R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 306
June 3, 2015
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.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
The Briefing 06-03-15
1) OSHA regulations on transgender restroom use keep up with moral insanity of sexual revolution
A Guide to Restroom Access for Transgender Workers, OSHA
2) Church of England group calls for right to name God ‘She’
Is God a woman? To ask the question is to miss the point, The Guardian (Kate Bottley)
Church Of England Group Wants To Call God A ‘She’, Huffington Post (Lydia O’Conner)
, AlbertMohler.com (R. Albert Mohler, Jr)
, AlbertMohler.com (R. Albert Mohler, Jr)
3) Sepp Blatter resigns as FIFA corruption spreads, inability to clean up own sin made evident
Sepp Blatter, Under Investigation, to Resign as FIFA President, New York Times (Sam Borden, Michael S. Schmidt, and Matt Apuzzo)
Bribery Inquiry Drawing Closer to FIFA’s President, Sepp Blatter, New York Times (William K. Rashbaum and Matt Apuzzo)
June 2, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 06-02-15
The Briefing
June 2, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Tuesday, June 2, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Supreme Court ruling on Abercrombie headscarf case religious liberty win for all Americans
In a major victory for religious liberty in a rather subtle case, the United States Supreme Court didn’t so much decide as send a clear message by sending the case back to the lower courts. In this case at the center of the situation is a Muslim young woman. She was 17 years old when she applied to work for the retailer, Abercrombie and Fitch, and found herself turned down for the job. The young woman, Samantha Elauf, came to the conclusion and it turned out she was right that she was turned down for the job because she was wearing, during the interview, a Muslim hijab or headscarf.
As Abercrombie and Fitch was to argue before the Supreme Court she did not announce even as she was wearing the scarf that she was a Muslim and therefore the company wasn’t guilty of religious discrimination. However, in a massive decision basically 8-1 on all the merits, the Supreme Court said that the employer had erred by making the assumption that she was a Muslim and by not hiring her because the wearing of the headscarf violated the company’s now notorious so-called look policy. Abercrombie and Fitch is undoubtedly a part of this story. They lost big at the Supreme Court yesterday. Samantha Elauf is a part of the story. She’s at the center of this situation and she emerged victorious and at least able to continue to argue her case in court. Religious liberty was also a winner. A winner for all Americans.
In looking at the company Abercrombie and Fitch and its so-called look policy, it’s important to recognize that the policy and the company was in controversy long before the issue of religious discrimination had emerged. Abercrombie and Fitch for the better part of the last two decades has made its corporate reputation by rather scandalous often almost pornographic advertising and by having in its advertising and in its retail personnel a look policy that stipulated exactly the kind of aesthetic appearance that an individual as an employee must have. The policy went all the way down to the fact that in their mall stores the retailer used open sexuality, including shirtless young men, and also included sexuality with the look the young women were to exhibit as employees and obviously as models. But we’re also looking at the fact that this infamous look policy also brought about a diminishing set of returns largely on a retail basis. Abercrombie and Fitch announced just in recent months that it was going to be abandoning that policy, not we should note, as a matter of principle. They did not leave the policy behind because they knew that it was morally compromised and corrupt. They did not plead guilty to having used sexuality and even pornography in an effort to attract teenagers and young adults, they didn’t apologize for anything. They simply said that the advertising retail strategy is bringing diminishing returns; therefore, it is going to be abandoned.
The Supreme Court entered into that conversation on Monday, delivering a very clear nearly unanimous decision that the company had violated religious liberty, which is something that before this particular case wasn’t the issue with Abercrombie and Fitch, but it is of a single piece with the larger issue of the company’s look policy.
We should recognize as Christians that one of the most fundamental errors that sinners can make is to confuse the good, the beautiful and the true as three different things. The Christian biblical worldview affirms that because God ultimately is the only beautiful, the only true and the only good, the good, the beautiful and the true, the so-called transcendental to the Christian worldview are exactly the same thing. This is a revolutionary understanding of beauty and truth and goodness that reveals the cosmetic aesthetic insanity of the modern world for what it is, a highly sexualized, often pornographic, always confused attempt to divide the beautiful from the true and the true from the good and the good from the beautiful.
The religious liberty aspect of this case is what’s gaining most of the headlines and it deserves to do so. Religious liberty is a major issue in terms of our cultural conversation these days, and given the trajectory of the culture, there are good reasons for anyone as an American citizen to believe that religious liberty is being subverted and threatened in our time. Most particularly now in terms of the moral revolution and its redefinition of marriage. Though religious liberty sometimes comes down simply to a matter of dress, and for all Americans when religious liberty is affirmed, in this case affirmed for a Muslim young woman who won her day in court and won the opportunity to continue to press her suit against Abercrombie and Fitch, because they didn’t hire her because she was a Muslim young woman and we should note, because her religion’s understanding of female modesty, ran into a head-on collision with the retailer Abercrombie and Fitch and its look policy, then very much in place and now still very much in memory.
2) Bruce Jenner ‘coming out’ as woman denial of human status as creatures, not personal Creators
Some days it is very difficult to know just what should be discussed on The Briefing. Sometimes there are issues I certainly do not want to discuss – but nonetheless, I must. That is the case today, in terms of the headlines that emerged yesterday, this headline from yesterday’s edition of the New York Times,
“Caitlyn formerly Bruce Jenner introduces herself in Vanity Fair.”
Ravi Somaiya, writing for the New York Times tells us,
“Caitlyn Jenner made her public debut on Monday on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. A photograph of Ms. Jenner, shot by Annie Leibovitz, accompanied an article on her transition to a woman after long identifying as a man named Bruce.”
As the New York Times says,
“It immediately became a sensation on social media when the magazine posted the article online.”
A couple of things just in terms of the minor background, Vanity Fair magazine is a very interesting periodical. It is one of the most interesting indicators of elite culture in the Metropolitan sense and what’s going on in terms of those who follow a more highbrow version of a celebrity worship. Vanity Fair magazine is for those kind of people who wouldn’t be caught dead buying a tabloid in terms of the supermarket checkout but they basically want the same kind of information, but in a more rarefied form about a more limited set of cultural icons and celebrities. Minor note number two, Annie Leibovitz is one of the most celebrated and popular photographers amongst the most elite in the United States and beyond. The fact that you have the intersection of Vanity Fair magazine and Annie Leibovitz is no surprise. The fact that the cover of the current edition of Vanity Fair magazine features someone identified as Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce, that’s a far deeper worldview significance. It is perhaps worthy of our note that the story of this gender transition as it is called began in the tabloids in America having to do with Bruce Jenner. It then began to migrate to more mainstream media and now once again, as I said yesterday, this was a headline from the New York Times. Also yesterday, ESPN announced in a Tweet that came from James Andrew Miller,
“Bruce, make that Caitlyn Jenner, will receive this year’s Arthur Ashe award for courage.”
We’re watching here, one of those very interesting confluences of events in terms of America’s popular culture. Even as the sexual revolution led to a gender revolution and even as that gender revolution led to a revolution in terms of sexual morality, including most especially same-sex relationships and now the whole question of the larger LBGT movement, including most particularly the idea of transsexualism and the transgender, including the idea that all human beings are not basically male and female, that’s been discarded as an antiquarian binary understanding of human sexuality and gender identity. Rather we’re now being told that all human beings are on a continuum and that any singular human being may declare himself or herself to be any gender or some other gender given any particular day or any particular moment in time. But Vanity Fair and the individual now known as Caitlyn Jenner have now found their moment of time in the release that came yesterday and it really came not so much as a cultural surprise, but to Christians as something of a heartbreaking acknowledgment of what’s happening here.
Bruce Jenner had won the gold medal in the decathlon at the Montréal Olympics in 1976 becoming an American hero. In more recent years, Bruce Jenner had joined with so many other Americans and basically now being famous for being famous. In those years, he had migrated toward the celebrity culture and had married into a family that was and is infamous for its involvement in the reality TV industry. Indeed a family that has become a major industrial complex in terms of the celebrity reality TV issue. In one of the saddest but most predictable extensions of the news that came yesterday, the New York Times says,
“Ms. Jenner began shooting a new reality series for the E Network in May.”
According to the E Network, this new reality television series, remember that’s what they’re calling it, will cover Ms. Jenner’s life as a transgender woman.
How should Christians think about this? In the first place, the most important issue here, most certainly is the issue of gender transition or the transgender movement itself and the understanding that someone who had won the Olympics in 1976 as a male can now be presented in the cover of Vanity Fair magazine as a female. One of the saddest aspects of this is the candor with which the story is actually told. Like so many others, Bruce Jenner speaks about how unhappy he had been as a man at various points in his life, eventually determining that he had a true identity as a woman and then attempting to move in that direction by means of gender reassignment surgery and other treatments; some of them cosmetic, some of them far more than cosmetic.
Even as celebrity culture focused on this as a matter of sensationalism we’re looking at a very tragic human drama. One that should bring about the compassion of Christians in terms of our thinking, but also the most keen biblical analysis of understanding what’s really at stake here. The biblical worldview makes very clear that God, for His glory, has made every single human being as male or female because of his intention for us and for our good. He establishes our identity. One of the most profound contrasts between the biblical worldview and the worldview that is now becoming so popular around us, if not pervasive, is that the biblical worldview tells us that our identity, in terms of the most fundamental questions of our lives, is established by God as an intentional act, and not by ourselves.
To state the matter bluntly, the Scripture is clear, we do not decide when we are born and we are not to decide when we die, we certainly do not decide to whom we are born or the circumstances into which we are born, we don’t decide whether we are male or female. All of these things are revealed to us in terms of the circumstances of our birth. Jesus himself said to his disciples that they could not add, even an inch to their height. They simply have no power or sovereignty over themselves in that sense, nor do we. To be human is to understand that we are made, we are creatures, we are not the creator. We are not even the individual creators of our own identity, as if it’s a project that is simply left to us. Let us just know clearly that if you do abandon the biblical worldview and if the worldview you have explains everything simply in terms of the natural world, then there is no reason why you would not see your own identity as your own personal project with your own right to determine at any given time what that identity might be. Now that project has gone so far as to reach the question of gender identity and thus the revolution taking place around us. Bruce Jenner isn’t the first nor the last, now identified as Caitlyn Jenner, the entire world in terms of entertainment and media, politics and the rest, the elite culture is doing its best immediately to change every reference from Bruce Jenner to Caitlyn Jenner and as the cover photograph by Annie Leibovitz chose in Vanity Fair, this is an attempt for this individual to present a new identity in stunningly contrasting terms to the young man who won the decathlon for the United States in 1976.
Christians need to understand that this is simply not a possibility, biblically speaking, we do not actually acknowledge in terms of the biblical worldview, our ability to change our gender. That is simply something that the world recognizes now not only as a project and the right but as a privilege we have to recognize it is actually an impossibility. But Christians also have to recognize that what we’re looking at here is not some kind of freak show. That is exactly how the celebrity entertainment complex is presenting it even though they’re trying to dress it up as a modern morality tale. This is not a freak show. Because in reality, Bruce Jenner, is not a freak. He is a human being made in the image of God. And even though he is here attempting a revolt against even the way that he was made by his creator, what he’s doing is actually the very essence of sin, which means that he is a sinner, which means he is a sinner just like every one of us. Christian compassion and Christian humility should lead us to understand that the confusion that we now see in Bruce Jenner is a confusion that is actually writ large in humanity. It is taking a particularly striking form in his case, but we delude ourselves if we think that in our own fallenness and in our own confusion, left to our own devices we would actually do any better.
We are also seeing what happens when the lid, morally speaking, comes off the culture and when all restraints are gone. This will not be the last salacious cover story in Vanity Fair magazine, of that you can be absolutely certain. Even as in recent days, there’s been controversy over a reality TV program featuring evangelical Christians. I pointed out so many times on this program; the problem in that sense is with the very idea of reality television. As soon as you start to commercialize the product to bring cameras into the room, you are no longer looking at a normal reality and in one of the saddest developments that was also released yesterday you find out the human drama here is as you suspected far deeper than may first appear. It’s very revealing that two of Bruce Jenner’s sons are refusing to appear on the new reality program. To put the matter simply, in terms of the biblical worldview real reality, as Francis Schaeffer referred to true truth,
“Truth is simply too much for us to ignore.”
Reality television is actually a way of often trying to ignore the reality, or at least to distort the reality rather than to face the reality, but before leaving this issue we simply have to note there is another element to this that is deeply revealing and that is that every reference to Bruce Jenner, in terms of the politically correct culture, in terms of the dominant moral perspective of this age, is going to be to the past tense. It will be as if Bruce Jenner now no longer exists. Now you have the debut on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, of an individual unknown to the world until very recent times, indeed, until Monday, identified as Caitlyn Jenner. How in the world is it possible that with a straight face the culture can all of a sudden begin speaking of a living person in the past tense and now speaking of a new person in the present and toward the future – who knows for how long? But in its essence that actually points to the impossibility of the whole transgender project. It speaks to the fact that the secular worldview behind this and even those who are the religious enablers by terms of their argument can’t deal with the fact that Bruce Jenner, is still very much alive and is still very much in public view. Now going by the name Caitlyn, but referring to Bruce Jenner in the past tense, isn’t actually fooling anyone, including the people who insist that’s exactly how Bruce Jenner should now be addressed.
3) Transgender baptism liturgy proposed to Church of England symptom of theological confusion
But leaving that particular issue, an even more tragic dimension comes that isn’t a part of America celebrity culture, rather, this one hits even closer to home in terms of the Christian church. The headline in The Guardian a few days ago, “The Church of England to consider transgender naming ceremony”, Karen McVeigh reports for The Guardian, a liberal newspaper from London. The Church of England is to debate plans to introduce a ceremony akin to a baptism to mark the new identities of Christians who undergo gender transition – well there you have it. We saw Bruce Jenner now moving into the past tense and Caitlyn Jenner now introduced on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. That’s what we should expect now in terms of America’s secular celebrity culture – but what about the Church of England? Here you have the Church of England declaring that it is going to consider a new ceremony that at least some Anglican priests are already using, whereby an individual is being reintroduced to the church and even as one cleric said, to God with a new identity, complete with a new gender.
According to The Guardian, the Reverend Chris Newlands, the vicar at Lancaster priory has proposed a motion to the General Synod of the Church of England to debate the issue after he was approached by a young transgender person seeking to be rebaptized, in the word used by the individual, in his new identity. The priest said:
“I wanted to bring it to the General Synod as a commitment that bishops will take seriously and for them to take the next step of getting a liturgy, which parish priest can use for people who do the transition where they can be affirmed in the church.”
In amazingly revealing language The Guardian then writes,
“Newlands was asked by a church member who had undergone gender reassignment if he could be rebaptized.”
Recalling the conversation, Newlands said,
“I said, once you have been baptized you’re baptized.” He said, “But I was baptized as a girl under a different name.” The priest then said “Let me have a think about it.” And The Guardian says, “So we did. And then we created a service which was an affirmation of baptismal vows where we could introduce him to God with his new name and his new identity.”
So here we’re not talking about Vanity Fair magazine, we’re talking about a priest of the Church of England officially making an overture to that church’s General Synod saying we need a ceremony whereby we can introduce an individual who is new, formerly a male now a female, or formerly a female now a male, and reintroduce them into the church, but you’ll notice the exact language he used,
“Introduce him to God with his new name and his new identity.”
Once again, one of the most fundamental issues of the biblical worldview is that we are known by God before we know ourselves. David makes it very clear in the Psalms, where he speaks of God knowing him in the womb even as he was being knitted together. Before he had a single day of life, David says, he was known by the creator and he was known intimately. As David understood the creator, then and now and forever, would know him better than he knows himself and yet here you have a priest of the Church of England suggesting that a ceremony is now needed because of the transgender revolution in which individuals can be introduced to God with their new name and with their new identity. I honestly can’t think of any development that would more demonstrably indicate the insanity of what we’re looking at here, but let’s be honest it’s one thing to see that kind of moral insanity on the cover story of Vanity Fair magazine. That is what we should expect. But to see that kind of insanity coming from someone who is taken ordination vows in an historic Christian church, that is not only insanity that is an unspeakable sin against the creator and against the Christian church, against the Scripture and against the very understanding of what it means for God to be the creator of heaven and earth, and the creator of every single human being made in his image.
In one sense it’s nothing less than scandalous to see this cover story in Vanity Fair magazine, but we’re actually just watching a very natural and predictable progression in terms of the moral insanity of a secular age. This secular age basically has no moral boundaries it can maintain by its own will. It has no fixed understandings and in many ways rebels even against the notion of fixed understandings, whereas that first emerged in terms of a moral relativism on sexual issues, now it is reached an absolute relativism when it comes even to gender identity. But as we have remarked so many times on The Briefing, even if you commit yourself to this worldview, it’s not going to work. And even if you were to look at this cover story in Vanity Fair magazine, this much is clear, they can’t really keep their argument straight and it is also incredibly revealing that they have to keep talking about an individual still very much alive as if he is not, referring to Bruce Jenner always in the past tense. But it is one thing as I say to see that kind of scandal in terms of the secular world, but when you see that kind of thinking invade the Christian church even to the point where you have a Church of England priest making an overture to that church’s General Synod to come up with a ceremony whereby people who have undergone gender transition can be introduced to God with their new name and their new identity, you have to wonder just how long any theological sanity will remain within that church.
But finally, the really scary thing is that this kind of thinking will not be limited to one church or one denomination. It won’t be limited to a conversation now taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. No, this is a kind of theological virus that is extremely contagious if it isn’t confronted directly, and if more importantly, the full wealth of biblical conviction is not taught in your church, then don’t be surprised when you hear this kind of argument coming to the person sitting next to you in the pew.
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 06-02-15
1) Supreme Court ruling on Abercrombie headscarf case religious liberty win for all Americans
Muslim Woman Denied Job Over Head Scarf Wins in Supreme Court, New York Times (Adam Liptak)
Supreme Court rules against Abercrombie in hijab case, Politico (Marianne Levine)
2) Bruce Jenner ‘coming out’ as woman denial of human status as creatures, not personal Creators
, New York Times (Ravi Somaiya)
Caitlyn Jenner to receive courage award at ESPY’s, Washington Post (Matt Bonesteel)
3) Transgender baptism liturgy proposed to Church of England symptom of theological confusion
Church of England to consider transgender naming ceremony, The Guardian (Karen McVeigh)
June 1, 2015
For Summertime or Anytime: A Summer Reading List for 2015
Do we read by seasons? To some degree, we probably do. Summer promises the opportunity to pack a stack of books that otherwise might not fit in the schedule. Every serious reader needs to read some books just for the sheer thrill of reading. A good book brings more than pleasure, of course, but pleasure in reading is not to be taken lightly. In this list I suggest some new and current books that brought me pleasure and satisfaction as I read them, and as I now share them with others. The list is heavily weighted to history and historical biography. No apologies there — these are the books I recommend this season for summer reading. Each earned its way on this list. By the end of the summer, perhaps you will have your own list to share as well.
1. Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (New York: Crown Publishers).
The list of authors whose non-fiction books make their way to almost every best-seller list is short, but Erik Larson is surely found among them. Larson has written a series of best-sellers, including In the Garden of Beasts and The Devil in the White City. Each is well researched and incredibly well told. Dead Wake is no exception. Larson tells the story of one of the greatest maritime disasters of all time — the sinking of a great ocean liner by a German U-boat. The sinking of the Lusitania is a great human tragedy, and it is tied to the story of a world at war, and of the United States finding its way in a dangerous modern world. Characters include the captains of both vessels and President Woodrow Wilson, along with a host of others. Readers will be gripped by an important story that is incredibly well told. Larson brings the story to life in the centennial year of the attack and sinking. Once you begin, don’t plan to put this book down for long.
Excerpt:
Schweiger recorded the encounter at 12:15 p.m. Half an hour later. he surfaced and returned to his westward course, to continue his voyage home. Conservation of fuel was now a priority. He could not delay–the journey back to Emden would take another week. By now the weather had cleared to a degree that was almost startling. “Unusually good visibility,” Schweiger noted; “very beautiful weather.” On the horizon, something new caught his eye.
2. Thomas Asbridge, The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Story of William Marshal, The Power Behind Five English Thrones (New York: Harper Collins).
Imagine a young boy, just five years old, standing on the gallows waiting to be executed in retribution toward his father, who had abandoned him to his fate. The boy was so young that he did not understand what he was facing, and he seemed to be fascinated with the weaponry of his executioner. Escaping the gallows, perhaps because his father’s powerful enemies could not bring themselves to execute a boy so young, William Marshal grew to become one of the greatest knights of medieval history — a powerful figure of war and authority to whom five English kings would, to a considerable degree, owe their thrones. William Marshal’s story is well told by Thomas Asbridge, who takes his readers into the tumult and tenor of the medieval world. This is a world so distant from our own, but perhaps not so distant as some might think.
Excerpt:
There is no way of knowing whether the actual experience of being a hostage and facing the threat of death–or, perhaps, more importantly, his subsequent recollection upon these events–left any enduring psychological marks. Perhaps the repeated telling of the tale represented some kind of defense mechanism or coping device, but William may equally have judged his father’s actions, and his own predicament, as a natural consequence of medieval war. It is notable, however, that in later years William never placed his own kin, nor even his knights and retainers, in such a position of forsaken peril.
3. Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books).
The Ottoman Empire was once the most powerful in the world–and one of the most lasting. Its demise would come only in the conflagration of the Great War. The story of the fall of the great Islamic empire, one of the most complex and fascinating in world history, was one of the most significant and lasting effects of World War I, and we now know that it set the stage for the world as we know it today. Eugene Rogan traces the history of the Ottomans but his particular focus and skill comes as he tells the story of how the Ottoman Empire sided with the the Central Powers and met disaster. In telling the story he also explains how the Middle East as we know it today came to be. Today’s headlines–and urgent world concerns–make much more sense after reading this important work. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire is a captivating tale, filled with sultans, pashas, viziers, and generals, told by a skilled historian and writer.
Excerpt:
The Ottomans has lost the great War. It was a national catastrophe but not unprecedented. Since 1699, the Ottomans had lost most of the wars they had fought, and still the empire had survived. Yet never had the Ottomans faced such a constellation of interests as they did in negotiating the peace after the great War. Caught between the conflicting demands of the victorious powers and Turkish nationalists, the Ottomans ultimately fell more as a result of the terms of the peace than of the magnitude of their defeat.
4. Robert Middlekauff, Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Do we need yet another major work on George Washington? The short answer to that question is an emphatic yes. Washington was larger than life to his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, and he remains one of history’s most fascinating figures. The great achievement of Robert Middlekauff is the way he tells the story of Washington and the American Revolution in a way that combines the best skills of a biographer with the critical insights of an historian. Middlekauff brings Washington to life to a degree that very few modern authors have achieved, and readers who think they know George Washington very well will soon discover that there is far more to know, and every bit worth knowing. Middlekauff leaves Washington where he thought he would be left, with the Revolution secured–at least tenuously, and Washington free to return to his beloved Mount Vernon. He was not to remain in a quiet life of farming for long, of course, and we can only hope that Middlekauff will follow Washington’s Revolution with the rest of the story.
Excerpt:
All the time that he served as commander of the Continental Army, he was in fact also the leader of the Revolution. His unspoken and undefined responsibilities in this role transcended those of his assignment as commander in chief, and he became, as the war developed, a symbol of the freedom the young republic embodied. He was the political leader of the Revolution, though he drafted no legislation and signed no laws. But if he failed, it was widely understood, the Revolution failed.
5. Charles Spencer, Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I (New York: Bloomsbury Press).
Sometimes a book appears and the reader simply has to ask why this book had not been written before. There are histories aplenty of the revolution that toppled the Stuart monarchy in England and took King Charles I to the scaffold. And yet, no one has really told the story of that revolution and regicide and then followed the story to the restoration of the Stuarts after the fall of the Protectorate and then to the absolute determination of King Charles II, son of the beheaded king, to track down the regicides and bring them to his violent judgment. In any event, no one has told the story so compellingly as Charles Spenser has done in Killers of the King. This is as interesting a book of history as any reader is likely to enjoy, and Spencer takes his reader right into the debates of that tumultuous age, when life and death would hang in the balance for a king and then for his killers. This was a violent age that set the course of British history and would, eventually, touch both sides of the Atlantic.
Excerpt:
Charles consistently overestimated the strength of his hand and the patience of his enemies, as he played Parliament, the army and the Scots off one another. He felt sure that none of these competing forces could achieve what they wanted without his support. At the same time, he felt no qualms of conscience about his many deceits: all was being extracted from him under duress, while he was in effect a prisoner. The king believed this negated his concessions: he fully intended to go back on any promises made, once his freedom was restored. He wrote as much, repeatedly, in letters he intended for sympathisers on the mainland. Many were intercepted. As the conditions of his confinement became stricter, it began to dawn on Charles that Governor Hammond was not his protector, but his gaoler, and that he was under house arrest.
6. David McCullough, The Wright Brothers (New York: Simon and Schuster).
Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, twice awarded with the Pulitzer Prize, David McCullough is an institution of sorts and a legend in his own time. Few writers of history achieve his stature, and McCullough’s ability to make an epoch or an individual come alive is truly remarkable. In that sense, we should be particularly glad that McCullough has written The Wright Brothers. The world as we know it would not exist without manned flight, and the Wrights are central to that story. Nevertheless, the Wright brothers seem, if we are honest, less interesting than their invention. McCullough’s achievement in this book is to make Wilbur and Orville Wright more interesting than most histories of flight and most biographers have yet revealed. Many people will read this book simply because David McCullough has written it. Fair enough. McCullough could, we imagine, make any subject interesting. But in The Wright Brothers McCullough makes us want to know even more about these determined brothers as he tells the truly compelling story of the birth of the flying machines that make the modern world possible.
Excerpt:
Success it most certainly was. And more. What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt than man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did…. As they crated up the damaged Flyer to ship home, the brothers were “absolutely sure” in their own minds that they had mastered the problem of mechanical flying. But they also understood as no one else could know how many improvements were needed, how much more they themselves needed to learn about flying so different a machine, and that this would come only with a great deal more experience. The Flyer would go into storage in Dayton. It would never be flown again.
7. Deborah Cadbury, Princes at War (New York: Public Affairs).
World War II remains a focus of intense historical interest, and it became so even before it was over and victory in both Europe and the Pacific had been secured. The uncovering of crucial intelligence information in recent years has led to the confirmation that the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, was, at the very least, working against the interests of his own nation and its allies before and even during the war. Many of the books about the relationship between King George VI, father of the reigning monarch, and Edward VIII, the abdicated king he followed to the throne, have been sensationalistic and lacking in substance. Princes at War is the most substantial telling of the story to appear after the release of the intelligence data on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the book takes the reader into some of the most dangerous days of the twentieth century. The book is a study in character, told through the lives of the characters who sat on the throne of Britain at a time when it really mattered.
Excerpt:
Adolf Hitler and his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, savored the prospect of a tour of Nazi Germany by Britain’s ex-king. Of all the pieces moving swiftly across the chessboard of European diplomacy, the former king turning up in the heart of Berlin was an unexpected bonus. Hitler had known of the duke’s pro-German views for some years, not least through the duke’s own relatives. A German grandson of Queen Victoria, Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, a member of the Nazi party and the Brownshirts, had agreed to spy for Hitler as early as 1936. Mingling unobtrusively with the royal family when they mourned the death of George V at Sandringham, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg had extracted from the untried new king, Edward VIII, much useful information for the Fuhrer.
8. Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice (New York: Doubleday).
We take our view of the world for granted. It just makes sense to us to imagine the globe with polar ice at both the North and South Poles. But that view of Earth, so fixed in our minds now, is barely a hundred years old. In the late nineteenth century, some of the brightest minds of the day sincerely believed that a warm ocean of navigable waters was to be found at the North Pole. Major maritime nations were in a race to reach this sea and to claim its riches. Add to this the fact that any number of adventurers and explorers were ready to risk their lives and the lives of others to reach the North Pole, in particular, and to find glory in their exploits. In the Kingdom of Ice tells the story of the tragic but heroic voyage of the U.S.S. Jeanette and her captain, George Washington De Long. Hampton Sides narrates the story very well, and explains why “Arctic Fever” was so contagious in the great Age of Exploration. Readers will never again look at the globe and see that polar mass of ice without remembering this story.
Excerpt:
De Long was even starting to doubt the cherished concept of the Open Polar Sea. The implacable ice did not appear to be a mere “girdle,” or an “annulus,” that one could simply bust through. It seemed to stretch out forever, and the pressures locked up within the pack suggested unimaginably huge expanses of even thicker ice. “Is this always a dead sea?,” he wondered. “Does the ice never find an outlet? Surely it must go somewhere. I should not be surprised of the ocean had frozen over down to the equator. I believe this icy waste will go on surging to and fro until the last trump blows….” The Jeanette expedition had begun to shed its organizing ideas, in all their unfounded romance, and to replace them with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly was. This, in turn, led De Long to the gradual understanding that an endlessly more perilous voyage lay ahead. They might reach the North Pole, but almost certainly they were not going to sail there.
9. William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee – the War they Fought, the Peace they Forged (Boston: Da Capo Press).
This work of dual biography tells the stories of two of the most titanic figures of American history. William C. Davis turns to the drama and depth of the Civil War to illuminate our understanding of the war’s two most significant generals, Grant and Lee, and, through them, to reshape our understanding of the war they fought and the nation they shaped. The American Civil War represents a battlefield of history and argument, and Grant and Lee are often considered as a focus of argument or iconic symbol. Both were real men, with real lives, real passions, and real beliefs, and they shared the unspeakably brutal reality of real war. Both continue to shape the American experience, and this book’s great value is in considering Grant and Lee together. The pathos of their stories, inextricably linked, will come through to every reader. This is not merely their story, but ours as well.
Excerpt:
Grant and Lee were not men of big ideas. They reflected little, if at all, on man and his place in the universe, the nature of democracy, or freedom, or liberty. They were two one-time Whigs turned quasi-Democrats, at least in spirit, with one of them now drifting in the crisis back toward the Republicans. Competing loyalties drove Lee, yet he always knew that there was only one way for him to turn in the end. Even as he felt himself nearing the close of a career he regarded as largely unsuccessful, now he looked ahead to a service he dreaded but could not refuse, in a cause he deplored, and which he feared might only cap his professional failure with personal and regional ruin. He was not a happy man and had not been for some years. He saw nothing ahead but questions for himself and his people, all at risk of being answered disastrously. For his part, Grant knew the face of failure intimately, but was finally achieving at least a kind of basic security and domestic stability he had not known before. He may not have been prosperous, but he was happy. The crisis brought no tugs on his loyalties. From the moment of the firing on Fort Sumter he saw through all secondary matters, like family or party alliances, that there was only one question and only one answer, and his was the Union at any cost. Each man embraced instinctive feelings about what it meant to be an American and what his country ought to be. Within a matter of hours in the bloom of springtime, each committed himself to war to try to give those feelings life.
10. Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Most Americans know that the nation was born at the cost of a revolution. Fewer know that the revolution did not produce the form of government that emerged, years later, in the form of the Constitution of the United States. Ellis rightly refers to the emergence of our constitutional order as the “Second American Revolution.” Author of an important book on the revolutionary generation, Founding Brothers, Ellis reminds us of the incredible achievement that the Constitution was — and is — and of the compelling story of how that achievement came to be. The Revolution won independence for the colonies. The “Second American Revolution” won a nation and a constitutional republic. Against the “progressive” school of American history, popular for over a half-century, Ellis argues that the motivating concerns of the constitutional framers were political and not merely economic. This is refreshing. He argues convincingly that four men were most responsible for this second revolution and its success — George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Even readers who will disagree with some points of Ellis’s constitutional interpretation (I did) will agree, appreciatively, that he has told the story very well.
Excerpt:
My argument is that four men made the transition from confederacy to nation happen. They are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. If they are the stars of the story, the supporting cast consists of Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris (no relation), and Thomas Jefferson. Readers can and should decide for themselves, but my contention is that the political quartet diagnosed the systemic dysfunctions under the Articles, manipulated the political process to force a calling of the Constitutional Convention, collaborated to set the agenda in Philadelphia, attempted somewhat successfully to orchestrate the debates in the state ratifying conventions, then drafted the Bill of Rights as an insurance policy to ensure state compliance with the constitutional settlement. If I am right, this was arguably the most creative and consequential act of political leadership in American history.
Reading is an individual act that, at its best, overflows into our relationships, conversations, and generous sharing. Good books make us think as we read and reflect. The best books make us think deeply, without the overwhelming sense that thinking is what we are doing. Enjoy reading worthy books, summertime or anytime.
I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler.
For more information on Southern Seminary, visit SBTS.edu and for more information on Boyce College, visit BoyceCollege.com.
Transcript: The Briefing 06-01-15
The Briefing
June 1, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Monday, June 1, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Senate debate over NSA program exposes tension between security and privacy in dangerous world
We’re watching before our eyes a drama in the United States Senate, having to do with what it means to live in a dangerous world. What kind of information needs to be collected in order to make us safer? What kind of information once collected doesn’t make us safer at all? That is the root of the debate and that debate has been playing out in recent days in the United States Senate. Last night the Senate adjourned at 10 o’clock without passing a new bill that would replace the Patriot Acts provisions for data and surveillance collection that came after the 9/11 attacks on the United States of America. So as of midnight this morning, 12:01 to be precise, those particular provisions of the Patriot Act expired and yet last night, United States Senate was able only to move by a vote to a debate of the issue, not to an actual consideration or a vote on the bill itself.
The original legislationm Americans will remember, is called the Patriot Act. It was signed into law by President George W. Bush, some of the specific provisions of that law enabled national security agencies to collect vast amounts of information on the phone calls made by Americans. The actual content of those phone calls was not available without some sort of judicial order, but the information on the phone calls themselves were allowable under the Patriot Act. That information became known to the world largely through the exposé that was undertaken by Edward Snowden, now basically in exile or asylum in Russia.
Politically this was a test for the United States Senate. The United States House had passed the new bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, by an overwhelming majority and that act also has the support of President Barack Obama. But in the United States Senate, especially among very powerful people who have been involved in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there has been resistance to the form of the bill that was passed overwhelmingly in the house. Specifically, there are several leading senators who feel that the House version of the bill, the bill supported by the President would leave America vulnerable in terms of lacking certain information that might well prevent a terrorist attack.
We’re looking at a political situation in which one Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has an outsized influence, as he has been arguing and frankly marshaling support among more libertarian elements in the Senate in order to defeat a stronger version of the bill that was supported by the other Kentucky Senator that is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell also of Kentucky. The bare political fact is that the house version is likely to be adopted by the Senate with minimal revision by sometime this week, but the reality is that as of 12:01 this morning, at least some provisions of the law will lapse. That is indeed the political drama, but there is a huge moral drama that is going on here and it’s one that is hard for any of us to answer in terms of exactly which course we should take.
There are two very strong arguments, both of which have traction in terms of the Christian worldview. The first argument is in an evil and fallen world, in a very dangerous world, we need to collect every bit of information that might be accessible in order that the government might review that data and prevent some kind of terrorist attack. The other argument, which also has strong support from the Christian moral tradition, is that, that kind of information is never neutral and once it is in the hands of a centralized authority it can be used for evil as well as for good. In the United States, politically this means that there are libertarians who basically want to say that the United States government should have no access to this information without already knowing who might commit a crime and on the other hand you have those who say there is no way to know who might commit a crime until there is a pattern of information that might reveal it.
It’s clear that the American people are themselves inconsistent, perhaps even contradictory on the issue. They want to keep their own personal information private and they want to make sure that the government is not using that information without their knowledge. On the other hand, they want to hold the government accountable to try to detect patterns that might indicate a potential terrorist act before it happens. The same kind of tension is playing out in much of Europe right now in France and Germany, for example, but in the United States, it takes on a special sense because the United States, as the bastion of liberty in the world has long cherished individual liberty and personal privacy as a part of that liberty.
An intelligent Christian looking at the situation and trying to think biblically recognizes that there are arguments to be made on both sides of this equation. There is always a danger when any institution, including a government, begins to collect vast amounts of information on its citizens without any presumption of a criminal act that might be actually in the making. On the other hand, in a fallen and dangerous world, it is the expectation of citizens that a government will do anything within its power in order to prevent some kind of violent or terrorist attack, and of this you can be certain, if indeed a terrorist attack were to happen Americans would ask the question, “Why did the government not prevent it from happening?” On the other hand, Americans have a memory, if not at first hand of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany listening into the phone calls of German citizens and of the communist government in the Soviet Union doing the very same.
It’s fairly easy to predict in terms of the political equation, as Senator Paul acknowledged last night, some version of this bill is going to pass. That’s because when the government look to these two competing issues, it’s going to side with security rather than with privacy. Whatever eventual form the legislation takes that is signed by the President of the United States, it will in one way or another, we can safely presume, allow the government to have some way to collect the data that it believes might prevent a terrorist attack. And American citizens are in the rather awkward, if inconsistent position of believing that the data shouldn’t be collected but that the government should use it very carefully.
Sometimes Christians need to understand there are cases to be made on both sides of an argument and at some point we simply have to decide which side of the argument will prevail even if both arguments have a certain amount of traction to them, even in the Christian worldview. Because the Christian worldview also affirms the fact that those who are plotting evil, almost by definition, have the jump on those who are trying to prevent it.
2) Scandal over former Speaker Hastert remind sin will find you out
Next, when it comes to sin we also need to remember regularly the biblical teaching that we should be certain our sin will find us out. There was a scandal that emerged as we went into the weekend, as the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, was indicted on federal charges having to do with financial irregularities. But as was immediately suspected that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois served as the speaker the house for 1999 to 2007, again, that’s the longest term held by any Republican in terms of serving as leader of a lower house of Congress. The case against the former speaker was put in blunt form by the New York Times on Saturday with reporters Michael Shear and Michael Schmidt, writing:
“J. Dennis Hastert, who served for eight years as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was paying a former student hundreds of thousands of dollars to not say publicly that Mr. Hastert had sexually abused him decades ago, according to two people briefed on the evidence uncovered in an FBI investigation. The story continues, federal prosecutors on Thursday announced the indictment of Mr. Hastert, age 73, on allegations that he made cash withdrawals totaling 1.7 million to evade detection by banks. Federal authorities also charged him with lying to them about the purpose of the withdrawals.”
Now here’s what’s really interesting from a Christian worldview perspective, in the first place we have very serious allegations at two levels made against someone who was second in terms of the line of succession away from the presidency of the United States. In the first place, we have financial irregularities that are actually now coming in the form of an official indictment from federal prosecutors. On the second level, we now have information on the reason why those financial irregularities appeared in the first place. By the time the weekend had ended, federal prosecutors had acknowledged that the financial irregularities were tied to a pattern of payments the former Speaker was making to a young man who had been a student in the high school where Mr. Hastert had served not only as a teacher, but also as the wrestling coach. According to federal prosecutors, the young man had addressed the former Speaker in the year 2010, and somehow an agreement was reached whereby Speaker Hastert would pay him $3.5 million to maintain his silence. According to the prosecutors, the former Speaker had paid $1.7 million to the man by the time the indictment was handed down late last week.
In terms of sin, there are a couple of very important lessons here from the Christian biblical worldview. In the first place, we’re talking about something that took place according to the allegations made decades ago and yet it came to light, not just in terms of the federal indictment, it came to light in terms of something that happened in 2010, three years after Mr. Hastert left office. Somewhere in those three years, a young man addressed him with the challenge that led him to promise $3.5 million if the young man would remain quiet. But there’s a first lesson, no matter how deeply in the past something like that may be thought to be left, it is not going to stay there.
The important thing to realize is that there is no doubt that in terms of human justice, even of human knowledge, there are any number of undetected crimes, certainly undetected sins. But the biblical worldview doesn’t assure us that somehow a federal grand jury is going to hand down an indictment one day, but it does assure us that on that Day of Judgment God will reveal every sin. There’s something else here, a fundamental interest to the Christian worldview, and it also is deeply tied to American criminal and criminal justice history. It has to do with the fact that it is not unprecedented at all. In fact, it is all too common in terms of American legal history, for someone to go to jail for some reason other than the underlying and more fundamental crime. Perhaps the most graphic illustration of that is the fact that the gangster, Al Capone, who is credited by virtually all, with multiple murders, all kinds of racketeering, any number of forms organized crime, eventually spent time in a federal prison, not for murder, not for extortion, not for gangsterism, not for all kinds of manifestations of organized crime with incredible violence, but rather for income tax evasion.
When it comes to organized crime in America and when it comes to any number of crimes including many drug crimes, the people who end up in prison are not there for the fundamental crime they have committed, because the evidence may be inadequate to bring that to court or a statute of limitations may have expired, but there is still the lingering issue of the money. As Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee famously said during the Watergate investigations of President Nixon in the early 1970s, “Follow the money.” What first alerted federal prosecutors in this case is that the former Speaker was withdrawing a huge amount of money from his financial accounts. He had the money to withdraw evidently and he was drawing at one time $50,000 multiply. Now one of the things we need to keep in mind is that federal banking law requires that the banks alert the federal government of any cash withdrawal of $10,000 or above. This provision was put in place largely because of the war on crime, including especially, the war on organized crime. Once the banks made an inquiry of the speaker, he began withdrawing smaller amounts of money. Now here again, the Christian worldview tells us that when we come to matters economic, when we come to matters of money, that’s where the intersection of sin and opportunity often shows itself most graphically. And one of the things that we have to keep in mind here is that this is a former speaker of the House of Representatives. This is someone who surely knew the banking laws. He had helped to put those laws into place. It seems almost inconceivable to us that someone who withheld that kind of position of authority would then follow the very pattern that he had to know eventually was likely to draw attention to himself and not only that, according to the indictment, when the speaker was addressed by federal investigators he lied to them about the purpose of the withdrawals.
Any way you look at it, this is a very sad case and one of the most interesting aspects of this is that the colleagues of the former Speaker who served with him in the House of Representatives, those who also knew him from Illinois politics, those who know him now in terms of his hometown there in Illinois, that express almost universal shock at the allegations made against the former Speaker. We also have to be very clear, that at this point these are allegations. This is a criminal indictment handed down by the U.S. Department of Justice. But Mr. Hester deserves his day in court, as does everyone accused of a crime. At this point, however, the federal government has put the indictment out for public view, making very clear, the specific charges it intends to bring against a former Speaker of the House of Representatives. This is indeed a world of sin and stories like this, heartbreaking as they are bring that very much to our attention. Also going back to Watergate, it’s important for all of us to remember that sometimes people go to jail or face criminal penalties not for the underlying crime but for the cover up. As Howard Baker might remind us, “Follow the money” – all the way to the Day of Judgment.
3) Presidential candidates multiply as middle ground between parties disappear
Next, as we are looking at the future of the United States, the year 2016 looms before us as a presidential election and in this case, there are more candidates than we had expected even a matter of just a few months ago. The most interesting action has taken place in recent days on the Democratic side, where the former Governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley announced that he will run against Hillary Rodham Clinton and against now Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for the office of President of the United States, specifically for the Democratic Party’s nomination for that office.
The interesting thing about Martin O’Malley, who served as governor of Maryland until last year, fulfilling two full terms, is that he is running to the left of Hillary Clinton, and that’s very interesting, because even in recent months, it’s been clear that the former Secretary of State and New York Senator, the former First Lady of the United States, has been running to her own left in terms of where she ran in the year 2008. So oddly enough, given the current spectrum of those who are running for the Democratic nomination as announced candidates, you have Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist by his own declaration on the far left and then you have on the nearer left Martin O’Malley, the former Governor of Maryland, and then you have the former Secretary of State who’s trying to prove to the Democratic grassroots that she’s the liberal after all.
Martin O’Malley’s argument is number one, rather subtle that he is younger than the former Secretary of State, he drew attention to that, but he also especially drew attention to what he believes are his bona fides, the proof that he is actually more liberal than the former Secretary of State, one of the things he offered is that he was for the legalization of same-sex marriage long before she was and he declared he was going to be running against Wall Street declaring that Wall Street really didn’t care if the election were to be won by a Clinton or a Bush, presenting himself as the liberal alternative.
From a worldview perspective it’s going to be really interesting to see how the Democrats fight amongst themselves in the who’s more liberal than whom contest, but the immediate political effect of Martin O’Malley entering the race is that it is likely to draw Hillary Clinton even further to the left, but there’s something else to watch here, and that is the answer to the question, “Why did Martin O’Malley enter the race?” He is way behind the former Secretary of State in terms of name recognition; he is way behind in terms of political apparatus, why did he enter the race? At least one assumption is this; he may well have entered the race in order to position himself as the obvious alternative if there is a major problem that emerges in a Hillary Clinton candidacy. That will be very interesting to watch.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side two new entries into the race for the Republican nomination, in the first place, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum he was in office as United States Senator from Pennsylvania from the years 1995, 2007 and in 2012, he came in second, albeit a rather distant second to Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican nomination. Rick Santorum has been a family values conservative. He has run every single time he has run for election on that very same kind of platform. However, he has been out of office since the year 2007 and he is facing a host of other Republican candidates who are trying to address themselves to the very same voters.
Rick Santorum is resolutely pro-life, that draws immediate contrast with the other man who entered the Republican race in recent days, former New York Governor, George Pataki. Pataki was the Governor of one of the most liberal states in the union as a Republican from 1995 to 2006 and George Pataki is pro-choice, that is going to add an interesting element to the conversation and debates on the Republican side of the presidential election process. This much is clear; the Republican Party really doesn’t have much room for someone who’s going to run against the party’s clear declaration of a pro-life position. One of the interesting observations so often made about American politics today especially the presidential level is that the middle ground, has disappeared or is disappearing. “Where is the ground?” We often hear for a more liberal Republican or a more conservative Democrat. The answer is there isn’t much ground for either. And the reason for it is actually very easy to understand. The issues are now so clarified that it is very difficult to imagine how one would bridge the positions of the two parties in a single individual or for that matter, in any kind of political platform. The Democratic Party is not only for abortion under almost any circumstance in terms of his 2012 national platform, it actually called for government funding of abortion, whereas the Republican Party adopted a pro-life position in terms of its 2012 national party platform. To the extent that it was specific about calling for exactly the kind of legislation that was adopted by the House of Representatives just in recent weeks.
One of the things Christians should recognize very clearly is that fundamental issues really are here at stake. The very fact that when George Pataki entered the race, national journalists immediately leapt on the fact that he is the first major pro-choice candidate or pro-abortion candidate to enter the race on the Republican side tells us that even those who are watching from a very different political standpoint in a very secular understanding notice that this is a very interesting development in the race. And it points to the worldview consequences; not only of the race, but of every vote. 2016 is shaping up to be a major test of the American people. It’s shaping up to be a major debate over issues of very deep and inescapable worldview significance. We’re going to have issues of war and peace, going to have issues of national security and privacy, we’re going to have issues of life and death, and we’re going to have issues in the balance of some states having to do with assisted suicide and euthanasia. One way or another, the issue of marijuana is likely to factor into the 2016 race as well. And of course, even as a major Supreme Court decision on the issue of same-sex marriage is looming before us, we have the great divide that separates Americans over this issue and the fact that in terms of middle ground, as represented by the two political party platforms in 2012.
As we anticipate 2016, it’s hard to imagine how the divide would not be even wider than it was before. Political campaigns, especially when the focus is the office of President of the United States are always unpredictable and they are often messy. But in terms of the worldview consideration, we need to note that it is our responsibility to watch very, very carefully because this is not most fundamentally a battle of personalities, though personality does matter, this is not fundamentally a battle over mere issues, though the issues certainly matter. This is a major struggle and there’s no way around to define what kind of nation we need to be, even what we understand to be the nature and dignity of human life, one way or another, this will be an election that will test our understanding of whether or not there is an established stable morality that is to be honored by all people everywhere, or whether morality is just an ongoing project of human social evolution. Week by week, the pollsters and the survey takers may bring us new data about who’s up and who’s down and what issue was on the front lines in which has been relegated to the inside pages. But know this, by the time we get into the voting booth we’re going to know a great deal more about the candidates and by the time we get out of the voting booth, we’re going to know a great deal more about ourselves.
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 06-01-15
1) Senate debate over NSA program exposes tension between security and privacy in dangerous world
Senate to let NSA spy program lapse, at least temporarily, Reuters (Patricia Zengerle and Warren Strobel)
NSA must end bulk data collection even as Senate moves ahead on NSA bill, CNN (Jeremy Diamond and Ted Barrett)
2) Scandal over former Speaker Hastert remind sin will find you out
Hastert Case Is Said to Be Linked to Decades-Old Sexual Abuse, New York Times (Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt)
Dennis Hastert Allegedly Made Payments to Conceal Sexual Misconduct, Wall Street Journal (Andrew Grossman, Devlin Barrett and Ben Kesling)
3) Presidential candidates multiply as middle ground between parties disappear
Martin O’Malley’s Star-Spangled, Snafu-Speckled Debut, New York Times (Maggie Haberman)
Bucking Odds, Martin O’Malley Tilts at Hillary Clinton, Wall Street Journal (Laura Meckler and Scott Calvert)
Enter Pataki, Fiorina, and Santorum: Thoughts on 2016, Forbes (John Zogby)
May 30, 2015
Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 2015-05-30
1) Were there actually women pastors and bishops in the early church?
2) What is the point of fasting?
3) Should evangelicals attend the weddings of divorcees or Catholic infant baptisms?
Call with your questions 24 hours a day, 7 days aweek: 1-877-505-2058
May 29, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 05-29-15
The Briefing
May 29, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Friday, May 29, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) FIFA corruption charges exposes incompetence of humans to self-police sin
The question is this: is there any dimension of human existence that is not corrupted by sin? Here’s the answer: no. And here’s the evidence: just consider the last couple of days when criminal indictments were brought by the Atty. Gen. of the United States against FIFA, that is the world organization that organizes and governs international soccer. We’re looking here at the fact that the United States – represented by its Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch – has brought criminal indictments against some of the highest-ranking authorities in the international world of professional soccer.
The indictments did not come out of the blue. It was well known that the American Justice Department was working on investigations, and the United States will not be alone. The nation of Switzerland is also highly involved in investigations of corruption of the highest levels of FIFA. But let’s remind ourselves what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a game. We’re talking about a game that evolved into a sport. And we’re talking about a sport that became a big business. And once you have a game that becomes a sport that becomes big business you have the opportunity for big corruption.
We’re talking out of business, a worldwide enterprise that involves billions of dollars a year. And in particular, the limited indictments brought by the United States Justice Department brought criminal allegations alleging at least $150 million in bribes. One of the most interesting things heard on the worldwide scene is that given the totality of the money involved in FIFA, $150 million doesn’t add up to that much. As a matter fact, in the last 12 months FIFA spent over $100 million just on attorneys’ fees. And indictments handed down this week mean they are sure to be spending a great deal more.
One of the things the Christian worldview informed by the Scripture helps us to understand is that sin in its insidious force works its way into every nook and cranny, into every crack of a civilization, into every dimension of human existence. You might think that one of the most innocent would be play. And yet as you know, even if you’re looking at just two kids in a sandbox play can turn anything but entirely innocent. And when you’re looking at a worldwide opportunity represented by multiple billions of dollars a year, and when you’re looking at the prestige and the egos, and you’re looking at the reputations that are at stake – when you’re looking at the confluence of glory and pride and money and profit, you’re looking at a recipe for moral disaster.
One of the things that immediately people will say – it’s a commonsense response – is you have to put adequate guards and matters of accountability into place. And when you look at FFA – let’s just remind ourselves of this: FIFA’s supposed to be the organization that watches in order to govern soccer and its moral integrity. Now you have very credible criminal investigations brought not just by the United States, but soon also by Switzerland, and with the full authority of the United States government behind them, including the active involvement of the Atty. Gen. United States, and their being brought against the very organization that exists in order not only to govern soccer, but also to protect what is known internationally as football against any allegations of corruption or immorality.
Sepp Blatter, who’s been the president of FIFA now for a matter of years is not the direct target of one of these indictments, at least not yet. And yet he’s been standing at the top of an organization that has been accused – credibly accused – of corruption for years now. And even now, even yesterday, he insisted that FIFA has to be left alone to police itself. The New York Times reported yesterday that Blatter said that these were, in his words, “unprecedented and difficult times” for his organization. He said it must do a better job of policing itself. But as the New York Times tells us, he largely avoided taking responsibility for the actions of what he called a tiny minority arrested in a corruption inquiry this week.
One of the most interesting questions raised in the context of this controversy over FIFA is how in the world you can have someone as president of the organization given now over a decade of sustained allegations of corruption, who at the end of that decade, and only after criminal indictments are headed down, says we must be left to police ourselves. Blatter said,
“We, or I, cannot monitor everyone all of the time. If people want to do wrong, they will also try to hide it. But it must also fall to me to be responsible for the reputation of our entire organization, and to find a way to fix things.”
Anyone familiar with the literature of the 20th century would hear that almost as a refrain from something like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, or something, perhaps, even older. It sounds like it could come from Dante. Here you have a man who is been at the top of an organization accused of immorality for years, who says ‘I’m responsible,’ but takes no responsibility.
He then has the audacity, facing scrutiny from the entire watching world, to say, ‘We haven’t done a good enough job of policing ourselves, even though we are basically when it comes to international football, the policing organization. And yet, we must be left to police ourselves, even now.’
There are so many interesting moral dimensions of this – one of the things is the tight ethical squeeze this now puts on the sponsors of international soccer. The New York Times again is reporting that many of the major corporations who are spending billions of dollars in advertising and sponsorships in international football, they now are saying they’re going to have to reassess the situation. But that doesn’t mean they’re pulling back their sponsorship. You see, this is one of the situations in which a cost-benefit analysis is just the way the world thinks. They have to measure whether or not at this point it is more expensive for them to spend the advertising or to withdraw the advertising. They have to decide whether or not the scandal is bad enough that it’s too expensive morally for them to associate their brand and their logos and their image with international soccer. At this point, many these companies are taking a wait-and-see attitude.
Once again, a lesson from the Christian worldview: when some scandal like this breaks there is almost the immediate response to say, let us govern ourselves. That’s what Sepp Blatter said. And yet, we remind ourselves, this is the organization that has spectacularly failed to hold itself accountable, much less the rest of international football. And then you have the immediate response coming from those who’ve been funding the operation, saying we’re going to take a wait-and-see attitude. We’re going to reassess.
I think that was sympathy for these corporations. They find themselves in an untenable situation. They simply don’t know how bad this corruption scandal is going to be. If, like previous scandals, it blows over rather quickly, the business will go on like usual. But the sign that the United States Justice Department is brought criminal indictments of this magnitude, that tells most people around the world this one isn’t going to blow over.
The biblical worldview reminds us of so many things that come out in the headlines concerning FIFA. The most important of them is this: we are simply incompetent and governing ourselves. In a sinful world even the organization, perhaps especially the organization that is formed to govern international soccer and its integrity falls prey to the corruption that is demonstrated by the fact that the president of the organization says that if people are intending to do evil, they will. And then you’ve got the rest of the world, including those sponsors with so much at stake, wondering just how bad is this going to get.
Well, the way sin generally works is this, when a scandal breaks of this magnitude at the beginning it’s just a hint of what is to come. And when it comes to the statement by Sepp Blatter saying we simply have to be left to police ourselves, well just remember this: just think of those preschoolers in the sandbox when they look up and say, ‘just let us police ourselves.’ In a fallen world, neither one of those statements make sense.
2) Attempt to blame infidelity on genes part of human conspiracy to excuse immorality
Here’s another symptom of a fallen world. We try to come up with rationalizations for why we sin. And furthermore, the complexity of the situation is each of us actually feel more comfortable with rationalizations for our sin if we can find some cold comfort in the rationalizations of other sins as well. Thus, I direct our attention to a major article that appeared in the New York Times. It’s by Richard A. Friedman, who is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College. He’s also contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He writes an article – just listen to this headline, “Infidelity lurks in your genes.” The subhead of the article, “Evolution doesn’t explain why women cheat, but hormones and their receptors might.” If you think this is interesting, well just wait.
Richard Friedman writes,
“Americans disapprove of marital infidelity. Ninety-one percent of them find it morally wrong, more than the number that reject polygamy, human cloning or suicide.”
And for this he cites a 2013 Gallup poll. Now we talked yesterday about the moral shift in America and about the fact that fewer Americans now believe adultery is wrong than was true about 14 years ago. But it’s still true that the vast majority of Americans believe at least this: they believe that adultery is wrong. So Friedman starts out on a rather strong ground when he makes the point that Americans believe that infidelity, that is marital infidelity, is wrong. And then he goes on to say,
“Yet the number of Americans who actually cheat on their partners is rather substantial.”
He goes on to document the rates of adultery – by the way this point, I’ll simply interject that’s one of the things is rather difficult actually to statistically verify. But nonetheless was just take his argument that marital infidelity is on the rise in America. That’s probably something is pretty safe to judge. The article takes its key turn when Friedman writes,
“We are accustomed to thinking of sexual infidelity as a symptom of an unhappy relationship, a moral flaw or a sign of deteriorating social values. When I was trained as a psychiatrist we were told to look for various emotional and developmental factors — like a history of unstable relationships or a philandering parent — to explain infidelity.”
But then he says,
“During my career, many of the questions we asked patients were found to be insufficient because for so much behavior, it turns out that genes, gene expression and hormones matter a lot.
“Now that even appears to be the case for infidelity.”
So without going into the details of his argument concerning genes and hormones and hormone receptors, let me just get to the bottom line. Professor Friedman, who again, is a clinical professor of psychiatry, is arguing that in a large number of cases went infidelity happens it is Simply because of a biological impulse. Whether that is rooted in a genetic evolution (which he clearly affirms, especially when it comes to men) or in hormones and hormone receptors which he now affirms especially when it comes to women, the bottom line is what he’s arguing for is a biological causality for moral behavior. Or in this case, clearly immoral behavior.
What we have here is nonetheless very clear evidence of what we’re left with what all we have is a naturalistic and materialistic worldview. He writes,
“Sexual monogamy is distinctly unusual in nature: Humans are among the 3 to 5 percent of mammalian species that practice monogamy, along with the swift fox and beaver — but even in these species, infidelity has been commonly observed.”
Now what you have here is yet another effort to reduce human beings to the level of being merely an animal. In this case, even a mammalian. And it turns out that in the animal kingdom monogamy is largely exceptional, but let’s just point out the obvious. Among animals marriage is nonexistent. That’s nonexistent in this article.
This article is so distant from the Christian biblical worldview that marriage only appears as the context in which sex outside of marriage might occur. This is a form of moral insanity that is growing more and more pervasive in our culture. And yet we need to understand not only the fact that the argument’s being made, we need to understand the reason why the argument is gaining traction. It’s because we as sinners want to be told we have not sinned. We want to be told that is not our moral responsibility, that is not our moral action. We want to be told the matter what the sin might be, that it is somehow rooted in something we could not not do. Something that was driven by a biological necessity. Something that is an accident of evolution embedded in our genes. Something that is rooted in our hormones or hormone receptors. Something that is simply a part of what it means to be a part of nature.
But this is where the biblical worldview simply intervenes to say human beings are not simply a part of nature. And when it comes to the moral expectations made of us, they are profoundly not merely natural. They are supernatural. Even as we are created by a sovereign divine Creator who made us in his image – human beings uniquely in his image – he made us moral creatures and he gave us he gave to human beings the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman as the very molecular unit of society on which the rest of society would depend. Animals beyond human beings, no matter how conscious they may be no matter how much intelligence, they may have no matter whether they are reptilian or mammalian or anything else, they are not moral creatures in this sense. And they are not made in the Creator’s image in any way, and they are not given the gift of marriage. And they are not accountable to marriage.
The fact that dogs and cats do not practice monogamy has nothing to do with human beings, because dogs and cats are not given the institution of marriage, and they are not moral creatures accountable to the institution of marriage. But we are. What you have here is a part of that vast human conspiracy to avoid moral responsibility, and in this case to avoid the obvious. How in the world can anyone make an argument about marital infidelity without dealing with the marital part, with marriage? It simply doesn’t exist in his argument. And that tells us a very great deal.
It would certainly be convenient for us if we were told that our sin really isn’t sin at all, it’s just a behavior that is rooted in biological causality. Of course second of argument doesn’t even work in a human court, much less in the divine court of judgment.
That article appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times and I waited because subsequent editions have brought letters in response to the article and the letters themselves are revealing for instance Henry Friedman who is an associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, said that the arguments made by the other Dr. Friedman in his original essay the New York Times are simply based upon a generalization. He says that extramarital infidelity is simply too complex to human behavior to be reduced to any form of biological argument. The Christian worldview would respond to this Dr. Friedman by saying the problem isn’t that sin is so complex, but actually that it’s so simple.
Yet a third Dr. Freedman appears. This one another psychiatrist, a former president of the New York County branch of the American Psychiatric Association. The third Dr. Freedman writes a second letter that appeared in the New York Times in which he says,
“Human beings can control behaviors. Even for some who may be at a disadvantage because of their biology, strength and motivation can be attained with the help of psychiatric treatment or other means of assistance.”
So now comes the third Dr. Freedman to argue that there is some biological element, but it can be overcome with psychiatric treatment. The Christian worldview would respond all three Drs Friedman by pointing out that the Bible teaches us that marriage is a gift to human beings to which we are accountable in every conceivable form. And marital infidelity is wrong, it’s called in the Bible ‘adultery’ precisely because it is extra marital.
In a fallen world, there is no doubt a biological dimension to almost everything. But the Christian worldview simply does not accept a biological argument for causation of our behavior. When it comes to moral responsibility the problem isn’t in our genes, it’s not our hormones; it is ourselves. We are indebted nonetheless to all three Drs Friedman for helping us to see this in a very clear way through their contributions to the New York Times.
3) Naturalists inadequately struggle attempt to explain experience of awe
Meanwhile, following on a similar theme, the New York Times ran another article, this one by Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner. The entitled article; “Why do we experience awe?” Now that’s a really interesting question. And once again, this article in its own way (by the way it appeared in the very same edition of the New York Times) points to the fact that in a naturalistic worldview, you have nothing but natural explanations and everything has to be defined in purely natural terms, including a three letter word that doesn’t appear to work in a naturalistic worldview. That three letter word: awe.
The two authors write,
“Here’s a curious fact about goose bumps. In many nonhuman mammals, goose bumps — that physiological reaction in which the muscles surrounding hair follicles contract — occur when individuals, along with other members of their species, face a threat. We humans, by contrast, can get goose bumps when we experience awe, that often-positive feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.”
They then ask the question, why do human beings experience awe? Well they try to explain that awe is a social emotion, that it’s brought about by the fact that human beings have a need – socially, not just individually – for some experience of transcendence and some experience of wonder. They’re writing about what they call an ‘awe deficit’ that is occurring in a modern society in which too few actually go outdoors.
Writing in a way that’s reminiscent of the naturalist Henry David Thoreau they write about the fact that human beings need to be in nature in order to have the periodic experience of understanding that we’re part of something bigger. We’re part of something grand. We’re part of something that transcends ourselves. We’re part of something that would bring about a moment of awe. It’s really interesting, however, that these two authors discuss all as merely what they call,
“the often-positive feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.”
Now once again we have the naturalistic worldview at work. Here we have a couple scientists trying to explain that one of the problems of the modern world is that we are so disconnected now from nature, we’re so attached to our digital devices, we stay indoors so much of our lives, that we’re not outdoors have any experience of looking at a valley, looking at a sunset, looking at the stars, and having experience of awe, complete with a goose pimples they physiologically described.
But of course the biblical worldview would respond by asking the question, why in the world would human being even looking at the stars, or looking at a valley, or looking at a sunset, or looking at anything experience what might be described as awe?
There’s something else in the biblical perspective that comes up here. We are told that our God is an awesome God. One of the problems of the word awesome so easily thrown around in our common English parlance is that awe in the Bible is particularly and specifically assigned to the human response to being in the presence not merely of a transcendent vision, not merely of nature, but of God. Oh, and by the way, the other problem with the biblical worldview in terms of awe, measured against this naturalistic very materialistic worldview concerning awe is that in the Bible the experience of awe, isn’t rightly described as an often positive social emotion.
In one of the classic expositions of awe found in Scripture we look to the prophet Isaiah 6 were he writes,
“In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!””
Isaiah then tells us,
“And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.”
And what did Isaiah say then? He said,
“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
Now that is a biblical definition of what it means to experience awe. That awe does not lead merely to goose pimples, and it certainly can’t be described as simply an ‘often positive social emotion.’ It doesn’t, as these two scientists are arguing, necessarily lead to human altruism. In the case of Isaiah when he actually had this vision of the one true and living God who was in the temple, high and lifted up, it was Isaiah, who said, ‘I am undone, woe is me trying a man of unclean lips, and I live in the midst of the people of unclean lips.’ And how did he know? He said, “For my eyes to seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”
So let’s think about the deep distinction between the Christian biblical worldview and the naturalistic worldview. The naturalistic worldview tells us that sin is something that happens by some biological necessity or evolutionary accident for which largely we are not responsible. The biblical worldview responds that we are moral agents made in the image of God, and that we are inherently, inescapably responsible.
The naturalistic worldview says that we are impoverished if we don’t take a look at nature and have the experience of goosebumps in looking at the fact that we’re so small and nature is so large. The biblical worldview responds by saying looking at nature and being impressed simply isn’t enough. When one has a vision of the one true and living God, the response is an awe that leads to an understanding of the fact once again that we are sinners. And we shouldn’t be surprised the sin makes his way into every dimension of our existence, even in our play.
But as we go into the weekend, let’s remember the people especially in the Southwest, and especially in states like Texas that have been ravaged by sudden floods. But even as we’re praying for those in Texas and beyond, let’s remember this; this too is a sign of what it means to live in a fallen world. A world in which even nature itself is corrupted by our sin. A world in which event like this, along with the reality of our sinfulness, point to why we need a Savior, and why we are awaiting a day that is yet to come. To a new heaven and a new earth. But that comes only by a biblical worldview. The naturalistic worldview isn’t looking for anything like that.
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 more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to our website at www.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 and call in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.
I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.
The Briefing 05-29-15
1) FIFA corruption charges exposes incompetence of humans to self-police sin
Global soccer corruption case deeply rooted in USA, USA Today (Kevin Johnson)
Sepp Blatter Says FIFA Must Police Itself, New York Times (Sam Borden, et al.)
Scandal Creates a Tricky Spot for FIFA Sponsors, New York Times (Richard Sandomir)
2) Attempt to blame infidelity on genes part of human conspiracy to excuse immorality
Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes, New York Times (Richard Friedman)
Blame Genes for Extramarital Affairs?, New York Times
3) Naturalists inadequately struggle attempt to explain experience of awe
Why Do We Experience Awe?, New York Times (Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner)
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