R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 365

Transcript: The Briefing 04-22-14

The Briefing

 

 April 22, 2014

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

 

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

 

Evangelical Christians in the United States now face an inevitable moment of decision. While Christians in other movements and in other nations face similar questions, the question of homosexuality now presents evangelicals in the United States with a decision that cannot be avoided. Within a very short time, we will know where everyone stands on this question. There will be no place to hide, and there will be no way to remain silent. To be silent will answer the question.

 

That’s the opening paragraph from an article I published today at albertmohler.com, entitled “God, the Gospel, and the Gay Challenge—A Response to Matthew Vines.” That article and a free e-book we are releasing comes in response to a book that is released today, entitled God and the Gay Christian, by Matthew Vines. Some of you are aware of the fact that it was Matthew Vines, who was then a young Harvard student who just about a couple of years ago released a lecture on homosexuality and the gospel, homosexuality and the Bible, that went viral on the Internet, and it also sparked a great deal of conversation even where that conversation had not yet occurred. You see, Matthew Vines makes a startling claim. He argues that there is nothing in the Bible that explicitly condemns monogamous, committed, same-sex sexual behavior or relationships.

 

Now that’s the kind of argument that has been running rampant in the world of liberal Protestantism. That’s where the secular world has been and is now taking itself, in terms of majority opinion. In other places, they are getting there as fast as they can. But now Matthew Vines is out with a book in which he makes his case and he seeks to be as persuasive as he possibly can. It is a book that is likely to spark a good deal of conversation and it’s a book that’s likely to give some evangelicals, or those who count themselves as evangelicals or are considered within the larger evangelical movement, what they’ve been looking for, which is an off-ramp out of this public controversy.

 

As I write in my article, the question is whether evangelicals will remain true to the teachings of Scripture and to the unbroken teaching of the Christian church for over 2,000 years on the morality of same-sex acts and the institution of marriage. By the way, in my article I cite the fact that there are non-evangelicals who understand that this moment of decision is fast arriving. Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University has said, “It is clear to an observer like me that evangelical Christianity is at a crossroad.” What crossroad? She says, “The question of whether gay Christians should be married within the church.” Journalist Terry Mattingly sees the same thing. He has said, “There is no way to avoid the showdown that is coming.” And Matthew Vines’ new book is going to play into that context, the showdown, in terms of the fact that everyone is going to be declared on this position and the fact that there is an incredibly large number of evangelicals who are trying to find a way out of this predicament; the predicament of holding to a set of moral judgments that are so devastatingly at odds with the larger secular community. As one young evangelical put it, “I’m in a vice and I need to get out of it.” But there’s no way out of it for faithful Christians. And one of the things that becomes abundantly apparent as one reads this book is that it is a very desperate attempt to prove what is simply unprovable because it’s implausible, and that is that the Bible in condemning same-sex behaviors is not talking about what we now talk about as homosexuality. But in order to accept that thesis, you to buy the argument that when the Bible condemns same-sex sexual behaviors it’s not talking but anything that we now talk about as homosexuality, but rather it is merely condemning sex acts that would exploit one human being by another, that would be nonconsensual, that would be an adult with a child, in terms of Greco-Roman pederasty, or similar kinds of sociological moral objections.

 

But any honest reading of the New Testament or of the Old Testament brings to our immediate understanding the fact that the Bible is rooting its understanding of the wrongness, indeed the unnaturalness, of same-sex acts in the fact that God has created us not only in His image, but as male and female; created us in terms of sexual complementarity, and He has made us for each other. He’s given us the picture of a one-flesh relationship that requires a male and a female in order to provide the picture. Just as in the New Testament, you have the picture of Christ and the church in which Christ is incarnate in human flesh, He has become like us, but He is not just like us; otherwise we would not be saved. And so when you start looking at this, you realize these are not new arguments. As a matter fact, these arguments are largely imported from the world of very liberal biblical scholarship, but he has taken them, and Matthew Vines claims to hold to what he calls a high view of Scripture. He says about Scripture, “I believe all of Scripture is inspired by God and authoritative for my life.” But that doesn’t hold because when he speaks of all Scripture being authoritative, he then denies the authority of Scripture to speak to what it clearly addresses and he claims that the human authors of Scripture were limited in terms of their moral vision to the moral concepts that were available to them at the time, and thus what we now know as a sexual orientation, a same-sex sexual orientation, was unknown to them and he then trumps all these Biblical passages in terms of their authority by using that category of sexual orientation.

 

As I made very clear in the article I posted today and in the e-book we released this morning, the real issue here is always the authority of Scripture. And it’s one thing to say that you affirm the authority of Scripture; it’s another thing actually to accept and to obey the authority of Scripture, to confirm it and to operate within a hermeneutic or system interpreting Scripture that fully accepts that every single word of the Bible is true, is God’s revealed truth; that, indeed, what we have in the Bible is a perfect testimony, a perfect Revelation of God to us. If we don’t believe that, then we may call our view of Scripture a high view of Scripture, but it’s one thing to assert that you hold to a high view of the authority of Scripture; it’s a very different thing to demonstrate, in terms of your theological method and argument, that you’re actually obeying the Scripture; in other words, operating under your affirmation of that biblical authority. You simply can’t relativize the text of the Scripture and claim that you’re accepting and affirming its authority.

 

Again and again, Matthew Vines comes back to sexual orientation as the key issue. He writes, “The Bible doesn’t directly address the issue of same-sex orientation.” The concept of sexual orientation “didn’t exist in the ancient world.” Amazingly, he then concedes that the Bible’s six references—he wants to limit the discussion to those six—six references to same-sex behavior are negative, he says. But he goes on to say, “The concept of same-sex behavior in the Bible is sexual excess, not sexual orientation.” Now that is not only an argument that is untenable, it is an argument that falls flat on its face. And yet we can understand why he has to make the argument because if he, indeed, wants to normalize homosexual relationships, same-sex behaviors, and same-sex marriage within the church, he’s going to have to convince an awful lot of Christians that the Bible is not an impediment to accepting these things.

 

There are many things to say about his book and his argument, and we address many of those in the book that was released this morning and I did also in the article that I released also today. I want to point out, however, a wedge argument because this is a very important aspect of this. Matthew Vines makes the argument that those who accept what we would basically call an egalitarian position, in terms of erasing or minimizing, perhaps even relativizing, the distinctions made in Scripture between the roles of men and women, the Christian who have already moved in that direction are going be hard-pressed not to move to the second step; in other words, to take the next logical step in that interpretive direction and go ahead and normalize homosexuality by relativizing those biblical texts as well. He makes that point emphatically and clearly and it’s going to be very interesting to see if those who have accepted the egalitarian position have theological defenses in order to prevent them from taking this next step. As I have argued many times over the last several years, it is the same kind of interpretive method that allows you to eliminate those gender distinctions as are now used by those who are arguing for eliminating or relativizing the Bible’s clear condemnation of same-sex sexual behaviors.

 

But the biggest problem with the book and with its argument is the fact that we lose not only biblical authority if we accept his proposal, we also lose our understanding of what the gospel is. Because if we can’t trust the Bible to tell us what sin is and accurately and understandably to tell us how we are to understand sin in ourselves and in others, we can’t possibly know why Christ died. For what sins did He die? If this is not a sin, then I do not need a Savior in order to be safe from the judgment that would fall upon that sin. We lose the storyline of the Bible, we lose the entire possibility of biblical theology, and we lose our understanding of sin and the gospel if we accept these proposals. Now just consider those costs, and consider those when you look to see how many of those who may claim an evangelical identity, who are looking for an off-ramp in order to find a way to endorse homosexuality are going to look to a book like this and say, “There’s a plausible argument. It’s irrefutable. We’re going to go with it.”

 

As I conclude in my article released this morning, the church has often failed people with same-sex attractions and failed them horribly. We must not fail them now by forfeiting the only message that leads to salvation. That is the real question before us. You can find that article and a link to the free e-book that I wrote along with several colleagues released this morning at albertmohler.com.

 

A very revealing controversy is taking place in Great Britain, and at the center that controversy is the nation’s Prime Minister David Cameron. Just before Easter, speaking to the British media, he began talking about his own Christian identity, his Christian convictions, and of the fact that Britain is, in his estimation, a Christian country. Now you might think that this would be an undebatable issue. After all, Britain has a state church. The Church of England is not just the church that is located in England; it is the official church of the nation. It has a state church. The Queen herself is identified as defender of the faith and she is the supreme head of the Church of England. And so, at least in terms of historical reference, it’s hard to imagine how the Prime Minister could be in hot water for saying that Britain is a Christian country. You could certainly argue that Britain is a Christian country in a way you could not argue that the United States is a Christian country because the United States doesn’t have a state church. It has no establishment of religion—Christian or otherwise. Great Britain does. So how in the world can his detractors argue that there is no truth when he says that Britain is a Christian nation?

 

Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor to Tony Blair, the former prime minister—he was his media adviser. He famously said decades ago that in Britain they don’t “do God,” in saying that politicians there don’t make reference to their Christian faith the way that politicians in the United States customarily do. By the way, the problem with that is that Tony Blair, the Prime Minister he worked for, did indeed “do God” in terms of references. And so does David Cameron. Just before Easter, he said, “I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country.” He insisted that Christianity should transform the “spiritual, physical, and moral state of Britain and even the world.” This comes in the background, by the way, of the fact that Britain’s church attendance is at the lowest state ever recorded and that indeed those who are the detractors of the British Prime Minister have everything to point to in terms of surveys and polls of the British people. The British culture has been pervasively secularized, leaving Britain in the rather embarrassing position of having a state church that almost no one attends.

 

But as The Telegraph in London reports, the really fascinating part of this entire situation is the fact that so many atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and humanists responded to the British Prime Minister’s statement with outrage, as if he’d somehow offended the state of affairs in Great Britain by claiming that Britain was a Christian nation. They said, “We object to his characterization of Britain as a Christian country and the negative consequences for policy and society that this engenders.” In other words, Britain, this fine, new secular nation, in a post-Christian age, these atheists are arguing its endangered by having a Prime Minister who even says—and they would argue says falsely—that Britain is a Christian nation. How dare he say something that is simultaneously so false, meaningless, and threatening at the same time? A list of very prominent cultural secularists in Great Britain released a letter in which they said:

 

Britain has been shaped for the better by many pre-Christian, non-Christian, and post-Christian forces. We are plural society with citizens with a range of perspectives and we are largely nonreligious society.

 

Here’s what makes this story just so interesting. How is it that secularists can be so nervous about the triumph of secularism that they’re troubled when the British Prime Minister makes a statement about their nation being a Christian nation and they say that it’s false, but it’s deadly dangerous that he says it? Why would it be dangerous if no one takes it seriously? If Britain is indeed a secular nation to the extent that they argue that it is, if indeed most people don’t pay any attention to religion at all, as they say openly in this letter, then what difference would it make whatever the Prime Minister would say?

 

Well from a Christian analysis, perhaps what this story tells us more than anything else is the insecurity of the worldview held by atheists and agnostics. They seem to be so insecure that they are out to argue that something is wrong and not only wrong, but dangerous when someone claims that a nation was a Christian nation, in terms even of its historical identity. And that’s why, for instance, the European Union turned down a statement in its own draft constitution that acknowledged that Western European civilization had once been shaped by Christianity, an irrefutable fact, an undeniable reality, but something that was considered so hurtful to contemporary atheists that they couldn’t abide even the historical reference.

 

But if you think that’s strange in Great Britain, consider in the United States a study just released by psychologists at the University of Kentucky. The headline in Pacific Standard reads this way: “Americans Intuitively Judge Atheists as Immoral.” It turns out, as this research makes very clear, Americans believe that if you don’t believe in God, you’re going to find it very, very difficult to remain committed to a moral code, to a moral law, to a set of understood, consensual moral principles. And so Americans indicate by this study—again, it was undertaken by Will Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. He wrote, “After reading a description of someone committing an immoral act, participants in five experiments readily and intuitively assume that the person committing the immoral act was an atheist.” But, as I said just a moment ago, we have compelling evidence that the worldview of atheists and agnostics is quite shaky. It’s incredibly insecure on intellectual terms. But if you need proof for that, you don’t have to look at the controversy over David Cameron in Great Britain; you just have to look to this study from the University of Kentucky because, as Will Gervais reports—and remember, what he’s reporting is that Americans assume that an immoral act is far more likely to be committed by an atheist than a believer in God. Consider this sentence from his press release: “Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups.” In other words, his research indicates that not only do people who aren’t atheists think that an immoral act is more likely to be committed by an atheist than by a believer in God; atheists themselves represent the very same pattern of thinking. In other words, it’s atheists along with everyone else who say than an atheist is more likely to commit an immoral act than someone who believes in God.

 

Now does this prove, by the way, that an atheist is more likely to commit an immoral act than someone who believes in God? That isn’t actually what the study indicates. That would be an entirely different set of scientific experiments. This is about perception, but it does point to the perception that is a reality, and that is that atheists are insecure in their worldview, so insecure that they say, in terms of this kind of research project, that even they believe that failing to believe in God or rejecting belief in God leads inevitably to a minimization or a relativization of moral principles.

 

One last insight from this study from the University of Kentucky and Will Gervais: it turns out that one of the issues that he studied was how this understanding of atheism and morality comes about. And here is the keyword: intuition. As he says, “People intuitively judge immorality as representative of atheists.” In other words, it doesn’t actually take cognitive work to come to this analysis. People overwhelmingly come to it by intuition, even atheists. And our intuition tells us a great deal about centuries and generations of moral wisdom and that’s a lot to overcome, as atheists and agnostics are discovering when they look to their neighbors or, evidently, when they look in the mirror.

 

Finally, the psalmist says that we as human beings are fearfully and wonderfully made. The very composition of our bodies, our anatomy, our physiology, all point to the wonder of the Creator. We know that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, but we continue to learn new things about what it means to be a human being and, indeed, to be a human body. A human body consists of 30 trillion cells. That’s 30 trillion cells. But the average human body includes within its body form 100 trillion microbes, little tiny critters, little organisms, living on us and inside us—100 trillion of them. These microbes, as it turns out, are absolutely necessary for everything from making our saliva work to making our digestive systems work, and, as it turns out, one of the problems than can lead to ill health is the fact that our microbes either aren’t working or have decided to flee. In any event, God made us so fearfully and wonderfully that He made us to be accompanied by 100 trillion microbes inside us and upon us, without which life itself would be impossible.

 

By the way, these new books by Nicholas Money and Martin Blaser, they are entitled The Amoeba in the Room and Missing Microbes. They point to the fact that we don’t know—even in all of our medical and scientific sophistication—we don’t know exactly what many if not most of these microbes actually do.

 

And, by the way, we don’t even have the technology to identify the 100 trillion different microbes within the average human being, but we do know this, they are necessary, and as one of these scientists says, the Nobel prize awaits the one who can figure out what these microbes are and what they’re doing, but in the meantime, most of us will simply ponder the reality that David pondered long before the CAT scan and the x-ray: we are fearfully and wonderfully made., and as this study tells us, perhaps a little weirdly too—all to the glory of God.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. Remember the release this morning of the article of “God, the Gospel, and the Gay Challenge.” Remember also the free e-book you can get by going to my website. That e-book is entitled God and the Gay Christian? A Response to Matthew Vines. It’s available free 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 04-22-14

Podcast Transcript

1) God, the Gospel, and the Gay Challenge – Will Christians remain true to scripture?

God, the Gospel, and the Gay Challenge — A Response to Matthew Vines, AlbertMohler.com (R. Albert Mohler Jr.)

2) Why are atheists so outraged David Cameron called Britain a Christian country?

David Cameron faking Christian convictions, suggests Alastair Campbell, The Telegraph (Matthew Holehouse)

David Cameron fosters division by calling Britain a ‘Christian country,’ The Telegraph

3) Even atheists intuitively believe atheism leads to immorality

Americans Intuitively Judge Atheists as Immoral, Pacific Standard (Tom Jacobs)

4) Glory of creation: 100 trillion microbes in each human body

Book Review: ‘The Amoeba in the Room’ by Nicholas P. Money & ‘Missing Microbes’ by Martin J. Blaser, Wall Street Journal (Sam Kean)

 

God, the Gospel, and the Gay Challenge — A Response to Matthew Vines

Evangelical Christians in the United States now face an inevitable moment of decision. While Christians in other movements and in other nations face similar questions, the question of homosexuality now presents evangelicals in the United States with a decision that cannot be avoided. Within a very short time, we will know where everyone stands on this question. There will be no place to hide, and there will be no way to remain silent. To be silent will answer the question.

The question is whether evangelicals will remain true to the teachings of Scripture and the unbroken teaching of the Christian church for over two thousand years on the morality of same-sex acts and the institution of marriage.

The world is pressing this question upon us, but so are a number of voices from within the larger evangelical circle — voices that are calling for a radical revision of the church’s understanding of the Bible, sexual morality, and the meaning of marriage. We are living in the midst of a massive revolution in morality, and sexual morality is at the center of this revolution. But the question of same-sex relationships and sexuality is at the very center of the debate over sexual morality, and our answer to this question will both determine or reveal what we understand about everything the Bible reveals and everything the church teaches — even the gospel itself.

Others are watching, and they see the moment of decision at hand. Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University has remarked that “it is clear to an observer like me that evangelical Christianity is at a crossroad.” What is that crossroad? “The question of whether gay Christians should be married within the church.”  Journalist Terry Mattingly sees the same issue looming on the evangelical horizon — “There is no way to avoid the showdown that is coming.”

Into this context now comes God and the Gay Christian, a book by Matthew Vines. Just a couple of years ago Vines made waves with the video of a lecture in which he attempted to argue that being a gay Christian in a committed same-sex relationship (and eventual marriage) is compatible with biblical Christianity. His video went viral. Even though Matthew Vines did not make new arguments, the young Harvard student synthesized arguments made by revisionist Bible scholars and presented a very winsome case for overthrowing the church’s moral teachings on same-sex relationships.

His new book flows from that startling ambition — to overthrow two millennia of Christian moral wisdom and biblical understanding.

Given the audacity of that ambition, why does this book deserve close attention? The most important reason lies outside the book itself. There are a great host of people, considered to be within the larger evangelical movement, who are desperately seeking a way to make peace with the moral revolution and endorse the acceptance of openly-gay individuals and couples within the life of the church. Given the excruciating pressures now exerted on evangelical Christianity, many people — including some high-profile leaders — are desperately seeking an argument they can claim as both persuasive and biblical. The seams in the evangelical fabric are beginning to break and Matthew Vines now comes along with a book that he claims will make the argument so many have been seeking.

In God and the Gay Christian Vines argues that “Christians who affirm the full authority of Scripture can also affirm committed, monogamous same-sex relationships.” He announces that, once his argument is accepted: “The fiercest objections to LGBT equality — those based on religious beliefs — can begin to fall away. The tremendous pain endured by LGBT youth in many Christian homes can become a relic of the past. Christianity’s reputation in much of the Western world can begin to rebound. Together we can reclaim our light” (3).

That promise drives Vines’s work from beginning to end. He identifies himself as both gay and Christian and claims to hold to a “high view” of the Bible. “That means,” he says, “I believe all of Scripture is inspired by God and authoritative for my life” (2).

Well, that is exactly what we would hope for a Christian believer to say about the Bible. And who could fault the ambition of any young and thoughtful Christian who seeks to recover the reputation of Christianity in the Western world. If Matthew Vines were to be truly successful in simultaneously making his case and remaining true to the Scriptures, we would indeed have to overturn two thousand years of the church’s teaching on sex and marriage and apologize for the horrible embarrassment of being wrong for so long.

Readers of his book who are looking for an off-ramp from the current cultural predicament will no doubt try to accept his argument. But the real question is whether what Vines claims is true and faithful to the Bible as the Word of God. But his argument is neither true nor faithful to Scripture. It is, nonetheless, a prototype of the kind of argument we can now expect.

 

What Does the Bible Really Say? 

The most important sections of Vines’s book deal with the Bible itself and with what he identifies as the six passages in the Bible that “have stood in the way of countless gay people who long for acceptance from their Christian parents, friends, and churches” (11). Those six passages (Genesis 19:5; Leviticus 18:22; Leviticus 20:13; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9; and 1 Timothy 1:10) are indeed key and crucial passages for understanding God’s expressed and revealed message on the question of same-sex acts, desires, and relationships, but they are hardly the whole story.

The most radical proposal Vines actually makes is to sever each of these passages from the flow of the biblical narrative and the Bible’s most fundamental revelation about what it means to be human, both male and female. He does not do this merely by omission, but by the explicit argument that the church has misunderstood the doctrine of creation as much as the question of human sexuality. He specifically seeks to argue that the basic sexual complementarity of the human male and the female — each made in God’s image — is neither essential to Genesis chapters 1 and 2 or to any biblical text that follows.

In other words, he argues that same-sex sexuality can be part of the goodness of God’s original creation, and that when God declared that it is not good for man to be alone, the answer to man’s isolation could be a sexual relationship with someone of either sex. But that massive misrepresentation of Genesis 1 and 2 — a misinterpretation with virtually unlimited theological consequences — actually becomes Vines’s way of relativizing the meaning of the six passages he primarily considers.

His main argument is that the Bible simply has no category of sexual orientation. Thus, when the Bible condemns same-sex acts, it is actually condemning “sexual excess,” hierarchy, oppression, or abuse — not the possibility of permanent, monogamous, same-sex unions.

In addressing the passages in Genesis and Leviticus, Vines argues that the sin of Sodom was primarily inhospitality, not same-sex love or sexuality. The law of Moses condemns same-sex acts in so far as they violate social status or a holiness code, not in and of themselves, he asserts. His argument with regard to Leviticus is especially contorted, since he has to argue that the text’s explicit condemnation of male-male intercourse as an abomination is neither categorical or related to sinfulness. He allows that “abomination is a negative word,” but insists that “it doesn’t necessarily correspond to Christian views of sin” (85).

Finally, he argues that, even if the Levitical condemnations are categorical, this would not mean that the law remains binding on believers today.

In dealing with the most significant single passage in the Bible on same-sex acts and desire, Romans 1:26-27, Vines actually argues that the passage “is not of central importance to Paul’s message in Romans.” Instead, Vines argues that the passage is used by Paul only as “a brief example to drive home a point he was making about idolatry.” Nevertheless, Paul’s words on same-sex acts are, he admits, “starkly negative” (96).

“There is no question that Romans 1:26-27 is the most significant biblical passage in this debate,” Vines acknowledges (96). In order to relativize it, he makes this case: “Paul’s description of same-sex behavior in this passage is indisputably negative. But he also explicitly described the behavior he condemned as lustful. He made no mention of love, fidelity, monogamy, or commitment. So how should we understand Paul’s words? Do they apply to all same-sex relationships? Or only to lustful, fleeting ones?” (99).

In asking these questions, Vines makes his case that Paul is merely ignorant of the reality of sexual orientation. He had no idea that some people are naturally attracted to people of the same sex. Therefore, Paul misunderstands what today would be considered culturally normative in many highly-developed nations — that some persons are naturally attracted to others of the same sex and it would be therefore “unnatural” for them to be attracted sexually to anyone else.

Astonishingly, Vines then argues that the very notion of “against nature” as used by Paul in Romans 1 is tied to patriarchy, not sexual complementarity. Same-sex relationships, Vines argues, “disrupted a social order that required a strict hierarchy between the sexes” (109).

But to get anywhere near to Vines’s argument one has to sever Romans 1 from any natural reading of the text, from the flow of the Bible’s message from Genesis 1 forward, from the basic structure of sexual complementarity, and from the church’s faithful reading of the Bible for two millennia. Furthermore, his argument provides direct evidence of that Paul warns of in this very chapter, “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).

Finally, the actual language of Romans 1, specifically dealing with male same-sex desire, speaks of “men consumed with passion for one another” (Romans 1:27). This directly contradicts Vines’s claim that only oppressive, pederastic, or socially mixed same-sex acts are condemned. Paul describes men consumed with passion for one another — not merely the abuse of the powerless by the powerful. In other words, in Romans 1:26-27 Paul condemns same-sex acts by both men and women, and he condemns the sexual desires described as unnatural passions as well.

In his attempt to relativize 1 Corinthians 6: 9, Vines actually undermines more of his argument. Paul’s careful use of language (perhaps even inventing a term by combining two words from Leviticus 18) is specifically intended to deny what Vines proposes — that the text really does not condemn consensual same-sex acts by individuals with a same-sex sexual orientation. Paul so carefully argues his case that he makes the point that both the active and the passive participants in male intercourse will not inherit the kingdom of God. Desperate to argue his case nonetheless, Vines asserts that, once again, it is exploitative sex that Paul condemns. But this requires that Paul be severed from his Jewish identify and from his own obedience to Scripture. Vines must attempt to marshal evidence that the primary background issue is the Greco-Roman cultural context rather than Paul’s Jewish context — but that would make Paul incomprehensible.

One other aspect of Vines’s consideration of the Bible should be noted. He acknowledges that he is “not a biblical scholar,” but he claims to “have relied on the work of scholars whose expertise is far greater than my own.” But the scholars upon whom he relies do not operate on the assumption that “all of Scripture is inspired by God and authoritative for my life.” To the contrary, most of his cited scholars are from the far left of modern biblical scholarship or on the fringes of the evangelical world. He does not reveal their deeper understandings of Scripture and its authority.

 

The Authority of Scripture and the Question of Sexual Orientation

Again and again, Vines comes back to sexual orientation as the key issue. ‘”The Bible doesn’t directly address the issue of same-sex orientation,” he insists. The concept of sexual orientation “didn’t exist in the ancient world.” Amazingly, he then concedes that the Bible’s “six references to same-sex behavior are negative,” but insists, again, that “the concept of same-sex behavior in the Bible is sexual excess, not sexual orientation.”

Here we face the most tragic aspect of Matthew Vines’s argument. If the modern concept of sexual orientation is to be taken as a brute fact, then the Bible simply cannot be trusted to understand what it means to be human, to reveal what God intends for us sexually, or to define sin in any coherent manner. The modern notion of sexual orientation is, as a matter of fact, exceedingly modern. it is also a concept without any definitive meaning. Effectively, it is used now both culturally and morally to argue about sexual attraction and desire. As a matter of fact, attraction and desire are the only indicators upon which the modern notion of sexual orientation are premised.

When he begins his book, Matthew Vines argues that experience should not drive our interpretation of the Bible. But it is his experience of what he calls a gay sexual orientation that drives every word of this book. It is this experiential issue that drives him to relativize text after text and to argue that the Bible really doesn’t speak directly to his sexual identity at all, since the inspired human authors of Scripture were ignorant of the modern gay experience.

Of what else were they ignorant? Vines claims to hold to a “high view” of the Bible and to believe that “all of Scripture is inspired by God and authoritative for my life,” but the modern concept of sexual orientation functions as a much higher authority in his thinking and in his argument.

This leads to a haunting question. What else does the Bible not know about what it means to be human? If the Bible cannot be trusted to reveal the truth about us in every respect, how can we trust it to reveal our salvation?

This points to the greater issue at stake here — the Gospel. Matthew Vines’s argument does not merely relativize the Bible’s authority, it leaves us without any authoritative revelation of what sin is. And without an authoritative (and clearly understandable) revelation of human sin, we cannot know why we need a Savior, or why Christ died. Furthermore, to tell someone that what the Bible reveals as sin is not sin, we tell them that they do not need Christ for that. Is that not exactly what Paul was determined not to do when he wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11? Could the stakes be any higher than that? This controversy is not merely about sex, it is about salvation.

 

Matthew Vines’s Wedge Argument — Gender and the Bible

There is another really interesting and revealing aspect of Matthew Vine’s argument yet to come. In terms of how his argument is likely to be received within the evangelical world, Vines clearly has a strategy, and that strategy is to persuade those who have rejected gender complementarity to take the next logical step and deny sexual complementarity as well.

Gender complementarity is the belief that the Bible’s teachings on gender and gender roles is to be understood in terms of the fact that men and women are equally made in God’s image (status) but different in terms of assignment (roles). This has been the belief and conviction of virtually all Christians throughout the centuries, and it is the view held by the vast majority of those identified as Christians in the world even today. But a denial of this conviction, hand in hand with the argument that sameness of role is necessary to affirm equality of status, has led some to argue that difference in gender roles must be rejected. The first impediment to making this argument is the fact that the Bible insists on a difference in roles. In order to overcome this impediment, biblical scholars and theologians committed to egalitarianism have made arguments that are hauntingly similar to those now made by Matthew Vines in favor of relativizing the Bible’s texts on same-sex behaviors.

Matthew Vines knows this. He also knows that, at least until recently, most of those who have rejected gender complementarity have maintained an affirmation of sexual complementarity — the belief that sexual behavior is to be limited to marriage as the union of a man and a woman. He sees this as his opening. At several points in the book, he makes this argument straightforwardly, even as he calls both “gender complementarity” and denies that the Bible requires or reveals it.

But we have to give Matthew Vines credit for seeing this wedge issue better than most egalitarians have seen it. He knows that the denial of gender complementarity is a huge step toward denying sexual complementarity. The evangelicals who have committed themselves to an egalitarian understanding of gender roles as revealed in the Bible are those who are most vulnerable to his argument. In effect, they must resist his argument more by force of will than by force of logic.

 

Same-Sex Marriage, Celibacy, and the Gospel

Matthew Vines writes with personal passion and he tells us much of his own story. Raised in an evangelical Presbyterian church by Christian parents, he came relatively late to understand his own sexual desires and pattern of attraction. He wants to be acknowledged as a faithful Christian, and he wants to be married … to a man. He argues that the Bible simply has no concept of sexual orientation and that to deny him access to marriage is to deny him justice and happiness. He argues that celibacy cannot be mandated for same-sex individuals within the church, for this would be unjust and wrong. He argues that same-sex unions can fulfill the “one-flesh” promise of Genesis 2:24.

Thus, he argues that the Christian church should accept and celebrate same-sex marriage. He also argues, just like the Protestant liberals of the early twentieth century, that Christianity must revise its beliefs or face the massive loss of reputation before the watching world (meaning, we should note, the watching world of the secular West).

But the believing church is left with no option but to deny the revisionist and relativizing proposals Vines brings to the evangelical argument. The consequences of accepting his argument would include misleading people about their sin and about their need for Christ, about what obedience to Christ requires and what faithfulness to Christ demands.

Matthew Vines demands that we love him enough to give him what he desperately wants, and that would certainly be the path of least cultural resistance. If we accept his argument we can simply remove this controversy from our midst, apologize to the world, and move on. But we cannot do that without counting the cost, and that cost includes the loss of all confidence in the Bible, in the Church’s ability to understand and obey the Scriptures, and in the Gospel as good news to all sinners.

Biblical Christianity cannot endorse same-sex marriage nor accept the claim that a believer can be obedient to Christ and remain or persist in same-sex behaviors. The church is the assembly of the redeemed, saved from our sins and learning obedience in the School of Christ. Every single one of us is a sexual sinner in need of redemption, but we are called to holiness, to obedience, and to honoring marriage as one of God’s most precious gifts and as a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church.

God and the Gay Christian demands an answer, but Christ demands our obedience. We can only pray — with fervent urgency — that this moment of decision for evangelical Christianity will be answered with a firm assertion of biblical authority, respect for marriage as the union of a man and a woman, passion for the Gospel of Christ, and prayer for the faithfulness and health of Christ’s church.

I do not write this response as Matthew Vines’s moral superior, but as one who must be obedient to Scripture. And so, I must counter his argument with conviction and urgency. I am concerned for him, and for the thousands who struggle as he does. The church has often failed people with same-sex attractions, and failed them horribly. We must not fail them now by forfeiting the only message that leads to salvation, holiness, and faithfulness. That is the real question before us.

This morning we released God and the Gay Christian? A Response to Matthew Vines, a free e-book, and it is the first in the Conversant series I am editing. This free e-book, in which I am joined by colleagues James Hamilton, Denny Burk, Owen Strachan, and Heath Lambert, addresses the biblical, theological, historical, and pastoral issues raised by Vines’s new book. To download a copy, go to sbts.me/ebook    The book will be available in formats for Kindle, Nook, and iBook within the week.

Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian (New York: Convergent Books, 2014).

Tanya Luhrmann, foreword to Ken Wilson, A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor’s Path to Embracing People Who Are Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender in the Company of Jesus ([Version 1.0)] (Amazon.com, 2014).

Terry Mattingly, “About Those Evangelical Whispers on Same-Sex Marriage,” Patheos.com, Thursday, April 17, 2014.

 

Genesis 14:1-24

An American Psychosis? – A Conversation with Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., is a research psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He is the executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and a professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Dr. Torrey was educated at Princeton University, McGill University, and Stanford University School of Medicine. The author of over 20 books, his latest work is, “American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System”

Transcript: The Briefing 04-21-14

The Briefing

 

 April 21, 2014

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

 

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

 

The death toll continues to rise and hearts continue to be broken in South Korea, as that ferry disaster in South Korean waters continues to unfold and as the death toll continues to rise. However, the numbers are now differentiated between the dead and the missing, but all of the missing are now presumed to be dead. There are approximately 60 bodies that have now been recovered. That leaves well over 200 still yet to be found; a total that is expected to rise to 302. Adding to the tragedy is the age of most of the dead: 16 and 17-year-old high school students on the equivalent of a spring break. Parents who had arrived at the port after they heard of the disaster had been told that their children had been rescued. One parent told The Financial Times, “We came to meet our children after the initial announcement that most of them had been rescued, but the reality was completely different.” Indeed, it was different, and a part of what is now becoming central to the story is that this is a moral disaster, not so much a technological disaster. In other words, someone is responsible for this; it need not have happened. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, they’re all kinds of questions about what kind of maritime principles and guidelines might have prevented this, but as it turns out, everything that might have prevented this was in place. And, yet, something went horribly awry upon this ferry, leading it eventually to capsize, and, hours later, for those who had been told to remain in the lower decks, to be drowned in the icy waters off of South Korea.

 

But as we made our way through last week and the story became even darker and more ominous, as The Financial Times reports, the captain of the vessel has now been arrested. It is known that he was resting when the accident took place. He was not at the helm of the ship. As a matter fact, it was the third officer, a young woman, age about 26, who had no experience whatsoever in some of the most treacherous waters in the Pacific, who was at the helm at the time of the accident. The captain himself, along with the third officer, has been arrested. The captain has apologized at least in part for what is now known as his unconscionable behavior. As one grandfather of a 17-year-old victim said, “How could he tell those young kids to stay there and jump from the sinking ship himself?” Well that’s exactly what the captain apparently did. As a matter fact, there is video evidence of the captain abandoning the ship long before others abandoned the ship and with hundreds left to drown.

 

As Christopher Drew and Jad Mouawad report for The New York Times:

 

Ever since the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, carrying its captain and many of the passengers with it, the notion that the captain goes down with his ship has been ingrained in popular culture.

 

Well that’s a very interesting opening sentence because it roots the morality in popular culture. Actually, morality is far older than that. There are very long, centuries old, perhaps even millennia old, maritime principles that hold that when a ship is sinking, the captain has a responsibility to get everyone off the ship before he abandons the ship himself. But as Drew and Mouawad report, for the second time in just over two years, a sea captain has put his own life ahead of those of his terrified passengers. The first was in Italy, the captain of the now-famous or infamous Costa Concordia, and now the captain of this South Korean ferry. As they report:

 

A much-publicized photo from the latest accident shows the Korean captain being helped off his own ship, stepping off the deck to safety even as scores of his ferry passengers remained below where survivors believe they became trapped by rushing water and debris.

 

As the reporters indicate, this behavior has earned the captain moral outrage.

 

Maritime experts called the abandonment shocking — violating a proud international (and South Korean) tradition of stewardship based at least as much on accepted codes of behavior as by law.

 

John Padgett, III, a retired United States Navy Rear Admiral and former submarine captain, said, “That guy’s an embarrassment to anybody who’s ever had command at sea.”

 

The reporters go on to explain that civil courts in the United States have long viewed captains as having a moral and legal obligation to protect their passengers and ships, but the cases in South Korea and Italy seem likely to test the notion of criminal liability in disasters. In other words, we’re now living in a new moral age and evidence of that new moral age now comes in the most unexpected way. It comes in the cases of two captains and the near universal, social, moral outrage at their behavior, abandoning their ships even as their own passengers perish, but there seems to be very little consensus that in this new moral age, anyone’s going to be able to make those criminal charges stick. The article in The New York Times makes very clear that the ferry took two and a half hours to sink. Survivors have reported that the crew told passengers it was safer to stay inside the ship rather than to come out on decks where they might have been rescued, likely now dooming them. The captain says he later issued instructions for passengers to evacuate the ship, but it remains unclear if that was conveyed to passengers.

 

Drew and Mouawad give some interesting historical background. As you look back to 1814, the Navy, that is, the United States Navy, issued rules that require the captain to remain with the stricken ship as long as possible and to salvage as much of it as he could. One man quoted in the article is Dave Warner, who is the spokesman for the Naval History and Heritage Command of the United States Navy. He said, “If it becomes necessary to abandon the ship, the commanding officer should be the last person to leave.” Famous for this, as this article indicated in its opening, was Captain E.J. Smith of the Titanic. He was probably steaming too fast when the giant ship hit an iceberg, but he later, as they say, won praise for helping to save more than 700 lives. It was he who insisted that women and children be evacuated first, and he stayed near the bridge as the ship went down.

 

There are other accounts in this article of similar captains who acted in the same way, who refused to leave their ship until everyone had been evacuated. One of the most interesting and recent cited here is Captain Chesley Sullenberger, III. He was the captain of the jet, the US Airways Flight 1549, that was forced to ditch in the Hudson River. He was known for twice checking the entire sinking cabin of his jet before he then abandoned the jet himself. He made sure that everyone was off. He checked it twice.

 

So what we now know about this disaster is that it was a moral disaster in the very beginning. It was human action, it was human inaction, it was was human wrong action that led to the ferry sinking, and it was an even more disastrous human moral action that led to what we now know to be, in all likelihood, the absolutely unnecessary drowning of so many young people in terms of this disaster. But the interesting point of maximum outrage seems to be that the captain abandoned his ship; abandoning his passengers to their icy deaths. And we look at this and we just have to ask the question from a Christian worldview perspective: Why are people so outraged about this? In an age in which we’ve tried to argue, as a society, that virtually all moral principles are relative and thus to be bent to circumstances, in an age in which most people become their own brand of situation ethicists, why in this situation is the captain’s action categorically wrong? Something in us tells us that what he did was objectively, categorically wrong, but why? It can’t be merely out of social and cultural conditioning because the reality is that people virtually everywhere in the world are on absolute agreement that what the captain did was categorically wrong. This points to the fact that morality isn’t quite so contextual and relative as many modern and postmodern people want to claim it to be. It also defies the fact that even as many people want to claim that all of these moral principles are merely the products of social conditioning and social construction, the reality is that there’s something in us that simply says this is wrong. Even when we can’t argue exactly why it’s wrong, we know it’s wrong.

 

The Christian understands that this is evidence of the fact that God made us in His image as moral creatures. This is the principle that is known in Christian ethics quite simply as the fact that there are certain things we cannot not know. We can’t not know them simply because God made us in His image. One of the things we cannot not know is that it’s wrong for someone who has responsibility to abandon a situation in which he saves himself and leaves others to drown, especially in the context in which he is almost surely responsible for the entire disaster from top to bottom, in terms of his responsibility as the ultimate steward of every single soul on that ship. Something in us cries out that there is something horribly wrong in this picture: the picture of a captain getting off of his vessel, leaving others to drown. But a postmodern, post-Christian world is very hard-pressed to explain why it’s categorically wrong. But that’s where the Christian has to understand this is only explainable in terms of scriptural understandings of what it means to be human, of what it means for God to have created us in His image as moral creatures, and for each of us, every single one of us, to know things we simply by that very fact cannot not know.

 

Shifting back to the United States, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday; the headline of the story is this: “Scientist Clone Adult Cells Into Embryos.”  Gautam Naik is the reporter for the article. As he explained, scientist for the first time cloned cells from adult humans to create early-stage embryos, and then derived stem-cell tissue from the embryos that perfectly matched each donor’s DNA. This is big news. It’s big scientific news, but it’s also news with a huge moral set of consequences. As reporter, Gautam Naik reports, the research is another advance in creating stem cells, which can be turned into any kind of body tissue to potentially treat ailments ranging from heart attack to Alzheimer’s. Last year, scientist reported the creation of the first early-stage human clones, using infant and fetal cells, rather than those from adults. The new experiment confirmed that striking and controversial breakthrough, and also shows the technique with a few tweaks works on mature cells. That as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

 

An interesting explanation for why the scientific world says this is important is offered by Robert Lanza, co-author of the study. He said, “The proportion of diseases you can treat with lab-made tissue increases with age. So if you can’t do this with adult cells, it is of limited value.” Now, again, the headline is “Scientist Clone Adult Cells Into Embryos.” One of the things the headline announces, and accurately announces, is that clonal technology is back in the headlines. This is a form of human cloning. We need to recognize that that is exactly what we’re talking about here. The cloning of a human embryo is the creation of an artificial embryo that is created using the genetic material of a donor—in this case of two different donors. And in this case, as in all others, the difference between what is called therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning is simply the context. In other words, this is exactly the same procedure that would be used if someone is trying to clone an actual human being. The only difference in terms of procedure is that the embryo would at that point be implanted into a woman so that it could then develop into the full gestation period and eventually be born. That didn’t take place here, but notice the only reason it didn’t take place is because they didn’t do it. There is nothing in this technology that would’ve prevented this. In other words, this headline tells us that the brand-new, brave-new age of human cloning is this much closer to us. Very successful cloning of two embryos taken from human adults—two men; again, they were aged 35 and 75.

 

The other thing we need to note from a Christian worldview perspective is the injury of all this to human dignity because these embryos were created simply so that they could be destroyed. This kind of human embryonic stem cell research is only important in terms of the medical research because they want to remove the genetic material from the embryo they have cloned. In other words, they are creating a human embryo. Let’s face it: that means they are creating a human being, biblically defined. Every single one of us started out as an embryo. And they are then destroying that embryo in order to remove its genetic content. What this amounts to is the sacrifice of an embryonic human in order to treat human diseases for others.

 

Gautam Naik reports, “The latest experiments mark something of a revival for medical approaches known as therapeutic cloning, which grew out of the techniques that led to Dolly the cloned sheep. The method got bogged down in ethical and political controversies.” Well that’s a very interesting assessment, reporting that these clonal techniques have been “bogged down in ethical and political controversies.” Well I guess they are not bogged down anymore because The Wall Street Journal, reporting that these clonal techniques had come to an end in these controversies, is now reporting with their own headline that they’re back. We need to note with grave concern the two big issues related to this headline. The first is that human clonal technologies are back. That’s bad news. The second thing we need to note is the assault upon human dignity in which we have a human embryonic medical research taking place, in which an embryo is created only to be destroyed. We must all pray that there will soon be medical treatments for heart disease and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and so many of those diseases that are now claimed to be the very topic and focus of this kind of medical research. We need to hope that there will be stem cell technologies and treatments that will help people with severe burns and those who have organ damage and any number of other things, including massive neurological consequences that might be reversed with stem cell treatments and technologies. But we need to be very, very clear that the stem cells that should be used in medical research are those that are taken from adult stem cells that require absolutely no cloning; that require the creation of no embryo and the destruction of no embryo.

 

The interesting conclusion of Gautam Naik’s article is this: “Scientists are uncertain which approach will prevail”—that is, the approach that uses adult stem cells or that approach that creates an embryo only to destroy it. You know, that’s an interesting sentence in which to end an article of this consequence, saying that scientists are uncertain which approach will prevail, as if it really doesn’t matter which way the science goes, but, of course, it does. Because nothing less than human dignity is hanging in the balance.

 

Looking at the intersection of theology and entertainment, we’ve looked at the Noah movie and controversies about it. Mother Jones magazine is out with an interesting article about Darren Aronofsky, that is, the director of the movie, and the fate of the movie Noah. And, interestingly enough, Mother Jones is a magazine of the cultural and political left and it begins this particular article by citing me. They cite my article on Aronofsky’s film and they quote me as saying I expected to be irritated by the movie, but I found myself grieved. They then quote me as characterizing the film’s environmentalism as leading to “a horrifying anti-humanism.” Now let me just be very clear here. It isn’t the environmentalism that necessarily leads to an anti-humanism. This film is driven by an anti-humanism that isn’t made in anyway necessary by its environmentalism. There’s an ideology that is driving this. The interesting thing about the Mother Jones article is that it is announcing a discussion that Darren Aronofsky is going to be leading in Washington, DC, this week. That is on Wednesday. According to this article, the director is going to be on hand to talk about the environmental and religious themes in his new film, that is, Noah, and their implications for modern issues like climate change. Now what’s also interesting by the Mother Jones article is this paragraph:

 

Yet there is a very strong case to be made that the film is not just provocative—it captures something very deep about the Noah story. Noah was the “first environmentalist,” according to Aronofsky, whose acclaimed previous films include The Wrestler and Black Swan. Aronfsky certainly has not been shy about the film’s green content. “There is a huge statement in the film, a strong message about the coming flood from global warming,” Aronofsky told The New Yorker.

 

Well that’s very interesting. I wonder if Aronofsky has actually read the biblical account because the biblical account includes the covenant God made with Noah in which He said there will be no second flood; that He would never destroy the earth again by water. As a matter fact, as James Baldwin, the African-American preacher poet put it, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water; the fire next time.”

 

But the really important article on the intersection of theology and entertainment with explicit reference to the Noah movie was found in the weekend edition of Financial Times, and writer Randy Boyagoda, a novelist whose latest novel, Baker’s Feast, is now published in the US and in the UK, he has written an article entitled “Biblical Flood As Hollywood Discovers Religious Epics: The Bible Shifting Place in Our Cultural Lives is Revealed.” This is one of the most thoughtful and interesting, even important, articles I’ve seen on this kind of issue in a very long time. Boyagoda has written a brilliant essay on what these movies tell us about the state of our culture and about its secularity. He writes, “This year Hollywood seems unusually interested in the Bible.” He mentions some of the movies that are out; others that are coming. He says, “There hasn’t been this much Hollywood interest in biblical material since the last midcentury, when movies such as Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Solomon and Sheba, The Big Fisherman, and King of Kings” were all made between about 1951 and 1961. He explained that those movies “came out to popular and critical success, establishing what we now expect from Bible movies: that they be outsized spectacles of event and feeling, frequently melodramatic, and occasionally lurid, but usually respectful of their source material.” Now Boyagoda writes that in order to make clear these new movies don’t feel so responsible to be respectful to the biblical material.

 

Boyagoda points to Aronofsky’s Noah movie and others soon to come out and he says this—and this is really important—he says these movies suggest a shift in the Bible’s place in our cultural lives, more so than the continued church-family success of the movies that are seen to be more respectful to the Bible. He then says this:

 

Indeed, the first world culture [he means the developed world] is now staggeringly self-confident in its secular ethos: its thinkers, tastemakers and film-makers have become so far removed from the histories…and moral propositions housed within the Bible, there’s no longer any reason to treat the Bible as a sacred text, or to attack it, or to shock its holdout adherents.

 

Just think about that one paragraph. First of all, those of us who believe the Bible is the word of God are identified as “holdout adherents,” and then the cultural creatives in this society, the cultural elite in the first world, in the developed world, especially North America and Northern Europe, they’re described as being “so far removed from the histories and moral propositions in the Bible that they no longer treat it or see any reason to treat it as a sacred text.” Boyagoda then says:

 

In other words, we seem to have reached a moment when the Bible is becoming a grand and rich storehouse of fantastic, ethically charged stories liberated from the responsibilities, risks, and demands that come of two millennia of globe-spanning belief in the book as the sacred writ of God. Instead, films such as Noah suggest the Bible’s status as an untapped source of amazing mythology, teeming with striking figures and stark tales just waiting to be remade by technologically advanced, self-affirming non-believers equipped with their own notions of good and evil.

 

Now, as I said when I mentioned that this article is important, I find this analysis to be the clearest I have seen virtually at any point, in terms of a secular analysis of what’s going on in these movies, secular movies dealing with the Holy Scriptures. Boyagoda explains that Darren Aronofski has presented Noah as “a tough talking eco-warrior,” he says that it is “easy edification come entertainment.” He says this is largely why the movie is doing so well at the box office and the review columns because it’s not about the moralizing of the Bible. It’s about Aronofski’s environmental moralizing—the only kind of moralizing people now pay money to buy tickets to see. He describes the Noah, that is, the character Noah as depicted by Aronofski, as a villain himself, emerging as a fatalistic and self-loathing believer in open conflict with his loved ones because of the rigidity of his devotion to God’s plans for the destruction and renewal of the world. Boyagoda then writes:

 

This fatalistic conviction turns Noah into a ship-bound egotistical tyrant who threatens his very family – because this is what God wants him to do. So rendered, the character becomes a perfect example of an astonishingly self-assured secular imagining of the dangerous and deadly extremes you can go to when you believe in God and try to obey His commands.

 

Well in reading this incredibly perceptive and, indeed, enlightening article, I can only wonder why this secular novelist sees so clearly what so many self-professed Christians seem unable to see: that this movie is a secular retelling of the Noah story in explicitly secular terms. And, indeed, the morality of the movie is a deliberate replacement of the morality of the Noah account as found in Scripture and that the people who are now making these movies, not just this movie, but so many others, are making them with no sense of moral accountability to treat the Bible as a sacred text. They are now, as he says, so distant from the histories, from the narratives, and from the moral propositions of Scripture that they don’t even feel any need to apologize for them. They just take them as mythology and retell the story in their own way. That is explicitly what Darren Aronofski has done, but, of course, the bigger problem is the failure of so many evangelical Christians to recognize it. That’s the bigger problem and the most haunting realization that comes by reading Randy Boyagoda’s excellent essay in The Financial Times.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. An edition came out last Saturday and one will come out this Saturday as well. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 04-21-14

Podcast Transcript

1) The South Korean Ferry Tragedy – A Moral, Not Technical, Disaster

S Korea Arrests Ferry Captain, Financial Times (Song Jong-a)

Breaking Proud Tradition, Captains Flee and Let Others Go Down With Ship, New York Times (Christopher Drew and Jad Mouawad)

Human Error Suspected as Hope Fades in Korean Ferry Sinking, New York Times (Choe Sang-Hun, Su-Hyun Lee and Jiha Ham)

2) The “Brave New World” of Successful Human Cloning Draws Very Close

Scientists Make First Embryo Clones From Adults, Wall Street Journal (Gautam Naik)

3) Recent Hollywood Productions Reflect The Bible’s Shifting Place in our Culture

Special Event: “Noah” director Darren Aronofsky discusses faith and the environment, Mother Jones (Chris Mooney)

From Noah to Moses, why the renewed interest in Bible films?, Financial Times (Randy Boyagoda)

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 04-19-14

1) What is your view of “Biblical Storytelling” method versus expository preaching?

2) Should I talk about God and His Word in every conversation with unbelievers in my school?

3) What are moral implications of infertile couple having a child through “gestational carrier” or surrogacy?

4) How do we know what’s true or not true when people tell us about their dreams?

Call with your questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: 1-877-505-2058

Transcript: The Briefing 04-18-14

The Briefing

 

 April 18, 2014

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

 

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

 

Heartache and turmoil in South Korea as military divers continue to try to find nearly 300 people now lost and feared dead after the sinking of a ferry on Wednesday of this week. It was at 9:00 a.m. Korean time that the ferry began to list and by 11:00 a.m., it had flipped over. As of 7 pm. on Wednesday night, approximately 174 people have been reported as rescued, but that left almost 300—284—still missing; only four confirmed dead. As of yesterday, the death toll was certainly beginning to rise as hope began to evaporate that any of the people left on that ferry might survive. What made the tragedy there so much more excruciating is the fact that most of the missing are age 16 or 17. They are high school students from a school near Seoul. They were headed for a spring vacation.

 

According to The Wall Street Journal, murky waters and fast currents are hampering the search as ships and aircrafts continue to scour the area during the day on Thursday and today. As the drama unfolded and as The Wall Street Journal says—it played out on national television—it took on increasingly nightmarish proportions. Parents of the students on the trip say they were initially informed by the Coast Guard that all had been rescued; only later did local media reports inform most of the parents that their kids were not safe. By evening on Wednesday night, it became clear that just 75 of the 325 teenagers who were on board were among the rescued. Total on aboard: about 462, including passengers and crew. But it is these students and their parents, now grieving and in excruciating pain, that are the nation’s main concern even as divers continue to try to rescue everyone who might still be on board. In the early hours of this disaster was hope that even more if not many more could be rescued because in a sinking of a ferry of this type, there are often huge pockets of air that continue where people might survive. But given the circumstances, the temperature of the water, and the time now evaporating, it is hard to imagine that there is much hope for the rescue of anymore or at least many more of these young people alive.

 

This is leading to national heartbreak in South Korea as we can well understand. It would anywhere. In South Korea right now, it is the prime consideration and, of course, it is the national obsession. And it points to the fact that we, watching this from thousands of miles away, know ourselves to be helpless to do anything directly, and yet the same thing is true for those who were looking at the submerged ship and at its exposed haul. There is nothing that almost anyone can do. Weather conditions and currents have made it almost impossible for divers to successfully be able to do much of anything in the ship, and the ship itself is over an hour and a half away from the Korean coast.

 

The horrifying reality is that these teenagers were headed for a school break; they were headed for a holiday of sorts in this time between their second and third years of high school, which is when most of these teenagers are under the most incredible pressure in terms of the national testing. But all of us looking at this must recognize the only Christian response is one of heartbreak and grief and prayer; prayer that somehow in this nation, that is, the nation of South Korea that has had such an awakening of Christianity in the last several decades, that this horrifying and heartbreaking disaster may be used, nonetheless, to call people to Christ, who is, after all, our only rescue. How horrifying it is to look at this situation and know that human rescue looks impossible. How much, therefore, the rescue that we know in Christ becomes all the more precious. But, of course, that is true. The gospel is true everywhere and the message of Christ is necessary. Sometimes a disaster like this is clarified, even from a tremendous distance.

 

Back to the United States, many of you will remember the February 4th debate between Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and Bill Nye, known as Bill Nye the Science Guy. It came after Bill Nye had done a video that went viral with millions of downloads in which he suggested that it was a form of abuse for parents to teach their children creationism. That was not the issue per se that was debated back on the 4th of February, but it was the larger issue of origins, Genesis, evolution, and it drew a worldwide audience numbered in the millions.

 

Now the Associated Press reporter Dylan Lovan is out with a story about Bill Nye’s second thoughts about that debate. That story made The Courier Journal here in Louisville yesterday and many other newspapers as well, but it’s all rooted in a massive article that Bill Nye wrote, published in the Skeptical Inquirer, entitled “Bill Nye’s Take on the Nye-Ham Debate.” He writes, “This is Bill Nye writing. The whole thing started when a crew from BigThink.com asked me about creationism.” That’s when he goes on to talk about that video he did. The excerpt that was logged, he says, over 6.3 million times in terms of viewing. He went on to write, “Among the viewers apparently was Ken Ham, who is the head of a congregation in Kentucky that holds doggedly to the idea that the world is somehow merely 6,000 years old.” In other words, Bill Nye, in this essay written to the readers of the Skeptical Inquirer, is trying to argue why it was right for him to have engaged in this debate with Ken Ham. Interestingly, it is clear in the article by the Associated Press and in this essay by Bill Nye that he’s on the defensive. There are many in his pro-evolution camp who have criticized him for entering into the debate with Ken Ham, arguing that that kind of debate essentially gives a lot of publicity to the creationist argument; something they desperately do not want to give. He writes, even as he explains why he engaged in the debate, he says, “I was willing to come to his facility if the topic was, ‘Is creation a viable model of origins in the modern scientific era?’” Nye wrote, “Note that this title does not include the word evolution nor does it connote or imply that we would discuss evolution specifically.” Well if Bill Nye is trying to write to his skeptical and secular constituency, explaining that somehow there was supposed to be a debate on creationism that didn’t include a debate about evolution, it’s hard to imagine who he thinks he’s fooling with that particular defense.

 

Nye went on to write that he does about a dozen college appearances every year. He says he enjoys that privilege immensely. H then wrote:

 

I slowly realized that this was a high-pressure situation. Many of you—by that, I mean many of my skeptic and humanist colleagues—expressed deep concern and anger that I would be so foolish as to accept a debate with a creationist as this would promote him and them more than it would promote me and us. As I often say and sincerely believe, you may be right. But I held strongly to the view that there was an opportunity to expose the well-intending Ken Ham and the support he receives from his followers as being bad for Kentucky, bad for science education, bad for the US, and, thereby, bad for humankind. I do not feel I’m exaggerating when I express it this strongly.

 

Well what we need to know from that is that in his defense as to why he would debate the creationist, Bill Nye says he did it because he wants to confront creationism and then he says, in words he knows are strong—he says, after all, “I do not feel I’m exaggerating when I express it this strongly.” He says that the idea of creationism is bad for Kentucky—that’s where the debate took place; that’s where the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum is located—he says bad for science education, bad for the US, but the most amazing words are those that conclude the sequence. He says, “Thereby, bad for humankind.” Now that’s an amazing argument. It’s the kind of argument you rarely see made honestly and straightforwardly. Here you have Bill Nye, self-style as Bill Nye the Science Guy, who says that he entered this debate and the larger public debate in order to confront creationism because it’s bad for science education, it’s bad for the United States, and, thereby, bad for humankind.” Well at least we know what he thinks the scale of the argument is.

 

The interesting thing from a Christian worldview perspective on that is that we actually agree with him about the importance of the argument. In other words, Christians who are committed to the full authority of Scripture, turning the argument around, would say that the problem with the secular, naturalistic, materialistic understanding of the cosmos that suggests that all that we know and all that we see and all that is, is merely an accident; the problem we have with the worldview that is made clear by the late Carl Sagan, Bill Nye’s professor, when he opened his program “Cosmos” by saying that the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be is because we think it’s bad. We think it’s bad for humankind and—as I agree with Bill Nye in this respect—I would say I do not feel I’m exaggerating when I express it this strongly.

 

The secular worldview that undergirds Bill Nye’s argument was made clear in the oddest ways in this essay that he wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer. For instance, he says, “With that said and everyone profusely thanked, I was going to be on my own in this thing”—he’s speaking about thanking those that helped him to think through how he should prepare. He says with all that behind, “I had to make my arguments come from my heart.” And what follows is the really weird statement; it’s embedded in parentheses: “A metaphor for my point of view from my brain.” In other words, Bill Nye the Science Guy is so committed to biological materialism that when he says my arguments had to come from my heart, he has to say to his secular, skeptical audience, “O, I really don’t mean that my argument came for my heart; that’s just a metaphor speaking of my brain.” When you have to make that kind of point to your secular audience, you’re really afraid that someone somewhere might think you’re actually arguing from your heart.

 

Bill Nye’s essay in the Skeptical Inquirer goes on for thousands of words. He explains why he wanted to go second. That was his rhetorical strategy in the debate. He wanted to go second. As it happened, Ken Ham won the coin toss, he went first, and Bill Nye went second. As he said, both of them were exactly where they wanted to be, and then he writes this: “Perhaps there was no winner, as this was not a scored debate. Nevertheless, by all or a strong majority of accounts, I bested him.” Now that’s very interesting. Not only was the debate not scored, I don’t know how the response to the debate was supposedly scored, but, nonetheless, even if we just say let’s go with them on this for a moment, let’s see how he continues his essay. “The fundamental idea that I hope all of us embrace is, simply put, performance counts as much or more than the specifics of the arguments in a situation like this.” An amazingly revealing statement; in other words, he says this was basically performance. He cites his background and training as an actor, and he says it comes in extremely handy because in this kind of the public confrontation of worldviews, it’s as much about acting as it is about content. It’s as much about acting as it is about argument. He says:

 

At a cognitive level, he believes what he says [speaking of Ken Ham], he really means it when he says he has “a book” that supersedes everything you and I and his parishioners can observe everywhere in nature around us. I respected that commitment. I used it to drive what actors call my inner monologue. I did not choose, as I was advised, to attack, attack, attack. My actor’s preparation helped me keep things civil and respectful with Mr. Ham, despite what struck me as his thoughtless point of view. I’m sure it’s influenced the countless people who’ve written to me and come up to me in public to express their strong and often enthusiastic support. Thank you all.

 

After the debate, my agent and I were driven back to our hotel. We were by agreement accompanied by two of Ham’s security people. There were absolutely grim. I admit it made me feel good. They had the countenance of a team that had been beaten, beaten badly, in their own stadium.

 

Now I don’t know nor would I pretend to know what these security agents were thinking with their grim faces as they drove Mr. Nye and his agent back to their hotel after the event, but I would dare to say that it would be drawing a wrong conclusion or at least a very dubious conclusion to believe that a grim face on security people indicates that they believed that their team had been beaten and in their home stadium. Anyone who works with security people will tell you they’re paid to look grim. If you’re judging the effectiveness of your address or your sermon or your message or your debate by the grimness or the lack of grimness on the face of a security agent, you probably don’t get out much.

 

Bill Nye ended his essay in the Skeptical Inquirer with these words: “If we keep making arguments clear and continue to vote and fight the political fights, together we can change the world.” Well I agree with him on this much: if we continue to make the arguments, we can indeed change the world. But the bigger issue is this: changing minds, one by one.

 

Predictably, as the annual celebration in the Christian church of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead approaches—it is so often called in the larger world Easter; it is most properly called Resurrection Day. By the way, a footnote here, we recall that every single Lord’s Day is a celebration of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, but it is not improper for the Christian church to observe in the course of the year special festivals and seasons in which we draw particular attention to the narrative of Scripture that begins with the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ and continues all the way through to His death, burial, and resurrection, and, indeed, His ascension. But it is Resurrection Sunday that is now before us and, not unexpectedly, many in the secular media are responding with articles and, of course, there are cover stories in magazines and all the rest timed in order to locate controversy right here as the Christian church is getting ready to celebrate the resurrection.

 

Religion News Service’s Kimberly Winston is also out with a story. The headline by RNS is this: “Can You Question the Resurrection and Still Be a Christian?” Now before I even turn to the article, I want to turn to the title. Let me read it to you again: “Can You Question the Resurrection and Still Be a Christian?” That’s one of those headlines that doesn’t actually say anything as specifically as the issue warrants and demands. In other words, what does it mean to question? If you mean to question in terms of questioning whether it actually happened, if you can doubt the resurrection or disbelieve in the resurrection and be a Christian, the answer to that is decisively answered in the negative within the Bible itself. But turning to her article:

 

Did Jesus literally rise from the dead in a bodily resurrection, as many traditionalist and conservative Christians believe? Or was his rising a symbolic one, a restoration of his spirit of love and compassion to the world, as members of some more liberal brands of Christianity hold?

 

Now again and again, I have to come back to Gresham Machen’s distinction between liberal and conservative Christianity, reminding us as he did 100 years ago almost that we’re not talking about two variants of Christianity; we’re talking about two different religions. The actual Christianity, as revealed in the New Testament, is absolutely unanimously clear that the resurrection, the bodily resurrection, of Jesus Christ from the dead is absolutely necessary if there is to be any gospel, if there is any hope, if there is any promise of the forgiveness of sins and the gift of everlasting life, if there is any truth and power to the story of Christ other than some kind of minimal moral exhortation. The power the gospel, the New Testament makes clear, is the power of Christ’s resurrection. So the first thing we notice in Kimberly Winston’s article is when she says that the belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is held by “many traditionalists and conservative Christians,” we have to respond by saying it has been held by all true Christians from the beginning of the Christian church, from the time of the apostles, until now.

 

She cites Scott Korb, who is a New York University professor, who said, “The miracle of a bodily resurrection is something I rejected without moving away from its basic idea.” Now let’s trace what in the world he means by that. Professor Korb said:

 

What I mean is that we can reach the lowest points of our lives, of going deep into a place that feels like death, and then find our way out again — that’s the story the Resurrection now tells me. And at Easter, this is expressed in community, and at its best, through the compassion of others.

 

Now the thing we need to note immediately is it is this kind of minimal moral message or exhortation that people who don’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ try to find in the rescue of the resurrection message from some kind of absolute meaninglessness. But at the end of the day, who in the world can base their lives on the fact that this supposed resurrection is a power you find within yourself when you reach the lowest point in your life? Furthermore, you can’t possibly claim to find that belief in the resurrection (that understanding of the resurrection) in the New Testament that teaches a profoundly different message—the message of the centrality of the death, burial, and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.

 

As Winston explains, liberal Christians have attempted to shift from what she calls a literal to a metaphorical understanding of the resurrection. Oddly enough, she cites someone identified as an evangelical youth minister named Reg Rivet; he’s a 27-year-old. He says his complaint is that the Christian church talks too much about resurrection. He said:

 

You hear about it year after year or at the end of every youth event — ‘This is why Jesus came and why he died.’ We tack it on to the end of everything and that is not what it should be. It’s like we’ve taken something that is very sacred and made it very common.

 

He says we should talk about it more rarely, but then let’s compare that with the New Testament. It’s certainly not just tacked onto a youth message, but it is repeated over and over and over again. As a matter fact, the Apostle Paul said that there is no preaching, there is no authentically Christian preaching, if it does not include the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and His resurrection from the dead. As you can almost always expect, this news article cites the retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, one of the most infamous heretics in the history of the Christian church. As Winston writes, “He’s best known for his famously liberal interpretation of Christianity.” By the way, that’s one of those distorted statements. John Shelby Spong doesn’t even believe in a personal God. There is no rational way he can be described as a Christian in any sense, which just makes the point that being an Episcopal Bishop doesn’t require one to be a Christian; not in any biblical or theological sense. He caused a dustup, Winston writes, when he wrote a book back in 1994 (that’s 20 years ago) that asked the question, “Does Christianity fall unless a supernatural miracle can be established?” Spong, now age 82, said the answer is no. He wrote:

 

I don’t think the resurrection has anything to do with physical resuscitation. I think it means the life of Jesus was raised back into the life of God, not into the life of this world, and that it was out of this that His presence, not His body, was manifested to certain witnesses.

 

In other words, Jesus was present in some metaphorical way, in some spiritual way, but not in a bodily or a physical way with His disciples. John Shelby Spong says that throughout His ministry, dealing with young people or with older people in the church, “I tried to help people get out of that literalism. But you don’t do it a single sermon,” he advised, “You need time to lay the groundwork and for people to process it, ask questions. You have to begin to build on that.” “When people hear it”—he means this skeptical, metaphorical, nonphysical, non-resurrection view of the resurrection—“when people hear it, they grab onto it. They could not believe the superstitious stuff and they were brainwashed to believe that if they could not believe it literally they could not be a Christian.” Well, Bishop Spong, let me just ask a question: Who might have brainwashed them, to use your term, who might’ve stated that you can’t be a Christian if you don’t believe in the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ? Well at the center of that answer has to be the Apostle Paul. Writing in Romans 10, he says very clearly that salvation comes to the one who confesses with the lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and believes in the heart that God raised Him from the dead.

 

Now, you ask, did the apostle Paul necessarily mean a bodily, physical resurrection from the dead? He answers that question most emphatically in First Corinthians chapter 15, where he says, “And if Christ has not been raised [speaking of the bodily resurrection], your faith is futile”—he begins this in verse 17 of First Corinthian 15—“your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” In other words, the Apostle Paul says that if Christ was not bodily raised from the dead, then God did not receive and vindicate His sacrifice. And if the Father did not receive and vindicate His sacrifice, then our sins are still upon us and we are still dead in our sins and trespasses. He then continues. Paul writes, “Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” But then he writes, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” And then the apostle goes on verse by verse by verse to defend the reality of the preaching of the cross and of the empty tomb, of the bodily resurrection of Christ, and then he writes:

 

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

 

Paul then continues by writing, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” So what would the Apostle Paul say in answer to the question raised by Kimberly Winston, “Can you question the resurrection and still be a Christian?” The Apostle Paul would emphatically say, “If you question, you better answer.” And here’s the answer: if Christ was not raised bodily from the dead, then we are doomed. We are still in our sins and trespasses, but thanks be to God the message of the empty tomb is true. That’s where the Apostle Paul ends with this marvelous note of victory that is ours in Christ, specifically because of His resurrection from the dead, and that’s why he ends with his verse with which I end The Briefing:

 

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

 

Happy Resurrection Day. We’ll celebrate together with all Christians around the world, who celebrate the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; this Lord’s Day and every Lord’s Day.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember tomorrow’s release of another edition of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Remember also to call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 04-18-14

1) Heartbreak, grief, and prayer for those in South Korea

Hundreds Missing After South Korean Ferry Sinks, New York Times (Choe Sang-Hun)

‘I love you,’ student texts mom from sinking South Korea ferry, Los Angeles Times (Steven Borowiec)

Emotions Mount as Rescuers Seek Survivors of Sunken South Korea Ferry, Wall Street Journal (Kwanwoo Jun, In-Soo Nam and Min-Jeong Lee)

2) Bill Nye defends debating Ken Ham, says creationism is “bad for humankind”

Bill Nye misjudged creationism debate’s impact, Associated Press (Dylan Lovan)

3) Do you really need to believe the resurrection to be a Christian? Yes, you do.

Can you question the Resurrection and still be a Christian? Religion News Services (Kimberly Winston)