R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 314

The Briefing 03-30-15

1) Media skews Indiana’s religious liberty law as anti-gay, showing extent of moral revolution

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence Says Controversial ‘Religious Freedom’ Law Won’t Change, ABC News (Stephanie Ebbs)

Indiana Law Denounced as Invitation to Discriminate Against Gays, New York Times (Michael Barbaro and Erik Eckholm)

Indiana Religious Freedom Law Sparks Fury, Wall Street Journal (Mark Peters and Jack Nicas)

Gov. Mike Pence signs ‘religious freedom’ bill in private, Indianapolis Star (Tony Cook)

Keeping them safe from gay marriage, Washington Post (Editorial Board)

Why the backlash against Indiana and not other states with similar laws? Timing., Washington Post (Philip Bump)

Controversial Indiana Law Puts Pressure on N.C.A.A. and Other Leagues, New York Times (Marc Tracy)

2) Nicholas Kristof reminds liberals Christian caricature shouldn’t be mocked

A Little Respect for Dr. Foster, New York Times (Nicholas Kristof)

3) Debate over motherhood as a job exposes shallow understanding of parenthood

Motherhood is tough and intense but it is not a job, Financial Times (Lucy Kellaway)

Transcript: The Briefing 03-27-15

The Briefing

 

March 27, 2015

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

It’s Friday, March 27, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Discovery Germanwings copilot crashed plane exposes inability to know the mind of others 

Yesterday the big news was the late breaking story on Wednesday night that authorities in both France and Germany had come to the reluctant conclusion that the Germanwings flight that crashed Tuesday in the French Alps had done so by deliberate human action. But as the story began to develop yesterday it became increasingly clear that it was the copilot on the plane who had actually crashed the plane deliberately into the mountain.

International media eventually identify the copilot as a 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, and the explanation was that he had been the one who had locked himself into the cockpit and he had been the one who would reset the flight computer on the plane to go from its cruising altitude down to an altitude of less than 100 feet – running the plane effectively right into the French Alps. The plane disintegrated upon contact.

After the world began to settle on the notion that it was indeed a deliberate human act, there were immediate questions. Yesterday on The Briefing we discussed the fact that even those who operate out of a secular worldview had come to the immediate conclusion that there was a categorical difference between an air disaster and an act of murder – in this case, mass murder, 150 people were killed. But it’s also important for us to recognize that there was an inevitability to the second round of questions. As reporter Stephanie Kirchner and Anthony Faiola reported for the Washington Post last night, there is now evidence that there was an intentionality behind this that goes beyond our moral imagination. Or that’s at least what the international media are now saying, that it goes beyond our moral imagination.

Of course that’s not exactly true; this doesn’t go beyond our imagination. It just enters into the realm of moral horror. And it does raise obvious questions that have to be answered by every single worldview and that is this: how could a human being, trained as a pilot, a young man who even as a 14-year-old teenager had indicated an obsessive interest in flight, how could someone with this kind of training, this kind of background, the kind of testing that goes into the training of pilots, end up being someone who, without any notice whatsoever, without any signs of mental or emotional turmoil, could end up locking the pilot out of the cockpit and flying the jetliner into the mountains? As the Washington Post reported last night,

“…the tragedy turned from air disaster to criminal investigation as authorities in multiple nations scoured for clues to what could have compelled a man to hurl a packed commercial airliner into a mountain. Germanwings parent company Lufthansa on Thursday expressed stunned shock, describing Lubitz as ‘100 percent fit to fly.’”

Well that statement flies in the face of the now accepted reality even by Lufthansa. This was not a pilot who is actually 100% fit to fly, what they did mean is that given their operational corporate airline criteria he appeared to be 100% within the expectations of one who will be fit to fly. But as we now know, we couldn’t read the mind of the man who got behind the cockpit and crashed the plane. No one else could. No pilot would’ve gotten on that flight and taken off with the copilot he had any suspicion would follow this course of action. The passengers wouldn’t have gotten on the plane, even as they passed the cockpit going to their seats and would’ve had a view in all likelihood into the cockpit with the two pilots. No one saw what was coming, that’s the truly frightening aspect of all of this.

The secular worldview looks at the reality that the pilot appeared to be 100% fit and ask the question, ‘what was missed?’ but we now know that it is perhaps true that nothing was actually missed because we understand, as the Bible teaches us, that it is impossible for any individual, no matter the expertise, nor any group for that matter, to be able to completely read the mind and the emotional state of another human being. And as the Bible also makes clear, we’re actually not able even to know our own emotional state and our own pattern of thinking, we can’t read our own hearts as we might urgently wish so to do.

The Washington Post report last night included these words:

Those who knew him, [speaking of the copilot], could not reconcile the reserved young pilot and avid runner who lived with his parents with the accounts of French prosecutor Brice Robin, who said Thursday that Lubitz’s actions appeared to be a deliberate attempt ‘to destroy the plane.’”

They went on to write,

“The dramatic revelations from the black-box recordings, meanwhile, seemed to challenge a fundamental faith of flying — the sanity of the people at the controls. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, cockpit doors have been re­designed for strength to keep people out, but leaving planes vulnerable to a danger that instead lies within.”

The report went on to quote German Chancellor Angela Merkel who said,

“It goes beyond the imagination.”

We know what she means, but it’s unlikely she actually means precisely what she said. The truly horrifying reality is that now we cannot not imagine it, it’s something we now cannot get out of our minds; the problem is we can imagine it.

An insight from a pilot’s perspective was published as an op-ed in the New York Times by Andrew B. McGee, who worked for over a decade as a commercial airline pilot. He writes about getting inside a pilot’s mind and one of the points he makes, indeed it is the most important of the point he makes, is that it is actually impossible to do what he is talking about – to get adequately into a pilot’s mind. He calls for increased psychiatric and psychological testing for pilots, but even as he writes that proposal it’s evident that he doesn’t actually believe that would entirely solve the problem. He writes,

“I worked as a pilot for about 10 years before going back to school to become an architect. There are a few oddballs I can remember flying with, but mostly we’re just talking quirks and eccentricities. Never did I fear a colleague intended to kill himself, or everyone onboard.”

He writes about some of the pilots he flew with; he writes about their quirks and eccentricities. But one of the most important issues we can draw from the article is the fact that that German pilot almost assuredly got on that Germanwings airliner, he went into the cockpit and willingly took off with this copilot. He left the cockpit in all likelihood having no idea that the pilot with which he had been flying the plane wasn’t indeed simply marked by quirks and eccentricities – but by a murderous intent. Here’s what we can count on in coming days: we can count on the fact that authorities and the general public are going to be struggling to try to understand the why. Why would anyone do this? How could it have become imaginable? How in the world did it actually happen? And one of the things you can count on is that there will be an effort to come up with some plausible reason.

Last night the Telegraph of London broke the story that German police said they had made what was called a significant discovery in his home. This came after an extensive search for what might be considered evidence in what is now a criminal case. But one of the things we need to keep in mind is this: even if some evidence is found, if there is some significant discovery that indicates what might have been this copilot’s motivation, it still will not be enough to explain the why. It still will not explain why a copilot committed such a murderous act – mass murder by aviation.

And one of the things we need to note right up front is that there is, morally speaking, certainly from a Christian worldview, no plausible reason. Any reason that may be found may go part way towards explaining the motivation of this copilot, but in terms of reading his heart, that is simply beyond our real ability. It’s beyond our pay scale so to speak, it’s beyond what we can understand, it is not beyond the creator who knows our hearts far better – infinitely better – than we know ourselves.

2) Triumph of erotic liberty over religious liberty evident in outcry over Indiana religious freedom bill

In the United States one the most important news stories had to do with the state of Indiana where Gov. Mike Pence yesterday signed into law a state version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And in so doing he set the stage for an incredible controversy that is now reverberating not only through the legal and political worlds, but through at least some denominations as well. There are huge lessons in this conversation and we need to look at them quite closely. More than anything else what this controversy demonstrates is just how far America has changed – morally and culturally speaking – in the span of less than a generation.

It was back in 1993 that the federal government adopted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was supported by an incredibly broad coalition of religious groups, including both religious liberals and conservatives; it was in the aftermath of a Supreme Court decision that had constricted religious liberty. And as a remedial active legislation the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was adopted by Congress, it passed without any opposition whatsoever in the House of Representatives. It was passed by the Senate by a vote of 97 to 3 and it was signed into law in 1993 by Pres. William Jefferson Clinton. Now, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, being adopted by several states, is a matter of intense controversy. And not only controversy, intense opposition, and that’s incredibly revealing.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act we should note did not unleash any long series of challenges to laws or for that matter even any major social discussion. There was no evidence, there is no evidence, that the federal government’s passage of the RFRA, or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, went on to cause any form of discrimination against anyone that became, in any way, a matter of public consequence. But as TIME magazine reported last night and I quote,

“Indiana Gov. Mike Pence vigorously defended the state religious objections bill that he signed into law Thursday as businesses and organizations including the NCAA pressed concerns that it could open the door to legalizing discrimination against gay people.”

One of the most interesting things we should note about that lead paragraph is that the legislation, at the state level, here is simply described as “the state religious objections bill.” That’s very strange language, but it tells you that the secular media assumes that what’s really at stake here are religious objections – not religious liberties, not religious freedom. When the legislature of Arizona passed similar legislation the Gov. of Arizona, bending to political and economic pressure, did not sign the law. But yesterday Gov. Pence did, and the Gov. of Arkansas has indicated that he is poised to do the same.

The really interesting issue is that back in 1993, we’re just talking about 22 years ago, the nation as a whole represented by the unanimous vote in the House of Representatives and the overwhelming vote – again it was 97 to 3 in the United States Senate – believed that the law was not only right, but righteous and necessary. So did Pres. Bill Clinton, who very proudly and publicly signed the bill. But now we’re talking about a very different set of moral and political conditions, and the big changes is the moral revolution and the central issue as homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

 

The next thing we need to note is the public backlash, we need to note who is complaining about the bill and the kind of language and argument they are using. We also need to look at the kinds of institutions and organizations that are now bringing very intense pressure. First you have politicians even within the states, such as the Mayor of Indianapolis, saying that this bill simply isn’t good for business – we’ll look at that claim more closely in just a moment – but you also have other organizations, not only gay-rights organizations, you also have organizations like the NCAA as that lead paragraph in the TIME article last night made very clear. Here’s another paragraph the makes the situation even more graphic. I quote,

“The Indianapolis-based NCAA, which is holding its men’s basketball Final Four in the city next weekend, said in a statement it was concerned about the legislation and was examining how it might affect future events and its workforce. ‘We will work diligently to assure student-athletes competing in, and visitors attending, next week’s Men’s Final Four in Indianapolis are not impacted negatively by this bill,’ [that was said by] NCAA President Mark Emmert said in the statement. [He also said,] ‘Moving forward, we intend to closely examine the implications of this bill and how it might affect future events as well as our workforce.’”

One of the things to watch very carefully is not just how this impacts the state of Indiana or the city of Indianapolis, but how this impacts the member schools of the NCAA. One of the key questions is this: how close is the NCAA to making an issue of nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual activity when it comes to same-sex behaviors and same-sex marriage, or even the issue of gender, an issue of its requirement for member schools? That’s a huge question. Pressure is also coming from at least one mainline Protestant denomination; in this case the Disciples of Christ.

As Religion News Service reported yesterday and I quote,

“Though the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has made Indianapolis its headquarters for nearly a century, the denomination is considering pulling its next biennial convention out of Indiana over a new state law that allows businesses to turn away gay customers.”

Well one of things we need to note is that it is not at all clear that this would allow businesses to turn away gay couples. The issue behind this of course is the very publicized controversy about certain cake bakers and photographers and florists and others who are being asked not just to serve gay customers, but to be actively involved and artistically expressively involved in same-sex marriages, same-sex weddings –that is a hugely different issue. But as Laura Markoe of Religion News Service goes on to report,

“Gov. Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act on Thursday (March 26), the day after receiving a letter from church leaders pleading with him to veto it and threatening to move their 2017 General Assembly outside the state.”

When it came to the pressure exerted on the state of Arizona, some of that pressure even came from the NFL – threatening that the city of Phoenix just might not be an appropriate setting for the Super Bowl in the future. There are other big issues that are clearly at stake here, and that’s the influence of corporate America. Indianapolis is a major American city, and there are several businesses that are headquartered there and some of them – especially those with massive national profiles – are putting pressure on the states because, in their view, the moral revolution when it comes to LGBT issues is simply over and the rest of America (including Christian America) should simply deal with it. Religious freedom is just not a major issue in their view and that should be extremely troubling.

That point was made very clear in a March 5 report that comes from Reuters published in Fortune magazine. According to the headline, many of America’s largest companies have signed on even to briefs in support of the legalization of same-sex marriage in the upcoming case before the United States Supreme Court. As Reuters reported,

“Many of America’s largest companies rallied behind the gay marriage cause on Thursday as the U.S. Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments for April 28 on the contentious social issue that promises to yield one of the justices’ most important rulings of 2015.”

Listen to the next paragraph,

“A total of 379 businesses and groups representing employers across various sectors, including Google Inc , Apple, General Electric, American Airlines Group Inc , Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Johnson & Johnson, have signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief in support of gay marriage”

Again, remember that’s 379 major American companies. That’s the kind of leverage now being brought not only against the Gov. of Indiana and the state of Indiana for that matter, but also other states that are considering similar legislation – including Arkansas and most crucially right now the state of Georgia.

Another very important signal was sent yesterday by the editorial board of the Washington Post in an editorial entitled, Keeping Them Safe From Gay Marriage. The editors wrote and I quote,

“Alarmed at the prospect that the Supreme Court will sanction same-sex marriage in every state, conservative state lawmakers are intensifying efforts to provide legal cover for evangelical Christians and others who regard homosexual unions as an affront.”

They then write the following paragraph,

“There can be legitimate debate on the balance between religious liberty and laws intended to prohibit discrimination.”

I can simply say we can hope there can be that legitimate debate, but thus far that legitimate debate has not taken place. The editors then, remarkably enough, write the following words, and again I quote:

“For instance, a bill the Georgia Senate approved this month bars the state government from infringing on an individual’s religious beliefs unless the state can demonstrate a compelling interest in doing so.”

Now we just a minute, wouldn’t the editors of the Washington Post believe that any state, including the state of Georgia, should avoid infringing upon any citizens religious liberty unless – and again these are there words – “unless the state can demonstrate a compelling interest in doing so.” Do the editors of the Washington Post really mean that a state should be able to trample upon the religious liberties of its citizens without a compelling interest in doing so? That doesn’t even get to the issue of how that compelling interest might be defined. The editors are clearly saying that they are opposed to a bill, now publicly opposed, that would (in their own words):

“…bars the state government from infringing on an individual’s religious beliefs unless the state can demonstrate a compelling interest in doing so.”

If the state of Georgia, or any state, doesn’t have to have a compelling reason to infringe upon an individual citizens religious liberty, then mark these words: religious liberty is effectively dead.

Note also the obvious political fact that it was Pres. Bill Clinton who signed this bill and celebrated it in 1993. Now at least one potential candidate for the Democratic nomination, at this point the only real Democratic candidate anticipated for the Democratic nomination, his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has said that she opposes this kind of legislation. That’s just how much the world has turned, how much the moral revolution has moved in terms of less than a generation in the span of 22 years. We’re talking about a moral revolution of unprecedented scale, and as we have so often noted, unprecedented velocity.  Here’s evidence that should be of concern to every Christian, and for that matter to every citizen who prizes liberty.

Once again, as we had been tracing, erotic liberty trumps religious liberty. There is always, in any society at any time, a conflict of liberties, a contest for which liberty is most basic. According to the new cultural elites, according to those corporations putting pressure on the state of Indiana, according to all those who are pressing back against the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of the state level – when just 22 years ago they celebrated it at the federal level – what we’re looking at is the fact that right now, in almost every case, a liberty that isn’t even mentioned in the Constitution to say the least – that is erotic liberty – is triumphing over religious liberty and that is one of the saddest development we can contemplate.

 

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

I’m speaking to you from Ashville, North Carolina and I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 03-27-15

1) Discovery Germanwings copilot crashed plane exposes inability to know the mind of others 

French prosecutor: Co-pilot took doomed flight on deliberate dive, Washington Post (Stephanie Kirchner and Anthony Faiola)

Inside a Pilot’s Mind, New York Times (Andrew B. McGee)

Police find ‘clue’ at home of Germanwings’ co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, The Telegraph (Josie Ensor)

2) Triumph of erotic liberty over religious liberty evident in outcry over Indiana religious freedom bill

Indiana Governor Defends Signing of Religious-Objections Bill, TIME (Tom Davies)

Disciples look to pull convention from Indiana over religious freedom bill, Religion News Service (Lauren Markoe)

Hundreds of companies urge the Supreme Court to back gay marriage, Fortune (Reuters)

Keeping them safe from gay marriage, Washington Post (Editorial Board)

Transcript: The Briefing 03-26-15

The Briefing

 

March 26, 2015

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

 

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

1) Suspicious circumstances surrounding Germanwings crash radically alters its significance

The crash on Tuesday of a Germanwings Airbus airliner with 150 on board was already horrifying enough. We’re talking about a modern jetliner strewn across the French Alps with 150 people dead; 150 people who boarded that flight expecting to have a fairly short trip from Barcelona, Spain to Düsseldorf, Germany. But the flight didn’t end in Düsseldorf, it ended on a French Alpine mountainside, a mountainside so remote that it is only accessible by helicopter.

But the story, tragic as it already was, took an even more ominous turn late on Wednesday when authorities in France revealed that there is evidence that there could well have been a deliberate act behind the crash. While authorities are scrambling to say that they do not yet know what happened, the fact that the cockpit voice recorder was recovered and that an initial investigation has already begun has already revealed that there was a pilot that was locked out of the cockpit in the final moments of the fated flight.

The most authoritative news source on the flight thus far is the New York Times in an article published late yesterday that virtually all other international media are citing. The reporters were Nicola Clark and Dan Bilefsky and they reported,

“As officials struggled Wednesday to explain why a jet with 150 people on board crashed amid a relatively clear sky, an investigator said evidence from a cockpit voice recorder indicated one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in.”

The New York Times quotes a senior military official that is involved in the investigation who described,

“‘very smooth, very cool’ conversation between the pilots during the early part of the flight… [but] the audio indicated that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.”

According to the official,

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer. And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer.”

Then the official said this,

“There is never an answer. You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

As the reporters for the New York Times indicated, there is no rationale yet offered for why one of the pilots left the flight so early in terms of the early minutes of the flight itself and why he could not gain reentry into the cockpit. There is absolutely no voice recorded inside the cockpit during these final minutes, at least according to the French official that was cited. Then the reporters write this,

“The data from the voice recorder seems only to deepen the mystery surrounding the crash and provides no indication of the condition or activity of the pilot who remained in the cockpit.”

This story of course brings up the fact that we had just recently noted the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner including a larger number of passengers over what is now believed to have been the South Indian Ocean. And as that story unfolded over the last several months it became increasingly clear that the only rational explanation that could be adduced from the evidence was that there was some kind of deliberate act on the part of one or both of the pilots that led to the crash of the Malaysian airliner. At this point we actually have to say the disappearance of the airliner because there is no direct evidence of the crash. But when it comes to the Germanwings crash there is plenty of evidence and it is horrifying.

We’re talking about a crash that took the lives of 150 people, including a large number of teenagers from Germany who had been in an intensive language study in Barcelona, Spain – the 10th graders were lost along with two of their teachers. It is clear that the New York Times had privileged access to either one or two of the French officials involved in the investigation. Later in the article the Times reports a French official who said,

“I don’t like it. To me, it seems very weird: this very long descent at normal speed without any communications, though the weather was absolutely clear.”

And then, even more troubling words,

“So far, we don’t have any evidence that points clearly to a technical explanation, so we have to consider the possibility of deliberate human responsibility.”

Last night media throughout the world were captivated by the story, and it is clear that an international audience was desperately seeking for answers – most urgently, of course, those who lost loved ones on the plane. But virtually everyone is now asking the same set of questions: how is it that a second modern airliner had disappeared, or in this case crash, when there is at least at this point evidence that it might have been a deliberate human act? Why, just minutes into the flight, was one of the pilots already outside the cockpit? Why could he not regain entry? And why was there no conversation going on at all, no words whatsoever, from inside the cockpit? And then you have a French official involved in the investigation who said on the record, though unwilling to be identified, that it appears at this point that human deliberate action may well be central to the story.

From a Christian worldview perspective there is one central issue that looms larger than any other in the story at this point, and that is that the situation is categorically changed if we’re not talking about an accident, if instead we’re talking about some kind of deliberate human act, or at least deliberate human involvement. Given the urgency and importance of this story it’s likely that a great deal of new information will be coming even in upcoming hour, but at this point, from the Christian worldview perspective, the issue of moral responsibility simply looms larger than anything else. And that’s because we understand that one set of moral conditions would apply if this were understand to be an accident, if some kind of mechanical problem had caused the crash, or some kind of unexplained weather phenomena. But in this case it appears that there is no evidence of any kind of mechanical failure, at least of anything that would have caused the airliner to fall out of the sky.

But it didn’t exactly fall, and that leads to an even bigger problem. It appears to have had a straight line descent from its cruising altitude to the level of between six and 7000 feet that ran the airliner directly into the French Alps. But when we’re talking about human responsibility here everything has truly changed because the moral set of conditions, if there is a human deliberate act behind this, means that what we’re looking at is mass murder – the murder of 150 people and perhaps the murder of 149 with the suicide of one. But what we’re looking at here, even given the facts, just given what we know right now in terms of the international conversation, it tells us that we should note that the audience was immediately alert to the fact that this just might be a very different story that first appeared on Tuesday.

What did we know on Tuesday? We knew on Tuesday that there had been a plane crash, a plane crash that took 150 lives. Already between Tuesday and the report that broke on Wednesday evening we knew that in the passenger list were two opera singers, we found out that there were two Americans – perhaps three – on the flight, we found out that those from several different nations were involved though the largest number were from both Spain and Germany, we also knew that there was a group of these 10th-graders on the flight along with two of their teachers. We imagined ourselves knowing that either we or our loved ones could’ve been on a flight like this, simply getting onto a plane as we do quite casually these days and yet even as the plane reached cruising altitude, finding the plane only to descend without any apparent explanation, and then to crash into a French mountainside.

Everything’s changed if this is a deliberate moral act. One of the things we should understand now is that even people who do not operate out of a Christian worldview understand the clear distinction between an accident and an act of murder. That tells us something about the fact that God made us as moral creatures – the fact that there is an immediate change in the conversation, the fact that a chill went down all of our spines, and that we immediately saw the story as even more tragic than we knew on Tuesday, this points to the fact the God made us as moral creatures who simply can’t miss a moral point. And here we’re talking about a moral point of immense magnitude.

One Christian philosopher wrote a book some years ago in which he pointed out that that there are things that we cannot not know. That’s very important. It’s important to know that there are things, simply because we are made in God’s image, we can’t not know, there are truths that we simply cannot suppress or deny. One of those truths is that morality matters, one of those truths is that a deliberate taking of life is one of the most urgent and massive moral considerations of which humans are capable of imagining. And it also means that if this story does turn out to be a story of deliberate human action, it is an entirely different event. Yes, there are things we do not know about this flight, but when it comes to the fact that we are moral creatures who inherently know a moral issue when we see one – certainly of this magnitude – it tells us also that there are certain things we cannot not know.

In Romans 1 Paul speaks of this knowledge, both of the fact that we are made in God’s image and also that God has revealed his law in nature, and points out that these things we cannot not know are things that we can, in terms of our human fallen-ness, seek to suppress. But as the evidence of international attention and international anxiety showed last night, the things that we simply do know because we are made in God’s image have a way of working themselves into daily headlines, even headlines as horrifying as this; headlines that everyone watching the news or following the news by social media last night well understood, headlines that are inherently undeniably moral.

2) New York Times piece argues belief in God is itself immoral

And speaking of morality, what about the morality of belief in God? That issue was raised in the opinion pages of the New York Times by Michael Ruse, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University. The title of his article, Why God is a Moral Issue. He writes about the new atheists, accepting that they’re not a comfortable group of people (in his words):

“They have scornful contempt for those with whom they differ — that includes religious believers, agnostics and other atheists who don’t share their vehement brand of nonbelief. They are self-confident to a degree that seems designed to irritate. And they have an ignorance of anything beyond their fields to an extent remarkable even in modern academia. They also have a moral passion unknown outside the pages of the Old Testament. For that, we can forgive much.”

Well that sets the stage for what Michael Ruse will argue is a major case against the morality of believing in God, or perhaps you might say the immorality he would argue of believing in God. He cites with special reference Richard Dawkins, the British scientists and leader of the new atheism, who has gone so far as to argue that raising a child in terms of religious belief is a form of child abuse – it’s something that simply shouldn’t be tolerated. But in this article Michael Ruse is getting to the very heart of one of the most central issues of the Christian worldview, and that is the fact that knowledge is never without a moral context, and morality and knowledge are always tied together.

After all we should recall, in terms of the biblical storyline, it was from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of knowledge that Adam and Eve ate and that was the knowledge that was forbidden. But now on the other side of that original sin, on the other side of Eden, we’re now looking at the reality that we do know things that we were not meant to know and as we know them, we are now responsible for that knowledge.

But Michael Ruse is arguing that in the modern age it is actually immoral to believe in God. He’s writing that when you look at the passion, the vehemence, of the new atheists it can be understood, he argues, when it is taken into account what belief in God actually morally means. At this point we’ve got a pay close attention to professor Ruse’s argument. In the first place he dismisses the idea that belief in God isn’t a moral question. He says it’s not like knowing that 2+2 = 4, instead he says,

“The trouble is that the God question is not so easily solved as the mathematical one — and this, as we’ll see, is what leads to moral issues.”

Now, interestingly Michael Ruse takes into account the argument from design. He says, ‘Yes it makes sense to so many people, we might say it appears the majority of people in the world, that the world itself, its very existence, can be explained only by an intelligent divine creator.’ He points to the fact that if you look at the intricacies of the world, if you look at the fact that it appears to be custom-made for human habitation, if you look at even the mystery he concedes of human consciousness it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t a divine intelligent designer behind it. But he says there’s another side to the question and this is where his argument gets even more interesting. He points to moral action, including righteous moral action such as those who stood up against Hitler and Nazi-ism, and he asked the question “can such a wonderful universe be entirely without point?” And yet, as we shall see, he argues that the argument for God actually has far less credibility – morally speaking – than the argument against Him.

In terms of the arguments against God, he raises the issue of evil and suffering. He says,

“According to many monotheistic religions, God is supposed to be both all loving and all powerful. If so, why does he/she allow human suffering?”

That is not an inconsequential question – that’s one of the major theological issues with which any intelligent Christian must struggle. And yet the Bible does answer that question, answering it in terms of the fact the God is both all-powerful and all loving, and that God has a purpose, a purpose for allowing, for ordaining, the reality of sin for allowing human beings to have the reality of moral responsibility. And even as his judgment against human sin is made clear in creation in what Paul in Romans 8 calls the groaning of creation in termites and mosquitoes and tumors and earthquakes, the reality is that God takes full responsibility for his creation. And the Christian biblical worldview points to the fact that there is no such thing as meaningless suffering.

The Bible takes human suffering with great and direct seriousness. With incredible honesty it doesn’t deny it in any respect, but it does put it in the larger context of the fact that even as we cannot trace all of God’s ways, we do know that he is both all-powerful and all loving. Michael Ruse then raises another question, and this is really interesting. He writes this:

“There are other modes of objection: If the Christian God is absolute how could such an astonishing variety of alternative beliefs flourish? Why does the Pope believe one thing and the Dalai Lama believe something completely different?”

That’s an interesting question, that’s actually something relatively new in terms of objections to belief in God. It’s rather clever on the one hand; he’s arguing that the fact of religious diversity, the reality that there are people who hold very different worldviews, points to the fact that God must not exist because if he did exist he would coerce us to believe all the same things, all the same truth about him. But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity and that misunderstanding of Christianity, of the worldview of Christianity based upon the Bible, becomes very clear when Michael Ruse asked the question ‘why doesn’t the Dalai Lama believe in the God of the Bible?’

He goes on to answer,

“The Calvinist might answer that his sense is clouded by original sin. But does one really think that the Dalai Lama is befogged by original sin in a way that a televangelist in Florida is not? Surely no one could be quite this insensitive.”

Well that’s a very interesting set of sentences, but it also reflects a deep misunderstanding of biblical Christianity. Biblical Christianity does indeed teach original sin, it teaches that the sin of Adam has so affected humanity that every single one of us is absolutely dependent not only upon the grace and mercy of God in Jesus Christ, but upon the fact that we can’t even know Christ without the gift of divine revelation. What he misses in this is that we do not believe that we have figured out the ways of God, the ways of the gospel, on our own in a way that the Dalai Lama has not.

To the contrary, biblical Christianity starts out exactly where the apostle Paul is, again back in Romans 1, if we did not have the gift of divine revelation we would all be equally in darkness and would be in equal confusion. That’s why in Romans 10 Paul will say very clearly, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. If we never hear divine revelation, if we never come into contact with it, if we never hear the gospel, then we can’t possibly believe in the truth about Christ and the truth about the gospel and the truth about God’s redemptive purpose accomplished in the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Michael Ruse asked a series of questions here in this article assuming that Christians really believe that we somehow are less affected by sin and thus we understand these things better because of the fact that original sin has not so clouded our vision. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding. The Bible teaches that all we like sheep have gone astray, the Bible teaches – Paul again in Romans 3 – that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In Romans1 Paul makes very clear that the conspiracy to suppress the truth in unrighteousness isn’t something in which some human beings are involved, but all human beings and that means we ourselves.

God’s mercy, we believe, is shown in the fact that he has spoken to us, he has revealed himself to us, he has shown us what he has done for us in Christ through the means of the gospel –which isn’t something we figured out, but something that God accomplished in Christ and then reveals to us by revelation. And of course it is then our responsibility to share that revelation with others. We don’t believe that we are intellectually superior to the Dalai Lama – far be it. We do believe that we have received, by grace, a revelation that we are obligated now to share with others – others including the Dalai Lama.

Professor Ruse then writes these two paragraphs. He says,

“This is only a small sample of what is going on in the minds of atheists. Yes, there are good reasons to think that there is more than meets the eye. But no, the Christian and other theistic solutions are simply not adequate. So, if there are so many problems with theistic belief, why do people continue to take it seriously?”

He then writes this astounding paragraph,

“The truth is that many don’t. In parts of the world where people are allowed and encouraged to take these things seriously and to think them through, people increasingly find that they can do without the God factor. It is in places where one is being indoctrinated from childhood and bullied in adulthood that people continue with God belief.”

That’s an astounding paragraph. Let’s go back to where he began. He was trying to explain why the new atheists are so vehement in their opposition to belief in God in general and Christianity in particular. He points to the fact, and he concedes just how radical this must appear, that someone like Richard Dawkins thinks that it is morally wrong to indoctrinate one’s children in theism – particularly in Christianity. And yet what he seems to fail to understand is that when he describes these parts of the world where,

“…where people are allowed and encouraged to take these things seriously and to think them through,”

When he writes about the people who “increasingly find they can do without the God factor,” he’s writing about people who live in largely secularize cultures and who are raised by – no inference needed here – largely secularized parents. So this raises a very interesting issue: why are the new atheist concerned about the morality of Christian parents raising their children in terms of Christian truth, and he’s not concerned about the issue of agnostic or atheist parents raising their children in agnosticism or atheism? It is because Michael Ruse simply seems to believe that there is some knowledge that really doesn’t have any particular moral responsibility. And that’s one of the most interesting things we could conclude on here.

As we know, from a biblical worldview, all knowledge is inherently moral. Yes he’s actually right, he is profoundly right. The question of belief in God is inescapably and massively moral. But those who are Christians firmly come to understand that the morality of the question is this: how can one deny the reality of God when He has shown himself so gloriously, so abundantly, and so clearly around us? Once again we go back to the most profound passage in Scripture about the morality of knowledge, indeed about the morality of knowledge in God – that again is Romans 1 – where the apostle Paul points to the fact that God has revealed himself even in the natural world and his human creatures refuse to see what is there. And then Paul writes these words, “so they are without excuse.” What the apostle Paul is saying is exactly what Michael Ruse is saying: belief in God is a moral issue. But Michael Ruse says it is moral in this sense: it immoral to believe in God. But the apostle Paul comes back and says exactly the opposite. To refuse to believe in God is the most significant moral act a human creature can make and when it comes to that we are all, says the apostle Paul, without excuse. When it comes to the issue of the moral knowledge of God, no statement is more clarifying than that.

 

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

I’m speaking to you from Ashville, North Carolina and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Gospel, Sexuality & the Church: Closing Message

Originally Preached at the BGCO’s Gospel, Sexuality and the Church conference, March 2015

The Briefing 03-26-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Suspicious circumstances surrounding Germanwings crash radically alters its significance

Germanwings Pilot Was Locked Out of Cockpit Before Crash in France, New York Times (Nicola Clark and Dan Bilefsky)

2) New York Times piece argues belief in God is itself immoral

Why God Is a Moral Issue, New York Times (Michael Ruse)

 

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 03-25-15

The Briefing

 

March 25, 2015

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

 

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

1) Exchange of ideas shut down on college campuses in order to protect students’ emotional state

Most Americans are generally unaware of the exactly what’s going on on the most influential and prestigious American college and university campuses. While most Americans would at least like to think that what’s taking place on those campuses is a robust exchange of ideas, what’s actually happening is quite different.

In an interesting insight into what’s actually happening was offered in the Sunday edition of the New York Times in an article by Judith Shulevitz entitled Hiding From Scary Ideas. The subtitle of her article is a question: “do students really need cookies and play-doh to deal with the trauma of listening to unpopular opinions?” She writes about Kathryn Byron, identified as a senior at Brown University and a member of its sexual assault task force. According to Shulevitz, Byron considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims – free from anything that might prompt memories of scandal.

So Byron found out last fall that a student group on campus had scheduled an organized debate about campus sexual assault including Jessica Valenti, a prominent feminist, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian. She was quite alarmed that McElroy had been invited. She told Shulevitz,

“Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences, and could be damaging.”

Then Shulevitz writes,

“Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide ‘research and facts’ about ‘the role of culture in sexual assault.’ Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a ‘safe space’ would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.”

Now note what follows,

“The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments ‘troubling’ or ‘triggering,’ a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”

Now keep in mind that the debate that was at the center of the controversy here was not over the morality of rape, it wasn’t over the reality of rape on college and university campuses, it was over the relationship between rape and campus culture. That was simply considered too troubling for some of the students at Brown. Shulevitz writes,

“Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being ‘bombarded’ by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.”

Very interesting from a worldview perspective; Shulevitz traces the idea of this kind of safe space and the trigger warnings back to what she identifies as:

“…the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s”

She says it can also be traced to gay and lesbian movements of the early 1990s. As she explained,

“In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity.”

But she goes on to say that the notion that ticklish conversation must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. And her article is about that idea leaking out and spreading. It’s about the shutting down of conversation, free expression, and even the exchange of ideas, on what are considered to be the most prestigious American university campuses.

Now Brown University is one of the exalted institutions of the Ivy League, and yet we’re talking about female students who were admitted to that prestigious university who are so troubled by a debate on campus – not a debate over the morality of rape, not a debate over the reality of rape, but simply a debate over the relationship between rape and the campus culture – that they required a safe space that included cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-doh, calming music – remember all this – pillows, blankets, and a video of frolicking puppies. She asked the obvious question – that is Judith Shulevitz – ‘Is this actually anything that is believable as what is now to be considered normal on the American college and university campus?’

But what she writes about is increasingly normal. It is increasingly the fact that a substantial discussion of ideas is being shut down on these campuses in favor of the emotional protection of students based upon whatever the students declare their emotional needs to be. Shulevitz then writes, and I quote,

“I’m old enough to remember a time when college students objected to providing a platform to certain speakers because they were deemed politically unacceptable. Now students worry whether acts of speech or pieces of writing may put them in emotional peril.”

Shulevitz, herself a feminist, points back to a controversy that emerged in late 2014 in England’s Oxford University. As she writes,

“At Oxford University’s Christ Church college in November, the college censors…canceled a debate on abortion after campus feminists threatened to disrupt it because both would-be debaters were men.”

Shulevitz quoted the student treasurer there at the college at Oxford who said,

“I’m relieved the censors have made this decision. It clearly makes the most sense for the safety — both physical and mental — of the students who live and work in Christ Church.”

Now remember this is a statement about the safety, both physical and mental, of students who are merely going to be subjected to a debate over the morality of abortion. That was simply considered, using the language of the day, too dangerous for students. Some observers of the college and university campuses of today, including especially those from the left, are pointing out the what’s being shut down is any kind of academic freedom or freedom of expression or the exchange of ideas on the college and university campus. Eric Posner, professor at the University of Chicago Law School, is cited in the article as writing at Slate.com last month that,

“…although universities cosset [that is to protect] students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are [too vulnerable]”

Posner wrote,

“Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity. If college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”

And that is what we’re now facing. Even on a university campus like Brown, an Ivy League institution that is known as one of the most liberal institutions in America, but liberal in this case certainly does not mean the free expression of ideas; it means the shutting down of ideas like the shutting down of that debate over abortion at Oxford University.

But Shulevitz is also pretty honest in her article in pointing out that what gets shut down is often any kind of conservative argument or conservative debate, or even the inclusion of a conservative in a debate. But something else Christian should note with great care and concern is the fact that the Christian gospel itself, or any reference to Scripture, anyone who would dare to uphold a scriptural teaching when it comes to something like the definition of marriage or of sexual morality, is likely to face the same kind of complaints. That is that citing biblical authority for sexual morality or speaking of any kind of traditional sexual understanding in terms of the moral structure of marriage is simply something that creates an unsafe space for students in terms of their emotional well-being.

It does tell us that something very serious is going on when a very significant feminist author like Judith Shulevitz writes a piece published on the front of the review section of the New York Times Sunday edition, at least pointing out the incredulity that should meet the fact that you’re looking at students at a prestigious university who are defined by a safe space that includes play-doh and cookies and coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies as a way of avoiding debate.  As even the New York Times understands, you really can’t have education if students are afraid of being emotionally injured by the exchange of ideas.

2) Aging Baby Boomers retaining drug use underlies political shift on drug laws

One of our responsibilities as intelligent Christians engaging the culture around us is to understand how moral change takes place within a culture. And there is evidence about this from several different directions; one of them is a recent article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It was on the front page of Monday’s edition, the headline Aging Baby Boomers Hold Onto Drug Habits. Reporters Zusha Elinson writes about the fact,

“Older adults are abusing drugs, getting arrested for drug offenses and dying from drug overdoses at increasingly higher rates”

She says,

“These surges have come as the 76 million baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, reach late middle age. Facing the pains and losses connected to aging, boomers, who as youths used drugs at the highest rates of any generation, are once again—or still—turning to drugs.”

The big point of her article is that the moral change taking place in America when it comes to the use of drugs is being driven at least in part by the fact that baby boomers are returning to their drug habits of the 1960s and 70s. She cites an authority from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who said, and I quote,

“Generally, we thought of older individuals of not having a risk for drug abuse and drug addiction. As the baby boomers have aged and brought their habits with them into middle age, and now into older adult groups, we are seeing marked increases in overdose deaths.”

Elinson then writes,

“Experts say the drug problem among the elderly has been caused by the confluence of two key factors: a generation with a predilection for mind-altering substances growing older in an era of widespread opioid painkiller abuse.”

Elinson quotes Neil Howe, a historian and author of several books on generational trends, who explained the baby boomers have always stood out for their willingness to break with convention and take risks which, from the early days, included taking drugs.

“They themselves continue to behave in a less inhibited fashion even as younger generations turn away from that type of risk taking,”

I point to this article, and it’s a truly massive article, because it underlines at least in part how moral change takes place within a culture. That moral change over the issue of drugs, including the drug of choice – that is marijuana – these days, has to do with the fact that the baby boomers actually didn’t leave their drug using habits behind. They have continued them even as they go into advanced adulthood, and they’re dragging the culture along with them. The legalization of marijuana is popular among the young, but in one of the most startling moral trajectories of our time it is also very, very popular among many baby boomers who are pressing for the legalization of the habits that they involved themselves in when they were teenagers and college students and young adults.

Moral change often takes place because in the passage of one generation to another there is a significant moral transition. On the issue of drugs there has been a very significant and very fast moral transition. It can’t be explained merely by younger Americans buying into the idea of normalizing drug use and legalizing marijuana. It can only happen because older Americans are actually joining with many now younger Americans in calling for this massive moral and legal change. Several times we pointed to all the different complexities that have to do with legalizing marijuana, including the fact that the states that have gotten into this have often discovered that they are unable to keep even the youngest Americans from access to marijuana once they make it widespread.

The Wall Street Journal article also points to the fact that habits that are begun in the early years of life are often difficult to overcome later. The article cites Jamie Huysman, that is a 60-year-old clinical advisor to the senior program at care and treatment centers, who said,

“If you have a trigger, and your youth is caught up in that Woodstock mentality, you’re going to revert back,”

That in itself is a very insightful comment. It’s also extremely revealing that when it comes to many of these baby boomers the legalization of marijuana and the use of so many drugs, including illegal drugs and prescribed painkillers, now is not only because they claim to be doing so on behalf of a younger generation, but because they intend to continue their habits well into old age.

3) Influence of deceased Michael Graves reminder of spread of postmodernism beyond architecture

Next in a fairly rapid sequence, three articles about three engines of cultural and worldview change that evangelical Christians often don’t think about. They are: architecture, fashion, and museums. First, last week national and international media reported on the death of Michael Graves. As Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times reports,

“[He was] one of the most prominent and prolific American architects of the latter 20th century, who designed more than 350 buildings around the world but was perhaps best known for his teakettle and pepper mill, died on Thursday at his home in Princeton, N.J.”

Now as Pogrebin also writes,

“Mr. Graves was first associated with the New York Five, a group of architects who achieved cult-like stature by helping to redefine modernism in the 1970s.”

But the big issue with Michael Graves is this: he became one of the most famous postmodern architects. Many American Christians thinking of the term postmodernism and understanding the vast intellectual change that came with it in the 1990s in particular, understand that it has a great deal to do with literature and philosophy; the change of a worldview towards the rejection of the understanding of truth as objective and towards a radical relativism. But many Christians don’t understand that the word postmodern, and the entire phrase postmodernism, was really first applied to architecture in the United States. And one of the most leading postmodern architects was none other than Michael Graves.

He was known for designing buildings that included both modernist and classical elements. He designed buildings including the Portland municipal building in Oregon and the headquarters of the Humana Corporation in Louisville, Kentucky. In so many of the cases of his buildings, if you look at one side it appeared to follow one style of architecture while another side looked very different. His postmodern designs were neither modernist nor classical, but they included elements of both. An aspect of his building might include classical elements like pediments and columns, but they will be mixed with very radical modernist symbols like giant balls or cones. The term postmodernism applied to architecture referred to the intentional mixing of these modernist and classical elements. Postmodern architecture represented something of a relativizing of architectural principles and the rules of the past.

But one of the things that an intelligent Christians needs to think about is this: even though the architecture might’ve been called postmodern, the engineering that held the building together wasn’t postmodern at all. Even while there might have been the flaunting of architectural conventions in order to argue against any kind of enduring truths or enduring principles, if the building is not hold together it had to be held together by objective truth and enduring principles. The appearance of these buildings may have been decidedly postmodern, but the engineering was most assuredly not. If the engineering had been postmodern, the building wouldn’t have stood because engineering isn’t a matter of relativity and it is nearly impossible to come up with the building that will stand that is defying the very idea of objective truth.

But one of the most important issues for Christian insight is the fact that when an idea like this gains cultural expression it doesn’t stay contained where it originates. Before long, postmodernism wasn’t merely being applied to architecture and art and aesthetics, but to every other arena of life – including claims of truth and morality and the interpretation of texts. Pretty quickly postmodernism came to subvert the idea of objective truth in any arena. What started in architecture didn’t stay in architecture.

4) Fashion shows present gender as fluid in effort to redefine aesthetic values of culture

The same, revealingly enough, is true of the fashion industry. Not long ago in the New York Times there was an article by Guy Trebay on recent fashion shows in Paris; the title of his article, Fluidity and the Idea of Gender. And he writes about recent fashion shows, especially in France, in which young models went across the stage wearing designs and themselves appearing as if they were in a fluid state of gender. He writes about some of these shows in which models appear “of vaguely indeterminate sex.” He also cites a show in which,

“The pale scrawny boy models, hair slicked down like geeks, looked fairly interchangeable with the pale scrawny girl model….”

Both the boys and the girls, as he still identifies them in this article,

“…had the same uncooked look of late adolescence, a time when everything to do with future sexuality still seems in germination.”

That’s exactly as he wrote this sentence.  But the big point, in terms of this article, isn’t about the fashion shows in Paris, it’s really not even about the fact that gender fluidity seems to be a major factor in terms of the fashion shows of the spring of 2015. No, the major point of this article from my interest is a statement that is quoted from one of the designers who said this:

“If you can change aesthetic values, you can change the values of society,”

That is an incredibly revealing statement made by a fashion designer. It’s a statement some might dismiss as being of artistic arrogance, but he’s onto something and he knows it. If you can change the aesthetic values of a society, what society considers normal and true and beautiful to look at, then you can change the values, the moral values, of that society as well.

It’s the Christian worldview that understands the unity of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and if you can fool a society into believing that gender is fluid simply by the expression of fashion – even the demonstration of a fashion show – then you really can bring about, or at least you can accelerate, moral change. Even as what starts in architecture won’t stay in architecture, what starts in terms of reportage in the fashion shows of Paris won’t stay either in Paris or in the field of fashion. What they’re about is not just selling clothes, what they are about – as this article makes abundantly clear – is changing the moral values of society, not only by the clothes they design and not only how they present them, but by how they change society in changing the way people see. It’s the biblical worldview that reminds us, if you can change what people understand to be beautiful, you have just changed also what they understand to be true.

5) Secular reporter finds fact that museums communicate beliefs as well as facts unusual

Finally an article that appeared just recently in a special museum section of the New York Times, this one by David Gelles and he’s writing about the fact that an increasing number of museums are getting into advocacy. He chooses two examples; the first is the Museum of Tolerance which is located in Los Angeles. He says it acknowledges that it’s not an ordinary Museum of artifacts and documents; instead it aims not only to remind us of the past but to remind us to act – acts you might say on the left. Then he goes to the cultural right, indeed to the Christian world, and identifies his other example as the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky – that is suburban Cincinnati – and he writes about the creation Museum that it’s a 70,000 ft.² space that “brings the pages of the Bible to life.” In his words,

“…the Creation Museum presents a counterargument to the theory of evolution with a series of exhibits that make the case for the theory of intelligent design.”

Well he gets that almost right, actually the Creation Museum makes far more than a claim for intelligent design, and it makes a claim to be demonstrating evidence of divine creation. But the interesting thing, in terms of this article, is not just that he sees advocacy – this writer – in the Museum of Tolerance and in the Creation Museum, what’s really interesting, is that he doesn’t see it elsewhere. Implicit in his article is the idea that there are normal museums that are somehow value neutral and then there are advocacy museums. The Christian thinking carefully will understand that it is impossible to have a value neutral Museum, every Museum and every exhibit is advocacy of some form. Every single person who puts together every single exhibit is operating out of a worldview and that worldview will become increasingly apparent when one looks at how the exhibit is put together. Christians walking into a museum, into any Museum, have to understand just as opening any book or watching any entertainment products that a worldview is actually on display. No, the really interesting thing about this article is not where the author sees advocacy in museums, it’s where he doesn’t.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. In the fall of this year Boyce College will be opening our new Northland campus in Dunbar, Wisconsin. Beginning this fall we’re going to train students in the north woods to serve the church and to engage the culture through a variety of undergraduate degree programs offered at the Northland campus. If you or someone you know is considering college, learn more about our Northland campus at www.BoyceCollege.com/Northland.

Remember we’re collecting questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your questions in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

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

 

I’m speaking to you from Ashville, North Carolina and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 03-25-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Exchange of ideas shut down on college campuses in order to protect students’ emotional state

In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas, New York Times (Judith Shulevitz)

Universities Are Right—and Within Their Rights—to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior, Slate (Eric Posner)

2) Aging Baby Boomers retaining drug use underlies political shift on drug laws

Aging Baby Boomers Bring Drug Habits Into Middle Age, Wall Street Journal (Zusha Elinson)

3) Influence of deceased Michael Graves reminder of spread of postmodernism beyond architecture

Michael Graves, 80, Dies; Postmodernist Designed Towers and Teakettles, New York Times (Robin Pogrebin)

4) Fashion shows present gender as fluid in effort to redefine aesthetic values of culture

Rick Owens, Valentino and Louis Vuitton: The Fluidity of Gender, New York Times (Guy Trebay)

5) Secular reporter finds fact that museums communicate beliefs as well as facts unusual

Museums Showcase Attitudes and Beliefs as Well as Objects, New York Times (David Gelles)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 03-24-15

The Briefing

 

March 24, 2015

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

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

1) Concerns rise as scientists near possibility of designer babies, a move beyond human dignity

The future of humanity, in genetic terms, was in the headlines of the New York Times as we went into the weekend; the headline, Scientists Seek Ban on Method of Making Gene Edited Babies and the article is by Nicholas Wade. It begins,

“A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that [babies could inherit]…”

One of the things we’ve been watching for years is the threat to human dignity and the sanctity of human life that comes from the promise or the threat of designer babies. The reality is that for most of human history this has been an absolute impossibility. There has been no medical or technological means of doing anything like the creation of a designer baby. We’ve also noted the threat to human dignity presented by the fact that there has now been a negative technology for the last several decades that has become increasingly practiced. That is the use of prenatal genetic testing in order to determine certain traits likely or certain to be carried by the unborn child; the decision is been made by some parents either to go ahead with the pregnancy or to abort the child and begin over again.

But the headline in the weekend’s edition of the New York Times was very different. It’s not about aborting a baby that is found to be deficient in terms of genetic characteristics; it’s about creating a baby – a designer baby in reality using germline therapies. Germline therapies are those that involve the genetic information that will be brought together in an embryo by the egg and the sperm cells. And for the first time in human history, as this article makes clear, this is now not only the stuff of science fiction, it is also the stuff of very real scientific fears. After all, this was the front page of the New York Times.

Nicholas Wade writes,

“The biologists fear that the new technique is so effective and easy to use that some physicians may push ahead before its safety can be assessed. They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence.”

Now the article grows only more interesting with the arrival in the report of David Baltimore, a very influential scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize. It is Baltimore who was key in gathering together the scientist last week in order to make a statement opposing the use of this kind of germline therapy on human beings. Baltimore is no outsider to the scientific establishment, in many ways he is the consummate insider. And at the journal science he issued an alarm, along with several other scientists, in which he calls what he termed “a prudent path” forward for genomic engineering and germline gene modification. This appeared in the Science Express, a science magazine – one of the nation’s most respected scientific journals – and it is a bombshell. That explains why something that took place in a group of very elite scientist in California made its way within 24 hours to the front page of the New York Times because even the secular world, operating out of a secular worldview, understands the importance in terms of morality, in terms of human dignity, when it comes to the idea of a designer baby. But something that becomes immediately evident is that the secular worldview offers no real grounding for understanding what the appropriate limits of an effort towards human perfection might be.

Why would a designer baby be bad? That’s a very interesting question. The secular worldview has very few resources or principles upon which it can make that determination. The one thing that is now clear is that David Baltimore and his associates are really fearful of what would happen if this genie were to be let out of a bottle. Because what they are worried about is this, this is the first time that these genetic techniques – these germline therapies – are now so accessible given some recent technological breakthroughs that virtually any laboratory with basic genetic equipment would be able to conduct this kind of experimentation. And that’s the real fear.

As I am looking at the actual article published at Science, the big fear is that in some place in the world (for instance in China) this kind of experimentation may not be something that is a threat for the future and may be something that is already going on. As a matter of fact there are credible reports coming out from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its own journal that there are evidences that that kind of experimentation is ongoing and there is no outright denial from some of the scientist who are thought to be involved in it.

The very same week that David Baltimore and his associates issue that alarm, also in Science magazine was an article by Gretchen Vogel and she writes,

“Rumors are rife, presumably from anonymous peer reviewers, that scientists in China have already used CRISPR on human embryos and have submitted papers on their results. They have apparently not tried to establish any pregnancies, but the rumors alarm researchers who fear that such papers, published before broad discussions of the risks and benefits of genome editing, could trigger a public backlash that would block legitimate uses of the technology.”

Now from a Christian perspective, this just gets more interesting. So here you have some researchers worried about other researchers. You have some researchers worried about the research itself and its threat to human dignity. You have other researchers who are concerned about rogue scientist being involved in this kind of experimentation who would give the experimentation a bad name before the public has an opportunity to deal with it. And what we’re looking at here is a perfect recipe for moral disaster.

It was back in the 1960s and 1970s that figure such as Francis Schaeffer and a good many scientists as well warned about the effort to create a designer baby; the effort, by means of technology and genetic experimentation, to produce the perfect human being. And there is at least the promise that at some point in the future some of these germline therapies could be used to cure some diseases that are genetically carried and are themselves triggered by genetic information. But the promise of that kind of medicine also comes with a grave threat and that threat was made clear in the article that was published at MIT’s Journal. The fact that all these articles are coming together should tell us something. This one appeared at MIT’s Technology Review by Antonio Regalado and it appeared on March 5, 2015 – just days before the gathering of those scientists in California.

To give an indication of the secular confusion and the limitations of the secular worldview in dealing with these issues, MIT’s technology Journal put a chart in the article about the perfect designer baby, indicating that 15% of Americans believe it would be right to use this kind of genetic technology to enhance the babies intelligence, 83% said they did not believe that would be legitimate. But 46% said it would be legitimate to use this kind of technology to reduce the risk of serious diseases, 50% said it would be illegitimate. But the incredible insight from this comes down to the fact that those numbers are almost surely to change because once this genie let out of the bottle there will be no medical means of limiting its application to the use of trying to reduce serious genetic diseases. There will be nothing what so ever preventing these technologies to be used by prospective parents in choosing eye color or trying to enhance intelligence, not just choosing gender but choosing athletic abilities and other things that parents might want.

Now already we have the arrival of designer babies in two forms. First of all, by the horror of the fact that there are now so many pregnancies that end in abortion because genetic testing reveals to the parents the baby just doesn’t meet their standards. This is especially true when it comes to Down syndrome, when it is now estimated that over 90% of all unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. But there are also right now designer babies available by the use of gamete catalogs from sperm banks and from egg donors where one can look in a catalog and choose genetic and physical attributes and look at intelligence scores in order to buy gametes for use in in vitro fertilization. But what we’re looking at here is the next great step beyond human dignity. The great next step towards defining human beings by what we will order when it comes to genetic information, what genetic information we will not accept, and what we will accept.

There is so much in these reports that it should have our attention, but the main thing is this: this issue has hit the front page of the New York Times. And the bad news is this: the secular worldview, as these articles make abundantly clear, has no ability to draw a line – anywhere for long.

2) Loss of deep relationships with grandparents unforeseen cost of delaying of childbearing

Next, an important article that appeared in TIME magazine on a related issue. This was written by Susanna Schrobsdorff and it is entitled The Grandparent Clock. As she writes,

“There’s often one forgotten variable in the decision about having kids.”

We’ve been tracking the fact that there have been major changes in the way human beings approach marriage and childbearing. For one thing the rate at which people are getting married has gone down, for another thing the age of first marriage has been going up, and furthermore not only are Americans not marrying at the rate they used to, not only are they putting off marriage until later ages – there is an extension of adolescence that is now remarkable among the millennial generation and those who are in their 20s – but there is also delay in childbearing. And this is now presenting a situation in which many women are having children not only into the late 30s, but into the 40s and beyond. And as Susanna Schrobsdorff writes, there is fallout to this that is often not recognized, and that is the fact that there are good many children will know their grandparents, if at all, only as the extremely aged. She writes,

“A few months ago I was sitting in the vast dining room of an assisted-living home in Washington, D.C., watching my 5-year-old niece bounce like a pinball between tables of seniors. It was a startling sight–that small, smooth blond blur amid a hundred crinkly faces. Her audience, mostly women in their 80s and 90s, grinned as she navigated all the parked walkers, canes and wheelchairs as if it were a playground.”

She goes on to write,

“She and my two daughters are among a growing number of kids who will see their grandparents primarily as people in need of care rather than as caretakers. They are the leading edge of a generation whose mothers and fathers had children later in life. They’ve seen us juggle our jobs, their school schedules and their grandparents’ needs simultaneously–one day missing work to be at the bedside of a parent who’s had a bad fall, another day trying to call an elder-care aide from the back row of a dance recital.”

One of the most basic insights of the Christian worldview is that we are to receive the gifts that our creator has given us in the way that he has intended them. This is a part of the goodness of God’s creation. Receiving the gift of marriage means that we do not put off marriage until there is a time when our society says it’s convenient, but rather we understand marriage to be the major marker of adulthood (for most people) and the major marker of accepting those full adult responsibilities. And with marriage, according to the Christian worldview, will come an openness and an eagerness for the gift of children – and earlier rather than later.

One of the things we’re looking at by the way is the fact that an incredible percentage of those who are now seeking assisted reproductive technologies are those who are seeking to become pregnant, and successfully pregnant, at an age beyond when most women in human history were even trying to have children. But Susanna Schrobsdorff is onto something really huge here when she points out that for most of human existence it was the extended family that helped to care for children – rejoiced in them and helped to take care of them. And now as she’s pointing out, so many children are being born so late that their grandparents are so old that they are people who need care rather than those who can give care.

Just in recent weeks we’ve been looking at new research out on the marginalization of marriage and we have seen even secular authorities say the big issue behind this is the rise of the worldview of personal autonomy. The idea that what is greater than any other good in terms of human value is our own personal autonomy. So we will get married, if we want to get married, when we want to get married, and we will have children if indeed we want to have children, the way and when and exactly how we want to have children. And life is seen not so much in terms of the interconnectedness of responsibilities, but rather the absolute autonomy of the individual. And now we see some the fallout; we see what is happening in a society in which an increasing percentage of children, if they are able to know their grandparents at all, will know of them as the enfeebled aged – those who are in assisted living facilities, those who are in need of care rather than giving care.

I can simply reflect on this article by saying that as a child I knew the care of both sets of my grandparents, I knew their intense involvement in my life, and I would not know who I am without knowing who they are as my grandparents. I can only sense the absence and the loss that is reflected in this article. And as you might imagine, Susanna Schrobsdorff comes to the very end of this article without calling for any mitigation or change in personal autonomy as the great good of human life. But at least she recognizes there is a problem, and from a Christian worldview, it’s the kind of problem that should point us to a deeper problem.

3) PCUSA shift on marriage reflects tremendous need for Scripture to resist pressure of culture

It was last week that the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States, the liberal PCUSA, voted to amend its constitution to change its definition of marriage from a man and a woman to an institution of two people, traditionally a man and a woman. So now that churches has changed its Constitution so to allow for same-sex marriage and it becomes just the latest of mainline liberal Protestant denominations to transform their understanding of marriage, only after they had transformed their understanding of Christianity. At National Review over the weekend David French wrote a very important article entitled Where God loves Abortion and Hates Israel, talking about the fact that when we are looking at a denomination like the PCUSA, we’re looking at a denomination that has had many theological and moral transformations before it could possibly get to the point of redefining marriage. That’s a theme to which we have returned over and over again. But David French writing at National Review offers some really keen insights on the PCUSA. As he writes,

“The drift from biblical orthodoxy to spiritualized leftism has profound real-world consequences. The church isn’t just shuffling out of Christianity, it’s shuffling out of existence.”

Pointing out, as we did last week…

“The church has lost 37 percent of its members since 1992,”

David French also points out that of course there were theological transitions before the redefinition of marriage, and there were moral compromises as well. Going all the way back to 1952 the PCUSA, at least in terms of one of its parent bodies that became the PCUSA in the 1980s, had redefined their understanding of divorce to take out the category of innocent party – leading to the avalanche of no-fault divorce that has had such devastating consequences for America and for Americans.

But there’s another very interesting article that appeared and for evangelical Christians this one is more important. It appeared over the weekend at the Daily Beast; it is written by Ross Murray and the headline is this: For Christians and Gay Marriage, It’s Culture, not Doctrine. Now let’s be clear, Ross Murray is in favor of the legalization and celebration of same-sex marriage. He is absolutely celebrating the fact that the PCUSA has now joined the crowd of those liberal denominations who have been affirming same-sex marriage. He writes that,

“The Presbyterians bring us ever closer to the tipping point of a majority of mainline Christian churches affirming LGBT people, including marriage equality.”

But then he raises the very interesting question, ‘how long will it take the other denominations – specifically evangelical denominations – to join the trend?’ And then he offers an absolutely stunning insight. He writes with specific reference to the Southern Baptist Convention and tells us that there had been theological changes that brought about the redefinition of marriage and mainline liberal Protestantism. He says that’s not going to work in these conservative denominations, but he’s writing to those who are in favor same-sex marriage and he says, don’t let that get you down, have no fear because the culture, not theology will eventually change those evangelical churches and denominations.

Now that’s coming as a matter of promise from this columnist to those who are in favor of same-sex marriage, but it should come as a matter of warning to us as evangelical Christians because we have to admit he’s really onto something here. He’s on to the fact that the culture has a pervasive influence on us and if we are not particularly careful the culture will determine our message, the cultural will determine our understanding of the gospel. The culture will determine our doctrine and our theology and the culture, not theology, not the Scripture, will determine our understanding of marriage.

Ross Murray understands that the velocity of this moral revolution has been unprecedented as he writes,

“Hardly any of this religious support for marriage equality was even imaginable a mere 15 years ago.”

So he’s pointing to the fact that even when you’re looking at liberal Protestantism you’re looking at a process of theological revolution that is less than two decades old. And that’s why he saying to his fellow supporters of same-sex marriage that when it comes to evangelical Christians – and as was reported last week, the last significant segment of Americans who do not support same-sex marriage are defined by their commitment to evangelical Christianity – Ross Murray says to those who favor same-sex marriage, ‘don’t worry, the evangelicals will eventually come to us in their own way and they will come to us not by a process of theological transformation,’ he says ‘don’t look to evangelicals to do that,’ but he says, ‘the culture will force them anyway.’

Now one of the things we need to note about the theological insight there is that when Ross Murray’s writing about the inability or the reluctance of evangelicals to go through that process of theological transformation, it is because evangelicals are committed to the authority of Scripture – and not only that, but to an understanding of the authority of Scripture that goes right down to the inspiration of the words. And Ross Murray, writing from his own worldview, is at least quite keen in understanding that that present a real obstacle towards the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage. But he says, and he writes with great confidence, ‘don’t worry, eventually the culture will trump theology.’

Eventually the cultural pressure will be so strong that even evangelicals will have to succumb and we shouldn’t hear that is a great challenge, we should heat that as a word from an outsider that we desperately need to take to heart. We should understand that what he is describing there is a real and present danger and we better be keenly aware that he’s absolutely right, the only thing that keeps us from redefining marriage is a theological commitment to the authority of Scripture and to our understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that also means we better be very, very careful watching not only this article and his argument, but watching the recent experiences of these other churches. The moment you let the culture determine your theology you have no theology whatsoever. Not when measured against the authority of Scripture and not when measured against the power of the gospel, not when measured against what Jude calls the faith once for all delivered to the Saints.

From time to time we need to hear this kind of theological alarm; generally it comes from inside the church. This one is perhaps even more powerful for coming from outside the church. And an argument we dare not ignore.

 

 

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

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 03-24-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Concerns rise as scientists near possibility of designer babies, a move beyond human dignity

Scientists Seek Ban on Method of Editing the Human Genome, New York Times (Nicholas Wade)

A prudent path forward for genomic engineering and germline gene modification, Science Magazine (David Baltimore, et. al.)

Embryo engineering alarm, Science Magazine (Gretchen Vogel)

Engineering the Perfect Baby, MIT Technology Review (Antonio Regalado)

2) Loss of deep relationships with grandparents unforeseen cost of delaying of childbearing

The Grandparent Deficit: Fertility Isn’t the Only Biological Clock, TIME (Susanna Schrobsdorff)

3) PCUSA shift on marriage reflects tremendous need for Scripture to resist pressure of culture

Where God Loves Abortion and Hates Israel, National Review (David French)

For Christians and Gay Marriage, It’s Culture, not Doctrine, Daily Beast (Ross Murray)