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

Transcript: The Briefing 11-20-14

The Briefing

 

November 20, 2014

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

It’s Thursday, November 20, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Jerusalem synagogue attack reveals seriousness of modern anti-Judaism

The scene of carnage in Jerusalem is absolutely horrifying. As Josef Federman of the Associated Press reports, Israel now vows harsh retaliation for a Palestinian attack that took place on Tuesday killing five people, that left blood-smeared prayer books and shawls on the floor of the synagogue in Jerusalem.

As Federman reports, the attack took place during morning prayers in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof. It was carried out by two Palestinian cousins wielding meat cleavers, knives, and a handgun. The two Palestinian terrorist cousins entered the synagogue and began stabbing people, killing indiscriminately. It was the deadliest assault upon Jews in the holy city of Jerusalem since 2008. According to the Associated Press, four of the dead were rabbis; one was a police officer who died of his wounds hours after the attack.

Of the rabbis, three were born in the United States and the fourth is born in England. All held dual Israeli citizenship. Five others were also wounded in the attack. One of the others wounded was a father who tried to shield his own 12-year-old son. The 12-year-old son eventually was able to escape and call for help.

Yesterday’s edition of the New York Times reports,

“The Orthodox Jewish men were facing east, to honor the Old City site where the ancient temples once stood, when two Palestinians armed with a gun, knives and axes burst into their synagogue … shouting “God is great!” in Arabic. Within moments [writes the Times], three rabbis and a fourth pious man lay dead, blood pooling on their prayer shawls and holy books.”

Today’s edition of the Washington Post runs a front-page article by William Booth and Ruth Eglash suggesting that both Israelis and Palestinians now fear that their decades-old conflict is moving beyond what was described as the traditional nationalist struggle into two peoples fighting for their homelands and spiraling into a raw and far-reaching religious confrontation between Jews and Muslims. As Booth and Eglash wrote,

“The threat — perhaps more accurately the dread — of an incipient but deadly “religious war” was expressed by Muslim clerics, Christian leaders and Jewish Israelis one day after a pair of Palestinian assailants, wielding meat cleavers and a gun, killed five Israelis, including a prominent American Israeli rabbi, in a Jerusalem synagogue.”

Oded Wiener, an Israeli Jew from the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, said quote,

“All of us are scared that there will be a religious war, that extremists from both sides will start fighting each other.”

But Christians observing these horrifying scenes in Jerusalem need to be reminded of what’s actually here at stake. And there is not a great deal of clarification in terms of much of the worldwide media, and for good reason. There’s a basic anti-Semitism – perhaps more accurately described as an anti-Judaism – within much of the Western mind, even now.

Furthermore there is a great animus towards Israel, an animus that is been building over the last generation and is now reaching something of a fever pitch. We need to look very closely what took place here: two cousins Palestinian terrorists entered into the synagogue in a Jewish area of Jerusalem (this is not contested territory) and entered with an abundant intent to kill. They entered with axes, meat cleavers, knives, and a gun and began killing as many as they could before they were stopped with deadly force by the Israeli police. By the time they had finished their carnage, four rabbis lay dead, and a fifth man also – a police officer – eventually would die.

And what we’re looking at here is not only an example of the kind of ‘lone wolf’ terrorism that is now a major concern of intelligence authorities, but we’re looking here also at the naked face of anti-Judaism. At least some major Palestinian authorities expressed regret about the attacks, but they did so only after there was sustained calls for such statements by United States Secretary of State John Kerry. And even then went Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did condemn the killings, he did so only after complaining about what he called Israeli provocations.

There has been an increased sense of tension on the Temple Mount in particular, and Muslims in the area of Jerusalem and beyond have been infuriated at Jewish incursions into that territory. But those incursions have not been deadly. There’s been no deadly force. This is a religious offense that was responded to with deadly killing. And that’s what we need to really look at here. Because even as Mahmoud Abbas did make a rather reluctant statement condemning the killings, the opposite came from Hamas, the terrorist organization with which the government of the Palestinian Authority is now allied.

As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, Hamas praised the attacks. The scenes of carnage in the Jerusalem synagogue brought to mind many of the most horrific acts of anti-Semitism in modern times. There are Jews in Israel still living who experience the Holocaust, and the images of Jewish prayer shawls drenched in blood on the floor the synagogue after a mass murder – this is simply too much for some to take. And yet here it is once again.

Yossi Klein Halevi, writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, suggests that what’s going on here is a concerted Palestinian effort to try to regain territory in Jerusalem. And once again to partition the city, a city that had been united under Jewish authority that is Israeli authority after the Jews regained the territory in the 1967 War. But as Halevi, a veteran observer, notes if these territories were to be partitioned once again, if the city were to be divided, there is virtually nothing that would keep the Arab portion of the city from being taken over by Hamas, an organization that has stated its steadfast and enduring hatred of Israel and its determination to put an end to the Israeli state.

President Barack Obama and the United States State Department unequivocally condemned the killings in Jerusalem. But both did so in a sense that adds to a certain kind of moral equivalence between the Palestinians and the Jews in this kind of situation. But it is immoral to insinuate in any sense a moral equivalence between the Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli government and the people of Israel there in that nation. According to the logic of Hamas, Israel is simply a Crusader state that has to be cast out of the Middle East entirely. And the Jews are a people who should be driven out of the entire land.

In response the Jews are steadfastly determined not to give up the Jewish state of Israel, and yet from its very beginning Israel has been in a dangerous and precarious situation. It has been surrounded from the very beginning with peoples who wish for it to be exterminated and extinguished. And for that reason it is immoral for anyone – especially those in the West with the legacy of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust – to fail to point to the difference between issues for which there can be a very legitimate complaint and mass murder for which there can never be any moral justification.

Getting right to the point in a very accurate statement, the editors of the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday,

“To understand why peace in Palestine is years if not decades away, consider the Palestinian celebrations after Tuesday’s murder in a Jerusalem synagogue of five Israelis, including three with joint U.S. citizenship. Two Palestinian cousins armed with meat cleavers and a gun attacked worshipers during morning prayers, and the response was jubilation in the streets.”

The editors went on to write,

“The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility, while Hamas praised the murders as a “response to continued Israeli crimes.” The main obstacle to peace [says the Wall Street Journal] isn’t Jewish settlements in the multireligious city of Jerusalem. The barrier is the culture of hatred against Jews that is nurtured by Palestinian leaders.”

So as Christians are properly horrified by the scenes of murder in Jerusalem, we should also be somewhat mystified by the moral equivalence put forth by so many Western leaders and so many in the Western press. This kind of moral equivalence is itself deadly – deadly to truth, deadly to morality, and as the bloodstained remnants of the synagogue in Jerusalem show, deadly to human life and human dignity as well.

2) Roman Catholic decline in Latin America result of theological, not cultural or political change

Meanwhile, in other news, big headlines concerning the Roman Catholic Church also point to issues that evangelical Christians should be watching as well. Michael Paulson, reporting for the New York Times, tells us that even as Roman Catholics are enjoying a great deal of publicity with Pope Francis in so much conversation in the international media, in Latin America it turns out that the Roman Catholic Church is in a rather marked retreat. As he writes, “after a century in which nearly all Latin Americans identified as Catholic, the church’s claim on the region is lessening..”

He’s referring to the fact that the Pew Research Center found that only 69% of Latin American adults say the Catholic. That’s down from 90% for much of the 20th century.

He writes,

“The decline appears to have accelerated recently: Eighty-four percent of those surveyed said they were raised Catholic, meaning there has been a 15-percentage-point drop-off in one generation.”

Paulson goes on to report,

“it has been evident for some time that evangelical, and particularly Pentecostal, churches are growing in Latin America, generally at the expense of Catholicism. But the Pew study … conducted by in-person interviews with 30,000 adults in 18 [Latin American] countries and Puerto Rico, provides significant evidence for the trend, and shows that it is both broad and rapid.”

Neha Sahgal, a senior researcher at Pew said,

“[Latin America] in most people’s minds is synonymous with Catholicism, but the strong association has eroded…And it’s a consistent trend across the region”

From an evangelical perspective, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the result of the study from Pew is this: the people who declared that they were shifting from Roman Catholicism to evangelical identification said they were doing so because they wanted a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s a very important issue. It points, for example, to the fact that this shift is theological – not just cultural or much less that, political – as many in the sociological world have tried to suggest. The second thing that is cited in the Pew study is that many people who shifted from Catholicism to evangelicalism also wanted a more direct experience in worship, and a more direct experience in terms of Christian fellowship. Both things that they found within evangelical Christianity.

But in perhaps the most shocking aspect of the report, it was discovered that many of the people now identifying with evangelical Christianity in Latin America did so because of moral conservatism. They did so because evangelicalism in Latin America is more associated with the traditional defense of marriage, with a standard of personal righteousness, with an understanding of biblical sexuality with an affirmation of the sanctity of life ethic, than is Roman Catholicism in those same nations today. That’s a rather shocking and surprising development.

Mark Woods, reporting for the British website ChristianToday, writes,

“Another factor may be the relative conservatism of Latin American Protestantism. On average, Catholics are less opposed to abortion, homosexuality, contraception, sex outside marriage, divorce and alchohol than Protestants.”

Recognizing this, the Pew report simply states,

“These differing views on social issues may help explain why many former Catholics who have become Protestants say they were looking for a church that ‘places greater importance on living a moral life’.”

Pew also tried to measure what is called a ‘Pope Francis effect’ noting that the first Latin American pope has been the cause of a great deal of interest in Latin America. But Pew also noted that that has not translated into a slowdown in terms of converts to Protestantism, nor on the other hand greater interest in joining the Roman Catholic Church.

3) Disregard of American Catholic youth for doctrine a warning against feel-good religion 

But even as the Pew study was gaining a good many headlines and even more important development was released within the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. As the Catholic News Agency reports,

“While a failure to understand doctrine is present in many segments of the Catholic population, young adults are exhibiting an alarmingly casual attitude towards accepting Church teaching.”

That, Mark Hadro reports, is the result, the findings, of a study was commissioned by the United States bishops. Responding to the study Archbishop of Miami, Florida, Thomas Wenski said,

“They [speaking of Catholic young people and young adults] feel completely Catholic even while disagreeing with the Church. We often heard ‘the Pope is entitled to his opinion.’”

From an evangelical perspective, the study just gets more interesting. For instance, the Catholic report on Catholic devotion found the most faithful and fervent Catholics were often very frustrated with the leadership of their own church and their own parish priest. Believing, in the report of the Catholic News Agency, that in their own churches, their own parishes, they found priests who were failing to teach and to inspire and they found an emphasis on activities rather than doctrine and teaching.

Speaking for the Catholic bishops, Archbishop Wenski of Miami was particularly pointed once again in speaking about younger Catholics. He said, “Young singles engage the Church with a remarkable amount of pride and ambivalence.” He went on to say that many within the church felt that the church had ‘goofy rules.’ Young adults surveyed “simply identified the rules as ‘to be nice to everyone, the Golden Rule.”

He said that if any of the church teachings conflict with their own young perceptions, young people simply “tune out the teachings.” In terms of doctrine the main doctrinal principles to which these younger Catholics seem to be committed, according to this report is in the first place the Golden rule (be nice to everyone), and in the second place ‘agree to disagree.’ There are no issues of truth that are considered to be central and mandatory, regardless of whether the church teaches them.

Then, in an especially revealing portion of the report, Archbishop Wenski said that for these young Catholics quote language like ‘hate the sin love the sinner’ means ‘hate the sinner’.” He spoke of the fact that these younger Catholics were especially allergic and averse to any language that implied moral judgment of any kind, on any topic. Now this study is really interesting. It’s really interesting as you consider the future of Roman Catholicism in the United States. But it’s also really interesting to evangelicals – urgently interesting – as we think about our own young people and our own challenges.

Writing at the website GetReligion that monitors religion coverage in the major media, veteran journalist Terry Mattingly gets exactly the importance of this report. He writes,

“The U.S. Catholic bishops just heard a major – terrifying is a better word – presentation on the doctrinal state of life in their pews, especially among the young. I realize that arguments about Pope Francis and politics are fun, and all that, but this new survey offered some really crucial stuff, folks, if you care about the future of the church (and the news that it makes).”

Later in his article, Terry Mattingly (again, a veteran journalist himself) writes,

“Call me idealistic, I would assume that journalists who have been following – to any degree whatsoever – survey work in the marketplace of American religion in recent years will have run into sociologist Christian Smith and the concept of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.””

Now, time and again on The Briefing and elsewhere we’ve looked at this very issue of moralistic therapeutic deism, or its shorthand ‘MTD.’ This is the very form of faith the Christian Smith and his fellow researchers found among young people when they surveyed the first as early adolescents, and then have been following them through what is now called ‘emerging adulthood’ into their late 20s. What they found is that most of these young people – Roman Catholics, evangelicals, and others – basically held to a form of the faith that was moralistic: they believe that God expects people to behave, therapeutic: they believe that there is a God who wants them to be well and authentic and psychologically healthy, and finally, deism: a deistic faith the holds even though there is a God, he is not a personal God who is personally invested in our everyday lives. Nor is he a God exercises any kind of direct or meticulous providence in the world he has created.

As moralistic therapeutic deism is summarized by Christian Smith and his fellow researchers, it comes down to these points: First a God exists who created in order the world and watches over human life on earth. Two, God wants people to be good nice and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. Doctrine three: the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. Doctrine four: God is not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. And doctrine five: Good people go to heaven when they die. That’s what Christian Smith says is moralistic therapeutic deism; that’s the summary of its doctrines what you might call the five points of moralistic therapeutic deism.

Terry Mattingly’s point is plain enough: how is it that major religion journalists, looking at this new report from the conference of Catholic Bishops, wouldn’t understand that previous research has already revealed the very same pattern? But the main point of the research by Christian Smith and others is that where these young people got these doctrines is the real problem. They got them in their local churches and they got them from their parents. This is the form of American civil religion that is simply serving as a substitute for authentic Christianity in many circles. Perhaps most pervasively as the study reveals in modern Roman Catholicism in the United States, but our main concern should not be the future of American Catholicism but rather the future of American evangelicalism – of American evangelical Christianity. The bottom line is this: if we cannot teach our children and young people –  if we do not teach them any better or more clearly; if we do not ground them in biblical truth and in the doctrines of the Christian faith, we should not be surprised that they end up with the same kind of ‘take it or leave it,’ ‘your opinion is as good as any,’ other nonjudgmental form of nondoctrinal Christianity. The bottom line is that ends up being no Christianity at all.

This major Catholic study just reminds American evangelicals of what we should have known all along. If you want to produce a generation of young people of teenagers and young adults who represent this kind of confused Christianity, just entertain them rather than teach them. Develop in them a feel good faith and tell them that’s Christianity. The bottom line is that moralistic therapeutic deism isn’t Christianity. It’s a gospel that cannot save. But for us the greatest scandal is not that moralistic therapeutic deism is found in Roman Catholic circles. No, the greatest scandal is it is found in far too many evangelical circles as well.

4) Youth vote declining for Democrats due to perceived permanence of moral revolution

Finally thinking further about young people in the future, Mark Bauerlein writes a very important article the New York Times entitled “Are Democrats losing the youth vote?” This article’s more interesting that at first you might think. Bauerlein teaches English at Emory University; he knows young people because he sees them in the classroom every day. And is point here is about politics, but his bigger point is far larger than politics. Bauerlein looked back to the November 4 midterm election, and noted the decreasing percentage of younger Americans who turned out to vote in the midterm election.

He also notes that the strategy employed by the Democratic Party was to try to scare young people into voting by telling them that Republicans are coming along with conservative policies that would infringe upon their social liberalism. As Bauerlein writes, the Democratic strategy didn’t work. And he wonders why. Could it be the case that these younger Americans are actually turning more socially conservative? Bauerlein looks to the data and says, ‘no, that is not what’s going on.’ He writes,

“The same surveys show that 18-to-29-year-olds are just as liberal as ever on social issues: They roundly support same-sex marriage and legalization of marijuana, and, according to Pew, “They are more likely than older generations to say they support an activist government.””

So then Bauerlein asks, “What gives?” Put simply, he said, the reality is that for these younger Americans the moral revolution in a more liberal direction on social issues has gone so far, it’s velocity is now so fast, that they can’t now be scared into believing that even electing a Republican would be able to turn back the clock on these social issues. The Democrats failed not because they disagreed with the young people on policy, but because the young people simply aren’t scared that there will be reverses in terms of the moral revolution.

In the most interesting section of his column, Bauerlein writes this,

“It’s not that they have become less socially liberal; it’s that social conservatism is a paper tiger. Liberalism has won so handily in the culture and courts that it no longer serves as a rallying cry.”

So while you’re pondering the contours of the moral revolution, and why you’re observing just how quickly this new moral reality is taking shape around us, consider this argument by Professor Bauerlein and recognize how truly important it is. He’s telling us that for the vast majority of America’s secular young people, social liberalism – in the movement of same-sex marriage, the legalization of marijuana, and so many other issues – is now seen as so safely protected in the culture, the direction so established and irreversible, that they can’t even be scared by political efforts to try to get them to vote out of fear that the direction might be reversed. As we think about the culture and its future that’s a very bracing assessment.

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 San Diego, California and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-20-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Jerusalem synagogue attack reveals seriousness of modern anti-Judaism

Israel vows harsh response to synagogue attack, Associated Press (Josef Federman)

Israel Shaken by 5 Deaths in Synagogue Assault, New York Times (Jodi Rudoren and Isabel Kershner)

Fear of deadly ‘religious war’ between Jews and Muslims raised after synagogue attack, Washington Post (William Booth and Ruth Eglash)

The War on the Israeli Home Front, Wall Street Journal (Yossi Klein Halevi)

Jihad in Jerusalem, Wall Street Journal (Editorial Board)

2) Roman Catholic decline in Latin America result of theological, not cultural or political change

Latin America Is Losing Its Catholic Identity, New York Times (Michael Paulson)

Religion in Latin America, Pew Research Center

Latin America: Why thousands of Catholics are defecting to evangelical churches, Christian Today (Mark Woods)

3) Disregard of American Catholic youth for doctrine a warning against feel-good religion 

Agree to disagree: Why young Catholics pose a unique challenge for the Church, Catholic News Agency (Matt Hadro)

U.S. Catholic bishops quietly offer update on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in the pews, GetReligion (Terry Mattingly)

4) Youth vote declining for Democrats due to perceived permanence of moral revolution

Are Democrats Losing the Youth Vote?, New York Times (Mark Bauerlein)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 11-19-14

The Briefing

 

November 19, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, November 19, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Pending Ferguson verdict from Grand Jury reminder of important check in American system

Erik Eckholm and Julie Bosman report the story this way,

“After hearing testimony for nearly three months in the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed African-American who was shot by Officer Darren Wilson on a Ferguson, Mo., street on Aug. 9, a St. Louis County grand jury is nearing a decision on whether to bring criminal charges.”

That is likely to be the biggest new story this week – unless it’s displaced by some unforeseen eventuality. But the one thing that is foreseen is the fact that the grand jury in Missouri is expected to hand down its decision. And this, though certainly leading to a massive controversy in America, is likely be focused on a part of the American legal system that is most opaque and confusing to the average American. As Eckholm and Bosman explain,

“Routinely, grand juries are virtual rubber stamps for prosecutors, approving the proposed indictments after hearing from a few witnesses and getting the bare outlines of the incriminating evidence.”

But that’s not what is taking place in Missouri. Given the volatility of the case; given the fact that involves the death of a young African-American man, and given the fact that the shooter in this case was a uniformed police officer on duty – this has raised the stakes considerably. For this reason the Missouri grand jury has been going through a very lengthy investigative process, subpoenaing witnesses, gathering information, and even talking (in an unusual development) to the man at the center the controversy; and that is the police officer.

Given the rules by which a grand jury operates, Officer Darren Wilson appeared before the grand jury without his own attorney. The volatility of the situation was made clear in yesterday’s edition of USA Today, when Yamiche Alcindor’s front-page story began with these words,

“ Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon activated the state’s National Guard and declared a state of emergency Monday, his first move to prepare for possible backlash to a grand jury decision in the case of a white police officer who shot and killed a black teenager.

The emergency order… [signed by the governor of Missouri] instructs St. Louis County Police Department, Missouri State Highway Patrol and St. Louis Metro Police to work together in a unified command,”

Backed up by the National Guard there in Missouri, in the event there should be a violent response to the grand jury’s decision.

Why so much attention to this decision? Because it is the grand jury, given our system of government, that will decide whether or not criminal charges are to be brought against the officer in the shooting. According to legal analysts familiar with the grand jury situation there in Missouri, the prosecutors there, though advising the grand jury, did not ask the grand jury to indict any specific count; rather; they have offered the grand jury four different criminal charges that could be brought against the police officer. Of course, the grand jury also has the option of bringing no criminal charges against the officer at all. And that’s exactly what Governor Nixon in Missouri is concerned about.

Because if the grand jury fails to bring a criminal indictment against the officer, there is the very real possibility of a violent backlash of protests there on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri and beyond, much like what took place in the immediate aftermath of the shooting itself, when the streets were taken over by violent protesters, and days of protests stretched into weeks. The expectation is that the grand jury will hand down its decision in coming days, almost assuredly this week. And that’s why there is so much discussion about this event and why there’s so much speculation on what will happen if the grand jury rules one way or the other. But what many Americans are simply unaware of is the actual way the grand jury functions, and the importance of a grand jury in our legal system. And furthermore, why from a Christian worldview perspective the very existence of a grand jury is a reminder of just how difficult it can be to achieve justice – even proximate justice – in terms of a human legal and judicial system.

The grand jury has a venerable history in the United States. And before that in Great Britain, where in English common law they were similar forms of juries formed in order to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against an individual. Many Americans simply make the jump from what they see on television in the arrest of someone to the subsequent trial. But in the American legal system there is a middle step, and that middle step is extremely important. Indeed, it’s legally necessary. That middle step, in terms of any serious charge, is the action taken and the deliberations that are considered by a grand jury.

The importance of this can be summarized with this simple statement: If it is simply the police bringing charges against an individual, then the trial would represent simply a contest between the police and prosecutors on one side and the defendant and his legal counsel on the other. But that’s not the way it works. When an American citizen faces a serious criminal charge, that charge doesn’t come in the name of the police, it doesn’t come in the name of the prosecutor; it comes in the name of the people. And the people function in this way in the form of a grand jury.

In the case in Missouri, the grand jury is made up of 12 individuals. In this case nine white persons and three black persons. Together, the 12 consider not just this case but other cases where police have arrested an individual for some suspicion of a crime, and prosecutors then determine they want to bring this person the court charged with a crime. But only the grand jury in terms of serious crimes can make that determination. And they can do so with wide authority, and they do so in the name of the people.

This is a very important protection for American citizens. The police and prosecutors simply can’t bring someone before a judge or jury for trial. It takes some intermediary determination, either coming in most cases by a grand jury or, if the defendant requests, by a preliminary hearing before a judge. In either event there is simply no one-to-one equation between an arrest and a subsequent trial. That’s what makes the grand jury so important. It is a jury made up of the people of the very community in which the grand jury is seated. It is called a grand jury because in an actual criminal court, the jury that is impaneled, the one seen on television by so many millions of Americans, is actually called a petit jury. That is a small jury, acting only in the case of this trial – not on behalf of the entire community in terms of the legal system for a duration of time.

To its credit, the Los Angeles Times yesterday ran an important story by Michael Muskal explaining the work of the grand jury to its own readers. As Muskal reported,

“A grand jury is the body that examines an incident and decides whether to bring charges. It can use its subpoena power to demand that documents be produced, can hear witnesses and weigh the evidence. It can return a “true bill,” or indictment, and the defendant is then arraigned on the charges and guilt or innocence is determined by petit jury. If the grand jury finds that no charges are merited, it can choose not to indict.”

Many Americans likewise do not know that grand jury’s operate in secret. As Muskal states,

“Proceedings by grand juries and deliberations of petit juries are secret, held behind closed doors to protect the jurors and give them the privacy to speak freely. But, [Muskal reminds us] it doesn’t mean the deliberations are forever unknown. Defense attorneys often poll jurors after a verdict…and will often interview them afterward.”

One additional issue is of importance here, and that has to do with the standard of evidence required of a grand jury. Remember that in a criminal trial, in almost every American jurisdiction, the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury has to find that the charge made against the defendant is proved beyond any reasonable doubt about the charge. When it comes to a grand jury, it’s simply ‘probable cause.’ The jury simply has to decide it is more likely that the individual is guilty than unlikely in order to bring the charge. But the reverse is also true, and given the standard of probable cause the grand jury can decide there simply isn’t enough evidence to find that there has been any crime committed or that this individual in any realistic sense has committed a crime.

As Americans brace themselves and wait for the decision to be handed down by this Missouri grand jury, Christians would do well to be informed about how a grand jury operates and why it matters. Because what we’re looking at here is yet another one of the checks and balances in the American political and legal system. The grand jury exists in order to protect Americans from being wantonly accused (and then charged and tried) for flimsy crimes on inadequate evidence. But the grand jury also has another equally important function: when there is probable cause when there is the cause in the minds of the jury to bring a charge against an American citizen, it is done so not in the name of the police, not in the name of the prosecutor, but in the name of the people. And that is one of the most important protections we have is a nation on both sides of our adversarial legal system.

2) Church of England’s approval of women bishops furthers divide in global Anglican Communion

Yesterday I discussed Monday’s day of decision in the Church of England when in Great Britain that church overturned the centuries of tradition, indeed millennia of tradition in terms of the larger church, and decided to vote to approve the service of women as bishops. I mentioned yesterday that this came after Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron had chided the church for failing to make this decision previously, explicitly telling the church to – in the Prime Minister’s words –  ‘get with the program.’ The issue of external pressure upon the church and its function within this controversy was made clear in an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times by Katrin Benhold. She dealt in particular with some statements made by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the aftermath of the decision.

He said,

“Today we can begin to embrace a new way of being the church and moving forward together”

But as Benhold makes clear, the Archbishop also acknowledged that moving forward together is going to be something of an insurmountable challenge. She writes,

“On Monday… he acknowledged that a split in the worldwide Anglican community was now a serious possibility.”

In the archbishop’s words,

“Without prayer and repentance, it is hard to see how we can avoid some serious fractures”

If anything, that is a significant understatement. Churches in the Anglican Communion outside Europe and North America have made very clear that they’re not going along with this new innovation. Furthermore, this adds to a long list of things with which these churches of announced they’re not going along with the liberal direction of the Church of England. This has to do also with the Episcopal Church in the United States, the American branch of the Anglican Communion. The African and South American churches in particular, joined by bishops and churches in Asia, have made very clear that they are not moving in the direction of liberalizing the question of biblical authority, the church’s historic biblical understanding of sexuality, the definition of marriage, or the ordination of women to the ministry. And now of course the elevation of women to the episcopate, to serve as bishops.

It’s hard to imagine how a major religious leader could speak of a vote that took place this week as something that will enable the church to move forward together while the same time acknowledging that it’s almost impossible to avoid fractures. That’s an interesting redefinition of the word ‘together.’ But in terms of keeping his church and the Anglican Communion together, Archbishop Welby probably faces an insurmountable challenge even before this particular issue. And that’s because the Church of England and the Anglican Communion have been split between liberal and conservative wings on a number of issues for a number of decades. And that split is only growing wider and more radical, especially on issues related to gender, marriage, and human sexuality.

But returning once again to the issue of the external pressure, there’s something really interesting in terms of the last two days of reporting in both the secular and the religious media. Almost uniformly there has been no mention whatsoever of any biblical argument on this issue. Rather, the external pressures been all that has been cited.

For instance in Katrin Benhold’s article the New York Times she writes,

“Archbishop Welby, the spiritual leader of the church and the global Anglican Communion, who supported the vote from the start, had warned fellow church leaders this year that the public would find the exclusion of women [as bishops] ‘almost incomprehensible.’”

That statement by the Archbishop, we might note, might certainly be true. It almost certainly is. But it should not be the determining issue (to say the very least) in terms of how the church deals with the doctrinal issue. On such a question, it should be what the Bible teaches it to be the issue of biblical authority that is paramount and decisive. Furthermore we just have to look at the Archbishop’s two words here, that is ‘almost incomprehensible,’ and realize that we should expect as a believing church that a radically secularizing culture will find every item, issue, and doctrine of Christian teaching to be (if truly grounded in the Scripture) utterly incomprehensible. A church determined to hold only those doctrines that a secular world find adequately comprehensible is a church that will hold to no central vital Christian teaching whatsoever.

Remember simply what the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians when he wrote that the gospel – the word of the cross –is foolishness to Greeks and a stumbling block to Jews. The gospel has always been foolishness to the intellectually sophisticated and in our own context, to the increasingly secular. Any attempt to make the gospel otherwise turns it into something other than the gospel.

3) Effects of marijuana legalization on minors reflects difficulty of stopping moral revolution

Thinking of cultural and moral change in America, we return to the issue of marijuana mostly because the Washington Post has run a major article declaring “It’s official: marijuana has gone mainstream.” The reporter is Christopher Ingraham and he writes,

“Voters in Alaska, Oregon and the District [of Columbia] approved marijuana legalization measures by comfortable margins on Tuesday. The votes signal that Americans are ready to expand upon the legalization experiments already ongoing in Colorado and Washington state, which opened up recreational marijuana markets this year.”

He went on to explain,

“The victories are significant because they come despite a midterm election holding huge structural advantages for Republicans.”

Indeed, one of the things that Ingraham points to is the fact that even though Democratic candidates fared very poorly, efforts to legalize marijuana, indeed recreational marijuana, did very well at the polls. From a Christian worldview perspective, the really interesting aspect of Ingraham’s article is his claim that marijuana simply going mainstream in American culture. He argues that perhaps the vote was taken earlier this month in Alaska is most indicative, it’s most revealing. Because Alaska, he says, is a red state – an overwhelmingly Republican state certainly in this election – his argument is that when Alaska follows Oregon and California and Washington state, and also the more libertarian state of Colorado something’s happening in terms of mainstream American culture. And that something, he says, is that marijuana itself is going mainstream.

But before we concede too much to his argument let’s consider the fact that both Colorado and Alaska, though often painted red, are actually purple states when it comes the fact that the basic worldview that is seemingly held by most of the citizens is more reflective of libertarianism rather than conservatism. Ingraham’s larger point however is that even Republicans, many Republicans are now swinging over to the pro-marijuana side, indicating that in state after state there might be the increasing liberalization of marijuana laws virtually coast-to-coast and in fairly short order. As we’ve discussed on The Briefing before the issue of marijuana is to some extent serving as a parallel to the issue of same-sex marriage in terms of the moral revolution that we are now experiencing. In both of these issues, what is called same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana, both of these it happened as moral changes in a remarkably short amount of time. The velocity of the moral change has been breathtaking, and noted by both sides of the issue – both by proponents of marijuana legalization and by those who are seeking to oppose it.

One last interesting note from Ingraham’s article, he argues that Democrats may find it to their advantage to try to put marijuana on the ballot in any close election, to serve as something of a swing momentum for Democratic candidates.

But a similarly, if not more, revealing article appeared recently in the New York Times; an article by Jessica Bennett entitled “Clean with notes of citrus.” A day, she writes, in the life of the nation’s first pot critic. It involves, she says, sampling the goods and distilling the essence of the high. The pot critic in this case is Jake Browne, he’s the pot critic for the Denver Post – hired officially by the paper in order to sample and write reviews of legal marijuana in the state of Colorado. If the article had not appeared in the pages of the New York Times you can be forgiven for believing that the article must be a hoax.

Bennett writes that Browne,

“is also the first pot critic for The Denver Post, Colorado’s oldest and largest daily newspaper. Which means that, every week, Mr. Browne takes a city bus from his home in Denver’s Highland neighborhood, crosses a street called Green Court and lands at one of the city’s downtown marijuana dispensaries to choose his product. Yes, he is paid to smoke it — and then write about the high.”

Mr. Browne said,

“The thing people say to me most often is, ‘Dude, you must have the best job ever,’…It’s either that, or, if they’re from out of state, ‘Can you send me pot?’ ”

Bennett then writes, surprisingly enough,

“The Post has had two pot critics on its roster since it created a spinoff site, The Cannabist, in December. (The newspaper is searching for a third, as well as a sex columnist to write about pot and intimacy.)”

Before going any further just remind yourself that this is the New York Times writing about the Denver Post. After the pot critic described how he does his work (in some detail we might add) he then concluded with this,

“I feel lucky to be this person in the middle of a historical moment, and I don’t think we’ll see anything really comparable to it…And, you know, I like pot, I think it’s a fun topic. Somebody has to cover it. So why can’t I be that guy?”

Well, I guess the obvious point of the article is, he is that guy.

But back in the reality-based world Kristen Wyatt of the Associated Press reported just this past Monday, just two days ago, that legal authorities in Denver are trying to come up with a way to protect the young people in that state from eating dangerous levels of marijuana in so-called ‘edibles.’

As she writes,

“Saying they’re still worried that edible pot sweets are too attractive to kids, Colorado health authorities plan to ask Monday for a new panel to decide which marijuana foods and drinks look too much like regular snacks.”

Buckle your seatbelts for the rest of the story.

Wyatt writes,

“The recommendation comes a month after the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment suggested banning the sale of most kinds of edible pot. That suggestion was quickly retracted after it went public.”

She then explains,

“Marijuana-infused foods and drinks have been a booming sector in Colorado’s new recreational marijuana market. But lawmakers feared the products are too easy to confuse with regular foods and drinks and ordered marijuana regulators to require a new look for marijuana edibles.”

That’s simply too much for the marijuana industry. Elyse Gordon owner of Better Baked, a Denver company identified as a maker of edible pot products, said,

“We’re governed to death, and people need to take responsibility for themselves.”

Conceivably meaning children as well. In recent weeks Colorado’s governor has been warning fellow governors not to get into the marijuana business certainly not hastily – he even referred to the action in his own state as reckless, only have to apologize to voters for an action they actually voted into effect. In Colorado there is grave concern about the effects of marijuana ingestion on children and teenagers, with scientific evidence building up that there is a uniquely damaging aspect to the effect of marijuana in the brains of children and adolescents. Proponents of legalizing marijuana predictably said that they would be able to keep marijuana out of the hands of those who were young. Even more predictably that promise has been shown to have been ineffective. And analysts on all sides of the equation acknowledge that in the state of Colorado, and likely in some other states as well, the first cigarette smoked by most teenagers isn’t made of tobacco but rather of marijuana.

The great worldview lesson in all this is quite simple and straightforward: once you start a moral revolution it takes on a momentum and set a course for its own. And when it does so, it’s very difficult to put the brakes on much less to reverse it. To put the matter is essentially it’s a lot easier to start a moral revolution than to end one.

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 San Diego, California and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-19-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Pending Ferguson verdict from Grand Jury reminder of important check in American system

For Ferguson Grand Jury, Details and Responsibilities Are Abundant, New York Times (Erik Eckholm and Julie Bosman)

Mo. governor declares ‘emergency’ before jury ruling, USA Today (Yamiche Alcindor)

What the Ferguson grand jury is secretly trying to decide, Los Angeles (Michael Muskal)

2) Church of England’s approval of women bishops furthers divide in global Anglican Communion

Church of England Approves Plan Allowing Female Bishops, New York Times (Katrin Bennhold)

3) Effects of marijuana legalization on minors reflects difficulty of stopping moral revolution

It’s official: Marijuana has gone mainstream, Washington Post (Christopher Ingraham)

The Life of a Pot Critic: Clean, With Citrus Notes, New York Times (Jessica Bennett)

Pot treats may face Colorado scrutiny, Associated Press (Kristen Wyatt)

Transcript: The Briefing 11-18-14

The Briefing

 

November 18, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, November 18, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Widespread support for military action against ISIS underlines it as stark image of evil

The third American and fifth Westerner was executed by the Islamic State over the weekend. In this case was a former Army Ranger by the name of Peter Kassig. According to media reports, Peter Kassig, age 26 when died just on Sunday, had been an Army Ranger who became captive. After having left the Army, he began a medical mission there to those in Syria on both sides of the Syrian conflict. He was taken captive in late 2013, and executed on Sunday. And also according to the world press, he had converted to Islam during his captivity, exchanging his name Peter for Abdul-Rahman Kassig. His chosen Islamic name meant ‘servant of the most merciful,’ but the Islamic State was certainly not merciful to Peter Kassig on Sunday, even though, according to those who been interpreting the video evidence of his execution it appears that Kassig did not cooperate with his captors in his final moments.

Several hours after the video was released, Pres. Obama made a statement in which he confirmed the execution. He also said the Peter Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group.”  He went on to say, “Today we offer our prayers and condolences to the parents and family of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, also known to us as Peter.” The President, who insists upon referring to the group as ISIS or ISIL – rather than by its preferred name, the Islamic State did use Peter Kassig’s Islamic name in a statement, underlining the fact that the Islamic State had murdered a fellow Muslim when they executed Peter Kassig.

The beheading of Peter Kassig just comes days after United States military and intelligence authorities indicated a very troubling development in that same area. It turns out that in Syria, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda (forces that have been at odds for the last two years) have now begun to cooperate, if not to consolidate their efforts. As American military intelligence agencies have indicated this is a very ominous turn, because the coalescence, even just the cooperation, of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda portends a very dangerous new development in the Middle East. At just about the same time the Pentagon warned Congress on Thursday that the long military campaign against the Islamic State, is in the words of the Associated Press, “just beginning.”

According to the AP report, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered a cautious assessment of progress in the three-month-old war against Islamic extremists who brutally rule large sections of both Iraq and Syria – estimated, by the way, now at at least one third of the territory of both of those nations. But when Secretary Hagel and General Dempsey went before Congress last week they weren’t just bringing report. They were also seeking $5.6 billion in increased authorize spending to expand the US mission in Iraq and to send at least 1,500 more American troops.

But before leaving this we need to note that this is a significant departure, a new development, in terms of Pres. Obama’s handling of the situation in the Middle East. It was Pres. Obama, after all, as Commander-in-Chief who ordered American military personnel out of Iraq after several years of military action there. But now Americans are back; at least in number of about 1500 and others are already on the ground training local troops. This is a very significant political reversal, but it is also a step that is gaining widespread support in both political parties and at both ends of the political spectrum. And that’s worthy of our consideration.

Veteran political observer Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times writes,

“Remember when pundits were worried that Americans had turned isolationist? As recently as August [that’s August 2014], polls showed big majorities opposed to military intervention in Iraq, Syria or anywhere else.”

But now, he says in a CBS News poll just weeks ago a massive 71% of Americans said they supported continued air assaults against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS).

“Even more notable [McManus writes], the number of people who supported sending U.S. troops to Iraq “to fight ISIS militants” …had increased to 47%, up from 39% in September. And a big majority [he says] said they believed U.S. ground troops were needed to defeat Islamic State in the field.”

One of the things McManus points out is that this new military effort is being supported by the Left, indeed the far Left; the only socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders the Senator from Vermont. Furthermore, it is also drawing very strong support from the right, including Senator John McCain and even Senator Rand Paul.

Now when you have a new political coalition that brings together senators like Bernie Sanders, John McCain, and Rand Paul, something is happening. And Doyle McManus says that something is the terrorism now so evident in the Islamic State – in particular the brutal killings of five Westerners and three Americans. One of the sober facets of the Christian worldview is the understanding that human evil is often distilled into a form that is like that now described as terrorism, and also very evident and all this horrifying reality in the Islamic State. What we’re looking at here is something that cannot be ended by cosmopolitan negotiation; something that can’t be ended by mere legislation; something that certainly isn’t going to be ended by conversation. It’s only going to be ended by force. And this is something that the American people and others around the world now know by intuition.

And the reason for that was actually articulated by President Obama in the aftermath of the brutal slaying of Peter Kassig. When President Obama said that Kassig was “taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group,” when he used that phrase ‘pure evil,’ he was pointing to the fact that there is no rational means of dealing with this in terms of anything short of deadly force. Oh, and there’s another very important aspect of this situation that is affirmed by the Christian worldview when it comes to this kind of human evil, the Bible makes very clear its source: inside the human heart. It also makes very clear the fact that though military action, judicial action, legal force, and other mechanisms to control and limit evil in terms of the fallen world, though they may have some limited successes – and even as we must try to use every mechanism at our disposal – the most effective human means can only restrain evil. Somewhat control evil. Perhaps limit the effect of evil and it spread.

But at the end of the day only divine judgment can bring this kind of evil to a final accounting, and to a final eradication. It’s for this very reason that even the most ardent and determined secularist, absolutely determined to use only secular categories in order to describe this reality, nonetheless has to use and inescapably, irreducibly theological vocabulary –  using that word ‘evil.’ A word in its essence actually makes no sense in a purely secular worldview.

2) Church of England formally approves women bishops despite counsel of Scripture

Shifting to Great Britain and the Church of England, John Bingham religious affairs editor of the Telegraph in London reports that yesterday the Church of England entered into what its Archbishop of Canterbury described as “a completely new phase of its existence.”

The reason for that was quite simple: it was yesterday that “the Church’s General Synod symbolically showed its approval for the change through a simple show of hands and a few signatures on a piece of paper.”

As Bingham reports, that opened the way for the first woman to be appointed to the episcopate, that is as a bishop, as early as the end of this year. And it means even that the next Archbishop of Canterbury or Archbishop of York (those of the first and second most important priestly positions in the church) could be female.

As Bingham reports, the legislation allowing women to serve as bishops was passed in July, but it received royal assent from the head of the church (that is Queen Elizabeth II) just last week. It became law just before 3 PM in Britain on Monday through a short item on the agenda of the General Synod which is meeting even now in London.

As Bingham reports,

“The brief but formally worded Canon was read out by the Synod’s chief legal adviser … followed by a vote, conducted by a show of hands. It was carried with an overwhelming majority, with [only about] 20 voting against.”

Now there’s a really important background of this development. The Church of England’s General Synod, just a matter of about two years ago, voted down this very measure. But there was huge cry and outrage in terms of the general culture responding to the Church of England’s General Synod, and the General Synod (we should note) that voted down the proposal for women to serve as bishops because an inordinate number of laypeople from the churches actually had a vote in terms of that assembly. But the secular outrage and reaction to back action by the General Synod was absolutely fierce. Even Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, representing the Tory Party, called upon the church to ‘get with the times,’ asking how long it would take for the church to come into the present age. There was an enormous threat against the Church of England offered by at least some in Parliament – in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords – to risk the church could even face disestablishment if it wouldn’t get along with the idea of full equality.

What we were looking at here was coercion from the secular state over against its established church. That’s another reason, by the way, as a Baptist I was certainly undermine the very danger of having an established church. It is dangerous to have an established church (that is a state church) and it is exceedingly dangerous to be a state church. But the Archbishop of Canterbury put himself on the line in order to bring his church into what the Prime Minister called the ‘modern age,’ by bringing about this authorization to allow women to serve as bishops.

Now in one sense this is just the logical extension of the church’s action two decades ago to allow women to serve as priests. It became rather untenable to suggest that women can service priests, but not as bishops. But in that earlier action evangelicals in the Church of England had warned that the church was turning its back not only on the Christian tradition, but also on the very clear words of Scripture. Now the Church of England two decades ago decided nonetheless it would defy the clear teachings of Scripture and get with the modern age is it defined then by ordaining women to serve as priests. Archbishop Welby’s comments after the vote are particularly instructive.

He said,

“I think it means above all that we have started a completely new phase of our existence as the church.

It has taken a very, very long time but the way is now open to select people to the episcopacy on the basis simply of our sense that they are called by God to be in that position without qualification as to their gender.”

Now that flies in the face of the fact that in the New Testament, where we have the Holy Spirit inspired definition of the ministry, it is not made without reference to gender. Far to the contrary.

But the Archbishop is surely not exaggerating when use the language describing the fact that the Church of England has now “started a completely new phase of our existence as the church.” Everything will change, as evangelicals warned two decades ago, and as evangelicals sought to argue just in the last several months. And even as the leadership of the Church of England just thinks it might have put this controversy behind it, another even larger controversy looms – that’s the larger controversy over homosexuality and same-sex marriage. And just as there was a secular outcry against the church’s position prohibiting women from serving as bishops, there is a similar outcry on the church’s reluctance (at least the reluctance on the part of many in the church) to endorse homosexuality and to allow the celebration and the ceremonial performance of same-sex marriages.

From a Christian worldview perspective the most ominous warning is this: a church that will look to Scripture and use the hermeneutical or the interpretive devices to get around the plain teaching of Scripture on gender will find it very difficult not to do the very same thing when it comes to the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. That is, to use the very same interpretive devices and mechanisms in order to get around the New Testament’s very clear statements on sexuality, and of course also on marriage.

There will be some who will point to the action yesterday in the General Synod of the Church of England and say that it was inevitable development that actually will change very little. But that’s simply wrong. Archbishop Welby has it right on this score: his church did enter yesterday into an entirely new phase of its existence.

3) Link between view of God and same sex marriage reveals impact of Scripture on worldview

Meanwhile, while we’re talking about the link between issues of gender and sexuality, we need to look at a very important piece of research recently released. It was published in the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion, and was conducted by Clemson University sociologist Andrew Whitehead. What Whitehead found according to Pacific Standard (a science magazine) is that people who refer to God as Father are much less likely than others to affirm same-sex marriage.

Tom Jacobs writing for Pacific Standard writes,

“Quick: What pronoun do you instinctively use when referring to God?

An esoteric question [he asks]? Not at all. In fact, you just revealed quite a bit about yourself—including your likely view of gay marriage.”

He goes on to report that,

“In a recently published paper, Clemson University sociologist Andrew Whitehead reports that people who view God as a “he” view gay unions, and gay marriage in particular, far less favorably than those who do not. What’s more [says Jacobs], this holds true even after taking into account their image of God and beliefs about the proper relationship between men and women.”

In Whitehead’s words,

“Those who view God as a ‘he’ are signaling an underlying gendered view of reality that directs them to oppose relationships that contradict traditional gendered roles…[Whitehead went on to say in terms of his research] Because gay unions cannot symbolize this gendered reality, they are deemed inappropriate.”

Now clearly, there are multiple fascinating aspects of this research. In the first place, what might have motivated Dr. Whitehead to conduct this research in the first place? How did the question come to his mind? How did he then conduct the survey? Well, as it turns out he went to data it was found in the 2007 Baylor religion survey, in which those questions were asked.

“After crunching the numbers [says Jacobs], Whitehead found that “viewing God as a ‘he’ is significantly and negatively associated with support for same-sex marriage, net of all the other effects of the model, including various images of God and other traditional gender-role beliefs.””

Cutting through the scientific jargon, this means that even when you take other questions related to gender and set them aside – even when you take other questions related to the image of God and set those also aside – if you look at nothing but the chosen pronoun used to refer to God, that, according to Whitehead, is a stunningly effective predictor of that same person’s belief about same-sex marriage.

Whitehead’s article in the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion also includes of these lines,

“[These people] may prove to be a group particularly resistant to liberalization because viewing God as masculine may exist as an integral part of their overall gendered worldview that extends beyond same-sex marriage issues. No longer viewing God as a “he” would not only mean a shift in attitudes toward same-sex unions but also in how their own marriages, society, or religious groups are ordered.”

That’s profoundly true and, furthermore, it affirms one of the major themes of our concern on The Briefing, and that is to point to the fact that worldview matters, and it always matters. In this case, you have a professor of sociology at Clemson University who points out the when you look at how persons refer to God – even just asking by the pronoun – and you link that to how effective it turns out to be as a predictor of you on same-sex marriage, Whitehead’s point is that something must explain this linkage. It can’t be an accident nor even merely a correlation. And that’s why, he goes on to explain, that it must be that there’s a fundamental difference in the worldview that makes this kind of linkage apparent. And not only apparent but predictable. And in that sense he’s absolutely right.

Furthermore, though he does not address this in the same language in his report, what certainly comes almost immediately to mind is something that can be put just this simply; those who are the most likely to use the Bible’s own revealed language for God including pronouns (including masculine references, most especially referring to God his father), those same people – shockingly enough – are also the ones who are most likely to affirm everything the Bible teaches about sexuality and about marriage. Needless to say, that would be a sufficient explanation for why using a masculine pronoun for God, and in particular referring to God his father would be a very accurate predictor of one’s position on the issue of same-sex marriage.

Concluding his article in the Pacific Standard, Tom Jacobs comes back to the issue and says that even as many people grew up with the understanding of God as Father,

“This research suggests carrying that understanding into adulthood has a surprisingly large impact on how we view this world, and how open we are to societal change.”

That’s another way of saying if that worldview is consistent from childhood into adulthood, that worldview is going to matter. Of course it will. Of course it always does. But Christians looking at this research and understanding that it actually makes sense to us – we might also want ask this question: why doesn’t someone reverse this research? Why doesn’t some researcher, perhaps even Dr. Whitehead himself, reverse the question and ask it this way: Is it true then that those who abandon the biblical language for God who abandon God’s own name for himself as Father, are they then in the very same pattern now far more likely to affirm the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage?

To put the matter as bluntly as possible, that would make an equal amount of sense. And of course it’s very easy to understand the logical leap from one position to the other. But it’s also interesting that evidently that question doesn’t have the same kind of interest among secular researchers as the one undertaken by Professor Whitehead. Instead they’re asking why won’t people go along with the normalization of same-sex marriage? Why is it that there are so many who won’t simply ‘get with the program?’

Well, as it turns out Andrew Whitehead’s research is extremely helpful in pointing out the biblical basis for that very reluctance; the reluctance to ‘get with the program’ of the secular moral revolution. Well it turns out that those for whom the Scripture is a binding authority find that it’s a binding authority in every dimension of life and thought. And that’s only consistent.

Furthermore, on the other side those who do not believe that the Scripture, in terms of its very clear teachings, is a binding authority in one area it becomes very easy if not inevitable to apply that same judgment to other issues and other texts of Scripture as well. That’s simply a matter of consistency. Which points to another very basic truth about our worldview; in spite of ourselves, in spite of our rational problems, in spite of our failings of logic, and despite our prejudices and our emotional responses, we actually tend over time to move into consistency. Over time our worldview begins to show a consistent pattern that reaches to all issues and every dimension of life. That too testifies to the fact that made in God’s image we are rational creatures to have a desire to move into a consistency. Those who seek to follow Christ faithfully will understand that every move towards consistency, in terms of Scripture, is a move toward faithfulness. And inconsistency when it comes to faithfulness to the biblical worldview is in itself unfaithfulness.

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 San Diego, California and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-18-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Widespread support for military action against ISIS underlines it as stark image of evil

Obama Calls Islamic State’s Killing of Peter Kassig ‘Pure Evil’, New York Times (Rukmini Callimachi)

Pentagon says US troops’ role in Iraq could expand, Associated Press (Donna Cossata and Lolita C. Baldor)

Americans rally ’round Obama’s war on Islamic State, but not Obama, Los Angeles Times (Doyle McManus)

2) Church of England formally approves women bishops despite counsel of Scripture

Welby hails new beginning for Church as women bishops becomes law, The Telegraph (John Bingham)

3) Link between view of God and same sex marriage reveals impact of Scripture on worldview

Viewing God as Masculine Impacts One’s View of God, Pacific Standard (Tom Jacobs)

Male and Female He Created Them: Gender Traditionalism, Masculine Images of God, and Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Unions, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Andrew Whitehead)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 11-17-14

The Briefing

 

November 17, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, November 17, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Obama’s promise to unilaterally move on immigration a danger to separation of powers

This is likely to be a big week in American politics because President Barack Obama has been sending every conceivable signal that he intends to act and act quickly, perhaps even this week, on the issue of immigration. And the President has made abundantly clear; he intends to act not in cooperation with Congress, but rather by executive order. As Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal reported last Friday, the President is expected to announce executive actions that will overhaul the United States immigration system – a move that, she noted, would bring the fractious policy debate to a boil and test the White House’s already tense relationship with the incoming Republican majority in Congress. Meckler summarizes the executive orders in these words,

“Mr. Obama’s moves are expected to offer work permits and safe harbor from deportation for several million illegal immigrants with deep ties to the U.S., people familiar with the matter say. They would also likely make more visas available for high-tech workers and redirect immigration enforcement from the interior of the U.S. to the border.”

Similarly, Julia Preston of the New York Times reported and I quote,

“Changes to the immigration enforcement system that President Obama is expected to announce as early as this week could offer legal documents to as many as five million immigrants in the country illegally, nearly double the number who received protection from deportation under amnesty legislation in 1986.”

She then goes on to report,

“Unlike that law, which gave permanent-resident green cards to 2.7 million immigrants, Mr. Obama’s executive actions will not provide any formal, lasting immigration status, much less a pathway to citizenship. The actions will, however, have a large and, White House officials hope, swift impact on the daily lives of many immigrant families, removing fears that relatives could be separated from one another by deportations.”

There are at least two huge issues with vast worldview implications at stake here. The first is the issue of immigration itself. This is one of the most controversial issues in terms of contemporary American political life and it’s one of those issues that has to be contextualized, it is geographically responded to in different terms because the issue arrives in terms of the American public disproportionately. Those who are living in border states, those who are working in certain industries, those who have certain kinds of concerns related to immigration, they are affected disproportionately. But by any measure, there is a huge problem that eventually will have to be addressed. There are between, by most estimates, 11 and 12 million undocumented aliens – or so-called illegal immigrants – here in the United States.

One of the issues that becomes abundantly clear is the same that became clear in the mid-1980s – the United States government clearly lacks the will to deport by force between 11 and 12 million people. That’s simply not even a rational action; it’s not going to happen. It would take an entire militia to make it happen and even those who are against the moves President Obama will make this week are not actually in favor of any practical operation that would remove these illegal immigrants from the United States and its territory.

The real question is what kind of national consensus exists to deal with those who are here illegally? By any question, they broke the law – even now are probably breaking the law, in terms of entering and remaining in the United States. But the United States government and our economic system have also been complicit in this particular pattern because there are several industries, indeed there are vast areas of the United States, where the labor brought by these undocumented workers is absolutely necessary. For a nation of immigrants, this is a particularly vexing political and moral quandary. What do we do with those who came to follow the American dream, even if in so doing they broke American law? How do we create a system that is truly fair when there are any number of millions of persons who would wish to enter the United States but have not broken our laws to do so? What about all of those who are in the system waiting for legal avenues of immigration? While virtually everyone agrees that our system of immigration and citizenship should be fair, there is no easy answer to what fair might look like given the current construct of our situation.

We are indeed a nation of immigrants, but at the same time any nation in order to retain its own integrity and its own operational stability has to control immigration. The United States has done a very poor job of that for the last 50 or 60 years. This is not a recent problem. But President Obama also is seeking to capitalize on some political momentum here, and there is no doubt that he also hopes that a good number of these millions of people who will be remaining in the United States will eventually become supporters of himself and his party.

In terms of immigration, honesty compels us to understand that immigration is not only a central part of the American story; it also has to be an important part of the American future. And we have to recognize that even as American birthrates have been falling rather precipitously, we will find ourselves falling behind as a nation if we do not have a growing workforce and a growing economy that’ll actually require two things at this point and that is a steady flow of immigrants and a relatively high birth rate from those very same immigrants. Furthermore, we need to understand that even as we continue to need immigrants and will do so in the future, we should be a land that is particularly thankful that we’re the kind of nation people are trying to enter rather than to leave – that is no small matter in terms of the world as it stands in the year 2014.

Some on America’s political left oppose, or act as if they really want the nation to have no enforced immigration laws an all. But when they’re pressed to candor even in that claim, they quickly retreat understanding that that would mean the end of the nation in any viable or stable form. On the other hand, there are some on the political right who are actually exhibiting a form of xenophobia – a fear of those who are outsiders. But history of American immigration, those successive waves of immigration that have marked our history, demonstrate that that vast majority of those who are coming to the United States are doing so for one central and highly important purpose; and that is they want to join the American Dream, they want to be a part of the American experiment.

Virtually any responsible person understands that the United States currently needs a vast comprehensive overhaul of our immigration policies and laws. No one should fool themselves into believing that this would be easy, in terms of the politics of the situation, but this is exactly the kind of challenge to which the United States government, and especially our elected officials, should rise. But that raises the second big issue here and that is the separation of powers and the extent of executive authority in the United States because, politically speaking, constitutionally speaking, what President Obama here has announced his intention to do should be unconstitutional.

What are looking at here was thoroughly discussed in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times by columnist Ross Douthat. He describes the President’s promised policies as a great betrayal and he warns, appropriately so, that what we’re looking at here is a vast consolidation and concentration of authority in the American Presidency that was never intended. There’s some background of this that is of vital importance. That article by Julia Preston from yesterday’s edition of the New York Times I referenced actually indicated what we’re talking about here. For instance, she mentioned the fact that the President’s threatened executive orders will, in her words, double the number of persons who receive protection from deportation under amnesty legislation in 1986. Well wait just a minute. That was legislation, that legislation was produced by Congress and eventually signed by then-President Ronald Reagan. What President Obama is threatening to do is to offer policies that will cover twice as many people without legislation – solely by his executive authority, or what he claims is his executive authority.

In terms of that authority, it comes down to this: there is no question that the President of the United States and the executive branch have the power of what is known as prosecutorial discretion. They have the executive authority to determine which crimes in which criminals are going to be prosecuted under the federal system. But when it comes down to the prosecutorial discretion the President is speaking of, no previous President of the United States, in the past more than 200 years of the American constitutional experiment, has ever overreached as the President now has announced his intention to do. And the timing of the President’s action is also highly suspect. Why did he not act this way in previous weeks and months if this is the right thing to do? The answer is abundantly clear – he did not want to endanger Democratic prospects in terms of the midterm elections that took place on November 4.

But the timing issue also plays another way. The Republicans have just been elected to a majority in the United States Senate and with a larger majority in the House of Representatives. Why would the President not do now what President Reagan did back in the mid-1980s and work with the new Congress in order to develop comprehensive immigration legislation? By any measure it would almost certainly not be exactly what President Obama would want, nor would it be what the Republican majorities in Congress would want. But it would be a significant advance and achievement and it would also honor the Constitution of the United States.

As Ross Douthat that accurately described in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, President Obama’s action with actually tend to move towards the idea of the imperial presidency in the United States. He reminds us that President Obama has already been using vast executive actions by means of avoiding Congress, but now he is also threatening to take this to an entirely new radical level. Douthat points out that this is actually beginning to mirror the kind of presidency that is found in Latin America and the doctrine of the presidency their known as caudillismo, referring to the executive who operates without much legislative or congressional checks or balances. Douthat rightly warns that if President Obama carries forth of this action and gets away with it, then, as he says, we’re making a kind of creeping caudillismo more likely in the United States.

He then writes these prophetic words,

“But if that evil must come, woe to the president who chooses it. And make no mistake, the president is free to choose. No immediate crisis forces his hand; no doom awaits the country if he waits. He once campaigned on constitutionalism and executive restraint; he once abjured exactly this power. There is still time for him to respect the limits of his office, the lines of authority established by the Constitution, the outcome of the last election. Or [says Douthat] he can choose the power grab, and the accompanying disgrace.”

Let’s just remind ourselves again that the separation of powers written into the United States Constitution was dependent upon the Christian worldview. The understanding especially of the fact that sin corrupts all centers of power and that if these centers of power are unchecked, the sinful results will be inestimable and horrifying. That’s why they developed the system of the separation of powers with the judicial branch, the executive branch, and the legislative branch, each acting as an important constitutional actor in our political stage; each checking the power of the other.

Make no mistake, and there are some people who will not find this as good news, the United States does indeed need comprehensive fair, just, and righteous immigration reform. That’s going to be a huge political challenge for this nation, but it’s a challenge the entire nation should face and especially the entirety of its branches of government. Both Congress especially and the President should work together towards this end. For President Obama, immediately after this election to act unilaterally in this way will endanger not only the future of genuine immigration reform but it will also endanger the nation in terms of the separation of powers and it will endanger our constitutional experiment in government and that in itself would be an unspeakable tragedy.

2) Gruber’s comments on Obamacare reveal irresponsible hiding of truth which hurts everyone

Also as we look at the week ahead, there’s another political issue that simply cannot be avoided. There’ll be a great deal of national conversation in the coming week as there was last week over the words that were spoken by Jonathan Gruber. Gruber is an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that’s MIT, and he was highly involved in crafting the Affordable Care Act – popularly known as ObamaCare. As federal records also show, he was a highly paid consultant to Democrats in Congress as the legislation was being crafted. But comments he made, both recently and in the years past, have now come to light indicating a deliberate deception when it came to selling the Affordable Care Act – not only to Congress, but to the American people.

As Jose A. DelReal of the Washington Post reported,

“Economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the Obama administration’s consultants on the Affordable Care Act, is under attack from conservatives for comments he made last year in which he said the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ was a factor in passing Obamacare in 2010.”

DelReal went on to report,

“The comments were made during the panel sessions at the Annual Health Economics Conference last year. A video of the panel began circulating Monday on conservative media. ‘This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,’ [that was said by Gruber]…during a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania… ‘Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.’”

 

Well as you might expect, that kind of controversy has led to a significant investigation of exactly what he’s talking about. Now yesterday’s edition of the Dallas Morning News also indicates and I quote,

“Other impolitic statements have continued to dribble out in which Gruber claims that the law was written to deceive federal budget watchdogs and mocks conservatives’ concerns over health care policy. He has since disavowed the most controversial remarks, saying he ‘spoke inappropriately… [he also said,] I regret having made those comments.’”

What he has not said, and cannot say, is that he didn’t say them. Furthermore, he has not retreated from the central claims that he made years ago. He has said recently that he has spoken inappropriately, he has not said that he acted inappropriately back in 2010. An editorial column that appeared in the weekend edition the Wall Street Journal reads like this,

“As a rule, Americans don’t like to be called ‘stupid,’ as Jonathan Gruber is discovering. Whatever his academic contempt for voters, the ObamaCare architect and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his candor about the corruption of the federal budget process.”

The editorial goes on to say,

“In his now-infamous talk at the University of Pennsylvania last year, Professor Gruber argued that the Affordable Care Act ‘would not have passed’ had Democrats been honest about the income-redistribution policies embedded in its insurance regulations. But the more instructive moment [they say] is his admission that ‘this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.’”

Now you can look at this controversy and recognize that there is an undeniable partisan element to it and the White House is now understandably on the defensive. After all, the ObamaCare legislation is coming before the Supreme Court once again – oh, as you might expect, Jonathan Gruber spoke to that issue as well and in a way that will bring even further embarrassment to the Obama White House. There are two paragraphs in the Wall Street Journal editorial that are particularly important from a Christian worldview. They are these two statements,

“Rarely are liberal intellectuals as full frontal as Mr. Gruber about the accounting fraud ingrained in ObamaCare. Also notable are his do-what-you-gotta-do apologetics: ‘I’d rather have this law than not,’”

The second important statement that is found in this editorial in this,

“Mr. Gruber told a Holy Cross audience in 2010 that although ObamaCare ‘is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it’s going to lower the cost of health care, that’s all they talk about. Why? Because that’s what people want to hear about because a majority of Americans care about health-care costs.”

Well, if you were following that statement carefully, Jonathan Gruber was saying that even though the ObamaCare legislation was not really mostly about cost control – he said, in essence, it was only 10% that, it was 90% new health care coverage. He said that’s not how the system was sold to the American people, or sold at least to Democrats in Congress. Remember that the Affordable Care Act passed back in 2010 without a single Republican vote. But now Gruber says that was entirely dishonest. The law was presented as about cost control rather than insurance, when as it turned out, it was 90% insurance and only 10% cost control. Why, he asked the question himself? That was what was necessary, he answered, in order to get the bill passed – barely passed we note by Congress.

So what are the Christian worldview implications of this big news story? Well in the first place, the truth will come out eventually. If someone’s making these kinds of comments, it will become known to the public; now to the great embarrassment and frustration of the Obama White House. But there’s more here of course, this also helps to build a great cynicism about the American government because the Congressional Budget Office, he referred to as the CBO, is supposed to be the nonpartisan absolutely fair judicious and accurate evaluator of  all things economic in terms of legislation. And now we’re being told they were deliberately duped and, as we see, quite successfully duped by those who told them by feeding false information that what was being presented was not taxation but rather a form of cost saving by cost shifting.

The most important Christian worldview observation is this: the truth really matters. About that, the Scripture is abundantly clear. Honesty matters, the truth matters, and deliberate deceptions will eventually bring humiliation. And that’s exactly what’s taking place now. Perhaps the most humiliated is Jonathan Gruber himself, at least he ought to be, but those who used and deliberately used his misrepresentations should also be humiliated. The other thing to watch here is simply what happens when government grow so large that it is largely out-of-control. Here’s the really frightening thing; very intelligent people – economists, analyst, accountants, and others – in the Congressional Budget Office were unable to separate fact from fiction on such a fundamental issue and such an important piece of legislation. As every Christian should well recognize, when the truth is violated and when truth is handled irresponsibly, everybody loses. One of the great losses here is loss of confidence in the credibility competence and honesty of the American government. And that’s a truly massive and tragic loss. It looks like this week is set to begin with a bang, politically speaking, but there are other fronts as well and to those we will turn in coming days.

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 Dallas, Texas and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-17-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Obama’s promise to unilaterally move on immigration a danger to separation of powers

White House Considers Timing of Executive Action on Immigration, Wall Street Journal (Laura Meckler)

Obama’s Immigration Plan Could Grant Papers to Millions, at Least for Now, New York Times (Julia Preston)

The Great Immigration Betrayal, New York Times (Ross Douthat)

2) Gruber’s comments on Obamacare reveal irresponsible hiding of truth which hurts everyone

Obamacare consultant under fire for ‘stupidity of the American voter’ comment, Washington Post (Jose A. DelReal)

Jonathan Gruber’s ‘Stupid’ Budget Tricks, Wall Street Journal (Editorial)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 11-14-14

The Briefing

 

November 14, 2014

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

 

It’s Friday, November 14, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Success of comet landing dependent on science built on a Christian worldview

Two days after a space probe landed on a moving comet, we’re just beginning to take stock of what all this represents. By any estimation it is big news, and it says a great deal about the human quest for exploration; it also says a great deal about the sophistication of modern technology. As Kenneth Chang of the New York Times reports,

“In a technological feat that gives scientists their first opportunity to dig into a remnant of the early solar system, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission successfully placed a small spacecraft on the surface of a speeding comet on Wednesday.”

Let’s step back for a moment and just take stock of what all this really represents. We’re talking about a comet that is located 316 million miles from Earth and yet this wasn’t a 316 million mile journey – no it was a 4 billion mile journey. The reason for that is quite simple. In order to actually reach, to physically reach, this comet, moving as it is through space in an orbit through our own solar system, this particular mission had to slingshot – that’s the astronomical term that is used – throughout the cosmos in order to reach a comment that was, in terms of its space from Earth, just 316 million miles away – that’s a big just.

This particular space mission undertaken by the European Space Agency was launched on March 4 of 2004 – so more than 10 years later, traveling more than 4 billion miles, this very small spacecraft actually reached the area where it could launch its probe onto the comet. And the comet itself is not a stationary object – far from it – it’s traveling through the cosmos at 40,000 mph. So let’s just take stock of what’s really going on here. This particular probe, about the size we are told of a washing machine, was launched from planet Earth over 10 years ago. It traveled to the cosmos nearly 4 billion miles in order to reach a comet that was about 300 million miles from planet Earth. And the probe – codename Philae – actually landed on the comet when the comet was traveling at 40,000 mph. The comet itself, by the way, is only about two a half miles wide. A comet of that size simply doesn’t have much gravity; that represented one of the challenges to the European Space Agency in this mission.

But the probe did land and even as scientist rejoice in Europe and elsewhere with a successful landing, remarkable as that was in itself, it turned out upon later observation that the lander was not where it was supposed to be. At least one of the legs of the probe is not attached to the surface. It turned out, observers say, that the probe actually bounced off the comet only to land a second time – this time more securely. And it also turns out the telecommunications back to Earth from the comet are bit more complex than had been expected. Then late yesterday came a final piece of bad news. It turns out that the location on the comet where the probe landed maybe shielding its batteries from being able to be recharged from the light of the sun. In other words, this probe may actually be dying just hours after it was successfully landed upon this comment 10 years after it was launched from planet Earth.

Does this make the mission a disaster? Does it make it a failure? Scientists are saying absolutely not. For one thing, the basic fact – the now undeniable fact – that a probe was launched from planet Earth 10 years ago, that it traveled slingshot style through the cosmos traveling 4 billion miles in order to land on a comet traveling 40,000 miles an hour, that in itself is nothing less than a stunning technological achievement. If it can be done once, it can be done again. Now secular scientists and the world media will be talking about this, politicians will decide if it’s worth the government funding of these kinds of programs, but from a Christian worldview perspective there’s certain issues that we need to talk about that the secular press will not.

 

For instance, why is there this human quest to understand the cosmos around us? Immanuel Kant, one of the founders of the modern world, one of the first prophets of the Enlightenment, said that there were – in his mind – two great mysteries. As he described it, the two ministries were the starry heavens above and the moral life within. Kant was onto something in terms of those observations. When we look at the starry heavens above there are huge questions that we ask. And those questions demand some kind of answer. The combination of scientific disciplines necessary to successfully launch this kind of probe, to track it through the cosmos, and eventually successfully to land it – not to mention receiving telecommunications and images back from it – those associated sciences are actually based upon a worldview that was given to the Western world by Christianity. Historians of science, such as Herbert Butterfield, have pointed to the fact that modern science was birthed where the world was believed to be intelligible – that is knowable; a very key issue comes in to play here.

Those earliest scientists who gave birth to modern science in the Western world believed, specifically, that the cosmos was intelligible – that it is intelligible, that is to say understandable – because they believed that it was created by an intelligent, sovereign, supreme creator that reflects His own glory and intentionality in the cosmos. In other words, they believed that the cosmos was intelligible precisely because it was created and it wasn’t an accident. They would have had very little confidence that the world would’ve been intelligible if it was just a cosmic accident. There was something else to their understanding; that was the continuity and the stability of natural laws. Those early scientists and the science upon which this Rosetta project is still based is established upon the premise that there are continuing physical laws in the universe that operate basically in all places, at all times and can be counted upon to operate regularly. Now where does that confidence come from?

In early science in the Western world the early science that gave birth to the high technologies we know now, the confidence was that those stable regular laws were indeed stable and regular precisely because there was a sovereign God who is exercising His providential care over this cosmos. Now modern secular science tends to think of itself as pervasively secular and in terms of those who are practicing it, there is often a very determined effort to make the science as secular as possible. But science will not remain as secular as the secular mind intends it to be. The very fact that the cosmos is intelligible, the very fact that the regularity these natural laws were exactly what was dependent upon by those researchers who launched this probe and now celebrate it’s landing, those are actually still pointing to the fact that the universe is regular and intelligible for a reason; it’s not regular and intelligible by accident. In other words, there is a profound testimony to the reality and the existence not only of a God but of a God who created the cosmos and is still actively involved in his providential care over it; even in these headlines. But you’re not going to be getting that from the secular press, but Christians ought to be very careful not to miss that point in these headlines.

2) Movie Interstellar underlines secular belief that the cosmos contains answers to life

Well millions of Americans have not missed Christopher Nolan’s new movie Interstellar over the last eight days. And when Americans have gone to that blockbuster movie lasting almost 3 hours in duration what exactly are they looking at and why are they going? Jeffrey Kluger writing for a cover story in Time magazine last week makes the point. He writes this way,

“It’s huge, it’s cold, it’s soulless. It’s possessed of forces that would rip you to ribbons the second you dared to step off the tiny planetary beachhead it has permitted us. What’s more, it completely defies understanding, at least for anyone who’s not fluent in the language of singularities and space-time and wormholes and all the rest.”

But he goes on in very profound prose to write this,

“But never mind, because we believe in it all—and oh, how we love it. Big cosmology [writes Kluger] has become our secular religion, a church even atheists can join. It addresses many of the same questions religion does: Why are we here? How did it all begin? What comes next? And even if you can barely understand the answers when you get them, well, you’ve heard of a thing called faith, right?”

Jeffrey Kluger is onto something of immense importance here. He’s pointing to the fact that cosmology has indeed become a substitute religion. Big cosmology, to use his term, is now the kind of not only science and entertainment but intellectual focus that is substituting for religious faith. Big cosmology, according to Kluger, is where the big questions of life are now expected to be answered. Or to put it another way, when theology recedes, Jeffrey Kluger says cosmology is ascendant. And he’s really onto something that is far bigger than a film when he makes that observation.

This is true not only when it comes to Hollywood movies, Christopher Nolan’s new Interstellar in particular, it’s also about why so many of the New Atheists are actually dealing in cosmology. Why so many of them come from the sciences trying to answer these very same questions with their own secular scientific discipline. But as Kluger also writes and I quote,

“Like religion, cosmology has its high priests: Einstein and Hawking–people who, like Muhammad and Jesus, don’t even need second names. It has lesser priests as well: Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson–the great communicators. It has its storytellers too, none more powerful than those in Hollywood. And no moviemaker is currently more influential than Christopher Nolan,”

director of Interstellar, the shrouded-in-secrecy movie that America’s began to see last Friday. As Jeffrey Kluger explains the premise of Interstellar simple enough,

“Earth is dying from an unnamed blight, and it’s the job of a small band of astronauts (led by Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway) and scientists (Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine) to look for a new world to colonize before it’s too late. So far, that could be the stuff of a Bruce Willis joy ride–a rocket-jock movie in which lots of things blow up and lots of people die.”

But says Kluger, and he’s right about this,

“…Interstellar has bigger ambitions–ambitions that go hard at the physics and at those cosmic questions.”

My wife Mary and I went to see the movie last Friday night and we can assure you this movie is doing it’s very best to address those big cosmic questions. I can also assure you of this, it doesn’t answer them – not in any fundamental way and certainly not in any way that will be intellectually, much less spiritually satisfying.

Nolan himself does seem to believe that cosmology can deliver on the questions, maybe even believes his movie can deliver the answers. He writes this,

“You can actually look up at the sky and see this stuff. That’s the prime thing. Looking up at the stars is the primal connection.”

Well looking up at the stars may raise the questions but it isn’t, and it can never be, the so-called primal connection. Without revealing a spoiler for the movie, one thing that does need to be said is that the question of love emerges in this totally secular context. There’s a lot of science fiction in the movie; Hans Zimmer score is absolutely powerful; there’s a strong storyline, and the acting itself is very good. But the main point of love, as it is raised in this movie, is to suggest that just maybe it could survive even if earth and all humanity does not. That rather secular affirmation that love somehow was the missing force in the universe that’s holding everything together, well that’s one of the great secular dreams; but it is absolutely fundamentally in opposition to what is revealed in Scripture. There is absolutely no hint whatsoever in Scripture that love is somehow an impersonal force; by its very definition, in every occasion, love in the Bible is affirmed as being inherently personal, it is linked to persons.

Reviewing the movie for the New Yorker David Denby writes,

“The Nolans take us into the farthest mysteries of space-time, where, they assure us, love joins gravity as a force that operates across interstellar distances. The Earth may die, but love will triumph. For all his dark scenarios, Christopher Nolan turns out to be a softie.”

Well as the narrative unfolds, Christopher Nolan does turn out to be something of a softie. But his answer also turns out to be something of a softheaded answer. Three hours into the movie, observers will be noticing some of the most anticipated ending scenes of any recent movie. Some of it is very highly predictable but there also some unpredictable elements that will retain your interest. But what becomes clear in this movie is exactly what Jeffrey Kluger of Time magazine is pointing to and that is that the movie actually suggests that the big questions of life will somehow, if ever, be delivered by cosmology. By, as Christopher Nolan says, looking at the stars and making the primal connection.

But putting the movie Interstellar and the Rosetta mission celebrated this week together one thing becomes abundantly clear. The movie may entertain us for three hours and the Rosetta mission may give us reams and reams of information that could take decades to unwind, but neither one can answer the biggest questions of life: the who, the what, the when, not to mention the why.

Before leaving Interstellar, by the way, there is an interesting debate taking place among cosmologists about the movie. And at least many cosmologists are upset at the movie for the very thing that was just noted by David Denby in the New Yorker; Christopher Nolan turns out to be a softie. Many of the scientists are saying that the attention to family and love in the movie is actually a distraction; they want more about gravity, they want more about the laws of physics, and they want more about black holes. That tells you something about what’s going on in scientific circles; some scientists have said they don’t want anything to do with talking about love in a scientific context. You can’t measure, you can’t observe it, is not scientifically valid. Well that response among other things might tell you why people in Hollywood are making the movies, not people who run the laboratories.

3) Supreme Court once more fumbles on same sex marriage, removes own stay on Kansas gay marriage

Next, once again the United States Supreme Court seems to fumble the question of same-sex marriage as yesterday’s edition of the Dallas Morning News reports,

“The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed same-sex marriage is to proceed in Kansas,”

Lifting a temporary stay issued Monday by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The two sentence order was similar to recently ones from the court and the court has repeatedly declined to intercede in the legal battles over same-sex marriage in so far as appeals have been made from other lower federal courts. But there’s one difference, says the Dallas Morning News, the earlier orders apparently had been unanimous – this one noted that Justice Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would have granted the stay.

Now there is a very interesting development in this because what’s different between then and now? What’s different between early October when the Supreme Court turned back all appeals from the federal courts and now when you had at least two Justices this week who said they would have granted a stay? What has happened is the decision that was handed down, not this week but at the end of last week, by the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals. And as I wrote about on my website at AlbertMohler.com, that particular decision, which sustained and upheld certain state laws defining marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman, that particular appellate court now sets the stage for the Supreme Court to have to answer the question it had tried to dodge just early in October.

But as I said earlier, if in the month of October the Supreme Court punted on the question of same-sex marriage to continue the football metaphor, this week it fumbled it once again. You had one Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, who earlier in the week granted a stay in terms of the lower court decision only have a larger group of justices reverse that stages two days later. This is not the way the highest court in the land should handle such a monumental question; not even in terms of procedure. The same thing happened a couple of months ago when Anthony Kennedy, another Supreme Court justice, issued a stay and then lifted the stay within a matter of hours.

Before leaving the issue one additional federal judge also declared a gay marriage ban to be unconstitutional. That took place earlier this week when District Judge Richard Gurgle, sitting in Charleston, South Carolina, struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Add one more state to the states out of 50 that have legal same-sex marriage. And furthermore, add one more state to the states where the issue was decided not by the people but by a federal judge.

4) Maryland schools remove names of all religious holidays in war on common sense

Finally, a very interesting story appeared from the Associated Press yesterday and even as many people are describing it is the latest installment on the war on Christmas, I suggest it’s really nothing of the kind – it’s more simply a war on common sense. As the Associated Press reported yesterday,

“Presented with the opportunity to recognize a Muslim holiday on the school calendar for the first time, leaders of Maryland’s largest school district went a different direction: They removed all mention of religious holidays from the calendar.”

Now, in other words, they simply removed all religious holidays from the calendar but left the holidays there under a different name. The Associated Press mentions that some districts across the country have been trying to keep the holidays while trying to act as if there’s no religious significance to them. Christmas break in some school districts has been replaced with ‘winter break.’ But the story in Montgomery County Maryland is a bit more complex and it takes the argument a bit further. As the Associated Press reports,

“Muslim activists had asked the board to note on next year’s calendar that Yom Kippur, a day when schools are already closed, is also Eid al-Adha. The two holidays do not always fall on the same date. But the board rejected that proposal, instead voting 7-1 to close schools on the same days as usual without mentioning their religious associations. As a result, Christians and Jews are upset at the removal of their holidays from the calendar, and Muslims are upset that theirs weren’t included.”

Phil Kaufman, the school board chairman, says he thinks the decision is fair. As he explained, schools will remain closed on Christmas, as well as on the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But one Muslim leader in the community said,

“It shows they would go to any lengths, they would take drastic measures to deny the Muslim community the right to have the Eid holiday on the school calendar,”

Well, Christians should step back for a moment and recognize that there is something important here at stake. There is no reason why Christians should argue against having a Muslim holiday on the school calendar if there is a significant group or percentage of Muslims in the community – that would simply be fair and it would simply makes sense. We should not claim the privilege of having our religious holidays on the calendar and consider it some kind of Christian victory to keep other religious holidays off the calendar. There is very little risk in most communities that there will be a sizable population yet that will lead to an absolute multiplicity of holidays that would make having school, a regular school year, impossible. What the Muslim authorities within this community were asking for on behalf of their families was simply to have one holiday put on the calendar – that is not an imposition, nor is it an unreasonable request; not in a school district in which there’s a sizable number of Muslim students and families represented.

But Christians also need to recognize that the Muslims, in making this case, are actually showing up as honest, with the school board showing up is either dishonest or simply irrational. It makes no sense whatsoever to say that we’re removing the kind of religious connotations to the holidays merely by refusing to call Christmas, Christmas or refusing to call Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashanah. If the holidays are still granted, no one’s going to believe that this some kind of cosmic coincidence whereby all the sudden the winter break appears exactly where Christmas break had been.

This is the kind of secular insanity that just leads us to go back and scratch our heads wondering how anyone can take this with a straight face. This is tantamount to the same secular nonsense whereby so many secular academics, afraid of any relationship to Christianity – even as an historical fact whatsoever – have tried to re-date the way history is recorded; shifting from BC, which means before Christ, and AD, or Anno Domini, the year of our Lord to B.C.E. for ‘Before Common Era’ and C.E. for ‘Common Era’ as if they’ve actually accomplished anything. But in reality, the very fact that the numbers start where they start – the great dividing point – is the birth of Jesus Christ. If they really want to secularize the numbers whereby we identify years, they’re going to have to go back and re-number everything. They’re going to have to come up with a new starting point. Just re-labeling the calendar is an exercise in self-delusion, it may make secularists feel better but it doesn’t actually accomplish anything. And the very same thing is true in Montgomery County, Maryland where if you’re going to have a winter break – exactly where Christmas break was – no one’s going to believe that you’ve just secularized the holiday; you’re just deciding to call it something else. Christians don’t need to mount some kind of campaign about this being new evidence for the war on Christmas, no – this is a war on common sense. And in taking an action like this once again the secular mind just offers a parody of itself.

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 Austin, Texas and I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-14-14

1) Success of comet landing dependent on science built on a Christian worldview

Landing on a Comet, a European Space Agency Mission Aims to Unlock the Mysteries of Earth, New York Times (Kenneth Chang)

Rosetta mission: What do you do when your landing probe bounces into a crater?, The Telegraph (Sarah Knapton)

2) Movie Interstellar underlines secular belief that the cosmos contains answers to life

Interstellar, Where No Movie Has Gone Before, TIME (Jeffrey Kluger)

Love and Physics, New Yorker (David Denby)

3) Supreme Court once more fumbles on same sex marriage, removes own stay on Kansas gay marriage

Supreme Court lifts hold on gay marriage in Kansas, Dallas Morning News (AP)

4) Maryland schools remove names of all religious holidays in war on common sense

Montgomery Co. Schools Scrap Religious Names From Calendar, CBS News (AP)