Personhood?

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. Okay, I'm going to hit you with a question that might sound, I guess, too simplistic. Too simplistic if I ask you, what is a person?

Do you have a quick answer? And would it be possible for your answer to expand beyond just the issue, if we're talking ethics, of abortion? Do you run personhood into anything else other than abortion? And what about the world?

Because we ask a question, what is a person, but we live in a world that isn't even comfortable, even if you're going to be sitting on the United States Supreme Court, with answering the question, what is a woman? And so now we've opened up the floor to reality across the board. Reality now takes a backseat. Ideology and narrative is the king. And so we have to wrestle with definitions. And for us as followers of Jesus Christ, we are here as witnesses, salt and light, as ambassadors of the gospel, first and foremost, but also of truth in general.

Jesus said it, talking to Pontius Pilate, for this reason, I was born and for this reason, I came into the world to testify to the truth and how the ultimate truth was the truth about himself, and how that would lead into the gospel, but also truth in general. So this notion of personhood is becoming a bigger deal every year. It's a bigger deal to have a grasp on this for me as a teacher that has about 160 students every week at the high school level to understand this in an ever-changing world, but more important this year in 2023 than it was 11 years ago when I first started teaching. So recently, on the campus of Bob Jones University, the CORE conference was asking a question that seems overly simplistic.

Who am I? The contemporary assault on personhood, because now it is a much bigger story than just abortion itself. So we're going to unpack this today. We've got a lot of roads to travel. There's a whole lot here, so don't think it's going to be just about abortion. It's primarily about that, but much bigger than that.

There's a lot of different branches that come off of this word personhood. So today, we'll walk through that with our good friend, Dr. Alan Benson, who's back in the house, who of course, for me, Alan was my very first contact at Bob Jones University when he was on the radio show. And then we decided we'd have a conversation sometime later, which ended up being about an hour and a half or two hours on the phone. And so, Alan, always great to have you on and just appreciate your friendship and our partnership here. But also, I'm excited about Dr. Mark Cetta joining us today, who's an MD, so a medical doctor and worked in the emergency room field for years.

And so we're going to bring that aspect, the medical aspect, quote unquote, science into this conversation. But Dr. Cetta and Alan, great to see you guys. How are you? Hey, Steve, it is so good to be back with you today. Hello to everybody out there in the audience. What a joy it is to come and talk with Steve today about a really important topic. And it's likewise good to be with you. It's great to have you.

And I appreciate you, Mark, taking the time to be with us and you just so everybody knows, I mean, Alan and I are kind of nerdy academic types that have been in the teaching world and stuff. But tell us a little bit about your background in the medical world, because I want to make sure people fully understand the weight of your opinion today. Well, I first started in a small town practice in Mississippi, and I was a family physician who did what's called womb to tomb medicine. I took care of all comers in a small town.

I did close to 2000 deliveries. But then because we had seven children and I was never seeing my kids, I segwayed to ER medicine, which I did for 20 years. Interesting side story. I was minding my own business in the ER when I got a phone call from my daughter who was a pre-med student at Bob Jones University. And she said, Dad, Bob Jones is looking for an anatomy professor. And I said, Well, that's just wonderful. I'll be praying for you guys.

And she says, No, Dad, I want you to do it. So I went home and it wasn't on my radar, but I took my Bible and I did the real spiritual thing. I put my Bible on its back end and I let it flip open. And it just happened to flip open to Psalm 71 18 that says, Now that I am old and gray headed, O God, forsake me not until I've shown thy power unto this generation and thy strength unto all those that are to come.

And let's just say the rest is history. Yeah, that's awesome. So it's great that we're going to fold in that kind of practicality that on the street level, in the surgery, in the ER room, in the doctor's office perspective on personhood today. But, Alan, obviously, you guys just coming out of the CORE conference, which I know is a great success, but a lot of different sessions there. Personhood from the beginning, the theology of personhood, personhood in the image of man, in the image of God and man. Why was personhood the number one word at the CORE conference this year? Well, it's an interesting concept you mentioned in your open about words that are being defined in our contemporary woke culture. And as much as we have wrestled with our redefinition of marriage, now a redefinition of life, a redefinition of gender. Is it transitory?

Is it fixed? What is a woman? What's remarkable is all of them actually find a basis in whether or not we, in a humanistic way, actually get to define what is a person. So to set the context of that for you a little bit, we tend to think of words that all mean the same thing. When we say human, we say life, we say person.

But I want you to know that today in the contemporary woke culture, those are three different things. You can be alive and not be considered a human. You could be a human and not be considered a person. And that has real ramifications on the ethical norms and particularly the bioethical norms that you have a right to as to whether or not you're a person. Can I pitch in?

Please do. So there's an evolution here of the word personhood. Back right after Roe v. Wade, it was easy for pro-abortion people to say that it's just a blob of cells. It's not really a living person. And so abortion is fine.

But then after ultrasound became readily available, it was very apparent that it was not a blob of cells. So they had to come up with some other terminology to justify abortion. So they separated out the term human being from human person. Prior to that, prior to that, they were one in the same. So you can be a human being, but not a human person. And so one of the issues here is where, when does personhood begin? Exactly.

Well, that thought right there, we're up against the break. So we're going to continue to unpack that. On the abortion issue, we'll look at Genesis chapter one, and then we'll take personhood and connect it to big issues like race and marriage and gender and sexuality.

Now we got two different words. What's your sex? What's your. Welcome back at Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary and Bob Jones University as well.

Our good friend, Dr. Alan Benson, back in the house and Dr. Mark Cetta, who's also an MD and served in the medical world for decades, as well as in the emergency room and has been teaching at Bob Jones University for about 11, 12 years now. Mark, how long has it been? Thirteen.

Thirteen years now. Human anatomy and physiology. And it's just an incredible mind and experience that we can apply to this question of personhood today. And Alan, during the break and Mark, you were talking about it as well, just talking about separating in the abortion issue. You have to change the language because you can't talk about a baby. You got to talk about a fetus. You have to dehumanize the whole process so that when you kill it, it's not a big deal. It's like you're removing a molar or something.

But so that the language matters when it comes to personhood. Did you want to finish up that thought there, Mark? Because I had to interrupt you when we hit the break.

No, I think that was it. OK. And Alan, we were talking during the break. I was mentioning something about the president's State of the Union address. You actually have, I think, what, four quotes from that? Go to the issue of personhood.

I do. Let me frame kind of that conversation. And then I want you to listen for specific language that was just used in the State of the Union address. So we talk about bioethics. We talk about personhood. One of the interesting avenues for us to think about is how is this whole change being foisted upon culture? Like, is this a frontal assault saying we don't care what you think we're going to beat you up and we're going to win the argument?

Or is there another pathway? And one of the things I want the audience to be aware of is that the terminology is is ethical terminology. So four values, in a sense, in ethics are fairness, respect, care, and honesty. When you take that to bioethics, they actually look at the principle of nonmaleficence, the principle of beneficence, the principle of justice. And so we're going to talk about this young child that is trapped in a body that that isn't their gender.

And how could you not help them transition and be just right? Are you not being the one that is carrying out maleficence and not carrying out the principle of beneficence? They use this language, and I want you to hear it. Here's some quotes from our from our president this week. He says this, here in the people's house, it is our duty to protect all the people's rights and freedoms.

What does that look like? Congress must restore the right the Supreme Court took away last year and codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman's constitutional right to choose. He adds this, the vice president and I are doing everything we can to protect access to reproductive health and safeguard patient privacy. He adds this then, let's also pass the Bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.

Do you hear the language of bioethics, fairness, justness, kindness? That same president at the end of that speech said this with regard to race relations. He said that all of us, every one of us is created equal in the image of God. And so he is going to on one side trumpet that fairness is because we're made in the image of God and yet completely set that aside in terms of ethical discussion. The whole speech about personhood is characterized in such a way that we're just doing the ethical thing, right? And so in that, in gaslighting the rest of the nation, to not agree with that means you have a poor ethic.

If you call yourself a Christian, you don't really love your neighbor and you don't really care about people. You're antiquated. You're this phobic.

You're that phobic. But ultimately, you have an unjust perspective on your fellow man, which makes you a bad citizen and an enemy of the people. So can I, for comparison, quote another expert who actually uses creation in the image of God? Well, I'll challenge that that you quoted an expert in the first place, but go ahead.

Agreed. I want to quote for you, Jesus. Oh, all right.

That's fine. He was put to the test in Matthew 19. It says this and Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? He answered, listen to the things he addresses.

Have you not read? He's going to call on the authority of scripture that he who created them from the beginning, he quotes us. The creation narrative made them male and female. He addresses gender and said, therefore, shall a man leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife? He actually defines marriage and the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. And so here you have Jesus actually addressing the similar issues that the president just addressed. And he also goes back to the fact that we are created image bearers. And he says that God with authority defined marriage, defined gender. And so there's a conflict here with regard to even quoting a source of authority that we can't be shy about.

This is why we're coming out and saying, no, no, no, no, wait a minute. There is an authority that defines what a person is that defines what a person is. It's not up for debate. It's actually not a descriptive definition, meaning we'll come look at what is there.

And based upon what we find, we'll determine whether or not it's a person. It actually is a prescriptive definition because we are made fearfully and wonderfully made. So on the one hand, he tries to use and as somebody that claims to be a Catholic and therefore a Christian, on the one hand, he tries to appeal using that type of ethical language, while on the other hand, completely denying what that source actually says. Which to me is the Romans one reprobate mine. Perfect example. I think positionally what the problem is that and Steve brought this out well, five times in the New Testament, Jesus says to the experts in the law, have you not read? And then in Genesis chapter three, we've got Satan telling Eve, hath God really said, is that what he meant?

So what's happening is that nominal Christians and people who claim to be Christians are going from the world and trying to make the scripture fit their philosophy, instead of going from the word of God to dictate the philosophy. Let me give you a good, hearty example of that. I was on the sex education review committee in Habersham County, Georgia. And that was when the federal government mandated that you had to teach sex ed in elementary school or lose your funding. So our committee very courageously and happily chose an abstinence only plan or program.

And I told them, what are you going to do when you have a classroom of 16 year olds? And you're telling them that abstinence is the best thing there is. Wait till marriage. You won't get sexually transmitted diseases.

You won't have pregnancy out of wedlock. And some 16 year old raised a hand and goes, why? Well, it's a good thing to do.

It's good to wait and you won't get all these others. But why? If you cannot cite the gold standard, God said, then it's like personhood. Is it when the heart begins to beat?

Is it when you can do an EEG on a fetal brain and see flickering of electricity? You can try to define try to define personhood from a humanistic, worldly point of view, but it does not. You've got to go to God on that one. Welcome back at Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary and Bob Jones University. What war were you waiting for since you were young, Steve? I don't pick these songs. I don't pick stuff for no good reason, just because I happen to like the music. I'm a little deeper than that. So I'm always picking things because there's always a message in there, which I need to hear myself.

And then I always want to turn around because I feel like I have an obligation to to share it with you. What war was I waiting for? It was the spiritual war. I had to have Jesus win that for me first to even get me into the army.

But after that, I continue to wage a spiritual war, whether it's 4 to 5 p.m. here each day of the week on the show or in the eight classes that I teach every week or down at Bob Jones University with all their classes and at the seminary with all their classes. We are in a war. You best not forget that. But the weapons of our war are not carnal. You better know that as well. They're not even political.

They are spiritual. So as we go down these roads and this is where I'm trying to teach all of my students to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves when all you want to be is a serpent that bites because this concept and what we're talking about with personhood today, whether it's abortion or we talk about the gender issue, human sexuality, marriage, whatever, I get so angry and so mad sometimes. All I want to do is smite.

That's all I want to do. Just give me a broadsword and let me take it to this destitute, depraved culture. But that's the same culture that Jesus would look out and weep because he sees her like sheep without a shepherd. So I appreciate our zeal and I know that we're onward Christian soldiers. But let's remember that all the people that we think are enemy actually aren't. We have one enemy. He's got a name.

It's Satan. And so let's just remember the gospel side of all of this as we deal with these topics, which I know can get us all a little bent out of shape. But Alan Benson, it's great to have you back.

Dr. Marchetta, M.D. is with us as well. Again, guys, thank you so much for your time today. Oh, it's great to be here, Steven. What an important subject to help people think clearly about. Thanks for for hosting us. Absolutely.

Of course. I wanted to ask you, Alan, to tackle this and then Mark, jump in wherever you want. How do we then take personhood, which most of us think just in terms of the abortion issue that you brought up, Jesus talking about marriage and divorce, where he folds in gender roles, he deals with marriage, men and women, he deals with all that stuff. How do we how do we then take our understanding of personhood where we would start, obviously, in Genesis chapter one? And then how do we use that to understand the other issues? Racial issues obviously are a big deal. Marriage, gender and sexuality.

Help us to build that bridge right quick. One of the things to understand is why personhood is so important. There's a sense in which we're actually a level up when we talk about the applications and abortion is one of them. Marriage is one of them.

Gender fluidity is one of them. Personhood is foundational beneath that. And I feel like while it's important and we're debating all of the issues with our culture above, we're not so much talking about personhood. But if beneath it all, all of a sudden our culture redefines what a person is. Now, all of a sudden, we don't have to talk about abortion anymore because we're not talking about the rights of anybody or marriage or any of that. And so what is so important to me on this issue is that we have to find a place where we say biblical authority matters.

Like there's an authority that speaks to my understanding of this issue. And it really is, as you mentioned earlier, Genesis one. In fact, Jesus, Matthew 19, appeals to Genesis one. And at some point, we have to come back to a place where we say. We are created by God in the image of God, and that means something that I have to submit to because he's the authority. And if we don't start there, we're going to find ourselves in a world of hurt, trying for other reasons to debate the other things and maybe feeling frustrated and unable to give an answer because we let the foundation go.

Yeah, and I think we were talking about this earlier, and I would ask you about this, Dr. Cheto. I think we at this point in 2023 within the church, and I think this is especially a big challenge for younger Christians, is almost thinking or either we don't believe it ourselves in the power of God's word. God is the ultimate authority dropping the G word or the J word into the conversation where it's almost like, well, they're not Christians, so we can't use that. We can't appeal to that as a source of authority. I was making the case over the break that, well, I'm going to go with Romans one again, and everybody knows God exists.

He's a hundred pound gorilla in the room. But that's my concern, Alan and Mark, is that a lot of Christians are like, I got to figure out a way to argue these things without mentioning the Bible. Well, I'm not sure that you can, but my thoughts about personhood and where it got aberrated was, if you think about this, after Darwin produced his origins of the species, we entered a time of industrial proliferation, and that entered the idea of modernism, that all we can know is what we can see, hear, think, and touch, a very materialistic, naturalistic approach to things. And then after World War II, that gave way to the idea that no we're two parts. We're both fact and value. We're both sacred and earthly. So, but where did all of this get its initiation? With a departure from creation.

Let me explain this. I was an avowed evolutionist. I was a pre-med who had a major in biology, and I had a minor in chemistry, and I was absolutely indoctrinated into evolution. And then I heard a very erudite Christian engineer named Dr. Henry Morris, who wrote the Genesis Flood. This guy wrote over 100 textbooks and articles. He came to speak at the college I was in, and I thought, wow, here's an intelligent, rigorous scientist who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid. He doesn't believe in billions and billions of years. And then about eight weeks later, they had Duane Gish, a biochemist from UCLA Berkeley, not exactly a citadel of conservatism.

Not exactly BJU. Yeah, he wrote the book Evolution the Fossil Say No. I devoured both of those books, and I realized that not every rigorous scientist believes in billions of years. It's purely the way you look at the same evidence. So, all of that to say this. Ken Ham at Answers in Genesis has this beautiful poster, and it's got two castles facing each other. One castle is the castle of Satan and his flags out of the parapets and the turrets.

And on top of those flags are abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, fetal tissue experimentation, all sorts of those things. And the base of that castle is evolution. And across this chasm is another beautiful castle, and it has flags off the top of it, honesty and integrity. And its base is creation. And the cannons on the evil castle are facing the good castle, and the cannons on the good castle are firing at those flags, evolution, I mean, transgenderism and abortion, et cetera.

And the cannons of the evil castle are firing at the base, the foundation, the concrete at the bottom, which is creation. If you destroy Genesis 1 through 3, you destroy all the doctrines of personhood. And that's what's happened to America, and that's what happened to Christianity. Yeah, which is why in 1859, when Origin of the Species, which was a deeply racist book, by the way, if you even understand the full title of the book, 1859 delivers to a fallen world what they think is the silver bullet to kill God. So if we can kill God, we can kill all of God's word. We no longer have any rules.

There's no speed limit. I can do whatever I want. And the human condition, the sin nature, the depravity, Alan, is all over that. So that's why. Then Katie barred the door, because then everything's up for negotiation and redefinition, right? Or am I just sounding like a nut job? No, no, that's spot on, Steve. That's spot on.

One of the burdens that I have in this area is for people to be aware of what is happening, as Mark described it, in that war over the foundations. So we're sitting in a woke culture with what has become now a prevalent view of personhood. It is what is called the reductionist view. And that actually defines moral status of a person that is attributed to them based upon their capability for a moral life. Moral life is actually defined as a valuable life. And there are categories of what they consider to be that. And I just want to lay them out there.

So what is that what is that like? If I'm going to determine if this is a person, they have the capacity for a valuable life. And here's what that is defined as.

Here's the criteria, self-awareness, self-control, a sense of one's history and future, the capacity to relate to others and the ability to communicate. Now, those are the categories. I can come back and say you're actually not a person.

And that's the criterion we're working from. Well, does a fetus have that? Oh, no, no, no. So it'll become a person later.

Does somebody that has suffered a traumatic brain injury have that? No, no. But let me go a step further. If I look at you as a Christian and say, here's the social norm and you're a social misfit, you actually don't relate well, you don't play well with others.

And you know what? You actually are in a place where you're not actually communicating. We could actually determine whether or not you don't have a mental illness that makes you less than a person.

Right, less than a person. And then, Alan, slap a number on my wrist. Welcome back. It's Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary and Bob Jones University today with our good friend, Dr. Alan Benson, back in the house and as well as Dr. Marc Cetta, MD. And we're talking about personhood. We'll turn the corner and Marc open up the floor to you on the issue. We'll specifically apply this to something that's perhaps the greatest moral evil we've seen in a long time. It's akin to exactly what happened in Nazi Germany, which is the national and international and for the last 5,000 years, the practice of abortion.

And so utilizing your training and your experience as an MD as well. As a Christian, what do we do with that? That ultimate question that deals with this is when does life begin?

How do we unpack all that? Well, I will tell you, when the Lord took the earth and he shaped Adam in Genesis 1 26 to 28 and he shaped Adam out of the dirt and the Bible says that he breathed into his nostrils to go from non-life to life. I mean, we can assemble amino acids and proteins and carbohydrates and lipids.

We can even assemble all the proteins that were necessary for human life. But until there's a spark, you cannot, and no evolutionist can explain and no evolutionist can explain how you go from non-life to life. So when the Bible says that God breathed into Adam's nostrils, the breath of life, that's the Hebrew word nefesh.

And what it means is that he gave him a spark. He took non-life and made life out of it. And he became, the Bible says a living soul. Now later on, God takes one of Adam's ribs. Now a rib, I did an estimate, would contain about a trillion cells.

And every one of those cells, whether it's bone cells or cartilage cells or dense connective tissue cells or blood cells, every one of those cells was XY. So God had to do the first CRISPR transfer and take all those Y chromosomes out and insert another X chromosome to make a female. But beautifully about this is that it still had the nefesh from Adam. So then when Eve ovulated an egg and Adam's sperm met Eve's egg, that nefesh from Adam went into her egg and her egg met it with the same nefesh because she got it from Adam. And then every child born after that, every child, you, Steve, me, Alan, we actually have within us that spark that was actually given to Adam on day six.

And we all became a living soul at the moment we received that spark. God speaks to this because in Jeremiah 1 5 he tells Jeremiah, he says, before I formed thee in the belly, I called you forth to become a prophet unto the nations. And even more to the point in Psalm 51 5, David is lamenting his sin with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah. And David says this, in sin did my mother conceive conceive me?

Now, Jesse and his mother were married. What sin could David possibly be speaking about? He was speaking about receiving the sin nature from his ultimate father, Adam. And thus he became a living soul at the point at the moment of conception. Yeah, that's such a beautiful I've often over the years, Mark and Alan pondered, why? Why does the human body keep going anyway?

Who got the who pushed the rock over the ledge so that it has this inertia that at this point lasts for, on average, 78 to 82 years here in the United States? That's always been just amazing to be. But I've never heard and praise the Lord for you explain it. I've never heard it explain the way you just did.

So thanks for that. You know, in this discussion, it's really important because in a sense, we're seeing a shifting argument. At one point, it was we're against abortion because it's a life. It's a person. It's a human. Why is it a human? Because it has human parents.

Well, now we've kind of debunked that. We've moved on to then saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, you can't kill it. It's alive. It has life.

How do you know? Because look, this ultrasound, it's got a heartbeat. And now we've moved on to saying, well, now we actually it doesn't matter if it's alive and it doesn't matter if it's human. What matters is if it's a person. And now tell me how you're going to prove it's a person in the womb.

And we're saying it's descriptive. We can't tell you it's a person in the womb. Therefore, abortion is ethically OK.

Right. And that's why this discussion is so important. So, so, Mark, Dr. Chad, where would you then place this argument?

Dr. Chad, where would you then place if we're going to put a marker on a timeline somewhere, where would you say this whole contortion of personhood began? Well, with the destruction of biblical creationism in our schools and even in our churches, I'd never hear. I mean, the reason I'm so passionate about scientific creationism is because that's that's how I got saved when I realized that, listen, creationists and evolutionists look at the same evidence, but through different eyeglasses.

There was nobody there at the beginning. To be honest with you, it's the theory of creation and the theory of evolution. But both of them take a lot of faith. And I believe that evolution takes more faith than creation. But the the the so-called scientists, let me just say this. There's two kinds of science. There's methodological, reproducible science, which we can observe. And there's historical science that we can only conjecture or theorize about. But don't let you don't let them fool you by saying this is science. It's been scientifically proven. That's just a lie.

Or to claim that they themselves are science. Right. But I digress. Allah Fauci. Yeah, I call him Pope Fauci, by the way. That's my praise for him. And that's why again, and Alan, you talked about this earlier, that we have to make sure as followers of Christ that we're really strong and understanding personhood for our own faith, for our own theology, for our own understanding, and then understanding that out of this flows all the poison that is woke ism. Or am I overstating it?

Yeah, I don't I don't think you are. When we just look at history and we go back and we look at great periods of human atrocity and the one that stands out in everybody's mind is what happened with the Nazis and what happened with the Jews. But you go back through history and look at every period of human atrocity and you will find that someone with an authority called the personhood of the victims into question, which gave license for the atrocity.

We need to look at what's happening in our own culture and realize that we could be staring at some of the greatest atrocity in history. And it once again will be foisted upon us because of the definition of personhood. And a good a good evidence that something is woke is if you try to talk to them, they immediately disparage you with their little racist trans trans phobic, transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, et cetera, et cetera.

So you can tell it's woke by the one word response. They create a straw man, then they have permission to attack the straw man. And you've got to remember, when you get into that, as soon as you do that, the implication is thus sayeth the Lord. And now we're right back to suppressing the truth, replacing it with a lie. And that's why once you open this door to personhood and that's why people were so excited about Darwin's theory that they literally at that point, they cannot say no to anything. Because if you say no to anything, you're importing some kind of notion of a moral standard.

So when it goes from gay marriage to gender, gender transition, and now we're talking about they're not a pedophile, it's a minor attracted person. And isn't it interesting how Satan always ends up going back after kids, kill them in the womb, chop them up at 13 or 14, give them a double mastectomy, whatever the case may be. And that's why it's so important for us and for us to be full of the Holy Spirit and unafraid of the culture, because when they call us names, what they're really doing is just getting mad at God once again. Yeah, I love the way you started the program, Steve, and you said you referred to Pontius Pilate saying, what is truth? And Jesus Christ himself says, I am the way, the truth. If you want to know what's true, get your Bible, read your Bible.

Don't take what the world has to say. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's so powerful. We only have about a minute and a half left.

Mark, how does this show up? Is this a real challenge for your students that are going into the medical field? Are they really struggling with wokeism?

We'll have to do a whole other show on this, but just in general, let us know kind of the atmosphere there. Yeah, I mean, I have actually had a couple of students segue from premed to nursing, for example. They're discouraged. But I try to tell them that wherever there is crisis, there is opportunity.

And when there's a darkness, the small light shines even brighter. This is not a time to practice cowardice and timidity. This is a time to become Acts 1-8 Christians, not in a coercive or pugilistic way, but in a persuasive way by being informed, but not being... Listen, I have this quote. Are we careless participants in the current culture of death? And by our acquiescence, quietly condoning what we say we abhor? The point is we can no longer afford to say, Hey, you do your thing. We'll do our thing. They're never satisfied with that until you not only affirm, but you practice. That's right.

Yeah, it takes it to a whole new level. And that's why we're left here. I didn't get saved and then taken home to glory. God left me here.

He left me here as an ambassador and as salt and light to speak His truth, not to put another notch on my belt, but because I actually do love my neighbor as myself. So Alan and Mark, God bless you guys. Thank you so much, Mark. We'll definitely have you back on. Alan, you can come on anytime you want and you know that. There's so much I want to talk to you guys about. We'll definitely do it again, but God bless you and thank you for being here. Hold on right there for a second, guys. We'll pray together. This is Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show. God willing, I'll talk to you again real soon. And like my dad always used to say.