Friday, May 30, 2025

Part I

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The Moral Significance of Bricks: The Dark and Weighty Reality of Living in a Town Built for Nazis

Are the bricks evil? That’s an interesting question posed in moral terms about a village. A village in a beautiful area beside a lake very near to Berlin, Germany, and I’m speaking from Berlin right now. But the New York Times just ran an article asking the question, “Are the Bricks Evil?” The subhead of the article, “In a Village Built for Nazis, Darkness Lingers.” The article raises huge questions about historical legacy. What does it mean that the Nazis, not only the Nazis but the SS, the most feared branch of the Nazis, built this as an SS village? What about the people who are living there now? What does that mean in moral terms? Thus the question, are the bricks themselves evil?

The little neighborhood is known as Waldsiedlung or Forest Estate, it is also known as Curved Lakeside or Krumme Lanke. It is described as, “A sought after place to live in the German capital. Named after an adjacent lake, its residents compare it to a fairy tale village. Little peaked roof cottages with wood shutters are built into a dense green forest crisscrossed by mossy paths.” It goes on, “Whole swaths are car-less. Children play in the gardens while dogs run free in a sloping meadow. In the summer, a short walk in flip-flops and a bathing suit leads to the lake.” But the article says, “Life here also means channeling Germany’s brutal past. The neighborhood was built in the lead up to World War II as an elite community for the SS, the elite guard of the Nazi Reich, whose responsibilities included carrying out the Holocaust.”

It is true that wherever human beings are and wherever human history is known, we are walking with ghosts in the sense that we are walking with historical memory, and we are walking with an historical memory that demands constantly, especially is underlined by a biblical worldview, a moral perspective. You can’t stand in certain places without knowing that something of grave moral significance happened here, and in so many cases, that’s an understatement. There are no words to express the horror that happened there.

My wife and I, with other Christians were at Buchenwald just a matter of days ago, one of the Nazi concentration camps. That’s one of the names emblazoned in infamy so long as human history continues. It’s hard to have a vocabulary to express what took place there. Being there just underlines the moral significance. It honestly doesn’t make that moral significance any easier to express. In some of these places it seems like the only appropriate moral response is to remain silent, but at the same time about the evils that are represented there, we cannot be silent.

Speaking about the challenges facing Germany and the civilized West, one doctor who lives there who’s now age 62 said, “I think we have a special responsibility,” “because we live on an estate that was built by perpetrators for perpetrators.” This little community was built as a so-called SS camaraderie estate. It was, “One of the few housing developments built by the Nazis in Berlin. During the war, the roughly 600 small apartments, row houses, duplexes, and single family cottages housed SS members and their families according to rank.” I continue, “The settlement was designed to embody the Nazi blut und boden, blood and soil ideology was touted Aryan’s quasi-mystical relationship with their ancestral land. War was in the blueprints. The settlers were designed to double as bomb shelters and the tree cover was useful for thwarting airstrikes.” So this bucolic neighborhood wasn’t just built for perpetrators, it was built by perpetrators, even as they were planning for deadly war, and worse.

The entire thrust of the article is raising the moral question about living in such a neighborhood. Looking at it now, you would have very few clues about its very violent past, or at least its past in housing some of the most violent human beings ever to live on planet Earth, along with their families, who according to the Nazi plan, were going to repopulate a Nazi-dominated Reich that would span the continent. Once you do know the past of this little village, you come to understand that the neighborhood was designed to house a racial elite, an officer elite of the SS. It was designed in what was described as, “The homeland protection style of architecture.”

The question is, what does it mean to live in such a place now? One woman identified as 67 years old, a teacher of disabled children who moved there with her family in the year 2000, she said, “Some people say it’s 80 years ago, it has nothing to do with me.” She said, for herself, “It’s the opposite. I want to know what happened here in my house.” The Times article then tells us, “As time passes and the last eyewitnesses die, physical locations are increasingly important to remembering the Holocaust. This is one of those physical locations.” But even as the paper acknowledges that, it goes on to acknowledge that very little is known about daily life on the estate, but the report acknowledges the quality of life there was, “Predicated on plunder.” As the war was coming to an end, Nazi Germany was doomed, some of the SS families living in this community decided with the threat of the Red Army and all of its horrors coming, they would simply, as some said, take a walk into the lake. You can understand what that meant.

Some of the people now living in the village or recently living in that village say they really didn’t know about its violent background. But one woman there said, “When we heard that, we thought, can we do that? Can we move here?” She said, “And it’s like, are the bricks evil?” Others said that they don’t believe that those live in the village now are responsible for the evil deeds of those who designed the place, built the place, and lived in the neighborhood during the Nazi years.

For Christians, this raises a very humbling set of issues. Number one, we understand that we can’t look at history without taking into full account the moral nature of that history, and this means that we are looking not just at the rising and falling of Reichs and nations, we’re not just looking at war after war. We’re looking at a story of human sinfulness, sometimes on a scale that is almost unimaginable. We understand there has to be a moral reckoning, but the moral reckoning really can’t be taken out on the lake. It can’t be taken out on the lake shore. It can’t be taken out perhaps in one sense, even on these houses because the bricks themselves weren’t committing the sins.

On the other hand, they do become symbolic of these sins and thus, if you ask the question, are the bricks evil? The fact is, no, the bricks aren’t evil. They’re inanimate objects, but we also understand that inanimate objects that are formed into a brick are formed into a brick by someone, with something, for some purpose, and that’s where we come to just concede in humility and in brokenhearted-ness looking at history, that those bricks can be made into a house or they can be made into a crematorium, either one. To be honest, it’s very difficult to know exactly how to analyze a situation like this. No, the houses aren’t guilty, the neighborhood isn’t guilty, but the very fact that this article ran this week in the New York Times all the way across the ocean tells us that it’s a live issue, in terms of reaching a moral reckoning with the past, even in this neighborhood. 

But it’s not just this neighborhood. This is an essential point we need to think about. Less than 20 minutes away, there’s another neighborhood. And it’s on a lake, very beautiful, it’s on the Wannsee. And it was in a house on the 20th of January 1942 on that bucolic lake just in what you might call the suburbs or the outlying beautiful areas around Berlin, it was there that senior Nazi leaders gathered on that day to come up with a final answer to the Jewish question, what became known as the final solution. It came out of German officers and functionaries of the Nazi regime of the Third Reich, meeting in a beautiful mansion, which still exists, it’s now a memorial to the Holocaust. On a beautiful lake, meeting there with culture in a beautiful house in order to plot the Holocaust, the mass murder of millions of Jews, with the intention as was made clear in that meeting, to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

How in the world can you reconcile that? How can you understand how people could meet in the context of beauty, in a beautiful house, and plot mass murder, even as they were celebrating themselves as the architects of a new Reich and a new human destiny? Christians look at all of this and we see brokenness that we can’t fix. We understand that there’s a legacy, a historical legacy, a moral legacy just about everywhere we turn. Not everywhere is like that neighborhood on the lake where these SS homes are found. Not every neighborhood is like the Wannsee, where this horrifying meeting of the final solution was held. God made us to live in space, time and history. We live in a place, we walk certain streets, we see certain views. All of this comes laden with moral significance, but not equally laden.

I guess one lesson from all of this, from a biblical perspective is that evil often disguises itself as beauty. That can be in a village, it can be in a lakeside, it could be near Berlin, or it could be far closer to every one of us. So no, the bricks aren’t evil, but they were built up into evil. These moral questions of history just won’t go away, and as Christians we understand, they shouldn’t.

Part II

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Ed Smylie, Who Saved Apollo 13 Crew, Dies at 95 – And Duct Tape Was Crucial for the Success of His Heroic Act

On a more encouraging note, human beings are capable of amazing achievements and some of them are unsung, even putting together common elements to save astronauts after an accident in space. Ed Smiley was one of the people who symbolized heroism in the 20th century, but it was an unusual form of heroism. It was heroism that came with an ingenious plan to save astronauts and a part of the plan was duct tape. Ed Smiley was his name. He was a NASA engineer and as The Economist of London recognized, reflecting on his death just a few weeks ago, he saved the crew of Apollo 13. But as he would say, he saved the crew of Apollo 13 with his team. They figured this out together.

It was the Apollo 13 mission, and as we know, many people now remember it by the movie, it experienced an incident. Houston, we have a problem. An explosion in the vehicle forced the astronauts to go into the lunar module. The problem is that the air scrubbers in the lunar module couldn’t handle all the astronauts in there for a sufficient period of time. If they didn’t come up with a solution of scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide, the astronauts would die in space.

Ed Smiley was just a man for an occasion and he had just the team. He was brought in as The Economist says, “At first he thought he could just siphon in lithium hydroxide from the command module.” I’ll just read that again. “He thought he could just siphon in lithium hydroxide from the command module,” “But that was shut down and the scrubbers were not interchangeable. In the command module, they were square bricks. In the lunar module, they were cylindrical. Another simple proverb that sprang to his mind was that you couldn’t put a square peg into a round hole. He and his team had to find another way. They didn’t have much to work with. There is not exactly a tool kit, a repair kit of adequacy carried on those missions back in the Apollo project.”

The Economist explains, “Working the stowage list, he found plastic bags, a spare suit hose to connect a square scrubber to a round one, and a piece of cardboard, the cover of the flight plan to stop the whole contraption collapsing as air ran through it. A sock came in handy, everything was fixed to the square scrubber with an even grid of duct tape applied by the astronauts step by step. As they heard the instructions read out to the crew by Ed Smiley safely on earth.”

The Economist then tells us, “The whole thing worked. The astronauts came home safe, splashing down into the South Pacific in a smother of orange and white parachutes.” Now, the pictures of Ed Smiley show him as a balding man, usually dressed in the NASA outfit at the time, which was a short-sleeve white shirt with a dark tie. But he was armed with ingenuity and practical know-how, you have to wonder how much of that practical know-how survives to this day. And he put together the limited tools and equipment that he had, including the cover of the flight manual, and worked it with duct tape into a system that kept the astronauts alive until they could return home.

He and his team were given the Presidential Medal of freedom. This is a great example of American can-do ingenuity. The incident did not make Ed Smiley famous to the larger world. It certainly made him famous inside NASA. It did also make the astronauts famous, and oddly enough, it made duct tape famous.

When it came to a motto in life, at some point he had imbibed the motto that he learned in rural Mississippi. “If a thing wouldn’t move when it was supposed to, use WD-40. If it moved when it wasn’t supposed to, use duct tape.” Civilizations and society’s great achievements often rise and fall on leaders who become famous. Sometimes they rise and fall on technicians who do not become famous. But it does tell you something, that The Economist of London recognized the importance of Ed Smiley and his duct tape, and it’s morally significant that we should take note as well. And we’re traversing through a dangerous world, my friends, it might help you to have some duct tape ready as well.

Part III

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If Marriage is a Good, God-Ordained Institution, Why Does the Apostle Paul Say That It Can Be a Hindrance to Ministry? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, now let’s turn to questions. 

A good question comes in from a 22-year-old young woman and marriage is on her mind. She speaks about reflecting on marriage as a God-given gift, an essential part of creation order. She then asks, “If marriage is such a good, God-ordained thing, why does it seem as though Paul may view marriage as a hindrance to Christians in 1 Corinthians 7?” She cites specific verses and she’s basically asking, how can I think about 1 Corinthians 7 and about God’s view of marriage, how we as Christians should understand marriage?

Well, it’s an honest question and I just recently taught in expositional study through 1 Corinthians 7, as a matter of fact, and I think there’s some very important cues in that text. When you’re looking at the writings of the Apostle Paul, you can look at an issue like marriage here, and yes, in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 he does not have the most, let’s just say optimistic view about marriage. And in some circumstances, it becomes very clear that the Apostle Paul’s ready to say look, he says, “I wish that you were all as I am,” and he means in an unmarried state. But it’s clearly in the context of gospel ministry.

And one of the things we sometimes miss is that the Apostle Paul gives us a major interpretive clue about this issue in Chapter 7, of Verse 26. He writes, “I think that in view of the present distress, it is good for a person to remain as he is.” Now, what is that present distress? Well, for one thing, the Corinthian church was involved in a lot of distress, and we know this. We can look at the inter-textual evidence and know the Apostle Paul wrote at least four letters to the Corinthian congregation. We have two of them by the Holy Spirit given to us, we called them 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. But in First Corinthians, let’s face it, the Apostle Paul is dealing with the congregation in deep distress, and at least that must be in part what the Apostle Paul was talking about when he speaks about that current distress.

And we also read Paul as we read all of Scripture, in light of other scripture, this is the analogy of faith. We interpret scripture by scripture. And you look at the entirety of the New Testament, you can even look at just the entirety of Paul’s letters, this is not a straightforward depiction of the Apostle Paul’s understanding of marriage. By the time you get to, for instance, his letter to the Ephesians, marriage is clearly the norm accepted among Christians, and the Apostle Paul accepted also as the norm.

But going back to 1 Corinthians 7, it’s clear that in a gospel perspective for gospel service, for maximum deployment, in terms of the gospel call, singleness has some advantages over being married because after all, when you’re married, you have concern for a wife as a husband. And you also are looking at the fact that once children enter the picture, yeah, a lot of other responsibilities come into view. And thus, the Apostle Paul says, for some evangelistic callings, for some evangelistic purposes, celibacy, and this is clearly a gift. And the Apostle Paul himself makes clear that if you’re struggling with this issue, you’re not given the gift of celibacy. And thus you should marry, that’s a creation order institution. Not only is there nothing wrong with it, God’s glory is in it, but there are circumstances in which in the present distress, the Apostle Paul offers the Holy Spirit-inspired counsel that he gives to the Corinthian congregation.

But we read 1 Corinthians in light, as I say, of the entire New Testament, where you have a very large, emphatic, comprehensive understanding that the vast majority of Christians are going to be married, and what we are called to is faithfulness in marriage. And by the way, the creation order commands have not gone away, “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” But there does come a higher priority of the gospel that can interfere with everything, even the relationship between children and parents, even the relationships between brothers and sisters in Christ. We also understand that marriage is essentially a commitment and that commitment becomes binding and that binding nature of marriage can indeed restrict and limit one’s mobility even for gospel causes, at least for a season. In that sense, there are advantages to being unmarried, but that’s a gift of celibacy, which means that one is not also given over to lust in that unmarried state.

The bottom line in a biblical theology is that creation order continues until the new creation, and that means that be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth, a man and a woman coming together in marriage remains the norm. But the gospel is disruptive with an even higher priority, the gospel order we might say, and thus some are given special gifts and make special commitments in order to be especially available for gospel service. This is not about just singleness and marriage. This is clearly as Paul is presenting it, not only in 1 Corinthians 7, but everywhere Paul speaks to the issue. It’s with the glory of God and with the furtherance of the gospel in mind.

Part IV

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Is ‘5 Solas’ an Oxymoron? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Another listener wrote in about the Reformation affirmations of Sola Scriptura, Sola Fides, Sola Gratia Sola Christus, Sola Deo Gloria. And he says, “What’s this about only, if you mention more than one, how can you say each is only?” He doesn’t raise that as his own concern, he says it came up in a recent conversation with a Catholic friend and the Catholic friend said, “How can you claim these are all alone, given that you mentioned three distinct things?”

Well, let’s be really clear. The Solas hold together. Each one of them is a statement of alone that makes sense most emphatically when you turn it into a sentence. You turn each one of them into a sentence and you have a system of sentences. How is it that we know what the gospel is? It is on the authority of Scripture alone. Not the Scripture plus anything else, it’s the authority of Scripture alone. Through whom does salvation come? Christ alone. How does it come to us? By grace alone. How do we appropriate it? By faith alone. And what is the sum of the gospel? To the glory of God alone. Those hang together. Every single one of those phrases reduced to the Solas, famously the Solas of the Reformation.

This is exactly what got Luther in trouble, even in the 16th century. Erasmus of Rotterdam was a Renaissance humanist, and he was at least favorable to an extent with Luther, but he remained a Catholic, and his problem with Luther is that he stretched everything to its logical conclusion. That’s where Erasmus wasn’t willing to go. Scripture, yes, but not Scripture alone, that’s an exaggeration. Faith, yes, but not faith alone. Grace, yes, but not grace alone. Christ, yes, but not his works alone. And the glory of God, yes, but there is earthly glory in the church too. That glory of God is not alone. Erasmus critiqued Luther as holding to a theology of hyperbole. Just say Scripture, Christ, grace, faith, glory of God. You don’t have to say those things and add alone. He called Luther, Dr. Hyperbolicus.

But Luther understood well that if you add anything to Scripture, if it’s not Scripture alone, then it’s not Scripture that has the authority. If faith isn’t alone, then it’s with works. If grace isn’t alone, then there is some cooperation coming from us. We are at least in part, responsible for our own salvation. You just go down the list. If the alones are missing, the essentials are nullified.

Part V

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How Can We Know That What We Know is Correct? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, as we come to a conclusion, I’m going to take a question from a 17-year-old young man, it’s one of the biggest questions we can imagine. This is going to be a test. He writes, “How can we know that we know what we know?” He says, “I don’t want to seem smart or clever. I just can’t overcome this mountain of doubt. I can’t stand the fact that what is rational to me regarding my eternal salvation is considered irrational by so many people. It seems almost arrogant to say I’m correct.”

Well, I understand the predicament here, and it’s not just experienced by 17-year-olds, it’s experienced by 70-year-olds as well. It’s not a stupid question, it’s not an irresponsible question. Indeed, it’s a responsible question. How do we know anything? Well, let’s just consider the alternatives. Let’s consider the fact that maybe we don’t know anything. Maybe we don’t even know that there is a real world. Maybe we don’t know that there is a God. Maybe we don’t know that God created the world. Maybe we don’t know who we are. It’s possible that there is no possibility of knowledge. Now, of course, that’s directly contrary to Scripture, it’s directly contrary to the entire structure of creation. It’s also contrary to common sense in that you think about thinking and you do know things and you know that you know them.

Now, you can know things that aren’t true, and that’s where we need to have our knowledge corrected by the facts. But the fact is, that the only fact that can genuinely correct and establish our thinking is the fact that there is a God and that he speaks. In reality, the greater epistemological burden, the burden of epistemology, of explaining how we know, the greatest burden doesn’t fall upon the Christian, it falls upon the secular worldview. Because according to a secular worldview, how exactly do you explain any of this? And what you see now is just a raw physicalism being presented, and it’s nothing more than processes in a brain which will decompose, in which case you may know something which is biologically possible, in terms of the mechanisms of the brain. And yet, it’s all basically provisional and it’s all in one sense, a mind game. And furthermore, it doesn’t fit into any larger understanding of anything. If we are just material accidents, if we’re just some kind of the product of cosmic dust, then well, dust is dust. And at the end, dust doesn’t know anything, including the fact that it’s dust.

The epistemological crisis, this crisis about knowledge, has been attempted in terms of an answer by many people. You can have people who say you’d know things actually by experience, you know things by intuition, you know things by tradition, you know things by observation. We have the scientific method and all of that, but the secular worldview has to eventually just attach its knowledge, or its claims to knowledge at nothing, which is transcendent.

This is where the Christian worldview comes in, and there are aspects to the Christian biblical worldview about knowing that begins with a fact that as John Calvin said, “All things basically come down to two essential forms of knowledge: The knowledge of God and of ourselves. The knowledge of God is prior because he’s the creator. We know because a sovereign, glorious creator made the cosmos. He created us as the human creature made in his image for his glory. We have the capacity of knowledge. As a matter of fact, we have a capacity of knowledge that is reinforced by common sense, by sensory perception, by cognition, by thought. But at the end of the day, we are entirely dependent.” This goes back to Sola Scriptura. We are entirely dependent on the fact that the creator who made us made us to think and ordered our thinking, even with general revelation and creation more specifically in Scripture.

One dimension about this I want to add in conclusion is that one of the tests of truth comes down to heartfelt plausibility. It isn’t plausible I would argue, when you look at various worldviews that try to explain the world in materialist, naturalist, atheistic terms, you just don’t end up with the world as we know it and we don’t end up with ourselves as we know it, and in our hearts we know it. As the Scripture says, “The fool is said in his heart, there is no God.” That knowledge is implanted within us, and it’s also the knowledge of ourselves, derivative of the knowledge of God, the creator. It’s a real knowledge, and one of the disciplines of the Christian life is not allowing ourselves to get caught into something like a whirlpool of doubt.

And so if you doubt, read the Scriptures, sing a hymn, think about the things of God, and for that matter, tell someone about Jesus. Have a conversation with a Christian friend. And just remember, if you don’t really know anything, I’m speaking to a 17-year-old here, you don’t even know that you’re hungry and you need to go eat, but you do know it and you’re probably headed to eat something about now. The knowledge of God and of ourselves as a real knowledge. It is also a revealed knowledge. And for that, we as Christians must be unspeakably thankful.