R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 338

Transcript: The Briefing 11-13-14

The Briefing

 

November 13, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, November 13, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Universal 0utcry over S Korean ferry captain’s actions undermines notion of moral relativity 

As one very wise moral philosopher noted some time ago, there are some things we simply cannot not know. There is a moral knowledge that is implanted within us that is virtually universal in terms of human moral revulsion; human moral judgment that actually points to a consensus that must be in something deeper than our cultural agreement, our philosophical complementarity. This has to do of course with the Christian understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God; for our common humanity to be made common by the fact that we are made by a common creator, made a single species, descended indeed from a first primal couple. Most importantly, every single one of us, at every point of development, made in God’s image and a part of that meaning that we are made moral creatures. There is a moral knowledge that is within us, there’s a moral sense that is simply a part of our structure and there are some moral judgments that are virtually universal.

One of these comes to light in the headline that appeared yesterday from South Korea; “Captain Gets 36 Years for Deserting Korean Ferry.” This verdict came as something of a disappointment to the Korean people. South Korea was rocked earlier this year by the horrifying ferry accident in which 304 people drowned; most of them teenagers, almost all of them from a single high school in a small town in South Korea. That devastating loss was made all the more horrific by the fact that there was clearly human wrongdoing involved. There were sins of omission – things that simply should have been done that weren’t done. But there were also sins of commission – there were positive acts that were taken, intentional acts that were deeply sinful.

At the heart of this is the fact that a basic fraud was running through the whole operation. There was twice as much weighted freight upon the ferry as it was registered to carry. Furthermore, there was direct negligence. Those in charge of the ferry when it began to sink did not do everything they could to save those who were on the vessel. To the contrary, they told the vast majority of the teenagers – most of whom died – that they should remain right where they were and not seek to leave the ship. Meanwhile, most horrifying of all, those who were in charge of the vessel saved themselves rather than their passengers. Choe Sang-Hun reporting for the New York Times from Gwangju, South Korea writes,

“The captain of the South Korean ferry that sank in April, killing more than 300 people, was sentenced on Tuesday to 36 years in prison for deserting his ship and its passengers in a fatal crisis. But he was acquitted of murder, infuriating family members of some of the victims in the country’s worst disaster in decades.”

He goes on to report,

“The captain, Lee Jun-seok, ‘abandoned his passengers, knowing that they were waiting for instructions from the crew and that if they were not evacuated, their lives would be at risk,’”

Those words were spoken by the presiding judge in the court bringing a five-month trial to conclusion. The 36 year sentence was infuriating to the family members of many of the victims. Furthermore, the prosecutors had asked that the captain would be charged with first-degree murder and they asked for the death penalty. But the judge in this case indicated that there had been no adequate evidence produced to find the captain guilty of murder; he was found guilty of grotesque and gross negligence.

In one of the most haunting paragraphs in the news article we read,

“Most of the victims died after the crew repeatedly urged them to stay inside the vessel. All of the ship’s 15 navigational and engineering crew members, including the captain and mates, fled on the first Coast Guard rescue boats that arrived at the scene.”

So there you have it. One of Korea’s worst maritime disasters; the death of over 300 people, most of them teenagers on a high school trip from one small school in one small village in South Korea. But what we also have here and should not miss is a unified sense of moral revulsion. Of absolute moral revulsion that the navigational and engineering crew, including the captain and his mates, would save themselves leaving hundreds of young people – teenagers indeed – to drown within the vessel they were abandoning. Furthermore they had given those very teenagers the orders to stay where they were as the captain and his own crew did exactly the opposite. This much is clear, virtually any sane responsible rational person would likewise believe that this captain and his crew had acted not only in a way that was negligent and irresponsible but deeply immoral. In other words, what they did was wrong; it was sinful.

But in today’s confused culture of moral relativism it would seem to be impossible that there could be a unified moral verdict on this kind of action, but there is. It’s hard to imagine that anyone living in any society at any time would come to any other conclusion but that this was deeply wrong; horrifyingly wrong, sinfully wrong. Major media reports, as a matter fact, indicate that not only throughout Korea but throughout the world there has been deep moral revulsion at this action. Furthermore, there’s been a shared deep dissatisfaction with the verdict – even though given the captain’s age, 69, the sentence will almost surely mean life in prison.

But there’s something else here that simply has to be noted. There is, in almost every culture, the understanding that a captain is not to leave his passengers; that the one who is in charge of the safety of others is not to save himself or herself – abandoning those within his or her charge to their own deaths. Where does that shared moral understanding come from? Where does that judgmental consensus originate? It has to be in something deeper than culture. It has to reach something deeper than moral formation and education. Indeed Christians understand, based upon the revelation of God in the Scripture, that what makes this a universal and unanimous human response is the fact that we are commonly made in the image of God. And that a part of that image bearing is a moral knowledge, a moral knowledge we simply do know, a moral knowledge we cannot not know.

But then there’s a deeper point, isn’t there? And that is that that knowledge we cannot not know is hardly limited to the fact that it is immoral for a captain to abandon the ship in the very first opportunity leaving his passengers to die. No, if there is that kind of deep moral knowledge, a knowledge implanted in us by the fact that we are created by God and made in his image, then it reaches to a host of other issues as well. There is actually a vast universe of shared moral knowledge that we actually do know and cannot not know. So why is there such deep moral confusion and often controversy in our midst? Well Paul answers that in the book of Romans 1:18 where we are told that humanity, after the fall, suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. That’s we see around us, that’s what’s really evident in so many controversies, that’s what Christians should see on so many issues and in so many arguments; it is the suppression of truth in unrighteousness. The moral controversies of our age come into clearer view when we understand that it’s really not a matter of argument over moral knowledge, but about whether or not that knowledge is going to be suppressed in unrighteousness.

2) Studies indicate demise of intact families negatively impacts economic success of children

Next, speaking of the suppression of truth in unrighteousness there is a profound act of moral rebellion in our times in denying the importance of the family, of the natural family, and beyond even that denial, the subversion of the family, sometimes by national policy. The marginalization and minimization of the family in our times has not happened by accident. Though vast social demographic and economic forces have been at work, there have also been intellectual and moral issues at work; a cognitive elite made up of intellectuals and policymakers who have been actively driving the marginalization of the family – the redefinition of the family in some cases – in our times.

I want to draw attention to a couple of pieces of evidence of the importance of the family and the persistence of that importance in our contemporary age. The first comes in the form of research recently released by the American Enterprise Institute. Two professors, Brad Wilcox and Robert Lerman have written a very important piece of research published first at National Review Online. In the piece published at the American Enterprise Institute by Natalie Scholl, there are four charts that are reproduced from the research offered by Brad Wilcox and Robert Lerman; these four charts tells us a great deal about the impact that is made by family structure and how an intact family effects kids economic futures. The concern of the studies is to demonstrate how intact family assist kids in that family to achieve the so-called American Dream.

There are four charts, four main points.

Point one. Children raised in intact families are more likely to acquire the human capital they need to live the American dream. As the researchers write,

“Having two parents in the picture typically increases the amount of time, attention, encouragement, and money that can be devoted to a child’s education.”

The intact family also protects children from the household moves and emotional stress associated with family instability. But as the chart indicates, there has been a decline in the number of intact families; families where kids are growing up with both parents married to each other residing in the home. Back in 1980, 78% of all children and teenagers were in such a home. Now, according to the data from 2012, it’s only 66%. That maybe a shift of only 12% but it hides the fact that it’s a massive shift disproportionately found within certain sectors of the population; those very sectors of the population that are falling further and further behind when it comes to economic progress in what is called here the American Dream.

Point two is this: Children raised in intact families are less likely to fall afoul of detours on the road to the American dream. Those detours include not finishing high school, getting in trouble with the law, or having a non-marital birth. All of these so-called detours, the report makes very clear, happen much more often – and that’s an understatement – in the lives of children not being raised in intact families.

Point three brings out an item of research not often reported.

“Young men raised in intact families make more money,”

Now money is not the end all of these concerns but when it comes to accomplishing family stability, getting married, and reaching the point of independence in life, money has a great deal to do with it. And the earnings that eventually come to young men who were raised as boys in intact families, that income is remarkably larger than the income of boys when they reach adulthood who were raised in non-intact families. When they reach adulthood, boys raised in intact families earned an average of $6,534 per year more than boys raised in non-intact families, When it came to total family income, boys in those families who are now men, as families earned an additional $16,000 over those who were not raised in intact families,

Point four:

“Young women raised in intact families earn more. [And furthermore,] young adults [both men and women] raised in intact families work more hours.”

As the researchers write,

“On average, the more hours you work, the more experience you gain in the labor force and the more money you make.”

Now for most working Americans that simply makes sense. But it does make sense in a moral context, not just pragmatic experience. And one of the things that this report makes very clear is that there is a certain work ethic that tends to be very highly correlated with the fact that young people grow up in intact families. That very much stronger work ethic produces a stronger work experience, and furthermore, the very kind of differential in income that was reported under point 3.

All these points in the research demonstrated within them point to the importance of the intact family. And this is coming from a rather conservative sociological and economic analysis. The full report from Professors Wilcox and Lerman is found at the American Enterprise Institute entitled “For Richer, For Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America.” Now that came from the right, but what about from the left? That’s where the second item looms even larger in importance. It’s found in an article published recently in the Washington Post by Robert J. Samuelson, a columnist and economist. He writes about what he calls the ‘family deficit.’ He said,

“We Americans believe in progress, and yet progress is often a double-edged sword. The benefits and adventures of change often vie with the shortcomings and disruptions, leaving us in a twilight zone of ambiguity and doubt about the ultimate outcome. Few subjects [he says,] better illustrate this than the decline of marriage,”

He cites, again a more liberal source, Isabel Sawhill and her recent book, ‘Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage.’ He then writes this,

“Even those who know marriage is on the skids — presumably, most of us — may be surprised by the extent of its decline… [He goes on to say] Americans coming of age in the 1950s, the expectation was that most would marry. It was part of society’s belief structure. And most did. Now these powerful social pressures have faded and, for many, disappeared.”

In 1960 he cites only 12 % of adults ages 25 to 34 had never married. So that’s 1965, only 12% of relatively young adults had not married. By the time they were 45 to 54, the never-married share of that generation was only 5%. That was just 1960, fast forward Samuelson says, to 2010 and 47 % of Americans aged 25 to 34 had never married. Based on present trends he says, this will still be 25% in 2030 when they’re aged 45 to 54.

Now in terms of worldview, consider the importance of the admission he makes in the next paragraph; and I quote,

“The stranglehold that marriage had on middle-class thinking and behavior began to weaken in the 1960s with birth control pills, publication of Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’ — an assault on women’s traditional housecleaning and child-rearing roles — and the gradual liberalization of divorce laws.”

Now note quite carefully that those very three things – the sexual revolution, feminism, and the gradual liberalization of divorce laws – those have been the very three things that many Christian conservatives, and furthermore social conservatives from a secular arena, have pointed to as the fountainhead of much of the breakdown of the family and the marginalization of marriage. But that paragraph was not written by a conservative Christian or otherwise, it was written by a mainstream liberal – a rather influential columnist – and published of all places in the Washington Post on its opinion page.

But the most shocking paragraph in Samuelson’s column comes later. It reads and I quote,

“But the biggest social cost of less marriage involves children. ‘New choices for adults,’ Sawhill writes, ‘have not generally been helpful to the well-being of children.’ [Samuelson then writes,] Single-parent families have exploded. In 1950, they were 7 percent of families with children under 18; by 2013, they were 31 percent. Nor was the shift isolated. The share was 27 percent for whites, 34 percent for Hispanics and 62 percent for African Americans.”

Then follows this absolutely blockbuster sentence,

“By harming children’s emotional and intellectual development, the expansion of adult choices may have reduced society’s collective welfare.”

That is indeed a stunning sentence. It’s an absolutely true crystallizing clear sentence. It’s a sentence that rightly describes what has been happening in America over the last 4 to 5 decades. There has been a radical expansion of adult choice and it has been at the tremendous now documented undeniable expense of America’s children. That’s the kind of thing the conservatives have been talking about for decades now. But it tells us something, something very important when that message comes from now one of the most influential syndicated columnist in one of the most influential liberal newspapers in the United States.

Now to be quite honest, in terms of Samuelson’s argument, he is not suggesting any kind of moral reversal. He seems to be just as committed now to the kind of moral individual expressive that created this kind of liberalizing trend. But he does at least have the honesty to document the problem and to trace it to its roots and to point out that this radical expansion of choices for adults, this great moral revolution, has come at the direct and now documented expense of America’s children. We should pause and note that the documented decline in the family unit, the documented marginalization of marriage itself, and the documented impact on children, the fact that this is now documented in the pages of the Washington Post, well that’s a remarkable cultural achievement; a moral achievement that should not pass without our notice.

3) Scarcity of conservative characters on TV points to worldview Hollywood promotes

Finally on another note of the importance of moral documentation, Patricia Phalen writes a very important article in yesterday’s edition of USA Today; the title of her article, “Know Any Republican TV Heroes?” As she writes,

“The fall television network schedule includes two political dramas that feature women in powerful roles, fueling speculation that the motive is to boost former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s prospective 2016 presidential run. The assumption is that any powerful female protagonist in a political drama is essentially a stand-in for Clinton.”

She points to the fact the back in 2005 ABC aired a program known as Commander-in-Chief starring Gina Davis as U.S. President. Even back then there was speculation in Hollywood and beyond that the show was something of an advertisement for Hillary Clinton’s later run for president in 2008. Before going any further, let me note that Patricia Phalen is associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. She is, according to USA Today, a recognized expert on the American TV industry and she defends that industry – at least in part – suggesting that these programs are not only perhaps offering something of a political advertisement for Hillary Clinton, they are serving the purpose of reflecting America’s culture where women are taking on these kinds of important roles.

She then writes this however,

“On the other hand, it is true that Hollywood is not just shaped by but also shapes our culture. Television programs present value-laden treatments of what is good or acceptable vs. what is bad or unacceptable. And, on a more superficial level [she says], programs communicate what is hip or popular among the Hollywood elite”

She goes on to make a couple of interesting statements. In the first place, she writes, that the writers of television programs generally write about that which they know. And so what is reflected is their own context and their social location. Most of them happen to be in very liberal Hollywood, their peers structure is made up of other very liberal people in Hollywood. The cultural creatives, according to demographers and sociologist, are among the most socially liberal classes in America. But there’s more going on here as she makes clear:

“Nevertheless, external pressures tend to impose limits on writers’ freedom of political expression and condition the kinds of characters they create. It’s no secret [she writes,] that liberal viewpoints are the ‘gold standard’ in Hollywood, or that careers can rise and fall according to one’s political beliefs. In this environment, writers are understandably reluctant to promote ideas on the screen that could ruin their careers. Consequently [this is what is important, she writes], the heroines of political dramas are overwhelmingly liberal. Few, if any, producers on the cocktail-party circuit [she writes,] would dare boast about creating a show with a heroine who is strong, smart, savvy — and conservative — a major defect in the otherwise creative community of Hollywood.”

Phalen’s piece is particularly fair and evenhanded. But from her insider perspective in Hollywood, she tells us something of how the political culture of that community and the demographics of the social class shape the kinds of products, entertainment products that become such an important part of our culture. But there’s something else she also makes emphatically clear. We are shaped by the entertainment we consume and watch. We are shaped by the very culture we’re here discussing. It is true, as she says, that the society shapes Hollywood. But far more powerfully, she acknowledges, Hollywood shapes the society.

Therefore, it should tell us something important when we contemplate what she says; that it’s virtually impossible to imagine a cocktail party in Hollywood where anproducer brags about the fact that he’s producing a heroine for a program that is smart, savvy, powerful, and conservative. That last word in liberal Hollywood is simply inconceivable. Honesty also compels us to acknowledge that even as Hollywood shapes the larger society, in so far as we consume it – we watch it, we listen to it, it also shapes us as well; inevitably so – at one level or another and we need to know it.

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-13-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Universal 0utcry over S Korean ferry captain’s actions undermines notion of moral relativity 

Captain Gets 36 Years for Deserting Korean Ferry, New York Times (Choe Sang-Hun)

2) Studies indicate demise of intact families negatively impacts economic success of children

4 charts that show how an intact family affects kids’ economic futures, American Enterprise Institute (Natalie Scholl)

For Richer, For Poorer?, American Enterprise Institute (Robert I. Lerman and W. Bradford Wilcox)

The family deficit, Washington Post (Robert J. Samuelson)

3) Scarcity of conservative characters on TV points to worldview Hollywood promotes

Conservatives rarer than women on TV, USA Today (Patricia F. Phalen)

Sexual Orientation and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

I recently addressed a major national conference on “The Gospel, Homosexuality, and the Future of Marriage” held by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. As expected, the conference was one of the most responsible and edifying meetings yet held of Christians concerned about these issues. This is exactly what would be expected of the ERLC and its leadership. The conference was both helpful and historic. I had the honor of delivering the opening keynote address entitled “Aftermath: Ministering in a Post-Marriage Culture.” The full text of my address will be posted here shortly. Subsequent to the conference, it became clear that the vast coverage of the conference in the national press raised some issues that need to be considered further.

One of these issues is sexual orientation. As I explained in my address, I had previously denied the existence of sexual orientation. I, along with many other evangelicals, did so because we did not want to accept the sexual identity structure that so often goes with sexual orientation. I still reject that notion of sexual identity. But I repented of denying the existence of sexual orientation because denying it was deeply confusing to people struggling with same-sex attraction. Biblical Christians properly resist any suggestion that our will can be totally separated from sexual desire, but we really do understand that the will is not a sufficient explanation for a pattern of sexual attraction. Put simply, most people experiencing a same-sex attraction tell of discovering it within themselves at a very early age, certainly within early puberty. As they experience it, a sexual attraction or interest simply “happens,” and they come to know it.

Given the depth of the Bible’s teachings on sin and this fallen world, this should not surprise us. In some sense, each of us finds within ourselves a pattern of desires — sexual and otherwise — we did not ask for, but for which we are then and now fully responsible. When it comes to a same-sex attraction, the orientation is sinful because it is defined by an improper object — someone of the same sex. Of course, those of us whose sexual orientation is directed toward the opposite sex are also sinners, but the sexual orientation is not itself sinful.

With this in mind, the concept of sexual orientation looms as very important, because it helps to identify the effects of the Fall and the depth of sin. Each of us, regardless of our sexual orientation, has a sin orientation that is, at least in part, inexplicable to us (as the Apostle Paul relates concerning his own struggle in Romans chapter 7). 

The concept of sexual orientation is not only helpful, it is in some sense essential. Even those who argue against its existence have to describe and affirm something tantamount to it. There is a pattern of sexual interest and attraction that is discovered in early adolescence. It is not something that is, in itself, freely chosen. That does not mean that the individual is not completely responsible before God for how that orientation is then handled.

In our sinfulness, we tend to feed our sinful desires and shape our lives around them. When it comes to sexual orientation, the secular world increasingly says that any orientation is as good as another and is to be celebrated by all. That is directly contrary to the Word of God.

At the same time, our biblically-informed understanding of sexual orientation will chasten us from having any confidence that there is any rescue from same-sex attraction to be found in any secular approach, therapy, or treatment. Christians know that the only remedy for sin is the atonement of Christ and the gift of salvation. The only hopeful answer to sin, in any form, is the Gospel of Christ. Understanding the complexity of sexual orientation and sexual sin should make us all cling to the Gospel ever more closely, and to the authority and truthfulness of the Bible ever more faithfully.

Finally, I decided to repost an article I wrote back on July 19, 2011, when some of the same issues arose in the midst of the 2012 presidential election. I do so in the hope of helping us all to think through these urgent issues. Let’s work together to think more faithfully, love more faithfully, and minister more faithfully in the name of Christ.

Each U.S. presidential election cycle brings its own set of unexpected issues, and the 2012 race already offers one topic of controversy that truly sets it apart — a debate over forms of therapy that attempt to change an individual’s sexual orientation.

Known as reparative therapy or sexual orientation conversion therapy, these approaches seek to assist individuals in changing their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. The cultural and political debate over reparative therapy emerged when a clinic run by Marcus Bachmann, husband of Republican candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, was accused of offering treatment and counseling intended to change sexual orientation.

Virtually all of the secular professions that deal with sexual orientation are stalwartly opposed to reparative therapy, or to any attempt to change one’s pattern of sexual attraction. Indeed, these groups hold to an inflexible ideology that insists that there is absolutely nothing wrong with homosexuality. These groups include, for example, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of Social Workers, among many others.

In 2008, a number of these groups released a statement on sexual orientation and youth that began with the stated premise that “both heterosexuality and homosexuality are normal expressions of human sexuality.” Thus, the groups argue that any attempt to change an individual’s sexual orientation is likely to be harmful. The “Just the Facts Coalition” also included groups such as the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. A statement adopted in 2000 by the American Psychiatric Association declares that the APA “opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as reparative or conversion therapy which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that the patient should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation.”

This controversy will inevitably demonstrate the basic worldview divide that separates the secular therapeutic community and evangelical Christians. The politicians, the mental health industry, and the media will have their own debate on the matter, but Christians now face the urgent challenge of thinking about these issues in a way that is fully biblical and theological — and thus faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

First, we face the fact that the Bible clearly, repeatedly, consistently, and comprehensively reveals the sinfulness of all homosexual behaviors. This truth is set within the larger context of the Bible’s revelation concerning the Creator’s plan and purpose for human sexuality — a context that is centered in the marital union of a man and a woman as the exclusive arena for human sexual activity. This flies in the face of the contemporary demand for the full normalization of homosexuality. As the joint statement of the “Just the Facts Coalition” declares, “both heterosexuality and homosexuality are normal expressions of human sexuality.”

The normalization of homosexuality simply cannot be accepted by anyone committed to biblical Christianity. The new secular orthodoxy demands that Christians abandon the clear teachings of Scripture, and Christians must understand that the sinfulness of all homosexual behaviors is not only a matter of biblical authority, but also of the Gospel. To deny that sin is sin is to deny our need for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Christians cannot accept any teaching that minimizes sin, for it is the knowledge of our sin that points us to our need for atonement, salvation, and the forgiveness of that sin through the cross of Jesus Christ.

Second, we must recognize that every human being is a sinner and that every sinner’s pattern of sexual attraction falls short of the glory of God. There is no sinner of physical maturity who will be able to say that he or she has never had a sinful thought related to sex or sexuality. Taking the Bible’s teachings about sin and sexuality with full force, we understand that every sinful human being is in need of redemption, and that includes the redemption of our sexual selves.

Actually, the Bible speaks rather directly to the sinfulness of the homosexual orientation — defined as a pattern of sexual attraction to a person of the same sex. In Romans 1:24-27, Paul writes of “the lusts of their hearts to impurity,” of “dishonorable passions,” of women who “exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature,” and of men who “gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” A close look at this passage reveals that Paul identifies the sinful sexual passion as a major concern — not just the behavior.

At this point, the chasm between the biblical and secular worldview looms ever larger. The modern secular consensus is that an individual’s pattern of sexual attraction, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is just a given and is to be considered normal. More than that, the secular view demands that this pattern of sexual orientation be accepted as integral to an individual’s identity. According to the secular consensus, any effort to change an individual’s sexual orientation is essentially wrong and harmful. The contemporary therapeutic worldview is virtually unanimous in this verdict, but nothing could be more directly at odds with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The New Testament reveals that a homosexual sexual orientation, whatever its shape or causation, is essentially wrong, contrary to the Creator’s purpose, and deeply sinful. Everyone, whatever his or her sexual orientation, is a sinner in need of redemption. Every sinner who comes by faith to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved knows the need for the redemption of our bodies — including our sexual selves. But those whose sexual orientation is homosexual face the fact that they also need a fundamental reordering of their sexual attractions. About this, the Bible is clear. At this point, once again, the essential contradiction between the Christian worldview and the modern secular worldview is clear.

Third, Christians understand that sinners are simultaneously completely responsible for their sin and completely unable to redeem themselves from their sin. Sinners may improve themselves morally, but they cannot mitigate to any degree their need for redemption. Indeed, moralism is a false gospel that suggests that we can please God by moral improvement. As Isaiah warns, the only righteousness of which we are capable amounts to “filthy rags.” [Isaiah 64:6] The law reveals what is good for us and what is sinful, but the law is powerless to save us. [Romans 8:3]

The law of God reveals our sin, and our sin reveals our need for a Savior. Paul’s own testimony about the law, his knowledge of his own sin, and the redemption that was his in Christ is clear when he writes to the Romans: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” [Romans 7:24-25] This is every Christian’s testimony.

Thus, we recognize that, without redemption, there is no eternal hope for the sinner. Even in terms of moral improvement in this earthly life, the non-Christian lacks union with Christ, the indwelling Holy Spirit, and the means of grace that alone can conform the believer to the image of Christ. Thus, for the non-Christian, the most that can be hoped for is a responsible determination to cease practicing an immoral behavior. The Bible holds no hope for the sinner’s ability to change his or her heart.

In other words, a biblical Christian will have no fundamental confidence in any secular therapy’s ability to change a sinner’s fundamental disposition and heart, and this includes every aspect of the sinner’s life, including sexuality.

This is where the Gospel-centeredness of the Christian worldview points us to the cross of Christ and to the sinner’s fundamental need for redemption, not mere moral improvement. The Bible offers no hope for any human ability to change our sinful desires. As the modern secular worldview generally acknowledges, the alcoholic who stops drinking remains an alcoholic. The secular world affirms that this is so. The Bible explains why it is so.

Fourth, the Christian cannot accept any argument that denies what the Bible reveals about the sanctification of believers — including the sanctification of our sexuality. The believer in the Lord Jesus Christ receives the forgiveness of sins, the gift of eternal life, and the righteousness of Christ imputed by faith. But the redeemed Christian is also united with Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and given means of grace through, for example, the preaching of the Word of God. The Bible reveals that God conforms believers to the image of Christ, doing that work within the human heart that the sinful human himself or herself cannot perform. The Bible reveals that believers are to grow into Christlikeness, knowing that this is a progressive process that will be completed only with our eventual glorification at the end of the age. In this life, we know a process of growing more holy, more sanctified, and more obedient to Christ. In the life to come, we will know perfection as Christ glorifies his Church.

This means that Christians cannot accept any argument that suggests that a fundamental reorientation of the believer’s desires in a way that increasingly pleases God and is increasingly obedient to Christ is impossible. To the contrary, we must argue that this process is exactly what the Christian life is to demonstrate. As Paul writes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” [2 Corinthians 5:17]

The Bible is also honest about the struggle to overcome sin and sinful desires. Paul writes about this in Romans 7, but the exhortations of the entire New Testament also make this clear. Christians with same-sex sexual desires must know that these desires are sinful. Thus, faithful Christians who struggle with these desires must know that God both desires and commands that they desire what He wills for them to desire. All Christians struggle with their own pattern of sinful desires, sexual and otherwise. Our responsibility as Christians is to be obedient to Christ, knowing that only He can save us from ourselves.

Christians cannot avoid the debate over reparative therapy, nor can we enter the debate on secular terms. We must bring to this conversation everything we know from God’s Word about our sin and God’s provision for sinners in Christ. We will hold no hope for any sinner’s ability to change his or her own heart, and we will hold little hope for any secular therapy to offer more than marginal improvement in a sinner’s life.

At the same time, we gladly point all sinners to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, knowing that all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. [Romans 10:13] We hold full confidence in the power of the Gospel and of the reign of Christ within the life of the believer. We know that something as deeply entrenched as a pattern of sexual attraction is not easily changed, but we know that with Christ all things are possible.

And, even as Christians know that believers among us struggle to bring their sexual desires into obedience to Christ, this is not something true only of those whose desires have been homosexual. It is true of all Christians. We will know that those believers who are struggling to overcome homosexual desires have a special struggle — one that requires the full conviction and support of the body of Christ. We will see the glory of God in the growing obedience of Christ’s redeemed people. And, along with the Apostle Paul and all the redeemed, we will await the glory that is yet to be revealed to us.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler

For more information on Southern Seminary, visit SBTS.edu and for more information on Boyce College, visit BoyceCollege.com.

Documentation:

Just the Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth: A Primer for Principals, Educators, and School Personnel, (Just the Facts Coalition/American Psychological Association, 2008). [Full document available here as a PDF file.]

Transcript: The Briefing 11-12-14

The Briefing

 

November 12, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, November 12, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Failure of pollsters to predict 2014 elections result of voters not voting

Well more than a week after last week’s midterm elections, one thing has become abundantly clear and before we move on from the election this needs to be noted. One big group lost hugely in terms of the election last Tuesday; I’m not talking about either party, I’m talking about a specific group of researchers, of specialist and commentators – the pollsters. As Reid Epstein of the Wall Street Journal reports,

“If the magnitude of the Republican wave in Tuesday’s election was a surprise to many people, it was in part because it was a surprise to the people paid to predict it—the pollsters.”

He goes on to say,

“In state after state, pre-election polls showed Democratic candidates remaining competitive in contests where they ultimately were trounced.”

The situation is actually even worse than that introductory paragraph in the Wall Street Journal story may indicate because given the space of more than a week after the election there has now been more time to go back and look at the pre-election polls. Some of them very expensive, some of them supposedly very authoritative, and then compare them to the eventual reality – they were off, they were off by a huge margin.

And that raises a very crucial issue, one that should inform every intelligent voter. One of the things we have to keep in mind is the fact that the polls are not merely reflective of the political environment – they also have an influence on that very same environment. Study after study has demonstrated that polls have a great deal to do with voter turnout. The fact that these polls often have a partisan aspect is reflected in the fact that when many the pollsters are introduced in the mainstream media, they are identified either as a Republican or a Democratic pollster. A closer look at the modern political equation of election campaigning indicates that you have the media with their polls, you have independent political organizations with their polls, you also have every major campaign with a paid set of pollsters –  sometimes the lead pollster inside the campaign – usually there are shadow pollsters that are also used to aggregate information. The end result of all this is supposed to be more clarity about the electorate, about what the electorate wants, about where the electorate is headed. But the evidence of last Tuesday’s election comes down to the fact that the evidence sometimes is fundamentally wrong.

The pollsters didn’t just miss much of what took place last Tuesday; they missed it by a mile. Looking back on their mistakes and miscues, many pollsters are saying the problem is that the American people are becoming less predictable – not so much in terms of how they will vote but –  this is crucial – whether they will vote. It turns out that the pollsters may mainly have been off, not in terms of predicting how people would vote one way or the other, for one candidate or the other, but whether they would vote at all.

That gets back to another issue that Christians understand. Sometimes we are prone, as fallen, infallible, sinful, human beings to lie to others and to ourselves about our intentions – even the intention to vote. In America where there’s a very high premium put on citizenship and the exercise of that citizenship, it’s embarrassing for someone to tell a pollster or survey taker, ‘no I don’t actually intend to vote.’ Therefore one of the interesting things, and just see Genesis 3 lurking in the background of this, one of the interesting things about modern polling is that one of the major concerns of pollsters is determining just what percentage of people are most likely to lie to them.

There’s another very important aspect of this more worldview perspective, assumptions always play a major role. The assumptions that go into the making of the poll and the taking of the poll have a great deal to do with what comes out as the eventual result. And of course those who hear the poll, at least the numbers reported, whether in the media or otherwise, generally are very unfamiliar with the assumptions that went into the poll. And often they have very little knowledge of exactly what questions were even asked. What they are told is that the assimilation and analysis of the poll data indicates that this percentage of persons is likely to do this, the other percentage to do something else.

But there is another very important perspective on this that Christians should pay heed to and that comes down to this: a frightening percentage of Americans, as it turns out, don’t actually know how they’re going to vote until they vote. Given so much that we’ve talked about in terms of the elections, given the vast worldview divide, given the increasing ideological separation of the candidates and the parties, one would tend to think that anyone with strong convictions of any form would have a very good idea, early on in a political context, how one’s vote is likely to be exercised. It tells us something important that a considerable percentage of Americans actually don’t know how they’re going to vote until they actually do vote. That also tells us something else, they’re not voting on the issues, they’re not voting on worldview, they’re not voting on ideology, they’re voting on something else; perhaps something that is an emotional tie or a lack of an emotional tie to a candidate. Perhaps they just like the way one looks or the way one sounds. In any event, a good number of people don’t know how they’re going to vote until they do vote and that also leads to the fact that pollsters are taking what can only be described as a fairly educated guess at best as to who will vote and those voters will vote. Well, come the next election cycle we’ll all probably be very interested to hear the polling data, especially as a Presidential election approaches. But just keep in mind that date November 4, 2014 when almost all the pollsters got it wrong – really wrong.

2) Disastrous legacy of communism example of lasting importance of worldview on civilization

On Monday we talked about Sunday’s 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yesterday’s edition of the New York Times had an incredibly important and insightful article by David Brooks, a major opinion columnist for that newspaper. His piece was entitled, “The Legacy of Fear” and what it deals with is the legacy of communism. And as it turns out, he offers some data and analysis that most of us probably have not seen before. He writes this,

“Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the biggest surprise is how badly most of the post-communist nations have done since. There was a general expectation back then that most of these countries would step out from tyranny and rejoin the European club of prosperous nations. Most of us [he says] did not appreciate the corrosive power of distrust, and how long it would take to heal the mental scars caused by it.”

Now one of our major concerns on The Briefing is the importance of worldview and the legacy – the lasting impact of worldview thinking not only on individuals but upon societies and civilizations. This article by David Brooks makes that abundantly clear and fairly frighteningly so.

He quotes Branko Milanovic, an economist at the City University of New York who has measured the wreckage in a recent essay published at his website Global Inequality. According to Brooks he looked at the growth rates of post-communist countries and broke them down into four groups. The fourth group is at the very bottom of the list, these are those nations described as ‘basket-case’ nations by Brooks. He says they haven’t even recovered the level of real income they had in 1990. These failed nations include Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia, Serbia, and still others.

The next group, that’s the third group, include those nations that are merely so-called moderate failures – just consider that term a moderate failure. They have per capita economic growth rates under 1.7% a year. They’re nations like Russia and Hungary. They are falling steadily further and further behind the West.

Then finally there are those that are the success stories. These are the very few in the post-communist world. These are those that are actually catching up with the West. These include the nations of Poland, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan; and yet David Brooks notes they have something that generally makes the difference. That’s at least the case in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and that is that they have oil or something else valuable in the ground they are digging out. That’s to say they’re not really modern diverse technological economies, they are economy still based upon selling something – generally like a mineral. But to give them credit, they at least are economically keeping up with the rest of the West. That’s just three countries in the post-communist world: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and finally Poland. But Poland as it turns out makes an emphatically important point.

Considering the failure of so many these countries in the post-communist world David Brooks asked the question ‘why?’ He says the first issue could very well be leadership. Good leaders make good decisions, bad leaders made bad decisions and those decisions had legacies. Next he says there’s the issue of institutions. Most of the post-communist world simply lacked virtually all the institutions that make for economic growth: creativity, entrepreneurship, and all the rest in the West. And lacking those institutions, it’s taken a generation and more than a generation for some of these nations even to get started in trying to catch up; much less keep up.

But from a worldview perspective it is the last issue that David Brooks considers that should certainly have our attention. He writes this,

“Finally, and most important, there is the level of values. A nation’s economy is nestled in its moral ecology. Economic performance is tied to history, culture and psychology.”

Now that’s a point we’ve made over and over again. Many Christians are indeed unaware of the fact that the science of economics – that discipline of thought – began in a concern for morality. As a matter fact Adam Smith, the very founder of modern economics, was concerned with a theory of moral sentiments. He wanted to understand why economic behavior demonstrated a basic moral worldview and why different moral worldviews would lead to different forms of economic behavior. As David Brooks considers this rather shocking news (shocking I think to most of us) that the post-communist world has sphered so poorly. He comes back to say the first thing we learn from this is that worldview really does have consequences. He talks about the enduring legacy of communism that spread so much distrust, horrifying ideology, and disastrous theory into the world. The nations that were shaped by a generation and more of communism, especially those nations that since the end of the second World War to 1990 suffered under direct Soviet communist oppression, they basically were so philosophically warped, their worldview was so pernicious that even now these nations are not thriving – some of them not even coming close to thriving.

But David Brooks gets to the moral issue and he says that really is a huge difference. He points to Poland as the outlier, as I said earlier, why would Poland be doing so well? He writes,

“Poland…had been invaded throughout its history, yielding a pragmatic, survivor ethos.”

A very deep moral strain, a deep strain of courage and conviction within the Polish people that have led them to survive all kinds of invasions and hardships and deprivations – even genocides – in the past. So now the Polish people are those that can count themselves and their nation among one of the very few success stories in the post-communist world. But as David Brooks says, this isn’t merely about economics, it’s never merely about economics, it’s about morality and it’s about worldview. Ideas always matter; bad ideas matter for a frighteningly long time.

3) Reproductive technology permits hugely problematic separation of sex and reproduction 

Finally in terms of the vast worldview and moral revolution we are currently experiencing in the West, here comes a headline from one of Britain’s major newspapers The Telegraph that should absolutely shock us. But upon reflection it may not shock us as much as previously it would have. Here’s the headline: “Sex will soon be just for fun not babies, says father of the Pill.” The man who is quoted here is Carl Djerassi, one of the major developers of the oral contraceptive now commonly known as the pill. He now argues, over a generation after the development of the oral contraceptive that,

“Sex could become purely recreational by 2050 with large numbers of babies in the Western world born through IVF.”

Djerassi told the Telegraph he expects that the pill will become obsolete, by the way, his own invention he says will become obsolete because men and women will choose to freeze their eggs and sperm when young before being sterilized. Now upon first reading this kind of new story sounds like something out of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley Brave New World; this doesn’t sound plausible. But then again just think of some of the headlines that are not only about the future but about the present that we’ve consider just in recent days and weeks.

One of the things we noted is that there are now Silicon Valley companies that are paying for egg freezing as a benefit to their female employees, a rather controversial move. But that’s not science fiction, that’s an actual personnel change taking place in the year 2014 in the state of California. A policy innovation that is expected by many to spread far beyond Silicon Valley throughout the country, meaning that the society at large now values women in the workplace far more than women in the home – especially women who are at home as mothers.

Djerassi says that the future of sex and reproduction is that the two will be completely severed. Speaking of the future he says,

“For them the separation between sex and reproduction will be 100 percent.”

He speaks of the rise of a so-called ‘mañana generation’ in which you have frozen reproductive cells merely waiting for some kind of future combination through in vitro fertilization. Now one of the things that even Professor Djerassi notes is that these technologies, though very present in our own time, are not yet perfected to the degree he expects they will be by the middle of this century. He says that IVF and the kinds of advanced reproductive technologies that many people are using now will become not just more widespread but absolutely standardized by the time we reach the midpoint of the 21st century. If some individuals were writing this kind of prognostication they can be written off as someone who has no business speaking to the issue or is some kind of ideological crank.

But Carl Djerassi can’t be dismissed so easily. He is after all the father of the Pill and he’s been at the forefront of reproductive technologies for the last four decades. Right now in vitro fertilization is primarily used, he says, by women who have reproductive issues, some kind of reproductive problem. He says that’s going to shift and it’s going to shift very quickly – to the fact that

“The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy,”

Speaking of the future he says that young people will simply freeze their reproductive cells and put them on hold – that’s the mañana generation – and then they will have themselves sterilized that will obviate any need for contraception or birth control because the only way to have a baby in the future is going to be by the intentional use of advanced reproductive technologies – in particular IVF.

Christians looking at this news story need to understand something that is of basic and fundamental importance. One of the great problems of our age is the separation of sex and reproduction. This is something that our Creator did not intend to be separated as they are our in our modern and postmodern culture. And what we now have is a Wild Wild West of reproductive technologies in which you have sex and reproduction being ever further separated one from the other. The separation of sex from reproduction is what has led to widespread sexual promiscuity, it is what has undermined more than anything else marriage as the basic institution respected as the union of a man and a woman – at the very heart of that institution is the monogamous union of a man and a woman. And one of the most damaging effects of the contraceptive revolution is that it has facilitated so much extramarital and non-marital sex. Then add to that the devaluation of human life by the contraceptive mentality.

The contraceptive mentality, not only the pill but the availability of other forms of birth control and ultimately abortion itself, has led to the situation that every pregnancy is now as one medical ethicist describes it, ‘a tentative pregnancy.’ The widespread phenomena right now, growing in virtually every Western culture, of same-sex couples having children. And just notice a matter fact the redefinition that is required of ‘having children’ is entirely dependent upon these advanced reproductive technologies; left on their own, there is no way for a same-sex couple to have a child. It requires the very kind of donor gametes and advanced reproductive technologies that Dr. Djerassi says will become absolutely commonplace for all couples, indeed for all people, in the future.

So the sexual revolution as we know it here in 2014 could not have happened without the technology of the Pill and these advanced reproductive technologies and now comes the very father of the Pill – speaking in one of the most respected newspapers in London – saying, ‘well, just wait for the future because in the very near term future sex and reproduction are not merely going to be separated as they are now,’ they’re going to be, as he said, 100% separated.

Christians looking at this kind of story must see two things and see them clearly. In the first place this is the world our children will inherit; this is the new picture of the moral norm that the generation now rising is going to understand as what the society takes for granted. The second thing we need to understand is this, Christians may never appear as more of the moral minority we are likely to be, more of the cognitive doctrinal convictional minority that Christians are going to be called to be in this coming generation, than when we consider the fact that we may be the last people on earth who know that sex and reproduction are not to be fundamentally separated. At the end of the day it may turn out that that may be one of the most counterrevolutionary subversive ideas against the modern regime that is even now taking shape around us.

A footnote to that story, The Economist, again one of the most influential magazines in the world, has come out with a new story this past week indicating that Britain, for example, is having to do a great deal of advertising to which young men trying to get more donor reproductive cells for use in in vitro fertilization clinics. As The Economist writes,

“The number of single British women [note that’s single British women] seeking sperm rose by 55% between 2000 and 2012, which was also the first year in which more women over 45 used donor eggs than used their own.

Now we can’t pass over that paragraph, it is so morally explosive. Here you have The Economist telling us that there’s been a 55% increase in single British women seeking this kind of reproductive assistance between 2000 and 2012. Meaning in that 12 year period there’s been a 55% increase in single women in Britain who intend to have a baby without a husband of any kind, without a man involved in the situation at all except as a cell donor. And then you have what might be even more shocking, the fact that in the year 2012 Britain became a nation in which more women over age 45 used donor eggs rather than their own.

There’s another very interesting aspect of the story. It turns out the whole purpose of the story is this, to make very clear that Britain faces a crisis in which there are more women now seeking to become mothers without men than there are men willing to help women in the process. Much of what is in this article in The Economist, one of the worlds most respected magazines, is just going have to be left unsaid. But there’s a final paragraph that should actually have our attention. It tells us that one nation in the advanced West has become a net exporter of these kind of reproductive cells, that’s the nation of Denmark.

The Danish government now keeps track of exports of beer, Lego, and let’s just says reproductive cells in order to trace its economic growth and development. Oh, and as you look to the future just consider Denmark. According to The Economist Denmark’s population would be shrinking if not for IVF babies. With that in mind, perhaps Dr. Djerassi is off, but off because he thinks that change will come later rather than sooner.

Finally while considering the challenges that we all face, let’s just consider for a moment what Christian parents face as a challenge in dealing with these issues with their own children. One of the problems we see in the society around us is that our own children are becoming sexualized so early; being forced to receive information, especially from the public school culture and the media around us in so many so-called experts, trying to reach our children and to reach them around us. But one of the great challenges facing Christian parents these days is how and when to talk to their own children about these issues. Articles like these we’ve consider today may present interesting and somewhat difficult and challenging conversations for Christian parents and their own children; teenagers and young people. But the articles point to something even greater than that and that is the responsibility of the Christian Church, of Christian leaders, and of Christian parents to address these issues. Because if our children, as they look to the future, are not deeply committed to living lives that are explicitly based upon biblical authority, the sovereignty of God, the gospel of Christ and the totality of the claim that is made upon us, a claim that reaches every aspect of our lives – including, as the Bible makes clear – very especially our sexual lives and our reproductive lives, then they are not only going to be ill-equipped to deal with this coming future. They are also going to be in a situation in which they will be extremely vulnerable to the wisdom of the world rather than the wisdom of Christ. It’s high time that Christians learn to talk about these things in the appropriate, biblical, and modest way – but talk about them we must, because if we don’t, we too will be listed among the unfaithful.

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-12-14

1) Failure of pollsters to predict 2014 elections result of voters not voting

Pollsters Missed Their Mark in Many States, Wall Street Journal (Reid J. Epstein)

2) Disastrous legacy of communism example of lasting importance of worldview on civilization

The Legacy of Fear, New York Times (David Brooks)

3) Reproductive technology permits hugely problematic separation of sex and reproduction 

Sex will soon be just for fun not babies, says father of the Pill, Telegraph, (Sarah Knapton)

Nice to gamete you, The Economist

Transcript: The Briefing 11-11-14

The Briefing

 

November 11, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, November 11, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss hopes for extinction of religion through education of children

Back in 2013 cosmologist Lawrence Krauss made headlines by suggesting that the teaching of creationism in the public schools was tantamount to child abuse; all be it, he said, a rather mild form of child abuse. Now he’s back in the headlines again as Salon.com reports; he is suggesting that religion could be largely gone in the span of just a single generation.

Now the reason this is noteworthy is because this kind of statement has of course been made before, most classically by the late Karl Marx who back in 19th century suggested that religious faith in general, and Christianity specifically, was doomed to disappear in short order in the acids of modernity. But now you have Lawrence Krauss, who teaches at Arizona State University, suggesting that in a generation – even the living generation of young people – religious faith may disappear. He states it, of course, as a rather hopeful thing from his worldview. He is the co-creator with the atheist Richard Dawkins of the program known as “The Unbelievers” and he’s been in the headlines on this kind of issue before. But the reason this should have special interest of Christians, in terms of this statement, is because he’s actually onto something. Perhaps he’s on to more than he actually himself understands.

As I said earlier this year, the theoretical physicist teamed up with Richard Dawkins to create the movie documentary known as “The Unbelievers.” And most recently in speaking about that, he spoke about the strategy he said,

“What we need to do is present comparative religion as a bunch of interesting historical anecdotes, and show the silly reasons why they did what they did,”

So, it’s a very clear strategy that’s at work here: it’s to attempt to ridicule religion in general, and theism in particular, by suggesting the religious practices and beliefs are silly and thus to be dispensed with by modern sophisticated people. But his main interest isn’t people in general, but very young people specifically.

When Krauss was challenged by people who say:

“Well, religion has been around since the dawn of man. You’ll never change that,”

He responded by saying,

“This issue of gay marriage, it is going to go away, because if you’re a child, a 13-year-old, they can’t understand what the issue is. It’s gone. One generation is all it takes”

Speaking about the disappearance of religion (remember that’s what he hopes will happen), he continued his comment by saying,

“Change is always one generation away. So if we can plant the seeds of doubt in our children, religion will go away in a generation, or at least largely go away. And that’s what I think we have an obligation to do.”

Now, again from a Christian worldview perspective, there are several elements to the argument there made by Lawrence Krauss that should have our attention. In the first place, many of us can remember Christian authorities – preachers, teachers, youth leaders, and others – who have reminded us throughout the generations that Christianity is just one generation away from disappearance, reminding us of the imperative of evangelism. But what is also in the background of this is that magic age that Lawrence Krauss is here cited: the age 13.

That should have our attention as well because when young people reach those ages of adolescence, especially the early years of adolescence, they become capable of critical thinking. And it’s at that particular intellectual juncture that Christians often fail our own young people. We fail them in one particularly strategic way, we often fail to give them the kind of intellectual ammunition they need to continuous faithful Christians as they move into adolescence. At that stage of life they’re facing complex questions for the first time and in a very new way. Cognitive psychiatrist point to these years of early adolescence as the development of analytical complex thinking; this is when for the first time a young person is not only able to think, but able to think about thinking and becomes very much aware of the fact that there are people who think otherwise and must have reasons for those very thoughts. The strategy outlined by Lawrence Krauss is very clear, if secularist can get to 13-year-olds and convince them that religious belief is silly. Then, as he said, religious faith will simply disappear in the span of one generation.

The next thing we need to note is the example he gives for intellectual change. And it’s the issue we’ve had to come back to again and again and that’s the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization in particular of same-sex marriage. Pointing to the issue, Lawrence Krauss said, ‘Look, just a generation ago it was unthinkable. Now when you talk to 13-year-olds – most 13-year-olds – they say what’s the issue? They simply do not understand it as an important issue.’ Now that may be something of an overstatement but he is onto something and we know he is. Intelligent Christians need to understand that here is someone who hopes the religious faith will disappear; here you have a very keen thinking unbeliever who understands what every Christian parent may not, what many Christian churches evidently do not, and that is that if we are not giving intellectual ammunition for the Christian faith, if we are not moving from mere assertions to moving to arguments with their own young people, we shouldn’t be surprised that they fall prey to exactly what Lawrence Krauss is talking about here. We shouldn’t be surprised if we lose our own young people if we do not give them arguments that go beyond merely ‘believe as we believe.’

Young people in this crucial period of life of early adolescence all the way through young adulthood need the continual support and encouragement of the church. One of the worst things we can possibly do is fail to teach our young people the reasons for Christian belief and the ground them in Scripture and the totality of the Christian worldview. In this sense, every Christian pastor, every youth minister, every parent, needs to be an apologist – ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us. And when the parent doesn’t have a ready-made answer, the next step is to go find someone who has an answer and to draw from the rich resources of the Christian tradition over 2,000 years of intelligent reflection upon the Christian faith.

Furthermore, we need to understand that our young people at these very important ages are headed into a period of sustained and in evitable intellectual combat. There are evangelists for any number of ideologies and worldviews out there and if we do not direct a very serious approach to the Christian faith, to our own children, and if they do not see it in us and understand it from us, we should not be surprised that they fall away.

Now as for Lawrence Krauss’s prediction that religion could be gone in a single generation, well it is Christ himself who said that the gates of hell will not prevail against his church. But that’s no assurance that the faith will not disappear where we are, it’s no assurance that Christian faith will not disappear in our generation, and our culture. And in this sense, this word that comes from Lawrence Krauss about his confidence of the disappearance of Christianity should come as bracing warning to every intelligent Christian. He’s onto more than he knows here. The question is do we understand it as well as he does?

2) Secular sex educators in Great Britain argue necessary to accept sexual activity of youth

Next, shifting to age 13 in a very different kind of context. The Telegraph, a major British newspaper, is reporting that teachers in Great Britain are being instructed in terms of that nation’s new sex education program that sex at age 13 “is a normal part of growing up.”

Graeme Paton, education editor The Telegraph, one of Britain’s most authoritative newspaper’s, writes,

“Schools are being told that children should be able to have consensual sex at the age of 13 as part of government-backed guidance,”

That came out just last week,

“The guidelines – which can be used as part of sex education lessons – say that having sexual relationships when children reach their teens represents a ‘safe and healthy’ part of growing up.”

As Paton explains, this new sex education curriculum has been produced by a national nonprofit as part of a plan endorsed by Britain’s Department for education – supposedly “to improve standards of advice given to pupils.”

In the most bizarre aspect of this new sex education curriculum, a traffic light tool – that’s what is called – is being used that’ll list green, amber, and red behaviors that teachers and other professionals should spot among school age children. In other words, some things are clearly not to happen, some things are okay in some context, and others are completely okay.

In one of the most frightening and offensive paragraphs I’ve read in any major newspaper in a very long time, Graeme Paton writes – with language I’m going to have to clean up for the audience of The Briefing –

“For 13- to 17-year-olds, normal behaviour includes taking an interest in pornography, having sexually explicit conversations, using the internet to chat online and consenting to …[sexual behavior]”

According to this new curriculum, choosing not to be sexually active is a green behavior – in other words, it’s just fine – but choosing to be sexually active in a consensual relationship, that’s also within the green zone.

There are at least some members of the British government and leadership in that nation that are not taking this new sex education curriculum lightly; they’re not taking it sitting down. Graham Stuart, the conservative member of Parliament for Beverly and Holderness, said that the guide sends out the wrong message and it sends out a message that is actually harmful and dangerous to young people colluding “with something we know is damaging to young people.” Similarly, Sarah Carter, identified as trustee of Britain’s Family Education Trust, told the committee of Parliament that the guidance in this new official sex education curriculum is actually illegal because Britain’s legal age of consent is 16 and the sex education curriculum puts sexual activity – consenting sexual activity – amongst those who were 13 and 14 and 15 within that green zone of acceptable and normal sexual behavior for young teenagers.

Speaking for the new curriculum, Joe Haman, identified as chief executive of the PSHE Association – that is a government agency connected with the personal social health and economic education of young people – said that even though many people believe that teenagers that age should not be engaged in active sexual lives, they said, “we got to deal with children’s realities.”

This news report coming from Britain is interesting to us precisely because it identifies the very same age as Lawrence Krauss did concerning the disappearance of religion. The focal age of 13; that crucial year of early adolescence. But it also points to the fact that people, in particular educators, on both sides of the Atlantic are arguing that young people –  very young people –  simply have to be understood to be sexually active and that sex education should never be addressed to trying to prevent that sexual activity, but rather to trying to channel it in more healthy and responsible directions. But there’s the real worldview clash – the clash between those who understand that there are biblical guidelines for sexual morality that are centered in marriage, and those who believe that anything outside of marriage at virtually any age simply has to be channeled in more responsible and healthy directions. That’s the great lie of ‘safe sex’ that ignores the very clear reality that sex severed from marriage can never be safe – not only in terms of physical terms, but ultimately in personal and spiritual terms as well.

But the last observation on that story is this; they’re out for the minds of our children. The secularists are out for the minds of our children; the evolutionary evangelists like Lawrence Krauss are out for the minds of our children. And the radical sex educators, they’re out for the minds of our children as well. It’s not just that they want to deal with what they identify as children’s realities – they profoundly want to shape that reality. This latest evidence coming from Great Britain is evidence enough for that.

3) Explosive growth of Chinese Christianity persists despite Communist persecution

Next, as President Obama’s about to embark on a major presidential visit to Asia, and in particular the nation of China, several the most authoritative news organizations in the world are out with a very interesting angle on the story. And that is the incredible story of Christianity in China.

First of all, last week’s edition of the Economist, another major British media outlet suggest that there are now “Cracks in the Atheist Edifice of Communist China.” As the magazine reports, the immediate story is a crackdown on Christianity in several provinces within the communist state. In one of them, Wenzhou, there is now a crackdown that has included the destruction of more than 230 structures that had been dedicated Christian worship. In particular, the destruction of a massive facility that had been known as China’s Protestant cathedral. Local officials said they were tearing it down because it violated building codes, and yet as the Economist and also the Financial Times of London have reported, documents leaked to the Western press havae indicated that the orders for this destruction represented the persecution of Christianity that came from the very top of the Communist Party in that nation.

But if as the immediate story, the Economist makes clear the longer-range story is not the eradication of Christianity in China, but the radical growth of Christianity that may now have so concerned communist authorities that led to the crackdown in Wenzhou, and it may be leading to crackdowns elsewhere. But as the Economist makes clear, the big story is the explosive growth of Christianity over against all the efforts of the Communist state.

As the Economist writes,

“Any shift in official thinking on religion could have big ramifications for the way China handles a host of domestic challenges,”

And yet there’s no way that the Chinese government is now going to be able to avoid dealing directly with the question of Christianity. Officials within China’s Communist Party estimate the number of believing Christians in China as between 23 and 40 million. The Pew Research Center, based upon its own definition, found 58 million Protestant and 9 million Catholics. Others, including Professor Yang Fenggang of Purdue University in Indiana, say the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He estimates there are now 100 million believers in China, and that by the year 2030 there will be 250 million Christians in China. That would make China’s Christian population the largest of any nation in the world.

As the Economist reports,

“Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire.”

By the way, there’s a big change reflected in the Economist here; in the 1980s the explosive growth of Christianity was in the rural regions of China, but now the explosion of Christianity is mainly in metropolitan and urban China. Remember that China has more than 50 cities at present of more than 1 million in population. The Economist, also writing from a secular perspective, points out that the issue of the explosion of Christianity comes also with the rise of much concern for human rights.

And then this blockbuster a statement:

“One civil-rights activist says that, of the 50 most-senior civil-rights lawyers in China, probably half are Christians”

And that points to the fact that the Christian worldview validates human rights – and grounds them in something beyond the mere political recognition of the state, grounding them in the Imago Dei. In the fact that every single human being is made in the image of God. That matters massively, and as this report and others make clear, it now matters to the Chinese Communist Party.

By the way, as the Economist reports, you’ll recall that as Lawrence Krauss of the Christianity may disappear the span of one generation, it turns out that the senior Chinese leaders have become – well a good deal more humble about such claims. Jiang Zemin, then the Communist Party chief back in 2000 said in an official space the religion would probably still be around when concepts of class and the state themselves have vanished. With the story of crackdowns in several provinces, the immediate concern of the Economist; it points out that the long-range trend of Christianity in China is not only growth but facilitated faster and accelerated growth under the very conditions a persecution.

The second major story on the explosion of Christianity in China (and for that matter the growth of Christian influence in that country) comes in the Financial Times, Britain’s major financial newspaper, that ran a front-page story with a picture of a Chinese Jesus represented, and the title: “China’s other Leader.” The Financial Times reports that the growth of Christianity in China is always a point of 100 million Christians – that’s very very similar to the estimates coming from Purdue University – and as the Financial Times reports, that now eclipses the 86.7 million strong membership of the ruling Communist Party. That’s an extremely important fact. Most estimates then now indicate that the number of Christians in China is now greater than the number of members of the Communist Party.

Then comes this very interesting sentence from the Financial Times,

“According to western intellectual tradition, modernity is supposed to bring secularisation but in modern Communist China it has been accompanied by an extraordinary rise of religions formerly banned as “opiates of the masses”.”

Most particularly, Christianity.

The Financial Times also reports that though Catholicism, is growing in China it is Protestant Christianity that is growing by far most rapidly. Then comes this very important sentence coming from Fenggang Yang,

“Chinese officials often cite the experience of Poland, where they believe the Catholic Church helped destroy communism and, although the two situations are not really comparable, the party still sees Christianity as a very serious threat that it needs to suppress.”

While pondering today on The Briefing the persistence of the Christian faith, the endurance of Christian belief, there comes this final paragraph in the report from Britain’s Financial Times, one of the world’s most influential secular newspapers. Here’s the paragraph;

“But even if Beijing does expand its struggle against Christianity to the whole country, the very most it could hope for is to slightly delay the moment when China will become the world’s largest Christian nation. ‘The current suppression and the campaign of demolishing churches, pulling down crosses and throwing people in prison won’t significantly slow the growth in believers,” [that was said by Professor Yang from Purdue, who said] ‘If anything, it actually adds fuel to the fire of Christian revival in China.’”

Before leaving China, another strange anecdote concerning the fate of Christianity there; it turns out the both the Financial Times and Christianity Today report that an increasing percentage of the Bible’s distributed and sold in English in the United States are actually printed in China. As Christianity Today’s Sarah Eekhoff Zylstr reports,

“Chances are good that your favorite Bible was printed in China. The overwhelming majority of Bibles sold at Christian bookstores or Barnes & Noble were printed there… and more publishers are joining in.”

Since 1987 more than 117 million Bibles have been printed by Amity Printing Company in China. Even so, 75% of all of the Bibles printed in China are for export meaning, that only 25% are available for distribution within China. Meaning that even as the Bible you now hold in your hand may well have been printed in China, those living in China might have very little access to the Bible. So perhaps, as you hold your Bible in your hand you should pray for those believers in China who would desperately want also to hold one.

4) Veterans Day an important day to show gratitude to  those who fought for freedom we enjoy

Finally today, November 11, is Veterans Day in the United States. And the reason for that observation on this date is also historically important, for it was on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year 1918 that World War I officially came to an end.

Pres. Wilson declared the first Armistice Day, or Veterans Day, in the year 1918 honoring all whatever warned the American uniform – all veterans not just those who on Memorial Day are commemorated for the fact that they died in action or wearing the uniform. So on Veterans Day a much larger number of Americans are to be honored: all those who are taken on military service on behalf of the United States of America, all those who’ve worn the uniform of any branch of the American military service, all those who are officially listed as veterans of the United States Military Services; the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, and others as well. Armistice Day was limited to honoring those who had worn the American uniform in what was called the Great War (that was World War I), but after World War II all that changed and in 1954 Congress change the name of the holiday from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. The great tragedy is that far too many Americans think of Veterans Day is just another holiday – it’s not that it’s an opportunity for gratitude. And as Christians understand, one of the most important moral imperatives of all is gratitude. Let’s not fail to be grateful this Veterans Day.

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

 

 

 

The Briefing 11-11-14

1) Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss hopes for extinction of religion through education of children

Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss: Religion could be largely gone in a generation, Salon (Sarah Gray)

2) Secular sex educators in Great Britain argue necessary to accept sexual activity of youth

Teachers told: sex at 13 ‘is normal part of growing up’, The Telegraph (Graeme Paton)

Child sexual behaviour traffic light tool, The Telegraph (Staff)

3) Explosive growth of Chinese Christianity persists despite Communist persecution

Cracks in the atheist edifice, The Economist

The rise of Christianity in China, Financial Times (Jamil Anderlini)

Why Your Bible Was Made in China, Christianity Today (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra)

China Bible publisher prints 125 millionth copy, Financial Times (Jamil Anderilini)

4) Veterans Day an important day to show gratitude to  those who fought for freedom we enjoy

 

In Defense of Marriage and the Rule of Law — The Importance of Making the Right Argument

Some arguments just have to be made, and made well. In the case of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the moment for such an argument arrived last week when that court had to rule on appeals over the question of same-sex marriage coming from the four states in its federal jurisdiction, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In each case, Federal District Courts had struck down measures banning same-sex marriage. Now, the question loomed before the three judge panel of the Sixth Circuit.

Until last week, no federal appeals court had ruled against same-sex marriage in the aftermath of the U. S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Windsor decision striking down the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA]. That changed when the panel of the Sixth Circuit, in a 2-1 decision, affirmed the measure limiting marriage to one man and one woman in the four covered states. The decision sent shock waves throughout the nation.

The panel had indicated its impatience with arguments put forth by proponents of same-sex marriage when the case was heard months ago, but the decision came even after the Supreme Court on October 6 had refused to accept an appeal from states that had seen their defense of natural marriage go down to court challenges. The nation was watching for the decision from the Sixth Circuit, and when the decision came down at the end of last week, the ruling instantly became headline news.

But, important as the decision was in itself, the larger event was the opinion released for the majority by Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton. Judge Sutton is known for his eloquent prose and forceful argumentation. The opinion released last Thursday was a blockbuster in terms of forceful argument. Judge Sutton’s opinion is a triumph of constitutional argument and the defense of common sense. It is a masterpiece of logic and a compelling argument for the rule of law.

Even though Judge Sutton knew that the U S. Supreme Court appears to be determined to legalize same-sex marriage, his responsibility, with the other judges on the panel, was to decide the cases in light of the U S. Constitution and the rule of law. Once the decision was made, it was Judge Sutton’s responsibility to write the opinion, and he did.

He began by noting the speed of the moral revolution that has produced same-sex marriage in many U S. states, mostly by judicial action. “From the vantage point of 2014,” he wrote, “it would now seem, the question is not whether American law will allow gay couples to marry; it is when and how that will happen. That would not have seemed likely as recently as a dozen years ago.”

He continued: “For better, for worse, or for more of the same, marriage has long been a social institution defined by relationships between men and women. So long defined, the tradition is measured in millennia, not centuries or decades. So widely shared, the tradition until recently had been adopted by all governments and major religions of the world.”

The first major argument presented by Judge Sutton had to do with the fact that the issue is now being decided in the courts. He clearly rejected the idea that a handful of judges should “make such a vital policy call for the thirty-two million citizens” who reside within the Sixth Circuit. That is a rare and refreshing statement of judicial humility. Furthermore, Judge Sutton cited the decision of the Supreme Court in 1972 to refuse to take a case about same-sex marriage from Minnesota, stating that the issue did not raise “a substantial federal question.” The Supreme Court may revisit that judgment, Judge Sutton noted, but it has not. Until then, he advised, lower courts are to be confined by that decision.

Windsor, Judge Sutton argued, did not address that decision [Baker v. Nelson], and thus the judgment of the Court stands. As he noted, this has not prevented other federal courts from ignoring the precedent. Some of those other courts cited “doctrinal developments” in making their decisions to strike down state provisions limiting marriage to a man and a woman, but Judge Sutton advised that such a reading of “doctrinal developments” apart from a clear Supreme Court ruling would be “a groundbreaking development on its own.”

In making his second major point, Judge Sutton argued that the original intention of the framers of the Constitution’s language would support the claim that the states have the right to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. “Nobody in this case,” he argued, “argues that the people who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment understood it to require the States to change the definition of marriage.”

Furthermore, he argued, the Supreme Court ruled just last year by making the same logical argument. In the case Town of Greece v, Galloway, the Supreme Court held that Greece, New York was acting within constitutional bounds when it began its town council meetings with prayer. The Court ruled that the framers of the Constitution would not have understood themselves to violate the Constitution when they opened their own sessions with prayer, as both the House of Representatives and the Senate do even today. Similarly, Judge Sutton ruled that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly did not see that language as requiring states to legalize same-sex marriage.

Then came the third argument presented by Judge Sutton — and it is cased within one of the most important sentences written by any judge in recent times: “A dose of humility makes us hesitant to condemn as unconstitutionally irrational a view of marriage shared not long ago by every society in the world, shared by most, if not all, of our ancestors, and shared still today by a significant number of the States.”

That is a stunning sentence . . . stunning in the larger sense simply because it is so breathtakingly clear and honest.

In his fourth argument, Judge Sutton argued that the biological basis of natural marriage, based in the complementarian nature of the male-female union, is a natural and lawful concern of the state. The state is within its proper domain in defining and limiting marriage to the uniquely procreative union of a man and a woman. A society has the right, he stated, to establish ground rules for marriage “and most especially a need to create stable family units for the planned and unplanned creation of children.”

Then came this strategic paragraph:

“What we are left with is this: By creating a status (marriage) and by subsidizing it (e.g. with tax-filing privileges and deductions), the States created an incentive for two people who procreate together to stay together for purposes of rearing offspring. This does not convict the States of irrationality, only of awareness of the biological reality that couples of the same sex do not have children in the same way as couples of opposite sexes and that couples of the same sex do not run the risk of unintended offspring. This explanation, still relevant today, suffices to allow the States to retain authority over an issue they have regulated from the beginning.”

In his fifth argument, Judge Sutton asked why marriage is still to be defined in terms of monogamy. “If it is constitutionally irrational to stand by the man-woman definition of marriage, it must be constitutionally irrational to stand by the monogamous definition of marriage,” he stated. He also recorded that in the oral arguments the attorneys arguing for same-sex marriage had been unable to answer his question. They could not, he stated, because the only argument they could advance was moral tradition. They could not cite moral tradition as the authority for monogamy because they argued that moral tradition was not a rational basis for law when it came to limiting marriage to a man-woman union.  Judge Sutton also noted that the Supreme Court has not defined any “fundamental right” for same-sex couples to marry.

Finally, Judge Sutton delivered a major blow for legal sanity when he directly addressed the argument that judges should interpret the Constitution as a “living” document, recognizing the evolution of moral judgment in the larger society. As Judge Sutton argued, and argued eloquently, if society is really evolving on this issue (as he conceded that it is), then the advocates of same-sex marriage should allow the democratic process to work. If morality is really evolving, then the matter will be settled democratically on the basis of the new morality. The only justification for going to the courts to deal with the issue is a lack of confidence that the society is actually evolving on the question. Furthermore, Judge Sutton argued, the “living constitution” arguments really rest on the evolving judgments of judges, not of the people. “The theory of the living constitution,” he asserted, “rests on the premise that every generation has the right to govern itself. If that premise prevents judges from insisting on principles that society has moved past, so too should it prevent judges from anticipating principles that society has yet to embrace.”

Once again, a refreshing statement of judicial candor and humble clarification.

Then, Judge Sutton offered an even more powerful assertion: “If, before a new consensus has emerged on a social issue, federal judges may decide when the time is ripe to recognize a new constitutional right, surely the people should receive some deference in deciding when the time is ripe to move from one picture of marriage to another.”

The ruling by the panel of the Sixth Circuit means that the question of same-sex marriage will almost certainly arrive again at the Supreme Court, and in short order. As Judge Sutton indicated in the opening section to his opinion, he fully expects the Supreme Court to rule in favor of same-sex marriage. In his opinion, he made clear that this would be a mistake and a violation of the Court’s own logic. More importantly, Judge Sutton made clear that he believes that any straightforward reading of the Constitution in terms of its original meaning would allow the states to regulate marriage and to protect natural marriage as the central organizing principle of human society.

Judges who have ruled against state measures limiting marriage to a man and a woman have acted recklessly, as Judge Sutton’s powerful opinion demonstrates, imperiling both the rule of law and the institution of marriage.

These judges, Judge Sutton reveals, have substituted their own moral judgment for the rule of law. Some years ago, the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall told a group of his clerks that this was precisely his legal philosophy. “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up,” Justice Marshall advised.

That is not a statement that honors the rule of law. It is a statement of judicial imposition. Judge Sutton’s opinion represents a very different philosophy of law, and one that will stand the test of time, even if it does not stand the test of appeal.

Sometimes the right argument just has to be made, even if it does not win at any given hour. The truth will stand the test of time, and Judge Sutton deserves our gratitude and respect for making an argument in defense of both marriage and the Constitution — and for making it so well.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Just write me at mail@albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler

Decision and Opinion: The United States Court of Appeal for the Sixth Circuit, April DeBoer, et al v. Richard Snyder, et al. Originating Case No. : 2:12-cv-10285 Link: http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-cont...

Quotation from Justice Thurgood Marshall, see Deborah L. Rhode, “Letting the Law Catch Up,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 44, (Summer 1992), pp. 1259-1265. Link (restricted access): http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307...

 

Genesis 23:1-20

Transcript: The Briefing 11-10-14

The Briefing

 

November 10, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, November 10, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Nomination of Loretta Lynch as new Attorney General significant political decision 

Last week’s wave election that swept Republicans into the leadership the United States Senate; into many of the nation’s gubernatorial ; and fundamentally reshaped the national political equation is also leading to a reshaping in the White House and at the senior level. Pres. Obama on Saturday appointed Loretta Lynch – she is currently the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and Brooklyn as the Attorney General of the United States. The incumbent Attorney General, Eric Holder, had announced his resignation shortly before the election.

Now before we even look at Loretta Lynch, one of the things to understand is that there is usually this kind of reshaping in the aftermath of a midterm election – that is, a reshaping in the Executive branch. There  are any number of reasons for this – in the first place, if the resignations were planned before, they largely do not take place until after the election to avoid senior resignations becoming an issue in the election itself. Furthermore, the president often has to respond to just what took place on Tuesday; a changed political situation in which there is a new need for senior leadership to work with new leadership in Congress, and also the signal to the nation turning something of a new leaf in terms of the Executive branch. In naming Loretta Lynch as the new Attorney General of the United States, Pres. Obama appears to have done just that. The incumbent Attorney General, Eric Holder, who announced his resignation prior to the election, was a major flashpoint for controversy in the Obama Administration. A major advocate of civil rights law, he was also a highly polarizing figure charged with abusing as well as using the authority of his office. And that office, by the way, is defined as the chief law enforcement officer for the United States of America.

In nominating Loretta E. Lynch to this position Pres. Obama appears to be leaning into experience, and the kind of experience that is likely to serve him well. Loretta Lynch is currently, as I said, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. That is seated in Brooklyn; responsible for the chief criminal and civil prosecutions for the federal government in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island. Needless to say that is a major law enforcement position in the United States, and is one that she is held not once but twice.

She was first appointed US Attorney by Pres. Bill Clinton, serving from 1999 to 2001 after lengthy service as a prosecutor in that office. Then she was appointed to the same position in May 2010 by Pres. Barack Obama. Her resume is very similar to others who held the position; she graduated from Harvard College and later from Harvard Law school. The 55-year-old prosecutor – if she is confirmed by the United States Senate – would be the first person in almost 200 years to rise from being a US Attorney directly to being Attorney General of the United States.

So what does that signal? It signals that unlike most Attorneys General in the history of the United States, Loretta Lynch is primarily being appointed for her experience –  not primarily for her political experience. And given the fact that Loretta Lynch will almost surely need widespread Republican support for her nomination to succeed, it’s likely the President Obama decided to appoint someone who has just the kind of experience that both parties in Congress are likely to respect.

There’s a big political question here to be settled, that question is this; which Congress will hold the hearings and will eventually vote on the confirmation of Loretta Lynch as the new Attorney General? Pres. Obama signaled that he hopes the hearings will happen quite soon and the confirmation come speedily. That would mean the current United States Senate in its lame-duck session under the continuing Democratic leadership. But if Pres. Obama really wants widespread bipartisan support, he should probably wait to call for those hearings after the first of the year with the seating of the new Congress, and with the opportunity for a new Senate and the Senate leadership to take some ownership of this very important confirmation process.

Given important constitutional role of the Attorney General of the United States, this is a series of confirmation hearings and this is a vote that should have the very wide attention of the American people, and especially of Christians.

One key issue sure to arise in terms of these confirmation hearings, regardless of whether held in December or in January is this; where will this nominee to be Attorney General stand on crucial issues of religious liberty? That’s a big question hanging over the nation and certainly also over these hearings.

2) Supreme Court takes new Obamacare case, a further referendum on execution of the law

And in terms of major constitutional issues, on Friday the Supreme Court of the United States announced that it will be taking up a new court case having to do the direct challenge to the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Many Americans and certainly the Obama Administration a believed that that act’s constitutional crises were behind it – but not hardly. And the fact that the Supreme Court has decided to take this case is a very ominous sign for the Obama Administration, but it’s also raising a host of fascinating and unavoidable constitutional issues for the nation’s highest court. As Adam Liptak of the New York Times reports,

“The case concerns tax subsidies that currently help millions of people afford health insurance under the law. According to the challengers, those subsidies are being provided unlawfully in three dozen states that have decided not to run the marketplaces, known as exchanges, for insurance coverage.”

He goes on to say,

“If the challengers are right, people receiving subsidies in those states would become ineligible for them, destabilizing and perhaps dooming the law.”

Now, let’s just look at the issue for just a moment. In terms of the actual legislation – that is the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress without a single Republican vote back in 2010 – that act explicitly said the coverage is limited to those states that have established exchanges. There’s no language in the law allowing for any other means of coverage for people within those states. The Obama Administration decided go ahead and decide to cover them as if they had exchanges, but that’s a huge ‘as if.’ Now recall the numbers here. We’re talking about three dozen states – that’s a majority of the states – that have not set of these exchanges. And yet the Affordable Care Act legislation was operating within their states even without the exchanges even though there was no provision for this in the law.

Now regardless of whether one is for or against the law – regardless of whether one is Republican or a Democrat – this is a huge constitutional question. Can the Executive branch of government continue in terms of its own interpretation of the law even when the explicit language of the law makes no provision for that executive action? That is a huge question, and it’s a question not only for 2014 in the Affordable Care Act, it’s a question for the future the nation and the prized separation of powers the stand at the very heart of the United States Constitution.

Responding to the fact that the court announced it was going to take the case on Friday, Josh Earnest – who’s the White House Press Secretary said,

“This lawsuit reflects just another partisan attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act and to strip millions of American families of tax credits that Congress intended for them to have…[he went on to say] We are confident that the financial help afforded millions of Americans was the intent of the law and it is working as Congress designed.”

Well, there are two important things to note in the White House spokesman’s statement. In the first place, the statement itself is rather unusual when it’s addressed to this context. Usually, the White House will be very careful about using this kind of language, knowing that the nine Justices of the Supreme Court are going to be reading the newspaper. This is a pretty direct political challenge to the nation’s highest court coming from the White House. That in itself is somewhat unusual.

Secondly, in making his statement Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary, basically admitted – he says so explicitly – that the administration is operating on the basis of its interpretation of the intent of the law, not on the basis of the explicit words themselves. Is that legitimate or is that illegitimate? That is a question only the Supreme Court of the United States will decide.

And when hearings are held before the United States Supreme Court both sides will have their say. Speaking for the other side is Scott Pruitt, the Attorney General of Oklahoma, who said that the administration,

“cannot ignore the plain language in a statute and rewrite laws with which they disagree. [He said], This Supreme Court review will provide Oklahoma and the 35 other states that did not establish state-based exchanges with immediate and conclusive clarity as to their rights and obligations under the A.C.A. so that the states may make appropriate health care policy decisions.”

Scott Pruitt, I should note, is a member the Board of Trustees of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

It is expected that the case will be heard in either February or March, and once again – don’t be surprised – the eventual decision is likely to come down in the very last days of June.

Finally, on this issue Christians need to remember that our Constitution’s separation of powers is deeply rooted in the founders’ understanding of sin. Of human sinfulness, and of the fact that human sinfulness tends to attract power unto itself. That’s why, given human depravity – given the fact as Lord Acton said, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely – the founders of this nation and the framers of our Constitution put in the separation of powers to avoid any one branch of government becoming autocratic. And they did not do so because they feared a specific person; it is because they understood human nature. And that’s another reason Christians should watch this kind of case with very deep interest.

3) Terrorists utilize major symbol of modern world for evil in Jerusalem car attacks

The specter of international terrorism has been known for using the very latest technology. ISIS, or the Islamic State, as it calls itself, is now infamous for using the technology of social media in order to make its propaganda points not only to its own people but to the watching world. And furthermore, there been very ominous reports of terrorist cells getting control of very high technology weapons, leading to the fears among many Western intelligence services that these international terrorists may soon have guided missiles or drones that could wreck havoc far beyond where the terrorists are themselves residing. And that’s what makes the story coming out of Jerusalem this past week all the more ominous and all the more concerning. Because the story that came out of Jerusalem in recent days is not of terrorists using advanced weaponries – the weaponries of late modernity –  but rather using one of the central artifacts of the modern age; the automobile as a weapon of warfare, as a weapon of terrorism. Jodi Rudoren, reporting for the New York Times from Jerusalem reports that about a month ago “Palestinian drivers plowed into Israeli pedestrians, killing three and injuring more than 20.”

This has now been followed by copycat attacks. As Rudoren reports,

“One cartoon circulating on social networks on Thursday [of last week] depicted the car is the barrel of an automatic weapon, [the Arabic caption underneath], “Revolt and resist, even by your car.” Another showed an odometer with the slogan, “Oh, revolutionary, use more gasoline, so we can have Palestine back.” A third simply had a vehicle in the red, white and green of the Palestinian flag hitting two men with Jewish stars on their black hats.”

As Rudoren reports,

“The new campaign called for a “run-over intifada,” apparently inspired by episodes , [when there was another one of these car attacks.]”

This new round of attacks has led many people in Israel to wonder if this is a third intifada, that is a third violent Palestinian uprising. There are, of course, haunting parallels to the use of the automobile; back in September 11 of 2001 it was airplanes – another one of the chief symbols of modernity – that were weaponized in terms of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the attempted attack on the White House itself. The use of airplanes is scary enough, but the use of automobiles – weaponizing the automobile – reaches a whole new level of terror, given the fact that there so many thousands in Israel and millions on the road worldwide.

Is this a new intifada? Well, mixed signals are coming from Palestinian authorities themselves.

“President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority said clearly in an Israeli television interview last week [says the New York Times], “We are not interested in an intifada.” But Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s central council and a leader of the first intifada… said “To me, when I say intifada, I mean a general status of public opinion and public readiness to engage in resistance actions…[he went on to say] If we follow that definition, we are definitely at a new stage.”

The news coming out of Jerusalem certainly points to the fact that there is a new face on international terrorism. Maybe better put, a new mask on an old face. First it was the airplane, now the automobile. The point being sent is quite easily understood; no one is safe.

4) North Korea releases Americans jailed for dangerous act of propagating Christian teaching

In other big news over the weekend, news came on Saturday that North Korea had released two Americans it had been holding in custody accusing them of trying to subvert the North Korean state. As David Sanger reports,

The release of the two came after the release days ago of a third, and it came in this case after James R. Clapper, Jr –  that’s the director of national intelligence of the United States – went to Pyongyang as the personal representative of the President of the United States. Now, you might expect the political background of this is very interesting. The United Nations is considering taking major political and legal action against North Korea for human rights abuses. It appears that these releases are timed to try to put North Korea in a better standing with United Nations. Furthermore, there is a great deal of conversation going both ways about what this may mean in terms of relationships between United States and North Korea.

But the bottom line of all this is; there is no relationship. That was made abundantly clear. It was even made clear by the White House,that indicated that it was under a blackout of communication with its own national intelligence director when he was in North Korea. Furthermore, why exactly did the North Korean autocratic government release the three? No one may know, because the North Korean state is by definition inscrutable. Its intentions are often impossible to decipher.

But one thing Christians need to understand is that two of these three who were released had been charged and held within North Korea’s gulag system precisely for their witness to Jesus Christ. In the case of the first it was for leaving a Bible in a hotel room. In the case of the second, Kenneth Bae, he was released after been held for two years after having been detained on charges of using an evangelical organization known as Youth With a Mission in order to preach against the North Korean government, and according to the Times, planning a “religious coup d’état.”

Now he was not planning a religious coup d’état in a political sense, but any Christian looking at the nation of North Korea has to hope that there will be a toppling of that regime not only for the good, the flourishing, and the freedom of the people there but also for the freedom of preaching the gospel. After a brief show-trial Kenneth Bae had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor on a farm. But now three Americans, Jeffrey E Fowle and Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller are home and they’re home by the direct action of the United States government, and due to the visit – in the case of the last two – of the director of national intelligence. Did he indeed add to our intelligence knowledge of North Korea? Maybe only he knows. But as the New York Times also reported North Korea is holding thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of political prisoners up in its vast gulag system. How many? No one actually knows – but many of them are in prison for similar kinds of crimes. Simply thought crimes. Crimes against the paranoid state of North Korea.

As the New York Times also reported,

“South Korea seized upon the release of the Americans to urge North Korea to free a South Korean missionary held there. In May, North Korea sentenced Kim Jong-uk, a Baptist missionary, to life in a labor camp for allegedly trying to build underground churches in the North [where the government has condemned such religious activities as an attempt to sabotage its rule].”

The missionaries also convicted of spying and other various “antistate crimes” –  that according to the North Korean news media. One final Christian worldview observation; the North Korean regime is indeed paranoid. Seriously, extremely paranoid. But when it comes to its opposition to Christianity, we might say that the North Korean government is at least on this one issue thinking rather clearly, because there is no worldview more directly at odds with the worldview of that paranoid state than the worldview of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

5) 25th anniversary of fall of Berlin Wall points to the power of words

Finally a major anniversary of a monumental event in world history happened yesterday. Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall fell – or lease began to fall – on November 9, 1989 when hundreds and then thousands of East Berliners began crossing into West Berlin. The background to this is itself one of the most tragic stories the 20th century.

It was in 1961 that the wall was built. It was erected as the East German government, under the direction of the Soviet Union, decided to imprison its own people – certainly in the city of East Berlin by erecting a wall. And not just a wall, but a fortified wall and a weaponized wall. Over the course of the days before the erection of the wall roughly 1,000 East Berliners per day had been pouring into West Berlin, leaving the repressive governments of the Communist East for the Democratic freedom of the West. This was a huge embarrassment to the East German government; to the larger Soviet bloc, and furthermore to the entire experiment – the deadly experiment – of world communism in the 20th century.

The Soviets began putting pressure on the East German government, the East German government began putting pressure on Berlin officials. Eventually the hemorrhaging of their own citizens fleeing their own regime became so embarrassing they decided they had to do something, and that something was the erection of a wall. And that wall became one of the ugliest symbols of Communist tyranny in the 20th century. And it was a deadly symbol. Between 1961 and 1989, at least 5000 East Germans attempted to escape over the wall. The estimated death toll ranges from 136 to more than 200. Most of those killed trying to escape – to get over the wall or under the wall – were young men, teenage boys who were doing the very best to escape Communist tyranny but were killed either by electrocution or by one of the landmines or by cold-blooded outright shooting.

In typical communist style the East German authorities had directed the wall calling it the “anti-fascist protection rampart.” In West Germany it was simply known as the Wall of Shame. In the rest of the West, known as the Berlin wall a symbol truly of communist infamy.

The question of exactly why the Berlin Wall fell when it did is a raging historical question that has prompted many arguments and analyses. The most interesting of which has recently come from author Mary Sarotte in her book entitled “The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.” Her very respected argument now based upon thorough research on materials that it only recently become available makes very clear that the argument that it happened by accident is actually a compelling historical argument. It turns out that at a news conference before the fall the wall a top Communist Party official East Germany, Günter Schabowski, bungled the announcement of what were intended to be merely looser travel regulations.

Not used to scrutiny by a free press,[ reports Marcus Walker of the Wall Street Journal] he couldn’t deal with rapid-fire questions from international journalists—and gave the false impression that the Wall was open.

“The result [says Walker] was chaos at Berlin border crossings, where crowds of East Germans pressed the guards—who were as confused as everyone else—into opening some of the gates. Faced with a peaceful internal uprising, a brutal regime lost its nerve and authority…”

Later in the same news conference, the Communist official was asked a fourth question. That question had to do with when the looser travel regulations would become available to the East German people. He said, “To my knowledge that is immediately, without delay.” East Germans then began to rush the wall, the soldiers at the wall lost their nerve to shoot their own fellow citizens, and the rest is history.

But there’s another very important aspect of this it should also have Christian attention and that is the power of words. In some cases, presidential words. The cover story the weekend edition of USA Today reminds us of two American presidents who confronted the ugliness, the terror, and the murderous nature of the wall, and called in their own way for the wall to come down.

The first was Pres. John F. Kennedy, who stood at the wall when it was still fairly new in 1963 and declared ‘ich bin ein Berliner,’identifying not only the people of West Berlin but those of East Berlin as well. Identifying himself and the American people with the cause of freedom for all Berliners, for all Germans, for all peoples.

24 years later, standing almost the same spot Pres. Ronald Reagan declared ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ This led Rick Hampson of USA Today to ask what “Whatever happened to the kind of inspirational presidential oratory that helped bring down that wall — and Soviet communism?”

It’s a very good question. Hampson reminds us that Kennedy’s most famous words were not in the final draft of his prepared text – he basically ad-libbed the most famous words from the foreign-policy legacy of his presidential administration. When it came to Pres. Reagan’s line –  oh, it was in the address but his own speechwriters didn’t want their nor did his foreign-policy advisers.

Writing about the importance of words Rick Hampson writes,

“Today, when President Obama’s rhetoric seems unable to stop aggression in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the two Berlin speeches demonstrate the power of words to influence world affairs, as well as their limits.”

Each, he says of the speeches “was a tightrope walk.”

Mary Elise Sarotte, author of the book The Collapse I mentioned just a moment ago, was quoted in USA Today as saying that these two presidential speeches were major detonations that eventually help to contribute to the fall of the Wall. Interestingly these pages also reveal a basic faith the both of these presidents; representing two different generations and two different parties. Both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan held the faith that Communism could not survive. They had the faith that the Berlin Wall would eventually come down.

Shortly after the wall fell was the words of Pres. Ronald Reagan tht began to resonate throughout not only the West but also the East. As for Pres. Reagan, Hampson reports from Reagan’s own autobiography that looking back in the speech he said, “I felt in anger well up in me, and I’m sure the anger was reflected in my voice when I said those words.” And what were those words Pres. Reagan said

“Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization — come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”

Years later, after the fall not only of the Berlin Wall but also the Soviet Union, that last leader ofthe Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, said that he hasn’t really been moved by Reagan’s words. He said, “We were not impressed. We knew Mr. Reagan’s original profession was actor.”

Well Mr. Gorbachev may wanted to dismiss Pres. Reagan’s words, but those words really did matte. And the greatest evidence of that, is not just the fall the Wall, but the fact that in the immediate aftermath of that fall, the video clip of Pres. Reagan’s words was playing not only in West Berlin but also thoroughly in East Berlin as well.

Finally while we’re considering the importance of the fall the Berlin Wall –  while also considering the importance of words on to point to a set of words spoken long before John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan spoke at the Wall. As a matter fact, I want to point to a set of words that were spoken before the Wall even existed by one who saw it coming. And yet so far as I can see, no one in the mainstream media has drawn attention to these words, which certainly need to be remembered on this 25th anniversary. The words weren’t spoken in 1963 nor 1987 – the words are spoken of March 5, 1946 when Winston Churchill just shortly out of office as Britain’s Prime Minister came to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and gave a speech in the presence not only of the assembled guests there, but also the President of the United States Harry Truman. In that speech in defiance of so many who refused to see reality, Winston Churchill declared,

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line [said Churchill lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

In that speech the former British Prime Minister (and later also again Prime Minister) was declaring what many in the West refuse to see and others refuse to say; that Communist tyranny was just that, and that what Churchill called an Iron Curtain had indeed descended across Europe as a mighty scar. The Berlin Wall would simply come as a very small graphic physical representation of the Iron Curtain, and we need to note that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not enough. The Iron Curtain itself had to fall. And on this 25th anniversary we need to remember the words of another Briton who understood the importance of words, the poet Rudyard Kipling, who ended one of his poems with these very profound words; “Lest we forget, lest we forget.”

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