Breakpoint

On Saturday, the successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon vehicle marked the first manned mission to space from U.S. soil in nearly a decade. NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, who ascended from the same launchpad as the Apollo missions and the space shuttle, are now aboard the International Space Station. Only this time, in an amazing “giant leap” of technology, the rocket that carried them into orbit returned and landed itself aboard a ship to be reused.  All of this was, for the first time in manned space flight history, carried out by SpaceX, the private company founded by billionaire Elon Musk.

SpaceX’s stated goal is to make off-world travel more affordable, but Musk has deeper, more science-fiction-like ambitions, including seeding the human species on other planets. Back in 2008, he wrote in Esquire:

“An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy [humanity], but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball--or go extinct.”

Musk’s movie-like ambitions don’t end there. In addition to SpaceX and (of course) Tesla, he founded a company called Neuralink to “develop ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” At the press conference announcing the launch of Neuralink, Musk restated that in English. He wants to help humans “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” creating technologies that would enable humans to “merge with AI.”

In other words, the worldview at work behind most of Musk’s projects is an atheistic transhumanism that seeks to control the evolutionary process toward the end of preserving and expanding human consciousness and capability. Recognizing these worldview motivations does not, however, minimize the achievements of Musk or SpaceX. Sending Americans back to the stars in a private spacecraft propelled by a retrievable rocket is just downright cool, to say nothing of just how useful the technology could be.

At the same time, Christians should realize that the awe that overwhelms humans when watching man set foot on the moon or a robot land on Mars or astronauts boarding the space station is more than a mere feeling. Rather, it’s a testament to our unique status and role in creation, as well as our drive and capacity to imagine beyond the constraints of what is to what might be, and it’s a reminder that the universe is a place to be known, explored, and even subdued. Adherents to any worldview must recognize these observable realities about this universe, but Christianity can uniquely explain them.

No elephants or apes look to the stars and long to visit them, nor are they capable of trying. Humans do and are, because we’re created in the image of the One who set the stars in place to declare His glory and gave us wonder and the ability to know Him. An atheistic worldview, even with ambitions to transcend our bodies and settle other planets, simply cannot account for these desires.

That doesn’t stop those who hold this worldview from trying. Elon Musk, for example, sounds eerily similar to atheist space-farer Dr. Weston from C. S. Lewis’ “Space Trilogy.” In civilized man, says Weston, life has reached its “highest form,” and now “presses forward to that interplanetary leap” which will place us “forever beyond the reach of death.”

Though anyone who knows Dr. Weston’s eventual fate will shudder, similar ideas often drive this new era of space travel. The opportunity for Christians is to, as my friend Greg Koukl often says, “put a pebble in their shoe” by asking why. Why is human civilization worth preserving and spreading? Why do we long to visit other planets? Why do we treat death like an enemy to be overcome?

Not only do these questions lack answers if we are no different from the elephant or ape, there’s really no explanation for why we would be asking them in the first place. If we are different from the animals, however, if we were made to know the universe and the God behind it, then our sense of awe and our drive to return to space makes a world of sense.

Presidents and politicians using the Bible or Christian symbolism for political ends is nothing new. Some, as President Trump did Monday afternoon, pose with Bible in hand. Far more common is the selective quoting, misquoting, or downright twisting of Bible verses to advance political talking points.

After nights of rioting and violence across America and even right outside the White House, the president punctuated his speech by walking from the Rose Garden to an historically important church that was nearly burned down the night before. He then posed with a Bible in hand beside the church sign.

The Bible should never be used as a prop.

Trump was condemned widely, and not just by those who take the Bible seriously. In fact, among the loudest voices were religious leaders who themselves use the Bible as a prop (and their religious mantles as cover) to advance a theological progressivism, especially revisionist teachings about sexuality and abortion. For example, on the TODAY show, Mariann Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C., accused the President of abusing “the spiritual tools and symbols of our traditions and of our sacred space."

To reduce the Bible to a prop, a mere “spiritual tool” or a mere “symbol,” however, is to miss the Bible’s real power, a power the world so desperately needs right now. After all, it is the explanatory capacity of Holy Scripture, its ability to describe the contours of reality and the human condition so accurately, that makes it so valuable, not just to Christians and especially in confusing times like these. Rather than using it to advance an agenda or score points with a religious base, it would’ve been far more valuable and helpful if the president had opened it and read to the nation its words of comfort and conviction, and especially its call to repentance.

In his book For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts, and the End of Slavery, sociologist Rodney Stark argues that Christians were the very first people in history to even imagine that slavery was not a normal condition of human society, as was universally assumed throughout history. While there were those, like the Jewish Essenes who didn’t like slavery, “…only in Christianity,” Stark argues, “did the idea develop that slavery was sinful and must be abolished.” Why did this idea develop in Christianity and not anywhere else? The Bible.

Though Jesus’ first followers did not forbid slavery, they did in their New Testament writings, especially Paul, unlock implications of our identity as image bearers of God and new creations in Christ, including the notion of universal human dignity. Thus, long-standing social barriers between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female were challenged and eventually torn down.

Centuries later, British Christians such at William Wilberforce would launch years-long campaigns to end the scourge of slavery. Other Christians, informed by what was written in the Bible, would lead the movement for Civil Rights in this country with arguments constructed from the Christian framework of reality found only in Holy Scripture. None of this is to say that Christians always got issues of race or slavery right. They certainly did not. And the Bible was often misused to enslave and dehumanize. But, as even atheist historians and philosophers like Luc Ferry and Tom Holland have acknowledged, the world owes a debt to the Bible for the very notions of human value, human rights, and human dignity.

Writing yesterday at Christianity Today, Ed Stetzer suggested that not only does the Bible “teach us in James (and other places) that favoritism and racism are wrong, and that a system that treats people of color with different outcomes is, well, sinful,” but also that “stealing, looting, and violence are (also) clearly addressed and condemned in the Bible.” And, I’d add, it points us to forgiveness and grace, required resources if we hope to be reconciled to God and to each other.

In other words, on the pages of the Bible the president held aloft for the camera on Monday is exactly what we need right now, including the keys to recapturing civic virtue, pursuing reconciliation, and restoring civil society. The better choice, especially in a society guilty of either ignoring the Bible or twisting it to wrong ends, would be to heed the exhortation contained in this prayer written by Anglican theologian Thomas Cranmer:

“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

In this moment of national crisis, rather than fighting over the optics around the Bible, we’d be far better off reading, hearing, and applying what it has to say.

Truth, Love, Together. That’s the theme of the Colson Center’s 4-week long virtual event featuring 20 of the leading Christian worldview thinkers.

We’re now into module 3, “Becoming People of Truth and Love.” And today on the BreakPoint Podcast we have a great—and eerily timely--presentation by Andy Crouch:  “Becoming the People the World Needs.”

Also: Thursday night at 8 Eastern, please join John Stonestreet, Pastor Chris Brooks and Andy Crouch for a special live webinar on how Christians should respond to the death of George Floyd and the chaos erupting in our nation's cities. It's absolutely free. Click here to register.

On Saturday, SpaceX and NASA, in a remarkable achievement, sent astronauts to the International Space Station. We cheered their success, but the timing, juxtaposed beside the horrific murder of George Floyd, protests by so many disillusioned and hurting Americans, and repeated nights of lawlessness that left cities across America looted and burned, was more than a little strange.

Think about it. We can go to space. We can instantly communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. We might even develop a treatment for COVID-19. It’s amazing what humans can do.  And yet, and yet, we are, by any objective measure, a nation barely holding itself together. Our best scientific achievements and our brightest technological innovations offer no solutions for our deepest divisions or our most serious problems.

Though no one who witnessed the scope and scale of the chaos this weekend could conclude “all is ok,” there are indicators everywhere that our nation’s health is worse than we’re willing to admit. We are what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called, in his famous 1978 Harvard University commencement speech, “a world split apart.” Like his audience that day, we too risk underestimating just how deep the fissures are.

For example, the initial condemnation of George Floyd’s killing was bipartisan and unequivocal by both right and left, but is since increasingly seen through, and being greatly distorted by, our political lenses. Solzhenitsyn warned against thinking “the danger (of the Cold War) could be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations” alone.  Well, neither can politics alone, much less increased state force alone, calm this perfect storm of a long history of racial grievance, a slow-moving and often malfunctioning justice system, misguided social justice warriors, and extremist agitators and opportunists, all swirling together within a nation on edge from seven weeks of social isolation.

Christians must not run for political or ideological corners. To the best of our ability, we must affirm all truths, even those hard to swallow, and we must deny all lies, even the ones that are politically expedient.

For example, even if the story is wrongly told, America still faces whirlwind-intense consequences from her “original sin.”  Though current economic, political, and social conditions for the African-American community is light years ahead of, say, 1863 or even 1963, American slavery was especially evil in ways that still poison today. In directly assaulting the image of God in African-Americans, the heinous sin of racism took deep root in American hearts, American institutions, and American history. And, slavery uniquely targeted and, in many ways, broke the black family. These are generational-sized evils that one does not just “get over.”

At the same time, indoctrinating our young in identity politics and critical theory, has made things worse. These bad ideas have consequences too, which in this case, take the form of rioters hijacking both protests and grievances that don’t belong to them. As Dr. Anthony Bradley of The Kings College has repeatedly noted throughout this episode on Twitter, privileged, "woke" white kids are wreaking havoc that will only blow back on the very communities they are purporting to “stand with.” Or, as Claire Lehmann, founding editor of Quillette tweeted, “Maybe saddling an entire generation of kids with debt & no hope of joining the property class while sending them to institutions that marinate them in neo- Marxist orthodoxy wasn’t such a good idea.”

Another hard truth to face is that no political solution can overcome our collective loss of virtue. It’s either the conscience or the constable, and the cracks in our social fabric cannot ultimately be held together by more creative (or condescending) public policies, or strong-man type leadership, and certainly not by unwise tweets. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, we’ve abandoned character and are surprised to see Antifa in our midst. The increasingly militarized governmental response that will most-likely be required in the coming days should not be confused, neither by us nor our president, as a solution. No, it’s a sign of just how bad things are.

None of this is to say that we don’t need leadership. Of course we do: political, spiritual, familial, and otherwise. Even more, we need a population able to govern itself. Our current lack of both means we instead, more and more, resemble Solzhenitsyn’s description of a dying society.

This past Sunday, Christians around the world remembered Pentecost, the day that God’s gift of the Holy Spirit enabled apostles to proclaim Christ and His resurrection across tongues and tribes. The day foreshadowed the day John describes in Revelation 7, when Babel is reversed and people from every tongue, tribe, nation, and language are united, once again, before the throne of God.

Could the Holy Spirit also empower us, today, to bridge the deep divide of tribe that inflicts our hearts and our nation?

This Thursday, innovative thinker and cultural analyst Andy Crouch will join me for our Thursday Q&A session, based on his Truth. Love. Together. session that released this week. It’s entitled “How We Can Be the Sort of People the World Needs, right now.” Live attendance is limited, but if you register and we run out of space, we will send you a link to the recording. Come to breakpoint.org to register.

How do Christian missionaries abroad keep working in a time of pandemic lockdown? Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, Jonathan Grooms of Global  Partners of Peace and Development shares his insights from the Middle Eastern kingdom of Jordan.

Learn How You Can Support Global Partners of Peace and Development

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the tragic killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the hard questions we as Christians must ask--and answer.

Also on this week's episode: The bizarre story of the Central Park "Karen" who called the police on an African American birdwatcher--and the destruction of her personal life by the twittersphere; the most recent "Instagram apostasy," this time a Christian rock star announcing his loss of faith.

And today's bonus content: an extended clip from Max Mclean in his masterful role as C. S. Lewis, plus John and Shane take Q & A on men and divorce and on the problem of pain and suffering.

Please watch our free online virtual event, “Truth. Love. Together.”

“The Post-Pandemic Church and Pre-Existing Conditions” by John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, BreakPoint

Outrage erupted across the country this week after video surfaced of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly 10 minutes. In the horrifying video, Floyd begs for air before bystanders plead for his life. In the end, Floyd, an African American suspected of no violent crime but of “grocery store forgery,” died.

The four police officers involved were fired almost immediately. The FBI opened an investigation, and the Justice Department pledged to make the case a top priority. While, in the past, police have often defended fellow officers in similar incidents, this time, as the Washington Post reported, police chiefs across the country “denounced the prolonged suffocation of Floyd.”

Earlier this week, Detroit-area pastor Chris Brooks, a former Colson Center board member and close friend, posted a picture of Floyd on Facebook along with a quote attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." I admit, for the last few days, I’ve struggled to know what should be said and what could be done.

We must say, first, that George Floyd was an image bearer of His Creator. His death is awful.  It's tragic. And it should not have happened.

Floyd’s murder has opened up, yet again, so many larger, painful cultural issues we face–especially those having to do with race. Also revealed, again and painfully so, is how essential justice is, especially for victims and family members but also entire communities. Civilizations can sustain many things, but not when perpetual injustices go unaddressed.

Still, we must not forget, in the midst of the important discussions we must have, that George Floyd was a real person. Too often when videos like this one go viral--and God help us and forgive us, there are too many--we automatically run to ideological or political corners, turning victims like George Floyd into a prop for our own positions.

The most obvious example is those using this killing to justify looting stores and destroying property.  Other examples include resorting to “what-about-isms,” as if some other unrelated wrong somehow diminishes the evil of this act or implying that one can only support either the police and law and order, or African Americans and justice… as if these are mutually exclusive options.

Dichotomies like that are dangerous and disingenuous. We must be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We can support the institution of law enforcement and acknowledge that the terrible injustice that happened here happens too often. We can denounce lawlessness and still listen carefully to our African American neighbors describe their deep pain and disillusionment. We can support a right to protest and still denounce using protests as occasions for evil.

Above all, I, a follower of Jesus who happens to be white, can listen. I can, indeed if I am to love my neighbor as Christ commanded I must, care about the suffering of my fellow citizens, especially my brothers and sisters in Christ. The Church can lead the culture in addressing this suffering and its root causes, advancing justice, and caring for victims. Who else can?

This Monday is the launch of the third module of our Truth Love Together virtual event, entitled “Becoming People of Truth and Love.” It could not be more timely. The Enemy uses situations like the police killing of George Floyd to drive us away from both truth and love, to their counterfeits. We must not deny the truth of what happened to George Floyd, and we won’t reach justice, much less reconciliation, without hard, sacrificial, and biblical love. Please come to Conference.ColsonCenter.org to watch module 3, “Becoming People of Truth and Love.”

May God grant comfort to the family of George Floyd, peace to the city of Minneapolis, justice for the officers involved, safety to those affected by the related violence, and power to Christ’s Church, so that we would be the agents of peace and reconciliation, the people of Truth and Love, our world needs so desperately right now.

Please watch “Becoming People of Truth and Love,” module 3 of our “Truth. Love. Together” virtual event.

Recently. a New York Times article drew attention to a corona that’s not a virus and that makes life possible instead of threatening it. The corona or outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere puzzles astronomers because it is, as compared with similar stars, so calm.

We take the sun for granted, unless it disappears for a few cloudy days or burns us at the beach or, less often, disrupts satellite communications. Once every century or so, it might burp enough energy to fry technology and maybe even ignite the Northern Lights over the Caribbean, as happened in 1859.  Aside from instances such as these, it’s easy to forget that the local star that warms our faces and wakes our flowers, this “blazing ball of fusion-powered plasma,” is actually capable, at least in theory, of scorching our planet and all of us to a lifeless cinder.

However, a new paper published in the journal “Science” suggests that’s exactly the sort of thing we should expect from the sun, if it behaved like other stars of its kind. But it doesn’t. The good news is, as the Times put it, the star around which we orbit is downright “boring” compared with its solar siblings.

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, after compiling data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope, which spent years monitoring 150,000 distant stars, concluded that our sun’s relative calm is among the reasons we are here at all.

After identifying 369 comparable stars in our galaxy, these scientists learned something astounding: The magnetic activity that creates the sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections on other stars is, on average, five times more intense than on our sun. On many stars that were studied, disruptions were even twelve times more intense. That level of chaos makes life in their orbits virtually impossible.

So why would our sun behave so differently than all the others? One unsettling theory, especially given the “what else could possibly go wrong” start to 2020, is that our sun is currently asleep, but might, at some point, wake up and blast us with deadly levels of radiation.  Another idea is that our sun is aging, and because it is now over-the-hill, has fewer bursts of energy to give off.

That sounds reasonable to those of us reaching middle age.

Currently, according to researchers, one theory is not to be favored over another, but what is clear, as the Times observes, is that our sun’s relative tranquility has unquestionably “benefitted our species.” As the study’s lead author put it, “It may be no coincidence that we live around a very inactive star.”

Of course, coincidence is the only reason that anyone already committed to naturalism can feasibly offer. If, however, the blinders of that particular worldview are removed, there’s a third possible explanation: Our host star is uniquely friendly to life because it was finely-tuned by God to support life.

In the marvelous book, “The Privileged Planet,” Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez list the many features that make our earth, sun, and our corner of the universe uniquely suited for life.  Not only do we have the right kind of star, we are just the right distance from that star. We are at the right location in the galaxy. We are in a solar system with gas giants that shield us from wandering asteroids and comets. We have a moon just the right size to stabilize our axis and create tides and seasons. We are on a planet with land, liquid water, oxygen, plate tectonics, and a molten iron core to generate a magnetosphere.

Tally up all these factors, as Richards and Gonzalez do, and it’s a dizzying improbability that we would be here at all: something like 1 out of 1 followed by 15 zeroes.

And yet, here we are, bathed in the warmth of a star scientists increasingly recognize as rare and hospitable. Our brightest minds could hardly imagine, much less imagine attempting to design, a better solar system. All of which is why we ought to thank the brightest of all minds, the One that also made our own minds bright enough to discover all of these remarkable things about our privileged planet, our privileged place in the universe, and our blessedly boring sun.

A recent poll conducted by the University of Chicago and the Associated Press concluded that “the coronavirus has prompted almost two-thirds of American believers of all faiths to feel that God is telling humanity to change how it lives.” For Christians, who know from Scripture that God has revealed Himself as the ultimate and consistent communicator, the question isn’t if He’s speaking in the events of the last few months. He is. But what is He saying?

Over these past two months, I’ve concluded that none of the most important issues we face today as a culture were created by this virus. Rather, the virus exposed and accelerated issues that already mattered. For example, the utopian aspirations of western culture, like the embarrassing video of celebrities singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” have been tested, found wanting, and should be abandoned. Both our self-centered delusions of “living for today” and our technocratic fantasies of controlling nature have proved inadequate for the challenges of coronavirus.

We’ve also seen that ours is a culture lost on the dignity of human life. With the threat of hospitals being overrun, how do we even approach the question of rationing treatment and care? When hospitals weren’t overrun in much of the country, one-size-fits-all visitation policies became dehumanizing barriers to healing, which harmed patients and family members unnecessarily. Part of the Church’s task, in bearing witness to the sanctity of each and every life, is to ensure that people are never sacrificed on the various altars of ‘efficiency.’

The confusing relationship between science and American culture was complicated long before COVID-19. For years now, the phrase “the science is settled,” has been used as a sort of secular equivalent for “Thus saith the Lord.” Yet, the ever-changing “findings” and “warnings” of the virus experts revealed, again, that a lot of science isn’t as “settled” as many would have us believed. Even dismissing cranks and conspiracy theorists, the overwhelming amount of contradictory information continues to fuel growing distrust in our national “experts.”

More troubling is what we continue to learn about the impact of social-distancing and lockdowns on the already-devastating loneliness epidemic. The overall health impact of loneliness, which is comparable to chain-smoking, not to mention the catalytic role it plays in suicide and addictions, seems to have only worsened in recent weeks. One Bay Area doctor claimed to have seen more deaths by suicide during lockdowns than from covid-19, and as many suicides in the last four weeks as they typically see in an entire year.

Then there’s the crisis of work and meaning. A 2015 poll of British workers found that 37 percent believed their jobs make “no meaningful contribution to the world.” Now we’ve added the label “non-essential” to millions more, a horrible adjective that fails to recognize the inherent good of work as an essential part of our human dignity.

“Non-essential” is an even worse adjective for religion, but the pandemic has revealed just how many Americans, including Christians, think of church this way. While liquor stores and marijuana shops and tattoo parlors were “essential,” churches were not, including clergy members and chaplains in hospitals. So much about this time revealed just how secular and, to borrow a term from philosopher Charles Taylor, “disenchanted,” American culture has become. What remains to be seen is how many Christians will conclude that video church is an adequate weekly fix from here on out.

To be sure, eventually, the pandemic and its accompanying hysteria will pass. The questions it has raised won’t. At root, all of the issues I’ve mentioned revolve around the fundamental worldview questions: Where did everything come from? Is there a God? Why are we here? What makes us human? Who decides right and wrong? and Where is history headed?

Today, at BreakPoint.org, we offer an online symposium. Over 20 Christian thinkers and ministry leaders and authors, from Jim Daly to Kristan Hawkins, Andrew Walker, Karen Swallow Prior, Trevin Wax, Cathi Herrod, Jeff Myers, and more – all share their thoughts on what God may be saying during this coronavirus crisis.

You can find their varied and thought-provoking responses at here.

Created seventy-five years ago this October, the United Nations was hailed as “the last, best hope for peace,” a moniker that proved neither true nor possible (though, as I once heard a former Israeli special forces guy put it, “no one ‘monitors’ better”).  A recent tweet reveals how the organization’s goal has been expanded to include the ever-elusive “equality.”

“Help create a more equal world,” said the Tweet, “by using gender-neutral language, if you're unsure about someone's gender or are referring to a group.” As part of the “System-Wide Strategy on Gender Parity,” UN employees are being encouraged to speak and write in ways “that [do] not discriminate against a particular sex, social gender or gender identity.”

Of course, some of the strategy suggestions, such as using “humanity” instead of “Mankind” or “police officer” instead of “policeman,” are fine. Others are bit more difficult to understand, such as substituting “representative” for “businessman,” as if those words mean the same thing. And then, there are those suggestions that can only be called linguistic nonsense, attempts at retrofitting established languages to an imaginary, genderless world.

Many European languages, such as Spanish and French, are very “gendered.” Every noun is either male, such as “book” or “hat,” or female, such as “table” or “coronavirus.” All previous attempts, especially in France, to de-gender these languages have gone nowhere, not with everyday speakers nor official language-guardians. As one wag put it, attempts to de-gender the language of love “make it look like algebra.”

In the midst of a global pandemic that has killed a few hundred thousand people, unleashed a global recession, and will likely exacerbate food shortages and political instability around the world, one might wonder how this became a United Nations priority. Well, the secular impulse to recreate the world, and the power of language to do just that, is strong. Those pushing for “gender-neutral” language aren’t as concerned with linguistic sense or what now-dead folks like Victor Hugo thought about life and the world, as they are with ridding the world of gender differentiation.

While, as the guidelines suggest, replacing the words “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” with the word “partner” may seem odd but harmless, using a term associated with business instead of gendered relationship words reveal a significant worldview shift: one in which love, marriage, and family are understood as contractual obligations rather than moral or spiritual ones, and in which people love and marry and mate and have children because “it feels good,” not because these things are good in and of themselves.

Individual languages are the products of a group’s particular history and culture--the Inuit of Greenland will describe weather differently than an Amazonian tribe--but every language reflects certain universal realities. There isn’t a known language without words for “foot” or “hand” or “head.” Though some languages are not as gendered as others, in the sense that not every object is assigned a gender or a gendered article, no language in the world is without words to describe sexual differences. Every language has words for male and female. Though gender roles differ from culture to culture, the underlying biological realities that make male and female remain the same.

The Scripture describe God’s words as creating the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing. As His image bearers, our words also have incredible power, to describe reality and even, in a sense, create. But we don’t create ex nihilo. Our words are confined within the world God created.

Any worldview that denies that the world is a creation of God also sees reality as more pliable than it actually is, and the world as a place we not only inhabit and steward but control. In such a world, there are no words higher than ours, and so we hear folks at the U.N. talk and write as if they can re-create the human person. They cannot. But, then again, the U.N. was never the last, best hope for peace either.