R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 370

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

Thinking in Public with Stanley Hauerwas

April 21, 2012

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

Hauerwas:       Thanks again.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Transcript: The Briefing 04-28-14

The Briefing

 

 April 28, 2014

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

 

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

 

The biggest news over the weekend was the canonization of two popes as saints. The ceremony took place before Saint Peter’s Basilica there at the Vatican with a crowd estimated to be numbered at almost one million people, and, of course, the great interest in that occasion was the fact that for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, two former popes were to be canonized. Canonization is the official declaration of the fact that one is a saint universally for the Roman Catholic Church and, in this case, the two saints are two former popes, two of the major popes of the twentieth century. And in observance were two popes: now Pope Francis I who presided over the ceremony and his predecessor, the first retired pope of modern centuries, Benedict XVI. So in a way that added to the drama, there were actually four popes who were involved in the ceremony yesterday at the Vatican: two living popes and two dead popes.

 

It was the two deceased popes who were canonized as saints. They were Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II. By any estimation, they were two of the most significant popes of the twentieth century. It was Pope John XXIII, formerly an Italian cardinal, who became pope and called what became known as the Second Vatican Council, the major theological council of the church that did not end before his death, but, nonetheless, Pope John XXIII became credited with the great turn in a more progressive or liberal direction in the 1960s. In many ways, this was seen as the great turning point for the Roman Catholic Church in embracing modernity. Prior to the calling of the Second Vatican Council and its deliberations, the Roman Catholic Church had been seen as steadfastly opposed to almost all the major intellectual currents of the modern age, in particular of modernity, in the wake of the Enlightenment. But the Vatican II Council changed all of that and John XXIII, a jovial man often seen with a smile, was credited with being the liberalizing force behind it. The theme of the Second Vatican Council was aggiornamento, the Italian word for change, and that council did bring radical change to the Roman Catholic Church.

 

The other pope canonized yesterday was Pope John Paul II, the Polish pope. Prior to his elevation to the papacy, he had been a cardinal in Poland and he had served as a cardinal in that land during the worst years of oppression under communist regimes. And what we saw in John Paul II was a Catholic response to the liberalizing trends of Vatican II. Now it is not fair to say that these two popes, canonized yesterday, simply reflect, first, John Paul II as a conservative and John XXIII as a liberal, but there is a sense in which this was clearly the political dynamic at work. Evidence for this is seen in the fact that the canonization process, the process of making John Paul II a saint, was rushed, especially considering the fact that John XXIII died in 1963 and he was canonized at the same time that John Paul II was canonized, and John Paul II died in 2005. In other words, the deaths of the two popes, who were both canonized simultaneously yesterday, was more than forty years. And Vatican observers and people outside Catholic circles as well pointed to the fact that at least there was plausibility to the claim that the Vatican was in some sense leveling the field as they were canonizing a progressive pope and a more conservative pope.

 

Those, on the other hand, who look more carefully at the theological dynamic of the Roman Catholic Church would know that as John Paul II was clearly a defender of the objectivity of truth and even as he entered the culture wars of 1980s and 90s and beyond, especially defending the sanctity of life against what he called the culture of death and defending the family against its many threats and encroachments during his pontificate, but as one looked more carefully at the actual dogmatic theology, the theological construction and contribution of John Paul II, he was not so conservative as many credited him as being. As a matter of fact, he was himself in a very real sense a loyal son of Vatican II, the very council called by that other pope canonized yesterday, the one recognized as being more liberal, John XXIII.

 

Now as those who look at the Vatican count popes, it was clear that the pope who was between John and John Paul II, that is, Pope Paul VI, was understood as being much more conservative. As a matter of fact, when Catholics think about an issue as controversial as birth control, you’ll recall that Humanae Vitae, that was the encyclical that condemned for Catholics the use of all artificial birth control, came during the pontificate of Paul VI. Many liberal Catholics hold out the idea, or perhaps the mythology, that had John XXIII survived and if he had been the pope who was alive when that declaration was made, it may well have been very different. We’ll never know.

 

In the meantime, the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday canonized two popes, and they canonized these two popes as saints. And in so doing, the Roman Catholic Church put forth a vivid picture of the great theological distinction between Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. As The Washington Post reported, it was about 700,000 persons at least who gathered there into Saint Peter’s Square for the observance. And, by the way, there’s a great deal of Polish pride in this. At least 1,700 different buses have been chartered from Poland and as well as special trains sent from Poland to Rome. But the key issue here is that these two men were elevated by the declaration of the Roman Catholic Church to be saints of the church. This followed a rather lengthy process, but not as lengthy as usual in the case of John Paul II. As Reuters reports, the process that can lead to sainthood, known as a cause, cannot usually start until five years after a person’s death, but given the sentiment for John Paul II after his death, even during his funeral ceremonies and services, there were calls for there to be an elimination or a suspension of that five-year waiting period. And his successor Benedict XVI did, indeed, wave that requirement. The process for canonization began almost immediately. In the early years of the church, a saint could be declared by the people simply by popular veneration or by cardinals or even by a papal decree, but today there’s an official Vatican department that studies sainthood. It is known as the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints.

 

Now, by the way, that particular congregation or department of the Vatican goes back to the year 1588, but the modern system for selecting saints to be canonized by the church involves several steps. First of all, one is declared to be a servant of God. Then, after initial investigation showed that a candidate for sainthood lived what is identified as a life of heroic virtues, that individual is given the title venerable. After that, there are lengthy investigations of the subject’s life, but mere virtue or theological contribution or historical significance or pastoral ministry is not enough. What is necessary at this stage is a miracle; a miracle that is attributed to the intercession or at least the action of the individual nominated to become a saint. Miracles are not necessary, by the way, if the person to be considered is a martyr, someone killed in what the church calls “hatred of the faith.” Usually, the kind of miracle that the church is looking for here is an inexplicable medical healing. As Reuters explains, “A medical commission appointed by the Vatican determines if there was any medical explanation for the healing or not.” After one miracle has been certified, the individual can be beatified or known as the blessing. After that, there must be a second miracle and this miracle has to be directly attributed to the fact that there was some intercession to this person after their death that led to a second certifiable miracle. Only at that point can there be a canonization.

 

The role of the saints is an essential point of distinction between Roman Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. The Bible says nothing about any kind of prayers ever being made in the name of someone who is dead. There is never any kind of intercession that is even hinted at in Scripture about someone who is deceased. The main point of distinction between evangelicals and Roman Catholics on the issue of the saints is not whether or not saints exist—of course, saints exist; they’re referenced in Scripture—but who are the saints? Evangelicals, basing their position solely on Scripture, believe that the saints are those who believe in Christ. They are the redeemed. They are the redeemed who are both living and dead. And yet there is no sense ever even hinted at in Scripture that the saints who are now living are to call upon saints who are dead for any kind of intercession. But that is exactly the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The current catechism of the Catholic Church includes this paragraph:

 

By canonizing some of the faithful, that is, by solemnly proclaiming that they practiced heroic virtue and lived infidelity to God’s grace, the Church recognizes the power of the Spirit of Holiness within her and sustains the hope of believers by proposing the saints to them as models and intercessors.

 

Now that word intercessors is the most important issue here. The Bible teaches us very clearly that it is Christ Jesus who intercedes for us before the Father. There is no hint whatsoever that there are others who intercede. And, furthermore, the practice of praying in the name of saints or to the saints is a very clear distraction from the centrality of the mediatorial work and the high priestly office of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Furthermore, though official Roman Catholic teaching very carefully does not deify the saints nor suggests that worship be directed to them, lay Catholic piety often inclines in that direction. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, adopted in 1563 as a classic statement of Reformation doctrine on this account, included the statement that the invocation of saints is “a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” That is the classic position of evangelical Christianity. And the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is directly at odds with that conviction. On this issue and perhaps a few others, the distinction between the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical piety and conviction was made abundantly clear there in Saints Peter’s Square yesterday.

 

Furthermore, the fact that in the aftermath of the declaration of the sainthood of these two former popes, relics from their body were brought forth as evidence of how they were to be venerated—this itself points to the very heart of the issue which is at stake in the matter. Just consider this singular paragraph from the coverage in The Washington Post by reporter Anthony Faiola. He wrote:

 

Cardinal Angelo Amato, the Vatican’s gatekeeper of saints, asked Francis three times for the canonization of the two popes, a gesture meant to signify the importance of the moment. After a reading from the pope, two reliquaries — vessels of silver, bronze and gold — were carried and placed to the left of the altar. One contained a vial of John Paul II’s blood, the other a piece of John XXIII’s skin taken from his exhumed body. The event brought together in death two men who in life were viewed as considerably different.

 

As perhaps nothing else, that singular paragraph points to the great theological chasm that separates Roman Catholicism and evangelism Christianity. Evangelical Christians saw much rightly to admire in the stand for truth and the sanctity of life that was represented by John Paul II when he was the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, but the very fact that he was a pope—in other words, the very fact of the papacy—and the very fact that he was defender of the very doctrine by which so many saints were made and the very fact that he is now declared to be a saint, even as a vial of his blood was brought forth for public exhibition, all this points to that great chasm between the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical Christianity. At the heart of that chasm is the gospel. And at the heart of the ceremony yesterday was a very clear message; a message we repeat over and over again: theology matters.

 

Shifting the scene to Israel and the worldwide observance of Holocaust Memorial Day, we need to recognize that history matters as well. And considering recent developments on the issue of the Holocaust, history demands our attention as well. What kind of recent developments will we be talking about? Well consider the article by Jodi Rudoren in The New York Times. The headline is, “Palestinian Leader Shifts on Holocaust.” As Jodi Rudoren reports:

 

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority issued a formal statement on Sunday [that’s yesterday] calling the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” and expressing sympathy with victims’ families.

 

That statement grew out of a meeting between Mr. Abbas and a Jewish rabbi, and yet it was Mr. Abbas who has been known as a denier of the Holocaust. In his doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 1983, he challenged the number of Jewish victims. He argued that Zionists had collaborated with Nazis to propel more people to what would become Israel. A senior Israeli minister, according to The New York Times, “incensed at quotations from Hitler highlighted on Facebook pages affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, denounced Mr. Abbas earlier this year as ‘the most anti-Semitic leader in the world.’”

 

Mr. Abbas, according to The Times, had been backtracking from his book. In 2011, he said he didn’t deny the Holocaust and he said he heard from the Israelis there were six million victims. He said, “I can accept that,” and, yet, at the very same time, that on Holocaust Remembrance Day he was planning to state very clearly that he believed that the Holocaust took place, there was also a rapprochement, that is, a new agreement between the Palestinian authorities, which he heads, and Hamas, an organization that officially calls for the extermination of Israel and officially denies that the Holocaust happened.

 

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal includes a major essay by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former intelligence officer of the CIA with responsibility for Iran, who reminds us that the leaders of Iran continue to deny that the Holocaust happened. He writes:

 

For them, Holocaust denial restores some logic to history: If they can assert that Hitler did not kill six million Jews, the Holocaust can be labeled a narrative spun by Jews to engender guilt and special advantages over Muslims and others. In that light, Holocaust denial [to the Iranians] is both moral and politically essential. The second main reason for denying the Holocaust: Doing so implicitly negates the need for Israel’s existence.

 

As he writes, in the worldview of Tehran, if six millions Jews didn’t die, Israel has no excuse to exist. In other words, one of the lessons of history is that history never goes away. The Holocaust, the killing of over six million Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices and, of course, added to the Jews were hundreds of thousands of others, including gypsies and homosexuals and others considered by the regime to be Lebensunwertes Leben or “life unworthy of life.” The Holocaust was an act intentionally undertaken by the Nazi regime in the service of its theory of race superiority. And, of course, even as you think about the gas chambers and the concentration camps and the horrors of all that went on in the Holocaust, it is an affront to human decency as well as to all historical reason to deny that the Holocaust took place. We should note quite carefully that as the last in the generation of those who experienced the death camps and the extermination camps are now dying themselves of old age, it is a moral atrocity that there are those anywhere in the world who would deny the Holocaust.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, perhaps the most important insight from this controversy on Holocaust Remembrance Day is the very fact that hatred can drive one to corrupt and contort history. That’s a very important issue for us to remember.

 

Finally, a note that is, in a sense, a sign of the times. The New York Times reports that “Ladies’ Home Journal, whose very name evokes a bygone era of women’s service magazine,” wrote Noam Cohen, “will no longer publish as a monthly after a 130-year run.” That was announced this past Thursday by the owner of the magazine.

 

The July issue of Ladies’ Home Journal will be the very last print issue sent to subscribers. The company intends to keep the brand alive, but no longer as a print magazine. There was a great sense of historical loss in the announcement that came about Ladies’ Home Journal. After all, you’re talking about one of the so-called eight sisters of the mass-circulated magazines addressed to women who stayed at home and raised children. But that raises the point, isn’t it? Why in the world is Ladies’ Home Journal going out of circulation? It isn’t because it didn’t have subscribers. It had a very important subscriber base of about 3.2 million. That’s huge for a magazine! But, as The New York Times reports, it was an aging subscriber base and advertisers were leaving in droves. Why? Well, for many younger women in America, the younger women whom the advertisers want to reach with their advertising, they no longer think themselves described by a magazine that’s entitled Ladies’ Home Journal.

 

In this particular story, we see an historical note to the effect that we’re losing more than a magazine here. It’s the hallmark or indicator of the fact that the world has changed. The world has changed so utterly that a magazine called Ladies’ Home Journal no longer reflects the mainstream of younger American women. Sometimes it seems a huge cultural shift can be indicated by what titles, that is, what magazines, are and are not on the magazine stand.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with you question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I’m speaking to you today from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and all day today, I’ll be speaking in Northland International University in Dunbar, Wisconsin, for their annual Founder’s Day. Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to see some of you there. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

Nearing the End – A Conversation with Theologian Stanley Hauerwas

Interview Transcript

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics at Duke University. He has written a voluminous number of articles from 1969 to the present, authored and edited several books, and has been the subject of other theologians’ writing and interest for many years. He is a board member of the Society of Christian Ethics, Associate Editor of a number of Christian journals and periodicals, and frequent lecturer at campuses across the country. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and a Doctor of Divinity from the University of Edinburgh. His most recent work is Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

The Briefing 04-28-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Canonization of two popes vivid picture of the distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism

Ancient Vatican ceremony makes saints of John Paul II and John XXIII, Washington Post (Anthony Faiola)

2) Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds us that history never goes away

Mahmoud Abbas Shifts on Holocaust, New York Times (Jodi Rudoren)

Holocaust Denial and the Iranian Regime, Wall Street Journal (Reuel Marc Gerecht)

3) Cultural shift indicated by what magazines are or are not on the magazine stand

Ladies’ Home Journal to Become a Quarterly, New York Times (Noam Cohen)

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 04-26-14

1) Is there a biblical basis for age-segregated ministry?

2) How should Christians exercise discernment in reading bad theology?

3) What is the eternal state of infants who die?

The Salvation of the ‘Little Ones’: Do Infants who Die Go to Heaven?,  AlbertMohler.com (Albert Mohler and Danny Akin)

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

Transcript: The Briefing 04-25-14

The Briefing

 

 April 25, 2014

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

 

It’s Friday, April 25, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

We’ve been watching and continue to watch the unfolding of the moral revolution on the issue of human sexuality that has dominated the headlines and so much of our national attention for some years now, especially in recent months. As a matter of fact, most of us pick up the daily newspaper or begin the look at the news feed on social media with the sense that it is likely that virtually any day there could be a major revolutionary development on these issues because we all have the sense we’re living in a revolutionary age. The new evidence of this comes in the fact that the landscape on this entire question is changing. For the last several years, the landscape has been predictable. There’ve been two sides in a cultural conflict. One has defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman and only as the union of a man and a woman, and that segment of the population has had behind it two millennia of Christianity and beyond that multiple thousands of years, multiple millennia of human wisdom. And add to that the fact right now that most of the people around the world do not find this even to be a controversial question. For most people around the world right now, marriage means only one thing, which is the union of a man and a woman. But on the other side of the cultural conflict there have been those who have been pressing to advance and extend the moral and social and sexual revolution that has been a characteristic of American culture since the 1960s, with the normalization of same-sex behaviors and relationships as the current front leading edge of that revolution and, of course, the legalization of same-sex marriage as its leading policy aim.

 

But there has also been a political dynamic to this, and that political dynamic has meant that in the United States with two major political parties, one party has at least since 2012—note, by the way, how recent that is—since 2012—that’s just two years ago; not even quite when it comes to the election itself—that party, the Democratic Party, has at least for about the last 18 months put itself on the side of the legalization of same-sex marriage, putting that affirmation in its 2012 party platform. Whereas, on the other side, that is on the other side of the political and moral landscape, the Republican Party had adopted at its convention in 2012 a platform that actually repudiated and opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage. So you had two political parties with two platforms. They faced off at opposite points, not only on this issue, we should note, but also on abortion as well.

 

But now we have a changing political and moral landscape. Or perhaps we should put it this way: the changing political landscape indicates what came before it, what came prior, and that is a changed moral landscape. Jennifer Rubin, writing in The Washington Post, tells us that the strident anti-gay marriage and anti-gay rights forces on the right, especially in the Republican Party, having lost their grip on public opinion, now can’t convince fellow Republicans of their views. She offers two pieces of evidence. Number one: a group of Republican officials, as reported by the Associated Press, want to oust former Illinois GOP Chairman Pat Brady for his statements supporting same-sex marriage laws. They, rather than the party chairman, have been replaced in their party positions. In other words, in the Republican Party, a party that less than two years ago had an official platform statement against the legalization of same-sex marriage, members of a party organization have now been removed for holding to the very position the party advocated in its platform less than two years ago. The chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, remember this is the Republican Party in Illinois, said that the party, in terms of that platform, is “on the wrong side of history.” Remember, you’ve heard that argument before. So, as Jennifer Rubin reports, Republicans are turning away from opposition to same-sex marriage. When, as one poll showed last year, she says, nearly two-thirds of millennial evangelicals support gay marriage, you know the party is shifting.

 

Then we come to the second piece of evidence she brought forth, and it is this: she says, “Few conservatives want to defend blatant bias against or unsubstantiated generalizations about gays.” And she pointed to a recent conversation that took place on the ABC news program this week. Now the point is how she ends the article:

 

The opposition to gay marriage is crumbling on the right, as it is everywhere. The true sign of progress is the deafening silence on the topic in the run-up to the 2014 elections.

 

Now I’ve mentioned this before, we have to come back repeatedly to make the point that the political parties follow political changes in opinion. The Democratic Party in 2012 endorsed same-sex marriage only after the vast majority of Democrats, as evidenced by polls and state organizations, had already gotten there. Now the same thing is happening on the Republican side, which is to say that as you watch this—and we’re learning the lesson from a worldview perspective. How do moral revolutions happen? Moral revolutions happen just as is evidenced in this kind of report. There is a change in opinion. The change in opinion takes place in the culture at large. Eventually, the change in the culture at large begins to affect the entire landscape, and before you know it, the political parties, each in its own way and on its own timetable, respond to this change in opinion by changing their official platform statements if necessary and adjusting themselves to the new moral reality.

 

What does this tell us from a Christian worldview perspective? It tells us the political parties are—here’s the shock—political parties. In other words, they will do whatever they think they have to do in order to get elected and stay elected. Generally speaking, if a political party thinks that a position, as might be evidenced by a candidate or in a political platform, is costing it votes and if eventually it comes to the conclusion that it’s costing it so many votes it is endangering its electoral results, then that political party is almost assuredly going to change the position. Which is to say, when we’re thinking of political parties, we shouldn’t confuse position with conviction, and as you know, in a political context it’s often hard to tell what someone actually believes. At the end of the day, history may well record that the Democratic and the Republican Parties both came to make peace with the legalization of same-sex marriage at different times, but those same historians may record the timing was just separated by two years. That’s how a moral revolution happens and that’s how fast this moral revolution is shaping up.

 

And speaking of moral revolutions, long before the issue of same-sex marriage was speakable or even imaginable, another moral revolution on the issue of sexuality was taking place, and that was the mainstreaming of sexually explicit material and the sidelining of the very categories of profanity or obscenity. And at the center of that moral revolution was a trial that was held in London in 1960. It was known as the Lady Chatterley’s Lover Trial, and had to do with the fact that the British government was preventing the publication of an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was the last novel written by the British novelist D.H. Lawrence. And as it happened, there was an appeal. As Paul Vitello reports:

 

Richard H. Hoggart, a pioneering British cultural historian who was most widely known outside academia as the star witness for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in a 1960 trial that ended British censorship of that novel, died on April 10 in London. He was 95.

 

So here we’re looking at an obituary that has vast, indeed, immense worldview significance. It is the obituary for a rather obscure literary scholar in Great Britain named Richard H. Hoggart, who died earlier this month at age 95 there in Great Britain. But as The New York Times reports, his death, as announced by Goldsmiths College at the University of London, reminds us of the moral transformation, that moral revolution that took place now more than a generation ago. As The New York Times reports:

 

Professor Hoggart was a senior lecturer in English literature and the author of a seminal analysis of changes in working-class culture in England when he was summoned to testify in a London courtroom in defense of Penguin Books. It had been charged [that is the publisher] with violating British obscenity laws by printing 10,000 unexpurgated [that is unedited] copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D. H. Lawrence’s last novel.

 

As the paper says, “Though professor Hoggart was not the most renowned literary figure called, his testimony was widely credited as the most persuasive in convincing a jury of nine men and three women thay [D.H.] Lawrence’s graphic descriptions of sex [in the novel] were not obscene,” were not pornographic. Now here’s what’s really interesting. We have to understand the testimony of Professor Hoggart and why he was successful. He ended up arguing—and this is a logic that seems almost impossible and implausible to most people, but it won the day. He argued that nothing could be obscene if by the obscenity it actually makes the sex act or the sex language being expressed more common. In other words, if you’re able to say it, it can’t be obscene. He actually talked about the sex scenes in the book and the language used and he said:

 

The first effect, when I first read it, was some shock, because they don’t go into polite literature normally. Then as one read further on, one found the words lost that shock. They were being progressively purified as they were used.

 

In other words, if you say something dirty often enough and over and over again, it’s not dirty anymore because by using them, you’re purifying them. Of course, that’s a nonsensical argument, but as the newspaper makes clear, it was the argument that won the day, effectively nullifying the obscenity laws in Great Britain and having a massive impact in this country as well; where eventually in this country it also became very, very difficult to define what in the world pornography or obscenity might be. In a famous obscenity trial here in the United States that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, Americans heard Supreme Court associate Justice Potter Stewart say back then, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see.” Well if you can’t define it, you can’t outlaw. And even though most Americans probably agree they know it when they see it, if you can’t legally define it, you can’t eliminate, you can’t prosecute it, you can’t write a law against it.

 

So as Richard H. Hobart at age 95 died in Great Britain last year, what died with him also was the knowledge of most people about the fact that just a generation ago, it was possible to outlaw a great deal of sexually explicit material as being obscene or pornographic. But a legal revolution that was a disguised moral revolution made that nearly impossible, leading to the mainstreaming of this sexually explicit material today. But if people think it’s always been that way, they’re simply wrong. It was a moral revolution that brought about that result and that result now shapes our entire culture. So it will also be with the moral revolution we’re experiencing now. There is simply no way to know how far reaching the impact will be, but remember now, we’re not talking about literature; we’re talking about marriage. And that should tell us something about why this revolution is more important even than that one that shook the world back in the 1960s.

 

Next, we’re accustomed by now to a very familiar pattern. As the church celebrates the resurrection or the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ in those holidays known largely in the culture as Easter and Christmas, you can expect the major media are all of the sudden going to wake up and start giving some attention to religious issues, even explicitly Christian issues. And thus we’re not surprised when the cover story in Time magazine this week, dated for Easter (that’s the issue dated April 28, 2014), is about a religious subject timed for the Easter celebration. And yet the cover story in Time magazine is not of something that reflects light, but rather darkness. It’s a picture of a railroad track receding into the darkness. The headline is “Finding God in the Dark.” The subtitle is this: “Beyond Enlightenment, Acclaimed Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor Argues That Strength, Purpose and True Faith are Found in the Shadows.” The cover story is by reporter Elizabeth Dias. As you look at the story, it really tells you something as much about Time magazine and about the larger culture as it does about Christianity. And that’s largely because this story is about someone identified as a preacher who actually has left Christianity and in the article speaks of leaving Christianity. As Dias writes, most spiritual seekers spend their lives pursuing enlightenment, but this Easter tide, Taylor (that’s Barbara Brown Taylor), who ranks among America’s leading theologians, is encouraging believers and nonbelievers not only to seek the light, but to face the darkness too, something that 21st-century Americans tend to resist.

 

That’s a very interesting article. You know, Christians throughout the centuries have discussed the distinction between light and darkness and have applied spiritual meaning to both the light and the darkness. But the Bible did this long before Christians began to consider it. And in the Old Testament and in the New, the distinction between light and darkness is always very clear. It is light that God speaks when he says let there be light and He separates the light from the darkness, and it is the light, not the darkness, that is His gift. In the New Testament, Jesus speaks of His own, speaking of the children of light in the midst of the children of darkness. The process of our salvation is described in the New Testament as coming out of darkness into His marvelous light. The process of seeing is described as enlightenment, and the gospel itself is described as light, and God’s love is described in terms of the light of His love. In other words, there is nowhere in Scripture where darkness is held up as something that is to be preferred over the light or is to be seen as morally neutral. It is always seen as something that is morally suspect, if not actually symbolic of that that is morally evil.

 

But it’s really, really interesting that Time magazine chose to feature an author, a preacher whose left the church and left Christianity, in order to talk about a spirituality of darkness. As Elizabeth Dias reports, Taylor has always inhabited the edge of mainstream Christian spirituality. She questioned biblical narratives as a child. Her first short story, written when she was eight, pondered the naming of the animals in the Garden of Eden, why some things got feathers, others got scales, and still others got skin. It goes on speaking about her marginal Christianity and then it writes about the fact that she left her church, she left a pastorate, and she has largely left the doctrinal structure of Christianity in whole. In her memoir, written in 2006, entitled Leaving Church, she spoke about leaving that pastorate, but she also spoke more metaphorically and generally of leaving Christianity. She aid this, “I cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest I used to keep them in is smaller than a shoebox now.” In her new book she writes:

 

After years of teaching other people what words like sin, salvation, repentance, and grace really meant, those same words began to mean less and less to me. But since the religion I know best has a lot to say about losing a precondition for finding, I can live with that.

 

In the article, she’s described as far from faithless. She prays to the Holy Spirit, whom she sees as both the universally divine and the hardest to understand. She attends church two or three times a month, rarely at the same place twice. Her spiritual guides include naturalists and cosmologists, everyone from physicist Chet Raymo to Tibetan nun Pema Chödrön. In her 2006 book, Leaving Church, she wrote, “In practice, this means that my faith is far more relational than doctrinal; although I’m guilty of reading Scripture as selectively as anyone. My reading persuades me that God is found in right relationships not in right ideas.” In her new book, published just in time to be featured in this cover story in Time magazine, she writes about leaving the Christian faith in terms of its language. She says:

 

After years of using this language to pray, teach, preach, and celebrate the sacraments, I fell out of love with it—not just the words themselves, but also the vision of reality they represent. It was a huge loss; as full of grief as any other. The language had come as such blessed relief at first, naming the tug-of-war going on both inside and outside me.

 

So what does this tell us? What from a worldview perspective do we learn from this? We learn this much: that one of the nation’s central cultural institutions, Time magazine, in its issue dated for the very week when Christians around the world would be celebrating the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, on that very week, in the cover story of the magazine for that issue, Time magazine would decide to feature a preacher who has left Christianity, who has decided to speak about the spirituality of darkness, rather than the gospel of light.

 

The issue here is not really Barbara Brown Taylor. It’s not really just Time magazine. It’s a culture for which this is now largely symbolic; a culture made up of people, at least many of whom see the darkness as plausible as the light, and the secular as plausible as the sacred, who see departing from the faith as much a liberation as a loss, and who understand Christianity to be receding into the background and into the darkness, even as the railroad tracks pictured so metaphorically in the cover story of Time’s issue.

 

But also revealed in the article in this cover story in Time magazine in a statement that Barbara Brown Taylor made–and I’ll quote it here—“The one thing most emerging Christians will say is that the faith they inherited from their elders is all worn out.” What we learn here also is the theological and spiritual exhaustion that comes from trying to hold to a form of Christianity which is devoid of its doctrinal content and somehow tries to hold onto to its spirituality and its hope. But as the Apostle Paul made very clear in, for instance, First Corinthians chapter 15, read by so many Christians this past Lord’s Day, if indeed these doctrinal truths are not true, if Christ is not raised from the dead, then our hope disappears; it is in vain. But, indeed, Christ has been raised from the dead and that’s the good news not only of the festival of the resurrection, but of every Christian, every day, every second, every moment, and that is the ground of our hope. And perhaps also as we close we need to consider the fact that sometimes out of darkness has come the greatest revelation and victory of the light; for instance, in the Reformation of the 16th century. Remember the motto of that Reformation? Post tenebras lux: after the darkness, light. So may it be. So should we pray.

 

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

The Briefing 04-25-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Opposition to same-sex marriage crumbling on political right

Anti-gay marriage sentiment fading, Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin)

2) How the mainstreaming of sexually explicit material paved way for current Sexual Revolution

Richard H. Hoggart, 95, ‘Chatterley’ Defender, Dies, New York Times (Paul Vitello)

3) TIME cover reveals spiritual and theological exhaustion of holding onto a Christianity devoid of doctrine

Barbara Brown Taylor Faces the Darkness, TIME (Elizabeth Dias)

Transcript: The Briefing 04-24-14

The Briefing

 

 April 24, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, April 24, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

The Boy Scouts of America, which voted last year to include openly gay scouts, but not openly gay scout leaders, just earlier this month, removed a scoutmaster, an openly gay scoutmaster, from leadership of a troop in the area of Seattle, Washington. Now The New York Times reports that the Boy Scouts of America has removed the church, that is, the Rainier Beach United Methodist Church near Seattle, from the list of approved congregations to sponsor a Boy Scout troop. As Kirk Johnson of The New York Times reports, this essentially bars the Rainier Beach United Methodist Church and its 15 scouts from using logos, uniforms, or names associated with the Boy Scouts, as long as the scoutmaster, who is himself a former Eagle Scout, named Geoffrey McGrath, remains in charge.

 

Now earlier this month, we talked about the fact that the Boy Scouts of America found itself now in a very difficult position and it put itself in that position. It was last year that the Boy Scouts at the national level changed their national policy. Up until then, they had gone all the way to United States Supreme Court and actually won several years ago on the claim that it was their responsibility, especially to the parents of the boys involved in Boy Scouts, that they would maintain a policy of excluding persons who were openly gay from either membership and the participation that comes with membership or leadership, as in being a scoutmaster. But when the Boy Scouts made this change, openly caving to cultural pressure—there was no doubt about what was going on. The very argument they made was that we are out of step with the culture and that we have to do this. And there were in the background open issues involving corporations of those who were on the board, that is, the employers of those who were on the board, putting pressure on their own employees as board members of Boy Scouts of America to effect this change or resign their posts.

 

But now as you have the story unfolding near Seattle, the story is even more interesting. The Boy Scouts of America put themselves in the middle of this controversy by caving to public pressure, but going only halfway. In other words, last year they announced that they would change their policy to allow openly gay scouts, but not openly gay leaders. The problem is the two often go together when it comes to the policies of a sponsoring Boy Scout troop, and that’s exactly what has happened with respect to this United Methodist Church and it scouting troop near Seattle, Washington. The pastor of the church, the Rev. Dr. Monica K. Corsaro, said on Monday of this week that the scoutmaster was going to stay and the Boy Scouts would have to go. She pleaded with the Boy Scouts to change the policy, but she said, “We’re going to stand firm. Geoffrey attends our church, and this is a way to support our youth in the neighborhood.”

 

Now as the story has also reported in detail, it turns out that this is the kind of church, as you would expect a liberal church in the United Methodist Church, that is standing for the full inclusion of homosexuals at every level. They support same-sex marriage. They’re an open and affirming congregation, by their own designation, and they are part of a fellowship of churches within the United Methodist denomination that is pushing for the full inclusion of gays and lesbians. They say we can’t reverse our policy when it comes to our convictions in order to meet the demands of the Boy Scouts of America.

 

But it is an open letter written to Time magazine by the pastor the church that makes another very interesting point from a worldview perspective. You see, after the Boy Scouts of America changed their policy last summer, a large group of conservative churches and denominations, not to mention parents, decided to withdraw their boys or their units from scouting and start an alternative organization that would maintain a very clear understanding of sexual morality when it comes to the issue of homosexuality and same-sex attraction. And yet what’s revealed in this article coming from this pastor now published in Time magazine is the fact that her congregation is going to be looking for an alternative on the left. In other words, if in this kind of cultural crisis, you try to find some kind of halfway position, you will end up pleasing no one. Because if you do not stand on principle, then you are simply caving to some kind of cultural accommodation, and eventually it won’t be satisfactory.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, this is easily understandable. If you stand on principle, the principal doesn’t change. The application and the context may change, the cultural moment may change, but the principle, the conviction doesn’t change. Those who understand that the Scriptures have revealed an objective sexual morality that is not ours to do with as we will, it’s not ours to compromise, it’s not ours to accommodate, we may find ourselves standing in a very awkward cultural position (surely we will), but we can’t be accused of a kind of insecurity or a kind of basic dishonesty by contradicting ourselves. That’s exactly where the Boy Scouts now find themselves. They had the strong principle that it was their responsibility to stand on a very clear sexual morality, and that included a moral judgment on same-sex relationships and behaviors. When they changed that position, but only for the scouts and not for scouting leaders, they left themselves in the position of having no clear principle other than they have one policy for the scouts and another for scoutmasters. Clearly, that’s not going to hold. We said that back when the national scouting organization changed its policy, but now this church near Seattle, Washington, may become the catalyst for forcing the Boy Scouts of America or at least leading them to forfeit their policy when it comes to scoutmasters and scouting leaders as well.

 

As a former Boy Scout myself, I can certainly lament the continuing dissolution of that organization, but you know, the interesting point, the really interesting point for Christians is this: If you begin to compromise principle and conviction in order to meet some kind of cultural pressure, it will never be enough. You take seven steps this way and ten more will be demanded. There is no way to find stability in the surrender of principle. This is now where the Boy Scouts of America find themselves. But they put themselves in this position. And now you have not only churches on the conservative side withdrawing scouts and units from the organization, you also have those on the liberal side saying we’re going to do the same thing for the equal and opposite reason. Driven by the opposite convictions, we find the current position of the Boy Scouts untenable. That’s a strange position in which the left and the right now find themselves agreed and the Boy Scouts of America in no man’s land in the middle.

 

The latest issue of Scientific American has a very interesting article entitled “The Genesis of Justice.” It’s written by Michael Shermer. He is himself a skeptic—he’s the publisher of Skeptic magazine—a prominent advocate of evolution, but he writes concerning a book recently published by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom. The book is entitled, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. And, by the way, the title of that book is a play on words. It’s not Just Babies as in only babies; it’s Just Babies as in babies who understand justice. You see, Paul Bloom, that psychologist at Yale, is making a very interesting case. He’s making the case that there is an innate moral judgment in what it means to be human. Human beings have an innate moral knowledge and innate moral capacity. Even babies can’t help making moral judgments. As Shermer describes in this article in Scientific American, Paul Bloom decided to test the theory that we have this innate moral sense. He provided experimental evidence that “our natural endowments include”—in his words—“a moral sense, some capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel actions, empathy and compassion, suffering at the pain of those around us and the wish to make this pain go away, a rudimentary sense of fairness, a tendency to favor equal divisions of resources, a rudimentary sense of justice, a desire to see good actions rewarded and bad actions punished.” In other words, here you have this secular psychologist arguing that when you look even at infants, you discover what he calls “a rudimentary sense of morality,” a sense that good things should be rewarded, bad actions should be punished.

 

I think you’ll appreciate the evidence from one experiment that he conducted. In his laboratory, a one-year-old baby watched puppets enacting a morality play. One of the puppets rolled a ball to a second puppet, who passed the ball back. The first puppet then rolled the ball to a different puppet, who ran off with the ball. The baby was next given a choice between taking a treat away from the nice puppet or the naughty one, and—guess what?—as Bloom predicted, the infant removed the treat from the naughty puppet and rewarded the good puppet. But this little morality play also involves not only giving a positive reinforcement, but punishment. When the bad puppet was shown to the baby, “the boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head.” As the article in Scientific American explains, in his inchoate, or very early and undeveloped moral mind, punishment was called for.

 

Now that’s a very interesting thing. Here you have a one-year-old baby, who doesn’t have the moral vocabulary of good and evil, who can’t even speak in terms of good and evil. Here you have a one-year-old baby with very rudimentary knowledge of anything—it’s described here as an inchoate moral mind—but the baby has the sense to know, the innate moral sense to know, the difference between a good act and a bad act, a just act and an unjust act. And the baby has the moral knowledge to want to reward the good action and to punish the bad action, even to the extent that this baby smacks a bad puppet on the head for having taken the ball away and run.

 

Now Scientific American finds this very interesting. As the article says:

 

Morality, according to Bloom, entails certain feelings and motivations such as a desire to help others in need, compassion for those in pain, anger toward the cruel, and guilt and pride about our own shameful and kind actions.

 

Now, by the way, that also explains why your two-year-old hides from you when she misbehaves. In other words, where does she get that sense? Why does she like Adam and Eve in the Garden after eating of the forbidden fruit, why do they flee? Why do they hide themselves? Why do we do these things? It is because we do have an innate moral knowledge. We don’t have to be taught to do these things; there is something within us. And that’s why Scientific American finds this very interesting because they can only have one explanation for why that would be so. Somehow—and you’re in advance on this in figuring out what they’re going to argue—somehow evolution has to have programmed us to have this kind of innate moral knowledge. Somehow, by a purely naturalistic and materialistic means, we developed to the point where even our infants have a rudimentary moral knowledge that came as a gift of evolution. Now if you’re going to accept that, you’ve got to accept the fact that somehow a purely naturalistic process over millions and millions of years by natural selection somehow produces a one-year-old baby who is has the moral sense to smack a bad puppet on the head. If you’ll buy that, then you’ll by the modern theory of evolution and all that the scientific community claims will go with it.

 

On the other hand, this is a magnificent testimony to what it means for every single human being, including every one-year-old little baby, to be made God’s image, to be made in the image of God. Because as the Scripture tells us, that moral knowledge that is within us and is even there, though undeveloped, in a human infant is there by God’s gift because we are made in His image and there are certain things we cannot not know. There are certain things that are made within us by the fact that we are made in God’s image. There is a knowledge that we don’t have to earn, we don’t have to learn; it is simply there. It is because we are not just human creatures, as Homo sapiens, the thinking being, we’re also the moral being, not because some biological or evolutionary accident explains this, but because God shows His glory in making us like Himself in this respect; made in His image as a moral creature. We are moral creatures because we were made by a moral God, a Creator who shows His glory and brings Himself pleasure in creating creatures who do know the difference between good and evil and are accountable for it. And, furthermore, it’s the glory of God in the fact that a one-year-old baby boy knows which puppet to be rewarded and which to be punished when he sees behavior enacted before his little eyes. That should give you hope. That should give you joy. It brings glory to God, and whatever brings glory to God, should bring us happiness as well, even if it throws the scientific community and its naturalistic worldview into absolute confusion about how in the world to explain this thing.

 

While we’re on the topic of young people, Paul Barnwell, a high school English teacher writing at The Atlantic, says that we ought to be very concerned about the growing inability of our adolescents to be involved in a decent meaningful conversation. He writes:

 

Recently I stood in front of my class, observing an all-too-familiar scene. Most of my students were covertly—or so they thought—pecking away at their smartphones under their desks, checking their Facebook feeds and texts.

 

As I called their attention, students’ heads slowly lifted, their eyes reluctantly glancing forward. I then cheerfully explained that their next project would practice a skill they all desperately needed: holding a conversation.

 

Several students looked perplexed. Others fidgeted in their seats, waiting for me to stop watching the class so they could return to their phones. Finally, one student raised his hand. “How is this going to work?” he asked.

 

Paul Barnwell, a high school English teacher, is writing about the fact that so many adolescents now find themselves or are found unable to engage in a meaningful conversation, or what he calls here even holding what can meaningfully be called a conversation. He writes:

 

As I watched my class struggle, I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single-most overlooked skill we fail to teach students. Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and one another through screens—but [now in this generation, for the first time in human history] rarely do they have an opportunity to truly hone their interpersonal communication skills. Admittedly, teenage awkwardness and nerves play a role in difficult conversations. But students’ reliance on screens for communication is detracting—and distracting—from their engagement in real-time talk.

 

Further evidence comes from outside this article in a recent report indicating that when parents and children, especially teenage children, are communicating even within their domicile, within their own family home, they are increasingly relying on text messages in order to communicate when the kid and the parent are just feet or yards away from each other, or perhaps separated by one floor of space, the bedroom and the kitchen are only separated by a matter of meters, and yet the parent and the teenager are communicating by text messaging because it’s easy. Well it may seem to be easy to communicate, but as this English teacher has absolutely put before us as a challenge, it isn’t a conversation. And he’s absolutely right. Conversation is one of the most essential skills for an adult in terms of human society. You can’t get a job unless you can have a conversation. You can’t keep a job usually unless you can have a conversation because getting a job and keeping a job means working with someone in communicating ideas and sustaining a relationship that requires a conversation. Employers are telling us they find young people whom they can’t hire because they can’t have a meaningful conversation to find out if they actually are qualified for the job or how they would fit within the job classification. Or they don’t believe that if they ever put this young person before a customer, they could have a meaningful conversation with the customer.

 

This goes hand-in-hand with other research reported in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and so many others that the distinction between many successful young people as teenagers and young adults and unsuccessful ones is whether or not the family ate a meal together, especially the evening meal with the family gathered together. Now is it the food that makes the difference? Well food’s important. That’s what you’re doing once you sit down to a meal, but that’s not what people take away. Children walk away from the family meal not just filled with food, but having the opportunity for a real face-to-face conversation, and in many cases, the only face-to-face conversation they are going to have with adults in the course of that day, the only face-to-face conversation they’re going to have with anyone in which there can be a genuine conversation about ideas and events and concerns and hopes and aspirations and all the things that people talk about when they talk meaningfully to each other. A family that doesn’t sit down for this kind of meal, that instead communicates by means of these small exchanges by text message or Twitter or whatever form of social media, is a family that is producing children that, by and large,  are described in this article; children, adolescents, and young adults who simply can’t engage in a normal conversation.

 

And, of course, there’s more to this. This gets back to the fact that we are made in God’s image, and God made us in his image giving us the capacity for communication, giving us the gift of language. Even the secular world understands one of the key distinctions between the human being and all other creatures is that the human alone has the capacity for language. The human alone has the capacity for meaningful, linguistic conversation, but if we do not use that capacity, we are denying a purpose for which we were made. And something is not only unformed within the individual, but a capacity is simply unformed to the glory of God. That’s something that should concern us all. It’s not only about worldly success—getting a job and keeping a job—it’s not only about the exchange of ideas, it’s about the development of the human being to the glory of God, fulfilling the purpose for which we’re made, a vocation that is implicit in our creation in God’s image. And that’s why when we look at a story like this, as appears in The Atlantic magazine, we need to recognize this English teacher—teaching high school English, bless his heart—he’s onto something, but he’s onto something that is far more meaningful than he knows. From a Christian perspective, this is even more important than he fears.

 

Finally, Jill Filipovic of The Guardian, that’s a left-wing newspaper in Great Britain, reports on a study done in the United States on American adolescents undertaken by the Robert Wood Johnson foundation that finds—now buckle your seatbelts for this—that in terms of teenage romances, girls feel the pain of the breakup far greater than do boys. Now if you’re writing that down as news, you probably have never been an adolescent or have ever been around a high school or ever known teenagers. This is hardly news, but it tells us a great deal about our society that someone needed a report in order to document this.

 

So how should we respond to this? The Guardian, again, is a left-wing newspaper. It shows a feminist agenda, but I think you may still be shocked by the kind of policy changes that the paper calls for, in terms of how to level the field so that girls are not hurt more than boys. They write:

 

Policy-wise, there’s a lot to be done: ending abstinence-only sex ed and finding more funding for a diversity of educational programs including art and music that can help all students forge individual identities and develop their talents. Outside of schools, policies allowing women to be equal players at work and in life would go a long way in shifting assumptions around female identity.

 

Does that sound like the wrong set of answers to the problem? In other words, where’s the sanity in this to say maybe parents need to be helping their teenage girls not to establish that kind of romantic relationship too early when it is an assured thing that the relationship will end and their hearts may well be broken? Where’s the response of this that indicates that parents should be involved here? And where in the world would even a left-wing newspaper come up with the idea that somehow ending abstinence-only sex education and finding more money for music programs is going to solve the problem of the broken hearts of adolescent girls? What we have here is a classic example of a secular society denying the obvious. And as we look at it, here’s the thing that Christian parents and others must remember: it’s one thing for the secular world to deny the obvious; it’s another thing for us to deny the truth. We’re to be the people who know these things in advance, long before a study comes along to tell us what we already know.

 

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

The Briefing 04-24-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Boy Scout charter revoked over gay leader as churches on left also look for alternative

Boy Scout Troop Loses Charter Over Gay Leader, New York Times (Kirk Johnson)

2) Scientific community dumbfounded over babies born with innate sense of justice

The Moral Life of Babies, Scientific American (Gareth Cook)

3) Adolescents increasingly don’t know how to hold conversation

My Students Don’t Know How to Have a Conversation, The Atlantic (Paul Barnwell)

4) Christians should know solution to girls feeling pain of break-up isn’t more secular programs

Girls who get ‘caught in a bad romance’ risk more than just their broken hearts, The Guardian (Jill Filipovic)

Transcript: The Briefing 04-23-14

 The Briefing

 

 April 23, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, April 23, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Yesterday, we talked about the controversy in Great Britain over statements made by that nation’s Prime Minister David Cameron. In an article written for The Church Times (that’s a Church of England newsletter) just before the Easter holiday, the British prime minister said that Britain is a Christian country and it should take greater pride in the fact that it is indeed a Christian country. In response to the prime minister’s statement, a group of atheists and agnostics and other skeptics, most of them celebrities within Great Britain, many of them in the entertainment business or major authors, they wrote to the prime minister this open statement saying that his words had been divisive and that, indeed, his statement was erroneous and harmfully so. And that controversy, as we said yesterday, is very revealing of the fact that there is a deep insecurity on the part of secularists. If they are intimidated by the fact that the prime minister of Great Britain had written an article arguing that Britain is a Christian nation, concerning the fact that the nation constitutionally has a state church and that the vast majority Great Britain’s, though operating out of an admittedly secular worldview, still claim to be Christians of one sort or another, if that is so much that it got under their skin that they had to make a public statement about the prime minister’s words being dangerous, well that shows you just how insecure the secular worldview is.

 

But, as of yesterday, the controversy left over the Atlantic, and the proof of that is an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times. Stephen Erlanger writes about the controversy in Great Britain, but interestingly he makes a point that you didn’t see in the British press, and that is this: Americans, he says, would come to understand exactly what the British prime minister is doing. We are accustomed, he says, to the fact that American politicians tend to get more religious as they tend to get closer to Election Day. In other words, as the British prime minister is now facing a party election upcoming, it’s likely, says Erlanger, that this is what’s going on. He writes in agreement with the critics of Mr. Cameron who say he is “acting like a politician, highlighting conservative values in the hope of undercutting a rival party on the right” (that would be the United Kingdom Independence Party), and, furthermore, just acting in terms of the way we come to understand that politicians act, showing up in church as they run for election when they hadn’t been seen before, showing up speaking, in terms of an overt Christianity, when no one had associated them with Christianity previously.

 

But there’s more to this story, and we go back to Great Britain in order to understand why this story is getting more interesting by the day. For instance, The Telegraph, a major British newspaper, reports that the attorney general of Great Britain agreed with David Cameron, the head of his government, that Great Britain is a Christian country. He said—and this is Dominic Grieve, by the way, the British attorney general—he said that it is nonsense to argue that a nation with an established church like the Church of England isn’t a Christian nation, but then the British attorney general went on to suggest what he thought the problem really was. He said the problem, if you get right down to it, is that some Christians, however, simply believe too much. He talked about what he called the assertiveness of religious groups across the spectrum. He said, “I do think there’s been a rise of assertiveness of religious groups across the spectrum. That’s why those with softer religious views find it disturbing and say they don’t want anything to do with it.” Well a closer look at the attorney general of Great Britain’s statement indicates that the defining issue is this: if you believe that your faith has any consequence beyond your privatized self, then you are a fundamentalist. And here you have a dichotomy, a very interesting dichotomy, but one that is of great interest to us, in which the British attorney general says that there’s a distinction between those with softer religious views and those, he says, that are assertive. He said in the same interview, “I do think that the rise of religious fundamentalism is a major deterrent to people. It is a big turnoff away from religion generally and it’s very damaging in that context.” So in other words, the British attorney general is saying the real problem, the reason why there are so many skeptics and atheists and agnostics, is because they’re responding to the fact that some Christians are just too Christian, they believe too much. And make no mistake, when the British attorney general uses the term assertiveness and fundamentalism here, he’s not talking about anything that’d be rightly defined as fundamentalism. He’s just talking about Christians who are—now here’s the scandalous thought—actually Orthodox Christians, who believe that the truth of Christianity is something that goes beyond their privatized faith.

 

In order to understand what in this controversy is actually so revealing, all you have to do is go to The Church Times, that’s the official newspaper of the Church of England, that’s where the prime minister’s essay appeared, in order to understand just how ridiculous, but revealing this entire controversy really is. For instance, as I hold here the Prime Minister’s essay, I read, he says:

 

Some people feel that in this ever-more secular age, we shouldn’t talk about these things [he means religion]. I completely disagree. I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country, more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organizations, and, frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference in people’s lives.

 

Well that sounds interesting, if a bit confused, but as you read the prime minister’s essay, he gets a lot more confused as you go along. In describing the core beliefs and values of Christianity, he comes up with responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, and love. He says, however, that even as these are the core of Christianity, they’re actually shared by people of every faith and people of no faith. In other words, the British prime minister says, we’re a Christian nation, but it obviously doesn’t mean very much. And what moral direction would Christianity give? The British prime minister says, a great deal, except it’s actually not much. This is exactly how he puts it:

 

Many atheists and agnostics live by a moral code and there are Christians who don’t. But for people who do have a faith, that faith can be a guide or a helpful prod in the right direction, and whether inspired by faith are not, that direction or moral code matters.

 

That is the kind of sentence that upon closer analysis makes absolutely no sense whatsoever; in other words, the quintessential sentence by a politician. In this case, a politician who wants to sound like he’s saying something, but who wants, when you look at the words, to recognize he’s not saying anything that should actually offend anyone. In other words, he says that atheists are just as likely to hold to a moral code as Christians, and Christians can be helped along by their faith, but so can atheists who have no faith at all, so it all works out in the end. Remember that the strongest statement he makes in that paragraph is that for Christians, Christianity can be a prod forward.

 

If you feel like you’re wrestling with a butterfly, just consider this next sentence. “I am a member of the Church of England and, I suspect, a rather classic one.” How does he then define that? “Not that regular in attendance and a bit vague on some of the more difficult parts of the faith.” So in other words, he says he is a classic member of the Church of England, and yet he defines that classic member as not a regular attender and one who is a bit vague on some of what he describes as the more difficult parts of the faith, the truth parts.

 

What he does like is art and architecture and liturgy. He says, “I felt firsthand the healing power of the church’s pastoral care and my children benefit from the work of a superb team and an excellent Church of England school.” He says about what the Church of England offers to the nation, he says, “I care deeply about the liturgy, the architecture, and cultural heritage of the churches.” He says, “My parents spent countless hours helping to support and maintain the village church I grew up next to. And my Oxfordshire constituency has churches, including some medieval masterpieces that take your breath away with their beauty, simplicity, and serenity.” But when it comes to his theological understanding, he makes that very clear in one singular paragraph. He writes:

 

Some fault the Church of England for perceived woolliness [and that’s a British word for unclarity] when it comes to belief. I am not one for doctrinal purity, and I don’t believe it is essential for evangelism about the church’s role in our society or its importance. It’s important and, as I said, I would like it to do more, not less, in terms of action to improve our society and the education of our children.

 

So here you have the British prime minister who says, “Britain’s a Christian country, and we should be thankful that it is a Christian country because Christianity can, for Christians, be a prod forward” (whatever that means). And then he says that even as he is an advocate for the Church of England and he is a rather classic member of that church, he defines that as one who is not a regular attender and one who is a bit vague on some of the more difficult parts of the faith. He says he’s glad that the Church of England isn’t very clear about what it believes. He’s not one, he says, for “doctrinal purity.” And as he comes to a conclusion, he says this:

 

If we pull together, we can change the world and make it a better place. That to me is what a whole lot of the Christian message is about, and it’s a confidence in our Christianity that we can all reflect on this Easter.

 

Now this was his Easter message, and notice what’s missing: Christ, the empty tomb, the cross—all of it, utterly missing. As he says, he’s not one for doctrinal purity, and that leaves us only to wonder exactly how much is included when he says he’s a bit vague on the more difficult parts of the faith.

 

One final article that just makes the case for why this controversy is so interesting from a Christian worldview perspective. This appeared not in The Telegraph, which is a more conservative paper published in London, but rather in The Guardian, which is the most influential paper on the British left. And the author of this article isn’t a Christian or member of the Church of England, but Julian Baggini, a very well-known atheist there in Great Britain. And he’s writing to his fellow atheists and agnostics, telling them that they need to chill, they need to calm down, that they don’t have anything to fear from the Church of England or from the British prime minister’s claim that Britain is a Christian country. As a matter fact, he describes David Cameron’s faith as being so absolutely empty of any kind of threat to anyone that no one should be offended. Responding to those very same statements by the British prime minister that I previously cited, Julian Baggini says, “There isn’t much to complain about in such tepid claims for faith.” Remember, he writes that as an atheist to his fellow atheists. Elsewhere in the article, he says,

 

It’s ridiculous to cry wolf when people like Cameron proclaim a Christianity that is as fluffy and harmless as a lamb. There is a clear enough sense that Britain is a Christian country and we should just get on with it. We have plenty to protest about in the ways in which religion is woven into the fabric of the state, but affirming a religion is not always a problem, and we need to acknowledge that in order to make a convincing case when it is.

 

So now we’ve come full circle, in which we had this article in The Guardian by an atheist, in which the atheist agrees with the British attorney general; that the real problem here can’t be the Church of England and a tepid faith—recall the fact that Baggini described the prime minister’s faith as “fluffy and harmless as a lamb”—but rather a Christianity that is defined as something that goes beyond a privatized, individualized faith. Something that has public significance, something that is rooted in actual truth claims, something that is announced by angels, in terms of an empty tomb.

 

Finally, Julian Baggini expands this not only from the British prime minister’s perspective, but to the entire nation. He writes:

 

But in other respects, the Christian nature of the country is indisputable. In the last census 59% of people still self-identified as Christian. The standard retort to this is that people tick this box almost as a reflex reaction and don’t actually take their supposed Christianity seriously at all. This is a somewhat patronising attitude; sure, most who chose that category wouldn’t know their Acts from their Ezekiel, but nor would they pretend to. They know full well that their Christianity is as much a cultural identification as a doctrinal one. They are locating themselves in a tradition, not asserting the Nicene Creed.

 

For that statement we can be very grateful to an atheist for understanding far better than many Christians what it actually means to be a Christian and why being the kind of Christian that defines Britain as a Christian nation isn’t the kind of Christian that should be offensive to any kind of non-Christian or any kind of secularist at all. If, indeed, all we’re doing is asserting ourselves as belonging to some kind of tradition, not asserting a creed, well, as Julian Baggini says, we’re no threat to the secular age, and the secular age or at least the smartest of its advocates know it.

 

Shifting from Great Britain to Italy, one of the things we continually watch is the impact of worldview in terms of the way people live. Or, to put it the other way, why watching the way people live reveals deep changes and shifts in their worldview. Yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal had an article entitled “More Italians Forgo Motherhood.” As Manuela Mesco reports from Milan, an increasing number of women in Italy aren’t having children and don’t ever expect to have children. As she writes:

 

Italy’s birthrate has been far below replacement rate for years. But now more couples with precarious jobs, low salaries and a late start together are opting to have no children at all. A quarter of Italian women end their childbearing years without children, compared with 14% in the U.S. and 10% in France.

 

A very interesting assessment going on here. When you look at something as basic to humanity as motherhood and when you look at the fact that a major shift in a pattern related to parenting and to motherhood in specific is taking place, this tells us that something major has changed in the way people understand themselves, understand the institution of marriage, understand the meaning of human life, and understand the blessings or, for that matter, the responsibilities of parenthood. As Manuela Mesco reports, “The average age when Italian women have their first child rose to 31.4 years in 2012—nearly six years older than North American women—from less than 30 in 1995.” In other words, there’s a huge shift going on here and it’s taking place at a very quick pace. She says:

 

Another reason for the later start is that more Italian women in their 20s and 30s are getting university degrees. By the time they finish and find a secure job, they are often reluctant to sacrifice those gains for children—a phenomenon demographers call “the safety trap.”

 

And it’s affecting women not only in Italy, of course, but also in other nations, including the United States, but not to this extent. The reporter goes on to say, “The high level of childlessness deepens Italy’s perilous demographic crisis. The country already has around 150 over-65s for every 100 people under 14.” Now just wait a moment. Just consider that. You’re looking at a society in which there are 150 people over age 65 for every 100 under age 14. That is an unsustainable demographic pattern. That simply doesn’t work. It can’t work in a small community; it certainly can’t work in a major industrialized nation. And the problem is getting worse, says Mesco, “It will rise to 263 elderly people for every 100 young people by 2050. And, by the way, that’s not the kind of trend that can be quickly reversed. You can create 14-year-olds and you can’t reverse this kind of pattern very quickly, even if you determine instantly to change the birth rate. She goes on to report:

 

Italy’s trend toward childlessness has left a raft of would-be grandparents yearning for little ones. Ida Farina, the mother of two women in their 30s who have decided against having children, tries to focus on her niece’s children to make up for the gap she feels not having her own grandkids. But she still finds it difficult to accept.

 

“I feel so sorry about it,” she says. “I feel I’ll die without passing on the few things I’ve learned in my life. I’m waiting. Maybe things will change.”

 

And that brings us to the cover story in this week’s issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The cover story shows a woman and the headline is this, “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career.” If there’s an article that has appeared recently that demonstrates what it means to try to have absolute control over one’s destiny while defying the natural pattern of life, this is it. BusinessWeek’s cover story says:

 

There comes a point in every childless woman’s life, usually around 35, when the larger world becomes very interested in her womb. Friends and family inquire about its health, asking why it’s not being utilized, when it will be, and then: Will it even work? For those who do want children, the pressure can be crushing and counterproductive.

 

That’s where this article gets very interesting because it deals with the new pattern where many of these women are freezing their eggs when they’re relatively young so that they can have children and, hopefully, healthy children far after the normal childbearing and fertility years.

 

The article cites Brigitte Adams, age 39, a marketing executive, who said, “Freezing my eggs bought me time and the possibility to have a child in the future. It’s not a sure thing, but a gamble I’m willing to take.” BusinessWeek declares this generation of women “the egg-freezing generation,” comparing them to the latchkey kids of glass ceiling breakers, who were taught “that you create your career and then everything else falls into place.” But, of course, many things aren’t falling into place. As this article makes clear, the two things that aren’t falling into place for many of these career women are the two things identified as husband and children.

 

As you might expect, BusinessWeek sees an economic angle to this with business booming in the egg-freezing business, especially as the technology has improved, so that the success rate of freezing these eggs has improved over time. And yet, as fertility experts warn, it’s not just a matter of economics, the average cost of this kind of procedure is about seven to twelve thousand dollars. It’s not cheap. As a matter of fact, just two years ago, in 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine moved to change the procedure as it was listed formally as experimental—they removed that label—however, they also warn, in what BusinessWeek calls a slightly paternalistic recommendation, that it’s still is far more effective to have a baby the old-fashioned way.

 

It’s very telling that BusinessWeek hardly even acknowledges that there is a moral dimension to this issue. It’s not even really recognized in the article at all. But the author does ask this question: “Are we headed towards a future of 50-year-olds who, having reached the corner office, decide they’re finally ready to start a family?” Reporter Emma Rosenblum goes on to say, “Maybe not,” but then she quickly says the next frontier in egg freezing is genetic screening. In other words, these women who are so busy in their careers, now missing husband and babies, they might consider freezing their eggs in order to perpetuate or at least extend the possibility that they can be mothers later. But, as Rosenblum says, the big issue is that by the time they get there, they might also want to avail themselves of another new genetic technology: the ability to screen embryos by genetic tests. In other words, not only to delay having a baby, but once one decides to have it, have a designer baby. Because, after all, this is a generation that thinks it can postpone motherhood, it may also think that it can define motherhood on its own terms.

 

As is so often the case, when you look in an article like this written in a business magazine, you find there are deep issues of worldview significance. And that’s where we need to look because this is where the cultural conversation is taking place, and the cultural conversation is revealing, not only for what is said, but for what is not said. Sometimes the absence of an argument is the strongest argument of all.

 

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