Breakpoint

How can a Christian artist “break through” in Hollywood? There may be no better person to ask than Devon Franklin, the producer of the surprisingly successful “Heaven Is for Real,” and the executive producer of the current hit, “Breakthrough.”

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, Warren Cole Smith interviews Devon Franklin about his path to Hollywood and how he integrates faith, film, and storytelling.

Imagine if tomorrow, a judge in the most liberal state in the country announced children no longer belong to their parents, they’re no longer under their parents’ authority. From henceforth, says the decree, kids belong to the state. Outraged parents would take to the streets! Angry and refusing to capitulate.

Well, that’s not how it goes. Instead, parental rights are taken a little at a time. The outrage is avoided, and the state usurpation of parents is largely non-controversial.  The same desired results using this strategy are not only possible, but inevitable.

Allow me to illustrate. A few days ago, a judge in British Columbia issued a gag order against the father of a 14-year-old girl who identifies as a boy. Why a gag order? Because he referred to his daughter by her actual gender in public interviews.

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Marzari also found the girl’s father guilty of “family violence” for going to the press after courts ordered that his daughter be allowed to start injections of male hormones.

In fact, the judge even forbade the father from referring to his daughter as a girl, from trying to persuade her to abandon her so-called “treatment,” and even from using her real name! The name he gave her. In other words, this judge has effectively forbidden this dad from even acknowledging that he has a daughter.

Legislatures elsewhere in Canada are laying similar groundwork to make this kind of government takeover of parenting permanent. Back in 2017, with barely a whisper of protest, Ontario passed the Youth and Families Act, which adds a child’s “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the list of things judges can consider when determining whether parents are abusive.

In other words, as written, this law would allow any judge in the province to do exactly what Justice Marzari did to that father of the 14-year-old girl. And that’s not just my opinion. When asked if this law would allow the government to separate children from parents who don’t approve of their gender identity, the Ontario Minister of Children and Youth Services said, “I would consider that a form of abuse, when a child identifies one way and a caregiver is saying no...”

Now, his office has since then changed its tune. A spokeswoman told BuzzFeed News that the law “does not give the government power to seize children from families based on a parent that disagrees with a child’s gender identification.” Their commentary on the statute may have changed, but the language of the statute hasn’t. So the precedent is set.

“Well, that’s Canada,” you say. “That’s not going to happen here.”

Are you sure about that?

Last year an Ohio judge awarded custody of a transgender teen to her grandparents rather than her parents, because mom and dad didn’t support her transition.

But an even greater threat to parental rights in this country will probably come from legislatures. “Sexual orientation and gender identity,” or “SOGI” laws have already been enacted in twenty states, making these protected categories like race or religion. It sets the precedent for treating disagreement with gender ideology as a crime. Eventually, that could be the case even if the person you are disagreeing with is your child. Several states already have the legal mechanism in place to emancipate children from parents who don’t support their gender identification.

Bit by bit, parental rights are chipped away in the name of sexual ideologies, especially gender identity. And bit by bit, mom and dad are treated as mere trustees of the state, subject to revocation without notice.

Ideas matter. They can change how we collectively understand family, and parents, and even who kids belong to.

I wish I had better news, but laws and rulings like these are the endgame for parental rights. Pay close attention and take responsibility for your own state, your own county, your own city, and especially for your own kids.

The transition to a society in which children are wards of the state is well underway. Like surgical gender transitions, once complete, the damage could be irreversible.

Nearly twenty years ago, Chuck Colson told BreakPoint listeners the story of Gauvin Hughes McCullough. His parents, Sharon and Candace, in addition to being a same-sex couple, were also deaf.

Being deaf was an important, if not the most important, part of their identity. It was so important, in fact, they did everything they could to maximize the chances that their child would also be deaf.

They recruited a deaf friend as a sperm donor and hoped for what they saw as the “best,” which they got: a deaf son.

Chuck’s commentary came to mind after I read a story at the BBC’s website entitled “Stop Trying to ‘Heal’ Me.” The author, BBC digital editor Damon Rose, begins by telling readers that “From time to time, without warning or encouragement, I get approached in the street by Christians who tell me they want to pray for me to get my sight back.”

Now, going up to a total stranger, especially one who cannot see you approaching, and offering to pray for them then and there without getting to know them first could reasonably be called “rude.” The same would be true if you insisted on praying with someone who told you not to.

If that were all Rose was trying to tell people, including well-meaning Christians, that would be fine. But he didn’t stop there. Bad manners were the least of his concerns.

What Rose objected to is the idea that anyone thinks that he needs “to be ‘fixed’ - just as Jesus ‘fixed’ disabled people in the Gospels.” Those are his words, not mine. What the Bible calls “healing,” which in Greek can also mean “salvation,” he views as a form of denigration.

Now if you’re thinking, “What about all the times the Bible tells us that Jesus was moved by compassion for the person He was healing?” Well, then you’re not reading the Bible through the proper modern lens. What matters most nowadays, apparently, is not what Jesus was feeling when He was moved to heal, but how it makes some contemporary readers feel when they read about those stories.

Based on this new criteria, one theologian quoted by Rose suggests that Jesus was wrong to heal those with disabilities. Even worse, she claimed that the people Jesus healed were not “really real characters or real people who have feelings and needs and personalities.” Instead, they were simply opportunities for Jesus to show off His power.

Now to be clear, this theologian quoted also argued that saints and martyrs such as Perpetua, Sergius, and Bacchus were transgender, so make of her statements what you will.

Even so, another person Rose quotes “defended” Jesus’ healings by pointing out there was no welfare state in first century Palestine. I’m not making that up. In her estimation, if Jesus were to see a blind man walking down the street today, He would not feel pity for him.

Chuck pointed out years ago that the case of Gavin McCullough is what Cornell West called the “cultural politics of difference.” Today, as we see in Rose’s articles, it’s more commonly known as identity politics.

As with McCullough’s parents, Rose and those who agree with him are claiming that what makes them different from other people is what defines who they are. So to suggest, as in the case of cochlear implants for the deaf or divine healing for the blind, that things could be different, or even better, is a personal affront, or even worse. It’s even been compared to genocide.

How different this is than from being at peace with your or your loved one’s disabilities. Think of Joni Erickson Tada or so many parents of children with special needs who see God’s hand at work in their circumstances.

They would never regard God’s compassion or healing as “alienating.” They certainly would not let their pride get in the way of God relieving them or their loved one of their disability.

Whatever our degree of brokenness or disability, none of us are whole. Not a single one of us. That’s why we should all welcome God’s grace and kindness, and why we should long for the day when God will make all things new in Christ—even us.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast we present a classic lecture given by Chuck Colson at the Harvard Business School in 1991. His topic: Why Harvard Can’t Teach Ethics.

The answer, Chuck argues, lies in the West’s rejection of a transcendent moral order. Here is Chuck Colson at Harvard.

Life, Marriage, and Religious Liberty: What Belongs to God, What Belongs to Caesar

John Stonestreet and David Dockery, editors, 2019

John Stonestreet and Warren Smith double down on the truth that ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. Those bad ideas include the anti-Semitism and hatred that drove an outstanding student and member of an Orthodox Presbyterian to murder, as well the ideology of the new sexual orthodoxy that would force Bethany Christian services to agree to place foster children with same-sex couples in Michigan.

John and Warren also mark the 10th anniversary of the Manhattan Declaration in defense of  marriage, life, and religious  freedom. They also discuss the new HHS rules that will protect the conscience rights of medical workers and a new ranking of America's "sin cities."

Resources

A Quiet, Piano-Playing Presbyterian Mass-ShooterShane Morris, BreakPoint.org, May 2, 2019

Bethany Christian Services Agrees to Place Kids in LGBT Homes After Michigan Settlement

Mark Martin, CBN News, April 26, 2019

Life, Marriage, and Religious Liberty

Free Webinar with John Stonestreet

The Manhattan Declaration – Ten Years Later: A BreakPoint Symposium

Protections expanded for doctors with 'conscience' objections to abortions, other procedures

Sam Dorman, FOX News, May 2, 2019

Life, Marriage, and Religious Liberty: What Belongs to God, What Belongs to Caesar

John Stonestreet and David Dockery, editors, 2019

In a recent opinion piece at Business Insider, Shana Lebowitz proclaimed, “Divorce isn’t a failure...In fact, it could mean your marriage was a success!” According to the relationship experts cited by Lebowitz, the goal of marriage isn’t that two people become one flesh, or create a family, or even share lifelong love. No, the purpose of marriage, these so-called experts claim, is that we grow as individuals. Even marriages that end in divorce can accomplish that goal!

If the goal of marriage is looking out for number one rather than two becoming one, then it makes sense that calling it quits could be a success story. But, I doubt that the abandoned spouses and children of even the self-improved would agree with that new way of thinking. This sort of sad nonsense can only be written in a culture where marriage has been redefined and reimagined around an already redefined and reimagined idea of love.

Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. Individual lives and entire cultures are devastated whenever love is reduced to something less than God intended, much less when it is redefined as selfishness. The love, or more accurately, the loves God created for us are way bigger than most of us understand.

Back in 2013 when Sean McDowell and I wrote our book on so-called “same-sex marriage,” I asked a friend to write the epilogue about what he, as an individual who struggled with same-sex attraction, needed from the church. “Don’t move the goalposts,” he wrote, and pretend the Scriptures aren’t clear on this issue. But, he added, if we are going to ask gays and lesbians to forgo sexual intimacy (which we should), we must not withhold friendship and family from them.

Behind his remarks is C. S. Lewis’ life-changing book, “The Four Loves”—a book I think is more relevant now than ever. In it, Lewis identifies four types of love: affection (or the Greek word, storge), friendship or brotherly love (Greek, phileo), sexual love (or eros), and sacrificial love (agape, what older Bible translations call “charity”).

Of course, Christians believe that marriage is the only rightful place for eros, but Lewis also makes it clear that affection, friendship and especially sacrificial love—the kind Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 13—should define all of our relationships, including and especially marriage.

This  is why pornography is so devastating. Beneath this cultural epidemic is a terrible mis-definition of eros, which not only twists inward the good God-given eros that can define marital relationships, but it corrupts all other loves as well.

I say “twist inward” because erotic love is intended by God to turn our attention outward, toward a captivation with the other. Think about it: Eros is literally life-giving. It’s what creates babies and families. Thus it can be said that erotic love is personal, but it’s far from private. By design it draws us out of ourselves, toward another person, toward her family, and Lord willing, toward new little lives who are the result of that love, who then take their place in the larger community.

Pornography not only corrupts and twists eros, but also phileo and storge as well. When the relationship between men and women becomes as hyper-sexualized as it is in our culture, men and women can’t be friends or show normal signs of simple affection and caring. Today, even the relationships between men and men, and women and women have been hypersexualized, which places a queer question mark over normal, healthy same-sex friendships that should be based on phileo and storge.

Re-orienting sexual love so that it serves both phileo and storge, and is sanctified by agape as Scripture teaches, isn’t just a recipe for a joyful and long-lasting marriage. It’s a recipe for healthy communities, families and friendships. Not to mention, it aims for things so much higher than “personal growth.”

Every relationship we have calls us outside of ourselves and invites us to show forth the image of the God who not only chose love for His own name, but put so much of it in His world that one Greek word simply wouldn’t do.

No one names their son Jehoahaz. It’s just too tough to pronounce. On the other hand, most of us know a Josiah or two. Not only is it a much more pronounceable, but as we read in 2 Kings chapter 22, “Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem thirty-one years ... He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left.”

Seek, King Josiah stands out among Judah’s final monarchs. Not only did he refuse to take part in idol worship, he tore down the high places and the Asherah poles, and he reinstated the worship and feasts of the true God.

According to the Bible, Josiah did all this because of a discovery in the Temple of a scroll of the Law, which had long been neglected and forgotten. He wept over Judah’s disobedience and recommitted his kingdom and people to the covenant recorded in that scroll. As a result, God promised that the judgment He would eventually send would not occur during Josiah’s lifetime.

A much more recent discovery brought this particular section of 2 Kings to light even more. The Times of Israel recently described two tiny objects unearthed at a dig in the City of David: an agate stone and a lump of burnt clay that both had Hebrew inscriptions which were the names of two individuals—“Ikkar son of Matanyahu”—and “Nathan-Melech, Servant of the King.” Whoever can tell me which one of those two names appears in Scripture deserves this week's Bible trivia award.

These were seals, you see—the kind once pressed into wax or dipped into ink to sign letters. According to Yiftah Shalev of the Israel Antiquities Authority, where these seals were found sets the 2,600-year-old signets apart for archaeologists. They were discovered in the remains of what was likely an administrative building dating to the 8th century B.C.

Many such artifacts hit the antiquities market, but often no one is really sure where they come from. These, however, were found in “their true archaeological context.”

The name that astute students of Scripture might recognize, by the way, is Nathan-Melech, an official who gets just a passing mention in 2 Kings 23:11, just as Josiah is purging Jerusalem of the trappings of idolatry. Outside of the Bible, this tiny clay seal is the first confirmation of this man’s existence.

And to be clear, it’s the obscurity of his name—both in recorded history and in Scripture—that should amaze us.

In biblical archaeology, it’s often the big players we look for—Moses and David and Paul. Last year’s announcement of a ring bearing Pontius Pilate’s name was big news, and rightly so. It’s a name we say every time we recite the Apostles’ Creed, proclaiming that Jesus' redeeming work happened in real history.

Still, names like Nathan-Melech, Servant of the King, may offer an even stronger confirmation that the events recorded in the Bible actually happened. The seemingly insignificant name from 2 Kings reminds us that King Josiah, who rediscovered the Law in the Temple and cleansed the nation of idols, isn’t just a character from a mythical story. He was a man in history; he had court officials and administrative headquarters; and he was part of the lineage that led to another King—the Lion Who sits on the throne of Judah and is ushering in a Kingdom—one that, unlike ancient Jerusalem—will never be conquered.

Of course, we don’t believe this big story because someone unearthed a piece of clay with an obscure name on it. But it is exciting to see how even the smallest details in Scripture can hold up under the digging and the scrutiny.

Come to BreakPoint.org and we'll link you to more on this incredible story about this very exciting discovery.

Remember that 1980’s cough syrup commercial when Chris Robinson said, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”? I wanted to paraphrase these immortal words when I read what actor Joaquin Phoenix of “Gladiator” fame said about his role as Jesus in the upcoming movie, “Mary Magdalene.” Phoenix is not the Son of Man, but he plays him on the big screen. His is a very different Jesus than the one we meet in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Judging by the trailer and the press roll-out, the movie will draw heavily on a second-century Gnostic text known as “the Gospel of Mary.” In a recent interview with Newsweek, Phoenix slammed early Christianity for not canonizing this and other apocryphal writings about Jesus, saying: “Why was Mary’s book not included in the Bible? The stench of blatant sexism,” he says, is “inescapable.”

Phoenix went even further in another interview: “Somebody made that decision to exclude [Mary Magdalene’s] observations and feelings about the life of Christ and her experience. There seems to have been an overt intention to exclude women from that process.”

The truth is, no one excluded Mary Magdalene’s experiences. Scholars universally agree that she didn’t write this so-called gospel. Along with other texts like “the Apocryphon of John,” and “the Sophia of Jesus Christ,” “the Gospel of Mary” was never recognized by the Church as part of the New Testament. The reason is that it is an obvious forgery. The Gospel of Mary is a work of fan-fiction by members of a false religion who attempted to co-opt Jesus for their own purposes. True to the pattern of other Gnostic texts, the “Gospel of Mary” claims that Jesus delivered a private revelation to its namesake that radically contradicts the canonical gospels.

Even more, the Mary Magdalene revealed in the Bible is the best response we have to the accusation that early Christianity was sexist. Recall that she is reported as the first witness of the risen Lord—a claim that would have scandalized first-century Jewish readers.

In that culture, the testimony of a woman was considered worthless, yet she and several other women were entrusted to take the message of Christ’s resurrection back to His disciples, and those disciples were hesitant to believe them. If the four gospels were written to make Jesus’ male followers look good at the expense of the women, they did a lousy job.

Authors like Alvin J. Schmidt and Rodney Stark have documented that Christianity—far from oppressing women—radically elevated their status in the ancient world. It’s hard for us in 2019 to grasp just how revolutionary the Apostle Paul’s words were that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

And speaking of important background material, Joaquin Phoenix grew up in a pseudo-Christian cult that seems to have soured him toward religion. While we should be sensitive to that experience, we have to admit he’s no expert.  Even so, his unfounded statements and the false story this movie tells will strike many as convincing, in the same way Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” did a few years back.

The good news is, we live in what I like to call the “golden age of good arguments.” There is a wealth of apologetic resources available that ably debunks the idea that the Gnostic gospels were unfairly suppressed or that they offer any new information about the life of Jesus. We’ll link you to just a few of those resources at BreakPoint.org.

The problem isn’t that the answers aren’t available. The problem is that the answers rarely reach as many people as the falsehoods do from the publishing industry, the media, or Hollywood—which, like the Gnostics of old—never tire of producing false Christianities and false Jesuses.

Our job is to learn the answers, to engage in conversations, to dialogue about those answers, and to do our best to set the record straight.