Breakpoint

John Stonestreet visits with Alisa Childers, author of Another Gospel: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity. Alisa is a featured speaker at the upcoming Wilberforce Weekend, May 21-23 in Fort Worth, Tx. Alisa shares how progressive Christianity is working to steal the image of God, providing context for her upcoming presentation at the Wilberforce Weekend. For more information on the Wilberforce Weekend, including a drawing where you could win tickets, hotels, and flights to the conference, visit www.wilberforceweekend.com

Back in January, at meeting held at the Royal Society in London, a team of scientists and investors announced the largest prize ever offered to solve a scientific mystery. Organized by engineer and business consultant Perry Marshall, the whopping prize of $10 million (ten times the Nobel Prize payout) will be given to any person or team who can "arrange for a digital communication system to emerge or self-evolve without…explicitly designing the system." The point of the contest is to learn where genetic code came from, and how it became the basis for all life. The winning experiment, according to their website, "must generate an encoder that sends digital code to a decoder," and transmit at least five bits of information, or roughly half as much as a comparable segment of DNA. In other words, to claim the prize, you must bring into existence the functional equivalent of the first living cell, without intelligently designing the system. Judges include Oxford and Royal Society biologist Denis Noble, Harvard Geneticist George Church, and philosopher of science Michael Ruse. According to Noble, a scientist whose work led to the first pacemaker, the prize is so big, because evolution "leaves two things completely unexplained: How did life get going in the first place, and what is the origin of the genetic code." With surprising honesty, he continued: "I cannot see personally how DNA could have been there at the beginning. After all, it requires the cell to enable it and to reproduce, and it requires the cell also to correct errors in that reproduction and replication process." Perry Marshall explained why he organized the prize by recalling a debate about the origin of life he once had with his brother. Sons of a pastor, Marshall offered a standard argument from design, but his brother retorted that natural processes were sufficient to explain all of life's complexity. Marshall wasn't convinced. As he was writing what would later become his bestselling book on computer networks, he realized that "mathematically [DNA and ethernet] are identical. It's encoding and decoding. It is a communication system…Genetics is digital communication." Intelligent design theorists have been making this point for decades. From a variety of angles, authors such as Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Steven Meyer have argued that information, like what is stored and communicated in DNA, has only one known source – an intelligent agent. To produce a system like DNA through unguided processes would not only be to do something that's never been done; it would be to do something never before observed in the history of science. But, it gets even worse of those hoping to snag that $10 million. As Dr. Noble reminded press and colleagues, DNA requires a cell to function…and cells, as far as we know, require DNA. To get one, you need the other. In other words, to win the money, competitors must not only put together the equivalent of functioning genetic code "without cheating," they have to create the molecular machines that use, replicate, and edit that code. How difficult is it to produce a living cell from scratch? A while back, my colleague Shane Morris asked synthetic-organic chemist James Tour this very question on the BreakPoint Podcast. Dr. Tour replied that anyone who claims we're close to building a cell, even in the most ideal of circumstances, "has no idea what they're talking about." In fact, he said, "ask them for details, and you see them start to sweat." The bottom line? The origin of life and of the information that makes it possible remain the most significant challenge to a naturalistic worldview. The only plausible explanation for how these incredible systems came into being is intelligent design, precisely what those competing for this prize are forbidden from using. Don't get me wrong. $10 million is a lot of money. But, it's still not enough to make the impossible possible.

John Stonestreet and Maria Baer discuss the ramifications of Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta as a result of Georgia's new voting law. How do Christians respond when corporate activism falls for a non-factual narrative? And how is it that politics has overtaken every sphere of public life? They also tackle Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchison's surprising veto of legislation that would ban transgender surgery and hormone treatment for minors (the veto was immediately overridden)--and just how detached from reality our language over biology, sex, and gender has become. John and Maria wrap up this week's episode discussing how it is that Gallup has found that--for the first time--fewer than half of Americans are members of a church. Is this a failure of the Church? The result of what John calls "an anemic ecclesiology?" As for their recommendations of the week: "The Chosen" TV series and, for young people, the Impact 360 Institute and Summit Ministries.

It's easy to think that the story of the last several decades, at least as it comes to Christianity and society, is the story of moral shifting. In other words, things that were once considered wrong are now considered right, and things that were once considered right are now considered wrong. That certainly explains an awful lot, and certainly there have been moral shifts in Western society. However, that's not enough to explain everything. More accurately, maybe we should say that the moral shifts that we see, which are obvious and which have indeed happened, are the fruit of the issue, not the root. They are the effect, not the cause. The deepest and more fundamental shifts that have taken place in Western culture over the last several decades have not been in our definition of what's right and what's wrong. They've been in our definition of reality itself, specifically our understanding of what it means to be human. Starting with that framework, we can answer some questions that for many of us seemed to be nearly unanswerable. What's wrong? It's been in our definition of reality itself, specifically our understanding of what it means to be human. Maybe you find yourself in the same cultural boat as Carl Trueman: a little dizzy, like so many of us, about how quickly things went from unthinkable to unquestionable. It is one thing for someone to say something like, "I am a woman trapped in a man's body." Certainly, throughout history, there have been people that have thought that sort of thing, and maybe even said that sort of thing out loud. The difference, as Trueman puts it, between those times and today is that that statement has now come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful. There is an essential question for Christians to answer. If we are to frame our worldview without being pulled here-and-there by the various deceptions of our culture while also having a strong enough cultural witness that is big enough for the questions of the challenges of this time in human history, then answering this question must involve a deep dive into the issue of the image of God. In other words, the Christian view of what it means to be human. That is why we are going to be spending an entire conference in May on that question at the Wilberforce Weekend in Fort Worth. If we want to understand the degree to which our culture is lost, if we wish to see how far our society has strayed from the truth, and if we wish to understand where they are and go to them with the answers to the questions that they have, then we need to understand this shift. Where did it come from? How did we change our minds? Not just about what is right and wrong and not only even questions about whether there is a God or not. How did we change our minds on what it means to be human? That is what this remarkable book by Carl Trueman offers: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Consider the subtitle: "Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution." The sexual revolution has gone so far – further than even its original progenitors could have ever imagined – and at the root of that is an idea that Trueman rightly defines and identifies as expressive individualism. In other words, when who we are as human persons is completely disconnected from any design and from any creator, then the only thing there is left to us is whatever I express about myself. With this framework, when anything – whether it's religious, moral, or social norms or even laws and public policies – gets in the way of me being whatever it is that I say or that I want to be, it is here that the greatest oppression, the greatest discrimination, comes. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a must-read book. My friend Bruce Ashford, a remarkable scholar in Christian worldview and theology, calls this book the most significant analysis and evaluation of Western culture written by a Protestant during the last 50 years. That is some serious praise. Rod Dreher calls this without question one of the most important religious books of the decade, saying, "Carl Trueman explains modernity to the Church with depth, clarity, and force. The significance of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is hard to overestimate." I think this book is absolutely essential reading for any Christian who wants to make sense of this cultural moment and do it in such a way that they know better how to take their faith into the public square. As we have said so many times over the last couple weeks, our understanding of the image of God is central to a Christian worldview, and it is crucial for our cultural witness. More than that, it is the pivotal place where our faith collides with Western culture because of expressive individualism. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is the featured resource for the Colson Center this month. For a gift of any amount to the Colson Center, I will send you a copy of this book, and, trust me, you will not be sorry to get the depth of understanding that the book offers. To pick up your copy of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, just visit BreakPoint.org/April2021.

The most recent incarnation of the Equality Act is also the most radical version we have yet seen. It's also worth noting that it's closer to becoming law than any version so far put forward. As a friend of mine would say, this isn't magic; it's math. This Congressional term, the Equality Act passed the House of Representatives. Though unlikely at this point, a 50-50 tie in the Senate broken by a Democratic White House is feasible, making the Equality Act a live option. Last year, it simply wasn't. Who knows what the next round of midterms will do to these numbers? In light of the very real threat posed by the Equality Act, a number of Christians have offered compromise solutions, most notably the Fairness for All Act. FFA would carves out exemptions for churches and certain religious organizations, though it's unclear which ones, but it would not protect the religious freedoms of private Christian citizens who are medical professionals, business owners, bakers, florists, photographers, and so on. These attempts to preserve legislatively whatever religious freedoms we can, while well-intentioned, are actually premature attempts at deal-making. Tactically unwise, compromise solutions will almost certainly make things more difficult in the future. Rather than carving out a place for Christians in an increasingly hostile culture, this appeasement shrinks the space available to believers, both now and in the future. Even so, political gamesmanship is only part of the problem with compromise solutions such as Fairness for All. In fact, there are at least three reasons not only to oppose just the Equality Act but all attempts to compromise in its direction. First, the Equality Act, even in a compromised form, says what is not true about the human person. Specifically, the Equality Act suggests that when it comes to human beings, questions of sexual and gender identity are equivalent to categories race and ethnicity. In other words, something largely determined by behavioral choice and personal expression is treated as an essential characteristic of a person. (Though in the past, LGB advocates may have used the "born this way" argument to explain sexual identity, that argument does not serve the new letter, T, in the acronym. Therefore, it has been largely abandoned). Attempts to compromise with the Equality Act not only affirm this same, false way of thinking about who we are for everyone else but "us," it relegates Christian belief in this area to subjective personal opinion. Second, by hijacking the history and categories of the Civil Rights movement, the Equality Act says things that are not true about the plight of those who are LGBT. The Civil Rights Act ensured that African Americans could participate in civil society, when at times they could not. Decades ago, for example, an African American family could not take a cross country trip since so many hotels, gas stations, and restaurants refused service. Effectively, an entire segment of the population was excluded from society. This is not the case for LGBT people. When Jack Philips refused to bake a cake celebrating a "same-sex marriage" (in a state that, at the time, didn't even recognize "same-sex marriage") dozens of bakeries nearby would have gladly taken the business. To compare the refusal to participate in a same-sex marriage or a "gender affirming" surgery with the Jim Crow South is obviously false, given the wide availability of services in any of these arenas. In fact, this reveals the Equality Act for what it is: an attempt to force citizens to comply with the government's point of view. Which brings up the third way in which attempts to compromise with the Equality Act fail. Compromise solutions wish to protect ministers and Christian institutions from being forced to comply with the government's point of view. Everyone else is left fully unprotected. While advocates of compromise might say we should secure whatever protections we can, we ought not stand for anything short of the full dignity and full rights every human possesses to continue holding and living from their deeply held convictions. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote decades ago, we don't have to join every protest or hold every sign. However, at the very least, we must not say what is not true. Thus, even for a good cause, we cannot lend voices in support of our culture's falsehoods about what it means to be human. And, we should tell our religious and political leaders not to, either.

John and Shane deal with a series of questions related to the image of God. John has referred to our inability to articulate the image of God as a debilitating oversight. The first question looks at the issue of immigration and what a Christian perspective of immigration should be. John and Shane then field a question seeking understanding in how we continue to bear God's image, even though we are sinners. To close, John and Shane work through a question on the presence of evil in God's good creation.

I have a hunch that if I went from one church to another, or one Christian school to another, or one Bible study to another, and I stood in front and challenged these followers of Christ, saying, "Fill in the blank. The Bible says that humans are made . . . ," my guess is that I'd get a pretty solid answer: "In the image of God!" However, if we followed up that question with another one, asking, "What is the image of God? What difference does the image of God make?" I think the response would be far more crickets than clarity. Our lack of understanding and our inability to articulate what the image of God means, and what difference this doctrine makes, is an incredibly debilitating oversight in the Church right now, and this for at least three reasons. First, the image of God is essential to understanding the story of Scripture. Today when we talk about identity in churches and especially youth group Bible studies and things like that, we use this phrase, "identity in Christ." But to fully understand what identity in Christ is, we need to understand our identity in creation. Many people have rightly summarized the biblical story in four chapters: Creation (how God made the world); Fall (what went wrong with the world); Redemption (the work of Christ to redeem what God made); and Restoration (when all things will be made new again). Before we were Christians, we were made in the image and likeness of God. The Fall impacted not only our behavior and what we do, but who we are. That's what Christ restores in His death and resurrection. In other words, we're not saved from being human, were saved to be human. The image of God is essential to understanding the notions of human equality, human dignity, and human value. We all know that the Declaration of Independence says that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Well, if you look around a room full of people, the most evident thing is not that we're equal. The most evident thing is that we're actually quite different. If there's anything about our humanity that grounds equality and dignity and value, it can't be any quality that we share on the outside, because, well, there is no quality that we all share on the outside. Some of us are older. Some of us are taller. Some of us have higher IQ's. And so on. Even atheist thinkers have recognized that the only source in history that's grounded equality, dignity, and value and given us an understanding of a shared humanity is the image of God. Not only is the image of God essential to understanding the story of Scripture and essential to grounding notions of human equality, dignity, and value, but the image of God is essential to our cultural witness right now. That's why we're going to focus our attention at the upcoming Wilberforce Weekend Conference, May 21st through the 23rd in Fort Worth, Texas, on this one doctrine of the image of God. From a dizzying variety of angles, we will look at this cultural question and this biblical question, "What does it mean to be human?" And we will bring a level of clarity so that we can have confidence for this cultural moment. To learn more about the conference, go to WilberforceWeekend.org. I cannot think of a more important question for Christians to lock in on right now, than the idea that every single person is made in the image and likeness of God. Again, go to WilberforceWeekend.org to learn more about this incredible event in Fort Worth, May 21st through 23rd.

A pattern emerges whenever a culture tries to fix itself, with only the resources of its own unmoored virtues. A problem is identified, but misdiagnosed. Then, a solution is offered that accomplishes the exact opposite of the goal. Examples of this include trampling on the rights of women in the name of inclusion, firing ethnic minorities for racism, and the new brand of anti-Semitism prevalent on college campuses that are supposed to be (even because they are) "woke." These many examples reveal why worldview matters. Every worldview answers the questions "What's wrong with the world?" and "How can it be fixed?" Some worldviews get the answers to these questions very, very wrong. Hatred of the Jews, for example, is perhaps the oldest hatred in the world. Typically, anti-Semitism is perceived as coming from far-right, white supremacists or radical Muslim extremists. However, acording to a new student group called the New Zionist Congress, however, anti-Semitism is increasingly found on college campuses, notably among the far-left. Apparently, the progressive orthodoxies built around Critical Theory offers little space for Jewish people. In the name of "standing up for the oppressed," maybe the most oppressed group in world history is being excluded? Blake Flayton, a self-proclaimed progressive, gay, Jewish college student first explained the problem in a 2019 op-ed in The New York Times. "At many American universities," he wrote, "it is now normal for student organizations to freely call Israel an imperialist power and an outpost of white colonialism with little pushback or discussion — never mind that more than half of Israel's population consists of Israeli Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, and that the country boasts a 20-percent Arab minority." The problem, of course, is that Critical Theory is not big enough as a worldview to deal with a real world that constantly crosses racial, socio-economic and national lines. Critical theory relies on those lines to determine human worth, dignity, and moral standing. No room is allowed for actual progress. Once an oppressor, always an oppressor. And, if an oppressed group rises above their oppression, whether perceived or real, they risk falling on the wrong side of the measuring stick. Jewish history is long and winding. Even after the Germans attempted to exterminate them, and much of the world closed their borders to Jewish refugees, the Jewish people somehow managed to reclaim their homeland in Israel. Now that Israel has secured relative safety and freedom, all of a sudden, they're evil? This self-defeating and dehumanizing logic is a central flaw of this way of seeing the world. Any worldview that grounds human value in a perceived proximity to power or ethnicity robs individuals of their humanity. God's Image is what makes us human and therefore valuable, regardless of whether we have any power or belong to any group. The Bible not only provides a much better standard for determining human worth, but it also offers us a clue as to why anti-Semitism has persisted for so long. God formed the nation of Israel and chose the Jewish people through which to send the Messiah in order to bless all the peoples of the earth. A world animated by His Enemy will hate them. Years ago in a sermon, John Piper said that a church that fails to evangelize the Jewish people - to accept, value, learn from, and minister to them - cannot "long hold on to the gospel." He was drawing heavily from the writings of Paul, which explore the mystery of God's love for the Jewish people. The world's new or, more accurately, renewed hate for Jewish people is another opportunity for the Church to be profoundly counter-cultural. Psalm 122 instructs us to "pray for the peace of Jerusalem." That peace remains a long way off. We should keep praying.

John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He wraps up our Time of Guided Prayer last week, reflecting on Proverbs as wisdom for the church and nation

Last week, the ACLU, an organization typically not friendly to Christian ideals, got one right (albeit unintentionally) when the organization tweeted out, "Trans children are perfect exactly as they are." Their attempt to affirm our culture's newest progressive doctrine actually communicated the opposite. After all, trans-activists insist that children, or anyone, who struggle with gender dysphoria are "trapped in the wrong bodies" and given the wrong names. The only way, in fact, for them to "be their true selves" is by altering their bodies, blocking their natural development through puberty, and sterilizing them with medication and surgery. In other words, what the ACLU really thinks is that trans children are not perfect the way they are. Then, just a few days after confusing the meaning of the word perfect, the ACLU issued another tweet with even more wrongly defined words, "Trans Youth are Loved. Trans Youth are cherished. Trans Youth belong." How is telling a kid that their bodies are a mistake of God or nature a way of cherishing them? How is telling them that they're wrong as is, not just in their feelings but in their very being, helping them "to belong?" How is any of this love? Still, it's one thing for the ACLU to get this issue so wrong; it's another thing altogether for the Church to get it wrong. Just as bad is the Church embracing one of the great lies of our culture, that telling the truth is unloving and that loving someone requires affirming their choices. Truth matters, ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. This is why we cannot love someone without speaking the truth. It is not necessarily cruel to say what is true. It can be, of course, if the truth is said in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons. At the same time, affirming someone's choices can be not only not telling the truth, but it can be an incredibly cruel thing to do, even when done from good intentions. In fact, the cruelest thing you can tell someone who's not ok is that they are. Even raising the issue of truth, especially in certain contexts, can end a relationship. For example, over the past few years, I've heard from many, many parents and grandparents of grown children, struggling to make sense of a generational gap that seems insurmountable. Generation gaps are, of course, nothing new but, in our culture, certain issues are driving these relationships to a breaking point. A new, four-week, online course, beginning tomorrow April 6, will address this need. "How to Speak Truth and Love Both Inside and Outside the Church" takes place four consecutive Tuesday evenings, led by four outstanding and practical speakers who will help us hold together truth and love in our interactions with four different groups of people. Greg Stier from Dare2Share will get things started tomorrow night as he discusses how we can speak truth and love to unbelievers who need to know Jesus. The following Tuesday, Colson Fellows National Director Michael Craven will help us communicate with Christians who don't know what (or how) to think about the issues in our culture (or maybe who don't seem to care very much). The third session, led by apologist and author Sean McDowell, will focus on communicating truth in love to progressive Christians who have abandoned important Christian truths. And finally, Jonathan Morrow from the Impact 360 Institute, will help us understand members of Gen Z, and help communicate to these people who often struggle to know who to trust. Register for this course at BreakPoint.org. Each week features a 90-minute session that includes a time for question and answer with the instructor. Everyone who signs up also receives a link to the recording of every week's session, that way you can review the information or you can catch it in case of a scheduling conflict. Truth and love are inseparable. Jesus Christ is the source and the very embodiment of both Truth and Love. We need not choose between them. We must not choose between them. Again, come to BreakPoint.org to register for tomorrow night's Short Course, "How to Speak Truth and Love."