Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 87

John Witherspoon – Pastor, Professor, and Patriot

John Witherspoon was born in Scotland in 1723 and emigrated to the colony of New Jersey when he was called as president of Princeton University in 1768. Those who heard his sermons said he was a gifted, though not flowery, speaker. He strengthened the curriculum taught at Princeton and emphasized the importance of a well-educated clergy, which was one of the primary purposes of the university at that time. He signed the Declaration of Independence and was a member of the Continental Congress. He had a significant influence on the founding principles of the United States because he trained a number of our early statesmen.

The founders [of Princeton University] had hoped too that the College might produce men who would be "ornaments of the State as well as the Church,'' and Witherspoon realized this hope in full measure. His students included, in addition to a president and vice-president of the United States, nine cabinet officers, twenty-one senators, thirty-nine congressmen, three justices of the Supreme Court, and twelve state governors. Five of the nine Princeton graduates among the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were students of Witherspoon.

Witherspoon was influenced by some of the best ideas of the Enlightenment. He thought faith and reason were compatible and converged to identify the truth. He believed in the ideas of liberty, natural rights, just government, and representative democracy. These were ideas he taught his students, including John Madison.

Under Witherspoon’s direction, Madison also came to hold a view of human nature that emphasized both human dignity and human depravity; this understanding would later inform The Federalist. Witherspoon warned him of the evils of a tyrannical society ruled by demagogues and introduced him to the idea of a government of checks and balances. Madison also learned the lesson of prudence and the importance of admitting mistakes. Most fundamentally, nonetheless, Madison came to think that the state—when governed not merely by the will of the majority but by the higher authorities of natural and divine law—may support the life of virtue.

Witherspoon helped to organize and unite the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

"One of his students, a later president of the College, recalled that Witherspoon had more presence than any other man he had known, except for General Washington."

A Shift in Rights

The Supreme Court's decision on the Hobby Lobby case upholding the First Amendment protection of religious expression (and conscience) is eliciting some odd complaints from those who are unhappy with the decision. The reason is that there has been a significant shift in how people think about the rights we have and the government's role to protect them.

Traditionally in the American system, our rights are negative – we have rights that others should not take away, but others have no obligation to do anything to provide these rights. The main thing is to refrain from limiting the rights of others. The First Amendment is a perfect example. It says that Congress shall pass no law infringing on the rights of citizens to exercise their free speech and religious expression. Don't inhibit these rights. But other citizens have no obligations to fulfill these rights, just not to infringe on them. That's a negative right.

But rights language has shifted 180 degrees, and those that are often talked about now are positive rights. These are rights that citizens hold that create obligations on other citizens to provide. There's talk of the right to clean water and decent housing. These are supposed rights that other citizens are required to ensure and provide. Those who object to the Hobby Lobby decision take this view of rights: Women have a right to the contraception of their choice, and these need to be provided by others when employers provide insurance. It doesn't matter to their view that the few "contraceptives" in question in this case (because they are abortifacients) are still available to women, they haven't been banned. Hobby Lobby has an obligation to provide this right by paying for them. That's a positive rights view.

The clash of these two views of rights is clearly on display in this case. One side thinks employers have an obligation to provide this right to women. The other side doesn't want the government requiring them to violate their religious consciences.

Imagine a group claimed they have a right not to go hungry and appealed to the government to make Chick-fil-a open on Sundays.  This group has a right that Chic-fil-a has an obligation to fulfill.  The owners point out that there are other options where people can eat on Sunday, and the government shouldn't require them to violate their religious convictions.  This is the conflict between positive and negative rights.  Can citizens place obligations on others, or do citizens with religious convictions have a right not to be compelled to break them?

The great irony in this clash of rights-talk is that employers would have nothing at all to do with women's "health care decisions" if the government didn't try to compel them to pay for it. The problem with the positive view of rights is that the government ends up involving other citizens in the rights of others and often ends up treading on their rights. Most of the rights talk in the Constitution and historically is negative rights – the government must not violate these rights. That was the point of the Bill of Rights. The new positive rights often end up conflicting with negative rights.

There are two very different views of rights going on, and they are bound to clash over and over.

Links Mentioned on the 7/01/14 Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

reTHINK Apologetics Conference – September 26–27 in Southern California
reTHINK 2013 Apologetics Conference DVD
Apologetics mission trips
The Mormon Scrapbook by Daniel G. Thompson
Mormonism 101: Examining the Religion of the Latter-Day Saints by Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson
Does God Whisper Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (PDF) by Greg Koukl
Decision Making and the Will of God (CDs) by Greg Koukl
Decision Making and the Will of God (book) by Garry Friesen
The Ambassador's Guide to Understanding Homosexuality by Alan Shlemon
Transgender Surgery Isn't the Solution by Paul McHugh
Slate: Don't Let the Doctor Assign a Gender to Your Newborn by Amy Hall
Worldview Ministries – Sean McDowell's website
ETHIX: Being Bold in a Whatever World by Sean McDowell
Summit Ministries
GodQuest materials by Sean McDowell
TrueU: Does God Exist?
TrueU: Is the Bible Reliable?
TrueU: Who Is Jesus?
Same-Sex Marriage: A Thoughtful Approach to God's Design for Marriage by Sean McDowell and John Stonestreet
How Dads Influence Teens' Happiness by Paul Raeburn

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Webcast Tuesday

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Hobby Lobby: Good News, Bad News, and a Warning

To get up to speed on the Supreme Court decision on the Hobby Lobby case, see Joe Carter’s “What You Should Know about the Contraceptive Mandate Decision,” an outline of the majority opinion, the majority opinion itself, and my post yesterday (where I explain the bit the decision got wrong).

First, some good news from John Mark Reynolds:

The most important part of the case is the (7-2?) dismissal of the dangerous idea advanced by the Obama administration that the “free exercise” of religion includes only “worship.” Religious people have the right to start “closely held” companies that reflect their religious point of view. The radical idea that the First Amendment and religion are only about worship is dead at the Court. This is of great importance. 

Now some bad news from Denny Burk:

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ginsburg agreed that the Green family’s “religious convictions regarding contraception are sincerely held” (p. 21). Nevertheless, she argues that their sincerely held beliefs are not a sufficient reason to find in their favor. For her, it doesn’t matter if their beliefs are sincere. The only thing that matters is whether or not those beliefs are valid. Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer believe that the job of the Supreme Court is to pass judgment on the religious views of the American public. In this case, they believe the Greens’s views were not “substantial” and can be dismissed as irrelevant. This is chilling.

Chilling, indeed. If religious freedom only exists as far as judges agree with the validity of the religious point of view, then religious freedom no longer exists. Since the reason why we need to protect religious freedom in the first place is the fact that people disagree on the validity of religious points of view, requiring our protectors to agree with our view before they protect us kind of defeats the whole point.

And finally, a warning from Ben Domenech, who points out that this decision will only mean that the government will shift the requirement to pay for these drugs from Hobby Lobby to all of us, through subsidies or Medicaid. As he says, most of us “are already subsidizing all sorts of life-destroying pills and implants, whether [we] like it or not”:

That’s one reason why the culture wars have only just begun. When the battleground shifts within a culture, moving from “my body, my choice” to a demand that others pay for and affirm those choices, the aggressors are incentivized to enshrine their perspective as broad mandatory policy, not just as a socially laudable practice. That’s why we’ve moved from a point where corporations providing benefits to employees was considered a good thing to a point where corporations which provide some benefits but not all must be made to suffer. You only pay for 16 out of 20 forms of birth control? Fascist.

A few more things to keep in mind as you encounter the outlandish, emotionally charged things people are saying about this decision:

As the last quote indicated, this particular case was about abortifacients, not contraceptives in general. Hobby Lobby had no problem with 16 of the 20 drugs required by the HHS mandate.
You can’t force your employers to be involved in your health care and then tell those same people to “get their hands off” your health care.
Drugs that prevent your body from working in a normal, healthy manner should not be classified as “preventive care.” Pregnancy is not a sickness.
Not receiving free contraceptives from your employer is not the same as being “denied access” to them.

Hobby Lobby Decision Summary

The decision on whether or not corporations like Hobby Lobby are protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act from being forced to provide free abortifacients via their insurance plan came down from the Supreme Court today. Here’s a quick summary of the decision from the NRO editors:

[T]he Supreme Court did not deny access to contraception to anyone. Rather, it ruled today that if the owners of a closely held company have religious objections to providing contraceptives or abortifacients in their insurance policies, the Obama administration cannot force them to do it.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) trumps the administration’s regulations. The act says that religious objectors must be exempt from a government policy that imposes a substantial burden on their beliefs if the government has a less burdensome way of advancing a compelling interest. Five justices of the Court ruled that closely held companies can be religious objectors protected by the law, and that the government can indeed make contraception more affordable without coercing these companies….

Congress remains free to enact a new law that requires employers to cover abortifacients and contraceptives and explicitly rules out any RFRA exemptions. It remains free, for that matter, to repeal RFRA altogether.

Just one important clarification, then I’ll have more on the decision tomorrow: The Supreme Court decision wrongly refers to the Hahns' and Greens' "sincere religious belief that life begins at conception" as being central to the case. That isn't the controversial belief in question. A new, whole, live and growing member of the human species begins to exist at conception and continues to be a live human being until he or she dies. That's just a scientific fact.

The actual "sincere religious belief" of the Hahns and Greens being violated by the HHS mandate is one that claims every member of the human species has value and rights, regardless of his or her age, size, or characteristics.

The ambiguous use of the word “life” to mean both “living” and “valuable” is confusing and misleading. If our culture can fool itself into hiding behind the notion that we can’t even know whether or not the unborn human is alive, we'll never be forced to openly face the real question of value and rights head on. If we don’t clarify the difference between “life” and “value,” noting where the disagreement actually lies, this equivocation on the word "life" will continue to obscure the real issue at stake, which is universal human rights.

I explain more about this needed clarification here.

Where Do You Experience Doubts with Your Faith?

Greg shares the areas in Christianity that raise questions for him personally. 

What She Wishes She Had Known Before Going to College

The Beyond Teachable Moments blog has an interview with a young Christian woman who had a difficult time in college when her worldview was challenged:

The most troubling thing was the amount of differing beliefs and worldviews I encountered, from professors and other students. At the time I thought they had much better arguments than I did for the validity of their views.

The post is focused on helping parents do a better job preparing their children:

[T]he top-of-mind question I had for [the young woman being interviewed] was: what did she wish she’d known before she went to university?  Here is her answer:

“I wish I had known that it was okay to doubt; it was okay not to know the answer; and that it was okay to ask hard questions and to challenge the answers.

I wish I had known that there was so much evidence in favor of a creator.

I wish I had known more history and had had a broader perspective on how the world operates.

I especially wish I had known arguments for the resurrection of Jesus, and had known enough to realize how real He really is and to have made Him the foundation of my life much earlier on.

I wish I had been exposed in-depth to different world religions, what their beliefs are and the historical background on which they lay.”

Remember that this young woman grew up in a home with regular family devotions and discussions about faith.  However, questions like: ‘How do I know that God exists?’ would send her parents into a tail spin of worry that she was losing her faith.  It became easier to conform to what they wanted her to be, than to openly question her faith under the safety of her parents’ roof.

The interviewed woman continues with some suggestions for what her parents could have done differently.

If I may also make some suggestions, visit our Parent Resources page, invite Brett to lead your youth group on an apologetics mission trip, and send your students to our reTHINK apologetics conference in September.

Slate: Don't Let the Doctor Assign a Gender to Your Newborn

Remember when I said that we should expect more attempts to erase the differences between men and women, and that the conflict in our culture over sexuality is, at root, a disagreement over “whether human nature is something in particular or a sea of possibilities bound only by what we can imagine for ourselves”?

Well, Slate has kindly illustrated that for me in its article “Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn”:

It's a strange hypothetical scenario to imagine. Pressure to accept a medical treatment, no tangible proof of its necessity, its only benefits conferred by the fact that everyone else already has it, and coming at a terrible expense to those 1 or 2 percent who have a bad reaction. It seems unlikely that doctors, hospitals, parents, or society in general would tolerate a standard practice like this.

Except they already do. The imaginary treatment I described above is real. Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infants every single day, in every single country. In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents' consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It's called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It's a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals.

Male and female aren’t particular things. They aren’t real. And they certainly have nothing to do with what genitals your baby has. They’re merely a doctor’s “opinion,” and he’s stepping completely over the line by forcing his opinion on the baby.

According to the author, Christin Scarlett Milloy, “assigning” a gender to your child is potentially damaging:

We tell our children, “You can be anything you want to be.” We say, “A girl can be a doctor, a boy can be a nurse,” but why in the first place must this person be a boy and that person be a girl? Your infant is an infant. Your baby knows nothing of dresses and ties, of makeup and aftershave, of the contemporary social implications of pink and blue. As a newborn, your child's potential is limitless. The world is full of possibilities that every person deserves to be able to explore freely, receiving equal respect and human dignity while maximizing happiness through individual expression.

With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby's life is instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes….

And there it is. We cannot stand to have any sort of ruler over us. We are gods, able to create even our own being by our will and desires. We answer to no one and nothing. No reality of what it means to be human defines us—not even our own bodies. We define all. We create all. We transcend all.

It’s madness.

Challenge Response: If God Requires Atonement, He Lacks Something

My answer to this week's blog challenge: