Albert Mohler has a powerful essay reflecting on racism and the burden of history. His remarks about Southern Baptist history are particularly candid. He writes: More humbling still is the fact that many churches, churchmen, and theologians gave sanction to that ideology of racial superiority. While this was true throughout the southern churches, Southern Baptists bear a particular responsibility and burden of history. The Southern Baptist Convention was not only founded by slaveholders; it was founded by men who held to an ideology of racial superiority and who bathed that ideology in scandalous theological argument. At times, white superiority was defended by a putrid exegesis of the Bible that claimed…

Albert Mohler has offered a brief, critical response to Pope Francis’s recent papal encyclical “Laudato Si.” Mohler reminds readers that evangelicals “reject the very idea of the papacy.” Having said that, he also points out that media coverage has focused almost entirely on how the letter reinforces a certain narrative about climate change without giving much attention to what it says about the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality. To wit, section 155 of the Pope’s letter reads as if it were written as a direct contradiction to fashionable transgender propaganda, which has become so ubiquitous in recent days. Here’s what the Pope writes:

I am a Baptist by conviction. That means that I not only hold to believer’s baptism but that I also adhere to congregational polity. I believe in these not for pragmatic reasons—though I do think they “work” the best—but for biblical reasons. Without question, my understanding of scripture on these matters has been decisively shaped by Mark Dever and the ministry of 9Marks. For me, this influence began when I was still a seminary student in a conversation with Mark Dever in the hallway at Southern Seminary. It was actually more of a debate. But over time after doing more reading and study, I became persuaded that he was right…