Hey, John Stone Street here. This is your official invite to join us at the 2026 Colson Center National Conference. It'll be held in Knoxville, Tennessee, May 29th to the 31st. Again, Knoxville, Tennessee, May 29th to the 31st. The theme this year is you are here.
You might remember those large, now largely empty buildings. called shopping malls. You had all kinds of stores and you were trying to find the one you were looking for and you had to go to the map. And not only did you need to find the store, you needed to find that yellow arrow or the star that said you are here. Our culture today changes so fast and at such a profound civilizational level.
And that of course is because we've abandoned the truth and we're reaping the consequences.
So a conference like this is absolutely necessary to get the lay of the land, to kind of figure out what's happening in culture and at what moment we're really in. If you've ever wondered if your faithfulness and obedience can make a difference in this civilizational moment that we're in, this is the conference for you.
So join us at the Colson Center National Conference. You'll be hearing from fantastic speakers like the one and only Oz Guinness. Remarkable story of Chloe Cole, Abdu Murray, and many more that will be announced soon. If you register before November 29th, you can receive up to 50% off tickets. For more details and secure your spot, For the Colson Center National Conference, May 29th through the 31st.
Go to colsonconference.org. That's colsonconference.org. 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. On this day in 1844, the brilliant and troubled atheist philosopher Frederick Nietzsche was born in the village of Rocken in Germany.
Nietzsche is best known for the claim God is dead, which he made in two parables. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche promised the potential if humans would only evolve beyond religion. But the parable of the madman was more of a warning. Not written to those who believed in God, but to those who didn't. It begins this way Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran in the market place, and cried incessantly, I seek God, I seek God.
As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another.
Is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Thus they yelled and laughed. In the late 19th century, many intellectuals believed in a utopian future without a God that was weighing us down.
Nietzsche, however, believed that these children of the Enlightenment had underestimated just how significant the so-called death of God would be. And so his madman answered the skeptics. Quote, Where is God? I'll tell you. We've killed him, you and I.
All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually, backward, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there any up or down?
Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
You see, Nietzsche was not claiming that God had once existed but no longer did. Rather, he recognized what the loss of God meant as the central reference point for Western civilization. especially when it came to politics, education, art, architecture, and just about every other aspect of Western culture. The death of God had, as he put it, unchained the earth from its sun. And so now life, he realized, had to be reimagined.
Specifically, the death of God would hold incredible implications for morality and for meaning. Without God, what is up and down, forward or back? What will warm us? What can light our way?
Now, throughout the 20th century that followed, as the Western world became more secularized and religion became increasingly marginalized, God became less and less relevant to much of life and culture. Secular humanists, just like the mockers in Nietzsche's parable, promised a better world without the moral constraints of God, Christianity, and the Bible. Salvation could be found in medicine. Prosperity, comfort, convenience could all be delivered through technology. The existentialist promised us meaning even if life were meaningless.
Sexual liberation promised unlimited pleasure if only sex could be untethered from the religious hang-ups of morality, marriage, and children.
Now, when I began teaching worldviews in the early 2000s, I often highlighted the absurd inconsistencies of attempting to make meaning in a meaningless universe. After all, if truth is relative and words have no fixed meaning, I would ask students, what could prevent someone from claiming that a stop sign means go, or up means down, or a man is a woman? Why couldn't murder mean health care? Why couldn't injustice be justified by just redefining oppression and justice?
Well, today, obviously, many of those examples have become the substance of Supreme Court cases. The hypotheticals are now actuals. And Nietzsche also predicted that. Quote, And here the madman fell silent, and looked again at his listeners. They too were silent, and stared at him in astonishment.
And at last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces. I've come too early, he said. My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering. It's not yet reached the ears of men.
Lightning and thunder require time. The light of stars require time. Deeds though done require time to be seen and heard. This deed is more distant from them than the most distant stars and and yet they have done it themselves.
Now, of course, God is not dead. Nietzsche was wrong about that, but he did foresee the coming crises of meaning, trust, truth, and identity that inflicts the Western world. With a clarity, unlike most who reject God, Nietzsche understood that, as the catechism puts it, our only hope in life and death is that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, life and death. to God and to our Savior Jesus Christ.
Now Nietzsche, of course, did not believe that kind of hope was real. He also did not think that once the West lost hope, it would be it could ever rediscover it. And let's hope, in honor of Frederick Nietzsche's birthday, that he was also wrong about that. for the Colson Center on Johnstone Street with Breakpoint. If Breakpoint is a helpful part of your daily worldview diet, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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