R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 306
June 24, 2015
The Briefing 06-24-15
1) Supreme Court’s leftward trend under Roberts shaped by kinds of questions Court faces
The Roberts Court’s Surprising Move Leftward, New York Times (Alicia Parlapiano, Adam Liptak and Jeremy Bowers)
2) Kennedy’s gay marriage rulings result of long-term concern for the ‘right side of history’
Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Tolerance Is Seen in His Sacramento Roots, New York Times (Sheryl Gay Stolberg)
Predicting Justice Kennedy, Weekly Standard (Robert F. Nagel)
3) Legacy of Allen Weinstein reminder the truth will out eventually
Allen Weinstein, Historian of Alger Hiss Case, Dies at 77, New York Times (William Grimes)
June 23, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 06-23-15
The Briefing
June 23, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Tuesday, June 23, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Netherlands considers extending right to die to children under twelve as culture of death progresses
A shocking headline came yesterday from the Netherlands. It was reported in The Guardian, the major British newspaper of the left. The headline is,
“Dutch pediatricians: give terminally ill children under 12 the right to die.”
We’ve been watching over the last several years how the logic of euthanasia has been reaching its extremities. It began in the secularized nations of Europe and there it has begun to take hold to such an extent that in some nations such as the Netherlands and in Belgium, the logic of the culture of death has now exceeded the point that even had been feared just a few years ago. We’re now looking at euthanasia being offered by policy now to children not only as young as the age of 12, but the new proposal calls for removing age restriction altogether.
The original press report came over the weekend from the French Presse Agency, it’s datelined from The Hague in the Netherlands and it reads,
“Terminally ill children in unbearable suffering should be given the right to die, the Dutch Pediatric Association has said, calling for the current age limit of 12 years old to be scrapped.”
The article goes on to cite,
“Eduard Verhagen, a pediatrics professor at Groningen University, who is on the organisation’s ethics commission, said: “We feel that an arbitrary age limit such as 12 should be changed and that each child’s ability to ask to die should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”
We need to notice how the culture of death moves forward on this kind of logic. In the first place, the right to die as it was characterized was to be extended only to those who are in extreme ages and were facing an unquestionably terminal diagnoses, and then they were also to be understood to be suffering from what was described as unbearable suffering in the final stages of a terminal illness, and then the logic of the culture of death moved forward. The next step was to remove the restriction having to do with terminal diagnoses. Instead, any kind of unbearable suffering was supposed to be legitimate grounds for a right to die. And in this case, we need to note the right to request a physician’s active assistance in the process of dying. Then the culture of death moved forward so that there was no longer actually a physical suffering that was to be required in order to ask to die. It was extended to psychiatric conditions and to what was then classified as unbearable psychiatric suffering. And then the next step of logic was to move to younger and younger ages.
All the previous discussion had been about those who were unquestionably adults who were claiming to make an adult decision. But then the logic of the culture of death moves towards younger ages, moving to those who were just under the age of majority, those who were classified as near adults. Then they moved it back to the age of 12 and now as we read in this report from The Guardian, the current effort undertaken by pediatricians in the Netherlands is to remove any age limitation or restriction whatsoever. One of the things we need to note most closely is that when you talk about the issue of euthanasia and we talk about the so-called slippery slope. The reality is that there is a slope and that it is tragically and sadly slippery. It is inexorably, inevitably slippery and that’s because once you begin to buy into this logic, there is no way that the logic doesn’t get extended further and further and further. There’s another aspect of this that is so important – one of the great distinctions often made by the advocates of euthanasia is between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia means that the person whose life is to be ended has to voluntarily acting in sound mind request that act. Involuntary euthanasia means that decision one way or another is made by someone else. Almost all of the early calls for euthanasia were entirely limited to so-called voluntary euthanasia.
The one aspect of the slippery slope is that voluntary euthanasia never stays there, it moves towards involuntary euthanasia and we need to watch how that happens. In the first stage that happens when someone says the person who would have otherwise demanded the right to die is now incapacitated and cannot do so. So acting as the legal authority for that individual, I on that person’s behalf demand the right to control the right of death. The next stage comes very quickly when people say this individual, if he or she had had the option to speak about this during their lifetime is the kind of person who would have asked to end life under these circumstances. Therefore, on that individual’s behalf, I therefore make the request. It isn’t very long until the third stage is reached and that’s when people say for the good of society, given the amount of investment that this is now costing in terms of medical care, given the fact that this person has become a burden upon the individual’s family and the larger society, there is no moral reason to allow this person to live any longer. It would be humane in terms not just of the individual’s frame of reference but the entire society or the related family to say that death is the better option.
This is where the Christian worldview reminds us that we never at any point have the right to say in terms of the so-called right to die that we have the right to determine when that death is going to take place. The Christian worldview reminds us the human life is sacred because it is a divine gift and God is sovereign over our lifespans to the degree that we simply admit that we do not choose when we are born. We do not even choose that we are born. Likewise, we have no right to choose when we will die and under what circumstances that we claim will be acceptable to ourselves. Another thing missing from this is the understanding that medical care has advanced greatly in terms of removing the kind of suffering that often comes at the end stage of a terminal disease and it is our Christian obligation to seek to remove suffering under any circumstances where that is possible, but as horrifying as that suffering may under some circumstances be, it is not justification for a so-called right to die. It isn’t a justification for the creature’s declaration that death would be preferable to life.
Looking back at this article from the Netherlands we need to note one other statement made by this member and remember this, of the Ethics Commission of the Dutch Pediatric Association. He said,
“If a child under 12 satisfies the same conditions, pediatricians are currently powerless. It’s time to address this problem.”
Powerless? Powerless to do what? In this case, let’s state the matter bluntly and plainly, powerless – according to Dutch law right now – to kill. We saw just in recent days that in the California Senate, a bill to authorize legal assisted suicide as it is called move forward after the California Medical Association removed its opposition to the bill and that Medical Association did so because they said there’s been a shift in public opinion. They acknowledge that right up front. But as we’re looking at this horrifying news from the Netherlands we need to recognize that this could not have happened if the vast majority of the people there in the Netherlands held to the historic and biblical understanding of human life that was at the very center of Western civilization even as the Dutch nation was born. This is one of the inevitable out workings of a secularized worldview. This is one of the signs of what happens when a culture redefines itself in terms of its most basic beliefs and having denied God, denies that life itself, human life in particular is God’s gift. This is what that kind of society increasingly inevitably looks like.
2) GOP struggles to find platform as less religious America veers politically left
This leads quite naturally to a second news article; this one was a front-page news story in USA Today last week. The headline of the article by Rick Hampson,
“If Americans skew less Christian, GOP faces challenge.”
My interest in this article is far less about the politics then about the worldview issues that are involved. But here’s the point of the article and this is why it was on the front page of USA Today. According to Rick Hampson and this article, the Republican Party’s going to find itself in a decreasing position politically because it has tied itself to the interests of a great many American Christians and as the number or the percentage of American Christians decreases, as America is secularized as well, the Republican Party he says, may find itself with a smaller constituency. Now here’s where the story gets really, really interesting. There is no doubt as the Pew Research organization and many others have been documenting, there is a rise in the number of nones, that is those with no religious affiliation whatsoever, n-o-n-e-s, they are now called. There’s a rise to the point that one out of five Americans now says he or she has no religious affiliation and one out of three under age 34. That’s very significant. No one should deny it. We’re also watching the progressive secularization of this country, not in the same way as Europe and not in the same pace but nonetheless secularizing on its own terms and its own schedule.
But remember, this is a front-page news story at USA Today and the front-page news story is warning the Republican Party that as the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians fall that party may find itself in a minimized political posture. Now let’s just look however, at the numbers the article actually cites, let me read directly from the article by Rick Hampson,
“Yet just last month the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christian has been going down a point a year, to 70.6% in 2014.”
Now wait just a minute – while we’re talking about Europe, we need to note that the number of persons there, the percentage who identify as Christians is not only below 70% it is catastrophically below 70%. There’s no doubt that 70% of Americans and in this case we can round it up to 71% , 71% of Americans identifying as Christian is less than it was even recently. As Pew says, it’s going down about a point a year or at least has in terms of the last several years in terms of the immediate past. But we’re still talking about 71% of the population. We’re still talking about 71%. That is a very clear majority. That means seven out of 10 Americans now in one way or another, even still identifies as some kind of Christian. In other words, I’m drawing attention to this new story because it is pointing to something that is happening, but it’s not happening nearly as fast as the headline placement in the headline itself in the story would have us to think.
But in this article, there is actually a wealth of worldview material. For one thing, one of the points made by the article is that those who now identify as the nones tend to skew rather dramatically to the left, politically and morally. Now once again, that should tell us something. Just think about the previous story that is datelined in Europe. Europe has become heavily secularized and that came with a radical increase in the political liberalism, the moral liberalism that characterized that continent. That’s why we were talking about the Dutch Pediatric Association and the issue of euthanasia. We’re talking about it in the Netherlands and the Netherlands is one the most secularized countries in Europe. Then we shift and look at the United States and to those who are identifying as the more secular among Americans also are skewing, they are tilting in the very same worldview direction. And that’s where Christians have to understand that’s actually what we would expect. We would expect those who are moving in a more secular direction to be moving to the left politically and morally and this article in USA Today says that is exactly what’s happening. Hampson writes,
“The political implications of the changing face of American religious identities are stark. Nones are far more likely to vote Democratic — in 2012, Barack Obama got 70% of religiously unaffiliated voters, compared with 26% for Mitt Romney — and skew liberal on issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and legalization of marijuana.
“Conversely, in recent general elections three in four evangelicals have gone Republican. So on the GOP campaign trail, it still seems like 2006.”
Now that actually points to something else that is a fundamental importance. On the left there has been a consistent movement leftward. Just to put the matter bluntly, looking back at 2006 2008, 2010, right up until 2012 major Democratic candidates may have believed in same-sex marriage but they did not dare say so publicly. That changed in 2012 with President Barack Obama, it changed even later with Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, who didn’t affirm the legalization of same-sex marriage until she left that office and until she began planning her own campaign for the presidency. So if you look at the left, there has been a progressive move leftward, just to take that one issue which is the legalization of same-sex marriage. But Hampson says if you look on the Republican side and if you look at those who identify as Christian, it looks he says like 2006. What’s he saying there? He’s saying that on these key issues, those on the political right haven’t shifted and that’s a very important issue as well because if we are committed to the Bible as our authority and that’s where we gain our definitions of human sexuality and marriage then there really is no place to move and so it looks like 2006. But in one sense it looks far, far older than that if he’s honest and it’s likely to look exactly the same if we hold to biblical conviction moving in the future. The left has the option of moving progressively leftward. But if we are tied to a biblical definition the text isn’t going to change and we can’t change either.
Finally, there’s another very important issue that is covered in this article. Hampson asked,
“What about the Democrats? After presidential nominee John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in 2004, it seemed the party had “a God problem.”
“They thought,” said Mark Silk, who teaches religion and politics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, “America is a religious country and we need to be in touch with that.”
Then Hampson writes,
“The party, including the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns, tried to reach moderate evangelicals,” that’s there term, “in 2008, but eventually concluded it was a lost cause.”
Hampson then writes,
“By the 2012 election, one in four Obama voters had no religious affiliation. And among Democrats today, Silk says, “political language is much less religious than it was eight years ago.”
Well as I said, that is a really interesting article. Something of a counterpoint to that original article we discussed that was datelined from the Netherlands. It turns out that worldview really matters and the prevailing worldview in a society, even if in the United States, biblical Christianity is waning. Even if the number of nones is growing, we’re still talking about the fact that the majority of those in America at least hold to some understanding of a binding moral authority and they still are operating out of at least the memory or the residue of a Christian worldview that has been virtually rejected in Europe and has disappeared a generation ago.
How long will this remain so in America? Time will tell. But at this point it is another very clear affirmation of the importance of worldview and the fact that our politics eventually will reflect the worldview of the people because, and we know this – the worldview does eventually produce the politics.
3) Elisabeth Elliot’s life inescapable example of forgiveness through the gospel
Yesterday, on The Briefing I mentioned that forgiveness was very much in the news over the weekend. Even the secular media were surprised by the language of forgiveness used by the loved ones of the victims in the Charleston shooting, even as they were directly addressing themselves to the man who would been arrested for the shooting. I discussed the fact that forgiveness is shocking, especially to those who no longer operate out of a Christian worldview. But many in the secular media did not trace that forgiveness back to the roots of that forgiveness in the gospel of Jesus Christ. But a contrary example actually also appeared in the mainstream secular media over the same days and in this case it was in an obituary. And the obituary was for Elisabeth Elliott, who died in recent days at her home in Gloucester, Massachusetts at age 88. Once again, it turns out that the obituaries published in the New York Times are very, very important from a worldview perspective. This editorial is written by Sam Roberts and he begins by writing,
“Elisabeth Elliott, a missionary who inspired generations of evangelical Christians by returning to Ecuador with her toddler daughter to preach the gospel to the Indian tribe that had killed her husband, died Monday at her home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, She was 88.”
Roberts went on to write,
“Ms. Elliot wrote two books stemming from her experience in Ecuador, and together they became for evangelicals “the definitive inspirational mission stories for the second half of the 20th century.”
That was a quote from Kathryn Long, a history professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. Now the background of this story is really, really important and most evangelicals are at least vaguely familiar with Elisabeth Elliott and her martyred husband Jim Elliott. And Sam Roberts in this obituary published over the weekend in the New York Times tells that story and that’s very, very important.
Elisabeth Howard (as she was known before she married Jim Elliott) was born December 21, 1926, and she was herself, the daughter of missionaries. She enrolled in Wheaton College where she majored in Greek and planned to become a translator of the Scripture, but there she met and eventually married Jim Elliott and together they trained for missionary service in Ecuador. In Ecuador, the Elliott’s had a heartfelt passion to reach the Waorani people, also known as the Auca Indians at the time with the gospel of Jesus Christ. They had translated the New Testament into that language and they had used their airplane to air drop love packages that included gifts and portions of Scripture to the Waorani people. And then in 1956 Jim Elliott and several of his missionary colleagues decided to fly their plane to the region and to meet the Waorani people on foot. As Sam Roberts writes,
“After Mr. Elliot and his colleagues landed by plane on Jan. 2, 1956, he kept rehearsing a message of good will — “Biti miti punimupa,” meaning “I like you, I want to be your friend” — from a Waorani phrase book. Three tribe members made a friendly visit, but then there was apparently a miscommunication or a perceived threat. After the missionaries failed to make radio contact with a base station, searchers found their bodies pierced by wooden spears.”
Now as we discussed over the weekend, the issue of forgiveness was in the press and it shocked an increasingly secularized American people. But then we read this from Sam Roberts,
“Ms. Elliot renewed contact with the tribe over the next two years. In 1958, accompanied by her 3-year-old daughter and the sister of one of the murdered missionaries, she moved in with the Waoranis, known to their neighbors as Aucas, or savages. She ministered to them and remained in their settlement, in the foothills of the Andes, subsisting on barbecued monkey limbs and other local fare and living in rain-swept huts.”
Even after the way a Waorani had killed her husband and his colleagues, after they had served as martyrs for the gospel of Jesus Christ, having gone to the tribe with the mission of befriending them and taking to them the gospel of Jesus Christ, two years later, Elisabeth Elliott moved with her toddler to live with the very people who would killed her husband and demonstrated by her love to them, the forgiveness that she not only knew was rooted in the Christian tradition, that she knew was the living evidence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The widows of the martyrs back in 1956, who had died in this incident, said that their prayers were for the salvation of the Auca people, again they’re now known as the Waorani. They said that they look forward to when the tribe would also join them in Christian praise and we need to note that day happened.
Several years ago when I was present at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, the church for the Shepherds Conference there had actually brought the wreckage of Jim Elliott’s plane and headed there for us all to see, and seated next to me at a dinner that night was one of the warriors who had been involved in the killing of Jim Elliott and his colleagues. He was then a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and he gave in terms of the most beautiful testimony, his account of how he had come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior through the love that was shown to him and his fellow tribespeople by Elisabeth Elliott and the other widows who took the gospel to them after they had killed their husbands. I can promise you this, I will never ever so long as I live forget that testimony. It was one of the most powerful I have ever heard, coming to me from a new Christian friend who had at one point been involved in the killing of Christian missionaries they understood to be a threat.
But I can only wonder how many people went beyond the front page stories, important as they were to the obituaries of the New York Times to find this incredible testimony to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was published in an almost half page obituary on Elisabeth Elliott. The world doesn’t understand this kind of testimony and that’s why I think there was so much interest in the integrity of this testimony that it appeared just as it did in this major obituary in the New York Times. Jim Elliott and his colleagues died before I was born, but I have been throughout my lifetime so touched by his testimony as well. Many Christians know the most famous quote from Jim Elliott, written when he was a student at Wheaton College long before he became a martyr for the Christian gospel, and I end on these words,
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to Boyce College.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
The Briefing 06-23-15
1) Netherlands considers extending right to die to children under twelve as culture of death progresses
Dutch pediatricians: give terminally ill children under 12 the right to die, The Guardian (Agence France)
2) GOP struggles to find platform as less religious America veers politically left
Religion and politics: Do the ‘nones’ have it?, USA Today (Rick Hampson)
3) Elisabeth Elliot’s life inescapable example of forgiveness through the gospel
Elisabeth Elliot, Tenacious Missionary in Face of Tragedy, Dies at 88, New York Times (Sam Roberts)
June 22, 2015
The Heresy of Racial Superiority — Confronting the Past, and Confronting the Truth
Among Christians, the word heresy must be used with care and precision. Not every doctrinal error is a heresy, though all doctrinal error is to be avoided. A heresy is the denial or corruption of a Christian doctrine that is central to the faith and essential to the gospel. The late theologian Harold O. J. Brown defined heresy as a doctrinal error “so important that those who believe it, who the church calls heretics, must be considered to have abandoned the faith.”
That sets the issue clearly. Premillennialists consider postmillennialists to be in error, but they do not consider postmillennialists to be heretics. Those who deny the Trinity, on the other hand, are heretics, and the believing church must consider non-trinitarians to have departed the faith. The same must be said of those who deny the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ. Far more can be said about heresy, but the word must be used with care and accuracy.
Protestants, rightly standing with the Reformers, have insisted that justification by faith alone is also central to the gospel of Christ and essential to any proclamation of that gospel. Martin Luther, for example, considered justification to be articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae — the article by which the church stands or falls, and so it is.
Today, we just recognize and condemn another heresy that has reared its ugly head in recent days, and murderously so. The killing of nine worshippers gathered at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina is a hideous demonstration of the deadly power of this heresy. The young white man charged with the killings has not, as yet, claimed a theological rationale for his acts. Nevertheless, he has been exposed as a young man whose worldview was savagely warped by the ideology of racial superiority — white superiority — and the grotesque and wretched ideology that drove him is now inseparable from the murders he is charged with committing.
If the reach of that ideology could be limited to a few fringe figures, we could allow ourselves to be less concerned. But the ideology that was represented in Dylann Roof’s reported words as he killed and in the photographs and evidence found on his Internet postings is not limited to a small fringe. You do not have to hang a flag representing the apartheid governments of Rhodesia or South Africa to be a racist.
The ideology of racial superiority is one of the saddest and most sordid evidences of the Fall and its horrifying effects. Throughout history, racial ideologies have been driving forces of war, of social cohesion, of demagoguery, and of dictatorships. Race theory was central to the Nazi regime and was used by both sides in the Pacific theater of World War II. In that theater of the war, both the Japanese and the Americans claimed that the other was an inferior race that must be defeated by force. The Japanese claimed racial superiority as central to their subjugation of other Asian peoples.
At the same time, many white Americans claimed and assumed the superiority of caucasian skin to black and brown skin — or any other color of skin. The main “color line,” as Frederick Douglass called it in 1881, has always been black and white in America. While this is a national problem, and theories of racial superiority have been popular in both the North and the South, it was the states of the old Confederacy that gave those ideologies their most fertile soil. White superiority was claimed as a belief by both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, but it was the Confederacy that made racial superiority a central purpose.
More humbling still is the fact that many churches, churchmen, and theologians gave sanction to that ideology of racial superiority. While this was true throughout the southern churches, Southern Baptists bear a particular responsibility and burden of history. The Southern Baptist Convention was not only founded by slaveholders; it was founded by men who held to an ideology of racial superiority and who bathed that ideology in scandalous theological argument. At times, white superiority was defended by a putrid exegesis of the Bible that claimed a “curse of Ham” as the explanation of dark skin — an argument that reflects such ignorance of Scripture and such shameful exegesis that it could only be believed by those who were looking for an argument to satisfy their prejudices.
We bear the burden of that history to this day. Racial superiority is a sin as old as Genesis and as contemporary as the killings in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The ideology of racial superiority is not only sinful, it is deadly.
I gladly stand with the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in their courageous affirmation of biblical orthodoxy, Baptist beliefs, and missionary zeal. There would be no Southern Baptist Convention and there would be no Southern Seminary without them. James P. Boyce and Basil Manly, Jr. and John A. Broadus were titans of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
But there is more to the story. Boyce and Broadus were chaplains in the Confederate army. The founders of the SBC and of Southern Seminary were racist defenders of slavery. Just a few months ago I was reading a history of Greenville, South Carolina when I came across a racist statement made by James P. Boyce, my ultimate predecessor as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was so striking that I had to find a chair. This, too, is our story.
By every reckoning, Boyce and Broadus were consummate Christian gentlemen, given the culture of their day. They would have been horrified, I am certain, by any act of violence against any person. But any strain of racial superiority, and especially any strain bathed in the language of Christian theology, is deadly dangerous all the same.
In 1995, on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination publicly repented of its roots in the defense of slavery. In 2015, far more is required of us. It is not enough to repent of slavery. We must repent and seek to confront and remove every strain of racial superiority that remains and seek with all our strength to be the kind of churches of which Jesus would be proud — the kind of churches that will look like the marriage supper of the Lamb.
I am certain that I do not know all that this will require of us. I intend to keep those names on our buildings and to stand without apology with the founders and their affirmation of Baptist orthodoxy. But those names on our buildings and college and professorial chairs and endowed scholarships do not represent unmixed pride. They also represent the burden of history and the urgency of repentance. We the living cannot repent on behalf of those who are dead, but we can repent for the legacy that we would otherwise perpetuate and extend by silence.
I will not remove those names from the buildings, but I bear the burden of telling the whole story and acknowledging the totality of the legacy. I bear responsibility to set things right in so far as I have the opportunity to set them right. I am so thankful that the racist ideologies of the past would rightly horrify the faculty and students of the present. Are we yet horrified enough?
I will not remove those names from the buildings, but I could never fly the flag that represented their cause in battle. I know full well that today’s defenders of that flag — by far most of them — do not intend to send a racial message nor to defy civil rights. But some do, and there is no way to escape the symbolism that so wounds our neighbors — and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Today, most who defend that flag do so to claim a patrimony and to express love for a region. But that is not the whole story, and we know it.
And now the hardest part. Were the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary heretics?
They defended all the doctrines they believed were central and essential to the Christian faith as revealed in the Bible and as affirmed throughout the history of the church. They sought to defend Baptist orthodoxy in an age already tiring of orthodoxy. They would never have imagined themselves as heretics, and in one sense they certainly were not. Nor, we should add, was Martin Luther a heretic, even as he expressed a horrifying antisemitism.
But I would argue that racial superiority in any form, and white superiority as the central issue of our concern, is a heresy. The separation of human beings into ranks of superiority and inferiority differentiated by skin color is a direct assault upon the doctrine of Creation and an insult to the imago Dei — the image of God in which every human being is made. Racial superiority is also directly subversive of the gospel of Christ, effectively reducing the power of his substitutionary atonement and undermining the faithful preaching of the gospel to all persons and to all nations.
To put the matter plainly, one cannot simultaneously hold to an ideology of racial superiority and rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ. One cannot hold to racial superiority and simultaneously defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints. So far as I can tell, no one ever confronted the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with the brutal reality of what they were doing, believing, and teaching in this regard. The same seems to be true in the case of Martin Luther and his antisemitism. For that matter, how recently were these sins recognized as sins and repented of? The problem is not limited to the names of the founders on our buildings.
I do believe that racial superiority is a heresy. That means that those who hold it unrepentantly and refuse correction by Scripture and the gospel of Christ must, as Harold O. J. Brown rightly said, “be considered to have abandoned the faith.”
We cannot change the past, but we must learn from it. There is no way to confront the dead with their heresies, but there is no way to avoid the reckoning that we must make, and the repentance that must be our own.
By God’s grace, this is the best I know to say. By God’s grace, may I not die with heresies unknown to me, but all too known to my children, and to my children’s children.
I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler.
Image of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina, Sunday, June 21, 2015, used by permission, AP News Photo.
I was asked by Religion News Service for a comment on the Confederate Battle Flag issue yesterday. This was my statement in full:
“Symbols matter, and sometimes they matter in different ways to different people. For most people in the South, the Confederate Battle Flag does not now represent racism or any reference to rebellion against the Union. Nevertheless, every symbol has a historical context and associations. For this specific flag, the most immediate context is the civil rights movement and resistance to its central goals. As Christians, we are called to love God and to love our neighbors. Some of our neighbors–and some of our own brothers and sisters in Christ–are deeply wounded by this flag. They see it as a denial of their essential humanity and as a statement of racial superiority. For that sufficient reason, gospel-minded Christians should support taking down the flag. Love of neighbor outweighs even love of region, and it certainly requires that we disassociate ourselves from any hint of racism, now or in the past.”
News articles drawing from that statement have now appeared in The Washington Post and other major media, but that is the full statement.
Transcript: The Briefing 06-22-15
The Briefing
June 22, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Monday, June 22, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) National shocked by forgiveness given by families of Charleston shoot victims to shooter
A chastened grieving and humbled nation has appropriately focused over the last several days on Charleston, South Carolina. As we now know, on Wednesday night nine people attending a church service at the Mother Emanuel Church as it is known, the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church there in Charleston, South Carolina, nine people were murdered in cold blood after a young man had sat with them for about an hour in a prayer meeting and Bible study and then opened fire, killing the pastor of the church and eight others in the church meeting. This is one of those violent crimes that simply focuses our imagination because the moral importance of this is impossible to deny and as our cultural conversation has gone in so many different directions in the grief and the shock in the aftermath of these killings, even in just these days it has become clear that virtually every thoughtful American knows that this is a very important moment. Something very important is now on the forefront of our national conversation and Christians have a unique responsibility to think this issue through on biblical and gospel terms and to be able to speak to our neighbors about even as the cultural conversation is largely consumed of this issue. It needs to be.
Christians have a particular responsibility to think clearly about these issues and to speak compassionately, especially in the aftermath of a tragedy of this magnitude. The moral issues simply present themselves in such a way that Christians have to speak to them. The national conversation in the aftermath of this horrifying event took a very interesting form as the nation went into the weekend. South Carolina law allows for those who are the victims of a crime and in this case this means, especially the parishioners at the Mother Emanuel Church and the loved ones of those who were killed in these murders, have an opportunity to confront the one who’s been arrested with a crime and to speak to him. And yet it’s very unusual even within this legal context that that kind of confrontation would take place during a bail hearing but that’s what took place in Charleston on Friday. Less than 48 hours after the killings, some of those most affected by the murders confronted the young man arrested for the crime, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, and they confronted him not only with their grief and anguish and anger but with something that took the nation largely by surprise, forgiveness.
The words of forgiveness uttered in that courtroom on Friday shocked the nation leading the headlines across the country in which media tried to come to terms with exactly how those who were so grieved by the intentional killing of their loved ones could speak of forgiveness to the one who had been arrested for that crime and furthermore, the background of the crime has been increasingly evident. It was deeply rooted in a sense of white supremacy and in the sin of racism. And as we take a closer look at the statements that were made in that courtroom, we come to even a new understanding of what is at stake from a biblical and a gospel perspective.
As Mark Berman of the Washington Post reported, Nadine Collier the daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance said at the hearing addressing herself to Dylann Roof,
“I forgive you.”
She went on to say,
“You took something very precious from me.”
And remember, that was her mother. She went on to say,
“I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”
Felicia Sanders as the Washington Post says her voice trembling spoke of her son, Tywanza Sanders, a young man who was killed in the murders. She spoke to the young man arrested for the crime and said,
“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with welcome arms. Tywanza Sanders was my son. But Tywanza Sanders was my hero. May God have mercy on you.”
The sister of another of the victims, DePayne Middleton-Doctor said,
“I acknowledge that I am very angry. But one thing that DePayne always enjoined in our family … is she taught me that we are the family that love built. We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive. I pray God on your soul.”
The New York Times shocked by the language used by these loved ones of the victims referred back to that policy in South Carolina law that allows the victims or the loved ones of the victims to confront the one who was arrested for the crimes and yet they wrote,
“But it is unusual for that right to be invoked in something as mundane as a bail hearing.”
But look closely at the next words,
“And the words spoken Friday by the survivors were rarer still.”
The national media reported only a small number of the words spoken by the relatives and loved ones of the victims of these crimes, but it is so interesting that the national media, the secular media focused on the theme of forgiveness. The question that we can only hope an amazed nation is asking is what would be the source of that forgiveness. Where would that forgiveness come from? How would it be expressed? How could those who lost so much speak to the one who has just been arrested for this horrifying crime and speak words of forgiveness? One of the things this should draw to our attention is the fact that the very idea of forgiveness in this sense is deeply shocking to the secular mind and we should understand why there is no reason in terms of secular logic why this kind of forgiveness should be extended. There is no ability of the secular worldview in and of itself, certainly now a secular worldview that is largely based in the fact that human beings are biological accidents in a great cosmic pattern, what we now see is that the secular media are amazed when this kind of statement is made.
Now the other thing we need to note from a Christian perspective is that the notion of forgiveness here, which is so deeply rooted in the Christian faith, was not explicitly Christian as reported by most of the secular media and yet that’s another very interesting point. I don’t know exactly what words were spoken by all of these relatives and loved ones of the victims. I don’t know all that they had to say I do know what was reported in the media and that tells us a great deal. But what’s missing here is also a vital importance. What’s missing in the reporting is the understanding that this kind of forgiveness is rooted essentially in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the fact that in Christ we who come to faith in him are forgiven our sins as we remember, Christ died as our substitutionary sacrifice on the cross. He was the sinless one who died in the place of sinners and forgiveness of sins and life everlasting come to those who come to Christ by faith. Forgiveness has been a very important issue in the moral conversation of our culture for some time. It entered into that conversation in a remarkable way in the generation that followed World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust.
One of the big questions, then and now is whether from the secular perspective forgiveness is even possible or whether it’s even admirable in one sense. There were those who argued after the Holocaust that it was immoral to forgive sins of that magnitude, the killing of millions of millions of persons, especially millions and millions of Jews. In the Jewish theological conversation in the aftermath of the Holocaust, there was a division of opinion as to whether or not forgiveness should be extended to the killers of their own loved ones and relatives. And we simply have to understand the scale of the issue here – we’re talking about the intentional murder of millions of persons. The question was asked, especially in the second half of the 20th century, how can forgiveness come in the aftermath of such a crime? And who would be able morally speaking, who would be qualified to extend that kind of forgiveness?
As I said there was a division of opinion in Judaism of the time and that is an ongoing conversation about whether or not forgiveness is the appropriate response to the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust. But what was very interesting, what was extremely clear in that courtroom in Charleston on Friday is that what struck the national consciousness, what shocked so many people is that in the immediate aftermath one of the most important instincts that came from those who were the loved ones of the victims in this case was to forgive and to express that forgiveness even as they addressed themselves directly to Dylann Roof. But there was actually more to this at least in some media reports, one of the loved ones of the victims actually called upon Dylann Roof to repent of his sin. That’s a very crucial issue. The gospel tells us that salvation comes to those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and repent of their sins. In terms of our human responsibility to forgive, about that Christ himself was emphatic; we have an absolute responsibility to forgive those who sin against us. But when it comes to understanding forgiveness it is the minor portion of the equation theologically speaking, in terms of how we or any human being for that matter would respond in forgiveness to one who has done wrong. The larger issue theologically speaking is whether or not we or any individual will know the forgiveness that can come from God and God alone.
It tells us a great deal that so many were shocked when words of forgiveness were used in that courtroom. And as Christians we have to admit that as accustomed as we are to that language, we too are sometimes shocked by the depth of the demonstration of the Christian understanding of forgiveness that can come even in the immediate aftermath of this kind of horrifying crime. We can only hope and pray that this provides an opening for an even more clear presentation to the culture of the gospel of Jesus Christ in all of its power. It is clear that so many in this increasingly secularized culture were deeply shocked by what took place in that courtroom on Friday. We can only hope and pray that that shock will be an opening into a deeper understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because as Christians understand and must always affirm that is the only message that tells us of how forgiveness can come to a sinner from a holy God. And that message takes us directly to a cross in an empty tomb. And it takes us directly to that imperative found in Scripture, repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
2) Heresy of racism forced upon society’s consciousness by Charleston shooting
Another aspect of our cultural conversation in recent days also demands our Christian attention and our very careful Christian response, a direct and emphatic Christian response. That is the issue of white supremacy. It has become increasingly clear that law enforcement authorities believe that the young man accused of these crimes now facing nine capital counts of murder was motivated by an ideology of white supremacy. We need to understand even as on Friday on The Briefing, we talked about the sin of racism that that is often rooted in what is precisely identified here; a profoundly unbiblical and ungodly notion that simply has to be identified for what it is the heresy of racial superiority.
The word heresy has to be used very carefully in the Christian life and in Christian theology. We do not refer to every doctrinal disagreement or even every doctrinal error as heresy. Heresy should be limited to a false teaching that directly subverts the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s why throughout the history of the church, most heresies have related to the question of who Christ is and what Christ achieved on the cross. That’s why throughout Christian history most heresies have related to the questions of who Christ is and what he accomplished for us in his death, burial and resurrection. But there are other issues that directly attach themselves to the gospel and one of those is the question, is every single human being of equal dignity? Is every single human being of equal dignity because every single human being is equally made in God’s image? That is a crucial question and it gets to the gospel because it is vital for us to understand that when Christ died, He died for sinful humanity. He did not die for one race, there is no biblical justification whatsoever for the attachment of any understanding of superiority or inferiority to any person regardless of racial or ethnic identity, regardless of skin color, in this case emphatically we have to say there is no superiority or inferiority tolerated in the biblical worldview and especially in the gospel of Jesus Christ for any claim of superiority or inferiority on skin color. We also have to acknowledge that in the history of Christianity some of these claims have been made disastrously and sinfully so. One of the most sinful forms of that argument has occurred in what’s historically been known as the argument about the Curse of Ham, which is a misunderstanding, a profound misunderstanding of the curse placed upon Canaan by his father Noah. That has nothing to do with skin color, nothing whatsoever.
Christians have to understand several things immediately and we need not only to understand these things, but to speak publicly to them. In the first place, there is no biblical justification for racism in any form. There is no biblical justification for any notion of racial superiority whatsoever.
Next, we have to understand that any assertion of racial superiority is an assault upon the Imago Dei, upon the image of God. And we have to understand that as God made every single one of us to his glory, he intended for us to display all of the diversity that is found in all of the physical features, including skin pigmentation that we find in humanity. This is to the glory of God. We have to also understand that this is so important to the gospel and even to how the gospel is portrayed in Scripture in terms of the picture. We are told to look forward to that day when before the throne of God there will be men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. That is what the kingdom is going to look like, that is what the marriage supper of the Lamb is going to look like. So when the secular world rightly understands that racism is wrong, Christians have to come back and say, ‘you have no real idea how wrong it is.’ It is not only an assault upon humanity; it is by direct extension in the biblical worldview an assault upon the creator. There are so many things for Christians to discuss and to think through in this cultural moment. But we have to understand there is no issue more compelling right now then this.
3) Gay marriage’s moment dependent on shift in culture’s moral judgement of homosexuality
Next, as we go into this week, one of those other issues looms so large before us. By Tuesday of next week, by June 30, the course of the Supreme Court for this term will be set. All of its major decisions will be handed down. There are several major decisions left, none more important than the decision in the case concerning the legalization of same-sex marriage. And everyone waking up this Monday morning understands that that decision could come today or in the course of this week or in the first two days of next week. It is coming soon. It is coming fast. Both sides in our great cultural conversation about this are paying very close attention to what will happen over the next several days. In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Frank Bruni a very well-known openly gay columnist that newspaper, writes about what he calls, “Gay Marriage’s Moment.”
It’s a very important article among other very important articles to emerge in recent days. He writes about the pace of cultural and moral change that has brought the gay-rights movement to this moment. He writes,
“Now we stand nervously and hopefully on the brink of a milestone. Before the end of June, a month associated with wedding bells and wedding cake, the Supreme Court will issue a major decision about the right of two men or two women to exchange vows in a manner honored by the government. It may well extend same-sex marriage to all 50 states, making it the law of the land.”
Now most informed observers of the court expect that one way or another the court is going to do that very thing. He then raises one of the issues that emerged in oral argument before the court on this case. Is this a very fast movement? Is this something that is taking place in the blink of an eye, historically speaking? He says no and he goes back to the beginnings of the movement to legalize same-sex marriage. He goes back to some of the earliest efforts to even begin a conversation about same-sex marriage. We need to note, most of those are taking place if at all in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. But even at that point as he acknowledges, same-sex marriage didn’t really seem to be a legal reality. Here first we have,
“Evan Wolfson, a chief architect of the political quest for same-sex marriage, wrote a thesis on the topic at Harvard Law School in 1983.”
Now 1983 was just 32 years ago. Once again, he is actually making the point he denies. In terms of history, this is the blink of an eye.
In his article Sunday he writes,
“Same-sex marriage isn’t some overnight cause, some progressive novelty, especially not when it’s put in its proper context, as part of a struggle for gay rights that has been plenty long, patient and painful.”
He goes on,
“Yes, the dominoes of marriage equality in individual states have tumbled with a surprising velocity. My first Op-Ed column, in June 2011, noted that New York had just become the sixth state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage. The count today is 37 states and Washington, D.C. I’m amazed at this still.”
So one of the things I want us to note is, he is actually making the point he denies. This is an extremely recent novelty. As Justice Samuel Alito said about two years ago in oral arguments in a different case, “same-sex marriage is younger than the smart phone.”
Considerably younger.
But Frank Bruni getting ready to celebrate what he expects will be a victory at the High Court writes about his amazement that as recently as two years ago, someone like Hillary Clinton, now running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States and until fairly recently, the Secretary of State of the United States under President Barack Obama wasn’t for same-sex marriage, although she now is. As he looks at it Bruni writes,
“A Supreme Court judgment for marriage equality wouldn’t be a rash swerve into uncharted terrain. It would merely be a continuation of the journey of gay Americans — of all Americans — across familiar land, in the direction of justice. It would be a stride toward the top of the hill.”
His general argument is that Americans shifted in their view of the morality of homosexuality, of homosexual relations and homosexual behaviors, and that led rather automatically to an increased public support that produced a political opening for the legalization of same-sex marriage. In his essay he cites several things that added momentum to that moral revolution. In one paragraph he writes,
“Alfred Kinsey told Americans in the late 1940s just how common same-sex activity was.”
Now that’s a very crucial data point for him to cite because what we now know, it is now affirmed by virtually every credible study, is that Kinsey’s data were horribly flawed. What Bruni doesn’t acknowledge is that no research scientist now would point to Kinsey’s research and give it anything like academic credibility. Kinsey was trying to normalize many sexual behaviors that went far beyond homosexuality and that was his agenda. And when it came to how he conducted his research, he goes beyond what we can safely discuss on The Briefing.
But what’s most important and revealed in this essay by Frank Bruni on Sunday is that people on both sides, people on both sides of this issue understand exactly what is at stake. The decision expected by the Supreme Court is no small decision and looming even larger than that is the great moral revolution of which this decision is one way or another, a very important part. As we all await the announcement of the decision by the nation’s highest court, we should all recognize how much is at stake. We’re talking about marriage here. We’re talking about morality here. We’re talking about a sexual revolution that has unleashed many other revolutions and will not stop with this.
On this Monday morning we sense that the days before us are momentous and they are. And that means that Christians have a particular responsibility to think clearly and to speak clearly, to think biblically and to speak biblically. To understand that there is no way to avoid the importance of these issues and there is no way to avoid the conversations that will inevitably come. So as we prayerfully enter this week, let’s be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us and let’s be ready to speak of biblical truth and the Christian worldview to the issues that surround us. And let’s seek in all of these things to be faithful to scripture and to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to BoyceCollege.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
The Briefing 06-22-15
1) National shocked by forgiveness given by families of Charleston shoot victims to shooter
‘I forgive you.’ Relatives of Charleston church shooting victims address Dylann Roof, Washington Post (Mark Berman)
In Charleston, Raw Emotion at Hearing for Suspect in Church Shooting, New York Times (Nikita Stewart and Richard Pérez-Peña)
2) Heresy of racism forced upon society’s consciousness by Charleston shooting
Dylann Roof, Suspect in Charleston Shooting, Flew the Flags of White Power, New York Times (Frances Robles, Jason Horowitz and Shaila Dewan)
3) Gay marriage’s moment dependent on shift in culture’s moral judgement of homosexuality
Gay Marriage’s Moment, New York Times (Frank Bruni)
June 21, 2015
June 20, 2015
Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 06-20-15
1) Is ‘redeeming the culture’ a biblical concept?
2) Is it normal to be intimidated by the idea of spending eternity in heaven?
3) Are the actions of ISIS comparable to the Old Testament actions of Israel?
Call with your questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: 1-877-505-2058
June 19, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 06-19-15
The Briefing
June 19, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Friday, June 19, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Charleston church shooting horrifying picture of evil of racism
Once again a terrorist attack is in the headlines, but in this case it’s a case of domestic terrorism. And in this case it appears that Islam has absolutely nothing to do with the equation. Instead one of the most historic and symbolic churches of the African-American experience in America, the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, became the scene for an attack undertaken by a 21-year-old young American. In this case a white young American by the name of Dylann Roof and it now appears rather irrefutable that his motivation was reducible to the grotesque sin of racism, in this case a violent sin. What authorities now tell us is that on Wednesday night Roof entered the church building there, one of the most historic churches in the heart of Charleston South Carolina, one the nation’s most historic cities and sat among the worshipers there for a matter of about an hour. Then he opened fire deliberately and savagely wounding and eventually killing nine people by his gunfire.
Hamil Harris reporting for the Washington Post tells us that this particular church, the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church there in Charleston, is known as the national Cathedral Church of the entire AME denomination. As he explains,
“The AME Church was founded in 1794 by Richard Allen and other blacks in Philadelphia after they were pulled from their knees while praying in an all-white church. In 1816, black members of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church withdrew from what was then the Free African Society because of a dispute over burial ground and they formed a separate congregation.
[We are then told that] “In 1821, Denmark Vesey, one of the Charleston church’s founders, organized a major slave uprising in Charleston. Denmark had purchased his own freedom for $1,500 with money from a winning lottery ticket.”
That’s back, we should recall, in 1821. Late yesterday, the New York Times reported that Dylann Roof, the young suspect in this case was arrested after a 14 hour manhunt. He was arrested in Shelby, North Carolina during a traffic stop and according to the Charleston police chief, Greg Mullen, he was arrested and is being flown back to Charleston to face charges. Reporter
Ishaan Tharoor for the Washington Post tells us that the young man declared,
“You are taking over our country,” before opening fire on Emanuel AME Church’s black congregants.”
He also tells us that,
“Roof’s apparent Facebook profile photo carries a possible indicator of his racist worldview. The picture shows Roof skulking in the woods, wearing a jacket with at least two conspicuous patches. The patches, as the Southern Poverty Law Center quickly noted, are the old flags of racist, white-minority regimes in southern Africa.”
Those flags point back to the fact that there were nations in South Africa, including the nation of South Africa itself along with Rhodesia that were controlled by minority white governments that held to an understanding of an absolute white supremacy. There was a racist ideology that declared that the whites should rule the blacks in Africa and of course that same ideology found its foundation also here in the United States in the expression of Jim Crow laws, and for segregation, not to mention the legacy of slavery. It was out of that very context of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church had emerged in Charleston, South Carolina. What this tragic story tells us above everything else is that sin is ever more dangerous than we can even imagine. What can explain how a young man can enter into a church building, sit with black parishioners for virtually an hour and then open fire intentionally killing nine, obviously with the intent of going there to murder? We can only ask the question, how can any human heart be given over to this kind of evil?
From time to time on The Briefing we have to come back to the essential biblical truth that human beings in our fallenness can give ourselves over to evil, to an evil that is virtually impossible for most of us to contemplate, but an evil that is all too real as made evident in these headlines. Just imagine being in that church building, just imagine feeling the weight of history, just imagine being gathered together for a prayer meeting, just imagine being African-Americans gathered together in this historic African-American denomination and its church. Just imagine a white young man entering in and appearing to sit down and join in prayer. Then imagine that young man declaring you are taking over the country and then opening fire killing nine of your fellow church members, including your pastor. It’s virtually impossible to imagine what it would have been like to have sat in that congregation. But morally speaking, it’s even more difficult to imagine how a young man can give themselves over to this kind of evil. How could it make any kind of sense, how can it enter into any kind of rationality that a young man would enter into this cold-blooded and diabolical calculation with such clear and sinister intent to murder, and do so even in the face of having sat with the people, the very people he was intending to murder for almost an hour?
It’s hard for us to imagine the depth of depravity demonstrated in the fact that this young man did not even murder in a cold-blooded distance. He sat among the people he intended to murder for almost an hour. It’s virtually impossible for us to come to moral terms with this and that’s where we have to remember that as Christians we don’t have to come to terms with this. In a very real sense, we can’t come to terms with this. We can’t enter into the mind of this young man, nor should we seek to because even to try to enter into that mind is to give ourselves over to some extent to that same kind of hatred. What we have to do in contrast, is understand that in spite of all of the evil of this world, despite all the depravity and demonstrations of violence in this world, Jesus Christ identified with us so as to enter human flesh and to be among us, eventually bearing the violence of the cross not merely as a symbol of divine love but as our substitutionary sacrifice. When we look to those events in Charleston, we have to understand a basic biblical principle which is the irrationality of sin, the fact that sin in its essence really can’t be understood because it isn’t rational, it’s irrational. It isn’t sensical, it’s nonsensical. There are certainly lessons here for law enforcement and for churches looking at the escalation of this kind of attack taking place in the very midst of religious observances in particular in Christian church services. But we also need to look at the fact that law enforcement is never going to be able to read every single human heart and be able to head off a Dylann Roof before he undertakes this kind of horribly violent act.
But right now one of our main responsibilities is to grieve with those who grieve. To understand the deep inexpressible grief that is taking place in one church family, perhaps very far from us, or perhaps rather close, and to understand in a very special way that we need to grieve with our African-American brothers and sisters. For whom this church in this congregation and this attack, well all of that is powerfully symbolic of an entire weight of history. And we need to understand and we need to say honestly to each other to remind ourselves that racism is not dead. And as this tragedy in Charleston reminds us in all too graphic form, not only is racism not dead, it is very, very deadly.
2) Pope’s environmental encyclical clear on responsibility, unclear in implementation
Next shifting to another very important headline from yesterday, the Vatican released Laudato Si, that is the much anticipated encyclical from Pope Francis having to do with the earth, with ecology, with the stewardship of creation and with climate change. As it turns out, it has to do with a great deal more as well. This was as I’ve said a much-anticipated document, the Vatican had been putting out a great deal of anticipation about this new encyclical, and for that matter, a leaked version had emerged earlier this week. I did not discuss that leaked version of the encyclical because after all, we could not be certain that it was the official text. Now we are.
Yesterday the Vatican released Laudato Si or blessed be and it is indeed a very interesting statement. Before looking to the text itself I want to look at the press coverage about the Pope statement because that in itself is very interesting, revealing a great deal of how this statement is being understood. Jim Yardley and Laurie Goodstein reporting for the New York Times tell us,
“Pope Francis on Thursday called for a radical transformation of politics, economics and individual lifestyles to confront environmental degradation and climate change, blending a biting critique of consumerism and irresponsible development with a plea for swift and unified global action.”
The New York Times then tells us that the vision that the Pope outlined in a 184 page encyclical is sweeping in ambition and scope. He described they say,
“A relentless exploitation and destruction of the environment and says apathy, the reckless pursuit of profits, excessive faith in technology and political shortsightedness are to blame.
“The most vulnerable victims, he declares, are the world’s poorest people, who are being dislocated and disregarded.”
Now that was the New York Times. On the other hand, The Economist, one of the most influential magazines in the world had a headline that appeared treading lightly in many directions. The Economist took a very different approach to the Pope statement than did the New York Times. The New York Times leads with it being radical. Meanwhile, The Economist tells us
that even though the Vatican released this statement as a major declaration on many controversial issues, the Pope really didn’t get very specific when it comes to exactly what he would have world governments and other organizations or for that matter individual citizens of the world to do. It’s a very interesting reminder that when you’re looking at a 184 page document. There’s a great deal of interpretation about just what the document represents and even what it says.
After reviewing the statement I was asked to give my own statement to the press I said,
“Laudato Si is a very interesting document, by any measure. Pope Francis is absolutely right to identify our care for creation as a theological issue. As stewards of creation, we are called by the Creator to take care of the world he has made. At the same time, several of the Pope’s central claims about climate change have more to do with the current scientific consensus than with theology. Furthermore, some of his specific proposals are likely to harm those he seeks to help — the poor. While fossil fuels are surely contributing to an increase in carbon emissions, it is hardly helpful to tell the poorest nations among us that they must forego immediate needs for refrigeration, modern medicine, and the advances of the modern age that have so extended and preserved life. At this point, there is no alternative to dependency on fossil fuels, and this is as true for the Vatican as for the United States and other advanced economies. The Pope definitely takes sides on several questions, though it is not clear that the Catholic church is willing to accept all the implications of the arguments asserted in this document. Pope Francis has also tied the credibility of his papacy to scientific arguments that may well change over time, perhaps radically.
It is interesting that fairly little of the encyclical actually references climate change, though this is what the international media have found most interesting. The Pope also rejects contraception and population control and affirms the Catholic Church’s traditional understanding of gender. My guess is that the secular press will make much of the Pope’s statements on climate change and very little of his affirmation of historic Catholic teachings that run contrary to the modern secular worldview.
Evangelical Christians reject the very idea of the papacy and the concept of the Vatican as a political state. We do not issue encyclicals nor do we claim to represent a sovereign state with a foreign policy. The Pope’s encyclical will be much discussed, but time will tell if there is any major policy impact from his arguments. On the day of its release, it looks as if there are sections that will please and displease all sides in our ongoing discussion about climate change and the care of creation.”
It is very interesting and will be of concern to many Catholics even that the Pope has attached his personal credibility to certain scientific claims about climate change and all it would take would be a change in the understanding of the scientific community to leave him stranded on an island of his own making here. It’s also interesting as The Economist pointed out and I’ll simply quote,
“Much of the writing might have come from a secular environmental NGO writing a briefing paper ahead of the summit in Paris at the end of this year which will mark a new attempt to strike a global bargain to restrain carbon emissions.”
I think it’s extremely telling that here you have a secular newspaper saying that much of this encyclical reads like it could’ve been written by a secular NGO. That is to say much of its argument (especially as it relates to the questions about climate change) really aren’t tied to explicit theological arguments or theological data at all. Now to be sure, the Pope is stating many things with which evangelicals would enthusiastically agree. We are responsible as stewards for our care of creation. The biblical notion of stewardship is tied to the biblical assignment of dominion. Dominion is something that seems to make this Pope very, very uncomfortable. That’s rather unusual when you consider the claims of the papacy itself, but ironic as that may be when it comes to the issue of the dominion of the earth on the part of human creatures, he appears to think that this is likely or perhaps likely to lead to a sense of domination over the creation that will be very dangerous and will lead to environmental degradation.
Before leaving that argument we need to recognize it has happened in just that way. People have claimed the biblical assignment of dominion to human creatures and they have misused that assignment but nonetheless it is right there. Look at Genesis 1:28, there is a very clear assignment of dominion which is to say human beings made in God’s image have a divine assignment that we are to undertake the responsible use of the creation God has given us. Even as we are put in a garden we are to till the garden, we are to tend the garden, we are to plow the soil, we are to plant seeds, we are to build houses, we are to use the goods of the world, whether it be timber or minerals or the other things God has given us for the enrichment of human life and for the extension of human flourishing. But at the same time that is balanced with a biblical understanding of stewardship, a theme about which the Scripture is also emphatically clear. It was Jesus himself who repeatedly taught about stewardship, making very clear that even as we are given these gifts we will give an answer to the one who has given us these gifts. Even as we are tending this garden we might say, we will one day give an answer to the owner of the garden that is not only for how we have used what he has given us for its intended purpose, but also how we have cared for what he has given us as an act of love because after all, we did not create this world he did and he gave it to us as our habitation as a gift.
As I said, reading this as an evangelical there are many frustrations. One of the frustrations is that the Pope, who I genuinely believe thinks himself to be helping the poor, is by his very argument consigning some of the poorest nations on earth to being forever without the goods the modern age brings whether that might be considered modern medicine or modern transportation, modern telecommunications or for that matter refrigeration, refrigeration to preserve life and food. As I pointed out in the statement I made yesterday, the Vatican is no less dependent upon fossil fuels than any other government or for that matter any other major institution. It isn’t on an island somewhere with an alternative form of energy. The Pope disseminating this document disseminated by the means that the modern world has provided in terms of technology, but the Pope condemns much of that technology. This does not appear to be a statement that will last very well over time but that’s simply points to an even more fundamental issue for evangelical Christians. We don’t believe in the papacy, and we do not believe in papal encyclicals, we don’t believe that evangelicals should have a foreign-policy. We do believe that we should come to our best understanding of the policy issues at stake in this or any other cultural conversation. But we also come to understand that we are to confess the faith together and we are to affirm everything that Scripture reveals together, but on some of these issues there just isn’t a dogmatic statement for the church to undertake. This is an official papal document and encyclical, it is intended to be a teaching text for the Roman Catholic Church and it will be up to Roman Catholics to decide what to do with this text as the Vatican itself acknowledged it will be up to local bishops in the Roman Catholic Church to decide how they’re going to apply it.
But that gets to another issue. There is no doubt that in making this statement when he made it and as he made it, Pope Francis intends to play a role politically on the world stage on these issues. After all, you have The Economist mentioning the summit coming up in Paris. You also have the Pope’s own state visit to the United States that will include an address to a joint session of Congress this coming September. That’s a huge problem from a theological perspective. Here you have an entity that claims to be a church and a state with a foreign-policy and with a head of state. That is a huge problem as the reformers well understood and as we had better understand today. There is going to be a lot more conversation about Laudato Si to see in coming days. If the Pope intended to start a conversation at the very least we can say he succeeded in that.
3) Unanimous Supreme Court church sign ruling major win for religious liberty
Finally, another profound statement came from a very different source when yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States in a rather unusual 9-0 decision struck down a law in Gilbert, Arizona that had discriminated in terms of content on signage; in particular political signs were allowed to stay up for months and to be quite large. When church signs that offer directions to church services were very small and they were allowed to be up for only 13 hours. That basically made it impossible for any church to put up any sign telling people where to find the church and its services. Now it’s very important to recognize this is a major gain for religious liberty. It’s very important that the Supreme Court of United States all nine justices said that it was ridiculous that a municipality in the United States would dare to discriminate on the basis of the content of the signs. It’s just untenable that they could allow political content but not religious content related to church services.
Back when the oral arguments for the case were held when the attorney for the city tried to explain the policy, Justice Elena Kagan said,
“Gilbert’s law did not pass even “the laugh test” because it lacked reasons for its signage distinctions.”
Now here’s where a close look at what the court did is also important. It’s a civics lesson of sorts. The decision was 9 to 0, striking down the wall. But the new understanding that the court put in place was not a 9-0 decision, it was 6-3. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that it was absolutely unfair and unconstitutional for the city to discriminate in this way. And Justice Thomas went on to say that a government organization would have to present what is constitutionally known as a compelling interest in coming up with any discrimination or limitation on signs in terms of the free expression of ideas.
Three other Justices in this case from the court left-wing, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in terms of the rationale, stating that they did not believe that the government would have to prove a compelling interest but rather a lesser standard. If that sounds like a bunch of legal minutia, it’s not. It’s not just a technical argument. It’s very important to know what a government must prove in terms of its interest in a law to be able to discriminate against free expression. The law in terms of the majority opinion by the way doesn’t say the government can’t restrict signs it says governments just can’t pick and choose in terms of the signage. They can’t allow a political sign but not a religious sign. That’s very, very important. It is important to recognize that in striking down the law this decision was unanimous. But it’s concerning to know that when it comes to how we move forward in what cities or state governments are allowed to do. There’s a split decision, but it’s still a very clear decision, a 6-3 majority decision for religious liberty. That’s good news and good news for which we should be very thankful.
4) WHO issues regulations against naming diseases after animals or places, leaving few options
At the very end I simply want to say that sometimes we learn a great deal about the fallibilities and foibles of the human race. When we see what others are doing and that simply shows our own capacity for being at times foolish. The Week reports from Geneva,
“The World Health Organization issued new guidelines forbidding the use of place and animal namesakes when naming new diseases under the guidelines monikers like “Lyme Disease” (taken from a Connecticut town), “Ebola” (taken from the Congo River), “mad cow” and “monkeypox” would be discouraged. The World Health Organization said such names can lead to the pointless slaughter of animals, lost tourism and discrimination. Swine flu, for example, isn’t transmitted by pigs and according to the World Health Organization, it’s a slander to pigs to name the disease after them. Middle East, respiratory syndrome has hurt tourism they say to the entire region. Infectious disease specialist by the way are quite skeptical.”
It’s hard enough to come up with names for things. Just look at the roads in your community. How in the world are you going to avoid all places and all animals when it comes to naming diseases? Stating the obvious, John Oxford, a scientist who is a specialist in so-called bird flu said,
“This document is laudable in its intent.”
But then he said,
“But slightly daft.”
That’s a rather British way of saying, albeit condescendingly, that’s nuts.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albert Mohler.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’m speaking to you from Dallas, Texas and I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.
The Briefing 06-19-15
1) Charleston church shooting horrifying picture of evil of racism
How black church leaders are responding to the shooting in Charleston, Washington Post (Hamil R. Harris)
In Facebook photo, suspected Charleston shooter wears flags of racist regimes in Africa, Washington Post (Ishaan Tharoor)
2) Pope’s environmental encyclical clear on responsibility, unclear in implementation
Pope Francis, in Sweeping Encyclical, Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change, New York Times (Jim Yardley and Laurie Goodstein)
Treading lightly, in many directions, The Economist
Mohler responds to Pope Francis’ ‘Laudato Si’, Southern News (R. Albert Mohler, Jr)
3) Unanimous Supreme Court church sign ruling major win for religious liberty
Tiny Arizona church wins Supreme Court case on signs, USA Today (Richard Wolf and Brad Heath)
Supreme Court rules for church in case against Arizona town’s sign law, Washington Post (Robert Barnes)
4) WHO issues regulations against naming diseases after animals or places, leaving few options
World Health Organization Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases, WHO
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