Breakpoint

We recently began the season of Lent. One of the practices most associated with this season is giving up something as an act of sacrificial discipline.

Some people give up chocolate.  Others decide to watch less television and instead use that time for prayer and Scripture reading.

The goal of Lenten discipline is to be more fully conformed to the likeness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave Himself for us.

After reading a recent op-ed by Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, I wonder if one thing we all might strive to give up this Lent is contempt.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “contempt” as “the feeling that a person or a thing is worthless or beneath consideration.” It is ultimately derived from the Latin word contemptus which means “to scorn or despise.”

Now, as Brooks wrote in the New York Times, contempt is not the same thing as strongly disagreeing with someone. Not only are strong disagreements inevitable, “disagreement helps us innovate, improve, and find the truth.”

The problem isn’t that we disagree, it’s how we disagree. Increasingly, disagreements today are characterized by a “noxious brew of anger and disgust,” which is directed not only at bad ideas but also at the people who espouse them.

This goes beyond incivility and rudeness. It even goes beyond intolerance. It’s the conviction that while your side “is driven by benevolence,” the other side “is evil and motivated by hatred.” It is, to quote to the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.”

You can probably think of several examples of contempt directed at Christians. So can I. In fact, we often talk about them. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s contempt for Jack Phillips comes to mind, and thank God, they’ve now backed down.

But, to paraphrase the First Letter of John, if we say that we are free of contempt, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Can we honestly say that we never think of our opponents as “irredeemable, stupid and deviant?” Do we always strive to be gentle with people while we criticize their ideas?

As Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a few years ago, while it may be “deliciously gratifying to see idiots roundly put down . . . that sense of gratification is not really one of our better points.” She added that whenever she hears a Christian say, “that he or she does not ‘suffer fools gladly,’ she thinks “Well, Jesus suffers you.”

Mathewes-Green isn’t against humor, parody or satire. What she opposes is “raw ridicule” disguised as wit and cleverness whose principal purpose is to demean the person we disagree with.

The fact that we are often unjustly maligned isn’t a reason to reciprocate in kind. Brooks wisely urges readers who find themselves on the receiving end of contempt to “respond with warmheartedness and good humor,” for their own sakes as well as that of those maligning them.

As Mathewes-Green would remind us, Jesus responds with love and grace to our hurtful words, mockery, and dismissiveness, too.

As part of our observance of Lent, let’s be mindful of those “occasions of sin,” those settings and circumstances that expose us to temptation. In the case of contempt for our opponents, things like social media, cable news, and political websites can be such occasions.

These are the haunts for what Brooks calls “rhetorical dope peddlers,” people who “profit from the culture of contempt.” They pump up the outrage and you can almost hear the “ca-ching!” with every page view and “like.”

Of course, this isn’t easy when so much is at stake in our culture. But being conformed to Jesus’ likeness isn’t supposed to be easy. It involves dying. We should be grateful that, in this instance, the “death” being demanded of us is to not treat our enemies as if they are beneath our consideration. After all, Jesus not only suffered his enemies, he suffered for them – and that includes us, who in our sin were also His enemies, as well.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/give-up-contempt-for-lent/

Warren Cole Smith and Shane Morris (sitting in this week for John Stonestreet) discuss yet another victory for Jack Phillips and religious freedom. After additional members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had yet again (despite the Supreme Court's admonition) expressed contempt for Phillips' religious beliefs, the Commission wisely dropped its case.

Warren and Shane go on to cover a wide range of news from the week: China's stepped up persecution of Christians, the new Trump Administration rules that will strip funds from Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, several airlines adopting a new "gender choice" for passengers, a male high school wrestler who forfeited a match instead of wrestling a girl, and the soon-to-be released movie "Unplanned" receiving an R-rating for depicting the violence of abortion.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/bp-this-week-jack-and-religious-freedom-prevail-yet-again/

Resources

Attend the 2019 Wilberforce Weekend!

Apply to the Colson Fellows Program

Despite winning at the Supreme Court, Colorado cake artist faced new threats – and he won again!

Alliance Defending Freedom

Wrestling with Purpose

John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris, BreakPoint, March 7, 2019

An Un-Planned R-Rating

John Stonestreet and David Carlson, BreakPoint, March 5, 2019

America is getting older. In 1950, near the beginning of the Baby Boom era, the average life expectancy of Americans was 68. Today, it is 79. By the year 2040, one in five Americans will be over the traditional retirement age of 65.

With so many facing life at or beyond retirement age, a new group of Christian leaders based in Colorado Springs is asking us to engage in some non-traditional, but thoroughly biblical, thinking about retirement itself.

This group says that age 65 isn’t the age to retire. It’s an age to re-fire, re-boot, and re-focus on your calling, influence, and ministry. It’s a time to pursue purpose, not pastime.

To focus their commitment, this group has produced a Retirement Reformation Manifesto, which begins: “Reforming retirement requires a reframing of our thinking, allowing us to shine a light into the purposeless retirement void and finding freedom from unending leisure, indulgence, and self-gratification.”

The group is led by Bruce Bruinsma, a 77-year-old entrepreneur and financial planner still active in business. Bruinsma says the Bible teaches that Christians are “called to bear fruit in every season of life.” That’s why the Manifesto aims to inspire “a movement where every Christ follower is confident in God’s plan for a lifetime of faithful service and committed to helping the Body of Christ reform its understanding of retirement.”

Bruinsma said: “As Christians, we are to remain faithful for a lifetime. My hope is that the Retirement Reformation Manifesto will inspire many, many people to believe God still has more for them in their later years.”

According to a statement released by Bruinsma and the other drafters of the document, “the 10-point manifesto challenges signatories to overturn traditional attitudes toward senior years as merely a time of relaxation and leisure. Instead, they are urged to embrace their ‘final quarter’ of life as time to find spiritual fulfillment and meaning in using their life experiences and resources to serve and enrich others.”

Among the commitments those who sign the manifesto make are to:

• challenge society’s typical view of retirement
• exercise wise physical and financial stewardship to ensure making the most of what could be as many as 30 years of post-work
• build intergenerational community

The topic of retirement is one we care about at the Colson Center, in large part because Chuck Colson himself talked about it often in the last years of his life. He swore he’d never spend his final years “chasing a little white ball around.”  Older Christians, he firmly believed, should be actively pouring their lives into other, younger people who could carry on Kingdom work.

In fact, the Colson Center owes its current vitality in part to Chuck’s belief that Christians should always die with “our boots on.” Chuck modeled that for us when, at 80 years old during The Colson Center’s 2012 Wilberforce Weekend, he collapsed on-stage mid-speech and had to be helped into a waiting ambulance. He died just a few weeks later.

In that speech and in many others, Chuck said that senior-citizen Christians might give up their 9 to 5 jobs, but they should never retire from Kingdom work. Deuteronomy says that teaching our “children and our children’s children” to love and fear the Lord is a part of the Christian’s job description. The Apostle Paul praised Lois, Timothy’s grandmother, for discipling her grandson in the faith.

Bruinsma and the Retirement Reformation team is taking up that message. “We believe that the Retirement Reformation Manifesto has the potential to be history-making,” said Bruinsma. “Imagine what might happen if millions of seniors are inspired and equipped to approach their retirement radically differently, finding meaning and satisfaction through helping extend God’s kingdom, as they pursue purpose rather than just pastimes.”

I can imagine it. Come to BreakPoint.org, click on this commentary, and we’ll link you to the Retirement Reformation Manifesto.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/the-retirement-reformation-manifesto/

Resources

The Retirement Reformation Manifesto

In Deuteronomy 25, Moses commanded that if a man dies childless, his brother should marry the widow and that “the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.”

The practice, called “Levirate marriage” was the backdrop for the Sadducees’ trick question for Jesus about the woman who married the seven brothers (Matthew 22).

If the surviving brother refused to fulfill his duty and marry the widow, she had options. One was to pull off the deadbeat brother’s sandal, spit in his face, and say, “So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house.”

Another possibility was for another kinsman to volunteer to marry the widow. In that case, the sandal would still be removed but would be handed to the willing kinsman without any spitting or cursing. This is what happened with Boaz and Ruth.

Today, Levirate marriage is rarely if ever practiced, even among the most traditional Jews. Instead, an increasing number of Israelis have found a new way to achieve the goal of Moses’ command.

As described in a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, all Israeli women under the age of 45 have a right to IVF treatments for up to two children.

Now, IVF, as we’ve discussed a few times on BreakPoint, is a procedure laden with ethical challenges, at least from a Christian perspective. Even so, the Jewish state has added a new ethical dilemma by fully subsidizing IVF “procedures using genetic material from deceased spouses.” That is, retrieving sperm from a deceased husband, and using IVF to create and implant an embryo.

If the idea of creating a child from a deceased husband sounds strange, hold on. It gets even stranger: this procedure isn’t limited to widows.

As the Atlantic tells readers, Israel is learning that the parents of deceased childless sons are increasingly looking to reproductive technology to provide them with a posthumously-conceived grandchild.

The article tells of an unmarried woman whose “biological clock” is ticking more loudly. She wants to have a child using IVF but is concerned about that child not knowing its father’s family.

Her “problem” is “solved” when she comes across a grieving family looking for a woman to bear their dead son’s child. To make a long story short, the procedure I described earlier worked, and a child was born from a dead biological dad, but with two sets of grandparents. And everyone lived happily ever after…

Or did they?

We’re talking here of the phenomenon of “ghost dads,” and it raises a host of ethical questions.

First and foremost is that the child is not the fruit of a union whose purpose was to produce her. Instead, she was conceived to meet someone’s else’s emotional needs. As a social worker at Hebrew University asked: “Is it ethical to create a child as ‘the means for fulfilling the wishes of an adult, in any way possible, and at any cost?’”

Another expert quoted in the article raised questions about the impact of what he called “planned orphanhood.” We have no idea how a child “will feel knowing that he is not an individual, but a copy of someone else . . . a ‘living monument to the dead.’”

By the way, the “ghost dad” phenomenon isn’t limited to Israel. While some European countries explicitly forbid it, the United States doesn’t. What’s more, the rates of children reproduced posthumously vary from state to state, furthering reinforcing their status as means rather than ends.

Even though, as I mentioned recently, Israel treasures children in ways that few nations do, you can’t say the same of the U.S. Too often here, “having kids is something you get around to” and the thing we worry most about is having the freedom to live as we please. If kids get in the way, we eliminate them. If they serve our purposes, we accept them. We might even use our technologies to make them.

Either way, in any country and everywhere, it’s wrong. The point of having children should never be us. It should be them.

Resources

Grieving Parents Are Turning to Posthumous IVF

Shira Rubin, The Atlantic Monthly, February 27, 2019

Resources

Grieving Parents Are Turning to Posthumous IVF

Shira Rubin, The Atlantic Monthly, February 27, 2019

We present part 2 of the Adams-Parker debate on the morality of abortion, picking up with Adams’ rebuttal of Dr. Parker and concluding with their cross-examinations of each other.  To listen to Part 1, click here.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, we present the debate on the morality of abortion between pro-life educator Mike Adams and Abortion doctor Willie Parker.

The debate was sponsored by Ratio Christi and Summit Ministries in front of a live audience at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

We have broken the debate into two parts. Part 1 is the opening statements. Part 2, which you can find here,consists of rebuttals and cross-examination.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the forty-day period in the church calendar known as Lent, a time of preparation leading up to Holy Week and Resurrection Sunday. Around the world, countless Christians will have the sign of the cross written on their foreheads in ash—what is known as the imposition of ashes—and will hear the words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”

That reminder, along with the various exercises in self-denial associated with Lent, can give the forty days prior to Good Friday and Easter Sunday a somewhat gloomy tone.

But that would be missing the point. During Lent, we confront our mortality not only to be reminded of it, but also in order to better understand why we need not fear it.

And make no mistake, our culture fears mortality, and goes to absurd lengths to keep that fear at bay. Our attempts to avoid death are the stuff of science fiction, such as uploading their consciousness to a computer and a kind of medical vampirism.

It’s not only tech luminaries who try to keep thoughts of their mortality at bay. We all do. Years ago, when my grandfather was dying, he suffered terribly for about three or four months. In sorrow, I remember asking my pastor, “Why doesn’t God just take him?”

Honestly, I expected my pastor to say something along the lines of, “Well, God has His ways, and His own timing.” But he said something more important that I’ll never forget: “Because your grandfather,” he said, “needs to know his mortality before he meets his maker.”

Now if that sounds a bit unkind, or even cruel on God’s part, recall that God did not spare his only Son in this regard. The Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus “tasting death for everyone.” As New Testament scholar Mary Healy writes in her commentary on Hebrews, “To ‘taste’ death means to experience its bitter reality. Jesus drank the cup of suffering and death to its dregs.”

What’s more, Jesus experienced this “tasting” as one of us in every way except sin. Later in chapter 5, Hebrews, referring to the Lord’s experience in the Garden of Gethsemane, says that “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death . . .” The Gospels also describe the physical and emotional toll of Jesus’ encounter with his mortality: “And being in anguish, [Jesus] prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

And yet as we know, that wasn’t the end of the story. Less than seventy-two hours later, Jesus destroyed death. Not only that, as the author of Hebrews tells us, He freed “those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

This freedom is about more than the promise of heaven, although, as Paul tells us, to be with Christ is gain. As Healy writes, “We instinctively resist and recoil from everything that reminds us of our mortality—pain, deprivation, weakness, criticism, failure. This paralyzing fear . . . leads to various forms of escapism and addiction, induces us to grasp the false security nets proffered by Satan, and keeps us from pursuing the will of God with freedom, peace, and confidence.”

And that’s why Lent, including its reminder of our mortality, is the farthest thing from gloomy. Yes, like the “founder and perfecter of our faith,” we will taste death. But by God’s grace, death’s power over us, in this life as well as the next, is destroyed. And that’s great news.

Whether or not you typically participate in Lenten activities—like the imposition of ashes, fasting, or giving up something—I hope you’ll still use these forty days to face and ponder your mortality, with an eye to Jesus’ resurrection, and the resurrection that awaits all of us who belong to Him.

 http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/happy-lent-seriously-2/

Resources

When Everyone is "Ok": Reminders about the Human Condition (Youtube video)

• John Stonestreet | BreakPoint.org | February 13, 2013

He Has Risen: The Worldview of Easter, DVD series

• John Stonestreet, T. M. Moore,  Colson Center

From the Grave: A 40-Day Lent Devotional

• W. Tozer | Moody Publishers

Jesus the King: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God

• Timothy Keller | Penguin Books | March 2013

I became convinced, after watching my wife endure a 31-hour labor, that women have a kind of strength men don’t have. There’s no question in my mind that after less than five of those full-on labor contractions, we’d be crying like a baby instead of delivering one.

And yet, an incredibly obvious thing that is now somehow controversial to say out loud in 2019 is that, on average, men are physically stronger than women. In fact, it’s not even close. According to a 2009 study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, the average male has a greater total muscle mass and strength than 99.9 percent of females.

Decades of research have demonstrated that real and biologically-ingrained differences, like the level of physical strength, exist between the sexes. Another study back in 1981 found that even if physically untrained men were scaled to the same size and weight as trained female athletes, they would still be stronger, on average, by every measure.

These scientific conclusions need to be fresh in your mind as I tell you about a ruling by Texas Federal District Court Judge Gray Miller just last week. Miller, after a suit was brought by a so-called “men’s rights” group, declared that it is unconstitutional for the United States to require only men to register for the military draft. Women, he determined, must register, too.

Now, of course, military conscription hasn’t been used for forty years in this country. As of now, our military is an all-volunteer force. But any man who’s ever turned eighteen in America knows (or should know) that he’s required to register with the Selective Service or face financial and even criminal penalties.

A previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling excluded women from the draft on the grounds that they weren’t allowed in combat roles. But as Judge Miller points out, that changed in 2015, when the military opened up such roles to women. The activists who brought this suit insist it only makes sense for women to also be required to register with the Selective Service. If they get their way, women as young as eighteen will be on the rolls alongside men, and in time of war could be forced into the military and sent to the front lines.

Judge Miller concluded that “While historical restrictions on women in the military may have justified past discrimination, men and women are now ‘similarly situated for purposes of a draft or registration for a draft.’” He concludes that “If there ever was a time to discuss ‘the place of women in the Armed Services,’ that time has passed.”

Well your honor, I beg to differ. Strongly. In 2017, Marine Corps Training and Education Command reported that three out of four women who signed up failed to meet combat standards in boot camp. There are women, of course, who excel their peers, but they are few and far between—and—this is important, they’re volunteers. Because the policy up until now has been to maintain one combat fitness standard for both men and women, there hasn’t been much of a problem.

But should women be drafted into the military instead of volunteering, one of two things will have to happen: either huge percentages of women will wash out of boot camp, or officers will have to introduce two standards—one for men, and one for women—that would severely compromise the combat-readiness of our military.

This kind of gender politics, like the underlying postmodern worldview it’s based on, doesn’t align with reality. It expects reality to align with it, something reality consistently refuses to do. The battlefield brings with it a rude introduction to reality. It’s not the place to turn our military into a social experiment.

Forcing our daughters to register for the draft is a repugnant idea. The current system which accepts women who can meet the standards for combat is fine. There’s no need to change it.

I admit, the prospect of this idea going anywhere is as unlikely now as the reinstatement of the draft. But I assure you as the father of three girls, I’m with Rod Dreher. I’d take my daughters abroad before I’d see them forced into combat.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the thousands of women who have served and continue to serve honorably, voluntarily, and well in our armed forces. But if being a man means anything, it means using our God-given strength and our lives to protect those under our care. Our daughters included.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-drafting-our-daughters/

Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules

Tyler Pager | New York Times | February 24, 2019

How did religious conservatives within the United Methodist Church withstand the push to recognize gay “marriage”? What is the future of the UMC now that it has resoundingly upheld biblical teaching on human sexuality?   Today on the BreakPoint podcast, lifelong Methodist and President of the Insititute of Religion and Democracy Mark Tooley gives us an inside look at what went on during the United Methodist’s special session in St. Louis.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/podcast-the-methodists-and-morality-with-mark-tooley/

Resources

Divided Methodists

John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris, BreakPoint, February 28, 2019

African United Methodists Won’t Trade Bible for Dollars

Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism, February 23, 2019

Institute on Religion and Democracy

Fifty years ago, when he was a student at Cambridge, John Lennox found himself seated next to a Nobel Prize winner at a formal dinner. Lennox decided to make the most of the opportunity and so he asked the Nobel Laureate if and how his scientific work had shaped his worldview, including his opinion on the existence of God.

The conversation didn’t go well. The gentleman made it clear he wasn’t comfortable with Lennox’s questions. Not only that, he asked to speak with Lennox privately, where he asked Lennox if he really wanted a career in science. Lennox replied, “Yes.”

“Well then,” the Nobel Laureate replied, “You must give up this childish faith in God. If you do not, then it will cripple you intellectually, and you will suffer by comparison with your peers. You simply will not make it.”

In a typical British understatement, Lennox called the exchange, “a remarkable situation.”

I am happy to report that, both to his credit and for our benefit, John Lennox didn’t follow the advice. Instead, since then, Lennox, who is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, has written dozens of books and engaged in countless debates arguing for the compatibility of faith and science, the debt modern sciences owes to Christianity, and the reasonableness of theism and Christianity in particular.

His debate partners include a veritable “Who’s Who?” of “New Atheism”: Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, and the late Christopher Hitchens, to name but a few.

In his latest book, “Can Science Explain Everything?” Lennox makes a compelling case against what is known as “scientism,” the ideology that insists that “science” is or should be the sole criterion by which society should know what is true and good.

Part of scientism’s conceit that Lennox calls out is the idea that science is “objective” and “unbiased,” whereas things like religion and art aren’t. The answer to everything worth knowing is akin to answering the question, “Does water expand at 39 degrees Fahrenheit?” A simple experiment with a glass of water, a marker, and a properly-functioning refrigerator will confirm the answer is “yes.”

But as Lennox explains to readers, very few of life’s questions can be answered so simply and definitively. More to the point, the kind of scientists who argue otherwise do so from a position of what I, not Lennox, might call “arrogant ignorance.”

Lennox quotes another Nobel Laureate, physicist Richard Feynman, who said: “Outside his or her field, the scientist is just as dumb as the next guy.” Another Nobel Laureate, Baron Rees, said much the same about his friend Stephen Hawking’s pronouncements on philosophy and religion. He once told the Guardian newspaper, “I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read little philosophy and less theology, so I don’t think his views [on those subjects] should be taken with any special weight.”

These are only two examples of Lennox’s ability to help ordinary believers in their efforts to go, to borrow the title from another of his books, “Against the Flow.” There is a strong case to be made for why faith and science are more than compatible, and in his new book, Lennox makes that case in a well-written, easy-to-grasp, and short way.

All of this is why I’m thrilled that John Lennox will join us at the upcoming Wilberforce Weekend in May. Not only that, but in a very special edition of Socrates in the City, the Colson Center will feature a special conversation between Eric Metaxas and John Lennox at the Museum of the Bible. This will take place Thursday May 16, the night before the Wilberforce Weekend begins. I hope you will think about joining us. Come to wilberforceweekend.com to find out more.

And in return for your donation this month to the Colson Center, we’ll send you John Lennox’s latest book, “Can Science Explain Everything?”

In a strange way, I’m grateful for the attempted bullying of the young John Lennox by that Nobel Laureate. Without it, we may all have been deprived of his invaluable contribution to Christian apologetics.

Read “Can Science Explain Everything?” and benefit from Lennox’s fifty years of insight and experience. Come to BreakPoint.org to make your donation and request a copy.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-can-science-explain-everything/

Wilberforce Weekend 2019 information and registration

Can Science Explain Everything? . . . with your donation to BreakPoint and the Colson Center

John C. Lennox, The Good Book Company, 2019