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Transcript: The Briefing 06-26-15

The Briefing

June 26, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Friday, June 26, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Supreme Court affirms Obamacare, exposing serious responsibility of interpreting texts

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States handed down one of the most anticipated decisions of this term, not the even more anticipated decision on same-sex marriage. This decision handed down yesterday has to do with the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. In a 6-3 decision, the court allowed the Affordable Care Act to stand basically as written. What didn’t happen in this case is the bigger news. What didn’t happen is that the Supreme Court didn’t strike down the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional and that is the huge story here. Basically this doesn’t change much. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

From a Christian worldview perspective, the most important issue in this case is what it reveals about differences among Americans and even among the justices of the Supreme Court, in this case most particularly on how a text is to be interpreted and that’s of crucial importance when the text in this case is the Constitution of the United States. In the legislation, now known as the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress in 2010, that we need to note passed without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. In that act we find the phrase,

“An exchange established by the state.”

That portion of the law has to do with how Congress authorized the spending of tax money to subsidize individual Americans buying healthcare insurance and the law clearly stated that the subsidies were to be available when a state had established a so-called exchange as defined by the law. But in the case of states that did not establish those exchanges, the federal government was still extending the same subsidy by means of a national exchange. The case was brought against the Obamacare legislation and against the United States government by several people, including some attorneys general in the states who accused the government of acting outside the limitations of the law that Congress had adopted and that the president, in this case President Obama, had signed into law. Again, that was back in 2010. The incontrovertible fact is that the law signed by President Obama and adopted by Congress was a law that included the fact that the subsidies were to be made available to individuals when and only when as the law says an exchange was established by the state. So the question before the Supreme Court of United States is whether or not in the first place, the United States government was acting outside the boundaries of those words.

The clear and unavoidable truth in this case acknowledged by both sides in terms of the argument is that the federal government is acting outside of those specific words found in the legislation. In writing the majority opinion for the court, the Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said,

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them.”

The Chief Justice acknowledged the problem with the words, but he said that it was the responsibility of the court to try to determine what Congress’s intention was in passing the law and uphold that intention. In a very revealing sentence the Chief Justice said,

“In this instance,” he wrote, “the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”

So here you have the supposedly conservative Chief Justice of the United States saying that there are times when the words have to be ignored in order to get to the intention of Congress. In this case, for the second time the Chief Justice of the United States basically rescued the Obamacare legislation from a constitutional crisis. He did so in the Sebelius case in 2012, he did so again in 2015. In 2012, the Chief joined the majority and wrote the opinion and what he did then was to rescue the Obamacare legislation from the fact that the President of the United States had argued specifically that it was not a tax. And Congress adopted the legislation; while also insisting this is not a tax. But then it left the open question on what constitutional authority did Congress and the government then act to intervene in this way in the American economy? To rescue the Affordable Care Act in 2012, the Chief Justice argued that it was allowable under Congress’s power in the Constitution to tax. So you had the President and Congress saying isn’t a tax, but if it wasn’t a tax it was unconstitutional. The Chief Justice of the United States for the majority back in 2012 rescued the law by saying it is a tax after all, regardless of what the president and Congress said. That was very controversial at the time, but it basically means that the Chief Justice and a majority of his colleagues had decided that they would rescue the law and find a way to do so.

That’s basically what happened again yesterday and that’s why this is actually so important. It’s more important than the Affordable Care Act, it’s more important than any single piece of legislation. Because what you have in the 6-3 split on the United States Supreme Court yesterday is at least two dramatically different ways of reading a text. Reading the text of the legislation and reading the text of the Constitution. Both sides agreed that the government is acting in violation or at least outside the authorization of the law that was adopted in 2010, but it was clear that the majority was willing to separate from the words in order to associate with the intention of the legislation. But in so doing, they also cited the fact that it would’ve led to effects they didn’t want to see. They didn’t want to see millions of people eliminated from the tax subsidy. So what we’re seeing here is what might be called an outcome based understanding of the law. You decide what outcome is appropriate and then you find the legal argument that will support it. That’s not supposed to be the way the Supreme Court of the United States works, but it’s worked that way now for a very long time.

Once again in a scathing dissent, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said of his colleagues in the majority that the ruling was quite absurd. He called it,

“Interpretive jiggery-pokery.”

In this case, Scalia said, the problem with these words is that they mean what they say and they were intended to mean just that. Scalia pointed out that Congress had the opportunity to write the law differently but Congress wrote the law this way. This is the law the President of the United States signed into effect. These are the words, said Justice Scalia, that didn’t matter. This is not some kind of typographical error; indeed it was an error in the law. An error that the administration tried to fix by its own bureaucratic action and an error that requires the law as it is written to be disregarded in favor of the law as those who now support it want it to be.

Now when it comes to this great divide over worldview one of the major proponents for that more liberal interpretation of a text come from, for instance, the editorial board of the New York Times. In their editorial response to the decision yesterday the editors of the New York Times said that it was ridiculous,

“That an ambiguous four-word phrase buried deep in the 900-page law eliminates health insurance for millions of lower-income Americans — was preposterous.”

Now the most interesting aspect of that sentence in this editorial is this – they’re not actually talking about the words of the law at all. They’re talking about what they would see as a negative effect had the decision gone otherwise. Now one footnote to this is the reason why the Supreme Court decision was so important. It’s because the obvious question is this, why wouldn’t Congress and the president fix the law if the law needs to be fixed? And the answer is they could not now get a majority in Congress to fix the law. So what they were looking at is the necessity of being rescued from the law by the Supreme Court of the United States and that’s exactly what did happen. Christians have a particular urgency in understanding why the interpretation of a text is so important. Let’s just take this law or let’s go even beyond it to the Constitution of the United States. Are we to be bound by the words of the Constitution? Well the reality is simply this; if we are not bound to those words then we’re really not bound at all. The Constitution is no longer the governing document of the country, rather the governing power is how nine justices of the Supreme Court, or least a majority of those justices, will interpret the Constitution at any given time. The Constitution then becomes just a document that has some historical meaning but we’re no longer bound to that historical meaning. We’re not even bound to the specific words.

Now it’s one thing when we’re talking about legislation, it’s another more important issue when we’re talking about the Constitution of the United States. But we have to recognize that we as Christians understand the ultimate question in interpreting a text is how we interpret and read the Bible, how we understand Holy Scripture. And when it comes to development such as the moral revolution we’re now experiencing, note how many on the theological left are now saying we don’t have to be bound by the words of Scripture. We can find some inner intention, some trajectory of argument and we can claim that if the apostle Paul were writing now he would agree with us. The ultimate problem with that of course is that our ultimate authority isn’t the apostle Paul, it is the Scripture. It is the Holy Spirit who inspired Paul to write those letters. And as is true of Paul’s letters and for every other word of Scripture, it is exactly what the Holy Spirit intended us not just to have in the past but to have in the present.

Our entire worldview is revealed by how we understand the responsibility of interpreting a text. The key issue for Christians always comes down to this, is the Bible actually God’s word? If it is, and it is, then we are bound to the actual words. What Justice Scalia called “interpretive jiggery-pokery” isn’t limited to the Supreme Court; it’s not limited to constitutional law. To a far greater and more tragic extent, it’s found among some liberal theologians as well. Oddly enough, the Supreme Court of United States handed us that lesson once again yesterday. It’s a lesson we dare not miss.

2) Right to die for depressed clear consequence of secular humanist movement in Belgium

Next, another issue that’s right at the heart of the Christian worldview and its intersection with contemporary culture, the issue of euthanasia continues to be a developing issue before us and in the most frightening and horrifying way. Now we have an article in The New Yorker, one of the most important secular magazines in America entitled,

“The Death Treatment”

It’s by Rachel Aviv, she asked the question,

“When should people with a non-terminal illness be helped to die?”

Her article originates from Belgium where the movement for assisted suicide and then doctor assisted suicide and then euthanasia has developed to the point that even children and teenagers are now considered to be candidates for euthanasia. We talked a few days ago about a similar development in the Netherlands, but this story is datelined from Belgium and it is a most ominous story indeed. Aviv tells us that it is increasingly common there where people who do not have a terminal disease at all to ask for and to receive euthanasia. They are killed by the action of a physician simply because they have decided that now is the time they want to die. As Aviv points out, this is now reaching even the cases in which there is an underlying psychiatric problem not a physical problem at all. When she asked the question, “when should people with a non-terminal illness be helped to die?”, we need to note that in asking the question she has already seemed to accept the fact that there would be some point and there would be some people who should be helped to die.

But one of the fundamental affirmations of the Christian worldview is that we have no right even to ask the question in that way. When we ask when, we are accepting the fact that at some point, it would be acceptable. The Christian worldview tells us that it is an act of creaturely overreach to determine that we will decide when we will die. The Christian worldview points out, we don’t decide to be born, that life is God’s gift and that every single human life is precious from the moment of conception until natural death. To demand control over the timing of our death in this way is actually an act of human hubris. It is an act of human arrogance and overreach and as we have seen once you bind to this logic, you can say you’re going to keep it at some point in society where it would be available only to those who have a supposedly terminal diagnosis and are the end stages of disease.

But as this article in The New Yorker makes clear, even a secular society is asking some basic questions about a country that seems to be so determined to support euthanasia that it is now extending a so-called right of euthanasia to those who have no physical ailment at all, who are merely suffering from something like depression. Every single line in this essay demands and deserves our attention. But for the sake of time I’m going to focus on the most remarkable section of the essay. It’s the section of this essay published in a very influential secular magazine that points to the fact that there is a basic theological issue that is at stake here. Aviv writes and I quote,

“The right to a dignified death is viewed as an accomplishment of secular humanism, one of seven belief systems that are officially recognized by the government. Belgian humanism, which was deeply influenced by the nineteenth-century Freemasonry movement, offered an outlet for those who felt oppressed by the Church, but it has increasingly come to resemble the kind of institution that it once defined itself against. Since 1981, the Belgian government has paid for “humanist counsellors,” the secular equivalent of clergy, to provide moral guidance in hospitals, prisons, and the armed forces. Humanist values are also taught in state schools, in a course called non-confessional ethics, which is taken by secular children from first through twelfth grade, while religious students pursue theological studies. The course emphasizes autonomy, free inquiry, democracy, and an ethics based on reason and science, not on revelation.”

Now to be honest, when I read this article I could hardly believe my eyes. That sentence sounds almost as if it were written by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970s, a major Christian apologist who defined where secular humanism was going and now almost as if Schaeffer’s prophecy has come true, here you have that paragraph in this week’s edition of The New Yorker and it goes on. Aviv cites Jan Bernheim, an emeritus professor of medicine at the Free University of Brussels, who is a specialist in ethics and the quality of life. He told her that euthanasia,

“Part of a philosophy of taking control of one’s own existence and improving the objective conditions for happiness. There is an arrow of evolution that goes toward ever more reducing of suffering and maximizing of enjoyment.”

That is an absolutely stunning statement. Here you have a professor of ethics in an institution that was once committed to the Christian worldview, in which he says that there is an evolution of ethics that is towards enjoyment and life as defined we then understand by enjoyment in which suffering is to be minimized and eventually to be denied to the point of ending one’s life rather than facing the reality of suffering. As we note, we’re not just talking here about the suffering that might come in terms of intractable terminal disease, we’re talking about the suffering that might just be as this article frankly makes clear, coming short of what one defines as happiness.

But what’s more important than anything else in this article and it’s a very long and extremely significant article is how Rachel Aviv gets to the point that worldview is the ultimate issue. The ethic of euthanasia could only have emerged and did emerge in a secular humanist revival that took place in that country. In exchange of the Christian worldview, which would uphold the dignity of every single human life and God’s authority over our circumstances of life to a worldview that says that human beings are autonomous free agents, we can decide the qualities of our own life that are acceptable. And if we do not have a life that meets our acceptable qualities we can ask and demand that a physician end our life. But even as we had noted that the California State Senate just days ago moved forward with an assisted suicide bill, perhaps the most frightening question for us is just how long it will take for this logic in its full force to find its own momentum on American soil, and in American minds, in American hearts.

3) International Yoga Day inaugurated in effort to make clear Indian, Hindu roots of Yoga

Next, when it comes to worldview and the intersection of worldview and culture. One of the key issues actually is yoga. Very interesting development not here in the United States but in India, where just a matter of days ago the Prime Minister of India made a very important point by declaring international yoga day and getting it acknowledged by the United Nations. That’s not so important as the fact that his purpose in doing so was very explicitly according to his own words,

“To recapture yoga for its Indian and essentially Hindu roots and to take it away from the marketplace of Western consumerism.”

The international media reporting on the first international day of yoga pointed out that history is very clear. Yoga began as a Hindu religious practice that was an outgrowth of Hindu doctrine and of the Hindu worldview, a polytheistic worldview that is to say the very least directly at odds with the monotheism of biblical religion and Christianity in particular. Now a similar controversy on yoga emerged some years ago and I was quite clear in articles I wrote at the time, that the Orthodox biblical understanding of Christianity simply doesn’t allow for the syncretism of Hindu religious practice. I also point to the fact that even those who brought yoga to the United States were very, very clear that it was a Hindu religious practice and that the very motions and especially the meditations involved in yoga were tied to essential teachings of the Hindu faith.

Now what was interesting to me at the time is that what I was articulating then was the position that the vast majority of Christians around the world had understood to be patently true, but given the fact that American consumer culture has adopted yoga in so many ways. There were many Americans, including many American Christians who were shocked; absolutely shocked that Hinduism had anything to do with yoga whatsoever. But in The Economist this week, there was an article entitled,

“How far can you stretch?”

The subtitle,

“Christianity, Islam and yoga.”

And in this article, published by a magazine with no theological axe to grind whatsoever, it points out the fact that yoga has been very controversial from the very intersection of yoga with Western Christianity from the very beginning. The Economist writes,

“In Western nations which are historically Christian but increasingly diverse in their approach to things spiritual, the very ambivalence of yoga (call it flexibility if you like) is one of its selling points. Depending on which school of yoga you follow and how far you go, it can be a way of limbering up the body and easing tensions, or it can involve the pursuit of extra-ordinary spiritual experiences, culminating in samadhi, variously described as union with, or absorption into, ultimate reality. It is agreed that yoga has its roots in the Hindu tradition and that it constitutes one of the main schools of Hinduism; but it can of course be practiced as a physical and even mental discipline by people who are ignorant of, or even mildly resistant to the teachings of Hinduism.”

That’s an amazingly accurate sentence. It is actually probably more accurate than the author of the sentence even understood. Going back to what was written here it says, there’s no major problem for many people being involved in yoga so long as those people,

“Are ignorant of,” or listen, “even mildly resistant to the teachings of Hinduism.”

That’s a direct quote from the article and that’s again, very accurate. So long as one is only mildly resistant to the teachings of Hinduism, there is no problem. But that raises the question, how can a Christian committed to the knowledge of the one true and living God be just mildly resistant to Hinduism that has so many thousands of gods, they can’t even offer an official count of the number of deities in the Hindu religion? The article acknowledges that the Catholic Church has distanced itself from yoga and it points to the fact that just a matter of days ago the Greek Orthodox Church condemned it as incompatible with its own theology. The article then turns to evangelical Christians and cites me saying that I have warned Christians,

“To stay away from stretches.”

Actually, my problem is not with Christians stretching their bodies. My problem is with Christians who are stretching Christian theology beyond the breaking point. The Economist writes,

“In his attack on yoga, Mr. Mohler described India as “almost manically syncretistic” in other words, prone to the mixing of religious ideas.”

The Economist then concludes,

“But the fact is that most Western societies, insofar as they think about religion at all, are pretty syncretistic too.  That puts traditional Christian or Muslim leaders on the back foot when they try to argue against the asanas.”

Now let’s remind ourselves that syncretism in this context means the mixing of religions and the mixing of theologies, and The Economist is undoubtedly right, that’s exactly what’s going on in secular Western societies. But it’s exactly what must not go on in Christian churches and it must go on in the lives of Christians. Once again here, the problem from a Christian worldview perspective of yoga isn’t in the stretching of the body. It is the acceptance of the larger Hindu worldview that says, by the stretching of the body and by the meditation that can go on with those exercises one can achieve a new spiritual state. The God who said, thou shall have no other gods before me is a God who profoundly excluded syncretism from faithfulness.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.

I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 06-26-15

1) Supreme Court affirms Obamacare, exposing serious responsibility of interpreting texts

Supreme Court Allows Nationwide Health Care Subsidies, New York Times (Adam Liptak)

The Supreme Court Saves Obamacare, Again, New York Times (Editorial Board)

King et al. v. Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al., Supreme Court

2) Right to die for depressed clear consequence of secular humanist movement in Belgium

The Death Treatment, The New Yorker (Rachel Aviv)

3) International Yoga Day inaugurated in effort to make clear Indian, Hindu roots of Yoga

How far can you stretch?, The Economist

Transcript: The Briefing 06-25-15

The Briefing

 

June 25, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

It’s Thursday, June 25, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Tsarnaev sentencing stark example of difference between mercy in Christianity and Islam

Once again, an American courtroom became the scene for a major moral drama and one that demands that we look at it closely. And once again, the city was Boston, and again the man at the center was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now convicted of 30 counts including several capital counts of murder for his involvement with his late brother in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. What happened yesterday in Boston was that for the first time Dzhokhar Tsarnaev spoke and it came as his sentence was announced by the judge in the same court room. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said,

“I would like to apologize to the victims and the survivors,” he said. “I did do it”

Later he said,

“I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering that I’ve caused you, for damage that I’ve done.”

He went on also to address the court by saying,

“I am Muslim. My religion is Islam. I pray to Allah to bestow his mercy on those affected in the bombing and their families. I pray for your healing. I ask Allah to have mercy on me, my brother and my family,” he said.

At the end of the hearing, U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Junior looked at Tsarnaev and said,

“I sentence you to the penalty of death by execution.”

Time and again we have found ourselves looking very recently at these moral dramas being played out before our eyes in the nation’s court rooms. What we’re looking at here is a moral drama in which the issues of guilt and innocence of right and wrong are unavoidable. Even in a society that has increasingly decided on a whole host of moral issues to embrace a certain relativism, you’ll notice the absolute lack of moral relativism in that courtroom in Boston and the reason for that is quite straightforward, no one can look at these premeditated murders, the murders that took place along with the grievous wounding of so many in the Boston Marathon, the deliberate murder of a Boston police officer in the days afterwards. So what we’re looking at here is an evidence of moral evil that simply doesn’t allow any sane person to find any kind of refuge in a kind of moral relativism. The announcement of the death penalty yesterday was not a surprise, a federal jury had already found that he was guilty of the crimes and in a separate phase had sentenced him to death. But the official declaration of that sentence is what took place in that Boston federal courtroom yesterday and the sentencing of death by the federal judge was a formal declaration of how the society through its own legal mechanisms had afforded this defendant every right of a legal defense and yet found him guilty.

Of course, we also know that in the course of the trial his own attorney on the very first opportunity pointed to his own defendant and said he did it and then Dzhokhar Tsarnaev yesterday said I did it. To use the exact expression, he said “I did do it.” In recent days and in other court rooms most particularly in Charleston, South Carolina, we have confronted some of the most basic Christian questions of forgiveness and in the case of what took place in Boston yesterday there was a marked distinction in terms of the response that was given to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for those who were the loved ones of those who were his victims.

As the Boston Globe reported yesterday afternoon, Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of eight-year-old Martin Richard who was the youngest victim of the blast denounced Tsarnaev in court for choosing to help his brother Tamerlan wage the attack, which as the Boston Globe says not only killed Martin but inflicted grievous injuries on the rest of the family. The parent said in their statement,

“His attorneys told us the truth of what we already knew. He was guilty. He could have stopped his brother, he could’ve walked away.”

The Richards also pointed to the fact that what we are looking at here is not just the planting of these bombs with the intention to murder and to maim, we’re also looking at the fact that days later, these same two brothers murdered an MIT police officer, a man by the name of Sean Collier, he was murdered in cold blood days after the bombing as the brothers were seeking to evade the police. In an expression of moral clarity, the parents of the dead eight-year-old boy looked to his killer and spoke of him saying,

“He chose to do nothing to prevent all this from happening. He chose hate. He chose destruction. He chose death.”

Jean Rogers, the sister of the murdered MIT police officer said of Tsarnaev,

“He ran his own brother over with a car; he had no issues shooting mine in the head. He spit in the face of the American dream. He is a coward and a liar.”

Now let me go back to the statement that was made by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as he spoke for the first time in any meaningful way in the courtroom in which he was sentenced to death. You’ll recall his words were,

“I would like to apologize to the victims and the survivors. I did do it. I am sorry for the lies I have taken, for the suffering I have caused and for the terrible damage I have done.”

Now we can look at those words and certainly they are morally significant. Here you do have Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to some extent taking some responsibility for what he did. But you’ll notice he spoke in no detail of the rather detailed murders he had undertaken with his brother. He did not speak in terms of taking full moral responsibility. The word apologize here is a very weak moral word. He did not ask for the forgiveness of those who were the loved ones and relatives of those he maimed and murdered. It’s also very, very important for Christians looking at this statement to understand the extension of what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had to say. He said,

“I am Muslim. My religion is Islam. I pray to Allah to bestow his mercy on those affected in the bombing and their families. I pray for your healing.” He then went on, “I ask Allah to have mercy on me, my brother and my family.”

Now Christians looking at that need to remember that there is a massive theological chasm between Christianity and Islam on this very issue. One of the central understandings of Christianity as taught by Christ and revealed in the New Testament is that we have the assurance of the forgiveness of sins that is based upon the atonement that was accomplished by Jesus Christ in his death, burial and resurrection. As a matter of fact, in the New Testament John reminds us if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. You’ll notice that that is a divine promise of the extension of mercy and forgiveness to those who confess their sins and of course that letter was written to Christians. Those who find their identity in Christ, who have confessed Christ as Savior and have repented of their sins, we are promised that if we do confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. These things are written says the New Testament, in order that we may know that we have the gift of everlasting life.

But in contrast and this is central for our Christian understanding, the Muslim understanding of Allah does not promise any mercy or any forgiveness to any specific person. That is very, very important for us to understand. Here Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is praying as an informed Muslim, he is asking that Allah will have mercy on the loved ones of those whom he has killed and hurt and that God will have mercy on himself and his brother and his family. That is a very characteristic Muslim prayer. But there is no doctrine of atonement in Islam, there is no understanding of the personality of God, of his moral character in which he will extend mercy to any sinner at any specific time. In contrast, according to Muslim theology Allah is a force of sheer will. He is not obligated to extend mercy or forgiveness to anyone, at any time, under any circumstances. As he wills, he wills. So as we see that moral drama that was played out in that Boston courtroom yesterday, it was also a theological drama and it’s very important that Christians understanding the gospel of Jesus Christ understand the difference, the difference that was displayed in that courtroom yesterday.

2) Time limit on religious liberty for education institutions evident cause of culture shift

While we’re talking about court rooms next, as we know, the big decision still remaining before the United States Supreme court are to be handed down today, tomorrow or Monday or Tuesday of next week at the latest. These include decisions related to ObamaCare and most centrally and certainly central to our concern, the looming decision of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Late yesterday, the New York Times moved a story by Laurie Goodstein and Adam Liptak entitled,

“Schools Fear Gay Marriage Ruling Could End Tax Exemptions.”

This gets right to the heart of what we’ve been discussing on this program and I’ve written about in terms of the threat to religious liberty. It will be represented by a decision that legalizes same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Something very important we need to notice here, we who have been talking about this for some time had been told repeatedly from the secular left that it is alarmism to raise these issues. But now you have the New York Times raising the very issue with the very same arguments coming just days, perhaps even hours before the Supreme Court rules. Goodstein and Liptak write,

“Conservative religious schools all over the country forbid same-sex relationships, from dating to couples’ living in married-student housing, and they fear they will soon be forced to make a wrenching choice.”

Here is exactly how these two reporters phrase that choice,

“If the Supreme Court this month finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the schools say they will have to abandon their policies that prohibit gay relationships or eventually risk losing their tax-exempt status.”

Well, indeed, that’s what we have been saying for a matter of not just weeks and months, but years now. But as the decision looms before us, these issues are becoming far more acute and we need to remember that back in April when oral arguments were held in this case before the very court, the Supreme Court of United States, one associate justice, Samuel Alito and the Chief Justice of the United States, John G Roberts Jr., both address these very issues as they were asking questions of the attorneys pressing for the legalization of same-sex marriage.

In the most important of these exchanges the Chief Justice turned to the solicitor general of the United States, representing the Obama Administration for same-sex marriage in that court, the Chief Justice asking pointedly if a religious institution tries to operate by its religious principles in terms of married student housing will they be forced to choose between their tax-exempt status and that married student housing on their convictions? And you’ll recall the solicitor general said it will be an issue. The reporters for the New York Times yesterday get to the other issues that are involved,

“Married housing is one concern identified in the letter. Dating policies prohibiting same-sex contact are another, along with questions about whether religious institutions would have to extend benefits to same-sex spouses of employees.”

This article is pointing to a letter signed by 70 Christian college, university and seminary presidents, I am among them, registering these very concerns about the impact of this kind of decision on the religious liberty of our own institutions. To put the matter bluntly, the liberty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to reflect and operate by and to teach the convictions of Southern Baptist Churches drawn from Scripture in agreement with the church and its definition of marriage throughout thousands of years. That is exactly what is at stake.

You recall as I said, the solicitor general of the United States said in response to the Chief Justice, it will be an issue. The New York Times quotes Douglas Laycock, a very respected law Professor at the University of Virginia who said the solicitor general’s response to Justice Alito was ill considered,

“Church leaders are worried about this because there is a certain obvious logic to Justice Alito’s question.”

Well, of course there. But then the reporters write this,

“He”, meaning Mr. Laycock, “added that it was unimaginable that any administration of either party would try to deny a tax exemption anytime soon to a religious institution based on its views on homosexuality. “When gay rights looks like race does today, where you have a handful of crackpots still resisting,” he said, “you might see an administration picking a fight.”

Well that’s extremely revealing, far more revealing than Professor Laycock certainly understood or intended himself to be. First of all he says here that no administration of either party would politically pay the price of denying a tax exemption, then look at the words “anytime soon.” Those words “anytime soon” are extremely important. How soon is anytime soon? How long does anytime soon last? Given the moral revolution we’re experiencing, I can imagine anytime soon might expire before this year does, before it reaches the month of December.

Another law professor, this one Richard Garnett at the University of Notre Dame’s Law School, said that sort of analysis doesn’t do much. That is, Professor Laycock’s analysis doesn’t do much to calm religious schools concerns. Professor Garnett said,

“Although many people insist that this will not happen,” he said, “they tend to rely on political predictions — which are probably accurate, in the short term — and not on in-principle arguments or distinctions.”

Well, notice again. Here you have another law professor saying this probably isn’t going to happen “in the short term.” Again, I ask how long is the short term? Or how short is the short term? In the final analysis, these words of assurance from these two law professors turn out to be anything but. They turn out to be an announcement that there is a time limit on religious liberty for Christian institutions. They will not bend the knee to Caesar on this issue and at least some secular observers get it. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles, is one of the most respected constitutional scholars in this country, said that religious schools are concerned for good reason. He said,

“If I were a conservative Christian (which I most certainly am not),” he added, “I would be very reasonably fearful, not just as to tax exemptions but as to a wide range of other programs — fearful that within a generation or so, my religious beliefs would be treated the same way as racist religious beliefs are.”

That is the logic we are seeing. But my response to Professor Volokh is this; it will not take a generation, not even close. I don’t even think it will take a decade. I don’t think will take a half a decade. There is every realistic expectation that those who are pushing this revolution will push it fast and faster still. As a matter of fact, many of the legal architects of these arguments have been telling us all along that this is precisely what they will do. I’m going to keep this article on file and I’m going to keep it close at hand, just to remind those who wrote it and those who are quoted in the article of just how short the short-term turns out to be.

3) Marijuana stigma declines as actual danger of marijuana consumption increases

Next, we need to talk for a moment about how societies work and how moral issues begin to shape or to reshape a society. Every single society includes a moral judgment that is rightly described as stigma. Every society decides that certain acts, certain behaviors are outside the bounds and if they are outside the bounds, then they are stigmatized. To do such a thing is to bring about the moral judgment, the negative moral judgment of the society. It’s easy to look around us and see some of the things that society stigmatizes right now. Just to take one obvious example, society stigmatizes any abuse of an animal or a child and rightly so. And that is the kind of stigma that is required for a society to operate on any kind of consistent or sane moral principles. You can’t have a culture; you certainly can’t have a civilization without an understanding of what kind behaviors are to be stigmatized. What kind of behaviors are to bring a negative moral judgment as a consensus of the entire society?

But one of the things we need to note is that in this great moral revolution we are experiencing, one of the shifts is a shift in stigma and is not only related to sexual behaviors and romantic issues, it’s also related to the issue of marijuana. That’s an issue that came quite clearly to the fore, in an article in the Los Angeles Times written by William J. Bennett and Seth Leibsohn. Williams J. Bennett is the former United States Secretary of Education and he was the first drug Czar, the first director of national drug policy in the United States. Leibsohn is chairman of Arizonans for responsible drug policy. Secretary Bennett served as Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush appointed in the nation’s first national drug control officer, the so-called drug czar. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Bennett writing along with Leibsohn gets right to the question of stigma. He says this,

“Twenty years ago, drug dealers were seen for what they were — criminal and dangerous elements in our society. People who sold marijuana were considered losers, in the business of harming our children. Parents warned their kids to stay away from those known to use drugs.

“But thanks to the marijuana lobby, what was once scorned is hyped and celebrated — even as the drug has become more potent, with THC, the intoxicating chemical, present at much higher levels than in the 1990s. Dealers run state-sanctioned dispensaries, lobby to further legalize their product and receive positive media coverage when doing so. The dangers have gone up and the stigma has gone down.”

That is a very, very interesting moral statement. That’s one of those statements that leads us to think for a moment. How is it that in a sane society you can have the moral danger go up at the same time that the stigma goes down? Bennett and Leibsohn point back that if you go back a generation there is bipartisan support for intentionally stigmatizing drug use, in this case including marijuana. As a matter of fact, marijuana has been well-documented as the so-called entry drug, whereby people who go on to even more dangerous drugs will trace their original use of drugs back to marijuana. And as Bennett and Leibsohn point out, the marijuana that is being celebrated and sold today is considerably more potent even than the marijuana that was stigmatized in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, until more recently.

Tracing some of the effects of this aspect of the moral revolution, the authors point to the fact that in Colorado, where marijuana became legal in 2012, adolescent use is 56% higher than the national average. They go on to write furthermore, the science is overwhelmingly clear that marijuana use is harmful to human health, particularly among children and young adults. They go to a study publicly released by the American Medical Association in 2013, let’s just note that’s not ancient history, when it came out against the legalization of marijuana with the AMA writing,

“Current evidence supports, at minimum, a strong association of cannabis use with the onset of psychiatric disorders. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to harm.”

It is so interesting that at this moment in the moral revolution two of the most interesting fronts two of the most important fronts are marriage and marijuana. Who would’ve expected this just a generation ago? But the key question is the one raised by Bennett and Leibsohn in this article, how can it be in a sane society that the danger is going up in the moral stigma is going down? That’s a question that every American should face and face clearly.

4) Anne Gaylor’s death sad comparison to Christian hope in death

Today I close with yet another obituary, this for Anne Gaylor, who died at age 88. The headline in the obituary by Sam Roberts,

“Anne Gaylor, Battler for freedom from religion.”

It turns out that Anne Gaylor, who almost reached the age of 90, was a very prominent nonbeliever. She became a principal founder in the 1970s of the group known as the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which as Roberts says,

“Bills itself as the nation’s largest group of atheists and agnostics.”

Roberts goes on to say, and from a worldview perspective and from a Christian understanding, this is really important. He writes,

“Even in death, she held to her principles. Having already arranged to be cremated, she left a handwritten list of instructions with her family that explicitly ordered “No memorial,” and specified that a small tombstone be inscribed “Feminist — Activist — Freethinker.”

Roberts says,

“No one could dispute those characterizations, not even the adversaries whose vitriolic passions she provoked, first by advocating abortion rights and raising money for poor women unable to afford to terminate their pregnancies, and then by singling out religion as “the root cause of women’s oppression.”

Roberts writes about Anne Gaylor that she,

“Never minced words, beginning with the provocative name of her group.”

She said,

“I’ve never liked euphemisms. If you have something to say, say it.”

And she did say what was on her mind. She said,

“More people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other reason,” Ms. Gaylor said. She branded the Bible “a grim fairy tale” and preached that “nothing fails like prayer.” She wrote a book titled “Abortion Is a Blessing” and declared unabashedly that “in the kind of world I want to live in, all children would be wanted.”

Let’s just point out in the world she said she wanted to live in, and by the way that’s the world we now live in, millions of these children are aborted, murdered in the womb, even before they are born.

In forming this organization the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Roberts says that,

“The group invoked the 19th-century term freethinker to describe someone who forms an opinion about religion on the basis of reason, rather than faith, tradition or authority. The Gaylors formally described the organization’s goals as educating the public about “nontheism” and protecting the constitutional principle of separation of church and state. The foundation now claims more than 20,000 members.”

But listen to the sadness in the last paragraph of this obituary,

“Ms. Gaylor’s final instructions to her family were far more personal. After dictating the text of her tombstone, she wrote, “Please plant something flowering when weather permits.” Then she told them: “Take care of each other.”

There’s something horrifyingly sad about those words, there’s something horrifyingly sad about this entire obituary. Here you have a woman who hated the Bible by her own words and loved abortion so much she called abortion a blessing. But at the end of her life after she had ordered her own cremation and that simple and very straightforward tombstone, she says to her family “take care of each other.”

Just a couple of days ago I made reference on The Briefing to the New York Times obituary of Elizabeth Elliott, the widow of the missionary martyr, Jim Elliott and of the story of her life that was so saturated by the gospel. In a span of just a few days, her obituary appeared and this obituary appeared. Now I’m not the only person who reads the obituaries in the New York Times. I can only wonder how many people reading those obituaries, those two in particular, understood the difference, the infinite and eternal difference between the obituaries written about these two women who died at almost the same age, at almost the same time.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 06-25-15

1) Tsarnaev sentencing stark example of difference between mercy in Christianity and Islam

Tsarnaev apologizes for Boston Marathon bombing, Boston Globe (Patricia Wen, Kevin Cullen, Milton J. Valencia, John R. Ellement and Martin Finucane)

Boston Marathon Bomber Says He’s Sorry for the First Time, New York Times (AP)

2) Time limit on religious liberty for education institutions evident cause of culture shift

Schools Fear Impact of Gay Marriage Ruling on Tax Status, New York Times (Laurie Goodstein and Adam Liptak)

3) Marijuana stigma declines as actual danger of marijuana consumption increases

What happened to the marijuana stigma?, Los Angeles Times (William J. Bennett and Seth Leibsohn)

4) Anne Gaylor’s death sad parallel to Christian hope in death

Anne Gaylor, 88, Dies; Guarded Wall Between Church and State, New York Times (Sam Roberts)

Transcript: The Briefing 06-24-15

The Briefing

June 24, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Wednesday, June 24, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Supreme Court’s leftward trend under Roberts shaped by kinds of questions Court faces

The Supreme Court is as we all know, one of three constitutionally coequal branches of government. And yet that phrase coequal points to the fact that there is a genuine division of powers between the executive branch represented by the President and his administration, by Congress, the legislative branch represented by the house and the Senate and the judicial branch represented at the very top by the Supreme Court of the United States. It is constitutionally proper to speak of these three coequal branches of government. But it’s also true that at particular moments they are really not coequal, because on one issue or another, at one historical moment or another, one of these branches actually holds the key to what will happen for the nation’s future.

On a day by day basis that is most often the presidency, especially given the vast administrative expansion of the presidency since the Second World War. At other times it’s Congress, it can actually be one of the two houses of Congress which is why sometimes the nations waiting to see how the House or the Senate individually will vote on an important issue. But at other times we are simply waiting to see how nine singular individuals seated on the United States Supreme Court will rule. As we find ourselves as the court comes to the end of its term that historically in by the last business day of June. Looming before us are huge decisions yet to be announced including most importantly the decision on same-sex marriage, another very important decision on the Obamacare legislation and there are other issues still hanging as well. But it’s particularly at this time of the year, also at times like January when the court tends to hand down some important decisions that the nation begins to focus attention on the judicial branch in a way it otherwise simply does not.

Now there are a couple of things that Christians need to note here. For one thing, the division of powers is intentionally designed to limit the effects of sin and the concentration of power that sin would lead to and that would cause an occasion for even greater sin. In other words, it is opposition to the idea of an autocracy, especially in the executive branch that leads to the separation of powers. It’s also the understanding that a direct democracy which would amount to a mob rule is ameliorated or limited by the very existence of the United States Senate. We also know that when it comes to the judicial branch, one of the ways our constitutional framers sought to make very clear the independence of the judiciary was by creating for the federal courts at large and especially with reference now to the Supreme Court life terms without any specific term of years.

Ever since the 1950s and a constitutional amendment then, the United States president has been limited to two full terms. There is no limitation upon the number of terms a member of the House or the Senate may serve but they do have to face the voters with regularity, in the house every two years, in the Senate every six years. But those who are appointed to the United States Supreme Court and the other federal courts and those who are eventually confirmed by the United States Senate, they sit on that court until they either die or retire and thus there can be extraordinarily long tenures on the nation’s highest court. And yet at the same time, most Americans even though they can name the president and feel they know something about him, even though they may be able to name their Congressman and their senators, we can certainly hope so, many of them are in no position whatsoever to answer even the most basic questions about one of the three coequal branches of the United States government, in this case the Supreme Court of the United States.

In more recent decades this is a particular issue because the court has been growing in influence and importance. There are several reasons for this – one of them is the kinds of questions that are being asked, if they are inherently constitutional questions as so many of them now are, they will inevitably arrive before the nation’s highest court. But there’s another reason as well. And that is the fact that where Congress and the executive branch often do not or cannot settle issues, it eventually arrives at the Supreme Court as the last Court of Appeal where the issue will in one way or another be decided.

One of the things we need to note there is that that is not the way a democracy, a representative republic should work. But nonetheless, that’s what we find ourselves as the 2014-15 term of the Supreme Court of the United States comes to a conclusion. As early as today but certainly by Tuesday of next week, we are likely to know how the court is going to rule on all the remaining cases and most assuredly the case having to do with the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. But the nature of the court, the influence of the court is underlined by an article that appeared yesterday in the New York Times. The article is by Alicia Parlapiano, Adam Liptak and Jeremy Bowers. The headline,

“The Roberts Court’s Surprising Move Leftward.”

The courts are generally referred to by the last name of the Chief Justice of the time. Thus, we talk about the Roberts court because of the tenure of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who took office in 2005. The headline here tells us that according to the analysis presented here this court has been moving left in particular in this term. The reporters write,

“The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been a conservative court. But even conservative courts have liberal terms – and the current term is leaning left as it enters its final two weeks.”

The reporters went on to say,

“The court has issued liberal decisions in 54 percent of the cases in which it had announced decisions as of June 22.”

They cited research undertaken by a very respected group known as the Supreme Court database. It’s generally considered to be fairly objective in making these determinations and according to that database using its own standard,

“If that trend holds, the final percentage could rival the highest since the era of the notably liberal court of the 1950s and 1960s led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.”

This is a really important article because it points to the fact that the Supreme Court is not just a court, it is made up of individuals, it is not a machine and these individuals like all individuals are susceptible to intellectual change over time. And also it’s interesting because this reflects to some degree the cases that arrive at the Supreme Court. But the court has to agree in most cases to take the case in the first place so this issue is doubly revealing. Whether it is the point of these reporters or not the importance of this article is to point to the fact that liberal change in the United States, in legal and political terms and in moral terms, has been led far more by the United States Supreme Court than by either of the other two branches of government. And looking at this particular analysis the reporters say,

“The court’s leftward movement is modest, and it remains well to the right of where it was in the Warren court years, when the percentage of liberal decisions routinely topped 70 percent. Yet the recent numbers do seem suggestive of a shift.”

Now that again is really interesting because it points back to those crucial decades of the 1950s and 60s and identifies quite explicitly the Supreme Court of the United States as the liberalizing force in American society at that time. Later in the article the reporters say,

“The court moved left in the early 1950s, remained there for almost two decades and has generally leaned right for the past 40 years.”

There’s also something really important to note there. When it points to the last 40 years and says that the court has increasingly during that time leaned right, or generally leaned right, that doesn’t mean that it goes back to a starting point before the war in court in say the late 1940s and then moved right, it means only that it moved right in comparison to the leftward shift they were undertaken by the Warren court that so reshaped American society in the second half of the 20th century. What’s also clear in this article is that there are those who are looking at this trend, and hoping that it extends to the issue of the same-sex marriage decision and the likelihood is indeed that it will and that will rank this court as even more liberal than it stood on Monday.

2) Kennedy’s gay marriage rulings result of long-term concern for the ‘right side of history’

But as I want to remind us when we talk about the court, once again it’s not a machine, it is nine human beings who listen to the cases, decide which cases they’re going to take in the first place and eventually discuss the cases and make their decisions, eventually releasing their decisions.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg in Monday’s edition of the New York Times had a front-page article entitled,

“Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Tolerance Is Seen in His Sacramento Roots.”

This has to do with Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has been the key vote on most gay right cases of the last generation. He is expected again to be the crucial vote in the current case before the court on same-sex marriage. Stolberg goes back to Sacramento, which was the home place of Justice Kennedy, pointing out that it was experiences there and it was also ideas he expressed in Sacramento and as a federal court judge before being appointed to the United States Supreme Court to give an indication of why he has become such a champion for gay rights on the nation’s Highest Court. Stolberg writes,

“Now, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether to grant a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy, a onetime altar boy, has emerged as an unlikely gay rights icon. At 78, he has advanced legal equality for gays more than any other American jurist.”

And as Stolberg also explains,

“Those who know him well cite a mix of factors in explaining his thinking: his views on privacy and liberty, his belief in marriage as a stabilizing force, his concern for the children of same-sex couples and his custom — in the words of one good friend, Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — of “stepping into the skin” of those his decisions affect.”

Judge Kozinski said about Justice Kennedy,

“I think it’s been an evolution. Maybe what happened is the world around him changed, and the evolution has not been so much in his own thinking, as in the world we live in.”

One of the things this article reveals by the way is how people outside the court, even those who are fairly close friends of the justices who sit on the court, spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how the justices think as well as what they think. Stolberg’s article also makes a comparison between Anthony Kennedy and Earl Warren when she writes,

“Today, legal scholars see parallels in Justice Kennedy’s record on gay rights and Chief Justice Warren’s record on civil rights, notably his landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools.”

In a section of the article that should ring in our ears and make us think, Lou Cannon, the biographer of President Ronald Reagan who appointed Justice Kennedy to the court said that Kennedy stated,

“Warren was a good chief justice and a good lawyer, as well as being on the right side of history.”

That’s a most revealing phrase as we now know. It’s a phrase we are hearing over and over again and here it is being used by a very respected biographer of President Ronald Reagan as applied to someone else he has watched very carefully, Justice Anthony Kennedy appointed by Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court. So here we have an advance word that what Anthony Kennedy wants in a very real way is to be seen as being on the right side of history. That’s the kind of political argument that has been used over and over again by those who are pushing the issue of the legalization of same-sex marriage. It is not, we need to note, however, the kind of argument that the framers of the United States Constitution considered to be a compelling argument when it comes to determining what the Constitution says and requires. Nowhere in our nation’s founding documents is there a hint that one of the roles of the United States Supreme Court is to make certain that the court finds the nation on the right side of history. The court has had spectacular moments in which it did exactly the right things such as in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It has also ruled in other cases disastrously only to be reversed by a successive court in a later time.

In another section of this article, the specific issue of gay rights as related to Justice Kennedy comes into view as Stolberg writes,

“But the 1980 case, Beller v. Middendorf, contained an important caveat. In dense legal language, Judge Kennedy noted “substantial academic comment which argues that the choice to engage in homosexual conduct is a personal decision entitled, at least in some instances, to recognition as a fundamental right and to full protection as an aspect of the individual’s right to privacy.”

Now what’s really important there is that that decision was written not as Justice Kennedy was a justice of the United States Supreme Court, but rather as he was a federal appeals court judge. In other words, those who appointed him to the court had access to that argument by Justice Kennedy and so did others. One of the most interesting investigative issues in this article by Stolberg on Justice Kennedy is that Lawrence tried a very liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard law school and those who are advocating for the gay-rights movement had indicated support for the nomination of Anthony Kennedy, believing that he was uniquely open to their arguments even before he was appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Looking at some of his appellate decisions including the one I just cited, Professor Tribe at Harvard law school said,

“‘I think this guy is terrific.”

So if Justice Kennedy, as he did in 2003 in the Lawrence decision and in 2013 in the Windsor decision, becomes the crucial justice in deciding the issue of the legalization of same-sex marriage and he rules for the legalization of same-sex marriage, you can draw a direct line not only back to 2013, not only back to 2003, but all the way back to 1980, even before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

3) Legacy of Allen Weinstein reminder the truth will out eventually

Next covering the same issue at this very important historical moment, the Weekly Standard, Robert F. Nagel writes an article entitled,

“Predicting Justice Kennedy.”

The subtitle of the article is of extreme importance,

“The status of same-sex marriage shouldn’t come down to one man’s opinion.”

Now here’s what’s really crucial, Professor Nagel who is a professor of law at University of Colorado is not arguing that it shouldn’t come down to one justice’s decision. Inevitably in many cases it’s going to happen that way. What he says, quite specifically is that it shouldn’t come down to one man’s opinion. That points to one of the great divides in America today, the divide between those on the left who believe that what the justices of the Supreme Court should do is to apply their opinions about what is right and defined in the Constitution some basis, however abstract for those opinions, and those who believe as constitutional conservatives that the actual text of the Constitution should decide the issues in the context of the original intention of the framers and founders of the nation. Conservatives do not argue that the Constitution should never change. They just argue that the courts shouldn’t unilaterally change the Constitution. Rather, it should be changed through the amendment process that protects the rights and the stability, not to mention the separation of powers of our constitutional republic.

Professor Nagel looks at the fact that there is the likelihood, given his two previous major decisions as a Supreme Court Justice on this, that Justice Kennedy is going to be if not the decisive vote, then a major vote in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage and the reason for it is going to come down to Justice Kennedy’s opinion. This is what professor Nagel writes,

“The cynical​—​but perhaps realistic​—​response is that, despite the importance of state sovereignty and the unique place of marriage in human history, Justice Kennedy will vote to strike down traditional marriage laws because he has simply chosen sides in the culture wars. If true, this means that he will vote to impose his political and moral preferences​—​that is, one lawyer’s personal opinions will masquerade as law.”

In one of the most important parts of Professor Nagel’s article he goes back to the year 1992 and to a decision, not on same-sex marriage, but on abortion. It was in the case Planned Parenthood versus Casey in which Justice Kennedy then wrote the opinion and was the deciding vote to uphold the Roe v. Wade decision. Now to put the matter plainly, the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand is one of the worst decisions in the history of United States Supreme Court and as a direct result there has been the abortion of over 50 million babies in American wombs. What Professor Nagel is pointing to and Justice Kennedy’s opinion there is where he defended Roe v. Wade because of the reputation of the court and the rule of law as represented by the Supreme Court. In other words, Justice Kennedy supported Roe v. Wade, largely because he said the Supreme Court would lose respect if it reversed itself on such an important issue. Putting Justice Kennedy in the context of his tenure on the court, Nagel then writes,

“These considerations suggest that Justice Kennedy must be finding the same-sex marriage issue deeply vexing. Having been accused by Justice Antonin Scalia, among others, of abandoning law to take sides in the culture wars, Kennedy presumably understands that his previous opinions in favor of gay rights are, like the initial abortion ruling, vulnerable to charges of illegitimate overreach. Perversely, however, this intellectual tenuousness might well produce in Kennedy a sense that national unity is being dangerously undermined by those who disagree with his pronouncements on gay rights, not to mention by those who are battling the many lower federal court rulings invalidating traditional marriage laws.”

In the end all this comes back to the argument that we are to be found and should seek to be found and if necessary moved to be found on the so-called right side of history. One of the points made in this article is that Justice Kennedy has been on the court long enough that he has himself represented by his decisions on the Supreme Court what he considers to be the right side of history. That points to the likelihood that in this case, he will seek to extend the trajectory he began not just in 2003 in Lawrence, not just in 2013 in Windsor, but back in 1980 in that decision that he had already made long before he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Christians need to remember that we are not called upon to be found on the right side of history. We’re called upon, to put the matter bluntly, to be found on the right side of eschatology. We have to believe the truth and stand by the truth and seek faithfully to live under the authority of Scripture, believing that God and God alone will vindicate the truth because after all, it is his truth because he is true. On The Briefing today, it seemed important given the issues at stake and given the central role likely to be played in this entire issue by Justice Anthony Kennedy to give particular attention as the nation at large is getting particular attention to how he is likely to rule and why. And all these articles arguments and analyses put together point to the fact that there seems to be a central focus here on seeking to be found on the right side of history.

 

Finally, I want to make reference to an obituary that appeared over the weekend in the New York Times, I’ll admit I just can’t pass up a good obituary because the worldview lessons are often so rich when it comes to being determined to be on the right side of history. Sometimes history has some interesting twists and turns but in reality there’s a good reason for this, the truth eventually comes out. The headline of the obituary is,

“Allen Weinstein, Historian of Alger Hiss Case, Dies at 77.”

The accusations made in the aftermath of World War II, especially during the 1960s. The State Department official Alger Hiss was in reality a Soviet spy, it was one of the great moral tales of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Alger Hiss was the icon of the Eastern establishment and yet charges were made by Whittaker Chambers, a former editor for Time magazine, who was himself a confessed Soviet spy, that his colleague spy had been none other than Alger Hiss, one of the highest-ranking officials of the United States State Department.

William Grimes is actually here writing the obituary of Allen Weinstein, a former archivist of the United States and Weinstein is chiefly remembered for proving long after Alger Hiss was dead and his defenders were largely dead as well, that as the Soviet archives were opened after the fall the Soviet Union, indeed, there was irrefutable proof that Alger Hiss was a spy. William Grimes writes,

“Accused by Whittaker Chambers, an editor and writer at Time and a former Communist, of passing government documents to the Soviet Union when he worked for the State Department in the 1930s, Hiss was regarded as a traitor by most Americans but many liberals and leftists saw him as an innocent victim of anti-Communist paranoia. He was convicted of perjury in 1950, and Mr. Weinstein said he had started out writing the book to prove him innocent, only to reverse his judgment in the face of the evidence.”

That’s an interesting statement in itself because it tells us that Mr. Weinstein, a very capable and competent historian, set out to write a book in order to prove Alger Hiss innocent only to come across the evidence that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was indeed the Soviet spy he was accused of being all the way back to the 1950s. We now know that Alger Hiss and any number of other spies and supporters of the Soviet Union supported that evil regime because they believe that it was to use this phrase again, on the right side of history. Not even close. That evil regime fell and fell apart in 1989 and its archives fell open and when those archives fell open. It was revealed that Alger Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy.

The great moral lesson for this obituary is one to which we return, those who are most determined to be found on the right side of history, may be most frustrated when the history is written.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 06-24-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Supreme Court’s leftward trend under Roberts shaped by kinds of questions Court faces

The Roberts Court’s Surprising Move Leftward, New York Times (Alicia Parlapiano, Adam Liptak and Jeremy Bowers)

2) Kennedy’s gay marriage rulings result of long-term concern for the ‘right side of history’

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Tolerance Is Seen in His Sacramento Roots, New York Times (Sheryl Gay Stolberg)

Predicting Justice Kennedy, Weekly Standard (Robert F. Nagel)

3) Legacy of Allen Weinstein reminder the truth will out eventually

Allen Weinstein, Historian of Alger Hiss Case, Dies at 77, New York Times (William Grimes)

Transcript: The Briefing 06-23-15

The Briefing

June 23, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Tuesday, June 23, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Netherlands considers extending right to die to children under twelve as culture of death progresses

A shocking headline came yesterday from the Netherlands. It was reported in The Guardian, the major British newspaper of the left. The headline is,

“Dutch pediatricians: give terminally ill children under 12 the right to die.”

We’ve been watching over the last several years how the logic of euthanasia has been reaching its extremities. It began in the secularized nations of Europe and there it has begun to take hold to such an extent that in some nations such as the Netherlands and in Belgium, the logic of the culture of death has now exceeded the point that even had been feared just a few years ago. We’re now looking at euthanasia being offered by policy now to children not only as young as the age of 12, but the new proposal calls for removing age restriction altogether.

The original press report came over the weekend from the French Presse Agency, it’s datelined from The Hague in the Netherlands and it reads,

“Terminally ill children in unbearable suffering should be given the right to die, the Dutch Pediatric Association has said, calling for the current age limit of 12 years old to be scrapped.”

The article goes on to cite,

“Eduard Verhagen, a pediatrics professor at Groningen University, who is on the organisation’s ethics commission, said: “We feel that an arbitrary age limit such as 12 should be changed and that each child’s ability to ask to die should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”

We need to notice how the culture of death moves forward on this kind of logic. In the first place, the right to die as it was characterized was to be extended only to those who are in extreme ages and were facing an unquestionably terminal diagnoses, and then they were also to be understood to be suffering from what was described as unbearable suffering in the final stages of a terminal illness, and then the logic of the culture of death moved forward. The next step was to remove the restriction having to do with terminal diagnoses. Instead, any kind of unbearable suffering was supposed to be legitimate grounds for a right to die. And in this case, we need to note the right to request a physician’s active assistance in the process of dying. Then the culture of death moved forward so that there was no longer actually a physical suffering that was to be required in order to ask to die. It was extended to psychiatric conditions and to what was then classified as unbearable psychiatric suffering. And then the next step of logic was to move to younger and younger ages.

All the previous discussion had been about those who were unquestionably adults who were claiming to make an adult decision. But then the logic of the culture of death moves towards younger ages, moving to those who were just under the age of majority, those who were classified as near adults. Then they moved it back to the age of 12 and now as we read in this report from The Guardian, the current effort undertaken by pediatricians in the Netherlands is to remove any age limitation or restriction whatsoever. One of the things we need to note most closely is that when you talk about the issue of euthanasia and we talk about the so-called slippery slope. The reality is that there is a slope and that it is tragically and sadly slippery. It is inexorably, inevitably slippery and that’s because once you begin to buy into this logic, there is no way that the logic doesn’t get extended further and further and further. There’s another aspect of this that is so important – one of the great distinctions often made by the advocates of euthanasia is between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia means that the person whose life is to be ended has to voluntarily acting in sound mind request that act. Involuntary euthanasia means that decision one way or another is made by someone else. Almost all of the early calls for euthanasia were entirely limited to so-called voluntary euthanasia.

The one aspect of the slippery slope is that voluntary euthanasia never stays there, it moves towards involuntary euthanasia and we need to watch how that happens. In the first stage that happens when someone says the person who would have otherwise demanded the right to die is now incapacitated and cannot do so. So acting as the legal authority for that individual, I on that person’s behalf demand the right to control the right of death. The next stage comes very quickly when people say this individual, if he or she had had the option to speak about this during their lifetime is the kind of person who would have asked to end life under these circumstances. Therefore, on that individual’s behalf, I therefore make the request. It isn’t very long until the third stage is reached and that’s when people say for the good of society, given the amount of investment that this is now costing in terms of medical care, given the fact that this person has become a burden upon the individual’s family and the larger society, there is no moral reason to allow this person to live any longer. It would be humane in terms not just of the individual’s frame of reference but the entire society or the related family to say that death is the better option.

This is where the Christian worldview reminds us that we never at any point have the right to say in terms of the so-called right to die that we have the right to determine when that death is going to take place. The Christian worldview reminds us the human life is sacred because it is a divine gift and God is sovereign over our lifespans to the degree that we simply admit that we do not choose when we are born. We do not even choose that we are born. Likewise, we have no right to choose when we will die and under what circumstances that we claim will be acceptable to ourselves. Another thing missing from this is the understanding that medical care has advanced greatly in terms of removing the kind of suffering that often comes at the end stage of a terminal disease and it is our Christian obligation to seek to remove suffering under any circumstances where that is possible, but as horrifying as that suffering may under some circumstances be, it is not justification for a so-called right to die. It isn’t a justification for the creature’s declaration that death would be preferable to life.

Looking back at this article from the Netherlands we need to note one other statement made by this member and remember this, of the Ethics Commission of the Dutch Pediatric Association. He said,

“If a child under 12 satisfies the same conditions, pediatricians are currently powerless. It’s time to address this problem.”

Powerless? Powerless to do what? In this case, let’s state the matter bluntly and plainly, powerless – according to Dutch law right now – to kill. We saw just in recent days that in the California Senate, a bill to authorize legal assisted suicide as it is called move forward after the California Medical Association removed its opposition to the bill and that Medical Association did so because they said there’s been a shift in public opinion. They acknowledge that right up front. But as we’re looking at this horrifying news from the Netherlands we need to recognize that this could not have happened if the vast majority of the people there in the Netherlands held to the historic and biblical understanding of human life that was at the very center of Western civilization even as the Dutch nation was born. This is one of the inevitable out workings of a secularized worldview. This is one of the signs of what happens when a culture redefines itself in terms of its most basic beliefs and having denied God, denies that life itself, human life in particular is God’s gift. This is what that kind of society increasingly inevitably looks like.

2) GOP struggles to find platform as less religious America veers politically left

This leads quite naturally to a second news article; this one was a front-page news story in USA Today last week. The headline of the article by Rick Hampson,

“If Americans skew less Christian, GOP faces challenge.”

My interest in this article is far less about the politics then about the worldview issues that are involved. But here’s the point of the article and this is why it was on the front page of USA Today. According to Rick Hampson and this article, the Republican Party’s going to find itself in a decreasing position politically because it has tied itself to the interests of a great many American Christians and as the number or the percentage of American Christians decreases, as America is secularized as well, the Republican Party he says, may find itself with a smaller constituency. Now here’s where the story gets really, really interesting. There is no doubt as the Pew Research organization and many others have been documenting, there is a rise in the number of nones, that is those with no religious affiliation whatsoever, n-o-n-e-s, they are now called. There’s a rise to the point that one out of five Americans now says he or she has no religious affiliation and one out of three under age 34. That’s very significant. No one should deny it. We’re also watching the progressive secularization of this country, not in the same way as Europe and not in the same pace but nonetheless secularizing on its own terms and its own schedule.

But remember, this is a front-page news story at USA Today and the front-page news story is warning the Republican Party that as the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians fall that party may find itself in a minimized political posture. Now let’s just look however, at the numbers the article actually cites, let me read directly from the article by Rick Hampson,

“Yet just last month the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christian has been going down a point a year, to 70.6% in 2014.”

Now wait just a minute – while we’re talking about Europe, we need to note that the number of persons there, the percentage who identify as Christians is not only below 70% it is catastrophically below 70%. There’s no doubt that 70% of Americans and in this case we can round it up to 71% , 71% of Americans identifying as Christian is less than it was even recently. As Pew says, it’s going down about a point a year or at least has in terms of the last several years in terms of the immediate past. But we’re still talking about 71% of the population. We’re still talking about 71%. That is a very clear majority. That means seven out of 10 Americans now in one way or another, even still identifies as some kind of Christian. In other words, I’m drawing attention to this new story because it is pointing to something that is happening, but it’s not happening nearly as fast as the headline placement in the headline itself in the story would have us to think.

But in this article, there is actually a wealth of worldview material. For one thing, one of the points made by the article is that those who now identify as the nones tend to skew rather dramatically to the left, politically and morally. Now once again, that should tell us something. Just think about the previous story that is datelined in Europe. Europe has become heavily secularized and that came with a radical increase in the political liberalism, the moral liberalism that characterized that continent. That’s why we were talking about the Dutch Pediatric Association and the issue of euthanasia. We’re talking about it in the Netherlands and the Netherlands is one the most secularized countries in Europe. Then we shift and look at the United States and to those who are identifying as the more secular among Americans also are skewing, they are tilting in the very same worldview direction. And that’s where Christians have to understand that’s actually what we would expect. We would expect those who are moving in a more secular direction to be moving to the left politically and morally and this article in USA Today says that is exactly what’s happening. Hampson writes,

“The political implications of the changing face of American religious identities are stark. Nones are far more likely to vote Democratic — in 2012, Barack Obama got 70% of religiously unaffiliated voters, compared with 26% for Mitt Romney — and skew liberal on issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and legalization of marijuana.

“Conversely, in recent general elections three in four evangelicals have gone Republican. So on the GOP campaign trail, it still seems like 2006.”

Now that actually points to something else that is a fundamental importance. On the left there has been a consistent movement leftward. Just to put the matter bluntly, looking back at 2006 2008, 2010, right up until 2012 major Democratic candidates may have believed in same-sex marriage but they did not dare say so publicly. That changed in 2012 with President Barack Obama, it changed even later with Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, who didn’t affirm the legalization of same-sex marriage until she left that office and until she began planning her own campaign for the presidency. So if you look at the left, there has been a progressive move leftward, just to take that one issue which is the legalization of same-sex marriage. But Hampson says if you look on the Republican side and if you look at those who identify as Christian, it looks he says like 2006. What’s he saying there? He’s saying that on these key issues, those on the political right haven’t shifted and that’s a very important issue as well because if we are committed to the Bible as our authority and that’s where we gain our definitions of human sexuality and marriage then there really is no place to move and so it looks like 2006. But in one sense it looks far, far older than that if he’s honest and it’s likely to look exactly the same if we hold to biblical conviction moving in the future. The left has the option of moving progressively leftward. But if we are tied to a biblical definition the text isn’t going to change and we can’t change either.

Finally, there’s another very important issue that is covered in this article. Hampson asked,

“What about the Democrats? After presidential nominee John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in 2004, it seemed the party had “a God problem.”

“They thought,” said Mark Silk, who teaches religion and politics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, “America is a religious country and we need to be in touch with that.”

Then Hampson writes,

“The party, including the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns, tried to reach moderate evangelicals,” that’s there term, “in 2008, but eventually concluded it was a lost cause.”

Hampson then writes,

“By the 2012 election, one in four Obama voters had no religious affiliation. And among Democrats today, Silk says, “political language is much less religious than it was eight years ago.”

Well as I said, that is a really interesting article. Something of a counterpoint to that original article we discussed that was datelined from the Netherlands. It turns out that worldview really matters and the prevailing worldview in a society, even if in the United States, biblical Christianity is waning. Even if the number of nones is growing, we’re still talking about the fact that the majority of those in America at least hold to some understanding of a binding moral authority and they still are operating out of at least the memory or the residue of a Christian worldview that has been virtually rejected in Europe and has disappeared a generation ago.

How long will this remain so in America? Time will tell. But at this point it is another very clear affirmation of the importance of worldview and the fact that our politics eventually will reflect the worldview of the people because, and we know this – the worldview does eventually produce the politics.

3) Elisabeth Elliot’s life inescapable example of forgiveness through the gospel

Yesterday, on The Briefing I mentioned that forgiveness was very much in the news over the weekend. Even the secular media were surprised by the language of forgiveness used by the loved ones of the victims in the Charleston shooting, even as they were directly addressing themselves to the man who would been arrested for the shooting. I discussed the fact that forgiveness is shocking, especially to those who no longer operate out of a Christian worldview. But many in the secular media did not trace that forgiveness back to the roots of that forgiveness in the gospel of Jesus Christ. But a contrary example actually also appeared in the mainstream secular media over the same days and in this case it was in an obituary. And the obituary was for Elisabeth Elliott, who died in recent days at her home in Gloucester, Massachusetts at age 88. Once again, it turns out that the obituaries published in the New York Times are very, very important from a worldview perspective. This editorial is written by Sam Roberts and he begins by writing,

“Elisabeth Elliott, a missionary who inspired generations of evangelical Christians by returning to Ecuador with her toddler daughter to preach the gospel to the Indian tribe that had killed her husband, died Monday at her home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, She was 88.”

Roberts went on to write,

“Ms. Elliot wrote two books stemming from her experience in Ecuador, and together they became for evangelicals “the definitive inspirational mission stories for the second half of the 20th century.”

That was a quote from Kathryn Long, a history professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. Now the background of this story is really, really important and most evangelicals are at least vaguely familiar with Elisabeth Elliott and her martyred husband Jim Elliott. And Sam Roberts in this obituary published over the weekend in the New York Times tells that story and that’s very, very important.

Elisabeth Howard (as she was known before she married Jim Elliott) was born December 21, 1926, and she was herself, the daughter of missionaries. She enrolled in Wheaton College where she majored in Greek and planned to become a translator of the Scripture, but there she met and eventually married Jim Elliott and together they trained for missionary service in Ecuador. In Ecuador, the Elliott’s had a heartfelt passion to reach the Waorani people, also known as the Auca Indians at the time with the gospel of Jesus Christ. They had translated the New Testament into that language and they had used their airplane to air drop love packages that included gifts and portions of Scripture to the Waorani people. And then in 1956 Jim Elliott and several of his missionary colleagues decided to fly their plane to the region and to meet the Waorani people on foot. As Sam Roberts writes,

“After Mr. Elliot and his colleagues landed by plane on Jan. 2, 1956, he kept rehearsing a message of good will — “Biti miti punimupa,” meaning “I like you, I want to be your friend” — from a Waorani phrase book. Three tribe members made a friendly visit, but then there was apparently a miscommunication or a perceived threat. After the missionaries failed to make radio contact with a base station, searchers found their bodies pierced by wooden spears.”

Now as we discussed over the weekend, the issue of forgiveness was in the press and it shocked an increasingly secularized American people. But then we read this from Sam Roberts,

“Ms. Elliot renewed contact with the tribe over the next two years. In 1958, accompanied by her 3-year-old daughter and the sister of one of the murdered missionaries, she moved in with the Waoranis, known to their neighbors as Aucas, or savages. She ministered to them and remained in their settlement, in the foothills of the Andes, subsisting on barbecued monkey limbs and other local fare and living in rain-swept huts.”

Even after the way a Waorani had killed her husband and his colleagues, after they had served as martyrs for the gospel of Jesus Christ, having gone to the tribe with the mission of befriending them and taking to them the gospel of Jesus Christ, two years later, Elisabeth Elliott moved with her toddler to live with the very people who would killed her husband and demonstrated by her love to them, the forgiveness that she not only knew was rooted in the Christian tradition, that she knew was the living evidence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The widows of the martyrs back in 1956, who had died in this incident, said that their prayers were for the salvation of the Auca people, again they’re now known as the Waorani. They said that they look forward to when the tribe would also join them in Christian praise and we need to note that day happened.

Several years ago when I was present at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, the church for the Shepherds Conference there had actually brought the wreckage of Jim Elliott’s plane and headed there for us all to see, and seated next to me at a dinner that night was one of the warriors who had been involved in the killing of Jim Elliott and his colleagues. He was then a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and he gave in terms of the most beautiful testimony, his account of how he had come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior through the love that was shown to him and his fellow tribespeople by Elisabeth Elliott and the other widows who took the gospel to them after they had killed their husbands. I can promise you this, I will never ever so long as I live forget that testimony. It was one of the most powerful I have ever heard, coming to me from a new Christian friend who had at one point been involved in the killing of Christian missionaries they understood to be a threat.

But I can only wonder how many people went beyond the front page stories, important as they were to the obituaries of the New York Times to find this incredible testimony to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was published in an almost half page obituary on Elisabeth Elliott. The world doesn’t understand this kind of testimony and that’s why I think there was so much interest in the integrity of this testimony that it appeared just as it did in this major obituary in the New York Times. Jim Elliott and his colleagues died before I was born, but I have been throughout my lifetime so touched by his testimony as well. Many Christians know the most famous quote from Jim Elliott, written when he was a student at Wheaton College long before he became a martyr for the Christian gospel, and I end on these words,

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to Boyce College.com.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 06-23-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Netherlands considers extending right to die to children under twelve as culture of death progresses

Dutch pediatricians: give terminally ill children under 12 the right to die, The Guardian (Agence France)

2) GOP struggles to find platform as less religious America veers politically left

Religion and politics: Do the ‘nones’ have it?, USA Today (Rick Hampson)

3) Elisabeth Elliot’s life inescapable example of forgiveness through the gospel

Elisabeth Elliot, Tenacious Missionary in Face of Tragedy, Dies at 88, New York Times (Sam Roberts)

The Heresy of Racial Superiority — Confronting the Past, and Confronting the Truth

Among Christians, the word  heresy must be used with care and precision. Not every doctrinal error is a heresy, though all doctrinal error is to be avoided. A heresy is the denial or corruption of a Christian doctrine that is central to the faith and essential to the gospel. The late theologian Harold O. J. Brown defined heresy as a doctrinal error “so important that those who believe it, who the church calls heretics, must be considered to have abandoned the faith.”

That sets the issue clearly. Premillennialists consider postmillennialists to be in error, but they do not consider postmillennialists to be heretics. Those who deny the Trinity, on the other hand, are heretics, and the believing church must consider non-trinitarians to have departed the faith. The same must be said of those who deny the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ. Far more can be said about heresy, but the word must be used with care and accuracy.

Protestants, rightly standing with the Reformers, have insisted that justification by faith alone is also central to the gospel of Christ and essential to any proclamation of that gospel. Martin Luther, for example, considered justification to be articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae — the article by which the church stands or falls, and so it is.

Today, we just recognize and condemn another heresy that has reared its ugly head in recent days, and murderously so. The killing of nine worshippers gathered at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina is a hideous demonstration of the deadly power of this heresy. The young white man charged with the killings has not, as yet, claimed a theological rationale for his acts. Nevertheless, he has been exposed as a young man whose worldview was savagely warped by the ideology of racial superiority — white superiority — and the grotesque and wretched ideology that drove him is now inseparable from the murders he is charged with committing.

If the reach of that ideology could be limited to a few fringe figures, we could allow ourselves to be less concerned. But the ideology that was represented in Dylann Roof’s reported words as he killed and in the photographs and evidence found on his Internet postings is not limited to a small fringe. You do not have to hang a flag representing the apartheid governments of Rhodesia or South Africa to be a racist.

The ideology of racial superiority is one of the saddest and most sordid evidences of the Fall and its horrifying effects. Throughout history, racial ideologies have been driving forces of war, of social cohesion, of demagoguery, and of dictatorships. Race theory was central to the Nazi regime and was used by both sides in the Pacific theater of World War II. In that theater of the war, both the Japanese and the Americans claimed that the other was an inferior race that must be defeated by force. The Japanese claimed racial superiority as central to their subjugation of other Asian peoples.

At the same time, many white Americans claimed and assumed the superiority of caucasian skin to black and brown skin — or any other color of skin. The main “color line,” as Frederick Douglass called it in 1881, has always been black and white in America. While this is a national problem, and theories of racial superiority have been popular in both the North and the South, it was the states of the old Confederacy that gave those ideologies their most fertile soil. White superiority was claimed as a belief by both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, but it was the Confederacy that made racial superiority a central purpose.

More humbling still is the fact that many churches, churchmen, and theologians gave sanction to that ideology of racial superiority. While this was true throughout the southern churches, Southern Baptists bear a particular responsibility and burden of history. The Southern Baptist Convention was not only founded by slaveholders; it was founded by men who held to an ideology of racial superiority and who bathed that ideology in scandalous theological argument. At times, white superiority was defended by a putrid exegesis of the Bible that claimed a “curse of Ham” as the explanation of dark skin — an argument that reflects such ignorance of Scripture and such shameful exegesis that it could only be believed by those who were looking for an argument to satisfy their prejudices.

We bear the burden of that history to this day. Racial superiority is a sin as old as Genesis and as contemporary as the killings in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The ideology of racial superiority is not only sinful, it is deadly.

I gladly stand with the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in their courageous affirmation of biblical orthodoxy, Baptist beliefs, and missionary zeal. There would be no Southern Baptist Convention and there would be no Southern Seminary without them. James P. Boyce and Basil Manly, Jr. and John A. Broadus were titans of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

But there is more to the story. Boyce and Broadus were chaplains in the Confederate army. The founders of the SBC and of Southern Seminary were racist defenders of slavery. Just a few months ago I was reading a history of Greenville, South Carolina when I came across a racist statement made by James P. Boyce, my ultimate predecessor as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was so striking that I had to find a chair. This, too, is our story.

By every reckoning, Boyce and Broadus were consummate Christian gentlemen, given the culture of their day. They would have been horrified, I am certain, by any act of violence against any person. But any strain of racial superiority, and especially any strain bathed in the language of Christian theology, is deadly dangerous all the same.

In 1995, on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination publicly repented of its roots in the defense of slavery. In 2015, far more is required of us. It is not enough to repent of slavery. We must repent and seek to confront and remove every strain of racial superiority that remains and seek with all our strength to be the kind of churches of which Jesus would be proud — the kind of churches that will look like the marriage supper of the Lamb.

I am certain that I do not know all that this will require of us. I intend to keep those names on our buildings and to stand without apology with the founders and their affirmation of Baptist orthodoxy. But those names on our buildings and college and professorial chairs and endowed scholarships do not represent unmixed pride. They also represent the burden of history and the urgency of repentance. We the living cannot repent on behalf of those who are dead, but we can repent for the legacy that we would otherwise perpetuate and extend by silence.

I will not remove those names from the buildings, but I bear the burden of telling the whole story and acknowledging the totality of the legacy. I bear responsibility to set things right in so far as I have the opportunity to set them right. I am so thankful that the racist ideologies of the past would rightly horrify the faculty and students of the present. Are we yet horrified enough?

I will not remove those names from the buildings, but I could never fly the flag that represented their cause in battle. I know full well that today’s defenders of that flag — by far most of them — do not intend to send a racial message nor to defy civil rights. But some do, and there is no way to escape the symbolism that so wounds our neighbors — and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Today, most who defend that flag do so to claim a patrimony and to express love for a region. But that is not the whole story, and we know it.

And now the hardest part. Were the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary heretics?

They defended all the doctrines they believed were central and essential to the Christian faith as revealed in the Bible and as affirmed throughout the history of the church. They sought to defend Baptist orthodoxy in an age already tiring of orthodoxy. They would never have imagined themselves as heretics, and in one sense they certainly were not. Nor, we should add, was Martin Luther a heretic, even as he expressed a horrifying antisemitism.

But I would argue that racial superiority in any form, and white superiority as the central issue of our concern, is a heresy. The separation of human beings into ranks of superiority and inferiority differentiated by skin color is a direct assault upon the doctrine of Creation and an insult to the imago Dei — the image of God in which every human being is made. Racial superiority is also directly subversive of the gospel of Christ, effectively reducing the power of his substitutionary atonement and undermining the faithful preaching of the gospel to all persons and to all nations.

To put the matter plainly, one cannot simultaneously hold to an ideology of racial superiority and rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ. One cannot hold to racial superiority and simultaneously defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints. So far as I can tell, no one ever confronted the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with the brutal reality of what they were doing, believing, and teaching in this regard. The same seems to be true in the case of Martin Luther and his antisemitism. For that matter, how recently were these sins recognized as sins and repented of? The problem is not limited to the names of the founders on our buildings.

I do believe that racial superiority is a heresy. That means that those who hold it unrepentantly and refuse correction by Scripture and the gospel of Christ must, as Harold O. J. Brown rightly said, “be considered to have abandoned the faith.”

We cannot change the past, but we must learn from it. There is no way to confront the dead with their heresies, but there is no way to avoid the reckoning that we must make, and the repentance that must be our own.

By God’s grace, this is the best I know to say. By God’s grace, may I not die with heresies unknown to me, but all too known to my children, and to my children’s children.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler.

Image of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina, Sunday, June 21, 2015, used by permission, AP News Photo.

I was asked by Religion News Service for a comment on the Confederate Battle Flag issue yesterday. This was my statement in full:

“Symbols matter, and sometimes they matter in different ways to different people. For most people in the South, the Confederate Battle Flag does not now represent racism or any reference to rebellion against the Union. Nevertheless, every symbol has a historical context and associations. For this specific flag, the most immediate context is the civil rights movement and resistance to its central goals. As Christians, we are called to love God and to love our neighbors. Some of our neighbors–and some of our own brothers and sisters in Christ–are deeply wounded by this flag. They see it as a denial of their essential humanity and as a statement of racial superiority. For that sufficient reason, gospel-minded Christians should support taking down the flag. Love of neighbor outweighs even love of region, and it certainly requires that we disassociate ourselves from any hint of racism, now or in the past.”

News articles drawing from that statement have now appeared in The Washington Post and other major media, but that is the full statement.

Transcript: The Briefing 06-22-15

The Briefing

June 22, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Monday, June 22, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) National shocked by forgiveness given by families of Charleston shoot victims to shooter

A chastened grieving and humbled nation has appropriately focused over the last several days on Charleston, South Carolina. As we now know, on Wednesday night nine people attending a church service at the Mother Emanuel Church as it is known, the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church there in Charleston, South Carolina, nine people were murdered in cold blood after a young man had sat with them for about an hour in a prayer meeting and Bible study and then opened fire, killing the pastor of the church and eight others in the church meeting. This is one of those violent crimes that simply focuses our imagination because the moral importance of this is impossible to deny and as our cultural conversation has gone in so many different directions in the grief and the shock in the aftermath of these killings, even in just these days it has become clear that virtually every thoughtful American knows that this is a very important moment. Something very important is now on the forefront of our national conversation and Christians have a unique responsibility to think this issue through on biblical and gospel terms and to be able to speak to our neighbors about even as the cultural conversation is largely consumed of this issue. It needs to be.

Christians have a particular responsibility to think clearly about these issues and to speak compassionately, especially in the aftermath of a tragedy of this magnitude. The moral issues simply present themselves in such a way that Christians have to speak to them. The national conversation in the aftermath of this horrifying event took a very interesting form as the nation went into the weekend. South Carolina law allows for those who are the victims of a crime and in this case this means, especially the parishioners at the Mother Emanuel Church and the loved ones of those who were killed in these murders, have an opportunity to confront the one who’s been arrested with a crime and to speak to him. And yet it’s very unusual even within this legal context that that kind of confrontation would take place during a bail hearing but that’s what took place in Charleston on Friday. Less than 48 hours after the killings, some of those most affected by the murders confronted the young man arrested for the crime, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, and they confronted him not only with their grief and anguish and anger but with something that took the nation largely by surprise, forgiveness.

The words of forgiveness uttered in that courtroom on Friday shocked the nation leading the headlines across the country in which media tried to come to terms with exactly how those who were so grieved by the intentional killing of their loved ones could speak of forgiveness to the one who had been arrested for that crime and furthermore, the background of the crime has been increasingly evident. It was deeply rooted in a sense of white supremacy and in the sin of racism. And as we take a closer look at the statements that were made in that courtroom, we come to even a new understanding of what is at stake from a biblical and a gospel perspective.

As Mark Berman of the Washington Post reported, Nadine Collier the daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance said at the hearing addressing herself to Dylann Roof,

“I forgive you.”

She went on to say,

“You took something very precious from me.”

And remember, that was her mother. She went on to say,

“I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”

Felicia Sanders as the Washington Post says her voice trembling spoke of her son, Tywanza Sanders, a young man who was killed in the murders. She spoke to the young man arrested for the crime and said,

“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with welcome arms. Tywanza Sanders was my son. But Tywanza Sanders was my hero. May God have mercy on you.”

The sister of another of the victims, DePayne Middleton-Doctor said,

“I acknowledge that I am very angry. But one thing that DePayne always enjoined in our family … is she taught me that we are the family that love built. We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive. I pray God on your soul.”

The New York Times shocked by the language used by these loved ones of the victims referred back to that policy in South Carolina law that allows the victims or the loved ones of the victims to confront the one who was arrested for the crimes and yet they wrote,

“But it is unusual for that right to be invoked in something as mundane as a bail hearing.”

But look closely at the next words,

“And the words spoken Friday by the survivors were rarer still.”

The national media reported only a small number of the words spoken by the relatives and loved ones of the victims of these crimes, but it is so interesting that the national media, the secular media focused on the theme of forgiveness. The question that we can only hope an amazed nation is asking is what would be the source of that forgiveness. Where would that forgiveness come from? How would it be expressed? How could those who lost so much speak to the one who has just been arrested for this horrifying crime and speak words of forgiveness? One of the things this should draw to our attention is the fact that the very idea of forgiveness in this sense is deeply shocking to the secular mind and we should understand why there is no reason in terms of secular logic why this kind of forgiveness should be extended. There is no ability of the secular worldview in and of itself, certainly now a secular worldview that is largely based in the fact that human beings are biological accidents in a great cosmic pattern, what we now see is that the secular media are amazed when this kind of statement is made.

Now the other thing we need to note from a Christian perspective is that the notion of forgiveness here, which is so deeply rooted in the Christian faith, was not explicitly Christian as reported by most of the secular media and yet that’s another very interesting point. I don’t know exactly what words were spoken by all of these relatives and loved ones of the victims. I don’t know all that they had to say I do know what was reported in the media and that tells us a great deal. But what’s missing here is also a vital importance. What’s missing in the reporting is the understanding that this kind of forgiveness is rooted essentially in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the fact that in Christ we who come to faith in him are forgiven our sins as we remember, Christ died as our substitutionary sacrifice on the cross. He was the sinless one who died in the place of sinners and forgiveness of sins and life everlasting come to those who come to Christ by faith. Forgiveness has been a very important issue in the moral conversation of our culture for some time. It entered into that conversation in a remarkable way in the generation that followed World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust.

One of the big questions, then and now is whether from the secular perspective forgiveness is even possible or whether it’s even admirable in one sense. There were those who argued after the Holocaust that it was immoral to forgive sins of that magnitude, the killing of millions of millions of persons, especially millions and millions of Jews. In the Jewish theological conversation in the aftermath of the Holocaust, there was a division of opinion as to whether or not forgiveness should be extended to the killers of their own loved ones and relatives. And we simply have to understand the scale of the issue here – we’re talking about the intentional murder of millions of persons. The question was asked, especially in the second half of the 20th century, how can forgiveness come in the aftermath of such a crime? And who would be able morally speaking, who would be qualified to extend that kind of forgiveness?

As I said there was a division of opinion in Judaism of the time and that is an ongoing conversation about whether or not forgiveness is the appropriate response to the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust. But what was very interesting, what was extremely clear in that courtroom in Charleston on Friday is that what struck the national consciousness, what shocked so many people is that in the immediate aftermath one of the most important instincts that came from those who were the loved ones of the victims in this case was to forgive and to express that forgiveness even as they addressed themselves directly to Dylann Roof. But there was actually more to this at least in some media reports, one of the loved ones of the victims actually called upon Dylann Roof to repent of his sin. That’s a very crucial issue. The gospel tells us that salvation comes to those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and repent of their sins. In terms of our human responsibility to forgive, about that Christ himself was emphatic; we have an absolute responsibility to forgive those who sin against us. But when it comes to understanding forgiveness it is the minor portion of the equation theologically speaking, in terms of how we or any human being for that matter would respond in forgiveness to one who has done wrong. The larger issue theologically speaking is whether or not we or any individual will know the forgiveness that can come from God and God alone.

It tells us a great deal that so many were shocked when words of forgiveness were used in that courtroom. And as Christians we have to admit that as accustomed as we are to that language, we too are sometimes shocked by the depth of the demonstration of the Christian understanding of forgiveness that can come even in the immediate aftermath of this kind of horrifying crime. We can only hope and pray that this provides an opening for an even more clear presentation to the culture of the gospel of Jesus Christ in all of its power. It is clear that so many in this increasingly secularized culture were deeply shocked by what took place in that courtroom on Friday. We can only hope and pray that that shock will be an opening into a deeper understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because as Christians understand and must always affirm that is the only message that tells us of how forgiveness can come to a sinner from a holy God. And that message takes us directly to a cross in an empty tomb. And it takes us directly to that imperative found in Scripture, repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

2) Heresy of racism forced upon society’s consciousness by Charleston shooting

Another aspect of our cultural conversation in recent days also demands our Christian attention and our very careful Christian response, a direct and emphatic Christian response. That is the issue of white supremacy. It has become increasingly clear that law enforcement authorities believe that the young man accused of these crimes now facing nine capital counts of murder was motivated by an ideology of white supremacy. We need to understand even as on Friday on The Briefing, we talked about the sin of racism that that is often rooted in what is precisely identified here; a profoundly unbiblical and ungodly notion that simply has to be identified for what it is the heresy of racial superiority.

The word heresy has to be used very carefully in the Christian life and in Christian theology. We do not refer to every doctrinal disagreement or even every doctrinal error as heresy. Heresy should be limited to a false teaching that directly subverts the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s why throughout the history of the church, most heresies have related to the question of who Christ is and what Christ achieved on the cross. That’s why throughout Christian history most heresies have related to the questions of who Christ is and what he accomplished for us in his death, burial and resurrection. But there are other issues that directly attach themselves to the gospel and one of those is the question, is every single human being of equal dignity? Is every single human being of equal dignity because every single human being is equally made in God’s image? That is a crucial question and it gets to the gospel because it is vital for us to understand that when Christ died, He died for sinful humanity. He did not die for one race, there is no biblical justification whatsoever for the attachment of any understanding of superiority or inferiority to any person regardless of racial or ethnic identity, regardless of skin color, in this case emphatically we have to say there is no superiority or inferiority tolerated in the biblical worldview and especially in the gospel of Jesus Christ for any claim of superiority or inferiority on skin color. We also have to acknowledge that in the history of Christianity some of these claims have been made disastrously and sinfully so. One of the most sinful forms of that argument has occurred in what’s historically been known as the argument about the Curse of Ham, which is a misunderstanding, a profound misunderstanding of the curse placed upon Canaan by his father Noah. That has nothing to do with skin color, nothing whatsoever.

Christians have to understand several things immediately and we need not only to understand these things, but to speak publicly to them. In the first place, there is no biblical justification for racism in any form. There is no biblical justification for any notion of racial superiority whatsoever.

Next, we have to understand that any assertion of racial superiority is an assault upon the Imago Dei, upon the image of God. And we have to understand that as God made every single one of us to his glory, he intended for us to display all of the diversity that is found in all of the physical features, including skin pigmentation that we find in humanity. This is to the glory of God. We have to also understand that this is so important to the gospel and even to how the gospel is portrayed in Scripture in terms of the picture. We are told to look forward to that day when before the throne of God there will be men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. That is what the kingdom is going to look like, that is what the marriage supper of the Lamb is going to look like. So when the secular world rightly understands that racism is wrong, Christians have to come back and say, ‘you have no real idea how wrong it is.’ It is not only an assault upon humanity; it is by direct extension in the biblical worldview an assault upon the creator. There are so many things for Christians to discuss and to think through in this cultural moment. But we have to understand there is no issue more compelling right now then this.

3) Gay marriage’s moment dependent on shift in culture’s moral judgement of homosexuality

Next, as we go into this week, one of those other issues looms so large before us. By Tuesday of next week, by June 30, the course of the Supreme Court for this term will be set. All of its major decisions will be handed down. There are several major decisions left, none more important than the decision in the case concerning the legalization of same-sex marriage. And everyone waking up this Monday morning understands that that decision could come today or in the course of this week or in the first two days of next week. It is coming soon. It is coming fast. Both sides in our great cultural conversation about this are paying very close attention to what will happen over the next several days. In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Frank Bruni a very well-known openly gay columnist that newspaper, writes about what he calls, “Gay Marriage’s Moment.”

It’s a very important article among other very important articles to emerge in recent days. He writes about the pace of cultural and moral change that has brought the gay-rights movement to this moment. He writes,

“Now we stand nervously and hopefully on the brink of a milestone. Before the end of June, a month associated with wedding bells and wedding cake, the Supreme Court will issue a major decision about the right of two men or two women to exchange vows in a manner honored by the government. It may well extend same-sex marriage to all 50 states, making it the law of the land.”

Now most informed observers of the court expect that one way or another the court is going to do that very thing. He then raises one of the issues that emerged in oral argument before the court on this case. Is this a very fast movement? Is this something that is taking place in the blink of an eye, historically speaking? He says no and he goes back to the beginnings of the movement to legalize same-sex marriage. He goes back to some of the earliest efforts to even begin a conversation about same-sex marriage. We need to note, most of those are taking place if at all in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. But even at that point as he acknowledges, same-sex marriage didn’t really seem to be a legal reality. Here first we have,

“Evan Wolfson, a chief architect of the political quest for same-sex marriage, wrote a thesis on the topic at Harvard Law School in 1983.”

Now 1983 was just 32 years ago. Once again, he is actually making the point he denies. In terms of history, this is the blink of an eye.

In his article Sunday he writes,

“Same-sex marriage isn’t some overnight cause, some progressive novelty, especially not when it’s put in its proper context, as part of a struggle for gay rights that has been plenty long, patient and painful.”

He goes on,

“Yes, the dominoes of marriage equality in individual states have tumbled with a surprising velocity. My first Op-Ed column, in June 2011, noted that New York had just become the sixth state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage. The count today is 37 states and Washington, D.C. I’m amazed at this still.”

So one of the things I want us to note is, he is actually making the point he denies. This is an extremely recent novelty. As Justice Samuel Alito said about two years ago in oral arguments in a different case, “same-sex marriage is younger than the smart phone.”

Considerably younger.

But Frank Bruni getting ready to celebrate what he expects will be a victory at the High Court writes about his amazement that as recently as two years ago, someone like Hillary Clinton, now running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States and until fairly recently, the Secretary of State of the United States under President Barack Obama wasn’t for same-sex marriage, although she now is. As he looks at it Bruni writes,

“A Supreme Court judgment for marriage equality wouldn’t be a rash swerve into uncharted terrain. It would merely be a continuation of the journey of gay Americans — of all Americans — across familiar land, in the direction of justice. It would be a stride toward the top of the hill.”

His general argument is that Americans shifted in their view of the morality of homosexuality, of homosexual relations and homosexual behaviors, and that led rather automatically to an increased public support that produced a political opening for the legalization of same-sex marriage. In his essay he cites several things that added momentum to that moral revolution. In one paragraph he writes,

“Alfred Kinsey told Americans in the late 1940s just how common same-sex activity was.”

Now that’s a very crucial data point for him to cite because what we now know, it is now affirmed by virtually every credible study, is that Kinsey’s data were horribly flawed. What Bruni doesn’t acknowledge is that no research scientist now would point to Kinsey’s research and give it anything like academic credibility. Kinsey was trying to normalize many sexual behaviors that went far beyond homosexuality and that was his agenda. And when it came to how he conducted his research, he goes beyond what we can safely discuss on The Briefing.

But what’s most important and revealed in this essay by Frank Bruni on Sunday is that people on both sides, people on both sides of this issue understand exactly what is at stake. The decision expected by the Supreme Court is no small decision and looming even larger than that is the great moral revolution of which this decision is one way or another, a very important part. As we all await the announcement of the decision by the nation’s highest court, we should all recognize how much is at stake. We’re talking about marriage here. We’re talking about morality here. We’re talking about a sexual revolution that has unleashed many other revolutions and will not stop with this.

On this Monday morning we sense that the days before us are momentous and they are. And that means that Christians have a particular responsibility to think clearly and to speak clearly, to think biblically and to speak biblically. To understand that there is no way to avoid the importance of these issues and there is no way to avoid the conversations that will inevitably come. So as we prayerfully enter this week, let’s be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us and let’s be ready to speak of biblical truth and the Christian worldview to the issues that surround us. And let’s seek in all of these things to be faithful to scripture and to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.