Culture Shift: The Battle for the Moral Heart of America

Culture Shift: The Battle for the Moral Heart of America

by R. Albert Mohler
Culture Shift: The Battle for the Moral Heart of America

Culture Shift: The Battle for the Moral Heart of America

by R. Albert Mohler

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Overview

Are you prepared to address the most challenging cultural issues of your time?

Mass media and technology are exploding. Popular entertainment relentlessly pushes the envelope. Biomedicine stretches ethical boundaries. Political issues shift with the polls.

The world in which you live is in the midst of a major cultural transformation–one leading to a widespread lack of faith, an increase in moral relativism, and a rejection of absolute truth. How are we to remain faithful followers of Christ as we live in this ever-shifting culture? How should we think about–and respond to–the crucial moral questions of our day? How can we stand up for the truth?

In Culture Shift, Dr. R. Albert Mohler–one of today’s leading Christian thinkers and spokespersons–addresses these tough topics clearly, biblically and passionately:

•Christian faith and politics
•The Supreme Court and religion
•The truth about terrorism
•Christian parents and public schools
•The abortion debate
•Christian response to global tragedies
•And many more

Here is trustworthy help for developing a comprehensive Christian worldview. It’s timely information powerfully connected to timeless truth that will equip you to stand strong and speak out.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781601424143
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/16/2011
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 208
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest and most influential seminaries in the world. A popular columnist and commentator, he has contributed to many leading newspapers including The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. His daily syndicated radio program is broadcast on more than eighty stations nationwide. Time.com has called him the “reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.” Mohler lives with his wife and two children in Louisville, Kentucky.

Read an Excerpt

Over the last twenty years, evangelical Christians have been politically mobilized in an outpouring of moral concern and political engagement unprecedented since the crusade against slavery in the nineteenth century. Is this a good development? Given the issues now confronting our nation, the issue of political involvement emerges anew with urgency. To what extent should Christians be involved in the political process?

This question has troubled the Christian conscience for centuries. The emergence of the modern evangelical movement in the post–World War II era brought a renewed concern for engagement with the culture and the political process. The late Carl F. H. Henry addressed evangelicals with a manifesto for Christian engagement in his landmark book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.1 As Dr. Henry eloquently argued, disengagement from the critical issues of the day is not an option.

An evangelical theology for political participation must be grounded in the larger context of cultural engagement. As the Christian worldview makes clear, our ultimate concern must be the glory of God. When Scripture instructs us to love God and then to love our neighbor as ourselves, it thereby gives us a clear mandate for the right kind of cultural engagement.

We love our neighbor because we first love God. In His sovereignty, our Creator has put us within this cultural context in order that we may display His glory by preaching the gospel, confronting persons with God’s truth, and serving as agents of salt and light in a dark and fallen world. In other words, love of God leads us to love our neighbor, and love of neighbor requires our participation in the culture and in the political process.

Writing as the Roman Empire fell, Augustine, the great bishop and theologian of the early church, made this case in his monumental work The City of God.2 As Augustine explained, humanity is confronted by two cities—the City of God and the City of Man. The City of God is eternal and takes as its sole concern the greater glory of God. In the City of God, all things are ruled by God’s Word, and the perfect rule of God is the passion of all its citizens.

In the City of Man, however, the reality is very different. This city is filled with mixed passions, mixed allegiances, and compromised principles. Unlike the City of God, whose citizens are marked by unconditional obedience to the commands of God, citizens of the City of Man demonstrate deadly patterns of disobedience, even as they celebrate, claim their moral autonomy, and then revolt against the Creator.

Of course, we know that the City of God is eternal, even as the City of Man is passing. But this does not mean that the City of Man is ultimately unimportant, and it does not allow the church to forfeit its responsibility to love its citizens. Love of neighbor—grounded in our love for God— requires us to work for good in the City of Man, even as we set as our first priority the preaching of the gospel—the only means of bringing citizens of the City of Man into citizenship in the City of God.

Because of this, Christians bear important responsibilities in both cities. Even as we know that our ultimate citizenship is in heaven, and even as we set our sights on the glory of the City of God, we must work for good, justice, and righteousness in the City of Man. We do so, not merely because we are commanded to love its citizens, but because we know that they are loved by the very God we serve.

From generation to generation, Christians often swing between two extremes, either ignoring the City of Man or considering it to be our main concern. A biblical balance establishes the fact that the City of Man is indeed passing and chastens us from believing that the City of Man and its realities can ever be of ultimate importance. Yet we also know that each of us is by God’s own design a citizen, however temporarily, of the City of Man. When Jesus instructed that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, He pointed His followers to the City of Man and gave us a clear assignment.

The only alternatives that remain are obedience and disobedience to this call. Love of neighbor for the sake of loving God is a profound political philosophy that strikes a balance between the disobedience of political disengagement and the idolatry of politics as our main priority. As evangelical Christians, we must engage in political action, not because we believe the conceit that politics is ultimate, but because we must obey our Redeemer when He commands us to love our neighbor. On the other hand, we are concerned for the culture, not because we believe that the culture is ultimate, but because we know that our neighbors must hear the gospel, even as we hope and strive for their good, peace, security,
and well-being. The kingdom of God is never up for a vote in any election, and there are no polling places in the City of God.

Nevertheless, it is by God’s sovereignty that we are now confronted with these times, our current crucial issues of debate, and the decisions that are made in the political process. This is no time for silence or for shirking our responsibilities as Christian citizens. Ominous signs of moral collapse and cultural decay now appear on our contemporary horizon. A society ready to put the institution of marriage up for demolition and transformation is a society losing its most basic moral sense. A culture ready to treat
human embryos as material for medical experimentation is a society turning its back on human dignity and the sacredness of human life.

Trouble in the City of Man is a call to action for the citizens of the City of God, and that call to action must involve political involvement as well. Christians may well be the last people who know the difference between the eternal and the temporal, the ultimate and the urgent. God’s truth is eternal, and Christian convictions must be commitments of permanence. Political alliances and arrangements are, by definition, temporary and conditional. This is no time for America’s Christians to confuse the City of Man with the City of God. At the same time, we can never be counted faithful in the City of God if we neglect our duty in the City of Man.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Preface xv

1 Engaging the City of Man 1

Chiristian Faith and Politics

Christian Morality and Public Law 7

Three Secular Arguments

3 Christian Morality and Public Law 15

Three Secular Myths

4 Christian Morality and Public Law 23

Five Theses

5 The Culture of Offendedness 29

A Christian Challenge

6 A Growing Cloud of Confusion 37

The Supreme Court on Religion

7 All That Terror Teaches 47

Have We Learned Anything?

8 Needed: An Exit Strategy from Public Schools 53

The Crisis Christian Parents Face

9 The God Gene 61

Bad Science Meets Bad Theology

10 Are We Raising a Nation of Wimps? 69

A-Coddled Generation Cannot Cope

11 Hard America, Soft America 77

The Battle for Americas Future

12 The Post-Truth Era 83

Welcome to the Age of Dishonesty

13 Is Abortion a Moral Issue? 91

A Fascinating Debate on the Left

14 Who's Afraid of the Fetus? 101

How America's Abortion Debate Is Changing

15 God and the Tsunami 109

Theology in the Headlines

16 God and the Tsunami 117

A Christian Response

17 Nineveh, New Orleans, and the City of Man 125

An Eternal Perspective

18 Hiroshima and the Burden of History 133

A Transforming Event

19 The Content of Our Character 143

King's Dream and Ours

20 The Challenge of Islam 149

A Christian Perspective

21 The New Atheism 157

Darwinism Makes Disbelief "Work"

22 A Black Cat in a Dark Room 163

Are Theologians Really Saying Anything?

23 The New American Family 169

Digitally Deluged

24 Where Did I Come From? 175

The New World of Reproductive Technology

25 Redefining Retirement 183

For the Good of the Kingdom

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