Dr. Albert Mohler

Something Deadly This Way Comes

16 Comments

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 388

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 394

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 400

– HT: OrthodoxNet.com Blog

The insatiable appetite of the Culture of Death

The debate over abortion comes down to one essential issue — the moral status of the unborn child. Those making the case for the legalization of abortion argue that the developing fetus lacks a moral status that would trump a woman’s desire to abort the child. Those arguing against abortion do so by making the opposite claim; that the unborn child, precisely because it is a developing human being, possesses a moral status by the very fact of its human existence that would clearly trump any rationale offered for its willful destruction.

This central issue is often obscured in both public argument and private conversations about abortion, but it remains the essential question. We have laws against homicide, and if the unborn child is recognized legally and morally as a human being, abortion would be rightly seen as murder.

In the main, abortion rights advocates have drawn the moral line at the moment of birth. That is why, even with our contemporary knowledge of the developing fetus, abortion rights activists have persistently argued in favor of abortions right up to the moment of birth. Anyone doubting this claim needs only to consider the unified opposition of leading abortion rights advocates to restrictions on late-term abortions.

From the beginning of the controversy over abortion, this supposedly bright line of the moment of birth has been unstable. Abortion rights activists have even opposed efforts to restrict the gruesome reality known as partial-birth abortions. The moment of birth has never been the bright line of safety that the defenders of abortion have claimed.

Now, an even more chilling development comes in the form of an article just published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Professors Alberto Giubilini of the University of Milan and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne and Oxford University, now argue for the morality and legalization of “after-birth abortion.”

These authors do not hide their agenda. They are calling for the legal killing of newborn children.

The argument put forth in their article bears a haunting resemblance to the proposal advocated by Dr. Peter Singer of Princeton University, who has argued that the killing of a newborn baby, known as infanticide, should be allowable up to the point that the child develops some ability to communicate and to anticipate the future.

Giubilini and Minerva now argue that newborn human infants lack the ability to anticipate the future, and thus that after-birth abortions should be permitted.

The authors explain that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion” to “infanticide” because their term makes clear the fact that the argument comes down to the fact that the birth of the child is not morally significant.

They propose two justifying arguments:

First: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus, that is, neither can be considered a ‘person’ in a morally relevant sense.”
Second: “It is not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to be a person in the morally relevant sense.”
Thus: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack the properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Those assertions are as chilling as anything yet to appear in the academic literature of medical ethics. This is a straightforward argument for the permissibility of murdering newborn human infants. The authors make their argument with the full intention of seeing this transformed into public policy. Further, they go on to demonstrate the undiluted evil of their proposal by refusing even to set an upper limit on the permissible age of a child to be killed by “after-birth abortion.”

These “medical ethicists” argue that a traditional abortion is a preferred option, but then state:

“Abortions at an early stage are the best option, for both psychological and physical reasons. However, if a disease has not been detected during the pregnancy, if something went wrong during the delivery, or if economical, social, or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone, then people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford.”

Nothing could possibly justify the killing of a child, but these professors are so bold as to argue that even “economical, social, or psychological circumstances” would be sufficient justification.

This article in the Journal of Medical Ethics is a clear signal of just how much ground has been lost to the Culture of Death. A culture that grows accustomed to death in the womb will soon contemplate killing in the nursery. The very fact that this article was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal is an indication of the peril we face.

For years now, pro-life activists have been lectured that “slippery slope” arguments are false. This article makes clear the fact that our warnings have not been based in a slippery slope argument, but in the very reality of abortion. Abortion implies infanticide. If the unborn child lacks sufficient moral status by the fact that it is unborn, then the baby in the nursery, it is now argued, has also not yet developed human personhood.

The publication of this article signals the fact that a medical debate on this question has been ongoing. The only sane response to this argument is the affirmation of the objective moral status of the human being at every point of development, from fertilization until natural death. Anything less than the affirmation of full humanity puts every single human being at risk of being designated as not “a person in the morally relevant sense.”

Something very deadly this way comes. This argument will not remain limited to the pages of an academic journal. The murderous appetite of the Culture of Death will never be satisfied.

Albert Mohler: Evangelicals and the Gay Moral Revolution

1 Comment

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

In the essay below, Dr. Mohler is speaking to an Evangelical Christian readership but many of his observations apply to all Christians. The normalization of homosexual behavior is a moral revolution Mohler writes and not one that Christians can join and remain faithful to their Christian faith. He’s right about that.

There will be pressure to adopt to this new morality as well. We even see it on the edges of the Orthodox Church with the Facebook group Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality within the Orthodox Church for example. Who ever thought that some Orthodox would drag this battle of the culture war into the Church?

Mohler takes the Evangelicals to task for their sloppy handing of the homosexual question. I’m not sure we Orthodox have been sloppy, but we have been complacent. The homosexual moral revolution is at bottom a question of anthropology, what it means to be a man or woman and thus a human being. We Orthodox know some things about human anthropology but we’ve been asleep at the switch.

My conviction is that we may be in a period of social unrest similar to what the Early Church experienced that caused the the forging of the great dogmatic truths like Nicea and others (I touch on this in my essay: Orthodox Leadership in a Brave New World). Great unrest imposes suffering, but it also can unleash creativity.

There’s a lot to be done. We have to resist the attempts to homosexualize the Church from within; teach that the object of one’s sexual desire is not a primary constituent of self-identity; develop our anthropology to answer the homosexual questions with better insight and compassion; learn how to help men and woman properly deal with same-sex desires, and more.

Mohler reproves his Evangelical followers for failing to meet the challenge of homosexuality face to face, and by this I presume he means that some Evangelicals prefer not to have dealings with homosexuals at all. That’s not an Orthodox problem I think because we have an easier time drawing the distinction between people and their behaviors, including their sins. We have a better practical sense that not much more than God’s mercy separates us from the next guy.

Unfortunately, the neo-Episcopalian wing like those on the Facebook group exhibit a deep immaturity about the the human person and same-sex desire. Their immaturity probably derives from moral confusion, particularly defining such concepts as tolerance and compassion in terms of the dominant culture rather than the moral tradition. They craft an apologetic that uses the language of the moral tradition to endorse behaviors that contradict its teaching, yet they refuse to admit that the contradiction even exists.

That’s why when they collapse the distinction between person and behavior they think they fulfill the law of love, and why they believe that insisting on moral parity between opposite-sex and same-sex marriage is pleasing to God.

If their confusion is allowed to prevail, then the dominant culture will trump the moral tradition and the deep anthropological understanding that shaped the language and makes the distinction comprehensible will be lost. So will the important pastoral work that depends on it. The Orthodox will become like the liberal Episcopalians except for our Eastern flair and better looking vestments.

Source: Albert Mohler.com

The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can’t Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, “The Honor Code,” moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we’ve witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than “moral deficiency.”

The liberal churches and denominations have an easy way out of this predicament. They simply accommodate themselves to the new moral reality. By now the pattern is clear: These churches debate the issue, with conservatives arguing to retain the older morality and liberals arguing that the church must adapt to the new one. Eventually, the liberals win and the conservatives lose. Next, the denomination ordains openly gay candidates or decides to bless same-sex unions.

This is a route that evangelical Christians committed to the full authority of the Bible cannot take. Since we believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches that all homosexual acts are sinful, as is all human sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage. We believe that God has revealed a pattern for human sexuality that not only points the way to holiness, but to true happiness.

Thus we cannot accept the seductive arguments that the liberal churches so readily adopt. The fact that same-sex marriage is a now a legal reality in several states means that we must further stipulate that we are bound by scripture to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman—and nothing else.

We do so knowing that most Americans once shared the same moral assumptions, but that a new world is coming fast. We do not have to read the polls and surveys; all we need to do is to talk to our neighbors or listen to the cultural chatter.

In this most awkward cultural predicament, evangelicals must be excruciatingly clear that we do not speak about the sinfulness of homosexuality as if we have no sin. As a matter of fact, it is precisely because we have come to know ourselves as sinners and of our need for a savior that we have come to faith in Jesus Christ. Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and the forgiveness of their sins.

This is not a concern that is easily expressed in sound bites. But it is what we truly believe.

It is now abundantly clear that evangelicals have failed in so many ways to meet this challenge. We have often spoken about homosexuality in ways that are crude and simplistic. We have failed to take account of how tenaciously sexuality comes to define us as human beings. We have failed to see the challenge of homosexuality as a Gospel issue. We are the ones, after all, who are supposed to know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only remedy for sin, starting with our own.

We have demonstrated our own form of homophobia—not in the way that activists have used that word, but in the sense that we have been afraid to face this issue where it is most difficult . . . face to face.

My hope is that evangelicals are ready now to take on this challenge in a new and more faithful way. We really have no choice, for we are talking about our own brothers and sisters, our own friends and neighbors, or maybe the young person in the next pew.

There is no escaping the fact that we are living in the midst of a moral revolution. And yet, it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.

Albert Mohler: Vanishing Christianity — A Lesson from the Presbyterians

14 Comments

Albert Mohler

AlbertMohler.com

“Liberal Protestantism, in its determined policy of accommodation with the secular world, has succeeded in making itself dispensable.” That was the judgment of Thomas C. Reeves in The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Protestantism, published in 1996. Fast-forward another fourteen years and it becomes increasingly clear that liberal Protestantism continues its suicide — with even greater theological accommodations to the secular worldview.

The latest evidence for this pattern is found in a report just released by The Presbyterian Panel, a research group that serves the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) [PCUSA]. The panel’s report is presented as a “Religious and Demographic Profile of Presbyterians, 2008.” The report contains relatively few surprises, but it is filled with data about the beliefs of Presbyterian laypersons and clergy.
Continue reading →

Fr Patrick Henry Reardon: Why I signed the Manhattan Declaration

3 Comments

Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings
Fifth Sunday of Advent
December 13, 2009

Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon

As I write these lines, more than a quarter-million people have signed the Manhattan Declaration, released this past November 20. I suppose I should be personally gratified, in the sense that never before have so many people agreed with me! I was, in fact, one of seven Orthodox Christians who went on record to endorse the document prior to its publication.

There are several ways in which the Manhattan Declaration is significant.

The first, I suppose, is the content. This is a public and deliberately political (though not partisan) pronouncement on three points: It is pro-life, pro-marriage, and pro-religious freedom. Under these headings it makes specific assertions about abortion, the scientific or medical use of human embryonic tissue, the proposed extension of legitimacy to sexual unions other than that between a husband and wife, and the limitations imposed on the State with respect to the conscience.

Second, the document is significant in the great variety of its authors and original signers, a group embracing members and leaders from several Christian bodies. Indeed, the Manhattan Declaration was endorsed by Christians very little disposed, as a rule, to append their names to documents described as “ecumenical.”

My friend, for example, Dr. Albert Mohler, the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was among the first to sign. Explaining the reason he determined to do so, Dr. Mohler wrote: “I want my name on that list. I surrendered no conviction or confessional integrity to sign that statement. No one asked me to compromise in any manner. I was encouraged that we could stand together to make clear that to come for one of us on these issues is to come for all. At the end of the day, I did not want my name missing from that list when folks look to see just who was willing to be listed.”

Third, the Manhattan Declaration is significant in some of the public reaction to it. I don’t mean the reviews of secular critics, of course, who detested the document’s contents. Their assessments were uniformly predictable. Neither do I have in mind the insouciance of those who, on principle, avoid politics. Nor am I thinking of Christians who filter their ethical sympathies through a different weave (those, for instance, to whom executing murderers is morally equivalent to murdering babies). Such reactions were entirely expected.

Continue reading →

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function nuthemes_content_nav() in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/prose/archive.php:58 Stack trace: #0 /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include() #1 /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once('/home/aoiusa/pu...') #2 /home/aoiusa/public_html/index.php(17): require('/home/aoiusa/pu...') #3 {main} thrown in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/prose/archive.php on line 58