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.
Well, other than top-secret security-level content, there's no information that, if we really want to find it, is beyond our reach these days. We live in the age of information. We have access to almost Anything from medical diagnosis to home values to sports statistics—all within seconds. And now that our Google searches are powered by AI, we have even more godlike access to virtually anything that we want to know. The risk that we run, both as individuals and as a society, is to start confusing all this information that we can access with wisdom.
Certainly, of all that our technologies have made possible, we're not somehow less susceptible to things like wars, or rage, or debt, or. Bloodshed, radical ideology still captures young people. False religions still confuse and deceive many. Abortion still continues to take lives. Poverty and crime still beleaguer entire nations.
As dramatic as the shift to the information age was, expanding now further to the age of AI is even more difficult to quantify. According to TechCrunch, ChatGPT alone receives about two and a half billion prompts every single day. Roughly three hundred and thirty million of those come from the U.S., and that doesn't account for all the other AI chatbots that are at our disposal. But what are we really getting from this windfall of information? What are we doing with it all?
And it's in that distinction between knowing things and living wisely that there's a world view of difference. Nearly a century ago, in his choruses from the rock, T.S. Eliot asked a very prescient set of questions. Questions. That foresaw this confusion.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God. Where's the life we've lost in living? Where's the wisdom we've lost in knowledge? Where's the knowledge we've lost in information? Though information can become a counterfeit to wisdom, it's not the only counterfeit out there these days.
Perhaps even more sinister, recently at least, is grievance. This idea that a real or perceived injustice, often based on someone's chosen identity, is the thing that makes them wise. It's part of the critical theory mood. Wisdom's not a matter of who's right or wrong, but just who feels more downtrodden. Moral superiority is the prerogative.
In this view of the oppressed, captivated as we are by this mood, wisdom also then is in short supply from our schools and our colleges. To borrow recent language from Georgetown professor and Claremont fellow Joshua Mitchell, America's institutions of higher learning no longer educate for citizen competence or expert competence. Instead, it favors elevating the role of innocent victims to the detriment of their oppressors.
Now the Bible. Offers a very different vision of all this. Get wisdom, the writer of Proverbs cries, no matter what it takes. Also, the fear of the Lord, not information or grievances, is the beginning of wisdom. The knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
Such fear is not a terror of God; it's a kind of reverence and awe that points to an understanding of wisdom that is about the pursuit of a life pleasing to Him. And only the fool, according to the Bible, says in his heart that there is no God. In the New Testament, God promises wisdom to all who earnestly seek it. Wisdom's not just the ability to see around the corners of life; it's the ability to live consistently in light of what's true and what's good. Thus, there can be no real wisdom apart from a knowledge of God and His ways.
Proverbs explains that wisdom was present with God when the world was created, and later Paul connects. That conception of wisdom to the life of Christ, the incarnation of God, who Himself is called the Wisdom of God, and that's why, once again, as in all things, we look to Jesus, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He's the source for wisdom. Jesus promised a wisdom that would overcome the world—the kind of wisdom that's a sure foundation and provides access to the blueprints of creation and to the mind of Christ. It's because we so desperately need wisdom right now, and because God so plainly and generously promises to give it to us, that pursue wisdom is the theme for the 2027 Colson Center National Conference.
We will pursue wisdom together—eternal wisdom—but for this time and place, where God. Has called us. We'll learn from an incredible collection of presenters, from renowned Princeton professor Robert George to human rights activist and thought leader Iyan Hursi Ali to poet Malcolm Guite to entrepreneur Henry Kaisner to speaker and author Amy Or Ewing. You can learn more and register at ColsonConference.org. Of course, growing in biblical wisdom is a lifetime project, but God's given us an incredible set of resources in our pursuit of it, and that's what we will explore at the Colson Center Conference.
Sources like innovation and story, repentance and forgiveness.
So don't miss this incredible opportunity to pursue wisdom together with thousands of others at the Colson Center National Conference. Visit colsonconference.org. That's colsonconference.org. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
