If you're hesitant to speak up about your Christian beliefs because you're worried about being criticized publicly or shut down, even canceled, Well, maybe you're trying to help your kids or students build courage when they face challenges. The new Colson Educators course, Navigating Cancel Culture, is here and can help. Created in partnership with No Safe Spaces, the documentary by Dennis Prager, the course is led by the Colson Center and Brett Kunkel. Using real-life examples, the course explains cancel culture, how it shows up today, and why truth matters, how you can learn practical ways to stand firm and push back. Ready to join?
Go to colsoneducators.org. That's colsoneducators.org. to sign up. Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street.
Recently, musician Tiffany Arbuckle Lee announced in a social media post that. that she has deconstructed at least part of her faith. Lee sold a half a million records as a Christian singer. In the video, she shared her doubts on the reliability of Scripture. And in an earlier statement, she took an affirming stance on LGBTQ issues.
Lee is the latest in a growing list of Christian celebrities to deconstruct various aspects of their Christian faith. including Kevin Max of DC Talk, Derek Webb of Cape Men's Call, and Joshua Harris, author of I Kiss Dating Goodbye.
Now Lee's doubts about the Bible could have been corrected in a decent Sunday morning youth group class. Questioning the reliability of the Bible, Lee said that she never knew that Jesus and Paul never hung out or that the apostle was reporting events that had happened decades before he wrote. Of course, neither of those facts are a secret. While it's theoretically possible a very young Paul could have met Jesus, there's no record of that in the Bible or church history. But we do know that Jesus met Paul.
On the road to Damascus, not long after the resurrection, and that Paul met with Peter and James, both of whom had spent years with Jesus, and that Paul was present with all the leaders of the church at the Council of Jerusalem. In other words, even if the idea of God's Spirit guiding Paul is dismissed as irrelevant, Paul was closely connected with many people who knew Jesus Christ well. Lee also claimed that the Bible was written by mostly white dudes.
However, the only books of the Bible written by a Westerner at all are Luke and Acts, because they were written by the physician Luke. White people barely show up in the scripture, in fact, and are often the villains. Maybe the Philistines of the Old Testament could have come from the Aegean Sea region and the Romans from Italy, but the vast majority of the Bible's authors and cultural contacts came from what's known as the Middle East. Lee's also troubled that Moses did not witness what he wrote about in the Torah, which is only partly true. He is, after all, a primary character within the events described in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
Only Genesis records events before his life, and it's remarkable just how accurate his account is. Kenneth Kitchen argued in his classic work on the reliability of the Old Testament. that the numerous details of the Bible's description of ancient life point to a deep knowledge of the times. And of course, if witnessing the actual events is a requirement of trust, we should dismiss every modern work of history, and we should also embrace the Gospels. And that's even if we don't accept the first premise that an all-powerful God who created everything wanted to give us a reliable historical account.
Lee also questioned why other writings were not made part of the Bible, like the Gnostic Book of Thomas. That's a topic that's quite often repeated by online skeptics and has already been thoroughly refuted by apologists like Wes Hough, Gavin Ortland, the Coulson Sinners' What Would You Say series, Sean McDowell, and the list goes on and on and on. What this all points to is the very real danger in letting baby Christians grow up to be pop stars. Mimicking the wider culture of celebrityism, a select group of talented believers are put on a pedestal without ever checking if they know the basics and have the required character for fame and fortune. And this is not so much an indictment of Christian celebrities as it is the way the church disciples its people.
How many young people are sideswiped by shallow claims of Former Christian celebrities, college professors, and online skeptics parroting challenges to the Christian worldview that have been thoroughly addressed and answered for decades now. It is a shame when a Christian is convinced that some very answerable claim about Christianity is unanswerable simply because they've never been exposed either to the questions or the answers that are out there. Not to mention how many people go through decades of church life without even knowing the basics of the Bible. Look, the call for the Church to go deeper has been clear for quite some time now. I'm certainly encouraged by the dozens of churches that now offer Colson Fellows training as cohorts, and those churches that have gotten serious about challenging their young people to ask hard questions about faith and the world.
Look, the truth is big enough for these questions. That's because the truth. itself is rooted in the very person of the one who created the world. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr.
Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And you can find more resources like this one at breakpoint.org.
