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. A 2026 study found that one-third of Americans are currently experiencing an existential crisis of meaning. That includes 39% of millennials and a whopping 52% of Gen Z.
Well, today on Breakpoint, author and professor Dr. Thaddeus Williams has some thoughts about what's causing this catastrophic loss of meaning in our culture today and how the person of Jesus Christ provides everything that people are actually looking for and need the most. If we want to speak meaning into our cultural moment with its epidemic levels of felt meaninglessness. Let's run a short thought experiment together. Paul tells us in Colossians 1:16 that all things were created both by Jesus and for Jesus.
In Romans 11, verse 36, we see that from Christ, and through Christ, and to Christ are all things, to whom all glory is due. The theologian Colin Gunton notes that it's not, therefore, something which holds things together, but someone, and that someone is Jesus. In our thought experiment, Let us assume for a moment that the resurrected person of Jesus is not the ultimate focal point of meaning, what then? We get a little help from Dr. Loyal Rue, an avowed atheist.
In a very famous lecture called The Noble Lie delivered to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, Doctor Rue offers us three possibilities for finding meaning. First, Each individual can become the center point of meaning for his own universe of personal fulfillment. Rue rightly calls this the madhouse option, which abandons all hope of social cohesion. Second, the state can make itself the center point of meaning in an otherwise meaningless cosmos. Rue rightly calls this the totalitarian option.
where all individuality and freedom are lost. Third, maybe we could say that the universe has meaning even though deep down we know it doesn't if there's no God. Rue calls this the noble lie, which quote deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest.
So in Rue's bleak trilemma, either the me, the individual, destroys the we, the social cohesion, or the we, that is, the state with a capital S, destroys the me, the individual, or the lie saves them both, but only by destroying the truth.
Now, Loyal Rue himself defends that last option, option three, since, quote, without such lies we cannot live. Atheist Alex Rosenberg offers a fourth possibility. In the concluding line of his book, The Atheist Guide to Reality, where he says, take Prozac or your favorite serotonin re-uptake inhibitor and keep taking them till they kick in.
So take your pick. Would you rather live in Rosenberg's pharmacy of chemically induced meaning? Rue's Church of the Noble Lie, the Totalitarian's Prison of State imposed meaning, or the Relativist's Madhouse of Self made Meaning. Thankfully, the thought experiment fails. Those aren't our only options.
Jesus is, in fact, the telos, the goal, the focal point where all lines converge and find enduring significance.
Now, let's put it in a historic context. Since the dawn of the modern era, We have come to understand the mechanics of the universe far greater than ever before, and yet it appears more meaningless to us than ever. We know more and more about matter, but less and less about why matter matters.
Now this closed-minded materialism. It's ushered us into a kind of teleological dark ages. where we become just as naïve about the meaning of the universe as the medieval alchemist was about the mechanics of the universe. but the meaning void left swirling at the center of a materialist cosmos will be filled with something. The human heart, just like nature, abhors a vacuum.
So To our family, our friends, neighbors, co-workers experiencing such existential crises? We must show them a grand talos beyond Rosenberg's pharmaceutical illusions, a meaning that is infinitely more meaningful than Doctor Loyal Rue's madhouse, his totalitary nightmares, or his noble lies. We live, my friends, under the great commission, not great suggestion. To make disciples of all nations. And that certainly includes nations currently succumbing to the crushing existential weight of life without Christ.
We must not be afraid to talk about Jesus often, pointing neighbors not to an impersonal something, but the personal someone by whom. through whom, and for whom they exist. What our increasingly nihilistic age needs is a generation of bold, clear evangelists, unafraid to announce the good news of the resurrected Jesus as the only one big enough to save us from sin and satisfy our deepest existential longings.
So are you up for it? Step out of your comfort zone. Tell someone about the ultimate meaning Jesus offers today. That was Dr. Thaddeus Williams.
For more on how the person of Jesus Christ speaks to the meaning crisis of this cultural moment, see his latest book, Reflecting the Sun, How to Mirror Jesus. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
