Breakpoint

In the whirlwind of moral balancing as the globe reacts to Coronavirus, we face pressing questions, from if and how to triage patients in the face of limited medical supplies, to how long we ought hobble the economy to curb the spread of the disease.

These immediate questions are essential, but there are others, too: eternal and existential questions endemic to our humanity that tend to emerge in times like these. Why are we suffering? How can we deal with suffering? What does suffering mean?

At this time, as the world deals with the spread of the Coronavirus, Christians have an opportunity to share one of our faith’s most unique pillars: Suffering is shocking, but it’s meaningful. Suffering is viewed quite differently within other religions, and it’s important to know that difference since every religion and every worldview must explain the world as it is.

A fundamental premise of Buddhism, for example, is that life is suffering. As creatures of desire, we attach ourselves and tend to cling to things such as stuff, health, youth, love, and even life itself. Thus, in Buddhism, we are only delivered from suffering by ridding ourselves of the attachments of our desire.

Not only does such a view deny any real distinction between what’s good and what’s bad—such as health and sickness, love and loneliness, or even life and death—it necessarily denies two things Christianity affirms: The goodness of creation and the possibility that the creation will be, as St. Paul put it, set free from corruption.

While many westerners play around with a sort of pop-Buddhism, the secular view of suffering is far more common here. In this view, suffering is real, and we certainly don’t like it, but we don’t really have the worldview foundation to make sense of it. Suffering interrupts of our pleasure and happiness, but in a world without purpose or design, we can’t really say that’s wrong or bad or that it shouldn’t be. We believe, as those with the most resources in human history to avoid sickness and disaster and certain sufferings, that we somehow have a right not to suffer or, for that matter, to not feel dissatisfaction or distress of any kind. But why would that be so, if the world is, as Richard Dawkins once put it, a place of “blind, pitiless indifference” and we are, as he also put it, merely “dancing to our DNA”?

As Dr. John Lennox pointed out on a recent BreakPoint Podcast, suffering is utterly meaningless for a true atheist. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s just there.

What about Christianity? Unlike Buddhism, Christianity doesn’t deny the objective goodness of the world, the objective nature of our suffering, nor the objective potential of restoration. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, called death “the last enemy,” which will be destroyed at Christ’s return. The author of Hebrews called the fear of death the means by which Satan enslaves men. And, most of all, Jesus seemed to identify with human suffering as something He literally felt in His guts. He entered the suffering of others, such as the mourning sisters of Lazarus in John 11, and He prayed to avoid suffering Himself in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The Bible is clear, as is the example of Jesus, that suffering is bad and avoiding it isn’t possible. At the same time, suffering is not seen as meaningless (unlike in secularism). On both the personal and cosmic levels, suffering points to the realities of higher truths and greater goods but is ultimately not the story of creation.

The One through whom all things were made drank from the same cup of suffering and death as all of us. The author of Hebrews says that He “tasted death for everyone.” And yet, rising from the grave three days later, Christ shows us that while suffering and death are real, they do not have the last word.

As John Lennox writes in his marvelous new book “Where Is God in a Coronavirus World?”, a Christian “is not a person who has solved the problem of suffering, but one who has come to love and trust the God who has suffered for them.” Christianity teaches neither resignation to suffering nor detachment from the world. Christianity neither denies the realities of suffering nor gives it more than its due. And so, Christianity alone offers a basis for hope, a true and firm “anchor for the soul.”

We’ve compiled a set of resources offering a Christian view of suffering and hope, including the recent BreakPoint Podcast interview with Dr. John Lennox. We’ll send you his outstanding new book, “Where Is God in a Coronavirus World,” with a gift of any amount to BreakPoint and the Colson Center this month. And you can also see the video of a recent Facebook Live presentation by my friend and mentor, Dr. Bill Brown, “How Can a Good God Allow Suffering?”

It is one of the premier Christian Worldview learning programs in the world: The Colson Fellows Program.

Colson Fellows learn from great Christian worldview thinkers and most importantly, over the course of 10 months, they are mentored and guided to develop a specific plan for applying all they've learned in real-world, practical ways.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, we'll hear from Colson Fellows staff and from commissioned Colson Fellows about how the program has equipped them to be salt and light in their communities.

The Colson Fellows Program is challenging--and rewarding. It's affordable, and takes advantage of the latest technologies for distance learning, but all within a strong sense of community and fellowship.

We're taking applications now at ColsonFellows.org.

Crises reveal much about us as individuals: our courage, our faith, our resiliency. They also reveal much about the health and strength of a community, a society, even a nation. Like that gold star or little yellow arrow on the map at the mall, certain moments in a crisis tell us, “You are here.”

Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was asked during a press briefing why the coronavirus infection rate was slowing in his state. Governor Cuomo said: “The number is down because we brought the number down. God did not do that. Faith did not do that. Destiny did not do that. A lot of pain and suffering did that.” To be clear, he wasn’t asked about God or prayer, he just said it. This was a “you are here” moment for us.

After all, acknowledging God and providence has been a common theme throughout our nation’s history, whether through declaring solemn days of prayer and fasting in the midst of a crisis or a day of thanksgiving after. Today, it’s more common for officials to just ignore God and any role He might play in our world. But there’s a world of difference between leaving God unmentioned and outright denying He deserves any credit at all for anything, from miraculous intervention to strengthening medical professionals to acknowledging He gave some the minds to develop therapies and technologies.

Even more telling, other than a few atheist “amens,” Governor Cuomo’s comments didn’t even make much of a stir. It’s almost as if his words were the culmination of the last few years, where the “don’t offer us prayers and thoughts, just do something” response to other tragedies moved from Twitter to media personalities to elected officials.

Cuomo’s comments, even more than any open hostility against religion we might see, reveal that a certain kind of secularism is now firmly embedded in our culture. To be clear, this isn’t the kind of secularism that takes Christianity and its claims about truth and morality head on, but the kind that dismisses and relegates them as personal, private commitments, irrelevant to public life and maybe even in the way. Despite being Catholic, the Governor seems to believe we live in a world where, at the end of the day, it’s our efforts, our knowledge, and our will that will see us through this and any future pandemics.

Though President Trump recently declared a “National Day of Prayer for All Americans Affected by the Coronavirus,” it’s clear that, as a people, we don’t take seriously God’s place in this world anymore, beyond being a source of personal encouragement and maybe inspiration. We are no longer the kind of people who really turn to God in times of trouble.

The growing conflict between churches and local governments only confirms this analysis. I’m thinking, for instance, of the people ticketed and fined for attending a drive-in church service, while fully complying with social distancing guidelines, listening to the sermon on radio in the church parking lot with windows rolled up. And this was in Mississippi.

Apparently, the mayor, like so many other officials we are hearing about, had signed an order deeming churches “non-essential.” Though he reversed course (thanks to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Justice Department, and public backlash), the larger point is that the church has long been relegated to the category of “non-essential” for so much of our lives as Americans, well before COVID-19. What else can explain the fact that in most states and according to many judges, abortion is an essential service, but worship is not?

Long gone are the “Little House on the Prairie” days, where churches were central to life in American communities, when school, community meetings, festivals, and local governments all happened at the church; where sermons were printed in newspapers and pastors were community leaders.

How churches became non-essential in our cultural imagination is quite a long story, but the primary fault is our own. If we think and talk of our faith as if its grounded in personal experience only instead of universal truths about the world, if Christianity is described within our own walls as an alternative self-help therapy, then we haven’t done such a great job catechizing our own people as to why Church is “essential.”

C.S. Lewis pointed out that people shouldn’t become Christians to be happy, since a good bottle of port can do that. In the same way, Christians shouldn’t go to church if there’s nothing there that they can’t get online, or in a fun reading club, or on a TED Talk, or at an AA meeting. In other words, if the Church is already non-essential to Christians, a pandemic is more than enough to make it official.

We are witnessing the greatest persecution of Christians in China since the dark days of Mao. So says Pastor Bob Fu in today’s outstanding BreakPoint Podcast.

And Pastor Fu should know. He and his wife escaped China and fled Hong Kong the day before the communists took over. Known as the “pastor of the Chinese Underground railroad,” Pastor Fu and organization he founded, China Aid, are helping Christian leaders escape certain imprisonment and worse.

Pastor Fu will receive the Wilberforce Award at our virtual event “Truth. Love. Together” in May. Join John Stonestsreet, Pastor Fu, Os Guinness, Joni Eareckson Tada, Sean McDowell, and more. It’s  free! Come to WilberforceWeekend.org to register.

Register for our free online virtual event, “Truth. Love. Together.”

Was it that long ago when churches were the center of American community life? Yet today the local officials can and do deem them "non-essential." And the governor of a major state can go out of his way to proclaim that God has nothing to do with stemming the spread of the coronavirus. Worse yet,  do Christians buy into the idea that churches are non-essential.

Also on today's program: separating true and false during the pandemic; China doubles down on its savage persecution of Christians; when will we open up the economy--and when will the finger pointing begin?

They wrap up the show with recommended viewing for families stuck at home: "The Chosen" and "Jump Shot."

“We Are Fast Approaching COVID-19 Gut-Check Time,” by Victor David  Hanson, The Daily Signal

“The Viral Pandemic of Distrust and Misinformation” by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint

“The Movie to Watch This Weekend,” by John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, BreakPoint

“Religious Freedom and the Coronavirus” by John Stonestreet and Roberto  Rivera, BreakPoint

The information age is full of both plusses and minuses, especially during a time of national crisis. Among the blessings we should count is the ability of many of us to work from home, and the ability to stay in touch with people we cannot visit. Another, at least in my line of work, is that so many more of the teachers contributing to our virtual Truth, Love, Together event now know how to use Zoom.

The main minus, though certainly not the only one, is the constant flow of news, headlines, and social media posts, some true and some false, some helpful and some very unhelpful and even misleading. Information comes at us in waves, with conjecture in the place of facts and assertions in the place of arguments.

Even before the coronavirus was given the name pandemic, misinformation was passed on by both major media outlets and personal social media accounts. In most of these cases, political ideology masqueraded as certainty about things that were, at the time, unknown, such as how deadly Covid-19 would be, whether or not it like the flu, and whether scientists and experts were misleading us.

Misleading voices on both the left and the right confidently asserted the virus really wasn’t that bad. More than one conservative talk show host, motivated to keep the president’s wins front and center, compared Covid-19 to the common cold or seasonal flu. And more than a few liberal voices also downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19, apparently hoping to cease an opportunity to portray Trump’s travel restrictions to China as racist or otherwise misguided.

Having now mostly pivoted on the seriousness of the virus across the board, many of the same voices continue with speculations, assertions, and analysis that are proclaimed with all the undeserved confidence as before. After Samaritan’s Purse set up a temporary hospital in Central Park to treat coronavirus patients, The Daily Beast ran a hit-piece warning of “sub-standard care and “discrimination,” chiding the Christian ministry and its president, Franklin Graham, for their allegedly “spotty record.”

Given the actual record of Samaritan’s Purse, the article was pure fear-mongering. Still, it paled in comparison to a horrendous op-ed by Katherine Stewart in the New York Times which blamed evangelicals for “paving the way to coronavirus hell” by “denying science.” She also accused us of looking to faith-healers and miracle cures instead of medical experts. It was vicious, historically ignorant slander, and published in America’s newspaper-of-record.

The Times decision to publish such a ridiculous article was not only poor, it’s ironic, given the paper’s commitment to expose fake news and conspiracy theories about the virus. They keep a full list: Covid-19 is caused by 5G cell phone towers. It’s a foreign attack. It’s a plot by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. All ridiculous claims, of course, but no more ridiculous than the Nero-like claim that evangelicals are to blame for this pandemic.

Brad Littlejohn made a key point over at Mere Orthodoxy, “This virus has surely come as a judgment on our divided, post-truth society. Judgment does not merely punish,” he points out, “it reveals...what Covid-19 has revealed in America is a society that has reached a point of crippling mutual incomprehension and distrust...that runs so deep that it leaves few if any shared handholds for common knowledge informing common action.” At all times, but especially during a pandemic, some degree of common knowledge and common action are essential for a society. How can Christians, people who are to be committed to truth, navigate this (mis)information age? Who is right, who is not, and how do we know? And, how can we be catalysts toward the renewal of a critical national resource: trust?

An essential part of the answer, and an essential part of a Christian worldview, is discernment. According to Paul’s prayer for the church at Philippi, love “abounds” best when accompanied by truth and discernment. And in an information age, discernment is the only true antidote to deception.

18th century British author Samuel Johnson called discernment “the supreme end of education,” before offering the best definition I know of discernment: “the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.”

In other words, discernment involves both wisdom and will. The wisdom to evaluate truth claims, and the will to understand the reality of our fallen world, which includes evaluating truth claims beyond whether or not it will make our side look good and their side look bad. Bearing false witness is a sin, and truth must take precedent over wanting something to be so or not wanting it to be so.

And finally, a necessary ingredient of Christian discernment is confidence in God’s sovereignty. Fear, on the other hand, often spoils discernment.

Discernment won’t end put an end to misinformation overnight, but it can slow its infection rate. And as with the actual pandemic, that could make a world of difference.

Most sports have a skill or a type of play that defines the way the game is played. For example, without the forward pass in football, it would just be rugby with better pads. The homerun, thanks to Babe Ruth, keeps baseball from being cricket with more running.

And basketball wouldn’t be basketball without the jump shot. It’s so endemic to the game, in fact, that many people can’t imagine that basketball ever existed without it. But basketball was without it, in its earlier days. Two handed set shots, overhand flings, running one-handers characterized what was a much slower game. Until, that is, the jump shot.

And for that, we have to thank a player from the University of Wyoming named Kenny Sailors. Never heard of him? Well, neither had I until quite recently, and I’m a basketball junkie.

A new film, appropriately produced by Steph Curry (perhaps the greatest jumpshooter in the history of basketball), which is appropriately titled “Jump Shot,” tells the Kenny Sailors story. Scheduled to be released in theaters in April, it’s instead opening online this weekend, from April 16-18. And it’s fantastic, featuring not only Curry but a “Who’s Who?” of all-time basketball greats including Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Durant, and even coach Bobby Knight.

Sailors who was born in the small Wyoming town of Hillsdale in 1921, learned how to play basketball against his older brother. His brother stood 6’5”. Kenny was only about 5’7. Apparently, his brother rather enjoyed, as brothers do, blocking all of Kenny’s shots.

One day, Kenny tried something new: jumping and releasing the ball at the top of his leap. His brother was so impressed, he told him to keep working on that shot.

Sailors did, earning all-state honors in high school and leading the University of Wyoming team that won both the NCAA and NIT national tournaments in the same year. In the four months after, Kenny married his college sweetheart and shipped out with the Marines to fight in the Pacific.

After serving with distinction in the War, Kenny resumed his All-American career at Wyoming before taking his jump shot to the NBA. An iconic photo of Sailors, which appeared in LIFE magazine, was taken during a game against Long Island University. Sailors’ feet are at the level of his defender’s waist, and he’s flicking his shot in a form that players around the world have mimicked ever since.

As CBS’ Clark Kellogg puts it in the film, Sailors was playing a different game from his contemporaries. In fact, he was named the NCAA player of the decade for the 1940s. It’s so fun to watch, in this film, NBA legends realize who they have to thank for this way of shooting they now take for granted.

After five years in the NBA, Sailors decided to retire from basketball. Why? “The Lord has shown me,” Sailors says in the film, “that there are a lot more important things than sports.” Yes, he said the Lord. If you are wondering why I am talking about a basketball documentary on this Christian worldview commentary, it’s because “Jump Shot” isn’t really about Sailors’ contribution to basketball. It’s about his contribution to people throughout his life. It’s about a life well lived.

After the NBA, Sailors moved his family to Alaska, where the clean air could improve his wife’s health life. There, he started Alaska’s first public-school girls’ basketball league, opening opportunities for Native Americans there. His teams won 68 straight games and three state titles. One person in “Jump Shot” calls him “the best thing that ever happened to Glennallen, Alaska.”

After the death of his wife, he returned to Wyoming and continued his well-lived life, investing in the community. Talking about his wife’s dementia and eventual death in the film, he said “The Lord gives you strength that you don’t even know where it comes from . . . He just gives you the strength to go through most everything.”

Two more things you need to know about Kenny Sailors. First, he’s not in the Naismith Hall of Fame. It’s a travesty, an injustice, and just plain strange. But he’s not. And he should be.  Second, Sailors died in 2016 at the age of 95.

This film “Jump Shot,” will ensure that his extraordinary life is not forgotten, though I imagine this unassuming man would be embarrassed by the fuss the film will create.

If you’re a hoops guy like me, but even if you aren’t, “Jump Shot” is the film you should watch this weekend. Especially if you want to see Stephen Curry fifty years before Steph Curry.

The limited release is runs online from Thursday to Saturday. Go to jumpshotmovie.com to learn more.

On April 9, right in the middle of New York’s epic battle against COVID-19, the state legislature passed, and Governor Cuomo signed, a bill that legalizes commercial surrogacy. As of February 15, 2021, residents of New York will be able to enter into legally enforceable surrogacy contracts.

From the beginning to the end, this debate was never driven by any serious consideration of what’s good for women and children, but by “heartstrings rhetoric, celebrity endorsement,” and especially, gay-rights advocates. As I predicted, the final proposal lacked adequate and necessary safeguards against the exploitation and commodification of women’s bodies, or the commercialization of children. Underscoring the shameful nature of this legislation, proponents secured its passage by subterfuge, smuggling it past both religious conservative and feminist opponents in the mandatory budget measure, even though commercial surrogacy has nothing to do with the state budget.

So now, in New York, amidst all the rhetoric about human dignity, the poor and marginalized, and protecting the vulnerable, lawmakers have kicked wide the door to “potential exploitation of surrogates, particularly those from low-income backgrounds.” The exploitation of poor women is the subject of a bestselling and award-winning 2019 novel, “The Farm.” In the book, set fittingly in a New York of the not-too-distant future, a tiny, wealthy, highly-unrepresentative slice of the population are the beneficiaries while the poor are exploited.

In real life, as I have said before, commercial surrogacy is led by same-sex couples, who benefit while poor women are exploited. According to an informal study commissioned by the Chicago Tribune in 2016, ten to twenty percent of donor eggs in fertility clinics went to gay men ordering babies through surrogacy. The overall number that represents was, at the time, skyrocketing, up fifty percent in just five years. Also, when you consider that self-identified gay people make up about 3% of the population, and not all of them are attempting to become “parents” from a lab, you realize just how much this population group is driving the surrogacy movement. Not coincidentally, the sponsors of New York’s law, like the sponsor of the similar 2018 Washington state law, are openly gay.

Both of these laws reflect the most destructive cultural views of our time. One idea is that “love is love,” which, if you remember, was the slogan behind the advance of same-sex marriage.

The problem is the slogan is Gnostic. It only makes sense if we pretend bodies don’t exist and if we exclude biological realities from any consideration of what “love” means. Once that’s done, those who have intentionally chosen sterile unions, arguing in fact that procreation is irrelevant to such unions, can now demand the right to have children.

Not only that, but the “love is love” mantra is extended beyond procreation to parenting, as if there were no differences between a mother’s love and a father’s love and as if intentionally depriving children of one or the other is completely acceptable. After demanding children without sex, we now impose on those children an upbringing without a mom or a dad, intentionally, as if a second dad could replace a mom or a second mom could replace a dad. It’s the final chapter in the long and brutal history of the sexual revolution’s most terrible myth: “the kids will be fine.”

But they’re not, and neither are poor women, who are made even more vulnerable to exploitation by commercializing their bodies. India, whose per capita GDP is three percent that of New York’s, sees this, and that’s why they banned surrogacy.

Katy Faust of the children’s rights group Them Before Us and a speaker at our upcoming Truth. Love. Together. live event, puts it this way: “…abortion and reproductive technologies [like surrogacy,] are two sides of the same child-commodifying coin. Abortion says, ‘If a child is unwanted, I can force her out of existence even if it violates her right to life.’ [Surrogacy] says, “If a child is wanted, I can force her into existence, even if it violates her right to her mother and father.”

This New York law is shameful. Like all bad ideas, it will leave victims in its wake. Especially women and children.

Where is God in a Cronavirus World? That’s question Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox asks in his wonderful new book by the same title.

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, Dr. Lennox discusses with John Stonestreet his motivation for writing the book, which was to explain the Christian view of God’s love in the midst of suffering in a way that will encourage believers, but that will also give skeptics, as he Dr. Lennox says, “something to sink their teeth into.”

We are making Dr. Lennox’s book available at BreakPoint.org/Lennox. It’s ideal for anyone struggling intellectually, theologically, or even physically and emotionally during this coronavirus crisis.

Claim your copy of “Where is God in a Coronavirus World?”

C.S. Lewis and the Coronavirus

John Stonestreet & Roberto Rivera | BreakPoint | March 13, 2020

Bill Brown on Why God Allows Evil