If the Ear Won't Listen, Tell It to the Eye

The Case for Proliferating Graphic Pictures of Abortion

 By Rolley Haggard

Does the name Emmett Till mean anything to you? It should. Photographs of Emmett Till are credited by some with launching the modern-day Civil Rights movement. That's right, pictures of one young man marked a turning point in racial relations in America.

How? Simple. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, the “thousand words” told by a single picture of Emmett Till were shocking beyond belief. They couldn't be ignored or dismissed.

You see, Emmett Till was murdered in an exceptionally brutal fashion. His grossly disfigured body spoke volumes about the evil committed against him. Emmett's mother, against convention, against the urgings of others, chose for Emmett an open-casket funeral. By making people see Emmett, not just hear about him in the obituaries, she galvanized a population against the horrific crime of lynching.

To be sure, people had “heard” things like this before—with their ears. But not with their eyes. They had never seen them. Emmett's mother made sure the world saw what Emmett had to say—in his death.

You can read Emmett Till's story here. You can watch a video summary here. And you can see the unedited picture, published by Jet magazine, here. But a word of warning: the open-coffin pictures of Emmett Till are extremely graphic.

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Rolley Haggard is a feature writer for BreakPoint.




As they should be.

Why? Because to understate the enormity of a gruesome crime is to effectively give it sanction. By not showing it just as it is, in all its horror, we make it seem not so evil. The hard truth is that without pictures, with mere words alone, it is easy for the public to remain ignorant and apathetic about even the most monstrous evils.

The Question That Will Define Us

By: Rolley Haggard

 Dave: Hey Norm, what's the correct pronunciation of the word “evangelical”? Is it “EVV-angelical,” or “EEV-angelical”? Long E or short E?

Norm: Long E.

Dave: So, “EEV-angelical,” right?

Norm: Right.

Dave: You sound pretty sure of yourself.

Norm: I am pretty sure of myself.

Dave: Oh? And how can you be so sure yours is the correct pronunciation? I've heard it used both ways.


Norm: Because I know the theology behind it.

Dave: Theology? What's theology got to do with the way you pronounce “evangelical”?

Norm: Simple. Using my pronunciation, if you take the “angelic” out of “evangelical,” phonetically speaking, what does that leave?

Dave: “Evil.”

Norm: I rest my case.

[Author's note: A halo each for “Dave” and “Norm” if the interaction above registers Honorable Mention in WikiLeaks' heavenly counterpart.]

* * *

The point of that little squib is to introduce an observation regarding American evangelical Christianity: It has lost the angelic. Or, to borrow language from Mark Twain, reports of its moral demise have been greatly understated.

Permit me, myself an evangelical, to explain.

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Rolley Haggard is a feature writer for BreakPoint.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

By: Rolley Haggard

 A new video titled “Wake Up Church!” posted on YouTube June 26 (below the cut) is provoking strong responses from America's evangelical congregations.

It's not hard to see why: It is nothing more and nothing less than an in-your-face call for America's best, gospel-centered, Bible-believing churches to repent.

That's right: for America's best, gospel-centered, Bible-believing churches to repent.


Many will find that a strange and seemingly contradictory juxtaposition. They are precisely the ones who need to watch the video.

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Rolley Haggard is a feature writer for BreakPoint.

Agape Defiled - How the Church Has Failed 55 Million Orphans

By: Rolley Haggard

 There's an elephant in the living room. Only it isn't an elephant, and it isn't in the living room. It's a golden calf, and it's in our baptismal font and our pulpit and our sanctuary and our Sunday School class and our Bible study group and everywhere else we worship and serve God, because, truth be told, it's in our hearts.

To put it bluntly: We, the church of Jesus Christ, have an idol.

It's called ministry.

Ministry?

Yes, ministry: busying ourselves with the things of God. Granted, ministry seems very un-idol-like. But then, subtlety is the hallmark of seductive sins. It has been the devil's most effective stratagem since the beginning of time: Get the sin to seem no sin. Better, get it to seem like service to God. Better still, get it to be service to God. Sins don't get more subtle than that, nor does idolatry seem like idolatry when we're busy doing things God instructed us to do. It seems like true Christianity, like pure and undefiled religion.

But is it? Even ministry can be idolatry when it supplants what God most wants from us. What is the acid test of true Christianity, of pure and undefiled religion? What does it look like?

Pure and Undefiled Religion

We are not left guessing. In James 1:27, God tells us what “pure and undefiled religion” looks like: “Visit[ing] orphans and widows in their distress.” That's divine shorthand for serving “the least of these” with sacrificial agape love. Acts of compassion, exemplified by coming to the aid of suffering women and children, are the distinguishing marks of true Christianity.

The American church, by stunning contrast, has been characterized the past 40 years—ever since Roe v. Wade—by the deliberate and thoroughgoing neglect of 55 million orphans in exquisite distress. One has to wonder if the cold indifference shown by the church to these orphans could have been any more absolute had salvation itself depended on completely ignoring them.

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Rolley Haggard is a feature writer for BreakPoint.

BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life.

 

 

Pro-Life Activism Is Not a Mission of the Church

It Is THE Mission of the Church

  

By: Rolley Haggard

Now that I have your attention, permit me to explain.

There's an ongoing debate in Reformed and Evangelical circles regarding the mission of the church. That's good, because the Body of Christ needs to be clear on what the Head expects the hands and feet to be doing.

But the way one frames the question can greatly affect the answer. So we need to make sure we're rightly framing the question.

Rightly Framing the Question

More often than not, the question “What is the mission of the church?” is framed so as to give either the exclusive mission, or the comprehensive mission, rather than the primary mission. As important as the first two are, the third is, by definition, the most important.

Exclusive mission means those things that the church and the church alone has responsibility for. There is no serious debate regarding the exclusive mission of the church. All parties are pretty much agreed that the church's exclusive mission is to minister the Word of God, particularly in fulfillment of the Great Commission. If the church doesn't do that, no one else will.

Comprehensive mission means all things the church has responsibility for. The comprehensive mission of the Church is what the aforementioned debate centers on. It involves determining what things are “official” church responsibilities and what things are not.

Primary mission means those things that are the church's most important responsibilities: the things she will be held most accountable for by Christ. Unfortunately, neither side of the debate is giving much consideration to this, and, incredibly, it is falling through the cracks. Christ and His apostles laid it out so plainly it is difficult to understand how we are overlooking it, but we are.

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A Thermonuclear Trumpet

Knocking Down the Jericho Wall of Abortion Apathy

 

By: Rolley Haggard

The apostle Paul noted that “if the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, no one will prepare himself to the battle.” His point: If what we're hearing doesn't sound to us like a clear call from God, even when it is, we're unlikely to mobilize.

History bears this out. It is precisely what happened with the transatlantic slave trade. One of the reasons it took so long to end that horrific business is that too few Christians believed that God wanted them to actively oppose it. The biblical message they heard on the issue was confused and indistinct, like a trumpet giving an uncertain sound. As a result there was no consensus, no united front, and slavery continued.

It wasn't that the message was not loud enough: Everyone heard the noise that was being made over slavery. It was that the message was not clear enough: The people of God were getting mixed signals and thus weren't sure what their responsibility was.

From abolitionists they heard biblical arguments against slavery. From some clergy, willing for different reasons to justify slavery, they heard other supposedly “biblical” arguments that either sanctioned slavery, or at the very least downplayed how important it was to God that it be abolished.

The result? The church did not rally to the battle, at least not in sufficient numbers. What the church ought to have done, and arguably could have done, peacefully, the state had to do by bloody civil war.

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Rolley Haggard is a feature writer for BreakPoint.

 

Brilliant Darkness - The Rationale by Which Biblical Christianity has Justified 40 Years of Abortion Apathy

 

 By: Rolley Haggard

 “If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” Matthew 6:23

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning once remarked that in the end all problems are theological. I couldn’t agree more.

One of Mankind’s Greatest Problems

Just a few weeks ago we all saw an example of what is arguably one of mankind’s greatest problems. You can probably guess the event I’m alluding to: the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. You are unlikely, though, to guess why I cite it.

Contrary to what you might assume, I don’t cite it because of the raw display of murderous rage that drove Adam Lanza to gun down more than two dozen innocent people.

Nor do I cite it because of the sad circumstances of Adam’s life that resulted in his carrying out these horrific acts.

No; there was, coterminous with what happened at Sandy Hook, a more fundamental and pervasive problem occurring across America, indicting all but a percentage who have awakened to the passive monster in us all. Sandy Hook provided an opportunity for us to see it in sharp relief.

Yet lamentably, still relatively few actually see the problem, which is this: that certain unutterably great evils can be committed on a grand scale right before our eyes and yet most of us, even Christians, though we know it is going on, act as if nothing is happening. We are inexplicably untouched, unaffected, and unmoved, and as a consequence we do practically nothing to stop it.

Surely, we ought to be convulsed with moral outrage every time something as horrifically evil as Sandy Hook happens. Instead, we too readily and too often accept the commission of certain great evils with something bordering on nonchalance.

Abortion in America, on this 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, provides 54 million cases in point.

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Rolley Haggard is a feature writer for BreakPoint.

 BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life.

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