Breakpoint

John and Shane answer a concerned mother's question on how to engage her children who are questioning their faith. She notes that they have all sought counseling, specifically asking John for clarity on the practice of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. John and Shane then field two questions regarding Christians in the public square. Specifically, one listener asks if Christian men should pull back from their church involvement to be more involved in local politics. Another listener asks how Christians should respond to mandates being issued from the government.

John and Shane answer a concerned mother's question on how to engage her children who are questioning their faith. She notes that they have all sought counseling, specifically asking John for clarity on the practice of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. John and Shane then field two questions regarding Christians in the public square. Specifically, one listener asks if Christian men should pull back from their church involvement to be more involved in local politics. Another listener asks how Christians should respond to mandates being issued from the government.

Last Sunday, kidnappers abducted 17 Christian missionaries, including five children, in Haiti. The American missionaries are part of a Mennonite group called Christian Aid Ministries, which has been working in Haiti for years. This time, they were building an orphanage in a town east of Port-au-Prince. Haiti has been ensnared in near-total political and social chaos for decades, as the country's people suffer under inept and corrupt governments, crushing poverty, natural disasters, and increasingly brazen and violent gangs. When news breaks of a shocking abduction like this, it prompts an honest question: why would a group of Mennonite missionaries from rural Ohio - why would anyone - keep going back to a place like Haiti? There's only one answer compelling enough to make sense: because Jesus rose from the dead, the Gospel is real, and Christ has called us to be His hands and feet to even the most vulnerable. Please join us in praying for the safe return of these courageous brothers and sisters, and for the suffering people of Haiti.

Over the next five years, the seven installments of C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia" will turn seventy. Generations of children have found delight in stepping through the wardrobe door to this mythical world, filled with magic, meaning, and a whole cast of fantastic characters. Still, in the end, the appeal of the Chronicles comes back to a single character. Aslan, the Great Lion, who calls the children into Narnia, plays the central role in each adventure. It's not exactly correct to call Aslan an "allegory" of Jesus, since Lewis disliked allegory. He thought it was poor writing, in fact. Lewis might prefer that we instead think of Aslan as Christ transposed into a Narnian key, a Creator and Lord fit for a world primarily inhabited by talking animals. Throughout The Chronicles, Aslan often emphasizes that he really is a lion and not an illusion or symbol. "Touch me," he tells one character in The Horse and His Boy. "Smell me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers. I am a true Beast." True to Lewis' genius and his love of myth, Aslan's purpose in calling children from our world into Narnia is the same as Lewis' purpose in writing the Chronicles. Through the Great Lion, Lewis gives us a glimpse of the character of the Savior and King he called "myth become fact," and whom Scripture calls "the Lion of Judah." Two moments in the Narnia series are particular favorites of my colleague Shane Morris, and illustrate Aslan's mission with particular clarity. One takes place during the third Chronicle (the fifth in publication order), The Horse and His Boy. Shasta, the main character, has ridden through the night and is lost in the mountains. Having grown up in a foreign country and just returned to Narnia, he doesn't realize he is royalty. After running and riding for his life for so long, he's tired and discouraged, and concludes that he must be the unluckiest boy alive. Suddenly, a great Voice confronts him out of the darkness, and asks to know his sorrows. A very frightened Shasta, not knowing what else to do, relays how he and his companions fled from their captors across the desert, how fear and danger have stalked them at every turn, and how he's been threatened by at least four lions. "There was only one lion," replies the Voice. "But he was swift of foot." Aslan reveals that he was the lion, and that his intervention at these crucial moments saved the boy's life, as well as the lives of his fellow travelers and his native kingdom. What Shasta saw as bad luck was Aslan's providential paw guiding him through danger toward his rightful throne, and even introducing him to his future wife. The second scene takes place at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace have just come to the edge of the world after months at sea. The rest of the characters have gone home or paddled into Aslan's Country, and the three children are left alone. They encounter Aslan on a grassy shore, who's taken the form of a lamb and invites them to breakfast. There, he tells the children that it's time for them to go home and, for Edmund and Lucy, there will be no returning to Narnia. They don't take the news well. "It isn't Narnia, you know," cries Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how are we to live, never meeting you?" "But you shall meet me, dear one," Aslan replies. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." Like Jesus revealing Himself to His disciples at the breaking of bread, here Lewis has Aslan shed the disguise to allow readers to fully recognize him. When Aslan reveals his role in Shasta's story, it brings to mind how Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, revealed to His disciples everything concerning Himself in the Law and Prophets. It's no wonder that, like those disciples, many who have met Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia have also felt their hearts burning within them. Seventy years on, C.S. Lewis's stories deserve every bit of their status as classics, filled as they are with spiritual treasures for young and old alike. But the lion's share of the credit goes to Aslan. In him we meet a character too good to be just a story. And, like Lucy, we long to know his true name—not in spite of the mane and tail, but because of them.

"Remember the signs." In C. S. Lewis' Narnian chronicle "The Silver Chair," Aslan tasks Eustace and Jill with finding a lost prince. To guide them he gives them a list of instructions—or signs—for them to commit to memory. Their success depends on it. Lewis made all of his tales from Narnia, including this quest, an allegory about the Christian life. Christ-followers are to seek the lost as part of joining God's great story to restore all things. But we're useless in this task if we don't remember the guidance God gives us in His Word. This story from "The Silver Chair" should encourage us all to encourage our kids to memorize Scripture. But how about you? Colossians 3:16 talks about the Word of Christ dwelling in us richly. Well, is it? Is it more and more? As we learn from Jill Pole, it's not too late to remember the signs, and to obey them.

A few weeks ago, Gabriel Gipe, a high school AP Government teacher in Sacramento, was suspended for encouraging his students to take up far Left activism. When students complained about the Antifa flag he'd hung up in his classroom, he dismissed their concerns and suggested that only fascists would be bothered by it. He also offered extra credit to students who attended radical political rallies. And, in an ironic and a-historical twist, this avowed anti-fascist also posted a photo online of himself with a Communist "hammer and sickle" emblem tattooed across his chest. According to one report, he often used "stamps with images of Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro and Kim Jung Un" to grade papers, and a poster of Mao Zedong was hung on his classroom wall. Apparently, this wasn't just his way of being edgy or provocative. In a video published by Project Veritas, Mr. Gipe was recorded saying, "I have 180 days to turn them into revolutionaries." Local parents were understandably enraged that their child's teacher praised history's worst villains, but while calling out his flawed thinking, some of his critics missed something essential about education. One mother said,: "I'm all for freedom of speech. I'm not going to deny that, but when you are a teacher, your job is academics. You are not here for morals, values, political views—anything like that is not welcome in the school unless it's a private school." Of course, no parent should tolerate such a historically devastating worldview being foisted on students, but it is a mistake to think that education without "morals, values, (and) political views" is possible. Or, for that matter, even desirable. It's not. Stripping morals from education—or, more accurately, attempting to strip morals from education—is a dangerous idea with dangerous consequences. Chuck Colson repeatedly highlighted this, especially in light of the financial scandals of the late 1980s and early 2000s. He spoke often of "a crisis of character" and the "inescapable consequence of neglecting moral training." This is also the central focus of the essay "Men Without Chests," the opening essay in one of C.S. Lewis's most important books, The Abolition of Man. Lewis clearly saw that years of attempts to de-moralize education would not give us a world without vice, but a world without virtue. And, he closed, we would wonder how it could ever have happened in our enlightened age: In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. Fast forward a few decades and here we are. When communism-loving and Critical-Race-Theory-advancing teachers work to indoctrinate children (even while denying it), they are simply stepping into a vacuum left long ago by those trying to make education amoral. They may be wrong to promote those particular values and moral framework, but they're right that education as inescapably an act of moral formation. S. Elliot reflected on this years ago in an essay about the purpose of education: If we see a new and mysterious machine, I think that the first question we ask is, 'What is that machine for?' … If we define education, we are led to ask, 'What is Man?' and if we define the purpose of education, we are committed to the question, 'What is Man for?' Every definition of the purpose of education, therefore, implies some concealed, or rather implicit philosophy or theology. Assuming that kids go to school only to acquire data is to assume that kids are mere computers made of flesh. With all due respect to this very concerned mother and Winnie the Pooh, education is about more than how to make "Twy-stymes" and "ABCs," or knowing where Brazil is. Here's how Neil Postman put it: Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. The curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses "skills." In other words, a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills. So, to summarize: Elliot taught us that a values-free education is impossible. Lewis predicted that the attempt at a values-free education would produce people not able to make moral decisions. Postman pointed out that education needs a moral center, or it's not an education at all. Educating for "skill acquisition" doesn't actually prepare students for life. And now, into the morals void, sundried progressive causes are promoting the ideologies that gave fascism to the world, in the name of being anti-fascists. We should've seen it coming. But, we didn't, and here we are, facing incredible challenges but also an incredible opportunity to show a better way for education and moral formation. You can start by studying The Abolition of Man with the Colson Center and Dr. Michael Ward this month. For a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month, we will send you two books and access to special online content.

You may have heard that Eastern story about the six blind men who encounter an elephant. The first touches its side and says, "An elephant is like a wall." Another one touches the trunk and says, "No, an elephant is like a snake." The third touches its tusk and says, "An elephant is like a spear." Another one touches the leg and says, "An elephant is like a tree." Another one touches an ear. "No, an elephant," he says, "is like a fan." And then touching the tail, the sixth one says, "You're all wrong. An elephant is like a rope." And who was right? Everyone, we're told. Just like everyone is right in their own view about God. But in reality, none of the men were right about the elephant. And as Trevin Wax at the Gospel Coalition points out, the parable contradicts the very point it's trying to make, by assuming that the one telling the parable sees the whole elephant. This story is just another claim to be right and everyone else being wrong.

If you've followed Breakpoint over the last month you've heard me say more than once that I think The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis could be the most important book for our cultural moment. It's one of those remarkably prophetic works that is increasingly applicable to the cultural moment in which we live. When The Abolition of Man was written, Lewis was uncovering the ways the modern world was logically inconsistent: ideas planted were not bearing the fruit that many moderns hoped they would. I believe the same is true in this generation, as well. For that reason, I think it's important to understand the observations Lewis was making when he wrote The Abolition of Man. We are so excited to provide an opportunity to study Lewis' book in-depth. This month we want to send you a copy of The Abolition of Man, as well as a copy of the brand new book After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, written by one of the world's top C. S. Lewis scholars, Dr. Michael Ward. Dr. Ward is a senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford, and also a professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, in Texas. He's authored several books on C. S. Lewis, but this is his first in-depth study guide. For a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month, we'll send you a copy of both The Abolition of Man and Ward's guide, After Humanity. Earlier this week, Dr. Ward spoke with my colleague, Shane Morris, about the inconsistencies of modern culture and the similar realities Lewis observed. They talked about the sorts of ideas the world is planting in the cultural soil and what the harvest now looks like. Here's a segment of that conversation: However much we may wish to be surgeons, chopping up nature to suit our own desires, we must stop at some point. That is to say, we must stop before we chop ourselves up. And that's why, you know, you reach this position of logical incoherence. He (C.S. Lewis) talks about the famous case of the Irishman who discovered that a certain kind of stove would heat his house with only half the amount of fuel. And he concluded that if he got two stoves of the same kind, he could heat his house with no fuel at all. It's that kind of logical incoherence: ...because we have such a linear imagination, we think that if we keep taking the same series of steps over and onwards, into the broad, sunlit uplands of the future, that we can go on indefinitely. But there is one step which is incommensurate with all the previous steps. We begin to treat ourselves as raw material, mere nature to be chopped up to suit our own desires. Science is a good thing, but science pushed to dehumanizing extremes is obviously not a good thing; and likewise, seeing through things, penetrating the veil of falsity, seeing through propaganda, understanding false peace, false consciousness, all that kind of penetration is good. But you see through things in order to see something through them. You see through the window in order to see the garden. But if the garden was transparent, like the window, what would you see through the garden? The world will become invisible. But a world in which everything is invisible is a world where effectively you are all blind. That's why he [C.S. Lewis] finishes with that famously negative statement, "To see through all things is the same as not to see." In other words, humility is really the answer. We mustn't think that we can master ourselves in the same way that we might rightly choose to master almost everything else. To get a copy of Dr. Ward's After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, as well as a copy of C.S. Lewis's classic book, The Abolition of Man, visit www.breakpoint.org/october. Also, Dr. Ward has graciously provided exclusive video introductions of each chapter of The Abolition of Man as well as a live webinar in November, which will be accessible to every person who gives to the Colson Center during the month of October. Join us in this study by making a donation of any amount to the Colson Center at www.breakpoint.org/october.

John and Maria reflect on Chuck Colson's legacy that endures at the Colson Center, and is also powerfully visible in Prison Fellowship and the Angel Tree ministry. Maria then asks John for clarity on the situation unfolding in Loudon County. There are allegations that the school board in Loudon County failed to act in responding to abuse by a student identifying as a transgender girl. To close, John unpacks the inner workings of the euthanasia movement through the story of a woman in Columbia who is battling ALS. Columbia recently provided provision for terminally ill people to receive euthanasia, but this woman's disease doesn't qualify her for the procedure. John also discusses the faithfulness of her grandmother and how aging and dying with dignity is more whole in a Christian worldview.

A little over forty years ago, Soviet dissident and literary giant Aleksander Solzhenitsyn delivered a thunderbolt of a commencement address at Harvard University. Survivor of the Soviet GULAG, a fierce opponent of communism, Solzhenitsyn stunned his elite audience as he took aim at the disastrous social and worldview trends happening in the West. He bemoaned that Western societies had given "destructive and irresponsible freedom . . . boundless space." By which he meant license, what Chuck Colson called freedom without virtue. Then he went after the Western appetite for "decadent art." Finally, he argued, no healthy society or culture lacks great statesmen. Solzhenitsyn was prophetic. But sad to say, the West has largely ignored his voice. Irresponsible freedom? Check. Decadence? Check. Now go through your mental checklist and see how many great statesmen or stateswomen you can name these days. Come to BreakPoint.org for more on Solzhenitsyn's stunning address, including a BreakPoint commentary.