Al Mohler, Robert Louis Dabney, and Public Theology

In Al Mohler’s editorial on gay marriage in today’s Wall Street Journal, he states that “[s]ince we [Evangelicals] believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality.”  He concludes that “it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.”

Here is a quiz.  Did Mohler also say this:

it is a homage we owe to the Bible, from whose principles we have derived so much of social prosperity and blessing, to appeal to its Verdict on every subject upon which it has spoken. Indeed, when we remember how human reason and learning have blundered in their philosophizings; how great parties have held for ages the doctrine of the divine right of kings as a political axiom; how the whole civilized world held to the righteousness of persecuting errors in opinion, even for a century after the Reformation; we shall feel little confidence in mere human reasonings on political principles; we shall rejoice to follow a steadier light.

No, he didn’t.  This was written in 1867 by Presbyterian preacher and Confederate Army Chaplain Robert Louis Dabney, in his treatise In Defense of Virginia.  Dabney, like Mohler, was trying to stem the tide of a cultural revolution that Dabney believed had caught the Church flat-footed.  Dabney continued,

The scriptural argument for the righteousness of slavery gives us, moreover, this great advantage: If we urge it successfully, we compel the Abolitionists either to submit, or else to declare their true infidel character. We thrust them fairly to the wall, by proving that the Bible is against them; and if they declare themselves against the Bible (as the most of them doubtless will) they lose the support of all honest believers in God’s Word.

The obvious resonance between Mohler’s and Dabney’s public theology ought to give careful readers pause.  Certainly, Mohler is not in favor of Black slavery, nor do I suspect he’s a racist.  However, Mohler employs precisely the same reasoning and rhetoric as did Dabney — right down to the claim that only folks who agree with him completely are part of the faithful remnant of the true church.  It failed then, and it fails now.  It was a misguided form of fundamentalism then, and it is a misguided form of fundamentalism now.

This is not to suggest that the question of African slavery in the 19th Century is morally equivalent to the question of gay marriage in the 21st Century.  That sort of argument is anachronistic and fails to account at all for the theological anthropology and ecclesiology that inform both the rejection of slavery and the support of “marriage” as a life-long covenant between a man and a woman.

But Mohler utterly misses the fact that “marriage” is primarily a sacramental covenant inseparable from the life of the visible Church.  His Biblicism fails because the Bible simply doesn’t function as a stand-alone rule book for public thought in a liberal democratic state.  (This is also why Mohler, like Dabney, must deny the reality of modern scientific theories in favor of earlier mechanistic natural theology — though Dabney’s critique of materialism is relatively sophisticated in some ways.)

Though Mohler speaks in his WSJ editorial of the “believing church,” he doesn’t seem to have any notion of The Church as an institutional alternative to the secular city.  But it is precisely and only in this alternative community that the true meaning of “marriage” can be disclosed.  It is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in life-long union, in submission to each other and often accompanied by great sacrifice and difficulty; it is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in chaste singleness, submitting their sexuality each day before the cross; and it is only in the Church that gay men and women who are so called by God can live as faithful participants in the life of the Church and for the good of the world, bearing the self-denial that this may involve.  The problem isn’t that people aren’t willing to read the Bible literally.  The problem is that we have forgotten what it means to be the Church.