R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 335

How Does the Church Remain Faithful in Today’s Culture? – Romans 1

The Briefing 12-05-14

Podcast Transcript

1) New Minnesota state athletic policy portrays velocity of transgender revolution

State high school league approves transgender policy, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Paul Klauda)

Minnesota High School League overwhelmingly approves new transgender athlete policy, Minneapolis Star Tribune (David La Vaque)

Pro: Transgender kids deserve inclusion, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Alison Yocom and Martha Burton)

Con: Transgender policy defies common sense, Minneapolis Star Tribune (John D. Hagen)

Transgender Eligibility Appeal Procedures for a Male to Female (MTF) Student, Minnesota High School League

Feds Say Transgender Students’ Gender Identity Must Be Respected, Time (Katy Steinmetz)

Questions and Answers on Title IX, US Department of Education

2) Social science fails to recognize value  of gender distinctions in classroom

Old Tactic Gets New Use: Public Schools Separate Girls and Boys, New York Times (Mokoto Rich)

3)  Report on rise of ‘gender-benders’ displays blind agenda of transgender movement

For These Millennials, Gender Norms Have Gone Out Of Style, NPR (Lidia Jean Kott)

4) DNA pioneers minimized human identity to pure biology

By Selling Prize, a DNA Pioneer Seeks Redemption, New York Times (Anemona Hartocollis)

Transcript: The Briefing 12-04-14

The Briefing

 

December 4, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, December 4, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Grand Jury decision in Eric Garner case reveals law insufficient to respond to a moral crisis

Late yesterday it almost seemed that the headlines had accidentally jumped two weeks – backwards because once again the headlines began to tell us that a grand jury decision had been reached and the grand jury decision was one in which the jury decided not to bring criminal indictments on any charge against a white police officer in the death of a black man. This brings us right back to Ferguson, Missouri but that’s not where the scene is in yesterday’s development, but rather in Staten Island, New York. And in this case, it wasn’t a black teenager but rather a black father of six – a man who was suspected of selling cigarettes illegally in a bus terminal there in Staten Island – who was under arrest and resisted arrest and was eventually put in a chokehold by a white police officer only to die from that chokehold.

The case of Eric Garner is different than the case of Michael Brown because in the case of Eric Garner you actually have video testimony. Major media in the immediate aftermath of the death of Eric Garner were showing a cell phone video account of the arrest, of the chokehold, and eventually of Eric Garner’s death. And that led to the presumption on the part of many that that video evidence would be sufficient for any grand jury to bring a criminal indictment against the police officer in this case. And there are very serious issues here involved just given the New York City’s own guidelines, chokeholds are forbidden and yet in this case a chokehold was used, it was used on video, and was used to fatal force for a man who was under arrest for a nonviolent crime.

The act of selling cigarettes illegally is certainly a crime but it is not a violent crime. And yet as you look at the video, it is also clear that Eric Garner was resisting arrest but resisting arrest in that form is also generally not something that is responded to with the kind of overwhelming force – indeed the chokehold – that led to the man’s death.

The deep divisions that became very apparent in American society over the death of Michael Brown came right to the surface once again just about two weeks later when all the sudden the death of Eric Garner became a similar focal point. There are differences in these cases, there are differences in the locales, there are differences in the deliberations of the grand jury, but a lot of that will be lost in terms of the public conversation because what it looks like, at least to many Americans, is a second time that a grand jury failed or refused to bring a criminal indictment against a police officer.

On one side of the public argument will be the very clear and valid point that resisting arrest is never a good idea. And furthermore, resisting arrest brings on the very likelihood of a violent, perhaps even in terms of deadly violence, response from the police. But when it comes to Eric Garner the situation was that even as he was resisting arrest, he was not resisting arrest violently and that is demonstrated on the video. And that’s what led many people, especially those in New York, to believe that it was almost inconceivable that a grand jury would not bring a criminal indictment against the police officer.

But that raises a very important issue for the Christian worldview. We’re looking here at a situation that demands a moral response; it also demands a legal response. One of the problems with the law is that it is insufficient to respond to every moral crisis – even one that involves a police officer, even one that is captured on video. Because the law itself has to put into its own structure the kinds of protections for police officers and for others who are actually assigned by society the use of deadly force and that’s why it is so often the case that grand jury’s fail to bring criminal indictments against police officers to use deadly force – whether with a gun or in this case with a chokehold – in the line of their duties.

We actually expect police officers at times to break the law in order to serve the public. We expect them to do this, for instance, in terms of speed limits, in terms of a chase. We expect them to use violence in a way that we would not allow a common citizen to use violence. We assign to them a certain responsibility because they are acting on our behalf. This leads to the very crisis, not only in the situation in Ferguson, Missouri but now also in Staten Island. That requires a trust between the community and its police force, a trust that is clearly tenuous right now, endangered by these kinds of incidents, and in sad and very urgent need of rebuilding and rebuilding quickly.

More about that in just a moment, but right now we need to recognize that there are many things that are wrong, clearly wrong, immoral, spectacularly immoral, but they are not illegal. The law itself simply is not capable of covering every moral question, nor of resolving every moral crisis. And in this case the grand juries, if we presume that they acted in both cases rightly on the basis of the evidence, they were not making a statement about the morality of the situation in terms of his totality. They were bringing a very discreet, isolated and specific decision. And that decision has to do with whether or not an indictment was to be brought against a specific criminal statute.

The law is one of God’s greatest gifts to his human creatures. Without the law we would be in a situation quite literally of lawlessness. But the law itself is not competent, nor capable, to resolve all of our issues, which is one of the reasons why you have infinite misery which seems to be visited upon the courts by people who go to the courts in terms of tort litigation, lawsuits, divorce suits, or even criminal prosecutions, only to know that justice was evaded. There are clearly very legitimate moral issues, meta-issues, huge issues, having to do with race relations in America when it comes to Michael Brown case. Those are not the issues that can be well decided by a grand jury facing a specific set of facts and having to make a very specific decision about the law – those are two very different things. It is often the case that we are looking for a moral satisfaction out of a situation that cannot possibly produce it.

In the situation in New York the reality is compounded by the video. We are actually able to watch this event; we’re able to see it unfold. There seems to be no doubt, in terms of the video, that Eric Garner was in some sense resisting arrest and yet he was doing so in a way that certainly did not appear to be threatening to the officer. But the officer responded with what turned out to be deadly force. Did he intend it to be deadly force? That is unknown. It was against the principles and the policy of the New York Police Department for this officer to use a chokehold. Was it against the law? That’s another question altogether. Did the situation have anything to do with the reality that Eric Garner is a black man? That is beyond the capacity of a grand jury to infer or to decide. Nor was it the question that was presented to them. It is however the question that is presented in the public square and it’s a question that isn’t going to go away.

And one of the things that Christians need to recognize is that these two cases, related only in terms of the grand jury involvement, present cases in which many people among us – including many African-American followers of the Lord Jesus Christ – are asking very deep and pressing questions about whether or not the American justice system is fair; and not only fair in a general sense, but fair quite specifically to African-Americans.  Conservatives, including conservative Christians, who have a rightful concern to uphold the law and uphold the system and structure of law and uphold law enforcement officers and to respect and to encourage them with great gratitude, we have an automatic reflex which leads us to say if there is a dispute between the police and an aggrieved party are prejudice is to side with the police; and there is actually a moral instinct there that is to be honored.

On the other side of the moral divide you have people who say look, there’s another moral imperative and that is to make sure that all persons are treated equally with the acknowledgment that any honest American must make that there had been structural and systemic issues of discrimination and prejudice against minority groups, including and especially, African-Americans. And that’s a reality that will be conceded by virtually anyone, including responsible spokespersons for law enforcement in America.

Once again, the first African-American President of the United States was very much on the spot needing to respond to the Garner situation even as he had to the Michael Brown controversy in Ferguson, Missouri. Speaking yesterday from the White House, the President said,

“…it’s time for us to make more progress than we’ve made. And I’m not interested in talk; I’m interested in action. And I am absolutely committed as President of the United States to making sure that we have a country in which everybody believes in the core principle that we are equal under the law…we are not going to let up until we see a strengthening of the trust and a strengthening of the accountability that exists between our communities and our law enforcement.”

That’s the kind of responsible statement that a President ought to make. And in this case, that same President of the United States is not only a lawyer but a former, at least part-time, law professor at the University of Chicago. He understands the law and he understand how a grand jury works and he was very careful not to suggest that a grand jury had made a mistake but rather that the grand jury had not resolved the problem.

In the most important section of the President’s remarks he said, and I quote,

“…right now, unfortunately, we are seeing too many instances where people just do not have confidence that folks are being treated fairly. And in some cases, those may be misperceptions; but in some cases, that’s a reality. And it is incumbent upon all of us, as Americans, regardless of race, region, faith, that we recognize this is an American problem, and not just a black problem or a brown problem or a Native American problem.”

Not just a black problem, or a brown problem, or a Native American problem – this, said the President, is an American problem. And this is an American problem, it is indeed an American opportunity, it’s an American responsibility. Our responsibility as a nation is to deal with this issue and to do it head on – to bring to the table, to bring to the public conversation, everyone who needs to have a voice in this and the to make certain that the rule of law is understood as absolutely necessary for the very kind a society in which we want to live. And that respect for police is absolutely necessary in the kind of society in which we want to live. And we want to live in a society in which teenage young men, African-American or otherwise, are not encountering police because they are suspects in a crime and thus you have a situation that can escalate as it did in Ferguson, Missouri. At the very least we recognize that all of these things are tragedies and we recognize that there is responsibility – human responsibility – that is embedded at every stage in every one of these. It’s now our national responsibility to have not only a national but a rational, caring, compassionate, and deeply honest discussion about what it will take to rebuild the kind of trust the president of the United States has rightly called for.

2) Proposed Minnesota sports transgender policy reflects profound consequences of sexual revolution

Next, while thinking about the kind of society we want to live in and be a part of, a very important article appeared this week at the Federalist by Stella Morabito; the headline is enough to get your attention, “Minnesota Plans To Eliminate Gender Distinctions For High School Sports.” I looked at the article and wondered, could that be an exaggeration? Well as it turns out, in one sense, it is. But in a deeper and even truer sense, it isn’t.

A closer look at the article is in order. Stella Morabito writes,

“Minnesotans are currently facing a fast and furious onslaught by the transgender lobby, which seems to be dictating policy to the Minnesota State High School League. The MSHSL decides policy for all extracurricular activities in public, private, religious, and home schools. It’s currently in the process of outlawing all sex distinctions in high-school sports. [Today according to this article], it plans to install an athletic policy granting transgender students the choice to play on either boys’ or girls’ teams.”

Stella Morabito writes that what is really going on is that…

“…there would be no accounting for sex differences in high school sports on the field or in locker rooms, bathrooms, and hotel rooms.”

The new policy will forbids any camaraderie, she says,

“…rooted in the biological reality of one’s sex, or any consideration of the reality of the opposite sex. In fact, to affirm that reality would basically be a crime [according to this new policy]. So the policy would ultimately abolish girls’ and boys’ sports alike.”

Now, that’s where the article is a slight exaggeration. The new policy doesn’t actually eliminate what will be labeled girls and boys sports. For the main part, there will still be girls teams and boys teams but this is not an exaggeration in terms of what Stella Morabito is actually writing about because as it turns out, those who will appear on girls teams and those will appear on boys teams are those who appear as girls and boys because they say they are in terms of their gender identity – not because they were born that way.

Morabito writes that Minnesota is a major trigger point for this policies application across the nation. If you haven’t noticed, she writes,

“…the trans agenda is being pushed throughout the nation in a media shock-and-awe style intended to have folks get with the program, just like the proverbial teenager who says: ‘Well, everybody else is going along with it.’ For the moment, on paper there will still be the illusion of male and female teams under this policy. . . . except that anybody claiming to be transgender can play on either the boys team or the girls team. In other words, there will not really be boys’ teams or girls’ teams.”

Morabito then writes,

“Follow me?”

Well at least some parents in Minnesota are resisting the trend. One parent put an ad in the Minneapolis Star Tribune stating

“A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter. Are you okay with that?”

According to the media report, Minnesotans sent in more than 10,000 protest emails to the league in the aftermath of that ad and many showed up at the meeting. The group then tabled the decision until today when it meets again and is expected to go forward with adopting the new policy. In her report, Stella Morabito not only quotes the policy to be considered, and expected be approved today, she also goes at background materials – including policy statements found at the league and published on its own website.

Here’s one of them, and I quote,

“It is important for policy-makers to understand that transgender girls (who were assigned a male gender at birth) are not boys. Their consistent and affirmed gender identity as girls is as deep-seated as the gender identity of non-transgender girls. The belief that transgender girls are not ‘real girls’ is sometimes expressed as a concern that allowing transgender girls to compete on girls teams displaces opportunities for ‘real’ girls to participate”

Now the very use of those quotation marks is meant to insinuate that there is no such thing as a ‘real girl,’ girl is now simply a social construct; it’s simply a matter of sexual identification, of gender identification. And that is the gender doublespeak that is now ruling his rationality in much of America – and believe it or not, to be considered today in Minneapolis for Minneapolis schools.

A couple of things come immediately to mind in terms of that paragraph just read. The first thing is it’s factually wrong. It’s not only ideologically loaded, it’s factually. The reality is that when the statement writes that the consistent and firm gender identity of transgender girls is as deep-seated as the gender identity of non-transgender girls, that is refuted by the facts as reported recently by the Wall Street Journal, that a majority of teenagers and children who experiment with this kind of transgender identity, abandon it at some point later. The other thing that should come immediately to mind when you read a paragraph like that is this: it’s unlikely that a group of athletic supervisors came up with that language and if that’s your assumption, it turns out you’re entirely right.

I decided to look behind the statement that was published on the Minneapolis leagues website and I found that the statement was derivative of one that was published; you’re not going to be surprised at this, at what is known as the National Federation of State High School Associations. And you’re also not going to be surprised that they really didn’t come up with this either – they hired it out. They franchised out that responsibility to an academic by the name of Pat Griffin. Pat Griffin is identified as Professor Emerita of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts. She also has what is known as “Pat Griffin’s LGBT sport blog” and it’s a blockbuster of worldview information let me tell you. For instance the most recent article that is up was posted February 28, 2013 and it’s against the use of any statement about family in the biographies of coaches published in athletic programs. She writes, and I quote,

“This personal information added to a professional biography is intended to provide the reader with information that rounds out the professional profile with a glimpse into the person’s family life.”

This is information such as,

“Coach Jones and her husband Frank have two children, Jane (2) and Linda (4).”

And she goes on to say,

“No big deal, right? Just a little piece of personal information volunteered by the staff member or elicited by sports information personnel.”

But then Griffin writes,

“I want to make the case that this common practice in sports media guides or on athletic department websites is actually quite a big deal.  The decision whether or not to include this one sentence description of family in a professional profile is inextricably tied to heterosexism whether intentional or not, and provides an incredible opportunity to reflect on and take a stand against heterosexism in sports.”

So what’s she calling for? She says, make no reference, in terms of high school coaches, to whether or not they have a family because that’s heterosexism. Why? Because she says, in the first, place people generally don’t do the same for people in a same-sex relationship and so you would think that what she’s calling for then is doing that. Just leveling the playing field so that when a coach is mentioned, it’s mentioned that the coach is married to someone of the opposite gender or whether the person has relationships with someone of the same gender. That’s not what she does. She says, no, that would be heterosexism too because that would imply that having a family is better than not having one.

Later in her essay she writes,

“The invitation is to look at that one sentence at the end of professional bios through the lens of heterosexism and see it for what it is: a small piece of heterosexual privilege that places non-heterosexual coaches and other athletic staff at a disadvantage and can put them at risk of being discriminated against.”

I read that from her blog just to give an indication of the worldview that is behind the policy to be considered today for the schools, the high schools, in the state of Minnesota. This is one of those new stories that you might expect to be bylined in Berkeley, California or perhaps in somewhere in Massachusetts or New York State. But we’re talking about Minnesota here. We’re talking about the very heartland of the United States, which tells us, as Stella Morabito writes, that what we’re looking at here is a shock and awe advance of the transgender agenda in a way that has left many communities, many parents and Americans, absolutely unprepared in terms of response.

Stella Morabito also writes the what’s being counted on by these who are pushing the agenda is that the people in the communities won’t even understand what’s going on until, we might say, it’s too late. Because in the actual policy, and I’m holding a copy of it here in my hand to be considered today by the Minnesota State high school league, there is nothing that states explicitly what Stella Morabito says is going to happen and yet it is explicit if you understand what the words mean.

For instance, we read,

“If the administration of a member school is notified, in writing, by a student, the student’s parent(s)/legal guardian(s) that a student has a different gender identity than listed on the student’s school registration records or birth certificate and that the student wishes to participate in athletics in a manner consistent with their gender identity as provided by state statutes and federal law, schools must review the following as each participation determination is made.”

First,

“Gender identity used for school registration records.”

And then second, and listen carefully,

“Documentation from medical personnel, acting within their scope of licensure, that the individual has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and is receiving appropriate clinical treatment.”

Well, in that case, it would cover virtually anyone that any medical professional is ready to say or to certifying in any sense, is experiencing gender dysphoria and simply now, with the force of law, must be recognized as the gender with which the individual wishes to identify and is now, according to this policy, free to play on any team, to enter any bathroom or locker room, or to participate in any terms of athletic trip staying in hotel rooms according to the gender identity with which the individual identifies; which may have nothing to do with the gender assigned at birth.

From the Christian worldview perspective what we’re looking at here in terms of the transgender agenda is a moral revolution that is deeper and more consequential even than the normalization of homosexuality. Because the elimination of gender distinctions, in terms of biological gender identity is assigned at birth, is something that will lead to a massive confusion at the very heart of what it means to be human. We should note that according to the biblical worldview the assignment by the creator of human beings as male and female, and that being a biological essence revealed at birth and in creation that is made so abundantly clear in the first two chapters of the Bible that anything that follows necessarily builds upon that very understanding.

If nothing else, what the first two chapters of Genesis help to underlying is the fact that we don’t know what it means to be human except as to be gendered humans as male and female. Now, of course, there are many people who will immediately respond that there are certain persons who were born with a nonspecific gender identity – that’s a very small fraction of people and that’s not who were talking about here. We’re not talking here about persons who are intersex or have no clear biological sex assignment at birth, we’re talking about people who intentionally do not want to identify with what was clearly identified in terms of biological sex at birth.

According to these news reports of the league in Minnesota is going to be making their determination today concerning this policy and in a matter of hours, at least on those terms, we will understand their decision – the bigger decision comes thereafter. What in the world will the people of Minnesota now do with this? What will parents of Minnesota now decide when it comes to the participation of their own children enter to the public schools and school-based athletics. And the bigger question will come to all of us as Christians seeking to live faithfully under the authority of Scripture. How in the world do we make sense of a world that is throwing itself into such deliberate and intentional confusion? How do we make sense to a world that is simply intoxicated with nonsense?

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-04-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Grand Jury decision in Eric Garner case reveals law insufficient to respond to a moral crisis

In Eric Garner Chokehold Case, Grand Jury Is Said Not to Charge N.Y.P.D. Officer, New York Times (J. David Goodman and Al Baker)

Obama Says He’s Committed to Fairness After Garner Decision, NBC News

2) Proposed Minnesota sports transgender policy reflects profound consequences of sexual revolution

Minnesota Plans To Eliminate Gender Distinctions For High School Sports, The Federalist (Stella Morabito)

Participation in MSHSL Activities by Transgender Student Athletes, Minnesota State High School League

Transgender Surgery Isn’t the Solution, Wall Street Journal (Paul McHugh)

History of the Minnesota State High School League,  Minnesota State High School League

Developing Policies for Transgender Students on High School Teams, National Federation of State High School Associations (Pat Griffin)

The Power of One Sentence: Heterosexism in Coaches’ Biographies, It Takes a Team (Pat Griffin)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 12-03-14

The Briefing

 

December 3, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Decline in divorce rates result of overall decline in marriage 

The issue of marriage and divorce has been in the headlines for decades now but never more importantly than in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times. The article appeared right inside the front page of the newspaper on page 3; the headline, “The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On.” With this article the New York Times is pointing to something that conservative scholars of marriage and others have been pointing to for some time and that is this: the rate of divorce in the United States is not going up, it’s actually going down and it has been for some time.

This is not to argue in any way that divorce is not a problem in American culture, it is profoundly a problem. As a matter fact, it is a more important problem than the problem of same-sex marriage in terms of the impact on families and especially on children. Far more damage will have been done to the institution of marriage by divorce than by the creation of so-called same-sex marriage. But the divorce culture in terms of American life is not what people think it is, and many in the Christian side of the equation have been pointing to this for a matter of years now. The reality is that the press, the national press in particular, has been following a narrative it simply has refused to let go of. And that narrative is that marriage is a very tenuous institution and that divorce is more the expectation than the exception.

But is Claire Cain Miller reports for the New York Times yesterday,

“It is no longer true that the divorce rate is rising, or that half of all marriages end in divorce. It has not been for some time. Even though social scientists have tried to debunk those myths, somehow the conventional wisdom has held.”

Now, she recounted an earlier paragraphs in the article how the national media and the national culture in general have been reporting the ‘half of all marriages end in divorce’ or even worse, that ‘more than half of all marriages end in divorce’ even though that hasn’t been true for a very long time. She writes,

“About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce, according to data from Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist (who also contributes to The [New York Times]).”

Now Miller goes on to suggest the many reasons for the drop in divorce; including later marriage, birth control, and the rise of so-called love marriages. She explains,

“These same forces have helped reduce the divorce rate in parts of Europe, too. Much of the trend has to do with changing gender roles,”

Before looking at some of the deeper issues, it is important to track some of the data that in this case Claire Cain Miller’s bringing to the article. For instance, two thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. That’s something that most people probably don’t know. When marriages break up, two thirds of them are the result of a divorce that was initiated by the wife not by the husband. Furthermore, as Miller writes,

“The marriage trends aren’t entirely happy ones. They also happen to be a force behind rising economic and social inequality, because the decline in divorce is concentrated among people with college degrees. For the less educated, divorce rates are closer to those of the peak divorce years.”

That’s a very important paragraph but it gets back to a basic question that is fundamentally unanswerable. And that is, which is the chicken and which is the egg? What caused this equation? Is economic inequality a result of marital breakdown or the absence of marriage or is it the result of it? There are good reasons to argue that it’s the result of the breakdown and marginalization of marriage, not because of it.

But it is a cultural achievement, it’s a moral achievement of sorts, to have the New York Times look at data like this and bring such an honest evaluation – even clarifying, in this case, is a genuine cultural and public service. Christians reading this article are going to read it with very different eyes because we look at marriage not just as a sociological institution but as a theological institution; as a spiritual institution. And in so doing we understand that marriage is not merely the product of some kind of human construction or social development, it is to the contrary one of God’s gifts – an institution given to humanity for God’s glory and for human flourishing and given to all humanity in God’s act of creation. Marriage, as you’ll recall, appears even at the conclusion of Genesis chapter 2.

Christians looking at this article are likely to see questions that weren’t asked and answers that weren’t contemplated. But what’s here is really powerful. And it’s powerful both because it’s printed in the New York Times and because it arrives with this kind of clarification – suggesting that the national culture simply has it wrong and the national media is often complicit in getting it wrong, in suggesting that divorce rates are rising or that they are even now at the rates they were back in the 1970s and 80s. But one of the questions that isn’t adequately addressed in this article is the question of ‘why?’ and even as the New York Times here tries to make the argument that the ‘why?’ is related to a different conception of marriage – what they call love marriage – and a changed gender roles between men and women, the bigger issue is actually addressed later in the article when Miller writes,

“Some of the decline in divorce clearly stems from the fact that fewer people are getting married — and some of the biggest declines in marriage have come among groups at risk of divorce. But it also seems to be the case that marriages have gotten more stable, as people are marrying later.”

Well let’s look at that for just a moment. First of all, the first part of that statement ‘some of the decline in divorce clearly stems from fewer people getting married,’ that is so true it should be earlier in the article. Looking at the marriage picture statistically there is no question that the main reason that there are fewer divorces is that there are fewer marriages in the first place. If you never marry, you’re obviously not at risk of divorce. This shouldn’t be buried lower in the article and as late as it arrives in this piece. It should be far closer to the very front of the article when the question ‘why?’ first appears but at least it is here and the New York Times deserves credit for allowing it to be here in such clear form. The fact is that the marginalization of marriage has had a devastating effect on marriage, upon human lives, especially upon children born outside of wedlock, and even as we certainly celebrate lower divorce rates and the fact that divorce rates are lower even just in terms of the aggregate number of marriage, still the fact that people are getting married is even a bigger problem.

The second part of that paragraph is found when Miller writes,

“…it also seems to be the case that marriages have gotten more stable, as people are marrying later.”

It also seems to be the case that marriages have grown more stable as people are marrying later. That’s an inference from the data that’s not clearly revealed in the data at all because there is also the argument available in the data to argue that marrying later has precisely the opposite effect because people who are not getting married earlier may not actually gain the social traction to marry at all.

The other major portion of this article dealing with marriage and how it has changed deals with what the New York Times calls the development of love marriage. Now this is termed in sociology, companionate marriage, it means a shift from marriage that is basically understood as a social institution with an economic function to being a romantic institution. And as a matter fact that’s not a particularly late development; it comes in the period of the Renaissance when all of a sudden you had the idea of romantic love eclipsing the idea of a family or clan relationship or an economic institution in terms of the definition of marriage. But what is absolutely appropriate in terms of the timeliness of this article is the understanding that many people marry today solely for what they understand to be romantic reasons.

The New York Times seems to celebrate that but it also seems to understand that there are implications of that development. One of them is that marriage now often doesn’t come, even in the view of those who are getting married, with all the parts, with all the components, with all the responsibilities that seem to be included in marriage in its original form – not to mention its biblical form. In one of the oddest paragraphs in the article Miller writes,

“The people who married soon before the feminist movement were caught in the upheaval. They had married someone who was a good match for the postwar culture but the wrong partner after times changed. Modern marriage is more stable because people are again marrying people suitable to the world in which we live.”

Now the first question in addressing that paragraph is asking the basic question, what could she possibly mean to say there? In her next paragraph she quotes Professor Wolfers who said quote,

“It’s just love now. We marry to find our soul mate, rather than a good homemaker or a good earner.”

Now what makes that so remarkable is that the very same newspaper has been running not just one but a series of articles in recent months suggesting that the reason many women are getting married is because they’re having a hard time finding a man who’s earning a decent wage. Now once again, one of the questions you should ask of a newspaper is whether the people who write it and edit it, read it, because if they did, this article would have to be considerably different.

There’s another matter addressed in the article that the article gets basically downright wrong, a fact that is also provable by other articles that have appeared in the same newspaper just in the last year. Miller writes,

“Perhaps surprisingly, more permissive attitudes may also play a role. The fact that most people live together before marrying means that more ill-fated relationships end in breakups instead of divorce. And the growing acceptance of single-parent families has reduced the number of shotgun marriages, which were never the most stable of unions,”

Now, in this case she’s quoting, you won’t be surprised here, Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State University, one of the nation’s leading exponents of marriage and family revisionism. The part in this article that is thus absolutely wrong is suggesting that cohabitation before marriage is actually somehow a defense of marriage itself. The recent reports coming out from the United States Census Bureau, and there’s been numerous news articles dealing with this, has to do with the fact that cohabitation is not serving now as a preparation for marriage but rather as a substitute for marriage, with most young Americans cohabitating without marriage even actually even being on the horizon.

To its credit the article does get to the effects of the marginalization and subversion of marriage in terms of the last paragraph where we read,

“And the effects could last for decades, as the children of stable marriages grow up with both the immediate benefits and the role models for successful future relationships — while at the same time, record numbers of children grow up in one-parent households.”

In this article the New York Times does perform a public service of clarification and truth telling. It also doesn’t get the story just quite right. This puts the secular press and the larger secular culture in a remarkably awkward position trying to say these developments are to be celebrated while pointing to the pathologies that indicate very serious negative results. But at least, and for this the New York Times deserves credit, it tells both sides of the story – in these days, that’s quite an achievement.

2) Muslim prayer in National Cathedral example of secularized religion in America

Next, a news story that is rooted in something that took place a couple of weeks ago is growing in importance as people begin to understand what took place in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul – otherwise known as the National Cathedral in Washington DC. As Carol Kuruvilla of the Huffington Post reports,

“On Friday [that would be November 14], the Washington National Cathedral was filled with the sounds of Muslim prayers. Muslims and people of other religious traditions have participated in Christian or Interfaith services at the Cathedral in the past. However, the November 14 event marks the first time American Muslims have been invited to lead their own traditional Jummah prayer inside the same sacred space that has hosted presidential funerals and other national religious services.”

Just prior to the event, Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post reported,

“The cathedral, part of the Episcopal Church, has long held high-profile interfaith events, and some mosques hold services in synagogues or churches if they need overflow space. But organizers said Monday that they are seeking to make a statement by having Muslim leaders come and hold their midday service in such a visible Christian house of worship.”

If they were attending to make a statement, I would argue they succeeded – wildly succeeded – in making a statement. But what is the statement? Boorstein also explains that the service developed out of a relationship between the Cathedral’s director of liturgy, the Rev. Gina Campbell, and the South African ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool who is Muslim. The two, she says, worked together on a moral service for Nelson Mandela.

“This is a dramatic moment in the world and in Muslim-Christian relations,”

That was said by Ambassador Rasool in a prepared statement,

“This needs to be a world in which all are free to believe and practice and in which we avoid bigotry, Islamaphobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Christianity and to embrace our humanity and to embrace faith.”

The story gets only more interesting as it is looked at more closely. For instance, the Muslim participants, estimated about 100, brought their prayer rugs into the national Cathedral in order to hold the Muslim service and as they did so they faced the portion of the Cathedral in which they could most easily avoid all Christian symbolism – all crosses or stained-glass or anything that would have Christian symbolism within it. They of course had to face toward Mecca in order to fulfill Muslim tradition and teaching.

The Huffington Post reported that the Cathedral removed some chairs in the north transept in order to place carpeting on the floor. The north transept also has limited Christian iconography, said the Post, which the Cathedral said provided “an ideal space almost mosque-like with the appropriate orientation for Muslim prayers.” Now keep in mind this is being said by a spokesman for a supposedly Christian church. Ambassador Rasool said that the National Cathedral’s ornate carvings arches and long central aisle reminded him of what he described as ancient mosques. Meanwhile, the Cathedral’s director of liturgy said,

“What struck me was how he could look at our building and see his mosque. That was a powerful moment to realize we could be standing in the same spot in the same building and see our own prayer traditions.”

After the service the Very Rev. Gary Hall, identified as Dean of the National Cathedral, spoke of St. Benedict who he said believed equally in the importance of prayer and hospitality. According to the Washington Post,

“Marveling at the sounds of Arabic prayers [which he called ‘a beautiful sacred language in a beautiful sacred space’] Hall said he hoped the service would serve as the start of more efforts to work together for good”

Now as I said, those who are holding the service, those who were sponsoring it at the National Cathedral, indicated that they wanted to make a statement. And as I said, they fully succeeded in making a statement but the statement they made is this: when you have a group of Christians and Muslims gather together with this kind of confusion what you need to recognize is that you have Christians holding onto a very tenuous understanding of historic Christianity and you have Muslims who are not representative of worldwide Islam. And that’s exactly what you had with reference to both partners in this prayer service held in the nation’s National Cathedral. What you had was a very liberal Protestant church, in this case more liberal than Protestant, and you had a very liberal group of Muslims who actually weren’t very representative of Islam either in the United States or around the world.

To take just one example, if you were actually dealing with Islam in the Islamic world you would not have women present with the men in these prayer services. Men alone would be in the main area of the mosque. Furthermore, if you understand historic Christianity, biblical Christianity, you would understand that it would be impossible to welcome within the communion of the Christian church prayers to be offered in which the entire presupposition is that Allah has no son – in other words, it is a direct repudiation of Jesus Christ in His incarnation and in His deity. It also says a very great deal that this kind of service can only take place in a highly secularized nation with highly secularized versions of both Christianity and Islam. This kind of thing could not take place elsewhere and you can be absolutely assured that no major Islamic mosque of any stature whatsoever would allow a Christian service to be held within it and for the Christian gospel to be declared within its walls. That is absolutely incomprehensible and would be considered an entire abdication of Islamic responsibility by faithful Muslims.

But when thinking about the fate of authentic biblical Christianity in a highly secularized world, you have to look at the fact that this is exactly what the watching culture wants to take place. The culture around us, representing a very highly secularized worldview and especially as that worldview is representative of the cultural political and intellectual elites, this is exactly what they’re looking for – people who claim to be Christian but have very little hold upon historic Christianity, and those who claim to the Muslim but are not representative of Islam worldwide, gathering together in a beautiful space of remarkable so-called sacred architecture in order to make a point that a secular world would find reassuring and nonthreatening.

At least some in the national media pointed honestly to the fact that the South African ambassador in this case is also known to have connections to the Islamic Brotherhood – something that surely wasn’t mentioned in terms of the major presentation and explanation of the service offered by officials of the national Cathedral. There’s another point to be made here as well and that’s the point with which I began. The actual name of the National Cathedral chartered by Congress early in the 20th century is that it is the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. You can only imagine what the actual St. Peter and St. Paul would make of this; taking place in the Cathedral that, at least formally, is known by their names. But as I said just a couple days ago on The Briefing, I must say again, churches and denominations do not die by homicide, they died by theological suicide and here’s yet another example of what that suicide looks like.

3) Real Madrid removes cross from apparel to appease Arab partner

It is said that Vladimir Lenin said that the capitalists would compete to sell the rope when the time came to hang the capitalists. It’s not actually known whether he said that or not, but if he didn’t say it, he probably should have, because it reflected both his worldview and the way at least certain capitalist work. The example of that came in the articles that appeared in the international press in recent days over the Spanish football club, known in the United States as a soccer club, known as Real Madrid. In this case, one of are the world’s winningest soccer teams is also one of the most valuable sport franchises and it has a new partner; and that partner is in Abu Dhabi.

As The Telegraph in London reports,

“Real Madrid [has] removed the cross from their club crest as part of a lucrative three-year deal with the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. It is believed the European champions’ new crest, minus the Christian cross, was created so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities in the United Arab Emirates, where a marketing drive will take place.”

The President of the club, Florentino Perez, labeled the deal as,

“…a strategic alliance with one of the most prestigious institutions in the world.”

And by that he means the national Bank of Abu Dhabi. But as The Telegraph reports, the redesigning of the famous club badge shows, and this is reported by the Spanish newspaper Marca, how far the world’s top sport teams are now willing to go “including sacrificing part of their famous identity to generate new revenue streams.”

In this case the team is partnering with the bank and products that will include a cosponsor credit card, and the credit card is going to have the newly designed crest upon it which will be without the Spanish crown’s historic Christian cross.

The Guardian, another London newspaper, reported,

“The crest, which was originally designed in 1931, usually contains a cross on top of a crown but that has been removed for use in the Middle East in order not to offend Muslim sensibilities in the region. The original design will continue to be used in Europe.”

Also according to The Guardian this move could be,

“The first of several designed to appease Arab backers.”

Well as I said, Lenin may or may not have said that when the time comes to hang the capitalists the capitalists will compete to sell the rope but this much is clear. This is a team that was ready to sell out the Spanish crown and its Christian symbolism, historically rooted in the tradition of Spain, in order to have a deal that would also allow them not to offend Muslim sensibilities in accomplishing that deal. And that should simply underline what the apostle Paul made very clear in 1 Corinthian 1, the cross itself is offensive. But it’s one thing to understand that offense in the context of a marketing deal in the Middle East; it’s another thing altogether to understand that offence when people are trying to face away from the cross in national Cathedral.

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-03-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Decline in divorce rates result of overall decline in marriage 

 The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On, New York Times (Claire Cain Miller)

2) Muslim prayer in National Cathedral example of secularized religion in America

Washington National Cathedral Hosts First Muslim Prayer Service, Huffington Post (Carol Kuruvilla)

In a first, Washington National Cathedral to host Friday Muslim prayer service, Washington Post (Michelle Boorstein)

Muslim Friday Services (Jumu’ah), National Cathedral

3) Real Madrid removes cross from apparel to appease Arab partner

Real Madrid lose Christian cross from club crest to appease Abu Dhabi bank, The Telegraph

Real Madrid drop Christian cross from club crest in Middle East, The Guardian

Transcript: The Briefing 12-02-14

The Briefing

 

December 2, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, December 2, 2014, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Mixed messages on predicted climate catastrophe reveal intellectual dishonesty of movement

Headlines tell us a great deal about a news story, but often the news story tells us a great deal about the headlines. Yesterday’s edition of the New York Times has a front-page story entitled ‘Optimism Faces Grave Realities at Climate Talks.” The article is by Coral Davenport of the New York Times and let’sjust take those words apart for a moment; ‘optimism’ is the first word, the third word is ‘grave.’ How in the world do you put an optimistic face on a grave reality? Well the headline is only an indication of the deeper confusion that is found within the article. Coral Davenport writes,

“After more than two decades of trying but failing to forge a global pact to halt climate change, United Nations negotiators gathering in South America this week are expressing a new optimism that they may finally achieve the elusive deal.”

The next paragraph is key to why there’s such a mixed issue of themes within the article. she writes,

“Even with a deal to stop the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warn, the world will become increasingly unpleasant. Without a deal, they say, the world could eventually become uninhabitable for humans.”

Now wait just a minute! We just read that there is optimism in terms of this news story – that’s the first word in the headline – and then in the second line of the second paragraph we are told that the grave part of the headline comes down to the fact that if the United Nations failed to reach a deal the world could “eventually become uninhabitable for humans.”

Now let’s just put reality in a more realistic frame. If indeed we’re talking about any realistic possibility that human beings could become extinct – well, let’s just state the obvious perspective, even from a secular worldview that’s bad news. As matter fact, it’s hard to come up with worse news. How in the world can you put optimism as the first word in a headline in which you seriously propose that your readers are supposed to imagine that if this conference fails to reach its goals the end result could be human extinction.

I have a dual purpose of bringing attention to this front-page article in the New York Times; the first is journalistic. When you look at a story like this it tells you that there is a very deep confusion about what exactly the reporter’s trying to tell us. And in this case was sympathy to this reporter, Coral Davenport, she’s really dealing with a very confused picture in the first place. But the one thing virtually every secular newspaper or secular authority now knows is that this is a really, really important story and the stakes are really, really high. And yet are the stakes really as high as possible human extinction? Even this news article doesn’t seem to make fit any context in which will make sense.

Davenport continues,

“For the next two weeks, thousands of diplomats from around the globe will gather in [the desert metropolis of] Lima, Peru, for a United Nations summit meeting to draft an agreement intended to stop the global rise of planet-warming greenhouse gases.”

But very quickly in the article she writes,

“But while scientists and climate-policy experts welcome the new momentum ahead of the Lima talks, they warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding — events that could harm the world’s population and economy.”

Now again, at this first point we’re simply looking at the journalism involved. How in the world can you write a paragraph in which you warn that if the world indeed now can’t be stopped from rising to a temperature of 3.6° higher than norm, that the events would be – let me just give her list again –  drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, and widespread flooding, how can you then end that sentence and paragraph by saying that these are events that “could harm the world’s population and economy”? If these things take place in the word harm there is something of an underestimate.

Before leaving the early paragraphs in her article, Coral Davenport tells us that there is optimism, new optimism about these meetings being held by the United Nations because there is the expectation that at long last an agreement may be reached. But a look back in the New York Times archives will reveal that every time this group meets, it’s preceded by article saying that there’s optimism that a final arrangement may indeed be worked out. And yet that is been optimistic ever since the meetings began, and when did they begin? 1992.

But my second point in raising this article isn’t journalistic. It’s rather a look at the issue of the climate change argument as it is now represented in this article and at this conference held in Peru by the United Nations. Coral Davenport reports,

“While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable”  - that is to say, she’s arguing here the scientists now believe that there is so much greenhouse emission now currently in the atmosphere that even if it were to be cut back drastically now, there will be enough to lead to this kind of threshold tipping point climate change –  she writes,

“While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable, scientists say that United Nations negotiators should not give up on their efforts to cut emissions. At stake now, they say, is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one.”

But again, shifting from the journalistic aspect to the supposedly scientific aspect, how in the world can use the word ‘optimistic’ or even the word ‘hopeful’ when your choice according to the scientists is between a world that is “newly unpleasant” and the other world that is “uninhabitable”?

I raise the issue in this way because I actually don’t believe these scientist believe what they’re saying. If they did they could be speaking in terms that they’re using in this article or in the United Nations conference being held in Peru. If they really did believe the kind of things that are reflected in this article, then they’d have to be taking actions more drastic than those that are being contemplated by the United Nations. Even far more drastic than those that are being supposedly celebrated in terms of the enthusiasm that is supposedly preceding this meeting of the United Nations panel. The scientific confusion is reflected later in the article when Davenport writes,

“The idea is for each country to cut emissions at a level that it can realistically achieve, but in keeping with domestic political and economic constraints.”

Now, let’s just end there to say that if you put all that together there is no way that any major changes going to take place. And that’s exactly what even many people, especially scientists, in the climate change world a been arguing for a long time. Davenport continues,

“World leaders would sign a deal in Paris next year committing all those nations to their cuts, including a provision that the nations regularly reconvene to further reduce their emissions.”

And yet you’re waiting for the next paragraph. Here it comes;

“The problem is that climate experts say it almost certainly will not happen fast enough. A November report by the United Nations Environment Program concluded that in order to avoid the 3.6 degree increase, global emissions must peak within the next 10 years, going down to half of current levels by midcentury.

“But the deal being drafted in Lima [remember that’s the one that hasn’t been passed, but there’s new optimism that might be passed.] will not even be enacted until 2020. And the structure of the emerging deal — allowing each country to commit to what it can realistically achieve, given each nation’s domestic politics — means that the initial cuts by countries will not be as stringent as what scientists say is required.”

And to that we simply have to say, if you bind to this worldview that can only be described as an irresponsible understatement. Davenport does her best to end her article on what might be described as a politically encouraging or optimistic note , but it’s important also to note that in the print edition of the paper yesterday this article continues on page A12, below the fold. And below the fold on page A12 is a scare quote. That’s the kind of quote that is popped out in large print in a newspaper, that reads this, “Without a deal scientist say eventual human extinction is possible.”

Now let me just to state the obvious once again. If anyone involved in the publication of this newspaper actually believed that to be true, would they possibly bury it below the fold on page A12 of yesterday’s print edition of the New York Times? I don’t think so. Nor, I’m guessing do you.

And while staying on this issue for a moment, an even more important article appeared in this week’s edition of the New York Review of Books, one most influential intellectual periodicals in America. Tthe article takes the form of a book review by Elizabeth Kolbert,  who is one of the most veteran environmental writers for this most left-wing of American literary journals. And she’s reviewing a book by Naomi Klein entitled This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. The short form of Klein’s argument comes down to the fact that the climate change catastrophe, this emergency that she predicts, it’s going to present an opportunity to “cure capitalism.” And by that she means, come up with a completely new economic system. She says there’s good news embedded in the climate disaster and that is that the disaster may provide the political pretext for a complete reevaluation of capitalism itself. But by the time you finish her book, as Elizabeth Kolbert makes very clear, she hasn’t actually transformed capitalism and all. It’s still capitalism, and for fairly good reason.

But even more importantly Kolbert gets to the heart of the argument she writes,

“Klein’s analysis—of the direness of the situation, of the structural nature of the problem, of the generalized direct and indirect complicity—makes it sound as if This Changes Everything is a downbeat book. But it isn’t, or at least it isn’t intended to be. It’s deeply optimistic, indeed some may say maddeningly so.”

The reviewer goes on to write,

“Klein contends not just that emission trends can be turned around in time, but that pretty much everything else that’s wrong with society today—inequality, unemployment, the lack of access in large parts of the world to electricity or clean water or health care—can be righted in the process. Climate change, she writes, “if treated as a true planetary emergency,” could “become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well.””

Now the important thing about Elizabeth Kolbert’s review is that she’s writing from a secular worldview in a very prestigious secular journal –  one that is closely associated with the political and ideological left in the United States, and she responds to the book by Naomi Klein saying this isn’t even honest. Elizabeth Kolbert points out that if you’re actually going to make the kinds of cuts in greenhouse gases that would be necessary, then everyone on the planet is going to have to be reduced to what she calls the 2000 watt society, cutting personal energy used to 2000 W. She writes,

“if you’re American, you currently live in a 12,000-watt society; if you’re Dutch, you live in an 8,000-watt society; if you’re Swiss, you live in a 5,000-watt society; and if you’re Bangladeshi you live in a 300-watt society. Thus, for Americans, living on 2,000 watts would mean cutting consumption by more than four fifths…To investigate what a 2,000-watt lifestyle might look like, the authors of the plan came up with a set of six fictional Swiss families. Even those who lived in super energy-efficient houses, had sold their cars, and flew very rarely turned out to be consuming more than 2,000 watts per person. Only “Alice,” a resident of a retirement home who had no TV or personal computer and occasionally took the train to visit her children, met the target.”

Kolbert’s point is very clear; if you’re actually going to cut greenhouse emissions as the scientists supposedly say we must, then you’re going to have to return to something like a premodern lifestyle, and that’s not what those who are pushing this agenda are acknowledging. And so I want to give a tip of the hat to Elizabeth Kolbert and to the New York Review of Books are being honest about the situation. And to offer the honest analysis that the only way to read Naomi Klein’s book is to look to her category of “managed to de-growth” by which Klein means to say that the only way around this problem is to remove the idea of growth from our economic picture and go to a managed de-growth.

But let’s be honest about what that means. That means massive unemployment, that means a complete blackout in terms of energy for much of the world. It means that the emerging world stays emerging, the developing world doesn’t get to develop, and it means a massive economic retraction which in every single historic case means disaster for human flourishing. Just think of the rather minor economic dislocation after the recession of 2007-2008.

If you’re talking about de-growth in terms of Naomi Klein’s analysis, you’re talking about a reversion to a premodern lifestyle. Say goodbye not only to the personal computer, say goodbye to the modern hospital and air-conditioning.

Elizabeth Kolbert concludes her article paraphrasing former VP Al Gore. She writes,

“here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too.”

In other words, she accuses those pushing this agenda with a massive intellectual dishonesty, a public dishonesty, because they’re not leveling with the American people. And that’s reflected in the confusion in yesterday’s front page article in the New York Times. If you really are talking about possible human extinction, even from a secular worldview you wouldn’t actually bury that below the fold on page A12.

Seriously committed Christians committed to a biblical worldview understand there’s a proper biblical environmentalism. But we can’t possibly look at human beings as the blight upon the planet. That gets back to yesterday’s discussion of Joseph Bottum’s cover story in this week’s Weekly Standard. But it also points to the point that bottoms made and that is thiswhat you have here is a doctrinal issue. The Christian understanding of the apocalypse replaced with a secular apocalypse. And in order to make that secular apocalyptic vision scary enough they have to talk about something like possible human extinction. And yet talking about it below the fold on page A12 indicates they don’t really believe it’s a likely possibility. Which takes us back to in the final analysis the most difficult issue at stake here, and that’s grasping in accurate and truthful terms, what we’re actually facing in terms of climate change.

2) Chaos of Colorado marijuana regulation shows sin will not be regulated

Next, another look at journalism. This case; kudos to USA Today for a very important article that appeared in Saturday’s edition or the weekend edition of that newspaper. The article is by Trevor Hughes, the title is “Regulators Can’t Answer Basic Pot Questions”. That’s one of those headlines that demands an explanation and that explanation comes in the very first paragraph of the article.

He writes,

“Despite a much-heralded system designed to track every marijuana plant grown and sold, and to independently test samples, Colorado’s recreational pot marketplace very much remains “buyer beware,” in large part because state regulators can’t answer basic questions about the industry they oversee.”

This is a blockbuster piece of investigative journalism – not something for which USA Today is usually known – but in this case the newspaper deserves high credit for an excellent piece of journalism. Hughes writes,

“State regulators, whose salaries are paid through the fees levied on marijuana growers, processors and retailers, say they’ve focused more on keeping the industry from running afoul of federal prosecutors. They admit they aren’t looking at large amounts of their own data, and acknowledge much of it would be useful to lawmakers and public health experts, as well as the general public.”

“There is no playbook to go off of,” said Lewis Koski, the state’s top marijuana regulator in the state of Colorado.

This is where the USA Today article gets really interesting. What is it that the state regulators don’t know about the very industry they’re supposedly regulating in Colorado? Well, according to this article as the newspaper documents they don’t know much of anything. USA Today entered into an investigative report with KUSA TV and they found,

“State regulators cannot even say how much marijuana has been grown and sold in the state since Jan. 1, despite creating a high-tech system designed to track the growth and sale of every single pot plant.”

They have the system, they just don’t know any of the numbers. Second the marijuana and edible products being sold the recreational consumers aren’t yet being tested for mold pesticides or other contaminants because state regulators of repeatedly rollback testing deadlines. USA Today and KUSA went together in this investigative report and because the state regulators wouldn’t allow any of their registered labs in the state of Colorado to offer test results to the news media, they had to go outside and get their own independent labs. Here’s what they found,

“Even though some marijuana being sold at Colorado’s stores is often twice and sometimes even three times as strong as consumers might expect, regulators don’t limit the potency.”

Next, the strength of popular marijuana infused foods known as edibles can vary widely. There is absolutely no quality control whatsoever, and that’s admitted by the state regulators whose job that presumably is.

“State regulators cannot — or will not — answer basic questions about the tests they require all marijuana growers and producers to conduct at special state-certified labs.”

Later in the article you find out they can’t even assure that the tests are actually being done.

“Colorado’s marijuana regulators don’t conduct an widespread independent testing to confirm results from the seven state-certified labs, and don’t require the testing of random samples.”

The USA Today/KUSA results indicated of much higher toxicity and potency of the marijuana than had previously been assumed. Trevor Hughes writes,

“One example: marijuana potency has been steadily rising for decades, according to federal scientists. In 1975, for instance, the average THC level was 0.75%. By 1990, it had risen to 3.82% and then 9.97% in 2000. Last year it rose to 12.55%. “

But the lab results cited by USA Today and KUSA indicated that at least one plant contained 32% THC. Hughes writes,

“Our testing results revealed wide variation in the strength of the marijuana, even when it was sold under the same name. For instance, three samples of what was sold as “Blue Dream,” a popular strain known to give a euphoric high tested at 13.54%, 13.63% and 18.73% THC.”

But about the names by which the marijuana sold, it turns out not those are registered trademarks and so they can be named anything. Anyone selling marijuana in Colorado can sell that marijuana under any name the individual chooses, whether it’s deliberately misleading or just made up out of thin air.

One important paragraph in the article reads,“Experts we consulted said wide variation is normal, but that the industry appears to be getting better at hitting the mark consistently.” But the next sentence gives it all away; “State regulators said they couldn’t access data that could illustrate that trend.”

The USA Today story is really important because it affirms what the Gov. of Colorado said himself, and that is that other state to better not follow the example of his state. In an unguarded political moment, the Gov. of Colorado said that his voters had acted in his words recklessly in legalizing marijuana. And it turns out the government acted recklessly in setting up the agency that was supposedly going to guarantee the safety of the marijuana sold within the state. But it should also tell us something that this article appeared in USA Today, a mainstream American media source. Indicating, that in the view of the editors of USA Today this is a very dangerous precedent set by Colorado, and one that should serve as a warning to other states as well.

But government accountability issues aside, intelligent Christians operating out of a biblical worldview should pay particular attention to the potency of the hallucinogenic effects that are indicated in this article by independent lab studies, as reported by USA Today. From the perspective of the biblical worldview the biggest problem with marijuana is the intentional consumption of marijuana in order to achieve an intoxicating effect. And here we have documentation from USA Today that that intoxicating effect is actually coming from marijuana with a potency that exceeds anything found even in recent years. And not by accident.And that tells us something, even if the state of Colorado doesn’t want to know what or says it can’t find its data.

One final thought on this new story, from time to time Christians need to contemplate the fact that when government claims its ability to somehow organize sin more responsibly, we need to understand the government is always incompetent to fulfill that promise. Governments try to assure citizens that they can control sinful behaviors and impulses, including something like gambling from which the state, of course, also hopes to reap a benefit. And that’s exactly what is taking place with marijuana as well. But as previous news stories have indicated, virtually all of the tax income from the sale and consumption of marijuana in Colorado has gone to efforts to try to prevent the abuse of marijuana. Efforts almost surely futile as the state also admits it’s incompetent to keep marijuana out of the hands of teenagers. But from the biblical worldview the point is this; you can’t gain control of her send by trying to regulate it. It simply doesn’t work. It has to be addressed as what it is. And especially, government put itself in a very compromised position when it says trust us, we can regulate it even as we will try to profit by it.

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-02-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Mixed messages on predicted climate catastrophe reveal intellectual dishonesty of movement

Optimism Faces Grave Realities at Climate Talks, New York Times (Coral Davenport)

Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?, New York Review of Books (Elizabeth Kolbert)

2) Chaos of Colorado marijuana regulation shows sin will not be regulated

Colo. regulators can’t answer basic pot questions, USA Today (Trevor Hughes)

Transcript: The Briefing 12-01-14

The Briefing

 

December 1, 2014

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said that at a recent teacher’s conference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He then went on to say,

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-01-14

Podcast Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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