R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 309

Genesis 35:1-29

Transcript: The Briefing 06-05-15

The Briefing

June 5, 2015

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later in the story by Julian Barnes, we read,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the New York Times reported,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m representing all of Rhode Island,”

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

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

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

“Time to rethink our social construct of motherhood.”

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

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

Then, in an odd cultural reference she says,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Briefing 06-05-15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript: The Briefing 06-04-15

The Briefing

June 4, 2015

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

“10 percent of Seattle residents identify as atheist.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

“The Least Religious Generation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

“The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion.”

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

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

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

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

Haberman then writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand asked the brilliant question,

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

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

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

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

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

At the end of his article Haberman writes,

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

In a recent statement Ehrlich said,

“My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”

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

 

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

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 06-04-15

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

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

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

The least religious generation, Science News

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

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

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

Transcript: The Briefing 06-03-15

The Briefing

June 3, 2015

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Guide to Restroom Access for Transgender Workers.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information, go to my website albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com. Remember we’re taking questions for Ask Anything Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 06-03-15

Podcast Transcript

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)

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

Podcast Transcript

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)

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.