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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. According to an article by Patrick west and the Spectator, many young people find Jesus, well, annoying. West pointed to a survey of UK teens aged 14 to 17 that was entitled Troubling Jesus. This joint project of the Scripture Union and the Bible Society sought to understand how non Christian kids thought about Scripture. According to the study's authors, and I quote here, what they shared was sometimes deeply uncomfortable, unsettling interpretations we may be overly familiar with, and offering fresh perspectives on God and Jesus that can sound almost heretical at first, and not just at first. These students had the impressions that the God of the Bible was really violent and aggressive, that he practiced mansplaining and had an unequal power dynamic. God the Father came across to these young people as a bully. God the Son was, and I quote, arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated and male. The most telling claim was that Jesus had a God complex. According to west, the reaction is understandable. Young people raised in a world without authority figures who command respect and a society bereft of didactism are naturally going to regard the teachings in the Bible as hostile and aggressive. In a world where everyone's reduced to having their own truth, many will find the idea of Christianity simply incomprehensible. End quote. Well, I'd say that's an understatement. The dominance of the critical theory mood over the UK and many other Western nations both invented and normalized new moral absolutes. And a generation that's been fully catechized in these absolutes will then turn and judge everything else by them, especially anything that smacks of tradition or what they consider to be the oppressive past. But there's another factor to consider here, too. As west went on to say, over the years, the Church of England and nearly all Christian denominations have merely gone with the flow of society and even helped to hasten Christianity's descent into relativism and ignorance. In other words, the whole experiment to win the loss through multiple strategies of cultural relevance has failed. In fact, it has failed in two ways. First, too many churches and too many Christians just lost their own theology in the process of trying to remain relevant. Second, we largely failed to make disciples, which of course is the primary task that the Lord gave us to do in the first place. But it's also fascinating that so many of these young people thought Jesus had a God complex, that he acted like he was God. Of course, they meant it as an insult, but they're not wrong. Jesus did act like God. He talked as if every person's eternal destiny depended on him. Remember, he said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. He affirmed the formerly doubting Thomas when he called Jesus my Lord and my God. Jesus himself regularly used the phrase I am about himself, often in unusual ways, most notably as John 8 reported that he said before Abraham was I am. And his opponents immediately took this as blasphemy in reference to God's self disclosure to Moses at the burning bush. Christ also identified himself as just being a greater fulfillment of all the Old Testament events. Like Moses, he provided food for the people in the wilderness. He brought the law down from the mountain. He was the living water. Like Elijah and Elisha, he raised a mother's son from the dead. And he said and did these things as if he had the power and authority himself. Unlike the older prophets, Jesus didn't say, thus saith the Lord, he spoke with his own authority, saying, truly, truly, I say to you. And they knew what he was doing. After all, Christ was not killed because he was a nice guy or because he stood up for the poor. He was killed because the powers that be found him dangerous. He wasn't the Messiah they were looking for. They rejected him. John the Evangelist quoted Jesus as affirming, if the world hates you, it has hated me before it hated you. Alluding to Isaiah, the Apostle Peter wrote of Jesus as a stone of stumbling, a rock of offense. So ironically, even in all their ignorance, these UK teens recognized a truth of Scripture. Even more ironically, it's a truth of Scripture that the Church of England has too often downplayed and downright rejected that Jesus was indeed God. And it is better, I think, at the end of the day to be offended by Jesus than to try to remake him into something he was not. As C.S. lewis famously put it in Mere Christianity, you can shut Jesus up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with this patronizing nonsense about him being a great human teacher. He's not left that open to us. He never intended to. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast and to download or share this comment with others, go to breakpoint.org
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Join the Colson center from April 18th to the 25th as we participate in America Reads the Bible, a seven day, historic, continuous public reading of the entire Bible by over 400 men and women from across the country in our nation's capital. This event is designed to commemorate America's 250th birthday, inspiring others to hear God's Word during a pivotal cultural moment. You can join in person in Washington, D.C. or via livestream. To register, go to AmericaReadsTheBible.com online. That's AmericaReadsTheBible.COM online.