R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 333
December 16, 2014
The Briefing 12-16-14
1) Exodus movie underlines significance of supernaturalism and historicity to biblical worldview
Moses Without the Supernatural — Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings”, AlbertMohler.com
Hollywood has a race problem — and it’s on display in Ridley Scott’s new movie ‘Exodus’, PRI (T.J. Raphael)
Christian Bale and Ridley Scott talk religion and ‘Exodus’: An RNS interview, Religion News Service (Jonathan Merritt)
Christian Bale on Studying Moses: He Was a ‘Freedom Fighter’ for Hebrews, ‘Terrorist’ to Egyptian Empire, ABC Nightline
Man versus myth: does it matter if the Moses story is based on fact?, The Guardian (Andrew Brown)
2) Lack of controversy over atheist billboard campaign in Deep South positive sign of Southern piety
American Atheists launch provocative campaign in religious Deep South, The Telegraph (Peter Foster)
3) Widespread acceptance of nativity story reveals Americans not as secular as they believe
Most Say Religious Holiday Displays on Public Property Are OK, Pew Research Center
December 15, 2014
Transcript: The Briefing 12-15-14
The Briefing
December 15, 2014
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Monday, December 15, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Sydney hostage situation points to importance of government preventing evil
This morning, about 10 o’clock Sydney, Australia-time apparently a lone gunman took control of what is known as the Lindt Chocolate Café in Sydney (that is of course Australia’s largest city). And in so doing apparently began what is an ongoing example of Islamic terrorism, or at least it is certainly intended to be understood that way. The lone gunmen put a flag known as a shahadah outside the café for everyone to see this morning that reads: ‘There is no God but God. And Mohammed is the prophet of God.’ That is the most central theological affirmation of the religion of Islam. And one that will be recognized by Muslims anywhere and this does send a very clear signal.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he and his government at this point do not know the motivation for the hostage taking but he also said,
“…we don’t know whether this is politically motivated — although obviously there are some indications that it could be,”
That’s one of those statements in the midst of a controversy or a crisis like this that is often spoken by politicians or government officials who don’t want to say anything but have to say something. With full sympathy to the Prime Minister’s predicament, in this case he actually succeeded in doing both; saying something and saying nothing. He went on to say,
“The whole point of politically motivated violence is to scare people out of being themselves. Australia is a peaceful, open and generous society and nothing should ever change that,”
Well that certainly true, nothing should ever change that. But this kind of attack is a significant indication that something could change that. A society cannot sustain the kind of continual suspicion and fear that this kind of terrorist approach is intended to engender. And that’s why when Western governments respond to this they have to respond in such a way that not only tries to explain what took place but to assure the people in their own societies that this is not a routine occurrence and should not occur again.
At least in that respect Tony Abbott and his government deserve some very important credibility because over the last several months the Prime Minister and his government and been very clear about what they saw as mounting signs of Islamic terrorism within Australia. As this event unfolds we can only hope and pray that no lives will be lost but it’s also very important that Western security agencies learn not only how to explain this kind of incident, not only how to end it, but how to prevent it in the first place.
As we speak about this incident at this point it also serves to underline the fact that we simply don’t know how big a story is, not just when it begins but until it ends. But the issue for Christians and for anyone intellectually serious engaging the news media is often not only how big a story is this, but is this a story at all? Or does the story turn into the story?
2) Confusion on Pope’s view of pets’ in eternity reveals priority of sentimentality, not Scripture
That’s what took place over the weekend when many headlines around the country, indeed around the world, trumpeted the fact that Pope Francis the first had declared to a young preschool boy that he should expect to meet his dog in heaven. The media headlines all around the world immediately trumpeted that the Pope declared that animals, indeed pets, would be in heaven and that we would know them. This was applauded by groups such as the Humane Society in the United States, and animal rights groups, and so many others, and it reached the point that I was receiving – in terms of my own mailbox – questions as to whether or not it was true that pets would be in heaven.
When I first started receiving those emails I wondered what in the world could be the source of such an urgent issue for it to arrive from so many people in so many different places all at once. And then I discover the headlines and came to understand that the Pope had told a five-year-old boy – distressed over the death of his dog – that he should expect to meet his dog in heaven. As a matter fact what was reported that the Pope had said was this, he had supposedly said,
“One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”
Now, to state the obvious, the Pope saying it so doesn’t make it so. But, to state another equally obvious issue, it would be important to know that the Pope actually said it – which in this case, Pope Francis most assuredly did not.
The first thing to learn in looking at this story is that there is a certain credibility factor that is built in to anyone claiming that someone like the Pope said anything. The President of the United States, a Prime Minister of a country, a major celebrity, or in this case, the Pope, when they are said to have said something, it often gets repeated before anyone has the opportunity to find out if the words actually were said. And one of the things that also has to be said is that when you have the kind of religious celebrity that Pope Francis the first is – someone who is very media-genic and who tends to say things the media loves – it sounded like him, indeed it sounds like the one he chose as his namesake, Francis of Assisi. But, once again, the more important question is, did the Pope say it? And he didn’t.
There is a lot to learn from this. The Pope gave a general audience at the Vatican on 26 November, that’s where this story originated. And according to the transcript from what the Pope had to say there, he said,
“Sacred Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this marvelous plan [he’s speaking of eschatology] cannot but involve everything that surrounds us and came from the heart and mind of God.’
He went on to say,
“The Apostle Paul says it explicitly, when he says that ‘Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God’ (Rom 8:21).”
The Pope there is explicitly citing Romans 8:21. He goes on to cite the text about a new heaven and a new earth from 2 Peter 3:13 and Revelation 21:1. In this sense, he says,
“…the whole universe will be renewed and will be freed once and for all from every trace of evil and from death itself. What lies ahead is the fulfillment of a transformation that in reality is already happening, beginning with the death and resurrection of Christ. Hence, it is the new creation; it is not, therefore, the annihilation of the cosmos and of everything around us, but the bringing of all things into the fullness of being, of truth and of beauty. This is the design that God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, willed from eternity to realize and is realizing.”
Notice what the Pope didn’t say: anything about dogs, anything about pets, anything about consoling a little boy. The immediate confusion of the Pope’s comments came after an Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera,interpreted the Pope’s remarks to say that dog should go to heaven. It is not at all clear how the newspaper jumped to that conclusion.
The newspaper actually then drew a comparison between what Pope Francis the first was said to have said and what a late Pope, in this case Pope Paul VI, actually said. So a Pope did say the words attributed to Francis the first but as Pope Paul VI back in the 1960s or 70s. It was not Pope Francis I, but it was Pope Paul VI who said to a little boy, consoling him upon the death of his dog,
“One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”
A couple of footnotes in terms of Catholic theology here: Pope Pius XII explicitly denied that animals will be in heaven. One of the successors to Pope Paul VI, that is his second successor, Benedict the XVI, currently the ex-Pope, the only living ex-Pope in centuries, he said that dogs and cats will not be in heaven in terms of a conscious identity with what they had been on earth as pets, because they lacked that kind of soul or` consciousness. Now Pope Francis I, as far as we know, is actually not intoned on the issue at all. What he was talking about in that November 26 General Audience is something that is rather common to Christian eschatology whether it is found in the Roman Catholic tradition or among Protestant evangelicals.
So if the Pope didn’t actually say it, and even if the Pope did, it wouldn’t make it so, how in the world has this become a major issue for us? Well in the first place, there is a big lesson here about the news media. When you see a comment like this, especially one that was first offered in an alternative language, in this case the language first spoken was Italian, you simply can’t always trust what you see is exactly what was said. But something else to count on is this: you do have cross reporting and you do have media watching and reading each other and you do have professionals in journalism who are going to pretty quick to say, ‘now wait just a minute the Pope didn’t say that.’ but what does that say about us? That is as journalists.
So looking at the issue from this first dimension it is interesting to see how many major news media outlets, including those as venerable and professional as the New York Times and others, are trying to say, ‘whoops, we got the story wrong. We were dependent upon a translation from another newspaper in another nation and they got it wrong and we’re trying to get the story right now.’ But the bigger dimension from a Christian worldview perspective is this: why is it that so many people want to believe that their dogs and cats, in particular their pets, will be with them in heaven?
The Christian worldview based in Scripture makes very clear that animals are not an accident, that indeed animals are part of the diverse glory of God’s kingdom, that God created these animals, these beings, for his own pleasure and for ours as well. And for his rule and for ours as well, as is made very clear in the stewardship and dominion assigned to the human creature – the only creature made in God’s image – even in the book of Genesis, in the first two chapters of the Bible. It is Adam who names the animals for example; the animals do not name Adam. So one of the first things we need to affirm is that the animals are part of the goodness of God’s creation. God declared the creation he had made, with the diversity of all these wonderful creatures, to be good and for these animals themselves to be good.
Furthermore, the biblical worldview also affirms the fact that there is consciousness found in the animal kingdom. There is a consciousness that is there and we know it and we recognize it. We do know that we can have something of a relationship with some of these creatures. And any of us who has a pet or has ever had a pet understands the incredibly strong bonds that can then emerge from that kind of relationship; a relationship of mutuality. That is invaded by a couple of very important things that are important for us to know. The first of these is the fact that we tend toward sentimentality. That is, as sentimental creatures, we tend to read onto not only animals but other objects of creation sentiments and emotions and knowledge that simply are not there. We tend sometimes to want to see things and we judge we have seen them because we want to. This relates to the fact that our sense of apperception, our rationality, our intelligence, is itself affected by the fall. This is known theologically as the noetic effects of the fall; we simply think we know things that we actually do not know. And even if we know them partially we don’t know them in whole. Or in some cases we are partly right but in other ways partly, indeed sometimes largely, wrong.
The second thing for us to keep in mind here is the tendency of human beings towards anthropomorphizing. That is, we tend to look at these creatures and read onto them our own intelligence, our own spiritual understanding, our own language ability, our own intelligence and emotional states. And so especially when it comes to pets – and it’s not only house pets but it’s also (as any farmer or rancher will tell you) the relationship that inevitably emerges out of those who were involved in that kind of animal husbandry and the animals themselves – when it comes to that kind of relationship there is a desire within us that it would continue beyond this life. Now by the way here’s a very important issue in terms of apologetics, that is the evidence for the reality and truth of the Christian faith, if secularists are indeed as secular as they think they are, why would they be concerned for the fact that there will be any continuation of consciousness or of knowledge or relationship beyond death because they believe that our life is basically a cosmological accident and our death is simply the end of the story. So when you’re looking at this, it is one of those very odd affirmations of the fact that even in a highly secular age even the most secular people aren’t close to being as secular as they think themselves to be.
But backing out of that issue for just a moment, understanding our tendency toward sentimentality and toward anthropomorphizing there’s another tendency and that is we sometimes want to answer a biblical silence with some kind of answer we think we can infer and then justify in terms of the biblical text. What does the biblical text say about our pets in heaven? It says absolutely nothing.
One of the most sophisticated analyses of the question about pets in heaven came from C.S. Lewis in the 20th century. Lewis wrote in two different of his writings about the continuation of pets in heaven. In The Great Divorce he actually wrote about in terms of it happening. But, as he said himself, that was a work of fiction that was intended to have a larger spiritual meaning. But in a work that wasn’t fiction at all and in which he wasn’t telling a story, in his book The Problem of Pain, he dealt in that book with the continuation of animal life – indeed with our pets in heaven. In the book he actually suggested that some of his colleagues had warned him against even thinking or writing about this since it would put him “in the company of old maids” – that is simply in a sea of sentimentality. But Lewis wrote back,
“The complete silence of Scripture in Christian tradition on animal immortality is a more serious objection.”
However, he went on to say that silence doesn’t mean it isn’t true. He said,
“…the curtain has been rent at one point, and one point only, to reveal our immediate practical necessities and not to satisfy our intellectual curiosity.”
So Lewis said the fact that the Bible doesn’t say that our pets will be in heaven doesn’t mean that Bible says that they will not be – which is a profoundly of saying the simple truth that the Bible actually is silent on the question. The Bible is not silent however on the fact that there will be a new heaven and a new earth and that on this new earth there will be animals. As a matter fact, we have eschatological references to Lions and the lambs but that is a different thing altogether than suggesting that there will be the conscious continuation of our own pets in terms of lives in the eternal life to come in that new heaven and new earth.
The deeper problem from a Christian worldview, from a theological consideration, is the fact that the human being is the only creature made in God’s image, is the only creature able to know God directly, to have a personal relationship with him, and to be directly morally accountable to him. And in that sense the human being stands out from all the rest of the creatures in terms of that conscious continuation of life. Christian eschatology points to the fact that the life to come on that new earth is going to be richer and fuller than anything we could have imagined even in Eden, such that every good thing here is not only present but present in its idealize perfect form.
One most emphatic points made in terms of eschatology and animals is the predation will cease. The lion and the Lamb will safely sleep together. It does tells us great deal that so many people, secular folks and Christians, seem to want to jump to affirm and to celebrate the fact that Pope Francis I said to that little boy who needed consolation that he would see his little dog in heaven. Quite honestly I can tell you I would be very happy to know that it’s so but that’s all I can say because the Bible says nothing directly about it. And indeed, even as we are told that there will be animals in the eschaton, we are given no indication whatsoever that they will be a continuous personality with one’s that we’ve known here on earth. But we do know this, the creatures we know right now, even in this fallen Earth, the creatures we know as pets are creatures that do show the glory of God and we should celebrate that in them. But we should be very aware of the sin of anthropomorphizing, of reading on to them more than they are because that is not only to do something that is wrong to the animal, it is to do something wrong in terms of understanding the human creature – the only creature made in the image of God, the creatures for whom Christ died.
3) Declining birth rate despite rising economy shows rewriting of ‘adult script’
For the last several years we’ve been talking about a falling birthrate in the United States and one of the points we’ve tried to make over and over again based on the data, and more importantly based on the biblical worldview, is that a birthrate is a very important signal of worldview because it is the deepest convictions about life, it’s one basic worldview that eventually determines whether or not one aims life towards having children and sees children as great and good gifts or whether or not children simply become something like an accessory, something that can well be done without. In the United States fewer and fewer children are being born. Tamara Lewin reporting for the New York Times last week tells us that the birth rate has declined for a sixth consecutive year. The last part of the headlines is really important; it’s these words, “Economy Could be Factor.” Now why is the second part of that headline so important? It’s because for the last several years as America has been experiencing these lower birthrates, we’ve been told over and over again that economics is the factor. We’ve been told by economist, by sociologist, and by demographers, that the reason the birthrate has been falling in the United States is the recession that began in 2007 and continued into 2008 and took several years for America to emerge from. But the point is this, America has now emerged for a number of years now out of that recession and the economy has improved dramatically. And yet, the birthrate has not only not gone up, it has actually gone down. That’s why you see that indecisiveness that, that question mark in effect at the end of that headline when the headline reads, “Economy Could be Factor.” Well, if it could be a factor, the obvious inference to draw is it might not be a factor after all.
Lewin reports the number of women in the United States who gave birth dropped last year according to federal statistics released just a week ago. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that there were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, down from 3.95 in 2012, 9% below the high in 2007. Now you’ll notice that’s almost a 10% fall in the number of births in the United States since 2007. As Lewin goes on to report,
“The general fertility rate in the United States — the average number of babies women from 15 to 44 bear over their lifetime — dropped to a record low last year, to 1.86 babies,”
That is below the 2.1 needed for replacement. So you need 2.1 merely to replace the previous generation. We have now dropped to not only under that, but we’ve dropped under any recently known statistic – to 1.86 babies.
One other factor this leading demographers to scratch their heads as Lewin writes, the decline is particularly notable because the number of women in their prime childbearing years – that’s rated between age 20 to age 39 – has been growing since 2007. So you have more women and remarkably fewer babies. In the most revealing statements of trying to evade the issue, Andrew Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns Hopkins University, says we shouldn’t worry about it because we’ve always got immigration. He said,
“Americans haven’t worried much about birthrates in the past, because we have the faucet of immigration to turn on and off. It’s a bigger problem in Europe, where countries like Germany and Spain have much lower rates. And even at 1.8, we’re in the ballpark with the highest rates in Europe.”
That reminds me of a statement I often think of said by former United States Senator Alan Simpson. When asked about an issue he said, ‘look, it doesn’t really serve to have your main ambition to be the last horse to the glue factory.’ In other words, saying that we’re basically keeping pace with the best of the European countries in the worst sort of way is not exactly something we should brag about.
A more directed mission of confusion came from William H. Fray, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, who said,
“On just about every demographic indicator involving young adults, whether it’s marriage, buying a home or delaying childbearing, it’s all been on hold since the beginning of the recession. I think it’ll come back up, and each time new numbers are coming out, I think maybe this will be the moment.”
But this statement is said in the context of the fact that moment has obviously not yet come. Other observers are actually speaking directly to the issue suggesting that clearly many Americans, especially those Americans who are young and not get married or married and not yet having children or for that matter are women who are not planning to have children, there’s obviously been a vast exchange of values that has taking place; a vast change in the target of light perception and of targeting of life ambition. What we have here is a fundamental rewriting of the adult script in the United States, whereas in almost any previous generation – not just of the United States but of humanity – the qualification of being an adult would’ve been in the main to aim towards having children. Now that has become something as an accessory, something of a hobby, seen in light of some younger Americans and something that can be done without – avoided altogether or postponed rather indefinitely.
Just keep in mind the fact that as we discussed several weeks ago you have Silicon Valley firms now offering to pay as a fringe benefit for egg freezing for their female employees – just put it off. But as many suggested even in responding to those headlines, it’s not so easy. One of the issues the Christian worldview affirms is the closer you get to the basic institutions of life the more apparent and abundant the worldview issues really are. Worldview issues determine more than anything else the most important decisions we make and those important relationships we create and nurture as well. Also our expectations, the picture of the life we expect to have and what and whom will be included within it.
One thing becomes abundantly clear, one of the great distinctions between the Christian worldview and the modern secular worldview comes down to, of all things, babies. What they mean when they are in the womb, what they mean once they are born, what they mean in terms of who has ultimate say over their lives in terms of their education, their health, and other choices, and of course whether they are in the picture at all.
Finally let me mention that tomorrow I’ll be bringing a review of Ridley Scott’s new movie Exodus: God’s and Kings. It’s a movie being talked about in the culture and for good reason. I’ll be talking about it tomorrow and will be positing a major review online at albertmohler.com as well.
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.
Christmas: A Sacred Holiday in a Secular Age – A Conversation with Tara Moore
Tara Moore teaches in the writing program at Pennsylvania State University in York. She has previously authored Victorian Christmas in Print. Her most recent work is Christmas: The Sacred to Santa.
Moses Without the Supernatural — Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings”
Timed for a Christmas season release, director Ridley Scott’s intended blockbuster, Exodus: Gods and Kings hit the big screens this past weekend. On its opening weekend the movie shot to the top of the box office charts, displacing the latest Hunger Games movie, but falling considerably short of expected receipts.
The best single line analysis of the movie and its failure to garner either critical acclaim or more viewers was offered by Eric D. Snider of GeekNation: “This big dud isn’t blasphemous enough to be outrageous, emotional enough to be inspiring, or interesting enough to be good.”
Well, I partly agree with the first two points of criticism, but I did find the movie interesting. Indeed, I even liked much of the movie, and I would not argue that mature and thoughtful Christians should not see it, even if the concerns about it are major. And make no mistake, the concerns are major.
Earlier this year, director Darren Aronofsky offended the faithful with his distorted depiction of Noah. Aronofsky’s Noah offered a portrait of Noah as a crazed homicidal maniac who hallucinated God’s will after drinking a potion given to him by Methuselah. Humanity itself is depicted as a blight upon the earth and the director himself bragged that his movie was “the least Biblical biblical film ever made.”
Ridley Scott’s Moses is not in the same category, largely because there are so many details of the Exodus narrative in the Bible with which the director simply had to deal. There are no Transformer-like invented creatures in Moses, and many of the film’s scenes and details are explicitly true to the biblical text. Indeed, Scott’s presentation of the ten plagues God brought against Egypt is spellbinding — far more moving than the same scenes as depicted in Cecil B. DeMille’s famed The Ten Commandments. The last plague, the death of first-born sons, is absolutely riveting and deeply emotional.
Critics are piling on. Film critics tend to be rather eccentric sorts and some of them seem almost impossible to please. As a general rule, critical acclaim and popularity with the public are not directly related. Some of the concerns are quite legitimate, however. Public Radio International published a review noting that “Hollywood Has a Race Problem.” Virtually all of the leading roles are played by white actors, even though the ancient Egyptians were certainly not caucasian. As PRI noted, “Ramses, the Egyptian pharaoh who enslaved the Jews in the Old Testament, is played by a white actor. In fact, the entire lead cast of ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ is white. Moses is white. Moses’ mother is white. The Egyptian prince is white. The African queen is white, too.”
Not only are they all white, the central characters speak as though they were educated at Oxford or Cambridge. This is rather typical of Ridley Scott’s films, with gravitas presumably added by a British accent. Needless to say, the skin tones and accents do not match the actual story.
But that fact points to an even more troubling dimension of the movie. The entire narrative does not match the actual story. It fails as a whole even more than it fails in its parts.
What is missing is the very point of the Exodus in biblical history and theology. What is missing is the truth that God acted in history in faithfulness to the covenant he had made with Abraham, rescuing Israel from captivity in Egypt. In Ridley Scott’s version, God is actually hidden from view, along with his purposes, motivations, and character. In his place we see an 11 year old boy who appears to Moses as a theophany, or divine appearance. God’s presumed words flow from the mouth of a small boy, who appears as something of an unmoved Mover in the film’s narrative.
As for Moses, the depiction offered by actor Christian Bale grounds Moses’ sense of divine call in a severe knock to the head from a rock, followed by what might well be a hallucination, with the 11 year old boy speaking to Moses beside the bush that burned but was not consumed. Completely missing from the portrayal is any explanation that God has chosen Moses as his instrument for bringing Israel out of captivity and that God was acting in faithfulness to the covenant made with Abraham. Moses appears as a tribal chief, a cunning general and killing machine, rooted in what Scott presents as Moses’ experience as a great general during his life as a prince of Egypt. Moses never seems to understand a divine purpose beyond his military exploits, and his relationship with God is troubled, to say the least.
It must be said that Moses’ relationship with God in the Bible is also troubled, to say the least. After all, Moses is not allowed by God to lead the children of Israel into Canaan. Nevertheless, the Bible steadfastly presents Moses within the context of his calling and his calling within the context of covenant. The movie leaves viewers with a depiction of Moses, riding alongside what must be the ark of the covenant, as Israel moves on from the parting of the Red Sea. But the ark is never identified, nor is the covenant.
The problems with the film could be anticipated, given the rather remarkable statements made by both Ridley Scott and Christian Bale, even before the movie’s release. Ridley Scott made clear that he did not believe that Moses had ever lived and that the Exodus account was not to be taken as historically true. He told Religion News Service that he looked at the film much as he looks at science fiction. “Cause I never believed in it, I had to convince myself every step of the way as to what did make sense and what didn’t make sense and where I could reject and accept. And therefore I had to come to my own decisions and internal debates.”
Accordingly, Scott presents the plagues and miracles as non-supernatural events with a naturalistic explanation. Unlike Cecile B. DeMille, Scott offered no version of a supernatural miracle at the Red Sea. He described his dilemma: “So I have to part the Dead Sea and I’m not going to part the Dead Sea because I don’t believe it. I don’t believe I can part the Dead Sea and keep shimmering water on each side. I’m an absolutely very, very practical person. So I was immediately thinking that all science-based elements placed come from natural order or disorder–or could come from the hand of God, however you want to play that.” Presumably, Scott meant Red Sea, not Dead Sea.
Well, Ridley Scott played it all in naturalistic terms, or at least he did his best to do so. The most interesting aspect of the film in this respect was the role played by a nervous vizier in service to Ramses, who did his best to offer a strictly naturalistic explanation for the succession of plagues. The vizier appears as an ancient demythologizer, offering natural explanations involving red clay in the Nile and a complicated series of basically environmental plagues that followed. Those explanations would be familiar to anyone versed in the liberal biblical scholarship of the last two hundred years. In Scott’s version of the story, the real story at the Red Sea was the receding of the waters due to a tsunami after an earthquake.
Despite himself, however, Scott’s depiction of the plagues appears quite supernatural indeed — especially the final plague, the death of first-born sons. Scott’s anti-supernaturalism utterly fails him on the final plague, and he does not flinch from presenting the horrifying divine judgment on the defiant Egyptians. The film’s scenes of dead and dying Egyptian boys and young men is deeply moving. By that point in the film the demythologizing vizier has been hung by a frustrated Ramses, and no character attempts to offer a “natural” or “scientific” explanation of the last plague.
The portrayal of Moses as a tribal warrior was explained by actor Christian Bale, who told ABC’s Nightline program that Moses, in his view, was “one of the most barbaric individuals that I have ever read about in my life.” Christian Bale may not read much, but those words betray his conception of Moses as quite different from anything found in the Bible. Where did he get his information about the “barbaric” Moses? Actually, in that conversation with Nightline and in other interviews, Bale revealed the real issue. Like Ridley Scott, he assumes a strictly non-supernatural storyline. Christian Bale’s comments indicate that he seemingly places the responsibility for the plagues at the hands of Moses, not God. Even so, in the film the 11 year old boy expresses frustration with Moses’ slow progress toward liberation and tells him to “watch” as he sets the plagues in motion.
The film has put the question of the historical Moses on the table of public conversation. In the Guardian, Andrew Brown declared: “There is no historical character of Moses, and no reason from archaeology or history to suppose that any of the exodus story is true.”
Brown then wrote:
“Since the central rite of Jewish identity is the Passover festival, which commemorates the moment that Moses freed his people from slavery in Egypt, the absence of evidence outside the Bible story is potentially embarrassing, says Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, who leads Reform Judaism in this country [Britain]: ‘When I heard for the first time that the exodus might not have happened, I did want to weep … then I thought, what does this matter? You have to distinguish between truth and historicity.’”
That is the great claim of liberal theology — that we must “distinguish between truth and historicity.” Brown’s article goes on to cite several Jewish authorities as arguing that it really does not matter to Judaism if Moses never existed. Brown even cited one Orthodox rabbi who argued that it was the giving of the law that had to be historical, not Moses. Brown also noted that Orthodox Judaism requires a belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, leading to the obvious question of how we can have Mosaic authorship without Moses. One may presume that other authorities in Orthodox Judaism would disagree with the cited rabbi.
In any event, the fact remains that, even if the historical Moses is not central to contemporary Judaism (by at least some accounts), the historical Moses is vital and essential to Christianity. Moses is a central character in the Bible’s narrative of Israel and the metanarrative of the Gospel itself. Jesus is the new Moses, leading his people out of captivity to sin. Moses is the divinely commissioned lawgiver. Christ Jesus is the divine Savior who perfectly fulfills the law and redeems sinful humanity. The Bible clearly presents the Exodus as history, and the history of Christianity is built upon that historic foundation.
As a film, Exodus: Gods and Kings is a mixed bag. I was deeply moved by parts of the film, and puzzled or troubled by others. But, in the end, perhaps the best way to understand Ridley Scott’s Moses is to put it in the context of Scott’s own comments. He told Religion News Service: “Any liberties I have taken in terms of how I show this stuff was, I think, pretty safe ground because I’m always going always from what is the basis of reality, never fantasy . . . . So the film had to be as real as I could make it.”
As real, in other words, as Ridley Scott’s version of “this stuff” could be presented “from what is the basis of reality” as Ridley Scott defines reality. What we see in the film is Moses without the supernatural. In his own words, that’s how he decided to “play” it.
It turns out that the real vizier is none other than Ridley Scott.
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.
Jonathan Merritt, “Christian Bale and Ridley Scott Talk Religion and ‘Exodus’ — An Interview,” Religion News Service, Wednesday, December 10, 2014. http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.c...
Andrew Brown, “Man versus Myth: Does it Matter if the Moses Story is Based on Fact?,” The Guardian, Saturday, November 29, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/...
T. J. Raphael, “Hollywood Has a Race Problem–And It’s on Display in Ridley Scott’s New Movie ‘Exodus,’” Public Radio International, Sunday, December 14, 2014. http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-12-14...
The Briefing 12-15-14
1) Sydney hostage situation points to importance of government preventing evil
Martin Place Lindt Chocolate Cafe siege: public transport and traffic diverted, Sydney Morning Herald (Patrick Begley, Tom Allard, and Jacob Saulwick)
Black Flag Is Hoisted as an Armed Person Takes Hostages in a Sydney Cafe, New York Times (Michelle Innis)
2) Confusion on Pope’s view of pets’ in eternity reveals priority of sentimentality, not Scripture
General Audience, Vatican (Pope Francis I)
Dogs in Heaven? Pope Francis Leaves Pearly Gates Open, New York Times (Rick Gladstone)
Pope Francis suggests that pets can go to heaven, The Independent (Andrew Buncombe)
Reports Wrongly Suggested Pope Francis Said Animals Go to Heaven, NBC News (Claudio Lavanga and Erik Ortiz)
3) Declining birth rate despite rising economy shows rewriting of ‘adult script’
U.S. Birthrate Declines for Sixth Consecutive Year; Economy Could Be Factor, New York Times (Tamara Lewin)
December 12, 2014
Transcript: The Briefing 12-12-14
The Briefing
December 12, 2014
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Thursday, December 12, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Vast theological and moral chasm within Anglican Communion shows a church losing its center
The Times of London, one of the world’s most authoritative newspapers is out with a major story having to do with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who also serves as the primate – or the very head – of what is called the Anglican Communion. That’s the communion of all the church is related to the church of England in terms of the larger Anglican tradition. This includes churches in the United States known as the Episcopal Church USA and now, given the liberalism of that church, various Anglican communions as well. This also means churches in other parts of the world – in particular what’s called the Global South. Churches in Africa and Central and South America, far more conservative than the American and English churches now.
And this leads to the very reason for the article in the Times about the Archbishop of Canterbury. Because it turns out that he has just concluded a massive global tour of the Anglican Communion. He’s been a full 11 days on airplanes over the last two years. He has traveled more than 149,000 miles, visiting places as diverse as Brazil, New Guinea, Sudan, Rwanda, South Korea, and Myanmar – all as he was making visits to the primates, or that is the local heads of those Anglican churches in those nations. But even as the times article primarily has to do with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England and the Anglican Communion there are lessons here for all of us. For every church, every denomination, every Christian.
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is quoted as saying that what he learned in terms of his worldwide visit to the entire Anglican Communion is that the communion may well break up. The first edition of the story in the Times carried the headline, “Conflict may Force Church to Split.” Subsequent editions of the story softened the headline somewhat, but the bottom line is still the same. There is every likelihood that the Church of England will break apart, and primarily over the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. There are larger issues but all of them are related to the great cleavage between theological conservatism and Protestant theological liberalism. What you’re looking at here is a massive division that is only growing wider. And that’s the reason for the likelihood of the breakup.
Now the Archbishop of Canterbury was elected as something of an evangelical. He’s at least identified with coming from the evangelical wing of the Church of England. But as the British Separatists and others of noted for a very long time, the conservative wing of the Church of England – though certainly including many theological conservatives – is after all in the Church of England. And the Church of England is by any measure in the Anglican Communion. And so what happens in one of these churches relates to all of them because of their interconnectivity, because of their fellowship, and indeed because of the fact they’re all unified in some sense under the Archbishop of Canterbury. And now you have a church, in particular the Church of England, and a communion , the Anglican Communion, that is trying to define itself as able to encompass this massive division theologically between those who believe that homosexuality is a sin and those who believe that it’s simply normal. Those who believe that the Bible is basically an ancient relic that includes some kind of divine inspiration, and those who believe that it is the inerrant and infallible word of God. Those who believe that what God did for us in Christ is a substitutionary atonement that achieves salvation from sin and those of believe that the gospel is instead more about a social message, more about liberation from social oppression.
You’re looking at a communion of churches that is losing not only any sense of the boundaries, but also any sense of the center. Leading to the obvious question, what exactly holds the Anglican communion together? And as this headline story indicates it might be that right now the answer is, ‘not much’.
A bit of history is instructive here; the Church of England makes a claim upon what is known as comprehensiveness. It’s a very important claim to understand. The Church of England basically claims (and not only the Church of England, but the larger Anglican Communion in some sense) to be able to encompass comprehensive theological views. That is to say, views on the far left and the far right. Views that in the Church of England include evangelical, absolutely radically liberal, and Anglo-Catholic. The question is can any church hold together with the kind a diversity of theological positions? Going back to the 19th century the strains were already there. You include those who hold the classical Christian orthodoxy and those that those very same persons consider also to be heretics.
Going back to the 20th century you already had bishops in the Church of England that were denying the divine inspiration of Scripture, the exclusivity the gospel and other crucial doctrines. You also had bishops that were denying the existence of a personal God. So already in the 20th century this claim to comprehensiveness meant comprehensiveness in one church, or denomination, or fellowship of churches that included people who are orthodox Christian believers and those that are effectively described as atheists.
It should be instructive to us that that did not split the Anglican Communion apart. People weren’t talking about this kind a split over the issue of atheism but now they’re talking about it over the issue homosexuality. Some theologians looking at this explain that we are finally getting to an issue that virtually everyone can understand – what many sociologists refer to as a transparent issue. This relates to other churches as well. In the controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s and 90s the presenting issue was biblical authority, defined in terms of biblical inerrancy. But there were many laypeople the churches who didn’t understand the nuances of definitions about inerrancy. What they get understand was an individual’s position on abortion and the sanctity of human life, or on questions a sexuality. That same dynamic seems now to have appeared in the Anglican communion, where even though there many people who might not understand what a bishop is saying when he tries to obfuscate or confuse a theological issue, they do understand whether or not someone believes that a woman should serve as a priest or a bishop. Or whether someone believes that homosexuality should be normalized and same-sex marriage should be legalized.
One thing’s for certain, the current Archbishop of Canterbury sounds pretty much like the ones who came before him. Seeming always to speak in terms of an ‘on the one hand and then on the other hand.’ According to the article, the Archbishop said
“I think, realistically, we’ve got to say that despite all efforts there is a possibility that we will not hold together or not hold together, for a while. I could see circumstances [he said] in which there could be people moving apart, and then coming back together, depending on what else happens.”
Later he said,
“I’m not saying that it’s inevitable, even probable than not. I think it’s very much of up in the air at the moment, and my suspicion is that the vast majority people will stay within the communion completely.”
Or, we could simply say, on the basis what he himself has said, ‘or not.’
From the Christian worldview perspective the most interesting aspect of this article is where the Archbishop discusses the churches on the extremes of this claim of comprehensiveness. And the two churches given as an example are the church of Nigeria on the one hand, and the Episcopal Church US on the other hand. The church of Nigeria holds that all homosexual practice is inherently biblically defined as sinful. On the other hand Episcopal Church USA not only has normalized homosexuality but now endorses same-sex unions, even same-sex ceremonies, and elected even a decade ago an openly gay man to serve as a bishop. In other words it’s hard to imagine a distance, theologically speaking, greater than that between the Church of Nigeria and Episcopal Church US. Presumably trying to articulate something like what others have described as a ‘third way,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury said that he has profound disagreements with both of these churches – without particularly saying what his profound disagreement might be.
The article then states,
“And although the church in America almost provoked an open schism with the consecration of an openly gay Bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003, Archbishop Welby said that his visit had been something of a breakthrough. ‘It was a real gift in terms of communication, at least there was understanding why we disagreed with one another when we disagreed, rather than simply disagreeing and not understanding each other.’”
Now when you hear that from a church leader here’s what you need to understand; the situation is almost never a lack of understanding and this is a situation that is well over a decade old. This is a situation the prompted an entire multi-year study commission of the Anglican Communion, and this is a situation that everyone has well understood for a very long time. And so it’s basically a dodge in terms of ecclesiastical responsibility to say, ‘we disagree but at least now we understand one another.’ No, the understanding actually came at the very beginning. This is a very clear disagreement, not a misunderstanding.
Just to make the point more emphatically, at the end of his comment the Archbishop said,
“The situation there [speaking of the Episcopal Church in the United States] is complicated, to put it mildly.”
Those who are committed to a biblical Christian worldview have to understand that the Bible itself says that belief cannot have fellowship with nonbelief. It is simply impossible. Two cannot walk together unless they are agreed. If that is true in terms of the biblical worldview, how in the world does a church actually claim comprehensiveness as something that it ought to be able to achieve, or even to claim? If comprehensiveness means claiming those within the church who are orthodox believers in terms of the Christian faith, and those who are no longer even theists, in what sense is that even defined as a church?
And when you consider the new comprehensiveness witch this communion is trying to achieve between those who believe that homosexuality is a sin like every other sin that leads to death, and those who believe that actually absolute normalized and even now celebrated, how in the world can that kind of comprehensiveness be sustained with any accountability to the Christian faith whatsoever? And the only way out of this is for the church to declare itself, for the Anglican Communion to define its doctrines and its boundaries and its doctrinal center, and then to make those an actual issue of accountability for the entire communion. It’s not enough, it’s not nearly enough, for the Archbishop of Canterbury to say “ the situation there is complicated to put it mildly.”
The situation is a complicated; it’s wretched.
2) Narrow repeal of LGBT ordinance in Fayetteville, AR reveals rising threat to religious liberty
An important event took place in the United States this week in the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, in which voters in that city repealed a law that had been passed by city officials; a transgender homosexual ordinance that many acclaimed would pose a direct threat to religious liberty. As Tom Strode for Baptist Press reports,
“In a special election Tuesday (Dec. 9), residents of Fayetteville — home of the University of Arkansas — approved repeal of the measure by fewer than 500 votes, with 52 percent … of voters in favor of repeal and 48 percent … opposed. The result rescinded a law passed by the city council in a 6-2 vote in August. Opponents of the ordinance collected enough signatures within a month to place its repeal on a special election ballot.”
The reason this ordinance gathered so much attention is because it posed very direct threats to religious liberty. It was written in the most vague language, and would’ve affected everything from public accommodations to virtually every aspect of business and institutional life within the city.
As Strode writes,
“The rejected ordinance included real or perceived “gender identity,” “gender expression” and “sexual orientation” among a list of classifications to receive protection from discrimination in employment and housing. It also barred discrimination by establishments that provide “goods, services, accommodations and entertainment to the public,” which would include hotels, restaurants and other businesses. In addition, the measure created the post of civil rights administrator, who would be responsible for investigating complaints and recommending prosecution.”
Interesting aspects of this included the fact that, churches could have been prosecuted if they refused to hire gay or transgender people for “secular” staff, that is, not with direct, demonstrated, ministry responsibilities. Christian schools and bookstores could have been required to violate their own convictions in terms of employment practices. Business owners with religious convictional objections would’ve been prosecuted for declining to provide services for same-sex weddings or commitment ceremonies.
These are typical kinds of issues that have emerged elsewhere. What’s important here is exactly what we saw in light of the Minneapolis transgender issue last week, and that is the fact that we’re not talking about here a liberal state on one of the two coasts. We’re talking about Fayetteville, Arkansas. It tells us something that this particular ordinance, vaguely written as it was and opposed even by the Chamber of Commerce simply because they said they couldn’t even advise businesses on how to comply with the law – it tells us something to the commission there passed the law in August, it tells us something that it was repealed this week by fewer than 500 votes.
I want to draw particular attention to Tom Strode’s article when he says that the Fayetteville Arkansas measure had created “the post of civil rights administrator, who would be responsible for investigating complaints and recommending prosecution.” Now just keep in mind what this law thus authorized, the law that was just very narrowly repealed. It created a new regulatory entity, it created a new bureaucratic officer whose job was to investigate complaints made on these issues, and then “recommend prosecution.”
2) Narrow repeal of LGBT ordinance in Fayetteville, AR reveals rising threat to religious liberty
Now at this point keep in mind the fact that I discussed just days ago the reality that a church here in Louisville, Kentucky, formerly related to the Southern Baptist Convention and the Kentucky Baptist Convention had performed a same-sex ceremony – not yet a same-sex marriage legally speaking, because Kentucky does not yet have legal same-sex marriage – but it was in terms of the religious event that which is tantamount to it. That was the Crescent Hill Baptist Church here in Louisville. That church was in the headlines just a matter of weeks ago because in November the Kentucky Baptist Convention removed fellowship from that church because, in the words of the Kentucky Convention ‘it had violated Scripture in terms of this new position.’
What links these two stories together, other than the issue homosexuality, is the fact that there is a commissioner involved. In this case, the Kentucky human rights commissioner wrote a letter to the local paper here in Louisville, the Louisville Courier-Journal, commending the church for its action and applauding the church even in the fact that it’d been excluded from the Kentucky Baptist Convention. In a letter published in the local paper on November 29, George Stinson, identified as Chair of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights wrote to the church saying,
“We write to you today on the occasion of your church’s recent separation from the Kentucky Baptist Convention. As a government body, we are obligated to respect the freedoms of speech, religion and association that are the rights of individuals and groups in our society.
“We commend you in affirming the worth and dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LBGT) people and in your continued efforts to include LGBT people in the life of your community.
“As stewards of our state’s civil rights heritage, we see the rights of LGBT people to work, live and participate fully in society as a logical progression in our continued pursuit of equality. The inclusion that LGBT people seek today is comparable to the women’s suffrage movement, the dismantling of Jim Crow and so many other human rights efforts in the life of our nation.”
He concludes in writing,
“One lesson of the 50-plus year history of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights is that change is never easy and progress often has a price. We know the process has not been easy and you have lost both friends and resources in living your beliefs.
“A letter cannot assuage that reality, but we want you to know that many who have labored in the field for human equality stand with you, and your sacrifice has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. We commend your courage and compassion in standing for your principles and we know someday that courage and compassion will be vindicated.”
Thus says, or thus writes, the Chair of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights.We’ve been noting a political leaders looking to churches have been saying, as David Cameron said (that is the Prime Minister of Great Britain) to the Church of England, ‘get with the program.’ Now you have the commissioner of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights applauding a church that is been disfellowshipped from its larger denomination for a liberal stand on human sexuality, and saying to the rest of the denomination, more or less, ‘when will you get with the program?’
Furthermore, you have this head of an official Kentucky commission making very clear that he believes that the issue of LGBT rights is exactly synonymous with issues related to the rights of women and to those of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States. But when you think about what happened this week in terms of that very narrow vote to repeal that ordinance in Fayetteville, that ordinance that included the establishment of a commissioner just like the one who is described in this letter, just remember the opening words of this letter to the paper written by George Stinson, who is the chair the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. Let me remind you of his early words in this letter,
“As a government body we are obligated to respect the freedoms of speech, religion, and association that are the rights of individuals and groups in our society.”
Did you notice the use of that word ‘obligated’? Here you have someone who is head of an official commission for the state of Kentucky who says with very straightforward language that he is simply obligated – it’s an obligation – that he respect the freedoms of speech, religion, and association that he says are rights of individuals and groups in our society. The use of the word obligated cannot be assumed here to be accidental. He sees this as an obligation. The question of course is this; how long will this commissioner or this commission feel obligated to respect religious liberty?
If it’s an obligation – the very word he used – we can only assume that what he wants as quickly as possible is to be free of that onerous obligation.
4) Misleading scientific headline evidence of need for Christian discernment
Finally from time to time we see a news article in which the headline doesn’t possibly match the content of the article. And when the Christian worldview and its very central issues are concerned, this means it’s something that ought to have our attention. Here’s the headline: “Scientist Re-create What May Be Life’s First Spark.” This appeared in the Associated Press this week in an article by Seth Borenstein. Borenstein writes,
“Scientists in a lab used a powerful laser to re-create what might have been the original spark of life on Earth.
“The researchers zapped clay and a chemical soup with the laser to simulate the energy of a speeding asteroid smashing into the planet. They ended up creating what can be considered crucial pieces of the building blocks of life.”
Well, all right let’s consider those first two sentences. We are told that scientists just may have re-created what just might be life’s first spark. Evidently, a spark that somehow was to have been created in the primordial history of the entire universe when clay and chemical soup were somehow zapped by a high-speed asteroid. If you’re following that theory, you just might be able to follow the article.
The study was published Monday this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included this statement,
“These findings suggest that the emergence of terrestrial life is not the result of an accident but a direct consequence of the conditions on the primordial Earth and its surroundings.”
Now one of the things it doesn’t become clear it all this article is why an asteroid hitting primordial clay in a chemical soup wouldn’t be described as an accident. It sounds to any fair-minded reader is something that might well be described as an accident. One scientist in Prague explained scientists have been able to make RNA bases – that’s a simpler relative of DNA described as a blueprint of life – in terms of using chemical mixes and pressure, but this( according to the Associated Press) is the first experiment to test the theory that the energy from a space crash could trigger the crucial chemical reaction that might eventually lead to the emergence of life. The article goes on to explain that this new research reveals something that just might have happened, that just might have been an accident, or just might not have been an accident. But the essential bottom line of the article is this, the headline is “Scientist Recreate What May be Life’s First Spark.”
But guess what didn’t happen? Anything. Anything described as life. They created what they say, in this headline, might have been life’s first spark, but there was no spark of first life. So when you’re engaging the media in any form and you see a headline or lead such as ‘scientists re-create what may be life’s first spark,’ you need to keep in mind that only the article will reveal if even the article reveals whether or not there’s anything to the headline after all. In this case the best line in the article comes from John Sutherland of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He said the amount produced of one chemical base was so small “that the results don’t seem relevant.” But as the week comes to an end, let’s remember the crucial, infinite distance between a headline that says ‘scientists re-create what may be life’s first spark, and those words that come to us in the book of Genesis, where God said “Let there be.” And there was.
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 on Monday for The Briefing.
The Briefing 12-12-14
1) Vast theological and moral chasm within Anglican Communion shows a church losing its center
Schism? More a temporary separation, The Times of London (Michael Binyon)
Conflict may force church to split, Welby says, The Times of London (Oliver Moody and Michael Binyon)
2) Narrow repeal of LGBT ordinance in Fayetteville, AR reveals rising threat to religious liberty
Fayetteville, Ark., LGBT law repealed, Baptist Press (Tom Strode)
3) KY advocate of LGBT rights views tolerance of religious opinion an obligation, for now
Letter | Crescent Hill Baptist, Louisville Courier-Journal (George W. Stinson)
4) Misleading scientific headline evidence of need for Christian discernment
Scientists re-create what may be life’s first spark, Associated Press (Seth Borenstein)
December 11, 2014
“To Give Knowledge of Salvation to His People: A Christmas Mandate for Christian Ministry”
So many moments of our lives pass with almost no sense of significance. The twenty four hours in a day fade into the memory of the seven days of the week, then the thirty-odd days of a month, and then months into years. The years pass into the mist of memory.
But certain moments, certain days stand out in vivid contrast. These are occasions of bright and lasting memory — births, deaths, family reunions, and Christmases. Add to those moments like this, a commencement ceremony. There is something even more special about this ceremony, however, for this is the graduation of those called to Christian ministry, and this ceremony comes fast upon Christmas.
The celebration of the nativity of Christ comes with triumphant declarations, prophesies, songs of praise, the great good news of the Gospel, and a spectacular opportunity for maximum theological clarity. I am speaking about the kind of clarity that the shepherds heard from the angelic host who declared that a child has been born in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. The clarity of Simeon, who announced when he held the infant Christ, “my eyes have seen your salvation that you prepared in the presence of all peoples.” [Luke 2:30-31] The clarity of Mary, who declared, “he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” [Luke 1:49] The clarity of Isaiah the prophet, who foretold: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.” [Isaiah 9:6-7]
We live in a day of terminal theological confusion — a day when that confusion comes from far too many pulpits and lecterns and churches. Christmas is the great biblical refutation of that confusion. A simple reading of the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus presents declarative sentences, undeniable truth claims, unavoidable clarity.
I want to direct our attention at this Christmas commencement to the prophesy of Zechariah found in Luke 1:67-80. Zechariah the priest has named the son promised and born to his aged wife Elizabeth “John,” as commanded by the angel. Upon writing the name John, Zechariah’s mouth was opened and Luke tells us:
“And his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’”
This beautiful hymn of prophecy begins and ends with the declaration that God is bringing salvation. Zechariah knows that John is to be the forerunner of the one who brings salvation. The Lord God of Israel is visiting his people with salvation, with redemption. The horn of salvation is rising, and Israel’s promised Messiah is coming to rule on the throne of David. Salvation arrives as was foretold by the prophets of old. Enemies are scattered and their evil is shattered. The mercy promised to the fathers is coming, God is remembering his holy covenant, the very covenant and oath God swore to father Abraham. God’s people, delivered from their enemies, will now serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness all their days.
Zechariah offered prophetic words concerning his own son, John the Baptizer, declaring: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people, in the forgiveness of their sins because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
The message has now turned from rescue from enemies to rescue from sin. The vindication of God’s people gives way to the forgiveness of sins and the tender mercy of God. Even as Isaiah foretold that the people who dwell in darkness have seen a great light, Zechariah speaks of the Christ child as “the sunrise” who shall visit us from on high, “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” The morning star will guide our feet in the way of peace.
Zechariah knew that John’s mission was to give knowledge of salvation to God’s people, to declare the tender mercy of God in Christ, to announce the forgiveness of sins. This was the calling that John fulfilled, even unto death. He came to prepare the way of the Lord, to call sinners to repentance, and to declare that in Christ the promised salvation of God has arrived.
In that sense, the clarity of the Christmas narrative thunders to us that our task is essentially a continuation of John’s. He came to prepare the way, while we preach Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But the message is the same. Those who will graduate this day will join the faithful line of preachers, missionaries, and ministers before them who, like John, gave knowledge of salvation to the people, by declaring the tender mercies of God that promise the forgiveness of sins.
That is the mission, the calling, the urgency. That is why a Christmas commencement seems so fitting. The celebration of the birth of Christ puts everything on the table. The unswerving directness and crystalizing simplicity of the Christmas message leaves no room for confusion. Reading the gospel texts we know that we either believe or run away. This is either the greatest truth ever declared, or it is the saddest lie ever told. The Christmas story cannot be reduced to a sentimental tale that gives humanity a warm glow. When the heavenly host declares that Jesus is the Savior who is Christ the Lord, they announce the forgiveness of sins to those who repent and believe and they declare war on those who would oppose this child.
The graduation of these ministers of the gospel gives us such hope today because we witness them taking their place behind the prophets and the apostles, the faithful through the ages, following in the line behind John the Baptist, giving knowledge of salvation, calling upon sinners to repent and believe, pointing to the sunrise that has visited us from on high, bringing light to those who sit in deep darkness.
In these days, our task is to raise up a generation of faithful, urgent, learned, and skilled counter-revolutionaries for the kingdom of Christ — an insurgency against the principalities and the powers. That is what Zechariah was declaring as John’s mission. That is what we declare today as the mission of these graduates.
Look back to Luke chapter one, verse 66, when those who witnessed the presentation of the infant John asked, “What then will this child be?” It was that very question that Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit, answered.
Do you now sense that same question today? When you look at the students on this campus, and especially as you look to these graduates today, do you now sense the same question: “What then will this child of God be?” Look at them together, and look at them singularly. Where will they go? What will they do? What will they build, what will they mend, what battles will they fight, what hurts will they endure?
We are not allowed to know the answers to these questions, but we do know this. We know what they are to do. They are to give knowledge of salvation. That we know. That is their calling, above all. That is their mission, wherever they may go.
The clarity of the Christmas story reminds them that they are to be defenders of the faith, teachers of undiluted truth, guardians of the treasure entrusted to them, heralds of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They have learned so much in their studies here, and they will learn even more as they teach others. Our hopes and prayers go with them, along with our pride and joy.
They have been taught the faith once for all delivered to the saints. They have been grounded in the knowledge of God’s Word, inspired, inerrant, and infallible. They have been skilled in ministry and equipped for mission. They have received their mandate from on high. And now, we watch them go.
We are all thankful that you have come. But these graduates would want, above all, for you to know Christ. On their behalf, I say to you that Christ came to save us from our sins, and that salvation and the gift of everlasting life come to those who repent of their sins and believe that Christ is the crucified and resurrected Lord. They would want you to know that Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, came to bring salvation. They would want you to know that he died in your place and that he was raised to life on the third day. They would want you to know that the baby lain in Bethlehem’s manger is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father, but by him.
This is the truth they will tell for the rest of their lives. This is the truth we declare to all today. Unto us was born that day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. The sunrise has come from on high. And we are saved.
This is the text of the commencement address preached by President R. Albert Mohler, Jr. at the December 12, 2014 commencement ceremony at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The entire ceremony will be live-streamed by digital video broadcast beginning at 10:00 a.m. EST at www.sbts.edu/live
I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler
For more information on Southern Seminary, visit SBTS.edu and for more information on Boyce College, visit BoyceCollege.com.
Transcript: The Briefing 12-11-14
The Briefing
December 10, 2014
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Thursday, December 11, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Recognition of evangelical Ebola fighters example of truth and power of the gospel
Time Magazine is out with its regular and iconic Person of the Year issue and this year the person of the year is the person of Ebola fighters. When Time Magazine chooses a collective as its person of the year it creates all kinds of language problems but it also makes a point, and that is that the big story of the year, so far as Time was concerned, was Ebola and the people at the center of it are those who are trying to fight it. In designating the Ebola fighters as person of the year Time said it was,
“For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to [strengthen] its defenses, for [the] risk [they took and the lives they saved] the Ebola fighters are TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year.”
Later in an essay Nancy Gibbs writing for the magazine says,
“Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease, and ‘us’ means everyone, not just those in faraway places where this is one threat among many that claim lives every day. The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight.”
That rather poetic and very poignant paragraph points to the fact that the issue of Ebola is still an ongoing crisis. It is indeed an ongoing deadly crisis in nations of West Africa and it is spreading to other nations as well. When we began the year 2014 we were not discussing Ebola, when we come to the end of 2014 it’s impossible to talk about the year and our own clear and present dangers without speaking of it. There never had been a case of Ebola in the United States of America until this year – not one ever. And now, American health authorities have had to put into place, along with major American hospitals and medical centers, protocols for dealing with the eventuality of an Ebola case showing up even in a local community.
Time Magazine’s historic definition of its choice for person of the year comes down to the person or persons who “most affected the news and our lives for good or ill and embodied what was important about the year.” Now that’s a very important definition because it explains why, at the middle years of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler received the designation person of the year once and Josef Stalin twice. So what we’re looking at here in the case of Time designating a person of the year is a statement that’s cultural, it’s newsworthy, it’s also very political because there is no decision like this that is made outside of the political context. And as a matter fact, several of the persons who were recommended as Time magazine’s 2014 person of the year were people who hold political office – most important among those, Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.
Given Putin’s importance on the world scene, and in this case almost all negatively in terms of his impact on the world scene this past year, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could of eclipsed him in terms of the cover story of person of the year. Therefore it says something, it says something very powerful that Time magazine decided to jump over Vladimir Putin and go to the fighters of Ebola.
And that raises a very significant Christian dimension to this story because when you look at the cover story you’ll notice that several of the people who were involved in being honored as Ebola fighters are those who are explicitly Christian, evangelical Christians, who were there before the Ebola crisis hit those nations in West Africa, who were there long before the Western media arrived for this kind of attention and will be there long after the celebrity attention has moved somewhere else in terms of the Western world.
The Washington Post, commenting positively on Time Magazine’s choice, says that the doctors, nurses, and other front-line workers helping to care for Ebola patients have – of course, according to them – been selfless, inspiring, and courageous forces for good. Now we just need to pause and recognize that the issue of the Ebola fighters, especially Christian Ebola fighters, raises a very important question in the modern secular mind; how is it that anyone for some reason would put to risk one’s own life, livelihood, future, and family, in order to go to a place far away to serve people we do not know and to whom we are not directly related in the context of such immediate danger? This is where the Christian church has a gospel centered answer now for two millennia; where, beginning with the apostles in the early church; there was a Christian understanding of what it meant to live and to give sacrificially – something that does confound the wisdom of the world and something that can be explained only in terms of the priorities of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the ultimate truth of that gospel.
It tells us a great deal when we consider the other potential persons of the year that Time Magazine contemplated before centering in on the Ebola fighters. This is important especially not only by Time but also by the Washington Post that tells us the Time selected the front-line caregivers from a list of eight finalists and the list of those finalist was made public earlier this week. The Ebola workers beat out pop music artist Taylor Swift, Apple CEO Tim Cook, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma, the Ferguson protesters, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kurdish leader Massoud Karzani. The choice of person of the year for Time Magazine is about as politically loaded as the choice of Nobel Peace Prize laureates by the Nobel Committee; in other words it tells us probably more about the chooser than about the chosen in many cases.
But this also tells us something basically very important for Christians to know and that is that sterling examples of personal courage still stand out and is still recognized, even eclipsing the kind of international nemesis of a Vladimir Putin, or the consumer curiosity and ingenuity of someone like Tim Cook. Frankly it takes a great deal these days to knock Taylor Swift off the front of anything and it tells us a great deal that it is the Ebola fighters who knocked her off of the cover of Time magazine. I for one see that is cultural progress. In these days any kind of cultural progress like that needs to be celebrated on its own terms, especially when in a far more enduring way it points a very important searchlight on the gospel.
2) Timing of LGBT civil rights bill example of velocity of cultural revolution
Sheryl Gay Stolberg writing for the Times told us last Friday,
“As barriers to same-sex marriage fall across the country, gay rights advocates are planning their next battle on Capitol Hill: a push for sweeping legislation to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination, similar to the landmark Civil Rights Act that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1964.”
Now this is really big news, it’s not news in the sense that it’s shocking, it’s news in the sense that now is the cultural moment when at least some see the political opportunity to bring forward this kind of legislative proposal because make no mistake, it is sweeping and it is comprehensive. As Stolberg makes very clear, this proposed legislation to be presented to the United States Senate will call for absolutely no federal allowance for any discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in housing, in hiring, in virtually any area of America’s public life having to do with employments or institutions of any kind. As Stolberg reports,
“Plans for a so-called comprehensive lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights bill are still in their infancy [and remember she is writing last week], and advocates say the campaign could take a decade or longer. With Republicans taking control of the House and the Senate in January, they say the measure has little chance of passing in the next two years.”
Now again, it’s important to recognize this article appeared last week and as Stolberg here is telling us, that at least many consider the political prospects of the bill to be rather low with at least some insiders in the movement saying it could take a decade actually to get this kind of comprehensive civil rights bill for gay and lesbian bisexual and transgender Americans through the United States Congress. And yet, embedded in the very same article last week were hints that it might not actually take anything like that length of time because the velocity of the moral revolution America’s now experiencing on the issue of sexuality and homosexuality specifically is one that is leading virtually everyone to say all bets are off when it comes to imagining how fast some of these developments might come. After all, if you go back to the beginning of this very year only a minority of Americans lived where same-sex marriage is legal; at the end of this year it’s already safe to say the vast majority of Americans live where same-sex marriage is a legal reality or about to be – held back only by some kind of hold on a judicial decision.
At the end of her article Stolberg writes,
“But advocates and their allies in Congress say they have no illusions. Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, plans to introduce a broad nondiscrimination bill this spring. But asked when such a measure might pass, he said, ‘That’s a hazy, crystal-ball question.’”
Now remember, this article appeared last week – that statement was published last week. But that was last week, this is this week. Now the headline comes at Time Magazine yesterday: “A Comprehensive LGBT Nondiscrimination Bill Is Coming.” It’s not coming in the spring, it’s coming now. It’s coming from the very man who said it might take a long time for it to come but it didn’t even take a week for him to deliver the bill, or least to announce that he is now ready to bring it.
Katy Steinmetz reports for Time Magazine,
“Democratic Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley will propose a much broader measure aimed at preventing discrimination against LGBT Americans, not just in employment but also with regard to public accommodations, housing, jury service and financial transactions.
Senator Merkley said,
“It can’t be right that people are thrown out of their rental housing because of their LGBT status or can be denied entry to a movie theater or to a restaurant.”
According to this article he’s already trying to put together what he calls bipartisan cosponsors for the bill even now. Now what makes the Steinmetz article in Time Magazine really important is that she quotes Sen. Merkley as saying, ‘look, here are some examples of why this kind of bill is needed,’ but he’s actually just citing that in order to get to the larger agenda and that becomes very clear as her article continues. I read,
“Arguments over nondiscrimination bills often get heated when it comes to public accommodations — shorthand for the businesses and services available to the public. The proverbial scenario (based in reality) has become a gay couple who goes to a baker for a wedding cake and is turned down because a shop owner’s religious beliefs include opposition to gay marriage. Under nondiscrimination laws, such shop owners could be subject to legal penalties, and Merkley says that’s how it should be. ‘If you choose to be the proprietor of a restaurant, you should be expected to operate that restaurant in a fashion that does not embrace discrimination,’ he says.”
Now just notice something, he has once again shifted the actual argument. He has shifted from a wedding photographer or a cake maker to a restaurant; now that’s very instructive in terms of the propaganda effort for this kind of bill. You turn to where there basically is no controversy and claim that that’s why you’re bill is necessary. Those who are currently at issue, in terms of the head on collision between erotic liberty and religious liberty, are not those who are running restaurants saying that they do not want gay people to eat in their restaurants – that would be something even the vast majority of Christians would understand to be a violation of the general kind of nondiscrimination in public business that should be expected in civil society. But it’s very different when you move to an expressive profession, when you move to someone who has to use an artistic gift in order to communicate a message. The clear argument being made by those who are asserting their religious liberty is that it is an infringement of a basic human liberty, respected by the U.S. Constitution in explicit language, to be forced to communicate a message with which you do not agree.
Now once again the chronology is important, the timeline matters. That article in the New York Times by Stolberg appeared last week looking at the indefinite future. And yet the new article in Time Magazine appeared less than a week later, announcing the fact that efforts to get this legislation going are beginning now. And the articles, amazingly enough, just days apart, quote the very same Oregon Senator. And at the end of the Time article he actually talks about the timing, at least in his version in this article. And I quote,
“Merkley, taking a long view, seems cautiously optimistic. He worked to pass a similar measure as a state lawmaker in Oregon and ran on supporting same-sex marriage in 2008 when it was legal in only two states. ‘No one imagined that within this six-year span that I’ve been in the Senate, my first term in the Senate, that we would be on the verge of ending marriage discrimination across the country, yet here we are,’ he says. ‘It’s very important to recognize how fast the world is changing, and another two years will bring additional changes as well, as people come to terms and understand this discrimination is wrong and it needs to end.”
Perhaps the most important message for us to receive from this is this: when people who are pushing this kind of legislation say they’re talking about it someday, they are really talking about it now. Are Christians ready now to defend religious liberty where it may matter the most?
3) Defense of religious liberty for the irreligious important Christian duty
Christians looking at the issue of religious liberty are most commonly going to be alarmed when we see our own religious liberties threatened or infringed. It’s something else to see how that might apply to someone with very different beliefs – most important for Christians we sometimes find ourselves in the more awkward position of trying to figure out what religious liberty means for the irreligious, in particular for agnostics and atheists. That’s why over against some of our instincts we need to give attention to an article that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, it’s by Laurie Goodstein and the title the article, its headline is this, “In Seven States, Atheists Push to End Belief Rule.” Let’s look at how she introduces the article. Goodstein writes,
“A bookkeeper named Roy Torcaso, who happened to be an atheist, refused to declare that he believed in God in order to serve as a notary public in Maryland. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1961 the court ruled unanimously for Mr. Torcaso, saying states could not have a ‘religious test’ for public office. But 53 years later, Maryland and six other states still have articles in their constitutions saying people who do not believe in God are not eligible to hold public office. Maryland’s Constitution still says belief in God is a requirement even for jurors and witnesses.”
So you have 43 states in which there is no such requirement, you have seven in which the requirement remains, but after 1961 virtually every lawyer, every political scientist, every judge, and every knowledgeable person knows that that kind of requirement is inherently unconstitutional.
Now let’s go back to 1961 when the Supreme Court handed down that decision. It came in the aftermath and in the very process of several other cases on religious liberty coming down from the court; many of them absolutely disastrous. Decision having to do with prayer in public schools and with religious expressions in the public square and that led to a host of controversies from which the court has never get recovered and confusions the court itself has never adequately clarified. But also when you’re looking at 1961 you need to recognize that the number of atheists and open agnostics in America in 1961 was very, very small. The percentage was incredibly small and thus when you had this case that arose from Maryland you had a situation in which most Americans looked at it and thought, ‘well this is going to be a very odd exception.’ Now we know that’s not really the case, at least one out of five Americans is religiously unaffiliated according to recent research by the Pew Center and that means one out of three Americans under the age of 30.
And so when we’re looking at infringement of religious liberty, even some of those very important infringements that we are talking about when we think about that omnibus civil rights bill for LGBT people in the last story, we need to recognize that if we’re going to stand for religiously for ourselves, we also have to be advocates for religious liberty for others. And that an article like this in the New York Times puts us in the position of saying, ‘we’re actually on the side of the atheist in this one, even though we fervently believe in God and we believe that the most important truth issue any human being can ever address, and ultimately is the truth issue with the greatest eternal consequences, we do understand that there is a constitutional right in this country to be an atheist or an unbeliever or the unaffiliated’ And furthermore we are the people who would want a religious, a theological affirmation, to be genuine not something forced by some kind of public circumstance.
Now certainly there is a sense of loss in this article when you consider the loss of a pervasively Christian culture, a culture that was so shaped by Christianity and included so many Christians that this kind of unbelief was, if not incomprehensible than very isolated and anecdotal. We’re not living in that America now. But it does tell us something that this article in the New York Times reveals that there isn’t the political will, on either party in terms of the legislatures of the seven states, to remove this legislation because they are afraid they will be criticized for Christians or for those who claim to be Christians for so doing.
Well here’s one Christian leader who says that shouldn’t be a Christian concern, we should not be concerned with trying to get people to say what they don’t believe. There is no Christian benefit whatsoever in trying to coerce some kind of religious expression that doesn’t come from the heart. And we as Christian should be the very first to understand that. Now are we making argument that it doesn’t matter if one believes in God or not? Profoundly, we are not making that argument. We would make exactly the opposite argument. But when we make it in the form of saying, with sincerity, that belief in God is so important we want it to be genuine, we want it be from the heart, we do not want it to be coerced either by force of law or some kind of arcane statutory requirement, much less buy public pressure.
And finally we’re going to be spending a great deal of our energies in years ahead, perhaps even in weeks and months ahead, contending for religious liberty over against the marginalization’s and infringements and violations that are coming and have come. And that means, painful as it may seem, contending for the religious liberty of unbelievers as well as believers. And we do so not merely on constitutional terms, but even more importantly, on theological terms. And on this one there can be both a constitutional and more importantly a gospel advantage to showing up in this argument where we’re not expected – to be very clear that when it comes to religious liberty, we really do believe in it for the atheist as well as the believer.
4) Scholarly conference takes sabbatical, hoping to help replenish the earth
Finally, from time to time it’s important to bring an aspect of American life to the imagination of those who otherwise might not see this kind of reality but it’s important because what happens in the Academy, what happens on academic campuses, eventually filters down to your own community, perhaps even to your own children. So let’s look at an article also from the New York Times entitled, “Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, for the Planet’s Sake.” It’s written by Mark Oppenheimer, a veteran religion writer for the New York Times and he writes about the American Academy of Religion, which is the academic society for theologians and religious studies scholars across the United States. It’s highly populated by those in the far left, as will become very clear in this article.
Oppenheimer writes about the current president of the group, Laurie Zoloth, and she is calling for the group not to meet, at least in some coming years, in order to celebrate something of a Sabbath so that the earth can be renewed by scholars not meeting. Using up all those carbon-based energy sources in order to get on airplanes or get into cars and have to turn on electric lights at these kinds of meetings. As Oppenheimer writes,
“Two weeks ago, at her organization’s gathering, which is held jointly with the Society for Biblical Literature and this year drew 9,900 scholars, Dr. Zoloth used her presidential address to call on her colleagues to plan a sabbatical year, a year in which they would cancel their conference. In her vision, they would all refrain from flying across the country, saving money and carbon. It could be a year, Dr. Zoloth argued, in which they would sacrifice each other’s company for the sake of the environment, and instead would turn toward their neighborhoods and hometowns.”
Before serving as the AAR President Dr. Zoloth, who teaches at Northwestern University, was the program chair and as the program chair she determined the program for this year’s conference, held just a few days ago and she made the theme of that conference the theme of saving the environment. Oppenheimer reports,
“So as she planned ahead for the 2014 conference, she encouraged the program chairmen, who coordinate the hundreds of small panels that make up the main business of the conference, to seek out papers that dealt with the environment and climate change. She succeeded; in her estimate, nearly a third of this year’s papers somehow discussed the environment, ecology or related issues, like animal rights.”
So while you’re thinking about this group of rather left-wing theologians gathering together to save the environment you might want to know what kind of papers they brought and what kind of effect they might have. Well here are a couple of examples given to us courtesy of the New York Times. Cynthia Bond, of Claremont Graduate University, in California, presented a paper entitled, “Strategic Essentialism as a Tactical Approach to an Ecofeminist Epistemology.” Steven Heine, of Florida International University, presented a paper entitled, “The Staying Power of the Zen Buddhist Oxherding Pictures.” And Donna Seamone, of Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, delivered her paper “The Path Has a Mind of Its Own: Eco-Agri-Pilgrimage to the Corn Maze Performance — an Exercise of Cross-Species Sociality.” Now that tells you a great deal about the academic and theological left and it leads me to ask you this question, just imagine the horrible loss to humanity if that group actually didn’t meet next year.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you tomorrow for The Briefing.
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