A question that I've heard come
up many, many times is from the faithful chaplains who are serving
our armed forces. And a question comes from a chaplain
who's here serving at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. How do U.S. Army chaplains stay faithful
to God and His truth and provide, not perform, the gospel, the
truth, to same-sex couples? There's many other related issues
that come along with this, of course, for our chaplains. What
counsel would you give to these men? How do they stay faithful amidst
the persecution? Well, it's going to be increasingly
difficult because the direction that is being taken by the armed
forces is equivalent to a moral U-turn within the process of
about twenty-four months. From don't ask, don't tell, to
we get to say and you have to accept us. That again is a complete
U-turn. A lot of the problems that evangelical
chaplains are having come down to the freedom of ministry. For
instance, evangelical chaplains, one of the major ways in the
armed forces they've been able to have a very important ministry
is through marriage retreats. But they're now being told you
can't do a marriage retreat if you're going to discriminate.
And so I know a good many of these chaplains who simply can't
do it because they can't in integrity and faithfulness counsel a same-sex
couple about how to have a better same-sex marriage. It's a gospel
impossibility. And this gets to the whole question
of how in the world, in a situation as complex as this, you determine
how you can do your job. I am not at all hopeful. that
this is going to go in a happy direction, simply because a new
moral regime has to enforce its new moral dictates, and that's
going to make it very, very difficult. I've been writing a lot lately
about the collision of liberties, and what's happening is that
what I call erotic liberty is now trumping religious liberty
at virtually every turn. And so the freedom that is now
being claimed, which is a new freedom in human history, that
you have to take me on the basis of my declared sexual orientation
or gender identification, or you go out of business, your
Christian worldview concerns notwithstanding, that's a new
thing. and those chaplains are on the
front lines. But now also joining them on
the front lines are cake bakers and photographers and florists,
and there have been others on the line in terms of pharmacists
and doctors on the abortion issue. The difference is that almost
no conscience grounds are being accepted. So You can't bow the
knee to Baal. I pray for the brothers who are
in this position. I pray they'll have wisdom. But
at some point, it becomes impossible to function as a gospel representative
in such a context if this kind of logic isn't checked. LARSON
This person writes and says that they have a son who has entered
into the gay lifestyle. How do I handle this? How do
I act? What do I say? Anyone? Yeah? Well, I think obviously
you preach the gospel to them and call them to repentance.
and call them to faith in Christ, and in no way giving your approval
to such an immoral lifestyle. I think you extend Christian
love to them, and if this is a son, you will always be my
son, and I want God's best for your life. and God's best for
your life is to come out of this darkness and to come to the light
of the Lord Jesus Christ. So I think you would have to
begin there, and I know that there would be many more complex
things that would need to be addressed, but as I said in the
sermon, the cross divides and the cross divides families, and
it divides nations, and this is a part of what the cross does. So I would call them to faith
in Christ and remind them of the great acceptance of those
who repent and come and say, Lord, have mercy upon me, the
sinner, and who come to faith in Christ. So, it really begins
with a gospel issue, and it probably ends with a gospel issue. Yeah,
you are my son, and I love you, but what true love is, I want
what's best for you, and this is not what's best. SPROUL JR.:
: You talk about a lifestyle, and a corollary to this is the
epidemic of young people of a heterosexual inclination living together,
cohabiting without marriage. And this is a crisis not only
in the world, but in the church where we have… it's so considered
normal now with the new morality that professing evangelical Christians
don't think twice about cohabiting outside of marriage. I honestly
believe you made a kind of a side comment, Al, during your message
about the eroticism that I think is the driving engine for this
cultural revolution that began in the sixties with the sexual
revolution. I think the driving force behind
liberalism is a desire to be able to be completely libertarian
or libertine arian, I should say, with respect to sexual conduct,
because the thing that the liberal can't stand about God is the
restrictions placed upon their sex life. And so, we're seeing
it not just with the homosexual marriage, but with the destruction
of marriage across the board and the destruction of the Christian
ethic. Again, we're not the first generation to live in a pagan
culture. The first century Christians
were, and the apostle Paul said, don't let fornication even once
be named among you as befitting saints. At least the first century
church understood they were living in a pagan world. They were living
in a barbarian world. That's why the myth of cultural
Christianity has to be destroyed as Christians begin to take their
marching orders for sanctification, as our Lord prayed in the high
priestly prayer. I'm reading a fascinating book
right now, a study of changing sexual ethics in the late Roman
Empire. It wouldn't be fascinating to everybody, but it is a very
careful scholarly study of sexual attitudes in the late pagan Roman
Empire and how that was changed by the advance of the church
into the late Christian Roman Empire. And one of the points
this book makes is that the great Christian message in that pagan
Roman world was, first of all, the purity to which God calls
us, which was applied to everybody. And I think we have to begin
with the observation that it's heterosexuals that have been
ruining marriage in our country first and foremost, not homosexuals. And we better start with ourselves
before we put everybody else's house in order. But secondly,
that pagan attitudes toward sexuality were entirely deterministic.
They were determined by the stars they were born under, according
to ethicists in the late Roman Empire. And that Christianity
came with a message of freedom. You are not determined by your
stars in your sexuality. You have moral freedom given
you by God to live a pure life by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And I think Christians need to start talking against the increasing
determinism of our time. Well, I'm just sexually driven. I have to live with my girlfriend,
or I have to live with my boyfriend. And Christianity needs to hold
up a message of purity, freedom, and love that is going to stand
against the sad deterioration of relationships in our time
and start to ask, what's happening to these young women who are
living for a time and then cast over? and then picked up maybe
by someone else and then cast over. This new morality is not
good for human beings. And somebody needs to say that.
And it's particularly bad for women. SPROUL JR. It is exploitive.
Nothing more exploitive of women than that. GODFREY SPROUL JR.
And Christianity, as it always has, has to again stand up for
the weak and the abused, and we have to try to be helpful
about that. FERGUSON Yeah, you know, I think
we read the early chapters of Genesis and see various things,
but I think one of the things that's fairly obvious in Genesis
3 and 4 is that given the role of marriage and family in the
purposes of God in Genesis 1 and 2, it was a central object of
Satan's attack. And I remember, this must be
a long time ago, and he must have written it in the 1950s
or 1960s, C.S. Lewis said that if the proverbial
man from Mars were to appear on earth and then go home and
be asked, what is the symbol of the religion? in this planet
that you've visited. Excuse the language, but I think
it was Lewis's language. The Martian would say the symbol
of their religion is a phallic symbol. And what I think Lewis was underscoring
was that of course Satan would not exercise his attack on the
world, on the society, and on the church. by immediately heading
for what we now have in our society, but that he would gradually work
his hypnotic deceptive powers so that we wouldn't even notice,
to pick up the point of exploitation, that almost every magazine we've
been buying over the last three or four decades has been exploitative
of women and their bodies. And the world and the church
has been silent, and one of the reasons the world and the church
has been silent is because of the extent to which the church
has been drawn into the world. And in this area particularly,
being extremely frightened of the pressure of being described
as a Puritan. And every time I think about
that, I remember the occasion when Rogers of Dedham's late
16th, early 17th century Anglican Puritan minister fell into conversation
with somebody in the neighborhood, and he said to him, my problem
with you, Mr. Rogers, is that you are too precise. And he gave this great reply,
so he said, I serve a precise God. And one of the things the
Scripture underlines for us is that God is precise because He
has our best interests in view. And the more we have allowed
ourselves to be fed into imprecise standards, ignorance of Scripture
and its application, the more frightened we have been of God's
laws in the evangelical church. Inevitably, we find ourselves
as a community powerless. The salt has lost its savor.
But the undermining, I think, as Al was really pointing out,
I think in the big-picture way, in what was a magnificent address,
has been going on a long time. And, you know, if you're not
an American citizen, You're kind of conscious you've got to wait
for an American citizen to say about his own country the thing
that was said this afternoon about our country here. But it
has been happening for a long, long time, and you don't need
to be a visitor from Mars. You need to be a visitor from
the United Kingdom to see that precisely the same things that
have happened in Europe have been happening here a long time.
And now, you know, our only hope is that we cry to God and turn
to God ourselves, and that the churches we build, however hated
for what they are, are hated because what they are is so extraordinarily
impressive in the world in which they live. This is a huge question,
I think, and really important. Another question related, I have
many Christian friends who are libertarians and say that the
state should not be involved in marriage at all. They claim
this whenever conversations on same-sex marriage come up. Is
this a correct position? The state should not be involved
in marriage at all? Dr. Sproul? I'd like to answer
that. We, as Reformed people, are very
interested in covenants. And we see the first covenant
in history, prior, only one before, this is the covenant of redemption,
is the covenant of creation where God makes a covenant with Adam
and Eve, not as Jews or as Christians, but as man qua man, as humans. And what we would call the creation
ordinances, the laws enjoined by the Creator. are for all men
of all time. And God ordained government after
the fall, the flaming sword of the angel. And that's a principle
biblically that there is a division of labor between the church and
the state. It's not the separation, but there's a division of labor.
And what we're involved in now is the separation of the state
and God. The secular state has declared
its independence from God, and the reason why in the old order
We saw sanctioned civil ceremonies by representatives of the state,
not of the religious institutions. They could perform marriages,
and the state could dissolve marriages because part of the
responsibility was the state to govern creation ordinances,
the two most important which are the sanctity of life and
the sanctity of marriage. There's no other reason, no raison
d'être for the existence of government, civil government basically, apart
from the overarching reason to maintain, protect the sanctity
of human life. And before we saw the total destruction
of the sanctity of marriage in this country, we saw the total
destruction of the sanctity of life. with Roe v. Wade, so that
the state said, I am not going to be answerable to God's law
for men as men. That's why I try to say to people
when we call the state to stop abortions and to stop sanctioning
same-sex marriage and that sort of thing, we are not asking the
state to be the church. We're asking the state to be
the state. and are reminding them that no civil government
is autonomous and that every civil government is under the
authority of God and is accountable to the authority of God, and
they've abdicated that by destroying the sanctity of life and in the
same breath the sanctity of marriage. So in answer to that question. with respect to the libertarian
perspective, that the state ought not to be involved, I think is
a fundamental denial of the covenant of creation, and those Christian
libertarians need to repent of that. I affirm everything Dr. Sproul
said. I want to come back and ask why would young people have
this basic libertarian impulse? It's because they're looking
for some way out of this. I have an article coming out
in the coming days entitled, you know, please just make it
stop. Because you have an entire generation of young Christians
who are saying, this is just too horrifying. I can't bear this.
I won't have any friends. I won't be able to share the
gospel. This is just horrifying. This issue is now just such an
explosion. The collateral damage is just
massive. Just make it go away. And so,
we can kind of understand as an impulse, you might think that
a libertarian position will make it go away. It doesn't go away
because libertarian positions don't work. in terms of this
kind of issue. What Dr. Sproul was talking about
refers to the fact that marriage is a pre-political institution.
Every society has recognized marriage as a pre-political institution,
which is to say the government doesn't create it, it respects
it. It's a very different act. And what the government respects,
it accepts as an objective reality before it then comes up with
laws and customs in order to protect it. Obviously, we're
undoing that entire thing. But the thing to note is that
there isn't a government on earth that doesn't regulate marriage. Every
government regulates marriage. And it's because the state is
making decisions that are marriage determinative. The state has
to decide in a custody issue, to whom does this child belong?
There are property disputes. There's an entire body of law
That's why those who are leading this moral revolution haven't
sought to sideline marriage, as has happened in some other
cultures where similar kinds of ambitions have been seen,
but rather to create the way that others can get into the
same state, sanctioned state, supposedly protected relationship. And so that's a crucial thing.
In other words, you just say, okay, the government gets out
of the marriage business, it'll just have to call it something
else. because it's impossible to have an organized society
without the government doing this. Another thing that evangelicals
often forget, and I hear younger evangelicals say this because
they're looking for a way to get the tire off the foot. You know, this is too excruciating,
move it. Do anything, just make it go away. They'll say, well,
let's just accept that the church and the state are going to have
two different understandings of marriage. Well, that may be a defensive
position, but it cannot be In other words, we can't take that
as an intentional strategy, because that denies, as Dr. Spoul is
making clear, the fact that we operate not only on the basis
of a doctrine of redemption, but a doctrine of creation, and
thus we can't get out of that. They also forget that if you
look at the Puritans, the Puritans believed that a wedding took
place as an act of the state, not of the church. The pilgrims
who came to the United States didn't allow church weddings
because they thought they were popish ceremonies. And that was
the job of the state, not the job of the church. And so it's
really, it's something we can understand, but the libertarian
impulse, when it comes to something that is pre-political, doesn't
work, because every society is going to have to come to terms
with one way or the other. The other issue to this is every society, it's
a very interesting argument, that every society makes an equal
number of moral judgments. And it's a very interesting argument. The Marxists came up with this
back in the early 20th century. And if you think about it, I'll
just close with this. Libertarians say, or those who are making
all these arguments will say, we shouldn't legislate on sex
anymore. Instead, we're going to outlaw
supersized sodas in New York City. In other words, every society
is constantly making moral judgments and constantly legislating morality. The question is whether it's
a sane, responsible morality they're legislating. But there's
no society that says, we don't care about any of these things.
We just have a society that said, go ahead and fornicate, but you
can't supersize your soda. That's the irrationality we're
living with in the present. Dr. Sproul's next book is Everyone's
a Legislator. You know, another thing that
I think libertarians of that kind don't understand is that
when you remove the basic, like the basic tenfold structure of
God's law. When you remove that, what actually
happens in a society is the best of all possible worlds for lawyers
is created, because when you remove those basic principles
and the ability of people to apply them to every kind of situation,
what a society then needs to do is to increase the number
of laws that it makes. And, you know, we are actually
living in that phenomenon. that when we remove the basic
structures, we then have to create isolated laws for every conceivable
instance, including the amount of soda that you can drink. And
it's a self-defeating formula and leads to chaos rather than
liberty. It's like trying to play golf
without the rules. This person writes, I have a
relative who is constantly trying to say that if I try to say something
is false or sinful, I am quote-unquote condemning the person or the
thing and not being loving. What do I say in response? How
loving it is to point out that that's a problem. And again,
that is the kind of foolishness, to quote Churchill, that's the
kind of nonsense up of which we should not put, because even
on his face it falls flat. And back during the Clinton,
you remember those glory days? Back during the Clinton controversies,
I was constantly on television debating issues of morality of
Fox and MSNBC, and I still remember being up against a liberal Catholic
priest. who said, you're making moral judgments and that's wrong.
And I said, so you think it's fine to have a child abuser,
a sex molester as a babysitter? And he said, no, that would be
insanity. I said, well, you just made a moral judgment. And he
said, well, that one's obvious. In fact, we're all making moral
judgments all the time, and it is an act actually of love in
terms of understanding the biblical conception of love to understand
the truth and love are the same thing, because they're transcendentals
realities located in the very being of a perfect God. His justice
and His mercy are not at odds. Love and truth are not at odds.
And we can, as finite creatures, sin certainly in how we communicate
the truth, but the worst sin of all would be failing to communicate
what we know is true because the truth is what will set us
free. And so, we have to be the people
of the truth, and that means we have to make moral judgments.
The question is, are we making the right moral judgments? And
that we have an infallible guide to at least be the foundation
to which we turn. SPROUL JR.: : One of the problems
we face here is the massive ignorance of the laws of immediate inference.
People assume that if I say, I think this behavior is not
proper, that I've just made a hate statement. that I harbor some
kind of ill feeling or personal animus towards the person who's
involved in that. You know, Jesus was the most
loving person that ever lived and would say, neither do I condemn
you. Go and sin no more. Now He did
not judge in the condemnatory sense, but He certainly made
a judgment of discernment. And that's where we get confused.
When the Bible tells us not to be judgmental, it means we're
not to have a spirit of condemnation towards fallen people. We're
to love them, to be concerned for them, pray for them, all
of that. but we're still supposed to have discernment, to be able
to distinguish between what is righteous and what is unrighteous. I had a conversation just the
other day with my doctor who said that he had made a comment
about the corruption of some of these laws that are going
down now in this country, and somebody immediately turned on
him and said he was judgmental. And I said, well, if that person
comes to see you because they're not feeling well and they have
indigestion, and you have to make a distinction between indigestion
and stomach cancer, are you being judgmental?" Of course not. But this is crazy stuff. I mean, obviously, we have to
discern every single day every one of these issues. We're called
to be discerning people. Otherwise, we're mindless. But
that's the culture. That's part of the strategy that
the other side is using to silence any objection to this reversal. You're exactly right, and that's
exactly the kind of decision to make. People have to make
judgments all the time. You know, it was Aristotle and his rhetoric
who pointed out there's the impossibility of being in a position of making
no judgments because you're actually making a judgment by suggesting
that you ought to make no judgments. Everyone lives by a set of moral
imperatives. Some of them, as he said, are
insane. But nonetheless, there's still moral imperatives. You
know, I do think there's a clear sense in which we need to say
to the church, what the Scripture says is that we are to judge
behavior. But we can't judge the heart.
We can't get in and judge another's heart. That's the distinction,
at least I would see, between condemnation of the person and
condemnation of behavior. And, you know, every parent understands
this. Uh, every spouse understands
this. At some point you have to say,
I disagree with that. You have to make a distinction.
You have to make a judgment, but you're, you're not trying
to judge the heart. And I think that's what Paul's
getting at in Romans chapter two in the beginning when he
says, insofar as you render judgment, you judge yourself. But that's
the apostle Paul who comes around and says, don't even have anything
to do with it. Let fornication not be mentioned among you. Don't
even greet someone who's involved in these sins. In other words,
you make moral judgments, but you do not make judgments that are
above your pay grade. in terms of judging hearts, which
we do not have access to read. Is personal peace… That's called
a smattering of applause. Is personal peace and affluence
the biggest impediment to Christian witness? Of course, hearkening
back to Dr. Francis Schaeffer's coining of
that phrase, is personal peace and affluence the biggest impediment
to Christian witness? I think that's a contextual statement.
but largely true. And things have gone a lot further
since Francis Schaeffer said that. I mean Americans now are
looking for salvation, and a diagnosis, and a pill, and a therapy, and
a new yoga technique, and everything but the gospel. They're able
to buy their way into a feeling of insularity where they can
hide themselves and keep themselves busy from the spiritual hunger
that is within them. The affluent buy options And one of those
options is to try to flee the truth. But at the end of the
day, I think the biggest obstacle to evangelism is Christians who
don't share the gospel. Both of my brothers are unsaved. One believes there is no such
thing as sin, therefore there is no need for a Savior. How
do I answer this question? How do I explain sin? Next. Going once. All right. Okay. Since there's one God,
why is it that we have so many different views and denominations?
SPROUL JR.: : Because we have two people. or more. Well, I... What about Bob? What about Bob? I think a beginning would be
to say that while we have too many denominations and too many
churches, part of that arises, a great deal of that arises from
people not reading the Bible. I, you know, people are forever
saying, well, the Bible can't be all that clear because we
have all these different denominations. But I think an awful lot of the
denominations arise from people not really reading the Bible
and listening carefully to the Bible. And in point of fact,
people who have read the Bible with great care end up agreeing
about an awful lot of what's there. And while we may be in
different denominations here on this platform, what divides
us is relatively few matters. And if you all just became Dutch
Reformed, everything would be perfect. Then again, we wouldn't be meeting
in a meeting house this large. A gross revelation of pragmatism. It works at the moment. You know,
and Bob's exactly right. Sidney Mead, a very well-known
American church historian, pointed out that denominationalism is
the inevitable result of theological difference plus a religious freedom.
And so, in a context of religious freedom, you have the ability
to constitute the church in what you believe is a true gospel
basis, and then to operate it according to what you believe
are biblical principles. And I've written a lot about what
I call theological triage. At the first level, all Christians
must believe these things in common, and you must believe
these things to be recognized by a fellow believer as a believer.
And thankfully we all hold to all these things, and we stand
in great, eager, happy affirmation. But when it comes to what to
do with water, there's a distinction. There's a distinction here. And
it's a distinction that matters. Beyond that there's a distinction
here. And it's one that matters. It matters enough to us that
as much as we love each other, right here on this platform,
we disagree enough to be in separately organized congregations and congregational
networks we would call denominations and presbyteries and associations
and conventions because we don't believe we can be truly faithful
to all we believe if we do not constitute the church this way,
we're not anathematizing one another. And so we shouldn't
exaggerate denominational differences where we have a unity in the
gospel. And that's often, the question there often exaggerates
what isn't the case. I mean, after all, Whitefield
and Wesley preached the gospel together with enthusiasm, and
then got on the boat and had a theological argument. And that's
the way it should be. So I would say there are ways
to get over denominationalism, and that's to eliminate religious
liberty. or to try to institutionalize
some kind of coerced uniformity, or to have a lowest common denominator
in which you just simply have, you know, we'll just have to
get rid of everything on which we might possibly disagree in order to stand on
that small ground of our union. And let's say that would include
people who would be outside this room. If we're just going to
open it up and say, well, let's be called a Christian, let's
just get rid of the labels, let's all just say we love Jesus. Well, a lot
of people love Jesus. who have aberrant beliefs that
we would say, or fail to believe in orthodox beliefs we believe
are necessary to the gospel. So, we're stuck with this for
some time. SPROUL JR.: : And also because
we care about truth. The people who say, let's all
get together, doctrine doesn't matter, they don't care about
truth. But if you care about it, and we can't resolve our
differences of interpretation, you do just what you just said
we do. And so, that's the good side. of denominations, don't you think?
That at least somebody cares about what the truth is. SPROUL
JR.: : You know, I think it's also important to say the word
simply comes from denominator, which means you name it. And
so it wasn't that people were trying to come up with brand
names in order to be able to advertise. Baptists didn't want
to call themselves Baptists. They got called Baptists because
we baptize. Methodists got called Methodists because of their methodical
way of devotion. You can just follow this through.
In other words, it's not like people were trying to come up
with a new market. Where these things are legitimate,
they were based in conviction. And we need to continue the conversation,
but we need to continue also to stand in conviction. LARSON
Follow one question to that. This couple writes, we live in
a rural area without access to solid biblical teaching, let
alone Reformed teaching. The nearest church with such
teaching is two hours' drive away. How should we choose a
group to meet with and serve when we disagree with the things
taught from the pulpit? What would you say practically
to this couple? SPROUL JR.: : Drive two hours.
LARSON. Drive two hours. SPROUL JR.: : Lots of people do. It's that important. If you had
to go to the hospital and it was a two-hour drive, you wouldn't
stay home. You would go to the hospital. You wouldn't go to
the dog pound because it was convenient. Would you? Seriously. I mean, it's the old
thing. I learned this from the former
coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Chuck Knoll, his phrase was,
whatever it takes. And the spiritual nurture of
your soul and of your children's soul are so important that if
you have to drive two hours for worship and for instruction in
the apostolic truth, then that's an obvious decision. You drive
two hours or move. But it has to be a priority in
every Christian family to be somewhere where there is true
worship, true gospel, true doctrine for the sake of eternity. Dr. Lawson, could you elaborate
on the Lord's concepts of salt and light in the Sermon on the
Mount and how He describes Christian character? Well, both of those
metaphors are the result of verses 3 through 12 in Matthew 5 of
what a believer, a true disciple, is to be. He is one who is poor
in spirit, who mourns over his sin, etc., all the way down to
is persecuted for the gospel. The result of the eight beatitudes
is that you will be light and you will be salt. To the extent
that those eight Beatitudes are compromised in our lives, we
diminish what the function of salt and light would be. Salt is that which is a preservative,
which prevents corruption when applied to meat, for example. And I think that what he is saying
principally is that we are to have the effect in the world
and in society of preventing the further corruption of family
values and the spread of sin, we are to be salt. It's argued
in a secondary way that salt is to enhance the flavor of something
and provide zest. Christians certainly are to provide
great blessing to the world in the way that we interact with
the world. Then the concept of light is,
we're to be the light of the world. He says you don't hide
a lamp under a bushel, but that it is to shine forth into the
world. And he talks about unbelievers
seeing our good works. I think that it goes back to
who we are and what we are and the way that we conduct ourselves
and the way that we live our lives should be a bright, shining
example to the world of how God intended life to be carried out. does not restrict from. In fact,
it would necessitate that a part of our good works would be our
good words and would be our witness for Christ. No one will come
to the knowledge of the truth by just observing us they must
hear the gospel. And so, for us to be light, there
has to be… that presupposes that we live in a very dark world,
darkness emblematic of ignorance of God and immorality And we
are to be light, bringing the light of truth to the world by
how we live and by what we say. And we are not to keep it to
ourselves under a bushel, but we are to be out in the world.
I think one of the less fortunate things is Christians just withdrawing
to themselves, and we could call it the holy huddle, and where
we're just salt in a salt shaker. We've got to get out of the salt
shaker and get out into the world and to penetrate the world. And
the same with light. We cannot keep our light hidden
under a bushel. We are to shine out into the
world, and that presupposes that we will be out into the world,
just like fishers of men have to be out in the sea. You can't
catch fish up on a mountaintop. You've got to be out in the world
where the fish are. So, I think for us here at this
conference, what a joy it is for us to pull together to have
our spiritual batteries recharged and for us to be encouraged that
when we leave here, we are to go penetrate the world with the
gospel of Christ. So, I think that those are the
two implications of those two metaphors. Thank you. Dr. Mohler, another question
for you. In light of your topic that you addressed today, is
homeschooling a retreat from the world? Can we put children
in school and expect them to engage the world? Yeah, you threw me a U-turn there
at the end. I thought you were going to say,
can you keep children out of the school and have them engage
the world? And the answer to that would be yes. My wife and
I homeschooled our children to a considerable degree, not in
every grade, but during their high school years. And they were
in a Christian school another time. In other words, withdrawal
is not to say, that you have to be in every context the world
makes available to you. In other words, the sin of withdrawing
falsely and quite disastrously is not seen in forfeiting the
opportunity, or even some would say the responsibility, to be
in every societal context at every time. Parents have an undelegatable
responsibility to educate their children. Christian parents have
that responsibility. It isn't given to the state,
it's given to parents. And actually, the public schools are the aberration,
not the norm, just in terms of even the history of schools.
And I think they're very toxic environments. I'm not saying
no Christian can be in them. I'm not saying no Christian can
send their children to them. But you just have to know exactly
what you're dealing with, and it's going to be… You know, a lot
of the people that used to make arguments, because I've been writing about
this for 30 years, and a lot of people used to make arguments
about, that's a withdrawal, you can't do this, it's a great mission
field, now tell me my children and grandchildren are being homeschooled.
Because, you know, it turns out that the parade of the horribles
has come a lot faster than people might imagine. That does raise
an issue though. If we're withdrawing our children
and teaching them in a homeschool that acts as if they're going
to be sent out into a world that doesn't exist, that's neither
good education nor good parenting. And so, What we have to do in
homeschooling is homeschool our children for maximum faithful
engagement with the world. not just with each other. And
Christian parents can pull that off very well and very naturally.
The first asset is the family, in terms of the extended family.
The second great asset to Christians is the congregation. The third
is the kinds of networks that Christian parents can put together,
and the kinds of experiences. In other words, if your kid is
playing on an entirely Christian, you know, little league team,
and made up of all homeschooling parents, that might not be the
best way to teach him how to engage the world. It's different if
you're turning them over and saying, please fill his brain
for me. And so I hope that makes some sense. I just think it's
in a situation in which A sinful surrender and retreat would be
to say, we're going to protect our children from the world.
They're never going to go out into the world. A proper Christian parenting
would say, we're going to take responsibility to educate these
children. They are God's gifts to us, our stewardship and responsibility,
but we're educating them to be in the world, not out of the
world. A very broad question here, but
it goes around the idea of engagement. What is the biblical way to think
about movies such as Son of God, Noah, God's Not Dead, and Heaven
is for Real, all out in theaters this year? LAWSON The last movie
I saw was Chariots of Fire. I'm probably the last one to
ask this. I did see Luther four times in two days, so maybe that
was the last movie I saw. I don't want to just answer everything,
and for whatever it's worth, I'll simply say that when you
look at movies, you need to recognize this is a major entertainment
focus of our culture to such an extent that people are many
times more likely to quote a movie than they are to quote a book.
We have so left the culture of the book, and I could give an
entire…I think all of us out here on the platform could give
you the elegy and the remedy for that. But talking about movies,
they are the cultural conversation in America, but you ask a complicated
question, because if you say, how do we think about movies?
That's a great thing for Christians to discuss. No medium is value
neutral. McLuhan isn't exactly right that
the medium is the message, but in many cases it's close. There
are certain things that cannot well be reduced to this. That raises the second issue,
not movies in general, but movies that are supposedly serving in
some sense to tell the story of the Bible, or a story of the
Bible. Well, the problem is that what makes for success in Hollywood,
that's the medium, not just in terms of the technology, but
the cultural context in which the technology is made possible,
doesn't make telling the story according to the Bible very much
possible. So if you're looking at the Son of God movie, it has
massive theological problems. And those massive theological
problems are explained as what is necessary to get this story
onto the big screen. So there you have the medium
problem. Evidently then that's not how
you tell this story, because we can't change the story in
order to get it onto the big screen. Now there's a part of
me too that just keeps jumping to the Ten Commandments going,
I'm not sure this is a good idea in the first place. in that it's
extremely dangerous, I think, to reduce some things to pictures.
Now, I don't want to draw an absolute on this, but I think
it's a very clear warning from the law that if you're trying
to reduce this story to talking pictures, you might actually
be reducing it below the level that it is justifiable. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense,
but let me be the absolutist here. Don't go to pictures where
Jesus is represented. I think our… Let me be a Calvinist
here and say, why not? Well, in part because you plant
in the minds of yourself and others a picture of a person
who is not Jesus. If I carry around a picture of
a woman who's beautiful in my wallet and haul it out and say
this is my wife But it's not my wife. My wife might be upset
about that We don't know what Jesus looked like, and the Bible
offers no encouragement to His pictorial representation. Now,
I know not everybody agrees about this, but we're each supposed
to give our own personal point of view here. I think the second
commandment, and I'm speaking as a good Puritan here, forbids
the representation pictorially of Jesus, and making a movie
of it makes it worse. So, stay home and read your Bible.
So, you do disagree with Calvin on that. where Calvin allowed
for the representations artistically of historical personages. We're
not monophysites. We're not trying to depict the
divine nature, which I think would be clearly excluded by
the second commandment. But does the second commandment
banish all art? It's one thing if you want to
make an argument of prudence that you may get a misunderstanding
of Jesus because we don't know what He looked like other than
the sort of subtle hints we get out of the New Testament. But
we still preach Jesus, and we have some mental idea of who
He is. And I want to know if you really
think that the Bible forbids the pictorialization of historical
human beings. SPROUL JR.: : Well, I didn't
say the Bible forbids the representation of pictorial human beings. SPROUL
JR.: : Is Jesus' human nature allowed to be depicted? SPROUL JR.: : I don't think so.
SPROUL JR.: : Why? because He is God come in the flesh. Is the flesh God? No, the flesh is human. Really? But it is united in the divine
person. You're not a monophysite, doctor.
I know you're not a monophysite. Say you're not a monophysite.
I am not a monophysite. But I'm not an historian either.
Neither am I. I'm sure you're not. But I can distinguish between
the two natures without separating them. In fact, I must distinguish
between them. Right. Let me just point out, this is
a problem with a lot of Bible storybooks if it's a problem.
In other words, we got this, we have a mental image of certain
things. And the argument I tried to make was precisely the prudence
argument in referencing this because I think there is a huge
prudence issue, but I can't say it's in every case wrong. And
I just want to say as much as I would never make a movie, there's
no image of Christ in my home or in my library. I have all
the Reformers and many other people, but no Christ because
I'm just not comfortable with that. On the other hand, I've
been in parts of the world with missionaries and preliterate
cultures where I recognize that much as in dealing with children,
we still, we pull out a Bible storybook because they are pictorial.
That's the first way they are going to get a story. still have
trouble with the movie, but I've seen where the Jesus movie, the
old Jesus movie done by Campus Crusade has been seen by millions
and millions of people, and I've met people who are now fully
of faithful Christians who first came to understand the story
that way. It is a prudence issue. If we were talking about how
to tell this story to a preliterate people in a preliterate culture,
we'd be having a different discussion about how to sell tickets to
a movie in Hollywood, where I have major issues with it. And because
how you have to tell that story gets it beneath the minimum of
what I think any of us would think would be justifiable if
we're going to tell the world this is a story about Jesus.
I do think we have to remember that Europe was a preliterate
culture largely before the coming of the Reformation. And the solution
of the Reformers to the problem of communicating Jesus to a preliterate
culture was not to make pictures, but to make books and to make
preachers. And I think that's the need of the hour today as
well. I agree with it in terms of the
main, but that it's not quite that easy. All you have to do
is look at the Lutheran Reformation and go to early Lutheran churches,
and it's not quite that simple. But I agree with you in principle.
You went to Calvinist church, it was that simple. Temporarily. Calvin's view was
to wean the people away from the idolatrous use of images
and icons in Rome. But it was not an absolute principal
objection. He thought it was a temporary
prudential need to change the worship culture of the church
from the idolatry that was rampant in the Roman use of images, Bob.
You know that. I mean, that's why I'm saying
if we're going to be Calvinistic, if you're going to follow Calvin
on this point, Calvin theoretically allowed for the use of images. prudentially after a moratorium
to liberate a generation of people from that stuff. But, I mean,
that debate goes on and on and on, and it'll go on after this
afternoon. Tonight, we'll talk about it. LARSON In closing, a word of
encouragement with this last question. What words of advice
or encouragement would you have for me as I teach three- and
four-year-olds? How do I prepare them for a world
who will be against them if they follow Jesus? We could briefly just, everyone,
take a quick run at that. Teach them the redemptive story
of the Bible. Bring them to a clear knowledge
of Christ. Be sure to pour as much Christian
theology into them as possible, and introduce them to as much
church history as you possibly can. and go about it a gospel way. If you can't teach your children
in this way, the problem is you haven't yet understood how the
gospel works. And I think this is a huge test
of where families and especially fathers are. Actually, it's a
huge test of where ministers are. One of the things that has
struck me throughout the whole of my life, because I've lived
in a world where ministers give children's sermons, is how many
evangelical ministers turn into legalists when they give children's
sermons. And it's there when they're speaking
to the children that it becomes clear how little of the redemptive
story they understand, how little they understand how the gospel
works, and how little they understand who Christ is. What I want is three simple things
I can do for my children. What I need to do is to become
the best expositor of Scripture in my family with the best knowledge
of how the gospel works, the most knowledge of Christian theology,
and as much church history as I can pour into the children.
And there are mountains of material out there to help parents to
do that. Take, since he is our host, R.C.' 's Books for Children. Every single one of them is profoundly
theological and doctrinal. So, there is a way to communicate
the profoundest theology to children. And I think we need to become
more and more passionate about that in our lives. on the off chance that there's
someone here I haven't yet offended. Let me say and answer that question
while agreeing absolutely with everything. What was your name?
Dr. Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson had to say, let me also
say, take your three- and four-year-olds to church. Don't send them to
children's church. Take them to church. So, there's
never a time that they can remember that they were not active worshipers
with all the people of God, and I think you'll do them great
good. FERGUSON. Amen. FERGUSON. Can I add to
that? FERGUSON. I think this is the most daring
thing one could say in an American context, take them to evening
church. FERGUSON. Yes, yes, yes. FERGUSON. Because
that's where…God help us if we've abandoned evening church. because that is where the children
will see the church as a whole. where older people will sit down
with them, delighted that they're there, and invest themselves
in them. It is the single best instrument
for the ordinary Christian family to fold their family into the
church and into the gospel. And, you know, I think if somebody
said to me, by what means did you rear your children? The answer
would be through thick and thin, dark and daylight, we took them
to evening worship. And the church loved them, and
they saw the grace of the gospel at eighty different stages of
the Christian life. And one cannot thank God enough
for the church when that's what happens in your children's lives. I appreciate everything that's
been said. I just have to tell you my wife and I are empty nesters,
and there are no little voices in our house, and we feel empty.
So, I'm all of a sudden really envious of someone who says,
how do I pour myself and pour truth into little three and four
and five-year-olds? I would just say, teach them
to love Jesus, to trust Jesus, and follow Jesus. And as life
gets more complicated and they get older, teach them to love
Jesus, to trust Jesus, and to follow Jesus. And when you're
sending them off to college, teach them to love Jesus and
trust Jesus and follow Jesus. It gets more complex, but it
never gets more profound. You know, the only thing I would
add, the way to prepare three- and four-year-olds for going
out into the world and the resistance that would come, is that the
question? I would say it's the same way you prepare an adult
to go out into the world and to find resistance there. I mean,
every answer that was given is the same for an adult. It's not
unique to a three- or four-year-old. Go to church. read your Bible,
be well-taught, and the heroes of the faith in church history.
It's not different for a three- or a four-year-old. It's the
ordinary means of grace being poured into the life of someone. So, I think it's just the same.
It's just at a different level. So… SPROUL JR.: : Day before
yesterday, our three-year-old great-granddaughter said to her
seven-year-old sister, I'm going to pretend to be God," which
is a pretense she carries on on a regular basis. The seven-year-old said to her,
"'No, Caroline, there's only one true God, and we must worship
Him.'" Now, how did she know that? Because she's been catechized.
and catechizing the children is another important mission
that we have. LARSON Could you thank our panelists
today? Thank you, gentlemen, so much.