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What does it mean to educate? What does it mean to be human? What do parents and teachers need to give the next generation a solid foundation for life? Join us as we consider these questions and more through a biblical lens with John Stonestreet, host of Breakpoint and president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Stay to the end to hear some practical advice for parents and teachers on equipping our children to face an ever-changing, post-Christian culture!
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again. Welcome. You've joined us for Veritas Vox, another episode, and this is Veritas Vox, The Voice of classical Christian Education. Today we have with us John Stonestreet, probably known to many of you as the president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and the host of Breakpoint – focused on worldview, apologetics, and cultural issues. Does that describe what you do pretty well, John?
John Stonestreet:
Oh, pretty much yeah. I mean, I think that's good. And, we had a whole internal debate about whether the best nomenclature was biblical worldview or Christian worldview. And that choice of language probably means more to us than it does to anyone else. But yeah, you're in the ballpark. Good enough.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, as it relates to those terms, my vote is for about 98% synonym.
John Stonestreet:
Well, that's right. I mean, unfortunately, Christian doesn't always mean biblical, but hey, man, biblical doesn't always mean biblical these days, either.
Marlin Detweiler:
And biblical doesn't always mean Christian.
John Stonestreet:
That's right.
Marlin Detweiler:
Lots of problems if you want to pick at it. But I think that it's understood. But, we like to start with, learning about, who you are, a little bit of background family, education, career, path and that sort of thing.
John Stonestreet:
Yeah. Sarah and I've been married for over 20 years. Our oldest is a freshman in college. We have four children, Abigail, Anna and Allie were our three girls. And then we had an eight year gap and a little boy. So, Abigail, Anna, Allie and Hunter. So we have both a college freshman and a first grader. We say if you're going to have a surprise little boy near when you're too old to do it, then have some teenage girls in the house. That is a pretty, pretty amazing experience.
They were, homeschooled. We chose homeschooling. And really, what's happened in Colorado is as as politically, left as this state has become on social issues, some work was done to really kind of shore up educational freedom. And there were a lot of educational options that were invented and imagined here. I've said this before, and I just think that, right now we have, kind of a golden age of educational innovation, some good, some bad, some really good. And so we just had a lot of options. So we went with a lot of hybrid options, growing up, but definitely a classical approach for us.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, wonderful!
John Stonestreet:
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, listen, I think it aligns best and my view with the Christian, worldview in the sense of, let's get the categories down, let's get reality down. Let's get the unification of, the physical world and the spiritual. In fact, it’s even a misnomer to say the physical world or spiritual world.
What is it if we're not talking about the same world? I always say listen, react. The world's a lot more like Narnia than it is like anything that, Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins has imagined. And also anything that kind of idealistic Gnostic views imagined as well. And, so, yeah, I just think that the that approach has been good for us.
It's certainly been good for our kids. I mean, look, our oldest is a freshman in college or the evaluation is still to be done, but so far, so good.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I remember when my oldest was a freshman in college, but it's a distant memory now.
John Stonestreet:
I have been traveling around the homeschool world. I was asked to speak at a lot of homeschool conferences, and I was always really hesitant. I still am to do things like marriage. Here's how to do marriage or here's how to raise your children, sort of events. I do think I've got something to offer in terms of what the Bible, says about marriage, the role that marriage plays in a society, the long term impact that is going to, manifest in society if we try to redefine or, ostracize marriage as, as the norm.
I think I also can talk about the cultural forces in particular that are, coming after our children. But, man, I'm no expert. I'm in the middle of this with everyone else.
Marlin Detweiler:
We're going to get into some of that in what you do, professionally. Now, what was your education? Where did you go to school?
John Stonestreet:
I grew up in Northern Virginia, k to 12, evangelical Christian day school, went to, my freshman year. Made decisions of where to go to college based on who would let me play basketball there. I know that wasn't a very academic choice, but I wasn’t a very thoughtful kid at the time.
Marlin Detweiler:
We have those things in common, I had sports driving my college solution too. I was a golfer, though. I was too short and too slow for basketball.
John Stonestreet:
I was too, but I found a place that would still let me play., I transferred to a college in East Tennessee and evangelical school, kind of in the Dallas seminary tradition and had a couple really important mentors that really sparked my imagination in terms of, Christianity being thoughtful and growing up, Christianity was moral, Christianity was passionate.
You did things for the Lord. But the idea of all of life and all of self, in allegiance and loyalty to Christ, that was, that that was something that God used, some, some individuals at that college to really spark in me. And then my journey continued from there..
Marlin Detweiler:
That really gives depth to the term worldview, to think of it that way.
John Stonestreet:
The college was the first college that I know of to have a required worldview class other than Calvin, probably, which kind of got it from the Dutch Reformed folks. This was coming out of a different tradition of worldview thought kind of went either the route of James Orr, the Scottish theologian and pastor or Abraham Kuyper, and they weren't that far apart.
But you could tell the difference between an Orr and Kuyper. And of course, Chuck Colson, who I would later work with and meet and serve under and who became a hero mentor as well, was definitely in that Kuyper route. My journey was through the oral route, but it was just an awakening.
I mean I had a required course called Biblical Worldview. I was just, by the way, two weeks ago with, the guy who taught that.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, isn't that fun to regroup with people that shaped you? I love it.
John Stonestreet:
I kept two sets of notes in that class. I had a set of notes that I knew I needed to pass the test. I also had a set of notes of things that he said, ideas, new things that I never wanted to forget because this was just an awakening happening in that class.
Anyway, I ended up starting at Reformed Theological Seminary, and finished at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Marlin Detweiler:
Which campus did you go to RTS?
John Stonestreet:
Yeah, the answer is yes, because the reason RTS was high on the list. I was moving in a reformed direction theologically. And also I was already working, at the same college where I'd graduated from in various roles. And so the flexibility there it's had for J term and summer term classes, mostly Charlotte, Charlotte and Orlando, were the two places.
And I would go and do kind of three weeks in a row and knock out 10 or 12 hours in the summer. But, anyway, landed up at Trinity to finish up and, so my area of study was really there was a good bit of theology and church history.
Church history became something that I became super fascinated with. But it was the kind of cultural anthropology, sociology and trying to think about those things and, strong theological categories and biblical categories just given the collision at particularly on what it means to be human, I think I came to really believe that that question, what it means to be human, is the central crisis point of our culture.
And of course, it's the thing that Christianity has the best answer to on the market. So there's wonderful opportunity there. But we're lost on what it means to be human. I mean, it's obvious. When I was thinking about it, we were just talking about abortion and maybe, where we were going to go with bioethics and education.
And some people had really written on what does it mean to educate as if kids are just brains or what does it mean to educate as if kids are just cogs in a machine? And of course, the classical approach really pushed back against that. Rightly so. Yeah. And of course, now we expanded into every area where we have government enforcement of Gnosticism.
We have government enforcement of thinking wrongly about the human person, not just in small ways, but in profound ways. I'm not just talking about calling right, wrong and wrong right. That would be bad enough if we were just morally confused. We're ontologically confused. We don't know what it means to be human or the nature of reality itself, which is why we gotta get these categories down with our kids.
Marlin Detweiler:
I couldn't agree more. Would you accept the summary description of who you are and what you do as a cultural apologist?
John Stonestreet:
I wouldn't hate that. I mean, I look at the Colson Center because of the life and work of Chuck Colson. And look, I live in Colorado Springs. There's a lot of organizations here who are second generation, third generation, and they really apologize. They spent a lot of time trying to explain away what their founders did or decisions they made, or it's a new day here or something.
I don't do that at all. I think Chuck Colson was one of the most profound and important leaders, and where he put us in a trajectory. And, of course, we were birthed as part of prison fellowship. Right. And that's what one of the interesting things Chuck believed in heart, mind and hands. He believed that you had to have right thinking and right doing. He was a Wilberforce guy, right? I remember Wilberforce.
Marlin Detweiler:
I think that's a good parallel to draw.
John Stonestreet:
Well, he wanted that and he emulated that. We still, by the way, award the William Wilberforce Award once a year at our national conference. And, it's always has to be someone who's both thought and did. Doesn't mean they can't be an academic. For example, a professor Robbie George or something, but that those ideas have kind of grown feet and walked out into the real world.
But that's Wilberforce, right? He Wilberforce famously said God gave him two great aims, the, abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. And of course, what he meant was the restoration of virtue characters, what he meant by manners. Not like table manners. Like get your elbow off the table.
Marlin Detweiler:
I want to say something about table manners, because sometimes a bad rap in that regard. First we have done in the context of the schools that we've started, we've done some significant formal teaching about protocol and manners, and it's not because we're embarrassed by the people, and we want to make sure that they behave better. It's because I have come to understand that manners are the way that we love our neighbor, by making them feel comfortable in our presence.
John Stonestreet:
I think that's absolutely right. And I think also the teaching of that stuff in that context, if it's framed, if it's explained, is that process of habituation. And of course, that's something that Aristotle rightly understood about the human condition. I don't think he got it completely right. I think Augustine's “We Are What We Love” is better than “We are what we habitually do.”
But there's an inherent connection between love and habitually do. And you do not love your neighbor if you don't have habitually practice loving your neighbor. This is my first interaction, by the way. Sorry, my first employment when I first came on board and Chuck was still alive. He died in 2012. And I have been invited into a handful of things with him and, his first things, his first big project that I was, traveling around speaking with him on.
And so on was called Doing the Right Thing. It was a curriculum on virtue and virtue formation. It was more like college level, but that idea of virtue formation became a primary thing. Because you can't just talk about what the right thing is and expect then people particularly and this is the work we do in a cultural moment where all the water is flowing the opposite direction, suddenly expect them to swim and to do it in the right way, that habituation is, is really, really important. That's what we mean, I think. I mean, at least holistic education has to include that.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. I couldn't agree more. You touch on a lot of different things. I looked at, kind of the list of things, topics that you've addressed. We're focused, substantially on education here. Tell us about your interests and initiatives in education, especially in the K-12 world that we focus on.
John Stonestreet:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we do talk about everything that and part of that comes from that Kuyperian. Remember that wonderful line from Abraham Kuyper? There's not a single square inch in which Christ isn’t Lord all the time. And here's what Chuck used to do. He would say, and that means the Christian's job is to go everywhere and say his.
And so when we go and talk about these random things, which we do on Breakpoint. Certainly all the sexual issues, I'm so tired of talking about sex. I could scream, honestly. But, you know, you don't always get to choose because of the cultural moment. But we always want to talk about these things theologically.
We want to talk about these things within the framework of what's true about the world. What's true about the human person and can mobilize Christians in their calling. So that's how we think about it at the Colson Center. The true story of the world, the true identity of people as made in the image of God. And then the how now shall we live question which, of course, began with Schaefer and Chuck edited that adverb there and I think gave some clarity to it.
When it comes to education, man, I'm all in now part of that has to do with my background, having done a lot with Christian schools, K-12 Christian schools and ACSI schools and so on. And of course, predating really the resurgence in classical education and the explosion, which we, of course, have taken part in as a, as a family.
And then, also, teaching at an evangelical college for years being involved in that space. So education is just kind of part of my DNA. I also, before working at the Colson Center, worked at Summit Ministries, which of course is trying to help prepare Christian kids for the challenges they're going to face in college on the apologetics and cultural level.
But look, what has heightened all of that is the last three years. Well, no, wait 4 or 5 really four years. I tell Christian schools, “You all should all write a thank you note to the Loudoun County School Board for the marketing efforts that they gave on your behalf.”
We have never been, in my lifetime. In a moment where the state run system is so vulnerable. Now, look, you can see it because they're doubling down. You could see it because they're starting to say the quiet thing out loud. Like your kids belong to us and not to you. I mean, you have leaders saying that. And what that means is things are shaky.
Now, look, it's not shaky as I want it to be. And if we're going to continue to chop away, we're going to have to swing hard, and we're gonna have to sharpen our axe.
Marlin Detweiler:
It does seem like it. I have a critical thought here. I just want to throw into this, and it may be too much of a side road for the time we've got. But the problem with that is when we get people at Veritas in our online school or in a school that we provide curriculum for, the bricks and mortar school somewhere all over the country.
Marlin Detweiler:
If they're running from something, they're not as good a person for what we're about as if they're running to something.
John Stonestreet:
Yeah, well, I don't disagree with that. And certainly you would have that experience in there. My approach is I want a thousand flowers to bloom, we have chosen the path we have chosen because we spent a lot of time thinking about it. We chose differently in some respects than the way both my wife and I were raised, but not holistically.
Right? I mean, this in a sense, it's a tweak. It's an important tweak. And probably more than a tweak that's understood how different it is. But the vision of the human person, seeing education not as transactional, but as the process of creating someone to love what's true and what's good to learn for the rest of their life.
Yeah. I think you're seeing more and more in the world of Christian education, the necessity to articulate what we're for, not just what we're against.
Marlin Detweiler:
And that given the opportunity that is the message. All I'm saying is the starting point is better if they're not running from if they're running to.
John Stonestreet:
And that underscores the sort of work we want to do, particularly with teachers. So, and our work at the Colson Center with education is not directed completely at classical schools, although we have, some of our, our big, school partners, are classical schools. I'll be down at one of them, a well-known school in the fall.
Marlin Detweiler:
Feel free to name it.
John Stonestreet:
Yeah. Have to remember it.
Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. No problem.
John Stonestreet:
All right. I mean, it's one that I've been at, it's kind of one of the ones I hear about is doing wonderful things. I'd have to dig it up in my calendar here.
Marlin Detweiler:
No, don't worry about it.
John Stonestreet:
Trinity Christian, in Texas.
Marlin Detweiler:
Very good.
John Stonestreet:
So, anyway, what we really focus on is two things. Number one is the cultural challenges. And number two is we aim that at teachers. So let me walk through that one at a time. First of all, the cultural challenges and my work with Summit Ministries as classical education was growing and building and the wider world of Christian education was starting to get more focused.
And what are we trying to do? Not just what are we trying to protect our kids from? One of the things that emerged that really served classical schools was that how do you take these, timeless truths and apply them to the contemporary challenges? Now, part of that had to do with the curricular parts of things, right?
Like there was a massive, robust, brilliant, homeschool curriculum that was kind of a classical journey through Western Civ. I thought it was great. and robust. I know, way more than I had ever learned, certainly growing up. But we had some parents come and say, that's great. They know all of what the classical thinkers wrote. They know how to distinguish between Aristotle and Plato on these things, but they're not real sure how to apply that to today.
And that's not a problem with the curriculum. The curriculum did what the curriculum can do. And that explains kind of the second part of it. Which is the focus on educators themselves.
Now, again, this is something I'm saying about the broader world of Christian education. There's a lot of groups out there putting out really good curriculum in the hands of unformed teachers is still a bad class. And ironically, kind of a bad curriculum if it's in the hands of a well-formed teacher, it's still going to be pretty good.
So the secret sauce, I mean, it's like Chick-fil-A, right? Chick-fil-A has this whole system where they invest in people, not in product, although they keep the product consistent. This is, I think, what an educational world that was running away from the public system didn't always kind of get right, which is teacher formation, teacher formation.
Of course, that's complicated by, I think, what is a very real crisis in Christian higher education. And certainly a crisis in higher education in general. So if you're going to hire a teacher from, a lot of places, they're not going to be well formed and integrate with an integrative Christian worldview that they can bring to bear, on the past, much less on the present.
And don't get us started on the future, but that's what a Christian worldview does. It holds those, those things together. And so our efforts with what we call Colson educators, it's a free platform for educators. And it's made up of different things. It's an explanation of Christian worldview by walking through those three facets that I talked about earlier.
Truth, identity, calling, story of the world, the truth about the human person and how natural we live, and also dealing with some really important cultural issues from the mental health crisis, particularly with teenagers and social media, certainly to all the various issues having to do with sexuality, making truth claims and arguing for those truth claims. And what does that look like? So the point there is to provide robust, information resources for schools to use with their educators together to get them all on the same page, to get them moving in the same direction, to serve the direction, in which a school is moving. And, we've seen about 30,000 educators, go through that program.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful.
John Stonestreet:
It is because it's the secret sauce. I mean, that is like the gift that keeps on giving. When you go after a high school or you get a high school or you go after an important mentor in that high school, there's life and you're getting a lot more.
Marlin Detweiler:
And, we have said we can have the best curriculum. We can have the best pedagogy, classical Christian education, but we still have an address. The most important thing in education. It's so easy to convince people that that's true. And that is the teacher is the most important part of education. And the reason it's so easy to demonstrate is because all I have to ask is, what curriculum do you remember that you grew up using?
What was the educational philosophy that was applied to you? And who are the teachers you remember? You remember the teachers. You don't remember either of the other two.
John Stonestreet:
You don't. That's exactly right. And in fact, you remember the teachers more than anything else. If you remember a class, you remember how bad it was, not how good it was. Right? But you remember a teacher. Yeah. and and in a different way. That's certainly the case in my life in the unit. You just kind of go through.
And it's these incredible individuals who invested in my life in and out of the classroom, too. And of course, that's that whole, life, sort of approach that parents really have to bring.That's the thing that we're doing in our other resources, for example, Breakpoint daily commentaries, we don't spend a lot of real estate in what is a five-day-a-week, five-minute commentary on the culture, on this idea of education, but also on the idea of parental rights, because we have a culture across the board that is prioritizing adult happiness over the rights and well-being of children and education that takes the form of outsourcing. And then that becomes a norm.
And so I was, I forget what I was just in this conversation, the other day, maybe I was speaking somewhere. I can't remember what the context was, but just kind of emphasizing, listen, your kids do not belong to the state. I mean, it's kind of like, gentlemen, this is a football. You remember that line, Vince Lombardi?
Marlin Detweiler:
He does it all the time. Vince Lombardi this is a football. And John Wooden boys we're going learn how to tie shoes. Yeah.
John Stonestreet:
It's so true. But that's one of the basics that parents have missed. And part of it is it's like the fish that don't know they're wet syndrome. This is the power of culture. That's an unbelievable statement that the kids belong to the state, in other contexts. It has become I mean, it was an unbelievable statement in the American context 100 years ago.
So the reason it's so believable and so widely assumed, I remember, this is a line often credited to C.S. Lewis, although I haven't been able to find where he said it, but it sounds so much like him. I'm going to think it's him.
The most dangerous ideas in a society aren't the ones argued, but the ones that are assumed and cultures made up of these crashing waves. That's the issues we all know about. But there's also the undercurrents that you don't see. And the undercurrents are these assumed ideas. And that's one of them. When you separate sex, marriage, and babies as a package deal, and you isolate parents from children and you elevate, sexuality to rights and happiness over and above other rights and happiness, particularly outside relationships, the most important ones with your kids. Then it becomes normal to think that, yeah, I'm just kind of, you know. It's to shirk that responsibility because it serves adult happiness, which we're told to pursue in every way possible. So we just got it all upside down, not just the difference between right and wrong, but we're not seeing reality for what it is.
And that's why we have to constantly find ways to say, gentlemen, this is a football, gentlemen, this is a football.
Or, there's a guy. By the way, if we're talking about lines, you can use this one. It is an old guy in my church in Tennessee. He would say something like.”Hey, man, it ain't rocket surgery”, you know? So this is it ain't rocket surgery, but it is for a lot of people, because of the shaping of our cultural moment.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. You have made some real observations. Do you have a couple of points of practical advice to offer parents, given the field in which you're playing the game?
John Stonestreet:
Yeah. Well, yeah. Look, I mean, the most obvious one, and it's, it's, and it's becoming more obvious, thank the Lord where we even had congressional hearings about this over the past year for the first time. And that's a very big difference from just several years ago where these sorts of things were intolerable.
But we're seeing the consequences of this. Look, it's this get your kids off smartphones. I mean, I know, I grew up in an environment where sometimes, morality was measured not by the heart, but by the length of a skirt or the length of hair or whether or not you went to the movies and so on.
I'm so, like rabidly, intentional about not confusing what the reformed theologians have called structure and direction. Right? That the structure was created good. And it's the direction that's the problem. But there are structurally evil things that humans can put into the world or things that are evil up into a point until people have reached some level of maturity and maybe not even then.
And every single indication is that social media through smartphones, is an intravenous line of direct poison into our students' hearts and minds.
I told Christian school heads this. I say, “Look, if there was a creepy old guy walking around the campus whispering all bad stuff into the ears of your junior high girls, would you intervene?”
And they were like, “Of course.” like, okay, that's TikTok, except it's a whole bunch of creepy old men that are part of the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, it mobilized to a whole bunch of other creepy men who are living in the basements at their mom's house, but are just doing awful, awful, awful, awful things. Stop it.
It's like that old Bob Newhart skit. It's like, I don't know what's causing the problem. Stop it. Just stop it. I love that we have so many shared references here. Stop it on smartphones. You just got it. You just got it. This is the Proverbs definition of folly. Just how sin makes you foolish.
And it is foolish to give kids unfettered access to the internet, particularly on these social media platforms.
Marlin Detweiler:
The differences in what we know and what we believe about the source, we think of it as an innocuous, independent source. And we see the creepy guy walking around campus. We know that he's not –
John Stonestreet:
Yeah. That's right.
Marlin Detweiler:
And they don't look the same. And we haven't made the connection.
John Stonestreet:
Yeah. And look, I know because I know this is hard for, for most people this would be putting the cat back in the back in the bag. Now if you're ahead of the game, good news. Stand strong, agree together. You can get all the data you want if you follow Breakpoint or all the sources on, kind of how bad this is.
I mean, good heavens, like, we all started wearing seatbelts for less of a risk. And that's a good idea. I'm not against seatbelts.
Marlin Detweiler:
It's an argument for the lesser of the greater though, I get it.
John Stonestreet:
Right, that's it. What else practical that I would say. I think this is a non-negotiable right now, is that we need to teach the Bible as a coherent narrative and be very clear on creation. I've got a couple things coming out this, this next week, where we're talking about a really helpful new book from a guy named Edward Klink called The Beginning and End of All Things.
And so we're offering that at the Colson Center, you can find out more, or you can just look up that book. What I really like about the beginning and end of all things, it's a very clear articulation of the connection between Christianity and redemption. So we talk about the truth about the world and those classic four chapters, creation, fall, redemption, restoration.
Redemption and restoration are re-words. Re means again, all the words for salvation and the scope and the impact of salvation on individuals and the creation are re-words. Renew, restore. Redeem, resurrect. Repent, reconcile. So we're always being pointed by Paul and the New Testament writers back somewhere. Think about Matthew 19. Jesus is asked about divorce.
He's specifically asked about divorce in the Mosaic Law by teachers of the Mosaic Law. And Jesus says, well, Moses did this, but what's really important is what was true from the beginning. He takes them back to creation to talk about what God really intended for marriage. We don't. We have spent about 150 years, and these are the commentaries that are coming out in the next week, talking about creation and evolution, about how God created.
Now, listen, this was important. There was a real war happening on ideas. Nothing cemented secularism into the Western imagination more than Darwin. Right? I mean, so you gotta deal with that stuff.
What we maybe lost track of in the midst of that. And part of that had to do with this kind of, what Philip Yancey once called the moral McNugget approach of reading the Bible, where you kind of break it apart for little bits and pieces that you can apply to your life, is the fact that God created the world and the difference that makes.
The idea of creation, and all that's implied in Genesis one and two, especially about the human person. So let's fast forward to today and I bet can go to most churches and say, hey, everybody, fill in the blank. Humans are made in the… and everyone says together, “image of God.” That's great. Then you say, well, what's that mean?
What's the image of God? How does the Bible talk about the image of God? Where does the Bible talk about the image of God? What are the implications if we're made in God's image or if we're animals with a conscience or computers made of flesh? What difference has the image of God made in human history? By the way, there's been no more consequential idea in human history than that one.
Friedrich Nietzsche said that, other than obviously the fact that God created the world and still cares about it. The image of God has become a matter of Christian trivia, but it is where it is one of the most consequential ideas in human history. It is crucial for understanding this cultural moment. And it is a critical aspect of the biblical narrative. So to miss the image of God is to miss the real world. And where do you find that? Where do you start? Where it begins. And so I just think that we have lacked a creation theology.
Just this week in Christianity Today, there's an article about this. Unfortunately, the article then looks to theologians who are so deeply influenced by kind of Protestant liberalism that the context of anthropology has to do with things like climate change and creation care.
We haven't even got back to the really basics and fundamentals of what it means to be made in the image of God. We need, of course, of course. John Paul the second gave the Catholic Church the theology of the body. And I'm not Roman Catholic for all kinds of theological reasons. but we need something like that, and there's not enough and it certainly hasn't crept down.
I mean, one could argue, has it crept down? And, among the laity and the Roman Catholic Church as well, but it certainly hasn't shaped us. And there's no way to not be deceived going into the next 30, 40, 50, 60 years. If you aren't solid on what it means to be human, so do Creational theology folks.
Marlin Detweiler:
True to the mission of the Colson Center and Breakpoint. You have answered the question so clearly and so directly and provided some real, tangible considerations for parents. Thank you. I hate to stop now, but we're out of time. In fact, we're over time. But that's okay.
John Stonestreet:
I have that condition.
Marlin Detweiler:
We have had John Stonestreet: from the Colson Center and Breakpoint with us. Thank you again for joining us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education.
