This week we welcome to the Ask Pastor John podcast, Dr. Russell Moore, a good friend of ours, who serves as the 8th president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. There are so many questions related to the church and culture in our inbox, and Dr.

Moore will help us out this week on the podcast, filling in for John Piper. And I want to begin the week by asking you, Dr. Moore, about that very thing we call religious liberty. In 1 Timothy 2, we see that religious liberty is a very good thing for the church.

Obviously, it's a good thing. But you believe religious liberty is at root not merely a political freedom, but a divine right to be defended. According to the Christian worldview, what are some transcendent principles behind religious liberty? Yeah, Tony, one of the problems that I think many Christians have is that we don't know who the villain is when we start thinking about issues of religious liberty.

I think there are a lot of Christians today who would say, "Let's just shrug off religious liberty concerns," because they assume that they're in the place of Jesus and the government's in the place of Pilate, and so let's just do what Jesus did and not speak in our own defense and let the government impose whatever sorts of restrictions it wants to impose.

Now, on the one hand, there's a good impulse behind that, and that impulse is that the gospel goes forward, regardless of what any government or any king or any dictator attempts to do. There's no stopping the advance of the church because Jesus promised this at Caesarea Philippi, and Jesus keeps his promise that he's going to build his church.

There's also a good impulse in the sense that the writer of Hebrews says we ought to be ready to be joyful even in the plundering of our property. And so there are good impulses there, but I think that that is wrongheaded, and here's why it's wrongheaded. The Bible says that God holds Caesar, holds governments accountable for the wielding of the sword in Romans chapter 13.

And so when we live in a democratic republic, the people ultimately are Caesar, that the people ultimately have accountability. And so the question is not simply are we going to be persecuted, although that's an important question, it's also are we going to be persecutors? Because if the government in our context is restricting people's religious freedom, we are restricting people's religious freedom.

And there are a number of theological and biblical principles that come into play. The first is a matter of lordship. The Bible says that God has given the sword to Caesar to be used in a very specific context to punish evildoers and to encourage the good. But the Bible makes very clear also that there are limits upon that power.

That's why in Revelation 13 we see a government that is a beast state, a government that has overstepped its bounds. So there's a matter of lordship here. Is the government over the conscience in order to direct worship and to direct the practice that comes out of that worship? That's what Peter and John were encountering when they said, "We are going to render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, but we're not going to render our consciences up when it comes to being forced, for instance, not to proclaim the name of Jesus." This is also a matter of gospel because what happens is the gospel cannot be enforced by the government.

You can't at the point of a sword have people become Christians because it's not the way the Spirit works. Nor can you restrict the advance of the gospel by the power of the government. How does the gospel go forward? It goes forward, the Apostle Paul says, by openly appealing, not by peddling the Word of God, but by openly appealing to the conscience.

So the government doesn't have the right to coerce and the government doesn't have the right to restrict the worship that comes from the heart. It's also a matter of the kingdom, our understanding of the kingdom of God. The Scripture tells us that Jesus has been given head over all things, over His body, which is the church, Ephesians 1.

And that church is to advance, the Scripture says, according to spiritual means. So there's a lot of confusion that happens these days about, for instance, the phrase "separation of church and state" because people have used separation of church and state to mean a separation of any religious motivation or conviction from the public square.

That's not what the separation of church and state means. It ultimately is something very biblical, which is to say the state has a responsibility held accountable before God to that responsibility, but the church also has a responsibility and a mission, and that mission is to be advanced with spiritual means.

And what that means, though, is that we have responsibilities as churches and we have responsibilities as citizens. The Apostle Paul appealed for his freedom. He appealed to his Roman citizenship for his liberty because the Apostle Paul knew this isn't simply about his rights. He's willing in all sorts of other places to surrender his rights.

He is appealing for those things because he does not believe that the courts are over his conscience when it comes to worship, and because he believes that this has implications for the advance of the gospel for other people. So I think what we need to be advocating for is the sort of pluralism in the public square that doesn't cause there to be less conversation, that causes there to be more conversation so that we are appealing to Muslims and to Hindus and to secularists about why we believe that the gospel is true, why we believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead.

We don't expect the government to do that for us, and we don't expect a government that's big enough to restrict us from doing that. And at the same time, we listen to those voices on the outside, and our ultimate hope is not that they would be silenced by the state.

We don't want that. We want instead to persuade people through the power of the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, that comes only to free consciences. We want liberty and Jesus for all. Thank you, Dr. Moore. I appreciate your thoughts on religious liberty. And Dr.

Moore serves as the 8th president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and he will be joining us all week to address this and other questions related to the church and culture. He is an author, blogger, podcast, and you'll see him appear from time to time on televised news programs, and you can keep up with him or try to keep up with him at russellmoore.com or on Twitter @DrMoore.

Speaking of Twitter, when our Twitter feed lights up with news of an evangelical leader who has chosen to come out and endorse same-sex marriage, what are we to do? I'll ask Dr. Moore tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.