R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 332

Transcript: The Briefing 12-01-14

The Briefing

 

December 1, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, December 01, 2014, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Secular theology of modern politics mirrors structure of Christian worldview

On The Briefing we seek to look at the intersection of theology and the news of the day; the Christian worldview and current events. That is made abundantly easy this week with a cover story that appears in the Weekly Standard. The article by Joseph Bottum has the title, “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas” and this article is a blockbuster in terms of the Christian worldview and understanding our own times.

Joseph Bottum begins his essay by discussing a professor by the name of Kim Radersma. He then writes this,

“In another age, Radersma might have been a revivalist out on the sawdust circuit, playing the old forthright hymns on a wheezy harmonium as the tent begins to fill. In a different time, she might have been a temperance lecturer, inveighing in her passion-raw voice against the evils of the Demon Rum. In days gone by, she might have been a missionary to heathen China, or an author of Bible Society tracts, or the Scripture-quoting scourge of civic indifference—railing to the city-council members that they are like the Laodiceans in Revelation 3:16, neither hot nor cold, and God will spew them from his mouth.”

But, says Bottum, that’s not exactly what’s going on here. It’s close; however, it’s not exactly what’s going on here because Kim Radersma is not a Christian evangelist. He writes, in fact,

“But all such old American Christian might-have-beens are unreal in the present world, for someone like Kim Radersma. Mockable, for that matter, and many of her fellow activists today identify Christianity with the history of all that they oppose. She wouldn’t know a theological doctrine or a biblical quotation if she ran into it headlong. And so Radersma now fights racism: the deep racism that lurks…in our thoughts and in our words and in our hearts.”

That’s not to suggest the Joseph Bottum doesn’t believe that racism is sin, he profoundly does believe that. But he does not believe it is the theory of everything, that it explains everything about the cosmos or even by human behavior. It does explain however the program –  that is a PhD program – that Kim Radersma is now undergoing at Ontario’s Brock University; it is entitled, the critical whiteness studies program. She writes,

“I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body, I have to choose every day to do antiracist work and think in an antiracist way.””

She said that at a recent teacher’s conference.

Now once again Joseph Bottum does believe that racism is sin, but then he points to the fact that its sin, it’s the very notion of sin that is actually absent from the secular analysis. He writes, and I quote,

“Some of this, of course, derives from the perception of actual economic and social effects still lingering in the long aftermath of racial slavery and segregation. But taken just as a concept, considered purely in its moral shape, white privilege is something we’ve seen before—for the idea is structurally identical to the Christian idea of original sin.”

That’s an incredibly well-written paragraph. He’s suggesting that this new secular theory, this new secular theory of what’s wrong with the world is, and mark his words very carefully, structurally identical to the Christian idea of original sin. He doesn’t say it’s theologically identical, only structurally identical. In other words, this is an attempt to replace the Christian understanding of original sin with an original something else, and the original something else in this case is original racism.

But Joseph Bottum is actually onto something larger than looking at this particular issue or this teacher. He’s looking at the fact that our contemporary secular discussion in politics won’t stay secular. And of course from a biblical viewpoint, we will come back and say it can’t stay secular. But as he discusses, what we’re looking at here is not just one doctrine that is “structurally identical to the Christian doctrine of original sin,” he points to the fact that deeply theological or spiritual issues keep emerging even in supposedly secular contexts.

In a truly interesting historical section in this essay, which is the cover story in this week’s Weekly Standard, he goes on to cover the rise and fall of the Protestant mainline in the United States – pointing to the fact that this Protestant mainline, made up of now liberal Protestant denominations, form the moral backbone of American society. But then those churches began to secularize themselves and they began to take on their own secularized notions of sin, abandoning the biblical worldview and its understanding of sin for a new understanding of sin that located sin in a mere superficial morality and in merely external acts and furthermore, shifted the entire idea of sin to society and off of the individual.

As Bottum correctly notes, the critics of this kind of transference came from both the left and the right. From the right in people like J Gresham Machen and from the left from people like Reinhold Niebuhr. Both saw that this was an incredibly superficial understanding of sin. But Joseph Bottum writes, it set the stage for these churches and the culture that they had represented to be co-opted by a new secular theology and that’s exactly what he’s writing about.

He point in particular to the rise of the social gospel movement in the early 20th century, pointing to the fact that it was Christianity effectively without Christ. And that led to the secularization of these churches and thus to the secularization of sin and the secularization of virtually every other major Christian doctrine as well. Bottum takes a very close look especially at the kind of racial studies that are ongoing in America’s most elite academic institutions. And he points to the fact that there is a deep revivalist impulse behind them and there is a deep ideological impulse behind them as well. And even as these are supposedly secular programs, they are driven my something that can’t be explained merely in secular terms; they’re driven by an effort to replace historic Christianity with an entirely new worldview.

In the first section of his essay, he’s pointing to the fact that there is an explicit attempt to replace the doctrine of original sin with an original something else that isn’t sin. He then writes, and I quote,

“The doctrine of original sin is probably incoherent, and certainly gloomy, in the absence of its pairing with the concept of a divine savior—and so Paul concludes Romans 5 with a turn to the Redeemer and the possibility of hope: ‘As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Think of it as a car’s engine or transmission scattered in pieces around a junkyard: The individual bits of Christian theology don’t actually work all that well when they’re broken apart from one another.”

Score that for a profound Orthodox theological insight in a secular news Journal. But Bottum also points to the fact that this supposedly secular discussion that turns out not to be so secular after all, will not stay neutral when it comes to Christianity. It is replacing a worldview explicitly based upon the Christian worldview to one that is explicitly antithetical to it and quite hostile as well. He mentions the teachers conference over race in which a presenter name Paul Cavell defined white privilege is,

“…the everyday pervasive, deep-seated and institutionalized dominance of Christian values, Christian institutions, leaders and Christians as a group, primarily for the benefit of Christian ruling elites.”

In another section of his essay, Bottum points to the fact that on the secular left you can quickly become ‘one of them’ – that is, one of the enemy – by simply making a comment that is considered so outside the pale that you’re no longer considered inside the group – even if you had been one of the major supporters and even funders – the exhibit A in this case is the actor Alec Baldwin.  But Joseph Bottum’s point in pointing to Alec Baldwin is to the fact that something like church discipline is going on here, only in terms of the modern academic culture and where the cultural elites are forming this kind of moral worldview, there isn’t a church but there is a form of discipline. You’re quickly out if you are found to be unacceptable by those who are in.

Furthermore, even though these elites would claim they have absolutely no creed, as Bottum indicates, they certainly do. And the violation of that creed makes you a heretic that must be expelled almost immediately. That’s what happened to Alec Baldwin. And as George Will explained (and his name will come up again in just a moment) the kind of action that is taken by those in the inside group to how some like Alec Baldwin is made so that they, not Alec Baldwin, will be recognized as being one of the good people, the good people were so outraged they know how to get rid of heretic when they see one.

This kind of shunning, using the language of church discipline Bottum writes about, is what happened to Brendan Eich after he resigned from Mozilla, an Internet software company he himself had founded, or at least cofounded, for the fact that he had given a contribution back in 2008 to California’s proposition eight – the effort to identify in the California Constitution, marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman. Just that very small donation, given all the way back in 2008 once discovered by the new moral police was enough to get Brendan Eich ousted from the very company he had cofounded. And of course, he’s not only ousted from the company, he is ousted from the company of all right minded people, according to the new moral police. And then Joseph Bottum mentions George Will, the very columnist I quoted just a moment ago because George Will has also been ousted. He’s also been shunned by all right minded people from this kind of intellectual and academic elite, simply because he stated the obvious and that is that the new sexual morality of mere consent on America’s college and university campuses won’t protect anyone. Joseph Bottum then writes with such deep perception,

“Our social and political life is awash in unconsciously held Christian ideas broken from the theology that gave them meaning, and it’s hungry for the identification of sinners—the better to prove the virtue of the accusers and, perhaps especially, to demonstrate the sociopolitical power of the accusers.”

But then in concluding his essay he says if this is going to continue, and if the forces of the new righteousness as they style themselves, is going to be successful, they can’t merely shun those who have the wrong ideas. They have to silence them as well. He points to at least two recent examples of academic book burning. But the burners of these books were not conservative professors burning anti-Christian or liberal books, but rather liberal professors, in the first case, burning books that were opposed to climate change. Or in the second, burning Christina Hoff Sommers book, The War Against Boys, in protest against its “perceived anti-feminism.”

The idea of silencing the opposition and even of burning books goes back, as Bottum indicates, to Pope Pius IX in his 1864 encyclical, The Syllabus Of Errors when he wrote, “error has no rights.” In at least this case, Bottum writes, the Pope was actually the Pope and he was writing on behalf of the Catholic Church. He at least knew it was a church. But Bottum then writes,

“As the New York Times reported in June, at many colleges including Bowdoin, Vanderbilt, and the 23 campuses in the Cal State system, administrators are removing official recognition from Christian prayer and reading groups, mostly for these groups’ refusal to accept non-Christians in leadership positions. This might be taken as covered primarily by the idea of shunning, but it contains an element of prohibited opinions and banished books as well.”

He then writes about the actual banning or silencing of student groups, including a Nietzsche club at University College London; they were unable to meet to discuss where the most influential philosophers of the late 19th century simply because conservatives had used his ideas in times past.

Finally Joseph Bottum writes about the incredible parallels behind much of the modern environmental movement and historic Christianity. Again, he’s not talking about the substance of the doctrines but rather the structure of the very idea – the structure of the worldview. He writes, and I quote,

“I wonder, though, whether these global-warming critics have seen all the way to the bottom of their analogy—for much of radical environmentalism has, in fact, the shape of a Christian worldview. Or, at least, what a Christian worldview would be if it lacked any role for the gospel. This is a supernaturally charged history: We have an Eden, a paradise of nature—until the Fall, with the emergence of sentient human beings as polluters. We then have a long history of the gradually increasing immorality of smog and litter, all aiming toward the apocalypse of the final injuring of the Earth beyond repair. Strong environmentalism is, in essence, an unknowing recapitulation of St. Augustine. Or, at least, the dark half of the theologian: what Augustinianism would look like if you stripped away the idea that there might be salvation. What Augustinianism would look like if you had just the human stain, without human redemption. Environmentalism often comes to us these days as a political idea with a particular spiritual shape. It comes to us as Christianity without Christ.”

To put the matter bluntly, this is one of the most important essays to appear in print in a very long time. And the provenance, that is the source, is especially important. This is the cover story in this week’s issue of the Weekly Standard, that is a political magazine – this is not a theological Journal. But that makes the point emphatically because Joseph Bottum is writing about the fact when you talk about politics, ancient, modern, or postmodern, that politics is always infused with theology, with worldview, with spirituality, whatever you want to call it politics will inherently be deeply religious, Once again, even though Joseph Bottum doesn’t write about this, the Christian worldview explains not only the what but the why. Explaining that God made us as the only creature made in his image as spiritual beings who simply can’t not be religious. We can’t avoid being theological, we are theological to the core because we seek a theological narrative in understanding our lives. In other words, we are preprogrammed by our creator as religious beings because he made us that way in order that we might know him.

In terms of our understanding of our present political moment, nothing comes close to this essay in explaining where we now stand and why. In his brilliant analysis Joseph Bottum points out the what’s really going on on the left is not secular at all – it is deeply religious, it’s just the old Christian doctrinal system evacuated of all Christianity and filled with something else. The doctrine of original sin is now replaced with the original something else and the means of redemption, if it’s pointed to it all, is likely to be by science or genetic engineering or environmentalism or something of the like. Included in Bottum’s essays is a quote from GK Chesterton that I was thinking of even as I read his essay. It is this,

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad, isolated from each other and wandering alone.”

And though he doesn’t say it straightforwardly in this article, we need to be reminded of the fact that those who are pushing this worldview are evangelist in their own right. They are pushing their own gospel, their own worldview, and they are pushing it very effectively especially on the young American who show up on American college and University campuses. But as Bottum shows, that’s not the ambition, or at least that’s not the limit of the ambition of the secular left, or the so-called secular left. What they are really trying to do is to evangelize the entire culture.

2) Church of England deems Sunday services inconvenient, New Testament considerations irrelevant

Next on the theme of Christianity, devoid of Christian content, we look to an example which comes to us in the pages of The Telegraph, a major London newspaper. How’s this for a headline? “Sunday morning inconvenient for church services … says Church of England.” As John Bingham, the religious affairs editor for The Telegraph writes,

“Sunday morning is an inconvenient time for church services because people are busy shopping and doing DIY, the Church of England has admitted. Worshippers are increasingly turning their backs on the centuries-old practice of attending worship on Sundays because of other leisure and social ‘commitments’, it said”

The church authority cited in the article is the Dean of Litchfield, the Very Reverend Adrian Dorber who said many people still crave quiet reflection but are seeking out less pressurized times in the week to worship than Sunday mornings. The Dean of Litchfield said that weekends are now,

“…very committed for most families in an era when life is ‘run at the double.’”

The article also cites the fact that midweek services in the Church of England have doubled in attendance. Wait a minute, you’re not going to be impressed, even as weekly attendance and Sunday services has fallen below 800,000 – that’s for the established church, the Church of England in Britain and remember that Britain has a population of 64.1 million people. But speaking of the fact that midweek services have doubled in attendance the Dean of Litchfield said that that is due to the fact that the midweek Cathedral services were likely to be “reasonably short” and that’s part of the attraction. The Dean went on to speak of the popularity, the new popularity, of these midweek services by saying,

“People often squeeze them in to very, very pressurised lifestyles, whereas at the weekend you have got commitments with children doing sport, shopping, household maintenance. Life is run at the double these days and weekends are very pressurised and very committed. Taking out half an hour or an hour during the week is much more negotiable, it comes out of much more discretionary time.”

Well let’s look at the point being made here. Are these midweek services actually growing in popularity? Yes, they have doubled. They’ve doubled to the new attendance of 15,000 people a week. That’s 15,000 people, up from 7.5 thousand people. And that’s 15,000 people out of a population of 64.1 million. This is a church that celebrating having now up to 15,000 people out of 64.1 million in midweek services even as their losing people by the hundreds of thousands on Sunday morning.

There is absolutely no acknowledgment in this news article coming from either the reporter or any of the Anglican authority cited about the fact that Sunday worship has something to do with the New Testament and with the practice of the apostles. For we are told that they did not forsake the assembling of themselves together and we are also told in the book of Revelation that they gathered together on the first day of the week in honor of the Lord’s resurrection from the dead. The tradition of Sunday worship for Christians is not something that emerged at some particular social point for some cultural reason – there was a deep theological reason. For in the era in which the church first began to meet for worship in the context of the Roman Empire, every day was like any other. They chose the first of the week, not because it was then a day off, but because it was the day on which the Lord had been resurrected from the dead.

What you have in these Anglican authorities is absolutely no reference to any Christian obligation or responsibility to gather together on the Lord’s day at all. It’s not even mentioned. Furthermore, there is a celebration even as attendance of the church has drop below 800,000 on Sunday morning – that’s for all Church of England parishes, cathedrals, churches, you name it, on the Lord’s day – and they’re celebrating the fact that there up to 15,000 people in midweek services, they’re actually looking at the fact that they are going to have to writes Sunday off because people are just too busy, what with all the other activities and don’t forget they actually use the word commitments. And this leads me to one of my fundamental principles in terms of church life – most churches and denominations die, not of homicide but of theological suicide and here’s a prime example of what the kind of theological suicide looks like.

3) PD James’ popular mystery novels reflect reality of transcendent morality

Finally, and staying in Great Britain, one of the major literary figures of the 20th century died last Thursday. She was Phyllis Dorothy James White, later known as Baroness James of Holland Park, better known as P.D. James. As Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times remarked,

“Ms. James was one of those rare authors whose work stood up to the inevitable and usually invidious comparisons with classic authors of the detective genre, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. A consummate stylist, she accumulated numerous awards for the 18 crime novels produced during a writing career spanning a half-century. Seven of her mysteries were adapted for the public-television series ‘Mystery!’ and were broadcast in Britain and the United States.”

We simply should note that several of her books also became major films, including her dystopian novel The Children of Men. The New York Times secular obituary of P.D. James noted,

“Reviewers frequently lauded Ms. James for ‘transcending the genre,’ but she was a champion of the detective mystery, which she called ‘a literary celebration of order and reason.’ She considered it a modern morality drama by virtue of its affirmation of enduring social values. In turbulent times, she said, people turn to detective stories for reassurance as much as entertainment ‘because they do affirm the intelligibility of the universe, the moral norm, the sanctity of life.’”

Now the New York Times did not attribute those values to the Christian worldview but P.D. James most assuredly did. Her writing was deeply steeped in the Christian worldview and she was drawn to the detective story, to the mystery tale, precisely because of the morality involved in what it showed about human nature, about human sinfulness, and about the endurance of a moral code that wasn’t invented by humanity but rather given to us. P.D. James deeply cared about morality, about right and wrong, because she believed that they were transcendent values and she believed that because of the Christian worldview.

As the Wall Street Journal’s obituary cites Michael Dirda, the prominent literary critic for the Washington Post,

“Her work was dark and gritty, and in 20 years will still be read because of her portrait of English life,”

He then went on to say,

“There are terrible crimes sometimes at the heart of them; they weren’t genteel in any way. In these books you cared about who was guilty and who wasn’t.”

That’s because P.D. James deeply cared about who was guilty and who wasn’t. She also cared deeply about human life, the sanctity of human life, which is what is reflected in perhaps her most unusual book because it wasn’t a detective story. And that was her 1992 novel entitled The Children of Men, later made into an American motion picture. That novel presented a dystopian, that is a horrifying future humanity in which children were no longer born. In many ways, even writing from over 20 years ago, she saw the brave New World of reproductive technologies around us and she also understood the fact that we were encountering an antinatalist worldview, a worldview opposed to the very reproduction of humanity itself.

P.D. James who died at age 94 will certainly be missed, as will her detective Adam Dalgliesh who will continue to live on in her writings. Writing of her most famous detective P.D. James wrote,

“Perhaps Adam Dalgliesh is an idealized version of what I’d have liked to be if I had been born a man,”

And that leads me to a final point, many evangelical Christians are unaware of the fact that the detective novel, in this case the murder mystery, really emerged from Christians in an explicitly Christian worldview. In particular, in the English-speaking world appearing first in Great Britain and then passing to the United States in terms of mass popularity. But there are many reasons why the detective story is important to the Christian worldview. It’s because the very structure of intelligibility, that’s what P.D. James wrote about, the very structure of the understanding of the cosmos, the very understanding of morality that’s at the heart of the stories, remember they only makes sense if murder is wrong and if crime is punished, these things point to the fact that the actually demonstrate how the Christian worldview operates in a fallen world. In a culture increasingly distant from and hostile to Christianity, it’s hard to imagine how these detective stories can continue in their moral shape and that would lead to a mystery I’m not sure even Adam Dalgliesh could unwind.

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 again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-01-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Secular theology of modern politics mirrors structure of Christian worldview

The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas, Weekly Standard (Joseph Bottum)

2) Church of England deems Sunday services inconvenient, New Testament considerations irrelevant

Sunday morning inconvenient for church services … says Church of England, The Telegraph (John Bingham)

3) PD James’ popular mystery novels reflect reality of transcendent morality

P. D. James, Creator of the Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries, Dies at 94, New York Times (Marilyn Stasio)

Novelist P.D. James Dies at 94, Wall Street Journal (Alexis Flynn, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, and Brenda Cronin)

The Ferguson Moment—A Moral Test for the Nation

This is an edited transcript of The Briefing podcast from early Tuesday morning, November 25, 2014, hours after the Ferguson, Missouri grand jury announcement.

The grand jury decision Americans were waiting for came Monday night in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. As the Washington Post reports,

“A grand jury on Monday declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, resolving a secretive, months-long legal saga and reigniting powerful frustrations about America’s policing of African Americans.”

The lead article on the issue in the New York Times offered a similar view of the facts:

“A St. Louis County grand jury has brought no criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago in nearby Ferguson.”

The reporters, Monica Davey and Julie Bosman, go on to say,

“The decision by the grand jury of nine whites and three blacks was announced Monday night by the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, at a news conference packed with reporters from around the world. The killing, on a residential street in Ferguson, set off weeks of civil unrest — and a national debate — fueled by protesters’ outrage over what they called a pattern of police brutality against young black men. Mr. McCulloch said Officer Wilson had faced charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.”

But as the news reports uniformly indicate, the grand jury found no probable cause to bring an indictment on any one of these crimes against Officer Wilson.

For the most part, the announcement is exactly what legal analysts expected. It is very difficult to bring a charge against a police officer who was involved in this kind of shooting in the line of duty. In almost any jurisdiction, this kind of police shooting would have led to an internal affairs investigation—not to a grand jury consideration. But the political stakes in Ferguson, Missouri were always high—especially after the images of the body of Michael Brown on the ground on a residential street in that city spread throughout St. Louis and the world.

As big a story as the announcement from the grand jury was in itself, the aftermath has become an even larger story, and exactly the kind of larger story that was feared. For what happened in the aftermath of the announcement from the grand jury was an outbreak of violent protests that set at least some parts of the neighborhood of Ferguson, Missouri on fire.

Furthermore, the protests in the St. Louis area turned violent with police reporting widespread automatic gunfire in the city. Americans saw a constant video stream of arsonist protesters and looters rampaging through some St. Louis neighborhoods. As the night wore on, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped all incoming flights into St. Louis’ major airports, citing automatic gunfire in the immediate area of the airport as the cause. As the evening wore on, protest spread to other major American cities as well. In the aftermath of the grand jury’s announcement, the family of Michael Brown, including his parents, called for protests to be peaceful, but their own admonition was not heeded.

Furthermore, as the evening continued, President Obama spoke to the nation from the White House about the decision of the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri. Christians trying to understand what is at stake in this very sad spectacle should pay particular attention to President Obama’s comments. The president stated,

“As you know, a few moments ago, the grand jury deliberating the death of Michael Brown issued its decision. It’s an outcome that, either way, was going to be subject of intense disagreement not only in Ferguson, but across America. So I want to just say a few words suggesting how we might move forward.”

In one of his most important public statements to date, President Obama continued saying,

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. There are Americans who agree with it, and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction. But I join Michael’s parents in asking anyone who protests this decision to do so peacefully. Let me repeat Michael’s father’s words: ‘Hurting others or destroying property is not the answer. No matter what the grand jury decides, I do not want my son’s death to be in vain. I want it to lead to incredible change, positive change, change that makes the St. Louis region better for everyone.’  Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone. We should be honoring their wishes.”

As the president continued his remarks, he turned to address law enforcement officials saying,

“I also appeal to the law enforcement officials in Ferguson and the region to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur. Understand, our police officers put their lives on the line for us every single day. They’ve got a tough job to do to maintain public safety and hold accountable those who break the law. As they do their jobs in the coming days, they need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence—distinguish them from the vast majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues in terms of how communities and law enforcement interact.”

Finally, the president said,

“We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation.”

The president’s comments were restrained and responsible. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to imagine a more suitable and responsible set of comments for a president to make—much less the nation’s first elected African-American president.

The president went on to talk about the cooperation needed between the police and the community during this time:

“Working with law enforcement officials to make sure their ranks are representative of the communities they serve. We know that makes a difference. It means working to train officials so that law enforcement conducts itself in a way that is fair to everybody.”

This is a fundamental statement that virtually everyone should agree with. The difficulty is pulling that off in the context of heightened tensions. In a truly tragic juxtaposition, even as the president was speaking such judicious words, the media displayed a video stream of burning buildings, looting and vandalism, and protesters committing violent actions in the street.

The president’s statement also included these very important words:

“But what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.”

When you think about how President Obama should address the issue, once again it’s hard to imagine how a statement could be more judicious and responsible than that. He went on to say,

“Separating that from this particular decision, there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion. I don’t think that’s the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials. But these are real issues. And we have to lift them up and not deny them or try to tamp them down. What we need to do is to understand them and figure out how do we make more progress. And that can be done. That won’t be done by throwing bottles. That won’t be done by smashing car windows. That won’t be done by using this as an excuse to vandalize property. And it certainly won’t be done by hurting anybody. So, to those in Ferguson, there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and there are ways of channeling your concerns destructively. Michael Brown’s parents understand what it means to be constructive. The vast majority of peaceful protesters, they understand it as well.”

In his comments on the decision, the prosecutor pointed to the 24-hour news cycle as a catalyst for many in the culture to rush to judgment on this issue. While it’s easy to understand the society’s rush to judgment, it is also impossible to excuse it. This reminds us of something very important. What we see on television or social media is only a micro picture—a very small fraction of what is actually taking place. It’s very dangerous to assume we know the entire story just by witnessing the images of violence in St. Louis. Many news media outlets, for example, gave almost no attention to the many peaceful protests that were occurring simultaneously.

At the same time, what the media did broadcast was horrifying. One of the most important things the president said last night is that Americans believe in the rule of law. He rightly noted that the decision was the grand jury’s to make. What the president did not say, probably for sake of time and clarity, was that the very existence of the grand jury is one of the great civil rights protections Americans have by virtue of the United States Constitution. Grand juries, made up of ordinary citizens in the community, exist as a buffer between the police, the prosecutors, and the people so that the police and prosecutors are prevented from bringing frivolous charges on inadequate evidence against an individual. That is a very important protection the United States Constitution grants us.

The grand jury considered between 60 and 70 hours of testimony, including the rather unusual opportunity to have face-to-face testimony from Darren Wilson himself. In keeping with the rules of the grand jury, the officer agreed to meet before the panel without the benefit of his own attorney. The grand jury was charged with a very serious responsibility. It had to look at the evidence, indeed it had to sift through the evidence, using its own authority to subpoena witnesses and to compel testimony from them. At the end of the day, the grand jury found that there was no adequate evidence to find probable cause to charge Officer Wilson with any of the available criminal counts against him, which ranged from counts of murder all the way down to manslaughter.

When the president spoke of the importance of the rule of law he pointed to the importance of civilization. One of the things that Christians should think about very seriously in this matter is the fact that this kind of justice system, the very existence of the grand jury and its responsibility to deliberate these issues on behalf of the people, is a testimony to the rule of law as an achievement of civilization. This requires community trust and cohesion; it requires the furnishing and the nourishing of institutions—including the judiciary, the police, and an entire system of customs and patterns of laws and statutes that make order within the society possible.

At the same time, we must note several important points. Even as we recognize the necessity of these judicial systems, we must also hear the accusations from those who argue that the system is broken. In one sense, Christians understand that every system is only as good as the frail and faulty human beings who are involved in it. There is no perfect system because human beings comprise these systems. This means that some of the accusations and concerns coming from the African-American community must be taken very seriously. Christians should be at the forefront of demanding that these concerns be thoroughly vetted, heard, and considered. After all, we know that as important as these systems are, every system breaks down due to human sin. It is no insult to the system or to society to make certain that we are continually watching to see if we are living up to our ideals—including the ideal of equal justice before the law.

Furthermore, we cannot forget the lessons of history. African-Americans can document many miscarriages of justice in which the police and law enforcement officials were very clearly using the rule of law as a weapon rather than as a protection for African-Americans. Christians operating out of the biblical worldview understand the importance of law. Furthermore, we understand the importance of maintaining institutions of social stability in order to protect human flourishing. Yet we must also remind ourselves that justice is an achievement, an achievement that must be true for the entirety of the society. If any within our society are on the underside of the rule of law, not because they have broken the law but because the law is being wrongly applied or it is being selectively enforced, then we must respond. Injustice to one ends up eventually being injustice to all

The images coming out of Ferguson also remind us of the fact that the kind of reform that is needed in our society cannot be brought about by flouting the justice system with the kind of injustice that was seen on the streets. The rule of law cannot be improved, nor corrected—much less reformed—by lawlessness.

It will take some time for the dust to settle on this case and there may be further legal issues yet in the future. But this much is clear: the people of St. Louis have a great deal of rebuilding to do—the rebuilding of trust, the rebuilding of social institutions, the rebuilding of cohesion, the rebuilding of the relationship between the police and the people. Those are very high responsibilities.

The nation as a whole also still faces the responsibility to look at the questions of race and the law, of law enforcement injustice, of righteousness and mercy, and the rule of law. The nation must consider anew what must be done in order to make our system of justice even fairer for all. Yet that type of reform would require a level of honesty that was notably absent from almost every dimension of this controversy. We can be almost sure that after some period of protest things will calm. They always do. But that does not mean that the problem has gone away. Christians know that the responsibility is ours to make certain that problems are not merely swept under the rug and that we do not look for a false peace.

President Obama’s words last night were a very good start. This might be an opportunity for his personal presidential leadership to be demonstrated in a way that could lead to a significant gain for the entire nation. In the final analysis, Christians looking at the events and the images coming from Ferguson should be prompted to remember just how urgently we need to pray for our nation and for our communities. We need to pray for the Brown family grieving the death of a son. The reality is they had a son who is now dead whom they loved. At the very least, Christians must pray for that family as they suffer a grief compounded by the events of recent days—even as their own call for peaceful protest was flaunted by so many protesters.

We also need to remember to pray for those who are also involved in this in ways that others might not remember. We need to pray for the police, we need to pray for those in legal authority, we need to pray not only for the Brown family but also for the Wilson family, and we need to pray that all will be protected from harm. We need to pray for peace in all of our communities, even as we recognize that the Bible teaches us that peace is the product of righteousness. Where there is no righteousness, there is no peace.

In the immediate aftermath of the events in Ferguson, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board made this statement:

“One measure—perhaps the measure—of a civilized society is the respect it shows for the rule of law. The decision by a grand jury not to indict Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson for shooting unarmed black teenager Michael Brown is such a test for America.”

That is a profoundly important sentence. The events in Ferguson, the larger context of conflict between African-American communities and the police, the continuing scar of racial division in America, the immediate aftermath of the decision by the grand jury in Missouri—all of these things point profoundly to the fact that they are a test for America. One of the most encouraging aspects of President Obama’s comments last night was the fact that the president spoke very carefully—even hopefully—as he cited improvements in race relations in America and his hope that these kinds of challenges can be met by responsible Americans. We must pray and work so that the images of brokenness so apparent in the aftermath of the grand jury’s decision can be transformed into images of wholeness.

From time to time, every nation, every people, and every community faces a series of tests—moral tests, economic tests, political and social tests. These events represent a huge moral test for America. Ground Zero of that test is the community of St. Louis, Missouri—especially the neighborhood of Ferguson. But intelligent Christians operating out of a biblical worldview know that this is not just a problem for Ferguson. It is the problem of the human heart. As Christians, we understand that the Bible and the Bible alone gives us an adequate understanding of where these problems reside, where they come from, and how they can only be solved. These tests can bring out the best or the worst in a people, a community, or nation. As we look at the situation in America, let us fervently pray that this test will bring out the best and not the worst of all the American people.

 

 

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 11-26-14

The Briefing

 

November 26, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, November 26, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Sec. Hagel’s resignation shows inadequacy of administration’s worldview in face of conflicts 

Chuck Hagel, the United States Secretary of Defense, has resigned his position. That resignation becomes effective as soon as President Obama appoints a successor and that successor is confirmed by the United States Senate. The story of Chuck Hagel’s resignation was lost in the flurry of headlines from events earlier in the week but it is important and it’s important to those who care about the world and especially to those who operate out of a comprehensive worldview. It’s important because Chuck Hagel’s resignation points to some of the realities we now face in the contemporary world.

Chuck Hagel was appointed less than two years ago as United States Secretary of Defense. He took office as a Republican; he came to prominence in the nation’s mind as a Republican senator from the state of Nebraska – senator with a demonstrated interest in foreign policy and national defense. But even as he was nominated by President Obama as a Republican to serve in this very crucial cabinet position in the Obama Administration, he began in a very tenuous way.

First of all, only four Republican Senators – remember he himself was a Republican Senator – only four Republican senators voted for his eventual confirmation. And in terms of his Senate hearings, they were, by almost any estimation, disastrous. Chuck Hagel, as the designated new nominee to be Secretary of Defense, seemed to be virtually unable to deliver coherent account of the world and the challenges facing the United States. That rocky tenure became only more tenuous in the course of the Obama Administration in the last two years when President Obama himself has been severely criticized – even by senior members of his own party, even by the last two the United States Secretaries of Defense to serve under him – in terms of his own handling of these crises facing the United States.

The bottom line in this was affirmed by Gerald Seib, writing for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, when he pointed out – the headline says it all – “Changing World Shrank Hagel’s Appeal to Obama.” What this means is that the Secretary of Defense became less and less effective within the Obama Administration in responding to these world issues, even as the President himself was being faulted by people in both parties for an ineffectual response. The world has changed; the world has changed in the less than two years that Chuck Hagel has been Secretary of Defense. It’s changed since 2009 when Barack Obama began his first term as president of the United States and the world has changed in ways that did not follow the script of the Obama Administration.

President Obama came into office pledging to end American military experience in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan; to pull back to a far humbler position in terms of the Middle East. But now in the last two years of his administration, the President has had to reverse course. Just in recent days the President has announced the United States military efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be increasing rather than decreasing.

And the world has changed even in terms of whose being talked about in the headlines. Two years ago no one was talking about the Islamic State or ISIS, but now the Islamic State as a resurgent Islamist movement in the world is consuming many of the headlines – both domestically and internationally. It’s now impossible to talk about the defense needs and challenges of the United States without talking about a group that wasn’t even known two years ago.

As Gerald Seib explains,

“The administration badly needed a public spokesman to deflect the charges, from Capitol Hill and elsewhere, that it had no clear strategy for dealing with the Syrian civil war and was falling behind the curve in the fight against Islamic State. But the White House never really trusted Mr. Hagel to be a reliable public spokesman.”

And the reason the administration – we may add – didn’t trust him is because he wasn’t trustworthy. In that sense, the lack of trust in Mr. Hagel had nothing to do with his ethical trustworthiness but rather with his competence; with his view of the world. The Obama Administration and its Secretary of Defense became faulted by the American people and by some of our key allies for failing to understand just how dangerous the world really is. President Obama, who early in his administration, far too early, became a laureate for the Nobel Peace Prize, found himself very quickly thereafter having to ramp up rather than down American military involvement – especially over the course of the last several months.

It is often the case that a President has a shakeup in terms of his senior political leadership, even the cabinet in the aftermath of a midterm election, especially one in which the President’s party gets a bruising defeat – as happened just days ago in the month of November. But the resignation of Chuck Hagel won’t solve the problems for the Obama Administration because the problems are being posed by a world that simply isn’t following the script of the President.

But this gets us right to the heart, right to the core, of the Christian worldview issues implicated in this controversy. Why should we care? Well we should care for this reason: every single person, especially one involved in terms of national affairs, especially a President of the United States or a Secretary of Defense, operates out of a picture of the world and that picture of the world is determined by the fundamental worldview. And in the case of the President and his current Secretary of Defense, both shared a picture of the world that suggested that the world should be basically peaceful – it should be expected to be a cosmopolitan association of nations that might be temporarily and in an isolated nature, interrupted by armed conflict. But the world, as it turned out, is not that world. The real world is a world in which the threats against the United States and against our allies were increasing rather than decreasing, were becoming more sophisticated rather than less sophisticated. And it turns out that the world, in terms of our enemies, is not so accessible in terms of the kinds of influence and persuasion that President Obama believed would rule the day in world affairs.

Now those who know American history will know that we’ve been in this very same place before. Americans were involved in these same kinds of conversations before what became known as the First World War and again, just a generation later, before what became the Second World War. And in terms of those two conversations, many of the people involved in those debates were the very same people separated by just 20 or 30 years. And now we find ourselves in the very same conversation once again. Christians, understanding the worldview issues at stake, will come to see the resignation of Chuck Hagel as a reminder that the world doesn’t bend to our world picture – rather our world picture has to been to the world. And furthermore, a biblical worldview reminds us that peace is not a normal state of affairs among nations; that in a Genesis 3 world, a fallen world, a world dominated by principalities and powers, a world that is dominated by sinful impulses, we shouldn’t expect that peace will be the norm. Rather we will understand that peace is a rare and all to be valued achievement.

Finally in terms of this new story we should consider the fact that we are talking about the resignation of a Secretary of Defense. That is something the founders of this nation wouldn’t have understood. Early on the United States had a Secretary of War, it wasn’t until the end of World War II when in the administration of Harry Truman that was shifted – the title of the department – from the Department of War, headed by his Secretary of War, to a Department of Defense, headed by a Secretary of Defense. President Truman, explaining that nomenclature change back in the late 1940s, explained that the title Secretary of Defense or Department of Defense would be far more accurate than Secretary of War with the Department of War. Why? Because in the view of President Truman, who had just seen the nation through the very end of World War II, the nation should understand that defense is ongoing when war should be episodic.

But President Truman’s other explanation was also very important. He said that only a strong national defense can avoid being in a continual series of unnecessary wars. Well, wars unnecessary or necessary pop up from time to time as the current war on terror makes abundantly clear. And even President Barack Obama, who came into office pledging to end the war on terror, finds that one of his final preoccupations and responsibilities is actually fighting it – maybe even expanding it.

Some will speak of Chuck Hagel as a political casualty but in one sense, he’s a world picture casualty; he’s a casualty demonstrating the danger of believing that the world will shift to our theory of the world. What President Obama and his administration are learning right now is that our theory of the world has to bend to the reality of the world.

Oh, and there is one additional thing to ponder in terms of this transition in the Obama Administration.

One thing this points to is the fact that the Obama Administration is followed the pattern of some previous administrations even moving further along this pattern and that is in centralizing authority within the White House. In many senses, the cabinet positions are becoming more and more irrelevant. Though perhaps necessary by political expediency, this isn’t good for our constitutional form of government because it is those cabinet heads, rather than people who report only to the President, who eventually must report to the Senate and the United States Congress and that’s an important distinction we shouldn’t lose in terms of these headlines.

2) Dem. Charles Schumer points to important worldview differences on vision of government

Shifting now to worldview in terms of domestic policy and our understanding of government, a recent speech given by Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democratic Senator from New York is instructive in terms of understanding why, on so many issues, we don’t just disagree over policy but over the very vision of government. Senator Schumer seems to understand that. In a speech at the national press club, the New York Senator said that the Democratic Party, if is going to win in the future, has to in his words “embraced government.”

“If people don’t believe government can deliver, they’ll follow the Republican path. That leaves the job to Democrats. If we run away from government, the negative misperceptions about it will take root, and even if people support our ideas, they won’t believe government can deliver.”

In the most important and instructive section of his speech, he said this,

“We must convince the middle class that the only way out of their morass is by embracing a strong and effective government, not demeaning it or running from it,”

Now if you’re looking for a set of distinctions between the Republican and Democratic parties, it’s hard to imagine one more clear than this. But far beyond the partisan divide, you’re also looking at a basic worldview divide in terms of how we understand government. Some, in terms of our contemporary society, see government as a necessary structure, an institution given to humanity by God. An institution authorized, for instance as we see in Romans 13, with a limited set of responsibilities – to uphold justice, to fulfill certain functions for human flourishing – but otherwise, to get out of the way, and allow human beings and the more prior institutions of family and church to do what they are assigned for an even greater good of human flourishing.

The other view of government sees government as an end in itself, and government increasingly taking on the responsibilities that previously had been invested in the private sphere. But what you’re looking at here in terms of Chuck Schumer’s speech given at the National Press Club is the affirmation that he sees the future of his party, in terms of its political prospects, in siding with government. But he goes far beyond that and that’s what makes his speech really even more interesting. He actually believes that government is what helps people and he makes that abundantly clear. He says he has to convince the middle class that the only way out of their morass – that the huge statement by the way, he speaks here of the economic setbacks that have been suffered by the middle class especially since the last recession – he says the only way out is by “embracing a strong and effective government.”

Now at this point we can only ask the question, what exactly would government do? And the clear implication in terms of Chuck Schumer’s address is that the government would create jobs but those jobs would then be fed by the private sector. But the problem is of course the more you starve the private sector the more it costs to have government sector jobs. And furthermore those government sector jobs are outside the normal kinds of accountability and stewardship in terms of responsibility in an economy that are found in the rest of the society. So what we’re looking at here is really interesting. It gets to just what we expect out of government and just what we think government can deliver. There is no example the government that actually can deliver what is being promised here by Senator Schumer – deliverance from an economic morass by sheer government effort.

But to his credit, it is clear that Senator Schumer was speaking candidly. And also to his credit he’s speaking what he actually believes and that’s what makes the speech so interesting. At one point in his address he said,

“Democrats must embrace government. It’s what we believe in; it’s what unites our party; and, most importantly, it’s the only thing that’s going to get the middle class going again,”

Now quite frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine any other even Democratic Senator speaking so frankly. And the words are so clear they deserve to be repeated again. He said, and I repeat,

“Democrats must embrace government.”

Now notice his next words,

“It’s what we believe in; it’s what unites our party,”

Now that’s a truly interesting set of affirmations and I believe he really believes this. From a worldview perspective, one of most interesting aspects of this is the clarity offered by Senator Schumer in terms of this address. It sets up a really important national conversation, the very kind of national conversation that this nation desperately needs to have. A conversation that is beyond mere policies at the superficial level, it gets down to the most basic question. What is government for? What should we expect out of government? What can government deliver? How can we make government more accountable and more efficient? How can we aim towards human flourishing and see government as the friend not the enemy of that flourishing? But what exactly can government do?

Once again Christians understand that government is not an accident, it is a divine gift given to us for our good and for human flourishing. But the government that most leads to human flourishing is the government that steps out of the way and allows that flourishing to take place, a government that does not try to intrude upon the life of a family but rather to set up the conditions in which the family itself can flourish. There is no example anywhere on planet Earth, anywhere in human history of a government that can replace the functions of those primary prior institutions – especially the institution of the family.

Well, I’ll be honest – I found Senator Schumer’s address to be very refreshing. It’s refreshing to have a major American politician of his stature speak with this kind of conviction and clarity. And furthermore, it’s good to have someone of his stature begin a conversation America desperately needs to have. A conversation that may not go the way he intends for it to go, but nonetheless will be served by the fact that he at least, by his directness, helped to get it started. Even as there many public debates not worth having, this one is and for that reason we should welcome it.

3) Apple’s anti-AIDS campaign and other social causes reveals companies carry own moral agendas

Next, as the Christmas consumer season is now well underway, it’s interesting to see a front-page story this week in USA Today; here’s the headline “Apple Jumps in on Social Causes.” Christians involved in the workplace must recognize that there are worldview issues all around us, every single purchase we make, every engagement we have in the commercial economy, is one that is latent with worldview importance and sometimes not so latent, sometimes it’s downright evident, as this headline about Apple makes abundantly clear.

Marco della Cava, reporting for USA Today says that,

“The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant launches an unprecedented two-week campaign Monday [that’s right after the Thanksgiving holiday] that involves its app store, retail locations and online store,”

In what is described as,

“Yet another example of CEO Tim Cook’s push to boost the corporate image”

Now, let’s just state the obvious. Here you have USA Today in this lead saying this really isn’t about the social cause so much as it’s about polishing a corporate image – that tells us something however. You have major American corporations now, Apple perhaps at the forefront, trying to show just how progressive they are by their involvement in social issues that previous generations of the same corporate leaders would’ve avoided like anything – including Steve Jobs, the predecessor of Tim Cook, at Apple. Marco della Cava reports,

“This marks not only another salvo in Apple’s battle to polish its reputation as a company that cares about everything from the environment to gay rights, but also echoes a number of recent high-profile personal donations and corporate campaigns targeting the recent Ebola crisis from companies such as Facebook and Microsoft.”

But in terms of the actual effort beginning Monday at Apple, it’s about combating AIDS. Joining in effort started by the singer Bono of U2 in order to try to address the AIDS crisis not only the United States but especially worldwide. But the real point in this USA Today front-page story is not just about Apple and its new (Red) project, it’s about the fact that American corporations, especially in the Christmas buying season, are doing their very best to make a worldview statement, to make a statement of their own corporate brand and identity by siding with certain social causes. And you notice that all of them, that’s right all of them, are rather far on the left.

In a second story appearing in the same edition of USA Today by Marco della Cava, he writes,

“Connecting with consumers hearts is also a good way to tap into their wallets. A growing number of tech fueled startups make corporate giving a part of their business model; such as Warby Parker and Tom’s donating glasses and shoes respectively whenever customers place orders”.

But the article also makes clear that what these corporate giants are trying to do is to lead customers to believe they are somehow helping human beings by making their purchases. If you make a purchase, a certain amount of this goes towards a charity. Generally, as this article makes very clear, a rather progressive or leftist social cause. But no one’s actually doing the accounting on this. What you’re doing here is trying to make the consumer feel morally superior by making the purchase and leading the company to look morally superior by siding with, you’ve heard this before, the right side of history.

In terms of Apple’s new (Red) effort starting on Monday, the issue is AIDS but the background of this is the gay-rights movement as this article makes abundantly clear. And here you have a major tech giant, one of most famous brands in the world, seeking to brand itself rather significantly, with a whole new moral revolution. And of course Apple’s not alone, virtually all the major tech corporations are on the same pilgrimage and beyond that even major American retailers are trying to join the same kind of causes.

This is not to say that we can stay out of the consumer economy, it’s not to say we shouldn’t buy these products – it is just to affirm – as the Christmas buying season begins in all of its frenzy, that there is nothing without worldview significance and that is especially true every time we make a purchase. Every time we make a purchase in which we just might think we’re buying more than a product, we’re buying our own personal brand, a brand that includes a moral statement – whether we want it or not.

4) Thanksgiving Day a day of gratitude to God, a key component of Christian life

Finally, as Thanksgiving Day approaches we need to remember just why this day is so important and why Christians have to look at Thanksgiving Day in a fundamentally different way than those around us who simply see it as Turkey Day. In one sense, Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday because it was in 1789 that then President George Washington declared the first American national day of Thanksgiving by asking his fellow citizens to,

“Unite and most humbly offering our prayer and supplication’s to the great Lord and ruler of Nations”

From that point onward successive presidents have issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations and, at least in terms of popular American culture now, is seen as a long holiday and a major family reunion opportunity. Americans do often refer to this as Turkey Day because the secularization of the holiday is nearly complete. In our current secular age, it’s almost impossible even for an American President to refer in any clear way to any thanksgiving to God, any particular God, for the blessings that this nation has enjoyed.

The kind of explicit Christian reference that would’ve marked someone like George Washington is now something of an embarrassment to more recent inhabitants of the Oval Office – at least some of them. And what you now have is an American political class that tries to be thankful in some general sense to a God of some general being who somehow is generally well disposed towards us. But Christians need to understand that even as Americans may or may not be truly thankful on Thanksgiving Day, we need to remember that Thanksgiving is a perpetual Christian responsibility – it should be the first impulse of the Christian heart.

Perhaps more than anyone else in the New Testament the apostle Paul makes it preeminently clear why gratitude is a distinctive Christian characteristic. He actually roots sin itself in a sense of ingratitude. And he roots the rebellion of sinners against God in their own pride and ingratitude. It was the apostle Paul speaking of his own situation who said he had found reason to be thankful and to be content in whatever situation he found himself. When Paul rights of humanity in revolt against God, he explains that ingratitude is the signal indicator of that rebellion. Paul explains that sinners “neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him” when he writes about the roots of human sin in Romans 1:21.

From the very founding era of the church the worship of the church has often been described as Thanksgiving – that’s what Christians do. Not just on Thanksgiving Day, this is what Christians do every Lord ’s Day when we gather together. We gather together for several functions and for several reasons but central to the gathering of Christians together in Christian worship is to give thanks to God. The biblical worldview reminds us that giving thanks to God is explicitly rooted in the fact that we are the creature and God is the creator. Everything we are, everything we have, has come from God’s hand. And furthermore our Thanksgiving is only pointed in times past to the blessings God has given us but rather to our very existence in the present and our hope for the future.

So as you and your family gather together for what I hope will be a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration, I hope you gather together for true Christian worship – for the understanding that the very urgency of our hearts should be to express Thanksgiving to God who is the source of every blessing, even our basic being. So while Americans all around us may be celebrating turkey day and even the unbelievers say there’s something about being thankful, even just for being thankful, we need to recognize that this is the deepest impulse of the Christian heart, and in that sense everyday must be Thanksgiving.

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. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-26-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Sec. Hagel’s resignation shows inadequacy of administration’s worldview in face of conflicts 

Changing World Shrank Hagel’s Appeal to Obama, Wall Street Journal (Gerald F. Seib)

Hagel Submits Resignation as Defense Chief Under Pressure, New York Times (Helene Cooper)

Defense Secretary Hagel, under pressure, submits resignation, Washington Post (Craig Whitlock and Missy Ryan)

2) Dem. Charles Schumer points to important worldview differences on vision of government

Charles E. Schumer to Urge Democrats to ‘Embrace Government’, New York Times (Jeremy W. Peters)

3) Apple’s anti-AIDS campaign and other social causes reveals companies carry own moral agendas

 Apple launches massive two-week (RED) campaign, USA Today (Marco della Cava)

Apple’s latest (RED) campaign pushes to end age of AIDS, USA Today (Marco della Cava)

4) Thanksgiving Day a day of gratitude to God, a key component of Christian life

Why Thanksgiving Matters, AlbertMohler.com (Albert Mohler)

Transcript: The Briefing 11-25-14

The Briefing

 

November 25, 2014

 

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

It’s Tuesday, November 25, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Response to Ferguson grand jury’s decision a moral test for all America 

The grand jury decision that Americans have been waiting for and bracing for came last night in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. As the Washington Post reports,

“A grand jury on Monday declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, resolving a secretive, months-long legal saga and reigniting powerful frustrations about America’s policing of African Americans.”

The lead article on the issue in the New York Times offered a similar view of the facts.

“A St. Louis County grand jury has brought no criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago in nearby Ferguson.”

The Times, through reporters Monica Davey and Julie Bosman, goes on to say,

“The decision by the grand jury of nine whites and three blacks was announced Monday night by the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, at a news conference packed with reporters from around the world.”

The paragraph goes on to state,

“The killing, on a residential street in Ferguson, set off weeks of civil unrest — and a national debate — fueled by protesters’ outrage over what they called a pattern of police brutality against young black men. Mr. McCulloch said Officer Wilson had faced charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.”

But as the news reports uniformly indicate, the grand jury found no probable cause to bring an indictment on any one of these crimes against Officer Wilson.

For the most part, the announcement is exactly what legal analysts would’ve expected. It’s very difficult to bring a charge against a police officer who was involved in this kind of shooting in the line of duty. In almost any jurisdiction this kind of police shooting would’ve led to an internal affairs investigation – probably not to a grand jury consideration. But the political stakes in Ferguson, Missouri were always high. High after the images of Michael Brown shot and dead on the ground in a residential street in that city spread not only throughout St. Louis but throughout the world. But as big a story as the announcement from the grand jury was in itself, the aftermath has become an even larger story and exactly the kind of larger story that was feared. For what happened in the aftermath of the announcement from the grand jury was an outbreak of violent protests that set at least some parts of the neighborhood of Ferguson, Missouri on fire.

Furthermore, the protests there in the St. Louis area turned violent with police reporting widespread automatic gunfire in the city, even as Americans saw a constant video stream of arsonists, protesters, and looters rampaging through some St. Louis neighborhoods. As the night wore on, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped all incoming flights into St. Louis’ major airports, citing automatic gunfire in the immediate area of the airport. As the evening wore on, protest spread to other major American cities as well. In the aftermath of the grand jury’s announcement, the family of Michael Brown, including his parents, called for protests to be peaceful but their own admonition was not heeded.

Furthermore, as the evening continued, President Obama spoke to the nation from the White House about the decision of the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri. Christians trying to understand what is at stake in this very sad spectacle should pay particular attention to President Obama’s comments. As the president began, he said,

“As you know, a few moments ago, the grand jury deliberating the death of Michael Brown issued its decision. It’s an outcome that, either way, was going to be subject of intense disagreement not only in Ferguson, but across America. So I want to just say a few words suggesting how we might move forward.”

In one of his most important public statements to date, President Obama continued saying,

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law.  And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. There are Americans who agree with it, and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry.  It’s an understandable reaction.  But I join Michael’s parents in asking anyone who protests this decision to do so peacefully. Let me repeat Michael’s father’s words:  ‘Hurting others or destroying property is not the answer.  No matter what the grand jury decides, I do not want my son’s death to be in vain. I want it to lead to incredible change, positive change, change that makes the St. Louis region better for everyone.’  [The President then said,]Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone. We should be honoring their wishes.”

As the President continued his remarks he turned to address law enforcement officials saying,

“I also appeal to the law enforcement officials in Ferguson and the region to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur. Understand, our police officers put their lives on the line for us every single day.  They’ve got a tough job to do to maintain public safety and hold accountable those who break the law. As they do their jobs in the coming days, they need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence — distinguish them from the vast majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues in terms of how communities and law enforcement interact.”

Finally, the President said,

“…we need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation.”

The President’s comments were restrained and responsible. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to imagine a more suitable and responsible set of comments for a President to make – much less the nation’s first elected African-American President.

The President went on to say that the cooperation needed between the police and the community means,

“…working with law enforcement officials to make sure their ranks are representative of the communities they serve. We know [says the President,] that makes a difference. It means working to train officials so that law enforcement conducts itself in a way that is fair to everybody.”

Well that’s one of the most fundamental statements that virtually everyone would agree with. The difficulty is pulling that off in the context of heightened tensions. The President said it means enlisting the community actively on what should be everybody’s goal and that is to prevent crime. But in a truly tragic juxtaposition, even as the President was speaking such judicious words, the images coming on the video stream from Missouri were images of burning buildings, of protesters with violent actions in the street, of looting and vandalism. The President’s statement included these very important words. He said,

“But what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.”

When you think about how President Obama should address the issue, once again it’s hard to imagine how a statement could be more judicious and responsible than that. He went on to say,

“Separating that from this particular decision, there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion. I don’t think that’s the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials. But these are real issues.  And we have to lift them up and not deny them or try to tamp them down. What we need to do is to understand them and figure out how do we make more progress.  And that can be done.”

But then the President said, even as the images of violence were behind him on many television screens,

“That won’t be done by throwing bottles. That won’t be done by smashing car windows. That won’t be done by using this as an excuse to vandalize property. And it certainly won’t be done by hurting anybody. So, to those in Ferguson, there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and there are ways of channeling your concerns destructively. Michael Brown’s parents understand what it means to be constructive. The vast majority of peaceful protesters, they understand it as well.”

Well that last point made by the President seems to be refuted by the images on the television screen. But that’s one of the points we need to consider. In making his comments last night, the prosecutor pointed to what he called the 24 hour news cycle and to a rush to judgment in terms of the press. But it’s very easy to understand that rush to judgment – even as it is impossible to excuse it. That rush to judgment can also happen to the viewers of those looking at these video streams because even as appropriately the news media were covering the violence, the arson, and the vandalism, the reality is what the cameras weren’t covering was a large number of protesters who were not involved in this kind of violent activity. By the very nature of the fact that they were not, they did not draw the camera attention.

What we see on the screen, whether it’s on the television or any other form of video screen, is only a micro picture – it’s only a very small fraction of what is actually taking place. It’s very dangerous for us to look at images and imagine that we actually know the totality, certainly the larger context, of what is going on. But at the same time, the camera doesn’t lie. What we’re looking at last night was a vast exercise in what can only be described as the near meltdown of civilization. One of the most important things the President said last night is that Americans believe in the rule of law. Speaking of the grand jury, he made very clear the decision was the grand jury’s to make. What the president did not say, probably for sake of time and clarity, was that the very existence of the grand jury is one of the great civil rights protections Americans have by virtue of the United States Constitution. Grand jury’s, made up of ordinary citizens in the community, exist as a buffer between the police and the prosecutors and the people so that the police and prosecutors are prevented from bringing frivolous charges – or very flimsy charges – on inadequate evidence against an individual; certainly when it comes to a major criminal charge. That’s a very important protection that is granted to us in the United States Constitution.

The grand jury their Missouri looking at this incident considered between 60 and 70 hours of testimony, including the rather unusual opportunity to have face-to-face testimony from the man who would’ve been the defendant – the police officer, Darren Wilson. In keeping with the rules of the grand jury, the officer had agreed to meet before the panel without the benefit of his own attorney. The grand jury was charged with a very serious responsibility. It had to look at the evidence, indeed it had to sift through the evidence, using its own authority to subpoena witnesses and to compel testimony from them. At the end of the day the grand jury found that there was no adequate evidence to find probable cause to charge Officer Wilson with any of the available criminal counts against him; ranging from counts of murder all the way down to manslaughter.

And the reason legal analysts expected this very result is that when a police officer is involved in this kind of shooting – even a fatal shooting –  in the line of duty, certainly in the process of making an arrest, the burden of proof is exceedingly high for anyone to demonstrate the misuse of that force – much less any deliberate criminal intent. When the President spoke of the importance of the rule of law he pointed to the importance of civilization.

One of the things that Christians should think about very seriously in this matter is the fact that this kind of justice system, the very existence of the grand jury and its privilege of responsibly deliberating these issues on behalf of the people, this is a testimony to the rule of law as an achievement of civilization. This requires community trust and cohesion; it requires the furnishing and the nourishing of institutions – including the judiciary, the police, and an entire system of customs and patterns of laws and statutes that make order within the society, within the civilization possible. But what we saw on video feed last night was a subversion of those very structures that makes civilization possible, of the morality and the rule of law that make our society actually operate – protecting the civil rights of all.

Now several things need to be noted here. There are many people who are saying the system is broken. Well in one sense, Christians understand that every system is only as good as the human beings fragile frail and sometimes downright faulty involved in the process. There is no perfect system, not humanly speaking, because human beings are involved in it. And this means that some of the accusations and concerns coming from the African-American community have to be taken very seriously. Christians should be at the forefront of demanding that these concerns be thoroughly vetted, heard, and considered, because after all we do know that as important as these systems are, every system indeed breaks down at the very fallibility of human beings. It is no insult to the system, it is no insult to the society, to make very clear that we have to watch continually that we’re living up to our ideals – including the ideal of equal standing, equal justice, before the law.

Furthermore, we know there is a heritage, there is a history here, and African-Americans can document many miscarriages of justice in which the police and law enforcement officials were very clearly using the rule of law as a weapon rather than as a protection for African-Americans. Christians operating out of the biblical worldview understand the importance of law and furthermore we come to understand the importance of the maintenance of the institutions of social stability in order to protect the human flourishing of all involved. But we also remind ourselves of our understanding of human sinfulness and we should add of the fact that justice is an achievement, an achievement that must be true for the entirety of the society, for every single individual within it. We have to come to the understanding that if any within our society are on the underside of the rule of law, not because they have broken the law but because the law is being wrongly applied or it is being selectively enforced, then we have to act on behalf of the entirety because injustice to one ends up being, eventually, injustice to all.

But the images coming out of Ferguson, Missouri also serve as a powerful reminder of the fact that the kind of reform, the kind of improvement in justice that is needed in our society cannot be brought about by flaunting that form of justice with the kind of injustice that was seen on the streets. The rule of law cannot be improved, nor corrected – much less reformed – by lawlessness. And the subversion of the rule of law on the streets of Missouri last night is a refutation of the claim that this is being done in the name of justice. It will take some time for the dust to settle on this case and there may be further legal issues yet in the future. But this much is clear, the people in St. Louis, Missouri and that community have a great deal of rebuilding to do; the rebuilding of trust, the rebuilding of social institutions, the rebuilding of cohesion, the rebuilding of the relationship between the police and the people. Those are very high responsibilities.

But the nation as a whole still faces the responsibility to look at the questions of race and the law, of law enforcement injustice, of righteousness and mercy, and the rule of law and to consider a new what must be done in order to make our system of justice even more fair and fair for all. But that process would require a form of truth telling that was notably absent from almost every dimension and every phase of the controversy over the incident there in Missouri. We can be almost a sure that after some period of protest things will calm down there in Missouri, they always do. But that doesn’t mean that the problem goes away. Christians are those who know that the responsibility is ours to make certain that problems are not merely swept under the rug – that we do not look for a false peace.

President Obama’s words last night were a very good start. This might be an opportunity for his own personal presidential leadership to be demonstrated in a way that could lead to a significant gain for the entire nation. In the final analysis, Christians looking at the events and the images coming from Ferguson, Missouri should be prompted to remember just how urgently we need to pray for our nation, for our communities. We need to pray for the Brown family grieving the death of a son. In any event, no matter what the facts were the facts that may have been considered by the grand jury, facts perhaps known only to God. The reality is they had a son who is now dead whom they loved. At the very least, Christians should understand the imperative to pray for that family suffering this grief – a grief compounded by the events of recent days and hours; even as their own call for peaceful protest was flaunted by so many protesters.

We also need to remember to pray for those who are also involved in this in ways that others might not remember. We need to pray for the police, we need to pray for those in legal authority, we need to pray not only for the Brown family but for the Wilson family, praying that all will be protected from harm. And we need to pray for peace in all of our communities, understanding the reality that the Bible makes very clear and that is that peace is the product of righteousness. Where there is no righteousness, there is no peace.

In the immediate aftermath of the events last night and early this morning in Ferguson, Missouri the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal made this statement,

“One measure—perhaps the measure—of a civilized society is the respect it shows for the rule of law. The decision by a grand jury not to indict Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson for shooting unarmed black teenager Michael Brown is such a test for America.”

That is a profoundly important sentence. Yes, indeed. The events of these past months, the larger context of conflict between African-American communities and the police, the continuing scar of racial division in America, the immediate aftermath of the decision by the grand jury they in Missouri – all of these things point profoundly to the fact that they are a test for America. One of the most encouraging aspects of Pres. Obama’s comments last night, to me at least, was the fact that the President spoke very carefully – even hopefully – citing improvements in terms of race relations in America and his hope that these kinds of challenges can be met by responsible Americans. We must pray and work so that the images of broken so apparent last night can be transformed into images of wholeness.

Last night is all these events were unfolding my wife Mary and I found ourselves in a long-delayed transcontinental flight coming from the West Coast back to our home in Louisville, Kentucky. That is to say, as these events are going on we were flying over the vast heartland of the continental United States. At one point even as images were coming across video screens within the airplane cabin of the violence in St. Louis, we recognized we were flying even then right over that troubled city. That led us to pray in a whole new way for the communities we saw below us; represented by the sparkling lights we could see on the Earth’s surface.

From time to time every nation, every people, every community, faces a series of tests – moral tests, economic test, political and social tests – this is a huge moral test for America. Ground zero of that test is a community of St. Louis, Missouri – especially the neighborhood of Ferguson. But intelligent Christians operating out of a biblical worldview know that this is not just the problem of Ferguson, Missouri, it’s the problem of the human heart and we understand that the Bible and the Bible alone gives us an adequate understanding of where these problems reside, where they come from, and how in the final analysis they can only be solved. But these tests can bring out the best or the worst in a people, a community or nation. As we look at the situation in America this morning, let’s pray – fervently – that this test will bring out the best and not the worst of all the American people. All the other issues I had planned to talk about today on The Briefing got swept away, that’s sometimes just the way it is. As morning breaks across America this is enough for us to think about today.

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 tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-25-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Response to Ferguson grand jury’s decision a moral test for all America 

Ferguson police officer won’t be charged in fatal shooting, Washington Post (Chico Harlan, Wesley Lowery, and Kimberly Kindy)

Protests Flare After Ferguson Officer Is Not Indicted, New York Times (Monica Davey and Julie Bosman)

Amid Missouri unrest, FAA closes air space over Ferguson, Los Angeles Times (Matt Pearce)

President Obama Delivers a Statement On the Ferguson Grand Jury’s Decision, White House (Pres. Barack Obama)

The Ferguson Decision, Wall Street Journal (Editorial Board)

Shepherds 360 Conference: Session 1

For more information on the Shepherds 360 Conference visit shepherds360.org.

Transcript: The Briefing 11-24-14

The Briefing

 

November 24, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, November 24, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Report on Adam Lanza, Newtown shooter, reveals efforts to explain sin through disease

A major massive report out over the weekend indicates what is described as a major series of failures in efforts to treat Adam Lanza, the very troubled young man who killed 20 children and 6 educators on December 14, 2012 in the infamous massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The report came out from a government agency indicating what is described as a series of massive failures.

As Alaine Griffith and Josh Kovner report for Los Angeles Times,

“In February 2007, Yale [University] clinicians identified in Adam Lanza what they believed were profound emotional disabilities and offered him treatment that … could give him relief for the first time in his troubled life. But [according to the report] Adam was angry and anxious, and he didn’t want to go. [According to the Times] His mother, Nancy Lanza, constantly placating her son, was inclined to pull away from the treatment, prompting a psychiatric nurse to reach out to his father, Peter Lanza, in an urgent email.”

That read,

“I told Adam he has a biological disorder that can be helped with medication. I told him what the medicines are and why they can work. I told him he’s living in a box right now and the box will only get smaller over time if he doesn’t get some treatment.”

According to the Los Angeles Times Nancy Lanza, that’s Adam Lanza’s mother, rejected the Yale doctors’ plan. At that time the boy was 14 – it was six years later, in 2012, that he committed the massacre.

The report that was released Friday in Hartford, Connecticut by the Office of the Child Advocate pointed, says the Times,

“to the Yale episode as one of dozens of red flags, squandered opportunities, blatant family denial and disturbing failures by pediatricians, educators and mental health professionals to see a complete picture of Adam Lanza’s ‘crippling’ social and emotional disabilities.”

The Times goes on to report, and this is very important, although the report does not draw a line between the events of Lanza’s life and the massacre, it points out repeated examples of times when the profound anxiety and rage simmering inside him was not explored in favor of attempts to manage his symptoms. Later in the report, and by the way it was 112 pages long, many of the most significant criticisms in the report were aimed at the fact that parents, educators, doctors, and others, repeatedly attempted to treat Adam Lanza’s symptoms rather than the underlying disease – and that again is in the analysis of this report that comes in Connecticut from the Office of the Child Advocate.

The same report was summarized by the New York Times through its reporter Alison Leigh Cowan in these words,

“Medical experts at Yale University had called for drastic measures to help Adam Lanza in the years before he shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., but those calls ‘went largely unheeded’ by his mother, who was also shot to death, according to a new study.”

At Cowan reports,

“The report, based on a comprehensive examination of the medical and school histories of Mr. Lanza, 20, found he was ‘completely untreated in the years before the shooting’ for psychiatric and physical ailments like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was also deprived of recommended services and drugs.”

The report went on to state that he also had an undiagnosed anorexia which could also have affected his mental state.

Now this story is truly important from a Christian worldview perspective because what it points to perhaps most profoundly is the fact that we, as rational moral creatures, made that way by God, want to find some kind of rationality in terms of this horrifying crime – the massacre of 20 elementary school-age children, six educators, and the young man’s own mother. We look at this and we have to wonder how can it be that these things could take place within a human imagination, much less with an actual human action? A part of the rationality we seek would be satisfied if we can find a medical, a psychiatric or psychological diagnosis that would serve as an adequate explanation. In this case there is plenty of psychiatric and psychological material available.

This 112 page report makes that abundantly clear. Adam Lanza, according to the researchers, was suffering from any number of major mental illnesses; any one of which could have contributed to this, all of which together certainly paint the picture of a uniquely troubled young man. A young man who was receiving treatment, or at least was receiving diagnosis, who as recently as 2007 had been diagnosed at Yale University by mental health clinicians who believed that he was severely ill and needed immediate treatment. But he was treated instead for symptoms, not for what the psychiatrist believed was the underlying disease.

The biblical worldview understands that human beings are psychosomatic whole – that is we are both mind and body. We are a physical creature; we’re also a spiritual creature. We not only have body, we have a soul. That psychosomatic unity, as it’s described in Scripture, can certainly explain how mental illness can take place and it can also underline the fact that there is a reality of a very serious mental illness. But the biblical worldview does not allow us to shift all issues of moral responsibility onto the disease theory. Even if the disease is actually real – terrifyingly present.

No one looking at the case of Adam Lanza even before looking at the 112 pages of this report could come to any other conclusion than that he was very seriously ill – mentally ill. But the biblical worldview also reminds us that we are mystery to ourselves, and in terms of the psyche, that is the psychiatric dimension of human beings, there will always be a hiddenness, even from the most skilled and insightful psychiatric observers. That becomes abundantly clear in this report because if anything is thoroughly documented in these over 100 pages, it is the failure of the mental health community, the failure of parents, the failure of educators, the failure even of pediatricians, to see just how violently ill this young man was and just how dangerous the situation would turn out to be.

The major question in this report is the major question on most of our minds, how is it that anyone who is familiar with this case, who knew of Adam Lanza and his deep mental illness, can come to any conclusion other than he had to be in some form of treatment and under some form of supervision that just might have prevented that horrifying massacre. That’s the question on our minds. Could it have been prevented? The report itself is not reluctant to point fingers of blame; it points at mental health practitioners, at educators, and particularly at Adam Lanza’s parents, saying that they failed. But the big documentation in this report is that many people failed – there was a massive series of failures. Virtually everyone who knew anything about Adam Lanza failed to take the appropriate action and thus the massacre was not prevented.

The Associated Press report says that Joseph Erardi, that is the superintendent of schools for Newtown, said the report would have great meaning if – and here’s an important quote –

“There is one school leader, one district, one mental health provider or one set of parents who reads this work and can prevent such a heinous crime.”

Well let’s state the obvious. We simply must hope that in this case the school superintendent’s hope might somehow be realized. We just have to hope and pray that future massacres like this might be prevented – indeed that he would not even been known to us because the perpetrators of these horrible crimes would’ve been the subject of some kind of saving helpful intervention or medical treatment, mental health treatment that would’ve prevented the massacre or the horrible crime from taking place. But that’s where the Christian worldview also points to an obvious fact in this report; it only makes sense in retrospect. Looking backwards the report is able to trace what it describes as a massive series of failures. But at the time, none of these actions appear to be such a failure – certainly not such a massive failure – at the time.

One of the other things that is now being commented upon by the mental health community and other observers of these horrifying realities is that there are many people who seem to have propensities such as those of Adam Lanza. It’s hard to identify in advance who is actually violent and who is not. We have to be thankful that there are some mental health professionals and others who do seem to be able to identify some persons who would be violent, dangerously horribly violent. But the case of Adam Lanza, as documented in this report, now seen in retrospect reminds us just how difficult it often must be to identify who is and is not going to be violent. Adam Lanza was missed.

The last observation from a Christian worldview about this report comes down to the fact that the disease theory in terms of mental illness and human crime is simply not sufficient. That’s not to say that disease theory is totally wrong, there could be some truth it is found within it. But what is wrong is shifting the moral question to the disease rather than to the problem of human sinfulness and the reality that sin, violence, murder, anger, all kinds of things, lurk in the human heart and not just in what can be described as a pathology or a disease.

2) Disease not primary cause of alcohol abuse, report reveals

Interestingly, the weekend also saw the release of another report. The second report is not likely to be linked to the first report in many minds but it should be in ours. The headline in the New York Times report on this research is this: “90% of those who drink excessively aren’t alcoholics, a government study finds.” Tara Parker Pope reports,

“Most people who drink to get drunk are not alcoholics”

According to a new government report suggesting that more can be done to help heavy drinkers cut back. As the New York Times reports,

“The finding, from a government survey of 138,100 adults, counters the conventional wisdom that every ‘falling-down drunk’ must be addicted to alcohol. Instead,  [and this comes from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health] … nine out of 10 people who drink too much are not addicts, and can change their behavior with a little — or perhaps a lot of — prompting.”

The report then cites Robert D. Brewer, a doctor who heads the alcohol program at the Centers for Disease Control and prevention. He said,

“Many people tend to equate excessive drinking with alcohol dependence. We need to think about other strategies to address these people who are drinking too much but who are not addicted to alcohol.”

Now the paper documents that there are about 88,000 deaths a year from excessive drinking – or what’s defined here as excessive use of alcohol. The report cites very high rates of binge drinking, of drunk driving, and other things, that are the symptoms of the heavy use of alcohol. So how and why are these two stories connected? Well it gets back to the disease theory and it’s directly addressed in the second news story. Because the whole point of this government report is the fact that the disease theory is also not enough to explain why so many people have so many problems with alcohol, because most of us would also like to put the problem of alcohol abuse in the category of the disease theory. We would like to say that people who commit these kinds of acts are doing so because they can’t help themselves, because they have some kind of syndrome or disease, because they are – in the words used in this report – alcoholics. And yet you’re told here, in this report from the federal government, from the very agency that is directing its attention to the problem of the abuse of alcohol, that it’s not just that not all of these heavy drinkers are not alcoholics but that nine out of 10 of them actually failed to meet the definition of alcoholism. They’re getting themselves falling down drunk, described in this report is dropdead drunk, repeatedly and they’re doing so perhaps even under the claim made to themselves that they are alcoholics. But again, just look at the statistics embedded in this report – nine out of 10 of those who have this kind of problem with alcohol are not alcoholics.

By the way there are some interesting things cited in this report. For one thing, a significant raise in the cost of alcohol leads – in the case of many users – to a drop off in terms of that use; meaning that the disease theory itself is failing to explain the behavior because if it really was tied to a disease there wouldn’t be such an impact from an economic change. Once again the biblical worldview takes us back where we started with the first story – horrifying as it is. The reality is that there may be something to the disease theory. No, let’s put it a little more strongly – there certainly is something to the disease theory, it just isn’t a sufficient explanation, it’s far too convenient to try to look at immoral behavior and say that it is rooted in some kind of mental illness, some kind of pathology syndrome or disease. But now you have a report coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that when it comes to the abuse of alcohol not only is it the case that many of the people who were abusers are not alcoholics but that nine out of 10 failed to meet the definition of alcoholism. To put the matter succinctly, even when the disease theory is right it’s simply not sufficient to replace a moral analysis and a moral judgment – indeed a moral understanding of the behaviors that are actually at stake.

3) Marvel Comics emphasis on character diversity reminder any art carries worldview agenda

A reminder of the power and the agenda of popular culture comes in the form an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times with the headline, “Marvel Boost Diversity Frontline.” Blake Hennon reporting for the Los Angeles Times writes that the company wants its comics’ universe to reflect the real world – even as some of its readers remain skeptical. As Hennon reports,

“When Marvel [announced] in July…that a woman would become Thor and a black man would become Captain America in its comics, debate ignited over what in Asgard’s name the House of Ideas was thinking. Such dramatic changes coming simultaneously to two of the publisher’s classic marquee brands – names that front blockbuster film franchises at its sister company Marvel Studios – were celebrated by many people … but others decried the decisions: ‘This is political correctness run amok,’”

Marvel, by the way, is celebrating its 75th anniversary and this story reminds us that some things are simply more important than many people want to believe – in this case were talking about comic books, we’re talking about comic characters. But we’re also talking about movie blockbusters and we’re talking about messaging that reaches millions of Americans – especially millions of young Americans. The point that is made by Blake Hennon is that the content in terms of these comic books is now very heavily directed by an agenda of diversity and is not just gender and racial diversity it is also a diversity that has now extended to sexual orientation, to sexual behavior, to same-sex relationships, and increasingly now to transgendered identities as well. Hennon quotes Axel Alonso who is the editor-in-chief at Marvel, who says,

“Marvel comic books are always at their best when they reflect what’s going on in the world right now,”

He went on to say,

“That’s been our… strength, dating back to Stan Lee – our ability, either through metaphor or through straight-on confrontation, to deal with social issues and the zeitgeist of the day.”

Marvel has recently been attracting the attention of many groups and even awards from some gay rights groups and others. From a Christian worldview consideration the most important issue for us to ponder is this, to be reminded of the fact that cultural products are never worldview neutral. There is some agenda, there is some worldview, there is some point to be made, there is some ideology. There’s some moral judgment, there is something behind the creation of all cultural products, whether it be art that is visual art, drama, poetry, music, the movies, or – as this article reminds us – even comic books. That’s right, even comic books – or in this article’s point – maybe, especially, comic books. Because as it turns out, comic books are particularly attractive to young people who may be the least aware of the worldview issues at stake, perhaps even least aware of the fact that a worldview is being presented to them.

At the very least this news article serves to underline the fact that there is no neutral spot on planet Earth. There is no position of neutrality; there is certainly no neutrality when it comes to communication or the cultural creation. Some agenda is going to shine through. Some worldview is going to shake the presentation – not only in its structure, but also in its form; not only in its style, but also in its content. That’s important when we think about every single Hollywood movie. It’s important when we think about every representational piece of art we see in a museum. It’s important when we think about music – whether it’s the high music of the classical culture or the popular music that is the favorite of any generation. So as we might put it: nothing comes from nowhere, everything come from somewhere and that somewhere comes with a worldview agenda. And now we know that extends even to the comic book.

4) Abortion debate at Oxford shut down, as freedom of speech is valued less and less

Finally, when it comes to the position of the intellectual elites on a question like freedom of speech, a very troubling comes from Great Britain and London newspaper The Telegraph in an article by Tim Stanley telling about the fact that students hoping to hold a debate on abortion culture in Great Britain were shut down. As Stanley reports,

“I would’ve thought that the one place in Britain where you could agree to disagree amicably would be Oxford University. But I was wrong. For instance, I’ve discovered that you’re only allowed to debate abortion there if a) you’re a woman and b) you’re all for it. Any other approach to the subject is liable to attract a mob…”

Stanley then writes, and he’s writing in the first person,

“A few months ago I accepted an invitation by the Oxford Students for Life to debate Brendan O’Neill on the subject ‘This House believes Britain’s Abortion Culture Hurts Us All’. The setting was Christ Church College and around 60 people signed up to attend on Facebook. To be clear: this wasn’t a pro-life demo and the subject wasn’t whether or not women should have the right to choose abortion. Even though I was speaking for the proposition, my speech would’ve begun with noting that the motion has nothing to do with abortion rights per se and was simply a consideration of how having effective abortion on demand affects wider society.”

He went on to say, however, that the debate was shut down. It was shut down because of protest group of about 300 people appeared on Facebook promising to

“take along some non-destructive but oh so disruptive instruments to help demonstrate to the anti-choicers just what we think of their ‘debate’.”

As Stanley goes on to report, that was all it took eventually for Christchurch College to pull the plug on the debate – to state that it was not going to allow the debate to take place because in this new age of intellectual closedness, the intellectual elites are unwilling even to have an issue like abortion – as carefully defined as this debate was at Oxford University – carried on in public.

We should also notice Stanley says that the issue wasn’t actually debating abortion rights. Stanley says that he wouldn’t have been willing to enter into that debate, that’s troubling enough. But the debate even as it was proposed on the effect of Britain’s abortion culture was simply not going to be allowed at Oxford University. Eventually the Students for Life that tried to sponsor the debate sought other colleges, that is residential colleges at Oxford University, to sponsor the debate but found none. Eventually the debate was simply called off – there was nowhere to hold it.

Stanley then writes,

“What it also proved is that elements of the Left are working hard to define new parameters for freedom of speech. You are free to speak so long as it doesn’t offend certain sensibilities, which of course amounts to no real freedom at all.”

In concluding his argument Stanley makes this point,

“On the subject of abortion, the Left can enjoy that authoritarianism because contemporary society broadly agrees with them. But a day will come when they try to argue for something that proves unpopular and they, too, will be gagged. And I’ll be there to defend their right to say something that I disagree with.”

Sadly the pattern that is here so very thoroughly documented by Tim Stanley isn’t limited to Great Britain, it’s not limited to Oxford University. Similar tales have taken place all over American higher education where it is simply now unthinkable that such a debate can take place on many college campuses. There are people who would simply claim that they would no longer feel that their space is – to use the new political correctness – safe if this kind of question were even to be raised.

Furthermore, you have too many spineless, defensive, scared, panicked, college administrators who simply are afraid of any controversy coming from the left and so they’ll even shut down freedom of speech and freedom of debate. What’s happening is that the supposed castles and palaces of academic freedom are no longer really representing ideological freedom – freedom of speech and freedom of ideas at all. Even more troubling, the same kind of restrictive efforts to control speech are spreading far beyond the college campus and Christians must be keenly aware, very urgently aware, that these kinds of restrictions on speech aren’t only about issues like abortion or same-sex marriage or any number of other contemporary controversies, but over the gospel itself. In some circles in this highly secular age, even the gospel is described as hate speech.

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’m speaking to you from La Jolla, California and I’ll meet tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-24-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Report on Adam Lanza, Newtown shooter, reveals efforts to explain sin through disease

New Report on Lanza: Parental Denial, Breakdowns, Missed Opportunities, Hartford Courant (Alaine Griffith and Josh Kovner)

Report on the Life of Adam Lanza Before the 2012 Shooting, Office of the Child Advocate

Adam Lanza’s Mental Problems ‘Completely Untreated’ Before Newtown Shootings, Report Says, New York Times (Alison Leigh Cowan)

Report questions role of wealth in Lanza’s care, Associated Press (Pat Eaton-Robb and Michael Melia)

2) Disease not primary cause of alcohol abuse, report reveals

Most Heavy Drinkers Are Not Alcoholics, New York Times (Tara Parker Pope)

3) Marvel Comics emphasis on character diversity reminder any art carries worldview agenda

‘All-New Captain America’ lands at Marvel’s diversity front line, Los Angeles Times (Blake Hennon)

4) Abortion debate at Oxford shut down, as freedom of speech is valued less and less

Oxford students shut down abortion debate. Free speech is under assault on campus, The Telegraph (Tim Stanley)