R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 337

Transcript: The Briefing 10-30-14

The Briefing

 

October 30, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, October 30, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Houston withdrawal of sermon subpoenas does not negate danger subpoenas represented 

Houston Mayor Annise Parker announced yesterday that the subpoenas issued to five evangelical preachers would be rescinded, the legal term is withdrawn. As the Houston Chronicle reports, the city of Houston will withdraw its controversial subpoenas of five pastors tied to a lawsuit over the city’s equal rights ordinance. Mayor Annise Parker announced that yesterday at a news conference. The decision according to the Chronicle comes amid a national firestorm over the subpoenas which had prompted outrage amongst Christian conservatives. Parker last week had left the subpoenas in place with a narrower wording, removing any mention of sermons. However, the Mayor also admitted that the sermons were not excluded and in so far as they addressed the issues of the subpoena, they were included in the demand for information as well.

In her press conference yesterday the mayor said,

“The move is in the best interest of Houston and is not an admission that the requests were in any way illegal or intruded on religious liberties.”

That’s one of those statements that lead you to scratch your head and say, ‘well, then why did you do it?’ But the mayor had more to say,

“I didn’t do this to satisfy them [speaking of the pastors]. I did it because it was not serving Houston.”

Now the background of this is really important. The mayor and the city council narrowly pushed through a gay-rights ordinance that included one specific provision that said that transgendered persons in public facilities could use whatever restroom they demanded and that if they were not accommodated they could then file suit or file charges. Those who are in the city of Houston upset about that ordinance tried to use the constitutional means of a citizen recall; they collected petitions of needed signatures in order to get the issue before voters by referendum. But after collecting more than enough, indeed multiples of enough of those signatures, they then had the effort thwarted by the fact that Houston city attorney called most of those signatures invalid and thus turn back the referendum attempt. The lawsuit currently pending is from citizens in Houston suing the city government for that ruling; and that’s what led to the subpoenas that led to the current controversy.

But the controversy isn’t going to go away. As the Houston Chronicle reported,

“[Mayor] Parker said [yesterday] she was persuaded, in part, by the demeanor of the clergymen she met with Tuesday, saying they were concerned not about the ordinance or politics but about the subpoenas’ impact on the ongoing national discussion of religious freedoms.”

Now as a matter fact, subsequent to this, some of those pastors did say they had discussed the religious liberty issues with the mayor but they did not say what, she insinuated here, and that is that they weren’t primarily concerned in the first place about the ordinance itself. The Mayor went on in a somewhat confusing statement saying,

“That was the most persuasive argument, because to me it was, ‘What is the goal of the subpoenas?’ The goal of the subpoenas is to defend against a lawsuit and not to provoke a public debate. I don’t want to have a national debate about freedom of religion when my whole purpose is to defend a strong and wonderful and appropriate city ordinance against local attack. And by taking this step today we remove that discussion about freedom of religion,”

Well I think she sincerely hope so. I think by this action she hopes she can get out of the mess she created for herself and her city on the issue of religious liberty. Well I don’t think the Mayor’s hope is going to be fulfilled; several reasons for that. First of all, the fact that the subpoenas were later withdrawn doesn’t remove at all the fact that they were at first issued. And furthermore they weren’t just issued by attorneys working on behalf of the mayor and the city; they were defended by the mayor and the city attorney. This is the same mayor who said about the subpoenas that sermons are – to use her very words – “fair game.” This is the same city attorney who, in a very public statement, said if these preachers were talking by issues he deemed political, then their own content was not going to be protected – their own speech was not going to be protected.

But let’s remember why the mayor rescinded the subpoenas; she has said so in her own words: she did so because the issue had become a vast controversy nationwide and even internationally over religious liberty. She said that wasn’t the reason the subpoenas were issued. But here’s the problem: the subpoenas were issued to pastors for materials that were germane to their pastoral ministry. Those are the only subpoenas that are here in question and the only reason those subpoenas were ever issued was to get the material that the subpoenas demanded. There’s no way the mayor can get out of the argument she made herself.

Christians looking at the story should surely be glad that the subpoenas were withdrawn. Just as a fact, that’s a very good fact. But we can’t forget that the subpoenas were already issued and we can’t ignore the fact that this represents a form of intimidation not only against the pastors whose sermons were first subpoenaed but to any preacher who will teach or preach on the terrain that some civic official will call political. And in this case, what city officials were deeming political was what was opposed to their own political agenda – plain and simple.

Nathan Koppel and Tamara Audi reporting for the Wall Street Journal reported,

“Christian leaders said the mayor’s decision doesn’t signal an end of threats to religious freedom.”

That’s profoundly true. The Wall Street Journal called me and in the next sentence of that paragraph quotes me as saying,

“This is a real warning shot showing how close we are to real infringement on religious liberty. A very clear signal has been sent, and we will have to watch this and other situations closely.”

I stand by that statement, a very clear signal has been sent. We’re going to have to watch this situation and others very, very closely. And we have to remember that this does indeed underline just how close to us very real infringements and threats to religious freedom actually stand. It is undeniably a news story that these subpoenas were withdrawn, but that pales over against the significance of the news story that the subpoenas were ever issued.

2) Article against hell displays its significance for entire biblical worldview

Many years ago my hometown newspaper, that the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, ran a church ad. The church had placed both the morning and evening services advertise (the morning service above the evening service). The morning service sermon title was “What Is Hell Like?” The wording for the evening service, “Come Hear Our New Organist.” Well that ad led to no shortage of laughter in South Florida but now Time magazine is out with a headline new story that isn’t a laughing matter at all – the headline, “What Christianity Without Hell Looks Like.” The article is written by John Shore, again it’s published at Time, and he begins the article by writing,

“The idea that the Bible declares hell a real and literal place is no more valid than…”

Let me interrupt him here and say, what would you expect to come next? Well here is what comes next.

“The idea that the Bible declares hell a real and literal place is no more valid than the toxic lie that the Bible condemns homosexuality.”

That’s his first line. It’s really important. One of the things that Christians need constantly to keep in mind is that the way we approach the Scripture shows up not just in one question but in all questions. And inevitably when you compromise Scripture ,when you come up with a revisionist hermeneutic (that is a method of interpreting Scripture) that allows you to say the Scripture doesn’t mean what it apparently does mean, then you won’t apply that to one area of life, you’ll apply that to many.

So at the very beginning of this article John Shore announces – he advertises – his own hermeneutic by denying the reality of hell as a real and literal place by saying it’s no more valid than what he calls the toxic lie that the Bible condemns homosexuality. Any faithful reading of Scripture reveals that every time same-sex acts or same-sex relationships are referenced, they are condemned and there’s no way to be faithful to the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture, no way to be faithful to the trustworthiness and the truthfulness of Scripture, and to deny that fact. But there are those who’ve been trying to get around the plain truth and the plain reading of Scripture for any number of years on other issues, those issues preceded same-sex acts and homosexuality, but that’s the key issue on the front of our cultural conversation right now and that’s the key issue of biblical interpretation in many circles in the present. And that’s what makes a story really interesting, because even though he thinks he’s writing about hell, he’s actually writing about hermeneutics – that is, the science or the discipline of interpreting the Scripture.

Recall that what he says here is that the idea of a real and literal hell is no more biblical than the idea of the condemnation of homosexuality – but he goes on. He writes,

“Yet the idea that hell is real persists. Why?[He asks. He answers,] Because over the centuries those in positions of power within the institutions of Christianity have methodically, relentlessly, and with great art used the doctrine of hell to exploit the innate fear of death that is harbored by one and all.”

He goes on to say,

“Show me a Christian terrified of hell, and I’ll show you a Christian ready to pay good money for the assurance that he is not going there.”

Well let’s just back away for a moment and say, let’s look at that last sentence. He says, “Show me a Christian terrified of hell, and I’ll show you a Christian ready to pay good money for the assurance that he is not going there.” Well, let me tell you – if you find a Christian terrified of hell, that’s a Christian who doesn’t understand Christianity. In other words, a Christian is one who no longer has any need to have fear of hell. A Christian is one who is assured that he or she is now in Christ and thus safe in Christ, never to be plucked out of the Saviors hands, safe from the fire and the threat of hell; safe eternally. But the real argument he’s making here is that hell has been used by those who are in power in the church in order to keep people faithful to Christianity or attract people to Christianity by the fear of hell. But then he raises the question, ‘what would Christianity without hell look like?’ He says, and I quote,

“A Christianity without hell would be literally fearless. [He goes on to say] A Christianity without hell would have nothing to recommend it but the constant and unending love of God. It would allow Christians to point upward to God’s love—but never downward to His/Her wrath.”

He says, and I quote,

“A Christianity without hell would be largely unevangelical, since there would be nothing to save anyone from. A Christianity without hell would trust that God’s loving benevolence towards all people (emphasis on all) extends beyond this life and into the next. Bringing peace about the afterlife, a Christianity without hell would free Christians to fully embrace this life, to heed Christ’s commandment to in this life love our neighbors as we love ourselves. In short, a Christianity without hell would be a fearless, trusting, loving, divinely inspired source of good in the world. And this Christianity would be more biblical [that’s his last argument]—would be truer to not just the words but the very spirit of Christianity—than any Christianity that posits the reality of hell.”

Time magazine has never done us a better service by demonstrating what’s theologically at stake in the doctrine of hell. Some years ago I participated by interview in a cover story in Time magazine, the very same magazine, on the issue of hell. And it’s interesting that we can’t get away from hell; not just believers in terms of our imagination and our knowledge of health, but the secular world actually can’t get away from the notion of hell. Theologically that needs to be explained. Why is it so? The Bible tells us that it so simply because God made us moral creatures, he made every single human being in his image, and a part of being made in his image is that we have an innate knowledge, not only of the Creator, but of the fact that he will judge us. That point is made explicitly in the opening chapter to the book of Romans, Romans 1.

You also have in this gift from Time magazine, a very clear indication of what’s at stake theologically in the doctrine of hell because what he’s calling for here is a Christianity without hell and then he asked honestly what would that Christianity look like. And let’s just consider what he said, ‘a Christianity without hell would look like a religion that points merely to the love of God, never he says, downward to his wrath.’ Well let’s think about that for a moment. Do even secular people really think that they want a God who is only love and never wrath? How would we know what love is unless there is something to which it’s contrasted? How would we know what the gospel is in terms of good news unless there’s bad news over against which it appears to be truly infinitely eternally good? But even secular people who want to say that all they want to believe in is a loving and entirely benevolent God, they don’t want that under all circumstances. Not when they look at the grotesqueness of unspeakable human evil; they don’t want a God who doesn’t judge such things as the Holocaust, as genocide, as child abuse, as ritual murder. They actually do want judgment, they just don’t want judgment on their own sins – which very typically they see to be much less consequential than the sins of those who were involved in such extreme sin – to use the way many secular people try to evaluate relative sinfulness.

He says in short, a Christianity without hell would be fearless, trusting, loving, divinely inspired, as a source of good in the world, and as a way that Christianity would be made better, he says, it would be non-evangelical. His term is actually ‘largely unevangelical.’ Since as he says explicitly, very honestly, there will be nothing to save anyone from. Well then again let’s just look at what’s at stake. So a Christianity without hell – which is what John Shore is calling for – is a Christianity that would actually be Christian only in the sense that there might be some vocabulary left from the Christian tradition and from Scripture because what’s being left behind is not just the doctrine of hell. The point here I want to make emphatically is he really helps us here by demonstrating you can’t just leave hell behind; if you leave hell behind, you’re living a lot else behind. You’re not only rejecting hell, you’re rejecting the wrath of God – which means you’re not only rejecting the wrath of God, you’re rejecting the holiness of God, and you’re rejecting the justice of God. Because as the Bible makes clear, God can’t be just if he allows human sin to go unpunished. No one would consider a judge just who judges the guilty and innocent on exactly the same terms. That’s not justice, that’s not even benevolence.

Furthermore, John Shore also helps us here by saying that a Christianity without hell would have to give up on evangelism which means it gives up on the gospel, there’s no bad news in terms of divine judgment from which the gospel would then be seen as good news in terms of salvation. But he also makes very clear even as he argues the opposite, he says that this Christianity about hell would be more biblical. Well now that’s very interesting, of course it wouldn’t be,  but how is he going to reconcile that? Well his next words are abundantly clear and wow, are they clarifying. Because what he say is,

“…this Christianity would be more biblical [he then goes on to say]—would be truer to not just the words but the very spirit of Christianity—than any Christianity that posits the reality of hell.”

Well there you have the real argument because John Shore is here arguing that a Christianity without hell will be more biblical but not when it comes to the words of Scripture but rather to what he calls its spirit. Well there you have it, if somehow you can claim that the message of Scripture is found in its spirit but not in its words, you really had come to the point that you are denying that the Bible is the word of God. You’ve really come to the point that there is no binding authority left, none whatsoever, when it comes to the Scriptures. When you finally reach the point that the only ways to understand the Scripture is to abandon the words, you’ve actually reached the point of hermeneutical nihilism – that is to say you’ve reach the point where your interpretation of Scripture is absolute nothingness, it’s whatever you say it is, there’s no corrective by the actual text of Scripture. And that ought to alert Christians to the fact that when people say we can have Christianity without hell, you need to understand you can’t have it just without hell, a whole lots going to go out with hell – and that includes the character and holiness of God, the justice of God and evangelism, the goodness of the gospel and any coherent reasonable honest interpretation of Scripture.

3) Population control anti-natalism of cultural elite closely tied to eugenics

Shifting to Britain, on Tuesday the Guardian, that’s one of London’s most liberal newspapers and yet a newspaper that is vastly read not in Great Britain but in the United States, that newspaper ran a story entitled, “How to save the planet? Stop having children.” It’s one of those articles that tells us just where the worldview of the age is headed.  Frankie Mullin wrote the article. She first quotes Pippa Hayes, age 56, who wrote,

“I was sterilised after the birth of my second son because I believed I had no right to have more than two children – it would have been more than my reproductive share. Humans are tipping the balance with the natural world, to the detriment of both humanity and the other species that share our lovely, finite planet.”

Well it turns out she’s a medical doctor and it turns out that she’s trumpeting this opinion, not only in this article but elsewhere. She feels strongly that medical professionals should – to use the words of the article – “encourage people to have smaller families.”

“Doctors should be promoting replacement number of children; two per couple, one per single parent. We don’t need to do this by coercion, we just need to talk about it.”

Well this is a very interesting argument. It’s one of those arguments that tells us where the worldview of the ages is coming because of this. It tells us of the anti-natalism that is now shaping so much of elite opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Anti-natalism means anti-babies, it means not having babies is held up as the virtue rather than having them. One of the first things we need to point out is that when that happens in a society, it is embracing what the late Malcom Muggeridge called the great liberal death wish – which is the you can have liberals without having babies. And that’s why he suggested liberalism is never a stable worldview because it doesn’t reproduce itself; not only ideologically but even biologically.

But the most interesting aspect of the comment made by this medical doctor is that she can’t actually mean to be speaking to the people likely to read this article. Why? Because people on both sides of the Atlantic, in North America and in Europe, are basically having children below the replacement rate. The average American family is having children below the replacement rate, so also is the average couple in Europe, so that’s not who she’s really talking about. As a matter fact, later in the article The Guardian concedes that, conceding that in 97 countries the average woman now has fewer than two children, in the United Kingdom (where this article is published), the average couples having 1.7 children. She said the limit should be two, so she’s not talking about those people – who is she talking about?

That’s where you need to see this second aspect of this that’s even more frightening. Because what’s really going on here is the claim that certain people shouldn’t have so many children and that goes back to the fact that the population limitation movement has been historically and is almost always tied to what is called eugenics. The actual agenda is not just about the total number of babies born, but the fact that babies are being born to the wrong people in the wrong places and that’s the real issue. For instance the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger in the United States, was very committed to eugenics. The motto of many in the movement was, ‘more from the fit, less from the unfit’ and that’s an undisguised form of racism. The same thing was true in terms of the same kind of movement in Great Britain. Again eugenics was at the very beginning of the call for contraception and birth control and abortion there in Great Britain as well. And the article becomes pretty clear as it continues that the real issue is that in other parts of the world people are having too many babies.

Finally we need to note the Dr. Hayes said earlier in her comment,

“We don’t need to do this by coercion, we just need to talk about it.”

Well evidently in terms of North America and in Europe, you don’t even need to talk about it because people already are having babies below the replacement rate. And by the way that’s a problem. So she must be talking about somewhere else when she says ‘we don’t need to do this by coercion, we just need to talk about it.’ But here’s the reality, the people who are trying to force this kind of movement elsewhere in the world aren’t just trying to talk about it – they are trying to coerce it. The most coercive form of all is China’s infamous one child only policy that is so coercive it leads to infanticide and forced abortions and sterilization. When you look at this kind of argument, it’s almost never what it first appears to be. It appears to be a very quiet argument based in a consideration merely the number of children and merely in talking about it but as you look at the issue clearer, as this article makes abundantly visible for us, what you’re actually looking at is a form of coercion. And the only way this can ever be regulated is by state action and by coercion. And in the end this just goes to prove how anti- natalist, how anti-baby our society is really going. Because the real problem is we’re not having enough, and here you have an article in The Guardian saying, still saying, we’re having too many or at least some people – those people – are having too many.

4) Geographic clustering of worldview in America evidence of changing landscape of nation

Finally time and again we come back to the reality that geography does have an impact on worldview and communities do tend to sort themselves out in terms of even the spectrum between conservative and liberal. And now The Economist of Great Britain is out with a list of the most conservative and the most liberal cities in the United States; ranking these city’s from those conservative to most liberal. Most conservative all according to The Economist is Mesa, Arizona followed by Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Virginia Beach, Virginia Colorado Springs, Colorado, Jacksonville, Florida, Arlington, Texas, Anaheim, California, Omaha, Nebraska, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Aurora, Colorado. At the other end of the spectrum the most liberal city is San Francisco, California – there’s a shock – followed by Washington, DC the nation’s capital. Then Seattle, Washington, Oakland, California, Boston, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Detroit, Michigan, New York, New York, Buffalo, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland.

You’ll notice some clustering here. New York State tends to have a cluster, California tends to have a cluster of liberal cities, and so also the cluster around Washington, DC – that would include Baltimore, Maryland. And on the conservative side you also have clusters – clusters especially in the great heartland of the country in states like Colorado and Texas and of course Nebraska and Oklahoma. And also interestingly when you’re looking at this report you see that there can be a state with one the most conservative and one most liberal cities in the same state; in this case you can look at Oakland and San Francisco, California on the one hand and Anaheim, California on the other. So even in the same state, a state as vast as California you can have more liberal and more conservative regions. Just look at the representation and House of Representatives and Congress and you’ll see the same thing.

But there’s a final aspect to look at here in terms of worldview and demography. It comes down to this, by every study representation it almost is uniformly true that cities tend to be more liberal than the countryside surrounding them; that the metropolitan environment itself seems to be very conducive toward more liberalizing trends. So that tells you that around these conservative cities, the countryside is probably even more conservative; and around those liberal cities, you can’t count on the people outside those cities being nearly so liberals as the people inside them.

So once again we learn that demography is never just a matter of statistics and studies of maps and graphs, it’s a matter worldview as well. And that really does tell us something about how we come to our worldview and how we maintain them. It turns out that where we live isn’t inconsequential. But that leads to a final question, do we choose where we live so that’s in accordance with our worldview or do we have our worldview shaped by where we live? The answer that is probably a bit of both, but the interesting this: most social scientist say that America is now becoming increasingly clustered by choice, by moving, such that over time before  are actually moving to states and regions – even cities – that are closer to their own worldview. So if the demographers know it, intelligent Christians ought to know that as well.

 

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

The Briefing 10-30-14

1) Houston withdrawal of sermon subpoenas does not negate danger subpoenas represented 

Pastors speak up on city’s decision to drop subpoenas, Houston Chronicle (Mike Morris and Katherine Driessen)

Houston Mayor Tries to Calm Uproar Over Transgender Ordinance, Wall Street Journal (Nathan Koppel and Tamara Audi)

2) Article against hell displays its significance for entire biblical worldview

What Christianity Without Hell Looks Like, TIME (John Shore)

3) Population control anti-natalism of cultural elite closely tied to eugenics

How to save the planet? Stop having children, The Guardian (Frankie Mullin)

4) Geographic clustering of worldview in America evidence of changing landscape of nation

The 10 most conservative (and liberal) cities in America, Salon (Allegra Kirkland)

Urban ideologies, The Economist

ERLC 2014: Aftermath; Ministering in a Post-Modern Marriage Culture

For more information about the Ethics and Religious Libert Commission of the SBC, please visit ERLC.com.

Transcript: The Briefing 10-29-14

The Briefing

 

October 29, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, October 29, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Reinstatement of Rev. Frank Schaefer a failure of United Methodists to maintain own doctrine

Most major American denominations one way or the other have been dealing for the better part of last 20 years with the issue of homosexuality, same-sex relations, same-sex behaviors, and the entire complex of what is now referred to as the LBGT movement. In mainline Protestantism the story has been by and large one of accommodation to that movement; one of eventual concessions being made first toward the normalization of homosexual behavior and then towards the recognition and celebration of same-sex relationships. Even to the point that most of those liberal mainline Protestant denominations now at least to some point allow their clergy to perform same-sex ceremonies and recognize same-sex marriage.

The outlier among those mainline Protestant denominations has been United Methodist Church. That church of course traces its roots all the way back to John and Charles Wesley. And deep in the Wesleyan tradition of holiness there is an instinct among United Methodists that holds them to a certain understanding of what it means to resist sin and to embrace holiness; that is at least one theological hold upon that denomination. The denomination has been conceding point after point in terms of biblical authority in recent years and theologically it now includes a wide diversity and pluralism of theological positions. But why has the United Methodist Church not moved in so far a liberal direction as those other denominations? It has to do with the fact that the United Methodist Church a generation ago decided to include churches from non-North American locations, in particular from Africa. And so many those churches from the Pacific Rim and especially those churches in Africa are staunchly resistant to the normalization of homosexuality and to the legitimization of same-sex relationships. And that’s why that church, rather than moving to the left in general as a national and international body, has been in something of a pause and perhaps even on some questions moving to the right.

But that church now faces an inevitable moment of decision. That was made clear on Monday when the church’s Judicial Council, meeting in Memphis, Tennessee, decided that a United Methodist pastor who was defrocked after officiating at his gay son’s wedding will after all be able to stay in the ministry. The United Methodist top court made that decision after the Rev. Frank Schaefer had been defrocked after he had performed a same-sex ceremony for his son. At least three of his children are gay and he performed the same-sex ceremony for one of them – that led to the fact he was defrocked by a lower Methodist court. Upon appeal, his appeal has now been successful and he is now not defrocked but in essence re-frocked; his temporary suspension from the ministry has been lifted. Now the court in Memphis on Monday did so, they said, because of a technicality and the technicality itself is a part of the problem. We need to look at this very closely because what this tells us is that a denomination that wants to take a half measure, in terms of censoring a pastor, is going to find out that a half measure ends up meaning almost nothing; that is the great lesson of this United Methodist experience.

That lower United Methodist Court did not defrock Frank Schaefer for performing a same-sex ceremony, but for not pledging that he wouldn’t do it again. Now a church that is unwilling to deal with the fact that one of its ministers has blatantly and flagrantly violated its own law, in this case known by United Methodists as the book of discipline, a church that is unwilling to deal with that violation and only seems to be willing to deal with the fact that the violator will not make a pledge not to violate again is a church that is doomed to this kind of death by technicality – and in this case that’s exactly what this church is looking at. Because a church that cannot and will not hold its clergy to its own doctrine and principles and laws is a church that is headed not only for disaster, not only for inevitable numerical decline, but for a total theological abdication of responsibility. Because if the church cannot even and will not even police what its own clergy, what its own ministers and pastors will do and will say and will not do, then that church is looking at an inevitable collapse; it’s looking at an absolute incipient disaster.

And that’s where the United Methodist Church now stands. It’s standing at the brink – at the precipice – of that kind of disaster. There is still time for that church to turn and that’s where evangelical Christians committed to the full authority of Scripture need to pray that this very important, very historic denomination – this denomination that along with Baptist represents the largest group of evangelicals in the United States – this denomination we need to pray will actually, perhaps by that intentional influence coming from Africa and elsewhere, stay true to the Scripture. And if it does so it’s going to have to do so in a way that’s clear, clear enough, that a violation becomes the issue, not just the promise that the violator won’t violate again. This affirms once again that when you’re looking at so many of these cases, church by church, denomination by denomination, when you’re looking at Christianity writ large, in many cases it’s not really a question of what does the Bible say, it’s a question of whether or not the church has the fortitude to make it stick.

2) Pope’s attempts to reconcile creation and evolution foments confusion, departs from ex nihilo

Shifting now to Rome in Vatican City, Josephine McKenna of Religion News Service reports that on Monday, that’s just two days ago, Pope Francis I waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life. According to McKenna saying the Big Bang theory did not contradict the role of the divine creator but even required it. She went on to say that the Pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. They were gathered at the Vatican to discuss the topic ‘evolving concepts of nature.’ The Pope as quoted by Religion News Service said,

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,”

He went on to say,

“He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment.”

RNS then reported the Pope’s words,

“God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life. [He went on to say] Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

Now the first thing I want to say is that regardless of the translation, this is a very muddled and confused, even confusing, statement. But pause for just a moment and realize that here you have Religion News Service, one of the most respected news agencies in the world, quoting the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church as stating among other confusing things that God “is not a divine being.” Now that’s one of most shocking things I’ve seen in news media in my entire adult life. It’s hard to imagine news more significant than the Pope declaring, in speaking to a Pontifical Academy of Sciences meeting, that God is not a divine being.

I looked at this story again and again; I read it over and over again, but there is no doubt that this is exactly what RNS reported – that the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church said just Monday. And furthermore, I waited to see if RNS might almost immediately publish some kind of clarification or retraction – it didn’t come. So I asked my office directly to be in contact with reporter to ask if this was a translation issue. Just late yesterday that reporter, Josephine McKenna, reported back saying that she was happy with her translation even though she’s unsure what the Pope intended; in other words, quite explicitly, she sticking by her story. She’s even sticking by her translation.

Now we have at least two huge new stories here. The first new story is that the Pope said such a thing. Now let’s just grant for a moment that the Pope almost surely did not mean what the context here seems to imply that he met; what the words themselves even more clearly seem to imply. There must be something else behind this and in the total context of the Pope’s address it appears that what he meant to say was that God the creator, as revealed in Scripture and Christian tradition, is not some kind of blind impersonal mere deity but an intelligent creator who had a plan for his creation. But that’s not what he said, at least not according to the translation and the report offered by Religion News Service.

But that leads to the second big news story here. How can it be that a news organization with the scale and scope and reputation of Religion News Service can put out a news report saying that the Pope on Monday declaring that God is not a divine being and there appears to be almost no conversation about it and no demand for clarification? At least, not until we asked for clarification and later yesterday we had a second clarification from the reporter who said that the word ‘demiurge’ used in some other translations would be acceptable. But she continues to stand by her original translation. Well I stand by my claim that this is a very big story. I don’t think it’s so much the fact that it’s a big story because the Pope meant what he is reported here as saying, I think more likely the big story is: where’s the controversy over the misunderstanding? Or where’s the controversy and demand for clarification over what the Pope apparently is understood to have said?

But that leads to an even bigger story from an evangelical and Christian worldview perspective. What we have here on the part of the Roman Catholic Church is an absolute fierce determination to try to state at every conceivable point that there is no basic problem or conflict between the theory of evolution and the biblical and Christian account of creation. And the Roman Catholic Church has been about this for a very long time. The last to Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI in their own way tried to make similar statements. Now you have this Pope coming out with a statement that there is no inherent conflict between evolution and creation. And then you look at the report and you see he said some things that are, in the long run, just as interesting and just as scandalous as when he said that God is not a divine being, or was reported or translated as saying so.

In McKenna’s report she also quotes the Pope as saying,

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,”

Now that would seem, by any means, by any legitimate interpretation, regardless of any variant translation, to state that God the Creator is somehow, in His act of creation, accountable to laws external to himself. The moment you do that you actually depart from the Christian tradition. You are departing from the very clear statements of Scripture, you are exiting from the Christian affirmation of creation ex nihilo, that is God’s sovereignly and unilaterally acting, ex nihilo, out of nothing to create the cosmos and all that is. And you’re entering into a worldview in which God has to deal with either stuff that exists before he creates or with laws that conscribe his creative activity. Either one of those, and at least one of those seems to be absolutely necessary to the Pope statement, is theologically disastrous and not only separates the Roman Catholic Church from evangelicals, but is now separating the Roman Catholic Church from the longer and more historic Christian tradition.

But there’s another huge problem here. And the Pope statement, regardless of his translation, demands that we look at it in the face. And that is this: the Roman Catholic Church, supposedly now, officially says there is no conflict between the theory of evolution and the biblical account of creation. But in order to get there it has to do a couple of things that we should notice and notice very carefully. In the first place it has to de-historicize much of the biblical account. It has to say that when you’re looking at the first two chapters of the book of Genesis you’re not looking at literal space-time history. But the second thing you have to do if you’re going to make that claim is you’re actually going to have to redefine the theory of evolution and that’s what the two previous Popes did quite explicitly.

The official statements of the Roman Catholic Church under John Paul II and Benedict XVI both defined evolution in such a way that evolution would not prevent an affirmation of the special creation of human beings and would not prevent the affirmation of the historicity of Adam and Eve and the common descent of humanity from them. But here’s what you need to note: no acceptable theory of evolution held in any major academic city in the world makes those allowances. So in essence the Roman Catholic Church publicly says there is no conflict between the theory of evolution and the biblical and Christian understanding of creation, but they actually redefined at both ends of the equation. The Christian doctrine of creation is redefined but so is the theory of evolution and that’s why it become so frustrating to evangelicals when we’re told that the Roman Catholic Church says there’s no conflict; as this Pope just recently said in one of the most muddled statements ever I have seen from the Vatican, that there supposedly is no conflict between the theory of evolution and the Christian account of creation. But when they do so they are basically counting on the fact that people aren’t going to read the footnotes because if you read the footnotes, it’s just not so.

But it does appear as this latest report comes out, regardless of the news source, that this Pope has taken that argument one step further. If indeed the Roman Catholic Church, if indeed the pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, now holds that God was constrained in his active creation such that he was accountable to anything external to himself, we’re now talking about a wholesale departure from the biblical doctrine of creation.

3) Report reveals influence of secular schools as engines of secularism

Shifting to the question of education and religion, The Economist, that very influential British newsmagazine, just a few days ago was out with a story entitled: “Falling Away”; the subtitle said this, ‘How education makes people less religious and less superstitious too.’ It’s a very interesting story. Once again, The Economist does not credit reporters so we simply credit the magazine. But the magazine states that,

“Just one extra year of schooling makes someone 10% less likely to attend a church, mosque or temple, pray alone or describe himself as religious, [That according to] a paper published on October 6th that [according to the Economist] looks at the relationship between religiosity and the length of time spent in school.”

It looked at a change in the compulsory school-leaving age in 11 European countries between 1960 and 1985 in order “to tease out the impact of time spent in school on belief and practice among respondents to the European Social Survey.”  As The Economist says, that’s a long-running research project. The next paragraph says this,

“By comparing people of similar backgrounds who were among the first to stay on longer, the authors could be reasonably certain that the extra schooling actually caused religiosity to fall, rather than merely being correlated with the decline.”

During those extra years according to The Economist the big issue might be that there are more rigorous mathematics and science classes taught. And,

“And increased exposure to analytical thinking may weaken the tendency to believe.”

Well it’s an interesting story, it is the kind of thing that would be of interest to a theologian; I looked at it very carefully. And here are a couple of thoughts that that come immediately to mind. This report makes no distinction between the impact of education and the impact of school, now that’s a crucial issue. Those are two different things. Education is about learning, school is about the institutional context in which that takes place. I think there is no reason to doubt that the longer one is in one of the secular school systems of Europe the less likely one is to be referenced as a believer. But the big issue here that isn’t even confronted in this story is the fact that those schools, those institutional contexts, become the very engines for the secularism their here trying to report on and trying to track and measure.

 

And that gets to another issue, the choice of a context for education. The choice of an educational option or school goes a long way in determining the kind of worldview that student is going to eventually receive. This points to the formative powerful educational influence and that’s exactly why Christian should pay attention to this story – education matters and for that matter, school matters. The choice of an educational option has a great deal to do with the character of the student in the end, with the beliefs of the student in the end, and completely what the worldview that student is going to have at the end of the educational process.

We shouldn’t doubt this research for a moment. There is no reason to doubt that the longer a student, especially a teenager and adolescent, is in one of these very secular institutional school settings in Britain and throughout Europe, there is no reason to suspect that it will be wrong that those students every single year would become more secular. That’s actually what we should expect. But that’s where we need come back and say that a clear distinction needs be made between education and school because this report actually doesn’t measure education at all – only length of time in particular school settings and in that institutional context.

There is a second issue to look at here and that has to do with the fact that when you’re looking at the countries that are being surveyed here in the European social survey, and look at the years – remember those years were 1960 to 1985 – that’s the very quarter-century, the very 25 year period, when Europe itself made that giant secular turn. When you look at the 20th century and you look at Europe, the period between 1960 and 1985 is when churchgoing rates in those countries fell precipitously. It just might have much more to do with the fact that these parents weren’t taking these kids to church, in terms of the fact that they turned out to be less religious as measured in terms of this study. That make sense as well, but that doesn’t get factored into this report. One of the things we need to keep in mind is that the culture is a whole and when you look at the public schools you look at what is eventually a reflection of the culture. And in Europe when you look at the secularization of those nations, you have to look at the schools as both a reflection of that secularization but – here’s the point – also an engine for that secularization. And that’s why Christians in the United States looking at a report like this need to understand that there are some institutional educational context that are deadly seriously damaging to religious belief, that are deeply subversive to the Christian worldview, and that will have an in evitable impact upon the students who were in those classrooms; year-by-year, year after year. The other thing we need to recognize is that when we’re looking at the total society making a turn, there is no reason to believe that there will be any distance between the secularization of the society and the secularization of the schools. But we also need to recognize that the cart and horse question applies here is well. It is more likely that it’s the secularization of the schools driving the secularization of the culture than the other way around. And that’s simply because what happens in the classroom eventually is what determines the shape of the culture. Christian parents be alert, be aware, be understanding, be very aware of this.

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 10-29-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Reinstatement of Rev. Frank Schaefer a failure of United Methodists to maintain own doctrine

Pastor who performed gay marriage keeps ordination, Associated Press (Travis Loller)

Frank Schaefer wins final reinstatement with Methodists, Religion News Service (Cathy Lynn Grossman)

Top court affirms Schaefer’s reinstatement as clergy, United Methodist News (Linda Bloom)

2) Pope’s attempts to reconcile creation and evolution foments confusion, departs from ex nihilo

Pope Francis: ‘Evolution … is not inconsistent with the notion of creation’, Religion News Service (Josephine McKenna)

3) Report reveals influence of secular schools as engines of secularism

Falling away, The Economist

Transcript: The Briefing 10-28-14

The Briefing

 

October 28, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, October 28, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) New Jersey nurse reveals conflict between personal human rights and public health concerns

Several issues in the news this week point to the issue of human rights; where those rights come from and how they are to be recognized and respected. And the first of them comes at the intersection of the human rights issue with the question of Ebola. Earlier this week the governors of New York state and New Jersey announced together a quarantine, an involuntary quarantine, for those who would return to the United States from affected regions in Africa and might be suspected of having contact with or actually contracted the Ebola virus. What makes this really interesting is that this comes after a medical doctor who had been in West Africa developed the disease and showed up at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, the first Ebola patient in that city – the nation’s largest.

This has led to a great deal of public concern, and understandably so. And there was a major political development when the governors of these two states, that is Andrew Cuomo of New York state and Chris Christie of New Jersey, governors representing two different parties (Christie the Republican and Cuomo the Democrat; both breaking effectively with President Obama, the sitting Democratic president), both of these governors making their announcements in a way that directly contradicted the advice coming from the federal government. This is a reflection of the fact that a good many Americans, including a good many millions of Americans in New Jersey and New York, find the federal government’s response to the Ebola crisis to be insufficient, confusing, and inadequate. And thus you have these two governors, governors of two of the most populous states in the union, defying the President and the Oval Office and the Centers for Disease Control to boot.

And then you had the news that came yesterday when a nurse returning from Doctors Without Borders service in West Africa was herself involuntarily quarantine. The nurse is Kaci Hickox, she’s a 33-year-old, and she became the first public test for this mandatory quarantine that governors Christie and Cuomo had put into place last Friday. Her lawyer, Stephen Heiman, announced yesterday that she had been released midday from University Hospital in Newark after she complained to the national media about the fact that she was being held against her will in this involuntary quarantine. According to Liz Robbins and a team of reporters for the New York Times, by the time the weekend was over this nurse, Kaci Hickox, had criticize the governors quarantine policy and had hired a team of lawyers to defend her own rights.

This raises the huge question, whose rights? What rights? How do the rights of an individual play over against the necessity of public health? One of the things that became very clear is that voluntary quarantines were not very effective. In the case of the doctor who developed the disease in New York City, it became apparent later that he had traveled in the subway, had ridden in a taxi, and had also gone to a bowling alley with friends. In the cases of some of the medical personnel in Dallas, the situation was even worse with one of the nurses having traveled on commercial airliners just 24 hours before the full development of the disease. So one of the things that has become very clear in this is that a voluntary quarantine is only as good as the volunteer’s voluntary commitment to do it. And in the case of this nurse, it was the first case of an involuntary quarantine and she complained about it saying that she should be free to leave. And yet as Governor Christie made very clear, when she showed up in New Jersey she showed up with a temperature that registered high enough to register the concern of the Centers for Disease Control in order to expedite her testing for the Ebola virus.

As the New York Times reports,

“After…Hickox landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, a forehead scan showed she had a temperature of 101… [that] prompted concern because fever is a symptom of the Ebola… [she]… later said that the reading came because she was flushed and upset. A later reading [by] an oral thermometer recorded a normal temperature, 98.6.”

Governor Christie said,

“If people are symptomatic they go into the hospital. If they live in New Jersey, they get quarantined at home. If they don’t, and they’re not symptomatic, then we set up quarantine for them out of state. But if they are symptomatic, they’re going to the hospital.”

That kind of very firm decisive leadership on the part here of both the governor of New York State and of New Jersey is an intentional contrast with the confusion that has come from the federal government, and yet you have a rights claim here. Here you have a nurse saying that her rights were violated because of the involuntary nature of this quarantine. And the situation becomes even more acute when she makes clear that had she not been involuntarily quarantine she would have left. This raises a huge question, when do our individual rights become limited by the public good? When does someone who may have been exposed to the Ebola virus find that individual rights of mobility and freedom are conscribed by the necessity of at least some defined period of a quarantine.

We’re looking here at one of the oldest questions of modern democracy: how in the world do you manage the balance between individual liberty and the common good? But we’re also looking at something that is even more sinister, we’re looking at something that should actually concern us a great deal. We’re looking at the fact that we have so now committed ourselves as a society to an unbridled and unfettered notion of human rights that the idea of an involuntary quarantine seems to sound many Americans like a prison sentence rather than as a matter of natural precautions for public health. In other words, we’ve now reached the point that our rights talk has so infected our moral discourse that most Americans, or least many Americans, find themselves unable to defend a common sense policy. It’s also interesting that the federal government is opposing the two governors in this action. And it’s the federal government, including the White House, putting pressure on them to rescind and reverse their decision; not because it doesn’t make public health sense but because of its symbolism – it might scare the nation.

And furthermore, they’re saying that it just might be something that would dissuade doctors and other medical personnel from going to West Africa. That’s where public health rationality seems to come in to play in order to save this: ‘we desperately need medical doctors and medical professionals to go to West Africa, there is a crisis there, there is a contagion there, and there is a plague there.’ But having gone and risked one’s life, it seems like a very small thing than to forfeit the kind of personal freedom we all take for granted just for 21 days upon return in order to make certain that one does not spread that contagion here at home.

2) Ted Olson argues rights can change displaying radically different worldview from US Founders 

A second illustration when it comes to our confusion over rights appears in yesterday’s edition of USA Today; the headline is this, “Ted Olson: ‘Point of no return’ on gay marriage.” No real surprise here, Theodore Olson, one of the two attorneys in the proposition eight case out of California – one of the two attorneys that had bound themselves together in order to legalize same-sex marriage coast-to-coast – Ted Olson the former solicitor general of the United States under Pres. George W. Bush says that the point of no return has now been reached. And in this case Mr. Olson’s commentary is actually directed not at the federal government he once served but at the current President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Because as we discussed just a few days ago on The Briefing last week’s interview in the New Yorker with Pres. Obama had the President saying that he now is fully supportive of court action to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states. You’ll recall the President said he now believes that the right to marry someone of the same gender is a fundamental right that should be respected in all 50 states. Now you have Ted Olson disagreeing with the President because the President said nonetheless he was willing for the courts to simply let these cases take their course. Ted Olson says, no the court needs to be very activist and actually to rule just as soon as possible in order to ensure that all Americans who want to marry someone of the same gender are free to do so. But here’s where the story gets really interesting in tying to the issue of rights.

Ted Olson said according to USA Today,

“I do not believe that the United States Supreme Court could rule that all of those laws prohibiting marriage are suddenly constitutional after all these individuals have gotten married and their rights have changed,”

So here Ted Olson was saying he finds it very unlikely that the Supreme Court would reverse course and fined constitutional those state constitutional amendments and laws that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman exclusively. He’s saying straightforwardly that the right to marry someone of the same gender is a new right; this is a new right that has been granted by the court to American citizens. The language explicitly used by Ted Olson is this, he says this, and “their rights have changed.”

One of the things we need to note is that the founders of this country did not understand the notion of rights that changed. Furthermore, they did not understand any notion of rights that were invented by courts. They didn’t even believe in rights that were granted by government. Their notion was that rights were granted by the creator to human beings. And even the most secular of the founders of this nation spoke of nature and nature’s God in speaking of the fact that nature itself reveals the rights that were granted to human beings by the Creator, and bestowed in the sense of the natural order. Such that what the founders of the United States believed themselves to be doing was not creating rights, even defining rights, merely respecting rights – respecting right that the Creator had given. They didn’t understand the notion that one could invent new rights, they didn’t believe that these rights were invented at all, they believed that there are granted by the Creator.

But now in the modern notion of human rights, this very radical notion of rights, you have Ted Olson saying that the Supreme Court is now unlikely to take back rights, new rights, that it has both invented and granted. Olson then said,

“To have that snatched away, it seems to me, would be inhuman; it would be cruel; and it would be inconsistent with what the Supreme Court has said about these issues in the cases that it has rendered.”

Well there’s certain logic to what Ted Olson is saying here. I actually agree with them that it’s unlikely the court will reverse course, but that’s because I believe the court is unlikely take away rights it has invented.

Speaking of the President’s position articulated last week, Olson said,

“I think the thing he overlooks…(is) that there are people in 18 states of the United States that don’t have this fundamental right that he has just announced that he believes in.”

Well there again, something very interesting. Here you have Ted Olson criticizing President Obama for being inconsistent, for saying that he believes it is a fundamental right but he doesn’t believe in it fundamentally enough to ask the Supreme Court to take a decisive action in its protection. Maybe Ted Olson’s onto something in terms of the inconsistency of President Obama, but he’s also onto something else. He becomes Exhibit ‘B’ of what it means now in this week to look at the issue of human rights and understand that there are those around us who actually believe that human rights are something invented by humanity; that can be defined and invented, even discovered by a human court.

If that reassuring to social liberals, it ought to be frightening to is all for the very same reason that our founders would be frightened by this prospect because if government can invent rights, it can un-invent them. If a government can discover rights, it can un-discover them. Government, according to the founders, was merely to respect rights granted by the creator; and all of those rights, and no other, claimed rights. But we’re now living in a very different world and these two examples; one about Ebola and one about gay marriage serve to prove that point all too well.

3) Tennessee abortion vote test case of moral consistency

Next, I have just returned from Nashville, Tennessee where there is a massive contest going on November 4 over the same question; the question of rights. In this case the question of abortion rights. Richard Fausset, reporter for the New York Times, tells us the state of Tennessee is now being described as an abortion destination. We discussed several days ago amendment one, the amendment coming before the voters of Tennessee that will allow them to adjust their Constitution to allow for a greater number of restrictions on abortion. And the scary thing about this story is the fact that the state of Tennessee, we’re talking after all here about Tennessee, has now become an abortion destination because it is the Tennessee Supreme Court that found within the Tennessee State Constitution protections for abortion rights that went even beyond the definition of abortion rights defined by the United States Supreme Court in the Roe V Wade decision back in 1973. This makes this a very important story and it’s also very important that the New York Times and other national media are taking great interest in it.

Fausset reports on those he describes as abortion opponents who believe that Tennessee has for too long been a Bible Belt outlier due to a state Supreme Court decision in 2000 that ruled that the state’s constitutional guarantee of a right to privacy includes the right to an abortion.

“Over the years [he writes], the ruling has served as a partial bulwark against the wave of abortion restrictions that have swept other conservatives states.”

Now here’s something that’s really interesting. Here you have the New York Times defining this rights debate in the state of Tennessee over abortion as having to do with the fact that that state’s Supreme Court located a woman’s right to abortion in a right to privacy. So, by the way, did the Supreme Court in the Roe v Wade decision. But Tennessee’s state court ruled that that right to privacy goes far beyond even what the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade. And thus this becomes a very important test of moral consistency and of moral resolve because the vast majority of the citizens of Tennessee have registered again and again the fact that they have pro-life convictions. They state that they believe that abortion under most circumstances is wrong. Now on November 4, in terms of this constitutional amendment that will face the voters, they had the chance to actually vote in consistency with what they say they believe. But the advocates of abortion on demand are actually rather confident that the number of Tennesseans who say they believe that abortion is wrong is going to outnumber profoundly the number of Tennesseans who are willing to vote those convictions into law.

And the reason for this is something that should also have our attention from a Christian worldview. It is because the defenders of legal abortion on demand in Tennessee are convinced that even those who say they are pro-life, even those who say that abortion is wrong, have been drinking so deeply of the wells of rights talk that they’re going to find themselves virtually unable to vote in consistency with that pro-life conviction when they enter the voting booth – and that’s really interesting. It’s also frankly scary because they just might be right. Could it be true that a vast number of Tennesseans, measured by the tens and perhaps even hundreds of thousands, say they believe that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life? And yet when they face the choice that allows them to amend their own state Constitution to come in line with those convictions, and thus to save human lives, they find that they simply aren’t able to do it because they have a higher commitment to a radical notion of human rights. They may not articulate that higher commitment, but the fact is that they do not vote to support amendment one on November 4 they will, by their failure to vote in that way, say they actually worship at the shrine of human rights more than they established their conviction of the sanctity of human life. That’s truly frightening but also gives us Exhibit C in terms of today’s consideration of the intersection between human rights, rights talk, and matters of right and wrong.

4) Controversy over means of paying for TN State school sex week example of moral confusion

Finally before I leave the state of Tennessee entirely, yesterday’s edition of the Tennessean, that’s Nashville’s major newspaper, ran a story with the headline, “East Tennessee State University wonders about impact of sex week.” This is one of those stories that also should have our attention, not so much because a university in America’s holding sex week – that’s now hardly headline news, it’s alarming enough – it started at Yale University about a decade ago and ‘sex week’ is now a week of absolute institutionally supported sexual debauchery and pornography right there on the campus of a University that was once established by Christians primarily for the training of Christian ministers out of the concern that Harvard, even centuries ago, had already gone too liberal. The fact that an American university is holding one of these sex-fests on its campus, that’s not news, what is news and ought to have our attention, that this is taking place in the state of Tennessee. Oh and by the way, not even in a city like Nashville, considered to be perhaps more liberal by its urban concentration and the presence of a major university like Vanderbilt, but in this case it’s Johnson City, Tennessee – in the middle the Appalachian region and it is East Tennessee State University. And yet that university is now ground zero for the controversy over sex week and the story run by the Associated Press is actually rather interesting because it’s really not about morality at all. It’s not really about the fact that there would be a good many people whose moral convictions and sensibilities would be run over roughshod by this kind of sex week, it’s not just that someone might consider that it will be wrong for this kind of thing to take place on a college campus – a state college campus in the name of taxpayers – no, that argument is not even being made. The only argument here is about the way the funding might be spent for it and whether the funding should come from student funds that would come directly from the university or student entertainment funds that the students would control themselves.

There is the recognition that perhaps some students would feel like their funds were being misused, that’s the only paragraph the really has to do with morality in the entire article. As the report states,

“Central to the arguments against the sex-themed programming is the concept that some conservative students may not approve of events like condom scavenger hunts and sex toy demonstrations, and would get no benefit from the portion of their student fees going toward Sex Week.”

So from a Christian worldview perspective, here’s another thing for us to note in terms of the moral confusion of our age. You can have something like sex week on a major college campus, and again we’re not talking about on the two coasts, we’re not talking about a major public university in an urban area in the Northeast, we’re talking about East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. And we’re not talking about a debate over whether or not this kind of organized debauchery and pornography on campus is wrong, we’re simply talking about the fact that it might be wrong to use the money that would come from conservative students for a program they wouldn’t enjoy or benefit from.

So in other words, all that’s left is an economic argument. And what’s missing is the recognition of just how far as a culture we have now come; that on a campus in Johnson City, Tennessee, on the campus of a public, University East Tennessee State University, you can have sex week and evidently having sex week is not a controversial issue at all asked, just where the money comes from and how the money is spent and whether students who might not benefit by the program, to use the words in this news report, as she might feel that their funds were unjustly used.

Oh, and when it comes to the University’s own responsibility keep in mind that at Yale the university is very proud of sex week. With its dean of students and others actually encouraging students to go and seeming to revel in all the pornography and other things that take place there. When it comes East Tennessee State University it appears University administrators are taking more of the classic Sgt. Schultz approach. They seem to say, ‘we know nothing.’ The University’s vice president of student affairs issued the kind of language that comes from a government bureaucrat. He said,

“All of our polices and state laws allow student organizations to hold events on campus as long as reservation forms are filed and procedures are followed.”

So there it is; all that really matters here is where the money comes from and whether it’s equitable to spend it. And so far as university is concerned, everything okay if the forms are filled out and all the policies are followed.

So it’s vitally important that Christians, biblically minded Christians, understand this issue of human rights in a biblical perspective that actually honors and grounds us human rights in something other than the decision and whim of the human court. That does recognize that these rights are granted to us by the creator and the fact that we are made in God’s image. But the same biblical worldview also tells us of those rights have limitations and that those rights are not going to be newly invented in every generation and age. And furthermore, we are told in Scripture that the issue of rights, important as it is to a biblical understanding of what it means to be human, simply doesn’t cancel the whole idea of right and wrong; it doesn’t cancel morality. And at the end of the day it simply isn’t enough to say ‘it’s going to happen, we have no way to prevent it from happening, because all the forms are filled out and all the policies are being follow.’ But that’s the language of a very morally confused America, in this age of worldview confusion, and it’s a good thing that we know 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 10-28-14

Podcast Transcript

1) New Jersey nurse reveals conflict between personal human rights and public health concerns

Unapologetic, Christie Frees Nurse From Ebola Quarantine, New York Times (Liz Robbins, Michael Barbaro, and Marc Santora)

2) Ted Olson argues rights can change displaying radically different worldview from US Founders 

Ted Olson: ‘Point of no return’ on gay marriage passed, USA Today (Susan Page)

3) Tennessee abortion vote test case of moral consistency

Abortion Capital of Bible Belt? Tennessee Vote Tests That Idea, New York Times (Richard Fausset)

4) Controversy over means of paying for TN State school sex week example of moral confusion

ETSU wonders about impact of sex week, The Tennessean (AP)

Transcript: The Briefing 10-27-14

The Briefing

 

October 27, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, October 27, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1)Washington high school shooting reminder of tragic unpredictability of evil

Once again, an American high school has become the scene of a deadly shooting; this time the high school was Marysville-Pilchuck High School in rural Marysville, Washington. Once again the shooting was indeed deadly. The rampage began in the school cafeteria when it is now believed that a 14-year-old boy by name of Jaylen Ray Fryberg opened fire on several students who happen to be his close friends, including, as news reports indicate, at least two being his first cousins. But the shooting turned deadly and at least two were dead at the end of the day on Friday; one of them was the shooter himself, the other was a young girl. Now, late last night authorities in Washington State revealed that yet another girl has died, bringing the total death toll right now to three. One additional teenage girl and two young boys are still undergoing treatment, two of them still considered in critical condition in the aftermath of the shooting. But there’s a new haunting aspect to this now all-too-familiar tragedy in American life.

As Kirk Johnson and Shaila Dewan of the New York Times report,

“If the bullet-scarred American psyche has an archetype for a school gunman, it looks very little like Jaylen Ray Fryberg. He was not a loner or a known misanthrope — far from it. He was a football player with a million-dollar smile, popular enough to be elected homecoming prince of his freshman class at Marysville-Pilchuck High School. Just a week ago, he presided over homecoming festivities in a red shirt with black bow tie, suspenders and Converse sneakers.”

Later in the article Johnson and Dewan write,

“The students and teachers in this community, near Seattle, had known they were no more immune to violence than Columbine or Sandy Hook; they had even practiced lockdown drills. But they never could have guessed who the perpetrator would be. ‘This wasn’t the typical trench coat, introvert-type person, no,’ said Rick Iverson, a former teacher and wrestling coach at Marysville-Pilchuck. [He went on to say,] ‘This was an outgoing person that everyone in the school loved.’”

In the wake of so many these now all-too-familiar shootings on American school campuses, law enforcement officials have learned to try to develop a certain kind of profile, both psychological and sociological, of the young men – and they are almost always young men – who perpetrate these crimes. And yet in this case, Jaylen Ray Fryberg doesn’t meet any of these expectations. He was a young male of course, in this case a 14-year-old boy, he had access to guns and yet he had been trained in terms of the use of those guns primarily in hunting, and he spoken social media about his love of hunting with his father and his brother. There were no signs, at least no signs that have yet come to light, of this kind of incipient violence in the life of a young man who was not the kind of loaner that is now typical of the kind of profile expected in such crimes, but was actually a member of the football team, a member of the wrestling team, and as the New York Times reported, was actually elected homecoming prince in the homecoming activities just about a week ago at the same school.

Not long after the shootings on Friday at least some friends of Jaylen Ray Fryberg indicated that they had detected some change in his behavior and attitude in recent weeks, especially in recent days. There were indications of the kind of typical trouble that a 14-year-old boy often gets into. There was at least the rumor of a breakup of a girlfriend and of at least one altercation that caught the attention of school disciplinary authorities, and yet as law enforcement officials around the country responding to this incident said, ‘if every 14-year-old adolescent male caught up in these kinds of events were to be considered a suspect in this kind of crime, there wouldn’t be enough jails or juvenile detention facilities to hold them all,’ and that’s an understatement. What this horrifying crime out of Washington State reveals more than anything else is our inability to read another human being’s heart and mind. There are signs we can and certainly should watch, there are signal sent that should certainly be received and monitored, but in the case of this young man and in this horrifying shooting in Washington state, it appears that there were no signs, at least known to us now, that would’ve indicated that this kind of murderous rampage was about to be set loose, and certainly not from this young shooter. This is a humbling realization for all of us. Recognizing that the people we pass on the street, the young people we see on the school bus, might be harboring resentments, hurts, and all kinds of turmoil, that are absolutely invisible to us. Furthermore, this tragedy based upon what we can understand about it now is a humbling affirmation of the fact that evil resides in the human heart and can break out in the most unexpected and violent ways in virtually a flash. We should be incredibly thankful for a system of law and conscience that is put into place by our Creator that serves as a great restraint upon human sinfulness and the outbreak of this kind of human evil. But this kind of evil does break out, and in occasions like this it breaks out in a murderous and horrifying form. Finally, when you see so many people scratching their heads in looking for a rational explanation, let’s just remember that the Bible presents sin itself as a form of irrationality. At the end of the day there is no rational explanation for the irrationality of sin.

2) Biomedical revolution of ‘embryo screening’ frightening commodification of reproduction 

Next, for several decades now we’ve been staring right in the face of a biomedical revolution that spells the redefinition of human dignity in our times. That was made abundantly clear last night on CBS News in the 60 Minutes program when reporter Norah O’Donnell reported on what is described as the ‘breeding out the disease.’ As CBSreported, “O’Donnell look[ed] into a controversial procedure that could stop the spread of dangerous genes that have stalked families for generations.” What the headline did not acknowledge was the depreciation and subversion of human dignity that is required in the process.

O’Donnell talked to physicians including Dr. Mark Hughes; he’s one of the scientists who have led the way in this new procedure known as PGD – that’s short for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. O’Donnell explains that this is “an embryo screening procedure that can identify deadly gene mutations – and alter a child’s genetic destiny.” Now, as it turns out, the latter part of that sentence is profoundly misleading if not outright dishonest, but we’ll get back to that in just a moment.

In introducing this segment O’Donnell said,

“There are few fields of medicine that are having a bigger impact on how we treat disease than genetics. The science of genetics has gotten so sophisticated [she reported] so quickly that it can be used to not only treat serious diseases but prevent thousands of them well before pregnancy even begins. Diseases that have stalked families for generations – like breast cancer – are being literally stopped in their tracks. Scientists can do that by creating and testing embryos in a lab, then implanting into a mother’s womb only the ones which appear healthy. While the whole field is loaded with controversy, those who are worried about passing on defective and potentially dangerous genes see the opportunity to breed out disease.”

O’Donnell then asked Mark Hughes, “Did you ever envision that you would have the capability you have today?” He responded, “No, but that’s the fun of science. It’s constantly surprising you.” Speaking of his procedure Dr. Hughes said,

“We all throw genetic dice when we have children. But when you know the dice are loaded and that there’s a really reasonable chance that your baby will have an incurable, dreadful condition, you’re looking for an alternative.”

O’Donnell then stated,

“Dr. Hughes helped develop PGD two decades ago to screen embryos for one disease: cystic fibrosis. Today, because of advances in the mapping of the human genome, he says it can be used to root out virtually any disease caused by a single defective gene.”

O’Donnell then asked a series of questions in which the doctor said that he believed they will be able to stamp out muscular dystrophy, sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease (at least that which is triggered as an early onset by a single gene), colon cancer (again those linked to specific genes), and breast cancer (tied to specific genes he now says this screening is done regularly). O’Donnell then featured a young couple who had given birth to both a boy and a girl; they asked that their last name not be used. They had used the embryo screening procedure in order to avoid the baby that might be born with a mutation that increases the risk of breast, ovarian, prostate, and pancreatic cancer. It was when the mother in this case, Melinda, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer that it was found that she carried a genetic mutation known as BRCA1. Dr. Hughes then explains that the screening takes place when couples first undergo in-vitro fertilization; that’s the process in which a man’s sperm is injected into a woman’s eggs under a microscope to create the embryos. Then five days later a tiny tube just 1/20 the diameter of human hair is used to extract from each embryo one single cell to be genetically tested for disease. Going back to the young couple, Matt and Melinda, the doctors created several embryos from their cells and then tested them for the genetic marker. According to Dr. Hughes, about half of them were found to have the marker and they were discarded. The other embryos then became candidates for implantation into the womb.

O’Donnell then shifted the scene to a conversation with Anne Morriss, she is joined with a Princeton molecular biologist by the name of Lee Silver to create another company called ‘Gene Peeks,’ also intended to create what are now called digital babies. In this case they use genetic material in order to create a digital projection of what a baby would be if born to these parents in the process of reproduction. Dr. Silver told O’Donnell that by analyzing the DNA in these “digital babies” he’s able to calculate the risk of two people conceiving a child with anyone of 500 severe recessive pediatric disorders. It’s at this point in the 60 Minutes segment that the brave new world of modern medicine and genetic manipulation truly stares us in the face.

Speaking of these new technologies Lee Silver went on to say,

“I see a future in which people will not use sex to reproduce. That’s a very dangerous thing to do.”

In other words, the normal human biological process of reproduction and procreation is here dismissed as being too dangerous; the danger being that babies could be born that parents would choose to be born otherwise. Remember that Dr. Hughes said that the having of a baby is simply a matter of rolling the dice, Dr. Silver comes back and says,

“It’s safer to have a baby with this pre-knowledge, this genetic information that might help them avoid disease.”

To her credit Norah O’Donnell seems to understandably some of the problems here. She asked Dr. Silver,

“We read your patent and it says your technology could be used to assess whether a child could have other traits, like eye color, hair color, social intelligence, even whether a child will have a widow’s peak? If your company is so focused on preventing disease, why would you include those traits?”

Dr. Silver responded,

“The purpose of the list of traits is simply to demonstrate that our technology can be used to study anything that’s genetically influenced. That doesn’t mean we’re going to actually do that.”

O’Donnell then responded,

“OK. But you’re running a company? That could be big business?”

He then said,

“We are the ones who invented this technology and we’re going to use it to study pediatric disease. At the moment, we will make sure the technology is used only for that purpose.”

So this molecular biologist at Princeton announces that he now holds a patent for this kind of genetic manipulation, he also acknowledges that in his patent he claimed the ability to be able to screen embryos for eye color, hair color, social intelligence, and similar things, and yet he says he will not use the technology to screen for those traits. You’ll notice what he said, “for now.” His exact words:

“At the moment, we will make sure the technology is used only for that purpose.”

O’Donnell then said,

“And at the moment, you’ll have to take his word for it because there are no real rules in this country limiting what this kind of technology can be used to screen for, leaving those decisions up to scientists like Lee Silver and Mark Hughes.”

She then asked Dr. Hughes, “So we should trust you set the boundaries?” He said,

“If I’m setting a boundary saying, ‘I’m not willing to do that,’ that’s no different from any other field of medicine. So sure.”

As I said, we’re now looking at the brave new world of the medical technology revolution in the face; a biomedical revolution that is being done in United States without any effective guidelines or boundaries whatsoever. In the United States there is not even a law against the use of clonal technologies when it comes to human beings. Right now when it comes to the medical establishment and these new technologies, everything’s acceptable, everything is allowable, and everything is legal. The United States is now referred to around the world as the wild wild West of human reproductive technologies and this report is one indication of why that is so.

Christians looking to this kind of report should certainly sympathize with parents who face the very real prospect of having a child with the deadly genetic disease, but there’s one thing in this report that I said early on was absolutely wrong, fundamentally dishonest. Very early in her report O’Donnell pointed to the PGD technology and then described it as,

“An embryo screening procedure that can identify deadly gene mutations – and alter a child’s genetic destiny.”

No, that’s not at all true. This kind of technology will not alter a child’s genetic destiny, it is instead being used to decide which children will be born and which human embryos will be discarded and destroyed. It’s fundamentally misleading and dishonest to say that these technologies will change a child’s genetic future or genetic destiny; it will do no such thing. It simply is used to determine which embryos will be implanted in the womb and which will be discarded, eventually later to be destroyed.

What we’re looking at here is another consumer society approach to having children. And while we fully sympathize with parents who are looking for the means of treating these kinds of genetic diseases, we need to understand the assault on human dignity that is represented by a technology that intentionally creates human embryos only to sort amongst them for the ones to be accepted and then to destroy those that are not acceptable. And as O’Donnell points out in her report, even though this technology at present – we are being assured – is being used by these doctors in these laboratories only to sort out embryos on the basis of presumed genetic disease, the reality is there is no law at all that would prevent any lab or any scientist from using this very same patented technology to use any other traits such as eye color, hair color, suspected IQ, or anything else, in terms of deciding which embryos to keep and which embryos to destroy. And make no mistake about their destruction, even though the 60 Minutes report is not very clear about this. O’Donnell says that when these harmful mutations are found in the embryo they are, “often discarded.” Well that’s an understatement that’s fundamentally misleading. They’re not just often discarded; the very purpose of the technology is to prevent those embryos from being implanted in the womb. They are of course discarded; if they are not immediately destroyed then they are kept in a deep freeze until the destruction takes place according to the protocols of the individual laboratory.

Finally keep in mind that Lee Silver said that having sex the normal way is just too dangerous. What we’re looking at here is not just a redefinition of human reproduction and procreation; we’re looking at a redefinition of humanity itself. And that’s something Christians understand, when you redefine the human reproductive process so that children become consumer products and when something like normal human reproduction is described as too dangerous, then you’re entering into a fundamentally dangerous terrain – one for which the only rescue would be the Christian worldview. Furthermore when you look at this news story, be reminded of the fact that Dr. Hughes referred to having a child as ‘throwing the dice’ – genetically speaking. Well that’s one of the most profoundly secular statements imaginable. That’s light-years separated from a statement such as found in the Psalms by David when he made very clear that he was knitted together in his mother’s womb, making the profound biblical point that every single human being is created by God and is lovingly created as that individual human being for God’s glory and God’s good pleasure.

This 60 Minutes report is one of the scariest things to come around in a long time; it’s a shot across the bow so to speak in terms of this brave new world of medical technology. It’s also a test; will the American people just take this as business as usual? Will we just allow the commodification of human beings to progress to the point that babies will be ordered just like other consumer products? There are already plenty of signs that we’ve taken a quantum leap in that direction.

Last Thursday’s edition of the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel included an article by Dahleen Glanton of the Chicago Tribune in which she referred to the lesbian couple now suing a sperm bank over the fact that they received the wrong sperm. You’ll recall as I discussed this on The Briefing a few days ago, this couple had ordered the sperm out of a catalog, they had sought to define exactly what they were looking for in terms of the traits of the donor father, they chose the one, and yet the sperm they got was clearly not from that donor and they found that out because the baby was of a mixed race. And now as you might expect, they’re suing the sperm bank and that led Dahleen Glanton of the Chicago Tribune to write,

“This just makes sense. [She says] This will be a major purchase with a couple, one that would affect them for the rest of their lives and they didn’t take it lightly.”

So here you have a lesbian couple unable to reproduce on their own, using a catalog from this kind of bank in order to order a specific set of cells from a specific donor and it’s described just like any other major purchase.  She wrote then,

“I imagine they felt a little like I did when I bought my first home; a weird mixture of excitement and fear with a splash of intimidation by the 30 years of payments that lay ahead.”

So in other words, buying sperm from a sperm bank is a major decision, a major product choice just like buying a house. Chillingly Glanton then writes,

“Who hasn’t gone shopping only to get home, open the bag and find out that you didn’t get what you’d paid for? Under normal circumstances, you’d just return it to the store. But we’re talking about a child here. All sales are final.”

Well the issue sale here is exactly the point. The buying and selling of these reproductive cells is nothing more than creating a marketplace for human beings by creating a marketplace for human reproductive cells. And you now have these cells being turned into commodities being sold. In some countries there are credible reports of organs, that is donor organs being sold, and from there it is a short jump back to that 60 Minutes story about embryos being created for a fee in order to produce designer babies. Put that together with the fact that the 60 Minutes report included Dr. Silver saying that having children the normal way is just too dangerous and then realize that in this case there’s no way for a same-sex couple to have a baby in the normal way whatsoever.

At this point Christians understand the very basic principles of the Christian worldview; that the further we get from the order God has given us in creation, the greater moral risk we inevitable take upon ourselves. When we reach the point of moral risk in which we are abandoning marriage as the union of a man and a woman, as the singular setting for procreation and reproduction, we see that what follows almost immediately is a catalog of reproductive cells, sorted by donor and donor characteristics. Furthermore we have the expectation of having a baby produced as a consumer product. As in this case a columnist said, ‘if the product isn’t what you want, then you take it back to the store; only when it’s a child you can’t do that, so the natural responses is you sue.’

3) 50th Anniversary of Reagan speech example that a speech can change history

Finally today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest speeches in American history. It was 50 years ago today, it was on October 27, 1964 that then private citizen Ronald Reagan delivered a speech entitled “A Time For Choosing.” It was an attempt to resuscitate the flagging presidential campaign of then Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, that didn’t work but what did work was the speech – it catapulted Ronald Reagan to the front rank of political candidates in the future and of course there’s a direct line from this speech 50 years ago today and the election of Ronald Reagan as President in the 1980 presidential campaign. What made this speech so important was not just it soaring oratory, it was its content. It was deeply rooted in specific political ideological philosophical commitments, in other words it was a conventional speech deeply rooted in a very coherent worldview. Speaking to the American people 50 years ago today Ronald Reagan said,

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

Ronald Reagan believed that when he said it and that was the conviction that led him into the Oval Office. 50 years later it’s important for all of us to remember that a speech can still matter, a speech can change history, and 50 years ago today one did.

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’m speaking to you from Nashville, TN where later today I’m going to be speaking at a very important national conference held by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. The conference is on the gospel, homosexuality, and the future of marriage. My plenary address will be coming in the 1:00pm session this afternoon, that’s 1:00pm central time, 2:00pm Eastern Daylight time. All of the sessions will be live streamed courtesy of the ERLC, and you can watch by going to live.erlc.com. This conference promises to be both important and timely. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 10-27-2014

Podcast Transcript

1)Washington high school shooting reminder of tragic unpredictability of evil

Tangled Portrait of a Student Emerges in Washington Shooting, New York Times (Kirk Johnson and Shaila Dewan)

2) Biomedical revolution of ‘embryo screening’ frightening commodification of reproduction 

Breeding Out Disease, CBS 60 Minutes (Norah O’Donnell)

In defense of couple suing sperm bank, Chicago Tribune (Dahleen Glanton)

3) 50th Anniversary of Reagan speech example that a speech can change history

A Time for Choosing, University of Texas (Ronald Reagan)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 10-24-14

The Briefing

 

October 24, 2014

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

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

1) As Ebola persists in America, important to remember and pray for the many afflicted in Africa

At 10 o’clock yesterday morning Dr. Craig Spencer, a medical doctor who been treating Ebola patients in West Africa, reported in New York City that he feared had developed the symptoms of the Ebola disease. By later that morning he was at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, a hospital designated by New York authorities for Ebola patients, or potential or suspected patients. By 9 o’clock last night the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, was facing his city in a public address seeking to calm fears and also to describe, in some detail, how the city of New York was responding to this new crisis.

Dr. Spencer becomes the fourth patient in the United States to develop Ebola and the very first in New York City, but Dr. Spencer’s case also raises several very troubling developments. In the first place, even though he knew he’d been exposed to the disease and had been treating patients with Ebola in West Africa, Dr. Spencer was reported to have gone to a bowling alley in New York City, to have ridden a cab, and also to have ridden on the city subways. That has immediately led to a grave concern of a further risk of the spread of the deadly disease.

Dr. Spencer is certainly to be credited with medical and personal courage for his willingness to go to West Africa to treat Ebola victims, but the fact that he was traveling around New York City, even when he knew he had potentially been exposed to the disease, raises a host of very difficult questions. It also is tied to the fact that another medical doctor – well-known in America – had also violated the terms of a voluntary quarantine, which is raising the question of just how effective any voluntary quarantine can be. And keep in mind that Dr. Spencer is a medical doctor, well aware of the risk of the Ebola virus and exactly how it is transmitted.

The other medical doctor who violated the quarantine was NBC medical editor Nancy Snyderman, also a medical doctor. As David Bauder, the Associated Press reported earlier this week,

“The quarantine against possible Ebola exposure ends this week for Dr. Nancy Snyderman, but the troubles clearly aren’t over for NBC News’ chief medical editor.

An admitted lapse [he writes] in the quarantine, combined with a curiously imprecise explanation, unleashed a furious response.”

Bauder when on to write,

“NBC must now decide whether Snyderman’s credibility is too damaged for her to continue [to report] on Ebola or other medical issues and, if so, for how long.”

Snyderman has spent 17 years as medical correspondent for NBC News first and then at NBC since 2006. She’s been covering Ebola outbreak in west Africa. She also worked with the cameraman who has caught the virus and is being treated for it currently in the state of Nebraska. New Jersey health authorities ruled that her quarantine should be mandatory – that came after the voluntary quarantine was violated – when Snyderman and her crew were spotted getting take-out food from a New Jersey restaurant.

In light of the fact that she violated this voluntary quarantine  – which she should well understand – some medical ethicists and journalistic ethicists are wondering whether she should be fired and also whether her medical license should be revoked. Kelly McBride, an expert on journalism ethics quoted in the Associated Press report said that her arrogance and dismissiveness crates a huge public relations a credibility problem for NBC. She went on to say,

“People are so freaked out about Ebola that the problem NBC has now is that whenever they put her on the air, some news consumers are going to see the woman who put others at risk, rather than the reporter and professional with great experience.”

On the other hand, Susan Dentzer, also a health journalist – she works for National Public Radio and the PBS news hour program – said the people to keep in mind that Snyderman and 13 put themselves at risk covering Ebola virus in Africa. She went on to say,

“She and her team clearly should have observed the terms of their quarantine, and she has said clearly that they made a mistake…But let’s put it in a broader perspective.”

That broader perspective is exactly the difficulty. It’s hard to know exactly what the perspective should be. Americans are being told that they shouldn’t fear – indeed, they shouldn’t enter into a panic over the Ebola crisis. At the same time, the deeply troubling aspect of these two stories is that the quarantines in this case were violated not only by American citizens, but by medical doctors who knew the risk and took the risk, even in light of the fact of their exposure or potential exposure to the disease.

We can certainly hope the Nancy Snyderman and her team are free the virus. But when it comes Dr. Craig Spencer we now know that he has the Ebola disease. Dr. Spencer’s diagnosis in the deep concern it has caused in New York City and beyond came a day after federal health officials said that there were now to be new restrictions on travelers from West African countries. They were to enter into a 21 day watch period, and were also being limited to five United States airports for their entry into the country.

But Americans are deeply troubled and are deeply troubled about the potential for the disease and there also very deeply troubled by the fact that are very advanced medical system seems to be breaking down at some of its most crucial points; at institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and other federal agencies, and international organizations such as the World Health Organization. They have been very generally faulted for inadequate response, and in the case of the Centers for Disease Control, of a not only disorderly response, but one that actually violated some of its own procedures and policies.

When it comes to these two medical doctors, we now see that the voluntary quarantine doesn’t turn out to be much of a quarantine at all; even when the persons being quarantined are medical professionals indeed, medical doctors who know and understand the risk. Some of the same people who are telling Americans not to panic are now violating the very quarantines that are supposed to be one of the reasons for the absence of that panic. There of course is still no reason for a panic, but there is reason for deep concern. And from a Christian worldview perspective, there is also the deep an urgent understanding that even the most advanced medical society in the world is still dependent upon human beings who are, after all, the medical practitioners. As it turns out our advanced medical science and technology is only as advanced as the human beings who were behind it and the practitioners who put it into action. The outbreak of the Ebola virus shows medical professionals at their very best not only competent, but also unspeakably courageous. But the incidents with these two medical doctors also demonstrates the fact that courage isn’t always translated into right decision-making, especially when it comes to something termed like a voluntary quarantine .

The outbreak of the Ebola virus in the United States still with only a handful of patients –and for that we should be very thankful – has also required a rethinking of some principles of medical ethics. As Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times reports some medical ethicists, including Dr. Joseph J. Fins are beginning to wonder, and wonder out loud, if the outbreak of the Ebola virus will not require some change in the ethics of general medical practice, especially when it comes to CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

As Altman reports, there is now the realization that any medical professional offering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or for that matter, even the chest compressions common to CPR might actually serve to spread the disease. And furthermore at a time when it is extremely unlikely that CPR will be in any way effective or efficacious. This has led Dr. Fins to suggest that this will require some change in the way medical ethics is applied to Ebola patients. And his concern was echoed by Lawrence McCullough, a clinical ethicist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas who said the Dr. Fins’s argument was “very well-reasoned.”

He went on to say that his argument,

“reminds us that there are justified limits on the risk to health and life that health care professionals are expected to take in the care of patients…Self-sacrifice by health care professionals [he said] that results in no offsetting clinical benefits for the patient…is not required by the professional virtue of self-sacrifice.”

Others, such as ethicist Arthur Caplan often cited in journalistic reports, are not so convinced arguing that even Ebola patients or suspected Ebola patients deserve the full range of care. This is going to be very lively debate and there are deep worldview considerations at stake here, but the very fact that this debate is now taking place in the realm of medical ethics tells us just how serious the issue of Ebola is, and how seriously it is now being taken by a wide range of medical professionals as well as government officials.

But while Americans are understandably concerned about the latest news, the reality is that the vast impact of Ebola is taking place not in Manhattan, certainly not in the United States, but in those nations of West Africa, where the disease is still ravaging people not by the handful, but by the thousands, killing multiple thousands since the outbreak began just several months ago. Love of neighbor requires that we be very mindful and prayerful, deeply, urgently concerned for the people of West Africa who are facing this outbreak without the advanced medical technologies available here in the United States.

I was deeply touched by an article written by Michel du Cille, a photographer for the Washington Post, who wrote about seeing the helpless and hopeless faces of so many children now orphaned because their parents have died of Ebola. He then wrote these very moving words;

“In one of the most emotional encounters I faced in Liberia, I photographed a family that accompanied a sick woman who seemed near death as they sought treatment. She was bleeding from the mouth and her breathing was shallow; she was not ambulatory. As the husband, a sister, a brother and a friend descended from the van, each wore large plastic bags around their hands, feet and bodies, trying to protect themselves from infection with makeshift coverings. They knew it was the only way to get their very ill relative to the Doctors Without Borders Ebola treatment unit…..At one point, [he writes] I approached the woman’s sister, who had secluded herself against a wall away from the others and her sister fading away in the van. Standing at a safe distance, I asked her how long her sibling had been sick; she said about a week… As we tried to converse, neither fully understanding the other’s dialect, our eyes did the talking. To me, her eyes said, “This is the end.” I looked at her and said, “You know she is very, very sick.” She said, “Yes, I know.” As I tried to continue our fruitless conversation, my voice broke and suddenly tears came involuntarily.”

Yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal ran a story by Patrick McGroarty in which he reports of this outbreak of orphans now in the nation of Liberia. He writes,

“Tragically, orphanages are again a growth industry in Liberia.

In the aftermath of civil war in the country between 1989 and 2003, which was broken only by a two-year lull, the government and international organizations worked to resettle many children orphaned by the violence.

With their success…the number of orphanages in the country fell from nearly 120 after the war to just over 80 today.”

After the last war orphans left one facility in 2011, it was transformed into a day care center and a home for a woman with 11 children. Now that woman and the remaining orphanages are preparing to handle the survivors of Ebola’s onslaught. The outbreak of the Ebola virus in the United States is a very significant, indeed a historic challenge to America’s public health system and to America’s medical ethics. But the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is a dire human emergency that should call out, by love of neighbor, our deepest concern and there we should focus on the fact that Ebola, long-term, may actually reshape nations. May create thousands of orphans and may represent – indeed almost now surely will represent – one of the great humanitarian challenges of our lifetimes.

2) Attacks in Canada expose the myth of inevitable human progress

And this challenge comes as other challenges continue. Many Americans, including baseball fans in Pittsburgh have been singing of Canada in solidarity with our Canadian neighbors to the north. And as the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote yesterday, what we’re now seeing is the reality that no Western city is safe.

There is also the realization that Canada, along with every other advanced Western nation is facing the realization that Islamic terrorism is not just something that takes place a long way away, or many years in the past, but something that is now looming as an even larger crisis and challenge than it heretofore been understood. As a matter fact, even as Canada’s reeling from two different terror attacks – both of them deadly – and even as there’s the realization for instance, that the soldier killed in the nation’s War Memorial on Wednesday was a man who was a single father leaving behind a five-year-old son, as the editors a Wall Street Journal report, on Tuesday – that’s the day before, indeed, just hours before the deadly shooting in Ottawa – the Canadian government had raised its internal threat level due to what was described as ‘an increase in general chatter from radical Islamist organizations.’

On October 8, just earlier this month, a report in Canada’s National Post said that Canadian security officials were investigating 63 national security cases linked to terrorism involving at least 90 suspects.

And as the editors wrote,

“This follows this month’s arrest of five young Muslim men in London on charges they were plotting “to shoot, to kill, police officers or soldiers on the streets of London.””

They then wrote,

“All of which is a reminder that what was once called the Global War on Terror remains very much global. The war now being half-heartedly waged against ISIS and other jihadist groups is not some faraway struggle, but part of a war also being waged on Western streets.”

The editors concluded,

“Meanwhile, maybe the Secret Service can draw some lessons about what the attacks in Ottawa suggest about the vulnerability of U.S. government buildings, starting with the White House.”

The last sentence is very chilling;

“The terror in Canada is a reminder of the threat the free world still faces, whichever way the tide of war is supposed to be going, and the shared responsibility of facing it down.”

But as other news reports make very clear, facing this challenge down isn’t something that just points to other nations. It points to our nations and to those within our own nations also seeking to join the international jihad.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article by Mark Santora, in which he wrote,

“In recent months, more than 100 Canadians have sought out conflicts in foreign lands from Somalia to Syria,”

That according to the Canadian government report. He then wrote,

“The threat was brought home for Canadians first on Monday, when a man who was inspired by Islamic extremists based overseas used his car to run down and kill a soldier in Quebec.”

Then came the deadly shooting Wednesday in Ottawa. The New York Times report then continued,

“The threat of a “lone wolf” attack is a top concern for Western security agencies, including Canada’s.”

Steven Blaney, who is Canada’s Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, back in October issued reported in which he said terrorism remains the leading threat to Canada’s national security. The report also said,

“As of early 2014, the government was aware of more than 130 individuals with Canadian connections who were abroad and who were suspected of terrorism-related activities.”

But the report also made clear that the real danger here in the United States and in Canada from these lone wolf attackers is not out in the global arena, but right here when they come home.

When you add together the challenges of Ebola and the outbreak of global terrorism now increased in the year 2014, we come to realize that the myth of inevitable human progress is just that: it is a myth. The current crises point to the profound fact that evil is still very present among us in the form of a deadly virus and the virus of deadly terrorism.

For Christians these two challenges call out not only the keenest biblical and worldview thinking, but also the deep reservoir and reflex the biblical theology that reminds us at the end of the story, to pray very strategically. To pray very sincerely, even so Lord come quickly.

3) ‘Ratings creep’ in movies reveal a progressing desensitization to sin

Finally, the patterns of seduction and temptation in the modern world came very clearly into view in an article that ran on October 20 in the Washington Post. The title, “The violent ‘Taken’ movies are rated PG-13. Do ratings make sense anymore?” Reporter Cecilia Kang writes about the phenomenon of “ratings creep” – something is been taking place in terms of Hollywood movies for the better part of the last three decades.

But she also writes something that from a Christian perspective should be even more deeply troubling. She cites the fact that the rating system was put in place by the demand of parents largely; parents who wanted some kind of warning system some kind of precautionary policy to keep children, young children and teenagers from seeing movies that are extremely violent, profane, and sexualized. But Kang’s article points to a recent report indicating that parents themselves might well be part of the problem, a big part of the problem now. Because even as it was parents who were demanding the rating system, an increasing number of parents now seem to want movies – even more sexualized, profane, and violent movies – to be accessible to their children, even rather young children.

The vast increase in terms of Hollywood products has been towards the PG-13 category, that now is the vast representation of the majority of Hollywood films. And the PG-13 label was put in place in order to warn parents about movies that were just shy of the R rating. As it turns out now in the economy of Hollywood, an R rating is largely prohibitive in terms of the entry of a lot of young adolescents and children into the movie theater.

But as it turns out now many if not most of the movies in 2014 rated PG-13 would 20 years ago clearly have been rated R. There’s been a creep in terms of the morality, a creep down from the R movies – and R movies down from the X movies – now from the R movies to the PG-13 category. But as Kang reports recent research indicates that parents largely are becoming themselves desensitized to the very moral concerns that led a previous generation of parents to demand the rating system in the first place.

She cited a recent study entitled parental desensitization to violence and sex in movies. It was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“In the study [according to Kang], 1,000 parents were randomly shown several short clips with violence and explicit sexual content from top-grossing movies such as “8 Mile,” “Die Hard,” and “Taken 2.” Early in their viewing, parents said the movies were only appropriate for older audiences and on average the films were appropriate for viewers 17 years old. But the more clips the parents watched, the more they began to assign lower ages and ended up saying most of the material was appropriate for PG-13 audiences.”

The lead researcher for the project said that this result may point to the fact that parents themselves are becoming desensitized to the mature content after repeated exposure.

“And this is significant [Kang writes], because it’s often parents who watch movies and assign MPAA ratings in the first place.”

The next paragraph is also very telling. She writes,

“The MPAA {that by the way, is the Hollywood agency. It’s an insider agency in Hollywood assigned the task of rating films] declined to comment for the story but has pointed to some academics and studies that show parents have indeed become more tolerant of mature content over time, a reflection [she writes] of evolving cultural attitudes.”

She also points out the PG-13 rating was first created in 1984 after parents complained about one specific movie. It might seem almost anachronistic now to point out the fact that movie was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That movie if rated today almost surely wouldn’t even rate the PG-13. It would be PG if anything.

What we’re looking at here is a moral lesson the Christian should well understand. The word here is used in the article. It’s used repeatedly in the research, and that word is ‘desensitization.’As it turns out we can grow accustomed to send we can go very accustomed to sin even in the form of violence, profanity and sexuality. The more we see the less sinful it appears. And even parents become part of the problem when they themselves are desensitized.

The old Puritans used to speak openly about what they called the ‘exceeding sinfulness of sin.’ The problem is, of course, that sin becomes so less sinful once we see so much of it, and once we see it in the form of entertainment. And that’s exactly what Hollywood is counting on Hollywood’s also counting on the fact that as the PG-13 category has become the most lucrative in terms of its own productions in business, more parents of become increasingly desensitized. That’s a warning to all of us; to parents when it comes to children and Hollywood, to parents when it comes to their own consumption of Hollywood products, and to all of us when we consider not only Hollywood and not only entertainment, but sin in every conceivable form.

The more we see it, the more we expose ourselves to it, the more desensitized we become to the sinfulness of sin. Just consider the headlines on so many issues that are driving contemporary conversations. Are we not seen the very same pattern writ large across our entire culture and sadly across so many of our churches? We’re becoming increasingly desensitized to sin. And that’s not just a Hollywood problem. That most of all is a theological problem.

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