R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 349

Lead with Empathy, Love Your Neighbor, Let the Truth Come Out — A Response to Ferguson

From a modified transcript of today’s edition of The Briefing:

I first addressed the situation in Ferguson back on August 12th, which was then 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 12th. 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 6 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 protest 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 Saint Louis—a local grand jury was convened with the very same aim, to try to determine exactly what happened.

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 has 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 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, it’s 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 assured will be 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 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 should suspend justice on these questions indefinitely. It means the time for judgment is after the facts are determined. And even if there 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 this 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 that evidence (in other words, the determination of the facts) never ceases to be the first and foremost important question.

But there is another dimension to this… “Americans 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—…should lead us to lead with empathy… 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 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 ask them what happened. Even when we see people expressing outrage—in clearly inappropriate, violent, and illegal ways—we need to understand that behind them are many people who are not violent who are equally offended, who are not protesting, who are equally hurt. And we need to realize that empathy—and indeed leading with empathy—is a very important first act.

There’s a double problem in so many of these crises. There’s an immediate temptation to say too much. And then on the other side of them, once those facts are determined, there is often the reality of saying too little. The Christian responsibility in a situation like this—and we are all inadequate to the task—is to say just enough at 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.

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The Briefing 08-21-14

Podcast Transcript

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

James Foley and the Last Journalists in Syria, The Atlantic (Uri Friedman)

Militant Groups Says It Killed American Journalist in Syria, New York Times (Rukmini Callimachi)

World ‘Appalled’ by James Foley Beheading, Obama says, ABC News (Erin Dooley)

Obama Transcript and Video: World ‘Appalled’ by Foley Murder; ISIS ‘Cancer’ Must Be Extracted, Wall Street Journal

Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti denounces Iraq’s Islamic State group, (Reuters)

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

Attorney General Eric Holder pens open letter to Ferguson, Washington Post (Nia-Malika Henderson)

Holder Arrives in Ferguson as Grand Jury Convenes in Police Shooting, Wall Street Journal (Devlin Barrett)

Obama would much rather talk about Iraq than Ferguson, Washington Post (Phillip Bump)

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

Together on the Road to Divorce, New York Times (Louise Rafkin)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-20-14

The Briefing

 

August 20, 2014

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

It’s Wednesday, August 20, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Response to ‘Purge’ hoax reveals fear of humans that law might be removed

“In five seconds you will experience anarchy” – those are the opening words to the theatrical trailer for this summer’s movie known as The Purge: Anarchy. Last summer the movie was known as The Purge, and taken together these two movies have now entered American popular culture, even if they were not blockbusters at the box office. And recently, both of these movies had gained attention – especially in cities such as Louisville, Kentucky – because the cultural phenomena that appears to have erupted in social media. Last Friday night many people in Louisville were quite concerned because a teenager sparked a crisis in the city by announcing that there would be a purge in Louisville on Friday night. What is it you ask? Well as USA Today explains,

 

The horror movie, released [this summer, that is The Purge: Anarchy], creates a world in which the government lifts every law for a 12-hour period, making all crimes — including murder — legal… [as well as]…suspending all emergency services.

 

What we’re looking at here is a movie that depicts a dystopian – that is the opposite of a utopia. If a utopia is a perfect world, a dystopia is a perfectly awful, evil, deadly, world.  And you can’t really conceive, in terms of the moral imagination, anything that would be more dark and deadly than the world that is described in either the movie The Purge or The Purge: Anarchy.  Anarchy is actually the right word for this, because that is the moral state of the absence of law or legal authority. What’s really interesting from all this is what the movie and the response to the movie and the cultural phenomena now in social media, what it tells us about the utility of the gift of law, what it tells us about the goodness of the fact that God created us in His image as moral beings and the goodness of the fact that God has given us the gift of the moral law. Without the moral law, we simply don’t have any measure of what is right and wrong – there is no structure of conscience in the universe, there is no moral sense of gravity, there is no restraint upon human evil.

 

The threat in the larger culture that USA Today is writing about, the threat in Metropolitan areas from Texas to Colorado to beyond is that there would be something that would mimic The Purge, in terms of their own community. Frankly, the actual fear is that some kind of false information sparked on social media will lead some people into the very set of conditions that these movies demonstrate – a murderous and deadly set of conditions which people operate without any law and society itself breaks down. Where law enforcement is suspended and even crimes, up to murder, are simply not matters of legal or moral consequence. But of course the very fact that these movies are gaining popular attention, even some conversation in the larger culture, tells us that these are issues that immediately spark human fears and no little amount of human imagination. It is a part of the human imagination to just wonder what it would be like if we were in a world without legal authority and without the restraint of law. In fact, most people, most human beings, at some point in their development have thought that they might even have wished for an escape from the moral law and from the reality of moral responsibility. But the more you think about it, the more dystopian this actually appears to be. The more deadly and dangerous we understand a world would be if laws removed.

 

Of course, Christians, armed with knowledge that is given to us by God’s revelation in Scripture, are already warned of the effects; as the Old Testament tell us, when every man does what is right in his own sight. We remember, for instance, the bedlam estate of moral anarchy that God judged in terms of bringing the flood, giving the entire Noah narrative its moral sense of meaning. We need to understand that from the biblical perspective, the great fear is not that the law would be given but that the law might be forgotten, or even that it might be removed. Many Christians, evangelical Christians in particular, are fully aware of the fact that the law is a positive reality – even as we often speak of it in the negative, reminding ourselves, as the Scripture makes abundantly clear, that we are saved by grace and not by the law. As a matter fact, wherever you find a clear understanding of Reformation doctrine – making the gospel crystal-clear – what you find is a clear distinction between grace and law. But we also need to understand that grace can’t possibly appear to be grace unless to get to the laws is understood within its context. This is the point that the apostle Paul makes emphatically in Romans 7, where he himself asked the question: if the law kills me and slays me by his negative judgment is it then evil? And the apostle Paul says, by no means, it certainly is not evil. It is God’s gift to tell me the accurate diagnosis of my problem – which is that I am a lawbreaker, I am a sinner, and to point me towards the only salvation from that peril and that is: the redemption that is accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

In evangelical theology, the laws have been spoken of as having at least three uses. One of the uses is to show us our need for the Gospel, the other use is to restrain human evil, and the third use is for instruction to godliness and faithfulness in the Christian life. Now, when we look at the Gospel, we come to understand what it means to be saved by grace and not of works – not to be saved by the law and not to confuse the Gospel with moralism. Far too many evangelical Christians end up speaking disparagingly of the law, in such a way that the movie The Purge actually brings to our attention. The dystopia of The Purge and its successor movie The Purge: Anarchy, the fact that you have law enforcement officials and the writers of USA Today concerned that there may be actual attempts to mimic The Purge, all these things are very clear indicators of the goodness of the law and how thankful we should be for the gift of the law. How concerned we should be, as Americans now seem to be intuitively concerned, about what happened if the law were to be suspended and legal authority were to disappear. And these two movies appear to be dystopian and scary precisely because they are at least indicators of what would happen if the law were removed and if legal authority were to disappear.

 

It’s hard to believe that there’s much of a serious threat of Americans actually trying to mimic this movie in any wide scale approach, but one thing is clear: this conversation helps us to understand why the law is such a gift, and why the restraining power of the law in human society is so absolutely necessary. If the movies, known as The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy are in any sense entertaining, it is because it is not only fascinating but horrifying to imagine a world in which the law has simply been suspended; in which there is no moral accountability. And even worse it’s possible to conceive a world in which there is no moral conscience, there is no binding sense of moral knowledge that is a source of the restraint against evil that is so necessary in human society.

 

Christians looking at the controversy over these movies need to recognize that a basic theological point is being made, a point that is central to the Christian worldview. The understanding that the world we live in is dangerous enough because of sin and its consequences in God’s judgment upon human iniquity. But it will be far worse if God did not love us so much that he gave us, as one of his gift to humanity, the moral knowledge that is part of being made in His image and the restraint of the law that is given to us in order that we might not kill each other, and rob from each other, and do everything that will be imaginable, even without the knowledge of the evil that is thereby done.

2) Confusion from legal marijuana indicate importance of law as moral teacher

But oddly enough, even as there’s a lot of cultural conversation about those two movies, there’s even more conversation about a more lasting and troubling issue – and that is what is known as legal marijuana. In this case as well, what we see is a testimony to the necessity of law, not only to the existence of law, but to the law rightly reflecting what leads to human happiness, to human order, and to human flourishing. For instance, looking again to USA Today a major article appeared on the front page entitled, “Colorado Aims to Produce More Legal Pot.” This is one of those headlines that even just a couple of years ago would’ve made no sense whatsoever, but it makes a rather awkward since now. And as USA Today reports, here’s the problem for the state of Colorado: Colorado legalized recreational marijuana and intends not only to make it available, but to make money off of it – in terms of revenue to the state. So in order to regulate this newly legalized marijuana trade, it has come up with ways whereby there are authorized growers and authorized distributors, in order to sell marijuana to people who would otherwise legally be able to buy it, in order that the state may gain some tax revenue.

 

But here’s the reality, there aren’t enough people growing marijuana through these legal channels for Colorado to get the income that it thinks it needs. Colorado’s actually battling now a black market in marijuana, which is the very thing they promise to be eradicated, if only legal marijuana were to be made available. But it turns out that is not enough marijuana being sold through these legal channels for Colorado to get the tax income that it promised itself and its citizens. As Katie Kuntz of USA Today reports,

 

As a result, Colorado state regulators are trying to increase the amount of marijuana produced and sold by legal retailers.

 

Ron Kammerzell, identified as Colorado’s deputy senior director for enforcement for the state Department of Revenue said,

 

Right now, we are pretty significantly under what should be produced

 

Now remember, this is the Department of Revenue, this is about tax income. Here you have an official, the Colorado government, saying ‘we’re selling marijuana but we’re not selling enough of it, we need to sell more, and in order to sell more, we need to grow.’ So what we see here is a parable of what happens when you tamper with the law without understanding the consequences.

 

Some of those consequences are made quite clear in an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 14, the writers were William J. Bennett and Robert A. White. Bill Bennett is well-known as the first drug czar, he was the first director of the National Drug Control Policy and was so under President George H.W. Bush; Mr. White’s an attorney at Princeton, New Jersey. As they write, “Legal Pot Is a Public Health Menace.” A couple of paragraphs in their article make the issue very, very clear. As they write,

 

In the journal Current Addiction Reports found that regular pot use (defined as once a week) among teenagers and young adults led to cognitive decline, poor attention and memory, and actually decreased IQ. On Aug. 9 [that’s just a matter of less than two weeks ago], the American Psychological Association reported that at its annual convention the ramifications of marijuana legalization [and as this article in the Wall Street Journal indicated] Krista Lisdahl, director of the imaging and neuropsychology lab at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, saying: “It needs to be emphasized that regular cannabis use, which we consider once a week, is not safe and may result in addiction and neurocognitive damage, especially in youth.

 

Bennett and White then say,

 

Here’s the truth. The marijuana of today is simply not the same drug it was in the 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s, much less the 1930s. It is often at least five times stronger, with the levels of the psychoactive ingredient averaging about 15% in the marijuana at dispensaries found in the states that have legalized pot for “medicinal” or, in the case of Colorado, recreational use. Oftentimes the level of that chemical, known as THC, is 20% or higher.

 

That is a radical multiple of the marijuana that was available in the 1960s and 70s. Bennett and White conclude,

 

There are two conversations about marijuana taking place in this country: One, we fear, is based on an obsolete perception of marijuana as a relatively harmless, low-THC product. The other takes seriously the science of the new marijuana and its effect on teens, whose adulthood will be marred by the irreversible damage of their brains when young.

 

They say,

 

Supporters of marijuana legalization insist that times are changing and policy should too. But they are the ones stuck in the past—and charting a dangerous future for too many Americans.

 

But add to those two articles, yet another that testifies to the importance of the law and to getting the law right, and making sure that the law teaches the right things.

 

Writing on August 18, in the New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope reports that one of the big problems that parents and educators, especially in states where marijuana has been legalized, are now facing is the fact that what they’re saying to their kids doesn’t match what their actually saying to themselves – and the kids know it. Tara Parker-Pope reports,

 

These are confusing times for middle and high school students, who for most of their young lives have been lectured about the perils of substance abuse, particularly marijuana. Now it seems that the adults in their lives have done an about-face.

 

 

And that’s exactly what has taken place. In state after state, you might say around dinner table after dinner table, parents are now acknowledging that they’re using what had previously been illegal, and which they are now saying is prohibited for their own children. Tim Ryan, an anti-drug educator who works with middle school and high school students said about these kids,

 

They are growing up in a generation where marijuana used to be bad, and maybe now it’s not bad

 

Meanwhile, the New York Times itself has been arguing over the last several weeks for the legalization of marijuana. And in its own reporting, in this story, it indicates the acknowledgment of just how dangerous marijuana use can be for teenagers and adolescence. It turns out the many of today’s adults, even parents, are confusing their own children and teenagers about what’s right and wrong because, here’s the point, they’re confusing their own kids of a right and wrong because of their contortions with the law.

 

The fact fundamental to both of these stories is very important. Having to do with the movies known as The Purge and having to do with the confusion faced by so many people, especially young, people over the issue of marijuana. The Purge movies remind us of how important the law is and what a gift the law is to restrain evil. The law makes civilization possible, and makes moral meaning possible – you take away the law and you take away the lawgiver and you have nothing left but moral anarchy. And the story about the legalization of marijuana and these new complications in states like Colorado, well they point to the fact that it is not only important to have the law but to get the law right – because the law is a teacher, it is a profoundly important moral teacher, and when you mess with the law, you mess with the morality. And there are a lot of confused teenagers in Colorado who are trying to figure out the confusion that they have just received from their own parents.

3) Sexual identity revolution recipe for moral anarchy

Finally, another testimony to moral confusion – this one of an even darker variety – Allen Metcalf for writing in the Lingua Franca column of the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us what we supposedly have learned in the last several years and what remains to be learned over issues of gender and sexual orientation and all the rest. He writes in the column,

 

It continues to be an education. Back in the late 20th century, we learned (as we had kind of known all along) that people were not simply male or female, but heterosexual or homosexual. The latter we learned to designate as gay, as opposed to straight. And then we learned to separate homosexuals by gender as gay or lesbian. So far, so good.

 

 

That’s a rather powerful paragraph when you consider the fact that what he’s stating there as what we learned is exactly what many people in the society around us think we did learn. But he is actually just getting ready to make his big argument. As he continues,

But then, as we investigated sexuality and gender identity more thoroughly, other types made themselves known. [And he says we learned] There were bisexuals, [he goes on to define that] …[then we learn that there were] transsexuals.

 

He says,

 

This gave us four types of exceptions from the older categories of heterosexual male and heterosexual female

 

By the time he says we reached the early point in 21st century we had not only heterosexual males and heterosexual females, but lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals… so in other words as that point the initials LGBT began to make sense.

 

A convenient abbreviation [he says] a convenient abbreviation to help us remember them all. (And [he says] we learned that transgender might be a better term than transsexual

 

 

So, these are things he says, we’ve been learning. But Metcalf’s recounting isn’t incomplete – not by a long – because as he suggests, we’re now learning more and more. What are we learning? Well he says for instance, we are learning there are intersex people who are neither male or female he defines that as a separate category of conversation, by the way, and then he says we add to those the asexual’s because even though they are just 1% of the population, and even though they say they don’t care about sex, they have to be counted as a new sexual minority – as well to be added to the alphabet soup. He then goes on and says,

 

And so, putting it all together, we get the abbreviation LGBTQQ2IA. Not so easy to remember. So someone came up with an alternative, the anagram Quiltbag.

 

The definition found in one gay dictionary he cites is this,

 

It stands for Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transsexual, Bisexual, Allied/Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer. It is meant [says this definition] to be a more inclusive term than GLBT/LGBT and to be more pronounceable (and memorable) than some of the other variations or extensions on the LGBT abbreviation.

 

And folks, I’m not making this up.

 

Metcalfe, who writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is speaking to the academic community, goes on to explain the Urbandictionary has a slightly different interpretation of this. Identifying the options as,

 

Q – Queer and Questioning

U – Unidentified

I – Intersex

L – Lesbian

T – Transgender, Transexual

B – Bisexual

A – Asexual

G – Gay, Genderqueer

 

Now keep in mind that here you have an educator, writing to the other educators of America, about how to remember these things. As you think about the expanding alphabet soup, and even as he traces the development, principally heterosexual male and heterosexual female to LGBT, and then on to – well, I won’t even repeat all the rest – he makes very clear that these options are hardly the last word. He says,

 

As gender-studies research continues, and discussion proliferates, other variations are likely to emerge.

 

Write that down as an almost certain understatement. He concludes, and this is really important to hear:

 

So young people nowadays have choices to make that they didn’t face before. And it’s not a once-for-all choice; they can question and redefine themselves at any time. They even need to let others know the pronouns by which they should be addressed. I’ll discuss these next week.

 

So let’s stay tuned for that article, adding to the confusion of that incredible alphabet soup he recited and yet with a straight face here you have an educator saying this makes moral sense. And furthermore, you have someone straightforwardly arguing that these are things we have learned, as if this is some kind of set of objective truth that have been placed before us. But he actually pull the rug out of his own argument by making very clear, this isn’t an objective reality at all – this is simply a socially constructed reality in which sex and gender are considered to be endlessly plastic.  In which, as he says,

 

Young people nowadays have to face choices they didn’t face before.

 

Well those choices are actually forced upon them by these sexual revolutionaries. And then he points to the truly revolutionary character of their assessment when he says,

 

And it’s not a once-for-all choice; they can question and redefine themselves at any time.

 

That’s a recipe for exactly the kind of moral anarchy we began talking about on the program today. And you’ll notice, that is not just something depicted in movies, it’s not just something discussed by legislators, it’s not something driven by intellectuals with an ideological agenda, and they make that agenda clear in articles such as this, published in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Keep in mind all this is not just about an intellectual debate, it’s about a battle for hearts and minds

 

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 08-20-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Response to ‘Purge’ hoax reveals fear of humans that law might be removed

Social media ‘Purge’ campaigns spark fear of bloody copycats, USA Today (Lindsay Deutch, Kelsey Pape and Ryan Haarer)

‘Louisville Purge’ takes toll, Louisville Courier-Journal (James Bruggers)

2) Confusion from legal marijuana indicate importance of law as moral teacher

Colorado aims to produce more legal pot, USA Today (Katie Kuntz)

Legal Pot Is a Public Health Menace, Wall Street Journal (William Bennett and Robert A White)

Legal Marijuana for Parents, but Not Their Kids, New York Times (Tara Parker-Pope)

3) Sexual identity revolution recipe for moral anarchy

LGBTQQ2IA, Chronicle of Higher Education (Allen Metcalf)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-19-14

The Briefing

 

August 19, 2014

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

 

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

1) Spread of Ebola aided by lack of cultural understanding of Western medical practice

Laurie Garrett, one of the world’s foremost specialists on infectious diseases has written an ominous story for Foreign Policy magazine, one of the most influential journals of the foreign policy establishment. The headline ought to have your attention “You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough About Ebola.” Laurie Garrett has a central concern here, and that concern is this: people in the West seem to believe that a disease like Ebola can be kept at a safe remove from the United States of America. And yet as she writes – even at this point, it has been rather localized, in terms of West Africa – all it has to do is get one significant population and it explodes. And she has her bull’s-eye on one particular population and that is the city of Lagos, Nigeria. Now the disease is in Nigeria, if it should reach this city with teeming millions there is nothing, she makes clear, to keep it from an international breakout. And as she says, quite ominously and quite truthfully, there is no vaccine and there is no demonstrated treatment for this disease, there are no pharmaceuticals available, there is no magic cure.

 

If indeed the drug that was used on the two evacuated US medical missionaries was effective, it will still not be available. And as Laurie Garrett says, the kind of outbreak we should fear is not going to wait for the development of either the technology or the delivery of those pharmaceuticals. Garrett says that far too many people in the West assume that there must, be in her words, ‘magic bullets’ in some rich country’s freezers that will instantly stop the relentless spread of the Ebola virus. She writes,

 

If you think airport security guards in Los Angeles can look a traveler in the eyes and see infection, blocking that jet passenger’s entry into LA,

 

you’re living in Neverland.

 

She cites John Campbell of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former US ambassador in Nigeria who warned recently the spread of the virus inside Lagos, which has a population of 22 million people, would instantly transform the situation into a worldwide crisis – thanks to the chaos, size, density, and mobility of not only that city but dozens of others in the enormous oil-rich nation. Add to that, she says, Nigerian civil war, national elections, Boko Haram terrorists, and a countrywide doctors’ strike – all of which are not just threatened, but already real.

 

A similar warning came in the August 17 edition of the New York Times, indicating that one of the major problems right now with containing the Ebola outbreak is the lack of medical personnel – and doctors in particular. Writing for the Times, Sheri Fink points out that many Western organizations have withdrawn their medical personnel – indeed many of them simply had to because the presence of those medical personnel was a part of the problem, and it still is. In much of Nigeria and West Africa there are many people who think that Westerners are infecting Africans with the disease. Western doctors are themselves suspects in the eyes of many Africans for spreading the disease, rather than for trying to help to treat it. That was made abundantly clear just recently when in Liberia people broke into a hospital full of Ebola patients and ‘liberated’ them – putting them out in the population because they felt they had be liberated from Western oppression. The article in the New York Times makes very clear the horrifying kinds of moral questions that are now addressing the world, not only in terms of the situation on the ground in West Africa, but the situation elsewhere, where people are having to make decisions in Charlotte, North Carolina and Denver, Colorado, and in Brussels, Belgium about whether or not to send medical personnel, what kind of medical personnel to send, and whether not sending them would help – or perhaps even hurt.

Similarly, over the weekend the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article indicating that one of the major problems there in West Africa is not only the shortage of medical personnel but of medical supplies. And one of them is profoundly simple – it turns out that one of the major avenues for the transmission of this deadly disease is the absence of medical gloves. As it turns out, the headline says, “For Want of Gloves, Ebola Doctors Die.” And is not just Ebola doctors who are dying – it’s medical personnel and others are contaminating patient by patient, taking the disease to people do not even have the disease. This kind of news should set seriously minded Christians to thinking very seriously about this issue, about this plague, this disease, and the larger questions that are involved.

 

For one thing, it should set us to praying in a whole new way when we understand this threat, understanding that we should be praying for the people of West Africa. We should be praying that this disease, this contagion will be contained. We should be praying that there will not be the kind of horrifying outbreak that Laurie Garrett describes in Foreign Policy magazine. We need to pray that – not just so that the disease would not reach us, but so that those who are even right now struggling with this disease may be among the last in this contagion to have to face that horrifying news. But we also need to keep in mind some other truths that most Americans never think of, and many American Christians are included in that number.

 

For one thing, let’s think about this for a moment, modern medicine is not just an invention or a discovery – it is an achievement, it is a monumental achievement, it is an achievement that emerged only in cultures that were committed to a very common worldview. And that worldview, was not the worldview of technology and industry, but the worldview that was inherited from the Christian tradition – the biblical worldview. The biblical worldview that dignified a rational world, created by an intelligent Creator, in terms of His omnipotence and His glory, who gave us the world and told us that it was to His glory and for our good that we would come to know it – a God of an orderly universe, who created that universe such that there is an orderly repeatable pattern. Modern medicine, indeed modern science, would’ve been impossible without that fundamental worldview. And add to that worldview, another very important issue and that is the dignity of human beings, the sanctity of human life. All those things came together with many other achievements in order to bring about the revolution we know as modern medicine. Most Americans for instance never ponder the fact that it was after the establishment of this nation in 1776, that people, even in the Western world, became accustomed and settled in what is now known as germ theory. As recently as the late 18th century, most people, even most intelligent and educated people – even in cities such as Washington and Boston and London ­– believe that diseases were caused by elements in the universe, and in particular clouds and humors, believing that mist carried those diseases, and that breathing the mist would cause the disease to be obtained, and avoiding the mist or the humor would prevent the same. But as it turns out, the invention of germ theory was instrumental to the rise of modern medicine and to the rise of the kinds of habits that go along with avoiding disease –the habits of hygiene and such things as antibiotics. Those things are part of the achievement of modern medicine, not just an invention, not just a discovery, but an achievement – and an achievement that requires a certain cultural understanding.

 

The absence of that understanding, right now among much of West Africa, explains why there are people trying to break into hospitals to liberate patients from modern treatment. Why the effort to isolate people, in terms of contagion, is seen as a form of racism or oppression. And amongst people who are even claiming that what is really going on here is an effort to harvest organs from people – the disease not even being real, they claim. One of our main concerns on The Briefing is to talk about the necessary intersection between worldview and life, especially as seen in the leading issues of the news and public conversation. Ebola is something that scares people, and as Laurie Garrett makes very clear, it ought to scare us. But far more than that, for the Christian worldview perspective it ought to make us think like Christians and understand just how thankful we should be for modern medicine – not as a gift of a secular modern age, but as the inheritance of a tradition that was established on the biblical grounds. And we should also see, in contrast, that where that worldview is absent, modern medicine actually doesn’t fit. We should be thankful that it has arrived in West Africa, but we should understand that is not always well received even when it has arrived. So as we say: worldview matters, it matters what you trying to get into a hospital or to break out of one.

2) Pro-choicer criticizes abortion movement for treating abortion as a significant moral issue

Frankly, you don’t have to look very far to find a deadly and devastating effects of a faulty worldview. In recent days all you had to do was look at the opinion pages of the Washington Post. If you did, you would find an article by Janet Harris identified as the president of Upstream Analysis, a news and social media analysis firm. We are also told she was previously the communications director of Emily’s List, a political action committee supporting Democratic pro-choice women running for office. In other words she’s been an activist for abortion – and when you look at this article you’ll understand that activism in a whole new sense. Headline of her opinion pieces is this, “Stop Calling Abortion a Difficult Decision” this is one of those pieces you would almost believe had been written by a pro-lifer in order to embarrass the pro-abortion movement – but  it wasn’t, it was written by someone with vast experience advocating for abortion. Janet Harris writes, and I quote:

 

Planned Parenthood calls abortion “a difficult decision” in many of its consent forms and fact sheets. When NARAL launched a film on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 2013, the president of the pro-choice organization called abortion “a difficult decision” women and couples face. Lawmakers [she says] use the adjective, too. “It was a difficult, difficult decision, but it was the right one,” [that was said by] Nevada Assemblywoman, Lucy Flores…in defending her choice to have an abortion at age 16.

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a United States Senator in 2005, described the decision to have an abortion as:

 

One of the most fundamental, difficult and soul-searching decisions a woman and a family can make.

 

But then Janet Harris writes this, and these are her exact words,

 

However, when the pro-choice community frames abortion as a difficult decision, it implies that women need help deciding, which opens the door to paternalistic and demeaning “informed consent” laws. It also stigmatizes abortion and the women who need it.

 

In Janet Harris’s view, abortion is not a difficult decision – indeed she says,

 

Often, abortion isn’t a difficult decision. In my case, it sure wasn’t. When I was 18, my boyfriend, whom I was with for more than a year, frequently pressured me into having sex. At the time, I lacked the maturity and experience to exert more control over the situation. For more than 10 weeks, I progressed from obliviousness about my pregnancy to denial to wishful thinking… Once I faced reality, though [she writes], having an abortion was an obvious decision, not a difficult one. The question wasn’t “Should I or shouldn’t I?” but “How quickly can I get this over with?” [she continues,] This was in the mid-1980s, when abortion was about women having control not just over their bodies but over their destinies.

 

Explaining her own decision to have an abortion and why it was such an ‘obvious choice,’ to use her language, she writes:

 

An unwanted pregnancy would have derailed my future, making it difficult for me to finish college and have the independent, productive life that I’d envisioned.

 

So very bluntly, she tells the reader of the Washington Post that it was an easy decision, an obvious decision, for her to have an abortion – terminating the life within her, so that that unborn child would not derail her life or make it difficult for her to finish college, and have what she describes as, “the independent, productive life that I’d envisioned.”

 

Janet Harris says she understands why the advocates of the pro-life position say that abortions a difficult decision, it’s because they wish it were, they hope it is, and in many cases, she implies, they want it to be. But she says it really isn’t a difficult choice, or shouldn’t be, she says when pro-choice advocates use the difficult decision formulation, they do so so as not to demonize women. They want to make it look as if women are struggling with the great and grave moral decision – and yet she says that’s not necessary. And just when you think her article can’t grow anymore atrocious, she writes

 

But there’s a more pernicious result when pro-choice advocates use such language: It is a tacit acknowledgment that terminating a pregnancy is a moral issue requiring an ethical debate. To say that deciding to have an abortion is a “hard choice” implies a debate about whether the fetus should live, thereby endowing it with a status of being. It puts the focus on the fetus rather than the woman. As a result, the question “What kind of future would the woman have as a result of an unwanted pregnancy?” gets sacrificed. By implying that terminating a pregnancy is a moral issue, pro-choice advocates forfeit control of the discussion to anti-choice conservatives.

 

From time to time we all read things that shock us, other things that horrify us – but this is not only shocking, it’s not only horrifying, it’s also very clarifying. Because here you have a woman whose had a major post in the pro-choice movement saying that it’s about time that that side of the equation simply took the issue of a hard decision or difficult choice off the table when it comes to having abortion. And she is so straightforwardly, if horrifyingly honest, to say that she makes this argument because the moment you say it was a hard decision, or difficult choice, you bring the fetus in the equation – you give it, as she says, a status – and she profoundly believes that the fetus must not have a status in this discussion. If anything, what she does is to lay bare the entire logic of the pro-abortion movement.

 

This is exactly the arguments made by the lawyers in the Supreme Court case in 1973 known as Roe v. Wade. They were arguing the fetus doesn’t have a status, this is exactly what those were opposing – even the partial-birth abortion ban act years ago were arguing – the fetus at no stage has a status, they don’t what the fetus as a part of the equation, they don’t want the fetus appearing on the refrigerator in that image from an ultrasound, they don’t want the fetus even implied in the statement that it is a difficult choice. She also goes on to say, as you heard her to say her own words, that the statement that it is a difficult choice or a hard decision implies that there is an ethical issue involved and she doesn’t believe there is. When she concludes her article she says that the only downside to the abortion, in her view, is that it is:

 

Highly stressful, and [in her words] humiliating evidence of a failure in judgment

 

But the failure in judgment is not the judgment to get the abortion and kill the baby, but rather the decision to have the sex that produced the context of the pregnancy that now is a problem, as she sees it, of no ethical significance.

 

In recent months we’ve been confronted with so many arguments coming from the pro-abortion side, arguments with the teeth bared, with no effort to disguise the intention. We have had women who claim that what needs to happen is a public relations campaign in order to make clear that women are proud of having an abortion, rather than being embarrassed of the same. They are now saying that abortion needs to be beautified in art and presented to the public in such a way that it’s an attractive option – rather than something that is to be whispered elsewhere. And now you have this one writing in the pages of the Washington Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the United States, a newspaper that is avowedly pro-abortion, but a newspaper in which is kind of article is still rather striking when it appears in the opinion page. And article is striking – because she’s not really here criticizing the pro-life side, she’s criticizing her fellow pro-abortionists, and she’s criticizing them for accepting, and for even acknowledging that abortion is a significant moral issue – that in the lives of many women, it is a difficult decision, it is a hard choice. It wasn’t for her, she says, and it should be for those women as well. She blames the pro-choice movement adopting that language for inflicting that ethical difficulty upon women, who otherwise would understand, as she did, that the fetus has no status at all and that there is no ethical issue here and the only question is how quickly she can get it done. ]

The culture of death generally hides behind euphemisms, false arguments, and equivocations. It’s really an acknowledgment of what the logic of abortion always is, when you have a woman who has had this kind of experience in the pro-choice, pro-abortion movement, criticize her own movement for suggesting that abortion might be a difficult choice, a hard decision, an ethical issue.

3) Anxiety in parenting reveals heart desires of parents

With Labor Day looming before us, most American schoolchildren are either already in school or soon to be headed that way, and as is usually the case with the back-to-school season, the media are giving a lot of attention to the back-to-school issues and there’s a flurry of articles having to do everything from the quality of schooling to school board and political issues, to questions about what children should wear, and what they should eat – but one most interesting dimensions of the conversation this year is a flurry of articles and analyses suggesting that parents are over-parenting, and that this is a problem for American schoolchildren. And there is also the acknowledgement that something’s wrong, not just with the curriculum but with the kids.

 

Writing the Wall Street Journal, Adam Price, a psychologist who practices in Newark City, New Jersey, writes about what he calls “The Underchallenged ‘Lazy Teenager’,” as he says the problem of lazy teenager is probably as old as humanity. However, American parents in the current generation seem to have forgotten how to deal with it. Simply wringing their hands as they are often very concerned about their lazy teenagers – and, as he says the major problem here is, the indolence of adolescent males, the laziness of adolescent boys. He’s not writing about the high achievers, whether boys or girls, trying to get into Harvard or Yale, he’s writing about some boys who are not achieving. He says,

 

They are the ones who make time for television, videogames, social media and friends, but not for school. Many do the minimum required to get by, flying under the radar of official “trouble” while causing their parents plenty of grief and consternation

 

He says,

 

My psychology practice is filled with middle- and high-school-age boys who cannot seem to achieve their “potential.”

 

Interestingly, Adam Price says one of the problems is parents are often a very poor judge of potential of their own kids, and sometimes they hold up the potential that is too high – leading their boys to believe, if I can’t meet that, I’ll  simply go into a shell and not do anything. But that’s not the main problem, he says far too many parents, when it comes to teenage boys, are telling them that they’re smarter than they are, that they’re doing better academically than they are, or they try to cushion the blow when the young man simply doesn’t do as well as he should have done. He also writes, not only should parent stop telling them how smart they are when they’re not actually performing in any smart way, but they should also stop doing the dishes for him.

 

Children are not helped when parents take care of household chores because the children are “too busy” with homework, sports and other activities. Treating them like royalty whose only job is to bring honor to the family gives them an unrealistic message about life—that they are special. Seeing a parent take out the garbage does not inspire a teenager to rush, with gratitude, to his studies. Rather, he draws the conclusion: “I am above all of that drudgery.” Successful people tend to be those who are willing and able to do things that they really don’t want to do [says Dr. Price]

 

Next, he says, don’t let the boy off easily. He cites clinical psychologist Wendy Mogul, who’s written

 

That it is easier for parents to feed, shelter and clothe their children than it is for them to set effective limits. But not enforcing consequences for the indolent teenage boy reinforces the notion, yet again, that he is special, and that the rules of the world do not apply to him.

 

Then he says,

 

Don’t make him shine for you. In a culture where teenagers scramble to amass credentials and gain admission to the best colleges…being considered average or even a little above has become unacceptable. But by overlooking the good in the quest for the perfect, parents saddle children with unrealistic expectations. A college counselor I know [he says] likes to say that a good college is one that fits your kid, not one whose name adds class to your car’s rear window.

 

Coming from a secular source, there is still an incredible amount of wisdom there and one that most parents can recognize as being a wisdom deeper than even a secular psychologist understands. But also buttressing his argument is an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of USA Today, the article by Michelle Healy is entitled “Parent-Reported Cases of Disability in Children Rise” and here’s what’s really interesting: it turns out that there has been a vast explosion of parent reported cases of disability in children, but not where they were expected, amongst those who are more impoverished, but amongst those where it was expected at all – those were the richest. It turns out that America’s most affluent and wealthiest parents believe that their children are somehow broken – marked by some kind of disability. As Healy writes,

 

Disability due to any physical condition, such as asthma and breathing conditions, hearing problems, and bone or joint problems, declined by 12% during the decade, while cases related to any neurodevelopmental or mental-health condition, such as [you know it] attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disabilities or emotional problems, increased by 21%.

 

And these wealthy parents are showing up with their children, and especially their teenagers, in the offices of doctors and psychologists and others, saying my child has a mental disability, has some kind of learning disability, needs some kind of drug, because otherwise you will be performing at the very top of the academic ranks and every major Ivy League college university will be seeking him for admission. Healy reports of the study that came out in the Journal Pediatrics yesterday indicated that amongst children living in affluent homes in the United States in the decades from 2001 to 2011, children in those affluent homes had a 28% increase in learning disability diagnoses.

 

The pediatricians looking at the at this report acknowledge that there is probably something going on here in terms the reality of some of these learning disabilities – but they say they can’t explain two things. Number one, this vast increase – some of that has to be simply an increase of parents worry, rather than any reality in the children and the second thing it can’t explain is why it’s happening mostly amongst the affluent, rather than amongst the impoverished – where at least these kinds of realities, if found, would be understood in terms of the context. No, the pediatricians are also noting something else and that is this: America’s parents, especially those parents amongst the elites and the parents who are most affluent, those parents have been believed that every one of their children must be like those parodied in the community of Lake Wobegon – they  have to be above average, and not just slightly above average but tremendously above average.  And what we have here is a set of very unmatched expectations of the part of many parents – who simply believe that their own self-esteem will rise or fall on whether their children are recognized by the larger world as being exceptional. Well every child’s exceptional, but not in the sense that is implied by this anxiety. The reality is, what we see in parenting is a mirror of ourselves, and what we see in parenting as we said yesterday in that international review, is what reveals a worldview in a culture and what reveals the heart of the parent as well.

 

It’s interesting that from secular sources there are now so many saying that American parents are over-parenting, over serving, over indulging kids – very arresting article here in terms of the indolent teenager,  but it is also really interesting that the same parents are turning around and saying if my child doesn’t get into Harvard or Yale, doesn’t gain all the approval of the world, and isn’t recognized as exceptional, it must be because of something like a learning disability – something I can blame or something for which there must be a pill. But in reality, most of our kids are average, most of the world’s average, and the glory of God is seen in the glory of average people.

 

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.

 

This morning at 10 o’clock (EST) I’ll be delivering the address at the annual opening convocation ceremony for Boyce College and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Following history and tradition of the Christian church through the centuries, we will be gathering together in order to consecrate ourselves before God for the academic year to come; praying for the Lord’s blessing. But there is a major message on my heart I want to share with the faculty and students at the seminary and the college, and you invited to watch as well. You can watch the streaming video at www.sbts.edu/live. The video will also be posted shortly thereafter.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

Do You Understand What You Are Reading? – The Christian Faith and the Call to Teach

Fall 2014 Convocation address given by Dr Mohler at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Alumni Chapel

The Briefing 08-19-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Spread of Ebola aided by lack of cultural understanding of Western medical practice

You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough About Ebola, Foreign Policy (Laurie Garrett)

With Aid Doctors Gone, Ebola Fight Grows Harder, New York Times (Sheri Fink)

Ebola Virus: For Want of Gloves, Doctors Die, Wall Street Journal (Drew Henshaw)

2) Pro-choicer criticizes abortion movement for treating abortion as a significant moral issue

Stop calling abortion a ‘difficult decision’, Washington Post (Janet Harris)

3) Anxiety in parenting reveals heart desires of parents

The Underchallenged ‘Lazy Teenager’, Wall Street Journal (Adam Price)

Parent-reported cases of disability in children rise, USA Today (Michelle Healy)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-18-14

The Briefing

 

August 18, 2014

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

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

 

We all know that the world is a dangerous place, and one of the signs of the particular danger of our context is the fact that a group can all the sudden emerge into our consciousness that we didn’t know about just a matter of weeks or months before. And yet it can now be a potent factor, landing almost every day in the headlines of the nation’s newspapers and having attention from all over the world. That’s certainly the group that is known variously as ISIS and ISIL – either the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In any case, it has to do with the group that used to be Al Qaeda in Iraq, that is now radicalized far beyond what Al Qaeda was already recognized to be – in terms of its terroristic threats and its actual potential. But what we are looking at now is a state of affairs in the world in which it appears that chaos, rather than order, threatens to break out at almost every turn. Journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign-Policy run articles suggesting that what we’re seeing is a return to tribalism and the decline of the nation-state.

 

That runs human history backward, so far as most of us in the West are concerned. Those of us who are citizens of the United States, or other modern Western nations, are generally unfamiliar with just how recent in terms of human history the nation-state actually is. And before the nation-state, they were various levels of either autocracy or chaos, battling empires or the absolute lawlessness that affected so many parts of the world. And there was the belief, at least to the end of the 19th century and certainly throughout the 20th century, that the rise of the nation-state would bring order out of all that chaos. The nation of Iraq as a matter of fact, is itself a classic example – it was created artificially as a nation-state, but the constituent parts of that nation were never unified, in any sense, other than what was forced by politics and military action. The Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites and a Christian minority all represented different understandings of exactly what the nation might be. And as current events make abundantly clear, any holding together Iraq as a nation is by force rather, at least at present, than by persuasion.

 

But the return of tribalism on the world stage should be something that rings with the familiar to Christians. All you have to do is think back to the narrative of the first book of the Bible. When we think about the Table of the Nations, found in Genesis 11, and what we find there is reference to families, clans, tribes, and nations. The nations identified in Genesis 11 aren’t modern nation-states, they are collections or groups of tribes. And what we see taking place in so much of the world today is that the nation-state that was believed to be the shape the future, actually has very little to do with what’s actually going on on the ground in much of the world – Iraq is a central example.

 

But on Friday of last week, Americans were informed by our own national intelligence agencies that the threat of a group such as ISIS and ISIL is not now limited to the Middle East, to the Levant, Syria, or most crucially right now, Iraq. Rather, as our own intelligence agencies have informed us now ISIS forms a threat to the United States. As Siobhan Gorman, Tamer El-Ghobasy, and Nour Malas of the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday,

 

[The groups] made in recent months by the group calling itself the Islamic State have bolstered its long-term ambitions to attack the West, including the U.S., and the group has become such a potent force that traditional counterterrorism tactics aren’t sufficient, U.S. intelligence officials said on Thursday.

 

The three reporters continue to write,

Officials painted a bleak assessment of the threat posed by a group that was largely counted out just four years ago, when it was known as al Qaeda in Iraq. Since then, it has staged an extraordinary comeback, particularly in the past year. The forces that fueled its resurgence are also the factors that will make it so difficult to defeat.

Citing intelligence agencies in Washington.

There are several ways to look at this news, all of them negative. One of them has to do with the fact that according to the very intelligence agencies who are cited in this report, almost every single one of the current leaders of ISIS was once in American custody. We once had them in custody, but then we set them loose and when we set them loose, they began to coalesce around an even more radical terroristic plot than even what would have been undertaken by Al Qaeda in Iraq.

 

Concerning an attack on the United States, the intelligence agencies said

 

It has pitched itself as the true successor to Osama bin Laden. The full implication of that is that it intends to focus on the West.

 

As The Wall Street Journal summarized,

 

While its focus on gaining territory has translated into local attacks, those moves are a means to the longer-term goal of attacking America and the West.

 

An unusually thoughtful understanding of exactly what we face was published over the weekend in the pages of National Review Online in a column written by Jonah Goldberg entitled ‘The West Gaza.’ As the subtitle of the article declares, “no one in the West wants a long struggle with jihad-ism – the problem is the enemy always gets a vote.” This has been the great problem that has plagued the Western tradition in terms of politics and foreign policy. In the West, there been successive attempts to tryto create a world peace – the League of Nations, before that the Congress of Nations, after that the United Nations and what we see time and time again is that lawlessness breaks out, even when the powers that be declare that they have established order. But Jonah Goldberg is making a very important point here, and one that Christians should well understand. Even when you declare peace, that doesn’t mean that there is peace –as the Scripture records, there is shame that comes to those who cry “peace, peace” when there is no peace.

 

Goldberg points back to the 9/11 attacks in 2001and points out that almost immediately those attacks were followed by a discussion that was flavored by the kind of understanding of the world that was offered by Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations, and the same kind of analysis offered by experts such as Bernard Lewis when he spoke of the problem with Islam. In both counts what we were looking at is the claim made by very credible academics, who understand the world and have a theory of the world, that what you’re looking at in the current conflict between Islam and the modern West is not something that is either new or resolvable.

 

And this is where Christians who understand the importance of conviction and worldview understand that if you have two peoples who are opposed by ideologies that are absolutely irreconcilable, and when one of these considers violence and appropriate means for furthering its ends, there is no way that the group that is not committed to violence can be completely non-violent because violence is inflicted upon them. This is why the Christian tradition in the West has offered what has been known as Just War Theory, often mentioned on this program. That’s the theory was developed all the way back in the fourth and fifth centuries in the Christian tradition in the attempt to understand when force is justified and must be used. That is not a question that is even asked in the Muslim world – there is no Muslim theory of Just War, because in the Muslim view any armed effort, any aggression, that ends up with a gain for Islam is just simply because of that fact.

 

It is Islam that divides the world into two different spheres: the world of Islam and the world of war – obviously implying from the very beginning of the Muslim experience that those who are in the world of Islam must enter the world of war in order to see Islam expanded to that territory as well.

 

Goldberg’s point in raising the ‘clash of civilizations’ model is to point to the fact that so many people on the left are embarrassed by any commitment to American or Western civilization to the point that they rejected there is any clash of civilizations – some go so far as to argue that there is no possibility of a clash of civilizations, believing that all peoples everywhere are basically the same, wanting the same thing, operating out of the same kind of worldview. Christians know that isn’t true. Furthermore, just about any sane analysis of the world reveals it isn’t true at all. Goldberg concludes his column with these sentences,

 

Pentagon officials told NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski that they see the Islamic State as a “10- to 20-year challenge.” I hope that’s pessimistic. But it’s simply realistic that the ideological agenda driving these jihadis will present a challenge for far longer than that.

 

Finally, he writes,

 

No one in the West wants a generational struggle with jihadism any more than Israel wants perpetual war with Hamas in Gaza. The problem is the enemy always gets a vote. It just may be that the Middle East will become the West’s Gaza. And, so far, nobody has a good answer for what to do about it.

 

Those last words are also important, no one, nobody, has a good answer for what to do about it.

 

And that leads me to an exceedingly important front-page story in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times – the headline, As World Boils, Fingers Point Obama’s Way. It written by Peter Baker and it is a very evenhanded article. It points to the fact that the chaos in the world is being blamed, at least in part, on the income of the Oval Office, the president of the United States. And Baker’s exactly right, in one sense that simply goes with the office, and in another sense presidents are themselves responsible for much of that misapprehension, because presidents build up the aura of their office so much that it seems as if the President speaking as President the United States can have an invincible will that should be inviolate just about anywhere on the planet. Baker cites people on both sides of the political spectrum, as you would expect in a piece such as this. On the right he cites Will C. Inboden, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush, and executive director of the William P. Clements Jr. Center on History, Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Texas. I should mention that Professor Inboden was my host for a public lecture at the Johnson School there just a matter of months ago. Will Inboden said

 

I certainly do not think President Obama is responsible for all of the world crises that have taken place during his time in office, [but he went on to say] but he is responsible for actions and attitudes he took that have contributed to some of those crises — and he is also responsible for how he responds, or fails to respond.

 

On the other side, Baker cites Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and a former deputy Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, he said what makes this period different is the diffusion of power from states to non-state forces – what we were just talking about in terms of the rise of the tribes – the rapid spread of technology in the rise of Islamic extremism. Talbott said,

 

We have an overall contagion of diffusion which makes it much harder to advance the cause of regional and global governance.

 

That is the kind of language, by the way, that’s rather common in the foreign-policy establishment the means basically we are in big trouble. Baker then says,

 

Some Democrats said Mr. Obama’s challenge has not necessarily been his approach to these crises, but his ability to explain and sell it.

 

And that raises a very important issue that should interest anyone interested in the way ideas form, and Christians at an even deeper level. Every leader on the world scene, or anyone who seeks to have an influence or understanding of what’s going on in the world, has to have what specialist in foreign policy have called for decades now a theory of the world. A theory of the world is a basic theory, not just of how geography works, but more importantly how foreign policy works.

 

What is the dynamic that leads nations to seek their way in the world – why are certain alliances steadfast while others break apart, why do things happen as they do in the world and what should we expect?  Is the natural state of the world peace or is it violence? Should we be surprised when order falls into the disorder? Or should we be surprised when disorder is arranged into order? Those are fundamental issues of worldview and this is where Christians have to understand some very important principles.

 

Part of President Obama’s problem is that he rejects the responsibility to have a theory of the world. He has basically said this even in some of his most important public addresses. In one sense it seems he trying to repudiate the very idea of a theory of the world – suggesting that such a theory is what got the United States into war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, which he judges to be entirely negative. I would argue that the main problem with President Obama’s foreign policy is that he actually doesn’t have one. That’s not to say that he does it make decisions and he hasn’t cast policies – it is to say in his rejection of a theory of the world he doesn’t even make clear what he expects to take place. Is he surprised when someone shoots or when they hold fire? It’s not at all evident.  Does he believe that democracy is a goal of all peoples or does he believe that it’s a cultural achievement – explained only by certain ideological commitments and certain kinds of understandings even of what it means to be human being? Where in the world does he ground a concern for human rights? Is it in some international consensus or is it in a deeper commitment – as Christians would voice – to the fact that every single human being, in every point of development, is equally made in the image of God.

 

One symptom of the way the world has been working of late is that it seems that on The Briefing on Mondays we tend to look at foreign policy issues simple because they demand that kind of attention. And that’s because it seems that almost every weekend brings a new sense of disorder in the world and new set of headlines about ominous developments on the world scene. But rather than just take the headlines and take each one in turn, we need to step back a bit and understand that we too have a responsibility to develop a theory of the world. We do not sit the Oval Office, we do not establish international policy, but it is our responsibility as intelligent Christians to develop an understanding of why we believe the world is as it is, and why we believe people act as they do, and why we believe wars and armed insurgencies occur and what we should do to confront them. How do we understand terrorism? What we do to answer a terroristic threat?  We should be at least comforted in part by the fact that Christians have been trying to think about this for centuries and have developed a very robust and substantial understanding of Just War Theory and other aspects of the morality and, for that matter, the theology of armed conflict, war, and violence.

 

But the Christian worldview based in an understanding of human sinfulness, and the fact that sinfulness is often set loose in terms of the world scene, also lead us to understand why Jonah Goldberg ends his column with a very insightful comment that no one seems to know what to do. Because Christians understand something, that it seems almost no foreign policy establishment understands – there is a good reason why these problems are intractable – it is because these problems are not waiting for a mere human solution, these problems not waiting for just the right diplomatic moment and just the right diplomatic insight, these problems are waiting for the Prince of Peace.

 

That is to say that Christians have an eschatological understanding of foreign policy – even as we have an eschatological understanding of every aspect of life. But having that understanding, and the fact that that understanding gives us and grounds us in hope, that doesn’t mean that we do not have a responsibility – and certainly that those in political office do not have a responsibility to act and act as wisely and helpfully as is possible, even in a fallen world, because the Christian worldview also honors something else – and that is even a gradualist gain, even a partial victory. The holding back of violence and aggression and evil, in any context, at any time, is itself a good thing. But the Christian worldview reminds us it’s not going to hold.

 

When I look at situation like this I think of the fact that when asked whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic, I have to say I’m neither – Christians have no right to be either optimistic or pessimistic, because both of those are false humanistic understandings. Rather, I live in hope. Perhaps a better way of expressing this was given voice by Lesslie Newbigin, the late theologian and missiologist who when asked, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?” said, “I’m not an optimist and I’m not a pessimist – Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.”

 

Finally on a lighter note, but one that also points to the importance of worldview and to cultural distinctions around the world, National Public Radio ran a story over the weekend on how American parenting styles just don’t match some of those found elsewhere in the world. They mention several, for example, in Norway parents have kids nap outside, even in subzero temperatures – it turns out that this is in the preschool program where children take naps outdoors and even when it is subzero they still take their naps outdoors. Secondly, Vietnamese mothers train their babies to urinate on command by age 9 months, when they’re out of diapers. Now as you would see if you read this article, the mechanism for doing that might be considered just a bit extreme. More akin to training a dog than training infant. But as NPR points out their babies are out of diapers at age 9 months. Third, people in some tribes in Kenya avoid looking their babies in the eye because they don’t their babies to feel powerful by having a kind of eye contact – so they just avoid looking their baby in the eye – they will look at each other, but not directly. Compare that to American parents who will stare into the eyes of their newborn all day long.

 

Four, Danish parents leave their kids on the curb while they go shopping. They just leave the stroller with the children or the babies in it outside the store, go in and assume they will be there when they come out. – just try the United States!

 

In the Polynesian islands, children take care of children. Babysitting is considered something that is appropriate for children as young as elementary school age when it comes their younger siblings.

 

Six, Japanese parents let their kids go out by themselves, and by going out by themselves this means that children as young as four are often found riding by themselves on the subway in Tokyo – four-year-olds.

 

And finally, in Spain kids stay up very, very late – it’s because people in Spain then have dinner very, very late. They want children be a part of the conversation so they let them stay up very, very late – sometimes even until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. The Spanish consider the American tradition of putting children to bed rather early to be cruel – meaning that American parents don’t want their children involved in family life.

 

Well listening to The Briefing today you may decide that you’re very glad that you weren’t potty trained in Vietnam, that you didn’t have to take naps outside in Norway, that you weren’t left out on the curb in Denmark, nor left on the subway alone in Japan – but I’m going to guess the kids listen to The Briefing today would wish that their parents ,when it came to bed time, were a bit more Spanish. Worldview matters, culture matters, it all matters.

 

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.

 

I Still Do – FamilyLife Conference Chicago 2014

The Briefing 08-18-14

1) Prominence of ISIS shows declaring peace does make peace

Iraq Crisis: Islamic State Now Threat to West, Says U.S., Wall Street Journal (Siobhan Gorman, Tamer El-Ghobasy, and Nour Malas)

The West’s Gaza, National Review (Jonah Goldberg)

2) Criticisms of Obama reminder that even Christians need to formulate ‘theory of the world’

As World Boils, Fingers Point Obama’s Way, New York Times (Peter Baker)

3) Worldview and culture affect parenting, too

Global Parenting Habits That Haven’t Caught On In The U.S., NPR (Emily Lodish)