Real change from a real savior

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

After bombings of Coptic Christian churches in Egypt on Palm Sunday killed 45 worshippers, Christians in countries where ISIS is active are heading into Easter weekend mindful of the risk of simply going to church.

A Coptic priest in Cairo spoke at a service Monday and made the point that ISIS “militants … are ‘filling up our churches.’” He noted attendance at the Monday night service was usually scant, but on that evening, people spilled out of the sanctuary. Finally, he offered the terrorists a message he said they wouldn’t understand: “We love you.”

John Stonestreet said that response challenges the culture’s treatment of religion as a personal, private reality, like medicine to deal with a tough world.

That approach, Stonestreet said, “doesn’t help us at all make sense of a response like this that is so overwhelmingly not self-centered but other-centered.”

When Peter preached in the book of Acts, he emphasized that the story of Jesus was not “just some religious, moral nugget to soothe our hearts. What Peter says is that God has made Him to be both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. As if that’s the truest thing in the world,” Stonestreet said.

Only something real—more than a feeling or philosophy—could explain how Christians could forgive, love, and pray for the terrorists who had just hurt them so deeply, Stonestreet said: “This is the best sort of apologetic there is, that there’s really something to this Jesus.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on The World and Everything in It.