A friend sent me this morning a copy of New Testament scholar Scot McKnight’s take on my Touchstone article on Johnny Cash. Turns out, McKnight sees a parable here. He notes that Cash was mistreated by another generation of Southern Baptists because of his “Man in Black” persona and ties that to the fact that “emerging church” guru Brian McLaren was disinvited from speaking at a Kentucky Baptist Convention evangelism conference. Moreover, McKnight comments:
I have no real truck with the SBC in general, nor with Moore in general, but I find it mighty convenient to stand in line with Johnny now when the tough days of standing with him are over. Stand with the men and women in black, I say, and you’ll find yourself sometimes standing next to Jesus.
First of all, if the Southern Baptist Convention (or the larger evangelical community) vilified Johnny Cash, it is certainly difficult to see from here. Cash, a baptized Southern Baptist, was a frequent speaker at Billy Graham Crusades and other evangelistic events and wrote a book on the life of the apostle Paul (Man in White) with an evangelical publisher.
Second of all, yes, it is much easier for me to commend Johnny Cash now than it would have been during his tumultuous days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, since I was born in 1971.
Finally, the tie between Brian McLaren and Johnny Cash just doesn’t work. When Cash spoke of his conversion (what we call “giving his testimony”), he did so in orthodox evangelical terms of repentance, sin, and faith in Christ. McLaren is not speaking as a penitent to other penitents. He is speaking as a pastor and theologian. As such, he denies some things that conservative evangelicals (including Kentucky Baptists) consider to be essential for evangelism (such as the necessity of conscious faith in Christ for salvation and the reality of hell). The issue is not why the Kentucky Baptists disinvited McLaren, whom most of us consider a false teacher. The question is why he was invited at all. This is quite different from Cash’s stumbling moves toward repentance. In fact, it is the difference between the early Augustine and Arius. The difference between Cash’s sin-and-repentance authenticity and the manufactured faddish candles-and-incense “authenticity” of the “emerging church” movement is one of kind, not just degree.
As the Dixie Chicks once sang of the contemporary Nashville music scene, “They’ve got money but they don’t got Cash.” One might also say of the repackaged liberalism of the “emerging church,” everyone who wears dark turtlenecks is not a Man in Black. After all, there’s not really a line to walk if there’s no ring of fire.
