R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 369

Transcript: The Briefing 04-01-14

The Briefing

 

 April 1, 2014

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

 

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

 

The death toll in that horrible earth slide in Washington State is now estimated to be twenty-four. An additional twenty-two persons are officially listed as missing. That number of the missing is down even from yesterday morning when the total was over thirty, but the grand total of those both missing and now accounted for as deceased is at least forty-six, and this is pointing to a major tragedy. Traces of the lives of the missing are now being found in the massive mud there on the banks of the Stillaguamish River there in Washington State, but the bodies themselves many people now think will never be found, simply absorbed in the massive one square mile of mountainside that fell into that river valley. But in response to that there are huge issues, and one of the most important of these is addressed by Timothy Egan in The New York Times when he writes:

 

Don’t tell me, please, that nobody saw one of the deadliest landslides in American history coming. Say a prayer or send a donation for a community buried under a mountain of mud …Praise the emergency workers [who are doing their best and have done their best both to rescue and to find the victims]… But enough with the denial, the willful ignorance of cause and effect, the shock that one of the prettiest valleys on the planet could turn in a flash from quiet respite in the foothills of the North Cascades to a gravelly graveyard.

 

Now what Egan is talking about is a comment, for instance as the one made by John Pennington, the emergency manager of Snohomish County. He said, “This was a completely unforeseen slide. It was considered very safe.” He said that two days after the incident, and yet, as Timothy Egan writes, those comments make no sense given the kinds of warnings that were actually already given. If it was unforeseen, Egan writes, it was unforeseen “except for 60 years’ worth of warnings, most notably a report in 1999 that outlined ‘the potential for a large catastrophic failure on the very hillside that had just suffered this large catastrophic failure.’” The large catastrophic failure that the emergency manager of the county said was a completely unforeseen slide. In other words, it wasn’t at all unforeseen, and yet the emergency manager stated that it was and the actions of so many people in residing on that hillside indicated that they too believed that there was no imminent danger.

 

These are the factors that make this article and this incident so interesting and meaningful from a worldview perspective. And whether or not Timothy Egan understands all that he’s writing here, in this paragraph he gets right to the core issue.

 

It is human nature, if not the American way, to look potential disaster in the face and prefer to see a bright and shining lie. The “taming” of this continent, in five centuries and change, required a mighty mustering of cognitive dissonance. As a result, most of us live with the danger of wildfire, earthquake, tornado, flooding, drought, hurricane or yet-to-be-defined and climate-change-influenced superstorm. A legacy of settlement is the delusion that large-scale manipulation of the natural world can be done without consequence.

 

Well he’s certainly on to something there and this is what we return to again and again as theologically defined in terms of the noetic effects of the fall. One of the sad consequences of the fall, of human sinfulness and God’s judgment upon our sinfulness, is the reality of what can only be described as cognitive confusion. In other words, we simply do not think as we should think. Our thinking is also affected by the fall. That’s the word noetic: it refers to the way we think. And this side of Eden, the way we think is quite often not the way we should think. In actuality, even though God made us as rational creatures, we often think in irrational terms. Our logic sometimes simply doesn’t work. Our mental calculus, even when we’re looking at facts straight in the face, enables us often to rationalize or even to completely ignore those facts. Our memory is faulty. We operate on the basis of a limited perspective and we too often have our thinking influenced by our own prejudices. In other words, our intellect is very much affected by the fall.

 

One additional noetic effect of sin is the fact that we have a very broken risk calculus. We have to judge risks all the time. We judge a risk when we turn left across a busy highway. We judge risk when we get on an interstate, when we buy an airplane ticket, when we open a bank account, when we do just about anything. But the reality is that our risk calculator is often broken. It often malfunctions. Evidence of this comes, for example, when we look at the fact that many Americans demonstrate a fear of flying, far more than demonstrate a fear of driving in an automobile; however, any honest look at the statistics would indicate immediately that it is far more dangerous to be in a car than in a commercial airliner. But it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t seem that way. There are psychological forces in effect that lead us to miscalculate the risk, often to worry about exactly the wrong thing, or, as Timothy Egan is actually insinuating in this very important essay, we fail to worry about the things that are actual risks right before us.

 

The key insight in Timothy Egan’s essay comes in this sentence, “It is human nature to look potential disaster in the face and see a bright shining lie.” Well it’s also human nature to see this primarily in the case of others rather than ourselves. It’s easy for us to look at this tragedy in Washington State and say those people failed to see what was right before their eyes. They failed not only to do that; they failed to heed very credible warnings given by authoritative sources that predicted exactly the kind of disaster that took place. And the fallibility of their thinking is seen in the fact that the emergency manager of their own county said just two days after the tragedy that nobody saw it coming.

 

There’s an intellectual problem in Timothy Egan’s essay as well. That’s in the last sentence of that paragraph when he writes, “A legacy of settlement is the delusion that large-scale manipulation of the natural world can be done without consequence.” In actuality, nothing in this incident whatsoever indicates that human manipulation of the environment had anything at all to do with that tragedy in Snohomish County, Washington. But the larger worldview issue is this: how is it that so many of us, not just these folks in Washington State, but virtually all of us, refuse to understand the data right before our eyes? Well it’s because, once again, we are reminded of the effects of the fall, and the effects of the fall in this case are demonstrated in the natural occurrence of this horrifying landslide. That too, of course, is evidence of God’s judgment upon sin and its effects upon the cosmos, but also on the refusal to see what was right before their eyes. But the reality is we all know that’s our story as well. And, by the way, there is no safe place to live. Undoubtedly, some places are safer than others, but there’s no place to live where you are not at least under the threat of a volcano, a hurricane or tornado, an earthquake, or some other form of natural disaster, or at least what the world calls a natural disaster. So as we remember and pray for those who’ve lost loved ones in Washington State, let’s also be mindful of the fact that we too are equally affected by the noetic effects of sin. In our own way, we too are just as likely to look at something and refuse to see what is actually there.

 

The last fifty years of American history have demonstrated over and over again the increasing authority of courts within our culture, specifically the nation’s highest court, the United States Supreme Court. With this in mind, very prominent liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky went to the pages of The Los Angeles Times in order to suggest that Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court should step down and step down immediately, so that President Barack Obama can nominate her successor before the 2014 congressional elections. Chemerinsky is a very prominent legal theorist and he’s also a liberal activists. He is very prominent in terms of the nation’s legal conversation. He pointed to the fact that Justice Ginsburg is now 81 years old. She has survived two bouts with cancer, and even as he conceded she is mentally and physically fit, it’s only a matter of time before she eventually will have to leave the court. And that leads professor Chemerinsky to suggest she better do it now when there is a Democratic president in the White House and when there is a Democratic majority in the Senate because neither of these can be counted upon after the elections of 2014 and 2016. Given the importance of the court, especially to the left, on issues going all the way back, of course, to cases such as Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion-on-demand back in 1973, Professor Chemerinsky says there’s just too much at stake for the left for Justice Ginsburg not to seriously consider stepping down. The background to Chemerinsky’s argument is the fact that it is now considered likely by both sides of the partisan divide that Republicans may gain control of the United States Senate after the elections this coming November. Given the fact that that will make it very difficult for President Obama to get any nominee to the nation’s highest court through the Senate and given the fact that in 2016 there’s at least the chance that a Republican president would be elected, Chemerinsky says there’s just too much at stake. If Justice Ginsburg really cares about the liberal values that she has demonstrated on the court, she should resign now.

 

Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate.com, said that’s simply nonsense; that Justice Ginsburg should retire on her own timetable. He suggested that it was insulting for Professor Chemerinsky to make this suggestion. On the other hand, Isaac Chotiner, joining the discussion as he writes for The New Republic, said that it is simply too big a gamble for Justice Ginsburg not to retire and allow President Obama to name her replacement and to do so speedily. Chotiner went on to suggest that the losers in this risk would be those who, for instance, are the supporters of abortion rights. He warned that the real losers would be in his words “women who want to control their bodies,” sending the ultimate political and moral signal to the political left.

 

From a worldview perspective, perhaps what this demonstrates more than anything else is the fact that the court has taken on such a central role in American life; arguably, a role that the framers of the United States Constitution never foresaw. They saw, as they wrote in their own writings, in the Constitution, and especially in the Federalist papers, that the court was to be something of a tiebreaker, in terms of disputes between the other two branches of government—the legislative and the executive. But the court has now taken on both executive and legislative roles at times, and it has taken on a very central role in terms of the great moral issues of our day. The relative merits of the arguments for and against the imminent retirement of Justice Ginsburg are something the justice herself will simply have to decide. After all, according to the Constitution, her term is for life, until she either dies or voluntarily retires from the court. Those watching the court are also aware of the fact that one of the justices, clearly on the conservative side of the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, is 78. Justice Ginsburg is 81. And by the way, in one of the oddest twists of the relationships on the nation’s highest court, one of the closest friendships among all the justices is that between Justices Ginsburg and Scalia, who are on opposite sides of the court and its rulings on so many issues. History reveals that many justices do try to time their retirements so that a president of their ideological persuasion can name the replacement or at least attempt to. That is not always the case, however, and in the case of Justice Ginsburg, her decision is in her hands and her hands alone.

 

Another important essay from a worldview consideration was published in this past Sunday’s edition of The Washington Post. The author is Stein Ringen, a Norwegian, now currently a professor of sociology at Oxford University in England. The title of this op-ed piece in The Washington Post, “Are We Heading for the Fall of Democracy.” He refers to what he calls “dysfunctional government.” He asked the question, given the fact that so many supposedly democratic governments are now dysfunctional, by his definition, the question is this: is democracy itself in decay? At this point, Professor Ringen raises a very important historical insight. He writes:

 

It took only 250 years for democracy to disintegrate in ancient Athens. A wholly new form of government was invented there in which the people ruled themselves. That constitution proved marvelously effective. Athens grew in wealth and capacity, fought off the Persian challenge, established itself as the leading power in the known world and produced treasures of architecture, philosophy and art that bedazzle to this day. But when privilege, corruption and mismanagement took hold, the lights went out.

 

It would be 2,000 years before democracy was reinvented in the U.S. Constitution, now as representative democracy.

 

He then writes these very important words:

 

The second democratic experiment is approaching 250 years. It has been as successful as the first. But the lesson from Athens is that success does not breed success. Democracy is not the default. It is a form of government that must be created with determination and that will disintegrate unless nurtured.

 

Stein Ringen writes with appreciation for the democratic traditions of both the United Kingdom (that is Great Britain) and the United States, and he writes with the political assessment that both of these governments are now in grave states of dysfunction. And in terms of at least the ability to deliver on the expectations of their populations, it’s clear that Ringen’s on to something. The American people and the British people are increasingly frustrated with their governments. They’re not always frustrated in any consistent pattern, but there is the increasing sense, on the part of residents of both of these nations, that something has gone wrong with government. Steinman then suggests that that kind of dissatisfaction can point to the decay of democracy. He writes, “It’s not enough for governments to simply be democratic. They must deliver or decay.”

 

Now one of the things we should note is that Stein Ringen writes from the political left. He’s quite open about that. But the warning he issues should be of interest to all those who love democracy and prize it as the best form of government on this planet. Those on the left and the right should be very aware of the fact that he’s onto something when he suggests that the Athenian disaster, in terms of perpetuating democracy, made clear that complacency is the enemy of democracy’s perpetuation. In other words, we can’t simply depend upon the fact that democracy will survive. This reminds us of the statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin during the process of deliberations over the Constitution in 1789. A woman is said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government have we. He responded, “A Republic,” and then added the words, “if we can keep it.” It’s up to every generation to keep it, and Stein Ringen offers the very prescient warning that at present we’re not keeping it very well.

 

By the way, Stein Ringen is a very interesting figure. He is a man of the political left, but he is also a man of the left who has come to believe that the perpetuation of the family is itself also important. In a book he wrote back in 1998, entitled, The Family in Question, Professor Ringen went so far as to suggest that democracy requires a stable family; a stable family that is defined in very traditional terms. He went so far as to lecture the left on the fact that increasing rates of cohabitation and abortion actually threaten the liberal values they say they represent. The perpetuation of those liberal values, he says, requires the government to preserve and protect what we would call the natural family. In that sense, we should heed the wisdom of a Norwegian teaching at Oxford University in England, writing in the pages of Sunday’s edition of The Washington Post. In that 1998 book, The Family in Question, Professor Ringen wrote these words:

 

With this book I wish to encourage analysis of the late-20th century social and family revolution. I believe the family remains an essential and productive institution for the well-being and freedom of the individual. I believe family values are about rock-hard issues of material standard of living and democratic citizenship, and about liberal ethics and equality of opportunity. I believe we are wrong to see the family as peripheral to modern life in advanced industrial democracies. I believe we have yet to understand how rapidly and radically the circumstances of family life are now changing. I believe these changes are at the cost of economic efficiency and social fairness in our societies.

 

We can only have wished that the liberal left responded with affirmation and acceptance to Professor Ringen’s arguments back in 1998, but, of course, the real test now is whether political and theological conservatives are willing to pay the price to hold to those same insights in our own day.

 

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

 

The Briefing 04-01-14

Podcast Transcript

1) The “unforeseen” mudslide tragedy was not unforeseen

A Mudslide, Foretold, New York Times (Timothy Egan)

2) Justice Ginsburg, the power of the courts, and the pressure of retirement

Much depends on Ginsburg, Los Angeles Times (Erwin Chemerinsky)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Irreplaceable, Slate.com (Dahlia Lithwick)

Liberal Writers Say Ruth Bader Ginsburg Shouldn’t Retire. That’s Not Only Wrong—It’s Dangerous. New Republic (Isaac Chotiner)

3) Will democracy survive? Complacency is the enemy.

Is American democracy headed to extinction? Washington Post (Stein Ringen)

Transcript: The Founders at Home – A Conversation on the American Experiment with Myron Magnet

Mohler:

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

Myron Magnet was the editor of City Journal from 1994 to 2006 and he is now the magazine’s editor-at-large. A former member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008. He has written about a wide variety of topics from American society and social policy, economics and corporate management to intellectual history, literature, architecture and the American founding. His latest book is The Founders at Home: The Building of America 1735-1817. Myron Magnet, welcome to thinking in public

 

Magnet: Thank you so much, it is a pleasure to be with you.

 

Mohler: Well, it certainly was a pleasure to read your book, and you know, I can normally say that because I enjoy reading every book that crosses my desk. But there was particular pleasure in reading your book because you’re covering the American founding you are covering the historical epic that perhaps has had greatest attention from American historians, and yet you found a way to tell the story in a completely new way.

 

Magnet: Thank you so much! You liked my historical houses part, I take it.

 

Mohler: Well, I will tell you one reason why; I get to live in one of those homes, or at least a replica of one of those homes.

 

Magnet: Do you really? Which one?

 

Mohler: I actually live in a in a replica of Homewood, the house of Charles Carroll.

 

Magnet: Oh how wonderful!

 

Mohler: Yes, well, the original Homewood is now on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, but the president’s home for this institution is an almost brick-for-brick replica.

 

Magnet: You know, I’ve found that the reason I wanted to write about the Founders – the gimmick of the book is that each of the seven Founders that I talk about has a house that’s open to the public that you can visit, and what I discovered when I visited them is that the spirit of these guys is just palpable. You feel almost as if you’re in their presence when you walk in. It’s especially true when you walk into a place like Monticello.

 

Mohler: Absolutely.

 

Magnet: I felt like I was inside Jefferson’s mind when I walked through there. But it’s true in Mount Vernon, it’s true in the newly restored Montpelier which is just beautiful, and it just gets you so interested in the concreteness of their thought. The houses, making them so real to me, led me on to their letters and their speeches and writings. I was so fascinated to discover that this was a country that was made by people who had a vision, who really thought about what kind of country they wanted to make in which their fellow citizens could have the best possible life for man. They had a very consistent vision, which centered on liberty.

 

Mohler: Mr Magnet, another point you make in this book is how much attention these Founders gave to the issue of religious liberty. Not just as one amongst other liberties, but as an essential issue for understanding what this new nation must be about.

 

Magnet: They cared about religious liberty with a kind of intensity that can sometimes get lost now. It wasn’t just the Pilgrims who came here in 1620 who came here looking for religious liberty. There was a whole stream of people; Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers – every kind of Dissenter and every kind of Protestant fleeing from France and Bohemia, came in wave after wave in the 17th and even into the 18th centuries seeking religious freedom here.

 

And it’s so interesting, the guy I start with in my book is William Livingston, and I like him because he was a New York magazine editor, so I feel we have something in common. It’s funny, he’s never quite sure of where he’s going to go in his magazine, but he starts out complaining, “Wait a minute, the Anglicans of New York want to found an Anglican college and they want to use tax money to pay the professors.” That’s ridiculous, because New York is not an Anglican city or colony. Anglicans are a minority, so obviously, if you use public money it ought to be for the public purposes of all. And it’s an infringement of our religious liberty to tax us for sectarian purposes for a sect we don’t believe in.

 

Well it was that insistence on religious liberty that led Livingston to put forth for the first time in the North American colonies an unsystematic but extremely eloquent exposition of Locke’s idea of government by consent of the governed, and the right of the people to rebel against a tyrannical ruler.

 

Mohler: In your book you claim that “the American Revolution, of all great revolutions, was the only successful one.” I am in full agreement of that statement, but I would appreciate if you would spell out a bit why you made that statement and why you made that claim.

 

Magnet: Well, the reason I wrote the book is because – I’m not a historian by training, I’m a policy journalist. I wrote a policy magazine. And I came increasingly to think that the country that we lived in was not really the country that the Founders envisioned when they created it. And that the Constitution that the constitutional lawyers have given us is not the Constitution that the Constitutional Convention gave us.  So I wanted to go back to the beginning and see what exactly did the Founders have in mind?

 

And so it was a great voyage of discovery for me, and just a thrill to spend weeks reading 1200 pages of George Washington’s letters and speeches, reading the Federalist papers, and asking, ‘what did they want to do?’

Mohler: I appreciated so much the way you made the point about the American Revolution being successful in that it delivered the vision of those who led it and fought for it. And you compare it to especially the French Revolution, which basically ended up with continued despotism, and that at the cost of untold terror. And then of the Russian Revolution that led to the Soviet oppression. And then you made the interesting point that we only have one life to live, and if you imagine a life lived under those circumstances, and compare it to the lives that we now live, you really see the difference that the vision of this kind of revolution leads to.

 

Magnet: It’s fantastic. Of course, the reason that ours worked is very largely because the Founders were quite modest in their aims. They only wanted to make a political revolution. They didn’t want to make a social revolution. They didn’t want to have ‘common property.’ They didn’t want to make a revolution in human nature. They weren’t trying to build ‘the new Soviet man.’ They were extremely realistic about human nature. They wanted to make a government, as they said over and over again, for people as they really were, not for angels.

 

As Madison says in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, we wouldn’t have any need of government. What is government but the greatest reflection of all on human nature?” By contrast, of course, we remember Robespierre, in the French Revolution, saying “Have you rooted out the mental habits of despotism within yourselves?” And you know, his view was that if he didn’t think you had, off to the guillotine with you. And they were guillotining by the half a dozen a day for two years.

 

Mohler: Yes, you mentioned two hundred people a week for two years – an unprecedented bloodletting, even for those very bloody times.

 

Magnet: Amazing. And then of course, the Russian Revolution. When we think of the toll of that, it exceeds even the carnage of the Nazis. Once you start overturning things, you have to be very careful what devils you let loose. One of the really wise things that Madison said is, ‘Okay, so you set up a Constitution and a government to govern people, and give those who do the governing power to do so. But the next problem is how do you get them to govern themselves?’

 

And that was the genius of what the Founders accomplished. They saw that the men who did the governing would have the same fallen human nature as everybody else. And they wanted to set up every kind of protection that they could think of to make sure that they didn’t give in to the kinds of – as they would call them – ‘passions’ or ‘narrow interests’ and use that power to oppress their fellow men.

 

Mohler: You know, you made me rethink my understanding of not just the founding era, but some of the intellectual changes that were taking place in the 18th century. In particular, a point you make over and over again is that these conservative revolutionaries of which you were writing, were largely satisfied with the English constitution as it had operated. That unwritten constitution that had basically accepted rights and responsibilities – so long as Britain kept on honoring that constitutional understanding, the American colonists were by and large quite willing to live within that.

 

It was when they came to understand that Britain was itself violating that compact that they really became revolutionaries.

 

Magnet: That’s right. And what Burke said is that the policy which Walpole and Pitt had followed when they were Prime Ministers of England was one of ‘salutary neglect.’ Here were these colonists three thousand miles away who were churning out wealth for themselves, yes, but also for the mother country. So why would anybody mess with that? It’s only when George III came to the throne. Remember, he was the grandson of George II, his father had died. And he was a youth! He was 22 years old when he came to the throne. And he just wasn’t going to take any orders from these old men who were around him. He was going to be a king, by heaven! And that was that.

 

He was a very pig-headed young man, and he surrounded himself with not-very politick guys. He decided he was going to make the Americans pay for fighting the Seven Years War, a big part of which happened on the North American continent. Well, you know the Americans had already paid for it, not just in treasure but in blood. After all, that’s where George Washington cut his military experience as a great and brave commander, in what we call the French-Indian War, which is what we call our portion of the Seven Years War. And why should we pay for it again? So when George III wanted to tax people who felt they were not represented by the British Parliament, they said, ‘Wait a minute. You a depriving us of our property without letting us vote on it. And that’s a violation of the British constitution, it’s a violation of the Magna Carta, it’s a violation of everything else we hold most sacred.’

 

And then, to make things even worse, when the king decided he was going to enforce these new tax laws by sort of summary vice-admiralty courts that would try tax evasion cases, where it would just be a judge who decides, and no jury, the colonists went bananas! They said, ‘Wait a minute! The first thing Magna Carta guarantees you is that you cannot be deprived of your life or property without a trial by a jury of your peers!’ So it’s like everything that they held most politically sacred in the British constitution was being overturned from their point of view, and they weren’t standing for it. They wanted things back the way they were.

 

Mohler: In your book – and I enjoyed ever single chapter! I have to tell you that you confirmed my estimation of George Washington, and basically on the other hand you confirmed my understanding of Thomas Jefferson. But you made me think far better of James Madison and John Jay than I had in the past. And your argument even lowered George III in my estimation – below in the abysmal ranking of royalty where he stood before I began your book. But that’s one of the reasons why I loved this book so much, because it deals with these men as men. As historical figures. And you take them seriously not only in terms of their intellectual contribution and their political lives, but also their social lives; what brought them pleasure, how they understood themselves as part of a larger society.

 

And you introduced me to someone whose name was certainly familiar to me, but I really didn’t know so well, and that’s William Livingston. You identify him as one of the firebrands, and that argument you just made about the trial without jury – it was Livingston who quite brilliantly argued that there was only one British precedent for that, and that was Charles I and the Star Chamber.

Magnet: The Star Chamber, that’s exactly right! And when he saw New York’s royal governor trying to Star Chamber-type things, and then when George III’s government also started doing  Star Chamber-type things, he, who had been trained as a lawyer rose to be one New York’s preeminent lawyers. He also worked very hard with other eminent lawyers to professionalize the law business. He just went ape when he saw that, he said, ‘You’re taking away what is an Englishman’s birthright, and he wasn’t having it. So we owe quite a lot to William Livingston.

 

One of the things that struck me in the reading I did for this book is, that John Adams is saying, ‘When did the American Revolution begin? It didn’t begin at Lexington and Concord. It began maybe 15 years earlier when Americans changed their political culture, really.

 

Mohler: It began in the heart!

 

Magnet: When they changed their ideas and affections and their idea of obligation. When they changed their loyalies. And it really was because of men like William Livingston, even earlier than John Adams, had said, ‘Wait a minute. We have certain liberties.’ That was in the 1750’s that he was saying this. Both the laws of nature and nature’s God on the one hand, and the British constitution on the other hand guarantee us these, and nobody can mess with them with impunity or we will have the right to revolt.

 

Mohler: Mr. Magnet, in your book you actually make a point without drawing any attention to it. And I saw it come out in a way that surprised me, even though I knew many of these stories and thought I knew them quite well. You draw attention to something, but you don’t mention it explicitly, and that is this; many of these Founders had their formative political ideas shaped during the time when they weren’t men, they were boys and adolescents! It just strikes me when you consider the current social context with this extension of adolescence into the 20’s and some argue, into the 30’s.

 

These were young men who were making life and death decisions and framing huge political issues when they were too young to get married.

 

Magnet: Well and take Alexander Hamilton as an example. There he is, he is a penniless, illegitimate immigrant from the West Indies, who by an almost Dickensian set of fortunate circumstances ends up at King’s College, New York – later Columbia. And Britain imposes the Stamp Act. Then Lexington and Concord happens. So he’s still an undergraduate. What does he do? His own kind of student activism. He quits college, he joins the militia and then the army, he becomes one of the greatest artillery captains of the whole Continental army, comes to the attention of George Washington – by the time he’s 21, he’s George Washington’s principle aide, and as another one of George Washington’s generals said, he not only wrote the letters for Washington, but he got to know Washington’s mind so well that in a way he even thought for him.

 

George Washington would just throw this hint out, and Hamilton would write it out while he was 21 years old! Imagine!

 

Mohler: Well let me take you even younger than that! In your chapter on Livingston, you pointed out that he went to Yale as a 13-year old, and surrounded by the library there, as a 13-year old, began to revise John Locke in a way that served the Revolution!

 

Magnet: Isn’t it amazing? And even when he was younger than that, he spent a year living in the woods with his tutor, who was a Princeton clergyman – was a Yale clergymen – learning about the customs of the Indians. This was a man who had had an astonishing amount of experience even before he went to college.

 

Mohler: I want to talk about the idea of this ‘conservative revolution,’ because as you point out, this was a revolution with a very limited set of aims, which is why it ended up being so successful. These conservative revolutionaries wanted a society that would enable men and women to pursue their liberties, and in order to build fulfilling lives. They understood human beings as human beings in a way that the other two revolutions that we’ve mentioned, the French and the Russian, never did.

 

Magnet: Well, because, yes, the Founders did believe with Aristotle that man is a political animal, but they understood that he’s not just a political animal. One of the things that always touched me about the letters that Washington wrote is that he had such a vision of creating a world in which every American could live “under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” I love that vision, they had such a sense that there was a kind of domestic, relatively modest life, that people would make for themselves in their own families and in their own communities, and that’s where they would find their largest and most fulfilling meaning. This is something so different from what a man like Robespierre or Comrade Lenin would have thought of that it just takes the breath away.

 

One of the things I liked so much about including the houses of these men as part of the story is that the houses themselves are really quite modest. And they’re just made for domestic life. I mean, go to Mount Vernon, and there’s the parlor with Martha Washington’s granddaughter’s harpsichord in there, which was given back by one of her descendants who was guess who? Mrs. Robert E. Lee. And you can just have a vision of this company sitting in this little cozy living room, listening to Nelly Custis, and that’s what they were fighting for. They wanted a life like that. Same with Jefferson, another great lover of music. And he played the fiddle, and his daughter would play the piano or the harpsichord along with him. And they’d sing.

 

What a nice vision of life that was.

 

* * * * *

 

Mohler: The title of Myron Magnet’s new book is The Founders at Home. And the home, even the house, plays a major role of how he plays the story. That reminds me of the fact that that metaphor isn’t new. It was Jesus himself who spoke of the wise man building his house upon a rock. What we have is a recognition that we are indeed domestic creatures. And the house in which we live says a great deal about us one way or another, inevitably. Myron Magnet helps us to understand why we know these Founders far better than we might because we know them at home.

* * * * *

Mohler: It not only humanizes these Founders who are in many ways ‘marble men’ in terms of our historical memory, it also places them in a far healthier context in which it is clear that they enjoyed dining, company, their family, and they delighted in their children, even if their children vexed them at times. They enjoyed walking on their property. Here’s George Washington, the very day he dies, walking, choosing some trees for timber.

 

Magnet: To cut down, that’s right. He’s still sculpting the landscape. It’s the most amazing thing. No, they loved it. And they loved it so much that when Washington was on the battlefield, in lulls between the fighting he was fantasize about his wonderful house, and wonder about where he could plant honey locust trees. And where would holly trees plant well? And should he cut down this stand over there? It’s terribly touching.

 

It’s also interesting – you mentioned that I have a chapter about John Jay. Well, there really isn’t a biography of John Jay. And this chapter, I hope people will think, is about as good as they’re going to get of this extraordinary and virtuous man. And when he set out to build his house at the very northern edge of Westchester county, New York, he wanted just a plain farmhouse, like his neighbors. If you go up to the John Jay homestead – now it’s been much enlarged toward the back by generations of very successful descendents of John Jay – but from the front you can see that it is just a regular Federal farmhouse of the kind that you see hundreds and hundreds of whenever you drive through any state in New England, and all over New York. He said he didn’t want a seat, he wanted a farmhouse, and that’s what he got.

 

Mohler: But it is clear, and you helped to demonstrate this, that so many of these men – Jefferson, Washington, and to a lesser extent Madison, perhaps, and the Lee family – they understood themselves in this new nation as standing aside history. And they were clearly trying to make a statement about continuity with classical truths and even classical patterns of architecture. With Jefferson, all these pattern-books drawn back from Pelagio, and ancient architectural sources – they were clearly making a statement about continuity with a civilization they had brought with them.

 

Magnet: Oh yes. And Washington had his pattern-books too. And actually, we have the pattern book from which Hamilton took his house up in Harlem. It’s the most fascinating thing to see. And you know, it’s a simply beautiful house, and yes, it’s filled with all of these Classical allusions. And by the way, with biblical allusions! If you look at the ceiling of Mount Vernon’s new dining room, you see all of these sickles and pruning hooks. I like to think, ‘wow, here’s this warrior who has stucco-ed his swords into pruning hooks. And you know that when he was presiding over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, he had a Philadelphia carpenter make the weathervane that was kind of the crowning touch on Mount Vernon. And what is it? A dove of peace with an olive branch in her mouth. So it’s a continuity not just with classical times, but with biblical times as well.

 

Mohler: You write of Washington, following Flexner, as the indispensable man. You demonstrate just how indispensable he was. As a matter of fact, I can’t help but read that with a providential understanding of history. It’s hard to imagine how one man, so well fitted for the times, could have been provided at just the right time.

But you also humanize him. So you point out that right to the end of his life, he’s designing new military uniforms for himself, because he loves to dress up in these uniforms.

 

Magnet: He loves clothes! I mean can you imagine, here is yes, the ‘marble man’ as you say – and he loves to dress up! We have a letter from him when he was about 18 years old or 17, when he’s designing a frock coat for himself. And up to the end of his life, he’s still wanting ‘tasty cockades’ for his hat, and wondering if he should have slashed cuffs or not on his uniforms. They were most human, most human people, and you can see it so much in their correspondence. One of the things – from so many touching letters – when Alexander Hamilton was killed in that terrible duel in 1804, John Jay, who desperately loved his wife, (who was William Livingston’s daughter) and had lost her at a very young age, wrote Hamilton’s father-in-law, who was his good friend, a letter of condolence. And he said, ‘You know, we all know the usual topics of condolence. So I’m not going to rehearse them here. I’m just going to hope that the only Giver of comfort may be with you.’

 

Mohler: They were men of such emotion.

 

Magnet: Oh, and Washington, the ‘marble man,’ his hands shook at touching moments. He cried when he said goodbye to all his officers at Sam Fraunces’ tavern down in lower Manhattan. I mean, it’s almost unbelievable. All these guys came up weeping real tears to exchange a hug and a kiss with him, and say goodbye. And he leaves the room, too overcome with emotion to speak. And what does he do on his way home to Mount Vernon? He stops off to call on Congress to hand them back the parchment commission which they handed him as Commander-in-Chief of the Army eight years earlier. And he hands it back with a voice trembling with emotion and shaking hands, but of course he’s doing something that is profoundly symbolic too, which is demonstrating the subservience of the military to the civil authority.

 

That George III of whom we both formed so low an opinion heard from the painter Benjamin West who was working in London and doing a lot of work for George III and his family that Washington was thinking of just giving up and going home after his presidency. And George III says, ‘You know what? If he does that, he would be the greatest man that ever lived.’ Well, he did.

 

And perhaps George III was right that one time.

 

Mohler: Well, we’ll give him that! I also want to point out that you humanize these men in others ways as well. One of my favorite passages from your book is where you’re talking about William Livingston and his wife Susannah, who were married for many years. And after 40 years of marriage, when she had gone through 13 pregnancies, he wrote “If I was to live to the age of Methuselah, I believe I should not forget a certain flower that I once saw in a certain garden. And however that flower may have since faded toward the evening of that day, I shall always remember how it bloomed in the morning, nor shall I ever love it the less.”

 

Magnet: Is that not beautiful?

 

Mohler: It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen a husband say to his wife!

 

And when you treat these men and discover so many things about them, it is really interesting to me that you bring it back to a domestic sphere. And you do so with the more than symbolic reality of the house. And I have visited at least five of the houses you describe. And I have found, just as you did, the sense that you are walking amongst men and their families who were so real, that you can see even in the way they stipulated with such detail the way that a rug was to be placed in a room that they were just as we are. They were concerned with making a life for themselves.

 

Magnet: You know, and that nice Livingston couple had famously beautiful daughters. And when they had retired to the house they had built in New Jersey, of course there was a steady stream of young men coming to call on the beautiful Livingston sisters. And who were the people who came to call on them? Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris. I mean, just imagine what the domestic life was like there.

 

Governor Morris writes such a lovely letter about Sally Livingston saying, “Oh how her cheeks bloom when she’s amidst her admirers. Which she will always have around her, unless the idea ever takes her to get into love.” Well, she did, and she married John Jay. And they lived almost happily ever after.

 

Mohler: In terms of John Jay, you mentioned that there’s not a very good biography of him; I really was so pleased to read your chapter on him. One of the things I most appreciated was that here you have one of the Founders who had a huge way to change his mind. And you show the adaptability of someone like John Jay to reality in a way that ideologues would never have been able to adjust.

 

For instance, when he comes to the conclusion that America’s future lies in what he doesn’t want to see take place, that is a cooperative agreement between the English speaking peoples; the United States and the Britain against whom it had won this revolution, he makes the change, exacts the treaty, and he comes back and delivers it.

 

Magnet: And, of course, defies all his instructions from Congress! Here we had the financial and military support from France. Without which we couldn’t have won the revolution. But you know, with classical American empiricism, John Jay is watching very carefully, and with classic, canny American understanding of human psychology, he sees that actually, what France is doing in helping America has nothing to do with their love for America, it has to do with their own geo-strategic ambitions in outsmarting Great Britain and becoming the preeminent global power. What they really wanted to do is keep America small, weak, hemmed in by hostile powers and utterly dependent on France. And as soon as he realizes this – and you know, the French are a very subtle people, so it took considerable penetration for him to figure it out – and even so wise a man as Benjamin Franklin doesn’t see it.

 

So he says, ‘Okay, if this is what they want to do, I’m not letting them get away with it. And he then proceeded to make a treaty with Britain, which made our borders so much more expansive than the French ever dreamed we could get. He, at that particular moment of the treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, he was the indispensable man.

 

Mohler: You know I had to smile when I considered the politics of what was taking place when he and his French interlocutor were raising the issue of where the western border of the United States was, and they agreed to come back and share their maps, and the French map was – let’s just say very much to the French advantage. It would have been a different nation.

 

Magnet: There wouldn’t have been a Midwest.

 

Mohler: And the people in the United States today often just take, well, I guess this comes naturally- take for granted what we are as a nation without understanding either the men or the ideas that brought it about. But you are a very contemporary thinker after all and I’m a devotee, an admiring reader of The City Journal, have been for many years…

 

Magnet: O, thank you.

 

Mohler: And so you have a very contemporary interest. So take us from the Founders to today and what is it that we are in grave danger of failing to understand that would be essential for us to know what America must be now as well as then.

 

Magnet: Well, let me start with a really small thing. Madison said, “if you ever see the legislators passing laws for the citizens from which they exempt themselves, you will know that you are living in anything but a democracy.” Well, we’ve lived to see it. These were guys who were so suspicious of human nature’s propensity for, I mean for… they understood long before Lord Acton was born, that power tends to corrupt and so they did not wish to put very much power in the hands of any government whatsoever. They wanted a small government; powerful enough to protect them form outside aggression from the English, as it happened in those first two times. But that was it. They didn’t want the government to do anything else for them. So when the Constitutional Convention, for example, Madison wanted to give the government the power to build canals and highways and his fellow members of the Convention said, “that’s gonna cost too much money, we don’t wanna to that. If states wanna build highways, they can do it. But, no we’re not doing it.” And so, sure enough, Madison, on his last day as President in 1817, vetoed a bill that was going to have the federal government build roads and canal and said, “it’s not that I don’t think they’re important, but if you want the federal government to build roads and canals, pass a constitutional amendment.” And the government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. Now he said, “you can set about just where exactly the limits are and you can argue just about what is necessary and proper to carry into a effect those nineteen limited and enumerated powers set forth in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution.” And you know, they had very ferocious arguments about that, you know Hamilton and Madison between them, from very early on. “But the one thing you cannot do,” said Madison, “is convert a limited government into an unlimited government.” And when you have a President who comes along and says, “I’m gonna take over a sixth of the economy,” and a majority in Congress, a bare majority in Congress that says, “fine, you can do this and you can write a bill and we’re not even gonna read it and we’re just gonna ram it through by a bare majority, and incidentally this isn’t a tax,” and then you have a Supreme Court, “Well, wait a minute, it is a constitutional law because it is a tax, and the Congress has the power to tax,” and then the President by decree says, “wait a minute, this bill doesn’t’ work because we’ve made it so sloppily so I’m gonna change things by edict.” Madison, Hamilton, Washington, John Jay, Jefferson, they would be spinning in their graves over this; this giant dictatorial government which does everything by rule-making-fiats rather than laws made by the people’s selected representatives; that is not what the founder had in mind and it’s not the government they created.

 

Mohler: Your newest book, The Founders at Home, has received a very warm reception in the publishing world amongst historians and I certainly want to commend it, but It leads me to ask you, because I’ve enjoyed so many things you’ve written in the past; What’s next?

 

Magnet: You know, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I never expected to write this book. I went to Monticello just because my wife said, “c’mon, you’re interested in architecture and you love the Founding Fathers and we’ve never seen Monticello, and Mount Vernon, and Montpelier; and don’t you think it’s time we did it?” And I said, “Well, that sounds kind of like fun.” And we went down there and I walked into Monticello and it was like I walked into Mr. Jefferson’s mind…

 

Mohler: Yes, I love the feeing…

Magnet: I knew him and I thought, “I have to write about this, I have to write about this.” And then I played this tiny role in the restoration of Hamilton Grange which is just up the street from where I live in New York and I was trying to raise money for the restoration and went to see one of my tycoon friends who said, “sure, I’ll help out, but what you could do is write about it and publicize it.” So I wrote another piece about a founder as his home and I thought, “gee, here’s two of them, I guess there’s a book and it’s a book that will answer a question which has been bothering me for a very long time which is: Where did we start from and how did we get from there to here?”

 

Mohler: Well, I found the book absolutely fascinating and, Mr. Magnet, the only thing I would suggest is that your work isn’t complete and your journey isn’t finished until you go see Homewood in Baltimore, the home of Charles Carroll, you’ll enjoy that one too.

 

Magnet: Yes sir.

 

Mohler: Well, God bless you, sir. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.

 

Magnet: Thank you, sir. It is such a pleasure.

 

Mohler: Myron Magnet’s new book, The Founders at Home, will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the American founding era, in the intellectual moment of the eighteenth century, and in the men who largely shaped that story in terms of serving as those who would found the American experiment in ordered liberty. But they weren’t just men, they were men and women, husbands and wives, they were sons and daughters, and the domestic context of the American founding era is something that has received much too little attention and that’s why Myron Magnet’s book is not only so interesting, but so important. It arrives at a time when many Americans are thinking in an entirely new way about the domestic realities of our own time and yet, here we have a very subtle, but ever clear affirmation of the importance of family, of husbands and wives and their children, of the establishments of families and the nurturing of those relationships, of the joys these founders had in their own homes with their wives and their children, and, as is the case in every family, there were vexations and joys mixed together. There were hopes and dreams, there were moments of joy and there were also moments of great sadness as was especially the factor in this founding era. There were so many children who did not live to adulthood or even to adolescence.

There are so many issues that Myron Magnet brings to our attention as I enjoyed raising in conversation with him. The fact that so may of these founders had their founding philosophies and convictions arise in their youth, indeed in their boyhoods and in their adolescence. You have William Livingston going to Yale at age 13 and revising John Locke’s understanding of liberty. You have George Washington losing his father at age 11, later remembering it even it as age 10, as Magnet says, “demonstrating just how traumatic the loss of his father was to young George Washington.” You have George Washington attaching himself to his older brother, his brother becoming as a surrogate father to him, and then you have George Washington coming into his own at a very young age. First of all as a surveyor, and then as a great army leader, eventually a great officer and a general.

You also have a frank depiction in this book, The Founders at Home, of the relationships between and among these Founders. After all, he separates the book into those who were the fire-brands and the Federalists and the Republicans, and to mention the Federalists and the Republicans is to mention two alternative understandings of how the American experiment in ordered liberty was to be organized. He also points to the reality of George Washington, that indispensable man who was President, found it far easier to demonstrate what the presidency was than to actually bring together his own warring cabinet over so many of the domestic issues of the day. Politics is a constant in terms of American life. Aristotle was right about life, we are political animals, but we are more than that and Myron Magnet helps us to understand why we are more than that and we are the beneficiaries of the vision that he helps us to see in his book, The Founders at Home: The Building of America 1735-1817.

I think there’s another issue that bears our attention here. So many academic historians have looked at the same people, looked at the same time, looked at the same founding era of the United States and seen less, less than Myron Magnet saw in looking at this domestic perspective into their lives. That is not to depreciate the academic study of history. It is to say that sometimes, it takes someone outside the guild to see questions that have not been asked and to bring something as subtle as this domestic perspective to our understanding of the founders. As we understand worldviews of crucial importance, and in the telling of this story, we see the worldviews of these crucial individuals on the world scene and in our national history come together, and we are the beneficiaries of the revolution they led, the revolution they won, the revolution they shaped, and the revolution, as Adams said, “was borne in the heart long before it was won on the battlefield.”

Well, like every good book, The Founders at Home continues a conversation. It’s a conversation I’ve enjoyed having with its author, Myron Magnet. It’s a conversation I hope will continue as you think about these issues on your own and as future authors and historians decide to come back to this era to consider some of the same questions and to tell us even more.

Many thanks to my guest, Myron Magnet, for thinking with me today. Before I close I want to invite you to join us on the campus of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on June 23 to 26 or June 30 through July the 3rd for the 2014 D3 Youth Conference. Designed to develop student’s understanding of leadership, worldview, and missions, D3 will set the foundation for discipleship and will forge friendships of likeminded Christian young people. For more information, go to events.sbts.edu.

Thanks for joining me for Thinking in Public, until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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At Home With The Founders – A Conversation on the American Experiment with Myron Magnet

Myron Magnet was the editor of City Journal from 1994 through 2006, and he is now the magazine’s editor-at-large. A former member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008. Magnet has written about a wide variety of topics, from American society and social policy, economics, and corporate management to intellectual history, literature, architecture, and the American Founding. His latest book is “The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817.”

The Briefing 03-31-14

1) How can there be such high rates of religious belief and such poor rates of religious faithfulness?

The Christian Penumbra, New York Times (Ross Douthat)

2) Demographics point us to reality world is changing, and we better pay attention

Smallville, USA, Fades Further, Wall Street Journal (Neil Shah)

3)Distortions in Noah Movie: The Bible is quite capable of telling it’s own story

Drowning in Distortion – Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, AlbertMohler.com

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 03-31-14

The Briefing

 

 March 31, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, March 31, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Once again, columnist Ross Douthat of The New York Times offers an analysis that simply compels our attention. The title of his article in Sunday’s edition of that newspaper is this: “The Christian Penumbra.” The word penumbra is perhaps seldom used these days. It refers to the fact that around a given thing is often a lesser form of the same thing. The image is often used of light. Around a strong light there is a dimmer form of that light. It is looking like the same thing, but it is not actually the same thing. That’s why he used the word in this column. As he writes:

 

Here is a seeming paradox of American life. One the one hand, there is a broad social-science correlation between religious faith and various social goods — health and happiness, upward mobility, social trust, charitable work and civic participation.

 

Yet at the same time, some of the most religious areas of the country — the Bible Belt, the deepest South — struggle mightily with poverty, poor health, political corruption and social disarray.

 

But those words are simply his introduction to the issue. The following paragraph states his case:

 

Part of this paradox can be resolved by looking at nonreligious variables like race. But part of it reflects an important fact about religion in America: The social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief. And where practice ceases or diminishes, in what you might call America’s “Christian penumbra,” the remaining residue of religion can be socially damaging instead.

 

This is a profoundly important article and it offers a very important analysis. The issue is this: social science research increasingly demonstrates that there are social pathologies, such as rates of poverty, rates of social injustice, rates of divorce and marriage breakup, rates of cohabitation and children born out of wedlock, in regions in the country that simultaneously register the highest levels of religious belief. This appears to be a contradictory reality. How can there be such high rates of religious belief and such poor rates of religious faithfulness, to put the matter bluntly? Ross Douthat helps us in offering this article because he writes about a religion that is predominantly influenced by American evangelical Christianity, and, though he identifies as a confessing Christian, he is himself is not an evangelical. In other words, he’s in a better position to write about this than someone who is an evangelical. He is not writing as an insider to the movement, but rather as one who is observing this contradiction and trying to determine what is actually going on here.

 

And, in terms of what is going on here, Ross Douthat gets to the point in that key paragraph. As he writes, “The social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief.” Now that states something that evangelical Christians should understand immediately. What Ross Douthat here cites from social science research as the so-called “goods of faith,” are what we might call “the fruits of faithfulness.” In other words, our understanding of the Christian life drawn from Scripture is that obedience to Christ brings about many things, good things for us, including what is defined here as social goods. In other words, a good in terms of how we build society and how we enhance and enrich our own lives: goods such as marriage and faithfulness in marriage; goods such as success in raising children based in the fact that these children are born within the covenant of marriage. In other words, to put the matter bluntly, it means not becoming a statistic of social science, not joining into one of the social pathologies.

 

In making his case in this essay, Ross Douthat cites sociologist Charles Stokes, who has pointed out through his research that practicing conservative Protestants have much lower divorce rates and practicing believers generally divorce less frequently than either the secular or the unaffiliated in the same community. But the lukewarmly religious are, as Stokes points out, a very different matter. What he calls nominal conservative Protestants, who attend church less than a twice a month, actually have higher divorce rates even than the non-religious, and, as Douthat writes, you can find similar patterns with other indicators—out-of-wedlock births, for instance—are rarer among religiously engaged evangelical Christians, but nominal evangelicals are a very different story. He then goes on to suggest we probably do know why this is the case. After all, one of our most basic biblical instincts is to understand that a nominal faith is sometimes worse than no faith at all. He writes:

 

It isn’t hard to see places in American life where these patterns could be at work. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics, for instance. Or among second-generation Hispanic immigrants who have drifted from their ancestral Catholicism. Or in African-American communities where the church is respected as an institution without attracting many young men on Sunday morning.

 

As Douthat points out, all three of these populations would identify to a pollster or a social scientist as religiously-affiliated. They would do so for one reason or another and they probably consider themselves religiously-affiliated, but in terms of religious participation and actual patterns of faithfulness according to their convictions and beliefs, there are few if any.

 

Douthat then writes this:

 

For believers, meanwhile, the Christian penumbra’s pathologies could just be seen as a kind of theological vindication — proof, perhaps, of the New Testament admonition that it’s much worse to be lukewarm than hot or cold.

 

Well, indeed, that is exactly what should come to our minds and, furthermore, we should understand that the idea of being a nominal Christian is something that simply isn’t found in the Scripture. It is actually antithetical to the gospel, and we need to recognize—and we must recognize this quickly—that many forms of so-called cultural Christianity actually do not serve to lead people into the Christian faith and deeper levels of confessing faithfulness, but, rather, they vaccinate people into thinking that they actually are Christians when in biblical terms, in gospel terms, they profoundly are not. Douthat writes:

 

Among religious conservatives, not surprisingly, the hope is that traditional forms of faith — if left to build, or re-build, without being constantly disfavored, pressured and policed — can make a kind of comeback, and fill part of the void their own decline has left.

 

That’s exactly the case. He writes there with incredible perception. That is exactly what many of us are trying to do, especially gospel-minded evangelicals, through our churches. He then warns, though:

 

On the secular side, though, there’s a sense that there’s a better way — that a more expansive state can offer many of the benefits associated with a religious community, but in a more enlightened, tolerant, individual-respecting form. And if delivering these benefits requires co-opting or constraining religious actors — be they charities and schools or business owners — well, that’s either a straightforward win-win, or a relatively modest price to pay.

 

He’s even more perceptive in that paragraph. Douthat actually lives and operates in the world he here describes; a world, especially on the cultural left, that sees liberation from Christianity in particular as a great human gain. Furthermore, they sincerely have confidence that the state, the political state, rather than the church can actually begin to fill the needs that are left by an eclipsing Christianity and do something about these social pathologies. Of course, as study after study has demonstrated, even though government can do something—and government does have a God-ordained role—it cannot fill the void left by an eclipsed church or a disappearing family. Neither the church nor the family, in terms of roles and responsibilities, can be replaced by the state; no matter how expansive it may become or how much money it may gain for itself. It simply lacks the ability to do what the church and the family are assigned to do.

 

From an evangelical perspective, the most important aspect of Ross Douthat’s very important column is the fact that lukewarm religion, cultural Christianity or nominal Christianity, all should be seen not as doors that often lead to people entering into faithful, believing Christianity, but, rather, as a barrier, perhaps as I said before, a vaccination, that makes people think that they are Christians and, thus, miss the gospel altogether. And when they miss the gospel, they miss all that comes with the gospel. In this sense, the social science data tells us what we should profoundly always know: you cannot expect non-Christians to live as faithful Christians.

 

Before leaving Ross Douthat’s article, I do want to point out one other issue he raised within this essay. That is his use of the term “identity politics.” We need to acknowledge, we need to understand that for many people in the United States, when they say they are Christians, they’re not making a theological statement at all. They’re making an identity statement, and that identity statement is often laden with political agenda; in other words, identity politics. We better be the people who are so gospel minded that we never confuse identify politics with Christian identity.

 

We often hear the expression that demographics is destiny. That’s an overstatement to be sure, but it is still a statement that points to a fundamentally true reality. That’s this: demographics do point us to the reality that the world is changing and we had better pay attention to those changes. And those changes are not only matters of statistical information, population shifts, and all the rest, they point to changes in the way human beings live. And if you love human beings and wish to reach them with the gospel, if you care about how they live together, and if you care about the fate of them individually and in community, you have to pay attention to this kind of demographic data. That’s why Thursday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal should have our attention in an article by Neil Shah entitled “Smallville, USA, Fades Further.” The article refers to data from the Census Bureau that became available last Thursday, and it revealed that nearly 60% of America’s rural counties shrank in population in just the last year. That’s up from 50% of rural counties that lost population in 2009 and 40% in the 1990s. As Shah writes:

 

In all, almost eight in 10 of the counties that lost population over the past three years were outside of metropolitan areas.

 

Rural America—which encompasses roughly three-quarters of the nation’s landmass—has seen slower population growth for a decade, as more young people move to urban and suburban areas for jobs and even aging retirees seek out more-populated places to live.

 

Neil Shah’s article is another important indicator of the future direction of our society, but as it looks backwards to demographic data, it actually points to the present and tells us what we should be seeing right now as we look at North America, as we look at the United States, as we look at our mission field here. Rural America is declining in population. As he writes, it has experienced slower population growth. But the statistics actually indicate it’s not just a slower growth, it is an exorable decline. There is a net reduction in population in eight of ten of America’s rural counties. He writes, “The population decline from pockets of Midwestern states such as Iowa, Illinois and Kansas comes at a time of rapid expansion elsewhere.” The population loss is especially acute in America’s farm belt. But not just in the Midwest and the Great Plains, but now reaching into Western Pennsylvania, Western New York, and some of the industrial areas in the rural countries closer to northern cities such as Detroit and Toledo.

 

In other words, this is becoming a matter that isn’t geographically-destined by region, as in Northeast or Southwest, but rather by the distinction between more metropolitan and more rural areas within the United States. Now let’s keep in mind the fact that at the opening of the 20th century, seven out of ten Americans lived in a farm community and not in a city, and, yet, by the time we get to the end of the 20th century, a majority of Americans lived in metropolitan areas for the first time. Now we see that that pattern is becoming even more extreme. The urgencies here are becoming even more acute. There are rural counties that are losing the ability to have school systems and hospitals. The evacuation of people, especially young people, from these counties has been accelerating in recent years. But the new data, coming from the Census Bureau, indicates that even as death rates are continuing to grow in these areas—in many of these counties death rates outstrip birth rates—but an increasing number of Americans at retirement age and beyond are also deciding to leave rural America and to move to more metropolitan settings. Part of this is so that they can be near the younger members of their own family, part of this is so that they can be near social services and medical care, and part of it is just because there are fewer compelling reasons for many people to stay in more rural areas in the United States.

 

As Neil Shah writes in this article, one of the things that has clearly accelerated this pattern is the fact that Americans continue to have fewer babies. He writes, “The number of births in the [United States] last year [that’s 2011, as measured by this report from the Census Bureau] exceeded deaths by the smallest margin in 35 years.” On the other end of the age spectrum, it is also very telling that the Census Bureau reports that the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the entire United States last year was The Villages, a retirement community in Central Florida.

 

We should note that these demographic changes point to massive cultural and moral changes as well. There’s a great distinction between the experience of growing up on a farm or in rural America in a rather intact and insular community and, on the other hand, growing up in one of the vast megacities in America or even one of the fast-growing metropolitan areas that isn’t a megacity. We’re looking at a change in the way Americans live and we’re looking at a change in the way Americans expect to live. One of the things that comes through loudly and clearly in this data is that it is inconceivable that there could be any major change that would reverse these patterns in the near future. This appears to be the pointer toward the shape of America for the next generation and beyond.

 

Writing in USA Today on the same information from the Census Bureau, reporters Greg Toppo and Paul Overberg point to another issue that is underlined in this research. The delay of marriage among young people is also leading to very significant demographic consequences, including the acceleration of moving to and staying in metropolitan areas. Younger people in America are moving to these metropolitan areas in order to get jobs and perhaps because they also aspire to live in a metropolitan environment. But reversing the trends that took place in previous generations, they’re not moving to the suburbs after they get married and have children because, to put the matter bluntly, they’re often not getting married and not having children.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, that is a far larger issue than the impact of demographic change. That refers to a moral change; a moral change that is both effected by and then, in return, affects the way Americans live, the shape of American’s lives, the contours of American character. The experience of getting married and having children brings about profound changes in the lives of an individual. Society after society has demonstrated the understanding that those particular experiences bring social stability and social cohesion, a great sense of responsibility on the part of young people as they move into the comprehensive duties of adulthood. When they fail to move into those comprehensive duties, there are vast changes in their lives as well as in the society at large, and we’re beginning to see some of them now. And they show up in the strangest places, such as in the information that comes in the cold statistical format of the US Census Bureau.

 

Finally, at my website at albertmohler.com, this morning I published a massive article (about 2,500 words) entitled “Drowning in Distortion—Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah.’” I can’t deal with the entire issue here, but on last Friday’s edition of The Briefing, I pointed out that the main thing that we should learn from this controversy is that the Bible’s quite capable of telling its own story. As a matter of fact, it tells its own story infinitely better than anyone or anything else, including and especially Hollywood. I was familiar with much of the controversy about the film and had read just about every informed essay that I had seen, but on Saturday night, I went to see the movie. And, having seen it, I came to a different conclusion than I expected. I expected to be both entertained and irked by the movie. I knew from many of the things that had been written about it that Darren Aronofsky took several significant liberties with the biblical text. That’s problematic enough, but almost any film, expanding out the bare structure of a biblical story, is going to have to invent something in terms of the expansion of the narrative and especially the creation of dialogue. But when I saw the film, I wasn’t irked; I was deeply distressed. There’s much in the film to respect, in terms of the way Aronofsky tells a story. He’s quite a skilled moviemaker and cinematography is clearly his heart, but when it comes to the story of Noah, he doesn’t just add to the story; he fundamentally distorts the story. He turns Noah into a sociopath and as he is on the ark, you see a different Noah than is in any sense revealed in Scripture. Furthermore, he puts in the mind of Noah certain issues that are in the Bible clearly ascribed to the mind of God. This is a fundamental problem.

 

There are other problems with the movie—most of them are rather minor compared to these—and yet there are huge distortions of the story. The huge distortions are the problem. He distorts the character of God and the character of Noah. He fundamentally changes the story into something it isn’t in the Bible. And, no, the problem isn’t that he includes the environmental theme—there are certainly elements in the Genesis account in chapters six through nine—but those elements are not the point of the story. Totally lacking from Aronofsky’s movie is the understanding of the function of Noah and the Noah narrative within the Old Testament. Missing entirely is the understanding of the covenant made by this covenant-making God.

 

Our best response as Christians isn’t outrage. Christians tend to get far too excited and far too exercised about the products of Hollywood. After all, let’s just remember, it is an entertainment industrial complex. It, however, is making a moral statement with this movie, a deeply theological statement, and everyone involved with it will be judged for that, as will be everyone who watches the movie. We’re judged by everything we read and by our response to it. Our responsibility is to think as Christians and I certainly hope that Christians think very Christianly when they see this movie or find themselves talking about it.

 

I go back to where I was on Friday. The big issue here is our responsibility to tell the Bible story, to let the Bible speak for itself, and to tell the story on its own terms. But perhaps the greatest lesson from this controversy in the movie over Noah is the realization that if we do not tell this story and tell it rightly and tell it truthfully, someone else will tell the story, and we’re generally not going to like the way they tell it. Again, that full essay, all of it, is found at albertmohler.com.

 

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

Drowning in Distortion — Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah”

My first experience teaching the Bible came when I was asked at the last minute to teach a Sunday School class of first-grade boys. I was only 16 years old, and I did not exactly volunteer to teach the class. I found myself telling a familiar Bible story to six-year olds and explaining it as best I could. There have been very few Sundays since when I have not taught or preached, usually to a congregation a bit less fidgety than my first.

You learn one thing fast when teaching the Bible to six-year-old boys — they often think they can “improve” on the story as found in the Bible. First-grade boys are big on special effects, blowing away bad guys, exploding just about anything, and what we might gently call “narrative overkill.”

That helps me to understand director Darren Aronofsky and his new film, Noah. Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel started with the Old Testament narrative about Noah, just about 2,400 words in English translation, and exploded it into a huge Hollywood production.

What could possibly go wrong?

Controversy about the movie erupted before the film hit the theaters. Three Muslim nations have banned the film and a number of evangelical figures registered concerns. Most of these concerns seemed to be about additions Aronofsky made to the narrative. Seeing the film after knowing of these concerns, I expected to be both entertained and irked. The actual viewing of the movie was an altogether different experience.

Evangelical Christians tend to be either too excited or too exercised about Hollywood. There is a periodic swing between giddy excitement that Hollywood has decided to make a movie about the Bible or a Christian theme and, on the other hand, barely restrained outrage that Hollywood has brought forth some new atrocity. Actually, most celebrations and consternations about Hollywood are overblown. The film industry is all about telling a story and selling movie tickets. There are artistic elements, worldview considerations, and moral dimensions to be sure, but Hollywood is, after all, an industry.

Believing that evangelical concerns about Noah were almost surely overblown, I went to see the movie. I was wrong. The concerns are not overblown. My response is not outrage, however, but deep concern – and part of my concern is that so many evangelicals are, in my view, focusing on the wrong issues.

Aronofsky, who has described himself as a “not-too-religious Jew,” is a skilled storyteller. His movies tend to be pretentious, but rarely boring. He has, to say the very least, added a very great deal to the Bible’s account of Noah in Genesis. In itself, that is not the problem.

As A. O. Scott, film reviewer for The New York Times commented, “The information supplied about Noah in the Book of Genesis is scant – barely enough for a Hollywood pitch meeting, much less a feature film.” Aronofsky told Rolling Stone magazine: “The film completely accepts the text, the four chapters in Genesis, as truth – just like if I was to adapt any book, I’d try to be as truthful to the original material as possible. It’s just that there’s only four chapters, as we had to turn it into a two-hour long narrative film. In the Bible, Noah doesn’t even speak. So of course we’ve got to dramatize the story.” Boy, did he dramatize it.

Before making that the issue, however, we had better note that evangelicals are not necessarily outraged to any degree when Hollywood (or anyone else) dramatizes the story, even adding non-biblical elements. There is no cold-hearted innkeeper in the Gospels, nor a donkey carrying the expectant Mary, but they make their way into countless movies made by and for Christians. There is neither a drummer boy nor a drum in the birth narratives of Christ, but no one seems to complain that the drummer boy appears. Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum.

Cecil B. DeMille added to Exodus to tell the story of the Ten Commandments, but that movie is loved by many evangelicals.

Why is Noah different?

Well, the problem is not that Aronofsky and Handel added to the Bible’s account. It is that they distort it to the uttermost, perhaps without even intending to do so. Since they knew that they had to “turn it into a two-hour feature movie,” they knew they had to invent a lot of material not found in the Bible. They may not have intended to distort the story as they did. Furthermore, Paramount Pictures had a big say in the final form of the film, much to Aronofsky’s frustration. The director and the corporation share responsibility for this movie.

The problem is not that the movie has to fill in any number of narrative gaps, or that Aronofsky used his imagination in so doing. His oddest characterization, by the way, may well be the “fallen angels” called the “watchers,” based rather loosely on the Nephilim found in Genesis 6:4. They appear in the film as giant figures made of something like rock and asphalt. They first appear as enemies of humankind, but one, speaking with the voice of Nick Nolte, protects Noah and convinces others to do likewise. They appear as mighty cartoon figures in the movie, but they really belong in a science fiction film.

In portraying the Nephilim this way, Aronofsky has not made these figures more strange than how the Bible describes them. The Bible actually presents them in even more bizarre terms. They are described as beings who were on the earth in those days, “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and bore children to them.” This appears to be an indication that rebellious angels had sexual intercourse with human women, who bore sons described as “the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” This understanding of the Nephilim seems to be affirmed in the New Testament in Jude, verses 6-7. Thankfully, this is not the Bible story I was assigned to teach those six-year-old boys many years ago.

There are big problems with how Aronofsky and Handel expand the narrative, even when we accept the fact that a film maker has to invent dialogue and embellish the narrative. Even as Aronofsky told Rolling Stone that he had tried “to be as truthful to the original material as possible,” he clearly decided to change key elements, rejecting the Bible’s account in some respects. He includes a wife for Shem on the boat, but when the ark begins its journey there are no wives for Ham and Japeth. Genesis states clearly that their wives were among the eight human beings who entered the ark. Aronofsky invents a scene in which a barely adolescent Noah witnesses the murder of his father, Lamech at the hands of the movie’s arch villain, Tubal-cain. Genesis makes that impossible. As a matter of fact, Aronofsky lifts Tubal-cain out of context in Genesis 4:22 as “the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron,” and puts him in the Noah narrative as Noah’s arch-rival, representing the line of Cain making war on the line of Shem. He even puts him on the ark, depicting Ham as his co-conspirator against Noah.

Aronofsky’s skill in cinematography and movie-making is clear. The visuals are often arresting and many of his narrative devices work brilliantly. Others are simply odd, like the suggestion that Methuselah would give Noah a hallucinogenic potion so that he can hallucinate God’s will. The list of odd elements would be very long.

But the odd elements are not the problem, the movie’s message is. Furthermore, the way that message distorts the Genesis account is a far larger problem when it becomes clear that the misrepresentation extends to the master narrative of the Bible – including the character of God.

Aronofsky presents the flood as the Creator’s judgment upon industrialization, urbanization, and ecological predation of humanity in the line of Cain. To be fair, there are elements of these themes in Genesis. But the Bible straightforwardly declares that the flood was God’s verdict on the sinfulness of humanity, seen in the wickedness and sinfulness that are described as “violence” and depicted, as in the tower of Babel narrative, as nothing less than idolatry. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continuously.” [Genesis 6:5]

In Noah, the existence of humanity is a blight upon the earth. Rather than suggesting that humans had misused and abused the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:28, human dominion is depicted as the fundamental problem. This leads to a horrifying anti-humanism in the movie that cannot be rescued by the (finally) rather hopeful conclusion, with Noah and his family depicted as placidly agrarian and vegetarian, restarting human civilization on a placid hillside. The covenant God made with Noah in Genesis 9 explicitly gives humanity animal flesh to eat, and the dominion and stewardship granted to humanity in Genesis 1:28 and re-set in Genesis 9:1-17 is a function of human beings made in God’s image. Image-bearing assigns dominion. The real question is what we will do with that dominion.

Aronofsky introduces Noah as a kind and caring family man, but his divine assignment turns the movie’s Noah into a sociopathic monster. At this point the movie veers into a radical distortion of the biblical account. Noah is now depicted as a madman ready to murder his own grandchildren in order to end humanity and rid creation of the human threat. This kind of distortion of the story is what led Christopher Orr of The Atlantic to refer to Aronofsky as “more Old Testament than the Old Testament itself.” The Old Testament, we might say, is Old Testament enough, on its own.

This not only misses the point of the Genesis narrative, it corrupts it. Aronofsky is telling a truly fascinating story in these segments of the film, but it is not the story of Noah as found in the Bible. Totally missing from the movie is the understanding that God is simultaneously judging and saving, ready to make a covenant with Noah that will turn the biblical narrative toward Abraham and the founding of Israel. God is spoken of in the movie, but he does not speak. He is identified only as “The Creator,” and he appears to be driven by an essentially ecological fervor. The entire context of covenant is completely absent.

God’s act of creation is both portrayed and celebrated as an act of divine glory and wonder, but Aronofsky cannot resist shaping the story to fit the theory of evolution, right down to the animation. The recasting of the creation narrative is not subtle.

The constant discussion of humanity as good or evil falls far short of the Bible’s treatment of sin. The problem is not that Aronofsky and Handel push an environmental message. There must surely be elements of that message in Genesis 6-9. The problem is their depiction of humanity as a blight upon the earth. The Genesis narrative clearly and consistently presents humans as divine image-bearers, though fallen. God’s purpose in the flood is not to destroy all humanity, but to begin anew with Noah as, in a sense, a new Adam. In this sense Noah and the ark function to point to what God will do for sinful humanity in accomplishing atonement for sin through the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

Genesis presents Noah as a faithful and obedient man. His obedience to God’s command is evident in Genesis 6:22 – “Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.” In Hebrews 11:7 we are told that Noah “in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household.” In doing so, “he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” In 2 Peter 2:5, Noah is described as “a preacher of righteousness.” In no biblical text is he presented as a murderous sociopath whose own moral judgment on the wickedness of humanity is in any way central to the story. The Bible presents God as the central actor in the story – not Noah.

More than anything else, the controversy over Noah should lead Christians to understand something that should be our natural instinct. We must recognize that the Bible tells its own story infinitely better than anyone else can tell it – Hollywood included. The Bible has suffered cinematic violence at the hands of its friends as well as its enemies. This is not to argue that the Bible is off-limits to Hollywood or that Christians, among others, should not make films and movies on biblical themes and narratives. It is to state, however, that no movie, book, story, song, or other narrative device can do what the Bible does on its own terms.

Hollywood knows that Christian families are a vast market. TIME published a major news report on the efforts undertaken by Aronofsky and Parmount Pictures to sell Noah to the Christian community. Similarly, USA Today reported on Hollywood’s new interest in the Christian audience. The writer of that report, Scott Bowles, quoted Jeffrey McCall, a professor of media studies at DePauw University: “Hollywood has the same corporate and relativist values it has had for many years . . . .  The producers have, however, identified a market that is underserved and won’t come to the movie theater to watch crazy violence and sex-drenched plots.”

We are given all that we need to know about Noah in the Bible – and we need every word of the Bible. We cannot expect Hollywood to tell that story for us, or even to tell the story well. Our response to Noah should not be castigation and cultural outrage, but rather a sober realization that the story is ours to tell, and to tell faithfully.

In a lengthy essay for The New Yorker, Tad Friend recounted Darren Aronofsky’s road to making Noah. The essay is not for the faint-hearted. In it, Aronofsky declares Noah to be “the least Biblical Biblical film ever made.”

We can’t say we weren’t warned. And yet, Aronofsky is almost surely far off the mark when he makes that statement. Noah is not the least biblical movie ever made about the Bible. There have been worse, and will be worse again. The movie is not without its brilliance and moments of penetrating insight. But it gets the story line wrong, indulges in eccentric exaggeration, and distorts the character of both Noah and God. That is what surprised me. I expected to be irritated by the movie – but I found myself grieved.

Oddly enough, the most important statement about the movie came at the conclusion of A. O. Scott’s review in The New York Times. The review, like most in the Times, ended with a statement about the movie’s rating, usually detailing the reason for the rating in terms of sex or violence (or both).

At the end of Scott’s review of Noah we find these words: “’Noah’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). “And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and only Noah remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.”

Scott’s point is clear enough – the Genesis account of Noah is messy and troubling and violent. Of course, it is filled with grace and mercy, too. The Bible tells us the story as we are to know it and tell it, and it is ours to tell. Again, the Bible is infinitely better at telling its own story than anyone or anything else, including and especially Hollywood. Perhaps the main lesson Christians are to learn from this movie is that if we do not tell the story, others will.

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

A. O. Scott, “Rain, Heavy at Times,” The New York Times, Friday, March 28, 2014.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/mov...

Tad Friend, “Heavy Weather: Darren Aronofsky Gets Biblical,” Monday, The New Yorker, March 17, 2014.  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/20... Bowles, “Box Office Runneth Over with Films for the Faithful,” USA Today, Wednesday, March 26, 2014.

Josh Sanburn, “Films Are His Flock,” TIME, Monday, March 31, 2014. http://time.com/31915/jonathan-bocks-...

Christopher Orr, “God’s Will vs. Man’s Will in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah,” The Atlantic, March 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainm...

Sean Collins, “Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical Blockbuster: The Genesis of Noah,” Rolling Stone, Monday, February 10, 2014.  http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/ne...

 

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 03-29-14

1) How should we understand the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit?”

2) Dr. Mohler, how do you study the Bible?

3) What is the difference between the types of apologetics and which do you favor?

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

“Suppressing the Truth in Unrighteousness: The Gospel of Christ Confronts the Conspiracy of the Ages” – Romans 1:16-32

“Suppressing the Truth in Unrighteousness: The Gospel of Christ Confronts the Conspiracy of the Ages” – Romans 1:16-32

Delivered at the 2014 Shepherds’ Conference. For more information, please visit ShepherdsConference.org

Transcript: The Briefing 03-28-14

The Briefing

 

 March 28, 2014

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

 

It’s Friday, March 28, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

We had sincerely hoped that the world was becoming a safer place, but as we have learned in recent days, in geopolitical terms, the world is actually becoming a more dangerous place, an ominously and threateningly more dangerous place. That was made abundantly clear when you look at the actions taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In recent days, he has stolen an entire strategic region of the world. He stole the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and he got away with it. On the geopolitical stage, he got away with what can only be described as grand larceny, but back on March 19 of this year, President Obama said, “What we’re going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to make sure that we’ve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message.” Well the coalition, we now understand, doesn’t exist and the clear message certainly has not been sent. Speaking this week in the European theater, the president was very clear in trying to say all the right things to President Putin and to our European allies about Ukraine. And, yet, as the president said the right things, President Putin is actually not listening or even if he’s listening, he’s not paying attention. He’s unconcerned with what President Obama says or President Obama thinks, and you can add to President Obama, the European nations as well.

 

Furthermore, he’s learned several very dangerous lessons (that is, President Putin) in recent days. He has learned that America understands, at least in terms of its president, that it is in a weaker and not a stronger position in the world. As David Sanger of The New York Times writes, “Mr. Obama acknowledges, at least in private, that he is managing an era of American retrenchment.” Sanger went on to write, “History suggests that such eras [of retrenchment]— akin to what the United States went through after the two world wars and Vietnam — often look like weakness to the rest of the world.” As the editors of The Weekly Standard said, “Retrenchment looks like weakness because it is weakness, and the consequences of such eras of weakness aren’t happy.” Well, indeed, they’re not. They’re not happy at all, but that’s the world we are now entering. We had thought, even in recent years, that we were living in a period of relative peace and that we were bequeathing to our children and our grandchildren an even safer and more stable world, but the world has not cooperated. Several incidents have brought this to our attention, but none more graphically than the grand larceny of Vladimir Putin and the fact that, even as he got away with stealing the Crimean Peninsula, he now threatens in a very real sense all of the Eastern region of Ukraine, perhaps the entire nation of Ukraine, and, as George Will warned in yesterday’s papers, perhaps even Poland as well. The geopolitical ambitions, the geographical ambitions of Vladimir Putin are not yet fully understood, but his aggression is itself clear. As many people around the world now recognize, a part of the problem is that America’s retrenchment, to use President Obama’s understanding, or our retreat in terms of power and influence has left a very nasty void, and as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the geopolitical scene. Someone will fill that void and Vladimir Putin intends to be, at least in terms of his theater of operations, the power that fills that void.

 

Speaking in Europe in recent days, President Obama has at least said the right things. Speaking to European leaders, he said, “We must not take for granted the progress made here in Europe. The contest of ideas continues. That’s what’s at stake in Ukraine.” The president is profoundly right that what is at stake is a battle of ideas, a contest of ideas: Western democracy over against Eastern autocracy. The kind of liberty that Americans understand and had hoped that was being recognized by other nations around the world and the denial of liberty in the name of nationalism that marks the leadership of Vladimir Putin. The president went on to say to the European leaders, “We live in a world where our ideals will be challenged again and again. We can’t count on others to meet those tests.” As The Financial Times of London reports, indeed, European leaders made clear by their own behavior that we can’t count on others to do this, to fill this void, to demonstrate to the aggressors of the world that they won’t get away with their aggression. But, as is becoming increasingly clear, we can’t even count on ourselves. President Obama is not part of the solution in so much of this, but rather part of the problem. He has sent a very uncertain sound and he has made the situation worse by saying things such as, “We will not accept such things as Putin’s annexation of Crimea,” but we have basically accepted and that’s the problem. The president has had the habit in this dangerous world of saying things that he hopes will deter aggression, but, as he has discovered, saying things doesn’t make them so. The president drew what he himself called “a red line” that Syrian President Bashar Assad must not cross. He did cross it using chemical weapons against his own people, and he too get away with it. Saying that something is unacceptable when you’re president of the United States and saying it in terms of the world diplomatic context used to mean that the president of the United States intended to do something to demonstrate that we were not accepting whatever the president said was unacceptable. Just think of someone like Teddy Roosevelt or, for that matter, not only George W. Bush, but Franklin Roosevelt or Richard Nixon or even Bill Clinton. But when President Obama says that something is unacceptable, the reality is people around the world know that the pattern is he will accept it.

 

In its editorial published in yesterday’s edition, The Wall Street Journal said that the lessons sent by the White House comes down to this: Mr. Putin can keep Crimea as long as he stops there. But then the editors asked, but why would he? The US and its allies had promised to exact a cost for his land-grab in Ukraine. Instead, the response has been anemic, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, and Mr. Putin can logically conclude that the price also wouldn’t be high for an incursion elsewhere in Ukraine or his continuing campaign to destabilize the new government in Kiev. As the editors say, the message that Kiev will understand in all this is: You’re on your own. And, indeed, they are on their own.

 

What we’re looking at here are some very serious and real constraints on American power, but when it comes to American influence, this is where the president of the United States seems not to understand just how dangerous the world is and, furthermore, how unpersuaded aggressors of the world are by his words and his rationality. The fact is, as President Woodrow Wilson understood during and after World War I, rationality has its limits when you’re arguing with aggressors. Aggressors, as it turns out, are impervious to Western rationality, to moral logic. They crossed those bridges long ago, and when they crossed them, they burned them.

 

By the way, Thursday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal had a business story that makes a very similar point and it’s very much filled with worldview implications. William Boston, writing for the business pages of The Wall Street Journal, writes about the CEO of Siemens AG. That’s a major European Corporation. The leader of Siemens went to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin, and, remember, this is a business based in Europe supposedly standing for democracy. But as Boston writes:

 

Siemens AG Chief Executive Joe Kaeser met Mr. Putin at his official residence outside Moscow on Wednesday. The men posed for the cameras and talked up Germany and Russia’s special economic relationship. Siemens began conducting business in Russia 161 years ago, when it built the czar’s telegraph network.

 

The leader of Siemens AG, the CEO John Kaeser, said:

 

Siemens has been present in Russia since 1853—a presence that has survived many highs and lows. We want to maintain the conversation even in today’s politically difficult times.

 

In other words, the CEO of this major German-based corporation went to Russia to say, Come whatever, come war, come peace, come Putin the aggressor or Putin the peacemaker, it doesn’t matter. We want to do business with you. We did business with the czars back over 160 years ago. The czars were autocratic, cutting off the heads of serfs and taking their policy. The czars were themselves notoriously evil, taking the property of peasants and executing people with impunity. Vladimir Putin annexes Crimea—no problem, says this capitalist, we’ll simply make sure our business continues. As he said, “We want to maintain the conversation even in today’s politically difficult times.”

 

In a fallen world, our economic issues are very revealing. The economic incentives for doing business with Russia are not going to keep many European companies and, perhaps, many American companies as well away from the moral problem of doing business with a dictator. It is often said that the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin said that when the time comes to hang the capitalists, the capitalists will actually negotiate and bargain over who gets to sell the rope. It isn’t actually historically verifiable that Lenin said any such thing, but it sounds like him and, furthermore, the point that is made in the aphorism seems to be hauntingly true. And one of the things we need to recognize when we think about living in this fallen world, a world that is explained only by Genesis 3, not only in terms of the individuals who make it up, but the geopolitical realities we read about in the headlines, the one thing that becomes clear is this: every part of our society, every part of our lives, every dimension of our society is affected by sin. That gets down to the economy as well, where there are people who are right now lining up to do business with Vladimir Putin, perhaps hoping even to take the places of those who might not do business because of moral scruples. It reveals a great deal. It reveals a part of why it is so dangerous to live in this world because the dangers are more subtle and more numerous and all the more threatening than we often want to think they are.

 

Speaking of living in a dangerous world, a very ominous news report came out on the front page of yesterday’s edition of USA Today. The reporter is Mahi Ramakrishnan, and as he reports:

 

The pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet is believed to be solely responsible for the flight being taken hundreds of miles off course and there is no evidence of a mechanical failure or hijacking by a passenger, according to an law enforcement official involved in the investigation.

 

A high-ranking officer attached to a special investigative branch of the Malaysia police force told USA Today on Wednesday that investigators are pressing relatives of the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, for information on his behavior leading up to the March 8 flight.

 

This is one of those stories that tells us of just how much evil can be concentrated in one single individual. This affirms the importance of the morality of human action and the fact that so many incidents in this world are only explained by the actions of human actors, the sinful actions of human moral agents. This also points to the moral context of the disappearance of this jetliner. As it turns out, at least according to this investigator, the reality is that this isn’t something that happened to this plane. It isn’t something that merely happened to the 239 souls aboard. One of those souls aboard, the captain of the airliner, is now suspected of committing suicide and mass murder by diverting the plane from its path and leading to its eventual crash in one of the most remote spots on earth—in the Indian Ocean.

 

Even as that was reported, other reports were coming that satellite images from France and China and other nations have revealed over 300 different items floating on the surface of the Indian Ocean, but cyclonic winds and other currents have so distributed these materials that even if they are discovered to have come from the Malaysian airliner, it may give no indication whatsoever of where the rest of the plane may be, certainly now, on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

 

One of the things the becomes clear here is not only the limits of human rationality and human research, the limits of human technology, the limits of our own investigative ability, but we also come to terms with the fact that there are parts of this planet—not just outer space, but of this planet we inhabit—that are so remote and so unknown to us that it is almost impossible now to believe that there will be any intellectually and morally satisfying end to this investigation. It’s hard to believe that the plane will ever now be found in any reasonable amount of time, and it’s going to be something that will test to those who have lost loved ones on this plane. It will add injury to the great hurt and grief of their loss, and that points out the fact that, again, as we are made in the image of God, God made us rational creatures and our rationality cries out for the demand of an answer. We want to know why, but one of the most haunting and painful realizations of our human existence in this fallen world is that sometimes we actually never get the answer to that haunting question why.

 

There’s a great deal of conversation in this country about the release this weekend of the new film entitled Noah. It’s by director Darren Aronofsky and it’s getting a lot of attention not so much because of how it tells the story of Noah, but by how it mistells that story. Russell Crowe is starring in the movie and it tells the story of Noah, but it’s not the story of Noah so much as is found in the book of Genesis, but the story of Noah as it was envisioned by Darren Aronofsky, who, in terms of a paraphrase, said that this movie is going to be the least biblical, biblical movie ever made.

 

There are a lot of problems with this movie. The way it tells the story is actually, well, it’s explained by the fact that if you’re going to make a movie about Noah as Noah is actually described along with the narrative about him in the historical events in the book of Genesis, there isn’t enough there for a major motion picture. The Bible gives us all we need to know about Noah, all we need to know about God’s judgment, all we need to about the ark and God’s purpose in Noah and his descendants, all we need to know about the Noahic covenant (that is the covenant that God made with Noah), but we are not given the kind of dialogue that you will have to have in a movie. We’re not given the details and, furthermore, in the Scripture, we do not find many of the interpersonal dynamics, not to mention the big world conflicts, that’s supposedly are necessary for telling a Hollywood epic. And Darren Aronofsky isn’t deterred by that. He’s filled in the gaps with his own version of the story, a narrative that mixes ecological concerns and animal rights with a retelling of the story that involves conflict and themes that are not found in the biblical narrative.

 

Now one of the interesting parts of this controversy is that many Christians are debating whether or not the film should have been made since it isn’t true to the Bible, but what’s even more interesting is how many Christians were involved in some sense with the movie, at least early on, and have been champions of the movie, suggesting that Christians should not only go, but should take others to see the movie as well. What we have here is a basic conflict about how to understand the entertainment industry and Hollywood as a subset of that. Christians, I would argue, tend to get far too excited about some things and far too disappointed in others. When it comes to telling stories from the Bible, I need to point out emphatically that the Bible is infinitely better at telling its own story than anyone else, including and especially Hollywood. One of the things this controversy makes clear is that many Christians need to think far more deeply and seriously about our engagement with the products, that is the consumer products, of an entertainment culture and Hollywood is a subset of that culture. Christians often get far too excited about some products and then far too concerned and worried about others, but we need to point out very emphatically that when you’re thinking about Hollywood, we need to keep in mind one fact, one central fact, and keep this ever in our focus. When it comes to telling the story of the Bible, the Bible is infinitely better at telling its own story than anyone in Hollywood, and, furthermore, we need to recognize that Hollywood, at its best or its worst, is always a commercial enterprise and that’s very clear too.

 

That was made very, very clear in an article that appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek on the fact that Hollywood is increasingly discovering Christians and those who are interested in Christianity or a part of the larger culture of cultural Christianity who will buy tickets to go and see these movies. And so even as this movie may be, as its own director states, the least biblical, biblical movie ever made, they’re trying to sell it to Christians as far more biblical than it actually is. Scott Bowles, writing in USA Today, also reveals this fact. He cites Jeffrey McCall, a professor of media studies at DePaul University in Greencastle, Indiana, who said:

 

Hollywood has the same corporate and relativist values it has had for many years. The producers have, however, identified a market that is underserved and won’t come to the movie theater to watch crazy violence and sex-drenched pots.

 

Well, it will be interesting to see how the Christian community responds to Noah and to many other movies that are now going to be marketed to Christians, but what we must recognizes is this: we cannot count on Hollywood to tell the story that is ours to tell; the story that the Bible tells infinitely better than anyone else can tell it. And if people are looking for the story to be different than what is found in the Bible, then they’re not actually looking for the Bible story, but for a story of their own imaginative invention. We are well warned by a director who said of this product, this movie is the least biblical, biblical movie ever made. If he’s saying that before we see the movie, we can only imagine what we’ll think once we’ve seen it.

 

On the other hand, we need to point out that as our friends and neighbors may be seeing this movie, it does give us an opportunity if nothing else to set the record straight. Oh, and as we’re setting the record straight, let’s set it straight in terms of the biblical metanarrative. And that is the reminder that the Noah account, the historical facts related to Noah and the universal flood that took place and the salvation that was pictured in the ark, that all this points to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the Noahic covenant points to the shift within the book of Genesis from dealing with humanity at large to dealing with what would become the nation of Israel. This is a very important historical chapter not only for the book of Genesis and the Bible, but in human history. It’s a good thing, at least, that many in our culture will be talking about it. Let’s help them to talk about it in ways that are most biblical and that get to the gospel. After all, that’s our point. Let’s keep that in mind.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember tomorrow’s release of another edition of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Remember to call with your question in your voice. Just give us a call at 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I’m speaking to you from Albany, New York. Today, I’ll be delivering lectures at Mid-American Baptist Theological Seminary’s New York Campus. Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking to the Northeastern Regional Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, also meeting here in the Albany area. Perhaps, I’ll have the opportunity to see some of you there. I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.