Max Lucado’s Problematic Apology

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Christianity, Culture, Culture War, Emotivism, Epistemology, Language, LGBTQ+, Max Lucado, Postmodernity, Progressive Christianity, Religious Left, Rhetoric, Truth

            The furor over Max Lucado’s remote preaching for the Washington National Cathedral has caught a fair amount of attention lately.  That Lucado met disapproval from some in the Episcopal church for holding elements of a biblical sexual ethic is as expected; that he was allowed to speak at all is rather surprising, and that those responsible have come to regret it is unsurprising.  But probably the most troubling part of the whole episode is the apology letter Lucado issued afterward.

            His opening paragraph suggests already a misapprehension about the seriousness of defying God’s design for the human person and relationships.  An orthodox Christian preaching to the Washington National Cathedral is undertaking a prophetic task.  This is, indeed, a “high honor”, but not, I think, in the sense that Lucado intends.  Prophets aren’t supposed to hear with dismay that their presence has been “a cause of consternation” to people who reject God’s Word; they’re supposed to expect it.

            Lucado identifies the source of this consternation, a sermon from 2004, and proceeds to apologize.  It is a good apology in that it owns responsibility without making excuses.  But what is he apologizing for?  The hurtfulness of his sermon.

            Here I must allow for the possibility that Lucado has something to apologize for.  I don’t know; I haven’t seen the whole sermon.  He thinks he was disrespectful, and I respect a man regretting being disrespectful.

            On the other hand, it seems far more probable to me that the consternation towards Lucado resulted not from how he communicated the truth, but from the truth itself.  Looking at the snippets of the sermon available in the various articles about this kerfuffle, one finds that Lucado, if not entirely on point with his inferences, was at least significantly less severe in his remarks about homosexuality than the Scriptures are (see Lev. 18:22; Rom. 1:26-27).  Apologizing for oneself is one thing, but we must never apologize for what God has said.

            God has said that He created mankind male and female, distinct and complementary, intended for union in this complementary distinction in covenant sexuality (Gen. 1:27; 2:23-24).  Lucado perhaps apologizes for this, certainly obfuscates it.  He refers without qualification to “the LGBTQ community”, “LGBTQ individuals”, “LGBTQ families”, and “LGBTQ people”, accepting these significations that frame homosexuality et al as a legitimate and morally neutral identity category instead of a rejection for God’s design for humanity.

            “Faithful people may disagree about what the Bible says about homosexuality,” Lucado says.  Granted that true Christians can misinterpret the Bible in all kinds of ways, his words in this context surely imply more than that.  If I said, “Faithful people may disagree about what the Bible says about theft,” would I not be suggesting that the Bible’s teaching about theft is unclear?  So also the teaching of Scripture about human sexuality; the question is not whether it is possible for a true Christian to misunderstand, but whether God has spoken clearly.

God has spoken clearly.

            To his credit, Lucado does not himself reject the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, and he is willing to say so here—here, where it will probably nullify his apology, because that biblical teaching is the very thing that so consternates those to whom he is apologizing.  But he includes that pesky adjective “traditional”; if he had only said ‘the biblical understanding of marriage’, and left it at that!  Christians must all come to realize that framing it as the ‘traditional’ understanding of marriage is a concession, a way of putting it positively while granting legitimacy to other understandings of marriage.  If you must put an adjective before marriage, ‘real’, ‘true’, or even ‘biblical’ are all acceptable qualifiers; ‘traditional’ gives too much away.

            All this obfuscation is wedded to the basic burden of the apology, addressing the ‘hurt’ his sermon of years ago has caused.  Here it is an exquisitely contemporary apology, of the kind we are used to seeing from a variety of public figures who have said something of real or perceived offense.  Whether what Lucado said was true or not, biblical or not, appears irrelevant; it was ‘hurtful’, and that is what matters.  For a telling comparison, just look at the similarity between Lucado’s apology and Dean Hollerith’s apology for inviting him to preach.  Both have feelings firmly behind the steering wheel, and truth in the back seat—politely observing the injunction against back-seat driving.  Both suggest a therapeutic model of truth—the kind of conceptual world in which the ubiquitous contemporary sentiment ‘my truth’ is, if not coherent, at least at home.  The locus of morality is not in the voice of God coming to us from without—‘what has God said?’—but in the inward response—‘how did it make me feel?’

            Such a therapeutic model of truth is utterly opposed to the Christian faith.  Christianity has, at its center, the gospel: the wondrous message of the saving life, death, resurrection, ascension, reign, and return of Jesus Christ, and the offer of redemption to those who repent and believe.  This message comes with a conviction of the fiery holiness of God and the wickedness of our sin.  We dare not trade the clarion call of the gospel for a soothing affirmation of every man’s sense of self.

            Lucado allows for differing interpretations of the clear teaching of Scripture regarding human sexuality, adding, “but we agree that God’s holy Word must never be used as a weapon to wound others.”  We have met this before, this strange surprise that the sword of the Spirit might prove sharp and pointed.  Of course, we must not twist the Scriptures out of spite towards others.  But where the Word of God cuts truly, we must not attempt to blunt its edge.  The surgeon’s scalpel cuts to heal; the holy Scripture convicts to save. Some things ought not be apologized for.

That To Which We Are Entitled

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Abortion, Christianity, Culture, Humanity, Jesus Christ, Life, Media, Rhetoric, Society, Truth

A recent salvo from the cultural left comes this article describing 350 members of the legal profession who filed an amicus brief regarding a supreme court case, in which they share about their abortions.  The basic goal, as even stated later in the article, would seem to be the normalization and de-stigmatization of the horrendous evil of abortion.

One may wade through the typical and deceptive jargon that attempts to make personal determination the central issue, rather than the lives of all the vulnerable innocents these women have killed.  This is the standard lie, and it needs no more comment than that.

What I did find interesting was a statement at the beginning of the article, where one lawyer says,

I was smart and I deserved my career and I deserved to be able to give it my all and to become a mother when I was fully, emotionally, psychologically, and in terms of resources prepared to become the best mother I could be.

The rhetorical and political success of abortion comes substantially through framing it as a right, something that is deserved.  It is connected with personal autonomy and flourishing.  And notice how positively everything is put: she does not say, ‘I deserved to decide whether to kill or give birth to my baby’ but ‘I deserved to focus on my career and defer motherhood until I was ready for it.’  It just so happens that deferring motherhood came at the price of an innocent life.

There are curious comparisons of this attitude with the story of the Fall.  We’re not told Eve thought she was entitled to the forbidden fruit; but she was given the idea that it was something good which God wanted to withhold from her, and she decided to reach out and grasp it.  Abortion advocates tell women that the God-given fruit of their womb is theirs to reject, if they decide it is not good.  In both cases, the basic lie is that we know better than God, and we can make our own path to flourishing.

But the attitude of entitlement moves us even further from the truth.  We don’t deserve to actualize ourselves at the expense of others.  We’re not entitled to kill people who stand in the way of our careers.

When you put it that way, it sounds absurd that anyone could think otherwise.

But add to that a true perspective on what we do, in fact, deserve.  We are sinners, and the judge of the universe is absolutely righteous.  We deserve the wrath of God.  The good news is that if we come to Christ, we receive not the just sentence we deserve, but mercy instead.

We shouldn’t be too quick to demand what we’re entitled to.  There’s no life that way.  But a society that trades the pursuit of righteousness and mercy for self-actualization and the pursuit of an increasing list of supposed rights is prime soil for a culture of death.

Christ is the answer.  Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.

Blame It on the Greeks

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Academia, Christianity, Hellenism, Postmodernity, Rhetoric, Scholarship, Truth

Reading Donald Bloesch’s God the Almighty has been quite engaging so far, although (or perhaps because) I often would raise a quibble or more with the author.  Many of my quibbles would coalesce around a single central quibble, which centers on a peeve I long ago adopted as a pet.

This pet peeve is Hellenephobia.  Bloesch’s got it.

Hellenephobia is my own tongue-in-cheek term for the tendency by (post)modern theologians to dismiss things they don’t like by blaming them on the Greeks.  ‘X idea is an infiltration of Hellenism (Greek thought) into Christianity, and therefore dispensible.’  This has been used in all kinds of ways.  Biblical scholars who don’t believe in the soul (you read me right) love to do this, as though the Bible’s teaching about life after death (and before the Parousia) were so easily dismissed.  Once you get used to identifying Hellenephobia, it becomes a pet peeve, and causes quibbles.

In its own way, I think that a parallel can be drawn between the (post)modern Hellenephobe and the scholars of the Renaissance–an ironic parallel, to be sure.  The Renaissance scholars pooh-poohed the Middle Ages in their desire to go back to the glories of the Classical era.  They liked the Greeks.  The (post)modern scholars maintain that the scholastics of the Middle Ages were captive to the Greeks, and the Greeks were interlopers, and we will get back behind all of them to the truth.  So, whereas for the Renaissance scholars the Medieval scholars weren’t Greek enough, for the (post)modern scholars, they were all far too Greek.

But what if the Greeks gave us some wonderful conceptual tools and should not be rejected just because they were Greeks?  And what if the scholars of the Middle Ages and the Reformation and pretty much everybody before us were more biblically faithful than some people give them credit for?

It’s at least worth considering.