The End of The World According to Jesus of Nazareth
Jeff Kinley joins Michael to discuss his most recent book, The End of The World According to Jesus of Nazareth.
Rob Schwarzwalder serves as Senior Vice President for the Family Research Council. He oversees the Policy Department, including the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI).
Rob spent many years on Capitol Hill as Chief of Staff for two Members of Congress and as a press secretary in both the House and Senate. The Senator and Congressmen for whom he worked held seats on the Senate and House Armed Services committees; the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee; and the House Oversight and Government Reform, Natural Resources, Science, Small Business, and Transportation and Infrastructure committees.
From 1997 – 2001, Rob was director of communications and senior writer at the National Association of Manufacturers. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Rob to be senior speechwriter at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he crafted language relating to all facets of the President’s health care agenda.
“One of them is that a lot of people who have been involved in politics over the years, went in with expectations that are unrealistically high. They thought if we only elect the right people; if we only pass the right legislation, then we can suddenly transform the culture. Well, here we are forty years after Roe vs Wade and we’ve made substantial progress, but elective abortion, is still the law of the land. I think that there’s an apathy among many younger evangelicals because they think we’ve been in the culture wars for years and we haven’t seen the dramatic change that we were promised.
A second reason has to do with the nature of the family. Right now only 46% of young people reach the age of 17 or 18 in a two parent home. In the African American community it’s only 17%. My hunch is a lot of younger people who have been raised with nothing but conflict are pretty sick of it. When they emerge into adulthood they don’t want to fight anymore.
They have good friends who are gays and lesbians. They have peers who are cohabiting and having children. As a result it’s easier for someone like me to say the only kind of sexually appropriate behavior exists within marriage between one man and one woman. I can say that Biblically I can make a strong theological case. But if you’re a 21 year old and you come from a broken home and suddenly someone is offering you affection, it’s very hard to take a principled stand. It does mean that you might feel a little bit apathetic about standing as strongly as you should for truth.”
“There’s a prominent conference every Christmas where ten to 12 thousand young evangelicals come from across the country. I can’t recall the name of it offhand, but they deal with human trafficking and poverty. Recently, they were challenged by John Piper, who said, ‘These are issues that socially and culturally have no opposition. Virtually, no one supports human slavery; no one supports slavery sex trafficking; no one supports a child being hungry. We have to go beyond that and ask ourselves, ‘Why are we impassioned by these issues when in fact three thousand unborn children every day are aborted in the United States and we shrug our shoulders.’
There’s a human tendency to gravitate towards the things that are non controversial. There’s no one in his right mind who would say that a girl who was sold into sexual slavery should not be rescued. Regrettably, there’s a huge debate in our society about the sanctity of unborn life. We need to come alongside of them in two ways. Number one: As friends, as mentors, people who listen to them, who are in dialogue with them, who ask a lot of questions, in other words we need to build relationships.
Also there needs to be theological instruction. The lack of strong expositional teaching from the Word of God, a lot of the things that young people grew up hearing are basically Dr. Phil with a Bible verse thrown in. That’s not enough and if you want them to take strong moral stands on issues like abortion, or same sex marriage, we have to provide them with the theological tools, the Biblical knowledge necessary to enable them to articulate what it is they believe, why they believe it, and why it’s important.”
“I could sit here and I could say, “Well Captain, the boat we’re in is sinking,” and the Captain could say, “ As a matter of fact that’s right. Now should we go have lunch?” I propositionally made a statement that is accurate; no action has been taken, nor have I explained the significance of it. A lot of younger people have been told that this is a biogenetic thing. It seems awfully cruel to come along and say well you can’t fulfill sexually the desire that you have naturally. We need to take a step back from that and say, “Why does God only call for monogamous heterosexual relationships in marriage?” Frankly, I don’t think a lot of us have thought about that because to us it’s so obviously wrong.
Is in fact sexual identity immutable? Is it something that has anything to do with character? Colin Powell years ago said that, “Race and sexual identity are not analogous because race is a benign and immutable characteristic.” It has nothing to do with character and it cannot be changed, whereas homosexual conduct is an intrinsically moral decision. Anything sexual of a sexually intimate nature, is intrinsically moral. We need to make those kinds of arguments and explain why God’s plan is for the good.
When we say “no” to someone because of a sin that they’re engaged in, we are not rejecting that person, even though it might sound that way. The most gracious man who ever lived is our Lord Jesus Christ and He was crucified. He was a friend of sinners; they hated Him. He said, “If they hate me, they’ll hate you.” Take a stand for the truth. We have to be willing to be misunderstood and disliked.”
“I can tell you that at the Family Research Council we’ve been involved for about three years in addressing issues, how younger people communicate differently, think differently, value things differently, and we’re still trying to think that through. There is no substitute for relationship. I think you and I could both point to myriad examples in Scripture where older men have come alongside younger men, older women alongside younger women, and mentored them, discipled them. Your great mentor, Howard Hendricks, was one of the fathers, maybe the Father of the Modern Mentoring Movement.
There’s no substitute for sitting down with an eighteen year old at a coffee shop and just listening, engaging, and preparing to be frustrated for a few hours. Only because you want to tell him the truth.
What he needs is somebody to affirm that he’s important by virtue of listening to him. For many of our evangelical people, whether individually or in small groups, we need to take a step back. I could talk nonstop about what’s true, moral, honorable, and good. But it will bounce off you unless I hear what you’re thinking, why you’re rejecting it, and how you’re integrating it.”
“I wrote something a few days ago and one of the responses I got was, “This is your truth.” Immediately, I thought truth is truth. It’s either right or wrong; it’s either accurate or not. When I make all of these statements that are declarative, propositional, definite, you can’t just say, “Well they’re your truths.”
They’re true or they’re not, and yet in the morally, relativistic age, the age of Postmodernism, the age where if you proclaim something as absolutely right or wrong, you’re seen as being harsh or cruel. We have to get past that and go underneath it and we have to get back to developing the relationships that build trust and to give us a platform whereby we can make those propositional claims that we’re used to making.”
“The Boy Scouts issued a tentative policy that they would allow open homosexuals to serve in the Boy Scouts. There would be no change in behavioral requirements in terms of moral conduct, sexual conduct. But if someone professed to be homosexual, he or she could serve openly as a leader or student participant. Over the next couple of months they redefined that and came back with a counter proposal. It said, ‘Any boy who affirms he is gay can remain in the Scouts if he doesn’t act on it’.
We opposed it because young boys are impressionable. If they’re around older boys who model a certain lifestyle, they will be swayed. As Christians, we believe there is a certain moral code and believe that it’s the Bible’s moral code. We can’t just treat human sexuality as though it’s the difference between coke and pepsi. It’s something far more profound than that.
I did a review of 1,932 perversion files that were published by the LA Times. Of the 1,932 incidents, roughly 1,915 were homosexual, man and boy, or older boy and younger boy. I want to be as clear as I can. Is every homosexual a predator? No! Are most homosexuals horrified by child molestation? Yes! Are the homosexauls as a movement trying to enter the Boy Scouts to recruit or to prey upon boys? No! But individual homosexuals have gravitated to the Boy Scout because as one author wrote, “That’s where the boys are.”
“Many scouts don’t want to be in a tent with a boy who’s sexually attracted to them. On top of all of that, the Boy Scouts historically was founded along Judeo-Christian principles. If you look for example in Boys Life Magazine, every month there’s still a Bible story at the back of Boy’s Life. Now, they’ve said, “Well, we’re secular and we believe, but we believe in God, and you can define God however you want to.”
The first openly gay Eagle Scout, a young man in Maryland, said that as soon as he hits eighteen, he’s going to sue the policy. They now have no legal basis to stand on to prevent open homosexuality in the Scouts. If Scouting cannot say certain things are right or wrong, then the Scout oath and the Scout promise are meaningless. You can’t have two boys standing next to each other, meaning fundamentally different things.
They just become words. Either they have subjective, important, valid meanings or they don’t. So, a bunch of us went to the National Boy Scouts Convention and sadly, our side did not win. We founded a new group called Trail Life USA. We now believe it has somewhere between thirty and forty thousand boys already involved. We’re very active in trying to raise up a new generation of young men who are grounded in firm Judeo-Christian principles around men who model Biblical morality. So, it’s an exciting new venture and we believe that the Lord is going to honor that.”
“The evangelical community is not a monolith. That applies not only along racial lines where many African American evangelicals tend to vote very differently than White evangelicals, but also Latino evangelicals who are a very divided voting block. Both political parties see this. They want to make inroads into populations or sectors that they would like to accrue for their political support. In the last few years, a number of prominent evangelical leaders have been touted with their books and conferences. One of them came out and recently denied the existence of hell. Others have fallen morally. Even still, others have said, “Well you know pretty much all issues are created equal,” or “I’m not going to worry about the slaughter of the unborn, I’m just going to fight global climate change.”
These are things that have created enormous rifts, not just politically, but sociologically and theologically within the evangelical community. We have to come to a deep commitment to understanding the essential truths of the Word the God.
We need to know Christ, and the body of Christ is fragmented in part because many of us think we’re doing God a favor by following Him. For example, “Oh, I’ve had such a hard life. Oh, this and that, but I’m still believing.” Well that’s great. Keep believing. Keep being faithful, but remember you were bought with a price. This isn’t about you fundamentally. It’s about living for Christ, living for His Kingdom, and living to advance the gospel. If we focus more on Him, His work, and less on our needs, wants, desires, feelings, there would be greater unity in the body of Christ.”
“When I was first married somebody told me that the greatest gift I could ever give my wife is my time. That has been invaluable for me over the years.
If you want to influence someone’s life for Christ, you have to be able to spend some time with them. Does that mean you’re going to have to say, “No,” to certain activities or things that you may really enjoy? It probably does. It also means though, that you’re going to have to prioritize certain relationships so that you’re winning those people to Christ, if not immediately then ultimately. I deal with ten to fifteen interns every term here at Family Research Council.
I talk to them all and we go out for coffee. Often times what they’re dealing with is just trying to figure out why they believe what they’ve been told. They’re internalizing their faith; they’re making it their own, and we need to be patient. We shouldn’t have expectations for younger people that others didn’t have for us and that they graciously gave us freedom to work through our own questions and issues. It really comes down to the heart, I think. If a young person’s heart for God and for people is where it should be, He will direct their paths. That’s where I think we need to focus a lot more of our attention.”
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