Word: mohler
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After roughly 200 years of decline, Calvinism, the faith of the Puritans, has made a modest comeback among younger Evangelical Christians. One of the movement's potent mentors is Albert Mohler, the influential, telegenic head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who made waves last June when he critiqued the religious claims of presidential contender Barack Obama in an essay called Secularism With A Smile...
...primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ," he explained, "and we are known... for our citizenship in the Kingdom of God rather than any earthly polity, and that is a clear and unambiguous teaching in the New Testament." Mohler is not a great colloquialist, but, as you might expect, he has an extremely well-developed and internally consistent worldview. The Apostle Paul, he pointed out, at one point refers to Christians as "resident aliens...
...Well, that was then... But where, I asked, might a contemporary Christian's interest diverge from an American's? "By God's providence," Mohler said, "we are not to the point where we have to debate the legitimacy of the regime. We are not yet in the position of the confessing church in the Nazi regime." Not yet?!? "There are some tension points," Mohler replied, "... with the structure of law having to do with issues like abortion and marriage. I can foresee the day when Christians would have to constitute an adversary culture...
...wondered whether Mohler meant civil disobedience. "Christians have to think carefully and clearly as to how to be faithful," he said. "It could lead to civil disobedience. It could lead to the acceptance of the [civil] penalty. In the history of Christianity it has led to martyrdom." He laughed. "I'm not jumping there," he said. I told him he had jumped. He replied that martytrdom was not something that currently applied. He also noted that Christians on the more liberal side of the spectrum might feel as he does, but about questions of war and non-violence...
...asked whether secular Americans might not fear (rightly or wrongly) that the 42% favored theocracy. Mohler gently pulled me back from the majority paradigm to the minority paradigm: the caricature would have to be sedition, he explained, or at least "concern about persons in their midst who have a higher allegiance than is understood by the secular Americans to be the basis of the cultural contract...