By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com
An address delivered as a Forum Lecture in the Marriott Center
Arena at Brigham Young University by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President of
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Tuesday, February 25, 2014.
I am honored once again to visit Brigham Young University and to
address both faculty and students at this great institution of higher
learning. When I visited last October to speak in a different BYU
context, I had the honor of meeting with members of your faculty and
administrative leadership and I deeply appreciated the conversation we
shared.
I also had the privilege of spending time with some of
the General Authorities of your church, including Elder Tom Perry, Elder
Quentin Cook, Elder Dallin Oaks, and several others. I am glad to know
these men as friends. We face many challenges, and we face many of those
challenges together. As always, BYU has extended the most gracious
hospitality and welcome, and I am very thankful for the honor of being
with you once again.
The presence of the president of The Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary behind the podium at Brigham Young University requires some
explanation. I come as an evangelical Christian, committed to the Gospel
of Jesus Christ and to the trinitarian beliefs of the historic
Christian faith. I come as one who does not share your theology and who
has long been involved in urgent discussions about the distinctions
between the faith of the Latter Day Saints and the faith of the historic
Christian church. I come as who I am, and your leaders invited me to
come knowing who I am. I have come knowing who you are and what you
believe and my presence here does not mean that the distance between our
beliefs has been reduced. It does mean, however, that we now know
something that we did not know before. We need to talk. We can and must
take the risk of responsible, respectful, and honest conversation. We
owe this to each other, and we owe this to the faiths we represent. And
we had better talk with candor and urgency, for the times demand it.
My presence here is indicative of one of the strangest and most
ironic truths of all — that the people who can have the most important
and the most honest conversations are those who hold the deepest beliefs
and who hold those beliefs with candor and engage one another with the
most substantial discussion of the issues that are of most crucial
importance to us. And thus the president of The Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary is thankful to be among you at Brigham Young
University. You are a university that stands, as all great universities
stand, for the importance of ideas and the honor of seeking after the
truth. I come to honor the importance of ideas and the centrality of the
search for truth with you.
President Samuelson, members of the faculty, and students, I come in
what can only be described as a dangerous moment for us all and for the
culture and civilization we commonly love. The most fundamental values
of civilization itself are threatened, and we are witnesses to one of
the most comprehensive and fast-paced moral revolutions ever experienced
by humanity. The velocity and breadth of this revolution are
breathtaking, and the consequences are yet incalculable. This society is
dismantling the very structures that have allowed for the enjoyment and
preservation of human liberty and respect for life. We are engaged in a
head-long effort to replace the convictions that gave birth to
democracy and ordered liberty with a new set of convictions that will
lead to the emergence of a very different culture, society, and
civilization. We cannot pretend that this is not happening. We cannot
delude ourselves into believing that it will not matter.
Writing in a very different revolutionary era, Karl Marx declared
that the modern age would sweep all conventional morality and political
structures aside in a complete transformation of values. In his
memorable words, “all that is solid melts into air.” We are in the age
of the advanced meltdown of those values. What Marx promised is now
happening before our eyes.
What can explain it? A witness to the collapse of Marx’s revolution,
that great Russian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, explained it with
four simple words: “Men have forgotten God.” And so they have. Nothing
else can explain the great shift in worldview we are witnessing.
The word for the process that is driving this shift of worldview in
the West is secularization. In the context of the late modern age,
secularization is fully evident even where we thought it was absent — in
the United States of America. For decades, the conventional wisdom held
that Europe was becoming thoroughly secularized as religious belief
melted in the face of modern culture, the rise of technology, the
dominance of science, and the moral reorientation of the twentieth
century. But that conventional wisdom also held that America was the
great exception — a society that was simultaneously hyper-modern and
highly religious, predominantly Christian. That conventional wisdom held
until it began to fall apart, and it fell apart as it was recognized
that there is more than one route to the secular. In Europe, that route
was largely paved with open antipathy to theism and to organized
religion. But there is another route to the secular, and that road is
paved with the redefinition of religious beliefs, the eclipse of binding
authority, and the open embrace of pluralism. There is more than one
way to turn solids into air.
The average American does not claim to be an atheist, but a theist,
and most often a theist of some specific sort, at least by family
tradition. But there is often very little connection between the
convictions of the faith that is named and the worldview of the one who
claims it. Thanks to the media and messaging of modernity, millions of
Americans have allowed themselves to be secularized without any
antipathy to theism. They just think and emote and analyze and reflect
as if they are secular people, for their worldview increasingly is
secularized.
Among the elites the pattern is a bit different. As Peter Berger, one
of the leading intellects on matters of secularization explains it, the
elites are far more classically secularized than the masses. As he has
explained, secularization theory worked right according to plan in
Europe and on the American university campus. The elites who control the
cultural content that emerges from Hollywood, New York, and the most
prestigious academic campuses are, by any standard of measurement, far
more thoroughly secularized and ideologically opposed to theism and its
implications than the general public. These elites are, as elites almost
always are, the dominant forces in the development of cultural
messaging, public policy, and moral influence. And those among the
intellectual elites tend to see those who hold to traditional religious
forms and beliefs as suspect and potentially dangerous — those who would
hold back what they believe is the necessary project of moral
liberation.
The secular worldview relativizes morality, and our society has
progressively compromised the moral system upon which it depends. A
living body that has a compromised immune system will soon fail. A
society that subverts its own moral immunities sows the seeds of its own
destruction.
In other words, the secular worldview actually undermines the very
values that the prophets of the secular age claim to cherish and
preserve — human dignity, human rights, and human flourishing.
Human Dignity
Human dignity can survive only if we commonly believe and commonly
affirm that every single human being, at every stage of development, is a
person made in God’s image and bearing the dignity that is the mark of
God’s personal possession. The only adequate conception of human dignity
rests upon the biblical teaching that such dignity is not a human
achievement, but a gift. Human beings do not achieve the status of
dignity by their abilities or performance or development. Human dignity
and the worth of the human individual is predicated only upon the fact
that every human being is made in the image of God, and therefore is to
be respected, protected, and cherished as a member of the human
community.
We are now attempting to create a new vision of human dignity that is
based in a secular vision of humanity. But what is that vision? If we
are not made in God’s image, and if this is not the defining fact of our
human existence, then who are we? The secular answer is not reassuring.
We are, this vision holds, the highly developed primate that has
invented the use of language and learned to cook food. If we are not
created, then we are accidents. And if we are accidents, there is no
essential dignity due us.
Back in 2005 the London Zoo featured an exhibit of humans. “Warning:
Humans in Their Natural Environment” read the sign over an exhibit of
scantily clad human beings, placed on display among the animals in the
more familiar cages and enclosures. Polly Wills, a spokesperson for the
zoo, told the press: “Seeing people in a different environment, among
other animals … teaches members of the public that the human is just
another primate.”
Well, if we are “just another primate,” there is no essential dignity
due us. Perhaps that helps to explain the twentieth century, with the
horrors of the Holocaust and the specter of eugenics, the intention to
enhance human breeding. The eugenic temptation, we should note, was not
something far off across the sea, but something supported and endorsed
by many American intellectuals.
Perhaps this reduced and secular vision of human dignity explains the
killing fields of Cambodia, the forced starvation of millions in
China’s Cultural Revolution, and the horrors of the Soviet gulags.
Perhaps it also explains the over 50 million American babies aborted
in American wombs since the legalization of abortion on demand by
Roe v. Wade
in 1973. Perhaps it explains the virtual disappearance of babies now
born with Down syndrome, aborted after genetic testing, and the demand
for designer babies. Perhaps it explains the cult of abortion in this
country and the refusal of so many in the elites to oppose even partial
birth abortion. Perhaps it explains how one vocal advocate of abortion
could recently declare that abortion is indeed a killing, but the
killing of “a life worth sacrificing.”
Perhaps this new secular vision of human dignity explains the rise of
sex-selection abortions in both the United States and Britain. Perhaps
it explains the demand for euthanasia and the so-called “good death”
that the government of Belgium in recent days has extended even to young
children.
If we are not — if every one of us is not — made in God’s image and
created for God’s glory, then why is a human infant of greater worth
than a pig? Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton
University, has gone so far as to argue that the pig might well have
more substantial claim to a right to live. He has also stated that
infanticide, the killing of young children after their birth, might well
be justified under some circumstances.
If every one of us is not made in God’s image, how are we to reject
his argument? I fear that our culture is losing the ability to answer
such arguments with a candid and urgent and convincing counter-argument.
The new secular vision of human dignity holds only that we are more
developed than other animals, but some humans are surely more developed
than others. Participation in the medal events at the recent Winter
Olympic Games was not open to all, nor is admission to the universities
where this new secular vision of human dignity is promulgated and
promoted.
Human Rights
The affirmation of human rights is claimed to be the great moral
achievement of the modern age. But this affirmation was based in the
belief that those rights belong to every human being by virtue of divine
creation. How can those rights survive when the foundation is
destroyed?
The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948,
fresh after the horrors of World War II. It was adopted in a spirit of
hope and desperation. The French intellectual Jacques Maritain, one of
the leading Roman Catholic philosophers of the century, was one of the
drafters of the statement. That Declaration is now cited as the
definitive statement of the modern affirmation of human rights. The
Declaration affirms that all humans possess “inherent dignity” and
states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and in
rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act
towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
That is an eloquent statement indeed, but upon what does it rest?
Maritain saw the problem. In his words, “We agree upon these rights,
providing we are not asked why. With the ‘why’ the dispute begins.”
And the dispute has never ended. Furthermore, the United Nations has
proved to be a most inept protecter of the very rights it claims to
defend — just ask the bleeding and dying citizens of Syria.
If we are biological accidents — just another primate — why should
any individual human life matter? And why should we respect an
abstraction called human rights?
An interesting witness to the force of this question comes from the late philosopher Ronald Dworkin. In his last book,
Religion without God,
posthumously published, the unbelieving philosopher made an awkward
admission — philosophical naturalism cannot bear the freight of
establishing human rights. Dworkin did not become a theist, but he
argued that the only defense of human rights had to come from some
spiritual argument, even if it took the form of what he called a
“religious atheism.” This book was not his strongest work, but it
revealed something really important. As one secular reviewer stated
boldly, the old philosopher had become, against all his intentions, a
theologian.
There is no secular ground that can support and defend human rights.
Furthermore, there is no secular system that can adequately rank the
claims to various rights that human beings present. Just look at our
current situation. Demands for erotic liberty — the unrestrained right
to full individual sexual expression, fulfillment, and legitimacy — now
routinely trumps religious liberty.
Professor Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School has warned of
the collapse of all human rights when everything is transformed into
secular “rights talk.” Right and wrong collapse as meaningful categories
when everything is a matter of competing “rights.” But without right
and wrong, there is no way to say that the denial of basic human rights
is wrong.
Interestingly, the very enterprise of modern human rights was an
attempt to replace the Christian understanding of related rights and
responsibilities with a thoroughly secular alternative. In his recent
book,
The Endtimes of Human Rights, Stephen Hopgood of the
University of London makes this very argument, and he makes it
convincingly. In his words: “My argument is simple: humanism (the
cultural precondition for Human Rights) was a secular replacement for
the Christian god.” The modern international enterprise of human rights
is “a secular church,” he explains. The problem is clear — the members
of this secular church are not even singing from the same hymnal. They
do not share even a common set of convictions.
The modern confidence that human rights could be grounded in a
secular worldview was a cruel delusion. The project of grounding human
rights in secular human hopes was a spectacular failure. Without theism,
there is no ground upon which to stand, and no ground upon which to
defend the defenseless.
Human Flourishing
Our common hope is to see humanity flourish, and every system of
government promises that it will lead, eventually, to greater human
flourishing — to human development and liberty and enterprise and
happiness and fulfillment. Such flourishing requires an adequate level
of both security and stability, and, even more importantly, the
necessary structures that allow human beings to flourish.
At the center of human society stands the most important of those
structures — the human family. At the center of the family stands
marriage. Every other structure, from government to schools to
corporations to volunteer organizations stands upon the foundation of
marriage and the family, and no structure can fully replace what is
absent if the family fails or if marriage is not fully respected.
At the center of marriage is the promise of children and the
investment of the responsibility to nurture the next generation of the
human family.
Twenty years ago, not one nation on earth had legal same-sex
marriage. Now, we are told that 40 percent of Americans live where
same-sex marriage is legal. A sense of inevitablity now hangs over the
entire nation. We simply cannot exaggerate the consequence to human
flourishing if marriage is subverted and transformed so that it is no
longer directed, as a human institution, toward procreation and the
nurture of children. Human flourishing will be inevitably harmed and
permanently debilitated by its redefinition.
And yet, as a society we have lost the ability to rank liberties and
claims of rights. We lack the fortitude to state clearly that erotic
aspiration and romantic legitimacy must be directed toward marriage and
made accountable to it. We sowed the seeds for this lack of fortitude by
our acquiescence to so called “no-fault” divorce and the idea of
unfettered personal autonomy.
But what did we expect? Marriage has rightly been understood by every
preceding culture as pre-political — before and beyond the reach of
politics. Every culture in every century before us has understood that
its task is to respect what comes before it and makes human culture
possible — marriage as the lasting monogamous union of a man and a
woman. Until now.
Our secular neighbors and friends also hope for human flourishing and
they work out of a vision of what will lead to human flourishing. But
while we understand their hopes, we also understand that such hopes are
false and harmful if based on a secular foundation.
If marriage is simply a human development, we can rightly redevelop
it. If it is evidence of the evolution of human relationships and
romantic attachments, we can evolve further. If it is a laboratory for
experimentation in hopes of greater human fulfillment, we can experiment
with abandon. But if it is the gift of a loving Creator who made us in
his image and gave us marriage and the family as among the most precious
of his good gifts, our experiments will lead to disaster.
Strengthen the Things that Remain
In the Book of Revelation [3:2] we find the letter from the Lord
Jesus Christ to the Church at Sardis. He commands that church to
“strengthen the things that remain,” and those words certainly fit the
challenges of our own culture and our own times. Without hesitation, we
do our best to strengthen the things that allow and provide for human
flourishing, that bear witness to human dignity, and that undergird
human rights. We bear witness to the truth that these good things are
not our own achievement or the result of our social experimentation, but
are instead gifts of a sovereign and loving God, who brings himself
glory and blesses his human creatures with these good gifts.
The task of those now living is to defend these truths in a time of
danger — and defend them we must and we will. But we are not called
merely to defend them, but to fulfill them and to receive them and to
find our joy in them. This means that our task is not only to defend
marriage, but to live that commitment before the watching world. Our
task is not only to point to the dignity due every member of the human
family at every stage of development, but to defend the defenseless and
to work for the affirmation of this dignity in everyone — from the
elderly to the infirm to the child with Down syndrome. We are not only
called to defend human rights but to contend for them, and to insist
that these rights are non-negotiable only because our Creator endowed us
with these rights, and allows no negotiation.
When I was with you last October, I said something that got picked up
by media around the world. I said that I believe that we will not go to
heaven together, but we might well go to jail together. That was last
October. That was four months and a few days ago. Since then, federal
courts in your own state have ruled that your legal prohibitions of both
same-sex marriage and polygamy are unconstitutional. Since that time,
the President of your church has been summoned to appear in a secular
court in London. Since that time, just over one hundred days ago, so
much has changed.
Civil and criminal penalties have recently been leveled against
bakers, photographers, and florists who could not in good conscience
participate in a same-sex wedding ceremony. Erotic liberty is in the
ascent and religious liberty is in peril.
We may go to jail sooner even than we thought.
This is why our conversation is really important, and why we need to
stand together on so many urgent concerns. Most importantly, we are now
called to defend religious liberty for each other, so that when they
come for you, we are there, and so that when they come for us, you are
there. We are learning anew what the affirmation of religious liberty
will demand of us in this dangerous age.
But as I come among you, and I as am honored by this opportunity to
address you, I come as a friend among friends to speak as who I am and
of what I believe. As a Christian, my ultimate confidence does not rest
in marriage, or the family, or civil society, or human rights, or any
human affirmation of human dignity, not matter how robust.
My confidence is in the Lord, the unchanging God of the Bible, who
revealed himself in the Bible and who redeems sinners through the
atonement accomplished by his Son, Jesus Christ, who was both fully
human and fully divine. My confidence is in the Gospel revealed by
Christ and preached by the Apostles — the Gospel of salvation by faith
alone in Christ alone. I believe in the saving acts of Christ in his
death, burial, and bodily resurrection from the grave. I believe that
the Bible is our sufficient written revelation, inerrant and infallible
and unchanging. I believe that God’s promise of salvation will be
fulfilled and that all he has promised in Christ will be given. I
believe in the truth unchanged and unchanging, because I believe in the
God who tells us in the Bible that he never changes.
I can close my eyes at night and I can open them to face each day
because I know that my Redeemer lives, and that history is in the hands
of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I know that I, along
with all who come to him by faith, are safe in Christ. I can trust that
he, as the Apostle Paul stated so famously, will be faithful to the end.
I am thankful for the honor of being among you today and the great
honor of delivering this Forum Lecture. These are dangerous times, but
also days of hope. In these times, it is vital that we bear witness with
each other of matters that matter so much to our nation, our culture,
and civilization itself. But, as we bear witness with each other about
these things of such importance, we also bear witness to each other
about what is even more important — eternally important.
You have been gracious to come and gracious to hear. I pray that God
will use this lecture to his glory — and I pray God’s blessings upon you
until we meet again.
We are suffering in great part from
the politicization of everything and the spread of government not in a
useful way but a destructive one. Everyone wants to help the poor, the
old and the sick; the safety net exists because we want it. But voters
and taxpayers feel bullied, burdened and jerked around, which again is
not new but feels more intense every day. Common sense and native wit
tell them America is losing the most vital part of itself in the
continuing shift of power from private to public. Rules, regulations,
many of them stupid, from all the agencies—local, state, federal—on the
building of a house, or the starting of a business. You can only employ
so many before the new insurance rules kick in so don't employ too many,
don't take a chance! Which means: Don't grow. It takes the utmost
commitment to start a school or improve an existing one because you'll
come up against the unions, which own the politicians. 
