Moody encourages believers to ‘unframe’ Christianity in Southwestern Seminary chapel message

Christians should “unframe” the Christianity of modern culture in order to show the faith in an authentic light, Josh Moody, senior pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Ill., said during the Jan. 29 chapel service at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

With a winter storm shutting down the Fort Worth campus part of the week, seminary President David S. Dockery welcomed students, faculty and staff to the chapel service, saying, “It’s so good to have everyone back on campus after the ice days.” 

He also noted guests present for the International Alliance of Christian Education (IACE) conference being held on campus, calling those attendees “our friends, colleagues, and partners in the shared work of distinctive Christ-centered education.” Dockery also serves as IACE president.

In introducing Moody, an IACE senior fellow and speaker for the conference, Dockery called him “a brilliant theologian, scholar, warm-hearted pastor” who has written extensively on various topics, including Jonathan Edwards.

“If you find a book by Josh Moody, I assure you it’s worth reading,” Dockery said. He noted Moody’s new book, Unframed, as an attempt to address some professing followers of Christ who are finding ways to back away from, or deconstruct, their faith.

“What this book really does is deconstruct the deconstructors” and address issues that are very much in our culture today, Dockery said. He encouraged the audience to listen carefully to the lecture, adding, “I think Josh Moody is God’s man to help speak to some of those issues.”

Moody, who grew up in London, England, studied the history of ideas at the University of Cambridge, focusing on the secular movement of the European enlightenment. “Of course, as I studied these European enlightenment figures, … I began to want to find a way of counteracting their claims,” he said.

Knowing he couldn’t simply use his own opinions in his papers, Moody began searching for a source to challenge these claims. One day while wandering through the Cambridge library stacks, “I stumbled upon probably the most brilliant and certainly most influential theologian in American church history, Jonathan Edwards,” he said. He discovered that Edwards “was formulating, at an erudite as well as more popular level, a deliberate biblical response to the burgeoning secularization of the enlightenment of his day; an enlightenment whose results we still live with,” he added.

Moody said this discovery helped him grasp how to respond to both secular modernism and postmodernism. The influence of postmodernism, he said, “is no less potent, despite being now less discussed, in the same way that fish hardly need to talk about water. Postmodernism, relativistic modernism, everything being about power—that’s the water we swim in; it’s the air we breathe.” Moody said he became convinced that postmodernism and modernism “was a cultural crisis of epistemology; that is, how we can know what we know.”

Moody said he later saw a number of students come to faith during a church revitalization near Yale. He developed an interest in statistics surrounding church attendance. Approaching the issue from a journalistic standpoint, Moody conducted a range of interviews with believers and non-believers, including an interview with a journalist who had started his work as a Christian, determined to defend the church in the media. However, “he found out so much negativity about the inner workings of the ‘church’ that he ended up leaving the faith,” Moody said.

Citing other examples of his interviews, Moody determined that Christianity is “susceptible to being framed as a mere power to dominate others … so that the end result is a profound misrepresentation of Christianity.

“Well, I thought, if people today are going to reject Christianity, let’s at least make sure they are rejecting the real thing,” he added. Moody believed Christianity needed to be unframed, which became the title of his book.

“We’re not merely putting on a new pair of glasses to view the world in a better way through a preferred set of lenses,” he said. “We are seeing [Jesus] as He is. Once we were blind; now we see. The blinkers are taken off, not new glasses put on. The veil has been removed, and now we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

Moody gave the audience three applications, or “uses,” as the Puritans would put it. First, he said, rediscover authority. “But I mean not our authority; His … we point away from ourselves to Him. What a huge challenge that is in our media-saturated celebrity age,” he said.

The second “use” Moody gave was to rediscover community. “Now, rediscovering community will require more than scheduling a few more potlucks,” he said with a smile. “It will require a commitment to the gathered Christian community, the local church that, for all its failings, is nonetheless the light of the nations, the hope of the world.”

The third and final “use,” he said was to regain the sense of sufficiency, “the sufficiency of Christ and the sufficiency of the Scriptures.” Not to make the Bible sufficient for math or to send a rocket to the moon, “but to let the Bible be sufficient for what it is designed for: teach, reproof, correct, train in righteousness, so the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

“Or, as Jesus so memorably dramatized in His parables, the sower sows the seed. And while there are soils who do not understand and are fruitless, the same seed in the good soil—the soil where the Word is understood—that soil does produce a bountiful purpose,” he added. “So this Word, this seed, is sufficient. It will not return to God empty but will accomplish what He has designed for it to do.”

View the entire chapel sermon here. Chapel is held in the MacGorman Chapel at 11 a.m. (CT) every Tuesday and Thursday and can be streamed live at swbts.live.