R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 318

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)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 03-23-15

The Briefing

 

March 23, 2015

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

 

It’s Monday, March 23, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Death of Singapore founder reminder of value of political separation of powers

For as long as human beings have considered the relative merits of political systems there have been those who have suggested that perhaps the very best – the ideal – governing system would be that of government under a benevolent monarch, under someone who wouldn’t have to be elected and wouldn’t depend upon getting elected in order to gain power, but once in power would rule with a benevolence and with a competence. Of course the great problem with this is that those who are not elected tend neither to be benevolent nor competent, and that leads to disaster. The sad history of monarchy is the fact that many of the people who have become crowned heads of state have been incompetent, others have been non-benevolent – that is to say, they were downright evil. And just looking at the Old Testament it is clear when you look at the kings of Israel there were far more who did evil in the sight of the Lord then those who ruled righteously.

But there is something to be said about someone who holds a great deal of power, there is an efficiency in government, and when it comes to a monarch or a dictator they can get things done – of course that’s often the problem. This is one of the reasons that Christians have been heavily involved in the development of political theory in the West and why the conversation about the right role and the right structure government has always been deeply infused with theological themes.

That comes to mind with the death earlier today of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the state of Singapore and its first Prime Minister. He died earlier today, age 91. As The Economist of London reported early this morning,

“Few leaders have so embodied and dominated their countries: Fidel Castro, perhaps, and Kim Il Sung, in their day. But both of those signally failed to match Mr Lee’s achievement in propelling Singapore “From Third World to First” (as the second volume [of his autobiography claimed]…).”

As The Economist reflects, Lee Kuan Yew managed to build Singapore into a modern state against far worse odds faced than by either Fidel Castro or Kim Il Sung. As they describe,

“…no space, beyond a crowded little island; no natural resources; and, as an island of polyglot immigrants, not much shared history.”

But by the 1990s Singapore, though claiming ‘Asian values,’ had become the most Westernised place in all of Asia. Lee Kuan Yew was a very interesting figure on the world stage. He led Singapore into a confederation with Malaysia in 1963, but Malaysia kicked Singapore out in 1965 – likely one of the stupidest moves in the 20th century in terms of political decisions. He was himself Western-educated in both the London School of Economics and at Cambridge University. At Cambridge he and his wife both earned the coveted rank of first in law. For all of his early life, Lee Kuan Yew had worked for the merger of Malaysia and Singapore. But when Malaysia broke that merger he decided to turn Singapore, single-handedly, into a major world power. And against all odds, that’s exactly what he did.

There were many in the West who described Mr. Lee as a benevolent dictator, but that points to the problem. He may have been benevolent in terms of his general disposition, but he did not leave democracy in his wake. As a matter fact, during the time that he was Prime Minister he set the stage so that there can be no credible threat to his power or to his party. And when he eventually left office himself, he left it to his own son.

The Economist is right, Lee Kuan Yew turned Singapore into a hugely admired economic success story; as a matter fact it’s one of the biggest models of economic success in the 20th and 21st centuries. Under his government the economy produce about 7% average growth, a record that is virtually unmatched anywhere else in the world. He ran Singapore like a business and he saw himself as the CEO. Lee Kuan Yew always saw Singapore as a very endangered political experiment and an endangered city state, for that reason he argued for “some curtailment of its people’s democratic freedoms,” that in the words of The Economist. As they explain,

“In the early days this involved strong-arm methods—locking up suspected communists, for example. But it evolved into something more subtle: a combination of economic success, gerrymandering, stifling press controls and the legal hounding of opposition politicians and critics, including the foreign press.”

Lee Kuan Yew is quite known for his visits to the United States where many of his governing principles were greatly admired. But even as they were admired, they were admired from something of a distance. The nation of Singapore was a tightly controlled nation, down to the minute behavior of its citizens. Very famously in the United States, chewing gum was a criminal offense, punishable by public punishments that could include flogging. Under his leadership in Singapore voting was compulsory, but that didn’t mean there was any kind of real democracy. Mr. Lee himself said he was “not intellectually convinced that one man, one vote is the best.” When it came to running Singapore he believed in what he described as a meritocracy, and unsurprisingly he appointed the meritocratic bureaucrats. In his words, “…we decide what is right, never mind what the people think.” And he kept the people largely happy with that massive economic growth.

One of the most important political works in the history of Western civilization was The Prince by Machiavelli. And Machiavelli famously advised that a prince had to decide whether he was going to be loved or feared. When it came to Lee Kuan Yew, he was quite clear. He said,

“Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.”

From a Christian worldview perspective it’s very interesting to reflect upon the death of Lee Kuan Yew and recognize that what we’re facing here is the reality that when power is concentrated in one person or over time in one party, when there is no actual give-and-take in terms of how the laws are made and how political issues are debated, eventually the government may become very efficient but it is not going to be benevolent. If you look at the long view of history the reality is that almost every dictator has fallen prey to his own pride and arrogance. And even when you have an inherited monarchy, the reality is very few of those crowned heads turn out to be either benevolent or competent. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is worse, the incompetent or the unbenevolent.

The worst possible combination is readily available to us when we look on the world stage at a place like North Korea where you have a combination of neither benevolence nor competence. And this should serve to remind us that there is a deep Christian theological principle behind the separation of powers and the American constitutional system. All those headlines about how inefficient American democracy is served to remind us that our founders intended this government to be relatively inefficient, because when it comes to government the first thing government is often efficient about accomplishing is trampling upon liberties of its own citizens.

In many ways the office of President of the United States, as described in our Constitution, was defined around the person of George Washington, our first president, even before he became the first president because it was obvious that George Washington was the one man who was capable of leading his country. And you’ll recall that it was George Washington who, after serving two terms in office, left that office and retired and went back to Mount Vernon, leaving the American people to choose his successor. When it came to Lee Kuan Yew, he made sure his party remained in power under the leadership of his own son. Explaining this he said,

“Occasionally two grey horses produce a white horse, but very few. If you have two white horses, the chances are you breed white horses.”

But as George Washington would respond, there’s an even greater chance that those horses grey or white will trample upon freedoms.

2) Islamic State attack on Yemeni mosques exposes internal conflict of Islam

The Islamic State struck over the weekend again, but this time it was Friday in the nation of Yemen which is being torn apart by sectarian strife and warring armies. The American effort to establish some stability in the war on terror in the Middle East is falling apart, perhaps worse than anywhere else right now in Yemen. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday,

“Suicide bombings at two mosques in Yemen’s capital killed more than 100 people Friday, the deadliest terror attacks in the country’s history and a sign, just days after an attack in Tunisia, of the spreading jihadist threat across the Middle East.”

Something very interesting is going on here. We’ve been tracking in recent days how many Western intellectuals are finally catching on to the fact that there is a real threat when it comes the Islamic state, and that there is no way to separate Islam itself from that particular threat. That’s not to say that we’re at war with Islam, being at war with every single Muslim, it is to say that a sizable number of Muslims are at war with the West. But one of the things we need to understand, if we’re going to understand this issue clearly as we should, is that even as the Islamic state is at war with the West, it is first of all at war with fellow Muslims – in particular with the Shiite Muslims.

The Islamic state is an insurgent Sunni movement – that reflects the largest number of Muslims in the world. The Shia are a minority – commonly known as Shi’ites – within the West, and they are a beleaguered minority when it comes to confrontation with the Sunnis. But on the other hand, they are a resurgent force in nations such as Iran. They have also been a very powerful force in Lebanon and right now it is Shia insurgents who are in control in Yemen. That led to the attack upon the mosque on Friday.

One of the most important thing for us to recognize here is that Islam is itself right now torn asunder by the distinction between the Shia and the Sunni. And one of the things that many people are now watching is the question as to whether much of this battle is now becoming a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That’s going to be truly interesting to watch. The Saudi’s are the great funders of Sunni Islam and the Iranians are the great funders and manipulators of Shi’ite movements around the world. At times Iran and Saudi Arabia have been linked by a common faith, that is Islam, but more often than not, going back centuries and centuries, they are divided by that great chasm that separates the Shiites from the Sunni.

Without going into great detail in the theological differences between the Shia and the Sunni, the one thing Christians need to recognize is that the basic distinction between the two is indeed theological. It goes back to the very year’s right after the death of the prophet Mohammed when there was a question about rightful authority within Islam and the question about its apocalyptic understanding of eschatology. The Shia are the most apocalyptic of all the Muslims, and once again what we’re looking at is a theological divide that the secularized West has made itself virtually unable to understand.

But the West does understand that the Islamic state, or ISIL, is committing mass murder and Friday’s edition of the New York Times had one of those very revealing headlines that reveals more about the West than about the Islamic state. Here’s the headline in Friday’s edition of the New York Times, United Nations Investigators Accuse ISIS of Genocide Over Attacks on Yazidis. We’ve discussed the fact behind Nick Cumming-Bruce’s report,

“United Nations human rights investigators on Thursday leveled accusations of genocide and war crimes at the Islamic State, citing evidence that the extremist group’s fighters had sought to wipe out the Yazidi minority in Iraq.”

Now, we’ve looked at this before but here’s the big issue: do we really believe this is going to have any impact on the Islamic state? Do we really think that a group that has been putting out beheading videos and is carrying out mass murder, killing people by the hundreds and eventually by the thousands, establishing a caliphate and overtaking so much territory in Iraq and elsewhere, do we really believe that a group that has recently declared that it will put up a Muslim flag over the Vatican after having eliminated the Christian influence in what it calls the Crusader state, do we really believe that this is a group that is going to look over its shoulder and change its behavior because it’s just been charged with genocide by the United Nations? Now there is a moral point of importance here of course, the United Nations is right. Genocide is exactly the right word to use in terms of what the Islamic state has been doing and is doing now to the Yazidis and other populations.

The word genocide is a fairly recent word; coined after, at least in terms of popular use, World War II to describe first and foremost the Holocaust against the Jews that was undertaken by the Nazi state. But ever since then it has been a hotly debated political issue. The hottest of all these debates has to do with the early 20th century and the question of whether or not the Turks carried out genocide against the Armenians in those decades. But what we’re looking at here is the reality that those who are committing genocide are not deterred by being told that that’s what they’re doing. And those who are committed to mass murder on this scale are certainly not living in the fear of what United Nations will do.

3) Ineffectiveness of UN reveals divide between nations will only end under Prince of Peace

That points to a very important article that appears in this week’s edition of the New Republic. The article is by Jonathan Katz and it’s a profile on Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In the article Katz writes,

“It can be easy to forget what an achievement the United Nations’ creation was 70 years ago. The organization was forged during World War II, a time of firebombings, starvation, and genocide. Even the previous World War hadn’t been enough to create a durable international institution.”

He goes on to say, after the end of World War II,

“The U.N. Charter was signed by 50 countries in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. It pledged nothing less than to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”

Now just to state the obvious, it has done no such thing. But of course that’s not to say there hasn’t been any impact. It is to say that the United Nations, insofar as those two words mean anything, is an oxymoron – especially when you look at how the United Nations actually operates, or doesn’t operate. As Katz states and I quote,

“The not-so-secret truth about the United Nations is that it is almost entirely passive when it comes to the most pressing matters of global security.”

He also notes that weakness was built into its structure. So when you look at the P5, that is the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, every one of those nations has a veto and those nations include both the United States and Russia. And that means that when it comes to the United Nations acting, there’s very little acting.

From a Christian worldview perspective one of the things this underlines and underlines clearly is the fact that there is no possibility, no real possibility, of anything like a global government. There may be international agencies and global organizations but when it comes to the actual task of governing it turns out that the globe is simply too big to be a governable whole; for that matter, even the former Soviet Union was too large to be a governable whole. And when it comes to the modern understanding of politics, we’re right back where we started. All politics is, as the late former speaker the house Tip O’Neill said, local.

This too is on the one hand evidence of human sinfulness and it is also part of the metanarrative of the great story of Scripture; which tells us that when it comes to an understanding of global government, that’s a promise that points to human pride going all the way back to the Tower of Babel. The breaking down of national and ethnic divides, and the achievement of a lasting peace, will come only when the Prince of peace comes; and when he comes, it will not be as Secretary-General of the United Nations.

4) Ongoing Senate stalemate over sex trafficking bill shows Democrats beholden to abortion lobby

Speaking about the inefficiencies of the American government, sometimes they can be deeply revealing and embarrassingly. We’ve been watching in recent days the development of a stalemate in the United States Senate over a bill that was intended to assist the victims of sex trafficking and was expected to pass with wide bipartisan support, only to break down over Democratic objections to the fact that the Republican initiated law will not fund abortions out of the funds confiscated from sex traffickers. Very interesting language is included in an article that appeared over the weekend by Michael Crittenden of the Wall Street Journal as he writes,

“…Democrats are trying to appease pro-choice groups by opposing abortion language that is in line with what lawmakers typically attach to all spending bills. Democratic lawmakers have said they either didn’t know about the language or were made aware of it only in the last two weeks. The end result: Lawmakers on both sides are frustrated.”

But that’s an understatement, what’s actually happening is that assistance to the victims of sex trafficking is being held up by Democrats who are fearful of deviating in the slightest degree from the orthodoxy of the pro-abortion movement. And in a very interesting development the editors of the Washington Post on Friday issued an editorial in which they declared, Democrats are the New Party of No. But what’s really interesting is the editors of the Washington Post – that’s one of most liberal newspapers in America – is calling out those who are beholden to the abortion lobby for now refusing to help the victims of sex trafficking.

As the editors wrote on Friday,

“Democrats who have been filibustering the Senate’s consideration of legislation to combat human trafficking cited concerns with language they claimed would greatly expand the reach of Hyde Amendment restrictions on abortion. But when John Cornyn (R-Tex.), chief sponsor of the trafficking bill and Senate majority whip, offered a compromise that would seem to answer their stated objections, it was rejected out of hand.”

Then the editors wrote this very important language,

“Perhaps Democrats thought they could score political points, or maybe they didn’t want to anger their traditional allies in the abortion rights lobby. Either way, it became depressingly clear that what they weren’t thinking about was the needs of vulnerable people, mostly young women and girls, who are the victims of sex trafficking.”

Now my point here is not inherently partisan, my point is the fact that what we’re looking at on the moral divide over abortion is a divide that’s getting wider, not narrower. And we’ve discussed that in recent days. But it’s really significant that when it comes to this particular bill, and this particular controversy, and the obstruction that is now being presented to the Senate by those who were so beholden to the abortion-rights lobby that even – and I intentional use the word even – the editorial board of the Washington Post says this is simply too much.

The Democratic Party’s official party platform for the year 2014 put that party solidly in support of a right to abortion under almost any circumstance. And not only that, it called for government funding of abortion. Just how seriously did Democrats mean for that be taken? The obstruction of this sex trafficking bill makes that point abundantly clear. They are now ready to scuttle a bill that a third of the Senate signed onto as cosponsors simply because they are intent upon abortion being funded – one way or the other. Perhaps this, more than anything else, shows us just what we’re up against in terms of the battle for human dignity and for the sanctity of human life. If a significant numbers of United States senators will block a bill that would restrict sex trafficking because they are so intent on funding abortion, that tells us where we stand. And it also tells us where the unborn stand. At least in this case I’m thankful and somewhat surprised where the editorial board of the Washington Post stands.

 

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.

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.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 03-23-15

1) Death of Singapore founder reminder of value of political separation of powers

Lee Kuan Yew, The Economist

2) Islamic State attack on Yemeni mosques exposes internal conflict of Islam

Yemen Division of Islamic State Claims Suicide Bomb Attacks That Killed Scores, Wall Street Journal (Hakim Almasmari and Asa Fitch)

United Nations Investigators Accuse ISIS of Genocide Over Attacks on Yazidis, New York Times (Nick Cumming-Bruce)

3) Ineffectiveness of UN reveals divide between nations will only end under Prince of Peace

The Secretary General in His Labyrinth, New Republic (Jonathan M. Katz)

4) Ongoing Senate stalemate over sex trafficking bill shows Democrats beholden to abortion lobby

Fight Over Abortion Grinds Senate to Halt, Wall Street Journal (Michael Crittenden)

Democrats are the new party of no, Washington Post (Editorial Board)

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 03-21-2015

1) What worldview will come after post-modernism?

2) What aspects of the early church should be part of our church worship?

3) Should a Christian accept a contract to build a Buddhist temple?

 

Call with your questions 24 hours a day, 7 days aweek: 1-877-505-2058

 

Transcript: The Briefing 03-20-15

The Briefing

 

March 20, 2015

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

 

It’s Friday, March 20, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Common Core false dichotomy between fact and opinion subversive to moral truth

As we go into the weekend several important news stories have appeared recently and they all have a common theme; that is the moral development of children and teenagers, how education happens or doesn’t happen, what kind of parenting even the secular world now understand to be problematic, and just how narcissists become narcissists – some very important stories for us all to think about.

The most important of them is a column that appeared at the New York Times; it’s in the opinionator column by Justin P McBrayer. McBrayer is an associate professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He works in the area of ethics and the philosophy of religion and the title of his article gets to one of most important issues we face today. Here’s the title, Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts. The article, now again remembered it appeared in the New York Times, is really, really important. McBrayer writes,

“What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

“I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.”

Now if we stopped at just that point there will be plenty for us to think about, because here you have a professor in a secular college telling us that philosophy professors are reporting that an overwhelming majority – that’s the very term he uses – of college students believe that all moral claims are mere opinions, or are true – if indeed they are true at all – only in a sense that is relative to a culture.

Now this is a pattern that can be traced all the way back to the 1980s when professor Alan Bloom wrote a blockbuster book entitled “The Closing of the American Mind,” and he wrote in the very first chapter of that book that the one thing that you can count on every student in the university now believing to be true is that all truth is relative. And now you have this kind of report coming some 20 years later, if not 30 years later, telling us the philosophy professors say that the overwhelming majority of college students now believe all moral claims to be merely opinions – not facts.

But the really interesting part of the article by Justin McBrayer is not about college students at all, it’s about second graders. He writes,

“What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t.”

He then ask the question,

“So where is the view coming from?”

Now comes his blockbuster analysis,

“A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

“Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

“Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.”

He then writes,

“Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled ‘fact vs. opinion.’ The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom. As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to ‘distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.’ And the Common Core institute provides a helpful page full of links to definitions, lesson plans and quizzes to ensure that students can tell the difference between facts and opinions.”

He then asked the question,

“So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view that there are objective moral facts?”

First he says –  and this is really important,

“…the definition of a fact waffles between truth and proof — two obviously different features. Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it.”

He then says,

“…second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both. For example, I asked my son about this distinction after his open house.”

Now remember his son is in the second grade,

“He [that is the son] confidently explained that facts were things that were true whereas opinions are things that are believed.”

And then he said they had the following father-son conversation:

Father: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Son: “It’s a fact.”

Father: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Son: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Father: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

The father then writes,

“The blank stare on his face said it all.”

As if this report isn’t scary enough he tells us about some of the assignments he found online and in his own son’s homework. He says,

“Kids [now remember, second graders] are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion. Here’s a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions?

1. Copying homework assignments is wrong.

2. Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.

3. All men are created equal.

4. It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism.

5. It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol.

6. Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.

7. Drug dealers belong in prison.”

He then sought in this homework exercise to find out what the answer was to be, again, are the following facts or opinions? He then writes, and this is truly chilling,

“In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum…”

Then (and remember, this is published at the New York Times) this professor, in a public college says,

“In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.”

Professor McBrayer points out that there is inconsistency that it is obvious in all of this. For one thing, at the beginning of the school year his second grader brought home a set of rules and expectations that the school treats as moral facts – not merely as opinions. But they insist nonetheless that when it comes to moral knowledge there are no moral truths, there are no objective moral truths – everything is simply a matter of moral relativism and mere human opinion.

He points to the problem beyond grade school, but he points out that even in grade school this simply won’t work. He says, they’re told to do their school work with academic integrity, but at the same time the curriculum sets up our children for doublethink.

“They are told that there are no moral facts in one breath even as the next tells them how they ought to behave.”

Well that’s a problem in the second grade. Its writ large, not only in the American college and university but also in what’s increasingly coming to us from Hollywood, from public officials, from the society at large. This is one of most important essays I’ve seen in a very, very long time because what we’re looking at here is the subversion of truth itself, which makes morality absolutely impossible. And without a basic moral structure, civilization, society, is simply impossible. Not only that, you can’t possibly raise kids in any consistent way by telling them there are no moral facts, but you better behave. That is an absolute impossibility.

Furthermore, there is nothing that is more subversive of human dignity and of human rights then the idea that there is no objective moral value. If there is no objective moral value, if there are no moral facts, than thou shalt not murder is nothing more than a statement of moral opinion. Once again, the most amazing dimension of this article isn’t the fact that it was written, it’s not that it was written by a concerned parent of a second grader, it’s that it was written by a secular college professor and published at the New York Times.

Now if the New York Times is concerned about moral relativism, then that really out of tell us something. If the New York Times is at least publishing this article that says break glass in case of this emergency, just imagine how much faster Christian parents should have been breaking the glass. Of course this also means that Christian parents better understand that educating our children in a biblical Christian worldview means making very clear why we believe that there are moral facts. And who we believe is the author of those facts.

2) Greater dependence on technology decreases likelihood of academic success

Another article appeared just a few days ago in the Los Angeles Times, it’s by Larry Gordon and it is entitled Students Focus Improves Offline. This is one of those articles that tell us of research that we shouldn’t actually need, but nonetheless can be helpful. Gordon’s writing about research on how college students learn, or you might say how they fail to learn, and here’s one of the most important insights – and there’s been similar research we reported on before – it turns out that greater access to and dependence on high-technology is inversely related to knowledge and wisdom and even to academic performance. As Gordon writes,

“USC [That is University of Southern California] professor Geoffrey Cowan is a scholar of free speech and communication. But Cowan, the former dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, insists that students sometimes should be cut off from the social media and websites that are so prevalent in their lives.”

This professor, according to Los Angeles Times, bans the use of laptops, cell phones, and wireless devices during his freshman introductory classes. And according to Gordon, like a growing number of professors nationwide, this professor says that electronic equipment, even just for note taking, causes students to mentally disconnect from lectures and distracts them from class discussions.

Now there are several things addressed in the research reported on in this article. For one thing there’s really clear research that students who go to social media sites and are browsing the web during class lectures don’t learn much – as if we actually needed research to tell us that. But the more important issue here is that one of the things that is now becoming evident is that students who take their notes on technological devices often do not learn as much as students who take down notes by hand. Now there are a couple of things going on here; for one thing, reading directly from the article,

“Other research published last year in the Psychological Science journal suggested that students learn concepts better if they take notes in longhand than if they type them on a laptop.”

Now here’s something that I’ve also noted as a professor: when students are taking notes on a laptop they tend to take notes in terms of verbatim statements; they are just writing down what the professor states. On the other hand, if students are writing in longhand they are far more likely to write down their thoughts about what the professor is saying. They are writing down what the professor is teaching and what they are thinking about as the professor is teaching as they are putting it in their own words.

Now previous research also mentioned on The Briefing has indicated that if this is true for all students in general, it’s probably truer even for the male students in the classroom. And this goes down to boys in high school and even in middle school, because as it turns out, as tactile learners boys actually learn more because the movement of the hand on the paper in a way that is tied to the brain in terms of writing down those objects we know as words. It turns out that has an effect in terms of how boys think, how their brains develop, and what they actually retain. Now that’s interesting research, but it also points out the fact that often times the technologies that are sold to us as the promise of the future when it comes to something like education, turnout – though they do have certain advantages and can bring tremendous gifts – to become a significant cost.

One of the things that Christians need to think about is the fact that every technology comes with a moral set of challenges. And not only that, but we learn a great deal about what it means as fallen human creatures to engage technology when we discover that we want to be rescued by technology. And this is yet another reminder that there is no rescue in technology; there is no magic pill and there is no magic machine when it comes to learning. And it also turns out that this research is pointing to something we actually should know, and that is that there is nothing like a teacher and a student in the classroom and there is nothing like pen and paper and books. There is nothing like the old technology of words and sentences and thoughts. Oh, with reference to just the last thing mentioned in this article citing so much research is the fact that professors are also concerned about the fact that when you add all these technologies in the classroom you make cheating a lot easier – a lot more difficult to trace, a lot more difficult to detect and a lot easier. And the last thing we need is to make cheating easier.

3) Study reveals tremendous influence on parenting on narcissism in children

Next, a very interesting question: where do narcissists come from? As it turns out, they tend to come from other narcissists. But more importantly, they tend to come from parents who keep telling them how special they are. This again is an article that appeared in a secular newspaper, this also originated in Los Angeles Times by Deborah Netburn. She writes,

“If you don’t want to raise a narcissistic brat, consider taking a hard look at your parenting style.”

She goes on to write,

“A new study found that parents who believe their kids are better, more special and deserve more than other kids can pass that point of view on to their children, creating young narcissists who feel superior to others, and entitled to privileges.”

Brad Bushman is a communication and psychology professor at Ohio State University, he says,

“Loving your child is healthy [well we know that already]…. but thinking your child is better than other children can lead to narcissism, and there is nothing healthy about narcissism,”

Over a generation ago a prominent thinker pointed out that we are becoming a nation of narcissism. We are making narcissism central to the American experience. And as it turns out, at least many believe that can be traced to patterns of parenting. You may recall the radio personality Garrison Keillor who writes about his fictional hometown Lake Wobegon where, as he says, all the children are above average. And we chuckle at that because it’s mathematically impossible for all the children to be above average, but every single parent seems to believe that his or her children is above average. And we can understand that in part, but there is danger in this, especially when parents tell their children they are above average when, as is it turns out, one of the most interesting insights in this article is how many parents said they would be disappointed if their children turn out to be normal; if they didn’t turn out to be spectacular.

Now from a Christian worldview perspective here’s the big thing we should think about: every child is spectacular, every child is above average when it comes to understanding what it means to be made in the image of God is a priceless gift and what it means for every child to have an individual personality with individual gifts and also individual challenges. But when it comes to telling children that their above average as compared to their peers, when children are told that they are simply excellent in all things and superior in many, what turns out is that we produce narcissists. And when people begin to ask the question “where do narcissists come from?” it turns out that they come from parents who tell researchers they wouldn’t be satisfied or pleased if their child turn out to be of normal aptitude.

So it turns out there’s a huge difference between telling our children they are special to us and special to God, and telling them they’re more special than the other kids they know. That turns out to be the big problem. And one of the things we as Christians need to think about is that that original sin of pride that took place in the Garden of Eden was, to use another word for it, narcissism. So narcissism isn’t new to the human experience, but perhaps it is new that so many parents seem to be so content with producing narcissists.

And from a Christian biblical worldview perspective something else is revealed here. What we think about our children in this case is probably an undisguised reflection of what we actually want to think about ourselves. Maybe, from a narcissistic perspective, there’s something even missed in this article here. Maybe a secular authority looking at this doesn’t know to ask the question, is the narcissism really about our children or is it really about us? That may be the harder question to measure by scientific research, but from a biblical perspective it is probably the easier question to answer from the Bible.

4) Chores found to foster important qualities needed for success in life

Finally, as we go into the weekend another very interesting article on a similar theme appeared – this one in recent days in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the headline, The Chore Filled Path to Success. Once again, it comes from a secular newspaper. Reporter Jennifer Breheny Wallace writes,

“Today’s demands for measurable childhood success—from the Common Core to college placement—have chased household chores from the to-do lists of many young people. In a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults released last fall by Braun Research, 82% reported having regular chores growing up, but only 28% said that they require their own children to do them. With students under pressure to learn Mandarin, run the chess club or get a varsity letter, chores have fallen victim to the imperatives of resume-building—though it is hardly clear that such activities are a better use of their time.”

She quotes Richard Rende, a developmental psychologist in Paradise Valley, Arizona who says,

“Parents today want their kids spending time on things that can bring them success, but ironically, we’ve stopped doing one thing that’s actually been a proven predictor of success—and that’s household chores,”

Now remember we’re not talking about advice being given in church or advice written from a Christian worldview being given to Christian parents, we’re talking about something that shows up in one of the nation’s most influential secular newspapers because even the secular world understands ‘Houston, we’ve got a problem.’ As Wallace writes,

“Giving children household chores at an early age helps to build a lasting sense of mastery, responsibility and self-reliance,”

Now in this case Wallace cites a lot of research having to do with the fact that children who are required to do chores at home tend to do far better later in life than those were engaged in other kinds of activities. And one of the most interesting aspects of this article is the fact that putting down chores in terms of a college application isn’t likely to be the kind of resume building that many people think you’d simply have to do if your kids going to get into a good college or university. But the point made by this article is that the habits of life, the habits of thinking, the habits of self-discipline, the habits of self-mastery that come with the accomplishment of doing chores and being expected to do chores actually leads to children who do have the kind of lifelong success that their parents seem to be so concerned about.

And from a Christian biblical perspective we should understand why that is so. God made us as creatures with an inherent dignity, but one of the ways we demonstrate that dignity is by our work, our labor. We are assigned the task as God’s human creatures of doing work. One of the interesting things about the transformation of childhood is how children are now expected not only not to work – we would see that as moral progress, that we aren’t sending children into the mines as industrial workers – but there also not expect to contribute to life increasingly in the home. One of the interesting things that come out of this research is that language even matters. I read to you directly from the article,

“In a study of… 3-to-6-year-olds in the journal Child Development last year, researchers found that thanking young children for ‘being a helper,’ as opposed to ‘helping,’ significantly increased their desire to pitch in. They were motivated by the idea of creating a positive identity—being known as someone who helps.”

Now once again, there’s a biblical dimension to this. It turns out that children respond better when they are told that they are to be helpers, in concrete and assigned ways rather than simply being told they are helping. Being a helper turns out to be linguistically different than helping. And when we think about it there’s a linguistic difference that is a basic moral difference there as well. It’s the Christian worldview that points to the fact that who we are is prior to what we do. When you put all this together and it turns out the parenting is in irreducibly moral act, and we as Christians we should be the first to know that. And as that most important article of today by Justin McBrayer in the New York Times makes clear, it is indeed not just a moral thought that it is our responsibility to raise our children in a moral way that is – according to Scripture – a moral fact. And that’s a moral fact that begins with us even before we get to our children.

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.

 

Theological education is so important to Gospel ministry, and where you receive your theological education is really important. As you consider God’s call on your life, I want to give you the opportunity to experience Southern Seminary at Preview Day on April 24. For just $25 we’ll cover your two nights of lodging as well as all your meals on Preview Day. For more information go to www.sbts.edu/preview

 

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.

 

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