R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 354

Baptist Polity and the Integrity of the Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention meeting last week in Baltimore was, in itself, a lesson in Baptist polity. The organizational structure of the Convention is directly drawn from Baptist principles, and those principles have been adapted to meet the new challenges faced by every generation.

In the last generation, the Convention responded courageously to the challenge of theological compromise, asserting both the right and the responsibility of the Convention to require confessional fidelity and theological integrity of its seminaries, mission boards, and other entities. That process culminated in the Convention’s revision of its confession of faith, The Baptist Faith & Message, in 2000. That revision included a clear statement of biblical inerrancy and a host of other truths that the Convention urgently affirmed.

In this generation, moral issues also require clear action by the Convention. Most urgently, the issue of homosexuality and same-sex relationships demand that attention. In this case, the Convention’s confession of faith is very clear — it affirms marriage as the union of a man and a woman and it affirms the sinfulness of same-sex behaviors.

Now, in this generation, the challenge faced by all denominations and fellowships of churches will be what to do with churches that deviate from that clear teaching and take any action to deny or to minimize those convictions.

A church that is recognized by the Convention as a participating church is a congregation that contributes to the causes of the Convention and is in “friendly cooperation” with it. The SBC Constitution states: “Among churches not in friendly cooperation with the Convention are churches which act to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior.” Thus, a church that takes any such action effectively removes itself from being “in friendly cooperation” with the SBC.

But this does not mean that the Convention does not have a responsibility to act on its own authority. In 1992 the SBC voted to withdraw fellowship from Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina and Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in neighboring Chapel Hill. Both churches had taken actions that endorsed homosexuality. In 2009, the Convention acted again to remove fellowship from Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, on the same grounds.

As the 2014 meeting of the Convention approached, a fourth congregation, New Heart Community Church in La Mirada, California, took a similar action. In this case, the congregation voted to retain its pastor after he announced that he had changed his understanding of same-sex relationships and behaviors. Pastor Danny Cortez acknowledged that his affirmation of homosexuality was a “radical shift” from the congregation’s stated position and the denomination’s confession of faith. He led the congregation to adopt a self-identification as a “Third Way” fellowship, allowing for multiple understandings of same-sex behaviors and relationships. That led to a schism within the congregation, with more conservative members leaving.

All this came to the Convention’s attention just days before the meeting in Baltimore. On June 2 I published an article alerting Southern Baptists to the development and making clear that the Convention now faces a duty to protect the integrity of its own confession of faith and integrity of fellowship. Further, I argued that there is no “Third Way” on the issue. Eventually, every church and denomination will have to decide if it will recognize or conduct same-sex unions. That moment of decision will come sooner, rather than later.

In Baltimore, the SBC did not act on the question, and for an understandable reason. The issues erupted just days before the Convention met, and there was no time for the Convention to come to a clear understanding of New Heart Community Church’s actual relationship, if any, to the Southern Baptist Convention.

Like many Southern Baptists, I was frustrated that the SBC could not and did not act during the meeting in Baltimore, though I fully understand why. I have no doubt that the Convention will act decisively and rightly at its earliest opportunity.

As the Convention gathered in Baltimore, there was a very real question about the nature and status of the New Heart Community Church. An official with the California Southern Baptist Convention said that the congregation is actually a mission of a parent church that does not affirm the mission’s revolt on this issue. If so, that issue needs to be clarified immediately and the “mother” church must act decisively to discipline the mission, assert its own leadership, and demand confessional integrity. If the mission continues in its revolt, that parent church must either repudiate the mission and sever fellowship, or it will violate its own confessional integrity and effectively remove itself from “friendly cooperation” with the SBC.

At this point, an urgent lesson in Baptist polity is in order. Baptists prize the autonomy of the local church — so much so that every local church is understood and affirmed to be complete in its ministry and free to determine its own membership, convictions, and principles. most Baptists know at least that much about Baptist polity.

But historic Baptist polity also affirms that every “general Baptist body,” meaning any association of Baptist churches at any level, is equally autonomous. and thus free to determine its own membership, convictions, and principles.

In other words, every local Baptist association, state convention, and national fellowship is free and responsible to determine the standards for its own membership and the principles of its cooperation. In 1992, with the challenge of the North Carolina churches in view, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted Resolution “On the Autonomy of Baptist Churches and General Baptist Bodies.” In that resolution, the Convention asserted that each Baptist church and general Baptist body is “sovereign in its own sphere,” citing historic Baptist language. Further, the Convention resolved to “affirm the autonomy of local Baptist churches and general Baptist bodies; and … confess our respective responsibility to maintain the integrity and scriptural discipline of every Baptist body in terms of faith, practice, membership, and programs, thus protecting the witness and purity of the church and denomination; and … urge a comprehensive preservation of historic Baptist polity, understanding the proper autonomy of local Baptist churches and general Baptist bodies under the mutual accountability all Christian bodies share under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”

I had the honor of serving as chairman of the Committee on Resolutions for that the 1992 Convention, and I was pleased that the SBC was ready to state clearly the principles upon which it was prepared to act with respect to the North Carolina churches.

Those principles deserve close attention now. The Los Angeles Southern Baptist Association, the California Southern Baptist Convention, and the Southern Baptist Convention now face a clear and unavoidable responsibility. None of these general Baptist bodies can act for any other. Each has the duty to determine its own membership and protect its integrity of confession and fellowship. Each must act as soon as it is able, once the situation is clearly understood.

The Baptist polity that stands behind this was well described by legal scholars Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr. and Philip C. Sorensen in these terms, using the Baptist General Convention of Texas as an example:

“The constitution of the Baptist General Convention of Texas is typical in stating that the state convention ‘has not, to any degree, and shall never have any ecclesiastical authority. It shall not have and shall never attempt to exercise a single attribute of power or authority over any church or over the messengers of the churches in such wise to limit the sovereignty of the churches, but shall recognize the sovereignty of the churches under one sovereign, Jesus Christ, our Lord.’ The state convention insists on its own autonomy as vigorously as the state convention defends the autonomy of the local church. The convention chooses its own membership and is sovereign within the bounds set by its own constitution. Therefore, just as it controls no church, no church or group of churches controls the state convention. The concept of messenger control of general Baptist bodies is firmly planted in Southern Baptist history and practice. Autonomy is so important that Southern Baptists guard against even the appearance of its compromise.”

Autonomy implies responsibility, and every general Baptist body related to New Heart Community Church now faces the responsibility to act. I am confident that the Southern Baptist Convention will act rightly. I am hopeful that the Los Angeles Southern Baptist Association and the California Southern Baptist Convention will act with equal clarity and resolution.

There is always sadness when fellowship must be withdrawn, but if the New Heart Community Church does not repent and return to agreement with our convictions and confession of faith, the failure to withdraw that fellowship will be nothing less than a tragic abdication of responsibility and a violation of theological integrity. The moment of decision will not be long delayed.

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

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., “There is No ‘Third Way’ — Southern Baptists Face a Moment of Decision )and so will you).” Monday, June 2, 2014.

Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr., and Philip C. Sorensen Ascending Liability in Religious and Other Nonprofit Organizations ed. Howard R. Griffin, “Mercer Studies in Law and Religion 2″ (Mercer University Press, 1984), p. 143.

 

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 06-18-14

The Briefing

 

June 18, 2014

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

 

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

1) Basis of theological authority cause of rifts now evident in Iraq

Monday’s edition of The New York Times had a headline that ran “Obama Pushes Iraqis to Mend Sectarian Rifts.” As was reported from Rancho Mirage, California, where the president then was:

 

As President Obama weighs airstrikes against marauding militants in Iraq, he has concluded that any American military action must be conditioned on a political plan to try to heal Iraq’s sectarian rifts, a senior administration official said on Sunday.

 

Now what makes that particularly interesting is this: many times when you look at the secular media covering even big geopolitical stories like this, what they miss is as interesting as what they get. And in this case, what they miss is the theological importance of this story; the theological or religious distinction that has led to the sectarian rifts that are referenced in this article. And by the way, when you look at the American political polarization that we talked about a few days ago resulting from this new report that came from the Pew Research Center, indicating that Americans are more polarized between Democrats and Republicans than at any point in recent history, just put that over against the fact that the two predominant groups of Muslims, the Sunnis and the Shiites, have been locked in a bloody conflict for 1,300 years.

 

When you look at the situation right now the Middle East and, in particular, when you look at the direct threat now posed by the group known as ISIS or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—the group that right now is pushing back the Iraqi army and the group that is right now threatening to establish a radical extremist terrorist cell and the group that right now is threatening to establish an extremist Islamic state, indeed an Islamic caliphate, on behalf of international terrorism—what you’re looking at is a story that is inherently theological. In other words, it has to do with our worldview and for that reason we should look at it with particular care. The distinction between the Sunnis and the Shiites goes back to the death of Mohammed, recognized by both groups to be the prophet, and once Mohammed died, the big question was authority within Islam and who would represent that authority and who would choose the authority. The Sunnis, who have always been the vast majority of Muslims in the world, determined that the rightful authority in Islam should be someone who comes in the line of Mohammed, according to his teaching authority and way of life, but not necessarily someone from his tribe or, indeed, from his family. The Shia, more commonly known in the United States as Shiites, came to the opposite conclusion that the natural successor to Mohammed must be one of his own family members. This has led to a violent conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites that goes back for 1,300 years and has led to sectarian strife in virtually all Muslim lands at some point or another and in some places consistently for thirteen centuries.

 

So there’s something somewhat naïve about a headline that tells us that President Obama is now calling upon Iraqi Muslims to get over this sectarian difference. It’s like saying forget 1,300 years of incredibly bloody conflict and just decide that it never happened. What is happening in Iraq right now is a reminder that theology matters and it always matters, and theology matters even inside world religions such as Islam. The theological distinctions between the Sunnis and the Shiites are not over the Quran; they both accept the Quran as divine. It’s not over Mohammed; they both believe that Mohammed was the messenger. It’s not over the so-called five pillars of Islam that are the very hallmark of Islamic devotion. It’s over authority. And when you look at the history of Christianity, you’ll note that the most crucial distinctions in the Christian church have often also come over the issue of authority. That included the schism between the East and the West that took place right after the first millennium of Christianity and it was particularly clear in the great Reformation of the 16th century. It was clear in the conflict between Martin Luther and the papacy, and it is clear right now in terms of the differing understandings of authority that separate evangelicals from the Roman Catholic Church. The issue of papal authority and the evangelical insistence on the authority of Scripture alone demonstrates the depth and the breadth of that particular divide. But in Islam, the historic divide between the Sunnis and the Shia has often turned violent and that violence has perhaps even increased in recent years; increased because of the movement of populations in recent years, especially after the First World War in the 20th century, and the conflict that comes when you add ethnic and regional divisions on top of this basic sectarian strife between the Sunnis and the Shia.

 

But as you’re watching the news, there is a third group that often comes to the attention and that is the Kurds. The Kurds are not defined first of all religiously, but rather ethnically. They are an Iranian group and they’re a group that is religiously very diverse. But as the old Kurdish saying goes, compared to an unbeliever, every Kurd is a Muslim. In other words, the basic theological structure of the Kurds is Islamic and when it comes to Islam, they find themselves hated by both the Sunnis and the Shiites, largely because of their ethnic identity. Ever since the late 19th century, the Kurds have been struggling especially not only for the protection of their people but for the establishment of a Kurdish nationality, and right now that looms perhaps as a greater possibility than it has ever been before. The Kurds number about 30 to 40 million in population and almost half of them are found within Turkey. They are also found within Syria and Iraq and, to some degree, in Iran, from which the group originated. And every one of those nations has found at some point in its history the Kurds to be a particular challenge because the Kurds intend to be challenging until they have a homeland of their own. And, once again, the changes right now taking place in the Middle East may offer the best opportunity yet in terms of world history for the Kurds to have their own nationality.

 

When thinking about the Sunnis and the Shiites, keep this in mind: the Shiites are a minority; probably between 10 and 15% of all Muslims worldwide. They are primarily found in Iraq and in Iran and in southern Lebanon. Elsewhere, almost all of the Muslims are Sunni. Something else to note is that when the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979 (that was by its very essence a Shiite revolution), Americans came to believe that the extremist and violent form of Islam was Shiites, and Shiites obviously sometimes can turn to violence. But the primary Islamic threat to the United States, the threat represented by al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and others is explicitly Sunni and, in particular, a branch of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. Wahhabism has led to the most extreme Muslim terrorism in the world today. You add that to the conflict with the Shiites and now to the conflict with the Kurds, you add that with the rise of ISIS, this Islamic state of Iran and Syria, and what you have is a recipe for absolute geopolitical disaster right there where America’s been so involved for so long. And to get to the bottom line, once again, this conflict like almost every major conflict is inherently theological, but you’re not going to know that if you gain everything you know from the national and international media.

2) Gallup poll on Bible reflects residue of cultural Christianity in America

Speaking of religious authority, the issue of the Bible and biblical authority came front and center last week in a major study released by the Gallup organization in Princeton, New Jersey. As Gallup revealed, 28% of Americans, they say, believe the Bible is the actual word of God and that it should be taken literally. They say that’s somewhat below the 38-40% seen in the late 1970s and near the all-time low of 27% reached in 2001 and 2009. But, they say, about half of Americans continue to say the Bible is the inspired word of God, not be taken literally, meaning a combined 75% believe the Bible is in some way connected to God. They go on to say in their summary:

 

About one in five Americans view the Bible in purely secular terms — as ancient fables, legends, history, and precepts written by man — which is up from 13% in 1976.

 

You know the old adage, “Ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer,” this is one of those polls that reveals more confusion about the poll than it does necessarily even about the people who were asked the questions. For instance, let’s take the three positions. Position one: the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word. Statement number two: the Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally. Those are not two different positions when understood by anyone with even a little bit of theological understanding. For instance, the word literal here is literally a very bad word. As a matter of fact, just about anyone who has survived high school English classes has been told the word literally is literally taken out of context most of the literal time. When you see the word literal you have to understand that it probably represents more confusion than it does clarity, but there obviously is something here. Let’s go back to that first statement—the Bible is the actual word of God (that’s very good) and is to be taken literally, word for word. Now what is meant by the word literally there? In one sense, what literally refers to here in its common sense meaning is that it is in actual fact the word of God word for word, but that’s the use of the word literal that your English teacher would find a problem with. In other words, what we’re talking about here is the use of the word literal that is literally wrong, but nonetheless helps to communicate. But it also helps to obfuscate or to confuse. That is to say that when someone affirms the total truthfulness of the Bible, what includes the understanding of the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible, we believe that every word of the Bible is literally the word of God, but that doesn’t mean that every text of Scripture is to be interpreted literally if that means reducing everything in the Bible to one form of literature. That is absolute nonsense. That isn’t to honor the Scripture; that is to dishonor the Scripture.

 

That second statement read: The Bible is the inspired word of God (that’s also good), but not everything in it should be taken literally. Well let’s think about that for a moment. When the Bible says that God rescued Israel from captivity in Egypt by His outstretched arm and His mighty hand, does it mean that God actually has an arm and a hand? Of course not. The Bible says that God is a spirit and He does not have a physical body. So what does that mean? It means God condescended to use language we would understand in order to describe His own action. He acted without a hand and without an arm, but it’s totally true to say that He redeemed Israel by His outstretched arm and His mighty hand. In other words, He did it personally by His own unilateral, sovereign, divine action. Now that is not a literal interpretation of the phrase “outstretched arm and mighty hand,” but it is a truthful interpretation of that phrase meant to be interpreted exactly as the author of Scripture intended it to be understood. That’s the goal of true biblical interpretation; a goal of biblical interpretation that is subservient to the understanding that the Bible, every single word of it, is inspired of God and is inherent and infallible.

 

But if we try to infer what the people responding to this survey really meant, that’s where we get to something of genuine significance. What we have here is the evidence that approximately one quarter of all Americans are ready to say—a little bit more than that—are ready to say that the Bible, every single word of it, is God’s word. It’s literally God’s word in the sense that it is actually God’s word, and as God’s word, every single word of it is to be received as nothing less than God’s word. That is the position of the evangelical church throughout the centuries. That is the understanding of biblical authority and biblical inerrancy.

 

That second position that is held by roughly half of Americans, they say the Bible is the inspired word of God, but they don’t mean that every single word is inspired. They say not everything in it should be taken literally. Well we’ve already explained why that’s not the best way to describe the position, but we do know what’s implied by the way that question is asked. There are people who claim to believe that the Bible is the word of God, but they try to find enough interpretive elasticity in the text of Scripture to say you don’t have to take it be literally true, not every passage.

 

Now this is the kind of position that we shouldn’t be surprised most Americans say they hold. Why do I say that? Because if the majority of Americans believed that the Bible, every single word of it, is the word of the one, true, and living God and is rightly to be understood as binding on us in every single word, Americans couldn’t believe the silly other things Americans believe nor could Americans behave the way Americans behave. That 50% demonstrated in this middle position reflects the residue of cultural Christianity, of those who say, “Yes, I’m Christian,” when they check off the box on the pollster’s question, and, “Do you believe the Bible is the word of God?” They have enough allegiance to the word of God to say, “Yes, I believe it’s God’s word,” but the other kind of evidence that demonstrates the superficiality of that position is when someone comes back to ask the question, “Okay, so you believe the Bible is the word of God, what’s in it?” The majority of Americans who say the Bible’s the word of God can’t tell you much of anything of what’s in the Scripture.

 

There’s another big issue that is certainly evident in this study and implied even in the narrative about it that comes down to this: most Americans still have lives, consciences, and moral understandings that are so pervasively and self-consciously shaped by Scripture that they can’t bring themselves to say anything less than that the Bible is the word of God. Even when it doesn’t lay claim upon their everyday life in terms of their understanding, even when they do not order their lives by it in terms of all the particulars, even when they fall short of the Bible’s own definition of its essence and inspiration and authority, they still live lives that are not free from the authority of Scripture in some way, to some degree. That tells us something about what America’s going to be like in the future. We should note that there is an age differentiation in this. Younger Americans know far less; older Americans feel far more allegiance to the Bible as the word of God even in this middle category. The disappearance of cultural Christianity in this country is happening fast. The velocity is shocking, and we should be surprised that the next time Gallup or some other organization asks this kind of question, the percentages of those who believe that the Bible is just an ancient book, that percentage is certain to rise. The percentage of those who believe that every single word of the Bible is indeed the inspired word of God, we can expect the fall, and that middle position, well it’s like every middle position, it doesn’t stay in the middle for long.

 

Christians operating out of a Christian worldview understand full well that there is no dimension of our lives that is not laid claim upon by our allegiance to Christ. Jesus is Lord of all means that He is Lord of every intellectual discipline. He’s Lord of every dimension of our life: economic life, political life, social life, entertainment—you name it. And that means that when it comes down to our economic lives, we will give an answer for every decision we make, ultimately for every purchase we make, for everything we do or fail to do in terms of our economic responsibility.

 

The Bible doesn’t set down a specific economic system, but it doesn’t set down principles; principles such as honoring private property, honoring labor and the rightful reward for labor, honoring entrepreneurship and invention, honoring investment and savings, honoring those who are generous, honoring frugality and frowning upon conspicuous consumption. All of those things are very clear in the Scripture, but there is no particular economic system mandated by Scripture. One of the hard decisions for people in modern economic life comes down to how we invest funds. Now there’s a moral dimension to everything we do in economics. There’s a moral dimension to every purchase or there’s a moral dimension even to the choices that we do not make. There are moral dimensions in employment, investment, savings, and all the rest, but in terms of investment, there are big questions.

3) Union Seminary divests endowment of fossil fuels to avoid participation in ‘sin’

That leads to an interesting story that appeared in TIME magazine this week. The headline is “Union [that is Union Theological Seminary in New York City] Becomes the World’s First Seminary to Divest From Fossil Fuels.” Well as a seminary president, I found this article very interesting. After all, seminaries don’t normally make TIME magazine, but Union Theological Seminary in New York, the flagship seminary of Protestant liberalism, made TIME magazine because they said, “We are divesting our endowment funds of anything having to do with fossil fuels.” Serene Jones, who is the president of Union Theological Seminary and also a professor there, said:

 

At Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, we have a particular call to live out our values in the world. In accordance with that call, our Board of Trustees voted unanimously today [that was on June 10th] to begin divesting the school’s entire $108.4 million endowment from fossil fuels, becoming the first seminary in the world to take this dramatic step in the fight against global climate change.

 

TIME magazine published her entire statement. In it she says that it’s clear that humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels is death-dealing. As Christians would say, she describes it as profoundly sinful. She says:

 

This concerns us deeply, and we are actively committed to finding new ways to participate in healing our wounded creation. We believe that the divestment of our endowment from fossil fuel companies is one small step in this direction.

 

In one very strategic paragraph in her statement, she wrote:

 

I hope our decision to divest encourages other seminaries and universities to recognize that there are things we can do as a country and as a people to cut down on our greenhouse gas emissions. For Christians, sin is the word that describes anything that prevents us from having a faithful relationship with God, with each other, with ourselves, and with creation.

 

We have sinned, and we see this divestment as an act of repentance for Union. All of the world is God’s precious creation, and our place within it is to care for and respect the health of the whole. Climate change poses a catastrophic threat. As stewards of God’s creation, we simply must act to stop this sin.

 

Reporting on this decision, Sarah Pulliam Bailey of Religion News Service writes:

 

Union, which bills itself as the flagship of American progressive Protestant theology [that in other words, by the way, is Protestant liberalism] and was home to luminaries such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, will host a conference ahead of the United Nations’ Climate Summit in September called Religions for the Earth.

 

As far back as the late 19th century, Union Theological Seminary was already denying the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. By the time you get to the midpoint in the 20th century, that seminary was already openly embracing universalism and the oneness basically of all religions, and now having redefined sin and salvation and virtually every doctrine of the Christian faith, they’ve come back to say they are divesting of all investments in fossil fuels because to remain in those investments is sin. It’s a very interesting statement. It’s either true or false. There is, of course, a stewardship of the earth that is our Christian responsibility. There is an economic responsibility in terms of how we invest our funds. Any wise Christian investor is careful about where those investments are made, but that same wise steward investor also understands that investing in particular stocks or the decision not to invest in particular equities is one that makes sense only if you also in other dimensions of your life do not participate in the same services or products. What makes this decision so insane is that everyone who voted for this divestment got into some vehicle that was dependent upon some kind of fossil fuel—and yes, that means even the electric vehicles because something had to produce that electricity—and they found themselves going home feeling very self-satisfied that they had taken a great moral action, and they no doubt woke up the next morning and went right back to using all of the fossil fuels that provided the air conditioning in their homes the very night they slept so soundly for having made this decision.

 

There’s something inherently consistent about a Christian who says I’m not going to invest in anything that sexually explicit, any form of pornography. I don’t want to be involved in any stock in any company that would involve itself in those materials, but that consistency would require that that individual also not be a user of pornography. It makes no sense to divest yourselves of fossil fuels and then crank up the car and go home satisfied with your decision. But we also need to recognize that a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty is in play here. It is probably true, indeed, it’s almost certainly true, that the use of fossil fuels impacts the amount of carbon emissions that end up in the atmosphere and that that contributes in some way to climate change and it is certainly true that we should be concerned about that. But, at the same time, in terms of the current world, there is no other energy technology that drives our industry, our lives; not only provides air conditioning in cars and everything else that we use, but is fueling the local hospital and everything else we consider important. To divest from fossil fuels is to say we want those businesses to disappear, but that would consign the world to look like something far more like the dark ages than anything we might contemplate. There simply is no current alternative. We can hope and pray that such alternatives will appear and we should encourage, in terms of our economy and political life, real alternatives that could lead to an independence from the use of fossil fuels or our current dependence on it. But this is one of those actions which in retrospect isn’t much of an action at all. It’s intellectually incoherent and it is ethically inconsistent, but this is not just to throw stones at Union Theological Seminary. Because the reality is, whether on the left or the right, part of what it means to be a sinner is to involve ourselves, if we are not careful, in just this kind of hypocrisy, of intellectual dishonesty, and of ethical inconsistency. It is a reminder to evangelical Christians of how dependent we are upon the Bible and how dependent we are upon the church, in terms of a reasoning community under the authority of the Bible, to come to terms with what our responsibility is in every dimension of life, including our economic lives. But we do know this: divesting your endowment of fossil fuels will get you much celebrated within the pages of TIME magazine.

 

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. Remember that right now we’re collecting questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition; the new season beginning in late summer. Just give us a call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

2014 Ligonier West Coast Conference: Welcome to the Machine

When a culture rejects God, it always replaces Him with something else. For many in our post-Christian culture, the new “god” is science, the new priests (those whom we must not question) are the scientists, and the new religion is a materialistic scientism. In this session, Dr. Albert Mohler will explore the changing place of science in our culture and explain how Christians should respond to the claims of science.

For more information about Ligonier Ministries and their regional conferences, please visit Ligonier.org

Question and Answer Session at the Overcoming the World: 2014 West Coast Conference

Stephen Meyer, Albert Mohler, R.C. Sproul, and R.C. Sproul, Jr. answer questions ranging from what means of assurance a Christian has to how to engage with someone who has had or encouraged an abortion

For more information about Ligonier Ministries and their national conference, please visit Ligonier.org

The Briefing 06-18-14

1) Basis of theological authority cause of rifts now evident in Iraq

Obama Pushes Iraqis to Mend Sectarian Rifts, New York Times (Mark Landler and Michael R. Gordon)

The Origins Of The Shiite-Sunni Split, NPR (Mike Shuster)

2) Gallup poll on Bible reflects residue of cultural Christianity in America

Three in Four in U.S. Still See the Bible as Word of God, Gallup (Lydia Saad)

3) Union Seminary divests endowment of fossil fuels to avoid participation in ‘sin’

Union Becomes the World’s First Seminary to Divest from Fossil Fuels, TIME (Serene Jones)

Union Seminary pulls investments from the ‘sin’ of fossil fuels, Religion News Service (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)

 

2014 Ligonier West Coast Conference: Sexual Devolution

The sexual revolution of the 1960s has been portrayed as a time of sexual liberation. In reality, this wholesale embrace of moral relativism resulted in a culture that is enslaved to its sexual lusts. Like all revolutions, it has left destruction in its wake. In this session, Dr. Albert Mohler examines some of the consequences of the sexual revolution, including rampant divorce and the destruction of families, gender confusion, acceptance of homosexuality, child molestation, and sex trafficking. In addition, he will call Christians to stand for moral absolutes in the face of persecution.

For more information about Ligonier Ministries and their regional conferences, please visit Ligonier.org

Transcript: The Briefing 06-17-14

The Briefing

 

June 17, 2014

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

 

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

 

Are Americans increasingly inhabiting two separate nations divided by political extremes and largely determined by worldview? That’s the very important question that was raised last week by the Pew Research Center in a report it released that, perhaps more than anything in recent times, demonstrates, once again, the importance of worldview. The Pew Research Center’s report is on the increasing political polarization among Americans. The upshot of the report is this: Americans are increasingly inhabiting two separate political worlds. And as the report also makes clear, there are other issues that are deeply and inextricably involved with this polarization. We’re the ones who understand that immediately from the understanding of the fact that everyone, every voter included, operates out of a basic worldview. The report demonstrates a deep political polarization. If you go back to the 1960s and the 1970s, Americans are divided certainly if you identify them as Democrats and Republicans, but when you look at the underlying issues, there was a great deal of commonality. And now Americans are increasingly divided and they are deeply divided as well. The report that came out last week demonstrates that Americans are divided over an entire landscape of issues—social issues, political issues, economic issues, educational issues, foreign-policy issues—and Americans are also increasingly polarized along partisan lines. In other words, if you say the word Democrat or Republican, you’re increasingly able to predict how an individual that is described by one of those two partisan affiliations is going to hold positions on a range of issues, not just how they will vote.

 

But the report also demonstrates that the polarization and the divide is generational. It’s also demographic, having to do with geography. And beyond that, it’s also highly predictive of theological or religious beliefs as well. Dan Balz, reporting on this report for The Washington Post, writes:

 

It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. Conservatives and liberals don’t just differ in their political views. They like to live in different places, associate with like-minded people, and have opposing views on the value of ethnic and religious diversity in their neighborhoods, according to a major new study by the Pew Research Center.

 

Political polarization is now deeply embedded in the United States — more so than at any time in recent history, and has intensified in recent years. The percentage of Americans who hold either consistently conservative or consistently liberal positions on major issues has doubled over the past decade and now accounts for one-fifth [or 20%] of all Americans.

 

Well here is something that’s really interesting about that. Even in recent days we reported on the fact that political scientist have determined that the people who care the least about many issues determine the most when it comes to political elections. Those who are in the middle, who sometimes vote one way and sometimes another way, the ticket splitters between the two parties, they’re the ones who are the swing vote that often determine who wins an election, but, as it turns out, they’re also the people who by their own admission know the least about the issues and care the least about the issues.

 

One of the things you quickly learn as you look at this Pew Research Center report is this: as Americans learn more about the issues, they care more deeply about the issues, and as their views on these issues line up with their worldviews, they are increasingly separate from the people who live in the same neighborhoods. But, as this report makes clear, maybe it’s better to say in the same state or in the same nation because the neighborhood issue plays a big part in this report. Indeed, The New York Times reporting on this—the reporter is Nate Cohn—points to the fact that the report suggests that Americans are self-selecting in terms of how they choose a neighborhood in which to live and with whom they intend to live as neighbors. As Cohn explains:

 

The urban-rural divide is at the heart of the polarization of Congress. There would be many more competitive districts if Democrats and Republicans were fairly evenly dispersed across the country, as they were for most of the middle of the 20th century. But geographic polarization means that there are few areas where it is even possible to draw a district full of persuadable voters.

 

Similarly, Dan Balz, writing in The Washington Post, explains:

 

What is the ideal community? To conservatives it is a small town or rural area. To liberals it is a city or suburb — although the suburbs are neither side’s favored location. Just 4 percent of those who are the most consistently conservative say they prefer to live in a city, while just 11 percent of those with the most consistently liberal views prefer to live in a rural area.

 

Now let’s look at this report a little more closely. The New York Times suggests that Americans are self-selecting where they want to live based upon their worldview. I would suggest that that is perhaps the wrong way to look at this. Indeed, a significant percentage of Americans haven’t really chosen where they live. They live fairly near where they were born. That’s especially true of more rural Americans. In other words, I think the larger question is this: Does where you live highly influence your worldview? And I think from that perspective, the Christian worldview would inform us that it certainly would, especially when you add yet another dimension of the Pew Research Report. And that is the question: Do you prefer to live near those who share your theological worldview? Fifty-seven percent of conservatives said yes; only 17% of liberals said the same. That is a huge divide, but it’s the kind of divide that is increasingly affirmed by researchers such as Robert Putnam of Harvard University, who suggested that mere attendance at church services was the clearest predictor of voting behavior in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 American presidential elections.

 

And from a Christian worldview perspective, this also makes a great deal of sense. Liberals by their own self-description are far more likely to be secular in their outlook, and thus they’re more likely to want to live in a secular community. Cities, we know, are far more secular than the suburbs and the countryside. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that worldview determines at least in part where people live or at least why they decide to live where they currently reside. Liberals are far more comfortable in the company of other liberals; conservatives are far more comfortable in the company of other conservatives, especially when you put the word consistent in front of either liberal or conservative. And in that sense, what this report points out is that when people are more logically consistent, when they’re more consistent in terms of their intellectual and moral understandings, they tend to be more consistent in terms of their voting patterns as well. And—and this is hardly a surprise—they’re more consistent as well in terms of their living preferences, at least where they get to live according to their preference.

 

Dan Balz offers one of the most important insights drawn from this report when he writes:

 

The findings lend credence to the proposition that there are divergent cultural and geographical components associated with political polarization.

 

“If people living in ‘deep red’ or ‘deep blue’ America feel like they inhabit distinctly different worlds, it is in part because they seek out different types of communities, both geographic and social,” [that quote directly from the Pew Research Center’s report].

 

Writing on the same data, Nate Cohn of The New York Times writes, “Polarization: it’s everywhere,” and to that we could add, “and just about everything.” But if any one issue becomes very clear, it’s that it is the cultural and social questions that are driving the deepest politicization. And even as conservatives are certainly more conservative on those issues in terms of the ideological spectrum today than they might have been in the 1970s, in more recent years it is the left that has moved more consistently leftward and that’s especially true just in the last decade.

 

An important analysis of that point appears in the editorial page of Investor’s Business Daily’s Friday edition. As the editors point out, the movement, in terms of the political direction, has been far more leftward on the left than rightward on the right. “Case in point,” they write, “American Conservative Union rankings show the average Republican senator cast conservative votes 75% of the time in 1990 and 77.8% in 2012.” That’s about a 3% increase over a period of 22 years. “In contrast,” they write, “Democrats voted liberal an average of 90% of the time in 2012, well up from 72% in 1990”—that according to Americans for Democratic Action. Trends in the house votes, they say, were identical for both parties.

 

Now what makes that remarkably important is this: the two groups counting score here are counting score according to their own ideological commitments. In other words, there’s no reason to question this data. When you’re looking at the American conservative Union, you’re looking at a conservative group. When you’re looking at Americans for Democratic Action, you’re looking at a liberal group. So if you’re looking at the description of liberal votes or conservative votes, Investor’s Business Daily has turned to exactly the right authoritative groups to ask concerning these percentages. And the change is absolutely shocking. On the Republican side, an increase over 20-something years of just 3%, but on the liberal side, on the Democratic side, an increase of a vast percentage point, going up from 72% to 90% in approximately 20 years.

 

A closer look at the data reveals why it is the cultural and moral issues driving the polarization. There are differences on political and economic issues to be sure, but it is the moral issues that are driving the deepest divide and that’s especially true in the leftward march of the left. And as Investor’s Business Daily’s editors point out, it’s not Ronald Reagan who could not in 2014 get his party’s nomination; it’s Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, they remind us, ran as a tax-cutting, free-trade promoting, welfare reforming, tough-on-crime candidate, who promised that government would never “grow faster than ordinary [American’s] ability to pay for it”—that’s a direct quote from President Clinton. But President Clinton, running on that platform, could not possibly gain his party’s nomination in 2016. That’s how much his party has changed in just that amount of time.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, the utility of this report is this. It demonstrates graphically, with undeniable data points, exactly the importance of worldview and why it matters. It matters because every single thinking human being operates out of a system of deep beliefs and those deep beliefs lead to other beliefs and to other decisions. They explain why a voter votes as he or she does. Eventually we live out our worldview. It’s inevitable. And the polarization on political and moral issues in the United States amongst the electorate is a polarization that’s explained by the fact that Americans at the deepest level are deeply divided over the most basic understanding of reality.

 

Perhaps the most important thing to see from this from a Christian perspective is that theism makes a difference. If you believe in God, you are in a dramatically different worldview position than one who operates out of a secular perspective. And also, one of the most important insights of this particular report is that geography matters and generations matter. It matters to whom you’re born and it matters where you live because as it turns out, the context in which one is raised, both in terms of the family and the community, makes a huge difference in worldview. Christian parents, Christian churches, had better take note.

 

And speaking of issues related to this, last week Terry Gross of Fresh Air on National Public Radio interviewed Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and United States Senator, who’s currently on an extended book tour, given the release of her new memoir, Hard Choices. And in this particular interview on National Public Radio, Hillary Clinton gets rather angry with Terry Gross over questions related to the evolution of her position on same-sex marriage. The background of this is easy to understand. When Hillary Clinton was in the Senate, she was against the legalization of same-sex marriage. When she was confirmed as Secretary of State, she was opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Before that, when she ran for the Democratic nomination for the office of President of the United States, she was against same-sex marriage. Shortly after she resigned as the United States Secretary of State, she declared that she was for same-sex marriage.

 

President Obama was for same-sex marriage when he ran for the Senate, the state Senate, in the state of Illinois. He was against same-sex marriage when he ran for president and then he was for same-sex marriage when he ran for reelection as president. The president described his progression on this issue in terms of evolution, and Terry Gross turned to the former Secretary of State, who is now expected be the front-running candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, and asked if her position had also evolved. Secretary Clinton said that her position on the question had evolved, as she said, along with the American people. But then Terry Gross began to press her, asking are quite directly if she had actually really believed in same-sex marriage all along, but felt constrained by political realities so that she could not publicly advocate what she personally have preferred. Now let me just insert here that’s exactly what even the handlers of President Barack Obama suggested was the president’s predicament. He was for same-sex marriage; he just couldn’t say so. He ran opposed to same-sex marriage in 2008 because he didn’t have a political choice. Once he did in 2012, he declared himself in favor of same-sex marriage. The Secretary of State’s handlers have said roughly the same thing, but now she’s in the position of saying, “No, I meant what I said all along. I was against it before I was for it.” And then Terry Gross pointed to the rather awkward position for both of the Clintons, pointing out that in 1996, it was President Bill Clinton who signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act. Defensively, the former Secretary of State said that her husband had signed that law into effect so that an even worse law, that means a law that would even be more restrictive on same-sex marriage, would not be adopted. She said that they perverted that point to authorize the states to move in the direction of legalizing same-sex marriage. The problem with that response is that the president gave no permission to the states and the states needed no permission from the president to move ahead on their own terms.

 

What makes this interview most instructive is that it demonstrates that even Hillary Clinton is now in the position of being greatly on the defensive in the Democratic Party on the issue of same-sex marriage. Responding to Terry Gross, she said:

 

Well I was fully on board with ending discrimination in the workplace on behalf of the LGBT community [speaking of when she was Secretary of State]. I did not support gay marriage when I was in the Senate or running for president, as you know, and as President Obama and others held the same position. But it, for me, became an opportunity to do what I could as secretary of state to make the workplace fairer – something I had always supported and spoke out about. And then when I was out of the secretary of state position and once again free to comment on domestic matters, I very shortly came out in favor of fully equality, including gay marriage.

 

Speaking of the movement just in the last several years toward support for same-sex marriage, Ms. Clinton said, “It has been an extraordinary fast – by historic terms – social, political, and legal transformation.” In the most interesting part of this exchange between Terry Gross and Hillary Clinton, Terry Gross, a liberal herself on this issue, very clearly thought she was helping the former Secretary of State to define her position. As Terry Gross said

You know, I’m just saying – I’m sorry – I just want to clarify what I was saying – no, I was saying that you maybe really believed this all along, but – you know, believed in gay marriage all along, but felt for political reasons America wasn’t ready yet and you couldn’t say it. That’s what I was thinking.

 

In response, the former Secretary of State said this:

 

I did not grow up even imagining gay marriage and I don’t think you probably did either. This was an incredibly new and important idea that people on the front lines of the gay rights movement began to talk about and slowly but surely convinced others of the rightness of that position. And when I was ready to say what I said, I said it.

 

What’s missing from my summary of this exchange is what’s found in the headline at Politico: “Hillary Clinton Gets Testy Over Gay Marriage.” And writing at The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri writes, speaking to the secretary:

 

So what will it be? Were you always secretly on what people now think of as the inevitable right side of history or were you part of what in 1993 felt like a fairly overwhelming majority and now seems dated and bigoted? Neither choice is great. Were you hiding what you felt because you weren’t ready or were you not ready yourself? Er, let’s talk about Benghazi more.”

 

I draw into that exchange because it is a stellar indication of the velocity of the moral change America is now experiencing and it is also proof positive of that kind of polarization that the Pew Research report was demonstrating. As the editors of Investor’s Business Daily pointed out, it is Bill Clinton, not Ronald Reagan, who could not at the present hour gain the presidential nomination of his own party. That’s how much the Democratic Party has changed, especially given on this issue just in the last several years, and it’s incredibly revealing that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, now expected to be the front runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has a real problem on the issue of same-sex marriage, not because she isn’t for it, but because she wasn’t for it soon enough.

 

Finally, for many kids, summer means summer camp, but so much for roughing it for today’s kids or at least some of them. As Tara Palmeri of The New York Post reports:

 

New York City mommies with money to burn are hiring professional organizers to pack their kids’ trunks for summer camp — because their darlings can’t live without their 1,000-thread-count sheets.

 

Barbara Reich heads a firm known as Resourceful Consultants. She says that she and other high-paid associates have been inundated with requests and she says the job’s a real challenge. It takes three or four hours to pack for clients who demand that she fit all the comforts of home in the luggage, including delicate touches like French-milled soaps and scented candles. These are for kids going to summer camp. She charges $250 an hour. She says that the average kid requires four hours of packing (that runs to about $1000). She said:

 

I talked three people off the camp ledge. For a lot of mothers, particularly when their child is going away for the first time, it’s very stressful. Clients will say, “I need to touch and feel the sheets for softness.”

 

One of her colleagues explained, “It’s really about bringing the feel of home to camp.” Well let me say to parents—here’s the obvious: they’re going to camp because they don’t want the experience of being at home. That’s what camp is supposed to be about and for many kids camps can be a very good experience, especially if they’re Christian kids going to a Christian camp where, for many kids, they may have experiences outside that they would otherwise, in this very metropolitan and hectic world, actually never have. There is something just horrifyingly wrong about sending kids to summer camp with French-milled soaps, scented candles, and 1,000-thread sheets. It also says something about many Americans that they will pay a thousand dollars just to pay a consultant to pack their kids’ truck for summer camp. So let the kids be kids and let camp be camp, and if anyone’s really willing to spend $250 an hour to have someone pack their bags, I think I know a lot of seminary students who’d be ready for the job.

 

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. Remember that we’re taking questions right now for the upcoming second season of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Just give us a call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 06-17-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Polarization of U.S. exposes deep significance of worldview

Political Polarization in the American Public, Pew Research Center

In polarized United States, we live as we vote, Washington Post (Dan Balz)

Polarization Is Dividing American Society, Not Just Politics, New York Times (Nate Cohn)

Dems Are To Blame For Political Polarization, Investors’ Business Daily (Editorial Board)

2) Hillary Clinton’s comments on same-sex marriage reveals leftward velocity of Democrat Party

Hillary Clinton: The Fresh Air Interview, NPR (Terry Gross)

Hillary Clinton’s strangely awkward Terry Gross interview on gay marriage, Washington Post (Alexandra Petri)

Hillary Clinton gets testy over gay marriage, Politico (Maggie Haberman and Katie Glueck)

3) Mothers making camp feel like home miss the point of camp

Moms paying pros $1,000 to pack their kids for camp, New York Post (Tara Palmeri)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 06-16-14

The Briefing

 

June 16, 2014

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

 

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

 1) Breakdown of nation of Iraq reminder of human inability to prevent catastrophe

There’s simply no question of what the big story in the world is today, and it is the emergence of a nightmare that many people feared might be possible and now appears to be actual. And that is the emergence of global jihad from the very site where American troops have been involved now for over a decade in the nation of Iraq; if indeed you can discuss Iraq as a nation, given the fact that its army was basically overrun by a very small insurgency in a matter of days at the end of last week. All this came to the attention of the world as a group emerged that strategists and military experts have known about for some time. It had been seen as a splinter organization from al-Qaeda. It had been seen as a threat, but not as a reality. The group is known as ISIS. It is known in Europe as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It is known in the United States as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. In any event, it is now known as one of the most potent military, insurgency, and terrorist organizations the world has certainly ever seen. And it is explicitly theological. Something that needs to be noted very quickly is not just that this group is explicitly Islamic, committed to Islamic jihad, and now threatening to launch a global jihad on the United States and on the West, but it is explicitly Sunni in terms of the sectarian understanding and identification of Iraq that drives the group.

 

And this leads to a total destabilization of the entire region. Many things now become clear. It appears that Iran, in its hatred of the United States, made a very bad decision when it decided to arm this group. Iran is a Shiite Islamic nation and it had gone to war with Iraq, you may remember, about two decades ago in one of the bloodiest regional conflicts of modern history. And now it appears that if this group is successful, there will be a massive Sunni Islamic extremist state right on the border of Iran. That may tie Iran down in terms of its national foreign-policy preoccupations for generations to come, but it is a haunting realization to what can happen if two giant rogue states appear in this same region. Even if they are at war with each other, they’re going to be making a lot of mischief for the rest of the world.

 

It is now clear that the rebel strike in Iraq over the last several days was many years in the plotting and the planning, but its success was nothing less than spectacular. As The New York Times reports:

 

When Islamic militants rampaged through [their] city last week [that’s in Erbil], robbing banks of hundreds of millions of dollars, opening the gates of prisons and burning army vehicles, some residents greeted them as if they were liberators and threw rocks at retreating Iraqi soldiers.

 

It took only two days, though, for the fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to issue edicts laying out the harsh terms of Islamic law under which they would govern, and singling out some police officers and government workers for summary execution.

 

As of Sunday night—that’s just last night—The New York Times and other major international media were showing some of the most horrifying video and photographic evidence of the summary executions of perhaps thousands of former members of the Iraqi army and of the Iraqi government taking place just over the last several days. This is a group that evidently intends by sheer force of power and murder and terror to take over not just one nation, but two—both Syria and Iraq—and to form out of those two nations a very powerful rogue state.

 

Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation, said, “What we see in Iraq today is in many ways a culmination of what the ISIS has been trying to accomplish since its founding in 2006.” He went on to say that it’s one of the most ominous developments in recent history not just in the Middle East, but on the world geopolitical stage. The man behind ISIS is known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he is now considered to be one of most dangerous men on the planet, if not the single most dangerous man now posing a threat to Western interests. He is known by Le Monde, the French newspaper, as the one who orchestrated the sacking of northern Iraq’s largest city and is today now controlling a nation-sized swath of land. He is known by TIME magazine as the world’s most dangerous man. He is also known by Le Monde as the new bin Laden. And as The Washington Post makes clear, the United States government has put a $10 million bounty on his head. In just one year of grisly killing, The Post says, he has in all likelihood surpassed even al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in international clout and prestige among Islamist militants. Going back to David Ignatius of The Washington Post, he wrote over the weekend, “The true heir to Osama bin Laden may be ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is “more violent, more virulent, more anti-American,” and, at the same time, he’s “now recruiting fighters from other Zawahiri affiliates, including al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch and the Somalia-based al-Shabab.” In other words, this is the worst of the worst.

 

It is not clear how the United States will respond to this, but what is clear is that miscalculations by two successive American presidential administrations have made this disaster possible, if not inevitable. The first mistake was made by the administration of George W. Bush. His administration miscalculated and miscalculated badly about the amount of military force and American troops that would be necessary both to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein and come up with anything stable on the other side. American troops, due to that decision, have been in that country for over a decade.

 

The second miscalculation was made by the administration of President Barack Obama. President Obama was elected on an agenda to get American troops out of Iraq and that appears to have been almost his singular concern. And in the aftermath of the American withdrawal, all kinds of horrible things have happen and there is plenty of blame to go around. The greatest blame, in terms of any singular person, certainly is to be laid at the feet of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He turned his government over to sectarianism, to corruption, and to cronyism, and he has a government that has been totally discredited. The emergence of ISIS has been made possible because the Maliki government has been not only weak, but crooked, and a government that has clearly helped to foster the kind of sectarian divisions that are now driving Iraq to the point of dissolution and not only that, but grave violence.

 

As of Sunday, the Obama Administration says it is going to withhold any military intervention in Iraq until it sees clear evidence that the country’s politics and governance are reforming. That’s almost a sure recipe for the fact that the American government now doesn’t intend to do anything because the conditions established by the Obama Administration are almost surely never going to be met, certainly not by this government or any conceivable government in the future. It turns out that the American ideal of establishing something like a representative democracy in Iraq in the aftermath of toppling Saddam Hussein was something that did not take into consideration the sectarian violence, the differences in terms of the regions, and the inherent political instability of that country. And in intending to do good, we may actually have sown the seeds for this kind of extremism that may boil over into a new jihad, even against ourselves.

 

Going back to David Ignatius, in an article that ran today in Investor’s Business Daily, Ignatius says that this group, ISIS, is so extreme that it has been denounced by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the nominal leader of the core al-Qaeda group. He goes on to say, “ISIS has seized control of the Sunni areas of western and northern Iraq in recent weeks — and this success has fueled its rivalry with Zawahiri.” This is very interesting because it demonstrates the fact that when you have evil, as is represented by al-Qaeda, it can be exceeded by an even more radical evil, as is now the case with ISIS. Ignatius says:

 

The two groups are, in effect, competing for recruits among militant young Muslims. Because of its recent, brutal success, ISIS now looks like the more potent organization — which may enhance its appeal and accelerate the cycle of violence.

But I can’t leave this story today without looking at one additional heartbreaking headline. This one appeared in Saturday’s edition of The New York Times. The article’s by Richard A. Oppel, Jr. The headline is this: “Veterans Watch as Gains Their Friends Died for are Erased by Insurgents.” From a Christian worldview perspective, war is always a horrifyingly serious moral question. The Christian worldview has made war such a serious issue that it developed what is known as just war theory to describe the conditions—the conditions necessary for war to be made morally right and the conditions under which any morally righteous war would be fought. But this much is abundantly clear, when you have a war fought, it better matter. It better count for something, and there is something for the Christian worldview that is absolutely horrifying about seeing gains that have been made at the cost of American blood and treasure now wiped away by an insurgency that we should have seen coming; wiped away by the weakness of a regime that simply in its banality and corruption wasn’t weak enough to even hold the allegiance of its own people and weak enough that it may be toppled by an evil regime that will put in place a two-state unified global threat in terms of a new jihad. All this should be very sobering to us. It turns out that our attempt, even as the United States of America, even well intended, to remake the world in a more peaceful way might have, in the end, the opposite result. That’s a horrifying thought, a very humbling and sobering thought. The world’s only superpower may be powerful, but is not powerful enough to make people behave on the world stage. It’s not powerful enough to make people want what we think they should want. It’s not powerful enough as it seems to turn back a group as determined to kill as ISIS.

 2) Fathers’ Day demonstrates cultural confusion over necessity of fathers

Yesterday was Father’s Day in the United States—a day that came late to the American holiday calendar and largely to compensate for the fact that there was already a Mother’s Day. But Father’s Day in 2014 demonstrates, if nothing else, the incredible and very dangerous confusion in America about whether or not fathers are even necessary and, if so, why. The Washington Post, just as the weekend approached, ran an article entitled, “Here’s to You, Dad—You Moron.” Katherine Shaver writes that many Father’s Day cards seem to slam dads; not to salute them. You don’t find these kinds of cards about moms at all. Mother’s Day brings cards that are primarily sentimental in focus and almost always uniformly honoring mothers. But as Shaver writes, when it comes to Father’s Day, the average fare, in terms of Father’s Day cards, presents fathers as offish, “tool-challenged buffoons who would rather hog the TV remote, go fishing, or play golf than be with the kids.” Industry insiders estimated that there were about 87 million Father’s Day cards sold this Father’s Day, but most of them presented dads in a somewhat less-than-positive light. Sometimes fully intending to be humorous, but the humor itself is indicative of the fact that there is a tremendous sense of confusion in this country about who fathers are and why they’re important if they are important at all. Shaver writes:

 

The greeting card image of Dad as lazy, incompetent boob is increasingly out of sync with today’s fathers, many of whom spend as much time packing lunches and helping with homework as their own fathers spent in the Barca­lounger.

 

Meanwhile, as Father’s Day approached, it was very interesting to see the coverage of the issues related to fatherhood in the international media. For instance, The Financial Times ran a review of a brand-new book by Paul Raeburn. He’s a former science writer for BusinessWeek. He wrote a book entitled, Do Fathers Matter? What Science is Telling Us About the Parent We’ve Overlooked. I took a good look at the book and one of the most interesting things about the argument that Raeburn makes is that he makes it with several kinds of hesitations that I think are also very indicative. Raeburn is himself a very committed father—he makes that abundantly clear—and he believes that fatherhood is important. And as The Financial Times summarizes:

 

Fatherhood is currently a hot-button issue in the US. For all the rise of the stay-at-home dad, by other metrics fathers are becoming less present in American society as a whole.

 

By the way, Raeburn points out in his book that only 11% of US children lived apart from their fathers if you go back to 1960. So in 1960, only about one out of ten American children lived without a father in the home. By 2010, that inclined to 27%. Some estimates in 2014 put that figure at over 30%. Raeburn insists the general undesirability of fatherlessness is important and he points out it has links to crime, educational failure, and depression, among many other pathologies as well.

 

Picking up on the research, Janice Shaw Crouse of The Washington Times writes:

 

The more involved the father [the research indicates], the better. When a father plays with, reads to, or takes his children on outings, those children have fewer behavior problems in elementary school and less risk of criminal behavior when they become teenagers.

 

There is a huge impact science now documents in terms of the impact a father has when he’s in the home with a daughter, especially when she goes into the crucial years of adolescence and puberty. It turns out that the father out of the home has a hormonal impact if the girl is his own biological daughter. His absence means that she is likely going to go into an earlier puberty, and in America, earlier puberty is clearly, clinically linked to earlier sexualization as well. If the father is in the home with his biological child, puberty tends to be delayed and there are other very positive impacts upon girls in particular that have to do with increased self-esteem, increased willingness to take risks, and when it comes to boys, there is a huge amount of evidence demonstrating that the absence of a father in the home can have devastating consequences.

 

All the pathologies that are associated with boys today—all of them; virtually every single one of them—is statistically tied to the absence of a father in the home. The likelihood that the boy will not graduate from school, the likelihood that he will be in trouble in school, the likelihood that he will be involved in substance abuse, the likelihood that he will have some kind of run-in with the police or perhaps even some kind of criminal behavior and incarceration, the likelihood he will not go to college—all these things are directly tied to the absence of a father in the home and these things are now very well attested. Crouse writes:

 

The research is very clear that children definitely do need a father, and preferably their biological one, and not just any man. They need involved, hands-on fathering that cements the connection to the man responsible for their birth. There’s nothing new about this need, of course, but recent research has shown us some fascinating wrinkles on the old themes. Fathers, the new research reveals, bring certain factors to parenting that are irreplaceable. Mentors and father-figures are needed, but they are not sufficient to meet a child’s need to experience the touch of their dad’s hand, his unconditional love and his voice reassuring him or her, “You are my son, you are my daughter … and I love you and am proud of you.”

 

Now the other thing that this research makes abundantly clear is that the lack of fatherly discipline in the life of both boys and girls can come with devastating consequences because it turns out that this is actually counterintuitive. Many people, especially on the left, would assume that where there is strong fatherly discipline, there is a loss of self-esteem when it comes to children. Well that can certainly happen if the father is an authoritarian who abuses that authority, but the authoritative father, the father who exercises that authority in terms of loving and very firm discipline, instills not lower self-esteem, but greater self-esteem in both boys and girls. And where the absence of the father is very clear in boys, it turns out that the boys do not learn how to put limits upon their own impulses. Controlling impulses, as it turns out, is a father’s impact upon the boy, and where that is absent, you see where those impulses then run out of control.

 

But the father also gives the gift of risk-taking. That was made abundantly clear in a very interesting article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend with fatherhood in view. The question was, “What are fathers adding to children?” and what they’re researching from the research that is cited here in this article is that fathers give children the gift of play. Mothers certainly play with their children and enjoy that play and generally spend more hours playing with their children than Dad, but when Dad is home, it is often associated with play, and a particular kind of play, a play that’s more aggressive, more physical, more risk-taking. For instance, the scientist discovered that fathers encouraged their children—both boys and girls, but especially boys—to risk a bit more even if they get a little scrape here or there, even if they stub their toe because they want the child to learn how to take a risk and then stand up and start all over again; shake it off and get back into the game.

 

And fathers also seem to be very ready to give their children the kind of aggressive physical play that leads even to increased coordination on the part of these children in terms of learning certain physical skills. As The Wall Street Journal says, the fathers immerse in the game emotionally, smiling, laughing, show spontaneity, creativity, silliness. The father in play is generally very good-natured about losing with no signs of ego—something that children need also to see. The father helps the child control his or her emotion and calms him or her when over excited. The father motivates the child to stay engaged and keep going or rejoin the game. The father—as father’s played with these children watched by these scientists—they are dominant in the game, but they share the upper hand, sometimes allowing the child to win—but only sometimes.

 

But going back to Paul Raeburn’s book, Do Fathers Matter? What Science is Telling Us About the Parent We’ve Overlooked, what’s most interesting is how he seems to be very hesitant in making his case. He seems to want to say that fathers are absolutely necessary and important and the absence of a father can have devastating consequences, but then he explicitly says he doesn’t want to create an intellectual or psychological distress for single-parent families headed by mothers. This is putting him in a very difficult position, and this is the position that our entire culture now finds itself in, in this very confused age. If we cannot state honestly that fathers are important and the absence of fathers can have devastating consequences, we can’t have an honest discussion. And yet in this age of not only political correctness, but emotivist understanding of how you discuss things in public, the reality is that many people make this case and then immediately back off of it and that is a tremendous tragedy. It’s not only a lack of nerve, it’s actually a lack of concern and of love because concern and love mean we tell the truth where telling the truth can make a difference and lead to human flourishing.

 

But without doubt, the most amazing articles on fatherhood appeared in the current June/July issue of Esquire magazine. Appearing back in the 1950s and 60s, Esquire magazine was hardly concerned with fatherhood. It presented a picture of the single male or married male life that was associated with the jet set and with the kind of things that sophisticated men would find sophisticated; and that did not include taking care of children. Even before getting to its theme articles for the month, the editor of the magazine ran a column in which he said:

 

What is it with Esquire and fatherhood? Yes, we’ve been paying more attention to fatherhood over the last few years. It’s an interesting time in our cultural history. There is a generation of young fathers that is taking an active, some would say obsessive, interest in their families, but this movement has come on the heels of a decades-long trend in which father’s influence on their children has been on the decline. Owing to divorce and many other factors, there are more single-parent households than in any time in the last century, and, overwhelmingly, the parent outside the house is the father. At the same time, institutions that have long stood in for fathers and have traditionally provided the kind of discipline that boys, in particular, thrive under have been in decline or under attack. Whether it is coaches, priests, or the Boy Scouts, support networks that once connected boys and young men with positive male role models have been in retreat. One cure is fatherhood.

 

Listen to these next words in the editor statement very closely:

 

One cure is fatherhood. Recent research has demonstrated that the most direct correlate of success for young men and young women is the presence of two parents. As Stephen Marche put it in a memo a few months ago, “Fatherhood is our most precious national resource.”

 

Now in the future we’ll give more attention to this series of articles in Esquire magazine, but for now what’s important is that editor statement, stating that Esquire magazine, of all periodicals, has now decided that fatherhood is an essential part of being a man and, furthermore, a sophisticated man. And you have in Esquire magazine a declaration of a national emergency and of the fact—get this—that Esquire magazine, hardly a magazine of the new Christian right, a magazine that has reveled in its moral secularism. This magazine now says that for young men and young women to arrive in adulthood safely and healthily, there needs to be two parents in the home: a mother and a father.

 

But for Christians this should hardly be a matter surprise. We understand that God’s plan from the beginning was that the family would include the mother and the father and their children, and that the children would thrive to the greatest degree when both the mother and the father are in the home and when the mother and the father are committed to each other and when the mother and the father are deeply involved in the lives of their children. On the day after Father’s Day, we should be thankful that even many in the secular world are beginning to understand why fathers are important, but from the Christian worldview, we understand it’s not enough to acknowledge the importance of fatherhood. We need to go that next step and honor our fathers.

 

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. Remember the upcoming season of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. We’re taking your questions even now. Just call us at 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. That new season will begin in late summer. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 06-16-14

1) Breakdown of nation of Iraq reminder of human inability to prevent catastrophe

Why the rivalry between ISIS and al-Qaeda may lead to attacks on America, Washington Post (David Ignatius)

Rebels’ Fast Strike in Iraq Was Years in the Making, New York Times (Tim Arango, Kareem Fahim and Ben Hubbard)

Al-Qaida’s Metamorphosis Leads To Danger Of Attack On U.S., Investors’ Business Daily (David Ignatius)

How ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became the world’s most powerful jihadist leader, Washington Post (Terrence McCoy)

Veterans Watch as Gains Their Friends Died for Are Erased by Insurgents, New York Times (Richard A. Oppel, Jr.)

2) Fathers’ Day demonstrates cultural confusion over necessity of fathers

Do Father’s Day cards that portray dad as an incompetent boob reflect today’s fathers?, Washington Post (Katherine Shaver)

Paternity on the page, Financial Times (Julius Purcell)

 New research reminds us why fathers matter, Washington Times (Janice Shaw Crouse)

Roughhousing Lessons From Dad, Wall Street Journal (Sue Shellenbarger)

Manifesto of the New Fatherhood, Esquire (Stephen Marche)