Russell D. Moore

Russell D. Moore
2nd President of the
Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
Assumed office
June 1, 2013 (2013-06-01)
Vice President Phillip Bethancourt
Preceded by Richard Land
Personal details
Born (1971-10-09) October 9, 1971
Biloxi, Mississippi, U.S.
Spouse(s) Maria Hanna Moore
Children Benjamin, Timothy, Samuel, Jonah, and Taylor Moore
Residence Brentwood, Tennessee
Education Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; M.Div., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary; B.S., University of Southern Mississippi
Occupation President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention
Website www.russellmoore.com

Russell D. Moore is an American evangelical theologian, ethicist, and preacher. He is currently president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).[1] Moore previously served at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of six seminaries of the SBC, as dean of the School of Theology, senior vice president for academic administration, and as professor of Christian theology and ethics.

Moore's tenure as head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has been described as transformative. He has attempted to move the SBC from the policies of the Christian right, arguing that partisanship for the Republican party has undermined the Christian gospel.[2]

A 2017 article from the Washington Post described Moore's attempt to transcend partisanship as polarizing. Moore was described as having strong support from Christian minorities and youth, while receiving criticism from older Southern whites.[2]

Early life and education

Moore was born and raised in the coastal town of Biloxi, Mississippi, the eldest son of Gary and Renee Moore. His grandfather was a Baptist preacher, and one of his grandmothers was Roman Catholic.[3] He earned a B.S. in political science and history from the University of Southern Mississippi, an M.Div. in biblical studies from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in systematic theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Political background and involvement

In the early 1990s, prior to entering the ministry, Moore was an aide to U.S. Representative Gene Taylor of Mississippi, a Democrat.[4]

Confederate flag

Moore has spoken out against the display of the Confederate flag; in 2015, two days after the Charleston church shooting (in which nine black churchgoers were murdered in an apparent hate crime), Moore wrote: "The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire. White Christians, let's listen to our African-American brothers and sisters. Let's care not just about our own history, but also about our shared history with them."[4]

Nationalism and the Syrian refugee crisis

In 2015, during the Syrian refugee crisis, Moore wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling upon evangelical Christians to support refugee resettlement. Moore criticized those who "demagogue the issue" and wrote: "evangelical Christians cannot be the people who turn our back on our mission field. We should be the ones calling the rest of the world to remember the image of God and inalienable human dignity, of persecuted people whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Yazidi, especially those fleeing from genocidal Islamic terrorists."[5][6] Moore wrote that security and compassion are compatible.[6] In a subsequent interview, Moore sharply criticized leading Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, stating that Trump's proposal to shut down mosques in the U.S. was a threat to religious liberty and that Cruz's proposal to impose a religious test for refugees would "penalize innocent women and children who are fleeing from murderous barbarians simply because they're not Christians."[5]

Donald Trump

Donald J. Trump from Twitter
@realDonaldTrump

Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!

May 9, 2016[7]

In 2016, Moore became a leading Trump critic, saying that in a presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Christians should vote for "a conservative independent or third-party candidate."[8] Moore stated that he could not support the former because he "stirs up racial animosity" and could not support the latter for her support of abortion rights.[8] Writing in the National Review in January 2016, Moore wrote that a Trump presidency would endanger the goals of the Manhattan Declaration; criticized Trump's involvement in the casino industry and past support for abortion rights; and argued that "Trump's vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled, and others ought to concern anyone who believes that all persons, not just the 'winners' of the moment, are created in God's image."[9]

White supremacy

Moore condemned the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.[10]

Personal life

On May 27, 1994, Moore married Maria Hanna Moore. Having adopted their first two sons from a Russian orphanage, Moore has written and spoken extensively on the topic of adoption from a Christian perspective, including his book Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches.

Career

Moore served as a youth minister at his home church, Woolmarket Baptist Church, while in seminary, and then as associate pastor of Bay Vista Baptist Church in Biloxi, where he was ordained to gospel ministry.

In 2001, Moore was appointed to the faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. As Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics, Moore was responsible for teaching across a spectrum of topics including systematic theology, Christian ethics, church life, pastoral ministry, and cultural engagement. In addition to his role on the faculty, he also served as Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement from 2001–9.

In 2004, Moore was named Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration. In this role, in addition to his regular teaching and lecturing, Moore served as the chief academic officer of the seminary, responsible for all curriculum and the administration of the seminary. Beyond these roles, Moore served as Executive Editor of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, and currently serves as Senior Editor for Touchstone Magazine, and Chairman of the Board for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

On June 1, 2013, Moore became President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention's official entity assigned to address social, moral, and ethical concerns. In this role, Moore leads the organization, which maintains offices in both Nashville and Washington, DC. in their advocacy efforts—addressing especially the issues of religious liberty, human dignity, family stability, and civil society.

Moore is also an active churchman and denominational servant; from 2008 to 2012 he served as a full-time teaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church, where he preached weekly and also taught an adult Bible study class. More broadly, Moore has served extensively within the Southern Baptist Convention, as chairman and four-time member of the Resolutions committee, as a member of the Ethics and Public Affairs Committee of the Kentucky Baptist Convention, and as a regular correspondent and columnist for Baptist Press.

Moore's book Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, was awarded the "Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year" award from Christianity Today.[11]

Theological views

Moore writes from the perspective of a theologically conservative Baptist Christian who affirms the inerrancy of scripture[12] and a complementarian [13] position on gender roles, believes in a literal hell and is a Calvinist.

He works extensively in the area of Christian eschatology, highlighting the kingdom of God as the center of theology and ethics.[14] Moore believes in an "inaugurated eschatology" in which the Kingdom of God is "already" and "not yet."[15] Consistent with this position, he sees Jesus Christ as the full inheritor of God's promises to Israel, and that the church receives the benefits of this as it is "in" Christ.[16] Moore emphasizes the kingdom as a spiritual warfare uprooting the demonic powers, an emphasis that shows up not only in his works on the kingdom and on temptation but also in his writings on, for example, orphan care.[17]

Moore is especially interested in issues of ethics and religious liberty. In his early work, he argued for the early Baptist commitment to religious liberty represented by such figures as Isaac Backus, John Leland, and Jeremiah Moore as consistently conservative, over against those who would articulate a more secularist understanding of the separation of church and state.[18]

In ethics, Moore stands within the conservative, Christian Democratic stream of communitarianism, calling for a Christian demonstration of ethical transformation within the church as the initial manifestation of the kingdom.[19] Heavily influenced by the Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper and the early American Neo-Evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry, Moore articulates a conservative evangelical call for justice for the vulnerable, including care for widows, orphans, the unborn, the disabled, the elderly, and the undocumented.[20]

He has also called on evangelicals, especially Southern Baptist Christians, to repudiate their racist legacy by working for churches that are multiracial and multiethnic venues of reconciliation as a witness to the coming kingdom.[21]

Other views

In 2014 Moore commented on reparative therapy, saying, "The utopian idea if you come to Christ and if you go through our program, you're going to be immediately set free from attraction or anything you're struggling with, I don't think that's a Christian idea. Faithfulness to Christ means obedience to Christ. It does not necessarily mean that someone's attractions are going to change."[22] He added, "The Bible doesn't promise us freedom from temptation. The Bible promises us the power of the spirit to walk through temptation."[22] Moore also said at that time that the Southern Baptists' Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission was working with parents of those who are gay and lesbian, adding, "The response is not shunning, putting them out on the street. The answer is loving your child."[22]

Select bibliography

Books authored

  • Moore, Russell D. (2004). The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective. Crossway.
  • ——— (2009). Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches. Crossway.
  • ——— (2011). Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ. Crossway.
  • ——— (1 August 2015). Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel. Broadman & Holman. ISBN 978-1-43368617-7.
  • ——— (1 May 2016). The Christ-Shaped Marriage: Love, Fidelity, and the Gospel. Broadman & Holman. ISBN 978-1-43367912-4.

Books edited

  • ———; Nettles, Tom J., eds. (2001). Why I am a Baptist. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing. ISBN 9780805424263. OCLC 45861873.
  • ———, ed. (2012). A Guide to Adoption and Orphan Care. SBTS Press.

References

  1. ↑ Southern Baptist Convention.
  2. 1 2 Bailey, Sarah (March 13, 2017). "Could Southern Baptist Russell Moore lose his job?". Washington Post. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
  3. ↑ Moore, Russell. "The Reformation at 500". National Review. Retrieved 2017-06-21.
  4. 1 2 Sarah Pulliam Bailey & Karen Tumulty, How a Southern Baptist leader became surprising voice on Confederate flag, Washington Post (June 24, 2015).
  5. 1 2 Ed Kilgore, Is Anyone Listening to Russell Moore in Iowa?, Washington Monthly (November 20, 2015).
  6. 1 2 Russell Moore, Stop pitting security and compassion against each other in the Syrian refugee crisis, Washington Monthly (November 19, 2015).
  7. ↑ Donald J. Trump [@realDonaldTrump] (May 9, 2016). "Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  8. 1 2 Alexander Burns, Anti-Trump Republicans Call for a Third-Party Option, New York Times (March 2, 2016).
  9. ↑ Symposium: Conservatives Against Trump, National Review (January 21, 2016).
  10. ↑ Moore, Russell Moore (August 14, 2017). "Russell Moore: White supremacy angers Jesus, but does it anger his church?". Washington Post. Retrieved August 14, 2017.
  11. ↑ "The Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year". ChristianityToday.com. Retrieved 2016-05-15.
  12. ↑ Russell Moore, "Why I'm a Happy Evangelical," [10 December 2005]. Online.
  13. ↑ Russell Moore, "After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians are Winning the Evangelical Gender Debate," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49 (Fall 2006): 569-76; idem, "Pastoral Leadership and the Gender Issue: What Does Courage Look Like?" [21 February 2008].
  14. ↑ Russell Moore, "Kingdom First: How the Reign of Christ Transforms Our Lives, Our Churches, and Our World," [8 September 2008]. Online.
  15. ↑ Russell Moore, "The Evangelical Uneasy Conscience Faces the Future," [22 January 2012]. Online.
  16. ↑ "http://www.russellmoore.com/documents/russellmoore/SBJT_2007Winter2.pdf From the House of Jacob to the Iowa Coaucuses: The Future of Israel in Contemporary Evangelical Political Ehtics." Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Winter, 2007. pg. 17.
  17. ↑ Russell D. Moore, "Triumph of the Warrior King: A Theology of the Great Commission." Online.
  18. ↑ Russell D. Moore, "Baptist After All: Resurgent Conservatives Face the Future," in Why I am a Baptist (ed. Tom J. Nettles and Russell D. Moore; Nashville: B&H, 2001), 233-46.
  19. ↑ Russell D. Moore and Robert E. Sagers, "The Kingdom of God and the Church: A Baptist Reassessment," The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 12 (Spring 2008): 68-86
  20. ↑ Russell Moore, "Orphan Care and the Great Commission Resurgence," [26 June 2009]. Online; Southern Baptist Convention, "On Adoption and Orphan Care," [June 2009]. Online; Russell Moore, "Immigration and the Gospel," [17 June 2011]. Online.
  21. ↑ Russell Moore, "Black and White and Red All Over: Why Racial Justice is a Gospel Issue," [12 June 2012]. Online; idem, "Race and the Gospel in Mississippi," [30 July 2012]. Online.
  22. 1 2 3 "Evangelical Leader Russell Moore Denounces 'Ex-Gay Therapy'". The Huffington Post. 28 October 2014. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
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