R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 330

“To Give Knowledge of Salvation to His People: A Christmas Mandate for Christian Ministry”

So many moments of our lives pass with almost no sense of significance. The twenty four hours in a day fade into the memory of the seven days of the week, then the thirty-odd days of a month, and then months into years. The years pass into the mist of memory.

But certain moments, certain days stand out in vivid contrast. These are occasions of bright and lasting memory — births, deaths, family reunions, and Christmases. Add to those moments like this, a commencement ceremony. There is something even more special about this ceremony, however, for this is the graduation of those called to Christian ministry, and this ceremony comes fast upon Christmas.

The celebration of the nativity of Christ comes with triumphant declarations, prophesies, songs of praise, the great good news of the Gospel, and a spectacular opportunity for maximum theological clarity. I am speaking about the kind of clarity that the shepherds heard from the angelic host who declared that a child has been born in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. The clarity of Simeon, who announced when he held the infant Christ, “my eyes have seen your salvation that you prepared in the presence of all peoples.” [Luke 2:30-31] The clarity of Mary, who declared, “he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” [Luke 1:49] The clarity of Isaiah the prophet, who foretold:  “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.” [Isaiah 9:6-7] 

We live in a day of terminal theological confusion — a day when that confusion comes from far too many pulpits and lecterns and churches. Christmas is the great biblical refutation of that confusion. A simple reading of the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus presents declarative sentences, undeniable truth claims, unavoidable clarity.

I want to direct our attention at this Christmas commencement to the prophesy of Zechariah found in Luke 1:67-80. Zechariah the priest has named the son promised and born to his aged wife Elizabeth “John,” as commanded by the angel. Upon writing the name John, Zechariah’s mouth was opened and Luke tells us:

“And his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’”

This beautiful hymn of prophecy begins and ends with the declaration that God is bringing salvation. Zechariah knows that John is to be the forerunner of the one who brings salvation. The Lord God of Israel is visiting his people with salvation, with redemption. The horn of salvation is rising, and Israel’s promised Messiah is coming to rule on the throne of David. Salvation arrives as was foretold by the prophets of old. Enemies are scattered and their evil is shattered. The mercy promised to the fathers is coming, God is remembering his holy covenant, the very covenant and oath God swore to father Abraham. God’s people, delivered from their enemies, will now serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness all their days.

Zechariah offered prophetic words concerning his own son, John the Baptizer, declaring: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people, in the forgiveness of their sins because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

The message has now turned from rescue from enemies to rescue from sin. The vindication of God’s people gives way to the forgiveness of sins and the tender mercy of God. Even as Isaiah foretold that the people who dwell in darkness have seen a great light, Zechariah speaks of the Christ child as “the sunrise” who shall visit us from on high, “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” The morning star will guide our feet in the way of peace.

Zechariah knew that John’s mission was to give knowledge of salvation to God’s people, to declare the tender mercy of God in Christ, to announce the forgiveness of sins. This was the calling that John fulfilled, even unto death. He came to prepare the way of the Lord, to call sinners to repentance, and to declare that in Christ the promised salvation of God has arrived.

In that sense, the clarity of the Christmas narrative thunders to us that our task is essentially a continuation of John’s. He came to prepare the way, while we preach Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But the message is the same. Those who will graduate this day will join the faithful line of preachers, missionaries, and ministers before them who, like John, gave knowledge of salvation to the people, by declaring the tender mercies of God that promise the forgiveness of sins.

That is the mission, the calling, the urgency. That is why a Christmas commencement seems so fitting. The celebration of the birth of Christ puts everything on the table. The unswerving directness and crystalizing simplicity of the Christmas message leaves no room for confusion. Reading the gospel texts we know that we either believe or run away. This is either the greatest truth ever declared, or it is the saddest lie ever told. The Christmas story cannot be reduced to a sentimental tale that gives humanity a warm glow. When the heavenly host declares that Jesus is the Savior who is Christ the Lord, they announce the forgiveness of sins to those who repent and believe and they declare war on those who would oppose this child.

The graduation of these ministers of the gospel gives us such hope today because we witness them taking their place behind the prophets and the apostles, the faithful through the ages, following in the line behind John the Baptist, giving knowledge of salvation, calling upon sinners to repent and believe, pointing to the sunrise that has visited us from on high, bringing light to those who sit in deep darkness.

In these days, our task is to raise up a generation of faithful, urgent, learned, and skilled counter-revolutionaries for the kingdom of Christ — an insurgency against the principalities and the powers. That is what Zechariah was declaring as John’s mission. That is what we declare today as the mission of these graduates.

Look back to Luke chapter one, verse 66, when those who witnessed the presentation of the infant John asked, “What then will this child be?” It was that very question that Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit, answered.

Do you now sense that same question today? When you look at the students on this campus, and especially as you look to these graduates today, do you now sense the same question: “What then will this child of God be?” Look at them together, and look at them singularly. Where will they go? What will they do? What will they build, what will they mend, what battles will they fight, what hurts will they endure?

We are not allowed to know the answers to these questions, but we do know this. We know what they are to do. They are to give knowledge of salvation. That we know. That is their calling, above all. That is their mission, wherever they may go.

The clarity of the Christmas story reminds them that they are to be defenders of the faith, teachers of undiluted truth, guardians of the treasure entrusted to them, heralds of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They have learned so much in their studies here, and they will learn even more as they teach others. Our hopes and prayers go with them, along with our pride and joy.

They have been taught the faith once for all delivered to the saints. They have been grounded in the knowledge of God’s Word, inspired, inerrant, and infallible. They have been skilled in ministry and equipped for mission. They have received their mandate from on high. And now, we watch them go.

We are all thankful that you have come. But these graduates would want, above all, for you to know Christ. On their behalf, I say to you that Christ came to save us from our sins, and that salvation and the gift of everlasting life come to those who repent of their sins and believe that Christ is the crucified and resurrected Lord. They would want you to know that Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, came to bring salvation. They would want you to know that he died in your place and that he was raised to life on the third day. They would want you to know that the baby lain in Bethlehem’s manger is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father, but by him.

This is the truth they will tell for the rest of their lives. This is the truth we declare to all today. Unto us was born that day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. The sunrise has come from on high. And we are saved.

This is the text of the commencement address preached by President R. Albert Mohler, Jr. at the December 12, 2014 commencement ceremony at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The entire ceremony will be live-streamed by digital video broadcast beginning at 10:00 a.m. EST at www.sbts.edu/live

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler

For more information on Southern Seminary, visit SBTS.edu and for more information on Boyce College, visit BoyceCollege.com.

Transcript: The Briefing 12-11-14

The Briefing

 

December 10, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, December 11, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Recognition of evangelical Ebola fighters example of truth and power of the gospel

Time Magazine is out with its regular and iconic Person of the Year issue and this year the person of the year is the person of Ebola fighters. When Time Magazine chooses a collective as its person of the year it creates all kinds of language problems but it also makes a point, and that is that the big story of the year, so far as Time was concerned, was Ebola and the people at the center of it are those who are trying to fight it. In designating the Ebola fighters as person of the year Time said it was,

“For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to [strengthen] its defenses, for [the] risk [they took and the lives they saved] the Ebola fighters are TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year.”

Later in an essay Nancy Gibbs writing for the magazine says,

“Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease, and ‘us’ means everyone, not just those in faraway places where this is one threat among many that claim lives every day. The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight.”

That rather poetic and very poignant paragraph points to the fact that the issue of Ebola is still an ongoing crisis. It is indeed an ongoing deadly crisis in nations of West Africa and it is spreading to other nations as well. When we began the year 2014 we were not discussing Ebola, when we come to the end of 2014 it’s impossible to talk about the year and our own clear and present dangers without speaking of it. There never had been a case of Ebola in the United States of America until this year – not one ever. And now, American health authorities have had to put into place, along with major American hospitals and medical centers, protocols for dealing with the eventuality of an Ebola case showing up even in a local community.

Time Magazine’s historic definition of its choice for person of the year comes down to the person or persons who “most affected the news and our lives for good or ill and embodied what was important about the year.” Now that’s a very important definition because it explains why, at the middle years of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler received the designation person of the year once and Josef Stalin twice. So what we’re looking at here in the case of Time designating a person of the year is a statement that’s cultural, it’s newsworthy, it’s also very political because there is no decision like this that is made outside of the political context. And as a matter fact, several of the persons who were recommended as Time magazine’s 2014 person of the year were people who hold political office – most important among those, Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.

Given Putin’s importance on the world scene, and in this case almost all negatively in terms of his impact on the world scene this past year, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could of eclipsed him in terms of the cover story of person of the year. Therefore it says something, it says something very powerful that Time magazine decided to jump over Vladimir Putin and go to the fighters of Ebola.

And that raises a very significant Christian dimension to this story because when you look at the cover story you’ll notice that several of the people who were involved in being honored as Ebola fighters are those who are explicitly Christian, evangelical Christians, who were there before the Ebola crisis hit those nations in West Africa, who were there long before the Western media arrived for this kind of attention and will be there long after the celebrity attention has moved somewhere else in terms of the Western world.

The Washington Post, commenting positively on Time Magazine’s choice, says that the doctors, nurses, and other front-line workers helping to care for Ebola patients have – of course, according to them – been selfless, inspiring, and courageous forces for good. Now we just need to pause and recognize that the issue of the Ebola fighters, especially Christian Ebola fighters, raises a very important question in the modern secular mind; how is it that anyone for some reason would put to risk one’s own life, livelihood, future, and family, in order to go to a place far away to serve people we do not know and to whom we are not directly related in the context of such immediate danger? This is where the Christian church has a gospel centered answer now for two millennia; where, beginning with the apostles in the early church; there was a Christian understanding of what it meant to live and to give sacrificially – something that does confound the wisdom of the world and something that can be explained only in terms of the priorities of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the ultimate truth of that gospel.

It tells us a great deal when we consider the other potential persons of the year that Time Magazine contemplated before centering in on the Ebola fighters. This is important especially not only by Time but also by the Washington Post that tells us the Time selected the front-line caregivers from a list of eight finalists and the list of those finalist was made public earlier this week. The Ebola workers beat out pop music artist Taylor Swift, Apple CEO Tim Cook, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma, the Ferguson protesters, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kurdish leader Massoud Karzani. The choice of person of the year for Time Magazine is about as politically loaded as the choice of Nobel Peace Prize laureates by the Nobel Committee; in other words it tells us probably more about the chooser than about the chosen in many cases.

But this also tells us something basically very important for Christians to know and that is that sterling examples of personal courage still stand out and is still recognized, even eclipsing the kind of international nemesis of a Vladimir Putin, or the consumer curiosity and ingenuity of someone like Tim Cook. Frankly it takes a great deal these days to knock Taylor Swift off the front of anything and it tells us a great deal that it is the Ebola fighters who knocked her off of the cover of Time magazine. I for one see that is cultural progress. In these days any kind of cultural progress like that needs to be celebrated on its own terms, especially when in a far more enduring way it points a very important searchlight on the gospel.

2) Timing of LGBT civil rights bill example of velocity of cultural revolution

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writing for the Times told us last Friday,

“As barriers to same-sex marriage fall across the country, gay rights advocates are planning their next battle on Capitol Hill: a push for sweeping legislation to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination, similar to the landmark Civil Rights Act that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1964.”

Now this is really big news, it’s not news in the sense that it’s shocking, it’s news in the sense that now is the cultural moment when at least some see the political opportunity to bring forward this kind of legislative proposal because make no mistake, it is sweeping and it is comprehensive. As Stolberg makes very clear, this proposed legislation to be presented to the United States Senate will call for absolutely no federal allowance for any discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in housing, in hiring, in virtually any area of America’s public life having to do with employments or institutions of any kind. As Stolberg reports,

“Plans for a so-called comprehensive lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights bill are still in their infancy [and remember she is writing last week], and advocates say the campaign could take a decade or longer. With Republicans taking control of the House and the Senate in January, they say the measure has little chance of passing in the next two years.”

Now again, it’s important to recognize this article appeared last week and as Stolberg here is telling us, that at least many consider the political prospects of the bill to be rather low with at least some insiders in the movement saying it could take a decade actually to get this kind of comprehensive civil rights bill for gay and lesbian bisexual and transgender Americans through the United States Congress. And yet, embedded in the very same article last week were hints that it might not actually take anything like that length of time because the velocity of the moral revolution America’s now experiencing on the issue of sexuality and homosexuality specifically is one that is leading virtually everyone to say all bets are off when it comes to imagining how fast some of these developments might come. After all, if you go back to the beginning of this very year only a minority of Americans lived where same-sex marriage is legal; at the end of this year it’s already safe to say the vast majority of Americans live where same-sex marriage is a legal reality or about to be – held back only by some kind of hold on a judicial decision.

At the end of her article Stolberg writes,

“But advocates and their allies in Congress say they have no illusions. Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, plans to introduce a broad nondiscrimination bill this spring. But asked when such a measure might pass, he said, ‘That’s a hazy, crystal-ball question.’”

Now remember, this article appeared last week – that statement was published last week. But that was last week, this is this week. Now the headline comes at Time Magazine yesterday: “A Comprehensive LGBT Nondiscrimination Bill Is Coming.” It’s not coming in the spring, it’s coming now. It’s coming from the very man who said it might take a long time for it to come but it didn’t even take a week for him to deliver the bill, or least to announce that he is now ready to bring it.

Katy Steinmetz reports for Time Magazine,

“Democratic Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley will propose a much broader measure aimed at preventing discrimination against LGBT Americans, not just in employment but also with regard to public accommodations, housing, jury service and financial transactions.

Senator Merkley said,

“It can’t be right that people are thrown out of their rental housing because of their LGBT status or can be denied entry to a movie theater or to a restaurant.”

According to this article he’s already trying to put together what he calls bipartisan cosponsors for the bill even now. Now what makes the Steinmetz article in Time Magazine really important is that she quotes Sen. Merkley as saying, ‘look, here are some examples of why this kind of bill is needed,’ but he’s actually just citing that in order to get to the larger agenda and that becomes very clear as her article continues. I read,

“Arguments over nondiscrimination bills often get heated when it comes to public accommodations — shorthand for the businesses and services available to the public. The proverbial scenario (based in reality) has become a gay couple who goes to a baker for a wedding cake and is turned down because a shop owner’s religious beliefs include opposition to gay marriage. Under nondiscrimination laws, such shop owners could be subject to legal penalties, and Merkley says that’s how it should be. ‘If you choose to be the proprietor of a restaurant, you should be expected to operate that restaurant in a fashion that does not embrace discrimination,’ he says.”

Now just notice something, he has once again shifted the actual argument. He has shifted from a wedding photographer or a cake maker to a restaurant; now that’s very instructive in terms of the propaganda effort for this kind of bill. You turn to where there basically is no controversy and claim that that’s why you’re bill is necessary. Those who are currently at issue, in terms of the head on collision between erotic liberty and religious liberty, are not those who are running restaurants saying that they do not want gay people to eat in their restaurants – that would be something even the vast majority of Christians would understand to be a violation of the general kind of nondiscrimination in public business that should be expected in civil society. But it’s very different when you move to an expressive profession, when you move to someone who has to use an artistic gift in order to communicate a message. The clear argument being made by those who are asserting their religious liberty is that it is an infringement of a basic human liberty, respected by the U.S. Constitution in explicit language, to be forced to communicate a message with which you do not agree.

Now once again the chronology is important, the timeline matters. That article in the New York Times by Stolberg appeared last week looking at the indefinite future. And yet the new article in Time Magazine appeared less than a week later, announcing the fact that efforts to get this legislation going are beginning now. And the articles, amazingly enough, just days apart, quote the very same Oregon Senator. And at the end of the Time article he actually talks about the timing, at least in his version in this article. And I quote,

“Merkley, taking a long view, seems cautiously optimistic. He worked to pass a similar measure as a state lawmaker in Oregon and ran on supporting same-sex marriage in 2008 when it was legal in only two states. ‘No one imagined that within this six-year span that I’ve been in the Senate, my first term in the Senate, that we would be on the verge of ending marriage discrimination across the country, yet here we are,’ he says. ‘It’s very important to recognize how fast the world is changing, and another two years will bring additional changes as well, as people come to terms and understand this discrimination is wrong and it needs to end.”

Perhaps the most important message for us to receive from this is this: when people who are pushing this kind of legislation say they’re talking about it someday, they are really talking about it now. Are Christians ready now to defend religious liberty where it may matter the most?

3) Defense of religious liberty for the irreligious important Christian duty

Christians looking at the issue of religious liberty are most commonly going to be alarmed when we see our own religious liberties threatened or infringed. It’s something else to see how that might apply to someone with very different beliefs – most important for Christians we sometimes find ourselves in the more awkward position of trying to figure out what religious liberty means for the irreligious, in particular for agnostics and atheists. That’s why over against some of our instincts we need to give attention to an article that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, it’s by Laurie Goodstein and the title the article, its headline is this, “In Seven States, Atheists Push to End Belief Rule.” Let’s look at how she introduces the article. Goodstein writes,

“A bookkeeper named Roy Torcaso, who happened to be an atheist, refused to declare that he believed in God in order to serve as a notary public in Maryland. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1961 the court ruled unanimously for Mr. Torcaso, saying states could not have a ‘religious test’ for public office. But 53 years later, Maryland and six other states still have articles in their constitutions saying people who do not believe in God are not eligible to hold public office. Maryland’s Constitution still says belief in God is a requirement even for jurors and witnesses.”

So you have 43 states in which there is no such requirement, you have seven in which the requirement remains, but after 1961 virtually every lawyer, every political scientist, every judge, and every knowledgeable person knows that that kind of requirement is inherently unconstitutional.

Now let’s go back to 1961 when the Supreme Court handed down that decision. It came in the aftermath and in the very process of several other cases on religious liberty coming down from the court; many of them absolutely disastrous. Decision having to do with prayer in public schools and with religious expressions in the public square and that led to a host of controversies from which the court has never get recovered and confusions the court itself has never adequately clarified. But also when you’re looking at 1961 you need to recognize that the number of atheists and open agnostics in America in 1961 was very, very small. The percentage was incredibly small and thus when you had this case that arose from Maryland you had a situation in which most Americans looked at it and thought, ‘well this is going to be a very odd exception.’ Now we know that’s not really the case, at least one out of five Americans is religiously unaffiliated according to recent research by the Pew Center and that means one out of three Americans under the age of 30.

And so when we’re looking at infringement of religious liberty, even some of those very important infringements that we are talking about when we think about that omnibus civil rights bill for LGBT people in the last story, we need to recognize that if we’re going to stand for religiously for ourselves, we also have to be advocates for religious liberty for others. And that an article like this in the New York Times puts us in the position of saying, ‘we’re actually on the side of the atheist in this one, even though we fervently believe in God and we believe that the most important truth issue any human being can ever address, and ultimately is the truth issue with the greatest eternal consequences, we do understand that there is a constitutional right in this country to be an atheist or an unbeliever or the unaffiliated’ And furthermore we are the people who would want a religious, a theological affirmation, to be genuine not something forced by some kind of public circumstance.

Now certainly there is a sense of loss in this article when you consider the loss of a pervasively Christian culture, a culture that was so shaped by Christianity and included so many Christians that this kind of unbelief was, if not incomprehensible than very isolated and anecdotal. We’re not living in that America now. But it does tell us something that this article in the New York Times reveals that there isn’t the political will, on either party in terms of the legislatures of the seven states, to remove this legislation because they are afraid they will be criticized for Christians or for those who claim to be Christians for so doing.

Well here’s one Christian leader who says that shouldn’t be a Christian concern, we should not be concerned with trying to get people to say what they don’t believe. There is no Christian benefit whatsoever in trying to coerce some kind of religious expression that doesn’t come from the heart. And we as Christian should be the very first to understand that. Now are we making argument that it doesn’t matter if one believes in God or not? Profoundly, we are not making that argument. We would make exactly the opposite argument. But when we make it in the form of saying, with sincerity, that belief in God is so important we want it to be genuine, we want it be from the heart, we do not want it to be coerced either by force of law or some kind of arcane statutory requirement, much less buy public pressure.

And finally we’re going to be spending a great deal of our energies in years ahead, perhaps even in weeks and months ahead, contending for religious liberty over against the marginalization’s and infringements and violations that are coming and have come. And that means, painful as it may seem, contending for the religious liberty of unbelievers as well as believers. And we do so not merely on constitutional terms, but even more importantly, on theological terms. And on this one there can be both a constitutional and more importantly a gospel advantage to showing up in this argument where we’re not expected – to be very clear that when it comes to religious liberty, we really do believe in it for the atheist as well as the believer.

4) Scholarly conference takes sabbatical, hoping to help replenish the earth

Finally, from time to time it’s important to bring an aspect of American life to the imagination of those who otherwise might not see this kind of reality but it’s important because what happens in the Academy, what happens on academic campuses, eventually filters down to your own community, perhaps even to your own children. So let’s look at an article also from the New York Times entitled, “Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, for the Planet’s Sake.” It’s written by Mark Oppenheimer, a veteran religion writer for the New York Times and he writes about the American Academy of Religion, which is the academic society for theologians and religious studies scholars across the United States. It’s highly populated by those in the far left, as will become very clear in this article.

Oppenheimer writes about the current president of the group, Laurie Zoloth, and she is calling for the group not to meet, at least in some coming years, in order to celebrate something of a Sabbath so that the earth can be renewed by scholars not meeting. Using up all those carbon-based energy sources in order to get on airplanes or get into cars and have to turn on electric lights at these kinds of meetings. As Oppenheimer writes,

“Two weeks ago, at her organization’s gathering, which is held jointly with the Society for Biblical Literature and this year drew 9,900 scholars, Dr. Zoloth used her presidential address to call on her colleagues to plan a sabbatical year, a year in which they would cancel their conference. In her vision, they would all refrain from flying across the country, saving money and carbon. It could be a year, Dr. Zoloth argued, in which they would sacrifice each other’s company for the sake of the environment, and instead would turn toward their neighborhoods and hometowns.”

Before serving as the AAR President Dr. Zoloth, who teaches at Northwestern University, was the program chair and as the program chair she determined the program for this year’s conference, held just a few days ago and she made the theme of that conference the theme of saving the environment. Oppenheimer reports,

“So as she planned ahead for the 2014 conference, she encouraged the program chairmen, who coordinate the hundreds of small panels that make up the main business of the conference, to seek out papers that dealt with the environment and climate change. She succeeded; in her estimate, nearly a third of this year’s papers somehow discussed the environment, ecology or related issues, like animal rights.”

So while you’re thinking about this group of rather left-wing theologians gathering together to save the environment you might want to know what kind of papers they brought and what kind of effect they might have. Well here are a couple of examples given to us courtesy of the New York Times. Cynthia Bond, of Claremont Graduate University, in California, presented a paper entitled, “Strategic Essentialism as a Tactical Approach to an Ecofeminist Epistemology.” Steven Heine, of Florida International University, presented a paper entitled, “The Staying Power of the Zen Buddhist Oxherding Pictures.” And Donna Seamone, of Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, delivered her paper  “The Path Has a Mind of Its Own: Eco-Agri-Pilgrimage to the Corn Maze Performance — an Exercise of Cross-Species Sociality.” Now that tells you a great deal about the academic and theological left and it leads me to ask you this question, just imagine the horrible loss to humanity if that group actually didn’t meet next year.

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

The Briefing 12-11-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Recognition of evangelical Ebola fighters example of truth and power of the gospel

The Ebola fighters are Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’, The Washington Post (Jena McGregor)

The Choice, TIME (Nancy Gibbs)

2) Timing of LGBT civil rights bill example of velocity of cultural revolution

Rights Bill Sought for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Americans, New York Times (Sheryl Gay Stolberg)

A Comprehensive LGBT Nondiscrimination Bill Is Coming, Time (Katy Steinmetz)

3) Defense of religious liberty for the irreligious important Christian duty

In Seven States, Atheists Push to End Largely Forgotten Ban, New York Times (Laurie Goodstein)

4) Scholarly conference takes sabbatical, hoping to help replenish the earth

Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, for the Planet’s Sake, New York Times (Mark Oppenheimer)

Transcript: The Briefing 12-10-14

The Briefing

 

December 10, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, December 10, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) CIA torture report fails to provide recommendations in response to brutalities

A long anticipated and already controversial report was released yesterday by a Senate committee and the report is controversial not only because of what it contains but of how it originated and why and when it was released. The report is being described in the media as a partisan report because the report was undertaken in terms of an investigation by the Democratic majority in the Senate intelligence committee. It was prepared by this same majority and released by that majority. And so we’re looking at a report that originated in a partisan controversy but is pointing to some genuinely serious moral issues that no American would hope to evade.

The front page story in the Washington Post reads, “Senate Report on CIA Program Details Brutality and Dishonesty.” Greg Miller, Adam Goldman, and Julie Tate writing for the Post tell us,

“An exhaustive five-year Senate investigation of the CIA’s secret interrogations of terrorism suspects renders a strikingly bleak verdict on a program launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, describing levels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence that at times brought even agency employees to moments of anguish.”

The controversy over the report preceded its release yesterday. It has to do with what are described as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used in the war on terror; particularly by American defense and intelligence agencies singled out in this report, the Central Intelligence Agency or the CIA. And yet the report as it was released yesterday tells us that what was taking place on the war on terror, in terms of these enhanced interrogation techniques, and were techniques and approaches that are well described as torture. And this is led to the greatest controversy over the report. Were these actions undertaken in the name of the American people and were they necessary? Were they in any sense moral? Does any civilized nation employ these kinds of enhanced interrogation techniques no matter what is at stake?

The reality is that this report that was released yesterday is only part of the larger report, most of which is still considered highly classified. As a matter fact the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is over 6,000 pages long – only about 500 pages were released yesterday. These are highly redacted, that is to say chosen pages, and they were chosen by the Democratic majority on the committee because the Republicans on the committee distance themselves from the process and from the report because they saw it as an attempt to libel the CIA from the very beginning. And one of the chief criticisms being made about this report is that it simply isn’t fair in terms of how it came about or how the study was conducted. For instance, the most controversial element of all in this has to do with the fact that the report, the entire investigation, is drawn entirely from documentary evidence provided by the CIA – there was no conversation, no interview, there was no testimony from any living person in the course of this investigation. Senate authorities themselves have suggested that this is unprecedented. In other words what we had was a Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic majority, deciding to interrogate the CIA without any conversation or any testimony, without any explanation from a human being, about what the documentary evidence meant – or now means.

From a Christian worldview perspective it’s hard to separate the issues out in terms of this massive issue. There is no doubt that the most significant issue that faces us is the issue of the techniques themselves; well described in terms of some of the material in this report as torture. Were these things undertaken on behalf of the American people? The answer from the documentary evidence is, it appears almost assuredly so. Were at least some of the techniques employed here actually torture? For that definition I simply turn to someone who has the most credibility of any member the United States Senate in dealing with that issue and I would suggest that that is Republican Senator John McCain. He was himself a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, he was imprisoned in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, and he was himself tortured.

Senator McCain who took to the Senate floor yesterday afternoon shortly after the release of the report distance himself from the report but even more importantly he said that what took place in terms of at least some of these techniques was torture. And he made the very direct argument that the American government and the American people should never put up with any kind of torture technique being employed by American personnel and in the name of the American people. McCain’s point, and again I would simply argue that he has the credibility – if not the solitary credibility in the United States Senate to speak most effectively to this – Senator McCain said the problem with torture is that first of all it is immoral. Secondly, it doesn’t work.

But at least some even in the Democratic majority and in the Senate staff of that majority indicated that even as this kind of enhanced interrogation technique was sometimes slipping into torture and even though it is both wrong and unproductive in terms of intelligence, according to the report, there are times at which virtually everyone at the time agreed that it was necessary and at the time agreed that it was at least in some sense productive.

Michael Gerson, a columnist for the Washington Post with experience within the Bush administration – he was on the chief speechwriter for former President George W. Bush –  he described the release of the report as, “an act of exceptional recklessness.” Gerson, very well known as an evangelical Christian who has written about his experience as a Christian in government in the midst of this crisis, Gerson writes about the fact that the American people and the American military have been involved in the war on terror in terms of new ground, in terms of military experience. Fighting in what has been described as asymmetrical warfare in which the need for this intelligence was often dramatic and immediate. Furthermore, he writes,

“The U.S. response in the war against terrorism has been dramatically more selective and focused on combatants. Even so, the CIA is often forced to operate at the edge of the United States’ acceptable response — currently with drone strikes and a variety of activities to degrade and dismantle the Islamic State. The avoidance of ‘boots on the ground’ in the Middle East has placed an additional burden on intelligence services to work with (often flawed) allies, target enemies and strike from afar. Political leaders, once again, urge intelligence officials to do what is necessary.”

In this sense, Christians should pay particular attention to Michael Gerson’s argument. He is arguing that the politicians, in a fallen world such as ours, facing the kind of asymmetrical warfare represented by the war on terror, often turn to intelligence agencies and defense forces and say, ‘do whatever is necessary, just get the job done,’ them in the aftermath they turn back and launch an investigation in order to distance themselves in the very actions they precipitated and approved of at the time. Writing about Senator Dianne Feinstein, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is behind the report and its release yesterday, Gerson writes,

“Dianne Feinstein, the outgoing chair of the committee, was thought to be more responsible. But her legacy is a massive dump of intelligence details useful to the enemy in a time of war. And she knows the likely results. Secretary of State John Kerry expressed the concerns of allies about increased violence. A National Intelligence Council report warned of threats to embassies, installations and individuals, and explored how partners would react to the disclosure.

He then writes,

“Tension with the CIA? Simple stubbornness? The main reason, I suspect, is different. Democrats who approved of enhanced interrogation at the time (such as Feinstein) must now construct an elaborate fantasy world in which they were not knowledgeable and supportive. They postulate a new reality in which they were innocent and deceived — requiring a conspiracy from three former CIA directors, three former deputy directors and hundreds of others.”

Perhaps the most authoritative word against the report came from a former Democratic senator and a former member of the same committee who has now openly questioned the motives and the actions of his former Democratic colleagues.

Writing for USA Today Senator Bob Kerrey, that is former Senator Bob Kerrey, says that this is a partisan report that fails America. He begins his article writing,

“I regret having to write a piece that is critical of the Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Most of them are former colleagues and friends. I hope they will remain friends after reading this.”

He also writes about the war on terror that the United States now faces and says,

“I also do not have to wait to know we are fighting a war that is different than any in our country’s past. The enemy does not have an easy to identify and analyze military. In the war against global jihadism, human intelligence and interrogation have become more important, and I worry that the partisan nature of this report could make this kind of collection more difficult.”

He then writes, and this is very important,

“I do not need to read the report to know that the Democratic staff alone wrote it. The Republicans checked out early when they determined that their counterparts started out with the premise that the CIA was guilty and then worked to prove it”

Senator Kerrey, again remember a former Democratic member not only of the Senate but of this select committee, then wrote,

“When Congress created the intelligence committees in the 1970′s, the purpose was for people’s representatives to stand above the fray and render balanced judgments about this most sensitive aspect of national security. This committee departed from that high road and slipped into the same partisan mode that marks most of what happens on Capitol Hill these days.”

One of Senator Kerrey’s main concerns in this report is that the fact that the committee did not talk to anyone from the CIA, they didn’t garner no testimony, had no conversation with anyone, conducted no interviews, means that they were simply drawing inferences from documentary material; documenting material that was supplied by the CIA for an investigation about the CIA, often dealing with materials that can only be interpreted and understood by the CIA.

Furthermore, the report that was released yesterday to the public represent something like 10 to 15% of a report that is thousands of pages long. So the American people are being sent a report that is highly redacted, highly chosen, and highly partisan. Does that mean therefore that we should reject everything that it addresses? From the Christian worldview perspective, assuredly not. It is very important we place this report in the partisan context out of which it has emerged. It is even more importantly that we place the support within the Christian worldview context that is our primary consideration and that raises the ultimate moral question. Is torture ever justified? And the answer to that must be almost assuredly no. No policy should ever justify the use of torture under any circumstance for any reason. But as Augustine, that great church father of the fifth century helped us to understand, in a fallen world even policies often fall apart in light of horrifying challenges. Sometimes that which is not policy, in which no policy should ever allow, happens because it simply is required by the circumstances in terms of an even more horrifying evil.

The worst part, in terms of the release of the report yesterday in the name of the American people, is that the American people, even after the release of this report, are simply unable to draw any rational conclusions about what actually took place in Afghanistan and Iraq and even more dangerously, we are unable to draw any policy recommendations about what should be done in the future. And that Senator Kerrey says, is the ultimate failure of this report. If it indeed documented everything it claims to have documented, why are there no recommendations? It is sheer cowardice for United States Senate Committee to release a report it says is this important that includes absolutely no policy recommendations about what to do in response. It has to make you wonder once again just how much credibility and confidence the committee itself has in its own report.

This is not the main issue I intended to discuss on The Briefing today and it is a horrifying issue, it simply staggers the Christian moral imagination sometimes to come to a realization in a fallen world of the things that are done on our behalf by those who are acting for our aid. But from a Christian worldview perspective we must understand there is no Christian rationale for the use of torture under any circumstances imaginable. But Christians must also be very candid and honest to say that we can conceive that there just might be circumstances in something like the war on terror in which one horrifyingly, even immoral thing, may be outweighed by an even more horrifying more immoral reality and that leads us to the final consideration which is it is very dangerous for any of us to either wash our hands as if we have no responsibility in this that is done in our name, nor to pose as if we do not know, as even the Democratic majority that released this report from that Senate committee yesterday must know and even will privately concede, these things happened in our name and at the time even some of the people who are now releasing this report in trying to distance himself from these procedures approved of them at the time.

Let’s remember that it was a Republican member of the Senate, Sen. John McCain, who nonetheless took to the floor yesterday in the Senate in order to clear in unequivocal terms with the credibility that only he possesses that the use of torture under any circumstances is immoral and wrong. That requires no partisan analysis and simply affirms what Christians must always understand; that is, when we pray that prayer ‘Even so Lord, come quickly,’ it’s because we know and we cannot not know that horrifying things are done in our name for our protection even by our own country.

2) Article notes rising denial of liberty by same sex marriage advocates

Next, a major British newsmagazine, the Spectator has run an important article with the headline “Gay Marriage and the Death of Freedom.” The subtitle of the article; “Rather than striking a blow for individual liberties, the dogma of gay marriage is stifling them.” It’s written by journalist Brendan O’Neill. He speaks about the theme of at least some in the effort to promote same-sex marriage under the banner of freedom to marry. He then writes,

“I hate to rain on this fabulous parade, but there’s a massive problem with this happy-clappy rallying cry. And it’s this: everywhere gay marriage has been introduced it has battered freedom, not boosted it. Debate has been chilled, dissenters harried, critics tear-gassed. Love and marriage might go together like horse and carriage, but freedom and gay marriage certainly do not. The double-thinking ‘freedom to marry’ has done more to power the elbow of the state than it has to expand the liberty of men and women.
There are awkward questions the ‘freedom to marry’ folks just can’t answer. Like: if gay marriage is a liberal cause, how come it’s been attended by authoritarianism wherever it’s been introduced?”

This is a pretty straightforward article. Its language is rather unusually candid and it’s right to the point. O’Neill writes,

“Consider France. Hundreds of thousands of French people — or ‘bigots’, as the gay-marriage lobby brands anyone who disagrees with it — marched against the legalisation of gay marriage in 2013. And they were beaten and tear-gassed by riot cops. Parisians in t-shirts celebrating traditional marriage were arrested for holding ‘unauthorised protests’. In the words of Parisian writer John Laughland, critics of gay marriage were turned into ‘ideological enemies’ of the French state. It’s a funny expansion of freedom that so violently pummels the right to protest.”

Or, he says, consider America (and rumor this is written by an Australian writing for a British newsmagazine).

“Consider America. The authorities there haven’t had to whip out their truncheons because non-state mobs have policed the opponents of gay marriage on their behalf. In the words of the author Damon Linker, a supporter of gay marriage, Americans who raise even a peep of criticism of gay marriage face ‘ostracism from public life’. We saw this with the medieval hounding of Brendan Eich out of his job at Mozilla after it was revealed that — oh, the humanity! — he isn’t a massive fan of gays getting married. Linker says the gay-marriage brigade has created a menacing climate, where the aim seems to be to ‘stamp out rival visions’. Americans who fail to bow at the altar of same-sex hitching, from wedding photographers to cake-makers, are harassed and boycotted and sometimes put out of business. The ‘freedom to marry’ clearly trumps the freedom of conscience.”

O’Neill then considers similar situations in Great Britain and elsewhere. Then he writes,

“Twenty-five years ago, American thinker Christopher Lasch argued that ‘progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order’.”

That’s a profoundly important sentence from a profoundly important thinker, Christopher Lasch. O’Neill then says,

“Bingo! There’s no better description of gay marriage.”

Let me repeat Christopher Lasch’s words; he said that’ progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.’ In this case a new moral order represented most importantly by the legalization of same-sex marriage. O’Neill then writes,

“There’s no better description of gay marriage. Here, too, progressive-sounding rhetoric is really the dolling-up of our atomised, risk-averse societies’ growing disdain for those deep relationships in which families and communities traditionally socialised the next generation, mostly away from the prying eyes of the state. This is why the gay-marriage campaign is so contradictorily illiberal, so hostile to dissent, and so attractive to petty-authoritarian politicians: because it isn’t about expanding liberty at all; it’s about unilaterally overhauling the moral outlook of the traditionalist sections of society and elevating the commitment-phobic, passion-lite, short-termist values of the chattering classes instead.”

It’s simply important at this point to say that Brendan O’Neill has the situation clearly in view. This is not a movement towards greater human liberty but less human liberty, and it is because of something Brendan O’Neill does not actually acknowledge – perhaps because he doesn’t know it. That is something that is known to Christians operating out of the Christian worldview, and that is this: there can be no true liberty at the expense of a genuine morality. There can be no expansion of liberty at the cost of the destruction of the institutions that make human society possible. The intentional, willful destruction of marriage – of the traditional patterns and institutions of child rearing, indeed of the family – the marginalization of these very important institutions at the heart and center of human existence will come not with an expansion of true human liberty but with the loss of so most important and precious liberties known to us.

The Christian worldview affirms not only that it will happen, but why that must happen. And it is simply because if you reject the very structures of creation that God is given, you cannot possibly expand true liberty in any honest sense.

2) Article notes rising denial of liberty by same sex marriage advocates

But finally we turn to the same issue as it is continuing to illuminate the deep theological and worldview divisions in American religion. The Kentucky Baptist Convention here in the state recently earned sneering headlines in the secular press for having dis-fellowshipped –  that is withdrawn fellowship – from a local congregation here in Louisville. The church with the Crescent Hill Baptist Church very close here to Southern Seminary and in previous times close in more ways than mere proximity. The action undertaken by the Kentucky Baptist Convention was in light of its convictions upholding the biblical understanding of human sexuality. And yet it came at the expense of an enormous outrage from the secular press, and from even at least one government agency here in Kentucky. But it came after the Crescent Hill congregation had determined that it was going to be ‘open and affirming’ of those in homosexual behaviors and homosexual relationships.

Sunday’s edition of the Louisville newspaper, the Courier-Journal included a major article by Tina Ward-Pugh. It’s identified as a special to the Courier-Journal. She spent 12 years as an elected official in the Louisville Metro Council and yet the article in the newspaper doesn’t have to do with her role as a public official, but rather with the fact that she and her partner Laura Hodges-Ryan were married in a ceremony Crescent Hill Baptist Church on November 29. A close look at the article indicates that they were legally married in the state of Maryland some time ago. They were legally married there because Kentucky did not then nor now have legal same-sex marriage.

Tina Ward-Pugh then writes,

“Considering the fact, however, that it took centuries for the church, and in particular Baptists, to even begin acknowledging that the love between two people of the same sex is to be embraced, how wonderfully radical is it then that a Baptist church would actually fully bless that love through the ceremony of marriage.”

And that took place, she says, on November 29. Later in her article she writes,

“As we were growing to understand ourselves and our love, our community, our world and our church were also growing in their understanding that we are all God’s people. And make no mistake, during that time of growth, the church, by its not progressing in more fully understanding God, has alienated many of its own believers and countless more who wouldn’t even give her consideration because the pain of rejection was simply too great to bear. We were two of those people. And there were others at Crescent Hill Baptist Church on Saturday who continue to feel alienated by the church’s infantile understanding of God. It is our hope that the church’s embrace of our relationship will serve as a measure of hope for others.”

Tina Ward-Pugh writes of what she calls her own awakening to the legitimacy of same-sex behaviors and same-sex relationships. She writes,

“I regard my “awakening” during grad school as life-saving in a number of ways. And while I came to more fully understand God’s love for me regarding my sexuality, it was the revelation of how the world — and the church — treated girls and women as second-class citizens that has shaped my life since then,”

The woman who officiated at the ceremony was the Rev. Dr. Johanna W.H. van Wijk-Bos, identified as a longtime professor at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary and a friend of the couple.

There are some stories it very close to home, and in this case this one’s exceedingly close to home, because this church is very close to the campus of Southern Seminary and for many years had one of the closest relationships between the school and a congregation imaginable. Bob Allen writes about this in particular about Tina Ward-Pugh in an article for Baptist News Global that appeared yesterday, in which he writes,

“A Southern Baptist Theological Seminary alumna who went on to become the first openly gay elected official in Louisville, Ky., walked the aisle Nov. 29 with her partner of more than 15 years in a wedding ceremony at Crescent Hill Baptist Church, a congregation recently kicked out of the Kentucky Baptist Convention for welcoming and affirming LGBT members.”

Tina Ward-Pugh is identified in the article correctly is a 1991 Master of Social Work graduate of Southern Seminary. She says, according to the article to her awakening a better sexuality occurred after she graduated from Belmont University and came to Southern Seminary, where she says she enrolled and graduated in the period she identifies as ‘BF.’ That means ‘Before the Fall,’ that is, before the conservative realignment of this institution.

In a video testimonial from 2012, according to Baptist News Global she said,

“What I quickly understood about God in the professors that I had and their relationship with God and understanding was radically different from what one typically hears, especially now, in Southern Baptist circles and other more conservative circles about issues of sexuality,”

As I said, this new story hits very close to home – after all the description here of ‘Before the Fall’ relates to my personal leadership here at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and of the conservative redirection of the school over the last now 22 years. And there can be no doubt that people on opposite sides of this controversy will see what took place here at Southern Seminary as either the best or the worst thing imaginable. But those who supported the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention and the conservative recovery of Southern Seminary did so precisely out of the fear that what was being taught here back then would result in exactly what we read about in the headlines now. There’s is a particular responsibility that falls to evangelicals in general, to Southern Baptists specifically, and in this case most importantly, to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to be very honest about the fact that the issues at stake are just this stark and just this urgent.

To follow the logic of what was taught back then is to result in the headlines we read even now. And the only way to avoid that was to change fundamentally what was being taught within the institution’s life. Once again, if you’re the other side of this controversy you see that entire process as the fall of the institution. Thus the language of Tina Ward-Pugh. On the other hand, those who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, and in the importance of upholding the faith once for all delivered to the saints understand that avoiding those headlines in our own churches and in our schools now was worth whatever price had to be paid for the recovery of these institutions a generation ago.

But these headlines also remind us of the issues are not over, the controversy has not ended and the challenge continues. So when evangelical Christians, Southern Baptists and others in this generation wonder what’s at stake, well just look at headlines like this to remind us all too painfully what’s at stake.

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

The Briefing 12-10-14

1) CIA torture report fails to provide recommendations in response to brutalities

Senate report on CIA program details brutality, dishonesty, Washington Post (Greg Miller, Adam Goldman, and Julie Tate)

Releasing the Feinstein report is an act of exceptional recklessness, Washington Post (Michael Gerson)

Partisan torture report fails America, USA Today (Bob Kerrey)

2) Article notes rising denial of liberty by same sex marriage advocates

Gay marriage and the death of freedom, The Spectator (Brendan O’Neill)

3) Former SBC church performs same sex ceremony; revealing importance of theology

Wedding marks a journey for couple, church, Louisville Courier-Journal (Tine Ward-Pugh)

Kentucky human-rights head commends Crescent Hill, Baptist News-Global (Bob Allen)

Letter | Crescent Hill Baptist, Louisville Courier-Journal (George W. Stinson)

Transcript: The Briefing 12-09-14

The Briefing

 

December 9, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, December 9, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Rise of young Western Islamists result of disillusionment with secular worldview

Those who rule the worldview and the narrative of the rising generation eventually rule the future. Keep that in mind when you consider the headlines now coming out of Canada. Here’s one from one of Canada’s major newspapers, the National Post; the headline, “John Maguire and ISIS Fighter from Ottawa Appears on Video Warning Canada of Attacks ‘Where it Hurts you the Most’.” Stewart Bell reporting for the National Post tells us that,

“ISIS attempted to incite further attacks against Canadians…, issuing a propaganda video in which an Ottawa extremist scolded the government for joining the international military coalition fighting the terrorist group.”

The video’s about six minutes long and in the video this former Canadian, still a Canadian citizen, said that Canadians would be indiscriminately targeted, that Muslims were obliged to either to join ISIS or to follow the example of the terrorist group who struck in Ottawa just a matter of weeks ago.

The young man, known as John Maguire, said to his fellow Muslims there in Canada,

“You either pack your bags, or prepare your explosive devices. You either purchase your airline ticket, or you sharpen your knife,”

The young man identifies himself on the video as Abu Anwar al-Canadi, but former friends have recognized him as John Maguire – a dropout from the University of Ottawa who converted to Islam and became radicalized. Last year at some point he vanished, now to appear in this ISIS video.

As the National Post reports,

“[Maguire] looking gaunt and sounding alien to those who knew him in Canada …. Read from a script [apparently] The camera shots appeared to be staged to show ruined buildings and a mosque dome in the background.”

The Post goes on to say the video is a part of a propaganda push by ISIS that appears  to be designed to attract recruits and use the threat of terrorism to deter the US-led air campaign that has killed hundreds of fighters and, according to military officials, stalled the group’s advance.

One of the most interesting comments in the story comes from Professor Amarnath Amarasingam of the Dalhousie University Resilience Research Centre there in Canada. He said,

“It follows quite closely to the theme of a variety of videos aimed at Western audiences, like the video aimed at French Muslims a few weeks ago,”

The professor went on to say,

“The interrelated themes are of course ones of religious obligation: if a caliphate has been established and Muslims have been persecuted by the state you are living in, you are required to leave the state you are living in. The risk of staying is hellfire. Maguire’s video is similar to the video aimed at French Muslims, asking a simple question: what are you waiting for?”

You’ll recall that back in October Canada was roiled by the fact that at least two separate killings of Canadian force members had taken place; one in Québec, one in Ottawa – both by men who had converted to Islam and joined the Islamic radicalism movement. But the video by John Maguire – again he’s not identified by that name but rather by an Islamic name in the video – is different in that he is clearly seeking to identify with young Canadians – in particular, young Canadian Muslims. He says,

“I was one of you. I was a typical Canadian. I grew up on the hockey rink and spent my teenage years on stage playing guitar. [He said] I had no criminal record. I was a bright student and maintained a strong GPA in university. So how could one of your people end up in my place? And why is it that your own people are the ones turning against you at home? The answer is [says the young man] that we have accepted the true call of the prophets and messengers of God.”

A quick look at the video tells you a great deal of the story. The young man appears, whether he is known by his Islamic name or by the Canadian named John Maguire, as clearly very young. Indeed given the fact that one of the obligations of young Muslim men is to grow a beard, it’s clear that this young man’s having difficulty growing a full beard. But even more haunting is a photograph that appears in the National Post coverage of John Maguire as a young boy – perhaps aged 12 to 13. He appears just like any other normal Canadian boy, and that’s exactly what he’s trying now to use as the point of argument in his recruitment video. He says, ‘I was just like one of you but something changed.’

The something that is changed, according to his logic, is that you now have the Western nations, by his own logic, that are involved in this conflict with Islam. And his logic is very clear: Canadian Muslims, whether they are born into a Muslim tradition or whether they convert, have an obligation greater than their obligation to Canada – that is their obligation to Islam. And that obligation to Islam means that they must now see Canada as an enemy even if they are Canadian citizens. And the radicalization is made very clear when he asked the question, ‘what are you waiting for?’ in order for these young Canadians with him to join the radicalistic movement and to join in killing Canadians.

But this story is not limited to Canada. As a matter fact, Saturday’s edition of the New York Times had a story with the headline, “Britain Puts 2 in Prison after Return from Syria.” In this case, it’s about two young men who are both 22 years old, who had left United Kingdom, had gone to Syria or the other parts in the Middle East, had been engaged in terrorist activities with extremist groups, and then came back to the United Kingdom. Once they arrive back in the UK their own families assisted police in placing them under arrest. They were both sentenced to 12 years in prison for their participation in terrorism.

But as the New York Times article makes abundantly clear, the big concern in the United Kingdom is not just over these two but about the ones who have not returned home and have not been arrested – perhaps not even identified. There is no doubt that there is something now of a steady stream of very young Britons going to joining group such as ISIS.

And it’s not just Canada and United Kingdom; the New York Times also last week had a major new story on France – the headline in this article, “A French Town Reels after Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently to Join Jihadists.”  We talked about this on The Briefing as there had been various media reports of teenage girls and young women, primarily we should note teenage girls who had been leaving France and Britain in order to joining the Islamic movement as jihadi wives. As the Times reported last week,

“Experts say that the problem appears most severe in France, which has a large Muslim population from the Middle East and North Africa and where more than a hundred families,”

Now listen to that again,

“…more than a hundred famlies have been talking to experts to help them cope with their daughters’ growing radicalization.”

But American should find no confidence in the fact that these headlines have been from Canada and the UK and France because the same pattern is happening here. American intelligence officials have also indicated that there are a number of young Americans who are going to join these extremist groups. At this point it appears that most are young American men – teenage boys and young men – and most of them are converts to Islam, although some also come from enduring Islamic families. But the one thing common to all these media reports, whether it’s Canada or the United States or the United Kingdom or France, is the big question ‘why?’ ‘How could this be happening?’

Just recall the fact that we’re living in the 21st century, in the year 2014 in which the forces of modernity are supposed to a produced a new secular society in which at least in terms of these nations – Canada, the United States, Britain, and France – there shouldn’t be the kind of radicalized religious worldview that these young people are now joining and not only joining but being mobilized by in terms of becoming extremist, terrorist, even murderers. We need to recognize that when a picture of someone like John Maguire shows up in the national press, whether in Canada or in one of these other Western nations, this leads secular authorities to an absolute point of perplexity. How is it that our own children – remember that picture that appears in the National Post of John Maguire as a young boy – how can our own children turn into converts to Islam who then see the United States, France, the UK, or Canada, as an enemy.

At this point Christians thinking from a biblical worldview simply have an explanation the secular world does not have – and even if it heard it, it could not understand it based on its own first principles on the secular worldview. The Christian worldview makes very clear that human beings are not biological accidents but rather we are creatures, we are creatures made by the creator and we are made by the creator in his own image. Thus, amongst all the other artifacts of creation, all the other creatures, we are the only creature that is built with a moral conscience, that is made in the image of God, that is given the capacity to know him and is given a drive for stewardship and dominion that is made very clear and averse such as Genesis 1:28. But Christians operating out of a biblical worldview understand that the problem, in terms of understanding this, is at the very basis of understanding what it means to be human because the modern secular naturalistic understanding of the human as something of a biological accident simply can’t explain someone like John Maguire. Furthermore, the Christian worldview begins with the understanding that the human being is a creature, a creature unique amongst all the other parts of God’s creation in that the human creature is the only creature made in God’s image – thus given a moral capacity, a moral consciousness. Made in the image of God such that we alone are able to know the creator and we alone are morally accountable to Him. And then building on this we come to understand that God made the human creature desperate for a sense of meaning, desperate for a sense of purpose, desperate for a sense of mission. And the secular world simply shows itself to be incompetent and empty and sterile in producing the kind of meaning and mission and purpose that will invigorate a young generation.

In one sense, what we’re seeing in terms of these young radical converts to Islam is the fact that they have looked at the modern, sterile, consumer pop culture of the West and they have said that’s not worth living, it’s for is not worth dying for. Desperate for a search for passion and purpose and meaning, even mission, they are found that in Islam and thus they have become converts and with the zeal of converts they are now speaking to their fellow young Westerners saying, let’s just use the words of John Maguire, ‘what are you waiting for?’

The secular who are looking at this just wants to ask the obvious question, ‘what’s gone wrong?’ but they are unprepared for the answer. What’s gone wrong is the sterility of a modern secular Western worldview that simply doesn’t offer, in the long run, any lasting sense of purpose or mission or meaning. It’s not offering a credible alternative to that which is presented to many young people in the West by a resurgent Islam. And this is where Christian churches, Christian parents, Christians just observing the headlines, have to realize that a very deep an essential theological point is being driven home – tragically enough – in these headlines. We are made for purpose and we are made for mission and we know it. Whoever supplies the coming generation with that sense of mission, that sense of purpose, with the narrative of that kind of mission, is going to rule the future. With the explicit rejection of the Christian worldview and with the explicit embrace of a sterile secularism, the modern West is finding itself unable to mobilize its own young to defend themselves against this kind of resurgent worldview. So when you see the teenagers sitting at your dinner table, or sitting in the pew next to you at church, when you look in and see the youth group at your church, when you look in and see high school students talking on the street corner, just realize what you’re actually watching – you’re watching the future taking shape. Whatever narrative rules their hearts is going to rule the future and if Christians need any further impetus towards the education of our young in the truth and the gospel, and the absolute preaching of the gospel to our own young people, not just as an isolated set of truth but as a comprehensive worldview that comes with mission and purpose and passion, than just consider the story of John Maguire and ask why it’s not your own young person who is appearing in that video.

According to the secular press, these stories are a wake-up call for the security agencies of the Western world. But in a far more fundamental way these articles, these headlines, are wake-up call for the Christian church and for Christian parents. It’s one thing for secular analysts to be scratching their heads asking the question, ‘how did this happen?’ it’s another thing for all of us to watch those videos and listen to John Maguire ask the question posed to his fellow young Muslims in the West, ‘what you waiting for?’ I can only wonder if that question shouldn’t be pointed back at America’s Christian parents and Christian churches, ‘what are you waiting for?’

2) Former Muslim points to integral nature of Islamic theology to Islamist terrorism

Next I turn to a very important column in a related issue that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, in this case by popular author and columnist Thomas L Friedman; his headline, “How ISIS Drives Muslims from Islam.” He’s making the point that at least some, especially westernized Muslims, are looking at the picture of Islam presented by ISIS – the Islamic state – and they’re saying they want nothing to do with it – that’s good news. But Tom Friedman’s article leads us ask the question what’s going on here and how does this picture differ from the picture of John Maguire.

Thomas Friedman writes,

“On Nov. 24, BBC.com published a piece on what was trending on Twitter. It began: ‘A growing social media conversation in Arabic is calling for the implementation of Shariah, or Islamic law, to be abandoned. Discussing religious law is a sensitive topic in many Muslim countries. But on Twitter, a hashtag which translates as ‘why we reject implementing Shariah’ has been used 5,000 times in 24 hours. The conversation is mainly taking place in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The debate is about whether religious law is suitable for the needs of Arab countries and modern legal systems.’”

One of the most interesting aspects of Tom Friedman’s article is that he goes to some of the critics of Sharia law, some of the critics of Islamic extremism from within the world of Islam, he writes about Ismail Mohamed, an Egyptian he says,

“on a mission to create freedom of conscience there, started a program called ‘Black Ducks’ to offer a space where agnostic and atheist Arabs can speak freely about their right to choose what they believe and resist coercion and misogyny from religious authorities. He is part of a growing Arab Atheists Network.

Well let’s just pause for a moment and point to the obvious, and that is that there will be a fundamental misrepresentation of the picture here if we are lead to believe that there is a large growing group of atheists in the Muslim world or that they would be tolerated in any sense whatsoever. Anyone who has ever spent any time in the Islamic world would know that is fundamentally untrue, dangerously so.

Tom Friedman basically acknowledges this when he says the conversations taking place not in the public square per se but in social media, on the Internet where there is a degree of anonymity. But my reason for looking at this article is not to look to the first individual cited, but rather the second, known as Brother Rachid, a Moroccan who created his own YouTube network to deliver his message of tolerance and expose examples of intolerance within the Muslim faith community. By the way he’s identified as a man who was born into a Muslim family but converted to Christianity. But the primary interest of this section of Tom Friedman’s article is that this individual’s message is being directed not primarily at fellow Christians or his former fellow Muslims but rather at President Barack Obama, because he says President Obama is aiding and abetting Muslim extremism by refusing to deal with the fact that it is Islamic.

Now again, what makes this important is primarily that it is appeared in a column written by Tom Friedman in the New York Times. In this case the man known as Brother Rachid writes, and I quote,

“Dear Mr. President [speaking to President Obama], I must tell you that you are wrong about ISIL. You said ISIL speaks for no religion. I am a former Muslim. My dad is an imam. I have spent more than 20 years studying Islam. … I can tell you with confidence that ISIL speaks for Islam. … ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. … They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam. They are following Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in every detail. … They have called for a caliphate, which is a central doctrine in Sunni Islam.”

He continues,

“I ask you, Mr. President, to stop being politically correct — to call things by their names. ISIL, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al Shabab in Somalia, the Taliban, and their sister brand names, are all made in Islam. Unless the Muslim world deals with Islam and separates religion from state, we will never end this cycle. … If Islam is not the problem, then why is it there are millions of Christians in the Middle East and yet none of them has ever blown up himself to become a martyr, even though they live under the same economic and political circumstances and even worse? … Mr. President, if you really want to fight terrorism, then fight it at the roots. How many Saudi sheikhs are preaching hatred? How many Islamic channels are indoctrinating people and teaching them violence from the Quran and the hadith? … How many Islamic schools are producing generations of teachers and students who believe in jihad and martyrdom and fighting the infidels?”

Again the stunning thing about this column is that has appeared in the New York Times, the stunning thing about these comments is that the appeared in this kind of article. The stunning thing about this young man’s point is that he is claiming that theology actually matters and the issue in terms of Islamic terrorism can’t be removed from Islamic theology. That’s something Christians once again understand, we understand that theology always matters, it always matters especially when you have a situation in which there is an explicit theological identity that is quite obviously the common denominator here. That’s the point made explicitly by Brother Rachid, it’s the point that is being explicitly denied by those in the Western media the he says have become the enablers of Islamic terrorism. Brother Rachid’s point is well understood by Christians, he’s exactly right, you can’t possibly come to understand Islamic terrorism if you won’t deal with it as an issue of Islam. We can appreciate that kind of theological and worldview candor in the pages of the New York Times.

3) Zuckerberg’s mission to connect world to Facebook pale replacement for gospel

But finally, this concern for mission and purpose in life takes me to the current cover story of this weeks’ Time magazine. It’s about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, it’s entitled, “Half the World is Not Enough.” It talks about Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to get every human being on the earth online. The article is by Lev Grossman. This is the second cover story he’s done on Mark Zuckerberg and he talks about Zuckerberg’s plan for the future. He looks back over the first decade of Facebook noting that it grew like crazy. It has now grown to 1.35 billion users and 8,000 employees. In other words, Facebook right now involves about one quarter of the earth’s population. But Mark Zuckerberg, that’s not enough, it’s not nearly enough.

As a matter fact when it reached 1 billion about two years ago, Zuckerberg said,

“If your mission is to connect the world, then a billion might just be bigger than any other service that had been built. But that doesn’t mean that you’re anywhere near fulfilling the actual mission.”

Notice his explicit use of the word mission. Mark Zuckerberg, this cover story makes very clear, is driven by a mission. His mission is to get every single human being on the planet connected, and connected as you are already might have guessed, to Facebook. This challenge is pretty large, the population of the Earth is about 7.2 billion, there about 2.9 billion people on the Internet, that leaves, says Grossman, 4.3 billion people who are off-line and needs to be put online.

Grossman says this is absolutely perplexing to the folks in Silicon Valley who just can’t imagine there might be people who don’t want to be online. That becomes a very clear point when Grossman writes that about 85% of all human beings on the planet right now have access to the Internet and yet billions of them are not connecting to the Internet and they’re not connecting to Facebook. Grossman says maybe it’s that these people don’t have access to the technology itself – that is they don’t have enough money for a phone and for a plan – but he says maybe they don’t know enough about the Internet or maybe they do know enough about it and just don’t care because it’s totally irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. Mark Zuckerberg, this article makes clear, can’t imagine a human being who would actually see the Internet as irrelevant to their day-to-day lives.

Grossman’s article is really interesting. As I said, it’s his second cover story on Mark Zuckerberg in the last several years. He points to the fact that Zuckerberg and his plans for Facebook basically amount to a form of digital colonialism, he calls its colonialism 2.0. He states his concern very clearly. He says,

“There’s something distasteful about the whole business: a global campaign by a bunch of Silicon Valley jillionaires to convert literally everybody into data consumers, to make sure no eyeballs anywhere go unexposed to their ads. Everybody must be integrated into the vast cultural homogeneity that is the Internet.”

He calls it World War Z(uckerberg). But most interesting aspect of the articles is where Grossman himself says that Zuckerberg operates out of a rather superficial understanding of anthropology – that is of human beings. He says the human beings are basically driven by a need to connect. Grossman writes,

“One might argue that somebody who shapes the social lives of a billion people and counting ought to have a more finely wrought sense of human nature, a deeper appreciation for what is lost when a new technology becomes part of our lives as well as what is gained.”

That would certainly be nice, he says, but those kinds of people probably don’t start companies like Facebook.

My point in raising this article is to follow up the two previous stories by indicating once again that everybody’s driven by a purpose. Mark Zuckerberg’s sense of mission appears to get every single human being on the planet onto the Internet and not only on to the Internet but also participating in Facebook. That the great need of the world as he sees it. But of course my deeper purpose is this: we come to understand that Mark Zuckerberg is driven by this purpose, he’s driven by this mission, and he’s trying to come up with every strategy imaginable to succeed in it – to fulfill it.

Christians, to the contrary, are driven by the understanding that the great need of humanity is reconciliation with God and thus the gospel of Jesus Christ. The really humbling thing for us is whether we believe our mission with the intensity that Mark Zuckerberg does when it comes to Facebook. The real question for us is if we know that our gospel is the gospel that saves, how is it the Facebook might get there first? Perhaps the most important insight Christians can draw from this article is they’ll notice the passion that drives Mark Zuckerberg with his mission for Facebook. The real question for us is, what infinitely greater passion should drive Christians when it comes to the gospel of Jesus Christ?

 

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-09-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Rise of young Western Islamists result of disillusionment with secular worldview

ISIS fighter from Ottawa appears in video threatening Canada with attacks ‘where it hurts you the most’, National Post (Stewart Bell)

Britain Puts 2 in Prison After Return From Syria, New York Times (Stephen Castle and Melissa Eddy)

A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently to Join Jihadists, New York Times (Suzanne Daley and Maïa de la Baume)

2) Former Muslim points to integral nature of Islamic theology to Islamist terrorism

How ISIS Drives Muslims From Islam, New York Times (Thomas Friedman)

3) Zuckerberg’s mission to connect world to Facebook pale replacement for gospel

Inside Facebook’s Plan to Wire the World, TIME (Lev Grossman)

The Only Intelligible Explanation for the Incarnation: A. T. Robertson on the Virgin Birth of Christ

The Christmas season comes each year with the expected flurry of media attention to the biblical accounts of Christ’s conception and birth. The general thrust of the secular media is often incredulity toward the fact that so many people still believe the Bible’s accounts to be true. This year, the Pew Research Center released a report on Christmas Day indicating that almost 75% of the American people affirm belief in the virgin birth of Christ. Meanwhile, the Public Religion Research Institute found markedly lower levels of belief, with just under half affirming the historical accuracy of the biblical accounts. The PRRI research indicated that four in ten Americans believe the virgin birth to be part of a “theological story to affirm faith in Christ.”

In truth, the virgin conception of Jesus, which most respondents know as the “virgin birth,” is no latecomer to controversy and rejection. On April 11, 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to John Adams in which he discussed his views concerning Jesus Christ. Jefferson was already known for his denial of miracles and other claims of supernatural intervention in history and nature. In this letter to John Adams, he predicts the collapse of all belief in the virgin birth of Christ:

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.

Theological liberals deny the virgin birth as revealed truth; Thomas Jefferson saw the gospel accounts as “artificial scaffolding”; and modern Americans increasingly see the virgin birth as part of a “theological story” about Jesus.

Back in the early decades of the twentieth century, when theological liberals such as Harry Emerson Fosdick were denying the virgin birth, Baptist New Testament scholar A. T. Robertson rose to its defense. In a little 1925 book, The Mother of Jesus, Robertson isolated the alternatives: affirm the truth of the virgin conception of Christ or abandon any claim of incarnation.

Robertson, who was among the most famous scholars of his day, taught at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1888 until 1934. He understood exactly what was at stake. The modernists, as theological liberals liked to be known, accepted a distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” They wanted to present a Jesus worthy of moral emulation, but not a supernatural Christ who was God in human flesh. In between, theological “moderates” attempted a compromise between orthodoxy and heresy, offering a Jesus who was supernatural, but not too supernatural. They were eager to reject the virgin birth but tried to hold to other facts of the incarnation. Robertson saw through both the modernists and the moderates. Neither presented a Jesus who was truly God in human flesh.

As Robertson understood, the virgin conception of Christ is both fundamental and necessary to the New Testament’s presentation of Christ.

He also saw what others try not to admit: if Jesus was not conceived by the Holy Spirit, then he had a human father. Without the virgin birth, there is no explanation for the incarnation. If Jesus had a merely human father, there is no authentic connection to the incarnational theology of Paul and John in the New Testament. All that remains is some attempt to claim that Jesus was a mere human being who had a unique divine mission, or who was uniquely God conscious, or who was somehow adopted by the Father into a form of deity. All of these are heretical Christs, and none of these can save.

The incarnation is itself supernatural in every respect. “If we believe in a real incarnation of Christ, we cannot logically object to the virgin birth on the ground of the supernatural feature in it,” Robertson insisted. Here he was targeting the “moderates,” who wanted a supernatural Jesus, but not too supernatural. They wanted to maintain a claim to the incarnation and the resurrection, but not to miracles and the virgin birth. Robertson saw their problem clearly: they were undercutting the very truths they claimed to defend. If the virgin birth is out, so is any New Testament claim of authentic incarnation.

He referred to the “common Unitarian view” that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus and responded, “If we take Joseph to be the actual father of Jesus, we are compelled to be illogical if we hold to the deity of Jesus, or consider Jesus as merely a man.”

Robertson also defended the accounts found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and tied them to incarnational affirmations in the Gospel of John and the writings of Paul. As Robertson asserted, “the whole New Testament presents Jesus Christ as the Son of God, once Incarnate, and now Risen and on the Throne of Glory with the Father.”

If the virgin birth is just part of a “theological story,” then we are not saved, for only the Incarnate God-Man can save.  President Jefferson’s Jesus leaves a moral example, but cannot save us from our sins. The Jesus of the modernists was a mere man and the Jesus of the moderates possessed some kind of deity. The Jesus of the New Testament—all of the New Testament—saves to the uttermost.

And as for the virgin birth, A. T. Robertson said it best: “The virgin birth is the only intelligible explanation of the Incarnation ever offered.” And so it is, and ever was, and always will be.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler

For more information on Southern Seminary, visit SBTS.edu and for more information on Boyce College, visit BoyceCollege.com.

A. T. Robertson, The Mother of Jesus: Her Problems and Her Glory (New York: George H. Doran, 1925).

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823.

“December PRRI/RNS Religion News Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, Tuesday, December 17, 2013.

“Most Americans Believe in Jesus’ Virgin Birth,” Pew Research Center, Wednesday, December 25, 2013.

Transcript: The Briefing 12-08-14

The Briefing

 

December 8, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, December 8, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Democrats lose last Senate seat in South due to accelerating secular agenda

The political event of the weekend was the defeat of three-term Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who went down to a 57-43 loss to Representative Bill Cassidy in the runoff from the November 4 midterm election. In terms of congressional math, this solidifies the new Republican majority in the United States Senate but the bigger issues from a worldview and from a cultural perspective come down to what this means in terms of the region, the Democratic Party, and the future.

Mary Landrieu did serve three full terms in the United States Senate. Furthermore, she came from what amounts to political royalty in the state of Louisiana. Her brother is the current mayor of the city of New Orleans, her father was a prominent politician, and Mary Landrieu has been herself on so many ballots in Louisiana in recent cycles that, for many people, it would’ve been inconceivable, even just a couple of years ago, that she could lose an election like this. And yet she has, and she lost it rather spectacularly.

Political observers knew that she was going to lose, or at least was very likely to lose, when the Democratic Senatorial committee pulled its advertising funds out of the race even though it was the last major race standing. Political pundits will be looking at this for some time; they will do an analysis of the campaign and try to come to some political science explanation of why Mary Landrieu lost. But the New York Times actually got to the most important issues even before the election took place on Saturday and they did so giving careful attention not only to the political dimension but to the cultural and worldview issues at stake also.

But in the middle of last week Nate Cohn writing for the New York Times, even before Saturday’s election, pointed to what Mary Landrieu’s defeat would mean – it would mean that there is now no Democratic member of the United States Senate from the South; and defining it out this way means all the way from North Carolina to the state of Texas. If you draw a line between North Carolina and Texas you would not find one state that has even one Democratic member of the United States Senate. Furthermore, as he writes, the disappearance of southern Democratic conservatives means that there are very few members of the House of Representatives than Democratic Party in the same states. And furthermore, where there are Democratic members they are almost always in order defined as majority minority districts.

In his opening paragraph Cohn writes,

“After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly told a fellow Democrat that the party had lost the South for a long time to come. It took more than a generation for old Southern loyalties to the Democrats to fade, but that vision is on the verge of being realized this weekend.”

And of course it was. And if you read the opening of Nate Cohn’s article it appears that, in terms of his analysis of this, it all comes down to race but by the time you end the article you have a very different picture. Cohn writes,

“Mary Landrieu, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, lost re-election in Saturday’s runoff election, as expected [and we insert, as she did], the Republicans vanquished the last vestige of Democratic strength in the once solidly Democratic Deep South. In a region stretching from the high plains of Texas to the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas, Republicans control not only every Senate seat, but every governor’s mansion and every state legislative body.”

Now if we just step back for a moment to get some historical perspective, Nate Cohn goes to exactly the right place, which is 1964 in that comment made by then-President Lyndon Johnson. He did say it’s rumored that Georgia Senator, Richard Russell, that the Democratic Party had lost the South for a generation because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his leadership in that vote. But a historical perspective also requires us to realize that that was fully 50 years ago. And as Nick Cohn indicates, there’s something a lot more than the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at stake here. As a matter fact, that 50 year perspective reminds us that for most of the last 50 years, and that means all the way to Saturday, at least some Democratic strength was still found in the solid South. But it began to evaporate. First in terms of presidential elections when Democratic candidates began to lose the southern states they had accounted on for many decades. And then there came another blockbuster and that was the fact that as you had the South becoming more Republican, you also had Democrats becoming far more liberal; something that Nate Cohn acknowledges in his article.

If you go back to 1964, Democrats held or controlled nearly every southern state and southern state legislature. And again to his credit, Nick Cohen indicates that the big issue here really isn’t the matter of the Civil Rights Act but rather the culture wars that have so characterized the last several decades. For instance, in his article he writes,

“Today’s national Democratic Party is as unpopular in the South today as it has ever been, in no small part because the party has embraced a more secular agenda,”

He then quotes Professor Merle Black, he’s a professor of political science at Emory University and he is well regarded in terms of his observation of politics in the South, and he said,

“It’s a completely different party than it was 20 or 30 years ago. When the Democratic Party and its candidates become more liberal on culture and religion, that’s not a party that’s advocating what these whites value or think.”

He was speaking in particular of the white voters in the South. Again while acknowledging the racial issues that are in play in politics in the north and the South, but especially in the South, he also writes, and this is very important,

“Yet nonracial factors are most of the reason for Mr. Obama’s weakness. The long-term trends are clear. Mr. Kerry, for instance, fared worse than Michael Dukakis among most white Southerners, often losing vast swaths of traditionally Democratic countryside where once-reliably Democratic voters had either died or become disillusioned by the party’s stance on cultural issues.

Pay close attention to the following statement. He writes,

“It seems hard to argue that the Democrats could have retained much support among rural, evangelical Southern voters as the party embraced liberalism on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.”

This article is important because it does get down to the worldview issues that are being played out in terms of the political headlines. And also because Nick Cohn in this case offers a very insightful analysis of what’s really going on. He concludes the article,

“It remains to be seen whether Republicans will continue to fare so well after Mr. Obama leaves the White House. Yet a Democratic rebound seems unlikely anytime soon. With Republicans now holding the advantage of incumbency, unless the region’s religiosity dims or the Democrats relent on their full-throated embrace of cultural liberalism, it may be theirs for a generation.”

What’s really important here is the diagnosis of why the Democratic Party has loss so much support in the South. And in this case not only Merle Black but Nate Cohn himself, in terms of the analysis offered, says it comes down to the culture wars and it comes down to the great cultural controversies of the last several decades. And the two things in particular that both men mention and that is the cultural liberalism when it comes to so many social issues now embraced by the Democratic Party, and furthermore what lies even more fundamentally at stake and that is the secularism of the party, also openly embraced at great cost in the South.

For much of the last two decades or so political scientist have been talking about the Republican Party growing more conservative. And yet political scientists are now pointing to something they really hadn’t noticed and that was that the Democratic Party has become even more liberal than the Republican Party has become conservative. So what we’re looking at here in terms of the cultural, social, and worldview issues at stake is a divide that is growing so wide that you’re finding Americans who really aren’t having any kind of hard decision whatsoever when they go to an election such as the citizens of Louisiana did this past Saturday. They’re going to elect a United States Senator in a runoff election but as they understood they are also going to elect a worldview, to elect an understanding of life, to elect a basic ideological and philosophical definition of reality.

Sociologist, news media types, and political scientist may debate this election in the larger pattern for any number of years to come. But right now Nate Cohn makes a very important point, and he makes it especially for the Democratic Party – if the party continues to hold to what he calls their “full throated embrace of cultural liberalism,” those are his words, it’s likely to be doomed in the South. And furthermore, even though this is not addressed in this article, this is what is costing the Democratic Party coast-to-coast, north to south, in so many districts and in so many states.

We understand that worldview matters and it always matters and it matters supremely in something like the political decision that was made by voters in Louisiana last Saturday. But it’s also very important to note that these same issues are now lining up to frame the coming 2016 presidential election. And most observers of the Democratic Party are suggesting that the only real conflict in that party is likely to be between the left and the further left, leading us to wonder, in terms of that party, whether it’s going to become even more full throated, to use Nick Cohn’s term, in terms of its embrace of cultural liberalism.

Before leaving the article it’s just very important to note that even here in the New York Times, even in this very important article, the link between secularism – that is a secular worldview – and political and cultural liberalism is made abundantly clear – and not only by the author of the article but also by the political scientist he quoted, Merle Black. That’s an important thing for them to observe, it’s an even more important thing for Christians to observe.

2) Unraveling of UVA rape story reveals importance of truth in confronting tragedy of rape 

Speaking of the culture, the big controversy over the weekend has to do with the magazine cover story that appears now to be falling apart but the controversy is only growing hotter. And this controversy is one that Christians have to watch with many different dimensions of concern. The article headline in the New York Times on Saturday was, “Report of Rape at a Fraternity Begins to Fray.” The article is by Richard Pérez-Peña and Ravi Somaiya, it’s datelined Charlottesville, Virginia and the reporters write,

“An account of sexual assault in Rolling Stone magazine that shook the University of Virginia and horrified readers showed signs of crumbling on Friday as the magazine admitted to doubts about its report of a premeditated gang rape at a fraternity party and the fraternity issued its first rebuttal of some details.”

The reporters go on to say that,

“Rolling Stone’s backpedaling came after … days of critiques that questioned aspects of its article about a woman who asked to be called Jackie, and concessions by campus activists against sexual assault that they had doubts about some parts of her account.”

On Friday Rolling Stone magazine published a note to readers from its managing editor, Will Dana who stated,

 

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.”

 

Now it’s hard to come up with an issue that is more morally significant than rape and certainly the kind of premeditated organized rape that was described in the Rolling Stone article. But before we go any further we need to place this in the context of the ongoing controversy about sexual morality and especially the issue of rape on America’s college and University campuses. There have been outlandish claims made of late, including the claim now often repeated in the media, that one out of five young women is raped during the college experience. Now I say that’s outlandish because I don’t believe virtually anyone, even those repeating it, believe it to be true. That’s not to say that rape is not a crisis and that it is not altogether to pervasive, it’s not to say that it’s not an institutional responsibility, it is to say that the truth really matters and it really matters when a story like this begins to unravel.

Just to the issue bluntly, by the way, in the one out of five claims, I don’t believe that America’s parents would actually send their daughters to colleges and universities if they for a second believed that kind of claim. Nor, I would add, would law enforcement officials allow such a crime ridden environment to continue – not with those kinds of numbers. The numbers are assuredly horrifying but it’s also horrifying when the truth is treated so superficially. And that gets to the heart of the controversy that erupted in such a hot and very important way over the weekend because as it turned out Rolling Stone magazine has had to admit, in terms of successive clarifications, that it didn’t fact check the story, that it allowed the woman named Jackie in the story – acknowledging that’s a pseudonym – to tell the story and then to ask the reporter, who it also turns out, was looking for the story, not to fact check and not to talk to those that she had accused of raping her. Rolling Stone now admits that that was a problem. Now, recall that on Friday when it released its clarification it stated, and I want to repeat the words,

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,”

Notice the next words very carefully,

“…and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.”

Keep those words in mind as you hear that late last night Rolling Stone issued another clarification and this time not blaming the young women at the heart of the story, but rather taking responsibility, saying,

“These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening.”

Frederic Frommer, reporting for the Associated Press on Rolling Stone’s clarification of last night, suggests quite openly that the magazine issued the second clarification because it got so much heat for the first one. And, as he says here, the magazine struck some critics as “blaming the victim.” That’s some of the new language of the new sexual morality and it’s laden with all kinds of moral importance.

That term ‘blaming the victim’ first emerged out of conversations in the aftermath of the so-called Moynihan Report on race from the 1960s when as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then working as a domestic policy advisor in the Nixon White House, pointed to spiraling pathologies in the nation’s African-American communities – even documenting the truth –  but Moynihan, in tremendous controversy, even though he later became a very liberal Democratic Senator from New York (indeed he held the seat was later taken by Hillary Rodham Clinton) –  Moynihan, it was accused, had blamed the victims even by documenting the kinds of pathologies that he did in the report that later, at least popularly, bore his name. But in this case the use of the language ‘blaming the victim’ is being put into the larger context of what is being described as a rape culture in America’s college and University campuses. The most distressing part of the controversy over the weekend however is the fact that, at least for some people, the truth itself no longer really matters – what they really care about is what they claim is the larger truth that these kind of sexual assaults do happen.

Without going into the details of the story and the now described discrepancies, these things are frankly too graphic for this discussion, the reality is that the story indeed is falling apart. Indeed it’s falling apart spectacularly so much so that Rolling Stone magazine has had to basically retract the story in a large sense by offering these two successive clarifications. Furthermore, even the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, other major media sources, are beginning to look at the story and note that it was, in its essence, irresponsible journalism from the start.

The reporter for Rolling Stone was Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She is described, in terms of the media, as a veteran reporter on these kinds of stories. However, as the editors of the Wall Street Journal noted also on Saturday, and I quote,

“The larger problem, however, is that Ms. Erderly was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative—in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem. As the Washington Post noted in an admiring profile of Ms. Erdely, she interviewed students at several elite universities before alighting on UVA [that’s the University of Virgina] ‘a public school, Southern and genteel.’”

In other words, say the editors,

“Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory. She appears to have been looking for a story to fit the current popular liberal belief that sexual assault is pervasive and pervasively covered-up.”

Looking at the national media coverage, it is really interesting to see how difficult the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so many other newspapers have found covering this story and the fact that it’s falling apart – because the very accusations made against the University of Virginia are now, they feared, to be made against themselves in terms of how they handle the story; even if the story does fall apart, as it now apparently, very clearly, is.

The same obvious difficulty in handling the story is clear in the current issue of Time magazine this week where Eliza Gray has a multi-page article in the center the magazine entitled “Fraternity Row.” And Time, even after at least the first clarification from Rolling Stone magazine, says that the story is still important even if the original Rolling Stone story turns out not to be true.

But by almost any measure the most interesting and alarming response to this controversy has come in the pages of the Washington Post by Zerlina Maxwell, identified as a political analyst, speaker, lawyer, and writer. According to the Post, she typically writes about national politics and cultural issues including domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender inequality. She then writes these very chilling words, and I quote,

“In last month’s deep and damning Rolling Stone report about sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a reporter told the story of ‘Jackie,’ who said she was gang raped at a fraternity party and then essentially ignored by the administration. It helped dramatize what happens when the claims of victims are not taken seriously.”

Maxwell then continues. She writes,

“Now the narrative appears to be falling apart: Her rapist wasn’t in the frat that she says he was a member of; the house held no party on the night of the assault; and other details are wobbly [that’s Maxwell’s word]. Many people (not least U-Va. administrators) will be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

She then writes, stunningly enough,

“In important ways, this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

Now there have been any number of very important legal controversies in America, not only over the last 200 years but even you could save the last 200 days, and yet nothing that I ever seen in all my observation of these discussions comes even close to this article that appeared under the name of the Washington Post in which a lawyer, writing as a columnist for the newspaper, says that the presumption of innocence is something we can now do without as Americans.

Just to make sure that her point is heard in its clarity, she writes and I quote again,

“Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

And, as she makes clear in her article, this means even if the rape didn’t happen and if the rapist is innocent. She acknowledges that the falsely accused rapist could face difficulties. She writes,

“The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook.”

But again, and remembers Zerlina Maxwell is a lawyer after all, as well as a columnist for the Washington Post, she also writes in her argument,

“…is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system.”

Where, evidently, truth is just too expensive to use in this kind of controversy.

Hats off to Hanna Rosin, another very veteran writer on these affairs writing at Slate.com for saying the problem is found at Rolling Stone; its journalistic failures in this case. But she says she’s not buying the argument that the truth doesn’t matter. Rosin writes,

“One thing I heard several times when trying to do re-reporting [she means of this story] myself: Many people had doubts about the details in the story, but didn’t really care, as long as it was effecting change at UVA. I don’t agree.”

She goes on to say,

“I still hope we can salvage some good from this episode, even if Jackie’s story proves false. Perhaps one thing we should look at is how we treat victims of sexual violence so differently than other victims, and whether that serves them.”

Now the most important thing about Hannah Rosin’s article is that she suggests that this new hyper ideological concern about rape really isn’t helping the victims of rape – the real victims of rape. Furthermore she says, the media is showing a lower standard of evidentiary interest when it comes to rape accusations over against other accusations. And once again she says, that’s not going to serve rape victims well in the long run.

From a biblical worldview perspective, as I said at the beginning, it’s hard to come up of anything more morally significant than rape. It is one of the vilest crimes addressed not only in the law but also in the Scripture. Christians must also be on the front lines of making very clear that rape must be opposed in every way possible and it must also be said that Christian should be on the front lines of calling for every legitimate instance of rape to be investigated and documented, and for every rapist to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But there are two additional observations that have to be made here. One of the most profound is that offer by Hannah Rosin writing at Slate.com – it does not serve the real victims well to have this kind of approach taken when stories fall apart. Those who are arguing that the truth really doesn’t matter actually devalue every actual rate that is taken place and make it easier for rape to go unreported and unprosecuted. And of course Christians looking at this have to understand that as we’re living in this culture, that for a long time was described as being postmodern, one of the main facets of the culture, at least on the part of some, especially on the cultural left, is the truth itself doesn’t exist – everything is a matter of interpretation and every truth claims is just social construction.

But you know it’s really interesting that the story began to fall apart not because of ideology but because of facts and the lack of facts – the discrepancy of claims became so important that even Rolling Stone magazine, one of the brand names of the cultural left, had to issue a clarification and then another clarification. And Hannah Rosin’s right, you can count on further clarifications to come.

But the last observation about this story, important as it is, comes down to the fact that Christians also understand the impossibility of creating any stable ethic that will protect human flourishing and human dignity if the entire understanding of the integrity of sexual morality is redefined in the wake of the new sexual revolution. If indeed you come down to the issue that the only thing that really matters in terms of the morality of sex is consent, then you’ll be involved in a constant debate over what might constitute rape, and you’ll come up with a constant debate about how anyone might prevent having young people get engaged in all kinds of abuses sexual relationships once they are told to have sex – just to have safe sex, and make sure you have consent.

The vast majority of controversies – legal, political, moral, and otherwise – over what’s happening in terms of the sexualized culture of American college and university campuses and we must acknowledge the very real problem of rape, much it is simply lost in the fog of trying to create an artificial sexual morality on the other side of having abandoned the only sexual morality that works. But the closing comment simply has to be where we began: the issue in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end is truth. And if Christians ever lose sight of that, we’ve lost sight of everything.

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-08-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Democrats lose last Senate seat in South due to accelerating secular agenda

Dems’ final insult: Landrieu crushed, Politico (James Hohmann)

The Democrats’ Southern Problem Reaches a New Depth, New York Times (Nate Cohn)

Demise of the Southern Democrat Is Now Nearly Complete, New York Times (Nate Cohn)

2) Unraveling of UVA rape story reveals importance of truth in confronting tragedy of rape 

Rolling Stone Cites Doubts on Its Story of University of Virginia Rape, New York Times (Richard Pérez-Peña and Ravi Somaiya)

A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA, Rolling Stone (Sabrina Rubin Erdely)

Rolling Stone Now Doubts Victim in UVA Rape Allegation, NBC29

A Note to Our Readers, Rolling Stone (Will Dana)

Rolling Stone Clarifies Its Apology on UVA Story, Associated Press (Frederic J. Frommer)

Like a Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal (Editorial Board)

Crisis on Fraternity Row, TIME (Eliza Gray)

No matter what Jackie said, we should generally believe rape claims, Washington Post (Zerlina Maxwell)

Blame Rolling Stone, Slate (Hanna Rosin)