R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 344

Transcript: The Briefing 09-23-14

The Briefing

 

September 23, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, September 23, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Islamic State threat to Westerners  clear statement that warfare is always theological

“You are not safe, even in your bedrooms.” That was the threat that came yesterday from the group known as the Islamic State, and this threat was addressed not just to governments, but to the peoples of Western nations. As the Telegraph, a British newspaper, reports,

“The Islamic State issued a rallying call yesterday for Muslims to attack and kill European and American citizens wherever they could be found and warned the West ‘you are not safe even in your bedrooms’. The chilling warning [says the paper] that civilians and military personnel would be targeted alike came as John Kerry, the US secretary of state, held a series of meetings with counterparts in New York to back US air strikes and other actions to degrade and destroy [the group known as] Isil.”

Within hours, the nation of France confirmed that at least one of its citizens had gone missing while the citizen was traveling in Algeria – and the French government issued an urgent travel warning to all of its citizens traveling abroad. The threat from the Islamic State came through its spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, who spoke variously; both to members of the Islamic State’s military forces and to those he was threatening to attack. Speaking to his own troops he said,

“Do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons and troops of the tyrants. Strike their police, security and intelligence members. [He went on to say,] If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that joined a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be,”

Speaking to those in Western nations he said,

“You will pay the price as you are afraid of travelling to any land. You will not feel secure even in your bedrooms. You will pay the price when this crusade of yours collapses.”

Once again, speaking to the soldiers of the Islamic State he said quote,

“Hinder those who want to harm your brothers and the state as much as you can. The best thing you can do is to make an effort to kill any infidel, French, American or any of their allies. [He then said,] If you are not able to use an explosive charge or a bullet, then single out the American or French infidel or any of their allies and smash his head with a rock, slaughter him with a knife, run him over with a car, throw him from a high place, choke him or poison him.”

This threat came as Western nations begin warning each other and their citizens of the threat of so-called lone wolf attacks. You’ll recall that just a few days ago the nation of Australia launched a massive police and military operation in order to apprehend suspects who were expected to be preparing to do just this kind of thing – a lone wolf attack; in the case of Australia, an effort to find a random Australian citizen and then video his execution, his beheading, in order to send a message to the West. This is clearly an intentional effort to intimidate, and not only to intimidate but to do so with the kind of language that simply hasn’t been seen, at least in terms of the modern age, for well over a century. There’s been no group with this kind of military presence, not to mention with this kind of social media savvy, that has been uttering these kinds of words, issuing this kind of message, calling for very real terrorists embedded in very real Western nations to conduct very real public random executions, all in the name of jihad or holy war.

What we’re looking at here is a reversion to previous eras of human existence. What we’re looking at here is something that amounts to a pre-civilizational condition. What we’re looking at here is the refutation of any claim that the human historical progress is always moving forward, towards greater liberty, greater safety, and greater security. Now we’re looking at a threat that makes all too clear that is anything but true. We often do not pause to consider the fact that the Christian worldview, based in Scripture, tells us that very near under the surface of civilization is a very uncivilized state. Living very near to the very serene exterior of a human being who may be sitting next to us on a plane, is something that is not very serene at all – a heart or soul filled with tumult, turmoil and sometimes terroristic intentions. The Christian worldview also affirms the fact that in a sinful world, we repeatedly refer to the fact that this is a fallen world, the equation that stares us in the face is the reality that evil is closer – far closer to us than we would like to imagine – and that security is far more rare, if existent at all, than we would like to think.

One of the challenges faced by President Obama is the fact the he continually appears to look to the world as if the world is filled with what we would call rational actors – people who act in a rational way. You recall that the President once in an interview described his understanding of foreign-policy as a warning to the nations of the world not to do stupid stuff. But that’s the kind of warning that might be appropriate to issue to a middle schooler, not to a warring nation, and certainly not to a group that not only threatens the kind of terrorism we just heard from their spokesman, but has carried off the very kind of terroristic attacks and brutal murders that have been now made infamous by means of the national and international media. Secular observers tend to be surprised over and over again by the fact that the irrationality shows up rather than rationality, disorder rather than order, and of course insecurity rather than security. But the world from the very beginning of the experience after Genesis 3 has been a world filled with peril far more than safety, with insecurity far more than security, with sin always as the Scripture says lurking at the door – looking for the opportunity. In the case of the Islamic State what you have is an embrace of the dark side, of evil, of sin, of violence, in its most extreme forms. Justified, given the twisted rationality of this group, by what it considers to be a divine command from Allah to wage war against the infidels. Rarely do you have the kind of language that we have just seen coming from this spokesman for the Islamic state in such unvarnished theological terms – using terms like infidel and disbeliever. And how in the world Western secular elites intend to confront this kind of a theological challenge from a vantage point of pure secularism? The Bible affirms over and over again that the only way to defeat a bad theology is with a better theology. Just think of 1Kings 18, of the prophet Elijah and the battle of the gods. But when the group known as the Islamic State looks to the secularized nations of Western Europe, it doesn’t even see a challenge, certainly not a theological challenge. The Islamic State understands that secularism is no match what so ever for its theological vigor and conviction, no that’s where Christians have to step in and say ‘the battle is always essentially theological, whether it’s recognized or not.’ And this statement from the Islamic State makes another point very profoundly and that is this: sometimes, indeed many times, a theological war of this nature is extremely deadly; more dangerous, more deadly, than a secular worldview can ever understand.

2) Climate change march reminder of difficulty of stewarding the earth well

Meanwhile in New York City on Sunday a major protest took place as the New York Times reports,

“Legions of demonstrators frustrated by international inaction on global warming descended on New York City on Sunday, marching through the heart of Manhattan with a message of alarm for world leaders set to gather this week at the United Nations for a summit meeting on climate change.”

 

As reporter Lisa Foderaro reports,

“The march attracted leading lights in the environmental movement, most notably former Vice President Al Gore. It drew the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, who will preside over this week’s United Nations climate summit meeting. And it included Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, fresh off his announcement that he was committing the city to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050.”

But, Foderaro says it was mostly an event for ordinary people, and it is estimated that over 300,000 of those ordinary people crowded into the streets of Manhattan in order to participate in this protest. Later in her article she writes,

“The climax of the march came in the early afternoon. All along the route, crowds had been quieted for a moment of silence. On Avenue of the Americas at 57th Street, there was an eerie silence as marchers raised their arms and looked down. Then at exactly 1 p.m., a whistle pierced the silence, setting off a minute-long cacophony intended as a collective alarm on climate change. There were the beats of drums and the blaring of horns, but mostly it was whoops and cries of the marchers.”

Well if you’re wondering what you missed when you missed this protest in New York City, you can get a pretty good idea by this front-page coverage in the New York Times yesterday. And of course the point of the article is that there will be this week, starting today at the United Nations, a summit on climate change that is intended to build support for addressing climate change. But as the New York Times also makes clear, notwithstanding this massive protest, the reality is that this summit meeting on climate change isn’t even intended to come up with any formal process or formal goals. This comes several years after an attempt in Copenhagen to come up with a similar set of rules and regulations to be agreed upon by the major emitting nations of the world when it comes to carbon gases broke down. It also comes after the Kyoto protocols, signed onto by many advanced nations, also fell apart when even the nation of Japan, the lead signatory to that arrangement, dropped out because the process is simply too expensive. The editors of the Wall Street Journal reported to the protest and to the upcoming summit meeting by pointing out what it calls one, not so minor, problem. In the words of the editors,

“The world’s largest emitters are declining to show up, even for appearances. The Chinese economy has been the No. 1 global producer of carbon dioxide since 2008, but President Xi Jinping won’t be gracing the U.N. with his presence.”

India’s the number three emitter of carbon in the world, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in New York but he’s skipping the climate summit. Russian President Vladimir Putin, his nation’s number four on the list, has other priorities. Japan’s number five on the list, it’s uncooperative after the Fukushima disaster has damaged support for nuclear power. Saudi Arabia, by the way of course one of the major oil producers in the world, is dispatching its petroleum minister – not exactly a sign that it intends to cut petroleum production. The Christian worldview affirms that we should be concerned for the ecological condition of the cosmos, in so far as we have any controller impact upon it. We are assigned the biblical responsibility of stewardship as human beings. We are given in Genesis 1:28 the mandate of dominion, but that dominion is clearly in the context of a stewardship. We are not the owners of this part of the cosmos known as planet Earth; we’re merely the stewards of what has been entrusted to us. As is made abundantly clear in both Testaments, what we face is the reality that we will one day give an answer for our stewardship of all that has been entrusted to us. When the Master comes and demands an account, every servant will have to give an answer and be judged for that answer.

That raises the very important issue that is documented by Steve E. Koonin in an article that appeared over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal. He writes about the fact that climate science is anything but settled, but he’s not denying the human impact on the climate, nor even is he denying the very real dangers of climate change. He writes,

“The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature [that is average] rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.”

That’s over the last century, not the last several decades. Then he writes,

“Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate.”

He goes on to say those influences are going to continue over the next several decades simply because of the amount of carbon already released into the atmosphere. Even if those carbon emissions were to end immediately and cease, there would be no impact upon the climate in terms of stopping the impact of this kind of influence for decades yet to come. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t take action where we could, that’s where he comes back to write,

“Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?” Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure. [Then he says, and this is so important,] …here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer.”

We actually do not have the scientific ability to answer the question that is now pressing upon us. We actually don’t have models that either look backwards in time with sufficient accuracy. As he says, many of the backward planning models that are used in order to suggest the rate and impact of climate change vary so much that they can’t all be right, at least only one of them can be right, if any of them are right. Furthermore he says, looking at the present and the future, we simply lack the kind of scientific models that will indicate if changing ‘a’ will truly bring about ‘b’ or if indeed we would end up with ‘c,’ ‘d’ or ‘e’ or some variant far in the extremes that is simply outside our ability even to predict, or perhaps even to anticipate.

Then comes an exceedingly important editorial published in yesterday’s edition of the Financial Times of London,also aimed at this summit meeting at the United Nations on climate change. The editorial board of the Financial Times writes,

“Climate politics makes for strange bedfellows. Among opponents of action to combat global warming, those who support it are often known as ‘watermelons’, because they conceal their true socialist agenda beneath their green skins. [They go on to write,] Some in the environmental movement, many of whom took the streets in protests around the world on Sunday, agree with that view. They see climate change as justification for abandoning market economics in favour of some generally ill-defined alternative. Naomi Klein, a veteran campaigner against globalisation, describes global warming as a historic opportunity to create a “more just economy”, with less “mindless consumption” [Those are her words]. Other environmentalists go further, arguing that the only way to keep the earth habitable is to stop economic growth altogether.”

That’s an amazingly clarifying paragraph, there’s some people who are trying to say that global warming presents us with the opportunity to completely up in the entire world economic order, to put capitalism to rest, and instead to shift towards, what the editors of the Financial Times described as, an agenda to keep the world habitable by stopping all economic growth altogether. We need to just ponder what in the world that would mean. First of all it’s a rejection of the mandate given for dominion in Genesis 1:28, instead of subduing the earth, this is a call to simply stop – to replace human action with inaction. But we also need to recognize that it’s a recipe for massive human misery. Stopping all economic growth means increased poverty, sustained starvation, it means that those nations that are now trying to pull themselves out of poverty will be told it’s too late – you missed the bus. That’s why the editors of the Financial Times write about that agenda, and I quote,

“It is bad politics because it stands no chance of winning widespread popular support. If the prospect of catastrophe was certain and imminent, people might be prepared to make great sacrifices to avert it. But the potentially cataclysmic effects are decades away, and the unavoidable uncertainties in climate modelling make it impossible to be sure when particular consequences will strike, if at all. Radical environmentalists want people to give up freedom and prosperity now to avoid distant disaster, which may not happen anyway. Good luck with that.”

And so they write. Christians should understand the importance of these questions, the ecological crisis is often dismissed by conservative Christians as being a merely secular and liberal concern – that’s not so. As Francis Schaeffer reminded evangelicals in the 1960s and 70s, the care of the earth from a Christian stewardship perspective is very central to the teachings of the Scripture; and as biblical Christians we must take that would do consideration. But even as we consider the kind of scientific evidence or the confused evidence that’s being brought to us on climate change even as we recognize there’s a real problem here and that draws forth some real responsibility, we also need the humility, the intellectual and moral humility – lets add to that the political and scientific humility – to admit that we really don’t know what to do in this case. And the editors of the Financial Times are exceedingly correct when they point out the basic injustice, indeed the morality, of telling people trying to come out of poverty that they simply missed the opportunity – climate change has simply cancelled that option, instead get used to your mud huts and your dirt floors. The Christian worldview would instruct that we should look at this issue squarely and humbly, understanding that we are indeed stewards and we should learn everything we can about how we might respond to this in a way that would lead to true human flourishing and human happiness and of course the care of the planet – not as an end in itself, that’s a purely secular idea, but rather as the creation that demonstrates the glory of God, who has assigned us a very important and crucial stewardship.

Being good stewards of this opportunity and responsibility means that we have to be humbly active and aware, seeking understand these things and adding all of this up in a moral calculus that honors the fact the human beings are not an imposition upon this planet, but instead are only beings made in God’s image and granted the consciousness, the moral understanding, and the intelligence, to even conceive of climate – much less climate change, much less a responsibility to be good stewards of all that is entrusted to us. And from a Christian perspective, lets be honest – it’s hard to take seriously a group, no matter how large, whether three or 300,000 that crowds onto the streets of Manhattan for a moment of silence, interrupted by a minute which is supposed to be a warning with drums and blaring horns, whoops and cries of the marchers. It’s even harder to take seriously one of the latter paragraphs of that front page article in yesterday’s New York Times,

“In front of the Flatiron Building, on Fifth Avenue, a 3,000-pound ice sculpture spelled out ‘The Future.’ Dripping onto the sidewalk, it had been carved over two days in Queens by a group of Japanese ice sculptors. ‘I would say we are melting down the future,’ said Nora Ligorano, one of the artists who conceived the work. ‘It’s a comment on what we are doing to the planet.’”

So let’s get this straight: a group of Japanese ice artists built a massive 3,000 pound ice sculpture in New York City, in the middle of two hot days, and surprise – it melted. Offering the moral meaning they claim that “it’s a comment on what we’re doing to the planet.” Like I said, an article like this appearing on the front page of a newspaper like the New York Times reminds us all to pointedly of the unseriousness of many people who claim to be deadly serious.

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

 

The Briefing 09-23-14

1) Islamic State threat to Westerners  clear statement that warfare is always theological

Islamic State: ‘You are not even safe in your bedrooms’, Telegraph (Damien McElroy and Philip Sherwell)

2) Climate change march reminder of difficulty of stewarding the earth well

Taking a Call for Climate Change to the Streets, New York Times (Lisa Foderaro)

People’s Climate Demarche, Wall Street Journal (Editorial Board)

Climate Science Is Not Settled, Wall Street Journal (Steve E. Koonin)

Saving the climate need not destroy the economy, Financial Times (Editorial Board)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 09-22-14

The Briefing

 

September 22, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, September 22, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Scotland remains part of United Kingdom but exposes global fragilities of nation-state

The world was watching this past weekend to see if the United Kingdom would remain united. And in one sense, it clearly will – in other senses, that remains to be seen. The vote was 55 to 45% as voters in Scotland voted on a referendum about whether or not to become an independent nation, ending almost 4 centuries of union in what became known as the United Kingdom – the United Kingdom that includes England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The vote of 55 to 45 came as a relief to Westminster politicians; that is to the British Parliament and to the government headed by Prime Minister David Cameron. It also came as a relief to world financial markets and to many people around the world who wondered if the vote in Scotland, if it had gone the other way, would’ve led to a fracturing, not only of United Kingdom but of other nations as well. But what we also saw in Scotland was a move that was brought about by concessions made by the politicians from all three major parties in England. The leaders of all three of Britain’s major political parties went to Scotland to try to convince the nation, as it is known, to remain in the United Kingdom. And evidently the argument won. It might have won anyway, polls are very difficult as predictors of many elections, and this one was particularly difficult to predict; but in the days prior to the vote there seemed to be a surge for the yes vote, that is for declaring independence from the United Kingdom. In order to gain traction with the Scottish voters, the three political party leaders went promising home rule, increased – what is known as – devolution, with power to be shifted from Parliament in London to the local assembly there in Edinburgh. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen, and whether it happens or not, probably has a great deal to do with whether or not this vote that took place on Thursday, and was made clear over the weekend, will be the last word for this generation; or whether it might be actually a prelude to an actual secession yet to come. All that remains to be seen.

A couple of interesting things, I think, from a Christian worldview perspective that ought to be noticed here. First of all, the importance of the nation-state in the modern world – we’re looking at a fact that the nation-state, we come again to recognize, is an achievement – it doesn’t simply happen. It requires a tremendous amount of political will; will not only on the part of the whole, but of the parts. And that is what was very much in question when it comes to Scotland, and it’s still in question. And that’s why the entire experiment, now almost 4 centuries old of the United Kingdom, is not a settled assured fact. That experiment is still very much in danger. And then we look elsewhere around the world and we notice that the idea of the nation-state is sometimes artificial. In the Bible, as we have seen even recently in the table of the nations in Genesis 11, it speaks of tribes and clans and families and nations; but those are ethnicities not modern nation-states. And many modern nation-states are made up of multiple ethnicities that don’t really have any commonality. That’s very much the situation that brings about the crisis in modern Iraq; that’s very much the crisis that brings about, well, what you just saw in terms of the referendum in Scotland. And it won’t end there.

The weekend edition of USA Today includes a headline article by Alan Gomez entitled, “Others Want Out: Look to Scotland.” As he says, there are seccession movements worldwide that now have a blueprint to follow. Even if the secession movement in Scotland failed (at least for now), there are many others trying to capitalize on the very idea. One of those regions is Catalonia, currently inside Spain. Catalonia has considered itself a separate nation for a matter of generations and centuries now, and this has been a major hotspot in terms of Spanish politics. But the Catalonian Parliament has declared it will be holding a referendum on November 9. There is a key distinction here, the Westminster politicians – that is the government there in London – approved the referendum in Scotland, but the Madrid government is not going to even consider approving this kind of referendum in Catalonia. But there is another distinction; you can almost count on this one going the wrong way if you’re looking for the continuation of the nation-state. The Catalonians are just itching for an opportunity to declare their independence. But it’s not just in Spain and Catalonia that we see this. As Gomez makes clear, and I quote,

“From a faction in northern Italy that wants to break off into its own country to the Faroe Islands, a 540-square mile archipelago that wants to be free of Denmark, there was plenty of sadness around the globe following the vote in Scotland. But that collective disappointment leads to one final lesson: The domino effect seen throughout the 2010-12 Arab Spring and other recent revolutionary uprisings does not necessarily translate to secessionist movements, successful or unsuccessful”

It’s a very interesting point; we’ll have to wait and see. But there is another interesting point in all this that I think many have missed: this was the first time, that is that vote that took place on Thursday in Scotland, was the first time that in the United Kingdom that some 16 and 17-year-olds got to vote. They’re not able to drink, they’re not able to do many other things, they’re not considered even legally able to stand on their own or represent themselves in court, but they could go into the polling place and vote. This came after the Scottish Parliament gave 16 and 17-year-olds the vote mostly in a hope that that would add momentum to the secession movement. And that’s the point of my consideration today. Why would those pushing for secession, for independence from the United Kingdom, believe that 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds would greatly aid their cause? Would vote disproportionately for succession? Well it is because of this: those who are behind giving teenagers the vote had the very clear and probably correct idea that it would be easier to fire up teenagers with the kind of vision for independence than it would to perhaps reach their parents – who after all have to consider the larger economic consequences. But that’s the point.

From a Christian worldview perspective, one of the things to note about democracy is that the vote simply is one for one – one individual, one-vote; that vote is not weighted. And that points to the fact that one of the fragilities of democracy is the fact that many people can vote who actually don’t have much of a stake. Now those who are behind giving the franchise to teenagers there in Scotland said, well they do have a stake because this is about their future. Well that’s true, but they really don’t have much accountability when it comes to making a decision in light of having to feed a family or send someone to college, like themselves, or to start a business or to sustain it. The economic consequences are almost assuredly what kept older Scottish voters, voting overwhelmingly now, to remain in United Kingdom. But the plan behind the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds in Scotland points to the fact that sometimes people are just looking for votes they can influence, votes that don’t have to be tied to larger economic and social realities. In creating a constitutional republic, the founders of the American experiment did their very best to accentuate the advantages of a system of democratic government while minimizing the dangers. What you see taking place in United Kingdom is a signal that that’s not always an easy balance to strike – whether or not you grant the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds.

Next, you may have noticed that the vote in Scotland gained the attention of at least some people here in the United States – not about so much what might happen to the United Kingdom, but to the United States. You can almost expect that reporters and newspaper editors, television correspondents, and all the rest would go out asking people in states like, oh I don’t know, Texas if they thought their state would be better off separated from the United States of America. That’s always a very popular question to ask Texans, and not only that, now Californians, Alaskans, and any number of others, because as we think about our own local experience, it’s more difficult to extend that kind of loyalty and identity to the corporate whole. That is what has set the United States apart, at least over the last hundred years or so. The United States has been held together by a very strong national sense of narrative, a very strong national sense of identity. People have identified themselves as Americans who happen to live in Alabama or Alaska or New York or Texas, but when you see issues like this come to the floor, we all of a sudden recognize that in our actual lived lives, well we live those lives locally, not nationally – far less even globally.

Much of the tension that was behind the vote that was just taken in Scotland has to do with the fact that the people in Scotland began to believe that politicians in London, seemingly far, far away, really were either incompetent or unwilling to govern in the way that best suited their needs. Now, in the United States we have a system of federalism in place, understood as recognized within our constitutional order. Federalism means that there are many rights that are attributed to the states, rather than understood as being under the power of the federal government. But over the course of the last 200 years there has been a massive shift from the states to the federal government. One recent indication of that, by the way, is well, to just utter the words “common core.” And when you look at that, you recognize that many people in this country, though hardly anywhere near wanting to take the kind of vote that took place in Scotland, do raise the question, ‘Am I really well served by politicians making decisions that affect me locally when they’re making those decisions in Washington DC?’

The devolution of power that was promised by those politicians to the voters in Scotland is something that many Americans have as a concern as well. And as I’ve mentioned time and time again on The Briefing, there’s a basic theological principle behind this and it’s known as subsidiarity – that basic theological principle rooted in the doctrine of creation says that issues are best addressed in the smallest possible social unit. That’s why you don’t have the creation of a global society in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, but the creation of man and woman made in the image of God and the creation of marriage and the family; it starts small, every healthy move in society starts small. But the further you get from that smallest unit, when those smaller units are either broken, as in so many cases by divorce with the families now marginalized and the family’s been so weakened by various social and economic forces – indeed moral trends – that the family is longer functioning as it should. At that point, the government then steps in; the government is a far larger collective and is not only the local government in the county or the city, it’s the state government, eventually the federal government. And then you have massive social programs, massive policies and laws established at the national level there in Washington, DC that are expected now to address the brokenness in an individual family or in an individual unit somewhere in the United States embedded within a local society or local culture, or a local community. There you see the problem, subsidiarity reminds us that it’s built into creation itself by God’s intention that things have to be made right at the local unit, at the smallest unit, at the family unit, if they’re going to be right anywhere else ultimately.

2) Ineffectiveness of world combating Ebola reveals crucial importance of local authorities

Now keep that in mind when there have been a flurry of very frightening headlines on the issue of the Ebola outbreak, because as we’ve seen this outbreak is not only not being stopped in its tracks, it threatens now to expand and to expand radically. The current analysis indicates that there may be as many as 277,000 more people who will contract Ebola by the end of this year in West Africa and beyond. Now remember we started out talking about dozens of cases, then hundreds of cases, then thousands of cases. The total number of those infected by the Ebola virus doubled in the last month, and as it is now breaking out elsewhere, and not only that where there is the threat of it mutating in terms of the viral form, the analysis is that there could be almost 300,000 people in addition to those already infected who may then be affected by the end of the year. And remember we’re just talking about now a matter of just a few months. We’re also talking about a disease that has a mortality rate of at least 55% and in some variance as high as 90%, we’re talking about something that should indeed scare us. If anything on earth should scare us, it should be an outbreak of a runaway virus with this kind of mortality. And as many health experts have been pointing out, it is simply not rational to suggest that it can be limited in terms of its spread to Africa. It will affect all of us eventually if the outbreak is not stopped.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal over the weekend wrote an editorial entitled “Hot Zones Without Borders” just pointing out the fact again that this is the kind of epidemic that begins with scattered representations in places like West Africa and then all of a sudden reaches the point of a breakout that is very, very difficult to stop and can be stopped only after thousands, perhaps even now hundreds of thousands, of deaths. But I told you to remember that issue of subsidiarity because that principal factors into the story as well. The New York Times on Friday reported that Ebola presents a challenge and an opportunity for the leader of the United Nations. If you’re worried about this breakout, well this article tells us that perhaps you don’t have to worry because the United Nations is running to the rescue. The article by Somini Sengupta quotes Richard Gowan , an associate director of New York University Center on international cooperation, who said,

“In some ways, Ebola is the perfect crisis to show why the U.N. matters: Solving it will take the whole range of U.N. tools, including [says the article] its tens of thousands of peacekeepers and experts on global health.”

He went on to say Ban Ki-moon, that is the general secretary of the United Nations:

“…can talk about it as a case-study of why we need a strong U.N. and reliable global institutions, in contrast to a divisive political showdown like Ukraine.”

Well, if only.

Of course if the United Nations were to be effective in dealing with this kind of situation, it will be dealing with it already, not simply at this point. What this actually points to is the dramatic, unquestionable ineffectiveness of the United Nations in dealing with any major crisis. Just ask yourself; since the existence of United Nations has it resolved any major issue? Has it dealt effectively with any major crisis? The truth is that the more critical the crisis is, the less effective the United Nations becomes. The more urgent the need, the less effective the United Nations reveals itself to be – even the New York Times responding to a statement by the professor said,

“All the same, the crisis points precisely to the weaknesses of the world body. The United Nations has already come under withering criticism for not reacting more swiftly to the epidemic.”

Well, that’s exactly the point. And here again, it is the United Nations, representing perhaps the most radical extension of the rejection of subsidiarity, that points to why it’s so ineffectual. Now let me be clear, we have to be absolutely hopeful that the United Nations, and any other body for that matter, will be effective in saving lives and stopping this epidemic; we have to hope that. The problem is we really can’t have much confidence in it. The confidence isn’t what takes place locally, and that takes me back to the editorial that appeared in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. The editors of the Wall Street Journal point out that the outbreak of Ebola in the several different selected places could have been stopped in its tracks if there had been local public health, local government, in place to deal with it locally with competence. But as they said, it was neither recognized for what it was, it was thought to be another disease since Ebola had not been in that part of Africa before, and they thought they had actually stopped it at one point only to find that it was anything but.

Finally, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have run articles about the challenge that the Ebola outbreak presents to the World Health Organization. And once again, the problem is the title ‘world’. We should be hopeful that the World Health Organization can find some way to be effective in this fight, but the more this is transferred from those who can deal with it locally to those who can mostly think and talk about it globally, the less actually takes place. That’s why I’m thankful for the action taken last week by President Obama on this when he spoke at the Centers for Disease Control because as the President made clear, we can’t wait on the W.H.O (that’s the World Health Organization), we can’t wait on United Nations. And as the United States has the ability to respond to this, it needs to respond to it as a friend to the world, as a friend to these nations, as a way of dealing with this as a nation. We’ll wait and see what United Nations does. But that’s really the point, most of the time we wait rather than see.

So these stories taken together should lead us to step back a moment as Christians and think about the fact that God has created an order that reflects a structure and a meaning that he has revealed in Scripture. And what the Scripture tells us is that we have to give attention to developing what the Scripture tells us will lead to human flourishing, and that means respecting marriage; that means respecting the family, building up marriage in the family, not stripping them of their authority, not trying to invade them with a regime of experts, not trying to suggest that marriage doesn’t matter or can mean anything other than union of a man and a woman, and not undermining the family by means of all kinds of social policies and for that matter even economic impacts that weaken the family unit. And then we need to recognize that in family comes community, as a community is made up of the families within it. And where there is brokenness, for instance in a family structure in that local community, the community can respond to it and can respond to it on the basis of the knowledge of the individuals involved, and a real sympathy for those who were involved. The further you get from the knowledge, the direct knowledge of that local community not only do the policies become more abstract, they become more dangerous. They often have the unintended consequence of doing the opposite of what is intended. For instance, many of our national policies actually subsidize the very wrong moral behavior that leads to the break of the family; the children being born out of wedlock, and any number of other things that make human flourishing almost impossible. It’s easy for us to look at the events that took place this past week in Scotland, or to think about the real challenge of Ebola and think, ‘well those are simply secular matters taking place and responded to by secular governments and secular agencies,’ but Christians understand the news is never merely secular. Embedded within the headlines in the cultural controversies all around us, embedded in the economic reports and just about everything else, are issues of great biblical and worldview significance. It’s up to Christians to see what’s behind the headlines, and to understand that in every one of these stories, in every one of these controversies, in every one of these issues pressing upon us, one of the most basic questions is whether or not we will receive what God gave us in creation as a good gift and respect it and do our very best to honor it. If we ever failed to do that, we harm the very chance of human flourishing we claim to be our purpose. And as the Bible reminds us, when it comes to matters of public policy, intention isn’t enough, it’s not enough to intend to do well – we must be very certain that what we do leads to good.

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

 

Genesis 19:30-20:18

The Briefing 09-22-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Scotland remains part of United Kingdom but exposes global fragilities of nation-state

Secessionist movements learn lessons from Scotland vote, USA Today (Alan Gomez)

For Scotland’s 16-Year-Olds, The First Vote Will Be On Independence, NPR (Ari Shapiro)

2) Ineffectiveness of world combating Ebola reveals crucial importance of local authorities

Hot Zones Without Borders, Wall Street Journal (Editorial Board)

Ebola Presents Challenge, and an Opportunity, for U.N. Leader, New York Times (Somini Sengupta)

An Urgent Campaign Against Ebola, New York Times (Editorial Board)

The global complacency on Ebola must end, Washington Post (Editorial Board)

Transcript: The Briefing 09-19-14

The Briefing

 

September 19, 2014

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

 

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

1) Prevention of Islamic State plot in Australia reminder of inability to know hearts of men

Australia has just undertaken its biggest national security operation in terms of counterterrorism in the nation’s history. Over 800 police officers were involved, including Australia’s top SWAT units; the level of deployment was unprecedented in the nation ‘down under,’ and it led to the detainment or arrest of 15 people. Why? Because the Australian government came to the conclusion that there was a very credible threat of action insight Australia by the group known as Islamic State; and the action that was threatened is exactly what has taken place on the now notorious and infamous videos that have spread around the world. It appears that the Islamic State was in direct contact with agents within Australia, suggesting that the group should then move to an active plan to kidnap civilians and behead them on video to demonstrate the power, the intimidation, and the reach of Islamic State far beyond the Levant, far beyond the Middle East, right into the heart of Australia – and as the Australian government had made clear to other Western nations, the plot was also to involve kidnappings and beheadings elsewhere in the advanced West.

The Sydney Morning Herald, one of Australia’s leading newspapers, reports that the top terrorist recruiters name is Mohammad Baryalei – he is now believed to be behind the plot by the Islamic State to murder Australians on video. The paper reports that the Australian police, including their advanced deployment of SWAT units, had begun to respond to this, swooping down – according to the paper – amid fears of public safety after Baryalei allegedly spoke by phone with a man known as Omarjan Azari. That took place just this past Tuesday, in which the federal government there in Australia intercepted a conversation in which the recruiter spoke to his recruit in Australia discussing a plan to kidnap and murder, by beheading, a random person on camera. The footage of that beheading was to be posted online by the Islamic State’s sophisticated powerful propaganda wing.

Several people around the world have been noticing something of tremendous interest, if not a small amount of irony here, a very dark irony. The Islamic State’s vision is not into the future, but into the past. The Islamic State is basically a medieval organization, going back to the military code and the moral codes of Muslims in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, and on the other hand, is using the most advanced digital technologies and in a very sophisticated way. The videos, now infamous, of the executions of these Western hostages that have been taken are very well produced by production standards. They have been released in ways that social media experts say it revealed a level of sophistication. And so here you have a group whose ideologies not only deeply evil, but deeply medieval, and they’re using a technology that is radically modern – and their using recruiting strategies that are just as modern. But the most frightening thing about the reports coming from the international press about the police action in Australia is the fact that it appears that the Islamic State is becoming increasingly successful in recruiting Muslims from Western nations to join its terrorist efforts. There is now evidence of a pipeline, in terms of this recruitment, from cities like Minneapolis into Somalia and beyond; especially from cities such as London – an extremist Islamic mosque there that had been well-known for well over a decade for fostering this kind of Muslim terrorism – now it’s known that similar things are happening in Belgium, in Germany, in France, and especially now in Australia. And if Americans have been waiting for a wake-up call about whether or not the Islamic State poses a threat to this nation, this is that wake-up call. We’re talking about the response of the Australian government to what is now recognized across its political spectrum as a legitimate threat. There were those in the beginning of the effort who are accusing the Prime Minister there in Australia of grandstanding, but now virtually all political parties, facing the evidence, now recognize that the government had to take this action.

From a Christian worldview perspective, one of most important things to consider here is the fact that your eyes simply can’t tell you who, in the heart, may be radicalized towards this kind of Islam. There are now people in Minneapolis who are told that some of the young men they had known in high schools there have been recruited for the Islamic State; there are people all over England and in London in particular, who had known young men who now know they’d been recruited by the Islamic State. And when it comes to Australia, the scariest thing that has been indicated by the law enforcement officials there is that some of the people, who are now believed to have been radicalized and recruited by Islamic State, are people who would had never been recognized by their neighbors as being so.

But if we’ve shocked by that, we need to go back no further than September 11, 2001. Where, if you will remember, those terrorists who boarded those airplanes with murderous intent and effect had lived among other Americans for matter of months and sometimes for longer; blending in, watching American movies, going to American department stores, hanging out in American malls. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, many people said about young men they had known to be their neighbors, ‘I had no idea that was in his heart or in his mind.’ As a matter fact, several novelist actually applied that very plotline after 9/11, suggesting that Americans should be at least alerted to the fact that people may be living right around us, within our own neighborhoods, who hold worldviews that are diametrically opposed to our own and even murderously so. But Christians looking at this can hardly now claim to be surprised, or at least to be shocked, because the Scripture itself tells us that there is murderous intent within the human heart. When it comes out in this kind of raid undertaken on Australia, we sometimes are surprised by the scale of it; but we shouldn’t be surprised by the substance of it.

2) False god of diversity valued by California university system cheap substitute for genuine pluralism

In recent weeks we’ve been looking at the California State University system’s decision to ‘de-recognize’ the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and now other Christian organizations; organizations that could not sign on to the universities so-called “all comers” policy. That “all comers” policy means that all groups on campus, all recognized student groups – with the exception of fraternities and sororities – must accept all who come, and not only in the membership but also, at least as candidates, for election to leadership. Christian organizations on college campuses determined to remain, in any way, authentically Christian obviously can’t sign on to those kinds of policies. You can’t have a Christian organization if you do not have Christians that are leading it – that’s just common sense. But its common sense that has eluded so many in a secular society, they are absolutely determined to put the new moral regime in place by whatever coercion is necessary. Sometimes it’s very helpful to have someone outside the Christian movement look at this and try to take its measure. That took place this week in the pages of the magazine Bloomberg BusinessWeek and in this case the columnist is Virginia Postrel, She’s not writing from an evangelical Christian perspective; she is writing however from her perspective that affirms pluralism, ideological pluralism, and she says what’s going on in California and in similar school systems is not really about pluralism, it’s merely about diversity. And to her credit, she understands the distinction, and so should we. She begins her essay in the magazine by writing,

“American colleges often praise “diversity” as one of their highest values. The term is, of course, a well-understood code word for diversity not of thought or values but of race and ethnicity. The assumption is that people of different backgrounds and experiences, including ethnic backgrounds and immigrant experiences, will naturally bring with them diversity of thought and values and, hence, enrich campus cultural and intellectual life.”

She makes a very important distinction here; the diversity that the average prestigious American college or university says it is absolutely committed to, even idolatrously so, is a diversity that doesn’t include intellectual or ideological diversity. This is demonstrated in the fact that if you look at the voting patterns amongst American college and university faculty, they are overwhelmingly in the liberal democratic direction. If you look at the reports about campaign contributions from university faculty, such as Harvard and Yale, you will see that to describe them as being imbalanced is a grotesque understatement. You’ll also understand that this kind of imbalance in the ideological or intellectual diversity is seen to be something that the university is absolutely unwilling to part with, even as it claims to be a high temple of diversity. Virginia Postrel is absolutely right when she says that kind of diversity is actually a very cheap substitute for ideological pluralism. If American colleges and universities were truly committed to diversity, they will be committed to that kind of intellectual diversity to what we might call worldview diversity. But the Christian worldview is now being sidelined, marginalized, and in some ways, absolutely – well their word is – de-recognized from the entire official campus culture. And Virginia Postrel, writing from a libertarian standpoint, not a Christian standpoint, comes back to say Americans should see that’s for what it is – it’s a form of coercion, it’s a form of discrimination, and it is done so under the false guise of what the University claims is diversity.

But Virginia Postrel also very intelligently points to another problem with this kind of policy. The policy again is known as in “all comers” policy and the idea behind it is that is absolutely wrong under any circumstance to discriminate on any basis towards anyone who might want to be elected to the leadership of one of these student organizations. Well in order to test her question, Virginia Postrel actually addressed the question to a university administrator, asking the question, does this policy actually deliver on what you seem to promise? And the administrator backed up, quickly arguing that the policy really wouldn’t have the effect of Christian organizations electing non-Christian leaders. Why? Because he says, the Christian members of the Christian organization can continue to elect merely Christians using social pressure, if not policy – there can be no creedal or confessional requirement, but after all, the students could vote for whomever they decide to vote. So Virginia Postrel intelligently then turns it back on the administrator, then does the policy actually mean anything? Or are you asking Christian organizations merely to sell away their soul in order to make you able to claim that you’re more diverse than you actually are? The false god of diversity demands continual sacrifices, the false god of diversity is never satisfied, and the false god of diversity is never diverse when it comes to worldview, and Virginia Postrel has done all of us a great service by pointing that fact out.

3) ‘Myth’ of sex-selection abortion problem in US turns out to be fact

For the better part of the last three decades it has become increasingly clear the gendercide is a reality. Gendercide is a word coined about the intentional murder of those who were either born or unborn of one gender, and in this case it refers to the abortion or infanticide of girls – almost always girls. Around the world there is a huge imbalance in the number of young girls, there are approximately 34,000,000 more Chinese teenage males and young men then there are women. These are referred to as ‘the broken branches’ – there will be no family tree. The imbalance, in terms of gender, in nations such as China and India is simply so massive that it is now even understood as a national security threat by at least the Indian government, if not yet the Chinese. China’s infamous one child only policy is only added to the very evil context of this reality – the reality of gendercide. The preference for boys on the part of Asian families is so strong that in China and in India one of those dangerous and difficult conditions for humanity is being a young, either unborn or recently born, girl.

But are sex selection abortions actually going on in the United States? At least eight states in the US have banned abortion for sex selection. There’s no particular enforcement mechanism that works in this case, but at least the law states that it is morally wrong – indeed evil – to abort a child based on its gender. Other states and jurisdictions are considering similar kinds of legislation, but just in recent days David Chiu, a San Francisco supervisor – that is a city supervisor – had initiated a resolution to oppose bans on sex selective abortion. Now let’s get the language right, he’s opposing a ban on sex selection abortion. Now what kind of moral agenda could be behind an effort to oppose a ban on sex selection abortions? Well Rachel Lu writing at the Federalist makes the point very clear, it’s because at least some in the Asian-American community claim that it’s a form of racism to suggest the sex selection abortions is taking place. And as a matter fact, David Chiu and others are doing their very best to argue that it isn’t taking place, arguing that sex selection abortion isn’t a problem in the United States, it’s all just a racist ploy. But then she writes,

“There’s just one problem with this argument. Sex-selective abortion does happen here, and the evidence has been bolstered by, ironically, the very study Chiu and others have cited as their primary source of data. Another day,[she says,] another reminder that maybe somebody (at least an intern?) should actually read the study before we all get on our high horses about it.”

The study that was cited by this San Francisco city supervisor, and others, in opposing bans on sex selection abortion actually makes the point that sex selection abortion is taking place here. As Rachel Lu points out, evidently in citing the study, they cited it without reading it. As she writes,

“The evidence is already before us that sex-selective abortion does happen here. Sunita Puri published a study in 2011 in which she interviewed 65 Indian immigrant women, all of whom had pursued fetal sex selection. Her study revealed that the women, like so many mothers abroad, had been shamed and sometimes abused for conceiving too many girls, and that nearly half of them had aborted daughters in the past. Among those study participants who were carrying girls, 89 percent chose to abort.”

That’s virtually 9 out of 10. Rachel Lu then turns to look at demographic data worldwide and the data, they are simply horrifying. It turns out that when it comes to a first child there is now a mild imbalance toward boys, indicating that where there is the opportunity of future children, at least some Asian parents are deciding to allow the girl to be born. When it comes to a second child, the gender imbalance is more remarkable. But then she says,

“The really significant finding concerned third births in families who already had two daughters. Among these children, there were 151 boys for every 100 girls. [The researchers] drew the obvious conclusion: when expecting for the third time, a significant number of Asian parents preferred an abortion to a third daughter.”

The University of Chicago’s International Human Rights Clinic has put out what it claims to be the new definitive word on sex selection abortion – its databases is much larger and more recent than the one cited in terms of the other report. Rachel Lu also says,

“It also wears its political agenda on its sleeve, presenting a list of “myths” (used by the pro-life movement to justify laws against sex-selective abortion) and replacing them with “facts” (meant to show that such laws are unnecessary).”

The report includes myth number six,

“The primary motivation behind laws banning sex-selective abortion in the United States is to prevent gender-based discrimination”

They then replace that with fact six,

“Restricting access to abortion is the primary motivation for sex-selective abortion bans.”

Now something here very important to note, if you’re doing demographic analysis – this isn’t the kind of conclusion you reach. This is an ideological assertion, and the myth, at least what they claim to be the myth, that sex selection abortions are actually happening, turns out to be the fact – as indicated in their own report. Rachel Lu then writes that even in this new report there is this statement,

“‘Our study of pooled ACS data confirms Almond and Edlund’s study with regard to the third births of foreign-born Chinese, Indian and Korean families that have already given birth to two girls.’ [Rachel Lu then writes,] Wait, what? This wonderful, up-to-date study confirms the very point that was most critical to the pro-life argument all along? So… then… what are all these pro-choice advocates [she says] so excited about?”

Well, as she suggests, they probably didn’t even read the study closely – they just cited it, not recognizing that it makes the opposite point than the one they were claiming. Instead of indicating that sex selection abortion isn’t a problem, it documents the fact that it is a problem and for that matter a growing problem – certainly growing when you add the number of pregnancies. Rachel Lu then summarizes,

“Now, in a way, I can sympathize. It’s got to be frustrating when you bring together a lot of important-sounding organizations to do a big, splashy study, and it ends up confirming the piece of data that most sticks in your craw.”

But what most sticks in my craw is this, the list of supposed myths and facts presented by a supposedly scientific organization at the University of Chicago – and it turns out that there myths are facts and their facts are myths.

4) Excitement over iPhone 6 reveals dissatisfaction of human heart with anything less than newest marvel

Finally in terms of worldview: our desires, our consumer demands, reveal a great deal about us – so do long lines. And even now, it is expected that very long lines are forming, or have already formed, outside Apple computer stores. Why? Because today the new iPhones are going to be released as the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6+, both of them larger than the iPhone 5 that came before it. And of course, if you’re doing the math you realize that the iPhone 6 is going to be replaced by the iPhone 7 in fairly short order and there will be lines likely in the same places just a matter of some months later for the iPhone 7 – and of course the 8, the 9, and the 10 coming after that. We can presume with new advances in technology and what we now created in this hyper-technological age is the fact that many, many sane people believe they simply can’t do without this – even for a matter of days or weeks.

The new technology comes with a sense of urgency that is almost idolatrous. I’m not suggesting that there are long lines of idolaters; I’m simply saying that the urgency behind it is something that Christians ought to look at with some skepticism. Because after all, the iPhone 5 is a pretty smart, smart phone, and the iPhone 6 is only marginally bigger and only marginally faster – maybe a little marginally better, marginally clearer. But we’re living in a time in which we’re almost embarrassed not to have the latest in our hands; and when Apple just a few days ago made the announcement of the iPhone 6, it appeared that what you had was the entire world waiting for the great oracle to hand down a vision of the future. It turned out to be an interesting vision if you’re really looking to smart phones, but not a very expansive future if you thinking about meaning. And perhaps the most important lesson for us all, whether or not we have a smart phone or if our smartphones is an iPhone 4,5,6 or even 6+, there may be someone right now even waiting in line outside an Apple Store for the smartphones – but let’s all consider this, every one of these smart phones, even the dumbest of the smart phones, every single one of them has more computing power than NASA had in order to accomplish the launching of a rocket that took men to the moon and returned them. What we’re looking at here is a marvel, but we’re living in an age in which having marvel is not enough. We need the even more marvelous marvel and whether you’re in the line or not, that’s a lesson for all of us, about all of us, in this hyper technological age.

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

 

The Briefing 09-19-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Prevention of Islamic State plot in Australia reminder of inability to know hearts of men

Australia terror raids are a reminder of the jihadists Down Under, Washington Post (Ishaan Tharoor)

Who is Mohammad Ali Baryalei, the man accused of conspiring to behead a stranger in Australia, Sydney Morning Herald (Rachel Olding and Megan Levy)

2) False god of diversity valued by California university system cheap substitute for genuine pluralism

Campus ‘Diversity’ Puts Religion on Probation, Bloomberg BusinessWeek (Virginia Postrel)

3) ‘Myth’ of sex-selection abortion problem in US turns out to be fact

The United States Has A Femicide Problem, The Federalist (Rachel Lu)

4) Excitement over iPhone 6 reveals dissatisfaction of human heart with anything less than newest marvel

With the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Aims for Versatility, New York Times (Farhad Manjoo)

Transcript: The Briefing 09-18-14

The Briefing

 

September 18, 2014

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

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

1) Primacy of cultural issues in electoral discussions reveal moral contours of our society

Back in 2002 then Senator Joe Biden declared ‘soccer moms are security moms now.’ He was responding to the fact that in 2002 the Democratic Party got a shellacking in the midterm elections, and the explanation for that loss in the electoral polls had to do with the fact that the issues of national security began to replace the issues of domestic policy in terms of the minds of so many, including the Democratic voters that the party had been counting on in previous elections – known throughout the Clinton years as ‘soccer moms.’ From a Christian worldview perspective, this raises a host of issues – politics only a part of it. How in the world do soccer moms become security moms? The answer to that is: when they have to. One of the things we think about from a worldview perspective is that every single one of us operates out of a hierarchy of needs and a hierarchy of concerns. At one point in our lives, we might be most concerned about something that, in later times in life, we have no opportunity to give any thought at all. Urgency tends to press out – issues of far lesser concern. And soccer moms become security moms when a very real threat is presented to them.

Over the course of the last three decades, the Democratic Party’s been tilting itself towards arguments that are arranged and marketed for a female constituency. As we saw in the election two years ago, the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates won the vast majority of votes among those who are single women, single employed women. If you look at the votes among married women, and add to that married women with children, the votes tilt towards the Republican Party. Now in order to gain electoral success, parties are giving an incredible amount of attention to the segmentation of the electorate. But my concern is about worldview, and on that account there are several different dimensions of this story that deserve our attention. Peter Beinart writing for the Atlantic says that the security moms are back. He says,

“Suddenly, it feels like 2002. [He goes back to that year and says.] Democrats got creamed in midterm elections that year because the women voters they had relied on throughout the Clinton years deserted them. In 2000, women favored Democratic congressional candidates by nine points. In 2002, that advantage disappeared entirely.”

And the reason for that was quite straightforward; you can simply say the date September 11, 2001. From a Christian perspective this reminds us of the fact that we often have concerns today that we didn’t have yesterday. And concerns that can all the sudden erupt, in terms of our moral consciousness, can basically displaced just about everything else. We’ve looked time and time again to the fact that many of the issues that we currently confront, many of the controversies now playing out of headlines, are the controversies that are only possible in a time of relative peace and affluence. You change the economic conditions, you change the national security conditions, and that kind of headline disappears – replaced with something far different. The images now emblazed upon the consciences of so many Americans and people around the world of beheaded journalist and humanitarian workers, those immediately crowd out all kinds of concerns about lesser issues and in particular economic issues. Peter Beinart says that the return of security moms is bad news for Democrats, similarly an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times by Michael D. Shear and Carl Hulse tells us that world events are muffling the Democrats economic rallying cry. Now looking at this from a worldview perspective, not merely from a position of partisan interest, the Democratic Party begun to tailor its message towards women for the 2014 elections, coming up in just a matter of weeks, believing that economic issues would predominate. Now if you rewind history about a year, the Democratic Party had every reason to believe that would be a sensible electoral campaign strategy, but not now. And as these writers in New York Times make clear, the Democrats are finding that Americans just aren’t that urgently interested in economic matters, at least in these weeks. They cite Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee. He said,

“I think the Democrats’ economic message has a lot of resonance, but it has been difficult to break through the focus on foreign policy issues,”

Another thing to consider here’s is fact that President Obama, running for office in 2008 for reelection in 2012, did his very best to say he would be the president who would avoid having to do with foreign-policy matters. He said in 2008, “If you elect me, you will see an American military withdrawal from the Middle East.” And now, this very President had to face the American people, and the watching world, and say he is sending in airstrikes. And just a matter of a few days ago, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that it will take some kind of ground campaign in order to oppose, and eventually to defeat, the group known as the Islamic State.

But then on Tuesday of this week the New York Times had a front-page article entitled “Democrats Put Cultural Issues in Their Quiver.” This tells us a great deal also about moral change and how this plays into the electoral situation, or you might reverse it and say, the nations consideration and conversation about the upcoming election reveals the true contours of the moral change taking place around us. If the earlier articles are about the fact that Democrats aren’t making headway with economic issues, this headline story in the New York Times says that they are making headlines with cultural issues. Now the background of this article is really interesting because in recent election cycles, going back at least three decades, Democrats have been running from, rather than towards, cultural and moral issues. That has been the political terrain of the Republican Party, and by and large, it is played into the fact that there have been electoral victories time and time again when Americans have gone to the polls to defend traditional marriage, to vote for a constitutional amendment, or to support a candidate who defines marriage as the union exclusively of a man and a woman. But in the fast-paced moral change we are currently experiencing, there has been a turning of the tables. As the New York Times says, those cultural issues are now working for the Democrats rather than for the Republicans and their working on the opposite side of the moral equation. Now the Democrats are capitalizing on the fact that increasing numbers of Americans support the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the Democrats are counting on the fact that if they’re having a hard time with their economic message, they’re going to be making a moral message and they’re going to be making it loudly.

Senator John Warner of Virginia, a Democrat running for reelection in that state, says,“The public has moved,” making very clear the fact that the public is moved in a more liberal direction. This article New York Times makes the point that Democrats are recalibrating their message to women voters, shifting from economic to moral, or cultural, arguments and we need to track very clearly, very closely the fact that many of these Democratic candidates are arguing that a vote for them means a vote for women’s health. Of course that’s now a euphemism; it’s a euphemism primarily for abortion and what is packaged as reproductive health services. But the word health in there betrays the fact that for the unborn child, it’s not about health, it’s about abortion. The 2014 midterm elections are still a matter of a few weeks away and a whole lot can change between now and then. One of the messages of all these articles put together just in recent days is that a major change in the world situation can change the terms of debate almost immediately. But the enduring message of these articles to Christians should be this: we are experiencing a time of vast moral change and when it comes that moral change, those arguments now appear to have even more traction for the Democratic Party than do the economic arguments that party is basically built its political strategy on for the last 30 to 40 years. Furthermore, those moral and cultural arguments the Democratic Party now sees as the future direction of their political strategies are premised upon the fact that a moral revolution isn’t just happening, but that it has happened. And regardless of how the election turns out in a matter of weeks, at least in terms of the big moral picture around us, they think they’re on the winning side.

2) Sexual revolutionaries underestimate the strength of Scripture’s sexual ethic

As a matter fact, shifting to another issue – a large percentage of Americans believe that it is important to be on what they call the winning side of history. Those who are arguing for the legalization of same-sex marriage come back again and again to the fact that all right-thinking people are moving in their direction, that the cultural momentum is in support of their arguments and that eventually anyone’s whose outlier, anyone who disagrees with the normalization of homosexuality, and the legalization of same-sex marriage, is merely going to be written off. And furthermore, they really believe, and numerous authorities make this very clear, they really do believe that everyone eventually is going to have to come to terms with this. In response to that, Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry, writing in the newsmagazine The Week, is trying to explain, as a Christian, why, as he says, so many Christians won’t back down on gay marriage.

As he begins his essay, he gets right to the heart of what he sees as a secular misunderstanding. He writes,

“A majority of Americans already favor same-sex marriage — and most everyone agrees that same-sex marriage will continue to be accepted by an ever-bigger majority. In many urban and progressive circles, it’s beyond impolitic to oppose gay marriage. Indeed, there’s a movement underfoot to make opposition to same-sex marriage akin to support for racism. That is to say, anyone who expresses opposition to same-sex marriage would be ostracized, with many progressives hoping to employ a variety of social and governmental means of coercion to force gay-marriage opponents to the margins of society.”

He goes on to say that it appears that strategy is working, at least in terms of the larger culture. In making his argument Gobry  argues that the secularists, and those who are pressing for the legalization of same-sex marriage, those who believe that even the Christian church is eventually going to have to bend the knee to this new moral argument, he says they operate on a false script. He says,

“The false premise goes something like this: Christianity, as a historical social phenomenon, basically adjusts its moral doctrines depending on the prevailing social conditions.”

I think he’s got exactly right. I think that is the false script that many secularists believe is true of Christianity, and that’s why they believe that we will eventually have to move their way – or get out of the way. But as evangelical Christians we also have to concede they have an argument for their position. If it is a false script, it’s false for orthodox Christians, for those who intend to be faithful to Scripture and all the Scripture teaches, but is the very manifesto what is known as Liberal Protestantism. Liberal Protestantism did exactly what those in the secular aside now believe Christianity’s going to have to do – that is, basically bend to what are called here, the prevailing social conditions. As a matter fact, through the high profits and priest of Protestant Liberalism said, that’s exactly what the church must do in order to be rescued from its predicament in the modern age. Now we’re simply hearing those arguments again about a century later.

But in confronting that false script, Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry goes on to write this,

“Christianity’s opposition to homosexuality is not the product of some dusty medieval exegete poring over obscure Old Testament verses. From the beginning, what set apart the new and strange sect called Christians from the rest of their culture was their strange sexual ethic. They refused polygamy. They refused the sexual exploitation of slaves by their owners. They refused prostitution, premarital sex, divorce, abortion, the exposure of infants, contraception — and homosexual acts.”

The point is clear, he said,

“From the start, Christians embodied a different way of life. From the start, they understood a particular sexual ethic to be a keystone of this way of life. And they understood the logic of this ethic as prohibiting (among other things) homosexual acts.”

Now looking at this article, I want to make a couple of observations. First of all, this is a brave article. It’s straightforward in its argument and, even as what he is arguing is transparently true, this is exactly the kind of message many people don’t want to hear – not only in the secular left, but on the Protestant left as well. In concluding his essay Gobry writes,

“Today, many gay-marriage proponents don’t just want a live-and-let-live relationship with Christianity — they want to force Christianity to affirm same-sex marriage. They do this, [he says] I think, because they believe very strongly in the rights of gays to marry, but also largely because they think that it will only take moderate prodding to get Christianity to cave in. History and Christianity’s own self-understanding suggest, however, that such an outcome is not in the cards.”

This is an important article coming from one who is not an evangelical, but who identifies with a classical historic Christian tradition of theology and moral reasoning. And he’s exactly right, if the church is to reverse his understanding of the morality of same-sex acts and same-sex relationships, it doesn’t have to change just the recent teaching of the church over the last several decades, or the last century, or over the last two centuries, or even just the modern age, they would have to go back all the way to the beginnings of the church with the apostles and say we’re going to reverse everything that is revealed to us about a sexual ethic in the New Testament. That’s an immensely important argument, and it’s one that evangelical Christians should look to with a particular interest, and also a particular sensitivity. Because when you add to the fact that we’re not merely arguing on behalf of the consistent moral tradition, but more importantly arguing on behalf of obedience to Scripture, that raises the stakes considerably and makes the point that even if other churches and denominations may try to find some way to accommodate themselves to this moral revolution, those who remain committed to the inerrancy and infallibility, the total authority of Scripture, the fact the Scriptures totally true and trustworthy, have no mechanism for making that kind of adjustment. It’s not just the church tradition that stands in the way, more importantly; even more fundamentally, it’s Scripture that stands in the way.

3) Pope officiates marriage of couples his doctrine excludes, softening doctrinal convictions

But about those other traditions, just in recent days I had to discuss an argument being made that the Roman Catholic Church is evolving on the issue of homosexuality, and there’s evidence that that church is evolving, especially if you watch and listen to the current Pope – Pope Francis I. And those who are either hoping for or fearing an evolution of the Roman Catholic Church on the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, they have to be looking warily or on the other hand hopefully to an event that took place Sunday in the diocese of Rome where the Pope himself married 20 couples. Now it’s been a long time since there’s been a papal wedding ceremony, that is a wedding ceremony presided over by the pontiff. As a matter fact, for the Roman Catholic Church, marriage is not just a sacred rite; it is considered one of the sacraments of the church whereby grace goes to the participants by means of the priestly ministration of the one who is conducting the marriage ceremony. In this case, no small matter, no mere symbolism, that it was the Pope himself. But the fact that the Pope was presiding over this kind of wedding ceremony in the diocese of Rome was not newsworthy merely because it took place, but because of who was married.

Among the 20 couples married by the Pope this past Sunday included cohabitating couples, and at least one couple that had a child from a previous sexual relationship before the marriage actually took place. Now why is an interesting? Well as Elisabetta Povoledo of the New York Times reports, the Pope in this case was “looking past tradition.” Now one of the key issues we’re going to have to watch very carefully as evangelicals is this – as I have argued over and over again, there are multiple arguments for the church’s position on same-sex marriage and on homosexuality, there is an argument from natural law, there is an argument from Christian tradition, and there is an argument from Scripture. The argument from Scripture for evangelicals is all that is necessary and yet as Scripture makes very clear, God has revealed himself. As Paul says in Romans 1, even his invisible attributes are clearly seen; he has revealed marriage in the morality of sexuality even in the larger world. But we understand that Scripture is the ultimate authority, and that what you have in nature is a testimony to the truth is revealed comprehensively in Scripture. When it comes to natural law, evangelicals need not to fear natural arguments but instead even to understand how to use them but to use them to apply Scripture, not as an alternative to scriptural reasoning. But the big issue we’re going to have to watch is this: how long will it be before arguments based upon mere Christian tradition give way? How long will it be before arguments made on mere natural law begin to collapse? Because as it turns out – I’ll simply make this statement as straightforwardly as I know how – only Scripture will hold. Only in obedience to Scripture will hold a church to the church’s historic understanding of sexuality because that sexual morality isn’t something the church came up with, it’s not even something merely the church has affirmed, it’s something the church has obeyed; that’s a fundamentally different equation. And that may mean that evangelical Christians find ourselves relatively alone, in terms of this new cultural moment, finding ourselves bound by Scripture alone in terms of defying the current moral revolution.

 

That may well be a very lonely place, but those who are looking for indications of evolution in terms of other Christian traditions have to be looking what took place Sunday in St. Peter’s in Rome as evidence of the fact that this Roman Catholic pontiff appears to be considerably softening his church’s historic teachings on these issues. By the way, one of things we’re going to have to watch, especially as this new extraordinary Synod of Bishops as it is known takes place in a matter of just a few weeks in Rome, one of things we’re going to have to be watching is this, the Roman Catholic Church can make a distinction between its dogmatic teaching and it’s pastoral ministry. In a glaring example of that came in a recent phone call disclosed whereby the Pope himself made a pastoral call to a woman in Argentina and gave her a dispensation so that she could attend the mass, even as she had married a divorced man in violation of church teachings. The Roman Catholic Church continues to say she should not be admitted to the mass, but the Pope gave her a dispensation – pastorally. That’s the kind of thing we might be looking for very carefully; a church that divides its pastoral ministry from its doctrinal teaching is a church that can find a way to negotiate through this kind of controversy. As for evangelicals committed to the authority of Scripture where the issue is obedience or disobedience, we have no such dispensation, we have no such priestly ministry, and we have no such way out of this equation.

From an evangelical perspective there is another interesting question here and that is this, how is conscience bound? As you know, as children or even as teenagers often times are conscience is bound by parents. We simply have the inherited moral authority of that which is taught to us by our parents, and extended family, and the larger society. Sometimes are conscience is bound by a word that comes from an authority such as a preacher, or a teacher, or professor, sometimes our conscience is bound by the force of civil law where we actually know that we have done something that is wrong by violating civil law or by being tempted to do so. But ultimately, and here Protestant evangelical Christianity has answered uniformly, are conscience is bound ultimately only by Scripture. The only way the conscience can be adequately bound is if it’s bound by the question of obedience or disobedience to the word of God. Standing in the Diet at Worms, Martin Luther the reformers articulated this classically for every single evangelical who would ever follow. When an answer to those who could’ve taken his life, Martin Luther simply said, “here I stand. I can do no other, God help me my conscience is bound by Scripture alone.” We will soon find out as this moral revolution unravels all around us – which churches and which Christians are, and which are not, bound by Holy Scripture.

4) Scottish independence vote today could lead to crumbling of modern nation-state

Something to watch for today in Scotland, people going to the polls to decide if Scotland will remain in the United Kingdom or whether it will secede – breaking a 300-plus year tradition of being united under one realm and one crown. It’s not a small question because as the modern age progresses, what we’re seeing is something that none of the foundational architects of the modern age could’ve imagined – and that is the potential crumbling of what is known as the nation-state. We’ll be watching to see how the voters in Scotland vote, because it won’t just be about Scotland, there are people all over the world waiting to hear what signal is sent – answering the question, will the United Kingdom remain united?

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 9-18-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Primacy of cultural issues in electoral discussions reveal moral contours of our society

‘Security Moms’ Are Back—and That’s Bad News for Democrats, The Atlantic (Peter Beinart)

World Events Muffle Democrats’ Economic Rallying Cry, New York Times (Michael D. Shear and Carl Hulse)

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

2) Sexual revolutionaries underestimate the strength of Scripture’s sexual ethic

Why so many Christians won’t back down on gay marriage, The Week (Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry)

3) Pope officiates marriage of couples his doctrine excludes, softening doctrinal convictions

In Weddings, Pope Francis Looks Past Tradition, New York Times (Elisabetta Povoledo)

4) Scottish independence vote today could lead to crumbling of modern nation-state

Transcript: The Briefing 09-17-14

The Briefing

 

September 17, 2014

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

 

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

1) Obama declares Ebola epidemic a national security crisis and global responsibility for the US

The President of the United States can choose just about any place as the location for making a speech, and when that speech is moved outside of Washington – specifically outside the White House – the president is making a point. And President Obama made quite a point yesterday in going to Atlanta, Georgia to the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control to give a major administration speech on behalf of the issue of Ebola. And the President addressed the issue of Ebola as if he was announcing a military campaign, and in effect that’s exactly what he was doing. In the President’s speech yesterday he acknowledged four major goals of the national strategy. He announced the first the goal is to control the outbreak, more about that in just a moment. The second goal was to address, what he called, the ripple effects of local economies and communities to prevent a truly massive humanitarian disaster. Third the President said the United States will coordinate a broader global response. And last, the President said the United States will help African nations to build a public health infrastructure to help to prevent this kind of epidemic from happening again.

The most important foreground to the President’s speech is the fact that the outbreak of Ebola, that is now several months old in West Africa, is threatening to break out into a worldwide epidemic. That point was made very candidly in the pages of the New York Times this past Tuesday when David Brooks cited Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who is the president of Liberia, who said, “At this rate, we will never break the transmission chain, and the virus will overwhelm us.”

Similarly, yesterday’s editorial page of USA Today indicated something to the velocity of this particular epidemic. As the editors wrote, “The first 1,000 cases took more than four months to spread. The next 1,000 accumulated in just one month. Since Aug. 13 — just a month ago — 2,800 cases have been added.”

We now know that at least 4,800 persons have caught the disease, half of them have already died. And we also know that the disease that began in Guinea and Liberia has now spread to Nigeria, and Senegal has has reported now one case. There are suspicions that other cases that have been misdiagnosed as other diseases may well be indicators of the spread of Ebola into yet other nations. The point being made by the president was this, Ebola, he now says, is a national security issue – not only for Africa, but also for the United States. And the President made a compelling point, because as he pointed out, when you are looking at the situation in Africa, we live in a global community where nothing can be limited, nothing on this scale can be limited to one region.

Furthermore, the United States has a particular responsibility in this because we are the only nation with a public health infrastructure capable of coming anything close to addressing this. That’s a point that we need to ponder for just a moment. Once again, we are reminded that this kind of cultural achievement is just that – it is an achievement. The fact that here in United States we have such a comprehensive public health infrastructure is a sign that there were centuries, decades, generations, of contributions into building that kind of systematic structure. It wasn’t just in one generation that such a massive infrastructure was born. When we look back to the founding of the United States of America, America’s public health system was no better than what’s in Africa now – it was assuredly worse. As a matter fact, when United States was founded as a nation most people didn’t even believe in germ theory, and certainly didn’t know about viruses. All that has changed now, and the United States is the epicenter of world health in terms of its modern representation. And the United States, as the President acknowledged yesterday in Atlanta, is the only nation that can really respond to this.

Furthermore, we should have a special burden for Africa in a different light. Africa as a continent has been making significant strides and developments just in the last generation. The American president most often credited with helping Africa to begin an accelerated development is President George W. Bush. Remembered around the world for many other things, but remembered in Africa for the very personal interest he took in that continent. But of course Christians looking at this recognize that our main concern isn’t economic, and isn’t national security, it’s humanitarian. It’s the fact that the people who are now catching this disease, developing it’s a horrifying symptoms, and dying of it, and all of those who are among their loved ones and in their communities, are people made in the image of God. And we have a special burden to understand that where we can help, we should help. Christians wondering about all this should remember, if nothing else, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Remembering that when we see a need we can meet, everyone is our neighbor – especially, including now, everyone in Africa.

2) Government’s integrity undermined by pervasive abortion services billed under Obamacare

Back here in United States our public health infrastructure deserve a closer look on a very important issue, and the issue is abortion. Stephanie Armour reporting for the Wall Street Journal yesterday indicates that at least some insurance plans that are available through Obamacare, known as the Affordable Care Act, are breaking rules aimed at ensuring federal funds aren’t used to cover most abortions. That was in a federal report that was released to Congress by the demand of the House of Representatives just in recent days. Now I want you think back to when the Obamacare legislation passed. You’ll recall that it passed without a single Republican vote, and it passed, so very narrowly, because some pro-life Democrats were convinced that there would be protections built into the legislation that would prevent a single penny, a single dime, from going towards payment for abortion. And now a report comes out saying that that very thing has happened, and not only has it happened, it appears to be pretty pervasive. As Armour reports,

“A review of 18 insurers found that 15 of them [that’s 15 out of 18] didn’t itemize the premium amount associated with the abortion services and didn’t send a separate bill for that premium amount.”

And that means that 15 out of 18 were finding a way to bill for abortion under the Affordable Care Act. And we’re clearly not talking here about exceptions, we’re not talking about outliers, we’re talking about 15 of the 18 insurers that were studied in this report. John Boehner, the speaker the House of Representatives said,

“Today’s GAO [that’s Government Accounting Office] report confirms that under the president’s health-care law, abortions are being paid for with taxpayer funds by more than 1,000 exchange plans across the country.”

So the report doesn’t just say that 15 of the 18 closely considered plans included abortion payment, but that it appears that similar kinds of malfeasance are present in over 1,000 of the qualified plans across the United States of America. Now this is one of the things that can quickly get sidelined by liberal media, something that can quickly be ignored by those who pledged that this wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen, and now you have even those who are running the Affordable Care Act saying that perhaps there needs to be a closer monitoring.

Ben Wakana, a spokesman with Health and Human Services said,

“[We] will work with stakeholders, including states and issuers, so they fully understand and comply with the federal law prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortions,”

But even as he made those assurances in light of this government report, this is the very administration and the very departments that made those assurances at the very beginning – and now we know those assurances were worth nothing. In terms of political integrity here something to watch for, in terms of political integrity here’s a big question; how many of those who voted for the Affordable Care Act, while claiming to be pro-life Democrats, and they voted for only after they had these assurances, how many of them are now going to stick their necks out to assure that their assurances are assuredly true? That’s a tougher question of course when we know that they surely were not true as verified now by the Government accounting office. It is stories like this that make the phrase “government accountability” or “political honesty” appear to be oxymorons – words that simply can’t credibly be combined.

3) Birthrate radically reshapes political demographics of Jewish voters

On The Briefing we often come back to the issue of birth rate as being very, very important in demonstrating worldview. The fact that one decides to have a child, and especially multiple children, is a very clear sign; first of all, as we have seen that is correlated with belief in God – theistic belief and birthrates are among the most closely correlated statistics to be found. Furthermore, the decision to have a child is a statement about the future, and in contrast the decision not to have children is also a statement about the future – certainly when you broaden it to an entire community; that what make an article in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times very important. Joseph Berger writes that liberal Jewish voters in New York may be a thing of the past. Why? Because liberal Jewish communities in New York have an atrociously low birth rate, and very conservative, even hyper orthodox Jews in New York, have an abundant birth rate. As he writes,

“A 2012 demographic study by UJA-Federation of New York found that 60 percent of Jewish children in the New York City area — the Jewish center of the United States — live in Orthodox homes, which suggests that in a generation [now he writes here a single generation] a majority of the city’s one million Jews may be classified as Orthodox.”

Now if that doesn’t sound like blockbuster news to you, you haven’t been following the history of the Jewish community in New York City – which is emblematic of the Jewish community in the entire United States of America. New York City has been associated with a very high concentration of a Jewish population for the better part of more than a century, and that Jewish population, mostly drawn from Eastern Europe, became overwhelmingly identified with the Democratic Party and with political progressivism and liberalism in the United States. And for the better part of the last half-century, the Jewish population in New York City has trended towards the most liberal, and even increasingly secular, variance of Judaism. But the birthrates are going to change all that. Cause as it turns out, the more liberal or secular Jews stopped having babies. In the meantime, the most Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, including the ultra-orthodox and the Hasidim, they been having very large families and their very large families spawn even more large families. And this means that if you’re a Democratic politician in New York, and you’ve been building your vote count on liberal Democratic votes, you’ve got about a generation to shift because as this article in the New York Times no less makes very clear, the Jewish population in New York is almost assuredly going to be a conservative population when it comes to voting patterns in just a generation. And it’s not that there has been a conversion from one political perspective to another, this is not vote shifting or party shifting – this is a birth rate issue, plain and simple. Those who do not have babies are going to give way to those who do, and in this case the Jewish population of New York City is a microcosm for what’s happening in the larger nation as well. And the same principle pertains; the ones who are having the babies own the future.

4) Coercive feminism gains political ground in Sweden evidences spiraling sexual revolution

One of the trajectories we been noting on The Briefing is the fact that when you start a sexual revolution, you discover something very quickly – it’s easier to start than to stop. Furthermore, it’s very hard to tell where the current sexual revolution, or gender revolution, might stop or even if it can stop. And the suspicion increasingly grows that it cannot stop, so the only question is: where does it go next? And that’s why the article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal by Anna Molin is very interesting. The headline is “Feminist Party Gains in Europe’s Model State for Equality.” It might not look like a spellbinding headline, but the story is really interesting. She writes,

“As the country that gets the European Union’s best marks for gender equality heads to the polls on Sunday, a top election issue is gender inequality.”

Now let’s pause for just a moment. Gender inequality in Sweden? Sweden is recognized almost worldwide as the most gender equal nation on earth. What is remaining to be done? Well, just buckle your seatbelts. According to Anna Molin, Sweden, like his Nordic neighbors, has long been known for its policies to get women into the workforce and into decision-making roles. Women today outnumber men in government, and the country’s day care subsidies and parental leave policies are among the world’s most generous. Now let’s pause for a moment again, we’re talking about a nation that might be compared only with its neighboring nation of Norway in terms of the progress that it has made towards its cultural goal of gender equality. And we’re also talking about a nation in which women now outnumber men in many businesses and even in government. And we also have a nation that has tried to do it’s very best to equalize the genders, in so far as it has the economic power, by offering subsidies, day care, all kinds of things, in order to facilitate women going into the workplace. So what hasn’t been done yet? Well as I said stay tuned.

It turns out that that’s not enough for the nation’s political leaders, and in particular for a group of feminists who are going to be a major factor in Sunday’s upcoming election. They formed a party known as the Feminist Initiative that’s now, according to Molin, at the center of Sweden’s election debate. In May the party became the first to win a seat in the European Parliament as a feminist ticket. It now has a chance in this upcoming Sunday election to become the only feminist party with legislative power in Europe. So what is it pushing for? It’s pushing for what it calls feminism 2.0. And this feminism is coercive. And it’s coercive in some very interesting ways. As a matter fact, if you add together what a husband and wife, now just a minute that’s anachronistic in Sweden, when a man and a woman, who are parents of a child, are given, in terms of paid parental leave, it amounts to more than 480 days. You put the two together, the mother and the father, more than 480 days – that’s well over a year of paid parental leave. But right now it’s up to the couple to decide how that leave is distributed – how much the father takes how much the mother takes. And now this new party, that is expected to have of vast amount of support coming this Sunday, says the government must mandate it. In order to mandate absolute equality men must be forced, by law, to take just as many parental leave days as are the women, the mothers.

Lena Wängnerud, political science professor at University of Gothenburg said,

“It is no longer enough just to have a number of women in parliament and in other positions,”

She said, according to Molin,

“Sweden’s history of promoting gender equality has created a breeding ground for feminist ideals. ‘Even when comparing with the other Nordic countries, the equality debate is much more radical in Sweden and focuses more on the remaining inequalities than on the progress made so far,’”

Cited in the article is Cerese Olsson, a 30-year-old finance administrator for the Women’s International League For Peace And Freedom, who said she’s going to vote for the party because she’s “fed up with not living in an equal society.”

But we need to recognize that this party’s platform is calling for a form of gender equality that can be brought about only by coercion – this is no longer about rights, this is about coercion, a forced equality according to this feminist vision. And by the way, by the time you reach the end of this article it’s clear that this feminist party has far broader goals than just requiring men and women to take equal parental paid leave. For instances as Molin writes,

“It wants to scrap the country’s defense because it says an arms buildup perpetuates violence and the idea that men are agents of violence, which it says leads to more domestic violence.”

So now you have this party that is expected to gain legislative power in the election coming up in Sweden on Sunday; it has already won one seat in the European Parliament, and it calls for an end to national defense – because that just privileges males. You might think that a party with this kind of radical platform wouldn’t have any political chance, but then you wouldn’t be talking about Sweden, and you might not be talking about Sunday – we’ll see what happens.

5) Removal of leader from Thai history books reveals importance of history for shape of future

Finally let’s think about history for just a moment. You know, when you think about the discipline of history, the subject of history, a lot of people just roll their eyes. But we need to recognize something that is very important from a biblical worldview. This is something that comes out in both the old and New Testament, perhaps most directly even in the Old – and that is the importance of history, and of getting history right, and the one who owns history, well like the birth rate, owns the future. Because the one who tells the story, identifies where the story should go. That’s a very important issue and it has been understood by every government, by every king, by every dictator, and every autocratic in world history –  the one who gets to write the history determines where the history should go, where the story begins, how we got to where we are now; if you own that part of the story, you have enormous power in suggesting where the story should go from here. That’s why just about every ideological force on earth wants to get to history.

In the cover story the New York Times magazine just about a week ago, the New York Times revealed that Bill Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is trying to reform the nation’s history curriculum, especially in the public schools. And, even the New York Times, at least raising the issue, if that’s a good thing. Furthermore, you have debates over history in all kinds of arenas now, but one arrives all the sudden by surprise in the pages once again of the New York Times in a story about Thailand. The reporter for the story is Thomas Fuller, the headline is this: “Loved and Hated, Former Premier of Thailand Is Erased From Textbook.” Now this reminds us of something that was certainly true of the Soviet Union, and its attempt to sanitize its history. If you look to successive editions of what was known as the Soviet Encyclopedia, you’ll discover that people moved in favor and out-of-favor by the fact that they moved in photographs and out of photographs. Sometimes the Soviet editors were so clumsy that they would leave a hand, as in a common handshake, while removing the individual whose hand was originally in the handshake. Sometimes they would move people in and out of photographs with no concern that anyone with eyes to see could look at successive editions of the same Encyclopedia and discover that that person wasn’t there when the photograph was taken. But then, if you’re going to play with history that way, how do you know that anyone in the photograph was actually there or not there?

But as an example of how people try to control history, you can hardly top what’s going on now in Thailand. As Fuller writes,

“His legacy is inseparable from the past decade of political tumult in Thailand, but high school students will not find the name Thaksin Shinawatra in the history textbooks that the country’s military junta recently ordered schools to use. Mr. Thaksin’s name was scrubbed from the book by the Ministry of Education, said the textbook’s author, Thanom Anarmwat. ‘The officials at the ministry just deleted it, cut it,’ he said. Mr. Thaksin elicits love or hate in Thailand and not much in between.”

To members of the Bangkok establishment, now in power by military coup, he is so odious they don’t even want to mention his name. But to many populous in Thailand, he’s a figure of great popular support. But the education ministry’s order last month, according to the report, that all public high schools use the new textbook as part of a broader effort to instill patriotism in Thailand youth, and the current regime thinks that the way to tell the story of Thailand in a patriotic sense for the teenagers in that country is to cut out some recent history – even to cut out the man who was the Prime Minister, such that they’re simply going to give students a gap in terms of history. So even as this New York Times story makes very clear that Thailand’s government is very clumsy in trying to rewrite history, even writing out a recent Prime Minister, we need to be reminded of the Christian responsibility to tell our story and the tell it well and to tell it right, and to make sure we tell that story to our children.

The story in the New York Times brought to my mind the text that is found in Deuteronomy chapter 6 beginning in verse 20 where we read,

20 “When your son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the Lord our God has commanded you?’ 21 then you shall say to your son, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 22 And the Lord showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household, before our eyes. 23 And he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land that he swore to give to our fathers. 24 And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as we are this day. 25 And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us.’”

And so, the Lord spoke through Moses to tell the children of Israel: get history right, and not only get history right, but tell the history to your children – not just so that they will know it, but so that they will be who God intended for them to be, and they will find themselves in that story – as we all do.

The one who controls the story, controls the future.

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.