R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 348

The Briefing 08-28-14

1) Utah polygamy ban struck down furthering absolute confusion on marriage

Utah Polygamy Law Partially Struck Down By Federal Judge Following ‘Sister Wives’ Lawsuit, International Business Times (Mark Hanrahan)

One Big, Happy Polygamous Family, New York Times (Jonathan Turley)

2) ‘Euthanasia tourism’ boom in Switzerland reveals quiet moral revolution on sanctity of life

‘Going to Switzerland’ Is a Euphemism for Assisted Suicide, The Atlantic (Julie Beck)

Will Doctors Be Forced to Kill?, First Things (Wesley J Smith)

3) Japan’s looming population crisis evidence of dangers of liberal worldview

The Other Population Crisis: What Governments Can Do About Falling Birth Rates, Foreign Affairs (Richard N Cooper)

Japan records fewer than 500,000 births in first half of year, Japan Times

Transcript: The Briefing 08-27-14

The Briefing

 

August 27, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, August 27, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) California commitment to abortion overrules conscience of two Catholic universities

Our attention today first turns to the state of California where the administration of Governor Jerry Brown has now ordered two Jesuit universities, that is Roman Catholic universities, to offer full and unrestricted abortion coverage to all of the universities’ employees, including the dependents of those employees. Columnist Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times explains it this way,

 

With minimal fanfare, California state officials have nixed an underhanded effort by two Catholic-affiliated universities and their insurers to deprive the universities’ employees of insurance coverage for abortions.

 

Now, this is an opinion column but notice how the opinion of this particular columnist is announced right up front. The effort by these two Catholic universities, to act in a way consistent with Catholicism, is described as, “an underhanded effort.”

 

On Friday of last week the California department concerned with health care informed the state’s major health insurers by letter that provisions in health plans eliminating coverage of what is described as voluntary or elective abortions – or for that matter just limiting abortion coverage only to what it described as medically necessary abortions – now violates state law and the California constitution. As Hiltzik continues,

 

The effort became public only after Loyola Marymount started implementing the changes in 2013. The dropping of abortion coverage [she writes,] created an uproar among faculty on the Los Angeles campus, not least because of the vagueness of the provision’s language: [As Hiltzik explains,] coverage was to remain in place only for “therapeutic” abortions, a term that ostensibly meant those deemed medically necessary.

 

Hiltzik then points to California’s therapeutic abortion act, which was overturned by that state’s Supreme Court in 1972. It was supplanted by what is known as the reproductive privacy act in 2003. Stephen F. Diamond, a professor of law at Santa Clara University – he’s been following the controversy closely – said that the law that was passed in 2003 “guarantees a woman’s right to both terminate a pregnancy and to birth control.”

 

Back at the end of 2013 we discussed on The Briefing the controversy on the faculties of these two Catholic universities, in particular, Loyola Marymount there in Los Angeles. As we discussed then, the faculty was deeply divided over the announcement by the school’s trustees and president that coverage for elective abortion would be denied. When the president of the university, backed by the university’s board of trustees, announced the change in medical coverage, the faculty responded with a vote of 215 to 89, decrying the administration’s change of the policy. In response the university stated the obvious, that it was simply acting on obedience to Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of human life and the issue of abortion. But the announcement handed down last Friday in California makes very clear that there is now no place in that state for an institution or organization that offers health care to its employees and is unwilling to pay for unrestricted abortion on demand.

 

The radical posture of California is made clear in the coverage of this controversy within the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. As that paper reports,

 

Until the current controversy arose, insurers in California had treated all abortions sought by women in their health plans as medically necessary.

 

That’s an interesting statement in itself. In other words, if the abortion is sought, it is by definition, medically necessary. As the paper continued in its report,

 

Insurance coverage for abortion is not mandated by the federal health care law [or by the laws of many other states]. But California guarantees abortion rights both by statute and by privacy protections in the state Constitution. The courts have also required the states medical care coverage for Medicare to pay for poor women’s abortions, overturning legislative attempts to cut off the funding.

 

A frankly horrifying quotation is found in the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage when a woman identified as Beth Parker, chief counsel for Planned Parenthood in California, offered these words, and I quote,

 

Termination of pregnancy is obviously a basic medical service. Abortion can be elective, but it’s medically necessary if recommended by my physician to treat a medical condition.

 

The logical implication of that statement is horrifyingly clear. In this case, what is described as a “medical condition” can only mean one thing: pregnancy. Catholic News Agency reports that the Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a protest with the state government over this ruling. As the Catholic News Agency reports,

 

The two groups [that is Alliance Defending Freedom and the Life Legal Defense Foundation] said that the action is a “clear violation” of the federal Weldon Amendment, which bars states that accept federal funds from discriminating against institutions and health care entities that do not provide coverage of abortion or refer for abortions.

 

Matthew Bowman, identified as senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, said,

 

When Congress enacted the Weldon Amendment, it sought to ensure that the government could never strong-arm pro-life employers into paying for abortion coverage; therefore, California’s decision is illegal.

 

He continued,

 

No state can ignore federal law in a pursuit to conform everyone to the state’s own ideology on abortion. Faith-based organizations should be free to operate according to the faith they espouse and live out on a daily basis.

 

If nothing else, this news from California reminds us once again of just how radically committed to abortion some governments now are, including some state governments; most especially in this case, the government of California. It also serves as a very poignant reminder of the fact that religious liberty requires essential and continual vigilance. And, though this particular policy refers to two Catholic institutions in California, this news should serve as ample warning to evangelical Christian institutions that we could be next on the line. That the protection that was now denied to these two Roman Catholic institutions can just as quickly, and just as arbitrarily, be denied to evangelical colleges and universities as well.

 

There’s also another major lesson embedded in this story. It has to do with that disturbance on the faculty when the university announced that it was determined, as a Catholic university, to act in accordance to Catholic moral teaching. It is incredibly telling that the faculty senate, of a supposedly Roman Catholic institution, would defy so openly the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. In this case we can look at these two Catholic universities, Loyola Marymount in particular, and see that in the present it is the victim of oppression coming from the state of California. That is an infringement of religious liberty we can only hope and pray will soon be reversed; but when it comes to that faculty vote, that’s an indication that this particular Catholic university has not been very Catholic in terms of the hiring of its own faculty. And that can’t be blamed on the state government of California. On that account, the trustees and administration of the university deserve full blame. If anything, that is an even bigger lessor for evangelical institutions to observe in this controversy.

2) Obamacare covers gender reassignment surgery in California

More news came recently out of California, but in this case it’s a story with direct implications for the rest of the country as well. The Daily Beast reports that Obamacare is now paying for gender reassignment surgery. According to the report by Anna Gorman of Kaiser Health News,

 

Among the less-talked-about implications of the Affordable Care Act is the relief it is providing to many transgender people, many of whom are low-income and who have struggled to obtain health coverage. Getting jobs [she explains] that offer insurance often has been difficult for transgender people and the cost of purchasing plans on the private market can be prohibitive.

 

Therefore, as she explains, a good number of those who have been seeking sexual reassignment surgery have been unable to obtain the surgery because of the daunting cost. Now, she explains,

 

Federal law prohibits health insurance companies from discriminating against transgender people, and it bars insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. [As she explains,] That makes it possible for more transgender people to purchase private plans. And in states that expanded their Medicaid programs, those with low incomes may get free coverage.

 

She goes onto detail that,

 

The federal anti-discrimination regulations have yet to be written, but California insurance regulators have said that companies must treat transgender patients the same as other patients. For example, if plans cover hormones for post-menopausal women, they must also cover them for transgender women. Medicare, the program for the elderly and disabled, lifted its ban on covering sex reassignment surgery earlier this year.

3) Former Johns Hopkins chief psychiatrist argues that surgery is not solution to transgenderism

But the whole reality of sexual reassignment surgery, as it is known, is called into question. Not only by those who are operating out of a Christian worldview but also by some mental health professionals. One of those is Dr. Paul McHugh, formerly the chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. As he writes,

 

Policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.

 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal several weeks ago, he writes,

 

This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

 

Dr. McHugh, again formerly the chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, points to the fact that some of these grim psychological outcomes are the direct result of sex reassignment surgery. Furthermore, as he indicates, studies undertaken of children and teenagers – who describe themselves as transsexual – have pointed to the fact that in approximately 70-80% of the cases of these children, they spontaneously lost the impression that they were transgendered. As McHugh argues, it should be considered a form of child abuse to perform either surgery or hormonal treatments that could lead to sterility on children and adolescents who, 70-80% of the time, reverse their understanding of being transgendered. He cites studies undertaken by Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic that indicated that these 70-80% of children “spontaneously lost those feelings.”

 

In other words, the feelings of being transgendered.

 

In his column, he then offers this amazing paragraph. I quote,

 

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

 

Just consider the moral weight of that paragraph. Here you have a former chief psychiatrist writing about his experience in the 1960s at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most respected medical centers in universities in the nation, which was the very first medical center to venture into what is called sex-reassignment surgery. But after they studied the results of their own surgery, they decided that it was not helpful to the patients, and that there was no “adequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.”

 

He then cited a study undertaken even more recently, in Sweden in the Karolinska Institute. As he says,

 

[It] produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery.

 

The surgery revealed that,

 

Beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties.

 

He writes with care and compassion about both teenagers and children experiencing a difficulty with their own biologically assigned gender. He writes about young men and women, including adolescence, who are, in his words,

 

Susceptible to suggestion from “everything is normal” sex education, amplified by Internet chat groups.

 

These patients he says, should not be subjected to what’s called “sex-reassignment surgery” but rather, in his words,

 

Treatments here must begin with removing the young person from the suggestive environment and offering a counter-message in family therapy.

 

He then writes about very young children, often prepubescent, who notice, in his words,

 

Distinct sex roles in the culture and, exploring how they fit in, begin imitating the opposite sex.

 

He then writes this,

 

Misguided doctors at medical centers including Boston’s Children’s Hospital have begun trying to treat this behavior by administering puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous—even though the drugs stunt the children’s growth and risk causing sterility. Given that close to 80% of such children would abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated, these medical interventions [he writes] come close to child abuse. A better way to help these children: with devoted parenting.

 

In an amazing final paragraph he then gets to the heart of the issue,

 

“Sex change” is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

 

Now we should note a couple of things with very particular interest. One is the fact that this was not written by someone who has no direct experience with the issue. Dr. McHugh is the former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. We should also note that this report was not published in some kind of fringe periodical; it was published in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, we should note instructively the compassion with which Dr. McHugh has written. And we should also respond with the same compassion to those who are struggling with this particular form of confusion. But as Dr. McHugh argues, and argues convincingly, two things are profoundly true. The first is that there is actually no such thing as gender reassignment surgery; it is biologically impossible, as he testifies here. The chromosomal structure of the individual doesn’t change, it is, as he explains, mostly just cosmetic surgery. On the other hand, there is another essential point, and that is the issue of compassion. True compassion, he argues implicitly in this article, isn’t in giving these people the opportunity to have sex reassignment surgery, much less as the news in California reminds us, paid for by Obamacare, we should instead reach out to these persons with compassion; understanding that what they are experiencing cannot be resolved by sex reassignment surgery. It cannot be resolved by hormonal treatments, true compassion, he makes clear in this case, does profoundly not mean giving people who demand sex reassignment surgery what they demand.

4) Twitter displaces TV and Facebook as medium for immediate news updates

Finally, thinking Christians should reflect on the changes in our news and media environment. Changes in how people receive news, and assimilate information, have to do also with the formation of worldview; not only the transmission of information. And for that reason, there is a particular news story having to do with the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri that should have our attention. The Financial Times in London reports that the TV networks found themselves far behind the social networks when it came to conveying information about what was happening in Ferguson, Missouri. One static stands out in the report by Hannah Kuchler published in the Financial Times. As she reports, there were almost one million tweets sent about the incident on Twitter before CNN had offered even 1 minute of coverage of the news story. That’s is almost 1 million tweets before there was even 1 minute of coverage on CNN, considered by many to be the cable network news of record.

 

There is another very interesting angle in this story and in the study behind it; the study was undertaken by the pew research center, asking the question why Twitter, they came to a very interesting conclusion. Twitter, rather than Facebook, was the medium of record and the medium of speed for the coverage of the Ferguson protest. But again, why? Well it has to do with the fact that Twitter appears to be almost architecturally constructed to covey this kind of news and information, and to allow the users to respond in a way that feels and seems appropriate. Not so much on Facebook. Why? Because on Facebook, the way to register interest is by clicking a ‘like.’ As it turns out, the story out of Ferguson wasn’t something that, at the emotional level, people felt like they could respond to with something called a ‘like.’ There was nothing to like about the story at all.

 

The upshot of the account from the Pew Research Center is reported in the Financial Times is this, Twitter it appears is now the medium of choice for the quick and almost immediate dissemination of news and information. It maybe be short and concise, limited to 140 characters as you’ll remember for each tweet, but it is immediate and it capture the attention of the world now. But when it comes to Facebook, that internet behemoth ­­ is simply not up to the task when it comes to covering news. And as for the TV network, even the cable TV networks; they are simply left behind in the dust. They will come along later to explain the story, and offer commentary, visuals, and an extended narrative, but in the immediacy of a news story, they simply are not there. Not there like Twitter, not there with almost a million tweets before they offered 1 minute of network coverage.

 

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 boycecollege.com.

 

If you or someone you know is considering college, I would invite you to learn more about Boyce College at our Preview Day event on October 31. Come learn how we are preparing the next generation of Christian men and women to serve the church and to engage the culture. Learn more at boycecollege.com/preview. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing

 

 

 

 

The Briefing 08-27-14

1) California commitment to abortion overrules conscience of two Catholic universities 

A women’s rights victory as California nixes an attack on abortion coverage, Los Angeles Times (Michael Hiltzik)

State reverses abortion decision at 2 Catholic colleges, San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Egelko)

Outcry flares over Calif. abortion push in Catholic colleges, Catholic News Agency (Kevin J. Jones)

2) Obamacare covers gender reassignment surgery in California

Obamacare Now Pays for Gender Reassignment, Daily Beast (Anna Gorman)

3) Former Johns Hopkins chief psychiatrist argues that surgery is not solution to transgenderism

Transgender Surgery Isn’t the Solution, Wall Street Journal (Paul McHugh)

4) Twitter displaces TV and Facebook as medium for immediate news updates

TV networks play catch-up to Twitter in Ferguson’s rolling story, Financial Times (Hannah Kuchler)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-26-14

The Briefing

 

August 26, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, August 26, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) In face of Islamic State atrocities, secularists struggle to explain evil

The reality of evil is front and center in the international imagination; driven most emphatically in recent days by the images of the cold-blooded execution of American journalist, James Foley, at the hands of the group known as the Islamic State. The image has seared the moral imagination of virtually everyone who has seen the still image, much less the video. And the knowledge of the fact that this man was killed in a cold-blooded public execution as an act of undiluted terrorism has reminded many people, who had  hoped to think otherwise, that evil is indeed a reality and a very dangerous reality among us. But one of the things that also becomes very clear is the inability of the secular worldview to come to terms with what evil is, and what it means.

 

This point was made very clearly, and we should say honestly, in an opinion piece published yesterday in the Washington Post by columnist Richard Cohen. He speaks of his own previous reluctance to use the category of evil. He said, quite straightforwardly,

 

I used to not believe in evil. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” I thought it was a dandy phrase but also a confession of ignorance. The word itself connotes something or someone diabolical — bad for the sake of bad. The Soviet Union was bad, I conceded, but not for no reason.

 

But Cohen ends his paragraph with these words,

 

Reagan had it right, though. The Soviet Union was evil.

 

Cohen then moved to the execution of James Foley by the Islamic state and said,

 

Now we are facing a different type of evil… It seems to love death the way the fascists once did. It is Sunni, so it massacres Shiites. It is radical Sunni, so it eliminates apostates. It is Muslim, so it kills Yazidis, a minority with a religion of its own, and takes as plunder their women as concubines. Men are shot in graves of their own making.

 

Cohen then says the Nazis are back. Dressed differently, speaking a different language, and murdering ostensibly for different reasons – but actually for the same: intolerance, hatred, excitement, and just because they can. He then makes a very interesting assertion that the Islamic State’s behavior is, in his words, beyond explication. He says it goes beyond human understanding the people can act with such violence and hatred as they do. He says that murdering, and torturing, and enslaving, because this is what it wants to do, is evidence of fact that the Islamic State is at its very core evil.

 

Cohen then turned his attention to Auschwitz, perhaps the preeminent symbol of the evil of the Nazi regime and recalled the late Jewish thinker Primo Levi, who as a boy knew the experiences of the horrors of Auschwitz at first hand. He recounts Levi as a boy having the experience of trying to slake his thirst by breaking off an icicle, only to have a brutal Nazi guard knock the icicle from his young hand. Levi, shocked by the brutality, turned to the guard and asked “Warum?” (Why?). The guard replied, ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (here there is no why). As Cohen then writes,

 

There was no why in all of Auschwitz.

 

In Cohen’s view evil is a reality he has had to come to terms with, in terms of the fact that it is a reality. But at the most fundamental level Cohen doesn’t see evil as something that can be understood or explain. It simply must be resisted, fought, and hopefully defeated.

 

Similarly, last weekend’s edition of the Financial Times published in London included a full-page consideration of evil; this time written by the British author Martin Amis. Amis also turned his attention to Auschwitz and to the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi regime. He also cited Primo Levi, pointing to the Jewish thinker as one who echoed the fact that evil exists but that it cannot be explained. Amis recounts the sheer horror of Auschwitz and looks to the Nazi leaders, unable to come to any conclusion about the ‘why’ of their inexplicable evil. He found himself in the position of looking at Hitler, at a recent effort to explain Hitler by a modern author. Amis suggests that the entire effort was misdirected, for Hitler cannot be explained. He goes back to Primo Levi, citing one of his writings where he spoke about the Nazi leaders saying that their words simply are incomprehensible to us.

 

They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human … [T]here is no rationality in the Nazi hatred; it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man …

 

That’s a remarkable statement and it is heartbreaking given the fact that Primo Levi knew these horrors firsthand, barely escaping the killing ovens of Auschwitz himself; only later, in despair, to commit suicide. The Christian worldview, we need to note, not only affirms the existence and reality of evil, but also points to the fact that evil is, in a sense, perhaps even a horrifying sense, explicable.

 

The very word evil is necessarily theological. Indeed it is difficult, if not impossible, to come to even a definition of evil without reference to the existence of God as the ultimate determinator of good and evil, the judge of the just and the unjust. Without a theistic point of reference, a divine determinator of right and wrong, the understanding of evil simply fades into some sort of continuum of human behavior and moral analysis. But I want to give Richard Cohen and Martin Amis credit for grappling with the issue in the first place. This is in itself a moral achievement in our highly secular and morally relative age. The fact that these two writers, both prominent in their fields, can look at the reality of the Islamic State or Auschwitz and see the undeniable reality of evil is in itself a moral achievement. That is much to be preferred over the kind of blithe moral relativism that has led some professors to indicate that they have difficulty getting their university students even to make a moral verdict on something like the Holocaust as being objectively, unquestionably, in all times, in all places, evil.

 

But these two articles also point to the necessity of the Christian worldview as the only worldview that has an adequate understanding of evil. Now we need to acknowledge at this point that the Christian worldview cannot fully explain evil. We too are left with questions; questions about the complexity of evil and the mechanisms of evil in the human heart and human society. This question has vexed Christian theologians throughout the centuries. Leaving us with the kind of witness offered by the great reformer Martin Luther who argued that, in the end looking at the reality of evil in its face, when asked for the question why and what now, Christians can only point to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. But that is the point. Because the Christian worldview based in Scripture tells us that evil is indeed a reality. But it is a reality that is defeated, in one sense, and fully will be defeated, in another, by the King of kings and Lord of lords, who, on that day that ends all days, will point back to the day of his own crucifixion, will point back to his own cross, and make very clear that that is where the serpent’s head was bruised by his heel.

 

The Christian worldview also points us to the most haunting realization about the power of evil and sin. It is, contrary to the assertion of Primo Levi, something that is inside man, not just outside of us. It is inside the human heart. And it was one of the great Jewish prophets who made this point most emphatically. It was the prophet Jeremiah 17:9 who made the point clear when he said,

 

The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

 

There is no way to explain the reality of evil if we look only outside of the human heart. It is in the heart, the Scripture says emphatically, that evil takes up its residents. There is perhaps no more horrible realization than that; which also points us back to the cross and to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ as the only solitary remedy for our sin.

2) Churches conforming views of sexuality all see decline of congregants

A very interesting article appeared in recent days at The Federalist where Alexander Griswold suggests “How To Shrink Your Church In One Easy Step,” the subtitle of his article, Every major American church that has taken steps towards liberalization on sexual issues has seen a steep decline in membership. Griswold directly addresses the argument that America’s churches have to get in line in the sexual revolution or lose membership, lose attendance, and social standing. As he writes, many are concerned, especially with the millennial generation, suggesting that so long as churches remain in the face of opposition to gay marriage…

 

those churches will shrink into irrelevancy when gay marriage (inevitably, we are told) becomes a settled political issue.

 

As Griswold writes,

 

These arguments often see church acceptance of homosexuality as a carrot as well as a stick. It isn’t so much that denouncing homosexuality will drive people away from church, but that embracing it will also lead people into church. LGBT individuals and their supporters, [he writes] many of whom hold a dim view of religion after a decades-long culture war, will reconsider church if denominations remove their restrictions on gay marriage and ordination.

 

But he goes on to document the fact that a growing number of churches and denominations have follow this logic, already taking significant steps toward liberalizing their understanding of sexual issues –  especially homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Griswold then says,

 

The evidence so far seems to indicate that affirming homosexuality is hardly a cure for membership woes. On the contrary [he says], every major American church that has taken steps towards liberalization of sexual issues has seen a steep decline in membership.

 

This is where Griswold article grows, not only truly interesting but very important. Because not only does he take the argument head on, he also looks at a statistical review of membership and attendance in several denominations that have liberalized their understanding and teaching when it comes to matters of sexuality, in particular homosexuality and same-sex marriage. He looks first to the Episcopal Church that rocked the Christian world in the year 2003 by electing and consecrating an openly gay man as the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire. Griswold then writes,

 

In 2002, the number of baptized U.S. members of the Episcopal Church stood at 2.32 million. By 2012, that number had fallen to 1.89 million, a decline of 18.4 percent. Meanwhile [he notes], attendance has fallen even more steeply. Average Sunday attendance in its U.S. churches was 846,000 in 2002, but had fallen almost 25 percent by 2012 to only 640,000. Other signs of congregational liveliness have fallen even further. Baptisms have fallen by 39.6 percent, and marriages have fallen by 44.9 percent.

 

He then turns to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. And in its 2009 church-wide assembly that group decided to extend ordination to gay men and women in what were termed “committed monogamous relationships.” At the same time the assembly passed an amendment allowing churches

 

To recognize, support and hold publicly accountable life-long, monogamous, same-gender relationships.

 

Griswold then notes that in the period from 1987 to 2009, that was when the mainline denomination was organized in its current shape, the average decrease in membership each year was only .62%. But after the liberalization of the denomination’s stance on sexuality, membership declined a whopping 5.95% in 2010, 4.98% in 2011.

 

Since 2009, [he writes] more than 600 congregations abandoned the denomination, with almost two-thirds joining conservative Lutheran denominations.

 

Griswold then turns to United Church of Christ noting quite accurately that it is inhabited the far left fringe of American Christian denominations. As he says,

 

In 2005 United Church of Christ became the first U.S. mainline Protestant denomination to support same-sex marriage, and has been an outspoken voice in the gay marriage debate ever since.

He then goes on to document that the UCC has been bleeding members for decades. He suggests that the decline rapidly accelerated after the gay marriage vote. Since the year 2005 the denomination has lost a quarter of 1 million members, a decline of 20.4% over just seven years. With an average of 39 congregations leading the UCC annually from 1990 to 2004, more than 350 congregations departed in the next three years. In final words on UCC Griswold writes,

 

2013 marked a particularly grim milestone for the denomination, as membership finally fell below one million. If the post-2005 rate in membership losses doesn’t taper out, the denomination will cease to exist in 30 years.

 

Griswold then turned to the Presbyterian Church USA, the mainline liberal Presbyterian denomination. He points to the years 2006 and 2010 when the denomination began to formally liberalize its understanding on the question of homosexuality, homosexual clergy, and same-sex marriage. He says,

 

In 2006, 2.2 million people were members of PCUSA, a number that dropped 22.4 percent to 1.85 million by 2013. PCUSA’s decline accelerated significantly after approving the ordination of non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy in mid-2011, [that] led to the creation of an alternative denomination in 2012.

 

As he writes,

 

If post-2006 trends continue, the denomination will cease to exist by 2037.

 

Meanwhile he turns to the churches that have stood by the historic Christian teaching on sexual morality as revealed in Scripture. He suggest that those churches, including conservative denomination like the Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptist Convention, have been spared the kind of membership losses experienced by the mainline liberal Protestant denominations. The Assemblies of God continues to grow, and as he writes,

 

Even theologically conservative denominations that are declining, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, began declining much later and much less drastically than other denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention has only declined by 3 percent since its peak in 2007—an average of less than 1 percent annually—and recently has actually been adding congregations.

 

We should note carefully that no church or denomination, or for that matter no individual Christian, should establish the moral understanding on questions of sexual morality on the basis of membership statistics and church attendance. But we should also note that even as Christians should always base their understanding of such issues on the sole authority of Scripture, it is instructive to see the churches and denominations that have abandoned or accommodated the scriptural message in order to meet the modern expectations of the sexual revolutionaries have experienced, not an influx of members who had been previously alienated by the church’s understanding of sex, but instead a hemorrhaging of members and a steep precipitous falloff in terms of church attendance. Finally, we should note that any church or denomination that has abandon clear biblical teachings and the historic understanding of the Christian church concerning sexual morality, has surely abandon other key and crucial doctrines long before the issue of sex arrived at the front burner. The evidence offered by Alexander Griswold is simply too important to miss and too important by far to ignore.

3) TV uses infidelity as source of comedy

Finally a couple of notes about the intersection of popular culture and the Christian worldview, USA Today recently featured an article by Ann Oldenberg about the fact that the television medium is now turning to adultery, in a big way, as a major theme. As she points out, adultery is hardly new; but a positive depictions of adultery, in terms of the mainstream media, is something that is rather new. It has also caught the attention of even secular analysts. One of them quoted in the articles, Donna Barnes, the founder of a dating site, who said:

 

A generation ago, you never talked about having an affair. Then Oprah got us all talking about these things. And now that we’re all talking, the next step is we’re living things out more and less afraid — and TV’s catching up.

 

Interestingly, one of the telling facts about so many of these television shows is that even as they try to focus on adultery they can’t avoid making an eventual negative judgment about it. The creator of one of these shows known as Married said, and I quote,

 

We knew there was some comedy to be mined…[people] say to me a lot: ‘Oh, monogamy is not natural.’ And I always say, ‘Well neither are toilets, but when you don’t use them, things get very messy.’

 

That may not be as sophisticated moral analysis, indeed it’s not. But it is, in its own strange way, a testimony to the fact that even the secular entertainment industry can’t find a way to dress adultery out; without it, revealing itself in the end to be, even use the words of Andrew Gurland, very messy. Of course the biblical understanding is that adultery is far worse than being very messy. But it is telling in its own way, that the moral shape of the universe, as God created it, comes back to reveal the evil and the harm of adultery, even in the words of a television show creator who can do no more than say it’s very messy – at least he understands that.

4) Entertainment industry’s fixation on end of world demonstrates centrality of theology

Meanwhile, TIME magazine’s James Poniewozik, writing about the same entertainment industry, points to the popularity of shows about apocalypse, in terms of America’s current popular culture. He says,

 

Today the world ends several times a week. You can see humanity decimated by virus (TNT’s The Last Ship), a civil war among angels (Syfy’s Dominion), infertility (Lifetime’s The Lottery) and unexplained sudden disappearance (HBO’s The Leftovers). [And as he writes,] And that’s just this summer. Stick around and you can witness civilization destroyed by plague (Syfy’s coming adaptation of 12 Monkeys), aliens (TNT’s Falling Skies) and a mysterious collapse of technology (Amazon’s The After).

 

Interestingly Poniewozik also points out that in most of today’s post-apocalypse series, in his words,

 

Disaster no longer comes from geopolitical conflict or ideological terrorism… [Instead] We die from mystery phenomena or pestilences that don’t even have the decency to hate us.

But, all these convoluted and interesting plot lines to the side, the most interesting aspect of all this is the fact that there is a deep hunger for an understanding of the end. Indeed, there is a moral hunger for an end that resolves the great moral quandaries of the age, in such a way that there’s moral satisfaction. Or if there can’t be moral satisfaction, there can at least be the exhilaration of knowing that at some point history comes to an end; by virus or plague, or technology, or infertility, or something else that a television director-producer may be able to come up with.

 

Once again we finally have to note this entire theme is inherently and inescapably theological. In a supposedly secular age, even our popular culture demonstrates the fact that we can’t get away from theology. We can’t get away from the big questions. We can’t get away from questions about sin and judgment and restitution and justice. We can’t get away from them because God made us that way and even as God made us in his image and gave us the innate knowledge of himself within us and the moral conscience, that is also a testimony to his glory, we come to understand that the human imagination simply cannot resist pondering the meaning of the end. Of course that’s not the end of the story, the story continues, not only to the end, but what comes after the end.

 

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 boycecollege.com.

 

If you’re considering call to ministry, I want to invite you to attend one of Southern Seminary’s Preview Days. The next is coming up on October 17. We will be glad to have you as our guest. For $25 we will cover your two nights of lodging, as well as all your meals on preview day. It’s an important opportunity to consider your call to ministry as you spend time on the seminary campus, getting know professors and fellow students as well. Joined by the faculty, I would be pleased to meet you. That’s on October 17, for more information visit SBTS.edu/previous. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing

 

 

 

 

The Briefing 08-26-14

1) In face of Islamic State atrocities, secularists struggle to explain evil

The Islamic State is evil returned, Washington Post (Richard Cohen)

Martin Amis on Hitler and the nature of evil, Financial Times (Martin Amis)

2) Churches conforming views of sexuality all see decline of congregants

How To Shrink Your Church In One Easy Step, The Federalist (Alexander Griswold)

3) Entertainment industry’s fixation on end of world demonstrates centrality of theology

Infidelity on TV is becoming quite a common affair, USA Today (Ann Oldenburg)

TV Goes to the Ends of the World, TIME (James Poniewozik)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 08-25-14

The Briefing

 

August 25, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, August 25, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Earthquakes in Napa and Peru reminder of instability of world

The people in Napa Valley, California were awakened early Sunday morning with a rather significant earthquake. The earthquake is now believed to have registered 6.0 on the Richter scale, making it the most powerful earthquake to hit the state of California in about 25 years. The quake brought a good deal of damage to the city of Napa, the heart of California’s picturesque wine country, but even as 120 people were injured and three critically, it was clear that this would stand in contrast to what would’ve happened if an earthquake of this magnitude had hit in a more highly populated area. After surveying the damage, California officials were shocked and disappointed to see that many of the structures that had been retrofitted after the last earthquake and were considered earthquake safe, had actually experienced significant damage – indicating the limitations of any, even architectural or engineering, planning for an earthquake. Local officials said that about 100 structures in the town, homes mostly, were uninhabitable. At the same time, local officials declared that they were going to be back in business as early as this morning. Utility, such as water and electricity, are still intermittent or nonexistent in some areas. And the governor has declared the region a state disaster area.

 

But it appears that yesterday the strongest earthquake was not actually in the state of California, but in the nation of Peru. Hours after that earthquake struck in Napa Valley an earthquake that registered almost 7 – actually about 6.9 – on the Richter scale, affected a largely rural and sparsely inhabited region of Peru, even though the tremor was felt all the way in Lima and other major cities. The fact that these two very strong earthquakes happened along the same kind of fault line on the same day is a reminder of the fact that we’re living on an earth that isn’t actually as stable as we like to believe that it is. We speak of the ground under our feet being solid, when it actually is not solid at all. And when underneath the ground upon which we are standing, are various strata of rock and sediment and other things that are actually in motion, and that motion can sometimes be chaotic and not only chaotic but dangerous. Sometimes that danger can be nothing less than spectacular.

 

We do well to remember that in the year 1755, a massive earthquake hit the town of Lisbon. It is now, looking backwards, expected that that earthquake registered between 8.5 and 9.0 on the Richter scale, which does not make it one of the strongest earthquakes on historical record, but does make it one of the most deadly. Historians now estimate that as many as 100,000 people may well have died of the direct result of that earthquake in Lisbon in 1755. But I bring it to our attention now because of the worldview significance of that event. The rise and spread of modern atheism can be traced back to the aftermath of the earthquake in 1755 – right in the period that is known by historians as the Age of Reason. It was during that period that many European intellectuals began to question the existence of God because of the reality of the earthquake and the death and awful destruction that came in its wake. Several religious skeptics pointed to the argument that we hear over and over again in the face of this kind of natural disaster and that is this – if God is good, he should’ve prevented this. If he is omnipotent, he could’ve prevented this. Since he didn’t prevent it, he is either not good or nonexistent.

 

Atheism of this sort is known as protest atheism. It’s a protest against the appearance of evil and the reality of suffering. Intelligent Christians should take that kind of argument very seriously, but the only way to take it seriously is to go back to Scripture and be reminded all over again that the Scripture teaches two unconditional truths that are not in conflict or competition all. The first of those truths is that God is indeed omnipotent. He is sovereign in every conceivable way and His omnipotence knows no boundaries whatsoever. But not only is He omnipotent, we also understand that He rules by means of His omnipotent providence, such that nothing happens outside of his rule and reign here on earth. But the second most fundamental biblical doctrine we must keep in mind is the absolute goodness of God. And that goodness is defined along with other moral attributes, including His graciousness, His justice, His righteousness, and all the Scripture reveals. So when we look at these two truth put together, the skeptical human mind would come to the conclusion that if God is good, He cannot be omnipotent or if God is omnipotent He cannot be good because of the presence of evil and suffering in the world. But that understanding flies in the face of the entire metanarrative of Scripture, the grand sweeping story of Scripture, that story – as you know – includes at least four essential chapters: creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. And that second movement in the story, the fall, underlines the fact that we live in a world that is horribly affected by, corrupted by, and damaged by sin.

 

In Romans 8, the apostle Paul reminds us that even as God is in sovereign control over all things, the created cosmos is actually also waiting for the revelation of the sons of God – awaiting that redemptive eschatological promise that is known in scripture as the hope of a new heaven and a new earth. Between here and there, we are not to set ourselves to wondering exactly why an earthquake may have happened in this place at this time, but rather as Jesus reminded his disciples: see an event like this as a powerful prompt into repentance, even as the ground around us is shaking and is the earth itself demonstrates our need for redemption in its own waiting for our redemption for its restoration. When we are prompted to ask the question why, whether an earthquake like this is strong or weak, whether it happens in a highly populated area or out in the countryside, when we see something like this that vexes us and leads us to wonder the question what is God doing in the midst of this, we need to remember the words of that great British Baptist pastor Charles Spurgeon, who advised his own congregation, in a situation like this, with these words:  “If you can’t trace his hand, trust his heart.”

 

If you follow a presidential administration or a White House press office closely, you’ll notice something very interesting. If the President and his administration want a story buried, they release it on Friday; often on Friday afternoon. Releasing a story at that time on Friday means that they don’t want attention drawn to it, they hope the affairs and complications and distractions of the weekend will mean that the story is largely forgotten before people begin the normal work week on Monday morning.

2) White House announces modifications of birth control policies, without resolving moral issue

This past Friday the Obama Administration announced newly formulated, perhaps it’s better to say newly modified, policies on the now infamous birth control mandate of the ObamaCare health care legislation. You’ll keep in mind the fact that this has been controversial from the start. And the modifications announced Friday are at least the third or fourth iteration of these policies. What makes the timing very interesting in this case, is the fact that the Obama Administration faced a severe setback earlier in the summer when the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision, sided with the firm’s Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods in making very clear that those for-profit family held corporations were not obligated to include and pay for contraceptives, especially contraceptives it might serve as abortifacients in the healthcare plan for their employees. But the looming issue had to do, not so much with companies like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods, but rather with the nonprofit Christian and religious sector; mostly including, not only churches, synagogues and mosques, but also religious schools and similar organizations.

 

Right after the Hobby Lobby decision was handed down, the Supreme Court also granted temporary reprieve to schools including Wheaton College in Illinois. An evangelical institution, Wheaton had complained that its own Christian conscience, as an institution, was violated by the birth control mandate because the modification that it previously been offered by the Obama Administration, still required Wheaton to enter into communication with the insurance provider for its employees in a way that was basically an accounting trick that only hid the fact that somehow, in the background to paying its premiums, Wheaton was actually complicit in the distribution of contraceptives that it believed could well be abortifacients. But as the Chicago Tribune reported yesterday,

 

the Obama Administrations new rule issued on Friday is aimed at winding down its years-long fight with religious groups over the requirement in its year-long healthcare law that companies provide insurance that covers contraceptives.

 

That’s according to the report by Kathleen Hennessey. She went on to explain the new rule will allow employers to register their objections to paying for such care with the government. That is to say, rather than with the insurance company, which would then step in and arrange for insurers to provide coverage to women seeking it. And with this modification, the Obama Administration, by the way, announced that it was by no means stepping back from its administrative goals, the administration clearly hopes that this would put an end to the controversy and potentially avoid a future embarrassment before the courts. Will the modification offered Friday by the Obama Administration be enough to put the issue to rest? It’s not clear that it is.

 

As a matter fact, two problems immediately arise. The first was made very clear by the Family Research Council in its response to the policy and that’s this, the policy is still a shell game. It’s still basically an accounting trick. The reality is that the insurance premiums paid by Wheaton College, or similar kind of Christian institution, will still, one way or another, undergird the contraceptive coverage that they’re trying to avoid. The second problem is also very clear and that is this, the policy that was announced as modified on Friday, does nothing to enlarge the group of institutions, organizations, and congregations that will be covered by this modified policy. This leaves a lot of religious organizations still out in the cold, and that’s a huge problem. The story was effectively dumped on Friday afternoon, but you can count on the fact that there will be a lot of consideration given to it this week. That’s because in an issue of conscience like this, it isn’t the story that’s going to be buried and isn’t an issue that is going to go away; on that you can be absolutely sure.

3) Richard Dawkins promotion of aborting Down Syndrome babies consequence of atheistic worldview

In considering the importance of worldview, indeed the life or death importance of worldview, it is hard to imagine anything more pressing and clear than an incident that had to do with British scientist Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most famous protest atheist, in terms of his twitter account last week. Last week the issue of children born with Down syndrome erupted because of tweets sent by Richard Dawkins in response to an incident in Ireland. Referring to a news story that had to do with the macabre and horrifying discovery of hundreds of babies’ bodies, including many apparently affected by Down syndrome, someone asked if that was a civilized response of a civilized people. In response Richard Dawkins tweeted this:

Yes, it is very civilized. These are fetuses, diagnosed before they have human feelings.

 

Well there you have a worldview in less than 140 characters. Richard Dawkins simply cast away the sanctity and value of all these lives, simply because they are merely, in the first place, fetuses and second, they are diagnosed as carrying Down syndrome. But if that particular exchange gained a lot of attention, it was a second exchange that exploded in terms of social media. A woman responded to the conversation between Richard Dawkins and Aidan McCourt in the earlier reference and said

 

I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down Syndrome. Real ethical dilemma.

 

Richard Dawkins responded quickly,

 

Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.

 

Now remember that Richard Dawkins has written in one of his books that is the equivalent of child abuse to raise a child in a religious tradition; to indoctrinate children into a faith such as Christianity. But here, his worldview becomes glaringly, horrifyingly, apparent when in just a very few words he simply says, and I read it again,

 

Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.

 

Notice very carefully his words: simply abort it and try again. In other words, every pregnancy is now a tentative pregnancy. If evidence comes along by diagnosis that anything that is unwelcomed is a part of this child’s future, you simply abort the child and start all over again. This is not the threat of a one day, in the future, arrival of a designer baby; this is the announcement that right now, as we well now know, there are many who are ordering designer babies in the present. But you can’t exactly order a designer baby or designer embryo, you simply have to discard or destroy the ones, or even abort the ones that do not meet your specifications and is exactly was taking place; but it’s not only taking place, that is exactly what Richard Dawkins commands. But notice he doesn’t just commend it as a choice that, in his view horrifyingly might be justified, he actually says to an even greater horror, that it would be, and I read his words again,

 

It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.

 

So he actually argues, and we have to watch this very closely, he actually argues that it will be immoral to bring a Down syndrome child into the world if you have that diagnosis in hand.

 

After the controversy erupted in such a glaring way, the very next day Richard Dawkins offered an apology on his own website. But if this is an apology, it takes the form of so many modern celebrity apologies. It’s an apology that basically comes out to this: I apologize if you were offended by what I wrote. Dawkins blamed the controversy on the fact that he has voracious critics, but also on the limitation of Twitter to 140 characters. He said that if he had more space he would’ve answered the woman with this longer paragraph, and I read it in full,

 

Obviously the choice would be yours. For what it’s worth, my own choice would be to abort the Down fetus and, assuming you want a baby at all, try again. Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort. And, indeed, that is what the great majority of women, in America and especially in Europe, actually do.  I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare. [Dawkins continued,] I agree that that personal opinion is contentious and needs to be argued further, possibly to be withdrawn. In any case, you would probably be condemning yourself as a mother (or yourselves as a couple) to a lifetime of caring for an adult with the needs of a child. Your child would probably have a short life expectancy but, if she did outlive you, you would have the worry of who would care for her after you are gone. No wonder most people choose abortion when offered the choice. Having said that, the choice would be entirely yours and I would never dream of trying to impose my views on you or anyone else.

 

Notice very carefully, in that more elaborated paragraph Richard Dawkins doesn’t concede anything. He doesn’t take anything back. He doesn’t modify his argument in any significant moral way. He goes on to reassert in even more elaborate words the point that he made in the 140 characters of the earlier tweet. He still thinks that it will be immoral, if you have the choice, to bring a child with Down syndrome in the world. With those words, either in the short or the longer form, you see the deadly consequences of the atheistic worldview of Richard Dawkins. You’ll notice several things in particular. For one thing, there is no grounding of any sanctity or dignity of human life. At some point along the continuum of fetal development, it appears by implication that Richard Dawkins must believe there is some value then to that life. He makes very clear that he sees no value at all at least the early stages of pregnancy. And when it comes to a child born with Down syndrome, Richard Dawkins sees nothing but unfettered trouble and obligation. He sees nothing of the glory of God in the creation of a child that comes into the world bearing Down syndrome, very much made in the image of God, one of us – not one of those. A human being made in God’s image to be received and treasured.

 

At the very end of his apologetic non-apology, Richard Dawkins offers this very telling sentence, which is also of tremendous worldview importance. He writes,

 

To conclude, what I was saying simply follows logically from the ordinary pro-choice stance that most us, I presume, espouse. My phraseology may have been tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding, but I can’t help feeling [he wrote,] that at least half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand.

 

No, Professor Dawkins, the problem here is not that you were misunderstood – the problem is that you are all too horrifyingly understood. And Professor Dawkins is profoundly right about one other point he makes in that final paragraph and that is this, his worldview is exactly congruent with the normal pro-choice or pro-abortion worldview. It’s exceedingly helpful in terms of clarification to have Richard Dawkins make that point so plainly.

 

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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 08-25-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Earthquakes in Napa and Peru reminder of instability of world

Napa, Calif., gets back to business after 6.0 quake, USA Today (Elizabeth Weise and Jon Swartz)

Strong California Quake Hit Vineyards, Surprised Many People, Wall Street Journal (AP)

Large Earthquake Strikes Central Peru, Wall Street Journal (AP)

2) White House announces modifications of birth control policies, without resolving moral issue

White House revises birth control rule to accommodate religious groups, Chicago Tribune (Kathleen Hennessey)

Obama’s Rules of Enragement, Family Research Council (Tony Perkins)

Obama offers new birth control fixes to religious nonprofits, some for-profits companies, Associated Press (Josh Lederman)

3) Richard Dawkins promotion of aborting Down Syndrome babies consequence of atheistic worldview

Richard Dawkins on babies with Down Syndrome: ‘Abort it and try again – it would be immoral to bring it into the world’, The Independent (Jenn Selby)

Richard Dawkins offers half apology over those Down syndrome comments: ‘Half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand’, The Independent (Ella Alexander)

Abortion & Down Syndrome: An Apology for Letting Slip the Dogs of Twitterwar, RichardDawkins.net (Richard Dawkins)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-22-14

The Briefing

 

August 22, 2014

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

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

 

You may not be aware of it, but childlessness is now claimed to be a lifestyle category. This point is made abundantly clear in the Financial Times by Janan Ganesh, who wrote an article accusing those with children, and the larger society, of being intolerant to those who choose not to be parents. He goes on to argue,

 

A childfree life is as good as any other [he then goes so far as to say] – and often better

 

He writes,

 

There is nothing like that moment when you cradle a friend’s newborn baby, gaze into its helpless eyes and realize, with a pang, that you would rather be almost anywhere else.

 

Well, maybe you haven’t had that experience, I would add, but evidently Janan Ganesh has had that experience and he thinks that those who do not share that experience often respond to the childless, the deliberately childless, ‘the child free’ – as some in the United States call themselves – with intolerance. He then writes, and I quote:

 

We are no longer citizens, sporting just one indivisible identity. We have become our genders, pigmentations, sexual leanings, lifestyle choices and credal enthusiasms, and our expanding notion of rights is always taking in new minorities: transgender people, the depressed, the merely offended.

 

But then he says,

 

There is one exception to all this mutual reassurance. The tent of identity politics [he accuses,] was never pitched wide enough to cover people who forswear parenthood. There is no childfree “community”, lobby or discourse to speak of. The childless are political unpersons – not persecuted but not noticed either.

 

He then continues in his argument to suggest that the welfare state is itself stacked against the childless. Why? Because the welfare state privileges those with children and represents a financial transfer from those without children to those with children – something he believes should be seen straightforwardly as being unjust and wrong. But wait just a minute. Why in the world would welfare systems, taxation systems, and societies at large privilege the raising of children? Why would tax structures appropriately recognize children and parenting as a responsibility on behalf of the larger society? It is because of a simple fundamental fact that the author of this article profoundly ignores, and that is this: if there are no children, there is no future for society. Every single human society throughout history has privileged the procreation and raising of children, and it is done so precisely because that’s the very essence of the civilizational drive. To be a conscious being is to be driven by a survival instinct, and societies as collectives of beings are no different. The survival instinct of every single society is been to recognize the importance of the raising of children – and to privilege and honor those who bear that responsibility in any generation – or at least that’s been true until most recently. And we also need to recognize that the biblical worldview has pointed to the fact that that is not only a civilizational imperative, it is a reality of human life, of the reality of the family and marriage, and of God’s plan for humanity from the very beginning. After all, as early as Genesis 1:28 there is the mandate that Adam and Eve are to multiply and to take dominion and replenish the earth.

 

Interestingly Mr. Ganesh actually references a recent controversy having to do with the historian Niall Ferguson of Oxford University and of Harvard.  Mr. Ferguson got into trouble for suggesting that some economists may lean towards liberal theories of the use of capital if they have no children, and thus are not concerned, because of those children, for the future. Even though Niall Ferguson was roundly criticized for an argument – that frankly is rather obviously true – it also turns out that Mr. Ganesh says, as one who is deliberately childless, there’s a point to be made there. In his words,

 

To be childfree is to encounter what economists call a steep discount rate: money is worth more now than in the future. Pension provision aside, there is little reason to defer gratification. College fees, a nest egg, a house big enough for a playroom – there sure are a lot of things to not bother saving for.

 

But the essence of the worldview that he represents is also made abundantly clear in his column in the Financial Times. He writes,

 

Any distaste we feel about this account of the good life is at odds with almost everything else we believe. After all, the whole point of the liberal journey that western societies have been on since the 1960s – and, really, since the Enlightenment – is the primacy of the individual.

 

Well, there you have it – the end result. The logical conclusion of this kind of absolute individualism is to de-privilege families, parenthood, and children – severing individual from society. Suggesting that all that society is is an accidental coagulation of individuals. And according to this worldview, every one of those individuals should be concerned about nothing more than his or her own rational self-interest – owing nothing to anybody else and certainly not to the future.

 

Ganesh goes on to say that the unfinished business of liberalism is to extend the dignity and respect to those who “Stand far from the breeding crowd.”

 

So there you also have another sneering indication of the worldview behind Mr. Ganesh’s column. The world is divided between the breeding crowd and those who yearn for something better – a life unencumbered by children, without the responsibility to build a play room, or to have a savings account for college. All those things are simply encumbrances that the absolutely self-directed individual can very well do without, thank you. He concludes his article,

 

Going childfree is not a frigid denial of life, it is the ultimate immersion in life.

 

Well let’s just put it this way: it is the ultimate immersion in the completely self-centered life, in the life of unbridled, unrestricted, infinitely asserted, individualism. Some Christians are surprised, and others are irritated, to realize that in the Scripture there is not even a category for a married couple that does not desire children. Deliberate childlessness of the variety championed in this article by Janan Ganesh is absolutely foreign from the Christian worldview. It is also the statement of what may be called, a terminal generation. If everyone followed Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative and did exactly as to Janan Ganesh does, this would be the last generation on earth. Of course Mr. Ganesh isn’t worried about that, because he’s quite happy for someone else – he calls them the breeders – to take up that task.

 

The intersection of biblical authority and popular culture is illustrated in a recent article that appeared in World Magazine. Jeff Koch reporting for that magazine writes about the Christian music group known as Gungor, suggesting that the group has now drifted from biblical orthodoxy. As Koch notes,

 

[Gungor is] known for creating a supple pop-eclecticism that transcends traditional genre limitations while maintaining Christian themes.

 

But then he says and I quote,

 

But their latest work reveals a band transcending not just musical genres but religious ones—wandering away from a biblically defined Christianity to a land twixt and tween.

 

Koch points back to an article that appeared in the October 25, 2013 edition of the Oakland Press in California in which Michael Gungor said that at some point in his recent life, he had “lost his metaphysic,” if you will. He also said that he had experienced an existential crisis sometime late in 2012. This led him to question many of his beliefs about life and the Christian faith, and as he told the paper

 

I’ve kind of let go of a lot of the concerns I had and just am trying to be present in life. And, interestingly, it affected the music greatly. A lot of the stuff we’d written about before was very grand and idealistic and big ideas, and this album [speaking of one of his most recent albums] to me is a little more earthy, a little more about being right here and right now.

 

In the group’s more recent music, they’re speaking of what Mr. Geiger said

 

We thought were true, but no longer are. Stories that we lived by, defined ourselves with, but can no longer believe in.

 

In an article entitled “What Do We Believe?” published at the group’s website, Michael Gungor wrote,

 

I have no more ability to believe, for example, that the first people on earth were a couple named Adam and Eve that lived 6,000 years ago. I have no ability to believe that there was a flood that covered all the highest mountains of the world only 4,000 years ago and that all of the animal species that exist today are here because they were carried on an ark and then somehow walked or flew all around the world from a mountain in the Middle East after the water dried up. I have no more ability to believe these things than I do to believe in Santa Clause or to not believe in gravity. But I have a choice on what to do with these unbeliefs. I could either throw out those stories as lies, or I could try to find some value in them as stories. But this is what happens…[he continued] If you try to find some value in them as stories, there will be some people that say that you aren’t a Christian anymore because you don’t believe the Bible is true or “authoritative”. Even if you try to argue that you think there is a truth to the stories, just not in an historical sense; that doesn’t matter. To some people, you denying the “truth” of a 6,000 year old earth with naked people in a garden eating an apple being responsible for the death of dinosaurs is the same thing as you nailing Jesus to the cross. You become part of ‘them’. The deniers of God’s Word.

In an article published at their website just a few days ago entitled “I’m With You,” Mr. Gungor went on to say that there is ample scientific evidence to know that human beings

 

…did not come from two individual 6000 years ago.

 

He went on to say,

 

We can PROVE these things beyond a reasonable doubt with science.

 

Concluding that column Mr. Gungor wrote,

 

Gungor is not, and has never been a fundamentalist band seeking to spread young earth, biblical literalism across the planet. Sorry if that disappoints you. Still, I hope some of us can use this opportunity to find unity within disagreement rather than turn it into another fundamentalist witch hunt over something extremely peripheral to what really matters.

 

The most important words in that particular senates are the words the conclude it, where he says that these things are “extremely peripheral to what really matters.”

 

That claim we’re going to have to consider. In an article that appeared at the website of BioLogos, a group representing theistic evolution in the main, Gungor said in the interview and I quote

 

I think a way forward is to adopt the position of so many Christians throughout history: Let scientists do the science, and if that plainly contradicts something we read in Scripture, then re-interpret how we are reading Scripture. The Bible makes for a great religious text, but it is not such a great science book. And vice versa.

 

With that statement Michael Gungor, whether he intends it or not or even recognized it or not, has revealed what is known as his epistemological authority. He’s made very clear what intellectual authority gets to trump all others – and his words are very straightforward.

 

If science, he says, conclusively proves something and it’s in conflict of Scripture, then you reinterpret the Scripture. So the authority, quite clearly, is modern science. Whatever the prevailing consensus is of modern science, whatever science claims to have “proved” – to use those quotation marks – at that point he says you have to reinterpret the Scripture.

 

In his interview with BioLogos he responded to the new story in World Magazine by saying,

 

I had to go through a period of perspective shifting, which can be a very scary and even painful thing to go through. But the perspective that I moved to could be summed up like this: Is it possible for a myth to be beautiful, important, and even “true”? And I now absolutely believe that the answer to that question is yes. There is a beauty to a great symphony or piece of poetry, for example, that has nothing to do with the other elements of “truth” like historical accuracy.

 

Speaking of Adam and Eve in the Genesis accounts of creation Gungor said,

 

Likewise, does believing that Adam (a name meaning “man”) and Eve were not actually two individual naked people in a garden 6,000 years ago having conversation with a snake make the idea that “the wages of sin is death” any less true? In fact, are there any truths other than historical accuracy that we can glean from those stories that are less “true” if those stories are myths and poems? I don’t see any.

 

Well, Michael Gungor might not see any problem here, but the big problem is in virtually everything he says. He uses the category of myth exactly as the 19th century Protestant liberals used it, to deny the historical accuracy of Scripture or the possibility of historical revelation. When Michael Gungor speaks of his perspective shifting what he’s actually doing is shifting into theological reverse, moving right back to the last decades of the 19th century, associating with theological ideas which were a part of that Protestant liberalism which also came over to the United States, infecting many denominations and seminaries. You see it is actually impossible not to live by an epistemological authority – that intellectual authority that determines what gets to trump other claims to knowledge. We will either believe that the Bible is the inerrant and fallible word of God, that it is the specially revealed word of God – which is our ultimate intellectual authority because it is indeed the word of God – or we will see it merely is a collection of inspirational and spiritual writings that are to be ‘reinterpreted,’ that’s Michael Gungor’s word, when it comes to claims of a superior intellectual authority – in his case, modern science.

 

His category of myth, by the way, runs face-to-face with the fact that that is exactly what the Bible itself repudiates. That’s exactly what the apostle Peter addresses in 2 Peter when he writes that the apostolic message concerning Jesus Christ was not a cleverly devised myth, rather he said, we were eyewitnesses of these things, pointing to the fact that the claim here is to an absolute historical accuracy, not to some kind of mythological meaning. There are several other dimensions of this situation that deserve our attention; one of them is the fact that this is inherently arbitrary. Michael Gungor says he can’t believe in a historical Adam and Eve anymore, but he wants to make very clear he still believes in the miracles of the New Testament; but why? He has just pulled the rug out from under his own intellectual argument, because if he is just allowed the naturalistic assumptions of modern science to deny the reality of Adam and Eve, how can he not follow those same naturalistic claims of science when they denied the possibility of the miraculous? Now I want to be clear, I’m saying that Michael Gungor doesn’t believe in the reality of the miracles, I am saying that if he does – I hope he does – he is simply doing so arbitrarily; having pulled the rug out from under his own intellectual argument.

 

This also points to the fact that what we’re talking about here is not the so-called slippery slope argument (Which I should also add isn’t always a false argument). It is a false argument if you say that a person denying one doctrine, then therefore has to go on to deny all other doctrines. That’s not true. Because many people actually are mentally incoherent and theologically inconsistent, but the theological peril should be expressed this way: if you decide that you’re going to undercut biblical authority when it comes to very clear historical claims that you say now have to be reinterpreted by the assured findings of modern science, then when it comes to any other issue, if you fail to follow those same naturalistic assumptions, you’re just being arbitrary. It may not be that you will also deny all those other doctrines that run into direct conflict with the naturalistic scientific worldview, but if you do not do so it will simply be because you decided not to do so, not because you are consistently recognizing an intellectual authority. And that’s exactly what the Scripture claims to be.

 

In the formula that evangelicals have known throughout the centuries, when the Bible speaks God speaks. The issue remains that simple. In reality, the fact that Adam and Eve were real, objectively, live human beings, who lived in space and time and history is essential to the entire biblical narrative; not just to the interpretation of Genesis 1 and following. One of the saddest aspects of this particular theological compromise is that it appears that Michael Gungor thinks that what he has achieved here is something new. It isn’t new. It’s just back to the future. It’s back to Protestant liberalism. And what, by the way, did Protestant liberalism achieve? The undermining and subversion of the church in the name of saving it – saving it from itself. We’re not called to save the Bible from itself, the Bible makes explicit truth claims. We’re not to try to save the Bible’s from those truth claims, but rather to receive them for what they are – the word to us which is the word of God. I’m indebted to World Magazine for bringing this to our attention, this is not – I remind you – a tempest in a teapot.

 

Finally, a consideration: the importance of the issue of education and worldview. This week’s issue of Time magazine includes a story about the burgeoning controversy over the Common Core project, in terms of the nation’s public schools. And as article by Haley Sweetland-Edwards and Holly Springs makes very clear, that the Common Core project, which was undertaken by Congress and by the United States government with the cooperation of most of the states five years ago, began as a project that was supported largely by both conservatives and liberals – at least those involved in the project. But now, it is under attack by both conservatives and liberals for equal and opposite problems. As Time magazine reports,

 

The standards were designed by state officials as a way to make sure that students in, say, Montana are learning at the same level as their counterparts in Maine. But as Common Core is rolled out this month in every grade level at every public school in the 41 states that have adopted it, the political controversy surrounding its implementation threatens to derail a program once hailed as a model of bipartisan accomplishment.

 

Why? Well the most important thing we need to recognize is that the answer the question why, is the inevitable infusion of worldview and education. You simply can’t talk about education without dealing with which worldview, what worldview, is going to be the dominating focus of a curriculum, or in this case of an entire educational approach. Why did conservatives and liberals support this in its inception five years ago? Well, conservatives are very pleased that one of the ambitions of conservative educators, going all the way back to the Reagan administration and beyond, was to achieve measurability in terms of testing, to come up with a way of knowing whether children are learning anything, as a way of finding out at the educational process is actually producing educated citizens. On the left, the interest is very different. The interest on the left was in creating what it considered to be a coast-to-coast set of standards and expectations for the curriculum, along with an understanding of the professionalization of the teaching class. So there were two very different ambitions that lead to one project known as Common Core, and yet it’s coming apart at the seams – as Time magazine’s article is merely a hint of. It would be impossible to offer complete review of the Common Core controversy, but this much should be clear –when you hear the words Common Core, you need to think back in American educational history to the words common school. The idea of the common schools should be traced back to secular theorist Horace Mann who wanted to free the schools from the influence of the church, and who also wanted to create a school in every local community that would reflect that community, and would create in that community a common body of knowledge and a common citizenship. The common school basically came to an end at the beginning of 20th century when control over the schools, including over hiring policy and curriculum, passed into the hands of credentialed professional educators rather than in the hands of local citizens elected through local school boards.

 

The common schools were to teach reading, and writing, and arithmetic, geography, and history, and math, but as the common schools developed into the public schools, they took on other responsibilities as well. And those responsibilities were laden with worldview significance, along with the original disciplines. But the public school project of the 20th century, largely led by humanist advocates such as John Dewey, that school project was intent upon, in the words of Dewey: separating children from the religious prejudices of their parents. The Christians looking at this need to recognize that something very fundamental is at stake here. First of all, the affirmation that education is more important than many people ever conceive. Education is about the creation of persons, not only the perpetuation of knowledge. Some worldview is going to be communicated and is going to be fundamental to the entire educational process. And when it comes to Common Core, the development of national standards is basically the fulfillment of everything Horace Mann and John Dewey wanted, but at a national level. And that means that the common school project is officially dead, and that the public schools no longer belong to the public locally, but in terms of control over the curriculum, all things are now nationalized. And that means that the current project of the Common Core is that the child in Maine and the child in Montana and the child in Mississippi, to use the language of Time magazine, would not only know the same things but also share the same worldview, and that’s why a lot of parents in Montana, and in Mississippi, as well as Maine, are concerned and rightly so.  We’ll be tracking this issue in controversy as it develops in month ahead but it’s very telling, that here, even as the first year of full implementation of Common Core is supposed to happen, it appears the entire project is falling apart at the seams.

 

 

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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 08-22-14

1) Childlessness as a lifestyle immersion in the self-centered life

Being childless, Financial Times (Janan Ganesh)

2) Gungor reveals modern science, not Bible, as his ruling authority

Gungor drifts from biblical orthodoxy, World Magazine (Jeff Koch)

Gungor keeping his feet on the rock, Oakland Press

What Do We Believe?, Gungor Music (Michael Gungor)

I’m With You, Gungor Music (Michael Gungor)

Faith after Literalism: An Interview with Michael Gungor, BioLogos Forum

3) Common Core controversy indicates importance of worldview to curriculum

Crashing the Core Curriculum, TIME (Haley Sweetland-Edwards and Holly Springs)

 

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 08-21-14

The Briefing

 

August 21, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, August 21, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Murder of James Foley can only and must be described as evil

The images were searing, and have now been removed from most social media sites. The images include a video of an American freelance journalist being beheaded by the forces of the group known as ISIS or ISIL, the Islamic State. And what we’re looking at is the raw, unadulterated, undisguised face of terrorism. The former director of the CIA General Michael Hayden, speaking to FOX News, said this is the very essence of terrorism: the intentional public murder of a human being in order to make a political point. That is indeed the very essence of terrorism, but it also reminds us to look at the spectrum of terrorism, recognizing that other groups that may not be so extreme are actually operating out of the same playbook, but it just happens that right now, the Islamic State is even scaring other terrorist organizations. And from a worldview perspective, that is extremely interesting and pertinent, because what we’re looking at here is the very essence of the thing, and from time to time we need to look that in the face –and that’s exactly what the Islamic State wants us to do with that video. And what we have to do in response to it is to fail to look at the video, but not to fail to look at the facts. Viewing that video actually fulfills the death wish of the Islamic State. It actually extends their terroristic attack upon this American.

 

The American is a freelance journalist by the name of James Foley, who had been captured along with dozens of other freelance journalists in Syria during the Civil War there, most in the year 2012. As a relatively young man, Foley, who was one of five siblings, went to Syria in order to cover the story. He went without the protection or the assignment of a major media organization, and that added to his vulnerability, a vulnerability shared with others who had been captured and are now being held by the Islamic State. It is not clear when the murder of James Foley took place, what is clear is that the video was posted by the Islamic State – which interestingly enough uses the technology of modernity, including social media, in order to spread its message of hate. The Islamic State posted the video on Tuesday and the 4 minute 40 second video immediately went largely viral on social media sites until most of them, at least the recognized and respectable ones, began to take it down. Twitter has gone so far as to actually delete the accounts of individuals who have sought to post the video – an unusual act of corporate citizenship that itself needs to be respected. The video was titled, “A Message to America”, and as the New York Times reports, it shows the journalist kneeling in a deserted landscape, clad in an orange jumpsuit.

 

I call on my friends, family and loved ones to rise up against my real killers — the U.S. government —

 

Said James Foley in a statement that was clearly written by his captors and forced upon him. He said that it is the U.S. government that is responsible for

 

For what will happen to me is only a result of their complacent criminality.

 

After the murder of Mr. Foley, which by the way was undertaken by a man with a very fine and recognizable British accent, the video went on to threaten to kill Steven Sotloff, another American national who had previously worked for Time magazine and other American news organizations. The voice on the video then continued with these words

 

The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision,

 

The message of the video was clear. The leaders of the Islamic State were trying to warn President Obama and the United States, to end the military action against them. In response President Obama rightly condemned the action of the Islamic State and spoke up for the sanctity of life of Americans now being held in Syria and elsewhere. He also made a very interesting statement about the Islamic State, and I quote,

 

They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people. So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just god would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.

 

The main thrust of the President’s statement was very clear. That particular paragraph is profoundly and unfortunately unclear. The President says that a clear distinction has to be made between actions of the Islamic state and Islam, but it’s actually up to Islamic authorities to make that very clear and it’s actually up to Islamic figures and leaders on the world scene to put an end to the reputation of the Islamic State as having anything to do with Islam. The President of the United States is in a rather difficult political position; he clearly wants to distance himself from the war on the Evil Empire language that was used by his predecessor President George W. Bush. But in avoiding the word “evil,” the President actually largely dodges the central issue at stake here. That was recognized by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida who said,

 

I remain deeply concerned that, despite the preponderance of evidence that proves ISIL is a fundamentally evil and dangerous terrorist threat to the United States, President Obama continues to appear unwilling to do what is necessary to confront ISIL, and to communicate clearly to the American people about the threat ISIL poses to our country and to our way of life.

 

One of the confusions of that paragraph I read from the President’s statement is that he does indeed attempt to say that the Islamic State’s agenda is a war against humanity, with no particular focus. But that is clearly not true. Even though it is true, as the President said, that most of the victims thus far of the Islamic State have been fellow Muslims, we need to note very carefully that the fact that those fellow Muslims that have been targeted is due to the fact that the Islamic State claims they’re not Islamic enough – they are not adequately opposed to the West. Remember that just a few days ago our intelligence authorities revealed that the main goal of the Islamic State is nothing other than a direct attack upon the United States of America and other Western nations.

 

In the final analysis, the situation revealed in this video and murder demonstrates the indispensability of a short four letter word in English language – and that word is ‘evil.’ The avoidance of that word leads to all kinds of moral confusions and ethical evasions. The fact is that some acts, some acts both in their intention and their execution, are so evil that no other word – even a word like despicable, which actually refers to the response to the act, rather than the act itself – will do. The word evil, even if you don’t want to talk about an Evil Empire, is indispensable. And make no mistake, it is an empire. But the other thing to recognize is that the very use of the word evil is inherently theological – that is one of the great lessons of the 20th century. Philosophers who sought to speak about the moral realities of the 20th century found themselves over and over again using the word evil, for instance in response to the Holocaust to the Jews by the Nazi regime in World War II. But as many of them also recognized, the word evil – rather uncomfortably for many and certainly awkwardly for those who are many of the leading atheist and agnostics of the 20th century – at the end of the day seems inflexibly theological. And that too is a testimony to what we understand when we hear as Christians of these horrifying events in the Middle East.

 

One other thing does have to be mention, I spoke of that important editorial that appeared a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal in which the question was raised, where are the voices of Muslim outrage? Well, as a matter of credibility, at least one needs to be mentioned and he is the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia. The Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, who is the highest religious authority in that nation, said on Tuesday that the militant group, the Islamic state, and he also mentioned Al Qaeda, were in his words,

 

“Enemy number one of Islam” [and he went on to say] and not in any way part of the faith.

 

One of the very interesting things about that statement is that any statement made by the Grand Mufti is associated also with a political power of the House of Saud, the ruling family in Saudi Arabia – which means, if nothing else, that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is very concerned about the Islamic State, and if anyone ought to know what the danger really is, it should be the Wahhabi leaders of Saudi Arabia.

2) Leading with empathy must be Christians’ first response to Ferguson

Here in the United States attention continues to be devoted, if not primarily, at least largely, to the city of St. Louis and to the outbreak of violence and protests in its suburb of Ferguson after the shooting on August 9 of an 18-year-old unarmed African-American man by police. That particular issue is an excruciating reminder that the racial issues in America continue, and that if anything, every one of these issues seems to raise so many of the same questions. But it also raises a host of other temptations we need to think about.

 

I first addressed the issue back on August 12, which was than the first opportunity I had to speak to the issue, since then I have not addressed the question because I wanted to stand by what I said back on August 12. We should not speak to the facts on the ground until we know what those facts are. The facts we know now are pretty much the facts we knew then. That there was an 18-year-old African-American young man who was shot six times, twice in the head and four times in the forearm, by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. We know that also, there was an immediate backlash in terms of controversy, cries of racism, and then moral protests that led to over 10 days of successive riots and protests – some of them breaking out into violence, some of them to which police responded with military tactics. We also know that now the Attorney General of the United States and the FBI are involved in an independent investigation to find out what exactly took place. We also know that yesterday in Clayton, Missouri, a suburb in the west of St. Louis, a local grand jury was convened with the very same aim – to try to determine exactly what happened.

 

We need to recognize that this is a testimony to the way the American justice system works. In attempts first to try to determine the facts with multiple levels of accountability, many Americans failed understand the importance of grand juries in our system of justice. Grand juries are important because they are panels of local citizens who hear evidence presented by prosecutors and determine if there was criminal intent, a criminal act, and if there is sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. The grand jury can then hand down what is known as an indictment, and the indictment leads to an arrest. The grand jury’s not the only avenue to an arrest. Police, if they are faced with adequate evidence upfront, can immediately arrest an individual. But after that, there has to be another authority to release the indictment. In any event, this is the way justice is supposed to work. And all persons, regardless of race, should be thankful for the fact that the Attorney General of the United States has gone to St. Louis to guarantee to the citizens there and elsewhere, that justice will be done. That is the main role of the Attorney General of the United States. It is rare for an Attorney General to intervene in local situation, but if any kind of local situation justifies that kind of intervention, this surely is at – because the main question being raised by this protest is whether or not justice is possible in Ferguson, Missouri. And the reality is that justice must not only possible, but must be achieved, and that’s going to require independent analysis of the evidence and what exactly took place. Because the one thing that Christians, committed to a biblical worldview, have to understand is that the facts never cease to be important. We simply cannot move to judgment until we know exactly what took place and why. Thus we have to resist the very real temptation to say too much, and that is what is worried me in terms of my own responsibility on The Briefing. Actually, my point here was very well made by President Obama himself. Because in statements made earlier this week responding to the situation in Ferguson, the President said,

 

I have to be very careful about not prejudging these events before investigations are completed, [the President continued] I’ve got to make sure that I don’t look like I’m putting my thumb on the scales one way or the other.

 

That’s a very good and important statement from the President of the United States, and quite frankly is a statement all of us should take to heart.

 

We do know this much, it is an unmitigated tragedy; it’s a tragedy that an 18-year-old young man is dead. We also know that the tragedy is complicated by the fact that this was an unarmed African-American teenager. We know that there are any number of other complications as well, to be revealed in the investigation, which we are now assured of the undertaken, not only by local authorities but also by federal authorities. And after all Eric Holder is the first African-American Attorney General of the United States and one who has spent his life as an activist and an advocate in the civil rights movement. In this case, he is uniquely equipped and qualified to deal directly with the questions on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri. The rest of us need to hold back and allow the justice system to do its work. That doesn’t mean that we suspend judgment on these questions indefinitely; it means the time for judgment is after the facts are determined. And even if they are competing facts, at least the facts need to be set out as they are claimed in order that we can have an understanding, each to ourselves and commonly as citizens, of what the situation really is: how it happened and what it means. Once we have those facts, we need to move to the kind of moral judgment that justice requires. But a part of the biblical worldview that is made abundantly clear, even in the Old Testament law, is the evidence, in other words the determination of the facts, never ceases to be the first and most important question.

 

But there is another dimension to this, and that was made very clear in an opinion piece that was run by St. Louis Public Radio by a man by the name of Jim Santel, an African-American who grew up in this very community, Mr. Santel made a very important point, and he made so calmly, and he made so very clearly. As he said, Americans of all races, Americans no matter where they live, when faced with a story like this need to “lead with empathy.” That too is something important to the Christian worldview. We need to lead with empathy, understanding that the ability to empathize is an ability to understand every single human being around us as our neighbor. Love of neighbor, one of the most important commands of Christ – after all, he said it was the second most important commandment after love of God. Love of neighbor should lead us to lead with empathy, a very good and important phrase. And in this case, that means we empathize with those in the African-American community who are outraged at what they see as racial injustice. It means we empathize with those who look at the situation and see it as part of a larger pattern of inequity and injustice against young African-American males. We certainly empathize with those who look at the situation and understand it is a part of the very tragic pathology that affects far too many African-American young people, and especially young men and boys. We empathize with the community now reeling from all of these protests, trying to understand how to reestablish order and to protect human life and human dignity in the process. We need to lead with empathy, but that empathy needs to be expressed in ways that do not prejudge the facts on the ground and lead to an immediate and premature understanding of exactly what happened. Sometimes, as every parent knows, you need to put an arm around someone and let them cry before you asked them what happened. Even when we see people expressing outrage, in clearly inappropriate, violent, and illegal ways, we need to understand behind them are many people who are not violent, who are equally offended. We’re not protesting for equally hurt. And we need to realize that empathy, indeed leading with empathy, is a very important first act.

 

There’s a double problem in so many of these crises. There’s the immediate temptation to say too much and then on the other side of them, once those facts are determined or at least once a situation is clarified, there is often the reality of saying too little. Christian responsibility in a situation like this, and we are all inadequate to the task, is to say just enough of the right time. And until the facts are more clarified, something that is the responsibility of our justice system at every level, that’s about the most we should now say.

3) Quest for personal fulfillment now understood to trump even the family

Finally, a testimony to just how radically the family is being redefined was given an awkward testimony in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times. And it came in the atrocious column entitled, Unhitched. It’s an atrocity because here’s a column in the New York Times, repeatedly devoted to stories about how people got unhitched rather than hitched – and almost all of them are emphatic to present just how happy these people are in their unhitched state. Oddly enough, it’s often published right alongside the marriage announcements in the very same paper – which is a very awkward reality – but it points to the fact that there is so much moral confusion that it even shows up in the formatting of America’s most influential newspaper.

 

We need to keep in mind the arguments of the so-called gay conservatives, who have been arguing that conservatives should support the legalization of same-sex marriage because of the supposed civilizing effects it will have on the homosexual community. This argument is made straightforwardly by gay writer such as Jonathan Rauch, Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan and William Estrich of Yale University. Their argument is that same-sex marriage is essentially a conservative movement. They actually undermine their argument by going so far as to suggest that same-sex marriage would in inevitably transform marriage into something else. They say that even as the legalization of same-sex marriage would create a civilizing context for homosexual relationships, they also acknowledge that the very reality that homosexual persons be married will transform marriage. Many of them have argued that it will open marriage to a new, less restrictive, understanding that it had in the past. Several have gone so far as to suggest that the legalization of same-sex marriage will lead to the marginalization of monogamy, as an expectation of marriage.

 

Well this particular article in the unhitched column of the New York Times seems to be a strange testimony to what’s happening to the family and to the radical redefinition of the family that is happening in our times. The two people identified are Clark and Valerie. We are told that they got married in 2000 and in then they unhitched, to use this word, in 2007. But even as the unhitched, it becomes clear they didn’t actually divorce. They haven’t divorced because they’ve come up with a new arrangement whereby there basically cohabitating. The woman in this relationship, who had been the wife of the man, is still legally his wife, but she now has had a relationship with another woman and she’s open to relationships with other men. The man in the situation also has other relationships, but they have stayed together to co-parent their child in what they acknowledges as a very nontraditional home. As Louise Rafkin, the columnist explains,

 

In 2007, Valerie began a relationship with a woman, but she and Clark decided to remain primary partners in parenting. He moved to a separate bedroom in their home.

 

He then said, and I quote:

 

People’s hearts change. It was the most difficult thing in my life to watch her fall in love with someone else.

 

And remember, they’re still married. Valerie is then quoted in the column as saying,

 

We’re a really happy family and we both have grown up and become responsible for our own fulfillment.

 

That might go down as one of statements that reveals the very essence of this moral revolution we are now experiencing – a revolution that is now redefining the family right before our eyes. Here you have a couple, living with their biological child, who remain legally married, but married in no other sense. They intend to live together, at least for now – having unhitched, to use their words – in order to share co-parenting responsibilities. Each has romantic attachments to others outside the marriage, and their frankly not romantically interested in one another anymore. But in perhaps the most emphatically important portion of that statement made by Valerie, she said that each of these two people has:

 

Become responsible for our own fulfillment.

 

That’s evidently the only goal. The quest for personal fulfillment means that everything else has to dissolve in its wake, including the reality of marriage, including monogamy, including any rational understanding of what it means to be a family.

 

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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.