Al Mohler

Christianity Today has a long profile of Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that focuses largely on theological battles within the denomination, but also contains some interesting information ... like the fact that at the age of 15, he was taken under the wing of D. James Kennedy:

At age 15, R. Albert Mohler Jr. had a crisis of faith. Two years earlier, his family had moved from the conservative idyll of Lakeland, Florida, to the other end of the world: Pompano Beach, 200 miles south ... In Pompano Beach, torn from everything he knew, Mohler found himself in class sitting next to the children of rabbis and Roman Catholics, the high-school honors curriculum stirring in his mind the biggest questions of existence.

The curious teen's youth pastor offered the diversions of his megachurch's bowling alley and gymnasium, but had no answers to his questions. He took the boy to meet the minister of a fast-growing congregation down the highway in Fort Lauderdale: Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. D. James Kennedy listened to Mohler and knew just the antidote to his anxieties. Francis Schaeffer's He is Not Silent "had an absolutely determinative impact on my life as a young teenager," Mohler says. "Not that I understood everything that Schaeffer was saying, but it came with incredible assurance that there were legitimate Christian answers to these questions." Schaeffer became a hero; Kennedy, a lifelong mentor. At 15, Mohler was already a friend of culture warriors and a citizen of the wider evangelical world—yet still a born-and-bred member of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBC), where the culture wars seemed remote and evangelical was a "Yankee word."

The article also explains how, in the early 1990s, Mohler became head of the SBC as conservatives were solidifying their control after the bruising battles of the 1980s. At the time, some were hopeful that Mohler would be a moderating influence because "in 1984 lent his signature to a full-page ad in the Louisville Courier-Journal protesting the SBC's recent resolution condemning female ordination" ... but they were quickly disappointed, as Mohler had become heavily influenced by "presuppositionalism" and set about purging the moderates from the faculty: 

Presuppositionalism is a system of thought that boils down to the slogans advocated by that other prominent presuppositionalist, Francis Schaeffer: There is no such thing as neutrality. Every worldview is predicated on certain founding assumptions, and those of Christianity are incompatible with those undergirding the secular humanist worldview. Studying Barth's effort to mediate between the presuppositions of Christianity and those of secular modernity hardened Mohler's conviction that "mediating between modernity and Christian orthodoxy doesn't work."

After graduation, Mohler's stint covering SBC news at the Christian Index convinced him that the battle between conservatives and moderates was not a matter of politics or personalities but of presuppositions. He saw that "these are two fundamentally different understandings of the Baptist faith, Baptist identity, and the future of the SBC," he says. When he took office at Southern Seminary in 1993, compromise and accommodation were not strategies he had in mind.

Within three years of Mohler's inauguration, Southern Seminary's faculty and administration had turned over almost completely. He asserted control over the seminary's hiring and tenure processes, insisting that even inerrantist evangelicals hired as compromise candidates were unacceptable if they supported women's ordination. "It was like John Grisham's The Firm," says Carey Newman, director of Baylor University Press, who joined Southern's faculty in 1993 but left after five tense years. "Al recruited young lieutenants, students who were spies in the classes who would report back to him what was being said in every classroom."

The seminary's Abstract of Principles did not address women's ordination, but Mohler and the trustees believed that faculty should conform to what they considered the prevailing sentiment among Southern Baptist laypeople. Through a combination of forced resignations and "golden parachute" retirement packages, Mohler purged the School of Theology, closed the School of Social Work, and replaced moderates with inerrantist faculty who agreed with him on abortion, homosexuality, women's ordination, and his brand of Reformed theology.

Of course, this sort of hard-line stance doesn't come as much of a surprise given that Mohler is equally opposed to Christians who practice yoga or associate with Mormons.

Yesterday, I wrote a post noting that while the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land was calling Mormonism "the fourth Abrahamic faith" in explaining his willingness to work with Glenn Beck, other SBC leaders were decrying Beck's revival rally as a "scandal" and Mormonism as a "cult."

Shortly thereafter, Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Tweeted that he would be appearing on The Janet Mefferd Show to talk about the issue of Evangelicals joining with Beck in seeking revival. I missed the first part, but I managed to record the second segment in which the two discussed just how dangerous and outrageous it is for Christians to partner with a Mormon like Beck in calling for spiritual renewal:

This turn toward spiritual renewal is just out of the blue and [Beck] obviously feels that he has some divine destiny here in terms of him talking about this, God told him to do this, this is a divine moment. Well, again do Christians understand what he is talking about there? When he's referring to God? And you're talking about someone who clearly identifies with Mormonism and was a convert to Mormonism? There is something very strange going on here and I don't understand the disconnect on the part of Christians.

You know, when you look at this Janet, for instance when you hear Glenn Beck, much of what he has to say on economics and politics makes a great deal of sense to us. And I'll tell you, he really gains a lot of points and deserves credit for identifying many really horrible and very dangerous liberal ideas. But just to debunk liberal ideas does not give you then the authority to be taken at your word, or at just your media presence, to be speaking truth when then you talk about the Gospel. That's where he just have to be mature Christians to say "let's look at the Scripture, let's look at what is being said here. We have a problem."

You know, [Beck's Mormonism] actually comes out at times in his conversations such as when he talks about Native Americans and their language being rooted in ancient Biblical Hebrew. You know, there are a lot of Christians who listen to that and go "well that sounds interesting." Well, it's not interesting; it's wrong. It's right out of the Book of Mormon. You also have other things going on here, far more important than Jesus visiting the Native Americans and that has to do with what the meaning of the cross was and exactly who God is. How many American Christians who are watching that and resonating with the call to spiritual revival know that the man who is up there speaking, using words about God, and Gospel and all the rest believes that there was a male and female deity? That the Godhead is a reproductive pair? That eventually we will be divine ourselves if indeed we follow the path of righteousness? What you have here is a complete confusion of the Gospel ... Christians have to understand: it is Jesus Christ who is the Alpha and the Omega. There is no successor. There is no completion. There is no new book we're waiting for.

This is just an edited excerpt of the discussion - if you want to listen to the entire segment, you can do so here:

That is the question Al Mohler asks on his blog, saying atheists might think they are thankful, but they can't really celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday because they don't believe in God:

Thanksgiving is a deeply theological act, rightly understood. As a matter of fact, thankfulness is a theology in microcosm -- a key to understanding what we really believe about God, ourselves, and the world we experience.

A haunting question is this: How do atheists observe Thanksgiving? I can easily understand that an atheist or agnostic would think of fellow human beings and feel led to express thankfulness and gratitude to all those who, both directly and indirectly, have contributed to their lives. But what about the blessings that cannot be ascribed to human agency? Those are both more numerous and more significant, ranging from the universe we experience to the gift of life itself.

Can one really be thankful without being thankful to someone? It makes no sense to express thankfulness to a purely naturalistic system ... it would seem that being unthankful, refusing to recognize God as the source of all good things, is very close to the essence of the primal sin.

...

Clearly, honoring God as God leads us naturally into thankfulness. To honor Him as God is to honor His limitless love, His benevolence and care, His provision and uncountable gifts. To fail in thankfulness is to fail to honor God -- and this is the biblical description of fallen and sinful humanity. We are a thankless lot ... So, observe a wonderful Thanksgiving -- but realize that a proper Christian Thanksgiving is a deeply theological act that requires an active mind as well as a thankful heart. We need to think deeply, widely, carefully, and faithfully about the countless reasons for our thankfulness to God.

Is it really "haunting" Mohler to know how atheists observe Thanksgiving?  That just seems sad.

So says Al Mohler:

The president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says at least two-thirds of Southern Baptist youths are leaving the church between adolescence and adulthood.

In a speech at the seminary in Louisville, Ky., the Reverend R. Albert Mohler warned that the Southern Baptist Convention will die out unless that trend is reversed.

The problem, he said, is that many of today's young people have reduced Christianity to a vague belief that God just wants them "to do well, and to do right and to be happy." Mohler said Southern Baptists have an image problem, coming across as "cranky" instead of joyful.

But he added, "If we stand by the Scriptures, we are going to have to say hard things to a culture around us that will consider us backward, unloving, intolerant."