Off the Road

Explaining Some Missing Posts

To keep sleepy drivers from going off the road, highway engineers have installed “rumble strips” on the side to sound a warning: “You’re going off the road! Get back in your lane!” Recent responses to blog posts indicate I must have been dozing at the wheel and allowed Salvo’s vehicle to drift out of its lane, off the road.

Now that I have surveyed the situation, two recent posts, both occasioned by the new film The Essential Church, have been taken down, since their focus and concerns fall outside the editorial mission of Salvo. They should not have been posted in the first place.

I acknowledge that the topic of church-state relations is an extremely important one, framed both by our confession that all authority in heaven and earth belongs to Christ and by apostolic instruction for us to obey our government, which is instituted by God. Working out the tension between those two realities has been the task of pastoral and theological leadership in the church since the beginning. This theological and pastoral responsibility has been sometimes neglected and sometimes mishandled, but judging when, where, and how in specific detail lies outside of Salvo’s mission. Drifting out of our lane into this topic on our blog was due to a failure of editorial oversight on my part. I apologize to any readers who may have been surprised, offended, or confused by the posts.