R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 362

“I Feel Super Great About Having an Abortion” — The Culture of Death Goes Viral

Emily Letts is a 25-year-old abortion counselor at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey whose video has gone viral. These days, videos go viral on a daily basis, and most are soon forgotten. But not this one. Emily Letts decided to make a video about her own abortion, and the result is one of the most disturbing video messages ever presented to public view.

“I feel super good about having an abortion,” Letts told Philadelphia Magazine. “Women and men have been thirsting for something like this. You don’t have to feel guilty.”

Her video follows her through her first-trimester abortion, undertaken at the clinic where she counsels other women. About a year after she began working at the women’s center, she found herself pregnant. As she told her story in Cosmopolitan, “Once I caught my breath, I knew immediately I was going to have an abortion. I knew I wasn’t ready to take care of a child.”

She was, however, ready to produce a video about her own abortion. “I searched the Internet, and I couldn’t find a video of an actual surgical procedure in the clinic that focused on the woman’s experience,” she wrote. “We talk about abortion so much and yet no one really knows what it actually looks like. A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes.”

She chose a surgical abortion, rather than an abortion by pill, just in order to be able to tell the story. “I could have taken the pill, but I wanted to do the one that women were most afraid of. I wanted to show it wasn’t scary — and that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story,” she recounted. “It’s my story.”

So Emily Letts set out to make a video of her own abortion in order to create “a positive abortion story” that would show the world that women seeking an abortion should feel no guilt. Over and over again, she suggests that she feels absolutely no guilt about terminating the life within her.

And make no mistake — guilt is her major focus. In her words: “I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.”

Actually, what she wants to address is her argument that the guilt women feel in having an abortion is simply imposed upon them by society. “Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions,” she asserted. “I didn’t feel bad,” she insists. Her purpose in her video is to eradicate the link between abortion and guilt. “I am thankful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.”

She is unlikely to be successful in that aim, and her article in Cosmopolitan about the video makes that point. “Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty,” she acknowledged. “Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about it.”

Our post-Christian society has been working hard for well over a century to bury guilt in the cultural backyard and deny that guilt can be morally significant. In the wake of Sigmund Freud and the therapeutic revolution, the modern secular worldview demands that guilt be understood as the lingering residue of the Christian conscience, an experience merely forced upon us by a society that imposes oppressive moral judgments. It is to be overcome and denied, never heard.

But the Christian worldview affirms that guilt is inescapably moral, and that our experience of guilt comes from the fact that we are made in God’s image as irreducibly moral creatures. We cannot not know of our guilt, which exists as God’s gift to drive us to the knowledge that we are sinners in need of a Savior.

If Emily Letts truly believes that there is no guilt rightly associated with abortion, she would not have to insist, over and over again, that she feels no guilt. When she tells of women who “feel guilty for not feeling guilty,” she testifies to the fact that they are moral creatures who cannot stop making moral judgments, especially about themselves, even when they insist there there is no moral judgment to be made. And this must be especially true when a woman has sought to terminate the unborn life within her.

And Emily Letts knows that the baby within her was a life. In an absolutely haunting narrative, she described her abortion in these terms:

“I knew the cameras were in the room during the procedure, but I forgot about them almost immediately. I was focused on staying positive and feeling the love from everyone in the room. I am so lucky that I knew everyone involved, and I was so supported. I remember breathing and humming through it like I was giving birth. I know that sounds weird, but to me, this was as birth-like as it could be. It will always be a special memory for me. I still have my sonogram, and if my apartment were to catch fire, it would be the first thing I’d grab.”

So her abortion was “as birth-like as it could be,” except for the fact that the entire procedure was intended to terminate the life so that the birth would never take place.

And her comments about her affection for the sonogram image of her baby? What moral sense can be made of a woman speaking her pride in the sonogram of a baby she would abort? She told Philadephia Magazine, “I have a special relationship with my ultrasound. People say it sounds weird, it’s my process. I realize it was potential life, and I love it in my own special way. I’m not glib and cavalier. I’m comfortable with my decisions.”

She actually states that she loves the baby she aborted (while filming the process) “in my own special way.” In a comment posted at Cosmopolitan, she said that she did not want to give birth to the baby and then allow someone else to adopt the child because if she ever gives birth to a baby, “I would need to be the main source of love and support for the child throughout its life.”

In the case of the child she aborted, that life was very short indeed.

Her most chilling words of all are those with which she ends her video:

“It is about a month and a half after the procedure. I feel like I talk to women all the time and of course everyone feels bad about this; everyone’s going to feel guilty. It’s a given how people should feel about this, that what they’re doing is wrong. I don’t feel like a bad person. I don’t feel sad. I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a baby. I can make a life. I knew that what I was going to do was right, ’cause it was right for me and no one else. I just want to share my story.”

Friedrich Nietzsche could not have said it more clearly. This is a statement of Promethean self-assertion. It is also a concise statement of an absolutely godless worldview. She feels “in awe of the fact that I can make a baby. I can make a life.”

That actually explains her worldview. She grants to herself the power to give life; to “make a life.” What she gives, she can destroy. Emily giveth, and Emily taketh away.

And she is also the creator of her own moral system of value and the judge of her own solitary moral universe — “I knew what I was going to do was right, ’cause it was right for me and no one else.” No one else matters.

According to Cosmopolitan, Emily Letts won “the Abortion Care Network’s Stigma Busting video competition” with her effort. They evidently believe that this video will help their cause.

So does Carter Eskew, former chief strategist for the Al Gore 2000 presidential campaign. Writing at The Washington Post, Eskew expressed his effusive appreciation for Emily Letts’s “brave actions.”

In his words:

“For too long, those who believe in abortion rights have been playing defense, hiding behind political locutions like ‘safe, legal and rare.’ The procedure itself may have come out of the back alleys, but the affirmative case for abortion, the necessary and positive impact it has had on millions of women’s lives who weren’t ready, able or desirous of having a child, has been in a shroud of shame. With her brave actions, Letts lifted it a bit.”

Oh yes, Emily Letts has lifted the “shroud of shame” a bit. And what she revealed is a reality about abortion that is undisguised evil. Those who strive and pray for the end of abortion should hope that this video is viewed and that her comments about it are read by millions. This video reveals the truth about abortion in a far more powerful way than its maker intended. She is, after all, the maker of a video — and not the maker of life.

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

Emily Letts, “Emily’s Abortion Video.” Vimeo, 2014. http://vimeo.com/84797427

Victor Fiorillo, “Q&A: Actress Emily Letts on the Reaction to Her Abortion Video,” Philadelphia Magazine, Wednesday, May 7, 2014  http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/05...

Emily Letts, “Why I Filmed My Abortion,” Cosmopolitan, Monday, May 5, 2014. http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/he...

Carter Eskew, “A Brave Voice Among Choice Supporters,” The Washington Post, Wednesday, May 7, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/p...

 

Transcript: The Briefing 05-07-14

The Briefing

 

 May 7, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, May 7, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Monday’s 5-4 decision by the United States Supreme Court in the case having to do with the city of Greece, New York, is continuing to send shockwaves through the community. And what’s most interesting is the discussion in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision because that discussion reveals that the great cultural divide in America is not just between liberals and conservatives, certainly not just between religionists and secularists, not between Republicans and Democrats, but, increasingly, between those who believe that something like prayer can only be only divisive and dangerous and those who see it as a natural response of the human being to the Creator.

 

Now when you begin looking at this situation, the editorial response has been fierce. But let’s go back to the case. On Monday, by a majority of five out of the nine justices of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court ruled that the city of Greece, New York, had not violated the Constitution by allowing ministers to open the meetings of the town council in prayer. Now, as a matter of fact, most of those who prayed were Christian ministers and, as might be expected, the prayers they prayed were distinctively Christian prayers. The city did not limit those invited to deliver prayers to be Christians, but the city itself is overwhelmingly Christian. And it has to be said that the city had to go to some extraordinary lengths in order to find persons who weren’t Christians to deliver prayers. But they did do that and they pledged to continue to do that.

 

In the syllabus of the court’s decision, that’s the official court summary of the decision handed down on Monday, the court declared this:

 

To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislature sponsoring prayers and the courts deciding these cases to act as supervisors and sensors of religious speech; thus involving government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the towns current practice of neither editing nor proving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.

 

Now that’s a very important statement and actually gets to one of the two or three most crucial insights in the aftermath of this court decision; in other words, in response to the public conversation about it. Now one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that the two women who brought the case against Greece, New York, were not arguing that the city had no constitutional right to have an invocation prior to the meeting of the town council. That’s already an established matter of constitutional law. Instead they were arguing that the only prayers that should be constitutionally permissible were prayers that, in the words of their lawsuit, were nonsectarian prayers to what they called a generic god. That’s what was rejected by the Supreme Court—narrowly, we point out; it was a 5-4 decision. But now you have people crying out that that was a failure of the court to uphold the Constitution.

 

Now we have to go back to the fact that the Supreme Court on Monday, in terms of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, stated the common sense presupposition that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of the actual practices of the ones who framed it. In other words, the fact that the founders and framers of the Constitution and our constitutional order opened their own meetings with distinctively Christian prayers, that was an indication that they did not intend to make unconstitutional what they were continuing to do. That’s just common sense, and common sense that should prevail in any similar situation.

 

But going back to the controversy after the decision was handed down on Monday; you have many people saying that the Supreme Court should have required nonsectarian or generic prayers. And what’s really interesting is that Justice Kennedy and the syllabus of the court’s decision clearly indicated the problem with that. Who is going to judge whether or not a prayer is adequately nonsectarian or whether the god referenced in a prayer is adequately a generic god? That gets to really the heart of the issue. Are we going to trust government? Are we even going to assign some government, some legislature, or some court to decide which prayers are and are not sufficiently nonsectarian, sufficiently nontheistic, sufficiently generic? Interestingly, we need to note even the typed form, the printed form, of the Supreme Court’s decision. The word God is generally capitalized. That indicates that the God who is referenced is considered a theistic deity, but when you look at the religious systems of the world, many are not explicitly theistic at all. Many would not have a God to capitalize in terms of deity. Many would not have a personal God that can be capitalized in terms of a proper noun. In other words, even in the formatting of its decision, the Supreme Court actually made the point. How in the world do you come up with some kind of generic prayer? What kind of prayer would be adequately nonsectarian? And who wants to assign to government the assignment to identify the content of prayers and judge, by their content and by their effect, whether or not they are nonsectarian enough?

 

That was the common sense form of reasoning that led Justice Kennedy and four of his colleagues to say that the town of Greece was right in neither proscribing the prayer nor prescribing it, declining to say what should be offered in a prayer and declining to say what should not be. Furthermore, in a very interesting point, the justices noted that the town of Greece, New York, neither said what should or shouldn’t be said nor criticized a prayer after it was offered.

 

Another key issue that plays into the current controversy after the handing down of this decision is a point that Justice Kennedy made in his opinion. He wrote this:

 

Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. It acknowledges our growing diversity not by proscribing sectarian content, but by welcoming ministers of many creeds.

 

Very interesting. The judicial branch of our national government pointed to the legislative branch and said, “They’re doing it right.” What Congress does is daily to invite clergy or representatives of world religions to pray and each is allowed to pray in his or her own way. They’re not told how to pray. They’re not told to pray nonsectarian prayers. You expect then that a Muslim is going to prayer Islamic prayers and a Jewish rabbi’s going to pray Jewish prayers and go on. You can imagine just how that would work. Recently, it was reported that Congress had welcomed its first Sikh ceremonial chaplain, offering prayers for the Senate that day.

 

Now evangelical Christians have to understand that this is the cost of religious liberty. It’s also the gift of religious liberty. Religious liberty for Christians means religious liberty for all, and the religious liberty that allows a Christian pastor to pray a legitimately Christian prayer in public is the same religious liberty that allows a Sikh to pray a Sikh prayer, Daoist to pray a Daoist prayer, a Buddhist to pray a Buddhist prayer, and going through the catalog. We, therefore, cannot claim to be offended when we hear a prayer other than our own, when we hear or experience a prayer that is something with which we do not agree, referencing a God in whom we do not believe, using language that we would never use.

 

Now it is actually impossible for a Christian, a gospel-minded, biblically-minded Christian, not to be theologically offended by those prayers. After all, we believe they’re false prayers to false deities. The Bible makes that very clear, but being theologically offended is very different than being politically or constitutionally offended. We have to run the risk of being theologically offended in order to uphold religious liberty. And the religious liberty that we would claim for ourselves is the religious liberty that we have to claim and protect for others as well.

 

In a rather predictable editorial outrage against the decision handed down on Monday, yesterday’s edition of The New York Times included an editorial statement that ended, “It was disappointing that the Justice Department urged the justices to uphold the prayer practice in the town hall meetings, which skirted the constitutional principle of religious neutrality.” The keywords now follow: “and caused some residents to feel like outsiders.” In other words, the insinuation—no, the direct statement—in this editorial is that if a prayer is offered that isn’t your prayer, that doesn’t comport with your religious beliefs or your worldview, if you hear that prayer, you then feel like an outsider. You know, that’s the problem. You should then feel like an insider in America. You should feel like an insider in a community and in a nation that welcomes persons regardless of their religious beliefs and welcomes them to pray in public regardless of their religious beliefs.

 

We also need to note something that is revealed in this controversy. We need to give this very close attention. There are now some people in our society who are not merely outraged and offended by these prayers, their claiming something akin to a psychological harm by being required in some circumstances to hear a prayer with which they do not agree. Religion News Service quoted Edwina Rogers, the executive director of the Secular Coalition of America. She said she was very disappointed that the Supreme Court—and these are her words—“chose to ignore the very blatant burden sectarian prayer imposes on the conscience of citizens with diverse religious beliefs and those without religious beliefs.” In other words, this Edwina Rogers, the spokesperson and executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, says that sectarian prayers, that is, prayer with any kind of theological content, imposes on the conscience of citizens; a harm upon the conscience of citizens. That’s a very strange notion of conscience. My conscience would be violated, seriously so, if anyone were to force me to pray or to worship in some way they did not match my own convictions. But my conscience is not impinged in any way, is not violated in any sense, simply by hearing someone else pray according to his or her own conscience and convictions. That’s a very strange understanding of conscience that claims to be harmed simply by hearing something with which we do not agree.

 

But that tells you something that is really going on in the secular mind and increasingly in the secularized culture that America’s becoming. People are claiming that it is their constitutional right never to hear something with which they do not agree. They’re claiming that there is a psychological harm in being required to hear someone with a conviction not their own articulate those convictions in public. That’s deadly dangerous not only for religious liberty, but for free speech and any notion of liberty that make any sense whatsoever.

 

And just when you think that kind of the illogic can’t possibly be topped, along comes Jeff Schweitzer, writing in The Huffington Post. And he suggests that if you take the prayers that are documented as having been prayed in Greece, New York, before the town council meetings, if you take out the name Jesus and put in the name of Allah, he says, “We’re living in Tehran instead of New York.” Well, that’s a very strange reading. Is he actually claiming that allowing Muslims to pray a Muslim prayer before the opening of a town council in a small village in upstate New York is somehow making New York State become Tehran, an Islamic theocracy? That’s the kind of overstatement and exaggeration that should be immediately identified as being the kind of argument offered from a position of very weak intellectual credibility, of very week rationality. He even said that this is evidence of what he calls a shift of theocracy in which, as he writes, Jeffersonian principles have been set aside for the convenience of promoting Christianity over all religions. He then writes, “Welcome to the United States of Saudi Arabia.”

 

Now when you see that kind of argument and obvious hyperbole, you might wonder what’s behind that. Well he makes it abundantly clear as he concludes his article. On the last page of his essay, he says this, “The time has come for us to fight the arrogant certainty among Christians that they hold a truth more valid than Jews, Muslims and those who eschew all religion.” In other words, what’s really driving Jeff Schweitzer’s outrage isn’t the decision handed down on Monday by the United States Supreme Court. It’s not actually the idea that Christians or Muslims or anyone else would be praying prayers before the town council of Greece, New York. It’s the fact that he’s absolutely outraged that Christianity as a belief system would claim to have, in his words, “a truth more valid than Jews, Muslims, and those who eschew all religion.”

 

Now let me just state what should be obvious and a matter of simple common sense. We all hold beliefs. The fact that we hold beliefs means that we’re human and the fact that we hold specific beliefs is because we believe those beliefs are more superior in terms of truth and authority than other beliefs. In other words, there isn’t a single human being on the planet, who is sane, who doesn’t believe that his or her beliefs are superior to the beliefs that he or she does not hold. So when Jeff Schweitzer writes, “The time has come for us to fight the arrogant certainty among Christians that they hold a belief more valid than Jews, Muslims, and those who eschew all religion,” we just need to point out that those who eschew all religion believe that their worldview is intellectually superior to those who believe in Christianity.

 

Now religious liberty means that Jeff Schweitzer has the right to pen that article and to have it published and to have it discussed. But it also means that Christians have the right to be Christians and that Christians have the right to hold to Christian convictions and to pray in public as Christians. That’s what religious liberty means and that’s why Monday was so important.

 

Next we go back to Nigeria. Yesterday, we discussed the fact that there is international concern and outrage, indeed, heartbreak over the fact that approximately 270 teenage girls were kidnapped in that nation and taken by the group known as Boko Haram from a school where they were studying for their annual exams. Boko Haram is an Islamic group, a terrorist organization that has killed many in the past and kidnapped many as well. They are now threatening to sell these girls as sex slaves, to sell them as wives. And the very name of the organization means they’re against Western education, and they’re blaming these girls and their families and the government of Nigeria for having put these girls in the situation of receiving a Western education. Their response is to kidnap them and to sell them into slavery. The leader of Boko Haram, as we reported yesterday, has said that Allah told him to do this and to sell these girls as slaves.

 

Now there’s increased outrage on two fronts. One is the fact that as recently as Sunday night, Boko Haram has kidnapped more teenage girls. The exact number is not known, but it is now believed that the total number of kidnapped girls between the ages of 12 and 17 may exceed 300. The fact that Nigeria has not been able to get those girls back that were kidnapped on April 14 is bad enough, but the government there in Nigeria seems to be unable to protect even the girls who are in schools now.

 

The other outrage was reported by The New York Times; reporter Adam Nossiter pointing out that it was a year ago that the leader of Boko Haram put on the Internet a video in which he threatened to do what he has now done. In other words, Nigeria had warning that this would happen, and yet you had the kidnapping of these girls in April, a year after Boko Haram and its leader put on the Internet a video saying that they had intended to kidnap these teenage girls from schools wherever they were found in Nigeria and to sell them as wives. The Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, had said in this 57 minute video released last year, “Western education should end. Girls you should go and get married.” He went on to say that he would “give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves. We will marry them out of the age of nine. We would marry them out of the age of 12.”

 

The New York Times also reports that Boko Haram has been kidnapping girls, but murdering teenage boys. They report earlier this year:

 

More than 50 teenage boys were slaughtered — some burned alive — at a government school in the north [of Nigeria]. That attack, like many others, was quickly forgotten in Nigeria and barely noticed outside of it.

 

You know, Christians looking at a news report like this or even several news reports like this, all related to the same kind of terrorist activity in Nigeria, have to recognize just what is required for a society to have a level of order and of respect for law and indecency. What you have is a breakdown of civic order and of morality and of law enforcement in a place like Nigeria that is making it possible that a group like Boko Haram can simply go into a girls school and kidnap the girls and sell them into slavery, or to go into a boys school and murder the boys, burning some of them alive. But this also points to the fact that the worldview that makes that kind of civilizational order possible is a worldview that requires a certain understanding of human dignity and human rights, and that is exactly what a group like Boko Haram is rejecting. And in the strangest and most haunting sense, while this news out of Nigeria that should break our hearts and lead us to add our voices to Christ for international outrage and international action, it should also affirm to us the lesson that we already know. Worldview matters and underneath the worldview is theology. Theology always matters.

 

Coming back to North America, specifically  the United States and Canada, back in 2011, we discussed the fact that a Canadian businessman had founded a business that went to the cover story of BusinessWeek, now known as Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The man was Noel Biderman. He’s a Toronto businessman who wants to sell you an adulterous affair. The cover story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek reveals that he’s doing a great deal of business. His business is known as Ashley Madison or Ashley Madison.com. It is known as the premier dating website for aspiring adulterers. And, by the way, that’s the way the magazine described. He says he came up with the idea after serving as an agent for professional athletes. That job required him to negotiate around the adulterous affairs of his clients. He decided that adultery could be big business and now—and this dates back to 2011—Ashley Madison grosses $60 million a year in yearly revenue, produces $20 million in annual profits. Now if you’re looking for ironies, note the fact that this business owner is a married man with two young children. His wife said, knowing his business—and, by the way, he has a sign on his desk that reads, “Life is short. Have an affair.” His wife, in response to the question that came from the magazine’s reporter, said, “I mean, yeah, I’d love it if he were working on a cure for cancer, but it’s a business and that’s how we look at.”

 

But that was back in 2011. Now Ashley Madison’s back in the news. The Washington Post reported on May 1—the reporter is Max Ehrenfreund—that the financial crisis of 2008 may have driven many people to betray their wedding vows. Ashley Madison has released details on its business from 2008 when the economy suffered that significant recession. An analyst at Ashley Madison found evidence of a relationship between the economy and infidelity when they examined user data and individual states. They compared the change in the number of employed people in each state with the growth in Ashley Madison’s membership. Their tentative conclusion: People who have lost their jobs might be more likely to cheat or at least are more likely to sign up for an adultery-dating site.

 

The Washington Post goes back to the site’s founder Noel Biderman. He said he believes that adultery is “a normal part of human experience and that greater tolerance of infidelity would preserve more marriages and more families.” That’s the kind of Orwellian moral doublespeak that points to the absolute irrationality of the worldview. Noel Biderman claims to be assisting marriage by undermining it, helping people to stay married by helping them to be disloyal and adulterous. One of the most interesting insights in this article in The Washington Post is this paragraph:

 

Dishonesty among those surveyed has been a real obstacle to research on infidelity. Sociologists and psychologists have long sought to understand how many married people are unfaithful and why they do it, and estimates of the proportion of cheaters based on surveys range widely — from 25 percent to 75 percent of married people.

 

In other words, any statistic that tells you that the proportion is somewhere between 25% and 75% is absolutely useless. You don’t have to have a degree in statistics to know that if something ranges between 25 and 75%, it ranges into stupidity. But what’s even more stupid is the fact that someone seems to be surprised by the fact that people who would commit adultery will lie about it. Why would someone consider that an individual, ready to break his or her marriage vows, is going to somehow feel morally obligated to tell the truth about breaking those vows? So The Washington Post reports on this supposed research coming from Ashley Madison, a business that makes its $20 million in annual profit on facilitating adultery, and then complains about the fact that adulterers tend to lie about their adultery and no one actually knows what statistics can be trusted.

 

But then again comes The Huffington Post, writer Lisa Haisha, suggesting that the time has come to change our views of adultery and marriage so that we just don’t worry about it anymore. She says the modern version of marriage emerged a mere couple of hundred years ago. By the way, you’re going to hear that argument over and over again, and actually it’s just talking about wedding customs. Everyone knows that heterosexual marriage, the union of a man and a woman as a monogamous union, doesn’t go back a couple of hundred years; it goes back to Adam and Eve. But she really gets to her point when she says that it’s time for the concept of marriage to continue to evolve. She asked the question, “Are we really supposed to be with just one person our whole life? And if not, must we get remarried five times? Are there alternative ways to perceive and participate in a marriage that will guarantee its success?” How will she guarantee its success? By not including monogamy in the marriage equation. She says, “I’m not condoning adultery as we know it, because I’m not strictly talking about sex. But because it is so taboo, when you consider the historical context of marriage, isn’t being shocked by adultery a bit of an overreaction?” Well, let me just suggest an intellectual principle to keep in mind. If we shouldn’t expect someone who commits adultery to tell the truth about it, we shouldn’t expect someone who proposes adultery to be rational about it. If you’re wondering what Ms. Haisha’s view of evolved marriage looks like, she says it’s this:

 

Maybe the tenets of a successful marriage should not be whether the couple stays monogamous for decades, but rather whether the couple openly communicates about what their unique marriage will look like, what will be deemed acceptable and what will not, and then honoring that joint decision.

 

Those who hold to a Christian worldview have to look at an article like this as a symptom of the absolute breakdown of the marriage culture in our midst. We have to look at the absolute loss of rationality and moral reason on marriage that is now becoming endemic in our culture. But we also have to look at the basic moral irrationality in the argument. Even as it’s irrational to believe that those who commit adultery will tell the truth about it, why is it rational to believe that people entering into marriage, but agreeing to commit adultery, will agree to tell the truth about it in advance? This is absolute nonsense. The real problem is not everyone sees it as nonsense, and that tells you something of the challenge we now face.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. 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.

Transcript: The Briefing 05-06-14

The Briefing

 

 May 6, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, May 6, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

In a landmark decision, the United States Supreme Court yesterday decided that the town of Greece, New York, was not acting unconstitutionally in allowing persons to pray before the town council meetings of that community. Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 decision that the town of Greece was not acting unconstitutionally when those who were praying those prayers before the town council prayed what many accused as being sectarian prayers.

 

Now here we have a major worldview divide in America, and you see a divided court in that 5-4 ruling that reflects that kind of divide. On the one side, you have persons who are willing to talk about prayer in public so far and only in so far as those prayers are identified as being nonsectarian; in other words, prayers that are prayed by nonsectarian people to a nonsectarian deity in a nonsectarian way. The problem with that, of course, is that there really is no such thing as nonsectarian prayer. Every single prayer is going to imply or invoke some kind of understanding of God; otherwise, it’s not actually a prayer.

 

On the other side of the cultural divide and on the other side of the court’s divide in this case, are those who argue that prayer is by no means unconstitutional, even in the setting of a legislative meeting, of a town council in this case, because the very framers of the Constitution were explicitly allowing that practice even as the Constitution was written and even as in the earliest years the Constitution was applied.

 

So when you look at that major divide on the court, we recognize just how important it was that in this 5-4 decision the conservative wing of the court, by a vote of 5 to 4, actually won; that one vote becoming very decisive. And writing the majority opinion for the majority side was Justice Anthony Kennedy. And Justice Kennedy seemed to understand the essence of the issue when, first of all, in terms of the procedural argument for the case, he went to the actual practices of the framers. He said the framers of the Constitution get to tell us what the Constitution means, and they get to tell us not only with the words that are used in the Constitution, but also by the practices the framers followed, which are clearly understood to be constitutional. And then in his decision he seems also to understand the impossibility of a nonsectarian prayer. The justice wrote, “The First Amendment is not majority rule and the government may not seek to define permissible categories of religious speech.” Then in a key sentence he wrote this: “Once it invites prayer into the public sphere, government must permit a prayer giver to address his or her own God or gods as conscience dictates.” In other words, Justice Kennedy seems clearly to understand the impossibility of nonsectarian prayer. Furthermore, he seems to understand the impossible standard of non-sectarianism that the other side in this argument tries to hold forth.

 

Now there is a clear divide in this country on the question and there is a clear divide on the court. On the other side of the court is Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the main dissenting opinion, and even as there were other dissenting opinions, her dissenting opinion, joined by other justices, has received the most attention. She said:

 

When the citizens of this country approach their government, they do so only as Americans, not as members of one faith or another, and that means that even in a partly legislative body, they should not confront government-sponsored worship that divides them along religious lines. The town of Greece betrayed that promise.

 

So here you have two very persuasive sentences. If you operate on the worldview of those who believe that the only prayer that should be permissible is a nonsectarian prayer, then Justice Kagan’s dissenting sentence makes perfect sense. On the other hand, if you agree that there is no such thing as a nonsectarian prayer and that the actual framers practices, when you think about the Constitution, should prevail, then Justice Kennedy’s sentence makes perfect sense.

 

Here you have the reality of what happens when two worldviews are in collision. They often collide in our culture in public conversation. Sometimes they collide in a PTA meeting. Sometimes they collide over an issue like marriage and its definition. Here they divide over the issue of prayer. And these two sides are clearly defined as operating from fundamentally different worldviews. It’s a 5-4 decision. Again, that points to that absolute importance of one vote, of one justice. If you wonder if even one vote or one Supreme Court justice is important, just consider how the outcome yesterday would’ve been absolutely different with a shift of just one vote. It was a 5-4 decision, as we’ve stated several times, so reverse the five and the four. And if you reverse the situation in that way, you end up with the Supreme Court ruling yesterday that it is not permissible, constitutionally permissible, for a local government to allow a Christian minister to pray a distinctively and authentically Christian prayer. That would’ve been ruled unconstitutional just yesterday.

 

Now we need to be very clear about this. Those who agree with Justice Kennedy, and profoundly I do, also come to understand that it is the responsibility of government not to establish a church or to establish a religion. In other words, everyone on the court agreed that the city of Greece would’ve been wrong to have invited only Christian ministers or to have of allowed only Christian ministers or to have offered any kind of theological test for anyone invited to pray. And the city’s going to have to prove that point emphatically if indeed it’s going to find itself out of trouble, as there will be continuing scrutiny of its practices in prayer before its meetings.

 

On the other hand, those who brought this case are not now going to be able to say, after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, that it’s wrong for Christian to pray as a Christian or for a Jewish citizen to pray a Jewish prayer or for a Buddhist citizen to pray a Buddhist prayer. We shouldn’t expect that a Buddhist and a Jew and a Christian can pray the same prayer. What is meaningful is that the Constitution won yesterday and so did religious liberty. And for that we should all be profoundly thankful.

 

Shifting the scene to Africa, Christians should be very concerned about a massive human rights violation there and one that threatens the lives and the futures of almost 300 young teenage girls in the nation of Nigeria. As an editorial published over the weekend in The Financial Times of London states:

 

Islamist extremists from the Boko Haram sect have a five-year record of atrocities. In the impoverished northeast of Nigeria they have murdered schoolchildren, attacked mosques and churches and this year slaughtered villagers in their hundreds – in the pursuit of imposing strict Islamic law on a multi-ethnic and multi-faith nation. In the past three weeks they have carried out two bomb attacks in a crowded neighbourhood of Abuja.

 

Nearly a hundred people died in attacks in that and in other places of the country. They’re trying to unsettle the nation with its upcoming hosting of the World Economic Forum, but here’s the latest issue. They have now kidnapped 270 schoolgirls, most of them kidnapped on the date of April 14. The girls are aged between 16 and 18. They were preparing to sit for exams. They were taken from their school late at night—about 50 escaped. It is thought that the militants initially took the rest. It has been thought that these girls were being held as hostages, but it now looks like, as Boko Haram’s leader announced yesterday, they’ve actually been kidnapped in order to remove them from their families forever and in order to sell them as wives. As Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, said, “I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah.” He said, “Allah has instructed me to sell them. They are his property and I’ll carry out his instructions.”

 

Now the name Boko Haram—and if you don’t know about Boko Haram, you should. This is one of the leading terrorist organizations in the world; one of the deadliest agents of terror found anywhere on the globe. The very name of the organization, translated into English, means “Western education is sinful.” They have been targeting young children. They have been targeting teenagers, targeting students in particular, and targeting schools. And in this case, they are particularly targeting young women because they believe that young girls and women should not be educated in the first place. They blame that as simply a symptom of Western education and westernization that will lead to the dissolution of Nigerian culture. Boko Haram is a terrorist organization, but is it almost unimaginable that you could have a terrorist organization kidnap almost 300 young teenage girls and now threaten not only keep to them forever, but to sell them into sex slavery, to sell them as wives.

 

And what is really haunting about this situation is that you have almost unanimous international outrage. You have The Financial Times, CNN. You have The New York Times and The Washington Post; The Times of London. You have newspapers virtually everywhere in the globe absolutely unanimous about the horror of this situation. You have the United Nations involved. You have other nations claiming that this is not only an atrocity, but an atrocity that must be quickly corrected, and yet nothing seems to be done. Most of these girls were kidnapped on April 14. That is now two weeks ago. They were taken into the forest and from that forest they have not returned. And every day that passes means that their return is less likely. Every day that passes means that more of them are closer to being sold into sex slavery. Every day that passes means that more of them are closer to becoming the wives of men who would buy them as a marketplace.

 

And that horrifying reality now faces us all in the world because the world appears to be powerless to do anything about this. The Financial Times, in its editorial, calls on Nigeria, its police, and its army to do something, but if anything has become demonstrably clear in recent years, it is that the Nigerian government isn’t up to this challenge. What about the other African nations? Many of them are also being targeted by Boko Haram, or if not by that specific Islamist organization, then by other terrorist organizations that have similar kinds of holds upon their own people; similar kinds of threats to their own public safety. What about the larger United Nations? How in the world can the United Nations—put into effect at the end of the Second World War as the organization that’s supposed to bring combined international effort, combining the efforts and moral outrage of all the nations to stop this very kind of thing—how can the United Nations be reduced to basically being quoted in news stories rather than doing something? If we ever needed evidence of the sinfulness of sin and of the deep social consequences of sin, of the tenacity of sin, and of the seeming incompetence and inability of virtually anyone on the planet to do anything about something so horrible, well, here is Exhibit A, an exhibit that simply cannot be denied. And what virtually anyone—a husband, a father, a mother, a wife—anyone—a brother, a sister, a cousin—anyone—the moral instinct of virtually anyone is to do something to save these girls. And yet no one seems to be able to do anything and that is one of the most horrifying human realizations that can come to us. Sometimes something like this can be known. It can be seen. It can be declared in public. It can be named for what it is, and it appears that no one is able to do anything about it. What does that say about us? What does that say about sin? What does that say about our need for a new creation?

 

And then from Nigeria we move to the nation of South Korea. You’ll recall that in recent days and weeks we’ve been discussing this horrifying sinking of a ferry; a sinking that has killed hundreds of people, including over 200 teenagers. Now it’s very easy as other headlines come and crowd our attention for something like that to just pass off the world scene and out of our consciousness, but I’m very thankful that The New York Times, in its international reporting, has gone back to South Korea and the town of Ansan, from which these high school students came, in order to take us to something that should have our attention. The question they ask is this: How do you suffer through 250 teenage funerals? How in the world does a community, a fairly small community, deal with the fact that an entire grade of its high school has been wiped out? How do you deal with the grief of 250 extended families? How do you deal with the reality that 250 teenagers who had been buying coffee in your coffee shops, using your Internet cafés, and had been there studying for tests, well known in the community–how you deal with 250 empty desks? How does a school or a community deal with an entire grade wiped out? In terms of our grade system, the students who died in this ferry were in what we would call the 11th grade. They would be seniors next year. They will be preparing to take the exams that would determine whether or not they could go to college? They were reaching the end of their childhood and adolescence, as defined in South Korean culture, and now they’re simply gone—250 of them. By the way, about 80 of the bodies have still not been recovered, but that means that still there are going to be about 250 funerals. This has taxed all of the infrastructure of this small town in South Korea. The funeral homes can’t handle this. The cemeteries and the crematoria can’t handle this. It’s simply too much at one time, but that doesn’t even get to the emotional strain. How do you handle this? How do you handle the long, lingering, lasting grief of 250 families?

 

Kim Hee-kyeum, the vice governor of the Gyeonggi Province where Ansan is located, said this:

 

An entire grade at a high school was wiped out. It is not just the 250 lost students. It is their surviving classmates, their parents, friends, neighborhoods, the entire city. It will take a long time to overcome this nightmare.

 

Well we can only imagine that that statement, though true, is actually an understatement. It will not just take a long time to overcome this nightmare. The nightmare will never be overcome. That, again, is one of these horrifying reminders to us of the necessity of the atonement that is accomplished by Christ, of the Judgment Day that is coming, and of the kingdom that He is establishing, and of the reality that only in that kingdom will every eye be dry and every tear be wiped away.

 

This points to us the necessity, again, of our understanding of the gospel as the central factor in our worldview, the central truth around all other truths, the central insight and conviction around which all other values, insights, attitudes, and intuitions have to be aligned. Our understanding is that there is no way, there is no means, whereby this kind of grief can be overcome. Not the loss of 250 teenagers in one small community, an entire grade in a school wiped out. This is something that no human philosophy can answer. This is something that no human ethical system can resolve. This is something that no human therapy or psychological intervention can really help. This is something that profoundly cries out a need for a gospel, for good news. And the only possible good news that can come out of such a horrifying situation as this is the good news that there can be life out of death, and that comes only in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if you needed an exhibit, in terms of this day’s news, in terms of why the gospel has to be at the forefront of everything we are and everything we think and everything we feel, even everything we read, well here’s this. How do you read a headline like this and read it without the gospel?

 

Coming back to the United States, evidence of what’s going on in terms of our higher education culture became clear in a Financial Times article datelined from New York. The headline, however, has to do with something that happened at Harvard University. Ed Crooks reporting:

 

Students at Harvard University blockaded its administrative offices in support of their campaign to persuade the institution to sell the investments in fossil fuel companies held by its $33bn endowment.

 

Yes: $33 billion of endowment. And in that endowment, are companies that sell, manufacturer, engineer, and otherwise have to do with fossil fuels. And these students have blockaded themselves in the administrative offices of Harvard University, taking them over in order to persuade Harvard University to do the right thing and to sell all of these horrifying stocks in fossil fuel firms. As The Financial Times reported, one student was arrested last week as officers broke up the blockade that had been intended to prevent Drew Faust (that’s the president of Harvard University) and other senior administrators from reaching their offices. The next paragraph is really sweet:

 

The action, which organisers said was joined by more than 300 students, is the latest round of a growing campaign for US universities and other institutions to divest from oil, gas and coal companies because of concerns about climate change and other pollution.

 

Now this is one of those stories that tells us not only about student activism, as if we’ve gone back to the 60’s, not only about Harvard University, but about the larger culture and also about how our larger society responds to this.

 

So here you have students who blockaded themselves within the administrative offices of Harvard University, demanding that the president of Harvard demand that the Harvard Corporation would divest itself and its $33 billion endowment of anything having to do with fossil fuels. Because having anything to do with fossil fuels is obviously immoral, unethical, and to be avoided at all costs. And then what did the students do? Well they celebrated the win in terms of their sit-in, no doubt, by getting in their cars, on their motorcycles and mopeds, and riding to the local coffee shop (or something worse) in order to celebrate. In other words, where is anyone in this society standing up, where’s anyone in the media saying, “Have these students given up fossil fuels? Are they living a fossil-fuel-free existence? Are they themselves not benefiting from fossil fuels? What is the moral sanity of a society that basically celebrates students for taking over the president’s office at Harvard University to make a point they themselves obviously can’t live with? Every once in a while you just wish someone in the media would turn to the very people they’re reporting and say, “Are you actually doing what you’re demanding?” That might be a very revealing question.

 

Finally, a very revealing article appeared in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. The style section writer Jessica Bennett writes an article about the fact that many people, even in hyper secular New York, now when they ask how their doing say, “I’m blessed.” When they’re talking about their lives, they say, “I’m blessed to have this. I’m blessed to have that.” Does that sound like theological or spiritual language? Well Jessica Bennett says it could, except in this hyper-secular age, it doesn’t appear that there is any particular spiritual meaning to it. Deborah Tannen, a linguist quoted in the article, says, “Blessed is now being used by many people in America as a substitute for lucky.” What’s the difference between lucky and blessed? Well lucky makes it sound like something just happened to you; where blessed sounds like someone gave this to you, and thus you should be thankful. This gets back to the quandary of the secularist at Thanksgiving. They want to celebrate Thanksgiving, but there’s no one to whom their thankful. How in the world do you do that? Well that’s the problem. And there is a secularization in our language. We have a shift in secularization from saying, “I am thankful,” to saying, “I’m blessed.” And there is a shift in our conversation between saying, “I’ll pray for you,” and saying now, “I’ll just think of you.” That secularization shows up in this article, but it’s really interesting that the article shows up in The New York Times. How do we know this? Well, because we’re blessed. I’ll be thinking of you.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. 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 05-07-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Religious liberty rightly affirmed by Supreme Court decision approving non-generic prayer

TOWN OF GREECE, NEW YORK v. GALLOWAY ET AL., Supreme Court

A Defeat for Religious Neutrality, New York Times (Editorial Board)

Supreme Court approves sectarian prayer at public meetings, Religious New Service (Lauren Markoe and Cathy Lynn Grossman)

The Supreme Court Rules That Christianity Is Not Christian, Huffington Post (Jeff Schweitzer)

Constitutional Wisdom and Common Sense on Ceremonial Prayer — An Important Victory, AlbertMohler.com (Albert Mohler)

2) Breakdown of civil society in Nigeria a reminder that worldview always matters

Nigerian Islamist Leader Threatens to Sell Kidnapped Girls, New York Times (Adam Nossiter)

More Nigerian girls abducted by suspected Boko Haram militants, BBC News

3) Normalization of adultery dissolves moral sanity of the culture

Adultery Incorporated- The Infidelity Industry, AlbertMohler.com (Al Mohler)

The Economics of Adultery, The Washington Post (Max Ehrenfreund)

Is It Time To Change Our Views Of Adultery and Marriage?, Huffington Post (Lisa Haisha)

Constitutional Wisdom and Common Sense on Ceremonial Prayer — An Important Victory

In a landmark decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled yesterday that prayer before the opening of a legislative body does not violate the U. S. Constitution. The decision is a victory for both the Constitution and for common sense, and the controversy about it points to the deep cultural divide over one of the founding principles of the nation — religious liberty.

That divide was evident in the Court itself, with the justices breaking along liberal and conservative lines. The 5 to 4 decision is an indication that this case, Town of Greece, New York v. Galloway, stands at the epicenter of cultural conflict.

The case emerged after two women filed suit against the town of Greece in New York, claiming that the town’s practice of opening town council meetings with prayer violated their liberties and the Constitution. The facts presented in the case indicated that the vast majority of citizens who prayed were Christians, and that their prayers were Christian in content. The women charged that this practice violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. They did not demand that the practice of prayers before council meetings cease, but that the only prayers offered would be “inclusive and ecumenical prayers” and that all references would be to a “generic God.”

The Court ruled that the practice did not, in fact, violate the Constitution. Furthermore, the Court’s decision included a clear refutation of the very concept of a “nonsectarian prayer” to a “generic God.” As the Court’s syllabus stated:

“To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures sponsoring prayers and the courts deciding these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, thus involving government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing nor approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact. Respondents’ contrary arguments are unpersuasive. It is doubtful that consensus could be reached as to what qualifies as a generic or nonsectarian prayer. It would also be unwise to conclude that only those religious words acceptable to the majority are permissible, for the First Amendment is not a majority rule and government may not seek to define permissible categories of religious speech. In rejecting the suggestion that legislative prayer must be nonsectarian, the Court does not imply that no constraints remain on its content.”

In the opinion for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy offered reasoning that should inform the Court at all points, especially on contested questions of religious liberty. Justice Kennedy stated clearly and boldly that today’s interpretation of the Constitution must be guided by the actual practices of the framers. In other words, the Constitution must not be read to forbid what the framers of the document unquestionably allowed.

On this issue, the historical record is clear. When attorneys for the two women who originated this case brought evidence of the fact that Christian pastors had prayed with explicit Christian language, Justice Kennedy countered that the framers of the Constitution allowed for the same, and that the United States Congress allows such prayers at the opening of daily sessions in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

But Justice Kennedy pressed further, countering two very dangerous arguments. The first is the assertion that the only prayers which may be allowed would be nonsectarian. He stated that any “insistence on nonsectarian prayer as a single, fixed standard” is not consistent with the Court’s previous rulings. Going back to the founding era, he stated that the Christian nature of the prayers offered to legislative bodies “must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our nation was less pluralistic than today.”

The second very important argument made by Justice Kennedy is even more perceptive and, in the long run, more important. He asserted that the government has no competence under the Constitution to evaluate prayers in terms of content. Specifically, he said that the Establishment Clause actually would prevent the government from determining the content of any prayer — especially in terms of some supposed standard of nonsectarianism.

Put bluntly, government has no right to declare that the only God welcome in public is a “generic God.” That is a profoundly important constitutional argument. For Christians, this is also a profoundly important theological argument. We do not believe that any “generic God” exists, nor can we allow that some reference to a “generic God” is a reference to the God of the Bible.

In her leading dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “When citizens of this country approach their government, they do so only as Americans, not as members of one faith or another.” That is a striking example of an argument that can only be explained by a thoroughly secular worldview. In truth, we can never show up in any context as simple citizens, informed and shaped by a generic worldview. We always show up as all we are, and that includes our most fundamental beliefs.

The Court’s ruling yesterday is important at every level — even as the controversy over the ruling is very illuminating. Some people argue that the problem is prayer in any form, and would simply prohibit public prayers at any governmental occasion. Others, like the women who brought this case against Greece, New York, would argue that prayers may be allowed, but only if they are sufficiently nonsectarian prayers offered to a generic deity. Others, including Justice Kennedy and a majority of the Court, argue that the nation has clearly allowed explicitly “sectarian” prayers to be offered at government occasions, and that the nation’s commitment to pluralism then depends on the invitation to pray being extended to all, regardless of creed.

That directs us to another very important section of Justice Kennedy’s opinion: “Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. It acknowledges our growing diversity not by proscribing sectarian content but by welcoming ministers of many creeds.”

This is a message that Christians in America must affirm without reservation. Religious liberty for Christians means religious liberty — full religious liberty — for all citizens. We must not only concede this point, we must make this point. We cannot be constitutionally offended when Buddhists pray at the opening of Congress as Buddhists, when Muslims open sessions of the town council meeting with Muslim prayers, or even when the rabbi prays in accordance with his Jewish faith.

Finally, we must recognize that one of the primary purposes of prayer before a government assembly is to remind all present that government, though important, is not ultimate. Justice Kennedy affirmed this understanding in these words:

“Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government to alter or define and that willing participation in civic affairs can be consistent with a brief acknowledgment of their belief in a higher power, always with due respect for those who adhere to other beliefs. The prayer in this case has a permissible ceremonial purpose. It is not an unconstitutional establishment of religion.”

Now, perhaps the real question for Christians is this — is prayer before government assemblies our only concern? It makes little sense to insist on a right to pray for our government in public, if we do not do so in private. As the Apostle Paul directed:

“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” [1 Timothy 2:1-4].

And all God’s people said, AMEN.

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

Supreme Court of the United States decision in the case of Town of Greece, NY v. Galloway, Monday, May 5, 2014. http://www2.bloomberglaw.com/public/d...

The Briefing 05-06-14

1) Supreme Court determines sectarian prayers before town council are not unconstitutional

Supreme Court upholds legislative prayer at council meetings, Washington Post (Robert Barnes)

Supreme Court Allows Prayers at Town Meeting, New York Times (Adam Liptak)

Supreme Court Upholds Public Prayer at Town Board Meeting, Wall Street Journal (Jess Bravin)

2) Kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls stark exhibit of deep consequences of sin in world

Nigeria’s missing schoolgirls, Financial Times

Nigeria’s Boko Haram threatens to sell kidnapped schoolgirls, Reuters (Tim Cocks and Isaac Abrak)

3) Ongoing emotional strain of Korean ferry tragedy cries out need for the gospel

A Korean City With 250 Holes in Its Heart, New York Times (Martin Fackler)

4) Harvard student protests are a display of hypocrisy

Fossil fuel protesters blockade offices at Harvard University, Financial Times (Ed Crooks)

5) Secularization of term ‘blessed’ 

They Feel ‘Blessed’, New York Times (Jessica Bennett)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-05-14

The Briefing

 

 May 5, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, May 5, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Twenty years after the first women were ordained as priests in the Church of England, that church held a national service. It was yesterday. It was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said, at that service marking the 20th anniversary of the ordination of women as priests, that the ordination of women should be celebrated with what he called ‘fullness of heart and no holding back’. At the same time, he warned against triumphalism. If it sounds like the archbishop was sending a mixed signal, it’s because he profoundly was. And as a matter fact, the church is still divided over these issues and in many cases deeply divided. Twenty years after the first women were ordained as priests, there are still no women serving as bishops in the Church of England, and if women are to be fully included at every level of the church’s leadership, they must be elected as bishops as well. That’s been the argument of women for the last twenty years. Just a matter of about a year ago, the Church of England, in terms of its General Synod (and that is democratically elected in terms of laypeople being involved), it narrowly turned down an effort to legalize women serving as bishops. That led to an outrage on the part of the British Parliament, asking when the church was going to “get with the program” in terms of joining the feminist momentum. And now twenty years after the first women were ordained as priests, it looks like the Church of England is this summer poised finally, according to the logic of the women pushing for this, to approve women serving as bishops as well.

 

In his message yesterday, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is head not only of the Church of England but is also the titular head of the entire Anglican Communion worldwide, he said, “We’re not there yet.” He was speaking to a congregation that included, according to the national press, more than 600 women who had been ordained as priests in that church since the first wave of female ordinations came in the year 1994. The Archbishop said:

 

As we celebrate how far we’ve come, let us be mindful of the distance yet to travel. In twenty years, we’ve come a long way. How did we not see that women and men are equally icons, witnesses, vessels of Christ for the world?

 

Noticeably absent from the archbishop’s message was any reference to biblical passages that would create quite an insurmountable problem for the ordination of women as priests. The Church of England, in terms of its decision-making process, has moved far beyond that over the last twenty years and it has adopted a method of interpreting Scripture, in terms of how the legislative bodies of the church are now acting, in such a way that when you look at this story that comes out of the Church of England yesterday, when you look at this service that took place on the 20th anniversary of the church’s first wave of the ordination of women to the priesthood, what you see is language that you can almost imagine you’re going to hear again very soon. But not addressed to the issue of women serving as priests, but to the issue of openly gay persons serving as priests. It’s because the hermeneutical, which is to say, the interpretive issues related to the Scripture on the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood, or that is to the pastorate, we might say, are almost precisely the hermeneutical issues that are involved in asking the questions about the sexual morality of same-sex acts and of same-sex relationships and of the qualifications of men who are called to serve as pastors and teachers of the church.

 

Speaking of that 20th anniversary service and addressing himself to what he described as the church’s progress on the issue of the ordination of women, the archbishop said, “In our celebrations, let us not overlook the cost, the bitterness of disappointment and rejection, the knee-jerk resistance of an institution facing change.” He continued, “As a representative of that institution, I want to thank those here today whose costly loyalty, whose scars make this celebration possible, and to say personally how I grieve that it cost so much, to apologize for my own part in that hurt.” It’s not just evangelicals in the church who expect that they might hear that language very quickly from the archbishop on a very different issue. It is also those who are pushing for the normalization of homosexuality within the Church of England, for its acceptance of same-sex marriage, and for the church to change its position, so that it will also ordain openly homosexual persons to the priesthood and eventually also to the episcopacy. The Times of London reports that number of ordained women in the Church of England now amounts to about a third of all the priests in that church, that is about 3,827 out of an existing 12,814. But what is really interesting, and this is also an issue of the archbishops concern, a good many of those women, indeed, perhaps even a majority of the women who have been ordained as priests in the Church of England are not serving as what might be described as pastors. Rather they are serving in alternative charges; serving as chaplains in hospitals, prisons, schools, and universities. The religious affairs reporter for the BBC, that is, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Robert Pickett said that there were in his words “clouds hanging over the celebrations.” In his words, a disproportionate number of women priests are working in unpaid positions and the recruitment of young women priests has, in his words, “dried to a trickle.” Affirming that analysis was Professor Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University. She said only one in seven people coming forward as new priests are women and she said the reason is that women are “very much second-class citizens” even now among Church of England clergy.

 

Evangelicals should note that it was twenty years ago that the political pressure within the Church of England led to the acceptance by legislation of women as priests. We should also note that the pressure, the political pressure, on that church right now, coming not just from within the church, but also from the nation’s government on the issue of homosexuality, is even more fierce and even more concentrated. As a matter fact, already you have bishops of the Church of England who will openly defy the laws of the church and of the state on this issue. You also have leaders in the Church of England who are coming out of the closet and inviting other priests to do the same. You have at least some bishops claiming that a significant percentage of the bishops of the Church of England now are living in same-sex relationships and you have a recipe for what almost certainly will be a church in fairly short order that will change its position, its convictions, and its doctrine on the issue of same-sex relationships and same-sex sexual behaviors. As many have correctly argued for a very long time, the hermeneutical issues are exactly the same, which is to say the theological logic is the same. If you can devise a way of dealing with the Scripture that allows you to avoid the clear teachings of Scripture in order to find a way to ordain women to the pastorate, then it’s a fairly short jump to use the very same process to find a way to get around those passages in Scripture that are very clear in declaring moral condemnation on same-sex relationships and same-sex behaviors. This is something to watch very closely because even as that celebration yesterday was in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the same issues are very close to us, being debated in almost every major denomination in America, certainly those on the Protestant left, and also a matter of concern to anyone who is watching for the credibility of evangelical witness and the issue of the authority of Scripture and trying to figure out what all these things mean. That service yesterday in St. Paul’s Cathedral was about the ordination of women to the priesthood, but for those who have eyes to see, it was about a great deal more.

 

Meanwhile, back in the United States, coming on the very same weekend, the first bishop of any church anywhere to be known who was ordained as an openly homosexual man announced that he is divorcing his spouse, that is, the man he calls his husband. As Gene Robinson who in 2003 was elected the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire announced, he is leaving his husband and they are not only separating, but divorcing. He wrote:

 

Life is hard. And it just keeps on coming, ready or not. Somewhere inside me, I guess I thought that life in “retirement” would be more peaceful, easier somehow. But I am also not naïve enough to believe it for long.

 

Recently, my partner and husband of 25-plus years and I decided to get divorced. While the details of our situation will remain appropriately private, I am seeking to be as open and honest in the midst of this decision as I have been in other dramatic moments of my life—coming out in 1986, falling in love, and accepting the challenge of becoming Christendom’s first openly gay priest to be elected a Bishop in the historic succession of bishops stretching back to the apostles.

 

It was in 2003 that Gene Robinson was elected the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church or of any known church. It was in 2008 that he entered into a civil union with his partner Mark Andrews. It was in 2010 that that civil union was transformed by the force of New Hampshire law into a marriage, and it was just about four years later, in now 2014, that the Bishop now in retirement has announced his divorce.

 

Now that introduction is probably sufficient to prove the point that Gene Robinson is living in open defiance to the clear teachings of Scripture, but it’s also true that he often make statements that appear to be in clear conflict with common sense. He says in this statement that he often says to couples in premarital counseling “marriage is forever, and your relationship will endure—whether positively or negatively—even if the marriage formally ends.” In other words, up is down and down is up. Your marriage continues—it endures to use his word—even if you divorce. If that makes sense to you, then so does the election of an openly gay bishop. In perhaps the most revealing paragraph of his statement, the retired Bishop wrote:

 

It is at least a small comfort to me, as a gay rights and marriage equality advocate, to know that like any marriage, gay and lesbian couples are subject to the same complications and hardships that afflict marriages between heterosexual couples. All of us sincerely intend, when we take our wedding vows, to live up to the ideal of “til death do us part.” But not all of us are able to see this through until death indeed parts us.

 

Now we need to note something very carefully in terms of the slippery language of that statement. The words “til death do us part” are not statements of an ideal; they are statements of a vow. A vow is not an ideal. It is not a statement of aspiration. It is a sacred commitment. And the ceremony of Christian worship, historically then and now, is a ceremony when those vows are made publicly so that, in the presence of God and Christian witnesses, the affirmation of the man and the woman to live together in holy matrimony “until death do us part,” that is a vow; a vow willingly entered into by both parties. In words that continue to flout both biblical teaching and common sense, he writes:

 

My belief in marriage is undiminished by the reality of divorcing someone I have loved for a very long time, and will continue to love even as we separate. Love can endure, even if a marriage cannot.

 

Now there’s something here we need to note very carefully. Certainly there are several lessons from this very interesting news report that comes on the very same weekend as that 20th anniversary of the ordination of the first female priests in the Church of England. What we have here is a pattern of evading Scripture, and you’ll notice that it comes hand-in-hand with a pattern of evading common language, common rationality, and common sense. And we should not be surprised that those two things tend to go together. Rejecting the one tends also to involve rejecting the other. You see, one of the main problems that Gene Robinson and others who advocate his moral position and his understanding of marriage have is not only that the Scripture must be dealt with, at least if you claim any kind of Christian identity, but so also must the plain use of language be dealt with, such as the words that would include marriage and fidelity and vow.

 

The other thing we must note is that a huge Christian concession on the issue of divorce preceded any controversy over so-called same-sex marriage. In other words, what should have been unthinkable, indeed, unspeakable in Christian circles on the clear teachings of Scripture, that is, the issue of unauthorized divorce, that willing confusion and doctrinal compromise set the stage for the confusion over the issue of what many now call same-sex marriage, and it inevitably followed. As a matter of fact, the churches who compromise their positions, their biblical convictions, on the issue of divorce are like those who compromise their positions on the issue of gender in the issue of the ministry and the clear teachings of Scripture. They find themselves in a very weak position to address with honesty and integrity the clear teachings of Scripture related to gender, to sexuality, to same-sex sexuality, and to marriage.

 

Perhaps the biggest lesson for evangelical Christians looking at this news about Gene Robinson is not the issue of his divorce. After all, we don’t believe that in the eyes of God he was actually married. In the eyes of the state of New Hampshire he may have been, and he may go to the state of New Hampshire for a divorce, but the reality is that Christians actually, on the authority the Scripture, can’t accept that he’s divorced because we can’t accept that he was ever actually married. So even as this issue points to the confusion in the larger culture over the issue of same-sex marriage, the bigger issue for Christians should be this: it is our concession and confusion on the issue of divorce over the last several decades that set the stage for continuing confusion, all the way down now to demands for people of the same gender, of the same sex, to be married and then, having been married, to claim also the right to divorce.

 

Shifting the scene from New Hampshire to Cambridge, Massachusetts, last month we talked about the fact that the Gospel of Jesus’s wife, so-called, was back in the news. It had emerged first back in 2012 when Smithsonian magazine declared that a papyrus fragment had been found, which would, in the words the magazine, “send jolts through the world of the biblical scholarship.” But as I wrote in an essay on April 14 last month, I wrote, well, it didn’t jolt much of anything, and, of course, it didn’t. As a matter of fact, the background of this is that professor Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School had announced back in 2012 that she had come across this papyrus fragment that supposedly referenced Jesus having a wife. It is about the size of a large postage stamp and the words in Coptic, supposedly, on this supposedly ancient papyrus included the statement, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’” But did this so-called discovery send shockwaves through the Christian world? It profoundly did not, but it should send shockwaves through the world of what is now called biblical scholarship, at least in many secular and liberal academies, because this is nothing more now than a huge intellectual and academic embarrassment.

 

As I pointed out in my essay last month, entitled “It’s Back—‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ and the State of Modern Scholarship,” the reality is that even The Harvard Theological Review that had to delay its publication, in terms of the analysis of this papyrus, attempting to defend its own faculty member Karen King, it also had to include articles within the very issue of The Harvard Theological Review that in the eyes of at least some leading Coptic scholars, the papyrus itself is nothing more than a fraud, a hoax, a fake. As a matter fact, one of the articles published in The Harvard Theological Review stated that it is beyond imagination that it’s anything other than a fake.

 

But now Friday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal includes an article by Jerry Pattengale. It’s entitled “How the ‘Jesus’s Wife’ Hoax Fell Apart,” and it involves things that have developed even the last several days. Just a matter of days ago, on April 24, Christian Askeland, a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University, revealed, says Pattengale, “that the ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,’ as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that has already been identified as clearly a forgery.” Pattengale goes back to The Harvard Theological Review’s attempted defense of the so-called finding; then he writes:

 

Then last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used—with the “wife” fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.

 

And then other shoes began to drop. On April 25, that’s the very next day, Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and an expert on the Coptic language at Duke University, wrote about the Gospel of John discovery. “It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus’ Wife fragment is a fake too.” Then after that, Alin Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and also a Coptic manuscript specialist, wrote—and this is the 26th, so one statement on the 24th,the next on the 25th, the next on the very next day, the 26th. Professor Suciu wrote, “Given that the evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemics surrounding the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife papyrus over.”

 

Pattengale concludes his article in The Wall Street Journal by suggesting that professor Karen King and her colleagues were probably, as he says, “the victims of an elaborate ruse.” But then he writes these words:

 

What is harder to understand was the rush by the media and others to embrace the idea that Jesus had a wife and that Christian beliefs have been mistaken for centuries.

 

That’s a profoundly accurate statement. And it’s the very same argument that I made back in 2012 and again last month in 2014 because that is the bigger lesson here. It’s not really about a hoax. It’s not really about a so-called ancient papyrus. It’s about the determination of people in the academy, largely in the liberal and secular academy, to try to prove that the church doesn’t actually know who Jesus was, that there are evidences that Jesus was someone other than what the church teaches and is proclaiming, what is revealed in Scripture. Now why would the secular world and the larger secular academy have that ambition? It is because if Jesus is who the church teaches He is, if Jesus is who He said He is, if Jesus is who the Scripture reveals Him to be, then the secular academy cannot remain comfortably secular. And that is exactly what is at stake here. It is the determination of a secular academy to remain solidly, convincingly, unshakably secular. And that has bread a sort of fanaticism, a fanaticism that has led one of the most well-known professors of the Harvard Divinity School to now be identified in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and academic journals all of the world as having been the victim of a ruse. There are certainly worse things that can happen to a person, but there are few more horrifying things that can happen to a professor at Harvard University.

 

Finally, you’ll want to note that Britain had a far larger anniversary to celebrate and commemorate yesterday. It was twenty-five years ago yesterday that Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s Prime Minister, and in so doing, she became one of the most influential and important figures of the 20th century in terms of the world stage. It was she along with Ronald Reagan, who was elected the United States president about two years after she became Britain’s Prime Minister, who largely redefined the approach taken by the West in terms of the Soviet Union, who brought an end to the Cold War. It was Margaret Thatcher who brought a conservative revolution into the politics and culture of Great Britain, following years of Labour liberalism and Tory compromise. It was she who represented a very clear model of convictional leadership, and it was she who modeled that even before Ronald Reagan was elected president here in the United States. It’s hard to imagine the history of the last quarter-century without Margaret Thatcher having played that central role as Britain’s Prime Minister in those crucial years from 1979 to 1990. Twenty-five years ago, Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s Prime Minister and that day is truly worth commemorating.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. 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.

Are We All Syncretists Now? – A Conversation About Evangelical Christianity And Alternative Medicine With Historian Candy Gunther Brown

Candy Gunther Brown is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. Dr. Brown teaches and writes on the topics of Religion, Health, and Healthcare Management in Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. She has published and edited numerous books and more than fifty journal articles, book chapters, and review essays. She earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University. Her latest work is The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America published by Oxford University Press.

The Briefing 05-05-14

1) Twenty-year anniversary of women priests in Church of England foreshadows shift on gay clergy

Justin Welby Says Church Of England ‘Has Long Way To Go’ Over Ordaining Women, Huffington Post

Welby: The Church has a long way to go in the acceptance of female priests, The Times (Sanya Burgess)

March through London to mark 20 years of women priests, BBC

2) Gene Robinson, first openly-gay ordained minister announces divorce

A Bishop’s Decision to Divorce, Daily Beast (Gene Robinson)

Gene Robinson, first openly gay Episcopal bishop, announces his divorce, Religious News Service (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)

3) Gospel of Jesus’ wife ruse major embarrassment to higher academia

How the ‘Jesus’ Wife’ Hoax Fell Apart, Wall Street Journal (Jerry Pattengale)

Jesus had an ugly sister-in-law, Evangelical Textual Criticism (Mark Goodacre)

Illustrating the forgery of Jesus’ wife’s sister fragment, NT Blog (Mark Goodacre)

It’s Back — The “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” and the State of Modern Scholarship, AlbertMohler.com (R. Albert Mohler, Jr)

4)Twenty-fifth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s elevation to prime minister of Great Britain

Margaret Thatcher, The Free Dictionary

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 05-03-14

1) How should Christians respond to the claim that God made homosexuals the way they are?

2) Should parents teach their children to pray to Jesus or to the Father?

3) For whom did Christ die?