“This conference is focusing on a – something
about the intellect by the church. Their problem seems especially acute in the
issue of origins and the age of the universe. Our pastors and church leaders, our leaders
in the sciences are now largely ignorant of the scientific evidence or reasoning, content
to receive and transmit information filtered through the (quote) ‘trusted sources.’ In fact, many seem to be actively afraid to
have direct contact with science. As a result, much of what is said about science
from our pulpits is simply untrue, and Christ is improperly and poorly represented. How do we instill a desire in our pastor and
the church leaders to engage science?” So who would like to answer that? At last year’s conference, Al, you addressed
part of that question, so would you like to speak today? MOHLER: Sure. I appreciate the question. I think I’m going to have to reformulate
it just a little bit. I did speak to the very age of the earth issue
that you asked me to speak about, and found out that there are a lot of folks who are
really interested in that. My email has hardly calmed down since. And the point I wanted to make then is the
point I’ve wanted to make at every point to speak to this, and that is that we have
to be very, very careful to understand that this is a gospel issue. It’s not merely an interesting issue. It’s not even as if you could say merely
– it’s not merely an issue of the interpretation of Scripture, and beyond that the authority
of Scripture. It’s a question that deals with the gospel,
when you start talking about what is implied in terms of, for instance, those who are suggesting
that we can do without an historical Adam – well, not with our gospel, not with the
gospel that was preached by Paul, not with the gospel that’s revealed in the Scripture. The bigger issue of science, the problem here
is that on the one hand, science is not a simple thing. Science isn’t a unified body of knowledge. Science is an entire assortment of different
worldviews and empirical claims and processes and intellectual habits. And the point is in general terms that your
pastor is doing very well to be rightly dividing the Word of God and preaching the Word faithfully
Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day, and I would not expect that most pastors would be thoroughly
familiar with all things scientific because even most scientists really aren’t. But there needs to be a way of pastors engaging
these issues, especially as they are Scripturally driven and doing so in a way that demonstrates
intellectual confidence, that ties to sources that can be of great help to us. There are some tremendous sources of help
out there. There are people who make it as their fulltime
calling to the glory of God to engage these issues. And so the first thing I would say is where
Scripture engages them, every preacher has to engage them, and should do so knowledgeably
and of course faithfully. Beyond that we need to train Christians to
be able to engage all of these issues and frankly to do the worldview analysis that’s
necessary because when some people say science, what they actually mean is scientism. And these are very complicated issues, the
kind of issues that grown up Christians spend a lifetime thinking about. SPROUL: Thank you, Al. OK. Anybody add to this? FERGUSON: Yeah, I think I’d like to add
to what Al said as a working minister that pastors are generalists. And I think one of the most important things
that we have in our ministry is the maintenance of a real integrity. And so I think ministers need to be very cautious
about pontificating about matters about which they know very little, only because they are
prejudiced towards a particular book by somebody who themselves may not know very much. I think that the point that Al makes about
scientists is enormously well taken, that they are by and large specialists in very
small areas. And the area in which very few of them are
specialists is philosophy, and therefore, scientists are characteristically not aware
of the amount of philosophical reasoning that’s involved in their science. But I think there’s a tendency certainly
in secular science to say we are just describing what is there without reflecting on the fact
they’re already using language that isn’t there, they’re employing metaphors that
isn’t there, they’re bringing to a worldview that isn’t there. And I think those particular things are areas
in which a gospel minister will have expertise on the basis of Romans 1:18 following and
so forth. And it’s perfectly proper in that context
to expose not only the unbiblical reasoning but the actual falsehood of the reasoning,
and the falsehood of the presuppositions that tend to drive the conclusions. But I think as Al says, I think, you know,
I think as ministers we need to stick to our last in expounding the Scriptures and also
we need to place great emphasis on the notion of the church as a community of people with
different gifts and to do very much to encourage those who do have gifts to progress in the
scientific enterprise just as far as they possibly can. SPROUL: Thanks for that. Here’s another one. “R.C. and Bob Godfrey spoke on the rise
of anti-intellectualism and the great divide of those who value God, God’s truth, and
those who value individualism. This has been played out in my home. My husband is profoundly against an educated
Christianity and learning from godly men in the past and today. My question: how do I continue to grow in
the knowledge of God’s truth, in which I’m firmly convinced I should be doing in an environment
that is openly hostile to it, while at the same time honoring my husband’s and his
authority over me?” You can imagine the tension and bitterness
all of this has caused? Steve? LAWSON: That was not my wife who wrote that. Well, as you would strive to know the Scripture
better and at the same time be in submission to your husband, I think obviously a gentle
and quiet spirit and being humble before your husband is very important. Surely, he would allow you to read the Bible. And to increase your understanding of Scripture,
I would begin with a study Bible, and ‘The Reformation Study Bible,’ and there are
many other excellent study tools that as you read the Bible those footnotes and those boxes,
theological boxes that Dr. Sproul has edited are extremely helpful as well as introductions
to each of the 66 books in the Bible. I would actually begin there, and even in
my own sermon preparation, I use ‘Reformation Study Bible’ virtually every day of my life,
as well as other study Bibles, and then move into commentaries. Those are available to you. I also think reading, excuse me, listening
to podcasts of sermons. And you can go onto Ligonier and download
and listen to Dr. Sproul and other teachers teaching the Scripture. I mean, we have an embarrassment of riches
available to us now. So, as I hear the question, perhaps it is,
how can I begin to learn the Bible even more? That’s where I would begin, and obviously
coming to conferences like this and as it relates to how this works out with your husband
and the amount of latitude that he gives to you, the Lord will simply have to lead you
step by step in this, but I think that your hunger for the Scripture, your Christian life
will grow no further than your intake of the Word of God. You may not live up to your knowledge of Scripture,
and who of us does, but you will not grow past the knowledge of God’s Word that you
are able to take into your own spiritual life. SPROUL: Anyone else? GODFREY: Well, I would think it’s very important
to find a good church where the pastor and the study life of the church really promotes
Christian growth, and I think a wife is to be obedient to her husband in the Lord. And I think a husband who would want to try
to keep a wife from the church is not functioning in the Lord, and so I would certainly encourage
someone to try to find a church where the Word is looked at in depth and good education
goes on. SPROUL: “Considering some anti-intellectualism
may come from Christian misunderstandings and outright rejection of scientific popular
thought such as evolution, how shall Christians address these issues, evolution specifically,
because of the myriads of differing opinion Christian opinions on the matter?” Now, we’ve already touched generically on
this idea, but this one hones in on the issue of evolution. I assume they’re speaking of macroevolution
and not micro. And anybody want to answer this? GODFREY: Well, as a historian, one of the
things I always want to say is that the people who are constantly changing their minds are
the scientists. They always act as if it’s the Christians
who are always changing their minds. And I think while it’s very important that
Christians who have the education and the training to do so engage with these subjects
such as evolution in the most sophisticated way educated people can, I think those of
us who are not trained in the sciences and those of us who might not have either the
time or the inclination to do that shouldn’t be afraid occasionally of saying, I don’t
know how to answer that exactly, but I do know I can trust my Bible, and I do know that
the very nature of science is to be evolving. That it is in the nature of the case reexamining
things, and things that scientists 10 years ago, 50 years ago, certainly 100 years ago,
certainly 200 years ago told us they knew absolutely, they admit today they don’t
know. So I think we don’t want to illustrate Calvin’s
old proverb that the greatest arrogance is ignorance, but we do want to remind scientists
occasionally that they’re arrogant in what they claim to know, and not all of them but
some of them, and they need to be reminded that their conclusions are provisional, but
the Bible is not provisional. SPROUL: You know when I wrote ‘Not a Chance,’
that particular book, I did get some letters from people who were objecting of my lack
of knowledge of quantum physics, and I wrote back and said, I said plainly that my field
was not quantum physics, and I don’t feel qualified to give an in-depth critique of
quantum physics. I said, but what I was responding to in the
book are statements made by physicists, and I am qualified to do linguistic analysis and
to show from a philosophical perspective that these statements are nonsense. And so if we stick within our own field, I
think we can find that we have an answer to a lot of these things. Al. MOHLER: A part of what we’re all about is
worldview analysis, and this is the perhaps front burner issue, at least in terms of this,
if we think about the fact that most scientists are methodologically, if not personally, they’re
at least methodologically committed to naturalism. And many of them are far more than just methodologically
committed. And frankly, if you are committed intellectually
to naturalism, you couldn’t come up with anything probably any better than evolution
as an evolving theory. If you assume that we simply have to eliminate
the supernatural from the picture from the very beginning, and nature has to be completely
self-explanatory, and you’re working within the black box of nature itself, and so everything
has to have a material explanation and a material cause, a naturalistic understanding, then
quite frankly if you’re going to stare at rocks long enough, you’ll probably be an
evolutionist, simply because that is what smart people operating of a naturalistic worldview
have come up with. That’s not where we can begin. The next thing is that we have to understand
that the dominant theory of evolution – and there are many doctrines and denominations
of evolutionary thought, but the dominant theory of evolution doesn’t just cause problems
when you think about Genesis 1 through 11 for instance. It eliminates as an absolute necessity that
there is any direction or purpose in evolution. It eradicates the very possibility that there
could be an original historical pair from whom all human beings are descended. In other words, it doesn’t just rub up against
the gospel with friction. It comes from a completely different intellectual
starting point and arrives in a very different understanding, not just of origins but of
virtually everything. Sam Harris, one of the four horsemen of the
new atheism, the book that came out just about five days ago, in which he’s arguing that
we finally need to face the fact that a naturalistic explanation of human beings eliminates moral
responsibility. Well, you know, there we have it. We’re all just chemicals. And so there again, if you’re working from
a naturalistic viewpoint, there are certain conclusions you’re going to have to reach. It was Richard Dawkins, another one of the
four horsemen of the new atheism, who said, and this is something we need to hear very
clearly, that atheism – excuse me, that Darwinism allowed one finally to be an intellectually
fulfilled atheist. So it’s the cardinal doctrine of atheism,
huge issues here, but this isn’t just an intellectual friction we’re talking about. It’s pretty much a head-on collision in
terms of the gospel versus the dominant theory of evolution. SPROUL: Thank you. Here’s a new one. “How do we present the truth of the Bible
to Catholics, Muslims, and other religions in a loving way? How do we support that Jesus is the only way
without being confrontational?” How would they do it in Scotland? FERGUSON: In a confrontational way. Well, you know, I think at the end of the
day, we are followers of the Lord Jesus, who was profoundly confrontational and full of
meekness and grace. And that’s what we aspire to, Christlikeness
with His spine. MOHLER: This is the big issue in terms of
where evangelicals routinely, if not daily, now find ourselves in an intellectual predicament. James Davison Hunter, you know, back in 1985
wrote a book on evangelicalism in the coming generation, in which he said – now, well,
looking at a generation ago now, that that coming generation that now have college students
of their own – that the exclusivity of the gospel was the most awkward and costly intellectual
claim for that young generation of evangelicals. It’s just gotten costlier. No one gets offended when you say, “Jesus
is the way, the truth, and the life.” The offence comes when you complete the sentence,
“No man comes to the Father but by Me.” We live in a time in which the prevailing
worldview says there can’t be one answer to anything. And so this is a confrontational claim, but
I really appreciate the way Sinclair put it. It was confrontation when Jesus said it the
first time. SPROUL: Thank you. Alright. Can you please explain to me why we should
trust in the authority of the Bible over other sacred writings? Go ahead, Steve. LAWSON: Alright, sure. Well, there are claims that the Bible makes
of itself that the sum of those, it would take far greater faith to reject the Bible
than to believe the Bible. A couple of years ago here I was asked to
present a message, “Ten Reasons Why the Bible Is the Word of God.” And there are very strong reasons why we believe
that the Bible is the Word of God. I think it begins with the fact that the extraordinary
unity of the Bible, that over 40 authors writing over a period of 1600 years in three different
languages on three different continents from the pinnacle, the king’s chamber all the
way down to shepherds, yet as the Bible comes together, it teaches one system of truth,
one way of salvation, one morality for man, one plan for the family, one story of redemptive
history. There is extraordinary unity to the Scripture
the way that it interfaces. There is the converting power of the gospel
itself, that there is intrinsic, inherent supernatural power that is in the Bible that
transforms and changes those who receive its message from the inside out, the stories of
which are so numerous. One example would be Augustine going into
the back pew to hear in Milan, to hear Ambrose preach, and just so he could be a better public
speaker and a better rhetorician, and hearing Ambrose preach, Augustine coming under the
powerful sway of the Word of God, in no way even seeking, coming out of a dark cult that
he had been a part of, and then with the Word of God stinging in his conscious, then hearing,
you know, “Pick up and read. Pick up and read.” And he turns to Romans, and he is dramatically
converted. There is such converting power in the Bible
itself. The fulfilled prophesies of the Bible that
have already been fulfilled to this point. The mathematical probability of all of these
being fulfilled has been likened if you covered the entire state of Texas with silver dollars. It’s 801 miles, I know, from the bottom
tip to the top of the panhandle of Texas, and if it was covered in silver dollars six
feet deep, and if just one silver dollar was marked, and you had one chance to close your
eyes and put your hand in and pull out a silver dollar, the mathematical probability that
you’d pull out that one silver dollar is the same that all of the prophecies of Scripture
just concerning the person of the Lord Jesus Christ in His first coming would be fulfilled,
even down to the very town where He would be born in Bethlehem, Micah 5:2, that He would
be born of a virgin, the whole thrust of His public ministry, etc. But you could add scientific proof, you could
add historical proof. You just begin to stack all of this up, and
plus the Bible does claim to be the very Word of the living God itself. When you take in the sum, and that’s just
some of these proofs, the Bible, I believe, is what it claims to be. It is the written Word of the living God. The grass withers, the flower fades away,
but the Word of our God abides forever. There are reasons why we believe that the
Bible is God’s Word. Certainly the Holy Spirit, who is the author
of Scripture must bring it home to our hearts as well, but that is what He in fact does
and convinces us of the truthfulness and the reliability of Scripture itself. You know, there are many other, you know,
reasons we could put in that, but not to repreach the entire sermon. MOHLER: Steve, could I jump on that for just
a moment. LAWSON: Please do. MOHLER: And, I want to affirm everything you
just said, and eloquently so, but I want to go back to the question for a moment because
the question is actually based upon a false premise, but it’s a very common understanding
that the average person – I get this in the media all the time – the average person,
or on a college or university campus, this is just a common perception. It’s as if you could have a library of the
great religious books of the world, and they’re all basically the same thing. You just have a shelf. You have the Upanishads, and the Koran, and
the Book of Mormon, and you could just go on through, and then you have the Bible. They’re all making basically the same claims
about themselves, and the assumption in the question is that they’re all basically the
same thing, and we’re just saying that we like this one. That’s not the case at all. If you are to take those books, they’re
not even making the same kind of claims. The vast majority of books that are claimed
like that – just as I said, Upanishads is one – they don’t make any claim except
to be accumulated human wisdom. There’s no claim to supernatural revelation
in that at all. And then we think that something like the
Koran was a claim of supernatural revelation, but it’s a claim to supernatural revelation
about an angel that revealed this to a man who was supposedly illiterate and didn’t
even know what he had received. And by the way, the Koran for Muslims is not
so much to be believed as to be obeyed. It’s not commensurate with the Scripture. Think of the Book of Mormons, which is supposedly
revealed through golden plates to a teenager in upstate New York, who had to have an angel
and peepstones to be able to see through to understand what it was, you look at that and
go, well that’s not making the same kind of claim. The Bible’s claim to supernatural revelation
is based upon the character of God, the acts of God, and the consistent purpose of God,
as Carl Henry, one of my mentors, said, “Graciously to forfeit his own personal privacy that His
creatures might know Him.” And the Bible is in terms of the claims as
Steve said it makes of itself in a completely different category. And so when I hear a question like that, I
always to go back and say, the question is itself based upon a false premise. It’s a very common false premise, but it’s
one we really need to address right up front. SPROUL: I’d just like to add too that what
you’ve already said about this climate or culture of relativism and pluralism that’s
allergic to anybody making exclusive claim for truth or anything like that. If you’re really concerned about that, I’d
challenge people who say they all teach the same thing to spend five minutes, just five
minutes just to compare the Koran or the Upanishad or the Bhagavad Gita, anything with the Bible. The claims are not only different. They are fundamentally contradictory. And these books cannot all be true. It’s that simple. And if you want to put them all in the same
plane, then you’d have to reject them all. But to accept them all, if I can be candid,
is mindless. OK? GODFREY: Can I just add to that? You know, I think going back also to that
earlier question about dealing with the Christian claim as to being the only way to God. I think the more that we can address these
issues both intellectually as they need to be addressed, but we also have to think a
little bit about practically. And I think practically we want as much as
possible to actually get people reading the Bible. If we can get them into the Bible, there’s
a much greater chance that the Spirit will be at work and that they’ll see how different
the Bible is from the way it’s represented. And I think it’s important that when we
talk about the exclusive claims of Christ, we do that not in terms of making them our
exclusive claims about Christ, but of making them His exclusive claims about Himself, so
that their problem isn’t with us. Their problem is with Jesus. And for Roman Catholics and even for Muslims
who make some nice statements about Jesus, they have to come to grips with what Jesus
has said about Himself. And so getting people into the Word is the
most practical thing we can do. FERGUSON: R.C. can I add to that? SPROUL: Yes, absolutely. FERGUSON: Because I have – I think we’re
living in a new age when the vast majority of people who make such claims have probably
no knowledge whatsoever of what’s in the Bible. And you discover if you – if you just probe
them a little, they have been threatening you, some of them threatening you on the basis
of their PhDs or somebody else’s PhD. But all you need to say to them is, “Well,
could you just kind of roughly take me through the message of, well, let’s say, Paul’s
letter to the Romans, or you know, choose your book to expose the grossness of the prejudice
that has kind of escaped into our society because it’s so cool now to say truth is
relative, and these books they’re all the same. And there’s this vast reservoir of actual
prejudiced, unintelligent ignorance that very gently, Jesus-like, I think we must expose. And you know, Jesus was not embarrassed on
occasion to embarrass people, even to embarrass them in public. And I think we need to have the God-given
confidence to do that. And if we’re going to do that, we ourselves
really need to know the Word better. SPROUL: Alright, here’s one. Is it a sin for a Christian to vote for a
Mormon or a Roman Catholic for President of the United States? FERGUSON: I think I’d better answer that
question. MOHLER: Absolutely not. SPROUL: What? MOHLER: Absolutely not. It’s not a sin to vote for someone of whom
you – in other words, if the only person we can vote for is an evangelical Christian,
then we’re in big trouble. We’re electing a president as a constitutional
officer, not a pastor. Now, at the same time at the same, at same
time we have to recognize we’re the people that know that worldview matters. And so I’ve been very involved in this in
terms of the media. People asking, you know, well, should there
or should there not? Of course, there should not be a religious
test for public office. That’s nonsense. Just wait until a scientologist runs, and
see how many of the liberal media decide there better be a religious test for public office. The reality is we know that we are a composite. Our worldview comes out of our most cherished
and basic beliefs. And so everything is fair game for interrogation
by voters. But quite frankly in 1960, when John F. Kennedy
was running for President of the United States, when there was a great deal of anti-Catholic
prejudice in the United States, he went and spoke to the Houston Baptist Pastors Association
and said that my faith should be a matter of interest only to me. And he said it should have no public significance
whatsoever. Well, that’s nonsense. The reality is I wish John F. Kennedy had
been far more Catholic than he was, because the worldview on the issues we’re talking
about is issues in which – these are issues in which we should be able to draw a line
from someone’s worldview to their policy positions. And they are composite human beings. We shouldn’t say you can’t vote for an
X or a Y, because quite frankly we’ve been humiliated by some who would identify themselves
as evangelical Christians and then hold public office and not make the connections between
our worldview and the policy positions that should flow from that. We need to look at a person, look at them
compositely, understand that we are electing a secular office to hold a constitutional
function, and then we should do our very best to encourage the people who have the comprehensively
healthy worldviews to run for office and to do so with integrity. And at the end of the day, let’s be very
thankful that we follow a Lord who said, “Render unto Caesar the things that Caesar’s, and
under God the things that are God’s.” We have to be the last people on earth perhaps
who know there is a difference between Caesar and Christ, and there’s a difference between
the church and the government. And it’s at difficult moments like this
we have some hard things to think through, but at the end of the day, this is where Christians
had better be thinking as Christians when we go into the voting booth. GODFREY: But I do think. I agree with what you said. But I do think just as it was right for people
to raise the question with John Kennedy – will he be able to conduct the constitutional office
independent of the papacy – some reporter ought to ask Mitt Romney, what is his relationship
with the prophet in Salt Lake City? And he ought to be on the record as to – in
what he – what his position is. MOHLER: That’s right. I agree. And that’s why we need more talk about this,
not less. GODFREY: Right. And that’s, you know – what becomes appalling
is how little the press knows about religion, and therefore never knows the right question
to ask about religion. And so, but I certainly agree with what you’re
saying. SPROUL: Good. Thanks. Next question here – GODFREY: Or we could have the queen as the
head of the churches and solve our problems. SPROUL: I would vote for that. FERGUSON: Well, you know. SPROUL: Not for the head of the church, but
for the head of the government. FERGUSON: Well, if your alternatives are called
Mitt, Newt and Rick, Elizabeth doesn’t sound too bad after all. MOHLER: We are not amused. SPROUL: “I’m concerned that if we (quote)
‘shelter’ our children too much from our materialistic, hedonistic, anti-Christian
society during their education, they will not know how to deal with people who disagree
with them. Shouldn’t we prepare our young children
so that as young adults, they will be courageous?” Let me just say one thing, that my son has
been challenged with that question all the time because he’s involved with the homeschool
movement. And he’s criticized for sheltering his children. And he says the next thing they’re going
to do is accuse me of feeding them and clothing them as well. But go ahead and answer, you guys. GODFREY: Well, I think the historic commitment
in my circles, Dutch Reformed circles, to Christian education was not to shelter children
from the world or knowing what’s going on in the world, but to provide them exactly
with a balanced education that includes God, rather than excludes God. So it’s a more inclusive than a more exclusive
education. I think we need to work at that. We don’t want our children unaware of what’s
going on in the world. We want them educated under the Word of God
to interpret what’s going on in the world, to understand what’s going on in the world,
and to respond to it. MOHLER: Yeah, I think that’s a very good
point, and it – so let’s wake everybody up. Let’s talk about sex. When it comes to sex education, we believe
that parents should take the role to teach their children such things, knowing that they
will hear many other things from those outside, but they need to hear the right things from
us first situated within a Christian worldview based upon the authority of Scripture. And we’re going to know they’re going
to hear many other things because I homeschooled – my wife and I homeschooled our children,
but quite frankly homeschoolers who think they’re completely shielding their children
from the world are fooling themselves. That’s not happening. But we are taking the lead to say we need
to be the teacher up front. It’s the same thing with these alternative
worldviews. The parent needs to be right up front. The parent needs to be the one who introduces
to his children the fact that there are many different worldviews. We need to give them the equipment to evaluate
these worldviews. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once told
the story – he was a Senator from New York. He told of going to upstate New York and meeting
with Amish. There was a controversy over dairy issues. And, he was meeting with Amish dairy farmers. And all you have to know is the name Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, and you know he was Catholic, an Irish Catholic. And he was talking to this Amish farmer. And this Amish farmer said, “You’re Catholic,
aren’t you.” And he said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “You know, I’ve been trying to
protect my children from you, from Catholicism.” And he said, “I have a 16-year-old daughter,
and she’s been raised in this Amish community all her life.” And he said, “I’m realizing that you folks
have an influence I didn’t even understand until just the other night when I heard my
own daughter talk about Madonna.” And Moynihan said, “Your problem, sir, is
not Catholicism. It’s a whole lot more than you think.” And that’s just to show, you can raise a
16-year-old girl in an Amish community, and she’s going to know about Madonna. We fool ourselves if we think we are actually
sheltering our children from knowing these things. We need to be actively guiding and teaching
them how to think about such things. SPROUL: “In the beginning of the Declaration
of Independence, it’s stated that all men have certain inalienable rights, and that
these rights are self-evident. From a Christian worldview, are these rights
truly self-evident, or are they revealed only by the illumination through the Holy Spirit? Romans declares God is made evident in His
creation. Can we say our rights that are bestowed on
us by God are truly self-evident? Can the concept of inalienable rights have
any foundation, merit, or stability apart from God and His Word as it is revealed? By the way, when we talk about self-evident
truth, if I can interject myself here at this point, I mentioned in my earlier address seventeenth
century rationalism and Descartes and all of that. These guys were seeking for certain principles
of truth. And the idea of self-evident truth was based
upon actually a Christian understanding of natural revelation, that there are certain
truths that are given in nature to all men, given in the Scripture in special revelation,
but beyond – I mean Scripture itself as the Bible tells us that there are certain
truths that God makes manifest and clear to all creatures. Now, again, in this wholesale rejection of
Christianity in our culture, we’ve seen a wholesale rejection against natural law
and against natural theology as well. But the framers of our Constitution and the
fathers at that time embraced the idea of natural law and of natural – general revelation,
and said these are truths that are manifest to anybody that opens their eyes. And again they go on to that with inalienable
rights, those few rights that were mentioned – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
– were based also on natural law and the common view of the nations, you know, the
nations of the world, that all agree on that sort of thing. But we live in a time now – I remember during
the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. When he was up for the judgeship in the Supreme
Court, he was interrogated by the Senate Judiciary Committee, who I believe the Chairman at that
time was the present Vice President of the United States. But that – Senator Biden at the time was
all over Clarence Thomas when he asked him if he believed in natural law. And Thomas said yes, he did. And Biden said nobody believes that anymore. Nobody teaches that in any of the laws. And here it is based in the founding documents
of our country. But that’s part of the crisis that we’re
into now. MOHLER: The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre
has given this probably more attention than anyone else. He gave a great series of lectures years ago
that became a book entitled, ‘Whose Justice, Which Rationality.’ And he was really demonstrating that the idea,
by the way, of human rights is a very recent kind of language. You don’t find that kind of language if
you go backwards. He also talks about how culturally specific
it is, and then he makes this observation. The language of human rights only emerges
out of a culture that’s been very pervasively Christian. So you find concern for all kinds of moral
issues and justice, and we would also attribute that to common grace and natural revelation. But rights language in terms of human rights,
the kind of rights that the founders of our country declared to be self-evident, it turns
out they’re actually only self-evident if you have other intellectual preconditions
met. And I’m going to be speaking tonight on
Romans 1, which is going to be convenient, because the question for us is, why are those
intellectual conditions not met? And Paul actually answers that. GODFREY: Well, in the context, of course of
the Declaration, the key point was that these rights come from God and not from monarchs,
and that when monarchs seek to take them away, they may be resisted in the name of God. SPROUL: But those monarchs wrote – ruled
by divine right, didn’t they? That’s a joke. GODFREY: That’s not self-evident. FERGUSON: It’s not even funny. SPROUL: Here’s a question specifically for
Dr. Godfrey. Do you believe that embracing the eschatology
of post-millennialism leads to anti-intellectualism considering that some of the greater minds
have held this belief? GODFREY: No. That’s an easy one. No, there were great theologians in the seventeenth
and eighteenth century, who were giants of intellect, who were post-millennial. My only point was that when you – in the
nineteenth century in America embraced an anti-intellectual stand, post-millennialism
could encourage that, in that things are all going to work out well in the end anyway,
so I don’t have to take a lot of personal responsibility in the matter. It’s not a necessary or even a fair application
of post-millennialism. I think it was a way in which post-millennialism
was misused in the nineteenth century. SPROUL: OK. What can the local church do to address the
rampant problem of Christian men who struggle with or are addicted to pornography? Do you recommend any ministries devoted to
this and how prevalent is this in the church today? Am I the only man who struggles? It’s not just a rampant problem of Christian
men. It’s a rampant problem of Christian pastors
that we’ve come to discover sadly. So how would you men respond to that? MOHLER: We may all need to speak to this. I’ll just simply say it’s a rampant problem
of Christians. It is primarily a problem of Christian men
on the one hand. On the other hand, you may have seen USA Today
yesterday mentioning that these romance novels are now exponentially selling more as women,
including some Christian women, are reading them because they can read them on their digital
devices without having racy covers sitting around the family room. And those – we could go into all kinds of
explanations about why those two different forms of pornography are very different, one
of them very romantic, one of them very visual. You can figure all that out. But the reality is that this is one of most
insidious, moral developments of our age. And it has to do with the fact that pornography
has a very long history. If you’ve been to Pompey, you know that. But it wasn’t available to everyone all
the time at a click of the mouse. That’s what’s different. And so we have lowered all of the defenses
of the culture, not only technologically, but we did it morally before we did it technologically. And we could talk about this ad infinitim
other than to say that this is bringing absolute devastation to the church, to families, to
marriages, to young lives, old lives. Someone told me the other day, they had to
put a filter in a nursing home, a filter on the computer system because it doesn’t go
away. It just doesn’t go away. I was asked about a ministry. We deal with all kinds of young people in
our church and obviously in other circles as well, and we use a ministry called Setting
Captives Free, which has been very, very helpful to many men especially struggling with this. SPROUL: One thing I would add is if you’re
a man struggling with this, and you’re really concerned about it, if you have a computer,
get rid of it, because nothing can be as valuable in the Internet that can outweigh the destructive
consequences of this. MOHLER: You know I spoke at a couple of Ligonier
conferences back. We did the pre-conference on the Christian
in the digital age, and I spoke about parents with young people. One other point I’d make is that according
to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study over 80% of teenagers in America have unrestricted
Internet access in their bedrooms. You know, that is insane. You put a 15-year-old kid in his bedroom with
unrestricted Internet access. You know, would you just take him into, you
know, a certain part of a certain town where you knew things happened and just let him
loose. You know, what kind of parenting is that. I suggest that when it comes to a computer
in the home where you especially have children and teenagers, the computer needs to be in
the kitchen where Mom is cutting carrots on the counter with a sharp knife. It has a wonderful effect in limiting what
goes on on the computer. SPROUL: There you go. GODFREY: Can I just say also as a practical
word, I know some seminarians in our seminary have – I have no idea how this happens – but
have connected their computers to one another so they can hold one another accountable for
the sites that are being visited. And this is another way to really help one
another out to know that someone is aware of what you’re doing. MOHLER: A program like Covenant Eyes helps
a lot of guys to do that because there’s true accountability. Everywhere they go is known by some Christian
brother, to whom they’re accountable. Or a wife. LAWSON: Just one sentence, R.C., just a dominant
vision of the holiness of God, which I know from the book that you wrote, if men would
be overwhelmed with the awesomeness of the absolute, unrivaled, unadulterated holiness
of God, I think that has such a sanctifying effect and the fear of God rightly cultivated
in the heart. SPROUL: That’s the longest single sentence
I’ve heard since I’ve been in Germany. Alright, we have to stop, because our time
has run out. [applause]
