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- [00:01]
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Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. In this polarized age, one thing that all sides agree on is that the state of the Union is not good. The recent Colson center national conference, noted speaker, author and Wilberforce Award winner Os Guinness argued that the best way forward for us is to look backwards at what made the Republic what it became in the first place. Here's Os Guinness.
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So we have those who understand America from the perspective of the American Revolution, 1776, but large swaths of this country who understand America from the perspective of ideas coming down from the French Revolution, 1789, higher education and many other spheres. There are ideas abroad entirely opposed to the Republic. But then again, in more ordinary circles, you can see the ignorance of what the Republic is. Make America great again, some people say, restore the soul of America. President Biden said. Biden never said what the soul was. But have you heard many people who praise Maga in saying what made America great in the first place? Very few of them know. But how can you restore the Republic and make America great again, unless you know what it was built to be and established to be? It was truly with flaws, a freedom like no other. Yet today there are a few champions of it. At a time when the global menace is unbridled power. You take the shifting of the platelets as people talk about it, the shift from the weak gods, the tolerance and so on to. To the strong gods of blood and nationalism. You take the shift from the west to an increasing concentration on the world's greatest landmass, Eurasia, with the authoritarian Putin in the west and the totalitarian Xi Jinping in the East. Nietzsche, in the very last words that he ever wrote, says this. Do you want a name for my world? This world is the will to power and nothing besides. He was attempting what he called the revaluation of all values, overturning the Jewish and Christian critique of power and going back to the unbridled pagan view of power. And that's our world and the only counter to it, the biblical understanding. But the best, as the American Republic was set up to be. But who champions it today? I literally only know one. Of all the congressmen, I know a good many and many senators who actually speaks on it. Not many, to put it mildly. But the tragedy of all this is that the forgotten key should be one that we all know well, because it's biblical. In the 17th century, there's a rediscovery through the reformation of what they called the Hebrew Republic. And was the Hebrew Republic hierarchical, based on power? No. What is it based on? Covenant. Covenant. And that notion of covenantalism is what shaped so much of the rise of modern freedom. Now we need to see that Sinai, the covenant of Sinai, is truly a singularity. There are other covenants outside the Bible. The Hittite treatise, there are covenants elsewhere in the Bible, like the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham. They're different. But the Sinai covenant has distinctive uniqueness. God is a partner to the covenant. It is with the whole of the people, not just between leaders. And it covers the whole of life. And that notion, as the reformers wrestle with the notion of covenantalism, came down in very practical ways to shape their understanding of politics. The consent of the government, where did that come from? Exodus. When the Lord proposes his covenant, he doesn't impose it, he proposes it. And three times it says in Exodus all that the Lord says, we will do, what Michael Walzer of Princeton calls an almost democracy, the consent of the governed mentioned in your own Declaration of Independence. But it goes back to Exodus. And the covenant, of course, is a morally binding pledge. It's not like a legal contract, narrow. No, no, it's a morally binding pledge. What centuries later, Martin Luther King would have called a promissory note. In terms of the Constitution and the Declaration, it needed to be cashed in. But it was a promise made and a promise to be kept.
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That was OS Guinness. For access to the recordings of the entire Colson center national conference, including a complimentary video of the incredible keynote presentation from chloe Cole, visit colsoncenter.org July that's colsoncenter.org July for the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with Breakpoint.
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The 8th Annual Great Lakes Symposium is happening August 6, 2026 in Bay Harbor, Michigan. This year we'll explore what it means to stay human in the age of AI. As AI continues to advance, it presents a temptation to surrender our minds, creativity, relationships and work on the altar of efficienc. But to do so is to surrender our very humanity. John Stonestreet will be joined by Abdu Murray, Gretchen Huizenga and John Lennox to help us explore how Christians can live out our God given humanity in an increasingly AI driven world. This event is free, but space is limited. Sign up today@greatlakesymposium.org that's greatlakesymposium.org.