R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 345

The Briefing 09-17-14

Podcast Transcript

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

Read his speech: Obama visits Georgia, CDC for Ebola updates, WJCL (Christopher Buchanan)

Goodbye, Organization Man, New York Times (David Brooks)

Ebola speeds up, world stands still: Our view, USA Today (Editorial Board)

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

Watchdog Finds Insurers Not Following Health Law’s Abortion Rule, Wall Street Journal (Stephanie Armour)

3) Birthrate radically reshapes political demographics of Jewish voters

Are Liberal Jewish Voters a Thing of the Past?, New York Times (Joseph Berger)

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

Gender Gap Fuels Swedish Feminist Party’s Rise Ahead of Election, Wall Street (Anna Molin)

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

So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class …, New York Times (Andrew Ross Sorkin)

Loved and Hated, Former Premier of Thailand Is Erased From Textbook, New York Times (Thomas Fuller)

 

 

Biblical Theology and the Sexuality Crisis

Western society is currently experiencing what can only be described as a moral revolution. Our society’s moral code and collective ethical evaluation on a particular issue has undergone not small adjustments but a complete reversal. That which was once condemned is now celebrated, and the refusal to celebrate is now condemned.

What makes the current moral and sexual revolution so different from previous moral revolutions is that it is taking place at an utterly unprecedented velocity. Previous generations experienced moral revolutions over decades, even centuries. This current revolution is happening at warp speed.

As the church responds to this revolution, we must remember that current debates on sexuality present to the church a crisis that is irreducibly and inescapably theological. This crisis is tantamount to the type of theological crisis that Gnosticism presented to the early church or that Pelagianism presented to the church in the time of Augustine. In other words, the crisis of sexuality challenges the church’s understanding of the gospel, sin, salvation, and sanctification. Advocates of the new sexuality demand a complete rewriting of Scripture’s metanarrative, a complete reordering of theology, and a fundamental change to how we think about the church’s ministry.

Why the Concordance Method Fails

Proof-texting is the first reflex of conservative Protestants seeking a strategy of theological retrieval and restatement. This hermeneutical reflex comes naturally to evangelical Christians because we believe the Bible to be the inerrant and infallible word of God. We understand that, as B.B. Warfield said, “When Scripture speaks, God speaks.” I should make clear that this reflex is not entirely wrong, but it’s not entirely right either. It’s not entirely wrong because certain Scriptures (that is, “proof texts”) speak to specific issues in a direct and identifiable way.

There are, however, obvious limitations to this type of theological method—what I like to call the “concordance reflex.” What happens when you are wrestling with a theological issue for which no corresponding word appears in the concordance? Many of the most important theological issues cannot be reduced to merely finding relevant words and their corresponding verses in a concordance. Try looking up “transgender” in your concordance. How about “lesbian”? Or “in vitro fertilization”? They’re certainly not in the back of my Bible.

It’s not that Scripture is insufficient. The problem is not a failure of Scripture but a failure of our approach to Scripture. The concordance approach to theology produces a flat Bible without context, covenant, or master-narrative—three hermeneutical foundations that are essential to understand Scripture rightly.

Needed:  A Biblical Theology of the Body

Biblical theology is absolutely indispensable for the church to craft an appropriate response to the current sexual crisis. The church must learn to read Scripture according to its context, embedded in its master-narrative, and progressively revealed along covenantal lines. We must learn to interpret each theological issue through Scripture’s metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. Specifically, evangelicals need a theology of the body that is anchored in the Bible’s own unfolding drama of redemption.

Movement One — Creation

Genesis 1:26–28 indicates that God made man—unlike the rest of creation—in his own image. This passage also demonstrates that God’s purpose for humanity was an embodied existence. Genesis 2:7 highlights this point as well. God makes man out of the dust and then breathes into him the breath of life. This indicates that we were a body before we were a person. The body, as it turns out, is not incidental to our personhood. Adam and Eve are given the commission to multiply and subdue the earth. Their bodies allow them, by God’s creation and his sovereign plan, to fulfill that task of image-bearing.

The Genesis narrative also suggests that the body comes with needs. Adam would be hungry, so God gave him the fruit of the garden. These needs are an expression embedded within the created order that Adam is finite, dependent, and derived.

Further, Adam would have a need for companionship, so God gave him a wife, Eve. Both Adam and Eve were to fulfill the mandate to multiply and fill the earth with God’s image-bearers by a proper use of the bodily reproductive ability with which they were created. Coupled with this is the bodily pleasure each would experience as the two became one flesh—that is, one body.

The Genesis narrative also demonstrates that gender is part of the goodness of God’s creation. Gender is not merely a sociological construct forced upon human beings who otherwise could negotiate any number of permutations.

But Genesis teaches us that gender is created by God for our good and his glory. Gender is intended for human flourishing and is assigned by the Creator’s determination—just as he determined when, where, and that we should exist.

In sum, God created his image as an embodied person. As embodied, we are given the gift and stewardship of sexuality from God himself. We are constructed in a way that testifies to God’s purposes in this.

Genesis also frames this entire discussion in a covenantal perspective. Human reproduction is not merely in order to propagate the race. Instead, reproduction highlights the fact that Adam and Eve were to multiply in order to fill the earth with the glory of God as reflected by his image bearers.

Movement Two — The Fall

The fall, the second movement in redemptive history, corrupts God’s good gift of the body. The entrance of sin brings mortality to the body. In terms of sexuality, the Fall subverts God’s good plans for sexual complementarity. Eve’s desire is to rule over her husband (Gen. 3:16). Adam’s leadership will be harsh (3:17-19). Eve will experience pain in childbearing (3:16).

The narratives that follow demonstrate the development of aberrant sexual practices, from polygamy to rape, which Scripture addresses with remarkable candor. These Genesis accounts are followed by the giving of the Law which is intended to curb aberrant sexual behavior. It regulates sexuality and expressions of gender and makes clear pronouncements on sexual morals, cross-dressing, marriage, divorce, and host of other bodily and sexual matters.

The Old Testament also connects sexual sin to idolatry. Orgiastic worship, temple prostitution, and other horrible distortions of God’s good gift of the body are all seen as part and parcel of idolatrous worship. The same connection is made by Paul in Romans 1. Having “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (Rom 1:22), and having “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25), men and women exchange their natural relations with one another (Rom 1:26-27).

Movement Three — Redemption

With regard to redemption, we must note that one of the most important aspects of our redemption is that it came by way of a Savior with a body. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14; cf. Phil. 2:5-11). Human redemption is accomplished by the Son of God incarnate—who remains incarnate eternally.

Paul indicates that this salvation includes not merely our souls but also our bodies. Romans 6:12 speaks of sin that reigns in our “mortal bodies”—which implies the hope of future bodily redemption. Romans 8:23 indicates part of our eschatological hope is the “redemption of our bodies.” Even now, in our life of sanctification we are commanded to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God in worship (Rom. 12:2). Further, Paul describes the redeemed body as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19) and clearly we must understand sanctification as having effects upon the body.

Sexual ethics in the New Testament, as in the Old Testament, regulate our expressions of gender and sexuality.Porneia, sexual immorality of any kind, is categorically condemned by Jesus and the apostles. Likewise, Paul clearly indicates to the church at Corinth that sexual sin—sins committed in the body (1 Cor. 6:18)—are what bring the church and the gospel into disrepute because they proclaim to a watching world that the gospel has been to no effect (1 Cor. 5-6).

Movement Four — New Creation

Finally, we reach the fourth and final act of the drama of redemption—new creation. In 1 Corinthians 15:42-57, Paul directs us not only to the resurrection of our own bodies in the new creation but to the fact that Christ’s bodily resurrection is the promise and power for that future hope. Our resurrection will be the experience of eternal glory in the body. This body will be a transformed, consummated continuation of our present embodied existence in the same way that Jesus’ body is the same body he had on earth, yet utterly glorified.

The new creation will not simply be a reset of the garden. It will be better than Eden. As Calvin noted, in the new creation we will know God not only as Creator but as Redeemer—and that redemption includes our bodies. We will reign with Christ in bodily form, as he also is the embodied and reigning cosmic Lord.

In terms of our sexuality, while gender will remain in the new creation, sexual activity will not. It is not that sex is nullified in the resurrection; rather, it is fulfilled. The eschatological marriage supper of the Lamb, to which marriage and sexuality point, will finally arrive. No longer will there be any need to fill the earth with image-bearers as was the case in Genesis 1. Instead, the earth will be filled with knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Biblical Theology Is Indispensable 

The sexuality crisis has demonstrated the failure of theological method on the part of many pastors. The “concordance reflex” simply cannot accomplish the type of rigorous theological thinking needed in pulpits today. Pastors and churches must learn the indispensability of biblical theology and must practice reading Scripture according to its own internal logic—the logic of a story that moves from creation to new creation. The hermeneutical task before us is great, but it is also indispensable for faithful evangelical engagement with the culture.

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

Transcript: The Briefing 09-16-14

The Briefing

 

September 16, 2014

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

 

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

1) Wave of transgender children’s books reminder sexual revolutionaries are targeting your children

From time to time an article seems to come almost out of the blue, and when it comes, it arrives with an incredible clarification – sometimes a shocking clarification. That was the case in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal where the article in question was written, not by a reporter nor by a normal opinion columnist, but by the newspaper’s reviewer of children’s books. In this case the reviewer is Megan Cox Gurdon, and what she writes about is a sudden proliferation of books for very young children about the transgender issue – the title of her article, “Heather Has Two Genders.” You may recall that back during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the society was awakened to the reality of at least one aspect of the gay revolution when a book arrived, intended for children, entitled Heather Has Two Mommies. Well now we’ve gone far beyond Heather Has Two Mommies, now Heather has two genders. Gurdon writes,

 

It is not a wholly new thing for a transgender person to appear in children’s books, but soon they will abound. Last February, Susan Kuklin’s “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out” brought a series of riveting first-person accounts of teenagers who are grappling—some successfully, some less so—with sexual dysphoria, or the profound dissatisfaction with the gender of one’s biological DNA.

 

But now she says, the audience is trending downward – from adolescence to very young children. She writes about Ami Polonsky’s new novel about a 12-year-old boy undergoing sexual transition, its entitled Gracefully Grayson, and is set to come out November. In January, Alyssa Brugman’s Alex as well features a conflicted male-female character – that is male-to-female character. Another book intended for even younger children is Michael Hall’s red/blue crayon brook – it going to come out in January of 2015.

 

Now the fact that Megan Cox Gurdon is telling us this has to do with the fact that publishers are trying to get to major periodicals like the Wall Street Journal because they want advance publicity for these new books – and of course, in this case, that’s exactly what they got. Summarizing the wave of new book she has now discovered, Gurdon writes,

 

So we are entering a miniboom in children’s books about a particular type of sexual identity, or mis-identity. It will surprise no one [she writes] that these books refrain from skepticism about the transgender condition or, in the memoirs, about the appropriateness of adolescents undergoing genital surgeries and powerful hormone treatments. These are books that seek to engage the sympathies of young readers on behalf of people who believe themselves imprisoned in alien bodies, and [as she writes], in doing so, to nudge the needle of the culture.

 

That’s a very interesting sentence. Gurdon writes that the purpose behind these books is to reach the hearts and minds of very young children, and adolescents, in order – hear her words again – to nudge the needle of the culture. And the needle of the culture is nudged, to use her expression; one might at a time, one heart at times. And that’s exactly the strategy behind this plethora of new books coming in a wave, beginning in the summer and extending well into next year. And furthermore, as Gurdon helps us to understand, this is a concerted effort. There has been an effort for the part of the last 25 years to try to get books like this into public school libraries, in the public libraries, and into the hands of children and teenagers. Stories have a powerful effect, just about everyone who considers the impact of the story in their own lives knows that there is a vulnerability and openness that comes by the form of narrative that often could not come in any other way.

 

The author of one of these new books, presenting a celebration of the transgender identity – that’s Jessica Herthel – her book is entitled I am Jazz. She writes,

 

The window of time in which children are truly open-minded is startlingly small.

 

In stating the issue just this way, Jessica Herthel is actually stating something that Christian parents should already understand. There is a vulnerability to the hearts of children, there is an openness to the power of the story and the kinds of stories that get read to our children, and are read by our children, do have an important outsized influence on the development of their hearts and their minds – and especially of their moral intuitions. Just consider the fact that as Christian parents we often find ourselves considering a story that we understand is affecting is emotionally in a way that is not consistent with our own biblical worldview. We see something on television, we observe something in the cinema, we read something in a book, or in any other format whereby a narrative comes to us, and we discover that our emotional response, our moral intuitions, are actually responding a way that is implied by the story but is inconsistent with our own worldview. We understand at that point that our responsibility is to bring our moral intuitions into accountability to biblical truth. But that is something that is accessible only to adults, in terms of an ability, and to later adolescence. The development of critical thinking, or abstract thinking, is not generally accessible to children – who find no way of distinguishing carefully between their own emotional response and their moral intuitions and the truths to which they understand themselves to be absolutely committed. They understand that something is wrong because they had been told by moral authority such as parents that it’s wrong ,they may even understand that the Scripture, very definitively, declares it to be wrong, and yet they find themselves confronting a story in which the opposite claim is made. And the opposite claim is made with the impact of a narrative that grabs them at the heart and creates a very confusing experience.

 

Let’s be brutally honest – that experience can be difficult enough for adults, much less for children and young teenagers. There’s a great deal to be concerned about in this article by Megan Cox Gurdon in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, there are also some crucial lines to be appreciated. One of those lines is this, she says:

 

Alas, for decades this has put them [speaking of parents who oppose this moral revolution] at odds with the gender-industrial complex, those busy feminist academics and journalists who insist that societal messages, not innate sex differences, make children behave in masculine or feminine ways.

 

That phrase she coins here, the gender industrial complex, is sheer brilliance, and we’re indebted to her for making the industrial complex scale of the gender revolution very clear to us. In another paragraph Megan Cox Gurdon makes another very interesting observation. She writes,

 

This brings us to an ironic possibility: The new crop of books for children featuring transgender people may have the effect of validating traditional sex differences.

 

After all, as she comments, the moral revolutionaries say we simply have to accept people in terms of the gender identity they claim. So if that means that a boy who claims to be feminine is to be respected for that, she argues that the same must be true for a boy who claims to be masculine. But that just points out something that Megan Cox Gurdon seems not to understand – the impossibility of this moral revolution, there simply is no end to it. That becomes abundantly clear when you understand the scope and scale of her article. The argument behind the moral revolutionaries on the transgender revolution, leads them into conflicting absolutes, as we noted in the past. You can’t have the total eradication of gender differences and then claim transgender identity. You can’t claim, as the feminist claim, that gender means everything and then argue that gender means nothing. But the main importance of this article that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal is to remind every single American parent, they’re coming for your children – this time, they’re coming with books.

2) American congregations report reveals rapid acceleration of demographic trends

Another major study in the future of American religion is coming out. This time it’s going to be released in December in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, but the study is already released to the media. The study was undertaken by Mark Chaves of the Department of Sociology at Duke University and Shawna L. Anderson of the NORC Center at the University of Chicago – its title, “Changing American Congregations: Findings from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study.”  If that doesn’t sound very interesting, it should – because the third wave of the study means that we now have one of most comprehensive analyses of American congregational life, reaching back into the 1990s, into the first decade of the 21st century, and now updated through about 2012. And what this study documents in the third wave of its analysis is a very significant pattern of change and one that actually demands our attention.

 

The researchers found that there are five primary changes that need our attention. The first is more ethnic diversity. America’s congregations are becoming even more internally diverse, and at the same time even as most congregations still have a predominant ethnic identity, the reality is that our own neighborhoods and our own communities are changing so fast that even those congregations that have not determined to become ethnically diverse, increasingly find themselves becoming so. For evangelical Christians looking at this, we should see this not only as a matter of measurement but as a mandate, because after all, we are those who understand that the gospel is for everyone, that our responsibility is to take the gospel to people of every nation, and we should aspire to see our congregations increasingly look like the kingdom which will one day include men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. To no one’s surprise, the big change in terms of ethnic composition in American congregations is that across the board most congregations are, if nothing else, less white. About 80% of congregations are less white than they had been in the past, even though the same 80% is still predominantly marked by membership and attendance from one ethnicity. But the indication of the trajectory here is very clear – that is going to change. The vast majority of America’s congregations will look increasingly less white, and some of them at rather fast speed.

 

The second trajectory is increased acceptance of gay and lesbian persons. Now at this point we simply need to make very clear that this study of congregations is not a sample of evangelical congregations, or even of Christian congregations, but of congregations in the major religious groups including Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. The authors write,

 

In just six years, the number of congregations whose leaders said that gays and lesbians could be full-fledged members increased from 37.4 percent to 48 percent. The number of congregations whose leaders said that no volunteer leadership positions were closed to gays and lesbians increased from 17.7 percent to 26.4percent.

 

Repeatedly we come back to make the observation on The Briefing that the moral revolution we are now experiencing is rather unprecedented in terms of its velocity. It’s happening faster than any kind of moral change on this scale ever, in terms of human history. That’s now something rather easy to document. This study is one way of documenting this, because here we’re talking about a vast moral change. Remember, we’re not talking about a slight shift, we’re talking about the reversal of the church’s historic teaching, and the fact that the number of congregations repudiating their own churches or traditions teaching on human sexuality has increased from 37.4% to 48% in just a matter six years, points to the unprecedented velocity and speed of this moral revolution. At this point, Chaves and Anderson actually answer a question you may have been asking: is this across-the-board? The answer is no. As a matter of fact, the authors point to the fact that among white conservative Protestant congregations, there’s actually been very little change. But as they write,

 

The increased acceptance of gays and lesbians among black Protestant churches, white liberal churches, and non-Christian congregations were large enough to offset these patterns and produce an aggregate change that is remarkably large for just a six-year period.

 

So putting the research altogether, it appears that the change on the issue of homosexuality among white evangelical congregations was relatively small, but the number of those congregations is very large. So looking at the rate of change in the total aggregate of congregations, it becomes clear that among black Protestants, white liberal Protestants, and non-Christian congregations, the acceptance of homosexuality experienced a massive shift – a shift large enough to overcome the fact that there was only a small shift among the enormous number of conservative Protestant congregations. That again tells us something, it tells us for one thing that conservative Evangelicals in America are going to find ourselves quite isolated on this issue. Fast-forward to another 5 to 6 years along this trajectory and evangelical Christians may be standing virtually alone in terms of defending a biblical vision of human sexuality and marriage.

 

The third great shift documented in this study is a shift towards more informal worship. And Chaves and Anderson are pretty specific about the kinds of hallmark issues they are looking for. For instance, fewer people attend services that include choirs or use a written program for worship. More are attending churches that include drums, raising hands in praise, visual projection equipment, and a time during the service when people greet one another, and other issues of contemporary worship are also included. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this research is that this change towards more informal worship is now affecting everyone, including the denominations and congregations that had been in the past most liturgical and most formal in worship. Everyone is apparently being affected by this trend towards more informal worship, and as the researchers indicate, there’s no sign at all that any kind of reversal of that trend is on the horizon.

 

The fourth change documents the decline in church membership and total attendance. But it also comes with an interesting twist. Even though most denominations and most congregations are either stable at best or declining, that’s more likely the norm, the average churchgoer or attender at a congregation is likely to be attending a congregation that is larger than it was just a decade ago. If that seems to be counterintuitive, I guess it is. What it tells us is that there has been a major shift towards increasing numbers of persons attending decreasing numbers of churches, or to put it the opposite way – there are fewer total worshipers, but they’re worshiping in larger congregations, congregations fewer in number but larger in size.

 

The fifth trend is one that should surprise no one who has been observing American religion for the past two decades or so – the decline of denominationalism is the fifth great fact documented by Chaves and Anderson in this very important research. They document that increasing numbers and percentages of congregations say that they are identified with no denomination or specific tradition. And of course, many of these are not using any denominational label; no denominational name appears in the congregation’s self-identification. But as the researchers also make abundantly clear, denominations are anything but dead. The vast majority of American congregations are still very denominational, and denominations continue to play a rather regular part in the lives and ministries of most American congregations. Still, there is a distancing of congregations from many denominations, and there’s also something that might be described as a wait-and-see attitude – waiting to see if the denomination is truly relevant for the church and its future.

 

There were certainly few huge surprises in this massive research project, but there was one big lesson. And that lesson is velocity or speed. What we’re looking at is the fact that the trends that have been developing over the last several decades are actually accelerating in the present. Just consider the fact that the period of study for many of these trends was six years, and both historically and sociologically speaking, six years is just the twinkling of an eye. That’s just how fast the world is changing around us, and as this study makes clear for many congregations, within the congregation as well.

3) Impact of Pres. Obama on the courts represents long-lasting importance of elections

And speaking of the future, what should we expect as we look to the future of the American courts? The answer to that question came rather definitively in a front-page story in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times. Jeremy Peters writes,

 

Democrats have reversed the partisan imbalance on the federal appeals courts that long favored conservatives, a little-noticed shift with far-reaching consequences for the law and President Obama’s legacy. [He continues,] For the first time in more than a decade, judges appointed by Democratic presidents considerably outnumber judges appointed by Republican presidents. The Democrats’ advantage has only grown since late last year when they stripped Republicans of their ability to filibuster the president’s nominees. Democratic appointees who hear cases full time now hold a majority of seats on nine of the 13 United States Courts of Appeals. When Mr. Obama took office, only one of those courts had more full-time judges nominated by a Democrat.

 

The main thrust of Peter’s article is that this is now a major part of President Obama’s legacy, and furthermore it is a likely way of perpetuating his agenda once he is long gone from office. That’s the way the federal courts work. Federal judges are appointed by the President, they are confirmed by the Senate, and once they take their seat, they have a lifetime term. That means that the President of the United States, through judicial appointments, can have far-reaching impact that can extend even more than a generation after the President leaves office. As this article in Sunday’s front-page edition of the New York Times makes abundantly clear, President Obama has decided to perpetuate his legacy through the courts. As we often observe, usually in the aftermath of an election, elections have consequences and when it comes to the election of the President of the United States, and now we are reminded of the Senate when it comes to which party holds the majority in the Senate, the reality is that American voters think they’re voting for the President the United States or their voting for one of their two senators, when in reality, directly and indirectly, they’re actually voting for the future of America’s courts. Given what so many have observed as the judicial usurpation of politics, the courts have taken on the answering of more and more political and policy questions. And that just means that this issue is more dramatically important than many voters can even concede or understand. But the writers and editors of the New York Times understand, and the Obama White House understands, and it’s about time anyone who cares about the future of this culture also understands the profound impact of the courts.

 

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 Little Rock, Arkansas. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 09-16-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Wave of transgender children’s books reminder sexual revolutionaries are targeting your children

Heather Has Two Genders, Wall Street Journal (Megan Cox Gurdon)

2) American congregations report reveals rapid acceleration of demographic trends

Changing American Congregations: Findings from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study, National Congregations Study (Mark Chaves and Shawna L. Anderson)

US churches feel beat of change: More diversity, more drums, Religion News Service (Cathy Lynn Grossman)

3) Impact of Pres. Obama on the courts represents long-lasting importance of elections

Building Legacy, Obama Reshapes Appellate Bench, New York Times (Jeremy W. Peters)

Transcript: The Briefing 09-15-14

The Briefing

 

September 15, 2014

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

 

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

1) Domestic abuse and health issues of NFL expose tendency towards a gladiatorial morality

Football may be the American sport, but it is also a very troubled American enterprise. Just over the last several days several crises have rocked the world of the National Football League. In the first place, controversy arose over Baltimore Ravens running back, Ray Rice. Cut by the team and placed on indefinite suspension by the National Football League, but only after a video had been released showing Rice assaulting his then fiancée, Janay Palmer back in February of this year in a casino in Atlantic City. Soon after that assault became known, the NFL Commissioner placed Rice on a two-game suspension – leading almost immediately to claims the NFL wasn’t taking domestic violence seriously. But the video that was released just in recent days has gone viral, and as David Kocieniewski of the New York Times reports,

 

Rice punched his fiancée, Janay Palmer, with such force that she was knocked unconscious after her head appeared to hit a railing, and he then calmly dragged her body out of the elevator. Yet prosecutors allowed him to enter a pretrial intervention program that will spare him jail time, probation and even a criminal record if he does not commit another offense. It was an outcome that made many suspect that Rice, a wealthy athlete and a sports legend in New Jersey, was given preferential treatment.

 

The outrage against Roger Goodell, the NFL Commissioner, has been hot and it is building – and appears to be building for very good reason. Goodell has steadfastly insisted that neither he, nor the NFL, had access to the incriminating video – and yet they did have access to a video showing the results of his assault upon Palmer. And a two-game suspension? It turns out that that is less significant than what would’ve been meted out if Rice had merely admitted to using the drug Adderall.

 

The controversy now shaking the National Football League has made the cover story of Sports Illustrated in an article by Phil Taylor. Taylor, a veteran journalist covering the National Football League writes about the video saying that it was so shocking, so brutal, and so repulsive, that the NFL and the Ravens had to take action. As he writes, within hours of the clip’s release, Baltimore had terminated Rice’s contract and Goodell had suspended from the league indefinitely. He continued,

 

The suddenly and appropriately harsh justice underscored after Rice’s brutality, the other major problem with this saga: the NFL’s tendency to face problems head-on only after they’ve become threats to its carefully polished public relations machine.

 

As he goes on to report, neither the Ravens, nor the NFL, had felt such steps were necessary back in February, even after Rice had been arrested for aggravated assault charges, those charges were later dropped, and after video has surfaced of him dragging Janay Palmer out of the casino elevator. He then writes,

 

In fact, over the summer the team engaged in a campaign to rehabilitate Rice’s image.

 

As journalist David Von Drehle writes at Time magazine,

 

Only some combination of arrogance and willful ignorance could explain commissioner Roger Goodell’s decision in July to impose a mere two-game suspension on running back Ray Rice, who knocked his fiancée Janay Palmer unconscious in February at a New Jersey casino. When the wrist slap drew harsh criticism, Goodell pledged to take domestic violence more seriously in the future–again [say Von Drehle], not exactly a model of accountability but seemingly enough to satisfy the fans of the Baltimore Ravens who cheered Rice at training camp.

 

 

But, as he says, that was before the surveillance video became public. After the video hit the public consciousness, everything was changed. From a Christian worldview perspective, this tells us a couple of very important things. First of all, it tells us that we are highly visual in making our moral assessments, that’s sometimes a strength and sometimes a weakness, because even as our eyes sometimes tells us the truth, our eyes can also lie to us. This is one of the reasons why we have to be so careful about how we adjudicate and judge what we appear to see. This video appears to be real, and not only does it appear to be real – no one, who is in a position to say otherwise, is saying that it is anything other than what it straightforwardly appears to be – a horrifying assault by a man upon a woman. Once the vision is in our eyes, we can’t escape it, we can no longer erase it, and it becomes indelibly imprinted in our moral consciousness. That’s part of what it means to be made in God’s image as moral creature – there are certain things that as human beings we simply cannot not know, no one can look at that video and not know that what it depicts is horrifyingly wrong, immoral, sinful, evil.

 

But even as NFL was reeling from that controversy, just even in more recent days, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was arrested on felony charges of child endangerment after he admitted giving his four-year-old son what he called a ‘whooping’ with a stick, in this case something like a switch. Photographic evidence, that was obtained by law enforcement authorities and later leaked to at least someone in the media, demonstrate that this was a very dangerous attack upon a very small child. What we’re looking at here is something that goes far beyond the biblical notion of the discipline of a child. What we’re looking at here is not an effort to train up a child by the use of mere hurt, but this extended to what is now unquestionably harm. And what we’re looking at here is a man, who is presented to us as a well-intended father, who nonetheless lost his temper, or at least used horrifyingly bad judgment, in causing deep cuts in his son’s legs and back side by the use of this switch.

 

Christians informed by Scripture understand that corporal punishment, the use of the rod, is indeed not only allowed by Scripture, but mandated by Scripture – in the sense that Scripture says that is the parents responsibility to use the rod of correction. The Bible certainly supports a parent disciplining a child by the use of a normal kind of spanking, something that is intended to cause temporary pain, but never to cause any degree of real harm. That’s why when you look at something like the charges now made against Adrian Peterson, you come to understand that this very easily plays into those who will try to argue that all corporal punishment is inherently abusive – this hardly helps. But what we’re also looking at is further evidence of the fact that the NFL has a huge problem, a huge problem in terms of men – and not just these two men – who appear to wantonly to use violence in ways that are injurious even to their loved ones, out of control.

 

Finally, the NFL has yet another problem that also emerged just in recent days – at least in terms of documentation. As Maryclaire Dale reported for the Associated Press on this past Saturday,

 

The NFL estimates that nearly three in 10 former players will develop debilitating brain conditions, and that they will be stricken earlier and at least twice as often as the general population.

 

That disclosure came out this past Friday – it was reported in the national media on Saturday. The headline in Saturday’s front page article in the New York Times put the issue bluntly, “NFL agrees, Brain Trauma in One in Three Players.” As Ken Belson reports,

 

The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.

 

Let’s try to put all this together in something that makes sense according to the Christian worldview. Early in the experience of Christians, Christians and the Christian church had to face the challenge of the morality of certain kinds of sport – in particular, the sport, or what was at least in a very dangerous age called a sport, the gladiatorial games in Rome. But of course those went far beyond anything that can be legitimately or morally called sport. And yet in the entertainment context of the ancient Roman Empire, the gladiatorial games, which most often led to either the maiming or the actual execution of one of the combatants, this was actually considered a central sport – a celebrated sport; part of what made Rome Rome – and the bloodthirstiness and the violence of the gladiatorial games offended Christians who understood that these two elements, the violence and of course the barbarity – not to mention the murderous outcome of the games – were a direct violation of what it meant for every single human being to me made an image of God. And that means, of course, every single human being, being an embodied person, has a body that is itself to be respected as a part of the goodness of God’s creation and a part of the identity of the human being made in God’s image. So the early Christians came to a nearly unanimous, and very clear and comprehensive, rejection of the gladiatorial games and the gladiator culture.

 

You have to wonder if we should keep this in mind in terms of the current debate over the NFL. You add together the situation regarding these two assaults, especially the assault by Ray Rice upon his former fiancée – now his wife; you add to that the evidence that is now coming in that the NFL is actually agreeing to – that is the evidence that one out of three, let’s think about that again – one out of three of its veteran players will be expected to experience significant cognitive difficulties in the future; experiencing those difficulties at a rate at least twice that of the general population, and with very early onset. There is no way that this can be squared and made consistent with the biblical and Christian worldview. This does not mean that football simply has to be eradicated, it does mean that something significant has to take place for this sport to be reformed; because seen in light of these recent headlines, and now with behaviors and with injuries admitted by the NFL itself, it’s very clear that the tending direction of the NFL at present is not away from the morality of those gladiatorial games in ancient Rome, but toward that very morality, posing once again the direct conflict between that morality and the morality held by Christians revealed in holy Scripture. That biblical worldview certainly understands that sports and athletic endeavors can be a very important part of human existence, indeed even to the glory of God. But the defining issue is this, the kind of sporting event or athletic event that brings glory to God and is consistent with the worldview is one that enhances and magnifies human dignity, not that which compromises and subvert it. That’s a very important issue for every Christian to consider when you look at the current controversies over the NFL.

2) Opposition to need to justify abortion represents further radicalization of abortion movement

And on the topic of human dignity, an article that appeared in Saturday’s edition of the New York Times is simply and essentially shocking. The article appeared on the op-ed page of the Saturday edition and the author is Merritt Tierce, identified as the author of the novel Love Me Back. The title of her article is, “This Is What An Abortion Looks Like.” She writes about Wendy Davis, the Texas State Senator now running as the Democratic candidate for the governor of Texas. In a recent book released even during the campaign, Wendy Davis has written about the fact that she has experienced two abortions. The abortions that she details in her book were, Wendy Davis argues, justified by medical and other considerations. But the main point of Tierce’s column had very little to do with the actual explanations offered by Wendy Davis and more by the fact that she believes that the explanations should not have been even necessary, and that Wendy Davis, in offering what she argued would be explanations for her abortions, actually compromises what she claims as a woman’s right to choose. She writes,

 

By repeating only the gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, terrifying abortion stories, we protect a lie: that abortion isn’t normal. We have learned to think of abortion with shame and fear. We have accepted the damaging idea that a person who wants an abortion must grovel before the consciences of others.

 

From time to time we come across an article that is simply almost breathtakingly shocking in terms of its candor and, as is so often the case, that article is on the issue of abortion. And this is still one of the most shocking yet to come. Merritt Tierce writes about the fact that she has had multiple abortions. She says,

 

I have been pregnant five times. I had a son, then a daughter, and my third pregnancy ended in abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic, at a gestation of about six weeks.

 

She continues writing,

 

I had an abortion because we were poor and I was depressed and I didn’t know who the father was. I had been having an affair. My kids were 2 and 3, and the debilitating morning sickness, which I experienced early in each of my pregnancies, made it difficult to work or care for two toddlers. I got pregnant again [she writes] soon after, but miscarried. A few years later I had another abortion because the man I was seeing was emotionally abusive. [She continued writing,] I had no control in that relationship, so I sabotaged my birth control to get some back. The whole situation was a complete abscess. In spite of my awareness of our miserable present and inevitably doomed future, I didn’t really want to have an abortion. I wanted the man to love me or at least be forced to publicly acknowledge our relationship existed. But he didn’t want to have a baby with me, and I knew that having that baby would have been a terrible thing for my children. And for me.

 

Well to state the obvious, whether Merritt Tierce recognizes it or not, what she has described in those excessive paragraphs is a complete moral breakdown – a moral breakdown from beginning to end. Of the fact that she was having an affair with someone to whom she was not married, she then had the abortion, and then she had another abortion after she set up a pregnancy in order to try to manipulate a romantic situation with a man she says was abusive. She then writes, and I quote,

 

This is how it really is, abortion: You do things you regret or don’t understand and then you make other choices because life keeps going forward. Or you do something out of love and then, through biology or accident, it goes inexplicably wrong, and you do what you can to cope. Or you do whatever you do, however you do it, for whatever reason, because that’s your experience.

 

Now we have moved from a complete moral breakdown to a complete breakdown in meaning and truth. In effect, Merritt Tierce is arguing for complete moral nihilism. She’s arguing that there is no real right or wrong. That in her words, you simply

 

Do whatever you do, however you do it, for whatever reason, because that’s your experience

 

What you hear there is the complete collapse of a civilization of moral meaning. But she goes on and then writes this,

 

We have to stop categorizing abortions as justified or unjustified. The best thing you can do if you support reproductive rights is to force people to realize that abortion is common, and the most common abortion is a five-to-15-minute procedure elected early in the first trimester by someone who doesn’t want to be pregnant or have a child. It’s our job to say it’s O.K. if that’s the end of the story. It’s O.K. if it’s boring or not traumatic or if you don’t even know what it was.

 

So now the New York Times runs this article, and that’s a fact is perhaps more morally significant than the article itself. This is published in the nation’s most influential daily newspaper, and this represents a new radicalization of the abortion argument – pushing the argument beyond those who have been arguing for the justification of abortions, now arguing that there need be no justification of abortion. Going back to her moral code, it’s just;

 

Do whatever you do, however you do it, for whatever reason, because that’s your experience

 

Perhaps we need to step back just a bit and recognize that the scariest aspect of this article is not just that it was written, nor also that it found its way into publication in the New York Times but that those two facts put together mean that a significant number of Americans, indeed a frightening percentage of Americans, evidently agree with this very argument and its logic. And even as that scares us, and it must, it also reveals to us just what our challenge now really is – the challenge of defending human dignity in a radically post-Christian and secularizing age. An age in which the moral code, written about by Merritt Tierce, is one that perhaps she just more honestly and straightforwardly presents that many others who live by the same code. Let me repeat her arguments again, as she says, you

 

Do whatever you do, however you do it, for whatever reason, because that’s your experience

 

That’s not just the language of the culture of death, that’s a language of the death of all moral meaning,

3) Moral segmentation of US population evident in shopping habits

Finally, given the importance of worldview, Christians really shouldn’t be surprised by the number of research reports and the increasing amount of data pointing to the fact that Americans are now rather morally segregated. We are clustering in terms of moral communities, where we not only worship alongside those who share our moral worldview, but we also tend to live in neighborhoods that share overwhelmingly that same moral understanding. And in terms of state-by-state analysis, we even live in states that are more predominantly according to our own moral worldview. Now it turns out, we also shop according to our worldview – as the market segmentation also reveals a moral segmentation. The Public Religion Research Institute in recent days came out with a study indicating a significant moral divide just on the question of same-sex marriage between those who tend to shop at Target and those who tend to shop at Walmart. According to the research indicated last week, 62% of those who tend to shop at Target favor same-sex marriage; only 40% of those who tend to shop at Walmart did the same.

 

A host of other issues is also tracked in terms of the segmentation between Target shoppers and Walmart shoppers. Walmart shoppers tend, overwhelmingly over target shoppers, to identify as conservative; 44% for Walmart only 29% for Target. Liberals outnumber conservatives at Target; 30% said they were liberal and only 16% of those shopping at Walmart identify themselves as liberal. In terms of religion, 23% of Target shoppers indicated that there religiously unaffiliated, only 14% of Walmart shoppers said the same. So what does all this tell us? Well it isn’t trying to tell us that we should shop at one of these stores rather than the other, nor is that the point to the Public Religion Research Institute, rather they are looking at correlations and patterns – patterns that reveals far more than preference for one store over another. They also reveal the importance of worldview, and the fact that worldview implications turn out, not only in terms of survey answers on questions of moral or political nature, but also in terms of decisions in the marketplace – even in the distinction between shoppers who tend to be at Target and those who tend to be at Walmart. As for worldview, it more than tends at all times to be important.

 

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 Little Rock, Arkansas. Tomorrow night I’ll be speaking at the 6:30pm session of the Truth Revealed conference at the Central Baptist Church in Conway, Arkansas. Perhaps I’ll have the chance to see you there. In any event, I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing

 

The Briefing 09-15-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Domestic abuse and health issues of NFL expose tendency towards a gladiatorial morality

Ray Rice Case Draws Attention to a Crime Often Obscured, New York Times (David Kocieniewski)

The Ray Rice video and what it exposes about the NFL, Sports Illustrated (Phil Taylor)

Brutal Ray Rice Video Exposes Failures of a National Obsession, TIME (David Von Drehle)

Adrian Peterson released on bond in child-abuse case, but NFL’s problems continue, Washington Post (Cindy Boren)

NFL: 3 in 10 Ex-Players Face Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Associated Press (MaryClaire Dale)

Brain Trauma to Affect One in Three Players, N.F.L. Agrees, New York Times (Ken Belson)

2) Opposition to need to justify abortion represents further radicalization of abortion movement

This Is What an Abortion Looks Like, New York Times (Merritt Tierce)

3) Moral segmentation of US population evident in shopping habits

Target’s Support for Same-sex Marriage Mirrors Customers’ Views, Public Religion Research Institute (Daniel Cox)

Transcript: The Briefing 09-12-14

The Briefing

 

September 12, 2014

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

 

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

1) Ironically, unbelivers Harris and Maher teach importance of belief 

We are currently living in a very strange age, and this age is often also an ironic age. That was made very clear in the fact that sometimes we now recognize it takes an unbeliever to make a very important point about the centrality of belief. That came to light just in recent days in response to President Obama’s address to the nation that took place on Wednesday night. President Obama, as we discussed yesterday on The Briefing, studiously tried to make the point that the Islamic State in the Levant, known as ISIL to the President, is actually not Islamic at all. Speaking just a few weeks ago after the beheading of journalist James Foley by a British jihadist associated with ISIL, the Islamic State, President Obama said these words,

 

ISIL speaks for no religion… and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.

 

Speaking Wednesday night to the nation, President Obama said,

 

Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim…. ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple.

 

On yesterday’s edition of The Briefing I made the point that the President’s evasion on the question of Islam is not only simply wrong, profoundly wrong, but downright dishonest and dangerously dishonest. Any honest look at ISIL, or ISIS as it is known also, reveals that the Islamic State is inherently Islamic – to press further and to claim that all Muslims are part of the Jihad represented by the Islamic State would be dishonest as well. But to step back and suggest that the Islamic State somehow is not Islamic, is just a profound confusion that is not only deliberate, but very dangerous – because it’s always dangerous to ignore the obvious, and in this case the obvious is the importance of Islam, indeed the centrality of Islam, to the worldview of the Islamic State. The Quran itself divides the entire world into two opposed realms.  The first is the world of Islam – that is the world brought into submission to the Quran under sharia law. The second realm is simply defined as the world of war – that’s the world of conflict, conflict that every Muslim, according to the Quran, has an obligation to join and bring about, in which there is a struggle to bring those remaining portions of the world under submission to the Quran. Now if that is at the very heart of Islam, and undeniably it is, it’s simply impossible to claim that something like the Islamic State, that roots itself in this very logic revealed in the Quran, is anything less than Islamic.

 

But as I said, today’s concern is in irony embedded in this situation. Sam Harris is well-known, not only an author, but as one of the so-called Four Horsemen of the new atheism. A militant atheist, he has written a great deal about the dangers of religious faith. And he has written a great deal in defense of a modern version of very radical atheism. But in a statement published on his own website in the aftermath of President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, Sam Harris wrote this,

 

As an atheist, I cannot help wondering when this scrim of pretense and delusion will be finally burned away—either by the clear light of reason or by a surfeit of horror meted out to innocents by the parties of God. Which will come first, flying cars and vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that beliefs guide behavior and that certain religious ideas—jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy—reliably lead to oppression and murder?

 

Sam Harris went on to write,

 

It may be true that no faith teaches people to massacre innocents exactly—but innocence, as the President surely knows, is in the eye of the beholder. Are apostates “innocent”? Blasphemers? Polytheists? Islam has the answer, and the answer is “no.”

 

Later in his essay he writes these words, again I quote,

 

But a belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels, and a commitment to violent jihad are not fringe phenomena in the Muslim world. These preoccupations are supported by the Koran and numerous hadith. That is why the popular Saudi cleric Mohammad Al-Areefi sounds [more] like the ISIS army chaplain. The man has 9.5 million followers on Twitter (twice as many as Pope Francis has). If you can find an important distinction between the faith he preaches and that which motivates the savagery of ISIS, [Sam Harris writes] you should probably consult a neurologist.

 

But Sam Harris isn’t even close to being finished, as he continues, he writes – again I quote,

 

Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture. A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran. The reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity. It is not an accident [he says] that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. Each of these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scripture.

 

And by Scripture in this case, Mr. Harris clearly means the Quran.

 

A further irony is found in the fact that a man I have never heretofore cited on The Briefing, Bill Maher, in a conversation with Charlie Rose, on Rose’s program on Bloomberg television earlier this week, got into an exchange over the very same question. Charlie Rose insisted, over and over again, that the Islamic State is not Islamic and is not representative of Islam. But Bill Maher, also a skeptic, an unbeliever, would have nothing of it. The televised exchange between these two men was very revealing. At one point in their conversation Bill Maher interjected,

 

There are illiberal beliefs that are held by vast numbers of Muslim people…

 

Charlie Rose, the host of the program, interrupted in to say

 

A vast number of Christians too.

 

Immediately speaking back to Charlie Rose, Bill Maher, a very militant unbeliever and of course no friend of Christianity as a belief system, simply responded:

 

No, that’s not true. Not true. Vast numbers of Christians do not believe that if you leave the Christian religion you should be killed for it.

 

Later he said,

 

Vast numbers of Christians do not believe if you draw a picture of Jesus Christ you should get killed for it.

 

Maher cited polling indicated that vast millions of people in the Muslim world agreed with these terrorist tactics, and then he said quote:

 

So to claim that this religion is like other religions is just naive and plain wrong. It is not like other religious. The New York Times [he said] pointed out in an op-ed a couple weeks ago that in Saudi Arabia just since August 4th, they think it was, they have beheaded 19 people. Most for non-violent crimes including homosexuality.

 

Charlie Rose then turned to ask Bill Maher if he would return to the program to debate a moderate Muslim. Bill Maher responded immediately,

 

Find one, yes. Find one.

 

It may well be that Charlie Rose can find someone who would qualify as something of a moderate Muslim here in the West, especially in United States, but he would be very hard-pressed, and that’s an understatement, to find someone who would fit that category in the parts of the world dominated by Muslim population. Now it’s very important to recognize that neither Bill Maher nor Sam Harris is any friend whatsoever to Christianity – especially to evangelical Christianity. Both of these men consider orthodox biblical Christianity to be, in its own way, dangerous – but dangerous in a very different way than the danger represented by the Islamic State. And at least both men have the intellectual honesty to demonstrate quite clearly, indeed even to argue in public, that it is simply wrong, dishonest, and profoundly unhelpful, to try to suggest that either, on the one hand Islam is not tending toward this kind of violence, and secondly to argue that if indeed Islam is tending in this direction, it must be doing so because it simply in the company of other religions with similar teachings, with similar effects. Bill Maher and Sam Harris rejected that argument, indeed both of those arguments, vociferously and very comprehensively.

 

But we need to note something else as well, in this case both of these avowed unbelievers, indeed very publicly assertive unbelievers, they both see religion itself as the problem. But they are at least very honest to suggest that worldview really matters, they note only suggest it, they insist upon it. They understand that theology does matter. It is those who are somewhere in the muddled middle who try to believe, in this secularized age, that theology is either simply a relic of the past or even if it intrudes in the present, it must be irrelevant. But Bill Maher and Sam Harris understand what every orthodox Christian must understand, and that is that belief matters – it always matters. The comprehensive worldview that guides an individual’s thinking always matters, and as the Scripture makes abundantly clear, that worldview, for every single individual, in its own way is inherently inescapably, irreducibly, theological. Sam Harris went on to make the point about his opposition to all revealed religion. He wrote in the same essay and I quote,

 

The idea that any book was inspired by the creator of the universe is poison—intellectually, ethically, and politically. And nowhere is this poison currently doing more harm than in Muslim communities, East and West. Despite all the obvious barbarism in the Old Testament, and the dangerous eschatology of the New [Testament], it is relatively easy for Jews and Christians to divorce religion from politics and secular ethics. A single line in Matthew—“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”—largely accounts for why the West isn’t still hostage to theocracy [he writes]. The Koran contains a few lines that could be equally potent—for instance, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256)—but these sparks of tolerance are easily snuffed out. Transforming Islam into a truly benign faith will require a miracle of re-interpretation.

 

So, to use his own words, Sam Harris sees all theistic belief as dangerous – he sees any claim of a revealed the book, whether it be the Koran or the Bible or anything else, well, in his words, such a claim is simply poisonous. But at the same time he is at least making to profound points. The first we have already seen, that is that theology matters. It always matters, even when the secular press may try to argue that it can’t matter – it does matter. And secondly, it matters what theology one holds. Sam Harris and Bill Maher may reject all religion whatsoever, but they’re at least honest enough to know that religions are not the same thing – they don’t believe the same thing, they do not teach the same thing, nor do their believers in adherence perform and practice the same things.

2) Tech executive parents understand vulnerability of children to technology

As I said, we live in a very ironic age – and in this case, a new irony comes to light. Sometimes it takes an unbeliever to make a profoundly important point about the centrality of belief. Earlier this week, millions upon millions of people appeared to be waiting – transfixed – for the latest announcement from technology giant, Apple. Even as people in the past waited for a word from the Lord, or word from the king, millions of people these days appear to be waiting for nothing more than a word from Apple. Apple chairman Tim Cook revealed a line of new products, including two new smartphones – the iPhones – and also a promised Apple watch. But all that is eclipsed by an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, the article really had nothing to do with the announcement made by Apple this week, but it has a great deal to do with the late Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic former leader.

 

The headline in the New York Times is a shocker, “Steve Jobs Was A Low-Tech Parent.” Nick Bilton, writing in the disruptions columns of the paper writes, and I quote,

 

When Steve Jobs was running Apple, he was known to call journalists to either pat them on the back for a recent article or, more often than not, explain how they got it wrong. I was on the receiving end of a few of those calls [he writes]. But nothing shocked me more than something Mr. Jobs said to me in late 2010 after he had finished chewing me out for something I had written about an iPad shortcoming. “So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

 

Bilton then writes,

 

I’m sure I responded with a gasp and dumbfounded silence. I had imagined the Jobs’s household was like a nerd’s paradise: that the walls were giant touch screens, the dining table was made from tiles of iPads and that iPods were handed out to guests like chocolates on a pillow. Nope, Mr. Jobs told me, not even close.

 

Bilton then writes,

 

Since then, I’ve met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things: they strictly limit their children’s screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights, and allocating ascetic time limits on weekends.

 

Nick Bilton says he was dumbfounded by the statement from Steve Jobs, and perplexed by the paradox of all these technology chief executives who do not allow their children and teenagers to have much access to the technologies they develop and then sell. Back to his article, he writes

 

Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now chief executive of 3D Robotics, a drone maker, has instituted time limits and parental controls on every device in his home. “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules,” he said of his five children, [aged] 6 to 17. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

 

Remember, that was said by Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine, now chief executive of yet another technology firm. Nick Bilton then writes and I quote,

 

The dangers he is referring to include exposure to harmful content like pornography, bullying from other kids, and perhaps worse of all, becoming addicted to their devices, [he then adds the words] just like their parents.

 

 

Later in the article Nick Bilton tells us that most of these technology executives believe that the age of their children and teenagers is of utmost importance.

 

Children under 10 seem to be most susceptible to becoming addicted, so these parents draw the line at not allowing any gadgets during the week. On weekends, there are limits of 30 minutes to two hours on iPad and smartphone use. And 10- to 14-year-olds are allowed to use computers on school nights, but only for homework.

 

These technology executives told Bilton they have very clear restrictions for both children and teenagers on social networks. Then Bilton writes,

 

There is one rule that is universal among the tech parents I polled. “This is rule No. 1: There are no screens in the bedroom. Period. Ever,”

 

Bilton ends his article by referring to a conversation he had with Walter Isaacson, the major biographers of Steve Jobs. Isaacson told Bilton

 

“Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things,” he said. “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”

 

In his article Nick Bilton asked a very interesting question, what do these technology executives know that other parents don’t know? Well, the obvious answer to that question appears to be this: technology never comes without a cost, technology, as the late French theologian Jacques Ellul said, always comes with a price. And that price is always exacted, and that price is particularly high among the vulnerable, and these tech parents, executives all, seen be very concerned about the fact that when it comes to their children and teenagers, they are the most vulnerable – and given that vulnerability, parents have to take kinds of defensive action such as are revealed in this article. But one of the most important insights from this column by Nick Bilton is that these tech executives, as parents, not only know something that other parents seem not to know, more importantly they are also doing something that other parents apparently aren’t doing – they are setting clear limits, they are not allowing the children to set their own parameters in terms of the use of these technologies, and they are using a word that is all too foreign to many parents but all too necessary to children and teenagers. That’s that short two letter word – no. These tech executives, as parents, are revealing to the world by this article that they are accustomed to say no to their own children about the devices they themselves have invented and developed and are now marketing to the world. So here’s a wake-up call for all parents – if technology executives know something that you don’t know, you need to know it fast, and this article is a quick way to get there. But it’s not only about knowing something, that is the dangers of these technologies and the addictive nature of these technologies in the lives, especially of the young, but also that parents have to be ready to do something. So add this irony to the ironies of the day – Steve Jobs may have been a high-tech executive, but he was a low-tech parent.

3) Bro. Richard Oldham, local church pastor and hero of the faith, passes on

Finally, hundreds of people in Bowling Green, Kentucky drawn from elsewhere in the nation as well, gather for the funeral of a man known there as simply, Brother Richard. This was Pastor Richard Oldham, who served for 57 years as pastor of the Glendale Baptist Church in that Kentucky city. I had the great honor of knowing Brother Richard, preaching often in his church, and seeing his influence. Today’s edition of the Bowling Green Daily News includes a news article about his funeral. Laurel Wilson writes,

 

In his 57 years as pastor of Glendale Baptist Church, Bro. Richard Oldham baptized over 6,000 people and today, hundreds of people whose lives he touched packed the church for his funeral.

 

It was a three hour-long service. One of the things you need to know by Brother Richard Oldham is that he not only baptized 6000 people in a little neighborhood church, but he was also father in the ministry to over 100 young men who became pastors and preachers out of his ministry. Richard Oldham never married, in one sense it was as if he was married to his ministry. But though unmarried, through his faithful evangelism, he had many sons and daughters in the faith and over 100 sons in the ministry – several of them spoke of the service yesterday. There are still heroes in this world, and Richard Oldham was one of them. He was a stalwart defender of the faith and a very compassionate and gentle shepherd. Most of the listeners to The Briefing probably have never heard of Richard Oldham, but you have now – and that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing at the end of the week to be reminded there are still heroes and heroines in the faith – Richard Oldham was one of them, and the world desperately needs more.

 

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 Atlanta, Georgia and I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 09-12-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Ironically, unbelivers Harris and Maher teach importance of belief 

Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, SamHarris.org (Sam Harris)

Maher vs. Charlie Rose: To Claim Islam Is Like Other Religions Is Naive And Plain Wrong, Real Clear Politics

2) Tech executive parents understand vulnerability of children to technology

Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent, New York Times (Nick Bilton)

3) Bro. Richard Oldham, local church pastor and hero of the faith, passes on

Hundreds flock to Glendale Baptist Church for longtime pastor’s funeral, Bowling Green Daily News (Laurel Wilson)

Transcript: The Briefing 09-11-14

The Briefing

 

September 11, 2014

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

 

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

1) President Obama neglects reality of worldview in conflict with ISIL, international terrorism

Last night speaking from the White House, President Barack Obama addressed the nation about the challenge posed by the terrorist organization known as the Islamic State. Speaking to the American people, knowing that he had an international audience, President Obama said,

 

I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.

 

In the next paragraph, at the very beginning of the President’s address, he stated these words:

 

As commander in chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people. Over the last several years, we have consistently taken the fight to terrorists who threaten our country. We took out Osama bin Laden and much of al-Qaida’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’ve targeted al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen and recently eliminated the top commander of its affiliate in Somalia. We’ve done so while bringing more than 140,000 American troops home from Iraq and drawing down our forces in Afghanistan, where our combat mission will end later this year. Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.

 

The President addressed a nation that is increasingly anxious over the threat posed by the Islamic State, and in his comments the President was trying to do his very best to state what was now his strategy – just days after admitting to the American people that he didn’t have a strategy. The President sought to outline his strategy in his address last night. In the first place, the President said, the objective of the strategy is clear,

 

We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

 

The strategy laid out by President Obama has four major components. First, he said, the United States will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against ISIL. He also said that the United States will increase our support to forces fighting those terrorists on the ground. Third, he said, the United States will draw on, what he described as “our substantial counterterrorism capabilities” in order to prevent future ISIL attacks. Lastly he said,

 

We will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who’ve been displaced by this terrorist organization.

 

This, the President says, is our strategy. The response to the president’s address was almost immediate – interestingly, much of the major opposition to the approach laid out by the president is likely to come from his own party.

 

President Obama ran in 2008 on a very clear agenda of removing American troops from Afghanistan and, even before that, from Iraq. And almost everyone now recognizes that the absence of American troops in Iraq was at least one major contributing factor, if not the major contributing factor, to the rise of the influence and domination of ISIL throughout much of Iraq. Furthermore, just months ago President Obama drew what he called a red line in Syria, and yet when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, himself an autocrat acting with malevolence against his own people – including use of chemical weapons, crossed that red line, President Obama did not respond. Those two factors are surely major components behind the rise of the group known as the Islamic State in the Levant or the Islamic state in Syria – known elsewhere in the world simply as the Islamic State, a state which is now declared a caliphate – that is an Islamic rule.

 

In the aftermath, and the response to the President’s address, much of the nation’s attention was drawn to CNN, where there ensued a debate between former White House press spokesman Jay Carney and Senator John McCain of Arizona, President Obama’s opponent in the 2008 presidential election. That heated exchange not only revealed the distance between the Obama White House and Senator John McCain, it also laid bare the differences now dividing much of the American people over the question, not only over Iraq, not only of the Islamic state, but of the posture of the United States in the world – especially when facing an enemy such as the Islamic State.

 

But one of the most interesting developments in the President’s speech last night was his clarification of something that we had suspected for some time. In recent days President Obama has been referring to the group, the Islamic State, by using the acronym ISIL – that is the Islamic State in the Levant. But by using that acronym, those initials, many of us have suspected the President Obama was doing his very best to avoid using the word Islamic, and last night the President effectively confirmed that suspicion. In one of the early paragraphs in his speech the President said this, and I quote:

 

Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state. It was formerly al-Qaida’s affiliate in Iraq and has taken advantage of sectarian strife and Syria’s civil war to gain territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syrian border. [The President went on to say,] It is recognized by no government nor by the people it subjugates. ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.

 

 

Working backward to that paragraph, a couple of things are very important. In the first place, the President drew a distinction between a terrorist organization and a state; but even the history of the 20th century demonstrates that there need be no distinction between the two. There have been states, that is to say governments recognized by the international community, who have been without doubt terrorist organizations. The President also, in avoiding the use of the word Islamic and in this case arguing that ISIL is certainly not Islamic, was making an argument that is not only unhelpful, it is fundamentally untruthful. While it is true to say that not all Muslims are represented by the Islamic State and while it is certainly true to say that Islam is not entirely represented by this particular organization, there is no question that the driving ambition of the Islamic State is the continuation of the expansion of Islam. When the President said, and I quote again,

 

No religion condones the killing of innocents […]

 

That is true, only in part. But in the part that it is untrue, it is absolutely dangerous for the President of the United States to make such a statement. Now at this point we have to recognize something else, and that is this – President Obama is not the first President of the United States, even in recent years, to be trying to suggest that the American people are not at war with the religion of Islam. That is an understandable White House quandary. President Bush also confused the issue, even in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks by suggesting that our enemy is not Islam.

 

There is truth in that of course, but there is also a confusion of the issues that is absolutely dangerous because there is no doubt that Islam is a major factor behind world terrorism. It is simply an indisputable fact that most of the dangerous and active terrorist groups in the world today are identified with Islam. It is also an indisputable fact that the terrorist organizations that have most targeted the West and the United States in particular, are specifically driven by an Islamic ideology and by the unquestioned ambition to further the reach of Islam, not only throughout the Middle East but also in the rest of the world. This is one of the animating driving forces behind the very logic of Islamic thought and theology. There’s simply no way around it, and in the eyes of many Muslims around the world, including many Muslim clerics, the President’s statement that no religion condones the killing of innocents, is profoundly and unquestionably untrue. President Obama’s own administration, every year since he is taking office, has released national and international intelligence reports warning about the recruitment of terrorists in Islamic mosques. And furthermore, the administration and the national security apparatus under its control and direction have been making that point on the front pages of the world’s newspapers just in the last several days. An armed conflict, such as that which is now taking place between the United States and its allies and these terrorist organizations, always reveals a deep worldview conflict – and there is simply no way around the fact that in this case, and for the perceivable future, that worldview conflict is essentially linked to the worldview of Islam. We can certainly understand the President’s political predicament, but when the President of the United States tells the American people, and the listening world, that ISIL is not Islamic, he’s stating something that is not only unhelpful, it is untrue, and not only untrue, but dangerously untrue.

 

There was of course profound irony in the fact that the President was making this address on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC. Those attacks now took place 13 years ago – 13 years ago today. And 13 years ago today, America was awakened from its international slumber to the realization that we are living in a very dangerous world. It’s interesting to note that children born in the last 13 years have known a world in which the crisis that has been posed by Islamic terrorism is now to be considered just a fact of life. But for Americans who grew to adulthood, before the last 13 years, this is a significant shift in terms of our understanding of America’s place in the world and the peril we now face in a world that reveals itself to be very dangerous. But in his address, very early in his address last night, President Obama spoke these words saying,

 

Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.

 

 

But America’s own security apparatus, again under the direction of this president, has stated consistently and repeatedly that America is profoundly not in a safer position in the world – not just in terms of other considerations, but specifically with reference to the threat of Islamic terrorism.

 

Evidence of that came in yesterday’s edition of USA Today when that newspaper offered a map of the world – first in 2001 and then in 2014. Those two maps trace the geographic influence of al Qaida, measuring al Qaida’s growth, not its retreat, from 2001 to 2014. USA Today was not trying to score political points, it was simply trying to make a very profound point about our peril in looking at the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Thirteen years is a long period of time; it might be a blip in terms of the span of world history but it is encompassed most of the last two presidential administrations. President Obama has been in charge of America’s military and foreign policy for the better part of the last six years, and in that light, when the president spoke last night, he was clearly speaking on the defensive. And the president was making statements that he hopes will be verified long-term in history, but this will require a fundamental change in the way this White House, specifically this president, engages the world, engages the threat of terrorism, and leads an international effort to do what he pledge to do in this address – and that is to defeat ISIL, and not only ISIL, but the many allied groups now with the vast international reach expressing the very same aims.

 

A warning about our situation in the world came recently in the pages of The Economist, a major newsmagazine published in Great Britain. And in that magazine, in an article entitled “Playing poker with the world,” the President, known to be an aficionado of the game of poker, was accused by the Britons of playing poker with foreign-policy. Most specifically, the magazine charged President Obama with playing poker by showing his hand rather than bluffing. The President has repeatedly, over the last six years, told the world what he would not do – what America would not do. Last night the President appeared to attempt something of a partial pivot on the issue, turning from speaking about what we would not do to speaking about what America would do. You can count on the fact that the watching world, and groups such as the Islamic State in particular, are waiting to see if the President meant what he said.

2) Marriage is fundamental to stability of home, despite arguments presented against it

Turning now to domestic issues in the United States, last week we discussed a major report on the American family, or more appropriately American families, that was released by the group known as the Council for Contemporary Families. That report, that gained a great many headlines across the nation, claims that there is no such thing as the American family now, there is no model of the normal family. Instead, the group said that the diversity of family forms in the United States means that there is now no normal. Jumping on that report, Mary Sanchez, writing in a column that appeared in a recent edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, argued the government leaders must now respond to this report and in this new reality. She wrote with these words, and I quote,

 

Substantial numbers of children are living in homes with divorced mothers, never-married mothers, single fathers, grandparents, cohabitating adults who may or may not both be working, and a range of other configurations, according to research done for the Council on Contemporary Families.

 

She continued,

 

And children migrate in and out of differing arrangements as they grow up […]

 

She was quoting Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who was the major author of this study. She then writes, and I quote,

 

Most of us realized long ago that married parents, with dad as the breadwinner and mom at home, is an image only accurate in black-and-white television shows of the 1950s.

 

While the study released last week did indicate that only a minority of American families now fit that model, it is certainly not the case that the report, and the reality, indicates that this kind of family, with the mother and father married one another, living in the same household with their children, with the father working outside the home and the mother primarily directed inside the home, is not limited only, as she said, to black and white television shows the 1950s.  As a matter of fact, in her very next paragraph she indicates that at least 22% of American children are still living in that kind of family. While that means that approximately 78% are not, 22% is hardly an insignificant number – it’s hardly a throwback merely to the 1950s.

 

But in writing her article, Mary Sanchez has a very different point to make. She’s not just writing about the claims made in terms of the numbers, she suggesting, to use her words and I quote,

 

More security […] is what many American families need. To help them get it, policy makers need to understand what American families look like these days. Only then can we set about promoting policy and supports that help many differing families and individuals achieve, not just ones that fit an ideal of yesteryear.

 

Let’s look at that paragraph for just a moment. Mary Sanchez is arguing that the American government should respond by attempting to add security to America’s families however they may be formed. Now remember the fact that in her documentation of this diversity, she mentioned children living with divorced mothers, never married mothers, single fathers, grandparents, and cohabitating adults who may or may not both be working, and then she adds a range of other configurations. How in the world can any government grant security to such insecure arrangements? Fundamentally, no government can do this. This is a profound point that seems to be missing from the understanding of many people looking at the family situation in America today. But Christians, looking at this question from a biblical worldview, have to understand that security is an achievement – it’s an achievement that comes primarily by following the pattern that God gave in Scripture concerning how the man and a woman are to come together in the covenant of marriage, how they are to be united to one another in a monogamous lasting union, and then how they are to receive children as God’s gifts and to raise them into context of stability and security that has been known throughout millennia as the human family.

 

But then on September 8 an even more interesting article appeared in the pages of the Washington Post, this time by Emily Badger. She writes this,

 

We know that children raised by two parents tend to be more successful — at school, in the future labor market, in their own marriages — than children raised by a single mom or dad. And from this fact, it might seem easy to conclude that marriage wields some outsized power over a child’s life — that its absence creates unstable homes and chaotic families, while its presence nurtures them.

 

Well yes, Emily Badger, that’s exactly what we might think, and that’s what most people would think and have thought throughout human history. How do we unthink that now? Well Emily Badger is doing her best. Not only to unthink the importance of marriage, but to lead the rest of us to unthink it as well. She goes through a rather long essay, doing her very best to suggest, based upon various sources of research, that marriage really isn’t the issue – that the issue is parenting skills, and the time parents would have to devote to their children and their flourishing. She acknowledges the fact that when children have two parents in the home, they get more parental attention. And she acknowledges that this surely must have some impact. But, she says, she insists that this doesn’t have to have anything to do, fundamentally, with marriage – it really doesn’t matter if the mother and the father are even married. She then goes on to a second point, saying that financial security is also a big part of the picture in terms of the flourishing of children. She acknowledges that when you have married parents, the mother and the father, you generally also have more economic security – but fundamentally you have greater income and greater wealth. This also factors in to greater opportunity for children, and you might also add, it contributes to the fact that the family continues to thrive.

 

Citing different avenues of research, she tries her very best to argue that the issue really isn’t marriage. Pointing to the bottom line in her accumulated research, she writes and I quote,

 

At the end of the day, marriage itself might still have some effect on the adult outcomes of children. But [she says] it would be a small one.

 

This article in the Washington Post is a classic example of trying to argue against reality – that reality is the importance of marriage. And try as she might, the author of this article simply can’t get to make her point. She has to come back again and again to say, ‘I know it looks like marriage is the issue, but it really isn’t the issue.’ She also separates marriage from all other moral considerations when she talks about parental stability, when she talks about parental investment in children, when she writes about the advantages of having two parents in the home, she comes back to say that it really can’t be about marriage – honestly, it can’t be about marriage. In her final paragraph she writes these words,

 

Making single parents get married, in other words, won’t fundamentally change the other characteristics about them that really drive their children’s success. The good news in this is that family income and parenting skills are more realistically addressed through public policy than marriage anyway.

 

Well, now she’s trying to take marriage, not only out of the moral equation, but out of the sociological equation as well. It simply won’t work.  Marriage is tied to economic stability, marriage is tied to the continuing thriving of the family, marriage is inherently tied to the flourishing of children – there’s no way to take marriage of the equation. And you simply can’t throw enough money at the problem in order to give stability to an unstable relationship. You simply can’t solve the problem of parenting skills by suggesting that it doesn’t matter if there are two married parents in the home. In doing her dead level best to argue that the issue isn’t marriage, it can be marriage, please don’t tell me it’s marriage, Emily Badger actually ends up making the opposite point – it really is about marriage, it has always been about marriage, and it will continue to be so; no matter how many researchers and how many essayists try to argue, “it simply can’t be about marriage.”

 

Here again Christians, driven by a Christian worldview, have to understand that marriage is not merely a sociological invention. If it were, then marriage might be replaced by something that is even more secure, even more effective and efficient. But it isn’t merely a sociological development – to the contrary, it is one of God’s gifts given to all human creatures and human societies throughout all human history in the gift of creation. To miss that point is to miss the obvious, but then again, that’s the problem with this article, and in so many others like it. But for Christians, it’s instructive to see that so many people are doing their dead level best to make the argument that ‘reality simply can’t be, we must be misunderstanding equation, marriage simply can’t be this important.’ But Christians have to respond, ‘Oh, yes it is.’

 

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 Atlanta, Georgia and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 09-11-14

Podcast Transcript

1) President Obama neglects reality of worldview in conflict with ISIL, international terrorism

Transcript: President Obama’s speech outlining strategy to defeat Islamic State, Washington Post (Pres. Barack Obama)

Al-Qaeda morphs into a new movement since 9/11, USA Today

Playing poker with the world, The Economist

2) Marriage is fundamental to stability of home, despite arguments presented against it

To bolster the American family, we need to get a grip on what it is, Kansas City Star (Mary Sanchez)

Children with married parents are better off — but marriage isn’t the reason why, Washington Post (Emily Badger)