An Interview with Russell Moore

Posted By The Helwys Society on Apr 29, 2013 | 2 comments

Interview with Russell Moore

One person to whom many of the Helwys Society’s contributors are indebted is Dr. Russell Moore. Moore has written numerous books on everything from kingdom to adoption to temptation to much more. He speaks especially on issues related to theology and ethics. Since 2004, Moore has served as Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration. Recently he became the President-elect of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

The Helwys Society Forum was recently privileged to interview Dr. Moore on everything from country music to Free Will Baptists to his recent appointment to the ERLC to much more. Check it out.

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Helwys Society (HS): Who is your favorite country music singer? And why?

Russell Moore (RM): Thank you for the opportunity to converse. I have been steeped in country music since I was born. My earliest memories include listening to the Grand Ole Opry records with my family. I love country music because it is rooted in storytelling, and deals honestly with issues of death, depravity, and redemption. My favorite musician is, of course, the late great Johnny Cash. Cash sang with authority, and not as one of the scribes.

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HS: What circumstances led to you ending up with a copy of the Free Will Baptist Minister’s Manual?

RM: I was working on Capitol Hill for United States Congressman Gene Taylor (D-Miss.). The Library of Congress allowed congressional staffers to take copies of discard books. I was assembling books of interest to me and picked up a copy of a Free Will Baptist Minister’s manual. It wasn’t until later that night that I started asking why I wanted this. It was a series of helps on weddings, funerals, ordinances and so on. It was that moment that the Lord used to reawaken my sense of call to gospel ministry. I have overwhelming respect for the ministry of the Free Will Baptists, a people who are rock solid convictionally and who hold Baptist distinctives with integrity. I am running for President of the Matt Pinson Fan Club, because every time I hear him speak I resonate with his vision.

As a 4-point Calvinist, I think the differences between Calvinists and Arminians are exaggerated and over hyped. When I’m gathered with the Free Will Baptists, I feel a sense of kinship. We might disagree on the finer details of how to reconcile God’s sovereignty with human freedom, or how to think about the ongoing effects of the fall, but we are together on the gospel, and on the authority of Scripture, and on the practical out-workings of these doctrines. So many in my tribe tend to equate Arminianism with pragmatism or revivalism or atheological evangelical mush, which so many of us have seen in various places, but that is not that heritage of Jacob Arminius or of Thomas Helwys, and that is certainly not what the Free Will Baptists are about. When we get beyond our caricatures of one another I think we can find strong and God-blessed alliances and friendships. I am in the foxhole with the Free Will Baptists and glad to be.

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HS: Can you tell us a bit more about the role of the ERLC, how it functions, and who it serves?

RM: The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission has a long history in Southern Baptist life, under various names. The ERLC was an early voice calling Southern Baptists out of isolationism and toward seeing how the gospel mandates a social ethic consistent with the kingdom of God. The ERLC was an early pioneer in denouncing Jim Crow white supremacy and calling on Christians to support the Civil Rights Movement and to model racial reconciliation within our churches. The agency, sadly, refused to be such a prophetic voice on the sanctity of unborn life in the immediate post-Roe era. This was remedied with the election of my predecessor, Richard Land, in 1988 who led the ERLC and Southern Baptists to a pro-life witness.

The ERLC functions really in two major arenas. One is to speak to Southern Baptists, and from there to other Christians, about the implications of the Christian life for personal and social ethics. The commission seeks to equip pastors and churches to think through with the mind of Christ questions, such as cloning, abortion, immigration, substance abuse, war and peace, and so on. The commission provides resources and a voice to call us away from being conformed to the pattern of this age, by applying the gospel to ethical and moral questions.

The commission also seeks to speak for Southern Baptists, as part of the larger people of God, in the public arena on questions of ethics and policy. We engage the outside world on matters of importance. This is especially true in calling for religious liberty. Religious liberty, as you know, is a Baptist principle that predates all of our various conventions. Thomas Helwys was a heroic voice for religious liberty, along with other Baptist pioneers such as Roger Williams, Obadiah Holmes, Isaac Backus, and Jonathan Leland. When we articulate a vision of religious liberty, whether in pre-revolutionary America or in today’s society, we are not asking for the government to give us some special privilege. We are asking the government to abide by God-given natural rights. And so I plan to spend my life doing what Paul did before Felix and Agrippa: advocating for a free church in a free state so that the gospel may go forward without hindrance.

The call to protect religious liberty means that one aspect of my job is to try to keep Christians out of jail in the next generation, both in North America and around the world. There is a persistent temptation to marginalize and persecute Christianity, which we see in various places in the world today under totalitarian or terrorist regimes. The same could be true, in the fullness of time, anywhere in the world. But my primary responsibility will not be to keep Christians out of jail, so much as it will be to make sure that Christians are ready to go to jail for the right reasons. The formation of consciences and congregations that see their primary allegiance to Christ rather than to Caesar is an indispensable aspect of prophetic ministry.

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HS: How will your new post affect your work in the areas, such as preaching, teaching, and books and blogging?

RM: My presidency really won’t change any of the things that you mention, except that I will be freed up to give full-time attention to speaking, writing, and so forth. My blog will continue, several book projects are underway, and part of my responsibilities will be preaching in churches, and speaking at colleges, universities, and conferences all over the country. I plan also to be a persistent presence on colleges, universities, and seminaries, teaching wherever folks will let me, because I believe this is where ministry commitments are congealed for the next generation.

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HS: Who is your favorite Christian ethicist? Along similar lines, who is your favorite Christian author(s)? Do you have a favorite Christian classic?

RM: I have been profoundly influenced by several writers in the history of Christianity. These include Irenaeus of Lyons, Justin Martyr, Carl F. H. Henry, and C. S. Lewis. All of them help shape my thought in various ways.

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HS: Do you think the ERLC’s task will evolve over the next decade in a way that is distinct from the role it has served in the past? If so, how? What new challenges do you anticipate?

RM: I think that American Christians have in the last generation often assumed a moral majoritarian stance. The assumption is that we hold to the same basic moral commitments and norms as the mainstream of American society; it’s just that we do so with a distinctively Christian twist. This shows up in the way that we speak, as though we are the majority speaking for the rest of society. I think it is increasingly clear that Christian commitments are not, in fact, just another way of articulating the “silent majority” of American life. We instead have a distinctly counter-cultural message. This does not mean that we withdraw from the culture around us. We can’t, even if we wanted to. It does mean that we see the primary mode of interaction as being, first, in cultivating churches that model the kingdom of God, and then speaking to the outside world about the priorities of the kingdom.

We also must see all ethical engagement as a gospel matter. The gospel informs every aspect of reality, including how we treat one another and live together as societies. We must model in our public engagement for the next generation of Christians how to love neighbor, speak winsomely, and yet never back down from what Carl Henry called “the criteria by which God will judge men and nations.” That takes what I call a spirit of “convictional kindness.”

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HS: In recent weeks, we have seen much news media coverage of the same-sex marriage case before the Supreme Court. Whether the Court adjudicates it as constitutional or unconstitutional, what do you believe is the correct Christian response to this difficult, ethical dilemma in our culture and society? How will the ERLC engage this topic?

RM: Many of our neighbors assume that we would like the state to restrict the definition of marriage, in order to exclude people from the blessings that we enjoy. This isn’t the case. A Christian vision of sexuality sees sexuality within the context of covenant. We believe that marriage is pre-political, and therefore cannot be defined, or redefined by the state. The state has an interest in recognizing marriage that it does not have in other relationships, and that interest is protecting the next generation of children through stable families with both a mother and a father.

The issue of sexual complementarity then isn’t incidental to the marriage relationship, but bound up in it. We believe that the path to same-sex marriage will lead to disappointment, and will be harmful to human flourishing. We don’t hate our gay and lesbian neighbors, or wish them ill. We have a different understanding of what marriage itself is. I think our engagement here must be two pronged. We must speak to the meaning of marriage in human flourishing in the public arena, and we must work to create churches that can disciple people to see marriage in gospel terms, not as merely a romantic relationship, but as a one-flesh union that reflects Christ and His church. This means, among other things, that we must engage in the scandal of the divorce culture in our own churches.

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HS: What contribution has the ERLC made to the pro-life cause? How does this ‘organizational response’ relate to the obligation of individual Christians and churches?

RM: The pro-life issue is among the most critical facing Christians and churches because it hits at the fundamental question of human dignity and human solidarity. The abortion culture seeks not only to act unjustly against unborn children, but to dehumanize and depersonalize them. This shows up even in the way that the culture speaks of the unborn, as “fetuses” or “embryos” or “pregnancies” rather than as persons. We see this in other arenas as well. Think of the way that some will speak derisively of the children of immigrants as “anchor babies.”

When we advocate for the right to life, we are calling our neighbors to recognize what in their consciences they already know: this is not at thing, but a person. This is not only a question of public justice, but of congregational holiness. We must not only be pro-life in our public witness, but in the way that we welcome pregnant women in crisis and children into our churches. This means cultivating a sense of receiving children as a blessing from the Lord, and advocating a Christian view that sees a person’s worth as intrinsic, bound up in the image of God, rather than in the perceived “usefulness” of that person.

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HS: As president-elect, how do you plan to guide the ERLC on adoption issues?

RM: The issue of orphan care is bound up with a concern for the sanctity of human life. From the very beginnings of the Christian church, we have received a mandate to care for “widows and orphans in their distress” (James 1:27). I plan to continue my advocacy for orphans, families, and women in crisis. Not every Christian is called to adopt, but every Christian is called to care for widows and orphans. That can happen in a multitude of ways. I plan to work closely with allies in the orphan care movement from Saddleback Church, to the Christian Alliance for Orphans, to Together for Adoption, to our Southern Baptist North American Mission Board to see to it that the global orphan crisis is consistently before us.

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HS: Having served for nearly a decade as dean of one of the largest seminaries in the world, what is one of the most valuable things you’ve learned about leadership?

RM: I have had the great blessing of serving in a 150-year-old seminary, the mother seminary of Southern Baptists, alongside some of the best visionaries and leaders the Christian church has known. I have learned from President Albert Mohler the importance of gut conviction, in the face of long odds, and the cruciality of investing in and mentoring the next generation. Dr. Mohler is a man of unquestioned integrity, an integrity that I have seen in his leadership in public and in private. Additionally, the team that has worked around me has shown me the value of an iron sharpening iron, diversity of gifts approach to leadership. We have been effective, I think, at Southern Seminary partly because we genuinely love each other and love the opportunity to work together. I pray that God would always give me the blessing of co-laborers like that.

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HS: What books or blogs might you recommend for pastors and laypeople who are particularly interested in engaging ethical issues in their denomination and/or local church?

RM: There are so many resources available right now that I hesitate to recommend just a few, because I would be by definition blocking off many more. I greatly appreciate the work that comes out of Focus on the Family these days, from my friend Robert George and the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton and their blog Public Discourse, and in various other Christian ministries. I always find provocative and helpful my friend Rod Dreher’s blog. I also love the work of magazines, such as Christianity Today, First Things, and Touchstone (full disclosure, I’m a senior editor of Touchstone, but I would love it even if I weren’t).
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HS: Do you have any parting words of direction for our readers, many of whom are committed members of another conservative Baptist denomination?

RM: I would simply remind your readers of what I often have to remind myself. It is easy to get into a pessimistic mode, where one thinks that one is a tiny remnant facing an onslaught. Elijah fell into that way of thinking, and God shook him out of it. We are not a tiny band of losers. Our denominations are not the whole of God’s people. We are part of a kingdom that streams through the ages from Abraham, through the apostles, and onward. We are joined right now to King Jesus, who is triumphant over all things in his resurrection and ascension, and gathered with him to a heavenly assembly of the myriads and myriads of angels and the redeemed of all of the ages. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward Jesus. Let’s remember that we are not crusaders and we are not victims. We are crucified, but we are also united to a risen Christ and therefore overcomers. I love my brothers and sisters in the Free Will Baptist and I look forward to joining arms with y’all as we stand together on the gospel and the permanent things.

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HS: We would like to thank Dr. Russell Moore for allowing us to conduct this interview. You can check out his website “Moore to the Point,” including his numerous publications. 

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