R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 339

Transcript: The Briefing 10-17-14

The Briefing

 

October 17, 2014

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

 

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

1) Houston mayor and attorney clearly threaten religious liberty in responses to subpoena controversy

Officials in Houston, especially the mayor, are doing their very best to distance themselves from a controversy over the fact that attorneys operating on behalf of the city issued subpoenas to five Christian pastors in Houston, demanding access to their sermons having to do with a recent effort to try to rescind an ordinance there in the city of Houston that would require all bathrooms to be made accessible to persons, regardless of their gender identity and would give transgendered persons the right to sue if they are denied that access. Houston residents upset with that ordinance had done their best to try to reverse it by means of an initiative that involve petitions, and yet attorneys for the city said that they were not enough petitions to lead to a successful review of the policy; this led to a lawsuit, the lawsuit led to the subpoenas, and now it is led to a controversy that the mayor of Houston – the first openly gay mayor of a major American city –  is trying to put behind her, but it’s not going to work.

I discussed this issue rather thoroughly on The Briefing yesterday, and as we look at this issue it appears as you know more the situation looks worse. And even yesterday it was reported that the mayor of Houston and the city attorney were backtracking somewhat and were rescinding the subpoena for the sermons. But now it appears, 24 hours later, that that withdrawal was not the backtracking it first appeared to be. On Wednesday the city attorney and the mayor both tried to distance themselves from the controversy and from the subpoenas. The city attorney said the city would clarify its request in response to the pastor’s motion. As the Houston Chronicle reports the mayor said,

“There’s no question the wording was overly broad. But I also think there was some deliberate misinterpretation on the other side.”

Now let’s watch that statement for just a moment because here you have the mayor saying, ‘yes, the language of the subpoena was – to use her phrase – overly broad.’ She doesn’t say it was wrong to issue the subpoena, merely that the wording was overly broad. But she also says here that there was – to use her words – some deliberate misinterpretation on the other side. That argument has also been taken up by some would be defenders of the mayor; including Katie Zavadski of New York Magazine, who wrote an article entitled “Is Houston’s Lesbian Mayor Really Out To Get Conservative Preachers?” And the answer of the article is, ‘no of course the mayor doing no such thing.’

Now recall the fact that the subpoena asked the pastors to turnover – this is the wording from the subpoenas –

“All speeches, presentations, or sermons related to HERO, the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession.”

Let’s just state that even the most simple and straightforward terms the words overly broad when it comes to that kind of demand are hardly fitting. Zavadski tries to cover the mayor, to politically protect her, with the language in her article that reads like this,

“But here’s the thing: The upset pastors and their defenders may in fact be right about the subpoenas being overbroad. (The mayor agrees, if only they’d asked her.) But their complaints make it sound like the pastors are about to be tried for hate speech using the new law, which is far from the case.”

Well it doesn’t look, at least upon second look, a closer look, that it actually is very far from the case. Zavadski article also says,

“Parker, who says she hadn’t heard about the subpoenas until yesterday [that would have been Wednesday], doesn’t care if pastors called her a dirty sinner or advocated for overturning the Equal Rights Ordinance. It turns out the subpoenas were sent by outside attorneys working for the city pro bono.”

I simply insert here, that doesn’t matter at all. The attorneys were working for the city, therefore they were acting for the city, they were speaking for the city and the mayor was behind the effort. She cannot hide behind the fact that she didn’t see the subpoena beforehand. How many subpoenas does any mayor of a major city see beforehand? That’s not an excuse. Zavadski then gives a longer quote from mayor in which she said that words you’ve already heard,

“There’s no question, the wording was overly broad. But I also think there was some deliberate misinterpretation on the other side. [She went on to say] The goal is to find out if there were specific instructions given on how the petitions should be accurately filled out. It’s not about, ‘What did you preach on last Sunday?’”

Well that’s a distinction without a difference. The mayor in effect says she has every right to issue a subpoena for sermons from these pastors, so long as she’s not asking ‘what did you preach on last Sunday?’ but rather ‘Did you give instructions on how petitions should be accurately filled out?’ Well let’s admit just for matter of clarification that there is a narrowing of the demand from ‘What did you preach on last Sunday?’ to ‘Did you, in your sermons, discuss the petition and how it might be accurately filled out?’ That is a narrowing; but morally, constitutionally, in terms of religious liberty, it isn’t the difference.

At 12:21 AM on 15 October, the mayor tweeted

“Always amazed at how little fact checking is done by folks who like to hit the retweet button.”

But if you actually check the facts, it turns out that it is the mayor who is profoundly in trouble here. She’s in violation of the facts, she’s in violation of the truth, and she’s in violation of her own words. Recall that that tweet I cited earlier was issued on 15 October at 12:21 AM. Less than an hour later – on that same Twitter feed – the official Twitter feed, personally supervised by the mayor, the mayor herself tweeted at 1:12 AM, on the very same day,

“If the 5 pastors used pulpits for politics, their sermons are fair game.”

Well there you have it. Their sermons are fair game. Who determines whether their fair game? The mayor says she does.

When this story broke earlier this week, it appeared that it would almost surely be a short-lived story because after all, the city’s elected officials would run as fast as possible from the actions of the attorneys; arguing that there had been some kind of misunderstanding, that the issuing of the subpoenas was a horrifying political mistake from which they would run and repent. And as late as yesterday, it appeared that the mayor and the city attorney were doing their best to distance themselves from the actions they themselves had taken – or at least the actions that had been taken on their behalf. But in just a matter of hours it appeared that they were not backtracking at all, that when they talked about narrowing the language, they were not apologizing for issuing subpoenas for sermons from pastors, they were merely narrowing the language of the subpoena itself.

The mayor said she was shocked that so many people were retweeting without looking at the facts, when later she made her own fact by tweeting “If the 5 pastors use pulpits for politics, their sermons are fair game.” The use of that language, ‘fair game’ that is some of the most ominous unconstitutional language subversive of religious liberty to be said by any elected American official, not only in years but in decades and maybe even in centuries. As a matter of fact, when you have an elected mayor of a major American city saying that the sermons of pastors are – to use her words – ‘fair game’ that’s language that may be impossible to find anywhere in American history until 1:12 AM on 15 October from the mayor of Houston, Texas.

 

But it’s not just the mayor who is being tripped up in her words, it’s also Houston city attorney David Feldman. Because on Wednesday he told reporters that the sole purpose of the subpoenas was to request materials that were related to the petition gathering and exactly how that had been done. But on Tuesday, just the day previous, the same city attorney had told reporters that if the pastors had preached sermons on what he determined were political issues, their sermons were – to use the mayor’s language – fair game. He said,

“If someone is speaking from the pulpit and it’s political speech, then it’s not going to be protected,”

So there you have the mayor saying the sermons are fair game and the city attorney saying, ‘if it’s political speech then it’s not going to be protected,’ and clearly the city attorney and this mayor feel that they are constitutionally competent to determine what is a sermon and what is political speech.

As the founders of this country well understood, liberties that are hard-won can be easily and quickly lost. In the United States of America as we’ve been talking about, the undermining and subversion of religious liberty in our times, the constriction of religious liberty, even to what the Obama Administration repeatedly calls ‘freedom of worship,’ this is a violation of the even what anyone could define as freedom of worship. In the process of just less than a decade, we have gone from an affirmation of religious liberty to the claim that that should be reduced to freedom of worship, to the mayor of one of America’s largest cities saying that the sermons of preachers are ‘fair game.’ But this is a threat to religious liberty for every single American, not just for these five Houston pastors. If their sermons are fair game, then so are the sermons of every other preacher, rabbi, imam, and religious leader in America and so is the speech of every single Christian believer. The mayor Houston says that what’s needed in this situation is for Americans to do some fact checking. I can only hope that Americans do just that, and check these facts.

2) Young Catholics’ differing with official doctrine reveals failure to teach binding ethics

Yesterday the Pew Research Center issued a critically important new report. The headline of the report by Michael Lipka is this, “Young US Catholics overwhelmingly accepting of homosexuality.” As Lipka tells us,

“Fully 85% of self-identified Catholics ages 18-29 said in a 2014 Pew Research Center survey that homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared with just 13% who said it should be discouraged.”

Very interesting language used here. It’s important that we look at exactly what is being reported. First of all the numbers are startling – 85%. Now remember, that as of today, consistent with the last 2000 years, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is – to use the words of the catechism – intrinsically disordered and in every context and situation sin. Regardless of the teaching of their church, indeed in defiance of the teaching of their church, you’re not talking about just a significant number of young Catholics, you’re not talking about just a majority of young Catholics – you’re talking about 85% of young Catholics aged 18 to 29. And here again the language has to be looked at carefully, they said that homosexuality should be accepted by society. That’s a very interesting way of putting it; in other words, this is the complete moral normalization of homosexuality. That’s what 85% of young Catholics said should happen. Compared to just 13% of those young Catholics who said it should be discouraged; which again, discouraged here is a very mild word of moral judgment. They didn’t even want to say that – only 13% would say that much.

 

“Older age groups [says Pew] are less likely to favor acceptance. But even among Catholics ages 65 and older, 57% say that homosexuality should be accepted.”

Those are devastating numbers. And from an evangelical perspective, there are a couple of issues that come immediately to mind. How can it be that a church that purports to teach that homosexual acts are in every situation immoral and that they are to – use the language of the church’s catechism – intrinsically disordered? How can that church reach the point that 85% of its own young people believe exactly the opposite of what the church teaches? Well, if nothing else, this demonstrated that this church was incompetent and unable to teach its own young people anything binding when it came to the moral judgment that the Christian churches taught for 2000 years on sexuality in general and same-sex acts and relationships in particular.

Now my purpose in raising this is not so much to throw stones at the Roman Catholic Church as to hold out what they have clearly failed to do as a word of warning to evangelicals about our churches and our own young people. It is certainly easy to look at this and say what ever the Roman Catholic Church failed to do, it failed to teach its own young people anything consistent, strong, binding, anything authoritative, anything that would bind their thinking and their consciences, when it comes to the issues of sexuality. And we know that the conflict with the church over issues of sexuality among Catholics in general, and young Catholics in particular, is absolutely comprehensive; ranging all across the fields of sexual controversies. But this is the issue of the most intense current controversy, this is the issue that’s at the very crux of our current cultural conflict; it is the issue of same-sex acts and same-sex relationships that focus the question asked by Pew that led to this very startling number – 85% of young Catholics saying that they reject, reject overwhelmingly, the official teaching of their own church.

Evangelicals looking at this should have a very significant warning; it’s not just that the Roman Catholic Church failed to teach its young people; it failed to teach them in any way that ended up being binding. That’s a crucial distinction and one that evangelicals should pay a lot of attention to right now. One of the things this kind of report should warn us about is this: this is a significant signal that it’s not enough to tell children, adolescents, teenagers, young people, young adults, what the church teaches – there must be a comprehensive theological and moral answer. There must be the outworking of a worldview, there must be a consistent biblical theology, there must be a presentation of this issue of sexual morality within the larger context of the total morality taught by the Christian church revealed in Scripture. It must be more than what the Pope says, that clearly isn’t even binding on Catholics. It must be more than just what the church says, that’s not binding upon Catholics. It must be what God says, and that’s why evangelicals have to remember that all we have is biblical authority. That’s all we have, and fundamentally that’s all that binds. Because these recent actions in the Roman Catholic Church, including the deliberations in their current synod, point to the fact that nothing but Scripture will bind – and that’s why the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura is not just a matter of historical affirmation, it is as current as the headlines in this pew study. If evangelicals for a moment believe that anything other than Scripture will bind us and our children to a biblical understanding of morality, then we fool ourselves. And if we are not diving deep with our own young people into the totality of all that God has revealed in Scripture, if it is not premised upon the absolute confidence in the total truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture, if we are not living it out and teaching it out comprehensively, then we should not be surprised if in short order a report from the same kind of research organization comes out telling us that 85% of evangelical young people are defying and denying and distancing themselves from the teaching of their own churches. In so far as that can be traced, a failure on our part to give more than assertion and to move to a biblical argument, then the guilt will be upon us and the shame as well – richly deserved shame.

3) Egg-freezing perk attempt by companies to own even a woman’s reproductive future

Yesterday we talked about the news coming from the brave new world of egg freezing and the fact that at least two Silicon Valley companies have moved to cover egg freezing in terms of benefits for women employees; those companies were Apple on Facebook. We talked about the worldview implications of that and it’s very significant that our Christian worldview concerns about this policy are now being matched by some secular concerns coming not from the right but from the left. In this case from the editorial board of the Financial Times in London; the headline of their editorial is, “Egg freezing is a perk too far in Silicon Valley’s war.” Now what are they writing about? They’re writing about this: they’re arguing that it can be no question about the rather sinister design behind Apple and Facebook’s decision to pay up to $20,000 to freeze the eggs of their female employees – it’s because they want those employees to prioritize work. They want them to be more or less owned by Apple and Facebook, even to the point that they will delay motherhood and put at risk their own fertility.

These companies, according to the Financial Times are now intruding too far into women’s personal choices. As the editors write,

“Companies are always looking at ways to attract and retain talented employees. Nowhere more so than in Silicon Valley, where America’s leading technology businesses live or die by the brain cell. Now, two of the district’s most influential residents, Apple and Facebook, have taken this so-called ‘perk arms race’ to a new pitch.”

As the editors say,

“[it is]… part of a drive among traditionally male-dominated Valley firms to attract more female talent, both are offering benefits to women who devote more of their childbearing years to building their careers.”

That is an emphatically important statement. The editors of the Financial Times in London get right to the heart of the issue. Apple and Facebook, under the guise of extending a new benefit to their female employees, are actually saying ‘we want to own even more of you. We want you to put your motherhood and your fertility on hold. And we will even pay for you to freeze your eggs.’ Just imagine what this means in this brave new world; now you have modern corporations in Silicon Valley saying to female employees, ‘We want to own your reproductive future. We will buy it with a $20,000 perk.’

The editors get right to the heart of the issue when they write,

“This is financially generous and may be a perk that some women will welcome. But if it is open to all female employees and not just to those experiencing fertility problems, there are doubts about the wider message that it sends. Benefits are social indicators [write the editors]. When companies offer entitlements such as paternity leave and assistance with childcare, they reflect what we value as a culture. The offer to assist with egg freezing sends just such a signal. It implies that women should consider deferring childbirth if they want to do well in their jobs.”

And evidently, at least some women are getting the message. The Guardian in Great Britain says that for the first time in British history more babies born in Great Britain are being born to women age 30 and over rather than to 29 and under. This has never happened in history of Britain and it evidently passed this marker in just recent weeks and months. More than half of the babies born in England and Wales are born to women aged at least 30 according to the latest statistics from Britain’s Office for National Statistics – that’s the first time since records began. As The Guardian reports, this indicates the fact that more and more women are putting off childbearing and child rearing until much later ages. And as many other reports make clear, this also explains why so many women are experiencing fertility difficulties. A great percentage of the fertility problems in America today, we are told by medical authorities, is due to the fact that so many people are putting off having children such that they are delaying them beyond the normal time of peak fertility and prime childbearing capacity.

From a biblical worldview perspective, this just points to the fact that we are not machines. We are embodied creatures and as embodied creatures, our bodies actually tell us something. There is no question that God is telling us, even through our bodies, that there are problems and consequences with delaying adulthood, marriage, and childbearing, so far into the adult years. But as the actions by Apple and Facebook, and as this editorial in the Financial Times makes very clear, one of the reasons behind this is commercial. It has to do with the fact that for many people in America today and certainly for the companies trying to keep and secure talent, it comes down to career over everything. And from a Christian perspective, that statement in itself is problem enough.

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

 

 

The Briefing 10-17-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Houston mayor and attorney clearly threaten religious liberty in responses to subpoena controversy

City officials try to distance themselves from sermon subpoenas, Houston Chronicle (Katherine Driessen)

Is Houston’s Lesbian Mayor Really Out to Get Conservative Preachers?, New York Magazine (Katie Zavadski)

City subpoenas sermons in equal rights case, Houston Chronicle (Katherine Driessen)

2) Young Catholics’ differing with official doctrine reveals failure to teach binding ethics

Young U.S. Catholics overwhelmingly accepting of homosexuality, Pew Research Center (Michael Lipka)

3) Egg-freezing perk attempt by companies to own even a woman’s reproductive future

Egg freezing is a perk too far in Silicon Valley’s war, Financial Times (Editorial Board)

More than half of babies born to women over 30 for first time, figures show, The Guardian

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 10-16-14

The Briefing

 

October 16, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, October 16, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Second Ebola infection in US humbling reminder of fallibility of humans

It hardly seems possible, but a second Texas healthcare worker has now tested positive for the Ebola virus and this one is far more troubling and far more complicated than even the first case. Just a matter of a few days ago, we were assured that the risk of transmission of the disease in the United States was virtually nonexistent because of the medical protocols and the sophistication of American medicine. But then last week we discovered that a healthcare worker, who had worked with the Liberian man who had contracted Ebola in West Africa and then came to Dallas Texas, later dying of the disease, we found that that that healthcare worker had contracted the disease from the patient. And yet we were told it would surely end there and that was true until yesterday, when it became apparent that there was a second case. And the complications are incredibly troubling. Because the complications include the fact that the Texas Presbyterian Medical Center where this took place now admits that those healthcare workers who were working with the man, later determined to have Ebola, were not wearing hazmat materials or protection in the early days of that care. That would lead to the fact that there could be not only these two healthcare workers, but any number of others who may also have been exposed to the disease and having been exposed to it may well still develop it.

Furthermore, the healthcare worker – the second one to contract the disease – on the day before she showed up at the hospital with a positive test for Ebola was on an American commercial airliner on a flight from Cleveland to Dallas. And that leads to the realization that there could be people on that airplane who also were now exposed to the Ebola virus – the very thing we were told that could not happen in the United States; that it would not happen.

Thomas R. Frieden, who is the head of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that the healthcare worker should not have been on a commercial airliner. We’re looking at a long string of ‘should not have been’ and ‘should not have happened’ in both of these cases, and that leads to the obvious question as to whether there will inevitably now be more. And the ‘should not have beens’ and ‘the should not have happeneds’ are exactly what should humble us when we recognize just how much faith and confidence most of us have in so-called modern medicine. Modern medicine is indeed a marvel, it has brought great advances – there’s no question about that – we are thankful for the advances and for the development of modern medicine and for all the increase of human flourishing that it has brought about. But the people who are actually conducting the medicine are the very same species as those who conducted ancient medicine – their human beings; fallible and frail human beings – human beings who, in a Genesis 3 world, make mistakes.

We’re now able to trace some of the strategic, lamentable, mistakes that allowed for these two transmissions: hazmat materials missing. One of the training videos that was used to train the medical personnel actually, according to recent reports by CNN, demonstrates that even in the training video the individual supposedly modeling the right procedures violate them even as they’re doing the training video. Clearly this both demands and has the attention of the White House. President Obama has spoken to the issue and as promised a concerted national federal effort to respond to the Ebola crisis. Operating out of the Christian biblical worldview, there is no reason here for panic. As a matter of fact, it is still rather amazing that given the virility of this virus there have only been two transmissions even among the healthcare workers working with the patient who later died of the disease. But these two cases do remain shocking, and deeply troubling, and also beyond that, very humbling.

So while there is no reason for panic, there is reason for concern. Just think of the people on the airliner and the people who love them and keep in mind that now we know there were many people who were exposed to the disease. Some of them may know it; some of them almost assuredly do not. And we don’t even know how many of them there are. So as Christians pray for the end of this epidemic in West Africa and the end of the death and the suffering there, we also know there are people who were in deep trauma here. Some who know they have been exposed to the disease, two have now contracted the disease, and any number of others who simply do not know and might not even know that they do not know.

2) Texas abortion clinics remain open under Supreme Court’s order while left cries out for more

Headlines across the nation yesterday announced the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States had acted to allow a number of abortion clinics in Texas to remain open; in effect putting a stay on a Texas law that would’ve led to the closure of those abortion clinics. The brief statement that came from the Supreme Court was terse and filled with legalese, but the bottom line is all too evident. And that is the Supreme Court at this point is not allowing the Texas law passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to go into effect. The court statement did say, in its concluding words, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would deny the application in its entirety; in other words those three justices wanted it said on the line and on the record that they would’ve allowed the law to go forward and the abortion clinics to close.

One of the interesting aspects of this case is found in the arguments made by the attorneys for the abortion clinics in their pleadings before the High Court. They said that if the abortion clinics closed, it was unlikely they would ever reopen – very interesting statement. There is also the realization now that in many of these abortion clinics that will now remain open; they are more unregulated than restaurants in the same city and in the same neighborhood. And so if this law is continued to be put on hold or if it is ruled unconstitutional by some federal court, the abortion clinic situation in Texas will remain as it is now; where it is easier to open and to run an abortion clinic than to open and operate a restaurant.

We’re going to be returning to some very interesting and troubling arguments on abortion that a recently appeared, but one of them comes on the heels of this announcement by the Supreme Court and it comes from the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, like the New York Times the Los Angeles Times is one of those newspapers that seems never to have considered an abortion it would not support. And the extremism of the position taken by the Los Angeles Times editorial board is made very clear in this editorial dated October 15, 2014; the headline of the editorial is “Supreme Court should put a stop to the relentless attacks on abortion.” Now, the great divide, the great worldview divide on the sanctity of human life and on the issue of abortion in America even comes down to how one would describe the legislation, for instance, adopted in Texas. Because those who are behind it argued for the legislation not only in light of the attacks upon human life represented by abortion but the insult on the dignity of human life demonstrated by the fact that abortion clinics are so unregulated. On the other hand, the opponents of the law and the opponents of very similar laws – including the law against partial-birth abortions – they’ve argued that if there’s any limitation on the legal access to abortion of any woman at any time, for any reason, it’s unconstitutional and morally wrong. That’s why on this issue you’re looking at a conflict of moralities that simply has no real middle ground. And that’s made very clear in this editorial. The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times says that what the Supreme Court must do is put a stop to what they call again the relentless attacks on abortion. But keep a couple things in mind; first of all the Roe v. Wade decision, the infamous decision handed down by the Supreme Court in 1973 legalizing abortion on demand, allowed many of the very restrictions that are here at stake in these cases. It was Roe v. Wade that allowed for a state government explicitly to make all abortion in the third trimester pregnancy illegal and unavailable. You would think that the LA Times editorial board and similar editorial boards of other newspapers that celebrate the Roe v. Wade decision would actually be honest about what is in it –but that would require them to read it.

Just consider the closing paragraph of this editorial, I read it and I quote,

“These relentless attacks on abortion are destined to continue until the Supreme Court steps in and rules definitively. It should take up these challenges to its authority and put a stop to this growing patchwork of bad, restrictive laws.”

Now you’ll notice what is really revealed here is a worldview that says that abortion must be available and fully legal in any context, in any point of pregnancy, if any woman wants it, for any reason or for no reason – at any time and any place. And any restriction on abortion is, to use the language of this editorial, a patchwork of bad restrictive laws.

But you’ll also note that they’re calling for the Supreme Court to step in and rule definitively and that’s an incredibly, explosively revealing statement because that means they’re not even satisfied with Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade, the decision that made abortion on demand legal in the first trimester of pregnancy –  conditionally in the second trimester pregnancy – that’s simply not enough, not for those for whom abortion is the solitary issue of their creed and where any restriction on abortion whatsoever is simply, in their view, unthinkable.

3) City of Houston subpoenas pastors’ sermons an immoral power grab

Next, a massively important new story came out of Houston, Texas – and to be honest it’s one of those stories that I required to be sourced a little more diligently before I would address it – and yet the story is real. As Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports,

“Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who drew headlines for becoming the first openly lesbian mayor of a major American city, led support for the ordinance. The measure bans anti-gay discrimination among businesses that serve the public, private employers, in housing and in city employment and city contracting.”

The report says,

“[under] the ordinance, transgender people barred access to a restroom would be able to file a discrimination complaint [one of the hotly contested parts of the ordinance].”

Well there’s an interesting political background to this; the ordinance exempted religious institutions, it was passed in June, but there was overwhelming opposition and then there was an effort by opponents of the ordinance to try to repeal it by an initiative. They claim the city’s attorney determined wrongly, they hadn’t gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, and that led to a political and to a legal controversy. Thus Bailey reports,

“City attorneys issued subpoenas to five local pastors during the case’s discovery phase. [Seeking] all speeches, presentations, or sermons related to HERO, the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession,”

And that was sent to Christian pastors. Five of the pastors, backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, have issued a motion to stop the subpoenas; claiming they are,

“…overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”

Well there are a host of incredibly alarming issues that come to the fore here. In the first place, would it be legal, is a constitutional, for a pastor’s sermons to be subpoenaed? Answering the question for the Washington Post, one of the keenest legal minds, Professor Eugene Volokh said that it is likely that under some circumstances it would be constitutional for certain sermons to be subpoenaed. He gave some illustrations as to how and why that might happen. The point of this subpoena issued on behalf of the city of Houston and its Mayor, he said that it is clearly overbroad and overreaching. There are a host of excruciating urgent constitutional issues here, but the first issue in my mind is this: I would not turn over any sermon that came as a demand of a subpoena; that is something I simply would not do. If there’s a legal price to be paid for it, I would pay that price. I would not render unto the government a sermon that was rendered unto God and God’s people. Even in America were there so many people who do not recognize the religious liberty challenges we face, this must be a significant wake-up call. We’re talking about pastors who receive subpoenas explicitly identifying their sermons as the material to be subpoenaed. And you’ll note, even as there was reference to any conversation about the ordinance, there was also a reference to any conversation about the mayor, there was also reference to any conversation about sexual orientation or gender identity.

As you would expect, the political controversy over this was hot, it was heated, and it was immediate – as it should have been. And the evidence of this comes late yesterday when a spokesperson for the Houston mayor said,

“Mayor Parker agrees with those who are concerned about the city legal department’s subpoenas for pastor’s sermons.  The subpoenas [according to the spokesperson’s statement] were issued by pro bono attorneys helping the city prepare for the trial regarding the petition to repeal the new Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) in January.  Neither the mayor nor City Attorney David Feldman were aware the subpoenas had been issued until yesterday.  Both agree the original documents were overly broad.  The city will move to narrow the scope during an upcoming court hearing.  [Its city attorney] says the focus should be only on communications related to the HERO petition process.”

Is that a good response? It is a start, it is not a good response; because this still does not rescind the subpoena extending to sermons, but rather merely restricts the subject content of the sermons that are now to be subpoenaed. We will likely have to wait until the actual pleading that would come from the mayor’s office arrives and is able to be read, but at this point there is simply not enough of an apology here. There simply is not enough of a recognition of not only the constitutional overreach, but the immoral power grab that is reflected in the demand of the Christian pastors having preached sermons and Christian churches turn over their sermons to the government for legal review.

Quite honestly this is the kind of headline that first you might expect would either be untrue or datelined somewhere in secular Europe or beyond. This is the kind of thing that you might think might’ve happened in the former Soviet Union or perhaps somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, but we’re not even talking here about a city located in the secular Northeast or Northwest – we’re talking about a city, the fourth-largest city in the United States, located in the heart of Texas. And that gets right to the heart of the issue, there is no place that is safe – not even Houston, Texas. And furthermore, it also points to the fact that one of the major demographic changes in America, one of the great distinctions to be found in terms of many of the moral issues, is whether or not you’re located in a sufficiently large city.

America’s largest cities are actually morally and culturally and socially more like one another than are the states in which they are located. So when you’re looking at a city like Houston, Texas after all, it did elect the first openly gay mayor, in this case a woman mayor, what you have a situation in which Houston in this case is probably more like Boston and Manhattan and Los Angeles than the rest of Texas. But make no mistake, every single pastor in America, and every single Congregational leader – be it imam or Rabbi or pastor or priest – must know that when someone from the government comes to subpoena their sermons, they claim the power to subpoena yours as well. And even if this case goes away because the mayor of Houston under the heat says that the subpoenas are no longer going to be in effect, the warning shot has been sent and the alarm has been sounded and woe onto the one who tries to forget this alarm.

4) Commodification of human beings evident in controversies over artificial fertilization

Well while you’re thinking about worldview issues, in the daily headlines it’s hard to top the headline that appeared recently in the Washington Post. The headline is simply this, “White Woman Sues Sperm Bank After She Mistakenly Gets Black Donors Sperm.” I wanted to read that headline just as it is, in order to make the profound point of just how unnatural the situation is that we’re talking about. The headline story here is pointing to the fact that a lesbian couple sought to have one of the partners become inseminated by donor sperm. They went to a sperm bank, they went to the process of going through catalogs to determine the kind of sperm they wanted to obtain, and yet when the baby was born it was clear that a mistaken had been made because the baby clearly has a black father.

This leads to the fact that, as Lindsey Bever of the Washington Post reports,

“an Ohio mom and her same-sex partners suing the Chicago area fertility clinic for sending sperm from a black donor instead of the white donor sperm that she had ordered.”

A couple of things to consider here; first of all just imagine any other generation of human beings living – they could not imagine, no pun intended they couldn’t conceive of what is being discussed here. This would be so far outside the imagination that not even science fiction would dare to go into this territory. To state the obvious, this is a problem – if it is a problem – that is simply unprecedented in human history. And if there is a problem for the Christian worldview perspective we have to recognize of the problem isn’t the mix-up of the cells here, the problem is the mix-up of the morality.

And the fact that what we’re talking about here is actually a redefinition in the first place of what it means to have a child. And that leads to a second point, an emphatically important point, and the point is this: if children come through what would rightly be defined as a natural reproductive process, there would be not only little danger this happening, there would be an impossibility the anything like this could happen. Because what we’re actually talking about here is the artificiality of these advanced reproductive technologies that actually change not only the physical process by which a child is conceived, but radically change the moral context, the objective relational context in which a child comes to be.

We’re talking here about the commodification of the human being, where human reproductive cells are now sold as a consumer product. They are marketed by commercial corporations and they are marketed by means of sorting through catalogs in which a designer baby can be ordered according to the reproductive cells that are chosen. And as is the case in any other consumer product, sometimes there are customers who are not satisfied and sometimes there are there are services that are wrongly rendered. And that’s the case here. You have a dissatisfied customer, but its a dissatisfied customer that from a biblical worldview shouldn’t have been a customer in the first place. And you also have a clear mistake being made by the corporation, but this is a corporation that shouldn’t be in this business in the first place.

As a matter fact, the only reason why this kind of problem has now appeared is because a same-sex couple unable to reproduce by any natural means of reproduction sought to overcome that with the use of this advanced reproductive technology, which meant going to a corporation that makes its existence by the commodification of human cells, and then by ordering the cells in the hopes of overcoming the fact that there is no natural means to have the child by gaining the pregnancy within one of these women by means of the donor cells. And when the baby that was produced was not the baby that was desired, the inevitable response in a consumer culture with a litigious context is exactly what happened here; they sued. To put the matter bluntly, if you have a husband and a wife married to each other and faithful to one another the baby they have can’t possibly be in baby other than the one that came from them. But once you alienate the active reproduction from the conjugal relationship of the husband and the wife, once you to redefine marriage, once you redefine what it means to, here again, have a child, then you’ve redefined not only a biological process in a medical technology you redefined with the most basic moral realities that human beings have known and counted upon ever since Adam and Eve.

Finally, another story with a similar kind of warning, Claire Cohen reporting for the Telegraph tells us that two companies in Silicon Valley –  well-known by their names – are now going to pay for their female employees to freeze their eggs in order later than would normally be possible for them to have a child. As Cohen reports,

“On the list of perks you’d like your employer to pay for, freezing your eggs probably isn’t at the top.

But that’s exactly what female employees at Apple and Facebook are being offered.

The Silicon Valley companies are offering up to $20,000 … to help cover the cost of putting their fertility on ice.”

The key sentence is this; “The idea is to ensure that women who want to focus on their careers aren’t sacrificing their chance to have a family.”

So now you have the ‘have a baby’ and ‘have a family’ redefined, but redefined only by access to advanced reproductive technologies. One of the political problems that is addressed in this article, at least in the background, is the fact the Silicon Valley’s having a hard time coming up with enough female employees to meet diversity standards. And one of the reasons why; many women say the Silicon Valley isn’t too employer friendly to them is the fact that the hours in the work culture to be make very difficult to have a baby while what is also trying to have a job in Silicon Valley. But now you have Facebook and Apple responding to it by saying, ‘no worries, we’ll simply pay to freeze your eggs. You can put motherhood on hold; those eggs always be there.’

But this is just further evidence that we are as a society in a headlong ambition to try to redefine what it means to have a child and to have a family, and we’re doing so in order to try to make having a child and having a family meet the new moral decisions and lifestyle choices we’ve decided to make. As even the doctors behind reproductive technologies will tell us there are some natural limits to this, beutyou can also count on this the try to overcome every natural limit imaginable. And that’s really the point, those natural limits aren’t there by nature – they were put there by the One who created us, and they are tell us something. But what those limits are trying to tell us is what so many modern and postmodern people in this post-Christian age simply don’t want to hear.

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

 

 

The Briefing 10-16-14

1) Second Ebola infection in US humbling reminder of fallibility of humans

Ebola-Infected Health Worker Took Flight From Cleveland to Dallas, New York Times (Timothy Williams)

Obama Cancels Campaign Trip to Meet With Cabinet on Ebola, New York Times (Michael D. Shear)

2) Texas abortion clinics remain open under Supreme Court’s order while left cries out for more

Supreme Court Allows Texas Abortion Clinics to Stay Open, New York Times, (Adam Liptak)

Order in Pending Case, Supreme Court

Supreme Court should put a stop to the relentless attacks on abortion, Los Angeles Times (Editorial)

3) City of Houston subpoenas pastors’ sermons an immoral power grab

Houston subpoenas pastors’ sermons in gay rights ordinance case, Religion News Service (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)

Is it constitutional for a court to enforce a subpoena of ministers’ sermons?, Washington Post (Eugene Volokh)

4) Commodification of human beings evident in controversies over artificial fertilization

White woman sues sperm bank after she mistakenly gets black donor’s sperm, Washington Post (Lindsey Bever)

Apple and Facebook will pay for female employees to freeze their eggs, The Telegraph (Claire Cohen)

Special Heritage Week Chapel Message – John 15:18-27

Originally preached at Southern Seminary’s Heritage Week Chapel. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, visit sbts.edu.

Transcript: The Briefing 10-15-14

The Briefing

 

October 15, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, October 15, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Same sex marriage supporters limit religious liberty to worship service context only

The cover story in The Economist, the major news magazines in Great Britain, has to do with the gay-rights revolution and its stunning success, in terms of reaching its political and moral and cultural aims just in the last several months and years. But one of the most interesting aspects of the coverage offered in this week’s cover story in The Economist has to do with an article entitled: “The Staff and Their Souls.” The magazine writes,

“Across the Western world, religious organisations have fought a hard and mostly successful battle to retain the right to ‘discriminate’ when choosing their own priests, rabbis and imams. And that seems reasonable enough. Something peculiar would be going on if say, a Christian church were obliged, under equality legislation, to admit to the priesthood a person who professed either atheism or some other religion.”

The Economist does not list the authors of its articles; rather the magazine itself takes credit for all of its content. Thus in looking at this article, the magazine is suggesting that it simply makes sense – and that’s interesting in itself – that a religious organization should be able to hire ministers, rabbis, or imams that would be in keeping with the faith of the congregation doing the hiring. Now you might be surprised that The Economist, a secular newsmagazine in one the most secular nations on earth, would recognize this; but the thing we need to recognize is just how narrow a religious liberty issue The Economist is actually recognizing. Because even as they say here would seem reasonable enough that a congregations should have the right to discriminate theologically when it comes to hiring the religious leader or teacher of the congregation, the article makes very clear that so far as The Economist sees it, that’s about as far as religious liberty would actually go. And when it comes to hiring virtually anyone else, even by a religious organization, as they say, when it comes to religion employment in teaching, the right of an organization or a congregation for that matter to discriminate on the basis of theological beliefs they see as far more dubious.

As The Economist writes,

“But the number of jobs over which religious bodies have some influence goes far beyond the ranks of clerics or prayer leaders. There are church-based charities and foundations. There are jobs like hospital chaplaincies where the employer is secular but appointments are subject to church vetting. There are university faculties, indeed entire universities, which are religious foundations. And across western Europe, churches have an influence over the education of children which is far out of proportion to the number of people who actually attend services.”

Very, very interesting – you can see the setup here. And even though this is a British newsmagazine writing primarily about the European context, it’s very clear they had the United States in view as well. They get right to the heart of what’s most important to us when they write,

“On the face of things, the further you get from narrowly defined clerical institutions and posts, the harder it would seem to justify ‘discrimination’ and the scrutiny of employees’ beliefs and private lives—something which would not be tolerated in any other walk of life. At any rate, that’s what secularists would strongly argue.”

Well the way they write it, their clearly siding with the secularists. And they’re also saying – if you watch their your own language – to quote again,

“…the further you get from narrowly defined clerical institutions and posts, the harder it would seem to justify ‘discrimination’”

And if you pay attention to the words of the magazine itself you’ll recall they said,

“…the further you get from narrowly defined clerical institutions and posts, the harder it would seem to justify ‘discrimination’ and the scrutiny of employees’ beliefs and private lives—

At this point in the report, The Economist points back to a story that first appeared in June of this year in the same magazine. That has to do with the fact that the European Court of Human Rights handed down a verdict in the case of a Spanish priest, who was an official religious teacher in the schools appointed by the Roman Catholic Church, who was discovered – after he appeared in the media – as being both married and having children; something that to say the very least is a direct contradiction and violation of the rules for priests. The church suspended him from his role and this case was appealed all the way to the European Court of Human Rights where the European court handed down the verdict that the Catholic Church had the right – in this case – to remove this official church teacher because he was violating the teaching of the church and its priestly vows by getting married and having children. Now, if you think that shouldn’t be headline news, ought to consider the fact that the headline news is the fact that we’re talking about this in the first place. The fact that we’re talking about a case in which now you have the newsmagazine revisiting the issue and suggesting that maybe the European Court of Human Rights went too far in its affirmation of religious liberty by allowing the church to remove someone who wasn’t functioning in the church, in the sanctuary as a priest or a preacher, but rather in a school as a religious instructor. So far as they see it, if you’re looking at concentric circles of influence and liberty, this man wasn’t in the sanctuary; he wasn’t fulfilling a priestly duty directly, and thus the churches on much shakier ground, according to their argumentation, for discriminating on the basis of religious belief and behavior.

Now why is this important to us? Well in the United States of America, we have many church related schools and colleges; many congregations have preschool programs and other ancillary programs very much related to the ministry of the church. One of the things you need watch in the United States is the way that the Obama administration and our current Department of State continues to refer to what they call the freedom to worship. But the freedom to worship is a severe constriction of religious liberty because when the phrase ‘freedom of worship’ is used as a substitute for religious liberty, it is used to define only what takes place behind the pulpit or in the sanctuary; not what takes place in terms of other aspects of the religious organization’s life and work. In the United States for example, the affirmation of religious organizations right to hire on religious grounds – especially when it came to a school – was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in what is now known as the Mount Tabor decision. But there are efforts even now by those who are trying to reverse that decision and reverse the logic of that understanding of religious liberty. When you look at the current situation in United States you come to understand that the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage sets up a whole new set of challenges when it comes to discrimination and the right to discriminate in hiring and other important personnel decisions. Furthermore, we need then to add to that equation the whole transgender revolution. And when you look at the situation in the United States right now, it is evident that there is a clear and present danger to religious liberty when it comes not only to churches, but especially to church related institutions: colleges and schools, seminaries, and all the rest.

In terms of worldview, a very important aspect is affirmed in the article by The Economist when it asked the question directly, ‘which freedom comes first?’ And the two freedoms they are talking about here are the liberties of a religious organization to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religious beliefs and the rights on the other hand of individuals to a so-called right of privacy; including sexual privacy, privacy in the most intimate aspects of life, or the privacy of conscience in terms of the religious beliefs that an individual might hold. Time and again I’ve come back to the fact that what we’re looking at in the United States of America is a conflict of liberties, not just a conflict of values but a conflict and a contest of liberties. On the one hand, I would describe it as religious liberty and on the other, erotic liberty. And this new liberty, now being recognized by courts and in the court of public opinion of erotic liberty is again and again trumping religious liberty. Ominously, in the most recent coverage in The Economist, a lawyer is cited who said,

“It could be argued that schools that apply blanket testing at all levels of teaching are going too far, because they could still maintain their ethos without religiously vetting every single post,”

Well here’s the big problem: you have a secular authority claiming to have the right to determine how many religious teachers in a religious school have to be committed to the religion itself in order for the school to maintain what is described here as its ethos. This is a recipe for absolute disaster. But the even bigger issue is this; we’re talking about this issue not because it was raised in this context by Christian leaders discussing the issue in a global context, but rather by The Economist itself and its cover story on the gay rights revolution. The most ominous aspect is this: even this secular newsmagazine, trumpeting the new arrival of a gay revolution, points to the fact that employment issues, discrimination issues, religious liberty issues, are necessarily, automatically, intrinsically, now on the line.

2) Secular report on conditionalism shows importance of hell and judgment to human mind

While we’re talking about the intersection of theological issues in the secular press, no more graphic example could be provided than what appeared in last Saturday’s edition of the New York Times. Here’s the headline, “Tormented in the Afterlife, but Not Forever: Conditionalism Gains Ground.” It isn’t often that a major secular newspaper in America give serious attention to a serious theological issue, much less to something that will be called conditionalsm; something that in terms at least of the terminology is basically known, mostly, to evangelical theologians and others dealing with the same issues. It tells us something that the New York Times, the nation’s most influential newspaper, still considers theological issues of importance. And one of the reporters of that newspaper that gives the most serious attention to religious and theological issues is none other than Mark Oppenheimer, who is the reporter of this article.

Conditionalsm is a fairly recent theological movement, found mostly in the last several decades, mostly in English-speaking evangelicalism after the end of World War II. The major tenet of conditionalism is a rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell, especially the doctrine of hell which follows the biblical logic that it is a place of eternal punishment and torment. And they suggest that it is the traditional doctrine of hell that presents a doctrine of God that simply doesn’t come up to the standard of divine love (more about that in just a moment). The interesting thing first of all is that the New York Times considers this an important story. Oppenheimer reports,

“In August 1976, Edward Fudge, a minister and Christian publisher, wrote ‘Putting Hell in Its Place,’ an article in Christianity Today exploring biblical language about hell.”

He goes on to say Mr. Fudge’s inquiry into the nature of damnation resulted in his seminal 1982 book “The Fire that Consumes” in which he argued that the suffering of the wicked in hell is finite, that after a time their souls are extinguished. This view, called conditional immortality or sometimes the more macabre, annihilationism, is in direct opposition to the traditional Christian view that suffering in hell last forever. The news reason for Mark Oppenheimer’s piece has to do with the fact that in July of this year, leading proponents of the theory gathered in Houston for a conference known as “Rethinking Hell.” It was a conference in honor of Edward Fudge. The group that produced the conference, according to Oppenheimer, maintains a website (rethinkinghell.com) dedicated to its theology.

Now again, the first most interesting aspect of this development is the fact that the New York Times thinks this is interesting. You’re talking about a secular newspaper writing to a secular readership. By and large it is clear that the readership of the New York Times isn’t considered to know very much about theology or even Christianity in general. Furthermore we’re talking about a newspaper that twice in the last couple of years has made horrifying mistakes in terms of the facts of Christianity; in particular, the resurrection of Christ from the dead and later had to correct those mistakes – with neither the reporter nor the editors evidently noticing that they were mistakes. But Mark Oppenheimer’s a very skilled reporter and he comes back to say that there is something here that must, in terms of his interest and the interest of his editors, be of interest to the readers of the New York Times. And what does that tell us? It tells us that it just might be; that even in the most profoundly secular context in America, the most so professedly secular context in America, you might just find that hell is a very difficult thing not to think about.

In Romans 1 we are told that God implanted the knowledge of himself in the consciences of every single human being. Augustine referred to this when he made very clear that in every single human being is a hunger – a quest – to know God that may be misdirected but cannot be extinguished. And when you look at the moral consciousness that God implanted in every single human being, it cries out for a resolution of judgment. And that’s why many modern secular people may say they do not believe in God and they do not believe in hell, but they can’t stop thinking about hell nonetheless. But in terms of the actual theological issues reflected in this article, as Oppenheimer writes,

“Advocates of conditional immortality say that their view reflects a common-sense reading of the Bible. They point to passages like Romans 6, where Paul says, ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ The ‘eternal life’ of the saved is contrasted with the ultimate ‘death’ of the unsaved.”

Well you look through this and you come to understand that the effort to try to redefine hell is actually not very new. In his magisterial three volume history of Protestant liberal theology in the United States, Gary Dorrien of Union Theological Seminary points out that the earliest sources of heresy in the American theological tradition had to do with the doctrine of hell. The first root of theological liberalism in this country was an effort to deny hell as a reality and certainly as a place of eternal punishment. We need to note that in the larger evangelical world the impulse to try to redefine hell arrived not with Protestant liberalism – mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries – but after World War II; first of all in Great Britain where you even had leading evangelicals such as John Stott who came to adopt and to advocate conditional immortality, conditionalism as it is known here, or annihilationist, suggesting that there had been alternative to the traditional doctrine of hell.

The problem with the argument – and Mark Oppenheimer seems to understand this – the problem with the argument of the conditionalist is that they’re picking and choosing Scriptures and their running in the face of the traditional Christian understanding based upon the Bible. And when it comes to the depictions of hell in Scripture, you’re not looking at any promise of conditional immortality, you’re not looking at any suggestion that hell is some kind of temporary corrective, you’re looking at the reality that there is a dual destiny presented in Scripture; on the one hand those who in Christ are in heaven and those who have rejected Christ, and are found under the punishment and wrath of God, who are in hell as a place not of temporary but of eternal everlasting torment.

Apologetically, we can understand that in modern age whether would be the impulse to try to redefine hell. As one theologian said about 10 years ago, modern theology could be described as one great effort to, in his words, air-condition hell. Well it just might be that the most important point is the first point; the point in which we now return. If indeed the fact that this article appears in the New York Times and that that is evidence of the fact that hell is simply something that even secular people cannot not think about it. It points to the fact that the reason hell is such an implanted idea in our consciousness is because not only do we have an innate knowledge of God and a hunger to know him, but we also have an innate knowledge of judgment that is to come. We also have an inner understanding of the requirements of justice, for an absolute justice, and the problem with a finite hell is the reality that our sin is not finite – it is infinite. Every one of our sins and transgressions, biblical defined, is an infinite transgression against an infinitely holy and omnipotent God.

Oppenheimer writes,

“For now, conditionalism is a scholars’ movement; it has yet to work its way into the pulpits. Most evangelical preachers still hew to a traditional view of hell, and mainline and liberal preachers are often ‘universalists,’ who believe that everyone goes to heaven, at least eventually.”

Well that’s a very revealing statement – the great theological divide is between those who believe in hell and those who don’t; those who believe in the gospel and those who are Universalist. But there is also a divide amongst those who believe in hell, as to what exactly is the hell in which we believe. And as this article makes clear, this isn’t ever just about hell because no single theological issue is entirely about just itself; it points to greater issues. And the conditionalist are right about one thing, the doctrine of hell does point to the doctrine of God and that’s where you have to begin with the doctrine of God in his absolute perfection, in his absolute righteousness, and His absolute justice. And that’s what makes the gospel of Jesus Christ such good news, for as the greatest of all American theologian said, ‘the real issue is how can any sinner avoid hell’ and as Jonathan Edwards said so well, ‘that salvation is found only by fleeing to Christ, believing in him.’ And only by believing in Christ can anyone escape hell, not as a temporary punishment, but as an eternal reality.

3) Willingness of some terrorists to confess result of genuine belief

Finally a really interesting article in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times – the headline: “Some Captured Terrorists Talk Willingly and Proudly, Investigators Say.” The article is by Benjamin Weiser and has to do with the fact that several people, who have been arrested for terrorism charges, especially those involved in Islamic fundamentalism, tend actually to say a very great deal when they are being interrogated. They don’t hold back, there is no need for any kind of intense interrogation; their asked a question and they often, according to this New York Times article, actually offer far more in return than was even asked. This is catching even many federal prosecutors by surprise.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, told the Times,

“It is counterintuitive — and I understand that…that people one morning want to do everything they can to kill everyone who looks like an American, and destroy cities, and in some cases, prepare to engage in suicide missions or help others engage in suicide missions, and then the next afternoon, when caught, snitch on their plans, snitch on their colleagues, snitch on intelligence that otherwise would have been unavailable to the very same people that they were dedicated to killing. However, it is true; it happens all the time. He said… [this] should be considered a little bit more by people who fight really hard in these debates.”

One FBI agent quoted in the article said,

“What works on one subject does not necessarily work on the other. But if you know how to do it and you know what buttons to push, intellectually and mentally, these guys will talk. Sometimes, the problem is in shutting them up.”

You know what you’re actually looking at here in this article is the fact that you have a secular newspaper that finds it very hard to believe that people who believe in a cause like this will take you exactly what they plotted to do. But that’s exactly what we see here evidenced in this article. We see the fact that people who really sign on to the agenda of Muslim terrorism, when they are interrogated often will take you exactly what they plan to do and why, because amazingly enough – and this is the point that seems to be missing from so many in this article – they must actually believe what they say they believe; and the must actually live in the worldview they were prepared to die for. The article appears in the New York Times because the behavior of the suspects under interrogation surprises the secular people asking the questions and the secular newspaper considering the whole picture, but perhaps the real take home lesson is exactly that – a secular culture is in no way prepared to deal with theological question and with the people who operate out of deep beliefs that our profoundly not safe.

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

 

 

The Briefing 10-15-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Same sex marriage supporters limit religious liberty to worship service context only

Marriage equality in America: So far, so fast, The Economist

The staff and their souls, The Economist

Which freedom comes first?, The Economist

2) Secular report on conditionalism shows importance of hell and judgment to human mind

Tormented in the Afterlife, but Not Forever, New York Times (Mark Oppenheimer)

3) Willingness of some terrorists to confess result of genuine belief

Some Captured Terrorists Talk Willingly and Proudly, Investigators Say, New York Times, (Benjamin Weiser)

Transcript: The Briefing 10-14-14

The Briefing

 

October 14, 2014

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

 

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

1) Vatican synod on family a major transformation of Roman Catholicism

The meeting known as the Extraordinary Synod, now taking place in Rome as a meeting of the Roman Catholic Church, is gaining headlines all over the world today and for good reason. Because we can now look at yesterday as a major turning point in the history of that church and in its transformation on major issues, including major moral questions. The Roman Catholic Church clearly finds itself now on the defensive; it’s describing itself in just those terms, in terms of the language coming out of this Extraordinary Synod. It feels itself on the disadvantage and it feels itself on the defensive simply because of the massive changes involved in the moral revolution that have so reshaped Western societies – especially Western Europe and North America. In those lands the Roman Catholic Church has been losing moral credibility because it has been holding to very traditional stances on the definition of marriage and the rightful ordering human sexuality. But there’s a lot more to it than that, and even as evangelicals look at the developments that have taken place and are now taking place in the Roman Catholic Church, there are very real warnings about how we must consider these issues and how we must maintain the faith once for all delivered to the saints even in the midst of the same changing moral and cultural environment.

Yesterday was a turning point because the synod released a preliminary paper known as a relatio on the question of the context and challenges to the family. And in this particular paper, which is not yet final, it is nonetheless pointing to the eventual direction this synod is likely to take under the direction of Pope Francis the first. Of course the current Pope has already signaled in many and various ways, his intention to change the posture of the Roman Catholic Church on these issues. But this points to a major distinction which becomes more and more clear as one looks at this document: the major distinction between the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Christianity; evangelical Christianity. The differences come down to at least these:

In the first place, the Roman Catholic Church officially recognizes a distinction between doctrine and pastoral practice. Some of the language coming out of the synod yesterday called for courageous pastoral practice; what’s really being called for there is the individual deviation from official church teaching. What the Roman Catholic Church here is poised to do is to say that it is not changing its doctrine, to say that it is standing by its centuries long affirmation of a biblical understanding of the family and of sexuality, while at the same time allowing for individual deviations – at least as acknowledged by priests of the church in their pastoral application. But there’s something else that becomes immediately clear as one looks at this document.

One is the issue of gradualism. This current working paper of the synod points to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church here affirms ‘gradualism’ in terms of persons moving in to greater faithfulness in terms of Roman Catholic teaching. In terms of the document itself, it says that persons should be received where they are and encouraged to move into greater faithfulness. Now how is that different from the evangelical understanding of sanctification? It’s because what’s missing from the entire Roman Catholic understanding here is the notion of conversion. What’s missing here is the understanding that there is a before and after in terms of commitment to Christ. What’s missing here is the understanding made clear in the New Testament when the apostle Paul says, “Behold old things have passed away, all things have become new.” This is a very important distinction and it becomes essential to understanding what’s going on in the Roman Catholic Church from an evangelical perspective. Because even as evangelicals also understand that there is a progressive understanding of sanctification – that is to say the Holy Spirit works within the believer to bring about a sanctification, a holiness, that is progressive – the longer we follow Christ, the more we obey Christ, the more we hear the preaching of the word of God, the more we’re involved in the Fellowship of the saints, the more the Holy Spirit applies that word to our hearts conforming us to Christ, the more that sanctification becomes visible in us. That is a biblical and evangelical affirmation. But the gradualism that’s being talked about in the Roman Catholic context at this synod is quite different; it talks about a gradualism in terms of obedience in which persons are received just as they are and received into the fellowship of the church and encouraged to stay in the church and to move into more gradual faithfulness. But of course the problem with that, lacking a doctrine of conversion, lacking any understanding of before and after, is that gradualism completely blurs the distinction between the church and the world – between the believer and the unbeliever. And that is a crucial gospel issue that evangelicals have to keep in mind when looking at the current Roman Catholic proposals.

The other major distinction that becomes immediately clear in the background of this conversation, the distinction between the Roman Catholic theological system and the evangelical theological understanding is sacramentalism. Because the Roman Catholic Church, through its sacramental ministry, actually believes in this gradualism as being an infusion of grace that is granted to the participant in the Roman Catholic Church by means of participating in the mass and in the larger sacramental system and thus as being moved into a state of greater grace by means of that sacramental system. Again, evangelicals do not find that in Scripture – profoundly do not find that in Scripture – and do not understand any such priestly ministry or any such sacramental infusion of grace. And looking at that, we can understand why the Roman Catholic theological system is well poised to come up with this gradualism; why the distinction between doctrine pastoral practices is something that fits within the Roman Catholic system but not within evangelical church life or evangelical theology. We can make no distinction between the teaching of the church and its pastoral practice, and the reason that we cannot is because we are not sacramentalists. If we were sacramentalists, we could believe that the sacrament itself will be efficacious in terms of the life of the person to whom were speaking, rather than the disposition of that person and obedience to Christ. Those are fundamentally separated issues. And the sacramental system thus does not only confuses what we would understand as true worship but also the true gospel and the doctrine of justification and, of course following on the heels of the doctrine of justification, also confuses sanctification.

In terms of the cultural context we can certainly understand the ambition on the part of the Roman Catholic Church to get out of an excruciating pastoral and cultural dilemma; that is holding to doctrine and to official teachings, including the definition of sexuality and family that is wildly now at odds with a radically secularizing Western society. But evangelical Christians have nowhere to run on this issue. If indeed we operate by sola scriptura and if indeed God has spoken in his word on these issues, than we are bound to his word. We profoundly do not believe in the evangelical churches right to develop doctrine beyond the Scripture. We profoundly do not believe in a sacramental system that allows us to shift away from obedience to Christ to the performance of a sacramental act. We do not believe in a priestly ministry that allows for distinction between the doctrine of the church and pastoral practice. And we may be, as these elements in Rome seem to indicate, perhaps the last people on earth who can’t go along with the flow. The Roman Catholic Church here wants to be in the position of saying that it is maintaining its doctrine and merely being more responsive to homosexuals in its midst. But of course this kind of responsiveness amounts to a theological abdication; and yet it is one in line with Catholic theology – it’s just not in line with the gospel and not in line with our understanding of the church and not in line with Scripture, and therein lies the problem.

2) Atheist Crispin Sartwell declares irrationality of atheistic belief

Meanwhile in the pages of The Atlantic monthly comes an amazingly candid article on the irrationality of atheism and it’s written by an atheist. Crispin Sartwell writes,

“Religious beliefs are remarkably various. But sometimes it can seem that there is only one way to be an atheist: asserting, on the basis of reasoned argument, that belief in God is irrational. The aging ‘new atheists’—Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, for example—pit reason against faith, science against superstition, and declare for reason and science.”

He goes on to say that he, on the other hand, is taking what he calls “a leap of atheist faith.” He then writes these amazing sentences,

“Religious people sometimes try to give proofs of the truth of their faith—Saint Thomas Aquinas famously gave five in his Summa Theologica. But for many people, belief comes before arguments, originating in family, social and institutional context, in desire and need. The arguments are post-hoc rationalizations. This can be true of atheism as well. For me, it’s what I grew up with. It gets by in my social world, where professions of religious faith would be considered out of place. My non-faith is fundamentally part of how I connect with others and the world.”

He continues,

“The idea that the atheist comes to her view of the world through rationality and argumentation, while the believer relies on arbitrary emotional commitments, is false. This accounts for the sense that atheists such as Christopher Hitchens or Dawkins are arrogant: Their line of thinking often takes the form of disqualifying others on the grounds that they are irrational. But the atheist too, is deciding to believe in conditions of irremediable uncertainty, not merely following out a proof.”

The importance of Crispin Sartwell’s article becomes even more clear in this sentence:

“Religious people have often offloaded the burden of their choices on institutions and relied on the Church’s authorities and dogmas. But some atheists are equally willing to offload their beliefs on ‘reason’ or ‘science’ without acknowledging that they are making a bold intellectual commitment about the nature of the universe, and making it with utterly insufficient data. Religion at its best [he writes] treats belief as a resolution in the face of doubt. I want an atheism that does the same, that displays epistemological courage.”

Now why is this article important? It’s important because it’s an amazingly frank and honest admission on the part of an atheist; that atheism requires faith, that it too requires a certain amount of epistemological courage, that there is no slam dunk, absolutely certain scientific or rational argument that sustains a theistic belief. Atheistic belief, Crispin Sartwell says, depends upon what he defines as epistemological courage. Now why is this argument important? It’s important because just as he said, there so many among the so-called “new atheists” who are arguing that any dispassionate fair-minded person looking at the scientific evidence would simply be compelled by force of reason and rationality to become an atheist. Crispin Sartwell says, ‘I’m an atheist and that’s not true.’ As a matter fact, Crispin Sartwell underlines the importance, indeed the inevitability, of worldview thinking. Because he acknowledges ‘I’m an atheist because it fits my worldview. My worldview is actually consistent with atheism; it allows me to get by in the world in which I live.’ He says professions of religious faith would be ‘out of place in my cultural and social context’, he says ‘it worked for me that I am an atheist, but I’m an atheist basically because I find the world to be random and meaningless, not because I find in any scientific evidence or rational argument an absolute clincher of the fact that there isn’t a God.’

The orthodox Christian understanding is very clear; that faith is not an active irrationality. That was the supposition of the philosopher Kierkegaard who argued that faith was a simple leap into the dark – it is anything but that. In Scripture we read such things as, ‘these things are written that you might believe                                                                                                                                                                                                                   and know’ furthermore yet Peter writing, ‘we are not writing about these things as those who are speaking of clever myths but as those who were eyewitnesses to these very historical events.’ The Bible goes back again and again to make a rational argument, a revealed argument, based in very rationally understandable terms of the evidence for faith. But at the end of the day there is still the necessity of faith, there is still a necessity of belief. After all, mere intellectual assent to the facts of Christianity will not save. That’s why the apostle Paul writing in Romans chapter 10 says that the one who had saved is the one who confesses with the lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and believes in the heart that God has raised him from the dead.

One of the things that evangelical Christians must always keep in mind is that belief in God can never be separable from other beliefs. Theology always matters and it bleeds through every major issue of our intellectual concern and every thinking person has major issues of intellectual concern. But in this case Crispin Sartwell writes about his non-belief in God writing,

“By not believing in God, I keep faith with the world’s indifference. I love its beauty. I hate its suffering. I think both are perfectly real, because I experience them both, all the time. I do not see any reason to suspend judgment: I’m here, and I commit. I’m perfectly sincere and definite in my belief that there is no God. I can see that there could be comfort in believing otherwise, believing that all the suffering and death makes sense, that everyone gets what they deserve, and that existence works out in the end. But to believe that would be to betray my actual experiences, and even without the aid of reasoned arguments, that’s reason enough not to believe.”

Again, an amazingly candid admission. Because what he states here is that his experience of a world indicates a world that is indifferent to us. And he says on the basis of that experience, non-belief in God simply makes sense. But if you were listen closely to his argument, you heard him say not only ‘I keep faith with the world’s indifference’ he said next, ‘I love its beauty.’ Now there’s the problem. Because as it turns out, he’s not quite the atheist he thinks he is, because to affirm the reality of beauty is to affirm a standard by which beauty can be measured; what makes something beautiful. The statement that the world is beautiful, that he loves its beauty, a statement he clearly intends to resonate to be understandable by others, it implies there is a beauty that is an objective reality. That’s an aesthetic judgment, but an aesthetic judgment is inherently a theological judgment. So even as he wants to state, as he certainly means to sincerely state, that he is perfectly sincere and definite in his belief that there is no God, the very fact that he wrote this article the way he wrote it, the very fact that he makes very clear that there is no clincher argument – rationally or scientifically that would compel one to be an atheist – the more he bases it on his experience and then goes on to say that not only does he experience the world as indifferent, he also affirms in it a beauty, he undermines the assurance of his own atheism. So when I read Crispin Sartwell say that he wants an atheism that displays epistemological courage I think in this article he’s trying to display just that – epistemological courage. But when he tries to match that within an epistemological certainty about atheism, he clearly fall short of his own argument and perhaps of his own ambition and maybe from a Christian perspective, from a gospel perspective, that’s a good start.

3) Debate over Islam reveals clash of worldviews within ideological left

An absolutely stunning argument has appeared on the cultural left and it has appeared on the issue of Islam and it deeply reveals the reality of worldview and all of a sudden the fact that even people on the cultural left now understand that worldview matters. The incident that was the catalyst for this discussion was HBO’s “Real Time” program were Bill Maher and Ben Affleck got into a very heated debate (they weren’t alone of course, but they were the center of that debate) over whether or not Islam is inherently evil. You may recall the fact the Bill Maher argues that it is; that theologically, culturally, ideologically, speaking Islam is evil. And then you had Ben Affleck suggesting that was a form of racism, of an ideological discrimination that’s absolutely out of bounds. Now notice that both of these men, and all the participants in that discussion on the HBO “Real Time” program, are on the left; indeed you might say on the far left. And now you see a major cleavage on an issue this clear on the cultural left. Well what could explain that?

Writing at Salon.com Josh Appelbaum says the problem is that both Bill Maher and Ben Affleck are reductionist when it comes to talking about Islam. He comes back to say, any fair-minded position would say ‘yes, there are very negative elements in Islam that ever right minded person should very clearly condemn.’ But he goes on to say it’s not fair to say that all Muslims are terrorists, it’s not fair to even say that all Muslims hold to the consistency and wholeness of Muslim thought. And yet that’s not the argument that is most interesting in terms of all this.

At Salon.com there was another article written by Andrew O’Hehir. And he’s writing that when it comes to atheism and Islam and to liberalism, you’re talking about a clash of worldviews not between the right and the left but on the left – and this is really interesting. He writes,

“Here’s a news flash: None of these heated public debates about atheism and religion, or about how Western ‘liberals’ should think about Islam, ever reach a satisfactory conclusion. There are many reasons …[but the biggest] reason may be that religion in general, and fundamentalist religion in particular, is a major sore spot in Western culture, a source of tremendous vulnerability and anxiety.”

Speaking here about the left. In other words, cultural leftist don’t know what to do with the resurgence or with the continuation of religious faith among most of the people on earth.

Writing about the other major exchange on Islam that took place between Reza Aslan and Sam Harris; with Sam Harris saying that Islam is entirely evil and Reza Aslan saying that that’s a form of racism; basically that is an outrageous mischaracterization of Islam. Now Andrew O’Hehir comes back to say the reason why that will never reach a satisfactory conclusion is that those who are arguing on the one side of this argument are not even sharing a worldview with those who are on the other side of the argument. Now where’s this worldview conversation coming on the left? The left has been committed to cosmopolitanism for the better part of the last several decades; arguing that worldview isn’t important or if it is important it’s only important in order to overcome it. But cosmopolitanism is a myth and that myth is being revealed in these debates over Islam; not between the right and the left, not between the right and the right, but between the left and the further left. O’Hehir writes,

“Indeed, I would argue that people who line up on opposing sides of the Harris-Aslan feud over religion and Islam represent fundamentally different worldviews, in ways they themselves may not recognize.”

We simply have to sit back here and say there’s something deeply satisfactory about having people committed to the cosmopolitan ideal admit the persistence of worldview; even in their own ranks. Of course from a Christian perspective, we would affirm the fact that worldview can’t be overcome even if you try to overcome it because every single rational human being operates on the basis of prior intellectual commitments. That’s actually what Crispin Sartwell was affirming in his argument we just considered on atheism, and now you have Andrew O’Hehir coming back to say that’s exactly what leftists now have to understand is going on in the intro liberal debates over Islam.

So what is the worldview division that Andrew O’Hehir sees? He says,

“I’m not talking about East vs. West or Muslim vs. Christian, and still less about lily-livered p.c. ‘progressives’ vs. courageous contrarian truth-tellers, or however Bill Maher would like to phrase it. And I don’t precisely mean the difference between people of faith and the atheistic or irreligious. Those are facets of the dispute that are largely obvious. In a conversation between Richard Dawkins and Pope Francis (and I’d definitely pay to watch that [he writes]), both would politely acknowledge that they hold divergent views about the fundamental nature of reality. What I really mean is the difference between [now hold your breath] humanities majors and science majors.”

And he’s writing about the left and he’s really on to something. In this case, Andrew O’Hehir is actually onto something that many people on the left have not acknowledged. The left is itself divided between those who present reality in terms of scientific rationalism and those who hold it in terms of a kind of humanism; those are two mutually incompatible worldviews. They may at times overlap in terms of political goals, but what’s being revealed here – and Andrew O’Hehir is exactly right – is that those who believe that everything must be defined simply in terms of scientific rationality, they can’t come to terms with anything as complicated as religious belief; be it Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or otherwise.

Meanwhile those who are holding to a more humanist worldview, he explains in terms of being humanities majors, they want to believe in this cosmopolitan world of endless rationality and they believe that everything can eventually be overcome by the kind of rational conversation that humanities majors can have around a doctoral seminar table. These are both conversations on the left. Andrew O’Hehir appears to have the ambition to say to people on the left ‘We need to get on the same page’ but here again, some good worldview thinking would correct that presumption because people who do not hold to the same worldview can’t end up on the same page or even when they do, not for the same reasons and not for long. Evangelical Christians understand the responsibility not only to acknowledge worldview thinking, but to bring our worldview into conformity and consistency with God’s word – with the Bible. But what’s really revealed here is the inability of any secular worldview, be it scientific or humanistic, to come to terms with theological claims and a theological worldview; that is the big issue here and that’s what makes it even more interesting to us than to them.

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

 

 

The Briefing 10-14-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Vatican synod on family a major transformation of Roman Catholicism

Vatican Signals More Tolerance Toward Gays and Remarriage, New York Times (Elisabetta Povoledo)

The Vatican’s Relatio, The Vatican (Synod on the Family)

Vatican document challenges Church to change attitude to gays, Reuters (Philip Pullella)

The Vatican’s New Stance Toward Gays and Divorcees, The Atlantic (Emma Green)

2) Atheist Crispin Sartwell declares irrationality of atheistic belief

Irrational Atheism, The Atlantic (Crispin Sartwell)

3) Debate over Islam reveals clash of worldviews within ideological left

Bill Maher and the liberal conundrum: Progressives, religion and extremism, Salon (Josh Applebaum)

Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about, Salon (Andrew O’Hehir)

Why Expository Preaching Matters

Originally delivered at Cutting It Straight Expository Preaching Conference. For more information on Cutting It Straight and the ministry of H.B. Charles, visit hbcharlesjr.com