Breakpoint

"Jesus would've baked the cake." "Christians hate LGBTQ people." "You're on the wrong side of history" "Why can't you let them be 'their true selves'?" "That's just your truth, not mine." And, perhaps most painful, especially when it comes from a friend or family member: "If you love me, you'd accept me for who I am." All of the slogans that leave Christians silent or shamed today are, at root, different ways of saying the same thing – that truth and love are incompatible. For people to tell the truth, especially when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender, is to be unloving and intolerant. And, to love someone is to affirm their choices. There's a uniquely "Christian" version of these slogans, too. Taking a moral stand, we are told, especially on questions so culturally controversial, is to distract from the Gospel. Instead, the Church must become more welcoming and avoid anything that makes people feel excluded from the Church. After all, we are told, isn't the Gospel really about inclusivity? Today, of all the days of Holy Week, directly confronts this mentality. Maundy Thursday is set aside on the Church calendar to remember the Last Supper. The word "maundy" comes from the Latin word for "mandate," or "command." At this first celebration of Communion, Jesus gave His disciples "a new command," that they should love and serve each other. To demonstrate what He meant, He picked up a basin of water and a towel and washed their feet. To fully understand His words and actions, recall that at this "Last Supper" and first Communion, Jesus and His disciples were obeying God's original command, given to all Jews, to remember the Passover. God's people were to never forget how they were rescued from slavery in Egypt. For Jesus to issue a "new" command was an audacious thing to do, especially given how significantly God's original command stood in Israel's history and identity as a people. Jesus, however, went even further than merely adding instructions to an old celebration. Now, rather than remembering how the angel of death "passed over" those homes with lamb's blood on their doorposts, they were to remember His broken body and His shed blood. Ultimately, the new command was to remember a new rescue, and how, through Christ's death, death is not merely avoided but finally defeated. Since at least the mid-20th century, the American Church has been divided over whether it should be primarily about proclaiming truth or about serving others. More recently, the volume in this debate has significantly increased. The Lord's Supper and Jesus' "new" command remind us that this is a false dichotomy, an unnecessary choice to make. Truth and love need never be separated and should never be separated. On the same night Jesus when commanded us to remember how His broken body and shed blood rescues us from sin (that's the truth), He commanded us to demonstrate our new life by serving others (that's love). We need not choose between truth and love. In fact, we must not choose. They always go together, because they are both grounded in the same Source, or specifically, the same Person. Jesus embodied truth and love, not only in the event we commemorate this day, but every event we remember this Holy Week. He is truth. He is love. And, He has risen. Indeed.

John and Shane discuss what a worldview is and if it can shelter racist sentiments. John gives a full explanation of worldview, and explains how the concept is both helpful and challenged in this cultural moment. Then Shane asks John to explain how we know Adam is a historical figure. A listener writes in because a pastor he knows presents Adam as an idea inside Scripture. To close, John explains an interesting trend in the United States where in some cases we're outpacing Europe in progressive actions. A listener asks for some explanation on the culture trends that are creating fertile soil for secular ideas.

Quantum theory boggles the mind. As science journalist John Horgan writes, quantum theory is "science's most precise, powerful theory of reality. It has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications. The trouble is physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means, that is, what it says about how the world works." At the core of the disagreement is what matter consists of at the quantum, or the smallest, level. At that size, matter's properties change when we try to observe it, even—amazingly—because we try to observe it. That's led to over a century of frustrated efforts to understand exactly what the fundamental "stuff" of reality is. It's not that these tiny things aren't real; it's that we can't figure out what they're like. At the same time, quantum theory has proven explanatory power. A theological parallel is the Trinity. We can't comprehend exactly how the Godhead functions, but that doesn't mean it's not real. As C.S. Lewis wrote back in 1952, if Christianity is true, it would be "at least as difficult as modern physics." And, we could add, just as rational.

Most Christians consider Easter to be a sacred and joyous celebration of Christ's resurrection. But what about the claim that Easter and its accompanying traditions originated from a pagan spring celebration? In his treatise On the Reckoning of Time, eighth-century English monk The Venerable Bede proposed that the word Easter comes from the name of a pagan goddess: "Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated 'Paschal month', and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month." Modern pagans latched onto this idea, and further associated Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility, with Ostara, a Germanic goddess of spring. There are multiple problems with this theory, however, the Venerable Bede notwithstanding. For centuries, the Church fought to turn people from paganism. Therefore, it is unlikely that one of the most important Christian holidays would be named after a pagan goddess. More importantly, there is no evidence, aside from Bede, of a goddess named Eostre, nor is there evidence for a Germanic goddess named Ostara. The name Easter is only used in English, and its cognate Ostern in German. Everywhere else, even in Germanic languages such as Dutch, Norwegian, or Swedish, the word is derived from Pascha or Passover. And, since Resurrection Day was celebrated for hundreds of years before the Anglo-Saxons or Germans were converted, it is unconvincing that its name points to a pagan origin of the holiday. More likely, Bede was mistaken, either following a folk etymology or simply guessing. In fact, where the day's name does originate is a bit more complicated. New converts, after receiving intensive instruction, were baptized on Easter. Easter Sunday was known as Dominica in albis, or "the Sunday in white," after the white robes worn by the catechumens. It may be that albis was misunderstood to be the plural of alba, or dawn, which was then translated into Old High German as eostarum. The words Easter and Ostern most likely are derived from that. Another common argument is that Easter traditions such as rabbits and decorating eggs were pagan fertility symbols. Some modern pagans even claim, without evidence, that the worship of Ostara involved these very things. However, the connection of these items to Easter is much less elaborate and far more recent than any mythical pagan past. During the Holy Week fast preceding Easter, Christians were prohibited from eating eggs. The chickens kept laying, however. Eggs laid during Holy Week were considered Holy Eggs. The practice of decorating them began in the thirteenth century, many centuries after Europe turned from paganism. The egg was seen as a symbol of the resurrection, with Christ bursting from the tomb in the same way the chick broke free from the egg. As for rabbits, the timing of their association with Easter also eliminates the possibility that they are a holdover from pagan ideas. During the Middle Ages, rabbits were seen as innocent, good, and harmless, and as such were sometimes used as a symbol of Christ. However, they were not associated with Easter until the 17th century. Another version of the "Easter has roots in paganism" idea associates the celebration of the resurrection with the ancient Sumerian myth of Tammuz and Ishtar. This myth, which is an explanation of the annual cycle of death in winter, tells of Tammuz and Ishtar spending half a year in the underworld, before a new birth when they are released for six months each spring. The myth bears little resemblance to resurrection story, especially the three days Jesus spent in the tomb and his once-and-for-all resurrection from the dead. Even so, this pagan story and others like it may, in fact, be connected to Christianity, just not in the way we normally think. In fact, we may have it the wrong way around. As C. S. Lewis described in Mere Christianity: And what did God do? …. He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Lewis believed that these myths were hints that God gave to the pagan world of the person and work of Christ. In other words, the argument that myths are the source of the story of the Resurrection has it exactly backwards. The Resurrection actually happened, and is the Reality to which these myths have always pointed. And because the Resurrection actually happened, it is certainly worthy of celebrationg... with Hallelujahs, raised glasses, and lots of joy.

Dr. Christopher Yuan led our Time of Guided Prayer last week. He shared how the prayers of his parents, and hundreds of other believers, were used to lead him to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. For more information on our Time of Guided Prayer please visit: www.breakpoint.org/praywithme

Recently, Twitter banned Christian satire site The Babylon Bee from their platform. Their offending tweet "awarded" Admiral Rachel Levine, the nation's first transgender four-star admiral, with their satirical "Man of the Year Award." Clearly, big tech censorship is a problem. What should Christians do? Christians, even in comedy, will have to continue to speak truths that people will not always want to hear … It's too easy to look away, ignore controversy, and just focus on what are often called primary issues. But truths about identity and sexuality are primary issues because they deal with the deepest questions of worldview: Who are we? And where does our design come from? Is humanity's fundamental problem society's lack of acceptance, or the wrongdoing we are each guilty of? Is the solution self-expression or self-surrender? Wherever and however we can, Christians should do things differently, especially in the digital world. But we should never give in to the culture's biggest demand: to stay silent on matters that matter the most.

Just a small sampling of recent headlines reveals what a disorienting cultural moment this is: Man wins a women's swimming championship, Supreme Court nominee refuses to define the word woman, Biden administration endorses gender reassignment surgery for minors. Back in 2020, theologian and historian Dr. Carl Trueman provided a full account of how something that was unthinkable a generation ago became unquestionable today. The dramatic shifts in how we think about gender and sexuality are among the fruits (not roots) of a much deeper shift in how we think about the human person. Trueman's book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self described the origin story of what has been called "the cultural identity crisis." Centuries ago, thinkers, writers, and activists began to rethink, redefine, and over-sexualize the concept of self. By describing this process, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self felt like a long-overdue answer key for our cultural moment. Weighing in at over 400 pages, it is the definitive account of the thinkers, ideas, expressions, and consequences of the sexual revolution. Thankfully, Dr. Trueman also heard the many pleas for a less academic approach to these essential concepts, one that works out the same essential analysis but for those Christians dealing with the everyday chaos of the culture he so aptly describes. The new and much slimmer version is called Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. In it, Trueman tells the story of the development and propagation of ideas that sparked a revolution in how Western people think about themselves and others. Eventually, these ideas transformed how we think about sex and the human body, about social institutions like the family and the role of the state, and about meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. Along the way, Trueman introduces the thinkers whose ideas sparked this revolution: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Wilhelm Reich, Germaine Greer, and others. Trueman connects how these thinkers built on one another's ideas, and ultimately shaped the assumptions that now influence most Western people, even those who have never read these authors. No assumption has been more influential than the idea that discovering and expressing our authentic, inner selves is the goal of life. Though it is as widely held today as any other belief in our modern world, it is not an assumption that most humans for most of history could have shared. A whole collection of forces has made this idea, which Trueman identifies as "expressive individualism," thinkable. Now, it is the ideological foundation for so much of modern Western culture. Another assumption that emerges in Trueman's account is the idea that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature. According to this assumption, our faculties as a species, our moral ideals, and even our gendered bodies are like "playdough," raw material to be molded according to our shifting desires and the whims of activists. Again, it is not hard to see where this leads. Strange New World is more than a Reader's Digest version of Rise and Triumph. It is a book to be carefully studied, especially by Christians committed to engaging this cultural moment with the truth and love of Christ. Increasingly, the battles over gender, sexuality, and selfhood are being fought in more areas of our lives: not just across political aisles or in courtrooms, but across dinner tables, classrooms, and social media feeds. Sometimes, those closest to us have radically different views of what human flourishing looks like, and these relationships can quickly become vulnerable, even volatile. This month, the Colson Center is offering an opportunity for you to join us in studying the essential ideas in Carl Trueman's new book Strange New World. For a gift of any amount, we will send you a copy of the book, a study guide Dr. Trueman has prepared to go along with the book, and a four-lesson digital course with Dr. Trueman and Colson Center theologian-in-residence Dr. Tim Padgett. Come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary to give, and to be better equipped to understand the increasingly strange headlines and issues of our moment.

The White House issued a series of documents for the "International Transgender Day of Visibility." Even more than revealing a new progressive "baseline" when it comes to politics and gender, these documents foreshadow new and real threats to religious freedom. For example, a statement from the Office of Population Affairs claimed that so-called gender-affirming treatment "improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender-diverse children and adolescents." In this case, however, gender "affirming" means to encourage grade-school children to question their gender and, once they do, provide them with puberty blockers and hormone therapy to help them reject their bodies. In some cases, the document says, adolescents should even have access to so-called "gender-affirming surgery," a procedure which removes or destroys perfectly healthy body parts and is irreversible. In recent months, states such as Texas and Florida have taken legislative steps to prevent children from being subjected to such mental and physical harm. However, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), an entity of the Department of Health and Human Services, issued a release proclaiming that "gender-affirming care" is neither "child maltreatment nor malpractice." Around the same time, the Department of Justice sent a letter to all state attorneys general, saying that opposing HHS guidance is discrimination, is essentially an attack against "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, nonbinary, or otherwise gender-nonconforming" people, and that such actions "may be unconstitutional." The Department of Justice! To top it all off, President Joe Biden issued a video in which he spoke specifically to parents, insisting that "affirming [their] child's identity is one of the most powerful things [they] can do to keep them safe and healthy." In it, he not only jumped way past the line of state authority into parental authority, but he appealed to biblical language, misguidedly conflating the image of God with the confusion of gender dysphoria. It's not just that the government's claims fail to match reality, or that their talking points are crafted from data with flawed research methodology, or even that their appeals to "settled science" are clearly premature. Transgender ideology falsely promises hope and instead brings harm to people who bear God's image. When government forces and federal departments are co-opted to advance this ideology, religious freedom is placed in a precarious and fragile position. Years ago, during the Obama administration, Chuck Colson began to notice how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other officials began to use the language of "freedom to worship" instead of "freedom of religion." As he said at the time, freedom to worship is a narrowing of religious freedom, away from public expression toward only private conviction. It is a major loss if religious freedom no longer includes the right to order one's life around deeply held religious beliefs, but only protects the right to believe in one's own heart, head, home, and house of worship. These recent proclamations from the Biden administration assume that flawed understanding of religious conviction, while also establishing a new baseline for political enforcement of the sexual revolution. The statements and letters issued frame all opposition to the state's view of sexual orientation and gender identity as intent, not only to discriminate, but to harm. Procedurally, this is how federal departments like Health and Human Services now operate. Each new administration will spend a year and half dismantling the rules and regulations of the previous one, while planning ways to implement their new rules in ways that make them difficult to dismantle. The Obama administration did this, the Trump administration did this, and now the Biden administration is doing it. These recent documents, proclamations, and videos indicate that the rules coming out of the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, and others will be the most extreme yet. Christians in this culture moment cannot abandon truths about the human person, sexuality, and religious freedom whenever a new administration roars. With clarity and courage, we must teach our kids, build our institutions, and take all necessary stands based on what is true about men and women, sex, marriage, and freedom. Connecting what is eternally true to the challenges of the cultural moment is what the Colson Fellows program is all about. In May, over 700 leaders—of churches, homes, institutions, businesses, and communities—will be commissioned, having studied worldview and theology, having wrestled with the challenges of the cultural moment, and having planned how to implement what they've learned as Christians of influence. There are cohorts in over 60 cities and 28 churches across America, as well as online cohorts for others. Visit www.colsonfellows.org for more information.

This summer the U.S. Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Part of what the justices will have to consider is a legal principle called stare decisis, which means respecting precedent. If the High Court wants to respect Roe, especially its deep ideological and legal flaws, it should take into account why Roe was decided the way it was. Since then, the pro-abortion movement has insisted that abortion is a "women's rights" issue. But in 1973, many Americans, especially elites, believed a now-debunked theory that the world was headed for catastrophe due to over-population. The Supreme Court justices themselves noted in the official majority opinion in Roe v. Wade that this concern, in part, motivated their decision to legalize abortion. In the Dobbs case, the justices should consider that this part of the legal precedent is a debunked and harmful theory, and therefore should see abortion for what it truly is: an unconstitutional evil.

John and Maria visit on a number of laws that are anticipating a gutting of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey from Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health that is before the Supreme Court. Maria then explains a new law in Washington State to shroud abuses in transgender prisons from the public. To close, John explains how unique it is that archeological findings continue to support the historical occurrences in the Bible. John points out that no other worldview that highlights a spiritual explanation for the world and humanity has as much archeological findings that support the guiding texts of the faith systems.