Albert Mohler: Far side Christians

Albert Mohler is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of a good book scheduled for publication on Oct. 27, We Cannot Be Silent (Thomas Nelson). We ran an interview with him in the June 13 issue of WORLD, and here—by popular demand—are more edited excerpts.

When Christians have crises of faith, what do you recommend? Two unorthodox sources. First, one of the most profound philosophers of the Western tradition, Søren Kierkegaard. If you follow his thought to its conclusion, you are going to abandon the gospel; but he did understand that to be an adult is to have an intellectual crisis. At some point you realize you do not believe this merely because your grandmother did, and you never really confronted strong arguments against what you were raised to believe. I want to help evangelical Christians have the confidence to know we really do stand on a superior truth claim. We really are standing in a tradition of truth, truthful confession, and truthful argument.

The crisis is when you realize you need to know what you believe. And my prayer is that when this happens, Christian young people are surrounded by intelligent, broad-minded, happy-to-talk Christians. The second person, and even more unorthodox than Kierkegaard, is Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said there are two kinds of simplicity. There is the simplicity on the near side of complexity and the far side, and that second simplicity is the greatest thing. In other words, there is a simplicity that simply doesn’t have an awareness of other worldviews or truth claims out there, that people disagree with us, that there are some pretty strong arguments against us.

The simplicity of a child versus … The simplicity when you are 9 years old and you ask your mom and dad a question and they give you an answer, show you a verse in the Bible, and you go to sleep at night with an untroubled heart. It isn’t the same when you are 25. We have to go through complexity. The problem is when we get mired in that complexity. We have models in the New Testament of what it means to move through that and end up with what Holmes talked about, the simplicity that comes on the far side of complexity.

What do you say to someone mired in complexity? That is not the worst place to be, it just isn’t the place you want to stay. But you don’t just jump out of it, you have to think out of it. That is where I believe in the gospel, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the communion of the saints.

‘I want to help evangelical Christians have the confidence to know we really do stand on a superior truth claim.’

So there are near side Christians and far side Christians, and the goal of seminary is to help you become a far side Christian. We were raised in the ’90s on the same cartoons. I thought the strangest bestseller on campus was a comic titled “Calvin and Hobbes,” because I couldn’t imagine who could write a bestseller about John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes. Then I became a believer.

Do we use different language to near side and far side Christians? You have to communicate to people in terms of their ability to receive that communication. We don’t speak to someone who has just arrived from Poland not speaking English, as if we are talking to someone who knows English. In some towns you can still use what Southern Baptists call the language of Zion, the language of historic evangelical Christianity. A lot of people are going to know exactly what you are talking about; but if you go to San Francisco, when you use the word grace, it is not going to be understood as what you mean.

Truth, like grace, has different meanings in different places. I can still remember in the early ’90s the first time that I found myself in an intellectual context, at one of the Ivy League universities, and I used the word truth. I realized I was talking to someone who understood truth to be something utterly different to what I was talking about.

And if we talk about capital-T truth we’ll be treated as a near side simpleton and sometimes attacked. On that note, I’ve read that in your home you have hundreds of books by and about the often-attacked Winston Churchill, along with two oil portraits of Churchill. Admittedly, I have had a fascination with Winston Churchill since I was 13. Churchill was not a theologically defined believer, but he was convinced that what he believed was true and right, and would be vindicated by history. The twists and turns in his career meant that the most fruitful period of his life were those wilderness years before he returned to influence and became the prime minister credited with saving Western civilization.

Western civilization is now under attack by Islamists. How have secularists thought about and reacted to the rise of Islam, and how should Christians respond? Secular elites are trying to bring a secular argument to a theological challenge. I serve around a lot of Texans who know that you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. No secular argument has any kind of traction against the theological figures of Islam. Secularists have no explanation for why 15-year-old girls are leaving London and a middle-class existence to become jihadi wives. We as Christians do, because we understand that as creatures made in God’s image, we are irreducibly theological creatures. We understand that the strongest adherence is going to go to the strongest versions of theology. That is why Islam has been from the beginning perhaps the greatest global challenge to Christianity.

Islam, not secularism. For a long time evangelicals thought Western secularism was going to be the main intellectual competitor. It has not gone away, but for decades, maybe centuries to come, if the Lord tarries, Islam is going to be the major challenge. It can only be challenged at a theological level by showing who God is, how He has shown Himself to us, and what He expects of us. The Christian worldview begins with saying where the world comes from and where I came from. It goes to what is wrong with the world and how the gospel is the answer, and helps us understand what has happened. The eschatology helps us understand what is going to happen.

Do you see any signs that secular elites understand the inadequacy of their approach? Some articles in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times are acknowledging that you can only meet a theological challenge with a more accurate theology. That’s what the gospel is, and the Apostle Paul makes very clear in Ephesians 6 that it’s all we have and need to fight the great conflict of this age. It is true that we are not at war with Islam if that is to say we are at war with every single Muslim. But we are at war with millions of people whose understanding of Islam goes right back to the founding of Islam. They know it, and they are willing to live and die for the sake of that theology.