Breakpoint

Today we present session 5 of “Doing the Right Thing: An Exploration of Ethics,” with Brit Hume, Robert George, and Chuck Colson.

As with the other sessions, this episode was filmed in front of a student audience.

One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Abraham Kuyper and was repeated over and over by Chuck Colson: “There’s not a single square inch over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry out ‘Mine!’” Working out the implications of that grand truth in the reality of our everyday lives will take a lifetime.

         As Christians, we often acknowledge Christ’s rule over things like human dignity, marriage, and maybe even our finances, but we often miss how central a Christian view of time is to a truly Christian worldview. Thus, we often find our time hijacked, assumed, taken for granted, killed, wasted, and even forgotten.

         Os Guinness thinks it’s time to change our view of time. His new book, “Carpe Diem Redeemed: Seizing the Day, Discerning the Times,” explores and explains how different views of time shape our culture and our individual lives.

         For example, eastern religions embrace a cyclical view of time. “All that is once was and will be over again.” In this conception, history runs like a wheel, forever returning to the same point. Even we, in a sense, will return according to this view, reincarnated according to the dictates of Karma.

         The cyclical view ultimately robs our lives of meaning, because our choices change nothing. Time and everything in it are illusions. Salvation consists of escaping the cycle, and along with it every love, longing, and purpose we know as human beings.

         The “chronological” view of time is the one that dominates our culture, according to Guinness, and is held by both optimists and pessimists. Enlightenment thinkers, and many secularists today, see time as that inevitable, upward march toward greater knowledge, peace, and civilization. We started as apes, but we’re on our way to becoming ‘gods.’

         After two world wars, the Holocaust, communism, and Islamic terrorism, chronological optimists are, well, more rare than they used to be. More common, especially in popular culture, are chronological pessimists. They, to quote Shakespeare, view time and history as “a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

For the chronological pessimists, all that’s left is to “seize the day” in that Dave Matthews and “Dead Poets Society” sort of way. In other words, live it up while we can… for tomorrow we die.

         What so many Christians miss is just how revolutionary the Judeo-Christian view of time is, over and against these other views. Guinness calls it a “covenantal” understanding of time, the view that the structure and purpose of history have been revealed by a God who stands outside of it, having created it. Genesis’ opening line, “In the beginning, God...” frames this view, and the rest of Scripture points to a grand purpose which is being wrought by our Creator, in partnership with His image-bearers.

         The covenantal view of time is the unique contribution of the Judeo-Christian worldview. History’s goal is neither utopian fantasy nor nihilistic despair. Even history’s darkest evils cannot thwart that for which time was instituted. And we, as humans, have a part to play. Our actions matter.

          “Human enterprise has significance and solidity...” Guinness writes, “under and alongside God, history is transformed from terror into task.”

         Grasping this view of time allows us to live what Guinness calls “prophetically untimely” lives precisely because we know how the story ends. But Guinness also goes beyond the heady theories to offer practical ideas on how to rightly seize the day, how to break our “slavery to the clock,” to work and rest and worship in light of this Christian understanding of time.

         You can request a copy of “Redeeming Carpe Diem: Seizing the Day, Discerning the Times” with your next donation to the Colson Center. And you can hear more about it directly from Os Guinness himself on a free Colson Center webinar, tomorrow at 1:00ET. If the time doesn’t work, you’ll still want to register at BreakPoint.org to get a recording of the session with Os Guinness. 

The infamous “Millennials” are the generational cohort born between 1980 and 1997, and they may be most-overanalyzed demographic group in American history. Unlike previous holders of that title, the “Baby Boomers,” most of the analysis of the Millennials has been negative, and have included words like “privileged, narcissistic, entitled, [and] spoiled.” That’s quite a cynical conclusion about more than eighty million people.

Here’s my controversial claim for today: Much of what we think is “wrong” with the younger generation, including the Millennials, can be attributed to the Baby Boomer and Generation X culture they were raised in, including their parents and other primary influences.

In full disclosure, I’m a Generation Xer. Once upon a time, we were what’s wrong with the world. And honestly, well, we kind of were.   

Now the blame is leveled at Millennials, including a recent article in New York Magazine headlined, “Millennials aren’t that into God, Patriotism, or Having Kids.”

The article reported on a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that compared the attitudes of Millennials with those of people 55-years-old and above. The results are somewhat stunning.

While 79 percent of those over 55 said patriotism was “very important” to them, only 42 percent of younger Americans said the same. While 67 percent of older Americans said that “belief in God” was “very important,” only 30 percent of younger Americans said so. And while 54 percent of those over 55 said “having kids” was very important, for younger Americans, the figure is only 32 percent.

Another recent article from the Huffington Post declared that “Millennials are the reason for the spike in Prenups.” According to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, requests for prenups is on the rise, especially from Millennials – which is saying something because the overall marriage rate for Millennials is significantly on the decline.

While prenups are quite common today, that hasn’t always been so. Before the 1970’s, and the acceptance of no-fault divorce, courts generally saw prenups as undermining the permanence of marriage.

Now, according to the Huffington Post article, many younger Americans enter marriage assuming it isn’t necessarily permanent, and a prenup seems to be just a smart way to plan ahead.

Writing for the New York Times magazine about breaking up with his girlfriend, David Samuels accurately described the worldview thread running through these two articles. “Our inability to imagine a future together was not ours alone,” Samuels said. “It was a symptom of a larger fracture or collapse, involving however many hundreds and thousands of people in their 20’s and early 30’s who seem to lack any sense of necessary connection to anything larger than their own narrowly personal aims and preoccupations.”

Here’s the thing: Samuels wrote this back in 1999. He was born in 1967. He is a “Gen Xer,” my generation; not a Millennial. But he accurately gets at something with which we need to reckon.

As one of our editorial team put it the other day, if there’s anything “wrong” with Millennials, it’s that their parents taught them too well. As Samuel’s quote demonstrates, the “lack [of] any sense of necessary connection to anything larger than their own narrowly personal aims and preoccupations” didn’t originate with Millennials.

The fruit we are seeing today is the inevitable results of cultural trends embraced in the 1960s and 70s that caused, in Samuel’s words, the “basic laws of social gravity [to lose] their pull.”

Why would Millennials value patriotism when they were taught not to by the culture? Maybe their parents taught them to be patriotic, but what else did?

How would they learn to value church when they were largely taught to “shop” around for the one they liked, the one that would most easily fit in to their lives without asking too much of them or being too invasive?

Why wouldn’t Millennials demand prenups if their fundamental vision of marriage never included permanence, and they never saw it by example?

When the only world they’ve ever known is one of infinite choice, why wouldn’t Millennials expect reality itself to bend to their self-determinations on everything from health benefits to gender identity?

Perhaps the principal fault of Millennials is that we taught them too well…

It’s back-to-school time across the country, and that also means back to home school for the two-and-a-half million homeschooled students in this country.  The Colson Center has always been a strong supporter of homeschooling.  We are often a part of homeschool events around the country, both as speakers and as exhibitors.

In this episode of the BreakPoint podcast, we bring you a recent speech by Colson Center President John Stonestreet to Great Homeschool Convention held this spring in Napierville, Illinois.

His topic is “What It Means To Be Human.”  In this talk, John helps us understand how humans are unique among all of God’s creations, because we are made in the “image and likeness of God.”

John Stonestreet and Warren Smith discuss yet the latest tragedy in a growing trend: the suicide of a Christian pastor. What can do the help our clergy?  Where can they turn when they need assistance? Will the Church learn to get past the stigma of depression and mental illness?

Also today, John and Warren discuss the New York City Council's decision to repeal the city ordinance against "gay conversion therapy" or any psychological treatment that seeks to help people struggling with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Feeling the heat from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Council acted out of prudence, not principle.

Also today: "Poultriphobia," a disorder that causes LGBT activists to fear Chick-fil-A; John and Warren announce our next Short Course; and Gilette's failed foray into woke social issues.

Last week, the government of Hong Kong finally withdrew a proposed extradition law that sparked mass protests that have rocked the territory and rattled Beijing for weeks.

However, if Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam thought that withdrawing the extradition law would end the protests, she was mistaken. Over the weekend, demonstrators continued to rally, march, and wave the U.S. flag, while chanting “Resist Beijing, Liberate Hong Kong!” and—get this—“Pray for us, U.S., pray for us!”

Their chants highlight not only a Christian dimension in their protests, but the potential impact they believe Christianity can have on the Communist Party’s dictatorial rule, both in Hong Kong and throughout China.

While the protests were initially sparked by the extradition law, it’s clear that deep dissatisfaction with life under Beijing is keeping the flames burning, especially as the Communist Party attempts to strengthen its grip over Hong Kong. One protester told the Los Angeles Times, “The whole system in Hong Kong is rotten, from top to bottom. We want to tear it down and start fresh.”

In the midst of all this, Communist Party leaders know what many of the commentators and so-called experts in the West have long forgotten. That the ideas about justice and freedom that motivate many of the protestors in Hong Kong are rooted in Christianity.

How can we be sure Communist leaders know this? Because of a 2011 study by the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

As one Academy member put it, “…we were asked to look into what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world.”

After researchers studied everything from a “historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective,” they “realised that the heart of [the West’s] culture is [its] religion: Christianity . . . The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.”

That’s quite a conclusion, to which an official of the Academy added, “We don’t have any doubt about this.”

Chuck Colson pointed out eight years ago that the connection between Christianity and the success of the West has created a conundrum for Beijing. As he put it back then, Communist Party officials know that “the industriousness and creativity of the West was born out of the Christian worldview, which sees every individual created in the image of God, desiring freedom, creative in nature, motivated by civic duty and love of neighbor.”

At the same time, China’s actions in Hong Kong and Mainland China reveal that the Communist Party sees all religions, and Christianity in particular, as dangerous rivals. If Jesus is Lord, then Xi Jinping is not.

As Chuck Colson also said, if Beijing “truly opened its doors to Christianity and unleashed the creative and spiritual potential of its people” the result would be even greater prosperity and “growing global and economic clout.” But that prosperity and clout would come “at great cost to the power of the Communist dictatorship.”

The crack down across mainland China and the attempts to control Hong Kong suggests the Chinese government wants what it cannot have: to enjoy Western creativity and economic vitality while simultaneously suppressing Christianity—the historical source of Western creativity and vitality.

And just as Beijing can’t have it both ways, here’s a note for all Western leaders: Neither can we.  

As the people of Hong Kong sing their hymns and chant their slogans, they’ve made clear they are not willing to trade their freedoms and loyalties, especially their religious freedoms and religious loyalties, for what Xi and company are offering.

Before I leave you today, I want to tell you that we have a free webinar on Wednesday September 18th with none other than Os Guinness, about his new book, “Carpe Diem Redeemed.” Come to BreakPoint.org to register. You won’t want to miss it.

Despite our ever-greater mobility and even more efficient connectivity, sociologists continue to note that Americans struggle to form lasting, fulfilling relationships of all kinds but especially marriage. We face a very real epidemic of loneliness, one that is, not coincidentally, accompanied by a steady decline in marriage.

         According to Pew Research, marriage rates have fallen to historic lows over the last thirty years, especially among younger people. At the same time, the typical age at first marriage has climbed to a historic high.

         Increasingly, Americans who are looking for love can’t find it, at least not in the traditional ways. And so they are turning online. A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University reports that online dating has now replaced the church, family members, and mutual friends as the primary way American couples meet.

         Now, in no way do I wish to knock online dating per se. Many happily married Christian couples began their stories together via an online dating service. I’d suggest online dating is filling a void left as traditional social institutions fail. At the same time, plummeting marriage rates and spiking loneliness rates indicate that even our best technologies will never fill the hole left as families, churches, and community become less central to our life together.

         The loss or decline of core social institutions in recent decades is well-documented. Just in my lifetime, extended family, youth clubs, civic organizations, and the church have all become less important to more people than ever before. This seismic social shift is a problem for many reasons, not least of which because these were places and means by which couples used to meet and connect. It’s simply impossible to replace such timeless, local, and embodied ties with apps!

         In fact, it’s no exaggerating that this is even a question of how the next generation will come into being—and what will play the central relational roles in their lives. After all, marriage is not a stand-alone institution. It’s part of a social fabric that’s tearing apart. As fewer couples get together and form strong marriages, the faster the tear grows, and the further apart people drift.

         Writing at Quillette recently, Mary Eberstadt describes how the de-centering of marriage and family has resulted in and reinforced the explosion of sexual and gender identities. Increasingly, young people are forced to answer the basic human question “who am I?” without a mother and a father, without siblings, an extended family, a community, or a church body to help. So many are left only with a letter in an acronym or an adopted sense of historical grievance to center their identities.

No wonder, as Eberstadt describes in her new book “Primal Screams,” so many identities today are meager and fragile, and the movements built around them more and more unhinged.  

         Yet, this culture of identity and family crisis is also a tremendous opportunity for the church, one not without historical precedent. As Rodney Stark observes, one of the reasons early Christianity grew so rapidly in the second century was that Roman young men turned to the church to find eligible young women. The church was full of eligible young women because early Christians had faithfully rescued Roman girls from infanticide and raised them in their communities.

         Years ago, I heard Maggie Gallagher suggest that it might be time for churches to get back to this kind of work. While we rescue babies from abortion in word and deed, perhaps we should also get serious about introducing singles to each other? Perhaps married Christian couples should, you know, “meddle” a bit more and host some matchmaking dinners?

         While there’s a universally repeated “ring by spring” joke across every Christian college campus, perhaps marriage opportunism is a good reason to encourage your son or daughter to attend one. Where else, other than working summer staff at a Christian camp, will young believers be surrounded by so many like-minded peers of the opposite sex? Having spent years watching this process in action, I promise it works.

         The Body of Christ has a unique potential role to play in reversing the decline of marriage and the epidemic of loneliness. If we do, those looking for love may one day open the doors of a church instead of an app.

It’s inevitable. Someone—maybe your kids, a co-worker, crazy Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving—is going to ask you a tough question about your faith or Christian convictions.

When Christians don’t know an answer to a tough question, they risk making one of two mistakes: Either staying silent or getting angry. The better approach, if you don’t know how to answer the question, is to say, “What a great question. I don’t know off the top of my head, but let me look into it and get back to you.”

And then, look into it and get back to them.

After all, you can find the answers. They are out there. And a new series of short videos aims to make them more available, accessible, and shareable than ever before. It’s called, “What Would You Say?” Each and every one of these videos answers a tough question in an understandable, trustworthy, and memorable way.

Today’s release: “Is Surrogacy Just Like Adoption?” In light of our commitment to personal freedoms, the legalization of commercial surrogacy in Seattle, the push of same-sex couples to have children, and the exploitation of women in developing nations, this has become a very important and difficult question…

Here’s Katy Faust with a “What Would You Say” response:

“Proponents of third-party reproduction, especially contract surrogacy, will often argue that it’s just another form of adoption.  But is that true?

Here are three reasons why third-party reproduction is not like adoption.

First, Adoption seeks to mend a family wound. Third-party reproduction creates a family wound.

Adoption is a necessity born of brokenness. Before a child can be adopted, they must first lose their biological family.  Many adoptees describe a primal wound that their adoptive parents have helped them work through.

Donor conception is also born of brokenness because a child is separated from one or both parents. But in the case of donor-conceived children, the parents raising them participated in creating their wound.

 Second, with adoption, the child is the client, but with third-party reproduction, the adult is the client.

The purpose of adoption is to make sure children have parents. Therefore, the adoption process is built around the best interest of the child. Adoptive parents undergo screenings and background checks and receive post-adoption supervision. In adoption, the adults sacrifice for the kids.

The goal of third-party reproduction is to make sure adults have a child, so the process is built around the best interest of adults. It usually lacks the safeguards of adoption and often separates the child from one or both biological parents. In third-party reproduction, the child sacrifices for the adult.

Third, with adoption, adults support the child.  With third-party reproduction, the children support the adults.

In both adoption and third-party reproduction, children experience loss. But adoptive parents can better support children through the loss.  This is possible in adoption because the parent parents seeking to help didn’t cause the trauma.

However, with third-party reproduction, children are living with the adults responsible for their missing parent.  Expressing their loss means condemning the decisions of the adults who are raising them. That means donor conceived children are more likely to suppress their feelings or feel guilty for having them in the first place. So it is the child who must often be understanding, accommodating, and supportive of the adults.”

That’s just a brief sample of today’s What Would You Say video. Come to WhatWouldYouSay.org, or Youtube.com/whatwouoldyousay. And be sure to subscribe so you will receive an update every time a new question is answered.

Today we present session 4 of “Doing the Right Thing: “An Exploration of Ethics,” with Brit Hume, Robert George, and Chuck Colson.

As with the other sessions, this episode was filmed in front of a student audience.

Today the panel deals with the very thorny issues involved in health care and life and death decisions. Is there such a thing as “a life not worth living?”

Could you even imagine a sports car with such a powerful, finely tuned rotary engine, whose rotor, drive shaft, and subunits work together so smoothly, that the engine can hit 42,000 rpm and achieve 100% energy efficiency? Well, no… as amazing as cars are these days, the best redline at 10,000 rpm and achieve below 50 percent energy efficiency, meaning that less than half of the power produced actually propels the car. The rest is emitted as wasted heat.

But… if automobile engineers could mimic the efficiency and power of the rotary engine that exists in every cell in our bodies? Well, watch out.

Recently, the an article was posted at the Discovery Insitute website summarizing three new studies of the enzyme ATP synthase. As they describe it, “ATP synthase is a high-tech, micromolecular power generator” that works like a rotary engine. Its “barrel-shaped rotator spins around transmitting mechanical energy into the drive shaft of the machine to create adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.

This is a good thing, since ATP is an “energy molecule that provides fuel that every one of your cells needs to function.”

And here’s where this gets really amazing. According to one of the recent studies, the ATP synthase rotary engine achieves nearly 100% energy efficiency. Meaning there is hardly any energy loss, even when working anywhere from 6,000 to 42,000 rpm—something human engineers can only dream about.

From their research, the authors of one of the studies claims “that nano-scale rotary engines” like ATP synthase “have much in common with basic design principles of man-made machines from the function of individual ‘machine elements’ to the requirement of the right ‘fuel’ and ‘oil’ for different types of motors.”

Now, there’s still a lot we don’t know about ATP synthase, but, the researchers confidently tell us, “What is evident is that several billion years of evolution have resulted in a biological motor that are unsurpassed in efficiency, fine-tuning to their environment, and sustainability.”

Really? So, a nano-tiny, vastly complex, and nearly perfectly energy-efficient machine can come about purely by chance and natural selection? This is the claim that Darwinists have to make, but as proponents of Intelligent Design have argued for the past 20-plus years, reason, logic, and mathematics stand in their way.

ATP synthase is a poster-child for what scientist Michael Behe calls “irreducible complexity,” a concept widely derided by neo-Darwinians because it’s so hard to refute. These tiny machines not only include many complex parts, they require a precise configuration of these parts in order to function properly. They could not have evolved from simpler mechanisms, because all the parts have to be present in order for them to work at all.

Similarly, Stephen Meyer describes in his book “Signature in the Cell,” how our DNA is made of “digitally encoded information.” All specified information like this, he writes, “always arises from an intelligent source, from a mind and not a strictly material process.” He places the chance of information randomly coming together to form the building blocks of life at 1 in 10 to the 41 thousandth power.

In his other landmark work “Darwin’s Doubt,” Meyer shows how the sudden appearance of numerous species of animals without common predecessors, something called the “Cambrian explosion,” proves to be an insurmountable obstacle to neo-Darwinian evolution. In fact, in a recent article entitled “Giving up Darwin”, renowned computer scientist and thinker David Gelernter credited Meyer’s work for leading him to reject Darwinism all together.

The more we discover about the world, the more complex and irreducibly complex we discover the world to be, from the vastness of the universe, to the preciseness of language, to those nano-sized rotary engines fueling our bodies. Eventually, the so-called “appearance of design” requires us to conclude the universe is the product of design, and therefore a Designer.