Breakpoint

In this cultural moment John called for a re-air of an interview with Ross Douthat. Douthat identifies that we live in a decadent society. But when you think of the word "decadent," you probably are thinking, lavish, immoral, wasteful, etc.

But that's not exactly what Douthat means. What he means is a society that is prosperous, powerful, and stuck. Stuck in an economic rut, a creative rut, a political rut; a society that is running out of spiritual and intellectual energy.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, John Stonestreet talks with Douthat about his new book, "The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success."

Two days before Christmas, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries confirmed that its founder had engaged in sexual misconduct over the course of many years. Ravi, a highly regarded speaker, author, and apologist, died a few months ago. In its initial "interim" report RZIM leadership not only confirmed the allegations but promised a full and thorough final report.

Like so many others, I'm devastated. Ravi was not only a significant personal influence for me, he was a great friend of this ministry for years. In fact, he was a guest on one of the last radio broadcasts I co-hosted with Chuck Colson. I remember beginning the interview apologizing for all the times I inadvertently plagiarized him over the years.

When Ravi died, the Colson Center honored him in a number of ways. At the time, there were initial allegations that had been investigated and dismissed. We trusted the information provided to us. We were wrong. I believed and shared excuses for Robby's behavior, and in doing that, I misled others.

There is no sugar-coating, excusing, or explaining away Ravi's behavior. It was sinful. It was wicked. And, it was folly, which is one of words Proverbs uses to describe sin. Simply put, our sin makes us foolish. Buried in sin, we actually think that, for the first time in human history, we will be the ones to get away with it.

And, Ravi's sin left victims. The most harm was done directly to those women he abused, human beings made in the image of God and for whom Christ died. Other victims include family, friends, and the disillusioned around the world who benefitted from Ravi's teaching.

Last week, a BreakPoint listener emailed us asking how we should respond to cases like this, when a Christian leader or teacher is caught in sexual misconduct. Is it possible to separate the good that they've done and the truth they've taught from the person and their sin? And, what about in cases such as this, when the perpetrator is gone and has no further opportunity to acknowledge his sins, repent, and seek forgiveness?

Last week on the BreakPoint Podcast, Shane Morris and I attempted to offer an answer. You can listen at BreakPoint.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

We need not deny that Ravi's teaching helped many Christians make sense of the faith, deal with their doubts, and engage other people with the Gospel, while we also acknowledge the truths revealed by this tragedy, including the truth about who we are as fallen human beings. Pastors and Christian leaders, as Shane pointed out, are not "made of finer clay" than anyone else. So, any sort of righteous indignation or superiority we're tempted to feel toward the fallen should be quickly overwhelmed by an important and humbling admission: There, but for the Grace of God, go any of us.

Another point to consider, on a Christian worldview analysis level, is that, to borrow a phrase popularized by Christian educator Arthur Holmes, "all truth is God's truth." In other words, if Ravi Zacharias ever said anything true in his life, and of course he did, he was not its source but only its medium. Any truth, all truth comes ultimately from God, outside of time or place or context.

A postmodern worldview, in contrast, relativizes truth to cultural settings or individuals. In other words, truth is not absolute. And, if truth is dependent on the shifting sands of attitudes, beliefs, perceptions of a culture or an individual, anything we build on it must collapse when any of those things do.

The Christian view is that Truth, even when delivered by sinful creatures, is as eternal and unchanging as God Himself. Of course, that truth about truth doesn't make what has happened any less painful, disorienting, or consequential. Just because the truth that has been spoken remains true does not mean the privilege of speaking the truth as a ministry or church leader (and it is an incredible privilege) should continue for anyone. And speaking the truth is an enormous responsibility.

Finally, let's be reminded again, especially those among us granted some degree of leadership, that we must be accountable to others. We must not trust ourselves, but only God and His Spirit. Pray for your pastor, church leaders, spouse, and whomever else God has placed in your life, that He would protect them from the real and ever-present temptations that could harm them, others, and their witness for Christ.

And, please, pray for Ravi's victims, for his family, and RZIM.

This is not how we wanted to start 2021, with the Capitol of the United States of America being overrun by a violent mob. John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the turbulent past few days and wonder whether Americans now have the moral and ethical wherewithal to govern ourselves. They also reflect on the truth that achieving freedom is not rare in history: Maintaining that freedom is.

Also on today's episode: What Democratic control of the Senate means for Christians; China's brutal and perhaps final crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong; plus John's and Shane's recommendations for the week: The Book of Proverbs and Pixar's new animated film, Soul.

A recent headline that isn't exactly news announced the findings of a recent Gallup study: "Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media." Six out of ten Americans trust the media either "not very much" or "not at all" when it comes to reporting the news fairly and accurately.

Truth be told, I'm among those six. I'm tired of bias, of opinion pieces masquerading as reporting, of buried leads and hysterical fearmongering. Apparently, many Americans are tired of these things, too. Last year, a major news network flashed this caption, "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting," as its reporter stood in front of buildings that were burning to the ground. Last week, America's paper of record ran a glowing piece on freedom in China, where people may not have freedom of religion, speech, or assembly but enjoy going to nightclubs thanks to their dictators' handling of COVID. And don't get even get me started on the news coverage of the events this week.

Watching or reading different news sources today is like watching and reading about completely different worlds. If aliens landed in America tomorrow, they'd have no idea what the truth is about this country. They wouldn't even be able to report back to their leaders about whether or not actress Tanya Roberts had died or not!

That last little anecdote brings up another challenge we all face: the sheer volume of noise we are forced to navigate. The Washington Post alone publishes an average of 500 news stories every single day. Add to that The New York Times, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, FoxNews, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, not to mention the ever-present and sometimes-tempting clickbait everywhere, and the noise is simply overwhelming.

More and more, Americans have turned to social media and news aggregators out of sheer desperation. These tools do offer help navigating the volume, but they don't offer wisdom. Increasingly, these tools become echo chambers. Recently, Pew Research found that nearly half of Americans are unable to determine whether their news sources do their own original reporting.

Even so, we must bear in mind what Paul said in his speech to the Athenians in Acts 17: God intentionally places us all in particular times and particular places in history. Engaged, thoughtful Christians not only must stay informed about those trends, issues, and stories that truly matter, they must discern between those that matter and those that don't. And that's not all. We also somehow have to navigate the constant worldview spins we are subjected to by media sources.

Chuck Colson first founded BreakPoint to illustrate that this sort of worldview analysis of contemporary events was not only possible but necessary and incredibly helpful. Let me be clear: We cannot do this work, which we love, without the help of faithful partners. One of the most critical partners we have in this task is the WORLD News Group and WORLD magazine. WORLD is a critical source of news and thoughtful analysis. The BreakPoint team relies on it.

WORLD does journalism from a Christian worldview without the click-bait and without the hype. Their print magazine, online articles, and daily podcast, "The World and Everything in It" (which I join weekly as a guest commentator) features clear reporting, news coverage of stories that matter, and a recognition of the central role of faith and religion in contemporary society.

This month, any gift of $19 or more to BreakPoint and the Colson Center, provides a one-year subscription to WORLD magazine that you can keep for yourself or gift to a friend or family member. So, if you already subscribe to WORLD, and I hope you do, you can bless someone else with a resource you know they will enjoy and can rely on.

Come to BreakPoint.org/January2021, that's BreakPoint.org/January2021, to get a one-year subscription to WORLD with your next gift to BreakPoint and the Colson Center.

In the introduction to his book The Content Trap, author Bharat Anand asks readers to consider what caused The Yellowstone Fires of 1988, which lasted for months and destroyed over 1.3 million acres of the world's oldest, and one of our nation's most treasured, national parks. The traditional story places the blame on a worker who dropped a single, still-lit cigarette. Anand disagrees.

The cigarette certainly triggered this fire, but a million cigarettes are dropped every single day. That year (likely even that day), other cigarettes and, for that matter, lightning strikes, fell in Yellowstone. Why did this one spark so much damage? Anand's point has to do with the pre-existing conditions, which made something that is benign in most other circumstances, a trigger for incredible destruction.

Yesterday, as protestors stormed the Capitol, Illinois Representative Kinzinger, a Republican, said, "We (Americans) are not what we are seeing today…" Others remarked how shocking it was to see the sort of political unrest common to other countries, here in America. And, of course, it was shocking.

But we'd better be clear on why. It's not because somehow Americans, even those who love freedom and wish to protect the remarkable gift that is our nation, are somehow exempt from the Fall. It's not because America has some sort of Divine pass to last forever. It's not because the rules that govern nations and civilizations, which have been proven over and over again throughout history, somehow do not apply to us.

In what now seems like an ominous prediction, my friend Trevin Wax tweeted out a quote from Chuck Colson Wednesday morning: "People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government ... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well."

Colson was right. Another way of saying what he did is, "Character is destiny." It's tempting to apply this undeniable truism rather selectively, but it is as true for individuals on "our side" as it is for those on "their side." It is true for presidents and for peasants. It's as true about a President "not as bad as she would have been," who delivers strong policy wins for our side as it is about anyone else. It is true for the narcissist and for the abortionist, for the one who rejects religious faith and the one who uses it for his own ends.

But, and this is the much more important point that many miss, character is destiny for a people as well as for a person. Yesterday, when President-elect Biden said that the actions of the mob did not reflect America, I wish he were correct. But he wasn't. We are not a moral nation. We are lawless. We are not a nation that cultivates the kinds of families able to produce good citizens. Our institutions cannot be trusted to tell us the truth or advance the good. Our leaders think and live as if wrong means are justified by preferred ends. Our churches tickle ears and indulge narcissism. Our schools build frameworks of thinking that are not only wrong, but foster confusion and division.

Yesterday's riot was not the first in our nation's recent history, nor will it be the last. There are certainly immediate causes for what we witnessed, including the words of a President who appeared to care more about the attention the riots gave him than the rule of law that they violated. Still, there are ultimate causes, ones that predate his administration and that have created what is clearly a spark-ready environment.

Yesterday's events cannot be understood, much less addressed outside this larger context. And the moment we excuse ourselves from being part of the problem, we have lost our saltiness

Often throughout history, moments like this have been embraced by the Church as an opportunity by God's people. When a people reach this level of vulnerability, either as individuals, as families, or as nations, it is clear that they are out of ideas. There is no sustainable way forward when the ideological divide reaches this level, not only about how best to reach commonly held aims but when there is no consensus on the aims themselves.

To be clear, civilizations usually die with a whimper, not a bang. America will go on, but we aren't ok. Even more, the resources once found in various places within our culture to build new things or fix what's broken are largely depleted. The only way out of the long decline of decadence, punctuated as it is by noisy, scary moments like yesterday, is either, as Ross Douthat wrote, revolution or religious revival.

The story of Yellowstone Park is that now, a decade letter, it has been largely revived and reborn. Let's pray that's also the story of the Church, and even our country.

John and Shane revisit a topic from the New Years Eve podcast to address moral failure in Christian leaders. They help expand our thinking to address the challenging world of sin and its impact on Christian leaders.

Specifically, John and Shane address the revelations from the independent investigation into allegations of Ravi Zacharrias participating in sexual misconduct.

Later, John and Shane address a critique to their response to invetro fertilization and embryo adoption. The two dig into the details of the science, ethical, and culture reasoning around the Christian worldview response they are positing.

Lastly, Shane presents a question related to second marriages. The question comes in light of the presentation of marriage as a procreative endeavor. They address a Christian view of marriage that is expansive, including marriages that are infertile. They include various Christian thinking on marriage, explaining nuances in Biblical interpretations without falling into a secular view of marriage.

A recent article published in the scientific journal Cell announced the "successful" creation of a human-animal hybrid. Researchers at the Salk Institute took pig embryos and implanted human pluripotent stem cells, or cells that can produce any kind of body tissue.

Believe it or not, attempts to genetically cross humans with animals, in various forms and to various degrees, date back at least twenty years. This team of 40 researchers worked for more than four years to create their human-pig chimera (the scientific term for an organism that contains cells from two different species). Previously, the same team created rat-mice chimeras by using the gene-editing technology CRISPR "to hack into mouse blastocysts." Having mastered the rat-mice cross, they applied the same technique to create human stem cells which they then introduced into pig embryos.

As was the case with Dolly the cloned sheep (remember her?), calling the whole process a "success" requires a bit of winking and nodding. Years of trial and error, and plenty of failed embryos, preceded the chimeric embryos which actually survived long enough to be implanted into adult pigs for three-to-four weeks. They were then removed for analysis.

What motivates the time, money, and energy to do such a thing? Well, remember, the road to Hades is paved with good intentions. In this case, the goal is to alleviate the shortage of human organs available for transplantation, a loaded phrase in and of itself. To say there is a "shortage" of organs available for transplant is to say, "not enough people have died to save others." Even so, the chimeras created contained so few human cells that any organs created by this method, at least at this point, would be rejected by our immune system.

And, there is the potential of other technologies to produce transplantable organs render flights to "The Island of Dr. Moreau" unnecessary. For example, "bioprinting" is a technology very much like 3D printing, only the products fabricated can be used in the human body. This isn't science fiction. It's quite probable that within our children's lifetimes, if not sooner, transplant surgeons will "print" compatible livers and hearts on demand, no chimera necessary. In fact, bioprinting could render the human-animal hybrid enterprise moot long before the Salk Institute produces a single viable organ.

All of which makes it possible that the whole organ transplantation rationale is just a smokescreen obscuring the real reason for creating human-ham hybrids … just to see if we can.

Just last year, Japanese and German scientists (who obviously never saw "Planet of the Apes") spliced human genes into the brains of monkey fetuses. We'll never know if these monkeys would have taken over the Earth since they were aborted.

Responsible scientists are sounding alarms over all this genetic tinkering, especially with gene-editing technologies like CRISPR. Others, to paraphrase a line from Jurassic Park, are so busy seeing if they can do something, they don't take time to ask whether they should.

This leaves the rest of us in high-stakes, real-life game of "what if?" What if technology allows us to create and farm human-pig chimeras to harvest for human organ transplantation? What if our science continues to not only outpace, but far outpace, our ethics? What if we continue our technologies without the world's only stable ground for human dignity, that every person bears the image of God Himself? What if, following the logic of naturalism, we treat humans as an accidental product of chemicals and atoms colliding, no different from other living beings, like pigs or pandas?

Twenty years ago, in remarkably written and prophetically entitled article, "The Pig-Man Cometh," Joseph Bottum walked through the what if scenario.

"…we live at a moment in which British newspapers can report on 19 families who have created test-tube babies solely for the purpose of serving as tissue donors for their relatives -- some brought to birth, some merely harvested as embryos and fetuses. A moment in which Harper's Bazaar can advise women to keep their faces unwrinkled by having themselves injected with fat culled from human cadavers. A moment in which the Australian philosopher Peter Singer can receive a chair at Princeton University for advocating the destruction of infants after birth if their lives are likely to be a burden. A moment in which the brains of late-term aborted babies can be vacuumed out and gleaned for stem cells.

In the midst of all this, the creation of a human-pig arrives like a thing expected. We have reached the logical end, at last. We have become the people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against -- and we will reap exactly the consequences those tales foretold.

Like the coming true of an old story -- the discovery of the philosopher's stone, the rubbing of a magic lantern –biotechnology is delivering the most astonishing medical advances anyone has ever imagined. You and I will live for many years in youthful health: Our cancers, our senilities, our coughs, and our infirmities all swept away on the triumphant, cresting wave of science.

But our sons and our daughters will mate with the pig-men, if the pig-men will have them. And our swine-snouted grandchildren -- the fruit not of our loins, but of our arrogance and our bright test tubes -- will use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters.

About a month before the great December conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, NASA researchers announced a separate, unexpected discovery: evidence of light in deep space without an explainable source. After studying photographs taken by the New Horizons space probe, which is now 4 billion miles away but still beaming footage to Earth, NASA came across an unexplained "glow." It was in areas particularly distant from the known sources of light, such as stars and galaxies, and from sources of reflected light, such as dust particles. In fact, one astronomer told NPR that the amount of unexplained light was about equal to the light coming from sources they could identify.

The NPR article described the "problem" this creates for scientists: "… for 400 years, astronomers have been studying visible light and the sky in a serious way and yet somehow apparently 'missed half the light in the universe.'" The choice astronomers face is either to double-down on the known explanations for light or be open to new ones.

I'm no astronomer, of course, and I certainly won't pretend to know more than those who've dedicated their lives to studying the heavens. However, it's worth mentioning that an additional explanation for light is found in Genesis. If the testimony of Scripture is, like science, considered an actual source of knowledge, rather than a book of religious metaphors and self-help, light was the first thing created by God, in order to form and fill an earth that was "formless and empty." Maybe knowing that light preceded existing physical objects points to a different explanation for those especially empty corners of the sky that seem to mysteriously "glow"

A few years ago, journalist and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell told a story in his book "Blink" about how surprisingly accurate human intuitions can be. In the early 2000s, a decorated general who had fought in Vietnam was called to the Pentagon, along with other top military analysts, specialists, and software engineers, to help with a war simulation exercise. Worried about unstable conditions in the Middle East, a simulation was set up to play out strategy if, say, an unstable despot did something rash.

For the simulation, Pentagon officials studied and made calculations and built algorithms to plan for every possible contingency. The Vietnam Veteran general was, on the other hand, assigned as the enemy. He was privy to none of the sophisticated strategizing, fancy equipment, software, or teams of mathematicians. Instead, he used intuition and the wisdom earned on the ground in Vietnam. Rather than calling meetings every time conditions changed, the General made decisions quickly. According to Gladwell, he trusted his gut. He won the battle in two days, humiliating the Pentagon.

Gladwell's main point is that humans tend to overthink things. The amazing successes of our science and technologies have led us to idolize sophistication and, at times, complicate what's really simple.

In Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, the main character is taken into space and is flabbergasted by what he sees. "Space," Lewis describes, "was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens - the heavens which declared the glory."

Many scientists and astronomers, of course, know and believe in the Creator. However, the better our technology and the more specialized our tools, the more we, as enlightened moderns, doubt older wisdom. Our algorithms and war game strategies and sophisticated techniques can, unintentionally become blinders that block the God-given intuition that comes from our created humanity. When light is discovered where there ought not be any, maybe we've stifled the most plausible explanation. Long ago, Someone said, "Let there be light," and there was light. That Someone, then, told us all about it.

Perhaps, it would be easier to see God in "the heavens" He made, if we weren't so convinced of our ability to explain everything by purely naturalistic causes or even, as some do, to dismiss all supernatural causes. Maybe our gut instinct to look upward when we encounter the unexplained is the right one. If the heavens indeed "declare the glory of God," we'd do well to listen.

About a month before the great December conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, NASA researchers announced a separate, unexpected discovery: evidence of light in deep space without an explainable source. After studying photographs taken by the New Horizons space probe, which is now 4 billion miles away but still beaming footage to Earth, NASA came across an unexplained "glow." It was in areas particularly distant from the known sources of light, such as stars and galaxies, and from sources of reflected light, such as dust particles. In fact, one astronomer told NPR that the amount of unexplained light was about equal to the light coming from sources they could identify.

The NPR article described the "problem" this creates for scientists: "… for 400 years, astronomers have been studying visible light and the sky in a serious way and yet somehow apparently 'missed half the light in the universe.'" The choice astronomers face is either to double-down on the known explanations for light or be open to new ones.

I'm no astronomer, of course, and I certainly won't pretend to know more than those who've dedicated their lives to studying the heavens. However, it's worth mentioning that an additional explanation for light is found in Genesis. If the testimony of Scripture is, like science, considered an actual source of knowledge, rather than a book of religious metaphors and self-help, light was the first thing created by God, in order to form and fill an earth that was "formless and empty." Maybe knowing that light preceded existing physical objects points to a different explanation for those especially empty corners of the sky that seem to mysteriously "glow"

A few years ago, journalist and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell told a story in his book "Blink" about how surprisingly accurate human intuitions can be. In the early 2000s, a decorated general who had fought in Vietnam was called to the Pentagon, along with other top military analysts, specialists, and software engineers, to help with a war simulation exercise. Worried about unstable conditions in the Middle East, a simulation was set up to play out strategy if, say, an unstable despot did something rash.

For the simulation, Pentagon officials studied and made calculations and built algorithms to plan for every possible contingency. The Vietnam Veteran general was, on the other hand, assigned as the enemy. He was privy to none of the sophisticated strategizing, fancy equipment, software, or teams of mathematicians. Instead, he used intuition and the wisdom earned on the ground in Vietnam. Rather than calling meetings every time conditions changed, the General made decisions quickly. According to Gladwell, he trusted his gut. He won the battle in two days, humiliating the Pentagon.

Gladwell's main point is that humans tend to overthink things. The amazing successes of our science and technologies have led us to idolize sophistication and, at times, complicate what's really simple.

In Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, the main character is taken into space and is flabbergasted by what he sees. "Space," Lewis describes, "was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens - the heavens which declared the glory."

Many scientists and astronomers, of course, know and believe in the Creator. However, the better our technology and the more specialized our tools, the more we, as enlightened moderns, doubt older wisdom. Our algorithms and war game strategies and sophisticated techniques can, unintentionally become blinders that block the God-given intuition that comes from our created humanity. When light is discovered where there ought not be any, maybe we've stifled the most plausible explanation. Long ago, Someone said, "Let there be light," and there was light. That Someone, then, told us all about it.

Perhaps, it would be easier to see God in "the heavens" He made, if we weren't so convinced of our ability to explain everything by purely naturalistic causes or even, as some do, to dismiss all supernatural causes. Maybe our gut instinct to look upward when we encounter the unexplained is the right one. If the heavens indeed "declare the glory of God," we'd do well to listen.

Dr. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow in the Academy of Fellows of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity and previously served as its Executive Director.

He visits with John to discuss the ethics of the Coronavirus vaccine. They discuss the origins of the vaccine and possible side-effects from taking the newly produced immunization to fight COVID-19.