R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 363

Genesis 15:1-21

Transcript: The Briefing 05-02-14

The Briefing

 

 May 2, 2014

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

 

It’s Friday, May 2, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Whether you’re trying to sell a message, sell a candidate, or sell a product, you have to know how the changing landscape in America is going to affect your challenge. And that’s why the front page of yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal included this headline: “Political Ground Shifts in Suburbs.” The headline: “More Like Cities. Now this article by Elizabeth Williamson and Dante Chinni is a very interesting analysis of how political change in a nation like the United States points to other changes as well because politics is never just completely separated from the rest of our lives and certainly not from the remainder of our worldview. The worldview determines the politics, and the politics indicates far more than political choice because as this article makes very clear in The Wall Street Journal—and let’s remember, they put it right in the center of their front page—those who are trying to understand what’s happening in America have to look to the suburbs and to the changing nature of the suburbs. And for those who have a great interest in American Christianity, this leads to an immediate interest as well. The reason is quite simple. American Christianity, as well as American retailing and American political dynamic, has been primarily isolated in America’s suburbs. And if America’s suburbs are changing, that tells us that Americans are changing the way they live, and perhaps even where they live and how they think when they live where they are now congregated. And it is clear that some of the most interesting action in America is taking place in what The Wall Street Journal calls “mature suburbs.” These are suburbs in the near regions of America’s great metropolitan cities, and even though they are still suburbs (they’re not a part of the city center core), they nonetheless are including people who would otherwise be urbanites. And they’re acting like urbanites; they’re shopping like urbanites; and they’re voting like urbanites.

 

Now when you look at America’s traditional demographic pattern, those who were in the cities are more likely to be educated, more likely to be liberal, more likely to be secular, and this means that what many people in America’s suburbs are thinking they’re experiencing is actually the case. They think that their suburbs are also becoming more liberal, more democratic, more secular, and perhaps even more highly educated, and that’s exactly what The Wall Street Journal’s pointing to in this particular cover story. As Williamson and Chinni report from Leesburg, Virginia, they write:

 

This was a pastoral, conservative Washington suburb until a decade ago, when new jobs sprouting in and around the U.S. capital began drawing younger, more affluent people [into that particular suburb].

 

It was previously a small town in Virginia, but it is now basically a suburb of Washington, DC, and it is increasingly what The Wall Street Journal is calling a “mature suburb.” In other words, it’s made up of an urban people who want to live a basically urban lifestyle; they just want to live it not in the urban center core, but in the suburbs, where there is more land, more opportunity for space for raising children, and the opportunity for the kind of lifestyle that would combine the flexibility and mobility of the suburbs with the intensity, culture, and lifestyle of the city urban core. As they write:

 

These neighborhoods—so-called mature suburbs that sprouted in the decades after World War II—have become so densely populated over the past decade that they more closely resemble the big cities nearby. The U.S. census now classifies the counties that contain them as “urban.”

 

Now that’s a very important data point in itself. If the U.S. Census Bureau now classifies those suburbs as urban, then they’re reflecting the fact that as these suburbs live, act, vote, buy, purchase, send their kids to college, and all the rest, they are basically mirroring the urban core.

 

In terms of numbers, The Wall Street Journal reports that the population of these mature suburbs in the US grew to about 16 million in 2010. It was only 51 million in the year 2000. So there’s a huge population shift towards these new mature suburbs. How is this reflected politically? As they write:

 

The newer residents look, shop and vote more like urban dwellers than suburbanites of the past. They bring money and diversity to their neighborhoods, supported by jobs in government, academics and technology.

 

A little footnote there: those are the areas of the economy least likely to be affected by a recession. And, as a matter fact, it’s no coincidence that this article is being written from the suburban Washington, DC area; the portion of the United States that due to government funding was also the least affected by the recession. They go on to write:

 

Politically, Democrats see opportunity; Republicans see a challenge. Growth in mature suburbs has helped the Democrats in presidential contests. George W. Bush, the most recent GOP president, built his two election victories, in part, on broad suburban support. To win the White House in 2016, Republicans must retain their exurban and rural strongholds, while beating back the growing Democratic tide in the suburbs.

 

The political, moral, and worldview shift reflected in this demographic reality was commented on in this article by former Congressman Thomas M. Davis, III. He’s formerly a Republican congressman from Fairfax County. He said that these new residents of these mature suburbs near Washington, DC, are not in love with the Democrats, he says, they’re just not in love with the Republicans either. They are voting their own class interest, but as they understand their class interest and personal concerns, they are now more closely identified and aligned with the Democratic than the Republican Parties. And as a matter fact, Davis said they are economically more aligned with the Republican Party, but they’re turned off in many ways by the social policy. That points out the moral change that is reflected here.

 

But as I said, this is not just about politics. It’s not just about marketing. It’s not just about selling a message. It’s also about the future of the church in America’s suburbs because evangelical Christianity has been, by and large, for the last 150 years and more, a largely suburban phenomenon, and as a suburban phenomenon, that means that the future of evangelical Christianity, at least in terms of demography, has a lot to do with the future of these suburbs. And as the suburbs tend to be more secular, this represents a challenge not just for those who are concerned about politics, but for those who are concerned about churches and evangelism and reaching a neighborhood and the missiological efforts of a church within its own neighborhood and beyond.

 

The changes in America’s suburbs are going to change the way America votes, the way America thinks, the way America buys. They’re also going to change the way America conceives of Christianity, patterns of churchgoing, and all the rest. And these mature suburbs that are discussed here in this Wall Street Journal cover story—and those are the ones around Washington, DC—are mirrored by the same kind of mature suburbs around cities like Charlotte and Atlanta and Dallas and Houston and San Diego and Los Angeles and beyond. In other words, this article is just the kind of information you need if you care about America’s future, as America’s evangelical Christians must certainly care.

 

And writing about political and moral change in America, sometimes evidence appears in unlikely places. One is in an article in yesterday’s first page of The New York Times by Amy Chozick, and she’s writing about former President Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, she says, is having to defend his legacy. Why? Because the political party he represented as president and as the central symbolic figure for almost a decade—as a matter fact, influencing that party not only for a decade, but for far longer. He’s now on the defensive because his party has moved to his left, considerably to his left, and he is being accused of political expediency and trying to move to the left with it and to carry his wife with him. In other words, trying to position Hillary Rodham Clinton for a race for the White House as more liberal than he was when he was in the Oval Office himself. As Chozick writes:

 

Former President Bill Clinton, who has grown increasingly frustrated that his economic policies are viewed as out-of-step with the current focus on income inequality, on Wednesday delivered his most muscular defense of his economic legacy.

 

He said, “My commitment was to restore broad-based prosperity to the economy and to give Americans a chance.” He was speaking at his alma mater Georgetown University in Washington. Chozick writes:

 

For nearly two hours, the former president defended the impact of policies like welfare overhaul and the earned-income tax credit, and displayed a series of charts detailing the number of people his policies lifted out of poverty. “You know the rest,” he said of the 1990s. “It worked out pretty well.”

 

But even as Bill Clinton and his policies were once the bragging rights of the Democratic Party (politically speaking), now they become something of an embarrassment. And in terms of his wife’s electoral prospects for the White House, the Clinton economic policies, welfare reform policies, and other populist centrist policies are now out of step with the very party whose nomination she might try to gain. Chozick gets right to the point when she writes that “Mrs. Clinton has come under criticism from some left-leaning Democrats who view her as too cozy with Wall Street.” In particular, the political rival to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic Party now is Elizabeth Warren, the fairly newly-elected senator from Massachusetts; a clear economic populist on the far left of Mrs. Clinton.

 

Well the Clintons and the Democratic Party are going to have to work out those issues, but the most interesting statement in the article comes at its conclusion. Chozick goes back to a statement made by Bill Clinton on CNN last fall when the former president was asked if the election and re-election of Barack Obama meant the end of the Clinton Democrats. He said this:

 

There’s probably something to that. America is growing more liberal culturally and more diverse. But, again, let’s not get carried away here. I ran on income inequality in 1992.

 

Now no one really remembers that Bill Clinton ran on income inequality in 1992, but he’s counting on Americans having a very short attention span. But he’s certainly right about this: the former president nails it when he says America’s growing more liberal culturally and more diverse. That’s a fact that is verified in the very article that was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on the changes in America’s suburbs. The former president was right. As to whether he can now position himself to the left to where he was as president, well, that remains to be seen.

 

But ours is a time not only of moral change, but of grave moral confusion. And as you look at the media over the last week, one big story points perhaps more than any other to that moral confusion. That big story is the fact that the White House and President Obama have said they are going to give increased attention to the problem of sexual assault on America’s college and university campuses. Now let’s be clear. Everything that can be done by anyone to stop the plague of sexual assault anywhere must be done, and there is a clear moral scandal here as many colleges and universities have been hiding the fact that there have been many assaults, rapes, and other sexual crimes that have taken place on their campuses and have been hidden and unreported and covered over. That is a scandal. But there’s another scandal here, and that is the actual approach taken by a society that tries to act as if sexual morality doesn’t matter until it comes to the point of rape or assault. In other words, that tries to act as if the only significant moral issue at stake is consent. Let’s be clear here. If you rewind American history a half-century and you go on America’s colleges and university campuses, those colleges and universities—private, public, Christian, secular, otherwise—all uniformly had rules that made very clear that sexual activity and sexual contact between students was forbidden. The issue of consent was not even the fundamental reality because there was a sexual morality in terms of right and wrong that clearly understood that sex was to be limited to marriage and marriage was the defining issue. Married couples were expected to act and live like married couples, and those who were not married were expected to follow the sexual rules established not only by the college or university, but by the larger culture as well. And, of course, those rules were policed not only by the campus authorities, not only by the campus minister or chaplain, not only by the dean of students, but by the police, and not only by the police, but also by the parents. That’s the moral revolution in a nutshell right there.

 

Now you have parents sending their kids to universities, expecting that their kids will have sex. And what they want to say now is just have safe sex, and what they want to say to their sons is ‘don’t get arrested as you have sex’. They want to act as if sexual morality doesn’t matter in this postmodern, post-Christian secular age until the issue comes to consent. Furthermore, you have the rampant use of drugs and especially of beverage alcohol in these campuses; you have a hooking-up culture that celebrates rampant misbehavior; and you have a recipe for disaster. And now on the other side of this insanity, you do not have the Obama Administration led by the president saying let’s recover some moral sanity here; let’s recover some sexual sanity here. Instead, they’re saying let’s go ahead and accept the sexual insanity of believing that consent is the only issue and then let’s draw our line at consent and let’s try to hold everyone accountable simply at the level of consent. And then you end up with all these sex codes and investigations and policies and all the rest, the sole purpose of which is simply to determine whether or not someone gave consent to an activity that may later alleged to have been nonconsensual.

 

Now that’s going to put America’s colleges and universities, but also the larger society as a whole, on trial here. How is it possible that you can draw the line and say the only significant moral issue is consent? How then are you going to measure this? How are you going to write adequate rules for this? The reality is you can’t write enough rules. How are you going to define where consent does and does not exist? You can’t possibly come up with a failsafe operation that will always ensure that. How are you going to come up with an adequate investigative or judicial process in order to protect all persons involved? You can’t. This is a charade. It’s an exercise in absolute nonsense. This is the kind of moral debate that would make sense in Alice in Wonderland, but doesn’t make sense in the real world. And you have college campuses that, furthermore, are holding things like “sex week” in which they celebrate all kinds of pornography and explicit sexuality and then they want to say, “But remember: all that’s good. All you have to worry about is consent.” It is nonsense. It is irrational. But as the nation’s major media trumpeted all during this week, it makes sense to someone who puts it on the front page of their paper and it makes sense to someone in the White House who says let’s make this a matter of national policy. In sexual assault, you bet, punish those guilty; absolutely. But will that solve the problem if the sole sexual moral issue that is held forth is consent? No, it will not. You cannot create chaos and then try to create one little neighborhood of order.

 

Shifting from college students to a generation younger, there is a very interesting article in The New York Times by David Leonhardt. It appeared on April 29, entitled “A Link Between Fidgety Boys and a Sputtering Economy.” That’s the kind of headline that should have your attention. And it should have the attention of parents, educators, ministers, and all others who care about the future of America, and especially the future of boys in America, because this article has some devastating data within it. Leonhardt writes:

 

The behavior gap between rich and poor children, starting at very early ages, is now a well-known piece of social science. Entering kindergarten, high-income children not only know more words and can read better than poorer children but they also have longer attention spans, better-controlled tempers and more sensitivity to other children.

 

Well if you knew that already, consider the next paragraph:

 

All of which makes the comparisons between boys and girls in the same categories fairly striking: The gap in behavioral skills between young girls and boys is even bigger than the gap between rich and poor.

 

Now this is a really interesting article. As a matter of fact, one of the interesting aspects to it is that, evidently, to some people in the nation’s intellectual elites, the fact that boys and girls are different comes as something of a great realization. Now there’s a lot of really interesting material in this article, including some very important data, but perhaps the most interesting insight you get from reading this article is the insight that at least for some amongst the intellectual elites in our country, the fact that boys and girls are different comes as something of a surprise, for which this kind of research was necessary in order to prove the point. Leonhardt writes:

 

By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys, according to a new paper from Third Way [a think tank in Washington]. By eighth grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A’s and B’s or better. Only 31 percent of boys do.

 

And here’s the economic angle by Leonhardt:

 

In an economy that rewards knowledge, the academic struggles of boys turn into economic struggles. Men’s wages are stagnating. Men are much more likely to be idle — neither working, looking for work nor caring for family — than they once were and much more likely to be idle than women.

 

Now one of the things to note is that the cultural left has resisted, steadfastly resisted, any acknowledgment of the fact that there really is a boy problem in America. But Leonhardt, here writing for The New York Times, is an exception, and for that we should be thankful. He writes:

 

These depressing trends have many causes, but the social struggles of men and boys are an important one. If the United States is going to build a better-functioning economy than the one we’ve had over the last 15 years, we’re going to have to solve our boy problems.

 

In other words, he’s got the message. Elaine Karmarck, a resident scholar at Third Way, a former administrator in the Clinton Administration, said quote, “We know we got a crisis and the crisis is with boys. We’re not quite sure why it’s happening.” But here is really important data, and this is where anyone who cares about the family and cares about children must pay very close attention.

 

Two of the leading theories involve single-parent families and schools. The number of single-parent families has surged over the last generation, and the effect seems to be larger on boys in those families than girls. Girls who grow up with only one parent — typically a mother — fare almost as well on average as girls with two parents. Boys don’t.

 

Now those particular studies are looking at things such as success in school that points to success later in life. If you take on larger issues, the reality is that the absence of a father shows up in very devastating ways in young girls as well. But when it comes to those key issues of concern to the studies, the two words that concluded that paragraph are absolutely essential: boys don’t. In other words, girls, they say, are faring almost as well, having two parents or one in respect to school success, but boys don’t. The absence of a father means that boys are seriously hampered in terms of their experience and success in school and later in life, especially in the workplace.

 

Leonhardt’s article continues looking at the problems that may exist in the schools themselves. Indeed, looking at the fact that at least several critics point out that the schools are so feminized, not only in terms of the fact that the teachers are mostly women, but the fact that the classroom experience itself tends to be far more naturally mastered by girls than by boys. That’s where the word fidgety in the title comes in. In other words, boys do not naturally sit still for long periods of time and their attention span is not what is naturally fed by the kind of classroom experience that is the norm in most schools—at least not over any significant duration of time. David Leonhardt concludes with this very interesting paragraph:

 

The problem doesn’t simply involve men trying to overcome the demise of a local factory or teenage boys getting into trouble. It involves children so young that most haven’t even learned the word “gender.” Yet their gender is already starting to cast a long shadow over their lives.

 

Well this article involves both clarity and confusion, but it is a victory of sorts, an achievement in one light. At least, you have the nation’s most influential city newspaper, The New York Times, acknowledging several times over in this article that one key issue for America’s future is what they identify as the boy problem. But parents, those who teach in schools, and especially those who are Christians observing what’s going on in our society have known this all along. When you create the kind of gender confusion that now marks America and when you begin to take the family apart and try to make it something it has never been, well, then you end up with a phenomenon like this and with all the pathologies that come.

 

The boy problem didn’t occur just overnight and it will not be easily solved. And it won’t be resolved until America comes to understand the importance of the family as God designed it and gave it to us for human flourishing; the importance of having both a mother and a father in the house, actively engaged with their children, functioning not only biologically, but in terms of nurture and discipline, in teaching and example as mother and father. Until we get back to that, well, the data will only become more depressing.

 

Earlier this week, we looked at the controversy in North Carolina where the very liberal United Church of Christ has filed suit against the state of North Carolina, alleging that that state’s amendment that identifies marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman violates religious liberty by preventing clergy from performing same-sex ceremonies and weddings. Now as we have considered over the last several days, there could well be religious liberty complications in such a law, but in the case of the amendment in North Carolina, there is no such concern, and the statutory law there in North Carolina should not operate in such a way that it would violate religious conscience and it never has. In other words, that law in North Carolina has never been employed or used in any way but to regulate how legal marriages are performed by ministers in North Carolina. Analyses by Ryan T. Anderson at the Heritage Foundation and by Mollie Hemingway, writing at the Federalist, have made this point very clear. But we also see in this situation that there are religious liberty complications on the horizon every time the intersection of marriage and law comes about because as the church operates on its understanding of marriage and as Christians committed to the Bible operate on an exclusively biblical understanding of marriage, we see a conflict on the horizon. And even a law like that on the books there North Carolina could, if in the wrong hands, in the wrong way, be used against evangelical ministers. The principle is simply this: what the law enjoins, the law can also require. And that’s why we’re going to have to look at these things very, very carefully. What happens, for instance, when a state says to a minister, if you’re saying, “By the authority granted to me by this state, I declare you man and wife,” if that minister as an agent of the state says, “I will refuse to say your husband and husband or wife and wife,” how long is it before the state shows up, as it has in the offices of county clerks, and says, “As an agent of the state, you’re going to have to do what the state says and you’re going to have to be nondiscriminatory when it comes to marriage.” That hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. And that’s why those who care for religious liberty, who want to defend marriage as a pre-political institution that has and must always mean the union of a man and woman, are going to have to watch these things very, very carefully. The debate in North Carolina is just one indication of the kind of conversation we’re going to be having state-by-state in years to come. This too is the chaos spawned by moral revolution.

 

There’s been a lot to think and talk about this week; just an indication of the world we live in. It’s not going to get easier.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition tomorrow morning, and remember to call with you 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 on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 05-02-14

1) Political views of ‘mature suburbs’ reflect deeper cultural shifts

Shifting Demographics Tilt Presidential Races in American Suburbs, Wall Street Journal (Elizabeth Williamson and Dante Chinni)

2) Bill Clinton’s politics now out of step with increasingly liberal Democratic party

Bill Clinton Defends His Economic Legacy, New York Times (Amy Chozick)

3) Sexual assault on college campuses cannot be contained by addressing only consent 

U.S. Lists Colleges Under Inquiry Over Sex-Assault Cases, New York Times (David S. Joachim)

4)’Boy problem’ in education key issue for economic future

A Link Between Fidgety Boys and a Sputtering Economy, New York Times (David Leonhardt)

5) Religious liberty issues arise every time the law and marriage intersect

Laws Defining Marriage as Union of Man and Woman Do Not Violate Religious Liberty, Ryan T. Anderson (The Foundry)

Suit Against NC Marriage Law Has Activists Excited. Should They Be?, Federalist (Mollie Hemingway)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-01-14

The Briefing

 

 May, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, May 1, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Over the last couple of days, Americans have been talking about what happened in Oklahoma on Tuesday night. Where what was intended as an execution actually ended in the death by heart attack of the inmate condemned to die in that execution. The inmate was Clayton D. Lockett. He was found guilty of having shot a 19-year-old young woman and then burying her alive. He was sentenced to death for that crime, and after a series of lengthy appeals and legal complications, he eventually entered the execution chamber there in Oklahoma on Tuesday night. The state of Oklahoma was using a new form of chemical execution, that is, lethal injection, and the background to that is itself a very interesting and telling tale. But the execution did not go as planned and even as at this point the governor of Oklahoma Mary Fallin is trying to figure out exactly what did take place, we do know that what did take place was not what was intended to take place. And that itself is a situation that only legal authorities in Oklahoma can unwind and unravel for us.

 

But this has led many Americans to ask some basic questions about the death penalty. And even as there has been a concerted effort in recent years to try to make Americans leave the death penalty behind—a concerted effort on the part of the opponents of the death penalty to make the death penalty the issue rather than the crimes that have led to the death penalty—that conversation in America has seemingly turned a corner, and we can feel the impact of that in the current cultural conversation. Should Christians support the death penalty? That was the question I was asked by CNN to answer at an article scheduled to be posted at CNN.com today. I answered that question by saying that the death penalty has been a part of human society for a millennia. It has been understood as the ultimate punishment for the most serious crimes, but when you ask today, “Should Christians support the death penalty?” we have to recognize it’s not an easy yes or no question. And that tells us more about our society than about the question.

 

On the one hand, the Bible clearly calls for capital punishment in the case of intentional murder. In Genesis 9:6, God told Noah that the penalty for intentional murder should be death. As Genesis 9:6 reads, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image.” In other words, God spoke to Noah saying that the ultimate sanction for the crime of intentional murder should be the forfeiture of the life of the murderer because the murderer has assaulted the image of God found in every single human being. The death penalty was explicitly grounded in the fact that God made every individual human being in His own image, and thus an act of intentional murder is an assault upon both human dignity and the glory of God in the image of God. In the simplest form, the Bible condemns murder and calls for the death of the murderer, the one who intentionally takes life by murder forfeits the right to his own life. We need to note that the same biblical affirmation of capital punishment appears in the New Testament. In Romans chapter 13, the Apostle Paul instructs Christians that the government “does not bear the sword in vain.” The Apostle Paul even goes so far as to say that the legal magistrate “is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the evil doer.” That’s found in Romans 13:4.

 

On the other hand, we also need to note with honesty that the Bible raises a very high requirement for evidence in the case of capital murder. The act of murder must be confirmed and corroborated by the eyewitness testimony of accusers, and the society is to take every reasonable precaution to ensure that no one is punished unjustly. While the death penalty is allowed and even mandated in some cases in Scripture, the Bible also reveals that not all who are guilty of murder and complicity in murder are executed. Just remember the biblical accounts concerning Moses, David, and Saul, later known as Paul.

 

Christian thinking about the death penalty must begin with the fact that the Bible envisions a society in which capital punishment for murder is sometimes necessary, but should be exceedingly rare. The Bible also affirms that the death penalty, rightly and justly applied, will have a powerful deterrent effect. In a world of violence, the death penalty is understood as a necessary firewall against the spread of further deadly violence.

 

Seen in this light, the problem we face today is not really with the death penalty, but with the society at large. American society is quickly conforming to a secular worldview and the clear sense of right and wrong that was Christianity’s gift to Western civilization is being replaced with a much more ambiguous morality. We’ve lost the cultural ability to declare murder, even mass murder, to be deserving of the death penalty. We’ve also robbed the death penalty of its deterrent power, and we did that by allowing the death penalty cases to languish for years in the legal system, often based on irrational and irrelevant legal appeals. While most Americans claim to believe that the death penalty should be supported, there’s wide disparity on how Americans of different states and regions think about the issue.

 

Furthermore, we need to note that Christians are to be outraged at the economic and racial injustice in how the death penalty is currently applied in the United States of America. While the law itself is not prejudiced, the application of the death penalty often is. There is very little chance that a wealthy, white murderer will ever be executed. There’s a far greater likelihood that a poor, African-American murderer will face execution. Why? Because the rich can afford massively expensive legal defense teams that can exhaust the ability of the prosecution to get a death penalty sentence. By any Christian understanding, this racial and economic disparity is an outrage and no Christian can support this kind of disparity. The Bible itself warns that the rich must not be able to buy justice on their own terms. We need to also step back and see there’s a larger cultural context. We have to recognize that our cultural loss of confidence in human dignity and the secularizing of human identity has made murder a less heinous crime in the minds of many Americans. Most would not admit that they hold to this lower moral evaluation of murder, but our legal system is itself evidence that it’s most certainly true. We also face a frontal assault on the death penalty that is driven by legal activists and by others determined to bring legal execution to an end in America.

 

Controversy over the execution this week in Oklahoma will bring even more attention to this issue, but most Americans will be completely unaware that this tragedy was caused largely by the inability of prison authorities to gain access to drugs for legal injection that would’ve prevented these complications. Opponents of the death penalty have, by their legal and political action, accomplished what might first seem to be impossible. They now demand action to correct a situation they largely created. Their intention is to make the death penalty so horrifying in the public mind that support for executions will disappear. They have attacked every form of execution as “cruel and unusual punishment.” You’ll recall that language from the U.S. Constitution, even though the Constitution itself authorizes the death penalty. This is a testament to moral insanity that they have successfully diverted attention from the murderous, heinous crimes and instead put the death penalty itself on trial.

 

Now we ask the question again: Should Christians support the death penalty today? I believe that Christians should hope, pray, and strive for a society in which the death penalty, rightly and rarely applied, would make moral sense. This would be a society in which there is every protection for the rights of the accused and every assurance that the social status of the murderer will not determine the sentence for the offense. Christians should work to ensure that there can be no reasonable doubt that the accused is indeed guilty of the crime. We should pray for a society in which the motive behind capital punishment is justice and not merely revenge. We must work for a society that will honor every single human being at every point of development and of every race and ethnicity as made in God’s image. We must hope for a society that will support and demand the execution of justice in order to protect the very existence of our society. We must pray for a society that rightly tempers justice with mercy.

 

So when CNN asked me, “Should Christian support the death penalty today?” I respond by saying that I believe we should and we must, but with the considerations that I’ve just discussed. At the same time, given the secularization of our culture and the moral confusion that this has brought, this issue is not so clear-cut as some might think. I do believe that the death penalty, though supported by the majority of Americans, may not long survive in this cultural context. It is one thing to support the death penalty; it’s another thing altogether to be able to explain it, fix it, administer it, and sustain it with justice. We’re about to find out if Americans have the determination to meet that challenge. Christians should take leadership to help our fellow citizens understand what is at stake. God affirmed the death penalty for murder as He made His affirmation of human dignity clear to Noah. Our job is to make it clear to our neighbors.

 

Meanwhile, looking elsewhere on the American scene, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News is out with an interesting poll saying that the vast majority of Americans just want the world to go away—at least a suppressing political and national concern for the United States. As Janet Hook reports for The Wall Street Journal, Americans in large numbers want the US to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington. She continues:

 

In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement.

 

As she explains, this is an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines, and without even looking at the numbers, that is assuredly true. This is really not a partisan issue, and it’s probably important for us to note that this interventionist/non-interventionist posture, this has really never been a hugely partisan issue at the most crucial moments in American history. And if you look back at the 20th century, there is a very interesting pattern that appears. Americans tend to be interventionist until they decide to be non-interventionist, until the world pulls them back in and they’re internationalists and interventionist once more.

 

If you look back to the early 20th century and as wars were spreading across the European scene, Americans said, “We want nothing to do with that. Let the Europeans fight their wars,” until, well, that became no longer an option, and America was dragged into the First World War. And then there was that intervening period between the two great world wars in the 20th century when Americans once again said, “We will never send our boys to war, certainly not over in Europe. Let the Europeans handle it themselves.” And then came 1941. Then came World War II with the American involvement in the war with a surprise attack from Asia, in terms of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and then with Adolf Hitler declaring war on the United States just 24 hours later. After World War II, American said once again, “All we want to do is to step back from the world stage and make sure that liberty is protected here and respected elsewhere,” but the Cold War changed all of that, and the great geopolitical battle between the two empires—one represented by the Soviet Union with its ideology of Marxist Communism and the other headed by the United States, in terms of the worldview of modern Western democracy—well that was a war that if described between the two major parties was a Cold War. At many parts in the world it wasn’t cold at all; it was very hot, ranging from Indochina to the Middle East.

 

With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Soviet Union, Americans entered another non-interventionist posture, but then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and then came the American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now Americans are fatigued by that investment and beginning to wonder if all that was paid, in terms of those military efforts, was actually worthwhile. And yet what we don’t have to compare with that assessment is where the world might be if we had not entered into those wars. Like every other thoughtful American, most of us look at this and say, “We want to ask the question, could it have been otherwise?” but we simply can’t answer that question. What we do know is that America tried to think that the world had gone away until the world came crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

 

And now Americans overwhelmingly are saying, “We want America to retreat from the world scene.” But as Walter Russell Mead makes very clear in a very important current article in Foreign Affairs magazine, the problem of geopolitics is that it simply won’t go away. The title of his article that appeared in the May/June 2014 issue is “The Return of Geopolitics” and, as he writes, the revenge of revisionist powers, speaking specifically of Russia now taking on many of the characteristics we thought had gone away with the end of the Soviet Union. As Walter Russell Mead writes:

 

Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant: the ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over communism, not the obsolescence of hard power. China, Iran, and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful attempts to overturn it. That process will not be peaceful, and whether or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics.

 

Now Walter Russell Mead is one of the most insightful observers of the world scene. He is certainly not an anti-interventionist. On the other hand, he’s hardly an eager interventionist. He is one of those who looks at the world and says, “We need to be involved only where we have to be involved,” but the sad thing is that in a fallen world sometimes we have to be involved. And every time America begins to believe that our involvement can be taken off the world stage, the world stage simply erupts right to us, sometimes right amidst us, as happened on September 11, 2001.

 

But that poll from The Wall Street Journal and NBC simply affirms what many of us have seen for a long time, and that is that America seems to be caught in a Ping-Pong game between interventionism and non-interventionism. And what seems to change the rules of the game is when something happens outside that forces us to pay attention, or something happens inside that simply can’t be avoided.

 

And what we now are looking at in the world scene is something that many Americans want to say is far, far away; for instance, in the Crimean Peninsula or in the nation of Ukraine. But it’s not far, far away because we’re involved there and our economy is involved there, and, furthermore, the tensions that are involved there will eventually reach here. Just think of the bombing at the Boston Marathon where a bloody political conflict in the region between Europe and Asia in the Caucasus Mountains spilled over into an explosive tragedy on the streets of Boston, Massachusetts, just over a year ago. As one of Britain’s major poets reminds us, the world is too much with us. And certainly it is.

 

And so is politics. And that leads to a second big issue in the news. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Harvard’s Institute of Politics has released one of its regular polls of the millennial generation. And as John Sides reports, it’s been making news mainly because it suggests that young people are not enthusiastic about voting in the upcoming midterm election. Now, by the way, a little footnote here. It’s hard to find an overwhelming majority of Americans who are too excited about voting at any time. That’s a part of the political Malays of American culture, but we do need to recognize that this poll does spell some difficult days ahead for the Democrats because, as it turns out, the young Americans least likely to vote are the ones that would be otherwise most likely to vote Democratic.

 

But the big worldview perspective in this article really isn’t about the partisan reality, but about the fact that the Millennials are trying to back out of politics. The bottom line of this poll, taken by the Harvard Institute of Politics, is that the millennial generation is apparently doing its dead-level best not to be a political generation. But just like foreign affairs intrudes upon our national scene, so also politics intrudes upon every generation’s life, and even a generation that wants to think of itself as relatively nonpolitical will find out that in this country being nonpolitical is just another way of being political. In other words, when most of the big decisions, in terms of the future of this culture, in terms of electoral process, happen by taking a vote, not voting is actually, mathematically, a vote because that empowers the votes of those who do go to the polls and gives them an outsized significance in terms of the eventual result. Harvard Institute of Politics polling director John Della Volpe said:

 

It’s been clear for some time now that young people are growing more disillusioned and disconnected from Washington. There’s an erosion of trust in the individuals and institutions that make government work — and now we see the lowest level of interest in any election we’ve measured since 2000.  Young people still care about our country, but we will likely see more volunteerism than voting in 2014.

 

Now that’s a very interesting statement because you have to wonder if he listened to what he said. Notice he said this is a dramatic problem. It’s unprecedented. It’s never happened before—except since 2000. In other words, if you go back just fourteen years, you’re at the same level they’re reporting now. Only they weren’t talking about the Millennials, they were talking about Generation X, which means that if you take these polls simply on the headlines offered, you’ll think the world’s turning around every 24 hours. If you look more deeply at the data, you’ll discover that the Millennials tend to be somewhat like their parents and like their grandparents, dragged into political involvement when they realize they have no option otherwise. The issues are simply too important to be avoided. And that’s what will surely happen to the millennial generation. We can simply hope that it will happen when they have a worldview that involves respect for the family and for raising children and for the critical institutions and moral structures that make civilization possible.

 

And finally, before I leave this poll, there is one rather stunning piece of analysis in it. And that is this: when you look at the millennial generation and you divide them between the older Millennials and the younger Millennials, the younger Millennials has some very serious concerns about the legalization of marijuana. In other words, there is something really interesting going on here. The younger you go in the population, the more concern there is about the legalization of marijuana. As a matter fact, much of the cultural momentum towards the legalization of marijuana is actually coming from people in their 60s and 70s who were a part of the revolution in the 60s and, evidently, never got over it. And yet when you look at younger Americans, we can come up with reasons why they should be concerned.

 

For instance, the Associated Press yesterday reported that the state of Colorado, on the forefront of this great social experiment by legalizing what they called recreational marijuana, is now considering—and you can imagine that this was coming. They’re going to have to come up with a lot of rules about this; a lot more rules than they thought they were going to have to have. Because what’s the most crucial issue right now in terms of health? It’s the edible marijuana. It turns out that when marijuana is put in edible products, such as brownies, cookies, and cakes and the like, it becomes very dangerous because people don’t know marijuana is in them and they don’t know how much marijuana might be in them. They don’t know how powerful the marijuana might be, and people in Colorado are getting sick and there is a grave danger to public health, especially to young people, to teenagers and young children, who might accidentally or even intentionally ingest some of these marijuana-laced edibles and find themselves in great medical distress. As Kristen Wyatt of the Associated Press reports:

 

Whether through inexperience or confusion, many are eating too much pot too quickly, with potentially deadly consequences.

 

A college student from Wyoming jumped to his death from a Denver hotel balcony last month after consuming six times the recommended dosage of a marijuana-infused cookie. And earlier this month, a Denver man accused of shooting his wife reportedly ate pot-laced candy before the attack, though police say he may have had other drugs in his system.

 

The deaths have underscored a common complaint from new marijuana customers – they say they don’t know how much pot to eat and then have unpleasant experiences when they ingest too much.

 

That’s an interesting and very telling complaint, isn’t it? I’m doing something I probably ought not to be doing and I don’t know how much of it I can do safely without doing what I shouldn’t be doing in a way that brings me results I don’t want. But even as that tells us about human nature, it tells us about human nature in a way that can only be explained by the Christian worldview and why we understand that sin is itself a barely disguised form of foolishness. And we know that full well because we recognize that very foolishness in the mirror.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember our weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with you question in your voice by calling 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. Remember that article on the death penalty is scheduled at CNN.com today. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 05-01-14

1) Questions raised by botched execution say more about morally  ambiguous society than death penalty

One Execution Botched, Oklahoma Delays the Next, New York Times (Erik Eckholm)

2) Most Americans want world to go away – history repeats itself

Americans Want to Pull Back From World Stage, Poll Finds, The Wall Street Journal (Janet Hook)

The Return of Geopolitics, Foreign Affairs (Walter Russell Mead)

3)Millennials attempting to back out of politics, just like their parents

The Democrats still have their own young-people problem, The Washington Post (John Sides

Low Midterm Turnout Likely, Conservative More Enthusiastic, Harvard Youth Poll Finds, Harvard University Institute of Politics

4) Need for edible marijuana regulations reveal sin as scarcely disguised foolishness

Colorado Eyes Edibles Rules As More People Eat Pot, Associated Press (Kristen Wyatt)

Transcript: The Briefing 04-30-14

The Briefing

 

 April 30, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, April 30, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Yesterday on The Briefing we discussed the fact that the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal denominations on the Protestant left, has filed a lawsuit against the state of North Carolina, charging that that state’s constitutional amendment that identifies marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman and the state’s statutory law violates the United States Constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty. It appears to be a novel argument. And as many in the major media over the last 24 hours have reported, this appears to be something that is rooted in the actual language of the North Carolina statute. But actually, the media’s coverage of this has been far more confusing. Major newspapers, such as The New York Times, reported on Monday that the state of North Carolina included in its amendment or it statutory law a statement that ministers could be arrested or at least face criminal penalties if they performed religious blessings and marriage rites and “if they perform a religious blessing ceremony of a same-sex couple in their church, they are subject to prosecution and civil judgments.” Well, a closer look at the story says that that’s not exactly false, but it is at least falsely reported or falsely presented because what we are looking at there is not the language from the marriage amendment in North Carolina, overwhelmingly adopted by the citizens of that state in 2012, nor is that actually a very accurate depiction of the North Carolina statute. But the statute is itself an issue of our ongoing consideration and interest for the very reason we discussed yesterday. Because those who are concerned for the preservation of religious liberty must be very concerned whenever there is any statutory or, for that matter, any authoritative legal address to ministers of any sort about any kind of message or ceremony they are either required or prohibited from exercising.

 

Now in Michael Paulson’s article that appeared April 28 in The New York Times, he cited Evan Wolfson, who is himself the founder and president of Freedom to Marry and many people at the national level credit Evan Wolfson with being one of the primary architects of the entire motion and movement to adopt legalized same-sex marriage. He said quote:

 

In their zeal to pile on to denying the freedom to marry, North Carolina officials also put in place a measure that assaulted the religious freedom that they profess to support by penalizing and seeking to chill clergy that have different views. The extent to which North Carolina went to deny the freedom to marry wound up additionally discriminating on the basis of religion by restricting speech and the ability of clergy to do their jobs.

 

Now I think it’s fair to say that a fair-minded understanding of those words would indicate that Mr. Wolfson here intends a chronological understanding of his statement. He says, “In their zeal to pile on to denying the freedom to marry, North Carolina officials also put in place a measure,” now when you look at that sentence when he says, “also put in place,” and he speaks of “a zeal to pile on,” you would think that that would mean that once the constitutional amendment had been adopted by voters in 2012, legislators put in new and innovative language that might violate the religious liberty of members of the clergy by suggesting that they either should or should not involve themselves in some religious ceremony. But actually that is not the case, and in order to gain an understanding of exactly what the North Carolina law is, I spoke to a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives, an attorney who is well-versed in this entire situation. What I discovered is this: the law here at stake, that is, the statute in the state of North Carolina, actually goes all the way back to the year 1669, before there was a United States of America. As a matter fact, before North Carolina was a state; when it was a colony. The second legislative action undertaken on behalf of that colony was a statute that would authorize and identify marriage. That shows, if nothing else, the centrality of marriage to human society as evidenced by the fact that the second statute adopted by the colony and by its legislature was the statute identifying and authorizing marriage. In that particular statute going back to 1669 and updated at several points since the 17th century, that law stipulated that ministers were authorized to serve as agents of the state in conducting marriages, but they were not authorized and were indeed enjoined from, prohibited from, exercising their authority to perform any kind of marriage that was not duly authorized.

 

Now fast-forward to the year 2014 when legal same-sex marriage is in some states a reality and in other states a threat. That statutory language would establish, in a state where there is no legal same-sex marriage, the fact that any member of the clergy who would perform such a marriage would indeed be violating the law of the state. Now I think for most people that would simply amount to what we would call common sense. In other words, a minister acting as an agent of the state, acting illegally, doing what the state has prohibited would be seen as committing an act against the law; in other words, an illegal act. And in that case, the state, we would understand, would be on sure and certain footing in criminalizing that offense with some kind of penalty. In the case of North Carolina, it is reported that the current penalty is a misdemeanor offense with a $50 penalty.

 

But a look at the North Carolina statute indicates that it also appears to use the language “religious ceremony” in its injunction against ministers from authorizing in any sense a marriage which is not recognized by North Carolina as a marriage. There is the problem or, at least, the potential problem; at the very least an appearance of a problem. For there it appears that the statute, which has roots going all the way back to 1669 in North Carolina, may actually do what those who are behind this lawsuit charge it of doing, at least in a very small way or in a very small and commonsensical part—that is, in stating that ministers must not bless what the state has cursed. But there is the problem. If it comes to the language of religious ceremonies or any kind of religious message—and theologically we can’t make a distinction between the two—then the reality is that no government, no legislature, no king, no president, no prime minister should make any such address to ministers of any kind for any reason, and that’s something that should have our concern.

 

But that points to something else. In fact, it points to several dimensions of this story. In the first place, it points to the fact that the national media appears to be absolutely determined to give aid and comfort to all of those making any kind of argument and filing any kind of lawsuit to challenge constitutional amendments or state laws that identify marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman. That’s one big lesson here and, as a matter fact, one thing to watch is how the news coverage on this particular lawsuit is changing right before our eyes.

 

The second thing we need to note is the desperation of those who are trying to do anything to remove those constitutional amendments and, thus, effectively to legalize same-sex marriage in those states. They are using whatever argument is convenient and whatever argument they think just might win the day. In this case, I continue to think that the United Church of Christ has been able to pick up something in the law that might be of genuine concern, but not in any sense the kind of concern that would nullify the constitutional amendment nor the statutory law.

 

There’s something here that needs to be considered and that gets to the third issue. The kind of language found in that North Carolina statute makes perfect sense when marriage is in all places amongst all people at all times understood as one and only one thing. In other words, when that statute was adopted in 1669, the only alternatives to heterosexual marriage, that is, the union of a man and a woman—in other words that institution historically and accurately called marriage—would be something that the state would clearly want to deny sanction and blessing, and that’s exactly what’s going on here. The state of North Carolina, going all the way back to the 17th century, said, “We believe that marriage is this.” The state authorizes ministers to conduct marriages of people who can be legally and rightly married in the eyes of the law of North Carolina. And at the same time, the law apparently, in terms of its statutory language, goes back and says ministers are enjoined from religious ceremonies that might give the impression of actually being a wedding or, for that matter, a marriage; in other words, conducting a religious ceremony that might look like marriage. But even as we need to look at that language, what this also tells us, once again, is where we began. It points to the centrality of marriage in every civilization and culture and of the fact that for thousands and thousands of years, marriage could mean only one thing, and that is the union of a man and a woman in an exclusive, monogamous, respected, pre-political institution: the institution of marriage.

 

By the way, I spoke to Representative Paul Stam. Paul Skip Stam has been a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives for the 37th District for many years now. He is also the Speaker Pro Tempore of the House of Representatives there in the state of North Carolina. He’s also an attorney. And he said, to the best of his knowledge, the state has never taken cognizance of any part of the statute other than the language directly related to marriage. In other words, he’s saying this is really a legal fiction; at least it is so on the part of United Church of Christ making this complaint.

 

But those of us who are very concerned about religious liberty, especially as related to the issue of marriage, must, as I said yesterday, be very, very sensitive and very, very concerned about any language, whether in a constitutional amendment or a statute, that would in any way instruct ministers of any kind as to what kind of ceremony or message they may exercise or fail to exercise. In other words, when you have language that could be well intended and deeply rooted in constitutional and cultural history that establishes what ministers must not do, then that language can be turned around and the same logic reversed in order to argue what ministers must do. And that right now may be the bigger concern for those of us who believe in the authority of Scripture, in the institution of marriage, and in the freedom of religious expression, and especially the freedom of the ministry and the pulpit.

 

And just because there’s been so much confusion about the issue of the actual North Carolina marriage amendment, let me read it in full:

 

Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party nor does this section prevent courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

 

That is the entire constitutional amendment. The statutory law, of course, is dependent upon and derivative from the North Carolina Constitution, as is the case in all 50 states and, of course, in our federal government as well, and that statutory law is often far more complex than the amendment that was just read. But the fact is that the amendment just read is one of the strongest, clearest, and most defensible constitutional amendments on the issue of marriage we can contemplate. In other words, this is an amendment that for every reason should stand. As for the statutory law, that’s something the legislature and the political leadership of North Carolina’s going to have to look at, not only as related to this case, but to the far larger question of how the state is to relate to those who are pastors, preachers, and ministers of other varieties because in this strange new postmodern world, all the sudden, to be a pastor or a preacher, to be a minister of any kind these days is to be on the front lines of a culture war. But then again, if you read the New Testament, that’s where it began.

 

By the way, in yesterday’s edition of The Briefing, I cited The New York Times, quoting Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition. She said:

 

It’s both ironic and sad that an entire religious denomination and its clergy, who purport holding to Christian teachings on marriage, would look to the courts to justify their errant beliefs. These individuals are simply revisionists that distort the teaching of Scripture to justify sexual revolution not marital sanctity.

 

As I said yesterday, those words are profoundly true, and they deserve repeating. Because the big issue here is theological before it’s constitutional or legal. The first concern of the Christian church and of all Christians should be what is right and what does God say and how do we understand the Bible to speak to this before we ask, “What sayeth the Constitution?” I’m indebted to Tami Fitzgerald for clarification on the constitutional issues here at stake.

 

Shifting to the issue of racism in America, headlines have been consumed in recent days with the controversy concerning L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling and reports of a conversation surreptitiously recorded that were made public, and to his great embarrassment. Because, as the content of that conversation made abundantly clear, Mr. Sterling was speaking in explicitly and horrifyingly racist terms.

 

There are a multitude of issues related to this; most of them rather unimportant. The most important issue has to do with the moral issue here at stake. And as was reported yesterday, Adam Silver, the Commissioner of the National Basketball Association, handed down sanctions against Donald Sterling, which amounts to him being banned for life from basketball and from his own team, fined $2.5 million for making racist comments, and as this ban makes abundantly clear, absolutely barred from any involvement in the team he has owned since 1981. As a matter fact, Donald Sterling bought the team in 1981 for $12.5 million. He has owned it through years, indeed, decades of controversy, including controversy about previous racist statements—not only racist, but sexist statements—and he has been fined previously for actions violating the NBA’s rules, including moving his team to Los Angeles without prior authorization. The Clippers, bought for $12.5 million in 1981 and now estimated to be worth approximately $700 million, and many in the larger culture have simply said to Donald Sterling, what you need to do is simply go away, sell your team, take your capital gains, and have nothing to do from now on with the NBA or with American public life.

 

From the Christian worldview perspective, there are several issues that should have our attention. One of them is the fact that Adam Silver, in handing down this sanction against Donald Sterling, did the only thing he possibly could have done. In other words, we have now reached the point in America, and this is something we should uniformly celebrate, when making the kind of statements that Donald Sterling made would bring about absolute, unqualified, overwhelming opposition and outrage. That’s a good thing. Just compare where we might’ve been a matter of 20 or 30 or 40, much less 50, years ago when such statements were horrifyingly uncontroversial and common. The good news is that in America this kind of moral change is something to be celebrated. The fact that when these statements came to light there was no one standing to defend him, there was no one suggesting that this was not a major issue, there was no one saying that there was no harm in the content of his speech.

 

But from a Christian worldview perspective that last comment takes us to another issue. The appropriate way for sanctions to be brought against someone making this kind of statement is exactly what the NBA has done, using the kind of corporate and financial economic levers to punish a man for making statements that are inexcusable, effectively putting him in the position where he has no other choice but to sell his team, barring him from the team he has owned for decades, and telling him he can have nothing to do—nothing whatsoever to do—with the sport of basketball at the professional level. What is not happening here is Donald Sterling being arrested and charged with a hate crime because even as we understand that this is a significant immoral act, it is not something that should be criminalized. The appropriate response is exactly what’s taking place here, and even as there is harm in his speech, there is greater harm in hate speech laws. And even as we should be very thankful that sanctions have now been brought against him, we should also be thankful that these sanctions are those rightly brought about, in terms of economic and corporate terms, even contractual terms, by those who have leverage over him, not by any government, which has no business criminalizing speech of any sort, of any reason, for any time.

 

Finally, two other observations: this was a private conversation, he thought, surreptitiously recorded. Just remember that very clear biblical exhortation: be certain your sin will find you out. In a digital age, this has taken on a new urgency. Just about anything you say can show up somewhere. And if it’s an outrageous statement such as Donald Sterling made, you can count on the fact that when it does erupt in public, well, the fall the house, as the Lord said, will be very great.

 

Finally, we need to remind ourselves as Christians of why these statements were so horrifying, so wrong. It is because every single human being, according to the Scripture, is made in God’s image. It is because every one of us is a descendent of Adam. Indeed, every single one of us is a descendent of Noah. We are all brothers and sisters, and this kind of racist language is not just an insult to fellow human beings made in God’s image, it is ultimately an insult to the Creator who made every single one of us equally in His image. Thus, once again, we remember that behind every major moral insight, every major moral impulse and intuition is an even deeper theological reality. But it takes the Christian worldview to understand that and to understand why Donald Sterling’s comments were not only horrifying, but more horrifying than the horrified culture around us does understand.

 

Finally, we end on a note of heartbreak that drives us straight to the gospel. A series of tornadoes have gone through the American Midwest, Mid-south, and Deep South. The death toll, at least at this point, is confirmed at 34 dead. At least fourteen people are confirmed dead in Arkansas on Sunday night, and as a tornadoes moved into the Deep South on Monday night, additional deaths were recorded. One thing to note, the National Weather Service offered detailed forecasts of these tornadoes and their outbreak, and in one of the most documented cases of the accuracy of the Weather Service’s forecast, exactly what they said might take place, unfortunately did take place. And it did not take place without warning, but warning was not enough.

 

I was reminded of this when I received an email from Dennis Rainey, a good friend and the head of Family Life Today, an important ministry located there in Little Rock. As he wrote

 

Rob Tittle, a Family Life Staff member and kindred spirit warrior for the family, died last night [that would be Sunday night] in the tornado that crushed parts of Central Arkansas. Two of his daughters, Tori age 20 and Rebekah age 14, were among the sixteen killed in the storm. Rob who was 48 and his wife Kerry had heard the tornado warnings and were shepherding their nine children under a stairwell when the tornado disintegrated their home. Rob was doing what a man does, putting his family first when the twister hit. All that is left is a grim, gray slab of concrete.

 

Rob Tittle and his wife Kerry had nine children, and the father and two of those girls died on Sunday night. The mother, that is, Kerry, is left with seven children on her own. And where they once had a home inhabited by a happy family with a mother and a father and nine children, there’s nothing but, as Dennis Rainey said, but a grim, gray slab.

 

How in the world can anyone survive this? How can anyone survive such a catastrophic loss? But as Dennis Rainey’s email made very clear, this family was deeply committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ they found their hope. Perhaps the most poignant statement I have seen in the aftermath of this tragedy was written by the Tittle’s 19-year-old daughter on Facebook. She had lost her father, her 20-year-old sister, and her 14-year-old sister. She wrote this:

 

Dear friends, do one thing for me. Hug your dad, hold him tight, and don’t let go. That man is the greatest gift God gave to you. Tell him you love him; tell him you will always love him.

 

Rainey told of another Family Life couple, Dan and Kristen. They lost their home and two cars in the tornado. As Dan saw the twister coming across the river, he hurriedly moved his wife, six children, two dogs, a bunny rabbit, and a lizard into the master bedroom closet—it was designed as a storm shelter. He closed the door, Dennis Rainey says, and as the seconds ticked by, he said to his children, “This is the day of salvation. If you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, now is the time to do it.” A moment later, the tornado tore into their home, sucking the vent plate out of the top of the shelter. When they looked out of the vent after the tornado had passed, all they could see was a landscape marked by massive devastation. They couldn’t even get out of the shelter, so they called 911. Their house was gone, but they were safe. As Dennis Rainey says:

 

Today has been a day of extreme emotions at Family Life. We mourn the loss of a good man and coworker and his two daughters, and at the same time, we celebrate the survival of so many children and family members. The news could’ve been worse.

 

Well even as we pray for the Tittle family and for all those who lost loved ones in this new round of tornadoes, we are reminded that we live in a world in which these tornadoes happen. And similar things happen in tragedies of other forms, whether they be storms or earthquakes or anything else. All too regularly we are reminded that we live in a Genesis 3 world, but aren’t we thankful that the answer to that Genesis 3 curse is a John 3:16 promise: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him might not perish but have everlasting life.” In a Genesis 3 world, we have no recourse but to pray for one another and grieve for one another and lean into to the promise of John 3:16.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with you 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 04-30-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Restrictions on what ministers can do is of great concern for religious liberty

North Carolina’s Gay-Marriage Ban Is Challenged by Church, New York Times (Michael Paulson)

2)Donald Sterling banned for life from basketball for racist comments

Donald Sterling’s L.A. Clippers Worth More Than Ever, Wall Street Journal (Sharon Terlep and Ben Cohen)

NBA Bans Clippers’ Donald Sterling for Life for Alleged Racist Comments, Wall Street Journal (Chris Herring)

3)The hope of the Gospel exists even in midst of tragic tornadoes

U.S. tornadoes kill 34, threaten more damage in South, Reuters (Emily Le Coz)

Transcript: The Briefing 04-29-14

The Briefing

 

 April 29, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, April 29, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

A new twist on legal challenges to constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage has now appeared from the state of North Carolina, and this one does come with a very interesting new twist. As it happens, this particular protest to North Carolina’s so-called Amendment 1, overwhelmingly adopted by the voters of that state just two years ago, comes from the United Church of Christ, a very liberal Protestant denomination. And the United Church of Christ has officially filed a lawsuit against the state of North Carolina on the ground that Amendment 1 is an unconstitutional abridgment and infringement of the religious liberties of United Church of Christ clergy. As Michael Paulson of The New York Times reports:

 

In a novel legal attack on a state’s same-sex marriage ban, a liberal Protestant denomination on Monday filed a lawsuit arguing that North Carolina is unconstitutionally restricting religious freedom by barring clergy members from blessing gay and lesbian couples.

 

Now what makes this lawsuit innovative is that most of the previous lawsuits brought against similar state laws and amendments were argued on the basis of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection before the law. This is a direct assault on those amendments that constitute barriers to same-sex marriage, but the argument is now grounded in the First Amendment, that is, the free exercise of religion. And, as this story enfolds, it’s going to be only more interesting as the arguments continue.

 

But as Michael Paulson continues in his report, the United Church of Christ has filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court and it is the first such case brought by a national religious denomination, challenging a state’s marriage laws. Previously, the challenges have come from same-sex couples. The denomination (this is the United Church of Christ) claims nearly one million members nationwide. It has supported same-sex marriage since 2005, and it is so liberal on the far-left wing of American Protestantism that it actually ordained an openly gay man back in 1972; decades before other liberal denominations generally moved in the same direction. Donald C. Clark, Jr., general counsel for the United Church of Christ, said, “We didn’t bring this lawsuit to make others conform to our beliefs, but to vindicate the right of all faiths to freely exercise their religious practices.” As Paulson reports, the denomination argues that a North Carolina law that criminalizes the religious solemnization of weddings without a state-issued marriage license violates the First Amendment. The next few words of his report are particularly crucial. Mr. Clark said that North Carolina allows clergy members to bless same-sex couples married in other states, but otherwise bars them from performing “religious blessings and marriage rites” for same-sex couples and that “if they perform a religious blessing ceremony of a same-sex couple in their church, they are subject to prosecution and civil judgment.”

 

Now I must tell you that I find the inclusion of this kind of language in a law or a constitutional amendment rather troubling, and I say that as one who is stalwartly opposed to same-sex marriage and stalwartly opposed to the normalization of homosexual behavior and relationships. And, of course, we’re looking here at another realization that sometimes there is more to a situation than first meets the eye. In this case, Amendment One, as it is known and passed by North Carolina voters and passed overwhelmingly two years ago, was clearly stated as a constitutional amendment, an amendment to the North Carolina state constitution, that would identify marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman. And, furthermore, that amendment went on to state very clearly that the state of North Carolina would not recognize any same-sex marriage performed in the state and, furthermore, that it would not allow officials of the state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

 

But this amendment went on—and let me remind you of the words of the amendment itself—to state that clergypersons cannot perform “religious blessings and marriage rites for same-sex couples” and it warned “if they perform a religious blessing ceremony of a same-sex couple in their church, they’re subject to prosecution and civil judgments.” Now the inclusion of that kind of language directly addressing ministers and members of the clergy appears to me to be both odd and ill-advised. As Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry (that’s a gay rights organization that supports same-sex marriage), said, “In their zeal to pile on to denying the freedom to marry, North Carolina officials also put in place a measure that assaulted the religious freedom that they professed to support by penalizing and seeking to chill clergy that have different views.” He went on and said, “The extent to which North Carolina went to deny the freedom to marry wound up additionally discriminating on the basis of religion by restricting speech and the ability of clergy to do their jobs.”

 

Now we need to look at this situation rather dispassionately. I am certainly in favor of any state law or constitutional amendment that identifies marriage as recognized within the state as exclusively the union of a man and a woman. I believe that that is not only that which comports with the definition and the support of marriage, but it also is that which will lead to the maximum human flourishing and will avoid institutionalizing behavior that will be injurious not only to human health, but to the moral fabric of the society at large. I think it is within not only the society’s right, but its absolute responsibility to protect marriage in every way imaginable—marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman.

 

But when the North Carolina amendment goes on to make specific address to the behavior and the speech of members of the clergy, of pastors and ministers, we seem to have a big problem, and it appears that those who have brought this lawsuit may well have a very convincing argument. And, furthermore, it puts all of us who wish to advocate for and to protect religious liberty in a significantly sensitive and difficult place because even those of us who believe that the main thrust of the amendment is not only right, but necessary, have to wonder if the particular language in the North Carolina amendment does not actually pose a threat to the religious liberty not only to the clergy of the United Church of Christ who want to perform same-sex marriages, but also of the ministers of any other faith, including evangelical Christianity, who at some point and in some places where same-sex marriage is legal might be addressed with exactly the opposite mandate. If this constitutional amendment can address the ministers of North Carolina, stating that they may not take certain actions within their churches, how long might it be before in a state that has legal same-sex marriage there is a similar and opposite effort to try to instruct ministers that they must perform same-sex marriages? This appears to be a very dangerous position and a very unsustainable legal situation not only in the state of North Carolina, but, by inference, to others states as well. It would seem that the state of North Carolina could well have accomplished its purposes in defining for the state in its law the requirement that marriage must be recognized as only and exclusively the union of a man and a woman, and it seems like the proper persons to be addressed by that constitutional amendment would be officers of the state—everyone from those who work at the county and local level all the way up to those who administer the highest levels of law and justice within the state of North Carolina. Why did they choose specifically in a constitutional amendment to address ministers? That is a huge question and it is a question that should trouble evangelicals who could just as easily if not even more inevitably find themselves on the wrong side of the equal and opposite argument.

 

In The New York Times coverage of the situation, Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, is quoted. She’s quoted as saying that this particular legal action is just “the lawsuit of the week, filed by those who want to impose same-sex marriage on the North Carolina.” Well it certainly might appear that way, but her next statement is profoundly true. She said:

 

It is both ironic and sad that an entire religious denomination and its clergy, who purport holding to Christian teachings on marriage, would look to the courts to justify their errant beliefs. These individuals are simply revisionists that distort the teaching of Scripture to justify sexual revolution, not marital sanctity.

 

I agree with every single word of her statement and with every single inference of her meaning. She is exactly right. The United Church of Christ has left the Christian faith, in terms of any normal standard of Christian Orthodoxy. It is also now operating in open rebellion to God’s law and to the very clear moral teachings of Scripture. But as is always the case, a denomination like this doesn’t start its liberal actions on something like same-sex marriage. Long before same-sex marriage was even imaginable, much less debated, the United Church of Christ was already headed in a very clear liberal direction, departing from the orthodox doctrines of the Christian faith. They abandoned such affirmations as the inerrancy and authority of Scripture long before. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that United Church of Christ, often known as the UCC, is on the wrong side of the same-sex argument, actually arguing against the clear teachings of Scripture.

 

But whether or not the constitutional amendment that was passed two years ago in North Carolina should have addressed members of the ministry—that’s a very different question. It seems to be both a dubious and a dangerous proposition that any law or constitutional amendment on any issue should address itself specifically to ministers. This is a case we’re going to have to watch very closely and it puts those of us who advocate both for marriage as the union of a man and a woman and for religious liberty, including the liberty of Christians to hold fast to a Christian and biblical understanding of marriage, in a very difficult position. Evangelical Christians must both understand and affirm our understanding that religious liberty for us means religious liberty for all and that means that even as we advocate for religious liberty, we have to understand that the guarantee of religious liberty means the freedom of heretics to teach heresy. If we deny religious liberty for others, very soon others will deny religious liberty to us. That’s fair warning and this case bears close attention.

 

Speaking of The New York Times, on the Sunday after Easter, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an article entitled, “Religion for $1,000, Alex.” It’s a clear reference to Jeopardy and the point of Nicholas Kristof is biblical illiteracy. He points out that many Americans, perhaps even most Americans, even as they affirm that the Bible is the Word of God and say that the solutions to most of life’s problems are found in the Scriptures, actually don’t know much of what’s actually in the Bible or, as this article makes clear, they imagine that many things are in the Bible that aren’t there at all.

 

As he wrote on Sunday, “Secular Americans are largely ignorant about religion, but, in surveys, religious Americans turn out to be scarcely more knowledgeable.” He quotes Stephen Prothero of Boston University in his book, Religious Literacy:

 

Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion. Atheists may be as rare in America as Jesus-loving politicians are in Europe, but here faith is almost entirely devoid of content. One of the most religious countries on earth is also a nation of religious illiterates.

 

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe that the Bible holds the answer to all or most of life’s basic questions. Yet only one-third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

 

Though writing sometimes rather knowledgably about theological and religious subjects, Nicholas Kristof belongs to the secular opinion class in America. He’s made that abundantly clear in many of his previous columns. And it appears that he is shocked—indeed, newly shocked—by the biblical illiteracy of the American people, and it appears that that’s why he quoted Stephen Prothero in his statement that Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion. But one of Protheros’s statements actually explains the situation implicitly. He said, and you’ll recall, that most Americans, even as they affirm the Bible, don’t really know what they’re affirming. As he said, “Here faith is almost entirely devoid of content.” This is an affirmation of what we call and must identify as cultural Christianity. Cultural Christianity is actually fast disappearing in America. That’s a part of the great cultural transformation that we are now experiencing, and that cultural Christianity is being replaced by some form of secularism: either the hard secularism of the New Atheists or the softer secularism of the so-called religious nones (that’s n-o-n-e-s), those who increasingly say they have no religious preference. But when he says that American faith is nearly devoid of content, he’s describing that cultural Christianity.

 

Now as evangelical Christians who love the Bible must fully understand, cultural Christianity is not Christianity. It’s a false Christianity. It is a basic secularism that is disguised or camouflaged by a veneer of Christian commitment or of Christian identity or even a residual commitment to some form of Christian morality. But with the increasing pressures of a secular age, cultural Christianity is disappearing. We should note quite carefully and with our understanding that cultural Christians, those who are merely culturally Christian, should be expected to have a very low level of biblical literacy because, after all, if they had a higher level of biblical literacy, they would be unlikely to be merely culturally Christian. On the other hand, if they’re more than culturally Christian, it is certainly also true that they must be that way because they’ve been taught by the Scriptures. So in some sense, this is a chicken-and-egg question. As in most chicken-and-egg questions, the answer which came first, the cultural Christianity of the low-level of biblical illiteracy, is irrelevant. They tend to go together. Though there is certainly a loss in terms of the fact that these who are marked by cultural Christianity have so little knowledge of Scripture, the real scandal is that so many people who actually attend evangelical churches also have woefully low levels of biblical literacy and that’s something that we have to address in our families, in our churches, in our congregations, everywhere we have influence. It should be an absolute scandal that those who are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ would have anything less than a growing faithful knowledge of Scripture. Biblical illiteracy in the culture? Well, that’s just a symptom of a secular age, but biblical illiteracy in the church? That’s the real scandal and that’s a scandal that comes with devastating consequences because Christians who do not know the Scripture and are not tied by the Scripture, will not live by the Scripture. They cannot and will not be faithful disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s a scandal the church has to consider; not one that’s likely to reach the pages of The New York Times. The more important question is this: Does this problem have the attention of your family and of your church?

 

Our continuing coverage of the controversy related to the Boy Scouts and the change announced last year in their policies so they now accept openly gay scouts, but not scout leaders takes us now to Louisville, Kentucky, where the Courier Journal, the local newspaper there in Louisville, announced over the weekend that the Louisville Metro Council (that’s the city council) can’t provide funding to the Boy Scouts because the organization’s ban on openly gay scout leaders violates the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance, or at least this was the judgment of the county attorney. As Sebastian Kitchen for the Courier Journal reports, this blocks an attempt by one member of the Metro Council to use $640 in neighborhood development money to expand swimming for two hours on two nights at a city park for scouts pursuing their swimming badge.

 

But this continuing controversy just erupts now in Louisville. And as we’ve pointed out time and again, when the Boy Scouts adopted their new policy at the national level last year, reversing their long-standing policy, a policy they had defended as recently as months before and all the way previously to the United States Supreme Court, and were adopting a new policy that would accept openly gay scouts, but not openly gay scouting leaders, they put themselves in the position of pleasing no one. They would displease conservatives, who would hold to a biblical standard of morality, by accepting openly gay scouts, and, of course, the fallout on the right has been huge with a new alternative organization put together and many Christian churches dropping out of scouting and many Christian parents withdrawing their scouts from the program. But, as we reported last week, the decision by the Boy Scouts to actually enforce their policy prohibiting openly gay scouting leaders and thus removing a gay scoutmaster from a church-based scout troop near Seattle, Washington, has led to an uproar on the left and to the fact that there are now open calls for the Boy Scouts to have to take the necessary and automatic next step after having changed their position when it comes to the inclusion of openly gay scouts. They put themselves in a very weak moral position and probably in a very weak legal position by having a very different standard for scouting leaders, and now as the Boy Scouts are being prevented from receiving this benefit from the city of Louisville because they continue to discriminate on scouting leaders.

 

Going back to the situation in Seattle, an interesting report has now come out of that city indicating, as The Seattle Times reports, that at least four members of the congressional delegation from Washington State have petitioned the Boy Scouts to change their policy. As The Seattle Times reports:

 

Four Democratic members of Congress have expressed concern over Seattle Boy Scouts of America’s recent decision to kick out a church for hosting a troop led by an openly gay scoutmaster.

 

The four congressmen who signed the letter were Adam Smith of Bellevue, Jim McDermott of Seattle, Rick Larson of Everett, and Susan DelBene of Medina. Employing language now familiar to us all, the representatives said that the decision and the policy there in Seattle “goes against Boy Scouts values of mutual respect and inclusion.” You can almost surely expect the Boy Scouts of America to cave on this issue and that will lead to further hemorrhaging of Boy Scouts from the right, from churches that will continue to drop out of the program and from parents who will continue, perhaps even in far larger numbers, to remove their boys from the Boy Scouts of America.

 

But from a Christian worldview perspective, perhaps what this demonstrates more than anything else is the untenability and unsustainability of a compromise of a moral nature. If you’re going to compromise on a moral principle of this importance and this clarity, you’ll find yourself in no-man’s land, and that’s exactly where the Boy Scouts now are. But the Boy Scouts are unlikely to remain alone in this situation. We should all remember this the next time we hear of an organization or a congregation, a denomination, or any kind of institution, or perhaps even a member of the government say, “What we need to do is to compromise on this moral principle.” On some principles, compromise is impossible.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. To call with you question in your voice, just call 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’m speaking to you today from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 04-29-14

Podcast Transcript

1) New twist on religious liberty as church challenges North Carolina’s same sex marriage ban

North Carolina’s Gay-Marriage Ban Is Challenged by Church, New York Times (Michael Paulson)

2) Secular media notices biblical illiteracy of cultural Christianity

Religion for $1,000, Alex, New York Times (Nicholas Kristof)

3) Boy Scouts’ compromise position on homosexuality continues to estrange those on the left too

Boy Scouts’ gay policy foils Louisville funding, Louisville Courier Journal (Sebastian Kitchen)

Lawmakers decry Seattle Boy Scouts’ action against gay leader, Seattle Times (Kyung M. Song)

Transcript: Nearing the End – A Conversation with Theologian Stanley Hauerwas

Thinking in Public with Stanley Hauerwas

April 21, 2012

Mohler:            This is Thinking in Public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline, theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

 

Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics at Duke University where he holds appointments in the Divinity School and Law School. He has written an entire library of articles and books dating from 1969 to the present. He is a board member of the society of Christian ethics. He is associate editor of a number of Christian journals and periodicals and a frequent lecturer at campuses across the country. He holds his PhD from Yale University and a Doctor of Divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His most recent work is Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life.

Mohler:            Professor Hauerwas, you have been in an ongoing conversation partner with me, perhaps without even knowing it. I read everything you write and always find a great deal in it that makes me to think. Sometimes, quite frankly, that aggravates me; other times that pleases me. You are one of the most unusual writers and thinkers that I engage with quite regularly. You’re newest book is entitled Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life. How in the world did you get there?

Hauerwas:       Well, eschatology has always been at the center of my work and I thought it was time to try to make that as explicit as possible. Plus, I am seventy-three. I am approaching the end and I am realizing death is not a theoretical possibility, even for me. So, I thought that the title had a double entendre, in a way that would show the interrelationship of those themes.

Mohler:            Well, the themes of your life are so well documented in your writing and the major streams of your thought. And there are so many of them that I would like to pursue with you a bit. But in this book, I’ll tell you, the most interesting essay to me is the one entitled “Church Matters on Faith and Politics” because in this essay, and the book is actually a collection of very, very pointed and perceptive essays, you make a stunning point. That is that the church in the western world is losing its ability to maintain any identity. You write that the church is in a buyers’ market that makes any attempt to form a disciplined congregational life very difficult. Is this just part and parcel with the modern age or is this a characteristically American moment?

Hauerwas:       I honestly don’t know how to answer that, Al. I think it’s certainly the case that America is the prismatic example of it. But I suspect its true in most places because basically a buyers’ market, that very description, reproduces the presumption that you live in a demand economy that says that the buyer is supreme and they get to buy what they want and therefore… I tell my students for example, if they are to sustain their life in the ministry without self-hatred there are two things they should not do: They should never have the Christian funeral in a funeral home. It is to be in the church. And they should never marry someone off the street. And they say well if we try to do that, they will just go to the church down the street and be buried in a funeral home or to marry people off the street. And I say “yeah, but that’s why they’re a bad church and you’ll be a good one!” We won’t have many members. So that’s the way I think that it works, namely that the consumer gets to consume the kind of faith they want.

Mohler:            The very next essay in this book you write about the end of Protestantism and that leads me to ask a very personal question: as an American evangelical Christian, do you think that Evangelicalism is in many ways the quintessential representation of the American faith and do you think that even as you write about the church in general – I actually don’t want to put a message in your mouth, I’d rather here it from you, but I get the impression that when you look at American Christianity in general, and American Evangelicalism in particular, you appear to see a church that is looking less and less like the church.

Hauerwas:       That’s true. I have great admiration for evangelicals for no other reason than they just bring such great energy to the faith and I admire that. But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship and I think that’s to get it exactly backwards: that the Christian faith is meditated faith. It only comes through the witness of others as embodied in the church. So I should never trust my presumption that I know what my relationship with God is separate from how that is expressed through words and sacrament in the church. So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations.

 

Mohler:            I have to tell you that one of the statements in one of your books that aggravated me was a statement in which you said that conservative evangelicals should read this book, but they won’t because they don’t read this kind of book. Actually, it aggravated me because I was reading it at the time. But I understood the point you were making, and I want to come back and just press you on this just a bit because, as an evangelical concerned with many of the same things, I just want to come back and ask: When you look at evangelicalism and you look at evangelical churches, what do you see as the particular moment that now presents us with a completely different set of challenges? In other words, be a prophet for a moment. You can do that. In other words, where is evangelicalism going to be given the increasing secularization and the hyper-modernity of our culture?

 

Hauerwas:       I think evangelicalism is destined to die of its own success and it will go the way of mainstream Protestantism because there’s just—it depends far too much on charismatic pastors, and charisma will only take you so far. Evangelicalism is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired. For example, I’m a big advocate of Morning Prayer. I love Morning Prayer. We do the same thing every morning. We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. I mean, there’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.

 

Mohler:            Well you are well-known for arguing that spirituality is practice and that ethics is virtue; just to put it in, perhaps, too short a compression there. But when you look at American spirituality in general, there doesn’t appear to be much practice or much on emphasis upon practice. And is that because our congregations have lost that set of habits?

 

Hauerwas:       It’s hard for me to generalize. I can’t pretend to be someone that has studied these matters from a sociological point of view—not that I particularly trust sociology—but I do think that Hagel made the comment at one time, “Christians arose in the morning and said their prayers. Now they read the newspaper.” Of course, that’s changing too. They probably look at their smartphone now. But I think that the fundamental habits of the faith have been in decline and that leaves us with insufficient resources to sustain our lives as Christians in a world in which we find ourselves. I think, again, it has to do with the loss of fundamental practices, such as reading the Bible, but reading the Bible, I don’t trust necessarily to me as an individual. I need to read the Bible with other people. And that has pretty much been lost. Let me say in that regard that one of the other things that worries me about evangelicalism is I’m afraid it’s got the Bible and now, and exactly how it is that you reconnect evangelical life with the great Catholic traditions, I think is part of the challenges for the future because you need to read the fathers reading Scripture as part of our common life if we are to sustain a sense that we don’t get to make Christianity up. We receive it through the lives of those who have gone before and that just becomes crucial for us to be able to survive in which we find ourselves.

Mohler:            I find it very difficult to predict sometimes where you’re going to go when you begin an essay or a book, for that matter, or a sermon. And I’ve also read your most recent collection of sermons entitled Without Apology: Sermons for Christ’s Church.

 

Hauerwas:       Thanks again.

 

Mohler:            But, as you surprise me, you always make me think, and in your essay on the end of Protestantism—and, by the way, written at the same time that so many others are arguing the case or analyzing the situation from different perspectives—I had this question: Are you suggesting that Protestantism was a failed experiment or that it’s basically been—well, as you said of evangelicalism, it’s died of its own success. In other words, mainline Protestantism, the big brands of Protestantism now famously in decline in the United States. How do you explain that? What do you say about that?

 

Hauerwas:       Well, Protestantism, by the very name, protest, was a protest movement within the church catholic that never was meant to be an end in itself, but a reformed movement for the church catholic to criticize where it had gone wrong. It has been successful. I think Roman Catholicism has responded fundamentally to many of what the Protestant revolt was about, but when Protestantism becomes an end in itself, rather than a reform movement that looks for and desires Christian unity—and that can come in many different ways—then, as a matter of fact, we become unintelligible to ourselves. And so—I’m going to die a Protestant, let me very clear, because I think I owe my Catholic brothers and sisters that continuing witness and, therefore, I am determined to remain Protestant. Though, after I taught fourteen years at Notre Dame, certainly Catholicism leaves a mark on you. But I, nonetheless, hunger for Christian unity in which, and at the very least that means that Christians learn not to kill one another in the name of being Christians or the name of certain national loyalties, etc. Because Christian unity isn’t just the bureaucracies getting together where no one loses their job, but it is the fundamental recognition that in this brother or sister I see Christ for me.

 

Mohler:            I think it was George Lindbeck who pointed out as a word of critique that you seem to have no interest whatsoever in institutional ecumenicalism.

 

Hauerwas:      Yeah, I’ve tried to respond to that, but I’ve never been terribly taken up with the ecumenical movement, particularly among the Protestant churches. In fact, the buyer’s market has meant that denominational identities have become less and less interesting. And so it’s very unclear—I mean, what good would it be for Presbyterians and Methodists to become united today? I mean, basically, all we’ve got a certain kind of emphasis they try to find that makes them somewhat distinctive in order for them to get their buyer-share of the diminishing market.

 

Mohler:            When Stanley Hauerwas talks about the buyer’s market for religion in America, he’s onto something that evangelicals ought to notice and notice very carefully. And that is in fact that that is indeed an apt metaphor for our society at large, but it also, if we’re not very careful, a dynamic that is experienced by many churches and denominations, not only in the Protestant mainline, where he mentions all those brand-named denominations jockeying to retain their membership and a declining membership base, but it’s also the case that there are many in American evangelicalism who basically think of the gospel as something to be packaged and sold. The problem with that, of course, it that it is the same pattern as that which was the besetting sin of Protestant liberalism. Protestant liberalism sought to accommodate the message of the gospel to the larger and secularizing culture in order that it would be, well, saleable. It would be acceptable. But the Bible and the gospel can’t be reduced to a product and that’s a warning that evangelical Christians had better heed and understand very carefully. Because just as there was that temptation amongst the Protestant liberals and perhaps the jockeying for position among the brand names of mainline Protestantism today, we can be involved in the same kind of strategizing in which we betray the fact that somehow we think the gospel’s a product to be sold as well. And if it’s a product to be sold, then, like any other product that’s successful, it has to meet the demands of the marketplace, and that is the antithesis of evangelism.

 

In your writings, you also make another very interesting case that has direct reference to mainline Protestantism and perhaps an indirect reference to evangelicalism as well. You argue that Protestant liberalism followed the apologetic strategy of trying to make the Christian faith rational in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. And, yet, as you in conversation with several others have remarked— Alasdair MacIntyre, I’m thinking of here, in particular—that when liberals made the Christian faith rational, they made the Christian faith irrelevant and unnecessary.

 

Hauerwas:       Right. Well, I want to be careful with that word rational because I think nothing is more rational than Christian Orthodoxy. I think the Nicaea account of Trinity is an extraordinary development that is a tradition thinking through its fundamental commitment in a manner that is intellectually compelling. So the rationality that I was criticizing was the kind of rationalizing that presupposed that there was some kind of reason that didn’t reflect a tradition-determined mode of investigation. So I want to say that the problem with the response to the Enlightenment was it accepted the Enlightenment’s account of reason as reasonable, which was a deep mistake.

 

Mohler:            Well, I appreciate that clarification because I certainly emphatically agree that there is nothing more rational than Christian Orthodoxy in terms of the right exercise of reason. But the attempt to make Christianity rational in Enlightenment terms with the autonomous reason, I just have to say, I think you make that point very compellingly, and it leads me to wonder sometimes if evangelicals aren’t methodologically sometimes following the same kind of trajectory that the mainline Protestants did, but just a century late. You know, perhaps many evangelicals are arriving at a new form of liberalism just about a century late.

 

Hauerwas:       Well, I think pietism and rationalism went hand-in-hand because each privilege the individual presumed capacity for rationality in and of itself. And so in so far as evangelicalism has reflected that pietistic background, it interestingly enough is the most determinative exemplification of rationalism. I mean, I know evangelicals are not necessary fundamentalists, but I can’t imagine a more rationalistic account of the Christian faith than some forms of how scriptural inspiration is understood. So I think that is exactly right that a good deal of contemporary evangelicalism has a kind of rationalism to it that is reproducing what Lindbeck identified in the nature of doctrine as the experimental expressive form.

 

Mohler:            Well I hope not to be guilty of that, but I speak as one who clearly as an evangelical feels the necessity to defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to do so in the contemporary moment and to make very clear that, indeed, Orthodox, biblical Christianity is the most rational worldview imaginable, so in thinking about the challenge on the other side of the Enlightenment where evangelicals, as much as Protestant liberals, we find ourselves. So let me just ask you. Rather than wonder what would Stanley Hauerwas have us to do. Let me just ask you: So what should we do?

 

Hauerwas:       Well I think the first thing we need to do is confess our sin; that we have pridefully tried to make our faith a faith that suits us, and, in particular, underwrite the American experiment as central to the Christian faith. So one of the things I think that we desperately need to do is recover the ecclesiastical center of the Christian faith in a manner that unites us with Christians around the world, in a manner that frees us from the kind of nationalistic presuppositions that have gone hand-in-hand with American Protestantism. That’s called becoming catholic.

 

Mohler:            Well I certainly appreciate the critique. I often, though, in reading your works, come to this question: Okay, so what if we handed everything over to Stanley Hauerwas, what would he do with it? In other words, where would you have us to go?

 

Hauerwas:       Well, let me say one of the things I would have us to go is a much richer, liturgical life than I think is the case in many evangelical and Protestant mainstream churches. I think a recovery of the centrality of Eucharistic celebration and why it is so central is just crucial for the future of the church.

 

Mohler:            Okay, now that really intrigues me. I’m not surprised by that. But in terms of the shape and substance of the congregation, of the church of an ecclesial center, how does one become a Christian? In other words, that’s another question I had in reading your works from beginning to end. There just isn’t much reference to conversion.

 

Hauerwas:       Ah. Yeah, I guess I stayed away from that term because it has been so associated with Billy Graham’s football-field evangelism. Billy Graham’s football-field evangelism and conversion is not without value, but to be a Christian means that from baptism forward you are living a life of constant transformation in a manner that you are able to have the sinfulness of our lives located in a manner that through the good graces of others I have some hope of living a life that is more, to use Wesley’s phrase, perfect. And so I think that conversion is the name of an ongoing process from birth to death that we as Christians are invited to live.

 

Mohler:            Well, again, looking at your writings, and even preparing for this conversation, and feeling the weight of your critique at many points and just very catalytic thoughts, I came back to another question, and that is, for Stanley Hauerwas, what is the gospel? What is the good news that is at the center of the Christian faith? Because I think I could hypothesize several answers, but I would just love to hear you to respond to that. What is the gospel?

 

Hauerwas:       That through Jesus Christ, very God and very man, we Gentiles have been made part of the promise to Israel that we will be witnesses to God’s good care of God’s creation through the creation of a people who once were no people that the world can see there is an alternative to our violence. There is an alternative to our deceptions. There is an alternative to our unfaithfulness to one another though the creation of something called church. That’s salvation.

 

Mohler:            What about the forgiveness of sins? How does the cross and atonement play into your understanding of the gospel?

 

Hauerwas:       Well, I think that what it means to have our sins forgiven is you’ve been made part of a narrative that you do not have to justify the path in a way that means the past continues to haunt you because you’re determined to live righteously. Interestingly enough, forgiveness of sins does say you do not have to be determined by the path because you’ve been given a future that is so compelling you don’t have to constantly try to renegotiate a world in which you are trying to be righteous even though you’re not.

 

 

Mohler:            Very interesting. Once one understands the gospel on those terms then becomes a part of the faith and practice of the church and is then shaped by the congregation’s life and those regular practices in what you describe as a rich liturgical life, what difference does it make for that individual as a citizen of this world? To use Augustine’s dichotomy—to be in the earthly city—what is the role of that Christian and the church in this earthly city?

 

Hauerwas:       To tell the truth. Very simple. Just tell the truth and see what kinds of tensions that produces. I think Augustine’s “Two Cities” have too often resulted in an apology for Christians not really being Christian because the church is really made up of sinners and non-sinners or at least people who are not quite as sinful and therefore you can’t tell that much difference between the church and the world. Well, we are sinners and that is a great achievement. That and the world doesn’t know that it is possessed by sin in the way that Christians do. So, there is a truthfulness to being able to be a Christian in a world that knows not God. This is our gift to the world, to be able of truth.

 

Mohler:            Here is another one of the tension points. I try to resolve in thinking about your proposal and the larger fabric of your though. You did teach at Notre Dame and you speak with incredible respect for the Roman Catholic Church and of its tradition. And clearly, even as you speak of your determination to die a Protestant, you speak of the fact that you have a Catholic identity. You warn about the dangers of “empire” and to such an extent that one of your critics says that “for Stanley Hauerwas, the original sin was desire for empire.” So, I cannot find any example in the history of the Christian church better than the Catholic church in terms of making peace with that empire. Is that not the problem?

 

Hauerwas:       I celebrate the fact that the church is a Catholic church is losing its control of the earth but remember one of the things that is so impressive about the Church Catholic is that it is the church of the poor. We Americans cannot imagine being a church of the poor; we can imagine being a church that cares about the poor but we cannot imagine the poor being Christians but Catholicism has done that in a way that is interestingly enough a very deep critique of empire.

 

Mohler:            You offer a penetrating critique, that’s one of the reasons why I never let one of your books pass by before it is fairly quickly read. Just in terms of social location, you have taught at Notre Dame and then for years now you have been teaching at Duke University. The last time I saw you I think was in the Gothic book store there at Duke, which has now been reduced, and I mourn that with you, but you are there at Duke. And if there is any institution, especially in the south, that represents the empire of reason and frankly the empire of wealth when it comes to this. . . so I have to wonder, Does Stanley Hauerwas’s thought exist mostly within an Academic world represented by the institutions that are basically the enemy of everything he talks about?

 

Hauerwas:       Well, institutions like Duke are many-sundered of things and so I try to serve it as best I can without . . . I don’t have to lick the hand that feeds me. I hope that Duke University, somehow through accidental reasons, has a Christian theologian in its midst and many other good Christians around. This is an indication that it may be incoherent but it nonetheless is an institution that may have the possibility of making the world just a bit better.

 

Mohler:            Back in 1989, you and your colleague William Willimon, now and once a retired Methodist bishop, wrote a book entitled “Resident Aliens” in which you argue based upon New Testament evidence and your own theological analysis that this is the proper way to view the church and always has been. And if I could summarize this book it seems that you are saying that liberal Protestantism was coming to a rather reluctant and perhaps inevitable understanding that the church is made up of resident aliens in a culture where we once felt at home but no longer do. And it seems to me that it might well be that evangelicals are discovering this same thing again, in this case about a generation after you wrote that book.

 

Hauerwas:       Yeah, the book has just come out with its 25th anniversary edition, in which Will has a forward and I have an afterword to it. So, if evangelicals would find that useful, we would be very happy.

 

Mohler:            Well, I think you will probably find it widely read and much quoted. By the way, Dr. Willimon’s second book on that issue, I wrote a review on it in Preaching Magazine and you won’t remember this but more than two decades ago you wrote me a very nice letter thanking me for that review. Again, not only do we love bookstores, letters still matter. And I still have that letter from you today

 

Hauerwas:       I am not much of an “e-mailer” but I do write letters.

 

Moher:             Well, they will survive when the emails do not and the historians will appreciate that.

But when I think about the state of the church and of Christendom in this post-Christian age, just to stress the point a bit further, it is clear that many of the things that trouble most Christians you seem actually to celebrate the end of Christendom and the collapse of a Christian worldview and Christian influence in the society. Just play that out a bit.

 

Hauerwas:       I think isn’t it wonderful, we are free! The idea that now that now somehow or the other, America has to be a Christian nation is gone and we are free. Now all that we have left as Christians is to say the truth and I think that is a great thing God has done for us.

 

Mohler:            Where, then, does that take us? In other words, what should we be thinking about as we anticipate the next twenty years of Christian existence in America? And even though you are writing about eschatology in your early 70s, I am hopeful that you will be here for the next twenty years. What do you expect to happen in that time?

 

Hauerwas:       I think that the church will be leaner and meaner and that will be a very good thing. I think that we will discover how much we need one another for survival and that is a very good thing. I hope that the world in which we find ourselves will be not as violent as it has been but I don’t have much confidence in that. I think the humanisms that prevail in our world today are tempted to murderous forms of life that there is little control over.

 

Mohler:            I want to give you an opportunity here in closing to speak to a largely evangelical audience, that is a listenership of at least a good many evangelical Christians and many of them young and thinking about the future. As someone who watches us and knows us and lives in a center where evangelical culture is all around you there in North Carolina, as you think about these things, what would be your word, if you were to write a letter right now to a young evangelical what would you say to him or her?

 

Hauerwas:       I would say . . . I wrote a letter fairly recently to young people going to college in which I said, “we need you, so you must acquaint yourself with the great literature of our culture, which is a Christian literature, in a way that you become articulate for the world in which we find ourselves so that we will not lose our ability to be people of substance in a world filled with superficiality. That’s what I would tell young evangelicals.

 

Mohler:            You ended your book that is actually focused upon eschatology entitled Approaching the End without ending it. It is just stops.

 

Hauerwas:       Yes, that’s just about how all my works end.

 

Mohler:            But on eschatology that sort of begs a certain kind of closure, so if you did anticipate a final word, what would that be?

 

Hauerwas:       Be a person of joy because you are God’s good creature who was created for the glory of God which is joy.

 

Mohler:            Professor Stanley Hauerwas, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.

 

Hauerwas:       Oh, thank you, Al. It has been lovely talking to you again.

 

Mohler:            A conversation with Stanley Hauerwas is never boring. It can’t be because he is simply one of the least boring human beings who have ever lived. As a matter of fact, in his books and there are so many of them, he is often, at least in places, seemingly in conversation if not in contradiction with himself. And yet there are some persistent themes. He is a critic of American Christianity, both modern and western Christianity. He is a severe critic of the kind of Christianity that makes peace with the empire, whether it was the Roman Empire in the time of Constantine or the American empire in terms of late modernity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He is also a man who very clearly, as a Christian critic, wants to accuse the church of reducing all of the truth claims of Christianity and the gospel itself to a form of product marketing. And he points out that this was indeed what the Protestant liberals did when they sought to make the Christian faith rational on the grounds of a purely secular reason. And he pointed out, very perceptively, that when the liberals did that, they succeeded in making Christianity unnecessary and irrelevant, because if all you need is autonomous reason in order to come to terms with Christianity then you can live on that autonomous reason alone. But one of the most perceptive of his arguments is that modern Christianity has lost an understanding of the necessity of certain practices in terms of Christian formation. And this is something that particularly afflicts contemporary evangelicalism. It afflicts us because we often treat these things as if they are merely means by which the Christian can move into a deeper and deeper faithfulness. We actually do not treat them often with the same seriousness we see them discussed in the Scriptures where they are discussed as necessary means of grace and as necessary means of being authentically Christian. In other words, in the New Testament you simply can’t envision a Christian who isn’t reading the Scripture and isn’t gathering together with fellow Christians, who isn’t involved in Christian service, and isn’t deeply devoted to prayer. You have the entire New Testament that is witness to this and certainly something like the book of James.

 

And so along comes Stanley Hauerwas who is not an evangelical and has described himself as something like a High-Church Mennonite, a person who is largely famous for trying to resuscitate the Anabaptist tradition in terms of the understanding of the church and especially the church in relation to the culture. And many evangelicals would wonder, how exactly do we involve ourselves in conversation with such a thinker? And the answer is, we read him on his own terms. This is a good example for how evangelicals need to read someone who is not an evangelical. We read him on his own terms. We understand who he is; we understand his basic worldview—how he sees the world, how he understands the church, how he engages the Scripture; and then we allow him to speak on his own terms and this gets to a second point that evangelicals particularly in this generation need to understand very clearly: We desperately need critics outside evangelicalism to help us understand not only the world outside but also the temptations within. And that is where someone like Stanley Hauerwas is a very invaluable partner in terms of thinking through so many of the issues that evangelicals now face. We are living in a post-Christian age. Stanley Hauerwas celebrates that. Many of us find great reason for grief and tragedy in that. But we see the inevitable loss of so much human flourishing and the descent into so much darkness abandoning light. But at the same time we have to be chastened by Stanley Hauerwas, not to miss empire too much, not to miss that kind of cultural influence too much, because he is exactly right, if we have to trade one for the other we must retain faithfulness and gospel witness and let the cultural influence go.

That gets to another one of my vexing issues when I read Stanley Hauerwas.  What if he were in control?  What if he actually got what he wanted?  How would this High Church Mennonite, this resuscitator of the Anabaptist tradition, this enemy of empire, this one who has taught at Notre Dame and Duke Divinity School, how would he reshape the church and its beliefs, practices, and understanding of its place in the world?  The answer is that I am profoundly unclear about the answer to those questions.  A conversation with Stanley Hauerwas doesn’t necessarily clarify them much because one of the things we have to keep in mind while we’re reading him is that he is writing in an academic world in which he is actually located at Notre Dame and at Duke University, very privileged places, and he is able to see things from that very privileged viewpoint.  Yet, I don’t think he is able to see how they might be seen outside those social locations.  That’s not just a critique of Stanley Hauerwas.  That’s a critique of all of us.  We see only what is possible to be seen from where we are.  That’s why I’m in agreement with him that we need to have an ongoing, substantial conversation with the Church, the Church through the centuries, with the democracy of the dead, with those who have gone before us, with the Apostles, with the Fathers, with the schoolmen, with the Reformers, with the Puritans, and with so many others coming down to the present age.

Yet, if we do so, it will be a different conversation than the one that Stanley Hauerwas envisions.  In all honestly, I think it would be a different conversation than what I would envision.  I think there will be much conversation about the necessity to hold on to certain theological verities of the faith once for all delivered to the saints in order that the Church would have the right beliefs that would then be validated and supported by the right practices.  I think Stanley Hauerwas is exactly right.  You can’t have disembodied truth.  That is antithetical to the biblical worldview.  Disembodied truth, in terms of the Church’s understanding of the faith once for all delivered to the saints, doesn’t exist.  That’s why we have the Church.  That’s why it is the Church which is to confirm and defend that faith.  After all, it’s delivered to the saints.  That is the Church.  Yet, there are definite truth claims that are made there.  There are definite truth claims that are the focus of that command given to the Church.

It seems to me that as we learn to hear the critique of Stanley Hauerwas in terms of how we so often reduce the Gospel to a marketing plan and a consumer product, how we so often try to divorce spirituality from practice, how we so often want to talk about ethics as some theological formula rather than the assertion of the centrality of the virtues, how we so often want to have the power of empire behind us in order so that we can have influence and in order that we can shape the lives and worldviews of individuals around us in the community around us and the culture around us, as much as we hear that critique, we have to be aware that we have do have to make an issue of truth, the truth revealed in Scripture.  It is the faith, which Paul revealed to Timothy was that “pattern of sound words.”  It has to be very central.  In this post-Christian age, those truths, those verities, those doctrines, and those revealed realities are under sustained subversion.  Only the Church knows why they are so eternally true and why they are so transformative if the Church is indeed to exist and persist.  The Church will continue to exist and persist, not because of the Church’s energy and determination, but because of the power of Christ, the risen Christ who guarantees that His Church will survive from this age into the kingdom yet to come.

I’m really thankful for that conversation with Stanley Hauerwas.  I think that reading someone like Professor Stanley Hauerwas makes me a more faithful evangelical.  At the same time, and this would probably make him chuckle, it also makes me more evangelical.  When I hear him talk and when I read him in his books, it makes me think, “You know, I really do hold to this evangelical identity and to our understanding of the Gospel as primary and paramount.”  That being said, we have a lot to learn from those who are watching us, and I’m thankful that someone like Stanley Hauerwas is watching us.  I’m thankful that he’s writing, and we get to engage his writing.  I’m even more thankful that today I got to engage him in conversation and to join with him in Thinking in Public.

Once again, I want to thank my guest, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, for thinking with me today.  For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.  For more information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.  Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.  Until next time, keep thinking.  I’m Albert Mohler.