Friday, May 16, 2025

Part I

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The Deaths of Two Heroic Code Breakers: Two Obituaries Reveal Two Women’s Heroic Lives From WWII That They Kept Secret For Decades

I’ll admit this, even as a teenager I was incredibly interested in spycraft and in espionage. I was very interested in the history of World War II. I was very interested in what was unfolding in the Cold War. I was very interested in what I would later come to understand are the moral dilemmas of espionage and spycraft. Of course, going back to the time that I was a young man, a teenager, an awful lot of it was basically misrepresentation in terms of the big screen on the movies.

That wasn’t completely disconnected from reality, but it was largely disconnected from reality. I wanted to understand the reality. I started reading far more serious literature and trying to understand the morality of espionage, the way it worked. This was at a time when you had the KGB versus the CIA, you had the USSR versus the USA in a very clear battle of espionage and spycraft with human lives on the line and the destiny of nations on the line. By the way, it is the same today, even as spycraft has been at least somewhat reinvented in the digital age. On the other hand, most spy agencies will still confirm that one of the most basic issues in espionage in terms of the great power conflict, it still comes down to individual spies, individual agents, and the three-dimensional relationships of human beings to each other.

Of course, this leads to an incredible avalanche of Christian worldview considerations, including the use of the truth versus the use of what is false. “Bodyguard of lies” is one of the descriptions that Winston Churchill used when it came to espionage and spycraft. So you all of a sudden understand this is an inversion of morality in one sense. By the way, how do you know who to trust? Because you not only have agents, you have double agents, and in some cases infamously during the Cold War, even during the struggle against Nazi Germany, you had triple agents. In other words, they flipped, they flipped, they flipped. How did you know for whom they are actually working?

In the struggle between the Allies in Nazi Germany some incredible achievements in spycraft, also later in the Cold War between the East and the West. But I’m bringing this up today because of two obituaries. I’ll be honest, I’m often moved by an obituary. In this case I’m moved by two of them. It was two very, very old women who died, one in Britain and one here in the United States. Both of them were World War II codebreakers. Both of them, as young women, were enlisted in the effort to gather intelligence, assimilate intelligence, understand intelligence, and turn intelligence into useful information for the Allied war effort. Of course, the United States and Britain were very close allies, and we are so today. That’s one of the reasons why there is this Five Eyes program in terms of Allied nations and the sharing of intelligence information even now.

But going back to World War II, one of the big issues on both sides of the Atlantic was cracking the Nazi code and then knowing what to do with the code once cracked. The secret to this was gaining access to what became known as the Enigma machine. It was a code machine used by the Nazis and, to their own stupidity, they did not recognize the code had been cracked. Throughout most of the war the Nazis patted themselves on the back in their genius in using this unbreakable code machine called Enigma, but it had been broken relatively early.

There were teams of young women, this is what’s really interesting, teams of young women, and you can understand why. It is because the young men were being pressed into the Royal Air Force, they’re being pressed into the army, they’re being pressed into combat. This left an awful lot of young women, many of whom obviously had enormous ability, and several of them were recruited into, not just several but many, were recruited into the codebreaking efforts in terms of espionage and national intelligence.

Two of them died just in recent days. I haven’t seen anyone make the connection, but I’ll admit there are probably few people reading the obituaries coming out of both Britain and the United States. I saw these two in juxtaposition, and I thought I want to tell you about them.

The first is an American, Julia Parsons, who died just in recent days at age 104. 104. This tells you that the surviving veterans of this kind of effort are getting very old. The headline in the obituary in the New York Times, “Julia Parsons 104, codebreaker in World War II.” Michael Rosenwald writes the obituary here. “Julia Parsons, a US Navy codebreaker during World War II, who was among the last survivors of a top secret team of women that unscrambled messages to and from German U-boats, died on April the 18th in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania, age 104.” Her death in a Veteran’s Affairs hospice facility was confirmed by her daughter. “A lover of puzzles and crosswords while growing up in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, Mrs. Parsons deciphered German military messages that had been created by an Enigma machine, a typewriter-sized device with a keyboard wired to internal rotors, which generated millions of codes. Her efforts provided allied forces with information critical to evading, attacking and sinking enemy submarines.”

You look at the heroes and heroines of the war effort, and you understand what was at stake, the free world fighting Nazi Germany. You come to appreciate the fact that there was a team of very bright young women who were committed, even sacrificially to the breaking of these codes and the stewardship of this information. Now, one of the most interesting aspects of the role played by Julia Parsons, is how she struggled with the morality of it all. In a fallen world, this is one of those situations of brokenness in which Christians can’t just run away from it. We have to understand how in the world would we negotiate within it, how would we act righteously within it? Ultimately, of course, you have to look at the rightness of the cause, and you have to look at the necessary defeat of Nazi Germany. But that doesn’t mean you’re not left with very deep moral questions and moral considerations.

Listen to this. “Her cryptological handiwork saved some lives while simultaneously ending others, presenting her with a moral quandary as she parsed the day’s messages.” The obituary continues. “She recalled decoding a congratulatory note transmitted to a German sailor following the birth of his son. His submarine was sunk a few days later.” Mrs. Parsons told the Washington Post years ago, “To think that we all had a hand in killing somebody did not sit well with me. I felt really bad. The baby would never see his father. Still, she was very proud to serve.”

Well, in a fallen world in which you have an enemy like Nazi Germany, driven by a megalomaniac and a man infused with deep moral evil who was bent on world domination and the extinguishing of freedom, who annihilated millions of people, bringing that war effort to an end was absolutely necessary. But you also have to keep in mind, here was a German sailor who didn’t himself necessarily declare war at all on the allies. For all we know, he was just a young husband and now a young father, and his life was extinguished in order to bring the war to an end. Christians are among the very few who can say, “We understand that in a fallen world there are some situations in which it is just not something that we are to feel good about.”

But I said there were two women. The other was on the other side of the Atlantic. Her obituary ran in London’s The Economist just a few days before the obituary of Julia Parsons. She wasn’t 104. No, she was only 101. She died, and here’s the interesting thing. She was there in London during the Second World War. She was involved with British intelligence. She was involved in the codebreaking efforts there in Britain. Very, very important. She was serving at Bletchley Park, famous in terms of the history of warfare and the history of military intelligence. That’s where the codebreakers were serving in England. Bletchley Park is defined here in The Economist as, “The center of British codebreaking during the Second World War.”

Here’s one of the most interesting things. She was involved in the codebreaking. She was receiving the messages, she was breaking the code. Obviously a great deal of intelligence, her own intelligence, invested in this. But she also had to paraphrase it because if it were discovered that there would be a British communication that was clearly just a translation of the German, the Nazi communication, the Nazis would know the code was broken. So she had to find a way and her team had to find a way of paraphrasing the information, putting it in different words in order to say the same thing, but not with the same words, not with the same word order.

So where would she get that talent? Well, she said she learned to paraphrase because her mother had taught her to memorize the Scriptures. In order to test the girl as to whether she understood the Scriptures, the mother had her paraphrase the Bible verse. Only then was the mother satisfied that she had understood the text. So it is very interesting to hear you have a British young woman, a codebreaker in Bletchley Park who was having to paraphrase messages, and she learned how to paraphrase because she as a girl had memorized scripture and had to paraphrase the verse. As The Economist said, “Her mother had taught her to put verses from the Bible into her own words so it came easily.”

Okay, now the Atlantic was crossed because Betty Webb was sent from Bletchley Park to the United States to work with the codebreakers on the US side, and she spent several months here in the US during the war. She did enjoy that. As The Economist says, “America thrilled her with its steak and ice cream, rayon stockings and astonishing freedom.” Okay, but here’s another interesting aspect of all of this. It’s really very interesting to me. Throughout most of their lifetimes, Julia Parsons and Betty Webb, these two young women on opposite sides of the Atlantic, they had been sworn to secrecy, understandably, they have been taken into the intelligence culture, they had been entrusted with a stewardship. They were told to tell no one about it on pain of death.

Betty Webb said that when the position was offered to her, the officer put his service revolver on the desk to make the point. “If you leak this, you will be shot.” Okay, when it came to Betty Webb on her side of the Atlantic after the war, she found herself crossing Trafalgar Square there in London and seeing another young woman she had worked with. She knew her only by a code name. They let their eyes meet and nothing else. They never spoke to each other. On the other side of the Atlantic in the United States, Julia Parsons told no one that she’d been involved in the codebreaking and that she had been involved in espionage for the United States because she was told never to acknowledge her participation. She had to keep mum. That meant that her husband died never knowing that his wife had been key to military intelligence.

But there’s an interesting turn in the stories of both of these women. When it came to Betty Webb, she was there in London with the woman she had allowed her eyes to meet, and they had served together in the intelligence gathering decades before. The colleague came up to her and said, “It’s out. We can talk about it now,” and that meant the British government had acknowledged Bletchley Park and the entire process. By the way, you can see an Enigma machine in many museums today.

That’s what happened to Julia Parsons. She had kept this secret through long decades of life, and then she went to a museum in Washington, DC and what she had been quiet about was now a matter of display in this museum with government cooperation. She all of a sudden discovered that she can now talk about it too. For Mrs. Parsons, this meant 1997 when she visited the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, and there were the Enigma machines displayed. She turned to someone there in the museum and asked why the machines were on display. This is classified information. The guide, according to the New York Times, replied that the Enigma work had been declassified in the 1970s. No one told either of these women.

I think it’s very touching that both of these women who served with so much distinction were clearly willing to take these secrets all the way to the grave until they understood that their own governments had released the secrets. It was safe now.

This is something else that you see mirrored from scripture. You just don’t know sometimes who you are passing on the sidewalk. You have no idea who is flying with you sitting there on the airplane. You just don’t know who you’re walking past just in everyday life. Sometimes it may be that you’re walking past what appears to be, and I mean this sweetly, a little old lady only to discover there’s a veteran of military intelligence who had the stewardship of lives in her hands.

One final thought about this by the way. The entire genre of literature that’s sometimes described as spy novels or espionage, it is amazing how many people involved in it got involved in it explicitly from a Christian worldview.

Part II

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Is It Wrong for a Woman to Hold the Title of Children’s Pastor? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, now we’re gonna turn to questions, and always, I’m honored by the questions that are sent and listeners honor us all by sharing these questions with us. I’m looking especially for those that may have the greatest application to listeners. A question comes in from Texas, and a woman asks, “Is it wrong or inappropriate for a woman to be given the role as a children’s pastor even if they’re not teaching over men?” All right. All right, that’s a fair question. I’m gonna say I think the immediate answer has to be no, it’s not appropriate for a woman to be given the title as children’s pastor. I think the key there is pastor.

I’ll tell you, I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with a woman having a lead responsibility and organizational responsibility and other involvement in terms of teaching children. I would say my own experience as a boy in Sunday school and vacation Bible school and elsewhere would’ve been unspeakably impoverished but for the dedicated women who taught me and loved me and organized the whole thing, and not only taught us the Scripture, but made sure we had windmill cookies and Kool-Aid as well.

But I’m asked this question, I want to say directly I think the problem is the word pastor. I think the confession of faith of the Southern Baptist Convention has it right that the office of pastor is limited to men as defined by Scripture. I think the word pastor just doesn’t belong here. If the word pastor does belong here, that changes the job. But I also want to say in the rightly ordered church, the word pastor should be reserved for those who have a larger pastoral oversight and responsibility and teaching role in the church. So rightly understood, I think the key word here is pastor rather than children’s pastor. As we look at the New Testament, I think the office of pastor is limited to men, and I’ll just have to leave it at that.

Part III

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When Seagulls and Raccoons Steal Food, Are They Sinning? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from an 11-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Okay, sometimes so often the neatest questions, the coolest questions, the most astounding questions come from children. This is a question sent in from a listener in Germany, and I appreciate so much this listener in Germany sending in this question. It’s a father sending in a question on behalf of his son who’s 11 years old, and he’s asking a moral question. The question is this. “Animals like seagulls and raccoons are known for stealing. Are they sinning?” This father says, he’s been trying to think of the best way of describing this. It’s a great question. When bears come and steal things out of your campsite, are they stealing? The answer is no. They’re being bears. So I love this question from an 11-year-old, because you just got to love an 11-year-old boy who’s interested in animals. Seagulls and raccoons. They’re not stealing, they’re just being raccoons and seagulls. They’re opportunistic eaters for one thing.

Now, it doesn’t help with clarity here, the fact that raccoons look like crooks because it looks like they’re wearing a criminal’s mask. But the other problem is anthropomorphism. We tend to read onto animals our own moral state and our own feelings and thoughts. With raccoons, that’s pretty easy to do. There are moral lessons to be learned from the animal kingdom, but we have to keep very much in understanding that the animals are not moral creatures as we are. They’re not made in God’s image as human beings are. So it’s a very different moral agency. Even when we say bad dog, sometimes we mean dog dog.

Now, this is again, a very smart 11-year-old boy asking because in the Old Testament an animal that kills a person would be killed for that act. Yes, that’s true, and there are other situations in which animals are involved in moral situations. But I think the important issue underlined there in Scripture is the fact that it’s the destruction of the image bearer, the human being, that is the issue. You just can’t blame a bear for being a bear. You can’t blame a cow for being a cow. But we’d sure better take those things into consideration while we’re dealing with them.

Well, a wise statement from the last century or so came with someone saying, “You know, when the kingdom of Christ comes, the lion and the lamb will be able to lie down together. But until the kingdom of Christ comes, the lamb better not try it.”

Part IV

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What is the Most Important Symbolic Number in the Bible? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from an 8-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Again, next I’m gonna take a question and another one from a boy here, eight years old in the third grade at a classical Christian school in Washington State. Love that. In class the teacher was talking about the importance of numbers in the Bible, the importance of the number seven, as in seven days of the week, the Sabbath, the 12 tribes, the 12 apostles, et cetera. Yes, the number 12 comes up. This little boy says, “I’ve also been thinking about the importance of the number three, the days between Jesus’s death and resurrection as well as the Trinity.” He says, “Okay, what number do you think is the most important number in the Bible? I think it’s probably three, but I wanted to know what you thought.” Well, I think you’re probably right.

Yet I want to say there’s a number you missed, which is the first number which is revealed in Scripture. It’s the first number given to Israel. Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God. The Lord is one. Deuteronomy 6:4. The Shema is known for the Hebrew word hear. Hear, O Israel. So the first number we need to keep in mind is one. Then after that, yes, I think the next number in priority is three for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

Behind all of this is the orthodox understanding of the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So when it gets to the number three, I think you are exactly right. But before we say three, we’ve got to say one.

Part V

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Is It Wrong to Use Other Words in Place of Curse Words? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from an 16-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

All right, we’re on a roll here, and it is because this is just as these questions are coming to me. The next one’s from a 16-year-old boy. Yeah, I can imagine where this question comes from. I’m not gonna read it exactly as he wrote it. You’ll understand why. He’s asking about whether it’s right or wrong to use words that aren’t bad in themselves, but they’re close to bad words.

All right, so I got to tell you, I going to say this, my young friend here, I was raised in a family, and especially with my mom, where you not only couldn’t use a bad word, you couldn’t use a word as a substitute for a bad word. She was pretty sure she could figure out what bad word you were substituting for. I can just say that meant that I heard an awful lot of words I couldn’t use. I’ll just say that in my lifetime, and certainly when I was 16, I heard a lot of words I couldn’t use, and I couldn’t even use words as substitutes for those words. This boy, this young man is asking is it okay to use. Words aren’t bad in themselves, but they might be tied to other things.

The very fact you’re asking the question, I want to say this young man, the fact you’re asking the question means you’ve already answered it. So I don’t think it is the same thing in terms of say, taking the Lord’s name in vain, using vulgar terms. I don’t think that everything that someone might think is connected to that or a substitute for that is forbidden In the same sense. I’ll just simply say, we are told in the New Testament to keep our language good, beautiful, and true. Now, I want to say to this young man, I got to say in retrospect, I think my mom was kind of overly strict on that issue. Sometimes it even confused me what the connection was. I walked away from some conversations just knowing, well, I’m not going to say that again and not exactly sure why. But I want to say to my young brother here, I think in the long run, I’m thankful that I didn’t have to apologize for words I didn’t use.

Part VI

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What are the Differences Between the Models of Biblical Counseling and Integrationism? What Dangers Do You See with Integration? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, big frame question comes in from another listener. “Can I share the differences between a biblical counseling model and an integrationist model and whatever dangers I see in the latter.” Okay, you asked, so I’ll answer. A biblical counseling model is based upon the understanding that the most appropriate counsel that a Christian should give to another is the explicit text of Scripture, explained and applied. The ordinary means of grace is the way we might put it. One believer sharing scripture with another believer, and in the context of the local church, this means that the most important biblical counsel is what takes place in the pulpit, in the preaching of the Word of God and that biblical counseling is the application of the preached Word, the application of the Word of God. That means that the Word of God is the sole authority in explaining everything important to the situation.

The reality of what it means to be made in God’s image, the reality of being a moral creature, the reality of right and wrong, the commandments of God. All of this, the entirety of the gospel and the sanctification, all this explicitly biblical categories, the text of the scripture applied in the context of counseling.

The integrationist model is by definition a bit different in that it is seeking an integration of what we would call secular models of counseling. That’s usually based in a secular understanding of psychiatry, psychology, therapy, et cetera. Doing that as a Christian engaged in mixing together, synergistically mixing together, biblical counsel, and secular psychological psychiatric structures.

The problem with that, because that’s exactly the questions asked, what is my definition of those two models and what dangers would I see in the latter that means integrationist model? Well, I think in the end, the big problem is that it seeks to integrate what can’t be integrated. For example, if you take the prevailing secular understanding of therapy and all the rest, the Christian understanding of sin is not at all consummate with most of those approaches. Even when they are, and even where sin might have some kind of role or function, it’s not likely to be anywhere near in terms of its structure. This is where there’s a genuine disagreement. It’s a deep disagreement. 

So for instance, at Boyce College and Southern Seminary, we don’t have integrationist professors, we have only biblical counseling professors.

My problem is, I’ll just tell you, the integrationist model, I don’t think it’s a fair fight, so to speak. I think it claims more than it can deliver because I think when you say, “Okay, here’s sacred scripture and here’s secular learning and we’re going to put them together,” well, I think Scripture gets displaced in that. I think what happens is that the secular claims really, they push aside the biblical claims, or even if they don’t push them aside, they redefine them in a way that I think is fundamentally unhelpful. So I’m a big proponent of biblical counseling. I am not a proponent of integrationism.

This also reminds us that from a Christian perspective, sometimes health can come from an unhealthy or inadequately healthy source. So I’m not saying that anyone who’s been genuinely helped, I wish you hadn’t been helped. I’m just saying I think true health and true help is going to come through biblical counseling. So I’m not questioning motivation, I am questioning theological frame and commitments.