Breakpoint (2026)

29/05/2026

The Centrality of the Trinity

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a day set aside in the western Church calendar to consider the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity. Any pastor or preacher tackling the topic is trembling, or at last should be. As one of my theology professors once noted, it’s basically impossible to explain the Trinity without, at some point, sliding into heresy.

But we must talk about it because it is at the top of the defining traits of orthodox Christianity. Perhaps more than any other doctrine, the Trinitarian understanding of God sets Christianity apart from other monotheistic faiths. It’s a difficult doctrine to understand, let alone explain to nonbelievers. As the great Augustine of Hippo confessed:

“Which of us understands the Almighty Trinity? And yet which speaks not of It, if indeed it be It? Rare is that soul which, while it speaks of It, knows what it speaks of.”

One way to talk about the Trinity is to clarify what it is not, and, to that end, the YouTube channel Lutheran Satire has produced the very funny video, “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies.” It's a way to own the struggle, rather than treat what God has revealed to us about Himself as irrelevant.

British theologian NT Wright has described his struggle with the Trinity, and why the ancient Celtic Church was so fascinated by it. Though the Celts do like things in threes, more importantly, these early Christians recognized that the Trinity wasn’t an optional doctrine to the Christian faith.

In his 2025 book, Spiritual and Religious, Wright explained:

“When I was younger, I could never understand why St. Patrick needed to use a shamrock to evangelize the Irish. I had never heard an evangelistic sermon which expounded the doctrine of the Trinity, and I couldn’t see why one would want to try. It makes a lot more sense to me now. Patrick could not assume, and we cannot today assume, that people know what Christians mean when we say ‘God.’”

Wright then observed that for many people, “God” is a product of their cultural and individual imaginations, not the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible. Simply put, Christianity is Trinitarian. If it is not Trinitarian, it is not Christian.

The doctrine of the Trinity describes God as independent and personal in a way other monotheistic faiths cannot. The gods portrayed in Islam or Deism cannot be fully personal on their own. Such a god would be more of an “it” than a “He.” Though a person away from others is still a person, what is a person when there are no such things as other persons? A god like that would be more of a “thing” or a “force” than a person. Even more, such a solitary god would need to create a world and other persons in order to be personal. A god who needs his creation is dependent, not independent.

According to Scripture, God is a Tri-Unity, one God eternally existing in three Persons. As such, He needs no one. Beyond time, Father, Son, and Spirit has had full personal fellowship within Himself. He did not need to create the world. This also adds real substance to the biblical claim that God is love. The eternal, loving fellowship within the Trinity ground love in His eternal being, and not just merely something He decided to do after creating other things and persons. He exists fully independent of His creation and loves because He wants to, not because He needs to.

The Trinity also tells us something about what it means to be human. After all, we are made in the image of not just any God. We bear the image of the God Who exists, Who is Trinity. Thus, our lives as persons in relationships with other persons isn’t an accident, a quirk of evolution or a naturalistic survival mechanism. If God is Trinity, He doesn’t merely do relationships, He is a relationship. And we are relational as well. This has incredible implications for everything from the epidemic of loneliness to AI companions to the breakdown of the family.

It matters that God is not a thing, a force, or an energy. It matters that He exists eternally, one Being, three Persons. Who we are, including our roles as mothers and fathers, grandparents and grandkids, and friends reflects and expresses the loving, personal nature of the Triune God.

28/05/2026

Pesky Facts

Unlike a lot of his contemporaries who thought that moving past God would be an exercise in scientific and moral progress, nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was willing to push the implications as far as they could go. Then came French philosopher Michel Foucault, the most widely cited source in all of academia. A student and an interpreter of Nietzsche, Foucault went even further in his imaginations about a world without God, without moral absolutes, and without fixed human identity. And in the living out of what he believed, Foucault basically was unparalleled.

Foucault epitomized and encouraged the chaos of postmodernism. In his writings, many of which are thoroughly (and intentionally) unreadable, he pushed the idea that education should be used as a tool of societal control and not just a means of learning. As he put it, “Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”

This was an inevitable application to education of the idea that reality is not fixed but constructed. The world, Foucault believed, is what we make of it. Truth doesn’t matter; only self-referential ideologies.

The consequences of Foucault’s ideas and influence can be clearly seen in a recent competition of news stories. On one hand, there’s the recent exhaustive report describing what happened on October 7, 2023. The full revelations about Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel includes details so horrific, I will not share them here. Not only were the slaughter and torture beyond what one would expect to be humanly possible, it was planned that way all along.

As a CNN article about the report noted, the goal for Hamas wasn’t resistance or liberation of Palestine. It was “to maximize pain and suffering.” According to one of the report’s authors, “The most important finding is the fact that the sexual violence on October 7 and against hostages in captivity has been a calculated strategy by Hamas.”

Just before the report released, the New York Times published an op-ed by Nicholas Kristoff. In it, he claimed the Israelis were practicing sexual torture on their enemies. In contrast to the meticulous research of the report about Hamas, even people in his own newsroom expressed doubts about his claims, his sources, and the timing of it all. Not to mention, the most dramatic of his accusations are anatomically impossible.

Those who find Kristoff believable will likely discount the details of Hamas’ atrocities contained in the report. While Kristoff’s sources were anonymous, the report’s sources were victims and the live-feed videos shared by Hamas on social media. However, trending narratives often supplant facts. In fact, they become “facts” for people already convinced of how the narrative should go. In a postmodern era, people are more willing to believe in the unbelievable because, as the academic disciples of Nietzsche and Foucault have been taught, there is no truth. There’s only power.

Of course, there’s more blame to go around, but we wouldn’t be here without Foucault. In a backwards kind of way, he was right. Once we strip God or any sense of transcendence from life, everything is up for grabs. Eternal concepts such as truth, justice, and morality are without meaning. They are only tools to be wielded in service of power.

Ben Shapiro famously says that “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” The mark of a world shaped by postmodern ideas is that feelings don’t care about pesky things like facts. Truth is a victim of these bad ideas, and so are the people who count on the truth to know what is good and what is real.

27/05/2026

Should Have Been Aborted

Ryan Bomberger is an amazing speaker with an amazing story that is now the subject of a new book and documentary. To tell more about it, here’s Ryan:

“You should have been aborted!” The Harvard student yelled this in my face while I was visiting the campus for a forum on abortion in the black community. It wasn’t the first time someone had said this to me, and it wouldn’t be the last.

I’ve been told this so many times throughout my life, I’ve lost count. It’s why my newly released autobiographical book and documentary are entitled Should Have Been Aborted. I am the 1% used 100% of the time to justify abortion. Even though my birth mom was a victim of the horrific violence of r**e, I’m forever grateful she didn’t make me a victim of the violence of abortion.

That student’s cold and callous remarks were out of desperation. The pro-abortion side at that event was unprepared and unhinged. Interestingly, I had convinced myself that I was unworthy of speaking at an Ivy League school prior to the event. I thought students would challenge me with questions complete with citations. There were no citations, just incessant interruptions. The professor who was slated to informally debate me had an arrogance about her as well that was deeply troubling. Despite agreeing to the debate, she literally knew nothing about the premise of it: abortion’s devastating impact in the black community.

Harvard’s hostility to the truth is a common one I experience not only in secular university events but in Christian colleges as well. Too many Christian students have been propagandized into embracing a social gospel instead of the Gospel. Too many Bible-evading churches do the same. We have a crisis, not of White fragility, but of worldview fragility. We live in a culture that pretends, since Roe, an injustice that has caused the deaths of over 65 million lives created in God’s image is merely a “political issue” that we can biblically have different opinions on.

No, we can’t.

The fact that I’m alive isn’t something “political.” It’s something spiritual, supernatural, and deeply moral. Because of a courageous birth mom, I’m still here. Because of two incredible parents who adopted and loved me despite how I came to be, I’m living out my purpose. Because of an amazing wife who adores me and vice versa, we are raising four children (both biological and adopted) to love Jesus and those He created. Because of God, I’m able to tell my story of how He enabled triumph to rise from tragedy.

The next time Satan tries to convince you that you’re not worthy of your calling, rebuke him. Don’t let him derail you from the direction and destiny God has intended for you.

I’m the tangible example of what so many people, in the abstract, can so easily dismiss. Lives like mine are the ones so quickly discarded by a society that claims to protect the marginalized. Yet here I am fighting for the most marginalized amongst the marginalized . . . because that was once me.

After years of pro-life, pro-family advocacy and speaking at over 1,000 events from coast to coast, including college debates, pregnancy center galas, conferences, capitol hill briefings and emceeing historic Supreme Court rallies, I finally have my God-sized story written. People ask me all the time how my parents raised thirteen children, ten of whom were adopted. Many want to know what it was like growing up in a diverse family of many colors. And others want to know what it’s like to fight for Truth in a culture that hates it.

Ever since my wife and I created The Radiance Foundation, we’ve been battling giants. I feel compelled to say the things that some Christians balk at because they don’t feel they’re the right color or the right gender to speak certain truths. My childhood hero, Frederick Douglass, had something to say about that. The motto of his liberating anti-slavery newspaper, The North Star, proclaimed this: “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are brethren.”

So never let anyone gender or color shame you into silence. Loving people with the truth is hard. Leaving people without the truth is Hell.

I’ve been smeared by mainstream media, denounced by the ACLU, attacked by Antifa, feared by Planned Parenthood, and even sued by the NAACP for my factivism. (After two years in federal court, free speech won and the NAACP lost.) I must be doing something right.

That confused Harvard student’s challenge wasn’t one that would break me. Abortion didn’t take my life. Severe depression in my 30s didn’t take my life. Bilateral blood clots in my lungs in my 40s didn’t take my life. And my recent battle with cancer didn’t take my life.

I’ve battled worse and lesser things. As the Psalm says, God has been my rock and my salvation, my refuge; I will not be shaken. Why? Because I know I was meant to be.

26/05/2026

Sober Minded in the Age of AI

Dr. John Lennox is a renowned mathematician, bioethicist, and lay theologian, who has written many books on religion, ethics, and the relationship between science and God. His most recent books—God, AI, and the End of History and 2084 and the AI Revolution—confront the challenging and confusing reality of AI from a Christian Worldview.

In our recent conversation for the Breakpoint podcast, Dr. Lennox made an important distinction between “narrow AI,” high-performing processing tools that easily integrate into modern life, and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the idea of superintelligence based on existing human intelligences or something radically new. It is the AGI version of AI that is evoking such serious concerns.

As Dr. Lennox clarified, what is driving much of the push for AGI right now is transhumanism, a worldview that stands in stark contrast with Christianity:

“… part of the AGI hype is the desire on the part of people like Yuval Noah Harari to create transhumans. We're evolving up to a higher stage. We take our own genetics into our own hands, and we develop superhumans and so achieve a certain kind of immortality. And I found it very interesting that he suggested that in his best seller, Homo Deus, he suggested that the agenda for the twenty-first century really amounts firstly to solve the problem of physical death. He said in a short time we won't have to die. We can die, but we won't have to because we solve this physical dying as a technical problem. Secondly, we will increase—massively increase—human happiness by bio-genetic engineering, merging with machines and all the rest of it. And that's their plan, to achieve some kind of eternal life.

“Now, when I meet that, I have a habit of smiling at people and saying, “You're too late.” And they say, “What do you mean we're too late?” Well, I said the problem with physical death was solved 20 centuries ago when God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And as for uploading our brains into some kind of silicon state, I can tell you of a far better and much more credible uploading.

“. . .This is the point where I think the Christian message makes a lot of sense to people: God has, in that sense, solved the problem of physical death. . . .the Christian message is centered on that and says because of it, He can offer anyone who trusts Jesus that He will one day upload them into another world and they will live permanently because they will have received a life, a new life in this age that will carry them on into eternity.”

Christians must, Dr. Lennox continued, contrast what he called the “AI metanarrative” with the biblical metanarrative:

“. . . That gives us an opportunity, that great differential between the biblical metanarrative and the AI metanarrative. To put it crudely, the transhuman AGI narrative is humans trying to become gods that is explicit in Harari's book, Homo Deus, the man who is God. Now that was first suggested by a snake in Genesis 3, so we might be very careful of following it. But all through history, all through history, there has been this attempt to push humans to a god-like status . . .

“Now, that encourages me to point out to people the vast difference between that narrative and the Christian narrative. Because the Christian narrative is not of humans trying to turn themselves into gods. It is the exact reverse direction that God himself has become human. And people can see that you’re claiming something.

“And I point out to them that the most amazing thing about human beings, model 101, so to speak, is that God could become one, which is awesome in its conceptuality. God became human. The word came to be, flesh came to be human, which is the exact opposite of the transhuman narrative. And of course, what adds to that, that God became human in order that He could elevate his created humans into his own sons and daughters sharing his life.

“That's the message I think we ought to put out into the transhuman space. And it's a much more credible one because there's much more evidence for the power of Jesus Christ transforming lives than the power of AI transforming lives morally.”

In our conversation, Dr. Lennox reminded that, in this time of great anxiety about AI, we are called to what the New Testament calls “sober-mindedness.” For Dr. Lennox, that involves two things that God always calls His people to, but especially in challenging cultural moments. Repeatedly in Scripture, we are told to not be deceived and to not fear. That exhortation applies to us today, as well.

25/05/2026

Belief Without Becoming

“I have good news and bad news,” Chuck Colson said many years ago. “The good news is there are more Christians than ever before. The bad news is, it doesn’t seem to make any difference.” Though churches remain active, Christian language still fills public discourse, and millions continue to identify with the faith, the moral and spiritual influence of Christianity continues to diminish. Why?

Perhaps the most important reason is that too many Christians are content with a version of faith that is sincere but thin, orthodox in confession but shallow in discipleship. Many Christians affirm basic biblical truths but are more shaped by the assumptions of the surrounding culture than by the Gospel. When Christianity functions more as a label of private identity than a comprehensive way of life, the faith that should define us is reduced to an addition to life rather than the lens through which all of life is understood.

The confusion that results helps explain why the Church’s public witness is often so weak. A faith reduced to private spirituality cannot sustain a public vision. A gospel confined to personal salvation has little to say about how we live in the world now. A Church that does not intentionally form people will see them formed instead by the ambient pressures of secular culture.

At root, the issue is theological. We speak of Jesus as Savior but rarely as King. Yet the full Gospel is of the Kingdom of God, the announcement that Christ reigns over all creation and that His authority extends to every sphere of life. When saved, our lives are situated within the grand biblical story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. We are called to live from this Story, as citizens of that Kingdom, under Christ’s reign, for His purposes. We are to be formed in that kind of faith.

Scripture consistently assumes that God’s people are not merely to know truth but to be shaped by it. Through worship, repentance, prayer, community, obedience, and the ordinary disciplines of Christian life, God reshapes hearts and minds, orders our loves, disciplines our desires, and teaches us how to live faithfully in a disordered world. Whenever that kind of formation is absent, our faith becomes fragile, irrelevant, and even indistinguishable from the culture surrounding us.

In late eighteenth-century Britain, Christianity had lost much of its moral power. Social decay and injustice flourished alongside showy religious observance. William Wilberforce observed that the problem was not the absence of Christianity, but of what he called “real Christianity”—a faith capable of shaping character and compelling sacrificial action.

What followed was not first a political strategy, but a spiritual renewal. Through the evangelical revival, men and women were deeply re-formed by the gospel. Wilberforce’s costly fight against the slave trade emerged from that deeper formation. His perseverance rested not on confidence in political success but on obedience to Christ. The eventual transformation of British society—the abolition movement, social reform, and renewed concern for human dignity—was the fruit of a people formed by the truth they professed.

The Church today faces a similar challenge. The answer to our present crisis will not come through louder rhetoric, political power, or nostalgia for a bygone era. It will come through the recovery of a robust Christian worldview and formative discipleship that shapes the whole person under the reign of Christ. This kind of formation doesn’t just happen. It requires commitment, Christian community, disciplined engagement with Scripture, theology, culture, and spiritual practice. And it requires patience, because formation is slow work—the steady shaping of hearts and minds over time.

The Colson Fellows Program cultivates that kind of formation so that Christians can recover the whole biblical story and learn to live faithfully within it. Through worldview training, spiritual disciplines, Christian community, and practical application, Colson Fellows are equipped to respond to this cultural moment with clarity, confidence, and courage.

The Church doesn’t need more informed Christians. It needs more formed Christians; believers whose faith is not merely an accessory but an allegiance to the reality that Christ reigns. That kind of faith has changed the world before. By God’s grace, it may yet do so again.

Applications are now open for the Colson Fellows Class of 2027, which begins August 1. If you long to deepen your faith, recover the coherence of the Christian Worldview, and learn to live with greater clarity, conviction, and purpose in this cultural moment, we invite you to apply and join a growing community of Christians committed to faithful obedience in the world.

22/05/2026

The Legacy of Bob Woodson

Years ago, after visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., sociologist and civil rights leader Bob Woodson wrote about a display that “stopped me in my tracks.” The 1980s were, according to the exhibit, “years of paradox.” While many blacks pursued advanced degrees and entered the professions, others existed in poor neighborhoods filled with drugs and violence. Who or what was to blame for the contrast?

According to the museum, the answer was Ronald Reagan, who cut many social programs.

Woodson, who founded the Woodson Center in Washington D.C. to “to empower low-income communities to solve their own problems” didn’t buy it, asking, “Is it truly institutional racism and heartless policies that have resulted in conditions today?”

On Wednesday, the Woodson Center announced that Bob Woodson, a recipient of the McCarthur ‘Genius' Fellowship, a Presidential Citizens Medal, the Freedom Leadership Award, and the 2018 William Wilberforce Award—among many others—had died at the age of 89. As the Center wrote in their announcement,

“From his early days as a civil rights activist to his decades at the Woodson Center, Bob built a body of work that reframed how America thinks about poverty, race, and community. He stood steadfast for the nation’s founding values and virtues, including faith, hard work, personal responsibility, the foundational importance of healthy families and communities, and the ability of everyone to shun a victimhood mentality and become agents of their own uplift . . . He has left behind a generation of leaders, revitalized neighborhoods, and a civil rights tradition centered on the people it was always meant to serve…

“He didn’t just build an organization. He built relationships, and those relationships built a movement.”

Woodson questioned the dominant narrative about race and oppression. Instead, he championed innovation, entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and family as the key to economic empowerment and community restoration. In fact, the 2018 Wilberforce Award ceremony featured academic luminaries, political heavy weights, and former leaders of rival gangs all honoring what he accomplished. Woodson’s approach was fact-based, not ideological. We interviewed Woodson for the Wilberforce Award. As he put it,

“If the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws are responsible for the decline in marriage and the rise in poverty and out-of-wedlock births in the black community, then why, during the Great Depression, did blacks have the highest marriage rate?”

He also wondered why, during the decades when blacks “had little political power and faced legalized discrimination, did they still make significant economic progress?”

Prior to the 1960s, Woodson said, African Americans “tapped their internal capacity . . . Hard work, cooperation, academic performance and moral excellence were elements of a strategy to achieve.”

He pointed to the history of black churches and civic institutions as models of what African Americans could achieve. When denied access to banks, they built their own. When insurance companies turned them away, black churches created “burial societies” and mutual-aid societies to assist the poor.

Tragically, Woodson said, that “rich history of self-determination” was “abandoned” in the 1960s. The only way forward, he concluded was “a return to a culture based on self-determination, personal responsibility, and strong moral values.” Woodson put these ideas into action, founding the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which became known as the Woodson Center. The best way to help the poor become self-sufficient, he believed, was by placing control of community development, not in the hands of faraway bureaucrats, but in the hands of community leaders.

Woodson Center programs spread all over the country, including the Violence-Free Zone, which sent young adult advisors into schools to mentor youth. At one Richmond, Virginia high school, arrests of students dropped 38% after adopting a VFZ program. A Dallas high school that recorded 133 gang incidents before bringing in VFZ, reported zero the following year. Woodson Center programs have also transformed the lives of former drug addicts, prostitutes, and the homeless.

According to Woodson, the secret to his success was that “Faith in God transforms the inside and that faith transforms the outside.” The faith of Bob Woodson, that brought so much transformation to the inside and outside for so many, is now sight. Learn about the Woodson Center mission, vision, and programs at woodsoncenter.org.

21/05/2026

Human Exceptionalism and Artificial Intelligence

In Paris, two historic structures offer explanations of the human experience. The Great Arche of the Defense is France’s official memorial to the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It’s an immense, striking, open cube of nearly perfect dimensions.

Down the river is the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Its two towers are of different heights. Various gargoyles adorn the exterior. The stones differ in size, and the stained glass is of different colors and shapes.

As George Weigel noted in The Cube and the Cathedral, the two buildings carry significant worldview implications. The cube represents rationality as a means of perfection. The Cathedral reflects the fragmented beauty of the diverse human experience and God’s creativity in all that He made.

Artificial Intelligence, especially its potential for education, tempts us to stand in awe of its seeming rational superiority. Like The Great Arch of Defense, it is impressive, especially in comparison to our limitations. To be merely awestruck, however, would be a tragic mistake.

Consider Unbound Charter Academy, Arizona’s first all-online, AI-powered charter school, which guarantees that students will score in the top 10% of standardized tests. At Unbound, there are no “good” or “bad” teachers. There are two AI chatbots, Phillip and Phoebe, available 24/7 and with a world of information at their non-existent fingertips. How appealing, especially when compared to Mrs. Smith, the local schoolteacher who is married with four children, unavailable after 4 p.m. and on weekends, and who has the unfortunate limitation of being merely human.

Unbound Charter is just one variation of AI schools that are disrupting traditional models. The rapid adoption of AI in education is unsurprising, especially given the shortage of quality teachers and the highly political emphasis in schools of education over and above subject matter expertise and mentoring skills. Moreover, the overall drive for efficiency makes AI desirable to both teachers and students. With AI, there is no lesson planning or teacher meetings, no study sessions or “all-nighters.” With AI, there are just instant responses to complex questions.

Within a Christian worldview, there is—to use the apostle Paul’s words—“a more excellent way” to approach AI in education and elsewhere. AI is an incredible tool for humans, but never a replacement. This is a difference not in degree but in kind. Simply put, humans are exceptional. AI is not.

The biblical framework of Creation and Fall provides the helpful and necessary context for this framing. Humans were created at the pinnacle of the creation story as the only beings made in God’s image, and the only creatures given authority over the rest of the created order. AI is a derivative of human creation and thus, below humans in the hierarchy of what exists. If we are to properly understand and manage the AI revolution, we must orient life as if humans are exceptional, because they are.

Christians can fully support employing AI in education, but we must do so prudently. Efficiency cannot be the only motivation. There will be a perpetual temptation to confuse the efficiency of AI in gathering and organizing information with cultivation of wisdom, knowledge, and virtue. Nor can the convenience of chatbots replace the mentoring students need by actual humans. Moms and dads may need sleep when AI does not, but they will always still be those who carry the primary educational responsibility for their children.

The emergence of AI forces the question of whether ultra-efficiency is always best. Formation and relationships are not always properly cultivated efficiently. A friend in the business space has adopted what he calls the “principle of intentional inefficiency in order to respect people as image bearers and honor biblical mandates. Likewise, in education, we must preserve higher values and fixed reference points beyond the promises of AI. Doing so can help us avoid what Josef Pieper called the temptation of “total work” (which, ironically, AI can incentivize) and instead cultivate “leisure,” which carries powerful educational benefits.

The Christian doctrine of the Fall also clarifies aspects of human nature in relation to AI. Though humans are exceptional, we are not perfect. Much of the discourse on AI is driven by the attitude, “We must do this now because we can!” The central lesson of the Tower of Babel is we ought not do everything we can do. Part of preserving human exceptionalism is recognizing and accepting human limitations.

We face a choice: The seeming omniscience of AI or the exceptionalism of humanity. Our answer will determine not only the trajectory of education, but the future of humanity.

Breakpoint

29/05/2026

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27/05/2026

26/05/2026

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