Before we're Americans, we're Christians. And so we have to be informed by a certain moral sense, which means that we need to speak up for moral principle and for gospel principle regardless of who that offends.

Charleston was where America split apart in 1861. Maybe it's where America comes together in 2015.

I think Confederate Battle Flag is a symbol that causes a great deal of division and reminds us of a really hurtful legacy and past... I think there are some Southerners, black and white, who feel as though the rest of the country looks down on the South as uneducated and backward. And for some people, that was a symbol of defiance against that.

Before we're Americans, we're Christians. And so we have to be informed by a certain moral sense, which means that we need to speak up for moral principle and for gospel principle regardless of who that offends.

An 'almost gospel' doesn't raise a corpse.

The biblical picture is not one of an upward, linear progress or a precipitous, downward decline. It is a more complicated picture of a fallen world in which there is a gospel of power.

We have to be the people who stand up and say look, vigilance is good and prudence is good. But a kind of irrational fear that leads itself to demagogic rhetoric is something that we have to say no - no, we're not going to go there.