R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 305

Transcript: The Briefing 06-09-15

The Briefing

 

June 9, 2015

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

It’s Tuesday, June 9, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) New York jailbreak coverage reminder of power entertainment has to confuse moral reality

As the New York Times reported,

“The plot was more “Shawshank Redemption” than “CSI”: two hardened inmates using power tools, handmade decoys and their hands to chisel and crawl their way out of a maximum-security prison in a subterranean escape.”

That’s the lead paragraph from a news story that has gripped Americans ever since Saturday morning. It is not an accident that a prison is often the context of some of the most interesting moral dilemmas and it’s also not an accident that Americans tend, at least in terms of their movie watching habits, to be very interested in prison breakout movies but this isn’t a movie this is real life. And as the reporters Jesse McKinley and David Goodman reported for the New York Times,

“The pursuit of the fugitives from Clinton Correctional Facility may be even more old-fashioned, in large part because of the manner in which the two criminals emerged: onto a camera-less street corner and into a world in which some of the best tracking targets available — cellphones, cars and credit cards — may not apply.”

As one law enforcement official indicated,

“They are basically untraceable.”

This is one of those fascinating human dramas and a very concerning one at that. You’re talking about a breakout from a prison. A breakout of two convicted murderers that in the words of New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo,

“Should be considered extremely dangerous.”

They broke out of prison by using tools and by digging. They broke out of prison the old-fashioned way and they broke out of a very old prison. The correctional facility was begun in 1865, the very last year of the U.S. Civil War.

As the New York Times tells the story the two men David Sweat and Richard Matt were discovered missing during a 5:30 AM bed check on Saturday morning. Further investigation showed the two men had assembled crew dummies to fool guards and had used cutting tools to carve holes in the sides of their adjoining cells before scrambling down into the bowels of the prison into a two foot wide pipe and out under the 30 foot walls. They then emerged from a manhole hundreds of feet from the prison, yet well in sight of the prisons opposing wall and the cellblocks beyond touching off a nationwide alert. The really interesting thing about this is that this prison was put in a place that was very remote in order to separate prisoners from civilization. But they also accomplished separating the prison from civilization in terms of many of the techniques and technologies that are available to law enforcement officials now to track people. These two murderers basically used a very old-fashioned system to breakout of a very old-fashioned prison to go out into the world in which all the newfangled technology appears to be relatively powerless to track them and find them and put them back in the prison where they belong.

From a moral perspective, there are several really interesting elements in this. In the first place, you have the big question that modern humanity finds very difficult to answer, just how bad can a person be? This is the question that is behind much of the conversation about the death penalty, much of the conversation about terrorism and its acts, much of the conversation about what’s going on in the larger culture in the headlines. Just how bad can people be? This is not some kind of esoteric abstract academic conversation. We’re talking about two convicted criminals here, both convicted murderers, all the murders involved being very violent. We’re talking about two men whose escape from prison caused such concern that the Governor of New York State immediately went to the prison facility in order to personally give leadership to the effort to try to recapture the criminals.

This story sounds like something from Hollywood, something from movie land that would’ve originated in the early decades of the 20th century. Moral historians look back to those decades and understand something that should have our attention. Americans during that time, and thereafter developed a very strange fascination with criminals, especially with the leaders of organized crime. The development of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and of the FBI’s now very famous Ten Most Wanted list was very much a part of the American fascination. Americans seem to be absolutely obsessed with details about the lives of famous criminals, ranging from people like Al Capone and John Dillinger to the most interesting case of all, and that was of Bonnie and Clyde.

These criminals and their crime stories provided a great deal of moral drama to Americans living in the early decades of the 20th century and we now know that drama has continued. It has just been transformed into other forms of crime. But it is interesting to note the moral confusion that entered into American public life and into the lives of Americans and their thinking when it came to the entertainment culture, giving so much attention, especially Hollywood in its early ages to these very well-known criminals. It turned out that when the criminals were put on the big screen, when their stories were told either in terms of fiction or nonfiction, the moral sentiments of Americans it turned out could be confused when the headlines intersected with the entertainment culture. And as soon as they became matters of celebrity not just of notoriety it turned out that Americans sometimes ended up pulling for the criminal rather than for the law enforcement officials. Now they didn’t do so when they actually had to confront the moral question but they did so when they were driven by a more emotional and entertainment driven understanding and we should understand that ourselves that that hasn’t gone away. That the mass power of entertainment, the mass power of telling a story on the big screen or for that matter now on the small screen, the ability to tell that story is the ability to manipulate emotions and the ability to confuse the moral reality.

But back to that most basic question raised by this issue – how evil, how dangerous can people be? So dangerous that you to put them into prison. So dangerous that you have to put the prison far, far from civilization. So dangerous that you have to create concentric circles of protection around the prison itself. So dangerous that you have to sentence some persons to life in prison without the opportunity of parole. So dangerous that in this case, the Governor of New York left his office in Albany and went to this site in order to make the point that he was personally leading the effort to recapture these criminals.

Oh and by the way, there are assuredly other moral issues here. For one thing, it turns out, and there’s no surprise here, that they evidently had some help from inside the prison. That would seem to be obvious since most prisoners don’t have the opportunity to take power tools to their cells. But that’s going to raise a host of other issues that points to the fact that even when we do our very best to create a context in which prisoners can be safely kept and kept away from society. It simply doesn’t work the way we plan. But when it comes to the sinful nature of humanity demonstrated very clearly in these two convicted murderers who broke out of this New York prison, you know, once again, the most interesting answer to this question doesn’t come from those who are trying to debate this issue in some law school seminar, or some doctoral class, but rather the people who are locking their doors and loading their guns and locking their windows in upstate New York.

2) Religious coalition urges Obama to allow government to fund abortions by breaking federal law

Next, another headline that should have our attention – this one also from the New York Times. It’s by reporter Michael Shear, the headline,

“Religious Leaders Urge U.S. to Fund Abortions for Rape Victims in Conflicts Abroad”

As is so often the case, the unfolding story is a great deal more interesting than the headline even would have indicated. As Shear reports, a coalition of religious and human rights leaders has called upon the President of the United States to support federal financing of abortions for

“women raped during violent conflicts overseas by members of terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram.”

Now here’s why this story is even more interesting than the headline might indicate. It’s because what we’re looking at here is a classic case of political opportunism. The really interesting thing about this story is not so much the occasion that supposedly brought this coalition together in order to make a statement to the President of the United States. It’s the underlying ambition of this group, which is not at all hidden if you go to their own websites.

As Shear reports, the leaders of several Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups accuse the president of talk rather than action in addressing the grim fate of women and girls by refusing to direct the United States government to help pay for abortions in cases of rape in foreign countries. The fact is that no American president since 1973 has believed that he had the authorization to use federal funds to pay for abortions overseas. This is because in that very year, the year of the Roe v. Wade decision, the so-called Helms amendment was passed named for former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms that bans the use of any federal funds for overseas abortions. But as Shear reports, the religious group said that the Helms amendment mentions only abortions used as a method of family planning and should not be viewed as restricting the use of federal funds to make abortions available in cases of rape or incest. They called on President Obama to issue an executive order making government funds available for that purpose.

As Shear summarizes the case,

“Advocates for the change concede that no administration, Democratic or Republican, has interpreted federal law to allow the use of foreign assistance funds for abortions in rape cases since the Helms amendment went into effect more than four decades ago. But they said they had hoped Mr. Obama’s administration would be different.”

In a really interesting aspect of the article one of the women directing the effort that is Sara Ratcliffe, a director of a group called Catholics for Choice said,

“Advocates had spent six and a half years pleading, prodding and shouting to be heard, but no avail. This administration continues to bend a knee to the religious extremists.”

Well what the Obama administration have actually been doing is bending a knee in terms of federal law. The Helms amendment is very clear on this. But what’s also clear is that the issue that is now presented in this headline is basically a pretext for what these groups really want, which is for the federal government to pay for abortions virtually anywhere, anytime for any reason, for any woman who demands one. Just in case you’re wondering if that’s really the agenda of these groups all you have to do is go to their websites where their policy positions and their histories are rather clear on the subject.

What we’re looking at here is a very clear demonstration of the great theological and moral chasm that separates religious groups in the United States. You’re talking here about the far left, and they have been on the far left for a very long time. They have been so pro-abortion not only since 1973, but even before as they were pushing for what became the Roe v. Wade amendment. These groups are so pro-abortion that they will call in terms of their policy statements for abortion for any reason or for no reason and they will do so in explicitly religious language.

As the article in the New York Times makes clear, the coalition is being led as Shear says, by a group called the Center for Health and Gender Equity, which has been pushing the Obama administration to act for more than a year. The groups include such organizations as the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Shear then says,

“Last year, the Center for Health and Gender Equity and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice helped send a letter to the president on the subject, signed by 33 religious leaders and women’s advocates.”

Showing that great theological chasm, the head of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, his name is the Reverend Harry Knox said,

“We faith leaders are here today to call the moral question.”

According to the New York Times he said,

“Members of the coalition were scheduled to meet with the White House Council on Women and Girls on Thursday afternoon.”

If you go to the website for the group Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, it was founded in 1973 as the religious coalition for abortion rights; you’ll come to understand exactly who is the extremist when it comes to the abortion question. And you’re looking at an organization that for instance, on its own timeline goes back to 1991,

“The Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights opposes mandatory parental consent and notification legislation as coercive and harmful to young women.”

These groups have opposed virtually every single restriction on abortion since Roe v. Wade in 1973 and they push not only for the legalization of abortion under virtually any circumstance but also for federal government funding of abortions themselves.

The website of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice lists member groups such as the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the United Church of Christ, the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, the General Board of Global Ministries, women’s division of the United Methodist Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the American Jewish committee and the American Jewish Congress.

What we’re looking at here in this headline just in recent days in the New York Times is a clear underlining of the basic worldview and theological conflict that now has created such a massive divide. The divide over abortions not a divide over how to define certain issues in what might be proposed as something of the middle ground. There is no middle ground here. You’re talking here about a constellation of far left denominations, churches and organizations calling itself the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice now – remember that it updated its language from its original name, as a religious coalition for abortion rights and then you’re talking about the worldview that understands every single human being at every stage of development as fully made in the image of God and fully deserving of a clear affirmation of the dignity and sanctity of that very life. This new story is one of those periodic alerts of the fact that sometimes the headlines just tell the tiniest part of the story. The big story is often behind the story, certainly behind the headlines and that’s certainly the case in this case.

3) Tony Campolo affirms gay couples in the church, continuing in predictable trajectory

Finally, a lot of headlines were made yesterday by Tony Campolo, a well-known figure on the so-called evangelical left. Tony Campolo released a statement early yesterday morning entitled, “For the Record.” The subtitle,  “Tony releases a new statement urging the church to be more welcoming.”

In the statement he says,

“As a young man I surrendered my life to Jesus and trusted in Him for my salvation, and I have been a staunch evangelical ever since. I rely on the doctrines of the Apostles Creed. I believe the Bible to have been written by men inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. I place my highest priority on the words of Jesus, emphasizing the 25th chapter of Matthew, where Jesus makes clear that on Judgment Day the defining question will be how each of us responded to those he calls “the least of these”.

From this foundation I have done my best to preach the Gospel, care for the poor and oppressed, and earnestly motivate others to do the same. Because of my open concern for social justice, in recent years I have been asked the same question over and over again: Are you ready to fully accept into the Church those gay Christian couples who have made a lifetime commitment to one another?”

Now that’s a very interesting way to put the question. That’s not the only way this question is being put, but it’s a very specific way that Tony Campolo has stated the question that sets him up for the next paragraph. He says,

“While I have always tried to communicate grace and understanding to people on both sides of the issue, my answer to that question has always been somewhat ambiguous. One reason for that ambiguity was that I felt I could do more good for my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters by serving as a bridge person, encouraging the rest of the Church to reach out in love and truly get to know them. The other reason was that, like so many other Christians, I was deeply uncertain about what was right. It has taken countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil to bring me to the place where I am finally ready to call for the full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the Church.”

Now, leaving the statement for a moment, this is the kind of news that isn’t as big as the news might have been if this had taken place several years ago. Most people, knowing Tony Campolo and following his trajectory, assume that this day would one day inevitably come and indeed it came, it came yesterday.

This comes over 15 years after Tony Campolo’s wife had taken a similar position and they have been involved in something of a rather public conversation about the issue. One that gained a great deal of evangelical attention. Tony Campolo says that he’s identified his entire life, since his conversion that is, as an evangelical and that he has in terms of the label, but he’s also identified himself very much on the evangelical left and he’s been involved in controversies with other evangelicals for most of that time as well. Controversies over the inerrancy of Scripture, controversies over the exclusivity of the gospel, controversies over any number of issues. Tony Campolo, I think it’s fair to say has often played the role of a provocateur and perhaps he intended to do that yesterday, but it’s too late.

Many others have already declared their understanding of this position in their affirmation of same-sex couples in same-sex activities and same-sex marriage and in this sense, Tony Campolo is arriving rather late to the game and once again it was fully understandable in terms of his trajectory that one day he would get here. The question was why not sooner rather than later? In the statement he cites what he describes as, “countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil.” There’s no reason to doubt that those things took place. But what’s not found in his article is any serious engagement with Scripture whatsoever. A couple of interesting things here – he basically dismisses the scriptural issue by saying that Christians of goodwill can disagree over the interpretation of the crucial biblical texts. But on this matter of biblical interpretation, Tony Campolo was certainly by no means so unclear in times past. In 1999, he gave an interview to Sojourners magazine in which he said,

“Romans 1:26-27 makes it clear that any homosexual sexual activity is contrary to what the Bible allows. We can argue over this interpretation or that interpretation, but we must take the church very seriously. The fellowship of believers called the church of Jesus Christ has stood from the time of Christ to the present day, and I believe it speaks with authority. For almost 2,000 years, the church has read Romans 1 in a particular way. People who knew the Apostle Paul personally have written about what Paul meant when he wrote those verses.”

In an appearance at Calvin College in that same year 1999, the news report from his appearance quoted as saying,

“I believe that the first chapter of Romans is where I rest my case, and that is that the Bible does not allow for same-sex marriages and same-sex eroticism.”

The article from Calvin College also says,

“He also based his argument upon the tradition maintained by the Christian church for 2,000 years, which univocally opposed erotic homosexual acts. On no other issue — not slavery or women in church leadership — has the Christian church ever spoken with one voice throughout history, Campolo said.”

To put the matter bluntly, Tony Campolo was right then and he’s wrong now. But you’ll notice that he speaks very differently about Scripture now. He doesn’t say that he believes Scripture to be very clear in authorizing same-sex marriage. Rather, whereas in 1999 he said that Romans 1 very clearly says that all homosexual sexual acts are sin and that same-sex marriage would not then been be legitimate in the eyes of the church. In the year 2015 he says that the Scripture can be interpreted in different ways.

The statement he released yesterday has no serious engagement with Scripture at all. The other really interesting thing to note from his statement is that he limits his affirmation here to monogamous, same-sex couples in a lifelong commitment. That’s very interesting in and of itself. It’s really interesting on the eve of the Supreme Court decision that’s coming in June. It’s really interesting in terms of asking the question, what about other homosexual acts and other homosexual relationships? You see, even as this evolution of Tony Campolo reached this crucial moment yesterday in terms of the statement. This is not where the issue really is found in terms of the lives of most churches or the lives of most homosexuals.

Tony Campolo may honestly think that his statement will rest from yesterday for the rest of his days. He may intend for that to be his last word on the subject. But even those who are celebrating his statement almost assuredly will not be satisfied with it. There’s also no doubt that from the worldview of Tony Campolo what he is done here is an act of compassion. But this is where biblical Christians who are committed to the inerrancy of Scripture and are committed to that steadfast moral tradition based upon that Scripture must understand that compassion will never actually take the form of denying anything that Scripture clearly says. It will never take the form of in any way subverting what Scripture reveals. And in this case we have to be very clear as in every case that even though something may be claimed to be compassion, if it confuses the gospel, and if it confuses sin, if it confuses the Bible then it really isn’t compassion.

Tony Campolo and I have clashed on issues in the public square for any number of years now, but in private conversations he’s been very gracious and always engaging. I grieve yesterday’s statement by Tony Campolo most because I believe it comes as a direct cost of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I also fear that his statement will be most dangerous to those he has just sought to be most compassionate.

 

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 06-09-15

Podcast Transcript

1) New York jailbreak coverage reminder of power entertainment has to confuse moral reality

Wide Net Cast for Escaped Killers; They Could Be ‘Anywhere’, New York Times (Jesse McKinley and J. David Goodman)

2) Religious coalition urges Obama to allow government to fund abortions by breaking federal law

Religious Leaders Urge U.S. to Fund Abortions for Rape Victims in Conflicts Abroad, New York Times (Michael D. Shear)

AFFILIATES, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

3) Tony Campolo affirms gay couples in the church, continuing in predictable trajectory

Tony Campolo: For the Record, TonyCampolo.org (Tony Campolo)

Holding It Together, Sojourners (Tony Campolo)

Homosexuality: Campolos discourse on their disagreement, Calvin College Chimes (Nathan Vanderklippe)

Transcript: The Briefing 06-08-15

The Briefing

June 8, 2015

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

 

It’s Monday, June 8, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Transgender and feminism agendas collide over admission policies at women’s colleges

Sometimes within just a matter of days or even hours a confluence of issues comes together in order to demonstrate what’s going on in the culture in an unmistakable and unavoidable way. That took place in the last days of last week and going into the weekend, including yesterday. It has to do with the transgender issue, and I’m not talking here about a celebrity case that has been much in the news. I’m talking about something that if anything is more important in the long run. And that has to do with policies changing within institutions and the collision of worldviews when it comes to how in the world institutions, including some the most famous feminist institutions in America, are going to deal with the transgender revolution.

From time to time on The Briefing I pointed out that what we have here is a set of conflicting absolutes. The feminist movement has its own set of ideological absolutes and it has to do with the fact that women, according to the feminist theory, are a besieged minority that must be identified in terms of being women in order for their cause to be heard and for their case to be made. And so you have in the feminist movement a major strain known as gender feminism. In some cases it argues that the feminine gender is actually superior to the male sex and in other ways it simply points to essential differences. Another mainstream of the feminist movement is that men and women are not basically different but they just have a different biology. But that biology is important because they argue that biology has been the cause of the oppression of women and girls throughout the centuries. And that leads to the collision with the transgender revolution because the feminist revolution is actually heavily invested in that old so-called binary understanding of male and female. And then you have the transgender revolution arguing that that binary system of understanding male and female simply has to go. It has to go entirely. In its place is a fluid understanding of gender and the thing we need to recognize right away is that you can’t have gender feminism and this fluid idea of gender and hold them simultaneously, at least not sanely.

But as I said, the most interesting development right now is taking place in institutions that are heavily invested in the feminist ideology. And there are seven institutions, seven very famous liberal arts colleges in the United States often known as the Seven Sisters that are amongst the most feminist institutions in America. These are women only colleges, all of them on the ideological left, all of them very committed to feminism, most of them very old and long-standing in terms of their tradition.

The headline came at the end of last week that Barnard College would be the last of the Seven Sisters to admit and to accept transgender students and this gets to be a very complicated tale. As Susan Svrluga reports for The Washington Post, in the fall of 2015 Barnard College will admit transgender students. This came after the trustees of the institution had gone through a year of what were described as intense discussions. These included public forums and online surveys of alumnae of the school,

“But it came [says Svrluga] at a moment of intense national interest in transgender issues.” She then gets right to the point, “Within the last academic year, all of the best-known women’s colleges have reconsidered their admissions policies, acknowledging a dramatic cultural change in the ways that people define themselves. What was once simple — male or female — has become far more nuanced for many, a complexity that traditional women’s colleges are taking on as they seek to be inclusive yet hold onto their missions.”

But even a cursory review of this issue makes very clear you can’t have both. You can’t have a commitment to the total radical inclusivity that denies that binary understanding of male and female and hold onto the traditional mission of a women’s college. Debora Spar, the president of the college and the chairperson of the board Jolyne Caruso-FitzGerald released what they called a joint letter in which they join two things which actually can’t be joined together. They said,

“There was no question that Barnard must reaffirm its mission as a college for women. And there was little debate that trans women should be eligible for admission to Barnard.”

Now just follow the complexity of the policy that was announced in the joint letter.

“To be considered for admission, an applicant must select ‘female’ on the Common Application”, that is commonly used by many colleges and universities, “and her application materials should support this self-identification.”

It’s not exactly clear how the admission materials are to support that assertion. Now remember that women transitioning to male will not be accepted for admission, but then The Washington Post said,

“Barnard students who choose to transition to male while at school will still be eligible to earn a degree.”

At the end of last week, Elizabeth Harris reported for The New York Times that,

“With its new policy, Barnard follows other prestigious women’s colleges in articulating a stance on transgender applicants and students at a moment when transgender people are more visible than ever.” She went on to acknowledge, “But the rules vary by institution. The policy at Wellesley, for example, is similar to Barnard’s, as is that of Smith College.” But then she reports, “Mount Holyoke, on the other hand, has one of the most inclusive policies of any prestigious women’s school.” Harris says, “In addition to welcoming transgender women, the school also accepts transgender men, as well as those born biologically female but who do not identify as either gender.” Then get the next sentence, “Only those born biologically male and who identify as men are ineligible to attend.”

The website for Mount Holyoke actually says,

“The following academically qualified students can apply for admission consideration:

Biologically born female; identifies as a woman
Biologically born female; identifies as a man
Biologically born female; identifies as other/they/ze
Biologically born female; does not identify as either woman or man
Biologically born male; identifies as woman
Biologically born male; identifies as other/they/ze and when “other/they” identity includes woman”

But then it again identifies those who cannot apply,

“Biologically born male; identifies as man.”

As Harris reports, Hollins University in Virginia takes a different approach than the other sisters in the group.

“Applicants born male will be considered for admission only if they have “completed the physical sex reassignment surgery and legal transformation from male to female,” according to campus policy. Students who transition from female to male will no longer be eligible for a Hollins degree.”

So in just a matter of days the Seven Sisters align themselves with Barnard College becoming the very last to join the transgender revolution. But the schools are joining this revolution in different ways. And while trying to do two things that are absolutely contradictory to try to maintain an identity as an historic women’s college, while denying that women is a meaningful category that has anything necessarily to do with sex.

Now remember that was at the end of last week going into the weekend and then comes the Sunday edition of The New York Times – always interesting, but on this count, this weekend, especially so. The front page article in the review section of The New York Times asked the question, “What makes a woman?” It’s by Elinor Burkett, a journalist, a former professor and a feminist, who was very upset with the direction of the ideology taken by the transgender revolution. Why? Because as she points out, there is now an automatic collision between old order feminists and the transgender activists. Burkett asked the question,

“Do women and men have different brains?” She then says, “Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations.”

What she doesn’t say is that in short order, Lawrence Summers was out as the president of Harvard University. But now Burkett says that which got Lawrence Summers fired just a matter of a few years ago as president of Harvard University, is now taken to be the absolute orthodoxy of the transgender revolution. Pointing to the most recent celebrity gender transition she points out that the transition was celebrated as a way of realigning a body with the brain. The brain, it was claimed, is female.

Elinor Burkett says that’s the very argument that feminist have been arguing against for the last several decades. That argument that cost Lawrence Summers his job as president of Harvard University just a matter of a few years ago. Now it’s being celebrated by popular culture and being applauded by the very people who opposed it just a matter of a few years ago. Much of Elinor Burkett’s article, and again, it was the front page article in the review section of yesterday’s New York Times, is unmentionable in terms of this explicit nature on The Briefing. But suffice it to say that Burkett’s point is that she is a woman and that the feminist movement makes a great deal of the fact she is a woman and she argues that the binary understanding of human beings as male and female is being undermined by the logic and the ideology of the transgender movement.

In recent months on The Briefing we’ve discussed articles in The New York Times magazine and in The New Yorker indicating this very collision, but it’s interesting that now The New York Times, just days, virtually hours after the announcement by Barnard College that the newspaper itself reported, it now reports there’s a major problem here. This article comes from the far left in terms of worldview and one of most interesting things about it, there are two points I want to make – one is that Elinor Burkett, who is a radical proponent of abortion, sees that the abortion-rights movement as identified with women and she points out that many abortion-rights organizations now are actually trying to join the transgender revolution, at least in terms of political correctness by not mentioning women, even though by definition, only those who are born women are able actually to have a pregnancy, which leads to the very issue of abortion and the logic of the abortion-rights movement.

Burkett points to the quandary of these women’s colleges, and remember this comes out just a matter of about 48 hours after The New York Times reported on Barnard College and she writes,

“Women’s colleges are contorting themselves into knots to accommodate female students who consider themselves men, but usually not men who are living as women. Now these institutions, whose core mission is to cultivate female leaders, have student government and dormitory presidents who identify as males.”

Well here’s one very influential feminist writing from the left who says that simply isn’t going to work. A second point that becomes very clear in this article to those operating out of a biblical worldview is an acknowledgment that Elinor Burkett makes. She makes the point that so long as babies are born and someone observes the baby and says it’s a boy or it’s a girl, there will continue to be an assignment made at birth. In her own way, consistent with her own worldview for her own reasons, Elinor Burkett still thinks that matters. So do biblical Christians, of course, operating out of a very different worldview and on the basis of very different assumptions.

2) Children’s books important tools in furthering transgender agenda

A story by Alexandra Alter, here’s the headline,

“Transgender Children’s Books Fill a Void and Break a Taboo.”

The most important aspect of the article is for Christian parents to understand that this ideology is now very much, very strategically aimed at children. The very point of this article is that we now have coming an entire series of books addressed to children, including elementary aged children, telling them the message of the transgender revolution. Alter reports,

“Children’s literature is catching up to the broader culture, as stereotypes of transgender characters have given way to nuanced and sympathetic portrayals.” Altar goes on to report, “This year, children’s publishers are releasing around half a dozen novels in a spectrum of genres, including science fiction and young adult romance, that star transgender children and teenagers.”

David Levithan, the vice president and publisher of Scholastic Press said,

“In our culture, it was really something that was in the shadows, but suddenly people are talking about it. As our culture is starting to acknowledge transgender people and acknowledge that they are part of the fabric of who we are, literature is reflecting that.”

Alter tells us that in coming months there will be an entire series of these books. She points in particular to a book that was published by Duet addressed to the young adult audience. It is about

“a transgender teenage boy who falls in love with an older boy on the beach in Cape Cod.”

Later in the article Alter writes,

“In August, Scholastic will publish “George,” a middle-grade debut novel about a boy who knows he is a girl but doesn’t know how to tell his family and friends.”

Now we need to note that The New York Times is telling us, and parents need to be aware of this, that these books are being addressed to middle grade children. Alter then defines that when she writes,

“The next frontier for authors writing about transgender people seems to be middle-grade literature, or books aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds. In November, Disney Hyperion published “Gracefully Grayson,” a novel for readers ages 10 and up about a sixth-grade boy who feels like a girl.”

It’s sometimes hard to know exactly what to do with the confluence of articles like this, but the one thing we must not do is ignore it. Many times we’re being told that conservative Christians just can’t get these issues off their minds. Well one of the reasons is The New York Times can’t keep it off of the front page. And in a story like this, a confluence of stories like this, there’s a pattern that Christians need to observe very carefully. Because we are looking at how the culture is driven, shaped and formed. And we’re looking at the fact that the people who were driving this revolution understand they’re going to have to reach children and now they intend to do that. And remember we’re talking here about the definition of what’s being called the middle grades and they are identified as children ages 8 to 12. This tells us just how young they are aiming their attention and it will not stop there because just as in the picture book Heather Has Two Mommies, now about 25 years old, you can count on the fact that even now, the transgender revolution is changing the way that books for the very youngest children are written too.

Just as you really can’t have an historic women’s college consistent with its mission and join the transgender revolution. You can’t join that revolution and then put out picture books that include a mommy and a daddy, a son and a daughter, a brother and a sister, without adding a good deal of what the culture is now calling validity to the mix. But it’s worse than that, of course, because in this rebellion against the gift of gender, this culture is increasingly making it impossible to use terms like mother and father, son and daughter, brother and sister, even boy and girl, or man and woman with any definite meaning whatsoever.

It’s hard to say at this point where the transgender revolution is going to end. As I said, it has planted the seeds for its own destruction in the radical nature of its ideology. It is an unstable project individually and culturally but we can tell where it’s headed. It’s headed towards a great deal of acceleration in this culture and the way to accomplish that the leaders of this revolution know is by aiming as young as possible.

In so many ways as virtually anyone has now observed, the entertainment and information complex has been a major engine for driving the sexual revolution. The pictures we see on television, the betrayals we see from Hollywood, the understandings that come to us by the mass media, these have massive culture and ideology shaping impact. But just imagine the amplification of that impact when it comes to the very youngest eyes and ears. The pictures they see, the messaging that they receive, Christian parents better be very aware of this when it comes not only to those are children but also teenagers and young adults. If we do not ground the coming generation and the understanding of what it means to be male and female, as one of God’s greatest gifts to his human creatures made in his image, then we are going to simply see the same kind of insanity we now see in the Seven Sisters of these historically women’s colleges written virtually across the culture, including our own churches and denominations.

It is really interesting, very telling that you have the most influential newspaper in the United States, perhaps the most influential newspaper in the world, reflecting in a single issue, not to mention in a single week, this kind of confusion that is sown by this kind of moral revolution. It is evidently confusing even to those who are the readers, writers and editors of The New York Times who you can count upon believe themselves to be a part of this revolution, but they’re not all moving in the same direction and they can’t be because the ideologies of feminism and the transgender revolution are eventually irreconcilable.

As a pastoral challenge, the transgender revolution at the individual level is going to require the greatest conviction and compassion of the Christian church deeply committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the totality of the Christian worldview. At the public level, you can see this debate that is primarily most interesting right now, is not between those who are arguing for the Christian worldview on the one hand and those who are the proponents of the revolution on the other – that’s an interesting debate.  But right now the even more interesting debate is on the secular left, amongst secular liberals who can’t decide right now which way to go – feminism or the transgender revolution. At least some of them recognize you can’t have both.

3) Gospel and prosperity theology incompatibilities evidenced in Creflo Dollar jet decision

But finally it’s also important for Christians to understand, also occasioned by headlines as we went into the weekend that you can’t have the gospel and prosperity theology. Those two are irreconcilable opposites. Prosperity theology or the so-called prosperity gospel is one of the most dangerous heresies now facing Christians worldwide. You can have the gospel of Jesus Christ or you can have the prosperity gospel, but you cannot have both. And the proponents of prosperity theology are out there replacing the gospel of Jesus Christ with a false gospel that doesn’t promise salvation from sin and all the promises that come in the gospel of Jesus Christ accomplished in the death burial and resurrection of the incarnate son of God, with a false gospel that promises health, wealth and prosperity instead.

This comes in mind with headlines that appeared in papers such as The Washington Post as we went into the weekend, telling us the Pastor Creflo Dollar is going to buy that $65 million private jet because God wants him to have it. You may recall that Creflo Dollar made infamous headlines in recent months, when it was discovered he was trying to raise $300 donations from his mailing list to buy him a $65 million private jet. What he was trying to buy was a Gulfstream G650, which as The Washington Post says, “isn’t just any private jet.” Faced with controversy, Dollar’s ministry backed off that effort to try to raise the money for a $65 million jet through $300 contributions. But at the end of the week his ministry announced that, those donations aside, the ministry is simply going to buy the jet for Creflo Dollar.

The board of World Changers Church International, according to The Washington Post has announced that the ministry will now go ahead and buy a Gulfstream G650 jet anyway, “at a time, place and price of our choosing.”

So take that, controversy. The board went on to say,

“We wholeheartedly reject the notion that the ministry’s airplane project is an imposition on our community or that it somehow takes advantage of our people. We plan to acquire a Gulfstream G650 because it is the best, and it is a reflection of the level of excellence at which this organization chooses to operate.”

To the credit of The Washington Post and Abby Ohlheiser, the reporter on this piece, she reports,

“Most Christians, evangelical or otherwise, do not consider prosperity gospel to be a mainstream interpretation of Scripture.”

That’s if anything, an understatement, but at least it’s important that she got that right in the article. The ministry statement included these words,

“A long-range, high-speed, intercontinental jet aircraft is a tool that is necessary in order to fulfill the mission of the ministry.” The statement went on to say, “In light of an unfortunate accident that recently resulted in the ministry’s aircraft being declared a total loss, it is our intention to purchase another airplane at a time, place and price of our choosing. We respectfully request that those who are not involved respect our right to practice what we believe, and only ask of the press that they report facts, and not fictional reports or biased perspectives.” The statement then read, “We encourage our community, and our pastors, to dream big, because we know that God loves us just that much.”

As I pointed out many times, the main problem with the prosperity theology isn’t that it promises too much. It is that it promises too little. Wealth and prosperity are passing at their very best and they are illusory and dangerous. This is evidence of that at face value. The most dangerous part of the statement from this board is where they defend the purchase of a $65 million jet because “we know that God loves us just that much.” But in reality, God does not love us that way. He loves us at an infinitely higher price for an infinitely higher gift. As John 3:16 reminds us,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life.”

That’s the gospel of Jesus Christ; the prosperity gospel isn’t a gospel at all.

 

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 06-08-15

1) Transgender and feminism agendas collide over admission policies at women’s colleges

Barnard will admit transgender students. Now all ‘Seven Sisters’ colleges do., Washington Post (Susan Svrluga)

Barnard College, After Much Discussion, Decides to Accept Transgender Women, New York Times (Elizabeth Harris)

What Makes a Woman?, New York Times (Elinor Burkett)

2) Children’s books important tools in furthering transgender agenda

Transgender Children’s Books Fill a Void and Break a Taboo, New York Times (Alexandra Alter)

3) Gospel and prosperity theology incompatibilities evidenced in Creflo Dollar jet decision

Pastor Creflo Dollar might get his $65 million private jet after all, Washington Post (Abby Ohlheiser)

Statement From the Board of Directors, Creflo Dollar Ministries

Genesis 35:1-29

Transcript: The Briefing 06-05-15

The Briefing

June 5, 2015

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

 

It’s Friday, June 5, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Accidental shipping of live anthrax by U.S. labs parable of living in fallen modern world

One of the most enduring moral lessons learned by humanity is that that was taught in the old Greek story; indeed it’s ancient of Pandora. You’ll recall the fact that when humanity opens the lid on Pandora’s box, it is impossible to get all the evils that come out back into the box. In one sense, in our age that is a particularly powerful parable when it comes to issues of technology and of information. Once something is known, it cannot be not known; when something gets out in terms of information it is impossible to eradicate that information or knowledge.

One classic example of that from the 20th century was the development of nuclear weapons, even though every single nuclear weapon might theoretically be destroyed by some kind of international treaty, the knowledge of how to create that atomic weapon would not disappear, which means the danger would never be over. And when you’re looking at issues of ideology, so many ideas once loosed in the culture simply are impossible to get back into some kind of controlled environment. And we also know that when it comes to that kind of danger – sometimes it’s even more literal, sometimes it actually takes the form of something that is actually viral. That’s why we should pay note to a very important series of articles important news coverage coming first of all, from USA Today and then from other major international media as well.

It has to do with the fact that the United States government in its official capacity is acknowledging that it’s owned, funded and supervised labs were very lax when it came to the control of biological infectious agents. Indeed as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday,

“Pentagon officials said Wednesday the inadvertent shipment of live anthrax to laboratories nationwide stretched back a decade and that the scope of the mishap was likely to expand in coming days.”

So what does that tell us? It tells us that the people who are in charge of trying to prevent infectious agents and getting loose set those agents loose. The very people who are in charge of making certain that these kinds of infectious agents can’t get out. They sent them out and not only that – it’s not an isolated single occasion, they are now acknowledging as the Pentagon released on Wednesday, that this is a problem that has stretched back at least a decade and the spokesperson for the Pentagon said, just wait, there will likely be more bad news in the coming week.

Later in the story by Julian Barnes, we read,

“Four batches of the pathogen sent from the U.S. military laboratory at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah—which were thought to have been irradiated and inactivated—have been identified as containing live anthrax, officials said. Samples from those batches were sent to 51 sites in the U.S. and overseas over the past 10 years.”

Anthrax is one of the most dangerous infectious agents on earth – one of the most deadly. And those who have been concerned about terrorism have for decades been worried that that particular infectious agent might be used by terrorists trying to bring about mass infection and the death that would follow.

As I said, USA Today deserves credit for extensive coverage of this issue. Allison Young and Nick Penzenstadler writing for USA Today tell us that vials of bioterror bacteria gone missing, lab mice infected with deadly viruses have escaped and wild rodents have been found making nests with research waste. Cattle infected in a university’s vaccine experiments were repeatedly sent to slaughter and their meat sold for human consumption. Gear meant to protect lab workers from lethal viruses such as Ebola and bird flu has failed repeatedly. USA Today then reported an investigation that revealed that hundreds of lab mistakes, safety violations and near miss incidents have occurred in biological laboratories coast-to-coast in recent years, putting scientists, their colleagues and even the public at risk.

Reading this extensive news coverage, one of the most important things we can realize is how thankful we are that thus far, none of these accidents or incidents has produced an outbreak of this kind of infectious disease among human beings. But as USA Today and other media are reporting, some of the technicians and scientists who been working with these pathological elements have indeed not only been infected, but have died from those infections that largely outside the site of the American people.

Christians looking at the headlines here need to recognize that the Bible is quite specific about the fact that disease, illness, this kind of contagion is exactly one of the signs of a fallen world that is explicitly identified in the Bible. We are told that pestilence and plague are indeed some of the most ancient enemies of mankind and they are symptoms of what it means to live in a world that shows all of the signs we would expect of what it means to be infected with sin long before there is the opportunity to be infected with the biological element. But even as the parable of Pandora ’s Box was so powerful in the ancient world, these kinds of headline should be very powerful in our own thinking. Reminding us of the limitations of human beings when it comes to creating limits to this kind of contagion. And what we see here is a fact that becomes a pattern we can see elsewhere. Sometimes very close to home, where the people who are assigned responsibility to prevent something from happening, actually either by inattention or by simple negligence, become the agents for how the very thing that was to be avoided actually happens.

From a biblical perspective, we need to keep in mind that there is a danger, a deadly danger in our ever assuming that we can control something this dangerous and this contagious. That is simply not really possible. I for one am very thankful that there are people who put their lives on the line to try to come up with vaccines against these infections, who try to control the outbreak of this kind of contagion, the very people who put their lives on the line for medical research and yet we now come to understand that when it comes to the most infectious agents on earth, the people who are supposed to have the highest expertise in making sure these things never get out, actually sent them out inadvertently over the course of the past decade.

It turns out that just as Pandora’s Box was dangerous, and the ancients understood it, so also is the modern research laboratory. That’s yet another parable of paradox of what it means to live in our modern world still so affected by sin. It seems that sometimes the only people who might be able to limit a problem are the very people who expanded it. This is one of those headlines that humbles us all because we recognize that human beings face real enemies, sometimes microscopic, infectious bacterial or viral enemies. We come to understand how thankful we are that mechanisms have been put in place to limit the damage of these enemies of humankind. And yet, we also come to understand that none of these defenses is sure. We come to understand that the four ancient enemies of mankind represented by the four horsemen of the apocalypse that is war, famine, plague and death. They will be with us in one form or another, until Jesus comes.

2) Democratic candidacy debates made more interesting  by entry of RI governor Lincoln Chafee

Next, the United States presidential race just gets more interesting. As we pointed out and as we will see on so many occasions between now and the presidential election, this is a test of the candidates, it’s a test of the citizenry. It’s also a test of our curiosity. Because as it turns out, in the last week at least three new candidates have tossed their hats into the ring as it is said. On the Republican side, former Texas Governor, Rick Perry announced that he will be running for president. And also on the Republican side, South Carolina Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham announced that he will seek the Republican nomination for President of the United States. For Lindsey Graham this is the first time in which he would run for the nomination, when it comes to Rick Perry, of course, it is the second as he ran four years ago in the Republican primaries as well. But the additions on the Republican side are by no means as interesting as the addition on the Democratic side.

Just a matter of a month ago, it looked like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was going to run unopposed for the Democratic nomination and yet that was unlikely. And even as we are looking at the fact that she is still very clearly the front runner by any estimation, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed socialist is now in the race. Martin O’Malley, the former Democratic Governor of Maryland is now in the race, both attempting to run to the left of Hillary Clinton. Then we have this week, the announcement that the Governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee would also be running for the Democratic nomination for the Office of President of the United States. And this is a lot more interesting than virtually anything that’s happened on the Democratic side thus far.

In the first place, if you were to go back in time 20 years and you were to say the name Chafee, you wouldn’t think Democrat, you might think a liberal, but you wouldn’t think Democrat. You also wouldn’t think Lincoln. You’ll be thinking of John Chafee, who was the Rhode Island Senator who was a declared Republican for so many years, serving in the United States Senate as a part of the left wing as it was then of the Republican Party. But then his son Lincoln took that Senate seat and held it for some time until losing office. He later ran for Governor of Rhode Island and he now holds that position. But in his political evolution, Lincoln Chafee has moved considerably to the left. He was originally a Republican Senator, and then he became an independent, then he became a Democrat, and now is running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. He’s not much of a threat to former Secretary of State Clinton, after all, he doesn’t even have the support of the Democratic Party in his own state.

As the New York Times reported,

“Joseph M. McNamara, the chairman of the Rhode Island Democratic Party, said that Mrs. Clinton had laid substantial groundwork when she won the state’s presidential primary in 2008.”

Speaking of his own Governor and supposedly the head of the party in the state of Rhode Island, the party chairman said,

“I certainly wish him the best. He’s a very gracious individual, but most of the leadership in the Democratic Party in Rhode Island is supporting Hillary.”

There are any number of politicians in America who have carved out rather eccentric personalities, but it’s hard to top Lincoln Chafee. Even as he was announcing why he was running to be President of the United States, the Governor of Rhode Island announced that one of his concerns was to internationalize the United States and to make the United States more integrated in the world economy. And the way he was going to try to accomplish that was to require the nation to join the metric system, giving up America’s historic understanding of measurements, whether it comes to inches and miles being changed to centimeters in kilometers or when it comes to exchanging Fahrenheit for Celsius on the thermometer. The New York Times, which is about as internationalist a major newspaper as we can imagine in the United States even thought this was odd. The reporter Alan Rappeport wrote,

“Mr. Chafee’s presidential announcement lacked the festive atmosphere that some other candidates have sought to create.” Speaking of the idea of shifting to the metric system, Rappaport reports, “Mr. Chafee struggled to make the case that switching measurement systems would eventually be good for the economy.”

I will simply have to note that about the time I was in middle school in the 1970s the United States made an attempt to switch to the metric system. It simply did not work. It was a colossal cultural failure. Americans it turns out are committed to inches and miles and to degrees in Fahrenheit. They buy gallons of milk. They don’t buy milk buy the liter and it also turns out that as America considered trying to change to the metric system, as did the rest of the world in the last half of the 20th century, it turns out that the habits of American measurement are just too ingrained to change. After all, just consider this; you wouldn’t just have to change all the units of measure in terms of things that are sold, you wouldn’t have to change just all the signs on the freeway when it comes to miles, you wouldn’t just have to change all those units of measure, you also have to change every single recipe in terms of shifting from the traditional units of measure to the metric system. It turned out decades ago that Americans in the kitchen were about as resolutely against the metric system, as those in the board room.

But even as until this week, Bernie Sanders was almost assuredly the most secular candidate running for any major party nomination, it can be argued that Lincoln Chafee is going to give them a run for the money. He is by self-identification an Episcopalian, and yet he believes in his own version of church and state separation, that is so interesting, that as Kimberly Winston reported for Religion News Service,

“Lincoln Chafee skipped church on the day of his inauguration as Governor of Rhode Island out of respect for the separation of church and state.”

Now that’s one of the most interesting understandings of church and state I’ve ever heard. Not only does he believe in some kind of strict separation of church and state, he evidently believes that that means he can’t go to church on the day he is inaugurated as governor. The governor also tried to give something of an encouragement to unbelievers perceived also as a slap at believers, when he declared May 1 in his state, as RNS reported, to be a day of reason, rather than the National Day of Prayer. His proclamation said that,

“His proclamation said reason has “proven to offer hope for human survival upon Earth by cultivating intelligent, moral, and ethical interaction among people.”

The governor also refused to identify the annual Christmas tree and the capital of Rhode Island as a Christmas tree. Referring to it instead as a holiday tree, explaining,

“I’m representing all of Rhode Island,”

that evidently believes in both holidays and trees, but might not believe in a Christmas tree. It might be tempting just to write them off as a fringe figure, but he is the governor of one of the 50 states of the United States of America. There isn’t much chance that he is going to get the Democratic nomination for president, much less become president. But there is a good chance that his entry into the race is going to make these issues all the more interesting. But as the governor might himself know there are many kilometers for us to go before this race is over.

3) Attempt to replace motherhood with institutional care a rebellion against creation order

Next, The Boston Globe ran an article in recent days that demands our attention. It’s by Kathleen McCartney, who is the President of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. That’s one of the historic women’s colleges of America going back to the 19th century. Writing in The Boston Globe, her headline,

“Time to rethink our social construct of motherhood.”

It’s one of those truly radical articles to appear in a major American newspaper in recent months. McCartney says that what America needs is a revised understanding of motherhood. She writes,

“Motherhood is a cultural invention. It reflects a belief adopted by society that is passed down from one generation to the next. In U.S. culture, we hold to the idea that young children are better off when cared for exclusively by their mothers. Mothers are bombarded by this message in the media, especially in programming directed to them.”

Then, in an odd cultural reference she says,

“Only after five seasons does Claire Dunphy, the iconic mother of “Modern Family,” return to the workplace.”

Before turning to her comments, let me extend them. She says,

“Anthropologists have attempted to disavow us of this view. Specifically they have demonstrated that child-rearing patterns are driven by economic considerations. In foraging societies, mothers stay in close proximity with their babies, while in agricultural societies mothers share child-rearing responsibilities with those less able to be productive in the fields, like grandmothers and young girls. Shared child-rearing has been and continues to be the norm across cultures. In contemporary society, child care is our form of shared child-rearing.”

Now one of the most important arguments that McCartney makes is where she says that “Motherhood is a cultural invention.” Now let’s just step back for a moment. There is no doubt that certain ideas about motherhood are determined by our culture. They are expanded by our culture. No one looking at motherhood should say it is merely a biological fact. But it is sheer insanity to argue that it isn’t a biological fact. That’s the most amazing thing about this article. The Boston Globe has written a major opinion piece, by a woman who is the President of Smith College, one of the most well-known educational institutions in the United States and she declares motherhood is a cultural invention. That’s the kind of statement that simply staggers the moral imagination when we look at something like this and realize she fully intends to be taken seriously. She then goes on to say, as I read,

“It reflects a belief adopted by society that is passed down from one generation to the next.” She then says, but she doesn’t actually explain, “In U.S. culture, we hold to the idea that young children are better off when cared for exclusively by their mothers.”

That raises a question which is raised by her very own argument as to, if so, why that would be so in the United States and for so long a time. After all, she’s arguing that these ideas are passed down from generation to generation. But the other thing we need to note immediately is that she acts as if this is somehow unique to the United States. That somehow a focus on motherhood tied to child-rearing is something that is unique to the United States, something that is fairly recent in terms of becoming a problem and something that is nonetheless going to be very difficult to eradicate as a cultural idea. Well, she’s right about that last part. But even as she cites anthropologists, she certainly has to have enough anthropological self-awareness to know that the link between mothers and their offspring is a constant in terms of human society as long as human society has existed.

There is a legitimate portion to her argument when she talks about shared child rearing in terms of the extended family. Of course that has been the norm throughout human history and the problem is that we have so severed the extended family in terms of grandparents and other kin that many American families are feeling isolated and no doubt many mothers, some of them even single mothers are feeling increasingly isolated as well. The radical nature of her argument is extended when she writes,

“Our culture’s ambivalence about maternal employment spurred research on whether child care was a risk factor for young children. In time, social scientists demonstrated definitively that infant care did not disrupt the mother-child bond and that children thrived in quality child care. I conducted some of this research, as one of the principal investigators of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s 20-year, longitudinal study of early child care.”

I simply want to ask the question, does anyone with full intellectual honesty believe that institutionalized childcare, no matter how excellent as defined in these supposedly scientific terms, is an actual replacement for mothers and in the lives of children comes with no appreciable loss? It turns out, however, that even as she and her colleagues conducted this scientific research that they published they were unable to get the culture to move towards the policies that they believed were right. She said,

“Earlier in my career, I believed solid research findings, like my own, would lead to policy change. I was wrong. Culture trumps data every time. Our romanticized views about motherhood continue to sow division and guilt, undermining our energies to organize for the policies that employed mothers and fathers deserve.”

We don’t have time to look at the actual policy she was proposing, but suffice it to say it was more government funding for what she would define as higher quality childcare across the board for children. But the most important thing to recognize is that she is straightforwardly without any embarrassment, making the argument that institutionalized childcare, a form of what she calls shared child rearing, would be preferable to an understanding that children are better off being cared for by their own mothers.

This form of worldview represents a rebellion not only against the current political reality, but against the created order. Because what we’re looking at here is a denial of something that is deeply rooted in biology. No doubt there are cultural aspects of motherhood, but very clearly, there is a biological aspect of motherhood. We also see in this article, a kind of ideology that is just laid before us in all of its candor. As deeply shocking as these ideas are they are also illuminating to us, when we recognize that there are an incredible number of people who evidently think just as this president of Smith College thinks.

Even as it’s interesting to note that she herself concedes, she and her colleagues haven’t been able to convince the culture of the rightness of their understanding. But Christians looking at an article like this also need to celebrate and recognize that we are not as human creatures left to our own, trying to imagine what it might be to be a father and a mother, or whether a father and a mother are necessary, or whether a child could be raised just as well in an institutional setting as in a family.

The Christian worldview makes clear that the family is not an accident and the roles of mothers and fathers in the family and the existence of mothers and fathers of children is also not an accident. You know, finally, I just have to recognize that this article wasn’t written for children, it was written for adults. But just consider this – try arguing to a child held securely in his mother’s arms that his social construct of motherhood is going to have to change. Or for that matter, try telling his mother.

 

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. Every year I put out a summer reading list of books that I suggest for summer reading. You’ll find that in an article posted right now at Albert Mohler.com entitled “Books for Summer Time or Any Time.” For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com. Remember we’re taking questions for Ask Anything Weekend Edition. Call with your question, in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

 

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

 

The Briefing 06-05-15

1) Accidental shipping of live anthrax by U.S. labs parable of living in fallen modern world

Up to 18 labs in U.S. got live anthrax shipments, USA Today (Alison Young and Nick Penzenstadler)

More Labs Received Live Anthrax, Pentagon Says, Wall Street Journal (Julian E. Barnes)

2) Democratic candidacy debates made more interesting  by entry of RI governor Lincoln Chafee

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to Run for President, Wall Street Journal (Nathan Koppel)

Lincoln Chafee Takes Winding Road Into Democratic Race, New York Times (Alan Rappeport)

3) Attempt to replace motherhood with institutional care a rebellion against creation order

Time to rethink our social construct of motherhood, The Boston Globe (Kathleen McCartney)

Transcript: The Briefing 06-04-15

The Briefing

June 4, 2015

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

 

It’s Thursday, June 4, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) American exception to secularization no longer true in Pacific northwest

 

Secularization is largely a social process. That’s because, no surprise here – we are social creatures. Secularization is the process whereby societies as a whole or in part become largely detached from their theological worldview and that’s what has happened in Europe. When you’re looking at the continent of Europe you’re looking at a continent that has been in a process of secularization for well over a century. You’re looking at the fact that in some European nations, there are so few people going to church that church buildings are being sold, being turned into bars and nightclubs and any number of other things including mosques. You’re also looking at the fact that the larger issue is the detachment, the distancing of those societies from the beliefs of the Christian worldview that had given the civilizations their birth.

For a long time, even within the last 20 years or so there were many in America who felt that this nation was the great exception to secularization. Now we know that is not actually the case. We now know that what we were looking at in the United States was not a society that was over the long-term resistant to secularization. We’re looking at something like a delayed fuse and there are a couple of issues in recent headlines that should bring this to our attention.

In the first place, from Seattle comes an article from the Seattle Sun Times. The headline is this,

“10 percent of Seattle residents identify as atheist.”

The writer, Kim De Guzman, points to new research largely coming from the Pew Research Center indicating that Seattle is one of the most secularized Metropolitan areas in all of North America. When you’re looking at the fact that in Seattle, 10 percent of the residents identify as atheists, you’re looking at the fact that that’s the highest rates amongst the largest Metropolitan areas in the entire nation. This is a standout – even though the number of none’s, that’s n-o-n-e-s, those with no religious affiliation, even though that number and percentage has been growing rather significantly, there has been no vast increase across the country in the number of people willing to identify as atheist. But Seattle is something of an outlier. We’re talking about a Metropolitan area in which one out of every 10 residents identifies now as an atheist. That is something that is completely new when it comes to American history and American society. It’s pointing to a very different American future. That’s because Seattle, even if it is an outlier in this respect, is an indicator in other respects of the direction of the culture.

Why Seattle? There are a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, when we’re looking at the Pacific Northwest in general, all the way from the Bay Area in California up to the Canadian border, we’re looking at the region of the Continental United States that has been least evangelized throughout all of American history. When you think about American religious history you think about the fact that so many of the colonies were directly established for theological reasons by very self-identified theological communities. Then you think about the fact that the United States in terms of its history was shaped by two Great Awakenings – two periods of religious intensity – without which we wouldn’t understand the United States and Christianity in the United States as we do now. The Pacific Northwest had none of those experiences. But there’s something else to keep in mind, the Pacific Northwest is outsized in terms of its influence now on the rest of the culture. Which is to say if you’re looking at Seattle and Portland, San Francisco, you’re looking at metropolitan areas that give us a pretty clear indication of what the rest of the country may one day look like, indeed, it’s a likelihood.

James Wellman, who is Chair of the Department of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington, told the press that one of the reasons why Seattle might have such a high degree of nonbelief, again 10 percent being atheists, is because as he said people come to Seattle to find cultural freedom. In his words,

“When people come to the Northwest, they come across the Cascades and all their old affiliations just drop out the door,” Wellman said. “I think they find a bit of paradise – you can think what you want, you can do what you want, you can make of your life what you want. Old affiliations, especially family affiliations, aren’t around to bring you back into the fold.”

That’s a very interesting analysis from a scholar of comparative religion looking at the situation there in Seattle and I think he’s really onto something. That is Wellman makes clear a lot of the people in the Pacific Northwest are not so inclined to become atheist as they are to adopt some kind of nontheistic spirituality something akin to what’s been called for decades now, the New Age movement. But for a significant minority of those in Seattle, a standout from every other Metropolitan area in the United States, fully one out of 10 is going to identify now as an atheist. In that sense, Seattle is beginning to look like something of a metropolitan representation of Europe, right here within the continent of North America.

2) Effect of individualism in Millennials reveals increasingly secular future for America 

 

The other thing we need to note is that across America’s northern border a border to which Seattle is relatively close, the nation of Canada is already and has been for decades following that European pattern rather than the American pattern. And in this case, it’s that pattern that’s influencing the United States, rather than vice versa. But if geography matters, it is also clear as is documented in another news story of recent days that a generational reality is also something we need to keep in mind. And when it comes to Christians thinking about the Pacific Northwest this makes very clear a bit of cultural analysis is important to our understanding of what it means to be a great commission people. This helps to define our challenge in terms of Christian witness, especially as we are looking not only to the reality of today’s Seattle, but the indication that that would point to in terms of the future. It simply follows the even more emphatic, and indeed coast-to-coast, a generational pattern is even more fundamental. And that’s why a headline that appeared recently in Science News also demands our attention.

This is a press release that came originally from San Diego State University there in California. The headline,

“The Least Religious Generation.”

Looking at 11.2 million U.S. adolescents of the last 50 years, researchers we are told, find that the Millennials are by far the least religious American generation. The summary of the research found at Science News, tells us that,

“Unlike previous studies, ours is able to show that millennials’ lower religious involvement is due to cultural change, not to millennials being young and unsettled.”

That comes from Jean Twenge, a very well-known analyst of adolescence in America, who is one of the lead researchers on this study. Twenge went on to say,

“Millennial adolescents are less religious than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age.” She says, “We also looked at younger ages than the previous studies. More of today’s adolescents are abandoning religion before they reach adulthood, with an increasing number not raised with religion at all.”

One of the most interesting aspects about this research is the attempt of the researchers to understand why this pattern is taking place. Why the millennials are now the most secularized generation of recent Americans and of course when we say that we really mean the most secularized generation in American history. Twenge said,

“These trends are part of a larger cultural context, a context that is often missing in polls about religion, one context” she said, and this is so important “one context is rising individualism in U.S. culture. Individualism puts the self first, which doesn’t always fit well with the commitment to the institution and other people that religion often requires. As Americans become more individualistic, it makes sense that fewer would commit to religion.”

Now this is the generic language of social science, but it tells us that in the United States where the vast majority of these teenagers are leaving behind Christianity rather than something else, it makes very clear that secularization is displacing any identification with Christianity on the part of an increasing and fast-growing number of youngest Americans, especially those who are now adolescents. Those millennials turn out to be the most secularized generation in our nation’s history and it’s very interesting that Twenge and her researchers writing entirely from a secular viewpoint come to the conclusion that the underlying shift is in the worldview towards individualism and as she indicates individualism is something of a solvent. It tends to dissolve all religious commitments, all religious truth claims, all religious authority – that simply makes sense.

One of the most interesting small issues in this study is the fact that the rate of nonbelief among these adolescents actually increased faster, according to the study amongst teenage girls than amongst teenage boys. Also reading directly from the published report,

“The rise of individualism (focusing on the self rather than on others and society) may have led American adolescents away from religious orientation.”

As a secondary issue, the researchers point to the potential role of increased religious pluralism in the United States they see it can also result “in the questioning or minimizing of all faiths.”

“In conclusion, survey results from 11.2 million American adolescents demonstrate a decline in religious orientation, especially after 2000. The trend appears among adolescents as young as 13 and suggests that Millennials are markedly less religious than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age. The majority are still religious, but a growing minority seem to embrace secularism, with the changes extending to spirituality and the importance of religion as well. Correlational analyses show that this decline occurred at the same time as increases in individualism and declines in social support. Clearly, this is a time of dramatic change in the religious landscape of the United States.”

The more fundamental concern here, however, is not just the present but the future. Because if anything, this report points to a far more secularized future in the United States than even the present, much less the past. Christians looking at this kind of research need to understand that this should alert us to a vast change in the society around us. Of course, one of the problems is we can look at this and just say this does, as the researchers indicate, change the religious landscape when it comes to the United States. But there is more to it than that because these issues by our world are not merely sociological, they are deeply theological, always biblical, very spiritual and they are always personal.

Our concern isn’t that Christians can’t be merely with a generation writ large, although that is clearly a concern, but with the young people who are a part of this generation, perhaps even a part of our families. It’s really important for us to recognize that, that underlying worldview of individualism is, as even the secular researchers understand, directly subversive of Christianity in a biblical faith. It is impossible to hold to a consistent worldview of individualism, as much as that is trumpeted by virtually every cultural authority in this society, and hold on to biblical Christianity with faithfulness. The biblical worldview points to the importance of the individual, but it does not allow the worldview of individualism. It doesn’t allow the worldview that says the most important unit of value, the most important unit of truth is the human individual.

But looking at these two developments together, the report on just how secular a metropolitan area like Seattle has become and is becoming, and just how secular the generation of the Millennials is and is becoming, these should serve to alert us to the challenges biblical Christians are going to face as we look ahead. But this isn’t just about the future. It’s very much about the present and for biblical Christians in this culture, this is a clear and present challenge.

3) Scientist remains committed to anti-human secularism despite unrealized overpopulation crisis 

 

Next, as we’re talking about patterns in the society we often don’t revisit, ideological disasters of the past that still have the continuing legacy in the present. That’s why Christians should be so interested in an article by Clyde Haberman that appeared recently in the New York Times, the headline,

“The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion.”

Now notice the second word in that headline was ‘unrealized’, which is to say that the horrors never happened. Haberman writes,

“The second half of the 1960s was a boom time for nightmarish visions of what lay ahead for humankind. In 1966, for example, a writer named Harry Harrison came out with a science fiction novel titled ‘Make Room! Make Room!’ Sketching a dystopian world in which too many people scrambled for too few resources, the book became the basis for a 1973 film about a hellish future, “Soylent Green.” In 1969, the pop duo Zager and Evans reached the top of the charts with a number called “In the Year 2525,” which postulated that humans were on a clear path to doom.”

Now as Haberman points out, the man at the center of so many of these doom prophecies was none other than Paul R Ehrlich, who was a biologist at Stanford University who wrote one of the most famous – we should say infamous, books in the1960s, his 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” Paul Ehrlich, I will point out is simply one of the most ideologically reprehensible people of the 1960s and all the way to the present. As Haberman points out, that book “The Population Bomb” sold in the millions, he calls it a jeremiad, teaching that humankind stood on the brink of Apocalypse because they were simply too many of us. Haberman then writes,

“Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

Haberman then writes,

“As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India. Hundreds of millions did not die of starvation in the ’70s. Humanity has managed to hang on, even though the planet’s population now exceeds seven billion, double what it was [in 1968]  when “The Population Bomb” became a best-seller.”

Now just looking back, I should say the 1960s and 1970s; Paul Ehrlich was one of the most quoted intellectuals in America. He made repeated appearances, not only in terms of the newspapers and the scientific journals; he was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Now as we now know, his prophecies came to nothing, but as Haberman says,

“After the passage of 47 years, Dr. Ehrlich offers little in the way of a mea culpa. Quite the contrary. Timetables for disaster like those he once offered have no significance, he told Retro Report, because to someone in his field they mean something “very, very different” from what they do to the average person.”

Now let’s just hold on for minute. When you have someone who says 65 million people in the United States are going to die in 1970s, that England probably will not survive in the year 2000, when he says that hundreds of millions of people will die of starvation decades ago, when it didn’t happen. The fact that they didn’t happen, he says, is not significant, because those claims don’t mean the same thing to scientists as they do to ordinary people. Now let me just suggest to you, if you’re buying that, you’ll buy anything. Haberman goes on to explain about Ehrlich,

“The end is still nigh, he asserted, and he stood unflinchingly by his 1960s insistence that population control was required, preferably through voluntary methods. But if need be, he said, he would endorse “various forms of coercion” like eliminating “tax benefits for having additional children.” Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted, he said, is akin to letting everyone “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”

Now you see why I wanted to draw attention to this article. Because when you look at a fundamental collision of worldviews, it’s hard to come up with any more fundamental collision than that between the population explosion worldview as represented by Paul Ehrlich and the biblical worldview that begins in Genesis and continues all the way through revelation. That immoral reprehensible language that Ehrlich used describing having babies as,

“Throwing as much of their garbage into the neighbor’s backyard as they want.”

That shows a deep anti-humanism, which gets to a point made so accurately and so emphatically by Francis Schaeffer in the 1970s and beyond when he said that as you watch humanism, that secular humanism will one day become no humanism at all. It will take on an anti-human worldview. And that’s exactly what we saw, even in this book in 1968, and we’re seeing it right now in the fact that Paul Ehrlich is unrepentant about the fact that not only was he wrong, but that his worldview is disastrous and that it is a direct assault upon the dignity of humanity.

By the way, one of Ehrlich’s colleagues in the 1960s and 70s was a man by the name of Stewart Brand. He became rather famous in the 1960s and 70s for his role in pop culture as the founder of what became known as the whole Earth catalog. But on this topic, given the experience of the decades since 1968, Stewart Brand changed his mind. Why? He quoted the economist John Maynard Keynes, who said,

“When the facts change, I change my mind.”

Stewart Brand asked the brilliant question,

“How many years do you have to not have the world end” to reach the conclusion that “maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?”

It’s really interesting that in this article from the New York Times, a paper that often sounds its own alarm about the so-called population explosion. This article by Clyde Haberman points out the fact that on the way to what Ehrlich and his friends promised was doom,

“The world figured out how to feed itself despite its rising numbers.”

A couple of things we need to note from the Christian worldview. In the first place, all these prophecies about doom in a population explosion have largely ceased to have any credibility, but that doesn’t mean that they cease to be asserted in public. Another thing we need to note is that even as we’re looking at the population of the earth, it is rising but it is expected by almost all demographic projections to peak in the year 2050, and then to begin a process of decline. And third, it turns out that that is the real problem. The decline of the population is likely to be a far larger problem. It is likely to bring about far greater concerns than the rise of the population. Largely because this will lead to a vast increase of the numbers of the very aged and to a decrease of the young. We also have to note – fourthly, that what we’re looking at here is a vast challenge of worldview, because it’s clear that some of those who were holding to these doomsday prophecies in the 1960s, even though, and for this we should be thankful they proved to be so colossally and massively wrong. Not just off by a degree, but totally, completely wrong.

And so finally we as Christians need to ask ourselves, why would people hold so tenaciously to this kind of ideology when it clearly has been proved to be wrong? How can they, like Paul Ehrlich, be so unrepentant and even so unreflective in looking at the fact that they made very specific claims about hundreds of millions of people starving in 1970s , 65 – he gave a number to it, 65 million Americans starving to death in the 1970s. How can he remain so steadfast in his beliefs when they proved to be so wrong? It’s because once you abandon the Christian worldview and its understanding of the meaning of humanity. You’re going to have to come up with some other understanding of what it means to be human. And when it comes to a significant number of those in the intellectual elites, they eventually come to the conclusion that humanity is a scourge on the planet. That humanity is a form of pestilence or to use the very metaphor that Ehrlich used, “having too many children is like throwing too much trash in your neighbors backyard.”

At the end of his article Haberman writes,

“Dr. Ehrlich, now 83, is not retreating from his bleak prophesies. He would not echo everything that he once wrote, he says. But his intention back then was to raise awareness of a menacing situation, he says. He remains convinced that doom lurks around the corner, not some distant prospect for the year 2525 and beyond. What he wrote in the 1960s was comparatively mild.”

In a recent statement Ehrlich said,

“My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”

Well, it would be even more apocalyptic and we need to note even more wrong. If you abandon the Christian worldview, and its affirmation that human beings are creatures made to the glory of God by a divine sovereign creator who made those human creatures in his image; if you jump from the biblical worldview that points out that every single human life is then of worth because after all, we were made by an infinitely worthy creator; if you abandon that worldview that eventually you’re going to see human beings as something quite different. You’re going to see human beings as something less than creatures made in the image of God. And eventually, as Paul Ehrlich now becomes Exhibit A, you’re likely to see the human beings aren’t merely a challenge, they’re a problem – even a form of pestilence.

 

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 more information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 06-04-15

1) American exception to secularization no longer true in Pacific northwest

10 percent of Seattle residents identify as atheist, says study, Seattle Sun Times (Kim De Guzman)

2) Effect of individualism in Millennials reveals increasingly secular future for America 

The least religious generation, Science News

Generational and Time Period Differences in American Adolescents’ Religious Orientation, 1966–2014, PLOS ONE (Jean Twenge, et. al.)

3) Scientist remains committed to anti-human secularism despite unrealized overpopulation crisis 

The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion, New York Times (Clyde Haberman)

Transcript: The Briefing 06-03-15

The Briefing

June 3, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, June 3, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) OSHA regulations on transgender restroom use keep up with moral insanity of sexual revolution

We are dealing with one of the most deeply confused epics of human history and the evidence of that is that the confusion has reached beyond even issues of sexual morality, right to the issue of sexual identity, gender identity, and the confusion of male and female. This is being raised, of course, in terms of a very much headline story all across the United States and the world and without going back to that story, I simply have to point out that what we’re watching is the head on collision between irreconcilable absolutes in terms of this new sexual and gender confusion.

For instance, when you look at something like the Olympics, and when we’re looking at the Olympics, we recognize that in virtually all the sports there’s a distinction between men and women. How will the Olympics deal with the transgender revolution? Which is to raise a question that is obvious  – at least obvious to me – as I asked on Twitter on Tuesday night: will the Wheaties box follow the example and the lead of Vanity Fair magazine, in terms of its cover story? How exactly will the Olympics deal with this? The very idea of the Olympics designation of certain sports and competitions of events, as male and female, is rooted in what is believed to be a biological distinction between the two genders, the two sexes. And as I will point out all of human history and human experience has been predicated upon that fundamental issue in reality of the human condition.

How in the world do you have the Olympics once you have the transgender revolution that is now being trumpeted and celebrated all around us?  Of course we’re facing the same issue when it comes to sports at other levels including, as we discussed on The Briefing, high school sports now also in middle schools as well. How do you have a distinction between boys and girls teams if you have lost the distinction between boys and girls? That’s a question that sooner rather than later is going to have to be addressed by those who organize and supervise for at every level all the way from T-ball to the Olympics. It’s going to be unavoidable, but it’s also pointing to the fact that if you lose the distinction between male and female, you lose the ability to make distinctions we count on in everyday life. Even those who seem to be joining and celebrating this revolution are likely to face some of the rather implausible if not impossible situations the revolution brings about.

This raises a set of regulations or best practices handed down by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration that is OSHA of the federal government. On Monday, OSHA handed down guidelines that include the statement,

“In many workplaces, separate restroom and other facilities are provided for men and women. In some cases, questions can arise in the workplace about which facilities certain employees should use.”

The headline on the document from the federal government by the way, is entitled,

“A Guide to Restroom Access for Transgender Workers.”

But those affected by the policy are not merely those who identify as transgender. As the policy statement makes clear it will affect every single employee. It is clear however, that the federal government is doing its dead level best to join the transgender revolution at its fullest. The statement reads,

“Gender identity is an intrinsic part of each person’s identity and everyday life. Accordingly, authorities on gender issues counsel that it is essential for employees to be able to work in a manner consistent with how they live the rest of their daily lives based on their gender identity. Restricting employees to using only restrooms that are not consistent with their gender identity or segregating them from other workers by requiring them to use gender neutral or other specific restrooms, singles those employees out and may make them fear for their physical safety. Bathroom restrictions can result in employees avoiding using restrooms entirely while at work, which can lead to potentially serious physical injury or illness.”

In language that can only be loved by a bureaucrat, the statement goes on to say,

“Under OSHA’s Sanitation standard (1910.141), employers are required to provide their employees with toilet facilities. This standard is intended to protect employees from the health effects created when toilets are not available.”

We needed government to tell us we need toilets, but at least in that respect, the government’s right. I will not read from our federal government statement all the health dangers that could come by avoiding the use of the toilet. I’ll simply state that we will stipulate, we will acknowledge that toilets are important. But getting to the point of our federal government, and it does have a point in these best practices,

“The core belief underlying these policies is that all employees should be permitted to use the facilities that correspond with their gender identity.”

And then, in case we didn’t understand they give examples,

“For example, a person who identifies as a man should be permitted to use men’s restrooms, and a person who identifies as a woman should be permitted to use women’s restrooms. The employee should determine the most appropriate and safest option for him- or herself.”

The federal government, we should note, still uses the terms ‘himself’ and ‘herself’ as if those are meaningful categories. But we can be assured that if the federal government is going to join the transgender revolution at its fullest. Pretty soon it’s going to have to abandon even terms like himself or herself. Even as those are applied by any individual to himself or herself at will. The statement then says,

“The best policies also provide additional options, which employees may choose, but are not required, to use. These include: Single-occupancy gender-neutral (unisex) facilities; and use of multiple-occupant, gender-neutral restroom facilities with lockable single occupant stalls.”

But from a Christian worldview perspective, the most important thing for us to recognize is the absolute insanity of this kind of policy in the first place. It is not going to accomplish what the federal government wants in terms of the situation. Because when it comes to the transgender revolution, no one’s going to be able to fulfill on the promises that the revolution claims. And when you look at the best policies that are suggested here, one of them explicitly is that the bathroom situation be changed in the workplace, so that there are unisex bathrooms with lockable individual stalls. Just to state the obvious, I don’t think most employees are going to be too comfortable with this, whether they are male or female, speaking for himself or herself. But where else does the federal government go once it is signed on to this kind of revolution? And when the culture at large is beginning to absorb this kind of insanity into the very center of the culture, how in the world is there any option other than eventually giving up on the fact that there is any meaningful distinction between male and female, men and women, boys and girls, and eventually saying in effect, that every single human being is now simply an it, deserving of its own private stall in a unisex or non-gender identified bathroom.

We’re watching right before our eyes a meltdown of sanity on this issue and we’re also watching the federal government try to accommodate itself by setting out regulations and best practices in order to meet that revolution with all its insanity. But as we discussed on The Briefing, this isn’t limited to the approach taken by the federal government in terms of employment. This is reaching right down to public schools very close to us and to your local college and university as well. This brings in mind the fact that when a very liberal Protestant denomination came and held its meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, one of the notable aspects of that meeting is that they re-identified the bathrooms in the hotel where they were meeting in order to have non-gender specific restrooms. Pretty soon that’s all that will be left. But if only this confusion were limited to the government, to the workplace and to the restroom – that isn’t the case.

2) Church of England group calls for right to name God ‘She’

Yesterday, we discussed the fact that the transgender revolution has reached the point that at least one priest in the Church of England is moving towards an official act, whereby the Church of England could come up with a religious ceremony, if not a sacrament, in order to identify a new individual with a new gender identity by means of introducing that individual to God, complete with a new name and a new identity – there’s nowhere else for this revolution to go. But the main point for us is it will not stop there. And it isn’t even stopping there to skip a beat.

As a matter fact, The Guardian, the major newspaper in Britain issued a new story in recent days by Nadia Khomami, in which it says

“A group within the Church of England is calling for God to be referred to as female following the selection of the first female Bishops.”

Now one of the things we need to note is that the arguments for the election of female bishops follow the arguments for the calling of female priests, which called for reinterpreting the Scripture in order to avoid very clear statements of Scripture that would’ve commanded otherwise. But as is so often the case, as is almost necessarily the case, that process of reinterpreting Scripture, which means abandoning the clear teachings of Scripture, won’t stop at this point. In fact it just won’t stop. It has to go onward. The logic has to work its way out. And that logic has to get, and as we now see very quickly got to, calls to change how we refer to God, after almost immediately after the Church of England received its first female Bishop.

According to The Guardian story, the group wants the church to recognize the equal status of women by overhauling official liturgy, which is made up almost exclusively of male language and imagery to describe God. The Reverend Jody Stowell, a member of Women and the Church, the pressure group, according to The Guardian that led the campaign for female Bishops said,

“Orthodox theology says all human beings are made in the image of God, that God does not have a gender. He encompasses gender — he is both male and female and beyond male and female. So when we only speak of God in the male form, that’s actually giving us a deficient understanding of who God is.”

Well just because you say something is Orthodox theology doesn’t mean that it actually is Orthodox theology. In this case, the member of this group is right in saying that Orthodox theology points to the fact that both men and women are made in God’s image, so good so far. But when she goes on to say that God does not have a gender by encompassing gender he is both male and female and beyond male and female. Well she’s going far beyond either Scripture or the Orthodox Christian tradition. Biblical theology does not say that God encompasses both male and female. It states that God has made both male and female human beings in his image, equally in his image and the Bible makes very clear that God is a spirit without a body and thus does not possess gender in that sense. But the Bible is also clear in referring to God as father and his Scripture is very clear, this is a God who chooses to name himself and who has the right to name himself.

The logic of the revolution that brought about female bishops in the Church of England is a logic that now says if women are to be fully included they must not only be fully included as priests and then fully included as bishops, they must also be fully included by the fact that we will now speak of God as a she as well as he. This isn’t actually a new argument. This has been around for the better part of the last 20 years, rather infamously in terms of debates and some liberal Protestant denominations in the United States. Some of those denominations years ago went forward with very radical liturgies that do refer to God as both he and she or beyond gender whatsoever or they use no personal pronouns about God or they are very careful now to include virtually anything they can imagine is a reference to God.

One major Protestant denomination a few years ago actually approved a form of the liturgy that abandons the traditional language for the Trinity moving to any number of rather creative triads. As I pointed out at the time, this is an act of creaturely rebellion against the creator who has the sovereign right to name himself and has revealed himself in Scripture. Coverage of this issue at the Huffington Post includes a statement made by Reverend Emma Percy, who is the chaplain of Trinity College at Oxford, who told the Times of London,

“This means that women can see themselves as less holy and less able to represent Christ in the world. If we take seriously the idea that men and women are made in the image of God, both male and female language should be used.”

But here she’s talking about language for God and you see just how that logic is now extended. Some in the group complain about the fact that the church’s traditional language of worship is heavily laden with masculine imagery for God and masculine titles. What isn’t even acknowledged in several of these articles is that it isn’t just rooted in the church’s historic worship; it is rooted in Holy Scripture. It is rooted in the Bible itself. This is such an important issue that it deserves some intense consideration. It is also an issue that requires some very careful thinking.

In the English language we use analogies, we simply have to, we say this is like that. But when we use that kind of analogy, it’s actually a metaphor. A metaphor in this would include a simile, uses one thing to explain another thing. It doesn’t claim that the one thing actually is the other thing; it says this is how you understand it. An analogy on the other hand is a stronger kind of expression. For instance, we use metaphorical language when we say that God is like this or that. We use purely analogical language when we say that God is something. And so for instance, the Scripture doesn’t say that God is merely like a father, the scripture says that God is a father. There are rare occasions in the Scripture where God is described as acting like a mother, like a mother hen gathering chicks. That’s understandable and we should appreciate that kind of language, but the Bible never says that God is a mother. To the contrary, however, the Bible does say God is a father. As a matter of fact, when Jesus upon the request of his disciples teaches them how to pray, he told his own disciples we are to pray to our father who art in heaven. God identifies himself consistently throughout Scripture as father. The understanding of God as our heavenly father is something that is deeply rooted in the entirety of the Scripture and we cannot understand the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of Rachel and Rebecca and Sarah, the God who is the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We can’t understand the God of the Bible without that masculine pronoun and without the understanding that he is not only like a father. He is referred to indeed, as our father, he is our heavenly father.

The late New Testament scholar, Elizabeth Achtemeier, was a stalwart defender of the Bible’s language concerning God, and she said,

“It is not that the prophets were slaves to their patriarchal culture, as some feminists hold. And it is not that the prophets could not imagine God as female: they were surrounded by people who so imagined their deities. It is rather that the prophets . . . would not use such language, because they knew and had ample evidence from the religions surrounding them that female language for the deity results in a basic distortion of the nature of God and of his relation to his creation.”

Similarly, when this controversy emerged in mainline liberal Protestantism, Roland M. Frye, leading scholar of literature said,

“According to biblical religion, on the other hand, only God can name God. Distinctive Christian experiences and beliefs are expressed through distinctive language about God and the changes in that language proposed by feminist theologians do not merely add a few unfamiliar words for God, as some would like to think, but in fact introduce beliefs about God that differ radically from those inherent in Christian faith, understanding, and Scripture.”

Furthermore, this controversy really isn’t new, going all the way back to the early church. One of the early church fathers, Basil the Great, said this,

“We are bound to be baptized in the terms we have received and to profess belief in the terms in which we are baptized, and as we have professed faith in, so to give glory to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Basil, centuries ago in the early centuries of the church said,

“It is enough for us to confess those names which we have received from Holy Scripture and to shun all innovations about them.”

It’s really interesting that the secular media, especially in Great Britain have noted just how quickly calls to change the language about God follow the change in electing female bishops within that church. So far as the secular media are concerned, they can draw a point-to-point progression understanding that the one has to lead to the other and in that sense, they’re absolutely right. What we are seeing we have to note is a gender confusion that will never be limited to human beings. It will never be limited to the world of sports; it will never be limited to policies about restrooms; it will never be limited once it’s set loose to the question, who and who cannot be a minister? It will eventually inescapably reach the question, how do we refer to God and how do we name him? And to that those who are committed to a scriptural understanding simply have to respond, God gets to name himself. He is the sovereign who has named himself. He has named himself in Scripture, and he is given us Scripture as his gift and may we remind ourselves this is the God who told us we must not take his name in vain.

3) Sepp Blatter resigns as FIFA corruption spreads, inability to clean up own sin made evident

Finally, in terms of really interesting headlines in the news; just four days after he was elected to a record fifth term as the head of FIFA, the international organization supervising soccer. Sepp Blatter announced that he was going to step down. What a difference just four days could make. Rewinding history four days, before yesterday, Sepp Blatter was elected even as the United States Department of Justice had handed down stunning indictments announced by the Attorney General of the United States herself against the international soccer organization. It was also announced that at least one other nation, Switzerland was also considering felony charges against some of the highest-ranking executives in the FIFA organization.

Sepp Blatter had been at the head of that organization for years, he was first elected president in the year 1998. He has been with FIFA as an executive since 1975. In a defiant statement released just a few days ago, Sepp Blatter had defied all of his critics. He also denied any personal responsibility for corruption in the organization and he accepted that fix term stating that now even though he had been in charge of the organization since 1998, he was going to work towards cleaning up the organization that he had been running. The illogic of that was apparent to most of the world. And yet somehow the corruption within that organization was demonstrated in the fact that even as those criminal indictments were handed down, Sepp Blatter was actually re-elected to that record fifth term as head of the organization. So just a few days ago, much of the world is collectively scratching its head wondering how in the world, a man who had run an organization since 1998 could run on a platform of correcting and cleaning up what he had himself allowed or caused to be made. But the morality tale that involves FIFA just got more interesting yesterday, when Sepp Blatter announced he was stepping down and this happened after United States federal authorities indicated that as a part of their indictment they identified Blatter’s right-hand man as the crucial individual and a transfer of $10 million cash as a part of the corruption charges. In a really interesting portion of his statement released yesterday, in stepping down Sepp Blatter said this,

“Although the members of FIFA have re-elected me president, this mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football. This is why I will call an extraordinary congress and step down.”

Now those sentences came in the context of the statement in which Mr. Blatter, rather illogically said that even after he steps down after having run the organization, he will lead the campaign to clean it up. But the most amazing thing is found in that sentence where he said, even as he was re-elected president of FIFA,

“This mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football.”

As we said, when this scandal first began to break one of the signs of the fall is that sin affects every dimension of life, even play, in this case demonstrated by professional sports. But one of the other things we need to recognize is that by God’s grace this kind of thing tends to show itself for what it is and even as God has made us moral creatures, there is at some point a limitation to how much moral illogic most human beings can take. Evidence of this comes in this very strange statement, very revealing in its own way, that Sepp Blatter made as he handed down,

“This mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football.”

Indeed, Mr. Blatter, it does not seem to be. The Christian worldview means that we shouldn’t be surprised when someone caught in this kind of corruption says, “Look, trust me. I’ll clean myself up.” The Christian worldview also explains why we’re not surprised when that project doesn’t work. And when it loses all credibility and eventually people say it’s not happening.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information, go to my website 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. Remember we’re taking questions for Ask Anything Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

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