R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 342

The Briefing 10-03-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Rise of ISIS reveals world is not becoming less religious

The New Crusades, Bloomberg Businessweek (Pankaj Mishra)

2) Fall of Arab civilization reminder of danger of seeds of barbarism to any civilization

The Barbarians Within Our Gates, Politico Magazine (Hisham Melham)

3) Consent laws replace objectivity of marriage with subjective experience as basis of morality 

Consensual Sex: There’s an App for That, Slate, (Amanda Hess)

4) Individualized preferred gender pronouns underline centrality of gender to human identity

What’s Your PGP?, Chronicle of Higher Education (Allan Metcalf)

What the heck is a “PGP”?, Gay Straight Alliance for Safe Schools

When no gender fits: A quest to be seen as just a person, Washington Post (Monica Hesse)

 

Faith on Earth — The Urgent Mission of Theological Education

There are few words more formal than inauguration and few occasions that can compare to the beginning of something so recognizably important as this – the ceremonial installation of the Reverend Doctor J. Ligon Duncan as Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary. It is my high privilege and great pleasure to participate in this occasion and to deliver this sermon marking my dear friend’s inauguration. But I do so with an urgency that eclipses the ceremonial.

Members of the Board of Trustees, faculty, students, and all members of the Reformed Theological Seminary family, distinguished guests and delegates, honored former chancellors Dr. Whitlock, Dr. Canada, and Dr. Milton, Dr. Duncan, Mrs. Duncan, and members of the Duncan family, I greet you all in the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ and with a sense that both promise and urgency mark this occasion.

Our text is found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18, verses 1-8:

And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (English Standard Version)

He told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. This is very helpful. We are told why Jesus told this parable to his disciples and we are told its intended effect – that Christ’s faithful followers should pray always, and never lose heart.

There is always the temptation to lose heart, and we should be thankful that Jesus names it as such. He truly was tempted in every way as are we, yet without sin. He who never lost heart knows that his disciples are prone to lose theirs. It is good that we know that losing heart is not a new problem, but in our own day we can easily find new reasons to lose heart.

Consider the current predicament of Christianity. We are witnessing the inglorious end of a civilization birthed by the Christian faith. We are tracing the accelerating secularization of our own society. In the Middle East, Christianity is disappearing on the ground. Historic Christian communities in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere are being decimated and destroyed—scattered by violence and threats of genocide.

In Europe, the historic base of Christian culture and Christian missions, the European Union is so embarrassed about its Christian heritage that it refused even to acknowledge this truth when it framed its charter. Christianity is disappearing or declining under the dhimmitude of Islam and the domination of secularism. Church buildings in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere are now routinely transformed into nightclubs, pubs, or even mosques. The European elites are so distant from living Christianity that they have virtually no memory of it and American elites are rushing to Europeanize our national intellectual life.

Cultural Christianity is disappearing as fast as a morning mist, providing the church the opportunity and challenge to make clear once again the radical difference between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the wisdom of the world. But with the disappearance of nominal Christianity comes a vast moral revolution with a new and ominous moral regime. The most basic moral convictions of Western civilization are being rejected in favor of erotic impulses. Erotic liberty now threatens even religious liberty in the great controversies of the era. The threats to religious liberty are real and present.

We also face the realities of the millennial generation – the largest generation in American history. As Christian Smith and his associates have documented, the belief system held by the vast majority within this generation can be described as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism – not remotely close to Christianity. And where did they learn this belief system? From their parents and from their churches.

The total secularization of America’s academic and intellectual culture is virtually a completed project, and “Sex Week” at Yale University advertises the rejection of even Christian morality in favor of the new revolutionaries.

What Peter Berger calls “cognitive contamination” now reigns in thousands of churches and theological liberalism has created a system of empty and emptying churches and seminaries. Those who hold to the beliefs of historic Christianity will lose social capital simply by opening their mouths, and the price of identification with our churches will only rise.

Liberal accommodationism failed from the start and fundamentalist withdrawal also failed. Few strategies now present themselves to evangelical Christians who face a fate which Carl F. H. Henry warned us about a generation ago – the fate of becoming a wilderness cult with no more social significance than the ancient Essenes.

It would be easy to lose heart. Easy, but wrong . . . even unfaithful.

Jesus would have his disciples learn from a persistent Jewish widow who simply will not give up. She makes her demand for justice heard morning, noon, and night. She gives a judge who fears neither God nor man something new to fear: a Jewish widow with a cause.

If this judge, a man who fears neither God nor man, eventually gives this persistent woman what she demands, what of our gracious and loving God? As Jesus told his disciples, “And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.”

This is good news, indeed. Jesus told his disciples that they ought always to pray and never to lose heart, and he told them this parable to this effect. It is a gift.

But it is also a warning. Look to the question Jesus then asked his disciples, “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

What a haunting question. When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

Of course he will. We know that the gates of hell will not prevail and that Christ will protect and vindicate his church. When the Son of Man comes, he will find faith on earth – but perhaps not here. Perhaps in Africa, where stalwart Anglican bishops defy demands to abandon the Gospel. Surely within the vast legions of people groups yet unreached with the Gospel. Here and there, more and less, sometimes in advance and sometimes apparently in retreat.

That question asked by Jesus frames the importance of what is happening here tonight. We are gathered here, at least in part, to do something toward answering that question with faith and faithfulness. We are gathered to do everything within our power and influence to make certain that there will be faith on earth – a particular quality of faith that is bold, courageous, confessional, convictional, tenacious, evangelistic, missiological, and persistent, just like this widow.

How then does Jesus’ question in this text point to theological education as the most important endeavor on earth?

In its servant role to the church, theological education is the necessary means whereby pastors, preachers, teachers of the church, evangelists, missionaries, church planters, and church leaders are formed in the faith of the church – that faith that is orthodox, apostolic, biblical, and very much alive.

This points to the central importance of the Christian ministry and the Christian minister, and this centrality is by Christ’s design—pointing to the priority of preaching and teaching in the church and in the making of disciples.

In former days, those days marked by the dominance of cultural Christianity, the ministry could be confused as a profession. No such confusion is possible now. The authentic Christian ministry constitutes a counterrevolutionary insurgency on behalf of the Gospel, an insurrection against principalities and powers, a redemptive rescue mission in the midst of late modernity.

What could be more important than the education and preparation of these insurgents and counterrevolutionaries? What could be more important than theological education?

At the theological seminary the twig is bent, the trajectory is set, the minister is molded, the preacher is formed, and the missionary is equipped.

The theological seminary is Ground Zero of the church’s future, and not just on its campus but everywhere its graduates will take their message, ministry, and influence.

Here at a theological seminary we find hermeneutics, exegesis, biblical theology, systematics, historical theology, homiletics, and missiology.

We find books and brains, a library and a faculty, mentors who mold the future, and dedicated Christian scholars who serve the church.

This is deadly serious business, and they know it. What shows up in the classroom shows up in the pulpit, and fast.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

Have you paused to consider what is happening tonight in light of that question? If so, what would it mean?

It would mean that the inauguration of the Reverend Doctor J. Ligon Duncan is a down payment and a public declaration that you mean to answer this question definitively within this generation. It will mean that the governing board of this great school states again its commitment to confessional and convictional theological education. It will mean a constituency of Christians and churches that understand the priority of theological education and support this great cause with prayer and finances. It will mean a faculty skilled in the arts and sciences of theological scholarship, professing the inerrancy of Scripture without compromise and teaching the faith once for all delivered to the saints without corruption. It will mean students drawn to study with such a faculty, determined to mine the treasures of theological education as they are being launched into lives of committed Gospel ministry. Lastly, a theological education that will truly serve the church will require an exceptional leader, a man who will give unreservedly of himself to the task of leading and guiding and protecting theological education. A man who is himself a scholar, a teacher, and a true minister. A man of unquestioned conviction and unbridled energies.

A man like Ligon Duncan.

I have known Ligon Duncan for almost a quarter century. We have talked together, strategized together, prayed together, written together, preached together, labored together, and dreamed together of what theological education would require in this generation. Now, in the providence of God, we serve together as colleagues in this great calling, the leadership of a theological seminary.

He is a faithful theologian, a brilliant historian, a churchman, a gifted leader, and a trusted friend. He is a teacher of right doctrine and godly living. He is an exemplary husband, father, son, brother, and friend. I would trust him with any cause, great or small; and this cause is great. He will be unembarrassed to be the chief executive officer and chancellor of a school that is unquestionably Reformed, thoroughly theological, and authentically a seminary.

So we gather tonight in rare formality to witness something even more rare. A torch is passed, a stewardship is being transferred. Ligon Duncan now takes on in a public ceremony the stewardship of the faith, the pattern of sound words, the treasure of sacred truths given by Christ to the church. We are all witnesses to these things, and gladly so.

Why do we feel the weight and glory and significance of this night so clearly? Because we hear a question ringing down through the corridors of time: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

In answering that question, what could be more important than theological education? What greater cause could form our joy and sense of moment tonight? In no small way we gather tonight to answer Christ’s question with a faithful assertion of both word and will.

By God’s grace, when the Son of Man comes, he will find faith on the earth.

This is the sermon preached by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President and Joseph Emerson Brown Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the occasion of the inauguration of Ligon Duncan as Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary. The sermon was preached on Thursday, October 2, 2014 at the First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Mississippi at 7:00 in the evening.

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

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

Transcript: The Briefing 10-02-14

The Briefing

 

October 2, 2014

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

 

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

1) Data shows marginalization of marriage to matter of status, not expectation

New data is coming out from the U.S. Census Bureau, analyzed by many research organizations; indicating that marriage is right now, in the year 2014, in even bigger trouble than perhaps we had thought. Look back to the year 2012, and one in five adults age 25 and older had never been married – that’s one in five, about 20%. Go back to 1960, only 10% of Americans, indeed only 9% of American adults age 25 and older, had never been married. This is demonstrating an underlining once again, a trend that many of us have seen and feared – and that is the marginalization of marriage in American life. First to the point, that is no longer seen as necessary; and secondly to the point, that it amounts to, in many circles, little more than a status achievement. It is no longer the moral expectation. We’re involved in a massive social experiment in the present to see if you can have a society that does not respect marriage – that does not have marriage as the central relational expectation. No previous society known to human experience has been so organized, but in our post-Christian, postmodern, post-whatever age, a considerable number of Americans have decided that marriage is now one of those things we can well do without.

Wendy Wang and Kim Parker, looking at this data from the Pew Research Center, indicated that not only do we have the statistical information that there has been now a vast increase in the number of American adults who have never been married, but furthermore the research also indicates that only 46% of Americans believe that all persons are better off if marriage and children are priority. Now you’ll notice the number, 46% – that’s less than 50% – which means a majority believes that, to use the language of this research, just as well off – that is people are just as well off if people have other priorities. That’s a frightening bit of data. What we’re looking at there is an explicit statement that a majority of Americans now think that marriage is no longer necessary, either as a moral template or as an avenue to human happiness. When only 46% of Americans say that society and individuals, parents and children, would be better off if children and marriage are priority together, we’re looking at a social disaster and we’re looking at it straight in the face.

There are those who look at the same data and say we should simply embrace it, we should celebrate it.  Brittney Cooper writing at Salon.com, she is, according to the column, a professor of women’s and gender studies in Africana studies at Rutgers University. She says that much of this conversation amounts to a national moral panic that she says must stop. She points back to the 1950s and says that’s where many Americans with a marriage concern are trying to take us. In other words, back to the future – trying to go back to some golden marriage age in the past. And certainly there’s some that will be quite satisfied to do that. But what you have in the worldview behind Brittney Cooper and so many others who write at Salon.com is the suggestion that society and its individuals can do quite well – thank you very much – without marriage. And in her case she says that this periodic moral panic, and she accuses not only the right but the cultural left in America, of coming to the same periodic panics – she says that simply has to stop. For instance, Cooper writes about the writer Isabel Sawhill, who has recently signaled an alarm about the fact that marriage is been marginalized in America and she’s writing not from the right but she’s writing from the left. Cooper responds that she finds this kind of thing still very irksome. She says,

“Frankly, I find these episodic moral panics, even the ones that appear in Sawhill’s subdued and pragmatic tones, to be tiresome, repetitive and lacking in creativity.”

Her final sentence,

“We don’t need more rules to police parents of unconventional families. We need better options for what families can look like in the first place”

But if you’re looking for a collision of worldviews, you don’t have to look to just the collision between the right and the left, you can look in this case at the collision between the left and the further left; in this case between Isabel Sawhill, a person of the left, and Brittney Cooper of the further left. And here you have even someone who is suggesting that when you have liberal scholars who go so far as to say, maybe marriage is a big issue, maybe the marginalization and subversion of marriage isn’t such a good idea. Even when you have that coming from the left, there are people on the further left who are suggesting that it’s simply time we acknowledge that there is no such thing as a normative family, we should simply embrace the modern anarchy we have over couplings and relationships and even the things we call marriage, and leave that old ideal behind – as a relic of patriarchy and an oppressive former morality. But what we’re looking at here is also an acknowledgment; when you even consider the statement that what we need is more creativity when it comes to family forms, you can only wonder where that more creativity could possibly take us. Because when you look at where the family is today, when you look at the data coming from the Census Bureau even in its most recent reports, it’s hard to imagine the you can come up with many different permutations of how human beings can be related to one another – much less how they can conceive and have children and then raise them. When major research like this is released, sometimes what is even more interesting are the responses to the research – more interesting and more revealing in the end than the research itself.

For instance when you look at American liberals looking at these reports about the family, you see the left and the far left, you see not only Brittney Cooper writing but also, as we’ve seen, Isabel Sawhill, and now writing in the Atlantic, Michael Wear. He writes about the American family making a comeback, and he points to President Obama and he points to President Obama in two ways. In the first sense, he points to the president and the fact that the President has recently, in speaking about economic inequality, spoken of the importance of the family. A couple of very interesting observations here, in the first place, Michael Wear is exactly right. He’s pointing to the fact that when you look at President Obama’s more recent statements, he is returning again and again to the family as essential to the building of society; and of course to a thriving economy, and to the removal of all kinds of social pathologies – or if not the removal of them, at least the lessening of them. It’s important that the President sees this, it’s important that he injects it into the national conversation. But the president’s argument has a severe limitation – he will not define what the family is. You’ll recall that in his evolution from 2008 to 2012, he evolved from an opponent of same-sex marriage to a supporter of same-sex marriage. Back in 2008 he said that marriage must be respected as the central institution of human society and as a traditional institution that was embedded with moral wisdom. When it came to the year 2012 in his reelection campaign, he said all that had to be put aside in light of the demand that all persons have access to marriage – including same-sex couples. But what was lost in all that, what gets confused in the President’s message is how you define the family if you’re going to help it. Because in terms of policy, or for that matter – simple logic, you can’t help what you cannot define. And that’s why the left finds itself particularly tied in knots over these questions. It wants to talk about the family – at least many people on the left wants to talk about the family – the eclipse of marriage, even many people on the left recognize, was not only a bad idea, it has led to a very disastrous effects. But there’s no recovery if you won’t talk about what the family is and what the family must look like and how the family must be defined – getting right to the central definition of the family which starts with marriage.

Furthermore, if, as Michael Wear, you’re talking about President Obama, there’s a second aspect – and this is one that conservative Christians need to take to heart and need to think about. When you look at President Obama and you think not so much about what he says but what he does, you have an example in President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, of two people who represent what marriage was intended to be; in terms of the fact that a man and a woman are united in a lasting commitment. Indeed we know that marriage is to be a lifelong commitment, but at this point – they ought to be commended as President and First Lady for demonstrating the stability of marriage. Furthermore, the President and the First Lady had been diligent in pointing out that their children benefit by being raised within the context of having a mother and a father, and the President and the First Lady have demonstrated real parental devotion to those children – making those children and their welfare, those two girls, a priority. Not only in terms of their private lives, but also in terms of their public statements. In this case what we need is what we said before; we need the President not so much to practice what he preaches, but to preach what he practices.

A recent report came out indicating that when it came to one White House staffer, it was the President who intervened in his life to point out the importance of marriage and its durability, the point of marriage as a mark of adulthood. In this case speaking to a young man, he said one of the markers of manhood is to get married. And yet that’s not something the President says in terms of his advice given to the nation. That advice, though sound in every respect, is not found in how the President often addresses legislation. And so as we look to the left and we have to concede also often to the right, we find that we often do not fail to live up to what we preach. But the opposite problem is also urgent. Christians have to recognize it’s not enough to practice what you preach – that’s essential but it’s not enough. We also have to preach what we practice.

2) Millennial women more conservative in own marital decisions than in politics

Finally, as we’re thinking about all this new research about the family, Catherine Rampell writing at the Washington Post points out that the research is also indicating why many women among the millennial generation aren’t married. And the answer overwhelmingly is they’re not willing to marry a man who does have a steady job. Here we’re looking at the radical inequality among the genders when it comes to the employment situation, especially among the millennial generation. And the point in the Washington Post article by Catherine Rampell is the fact that what we need is intervention in the lives of many young men if they’re going to have the kinds of jobs that would make them good marriage prospects when it comes to many of the women in their own generation. But there’s another point that’s made here, and it is made profoundly. It turns out the many of these millennial young women, who declare themselves to be revolutionaries in so many issues of sexuality, gender, and marriage, and all the rest, it turns out there rather conventional when it comes looking for a husband. And that gets back to the point I was making about the Obamas, even though they are the central symbols of a party that has joined the moral revolution, they in terms of their own domestic life have done nothing of the kind. And also when you look at this report coming out about millennial women, these are women who say, overwhelmingly in terms of social science data, that we should join the moral revolution. But when it comes to looking for a husband, they’re not looking for a revolutionary, their looking for man with a job. That tells us a great deal, it tells us that the desires that young women have perhaps don’t change all that much, regardless of what they think they’re supposed to say. The data coming up in these reports on marriage, or the lack of marriage, the data coming out from these Census Bureau reports is analyzed by so many research organizations the very research that is now analyzed by the Washington Post in this column points out to the fact that most of these young women – just looking at their own words – say that what they’re looking for is a trustworthy man of integrity with a job. And they do understand something that is of vital importance and is affirmed in the biblical worldview. Where you find a man, you should find a job; and where you find a man at work, you find a man who is far more likely to be seen as a prospect for marriage than a man without a job. And we understand that would be for good reason.

Next, shifting from these reports on marriage to a recent report on same-sex marriage – Time Magazine reminds us that on October 1 of 1989, Denmark became the first country on the planet to grant legal status to same-sex couples. They were defined there as domestic partnerships; that’s 25 years ago on October 1. Then you look at the fact that it was in 2001 that the first nation on the planet legalized same-sex marriage; that nation was the Netherlands. But looking back to the anniversary of October 1, 1989, you’re talking about 25 years, and when you thinking about the scale and the velocity of this moral revolution, perhaps that 25 year hallmark is really important for us to consider. Because as Time Magazine’s Sam Frizell points out, if you look back 25 years, virtually the vast majority of Americans 25 years ago said that domestic partnership would be morally wrong. They said that same-sex marriage would be unthinkable. It was such an overwhelming majority that most of the pollsters and survey takers in America suggested that it would be decades –  multiple decades – before Americans would have any change of heart on the issue of same-sex relationships; especially when it came to something as radical as same-sex marriage. But a quarter of century later, it appears that everything has changed. As Sam Frizell writes,

“It’s easy to forget how much societal mores have changed. In the intervening years, views on same-sex marriage have flipped, with 59% of Americans supporting it and just 34% opposed, according to a March 2014 poll by the Washington Post-ABC News.”

3) In 25 years since first legalization of same-sex unions social perception changed radically

Now back 25 years ago, Walter Isaacson wrote an article for Time magazine about the decision in Denmark and Isaacson made an argument for same-sex marriage. But as Frizell says, it must’ve sounded eccentric in 1989. It has become, in his words, mainstream in 2014. That tells us a great deal. What was eccentric, so far outside the bounds that no one even took it seriously 25 years ago, is now mainstream.

Finally on this topic, how mainstream is it? The Pew Research Center indicates that when the Census Bureau released the data last week on marriage for the first time ever included among married couples were same-sex couples. Now the interesting thing about this is that even as the Census Bureau included them, it isn’t sure exactly how to include them and it isn’t even sure how many of there are. It is sure that they are so few they don’t change any of the major statistics on marriage, but this just points out the fact that even as we’re looking at trying to talk about marriage we’re losing the ability to define it – not only in terms of academic theory and public policy, but even in terms of math – even the Census Bureau isn’t sure how to count people who are now married.

4) Rise of jihad brides reveals need of family for stable society

Next, we’ve all been concerned by reports coming out of Europe and now Canada and the United States about young Muslims being mobilized for jihad; joining groups such as the Islamic State, traveling to countries outside the United States as a way of eventually getting to nations like Syria and Iraq in order to join ISIS, or the Islamic State. And we’ve been primarily talking about young men who have become jihadi, stories about young men from cities such as Minneapolis and London and Brussels. But now also not just about young men, but also about young women – even teenage girls. A report comes from Great Britain’s newspaper The Telegraph that at least one young girl, a 15-year-old named Yusra Hussein, she’s believed now to be heading to Syria to join the Islamic State terrorists. And her parents say that their heart is torn by their daughter’s disappearance and they have pleaded with her to come home. They said,

“Please dear Yusra, I love and I miss you [this said by her mother], my heart is torn, and I want you home as soon as possible.”

Now both her mother and her father have spoken of their increasing concern for their daughter, but the likelihood is that she is already with the Islamic State and has already become a part of jihad. She and several other teenage girls now missing from Great Britain are expected to have become jihad wives to young jihadis in the Islamic State. And this brings up a very interesting article that appeared last week in the international media, especially in article by Raja Abdulrahim in the Los Angeles Times. As Raja Abdulrahim reports,

“Months after declaring an Islamic caliphate, Islamic State, which has seized large [areas] of Syria and Iraq, is seeking to address a need of any viable nation: women.”

This is at present, as the Islamic State, primarily an army. And as an army of course is made up overwhelmingly of men, indeed in terms of the active soldiers within Islamic State, they are all men. Many of them are very young men, including not only young men in their 20s but also teenagers as well – and they want wives. And now in Internet posts and social media messaging, the extremist Sunni militants are recruiting females to marry their fighters and have children together. As Abdulrahim reports, this is part of a larger strategy of state building. Rita Katz, director of the site intelligence group which monitors online activity by militant organization said,

“They are treating the Islamic State as a country that needs women. The message is: ‘You are coming to marry someone immediately and have kids and cook.’ They’re building a state.”

Abdulrahim reports,

“Female recruits who have made the trek are chiming in: On sites like Twitter, Tumblr and ask.fm, they use the abbreviated and grammar-challenged writing characteristic of the Internet, employing lots of LOLs and emoticons even as they advocate attacks on religious minorities, quote extremist religious leaders and cheer [on] the beheading of American journalists.”

Remember we’re talking primarily about teenage girls. These are the teenage girls who use those emoticons at the same age to talk about their romantic crushes and all kinds of things with their adolescent peers. But at least some are being mobilized for religious extremism and for violence – indeed for jihad. This tells us a great deal about societies, no society can exist as a society just of young men. Young men inevitably have what psychologist Gail Sheehy called the ‘urge to merge,’ and they are looking for wives. And a society can’t exist merely by recruiting soldiers, eventually it has to recruit wives for those soldiers – and in this case, not only women but very young girls.

And they are being recruited for the most traditionalist of roles. They are being told, come and marry and immediately plan to bear children and to cook for us. Perhaps the most amazing thing to many people in the modern age is that there is a significant tug on the hearts of many Muslim teenage girls to join this kind of jihad. Not to join the jihad by taking up a gun, but by joining the jihad by taking up the kitchen and by becoming mothers and by marrying soldiers and by building up society in so doing. Again, one of things that shines through this is the necessity of marriage and the necessity of family to a society. So even in the situation in which you have so many postmodern states in the post-Christian West trying to act as if marriage doesn’t matter, in contrast you have the Islamic State saying marriage matters so much that we now need to recruit wives for our soldiers in order to build a society. Well if it takes wives and husbands to build a society at the beginning, it also takes wives and husbands to keep a society alive. And it should be to our absolute humiliation, facing the grief of these parents who have lost their daughters in England, to understand that perhaps the Islamic state know something that we have denied – the importance of marriage after all, and marriage as a husband and a wife.

5) Secret Service director resignation reveals eccentricity of Washington politics

Finally, yesterday a parable played its way out in Washington DC when Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigned after she and her agency were humiliated by the fact that an intruder was able to cross 70 yards across the White House lawn after climbing the gate, entered the unlock front door the White House and eventually made his way we now know all the way to the second floor of the executive mansion. It was impossible for her to maintain credibility as head of the Secret Service when an intruder like this was able to get to the second floor of the executive mansion. But the parables not just who resigned, in this case the head of the Secret Service, but who hasn’t resigned in Washington under even greater embarrassments – such as the head of the Internal Revenue Service. Even after multiple embarrassments, including the singling out of conservative organizations for particular scrutiny and supposedly the accidental loss of recorded information time and time again – always by accident. The national media will be talking for sometime about the resignation of Secret Service director Julia Pierson, there ought to be more conversation about the people who, under even greater embarrassment, has not resigned.

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 10-02-14

1) Data shows marginalization of marriage to matter of status, not expectation

Record Share of Americans Have Never Married, Pew Research Center (Wendy Wang and Kim Parker)

The American family is a myth: Why our national moral panic must stop, Salon (Brittney Cooper)

The American Family Is Making a Comeback, The Atlantic (Michael Wear)

2) Millennial women more conservative in own marital decisions than in politics

 For millennial women, ‘the one’ must have a steady job, Washington Post (Catherine Rampell)

3) In 25 years since first legalization of same-sex unions social perception changed radically

This Is How Much More Popular Same-Sex Marriage Is Today Than in 1989, Time (Sam Frizell)

 For first time, census data on married couples includes same-sex spouses, Pew Research Center (D’Vera Cohn)

4) Rise of jihad brides reveals need of family for stable society

Mother of 15-year-old ‘jihadist’ Yusra Hussien says her ‘heart is torn’ as she pleads with her to ‘please come home’, The Telegraph (Gordon Rayner)

Islamic State recruiting women to ‘have kids and cook’, Los Angeles Times (Raja Abdulrahim)

5) Secret Service director resignation reveals eccentricity of Washington politics

Secret Service Director Resigns in Scandal Over Security Lapses, New York Times (Michael S. Schmidt and Michael D. Shear)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 10-01-14

The Briefing

October 1, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, October 1, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Medical response to Ebola case in Texas example of value of worldview undergirding society

Ebola has come to the United States – in this case not someone who had Ebola and was airlifted here, but someone whose first diagnosis was right here in the United States, in the city of Dallas, Texas. As Reuters reports,

“U.S. health officials said [yesterday] the first patient infected with the deadly Ebola virus had been diagnosed in the country after flying to Texas from Liberia, [it’s] a new sign [said Reuters] of how the outbreak ravaging West Africa can spread globally.”

It turns out that this individual came to the United States by air from Liberia on the 19th of September, just a matter of days later – well at least by yesterday – he was diagnosed as having the Ebola virus. So just in recent weeks we’ve had warnings coming from many in the international community and from those especially who are health authorities, that what we’re looking at in Ebola is not something that has thus far been managed – not even close; it threatens now to break out of West Africa. And yet we were told over and over again that it was unlikely that a case would ever appear here in the United States. Well as unlikely as it might have been, it’s now in actuality. And even though the same news report indicates that American health officials are quite certain they have the ability to isolate this case and to handle the challenge of this infectious virus, the fact is that Americans now have to know that the virus is here and that it has emerged here in a fresh case; and even though there is a direct tie to Liberia, the reality is that there can be a direct tie to any number of other cases that could emerge as well. We’re talking about a disease, that thus far has resisted every effort to contain it, and a disease that has a mortality rate of at least 50 to 90%. Those are daunting numbers. But even as this news comes with a fresh shock to Americans, there are some reassurances that are in order.

In the first place, much of the problem in West Africa is the lack of a public health infrastructure, and even entire social infrastructure, to handle this kind of a public health challenge. And furthermore, this case didn’t come out of a vacuum – it did emerge from a contagion that happened in West Africa. It was not a contagious situation that happened here. But of course so long as this individual has this disease, he is deeply infectious. And for that reason, public health authorities in the United States now have to be on a whole new scale of alert. But this should lead Americans, even as we are forewarned, about the fact that an Ebola cases has happened here, this should also lead Americans to be very thankful for a public health apparatus, an entire public health system that is attribute to the achievement of human civilization. And as Christians, we are mindful of the fact that that kind of social system requires a certain worldview to undergird the entire culture. You take away the worldview, you take away the social cohesion, you take away the culture, and that means you also take away the public health system. I for one look at the news coming out of Texas and I am fairly reassured that American health authorities can indeed handle this challenge. If I were elsewhere in the world, I wouldn’t have that kind of confidence. And for that reason, we need to recognize that confidence is hard-won; and we also need to remember that it can be quickly lost.

2) New California active consent law reveals a sexual morality built only on consent

Shifting to the state of California, we know that every single society includes a morality; a moral system that holds the society together and gives it common meaning. And at the center of every moral system is a way of regulating the most intimate matters in human life; that is to say every moral system includes a sexual morality – however minimal. And as for Western civilizations, we have had what can only be described as a thick sexual morality, that is – a very comprehensive and complex sexual morality. It was simple in the sense that it centered in on marriage, but it had many boundaries and many rules by which marriage was protected and the sanctity of the intimate relationships between a man and a woman were honored. But now we’re looking at a far more complicated morality, we’re looking at a far more minimal moral system. And the evidence of that comes in California, where Governor Jerry Brown on Monday signed into law, as the very first state to do so, that all the universities in that state receiving any funding from the state must agree to adopt a policy on sex among students that amounts to ‘yes means yes’ rather than merely ‘no means no’.

As Richard Pérez-Peña and Ian Lovett report for the New York Times,

“Facing what many regard as an epidemic of campus sexual assault, some colleges have cracked down on binge drinking, others have reined in fraternities, while still others are training incoming students not to be passive bystanders when they see signs of trouble. But [they say] the most talked-about new approach, adopted by many schools in the past year, is to require mutual ‘affirmative consent,’ [affirmative consent, usually put in quotation marks to indicate it as a new term] and not just passive acquiescence, before any sexual contact. California has raised the stakes becoming the first state in the country to pass a law obliging every college to have a consent policy or lose state financial aid.”

A couple of paragraphs in this article are absolutely crucial. Jane Stapleton is a researcher who advises colleges on sexual abuse policies, she’s co-director of the prevention innovations program in the University New Hampshire. She said,

“In a lot of places, there is little to no evidence behind the measures being taken, that doesn’t mean they won’t work. It means we don’t know.”

So what we’re looking at here is a rather desperate response to an epidemic of campus rapes. And we need to stay to this point, that if there is campus rape at any level, it is a horrible sin. And we need to understand that a sane society does everything it can to prevent this kind of sin – indeed this kind of crime – from happening. An epidemic of this kind of crime points to a basic social problem, a basic failure on the part of the society. And California Governor Jerry Brown, following the lead of many modern sex educators and those establishing the kinds of policies that we just read about, they’re saying the way to establish safety on college campuses is to try to regulate the kind of sexual lifestyle that is now encouraged their by requiring this affirmative consent, rather than just passive acquiescence.

Under California law, says the New York Times, signed by Governor Brown on Sunday night,

“Colleges must require ‘affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity,’”

Now that’s not language from the newspaper, that’s language from the governor. The law he signed says that every single college must require, and listen to these words again, “affirmative conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity” – which can be according to the policy and the newspaper, either verbal or communicated through actions.

“Consent [says the New York Times] to one kind of contact cannot be taken to mean consent to another. So an encounter that progresses from kissing to intercourse would require not one go-ahead but several.”

Now when we’re looking at the intersection of the Christian worldview and the headlines of the day, this one demands our attention. It’s awkward to discuss and it’s rather horrifying to conceive, but what we’re looking at here is the sexual insanity – now signed into law by the state of California, indeed signed by its governor – that establishes that sanity somehow allows for a policy of affirmative consent that is defined in just the way the California legislation defines it; as requiring positive, ongoing – well, to use their words here – to require ‘affirmative conscious voluntary agreement’ to engage in any kind of sexual activity, and that is the only morality. It has to be, look at those three words, ‘affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” – that’s all that is required. The only issue here is consent; all those other words are simply to define what it means for an individual to consent to a sexual activity. But then you’ll notice this consent, this ‘affirmative conscious voluntary’ agreement has to be acknowledged, or at least expressed, over and over again as the kind of acts may escalate in terms of a sexual encounter. Furthermore, they can be verbal or communicated through actions. If you’re confused about this, is not because you don’t understand the policy, it’s because you do. And because any sane individual looking at this policy understands this can’t possibly deliver on what the governor promises. This can’t possibly deliver sexual sanity out of insanity, because this just institutionalizes the insanity.

Just a few years ago, college campuses were considered to be ruled by what were called parietal rules. And the principle of in loco parentis, whereby college administrators and faculty were understood to stand in the place of parents; assumed to have the same kind of concern for students that parents would have if these students were actually still living in the parents homes. These parietal rules, these rules about in loco parentis, were in place in such a way that they also were to keep sexual activity not orderly and consensual but not happening. And that’s what has changed utterly since the 1960s. The sexual revolution has now swept aside all sanity on these issues, and not only that but all sanity in terms of the policies. Because a policy that once said that a young man and a young woman should not engage in sexual activity unless they are married, has now given way, after various fits and starts in all kinds of steps in between, to the governor of California on Sunday night signing into law that was announced on Monday morning – a law that says that for sex to be moral, for it to be legal, it merely needs to be consensual. But in order to be consensual, it has to be, well, consented to by a positive statement that has to be verbal or through actions – whatever in the world that might mean – that would indicate that it is indeed affirmative, conscious, and voluntary.

The editorial board of the New York Times has already said they think this kind of policy makes sense, but even in their news story, well, there are embedded clues that this isn’t going to work. For instance, Pam Thomason, the U.C.L.A. official who oversees compliance with Title IX, that’s the federal anti-discrimination law, she says,

“I think the disciplinary panels find it easier to find a student responsible for sexual assault. They can ask, ‘What happened that made you think consent was affirmative, unambiguous and conscious?’”

So in other words, if you’re going to try to bring charges against, presumably, a young man for a sexual assault, now you have an administrator saying this law will make it’s easier because it’s easier to ask him “What made you think that there was an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious consent?” On the other hand, Emma Goldberg, also cited in this news article – she’s a junior active in a group known as Students Against Sexual Violence at Yale – said,

“Affirmative consent is an absolutely necessary standard and Yale University [she says] does a fantastic job of conveying that to students,”

Those are her very words. But these are the next words in the article,

“But it’s obviously quite difficult for administrators to adjudicate affirmative consent, and there is always room for improvement in enforcement of these policies.”

Those are her words. Just consider the first of her words in that sentence, “it’s obviously quite difficult for administrators to adjudicate affirmative consent,” so now you’re putting college and university administrators in the position of judging students by means of these disciplinary panels as to whether or not they actually received the kind of affirmative consent by words or by actions that are required by these kinds of policies. And if you think that’s going to work, just imagine how difficult it is to talk to a teenager about what just happened in a conversation moments ago. How in the world are you going to talk to college students in a reasonable way when these kinds of charges are made and there is no absolute definition of about what kind of action or words would be necessary for this kind of affirmative, unambiguous, consent? The problem with this is that consent is just too thin a moral principle; it just isn’t an adequate sexual morality. This is the insanity of a society that says we’re going to turn young people lose and we’re going to tell them that they can have all the sex they want so long as it is consensual. We will decouple sex from marriage, we will decouple sex from any morality except the morality of consent, and then we’ll try to define that consent. And of course this isn’t the first effort; this is just the most recent effort because all the previous efforts at consent have failed.

The previous policy was basically no means no, if a young woman says no, that no is binding. But that isn’t good enough, so now it’s yes means yes. But the yes isn’t going to be any more clear than the no -not in moral terms. If you’re wondering, as most must be wondering, what this means about American colleges and universities, the entire culture American higher education, what it means is that the average college University campus right now is a carnival of rampant sexual immorality. But it isn’t called sexual immorality and it isn’t even considered sexual immorality, not only by the students but also by the faculty and administrators.

Erica E. Phillips writing for the Wall Street Journal yesterday writes,

“During her freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, Meghan Warner was raped by a fellow student and sexually assaulted by a second student. She didn’t report it at the time, she said, because she didn’t realize [it was rape.]”

So now you even have a problem in terms of defining rape to where it’s not understood that it was rape when it happened but only later. Many people are now saying that the real problem here is education and there’s no doubt that education is needed. But the education that’s being offered here will offer morality that simply can’t sustain any kind of responsible moral judgment. Now just listen to where this goes on,

“Now a junior, Ms. Warner has since led peer workshops on sexual assault and consent—and has encountered many students as uninformed on the topic as she was. [It gets worse, hold on.] At a recent session with some fraternity members, Ms. Warner said, ‘jaws dropped’ when she explained that sex with someone who has blacked out from drinking amounts to rape. They didn’t even know that was illegal or wrong,”

Well at this point we need to break the glass and declare an emergency. If these fraternity members didn’t know that having sex with someone who had blacked out from drunkenness was wrong or illegal, then something is wrong in terms of the total context here. Now, you have to doubt whether this is actually plausible, that anyone with the slightest amount of moral knowledge would be unaware of the fact that sex under this circumstances would be immoral – but of course what’s being denied here is that marriage has anything to do with this, or that there should be any expectation of students not having sex until they are married, or of any expectation that the university or the college should have an interest in that. And instead the only interest is in trying to negotiate students into safe patterns of sexual immorality. And that’s the problem; there aren’t any safe patterns of sexual immorality. When you have the President of the United States, the Governor of California and so many others who are claiming that we have an unsafe situation on American college and university campuses because of an epidemic of rape, we don’t disagree with them. Christians with any sense about them will say, ‘no that’s absolutely so, this is a profoundly unhealthy and immoral situation.’ The problem is where these secular leaders want to move the situation isn’t actually to a higher morality, it isn’t actually certain that anything is going to be safer. But the proposals made by these secular leaders simply will not get the college campus to a safer place. In this case, consent doesn’t equal safety and it certainly doesn’t equal morality; and that’s the whole problem.

When it comes in the legislation signed into law by Governor Brown on Sunday night, Christians responding to this need certainly to say that what is needed is not less, but more – much more, much more morality than is offered here, much more moral clarity that is found within this legislation, much more in terms of rules and boundaries than just consent – however consent may be defined. When you reduce sexual morality to nothing more than consent, then you’ll spend the rest your time in endless debate about what constitutes adequate consent. If all you have is consent, the question is when do you have enough?

3) Hong Kong protests over loss of democracy exposes autocracy of one-party government

Shifting our focus to Hong Kong, on Monday night demonstrators filled the streets of Hong Kong and the Chinese government is expected to crack down. As the Wall Street Journal said very ominously, if those protesters are waiting to see what the Chinese government is going to do, just consider what happened in Tiananmen Square just a matter of a generation ago. I mention this because we need regularly to be mindful of the fact that there are autocracies on this planet, there are dictatorships that continue, and there is a continuing sad tragic and deadly experiment in Communism that is now represented most centrally by the communist party and its government there in China. That one party system of rule is now extended to Hong Kong since a matter of just about a generation ago; it was transferred from the British Empire to the Chinese government and it was transferred with assurances made by the Chinese of protecting democracy. But now when it comes to elections in Hong Kong, the Chinese government claims the right to pre-approve candidates, which makes democracy of course a sham. And what’s really a tragedy here is the thought that anyone actually trusted China in the first place. The one thing you can trust, a one party system of government to do is to do whatever is necessary to serve the ends of that party. That was true whether it was the Communist Party that was ruling of the Soviet Union and it’s true of the Communist parties to others Eastern Bloc countries and it’s true of the Communist party right now in China. If you have one-party, you have one-party rule, and if you have one-party rule, you have a dictatorship no matter what it might be called. And right now there lots of people in Hong Kong who appear to be waiting to see if China is going to crackdown. At this point Western observers who know China best say, it’s not a question of if, it’s only a question of when.

4) Tennessee abortion vote crucial moment for protection of unborn infants

Meanwhile on November 4, when the election comes up all eyes are going to be on Tennessee, where the voters of the state, for the very first time, get to vote on the issue of abortion. The legislation is known as Amendment 1, as is explained by Anita Wadwhani of The Tennessean there in Nashville,

“A ‘yes’ vote would amend the state constitution to give lawmakers more authority to enact abortion restrictions. A ‘no’ vote would preserve the state’s unusually strong protections. Whatever the outcome, it could have an impact well beyond Tennessee’s borders.”

Here are a couple of facts about Tennessee: Tennessee is in danger of becoming the Mecca for abortion in the deep South, or even in the Mid-South. As a matter fact Russell Moore, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention said,

“Tennessee is sort of becoming the abortion capital of the Bible Belt,”

Why? Well it’s because the Tennessee Constitution, as it currently stands, offers what are interpreted to be expansive protections for abortion rights, which has made it difficult for pro-life forces – including the legislators there in Tennessee – to come up with common sense responses to abortion and limitations upon the practice. As Wadwhani writes,

“Abortion opponents have fought for 13 years to get Amendment 1 on the ballot. They say that Tennesseans don’t want to live in a state known as an abortion destination and that lawmakers should not have their hands tied in making ‘common-sense’ abortion policy decisions.”

One of the things to note by the way is that some of the abortion clinics in Tennessee are glad to be destinations for those coming for abortions from other states. One abortion clinic in Nashville even offer discount coupons for those coming from out of state, a rather perverse demonstration of the business behind abortion. At present, the state of Tennessee has seven abortion clinics – that’s down from 16 in 2000, but still more than any of its neighboring states with the singular exception of North Carolina. We’re looking here at the fact that once again geography matters, and when it comes to abortion geography can matter profoundly. But the citizens of Tennessee have an opportunity to make their geography matter differently than it does now – ending, or at least reducing, the fact that their state is an abortion Mecca. That is a moral tragedy for any state and especially a state where the voters get to have their say; as the voters of Tennessee certainly do on November 4. We can only hope and pray that the voters of Tennessee will take a stand for the sanctity of human life and for the sanity of constitutional government.

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 10-01-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Medical response to Ebola case in Texas example of value of worldview undergirding society

First Ebola case diagnosed in the United States: CDC, Reuters (Julie Steenhuysen and Sharon Begley)

2) New California active consent law reveals a sexual morality built only on consent

California Law on Sexual Consent Pleases Many but Leaves Some Doubters, New York Times (Richard Pérez-Peña and Ian Lovett)

When Yes Means Yes, New York Times (Editorial Board)

Campus Sexual Assaults Draw Greater Scrutiny, Wall Street Journal (Erica E. Phillips)

3) Hong Kong protests over loss of democracy exposes autocracy of one-party government

Pro-Democracy Protests Shake Hong Kong, Wall Street Journal (Isabella Steger, Fiona Law, and Prudence Ho)

4) Tennessee abortion vote crucial moment for protection of unborn infants

TN abortion rights at crossroads, The Tennessean (Anita Wadwhani)

Transcript: The Briefing 09-30-14

The Briefing

 

September 30, 2014

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

 

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

1) Supreme Court maneuverings on same-sex marriage reminder that the political is often personal

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States began its new term and the court did not begin by hearing cases, but rather by meeting in secret – as the justices began the process of deciding which cases they will take. And virtually everyone looking at the issue of same-sex marriage, especially the leaders on both sides of this contentious issue, expect that the Supreme Court of the United States this year will take up one big case – one case, at least, having to do with the legalization of same-sex marriage. And the end result of the Supreme Court taking that case is that by the end of its term, on the last day of June in the year 2015, it will have decided – one way or another, whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage that applies to all Americans in all 50 states. Now most Americans watching the trajectory of this issue know that virtually everyone, including the opponents of same-sex marriage, believe that the Supreme Court is poised to legalize same-sex marriage, or what is now called same-sex marriage, in all 50 states.

Just back in 2013 by a narrow vote, the Supreme Court struck down the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act. Simultaneously, on a technicality, it allowed the striking down of California’s proposition eight to stand. The net result was that the court sent a signal on the issue of same-sex marriage. As justice Antonin Scalia said, we’re just waiting for the shoe to drop. And that shoe is expected to drop this term and almost no one expects that it will drop in defense of traditional marriage; rather the court is set itself out by the trajectory of its own presidents to legalize same-sex marriage. And if anything, what we now see in retrospect is that the court was ready to do that back in 2013 as many of us have suspected, but lacked the political nerve to do so. And now, given the fact that there are been at least 30 court decisions at the federal and state level since those decisions handed down by the highest court in 2013, almost all of them have gone in favor of same-sex marriage; and that now puts the court a different political situation. Note carefully the use of that word; the court is in a different political context, it is not in a different legal context – nothing has changed in the law or in the legal facts to make a change from 2013 to 2015. But the political context has changed, and this this court has shown that it is, if anything, exceedingly political.

On the issue of this upcoming term and the likelihood of a major landmark case and decision, David G. Savage said,

“After fighting state by state for more than 20 years, the same-sex marriage movement is riding an extraordinary wave of legal victories as the Supreme Court prepares to decide whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry nationwide.”

Irv Gornstein, a law professor at Georgetown University who heads that University’s Supreme Court Institute said,

“It’s a near certainty the court will decide it this term and definitively answer”

Evan Wolfson, one of the major proponents of same-sex marriage and an activist early on this issue said,

“There is no question we are winning, but winning is not won. It’s time for the Supreme Court to finish the job.”

And even though the two sides in this argument could not be further apart on the basic question, both acknowledge that 2015 now looms as the key year at the US Supreme Court. And both are now saying, rather openly, that the Supreme Court has the responsibility to settle this issue and that the court can no longer duck it as it did back in 2013.

Utah’s Attorney General, defending his states legislation and amendment against same-sex marriage, made this comment,

“It all comes down to this: Thousands of couples are unconstitutionally being denied the right to marry, or millions of voters are being disenfranchised of their vote to define marriage. Either way, the court’s review is necessary. ”

Well regardless of the fact that the Utah Attorney General was speaking out of an obvious urgency, it’s hard to see that there’s really any mystery about which way the court is likely to rule in this case. We need to say this early and we need to say it often: the Supreme Court has set itself up in 2015 to rule in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide, and to do so not because of a change in the law, but because of a change in the politics; showing us once again that the branch of our government that is supposedly least political, is still political after all.

And speaking of the issue of same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court, for at least two justices of the court, this is not merely a theoretical or hypothetical issue. It’s a very personal issue. That was made clear when Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in recent weeks both conducted the ceremony for a same-sex marriage – both of them doing so, making a statement personally, but also professionally because they did so in their capacity as associate justices of the United States Supreme Court. So while we’re making our case, there really isn’t much mystery about where the court is going – just consider the fact that at least two justices of the Supreme Court have already gone, in terms of going so far as to preside at same-sex marriages. As the feminist said back in the 60s and 70s, the personal is the political, but as these two justices have also shown – the political is often the personal.

2) Rapidity of moral change evident in perceived obsolescence of conservative values

One of our major ongoing concerns is the scope and velocity of moral change taking place all around us, and sometimes it takes someone on the other side of that moral divide to make the point most emphatically, if sometimes also most clearly. That’s the case in the opinion pages of the New York Times yesterday, but not just the opinion page but the editorial page because this was an official editorial, an official statement by the editors of the New York Times; the headline, “The Tide of the Culture War Shifts.” The editors of the New York Times declared that the times are changing and so are the political campaigns. And whereas it had been Democrats who had been on the defensive in so many moral issues in recent decades – issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion – now they say the tide has turned, the culture war has shifted in the opposite direction. No longer is it Democratic candidates who are on the defensive, now it’s Republican candidates who find themselves under attack by their Democratic opponents, and also well-funded special interest groups, because of their stand for something like human personhood or the sanctity of human life or the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The editors acknowledge that the reason why many of these campaigns have turned on these issues is because Democratic candidates are trying to get the support of women, especially, as the editorial notes, single women. At the same time however, they argue

“It is also a reflection of the growing obsolescence of traditional Republican wedge issues in state after state. For a younger generation of voters, the old right-wing nostrums about the ‘sanctity of life’ and the ‘sanctity of marriage’ have lost their power, revealed as intrusions on human freedom. Democrats ‘did win the culture war,’ Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, admitted to The New York Times recently.”

What we talked about that article, in which Mr. Castellanos made that statement, the article was a story by Jonathan Martin published on the 15th of September.  The headline of that article was “Democrats Put Cultural Issues in Their Quiver.”  So in this case, journalistically, there’s an interesting pattern here.  The New York Times runs a big news story, and then several days later, it runs an editorial in which is very clear that the paper was thrilled with what was revealed, or what was presented at least, in terms of the new story. There’s no doubt that on these issues The New York Times editorial board is exceedingly thrilled to be able to say, or least to claim, that the culture war has shifted, but they are a couple of other very interesting aspects of this editorial that appeared in The New York Times yesterday. For one thing, you had the editors of The New York Times using the language ‘sanctity of life’ and ‘sanctity of marriage’ but put in quotation marks known as scare quotes around both of those expressions, as if they’re merely expressions of art – there’s no real argument behind them – there’s no substance behind them.  And evidently, the editors of The New York Times believe just that.   These are nothing more than, well, let’s use their words, “old right-wing nostrums.”   In other words, the moral worldview of the editorial board of The New York Times is so distant from those who believe in the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of marriage, that the editors can only even use those terms in quotation marks, as if the language is so bizarre and so odd that the normal average reader The New York Times wouldn’t understand them, or might even be scared by them, that the editors didn’t try to neutralize them somewhat with those quotation marks.

Recall also that the editors describe the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage as, well let’s just look at their words “the old right-wing nostrums,” – nothing more than outdated moral language. Again that tells us something. It tells us something we need to know and something that should frighten us. Here you have the editorial board of the most influential newspaper in the United States speaking of the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage, using those very terms, putting the within scare quotes, and then say the nothing more than old right-wing nostrums – they can simply be dismissed now as something that is so out of date they are no longer even meaningful. The last words of the editorial are similarly important and concerning. The editors concluded their statement with these words,

“The shift in public opinion might not be enough for Democrats to keep the Senate this year. But over time, it may help spell an end to the politics of cultural division.”

Well let’s think about those last words, they’re suggesting that this cultural shift – away from the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage – may spell politically what they call an end to the politics of cultural division – but at what cost? At the cost of the fact that the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage simply cease to be active moral or theological issues at all. That’s clearly what their hoping for. But not only do they hope for it, they think they see it, they think this is the New Age coming – an age in which there is no longer even a conversation about the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage. And so this editorial that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times has yet another function, this one a function for us, for those who believe in the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of marriage; because we are being told here that our time is running out, perhaps even that it has run out. And in terms of making the arguments while there is time, that’s a warning we need to hear.

3) Role of doubt in Christian life raised by Archbishop Welby’s confession of doubt

Next we turn to some very interesting and concerning developments in the Church of England. In recent days the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head not only of the Church of England but also the entire global Anglican communion, he was cited by the BBC, that’s the state British Broadcasting Corporation in an interview as having said that he has doubts at times as to whether there is a God; the headline in the BBC was simply this: “Archbishop of Canterbury admits he has doubts about God.” Well that headline can be leading or misleading so let’s look more carefully at the story. In this case, in an interview with BBC Bristol there in Great Britain, the Church of England leader said he doubts “in lots of different ways.” He said,

“There are moments, sure, when you think, ‘Is there a God?’ ‘Where is God?’”

The BBC reported the Archbishop has recently completed a tour there in Great Britain; he made his comments at an event called Standing Room Only at the Cathedral in Bristol. When asked about doubt by Lucy Tegg, who was the moderator of the event, he said quote

“It is a really good question. I love the Psalms, if you look at Psalm 88 that’s full of doubt. The other day I was praying over something as I was running [said the Archbishop], and I ended up saying to God ‘look this is all very well, but isn’t it about time you did something, if you’re there? Which is probably not what the Archbishop of Canterbury should say.”

I think of course that something of an understatement, and evidently so did the editors and producers of the BBC who gave attention to this comment rather than the archbishop’s other sayings. And also the fact that it became a story that went rather viral in the United Kingdom almost immediately after it was posted. For the Archbishop of Canterbury, after all, the very head of the church in terms of being its head cleric, for him to say that he has serious doubts about the existence of God is sending quite a signal and that’s an understatement for sure. The Archbishop went on to say as it is possible to be a faithful Christian even if you have doubts. He said,

“The extraordinary thing about being a Christian is that God is faithful even when we’re not.”

By the way that statement is entirely orthodox, but on the other hand it doesn’t actually deal with the sum and substance of the shock over his comments. He went on to say,

“When we get into the wrong place he comes alongside us and says, ‘Right let’s go from here.’”

Well, this raises a very interesting question – a question that applies in some way, at some time, to every intelligent Christian. What is the role of doubt in the Christian life? I think they’re basically three kinds of doubt, or we might say three responses to doubts. One is to ignore it, that’s not biblical – we’re not called to ignore our doubts. As a matter fact, we are to doubt many things. If we didn’t doubt most idols, we would be polytheists rather than believers in the one true and living God. Furthermore, we need to be dubious about so many things that turn out to be absolutely false. When we hear a teaching, we need to be dubious about it, we need to respond to it was some doubt until we see that is clearly revealed in the word of God. So ignoring doubt is not a good Christian practice, it may be something that many people would advise because of fear, but it doesn’t correspond a Christian faithfulness, it doesn’t lead to an active and deeper discipleship.

But the second option when it comes to doubt is to embrace it. And quite frankly, in the past two centuries there have been many Christians, or those who have identified themselves as Christians, who have suggested that the proper response to doubt is simply to embrace it; to give up on any kind of certainty, to suggest that these questions are just so large, that faith is so complex, that we are so distant from the events that took place in the times of the Scriptures and we find ourselves in the modern age asking such new questions. Questions that strike at the very heart of theistic belief, that we merely need to embrace doubt and develop what we might call a ‘discipleship of doubt.’ But of course, that is hardly faithful to Scripture. And we are told in Scripture these things are written that you might know; in other words the goal of the Christian disciple should be a proper certainty, not a certainty that isn’t tested by doubt – that can confront honest and pressing questions – but a certainty that comes on the basis of the realization that there is a God, and that He has revealed himself in His word and that He has sent His Son for our salvation.

And that leads us to the third response to doubt which is to settle doubt in a renewed and deepening conviction. This is the hallmark of a healthy Christian life. That healthy faithful Christian life involves the discipleship of the mind, as well as the discipleship of every other aspect of life. And the intelligent Christian doesn’t run from questions, rather the intelligent Christians should run at the questions – running at the questions with the full measure of Christian conviction, with the full confidence in the word of God, and with the absolute confidence that God does not mean for us to be stranded in an island of doubt but rather to move into a deeper discipleship, a deeper faithfulness, and even a deeper conviction.

So it turns out that ignoring our doubt isn’t the right option. It might be convenient, but it really doesn’t last – especially on the big questions. But it certainly turns out also that embracing doubt is fatal to Christian faithfulness. But on the other hand, using doubt as an opportunity to look more carefully at the word of God face, to face the questions very courageously, to know that were doing so from the full wealth of Christian conviction, to bring everything we can learn from the Scripture to answering the question, to look at the full wealth of the Christian tradition, and how faithful Christians have struggled with these questions over the centuries. These are the proper ways to respond when there is an occasion of doubt. And that’s the kind of doubt that leads us into a deepening faith and a deepening discipleship based upon a deepening understanding of our key convictions. That kind of deepening of convictional certainty should be the aim of every Christian so long as we live – not running from the questions, but running at the questions. But not running at the questions unarmed, but running at the questions with the full wealth of Christian conviction.

The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to have understood that he made a major error in the interview when he said, “Which is probably not what the Archbishop of Canterbury should say.”

Sure, the Archbishop just like any other Christian will have certain moments of doubt, but they shouldn’t be shared in such a way as to inflict those doubts upon others. And in this dangerous post-Christian age, it’s malpractice for a Christian minister or Christian leader in any capacity to get up and try to inflict these kinds of doubts upon others. Well it remains to be seen what will be the final impact of the Archbishops comments.

4) Crisis of Church of England’s survival is theological, not demographic

But just days after, not having anything to do with those comments in particular, the church met in its General Synod in York and at least several of those who were speaking suggested that the Church of England “will be dead in 20 years.” Tim Ross, the religious affairs editor writing for the Telegraph, a major London newspaper, writes

“The average age of its members is now 61 and by 2020 a ‘crisis’ of ‘natural wastage’ [that’s the very term used by these Church of England leaders] will lead to their numbers falling ‘through the floor’, the Church’s national assembly was told [just in recent days].”

 

As Ross reports, the church was compared to a company impeccably managing itself into failure. The warnings follow an internal report of the Church of England, calling for an urgent national recruitment drive to attract more members. In the past 40 years, the number of adult churchgoers has been cut in half; the number of children attending regular worship has declined by four out of 5, by 4/5. And that make some of the comments made in this general Synod comments that they thought were comments of concern rather underwhelming. The Reverend Dr. Patrick Richmond, a Synod member from Norwich, told the meeting that some projections suggest that the church would “no longer be functionally extant,” – that’s rather interesting language – in 20 years’ time. Well let’s look at the numbers as they stand right now. The church has just acknowledged, in this very meeting, that over the last 40 years it is lost half of its attenders when it comes to adults and four out of five of its children.

Speaking of the church in 20 years’ time being no longer functionally extant is suggesting that it’s functionally extant now – which it doesn’t actually appear to be. By some reports right now, no more than 2 to 3% of the population there in Great Britain attends a Church of England service in any given month. Furthermore as Ross reports,

“’The perfect storm we can see arriving fast on the horizon is the ageing congregations.”

The average age of an attender at a Church of England service right now is 61. And many congregations have averages far above that.

“Another 10 years on, [said one of the leaders] some extrapolations put the Church of England as no longer functionally extant at all.”

That actually means they’re looking at being extinct in less than a decade. Andreas Whittam Smith, another Anglican leader there the general Synod, said that the Anglican Church now faces “a demographic time bomb,” which should be seen as a crisis. Well if a church leader is going to define their current problem as a “demographic time bomb” then they’re going look for a demographic solution. But the church’s problem, when it comes to the Church of England, is not a demographic crisis. The demographic crisis followed a theological crisis. This is a church that has been in theological crisis for the better part of a century. We’re talking about a church that began accepting unbelief into its clerical ranks, among its priests and its preachers, and its leaders almost a century ago, and is now reaping the bitter harvest of allowing itself to become secularized. And the demographic crisis comes down to this, there’s no reason for a secular society to attend any kind of worship in a secular church.

But both of those stories are actually just a prelude to the blockbuster, which is a story that appeared also in the Telegraph just in recent days; published on 28 September in which the Church of England’s Bishop of Buckingham claims that as many as a dozen of his colleagues as bishops are trapped in the “episcopal closet” because they are gay and cannot openly declare themselves to be so. John Bingham, the religious affairs editor of the paper writes,

“A serving bishop has issued a stinging public denunciation of “duplicity and hypocrisy” in the Church of England over homosexuality – claiming that around as one in 10 of his fellow bishops could be secretly gay but unwilling to speak publicly.”

The Bishop in this case is the Rt Rev Alan Wilson, he’s the Bishop of Buckingham, he accused the current episcopate of preaching a 1950’s Janet and John image of human relationships while adopting what he called an eyes wide shut approach to homosexuality in its own ranks and in the wider church. And here you have a sitting Bishop, writing about his fellow bishops, writing on the basis of his personal knowledge, that at least 10 to a dozen of them are actually gay. The Bishop has a book coming out next week in which he is trying to persuade the church to change its position on homosexuality and same-sex marriage. He declares that the Church of England has not adopted the gay revolution because of what he called “the tiny clique of reactionary activists” – otherwise known as evangelicals and orthodox Christians. He says they have effectively undermined the church’s position on the issue for decades. He spoke of the last Archbishop of Canterbury, and that is Rowan Williams, saying that the hope had been that electing a liberal intellectual would lead to a liberalization in the church on the issue homosexuality. But, about Rowan Williams, he said  “unfortunately, the institution ate the man for breakfast.”

Cleary, this is the kind of Bishop that is looking for controversy; perhaps like that controversial Bishop in the Church of England in the 1960s John A.T. Robinson who declared himself an atheist but continued to be a Bishop. Well you put these stories together, and you see a perfect storm – The Archbishop of Canterbury saying has doubts about God, a General Synod of the church declaring that they face a demographic crisis because they’ve lost half their adults and 4 out of 5 their children, and a sitting Bishop of the Church of England declares that church has to get on with the moral revolution; and furthermore need to acknowledge that at least 10 to 12 of its sitting bishops are also gay. But now the Church of England stands before us as a parable, not so concerned with being faithful, but with being, to use the words of this leader, functionally extant. But a church that sets as its aim to be extant isn’t going to remain extant for long.

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 09-30-14

1) Supreme Court maneuverings on same-sex marriage reminder that the political is often personal

Supreme Court meets to consider taking gay marriage cases, Chicago Tribune (Lawrence Hurley)

Gay marriage supporters, opponents alike eager for Supreme Court ruling, Los Angeles Times (David G Savage)

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan Performs First Gay Wedding, NBC news (Associated Press)

2) Rapidity of moral change evident in perceived obsolescence of conservative values

The Tide of the Culture War Shifts, New York Times (Editorial Board)

Democrats Put Cultural Issues in Their Quiver, New York Times (Jonathan Martin)

3) Role of doubt in Christian life raised by Archbishop Welby’s confession of doubt

Archbishop of Canterbury admits he has doubts about God, BBC

4) Crisis of Church of England’s survival is theological, not demographic

 Ageing Church of England ‘will be dead in 20 years’, The Telegraph (Tim Ross)

One in 10 Church of England bishops ‘could be secretly gay’ – says bishop, The Telegraph (John Bingham)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 09-29-14

The Briefing

 

September 29, 2014

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

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

1) Difficulties in combating terrorism indicate the challenges of maintaining democracy

Speaking on the CBS news program 60 minutes, President Obama acknowledged that the United States has been caught off-guard by the rise of the group known as the Islamic State. Speaking on 60 minutes President Obama acknowledged that the United States government, and in particular its intelligence agencies, had underestimated the risk of such a group and then underestimated the group itself. Speaking of the terrorist group that has leapt into the headlines calling itself the Islamic State, the President spoke of the nation’s national security apparatus, indicating that the intelligence community had been taken off guard. The president said,

“Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,”

As the New York Times acknowledged, in citing Mr. Clapper, the President made no mention of any misjudgment he may have made himself. But just a matter of months ago it was President Obama who was referring to terrorist groups like the Islamic State, and including that group as “a JV team” compared with Al Qaeda. As the New York Times reports,

“[T]he rebutted critics who say his refusal to intervene more directly in the Syrian civil war and his decision to pull all American troops out of Iraq in 2011 had created conditions that allowed the rise of the Islamic State.”

Instead the President blames the former Iraqi leader Nuri Kamal al-Maliki – suggesting that when the United States left, its democracy was intact; Iraqi was left with a military that was well-equipped and the ability to chart their own course. The President said,

“And that opportunity was squandered over the course of five years or so because the Prime Minister, Maliki, was much more interested in consolidating his Shia base.”

The president has been on the defensive when it comes to foreign policy for matter of months now. Polls indicate that even a majority of Democrats believe that he has not done well in leading the nation in terms of national defense and international relations. In one of the major issues of concern, has been the rise of these terrorist groups. And it’s been impossible for Americans not to know what these groups are doing when they keep posting videos of the beheadings of Americans and other Westerners; continuing even into last week. Interestingly, the President said that he feels his administration has a good plan in place – those are his words – when it comes to Iraq and its future, but as for Syria – the President acknowledged it’s a much tougher case.

Also appearing yesterday, in terms of the national news programs, was United States Senator Timothy Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia. He is an ally of the President, but he has been a very outspoken critic of the President’s decision not to go to Congress to ask for legislative permission for the war that is taking place in Iraq and Syria against ISIS. Senator Kaine said,

“It really concerns me that the president would assert he has the ability to do this unilaterally when as a candidate for president he made very plain that the president cannot unilaterally start a war without Congress,”

Senator Kaine made those statements on the CBS news program Face the Nation, also yesterday. As is so often the case, a crisis never touches just one dimension. We’re looking here at a multifaceted crisis that has to do with the rise of the Islamic State, the worldwide challenge of terrorism, the difficulty of putting together an American foreign-policy, the defense issues related to a military strategy, and also the constitutional issues at stake when the President decides to move forward unilaterally. This President has shown his willingness, to say the very least, to rule by Executive Order. And when it comes to this action, he appears to be doing exactly what he criticized previous presidents for doing when he ran for office and precisely what he said no President under any circumstances should do. It is very significant that one of the President’s most outspoken critics on this is one of his political allies, Senator Kaine.

Christians looking at the situation should remember the fact that our constitutional separation of powers was intentionally based upon the Christian understanding of sin, and the realization that the tendency to concentrate power in any one branch of the government, unchecked by others, leads by sinful inclination to autocracy – eventually, in some extreme cases, of course, to dictatorship. It also underlines the fact that democracy is a rare commodity, it is a rare achievement, and it perhaps is an even more rarely maintained achievement than it is in terms of a short-term establishment of a Democratic pattern. The United States and its constitutional order have existed now for well over 200 years, but that is no guarantee that our Constitution, our democratic experiment, our constitutional republic, or its separation of powers, will endure; they must be defended in every single generation. So once again, Western powers find themselves confronting an enemy such as the Islamic State and once again, Americans find themselves looking at a challenge to our constitutional balance – both of these are vitally important for future.

2) Likely ‘lone wolf’ attack in Oklahoma by Muslim convert what law enforcement warned about

Meanwhile this kind of terroristic threat came very close to home when on Thursday of last week a man in Oklahoma beheaded a coworker at a food processing plant. That happened on Thursday afternoon. The suspect has been identified as Alton Nolen. He has a criminal history, but as the New York Times also reports, he had recently started to convert some of his coworkers to the Muslim religion – to which he had also been a relatively recent convert. According to the news report by Richard Pérez-Peña and Michael Schmidt, the suspect Alton Nolen, after being fired by this company,

“…drove to the front of the business, running into a vehicle, exited his vehicle, entered the business, where he encountered the first victim, Colleen Hufford, and began assaulting her with a knife,”

He did kill her, and eventually beheaded her. He then attacked Tracy Johnson, another former coworker with the same knife. He was stopped only when Mark Vaughan, the chief operating officer of Vaughan foods, who is also an Oklahoma County reserve deputy, confronted him and shot him and stopped the threat. According to news reports, Mr. Nolen was transferred to the Oklahoma University Medical Center where he is expected to survive and eventually to be charged with this horrible crime. The following paragraphs in this story demand our attention.

“The Moore police called in the F.B.I. to assist in the investigation. After the United States began its bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria on Monday, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security put out an alert to local law enforcement officials across the country to be on the watch for so-called lone wolves who might respond violently.”

The next paragraph says this,

“A law enforcement official said the F.B.I. had not found any connection between Mr. Nolen and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, or other groups. ‘It’s not a typical workplace response, and given the current environment it is very alarming and is something we are closely looking into,’ [said] one of the officials said. ‘So far, there is no nexus to terrorism we are aware of.’”

Then there is a third paragraph,

“Law enforcement officials said Mr. Nolen recently converted to Islam. On a Facebook page that appears to be his, references to Islam began in April 2013, and he called himself Jah’Keem Yisrael. The page is filled with criticism of American culture, and dire warnings for those who do not follow that religion.”

In the immediate aftermath of this horrifying new story on Thursday, several people involved in law enforcement at the national level suggested that this should be treated as an example of horrifying workplace violence – not as an incident of terrorism tied to the war on terror. But that began to fall apart almost immediately, especially when this Facebook page was found. And this leads to a very interesting observation – in a single week, just last week, the FBI and other national security organizations warned local law enforcement officials across the United States to be on guard against the so-called lone wolf attacks. You’ll recall the fact that Australia launched a major police raid based upon the very real threat of this kind of an attack in Australia just a matter of days ago. But in this single week – when United States government, through its official security apparatus, issues this warning – when just four days later this kind of attack takes place in Oklahoma, many in our national law enforcement apparatus want to step back and say it can’t be what it looks like.

Well time will tells what this investigation unfolds, but this much is clear: this man at least considered himself, by his writings and by his actions, as the very kind of lone wolf that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have been warning about. Those very national security agencies had indicated that these lone wolves might be activated by reports in the media, not by any direct contact from the Islamic State or any other terrorist group. But now, after this attack is taking place in Oklahoma at least some want to say it can’t be connected to this warning because there was no tie to the Islamic State. You have to wonder sometimes if our national law enforcement agencies are talking to one another. You also have to wonder if political correctness is severely distorting the reality picture here. Finally you have to wonder if at least some of these agencies are reading what they’re writing. In any event, the lone wolf kind of attack that was warned about seems to be exactly what took place in Oklahoma. That’s just an evil reality we’re all going to have to deal with.

3) Evolutionary scientist recognizes incompatibility of evolution with Christian faith

Meanwhile, also in the pages of the New York Times this in yesterday’s edition – an op-ed article appeared by David Barash, who is an evolutionary biologist, who is also a professor at the University of Washington. The title of his article, “God, Darwin and My Biology Class.” This article, which is directly opposed to the Christian worldview, is exceedingly helpful in defining the issues. Writing about the beginning of the college year, Professor Barash says each year he gives his students what he calls “the talk.” But this talk isn’t about sex, it’s instead about biology and it’s about God. As he writes,

“[This talk is] about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don’t. [He writes,] I’m a biologist, in fact an evolutionary biologist, although no biologist, and no biology course, can help being ‘evolutionary.’ My animal behavior class, with 200 undergraduates, is built on a scaffolding of evolutionary biology.  And that’s where The Talk comes in. [He says,] It’s irresponsible to teach biology without evolution, and yet many students worry about reconciling their beliefs with evolutionary science. Just as many Americans don’t grasp the fact that evolution is not merely a “theory,” but the underpinning of all biological science, a substantial minority of my students are troubled to discover that their beliefs conflict with the course material.”

Now at this point in the article, you know it’s going to be interesting. He continues to write that until very recently, he tried to ignore this discomfort on the part of his students – assuming, in his words, that it was “their problem, not mine.” He said that he thought teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching chemistry about molecules. He went on and said that what was required was a direct conversation, thus what he calls, the Talk. Then he writes,

“There are a few ways to talk about evolution and religion, I begin. The least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible”

He then cites the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who called them noma or non-overlapping magisterium; claiming in fact that science and religion have two different intellectual authorities, operating in two completely separate intellectual domains. Writing about Gould, Barash writes,

“He and I disagreed on this (in public and, at least once, rather loudly); he claimed I was aggressively forcing a painful and unnecessary choice, while I maintained that in his eagerness to be accommodating, he was misrepresenting both science and religion.”

In some ways, he says, nonetheless the late Professor Gould has been winning. Noma, that’s the claim of non-overlapping magisterium, is the received wisdom, he writes, in the scientific establishment; including, at least the official position, undertaken by groups such as the National Center for Science Education. According to this expansive view, he writes,

“God might well have used evolution by natural selection to produce his creation.”

But as this professor well understands, and as he now wants his students to understand, the classical form of the theory of evolution and the classical form of Biblical Christianity are not non-overlapping magisterium; they indeed overlap a very great deal. As he writes,

“So far, so comforting for my students. But here’s the turn: These magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish. As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God.”

The professor goes on to say that what modern people often try to claim as an argument from complexity, going back to the 19th century and William Paley, that’s the argument that is used by many, suggesting that the world is so complex and it is so fine tuned in its operation that it’s like the watch a watch – a watch that clearly implies a watchmaker. But now this professor says the modern form of the theory of evolution, the contemporary dominant form of the theory that’s taught and believed in America’s colleges and universities, doesn’t allow for that kind of intelligent design. Indeed it doesn’t allow for any kind of design at all. As his argument makes clear, there is also no room at all in terms of the prevailing scientific theory for any kind of divine agency – much less of an omnipotent God. Therefore he claims, on a scientific basis, that God being omnipotent and God being all loving – these two affirmations of classical Christianity established in Scripture – are just untenable, disproved by modern science. He also says that what is disproved by contemporary science, and by that he means evolution, is what he calls the illusion of centrality. In his words,

“Before Darwin, one could believe that human beings were distinct from other life-forms, chips off the old divine block. No more. The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them — literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness. [He continues] Moreover, no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure as well as physiological mechanism.”

What you have in that statement, published by a professor at the University of Washington in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, is a classic undiluted, distilled version of modern naturalism, of materialism, of the belief that the cosmos is made up of nothing but natural realities and it runs only by material and natural mechanisms. And what you have here is a direct acknowledgment that this worldview is directly contradictory of classical Christianity. When this professor gathers his students together for what he calls ‘the talk,’ he intends to tell them that the idea of non-overlapping magisterium, the idea that there can be different authorities operating in completely different intellectual realms when it comes to modern science on the one hand and Christianity on the other, he says it’s time these students understand by ‘the talk,’ these are actually impossible.

Furthermore, just consider the kinds of claims he’s making in the name of science. He claims that science has disproved an omnipotent God, has disproved of a God who is all loving. He then writes,

“The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.”

Well of course like every fundamental worldview, this is a rather circular self-referential worldview. When this professor says, operating he says as a scientist, that human beings simply evolve by what he calls a “natural, totally amoral process” he’s simply accepting the evidence for his theory and rejecting by worldview on the contrary evidence or claims to truth. And if that’s true of evolutionists, we need to acknowledge that it’s also true of Biblical Christians, it’s true of any honest intellectual worldview or any honest thinking person. We operate out of certain preconditions, we all operate out of certain presuppositions, we operate on basic principles of understanding, of understandings that relate to truth and reality and meaning, and of course when it comes to authority, most importantly epistemological authority – that means the authority for knowing – we all choose, rather in advance, what authority we are going to acknowledge.

Christians operating on the authority of Scripture are often criticized for operating on the basis of circular reasoning. And there’s a certain amount of truth in that – we believe the Bible is God’s word because God gave it to us. We believe in the Bible because God exists and He is spoken, we know that God has spoken and we know that he exists because he’s revealed himself in the Scripture. Virtually anyone who can draw a diagram knows that there is some circular reasoning in that argumentation. So if circular reasoning is the problem, we’re guilty as charged. But so is this professor and so is every intelligent person when it comes to any worldview – every worldview establishes certain claims to truth and disregard and rejects others. Every worldview establishes a means of intellectual authority; who we’re going to believe, what we’re going to believe, what authority we’re going to trust, and why. And every single worldview comes to its own conclusions based upon its own premises. This professor is at least honest, more honest than many others. There are some who try to argue, even still, that Christianity or religion as they might say can be made compatible with evolution and certainly religion can – but not the religion of the Bible, not biblical Christianity. The doctrine of creation, indeed as this professor helpfully points out, the doctrine of God revealed in Scripture is directly in conflict with the dominant theory of evolution as held in the academic world today. This professor also deserves a certain commendation for honesty, or least for candor, for stating to his students that in his belief biblical Christianity and the modern theory of evolution are in absolute conflict. We might only wish that a good number of other evolutionary scientists would be so candid, but then again we can also wish far more urgently that many who call themselves evangelical Christians would acknowledge the same.

4) Gay US ambassador in Dominican Republic reveals impact of elections beyond US borders

I’m speaking to you from the Dominican Republic where I have been involved in ministry for the past several days. And this proud Caribbean nation now has serving as its ambassador from the United States, a man known as Ambassador James, or Wally, Brewster. He was confirmed by the United States Senate after being nominated by President Obama, confirmed on 8 November in 2013. He was then sworn into office on November 22 of the same year, just almost a year ago. The evening of that very day, he married the man who is now his husband and then shortly thereafter they moved here to Santo Domingo, the capital city. American Christians should recall that President Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made very clear that they intended to make the promotion of gay rights a major agenda of American foreign policy and of the Obama Administration. The appointment Ambassador Brewster, announced by the State Department as the first openly gay ambassador to the Americas, is a symbol of that kind of effort – and it has not been well received by the Christians here in the Dominican Republic. They understand this appointment for exactly what it is, an effort on the part of the United States of America to try to point this island nation toward the acceptance of same-sex relationships and eventually same-sex marriage. Sending a married gay ambassador of the United States to this island nation was intended to send a signal – and it sent a signal indeed. We often repeat the fact that elections have consequences, but did Americans realize in 2008 and 2012 that those consequences would extend even to a nation like the Dominican Republic? That question has certainly come to my mind time and again as I’ve been visiting this beautiful nation.

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com you can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’m speaking to you from Santo Domingo, capitol city of the Dominican Republic, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

“The Sufficiency of Scripture and the Care of Souls” – Counsel the Word Conference Session 1

An address given at the “Counsel the Word” conference held September 18-19, 2014 at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  For more information on the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors go to biblicalcounseling.com. For more information on the conference and other events at Southern Seminary, go to events.sbts.edu.