Renowned landscape photographer Ric Ergenbright here turns his attention to the holiness reflected in the beauty of the natural world. Combining scriptural passages with photographic and scientific observations relating to the elements of nature, Ergenbright uses his dramatic, often astonishing photographs as a testament to the power and perfection of God. Though he recognizes that “if all Scripture were lost, we could still know something of [God’s] character by carefully studying the works of his hands,” Ergenbright uses the book to emphasize how God’s Word can illuminate the world around us. This beautiful coffee-table book is a wonderful addition to any nature-lover’s collection, and the detailed notes throughout are an education to any aspiring photographer.
But politics cannot begin to put the conecting tissue back in society. It is ill-equipped to reconstruct traditional moral beliefs. The best policies cannot recover courtship or marriage, make fathers responsible for their children, restore shock or shame where it once existed, or recover legitimate social authority to institutions that have been hollowed out by a pervasive ideology of individual autonomy. The vast majority of moral problems that trouble us cannot be eradicated by law.
Still, I must insist that the most important question about heaven and hell — who goes where, whether there are second chances, what form the judgments and rewards take, intermediate states after death — are opaque at best. Increasingly, I am grateful for that ignorance and grateful that the God who revealed himself in Jesus is the one who knows the answers.
The Bible recognizes many evils, but does not supply a specific mandate for outlawing all that believers consider immoral or improper. As the late theologian John Courtney Murray put it, “The law, mindful of its nature, is required to be tolerant of many evils that morality condemns.” Christian should not adopt the habit of their secular brethren in turning to the law to right every wrong, especially on issues where only a genuinely restored moral authority in the culture will get the job done.
The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture is becoming an ever-wider sewer. We are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.
For me Jesus has become the focal point of faith, and increasingly I am learning to keep the magnifying glass of my faith focused on him. In my spiritual journey I have long lingered in the margins, puzzling over matters like the problem of pain, the conundrum of prayer, providence versus free will. When I do so, everything becomes fuzzy. Looking at Jesus, however, restores clarity. For example, the Bible leaves many questions unanswered about the problem of pain, but in Jesus I see unmistakable proof that God is the God of all comfort, not the author of pain.
Preachers should not be known for condemning others. If God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, what gives them the authority to condemn? If the ordained believe “the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases,” they have a biblical mandate not to trash a President they don’t like or mawkishly support one they do admire.
Politics is not the answer to our national spiritual salvation. Only personal evangelism, marriage enrichment, the rebuilding of a child-centered culture, and spiritual revival can do that… But surrendering politics would essentially condemn future generations to the failed policies of the Left. And make no mistake: without our check, there would be no balance. Our withdrawal would condemn millions in this nation who otherwise might have struggled to maintain our culture. It would send countless more unborn to their premature deaths. It would consign too many children to lives without hope or opportunity in the inner city. It would mean a crushing burden of higher taxes that weighs too heavily on the middle-class families struggling to give their children a chance at the American dream. This we cannot and must not do.
Frustration at slow progress in the political arena is understandable. But my advice to my friends in the pro-family movement is this: Do not be discouraged. As Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, "The arc of history is long, but it curves towards justice." This road is often long and hard. But it has always been so. The antislavery movement began petitioning Congress in the 1830s, and did not see slavery abolished for 30 years — and that required a bloody war. The NAACP was founded in 1909, but it did not even gain support in a national party platform until 1948, and it did not pass landmark civil-rights legislation until 1964. The suffragist movement gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848, and women did not gain the right to vote nationally until 1920. The same will be true in the pro-life and pro-family movements. The gradual and incremental nature of our progress and victories is not unusual in the history of social-reform movement in the United States. It is the norm.
In 1947 Carl Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism and led Christians back into the American mainstream. What really galvanized them, however, was the liberal victory in Roe v. Wade. In one swoop, the Court struck down abortion laws in all 50 states, turning around an entire culture on the most crucial moral
issue of the day. The lesson was not lost on moral conservatives: they concluded that top-down political action was the
most effective means of cultural transformation. If liberals could do it, so could they.