfish nature of pornography (rather than seeing sex as how Scripture presents it, as the ultimately intimate act to be enjoyed and shared by husband and wife who are not their own but belong to one another in their bodies for the purpose of fulfilling one another’s healthy desires and needs).

There is alot here to this. Dissertations could be (and, i’m sure, have been) written on these issues. But we  just need to contemplate these things and allow our actions (and our teaching) to follow our thinking.

HT: Mark Horne

According to the London Telegraph, some leading psychologists in the UK have discovered the ability for even the youngest infants to lie in various different ways. The claim of the Telegraph: “[B]abies learn to deceive from a far younger age than anyone previously suspected.” Well, if i might say so, what Christian didn’t “suspect” that? Psalm 58:3, “Even from birth the wicked go astray; from the womb they are wayward and speak lies.” 

I remember speaking to some friends of mine even before i had children (after my daughter was born, this conviction was only confirmed and reinforced) and telling them of my firm conviction that even the youngest children are capable of and actually engage in lying. It starts with fake crying to get attention, and it goes on from there. Well, now, even the secular psychologists are affirming what Christians have known since our Father, David, told us about how the root of evil is present from the very womb.

HT: Al Stout