Culture Friday: Faith, forgiveness, and football

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 17th of January.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet … president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

EICHER: The College Football National Championship Monday night will feature two starting quarterbacks known for their outspoken Christian faith.

Will Howard—quarterback for Ohio State, sorry, The Ohio State University.

And Riley Leonard—quarterback for Notre Dame

Will Howard’s first, then Riley Leonard.

WILL HOWARD: First of all, God is good and I got to give all the thanks to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And man, we wouldn’t be here without these guys right in front of me, this coach right beside me. I love this place, man. I’m so glad I decided to come here. I’m just blessed, man. This is unbelievable.  

RILEY LEONARD: I looked up and said, “Jesus, whatever your will is for my life, I trust it 100 percent.” I know that this offense and this team trust in Jesus and His plan for this season.

If you’re not an Irish fan or a Buckeyes fan, I think we can just root for some interesting post-game interviews at least. Pretty exciting, John.

STONESTREET: It is exciting. It’s exciting to see these public expressions of faith—and not to make this too much about the actual game itself, but it’s probably good for Notre Dame that they’re doing a bit of praying.

It looks like they may need it! That’s my hot take for the evening! Next week we’ll find out if I was right or wrong.

Look, this is a trend that a lot of people have been noticing for a while now, and it actually started with coaches. I first tuned into this maybe seven or eight years ago. I caught the pregame show of the college football National Championship game, Clemson versus Alabama, and coach Dabo Swinney was talking about their culture at Clemson.

Player after player after player talked about how they thought about each other as a team—and I heard the word “love” a lot. It wasn’t “Oh, I love these guys” the way that athletes usually talk about it. It was that they have intentionally built a culture around the idea that “the greatest of these is love.” Of course, thrown in here were Biblical references here and there.

You’re seeing this not just in college football, but in the NFL. Arguably one of the great rookie quarterback seasons that we’ve seen in our lifetime by the Redskins quarterback, Jaden Daniels, unapologetic about his faith and thanking not only the Lord, but the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think it’s interesting too that we’re getting more airtime for this. It used to be that networks were seemingly instructed to cut this off as soon as possible. Now it seems to have a little bit more airtime—and good, it should, if you look at what motivates and drives these players.

So it is a very important development when you see so many other aspects of culture—particularly academic culture has been going secular where we’ve lost even the Christian part of Christian colleges over the last several decades (at least Christian moral beliefs or Christian convictions). In sports, it just seems to be an exception to this rule.

The last thing I’ll say is, you could say praise God, thanks for the Christians that God has put in these places.

EICHER: Speaking of Christians God has put in key places, I wonder what you thought of the same sort of conspicuous use of the name of Jesus by the nominee for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. This is quite the story arc. Drunkenness, divorce, serial infidelity, and now he says that’s all behind him. He’s repentant, received forgiveness, and he’s giving glory to Christ. But is it possible the politics around the nomination kind of muddies the public-witness waters here? It’s one thing to say if you love Notre Dame, well, “Good on the Ohio State Q-B, great guy.” I don’t see Democrats rallying around Hegseth in any way. What do you say about that?

STONESTREET: Well, the politics certainly makes it messy. I think there is a level of tone deafness from those on the political left being so out of touch with reality and then suddenly playing the morality card on the nominee. There’s something frustrating about that.

We have a challenge: what does it mean to be forgiven? I especially appreciated that he thanked God for working in the life of his wife to forgive him. Look, sin is messy. Sin messes up a lot of things.

But what do we think Jesus does?

So I want to be hopeful, certainly. We do have in a culture so dominated by sexual brokenness on so many levels, the question of what does restoration look like? When can a pastor be returned? When can a leader be returned? When can a public figure be returned?

It’s important to note that’s a question that goes back to the very first persecutions the church had to wrestle with.

What do you do with those who actually succumbed to the pressure to renounce Christ or to at least claim the Roman gods and then came back later, repentant, saying, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

This is not exactly the same thing, but forgiveness and grace are such a scandalous, essential part of the gospel. I guess at some level it makes sense that we would have to wrestle with it to this degree because sin is that bad and grace is that brilliant.

BROWN: John, I’m sure you have heard the recent conversation between Joe Rogan and Christian apologist Wesley Huff. Here’s a quick clip of Huff responding to Rogan’s question about Jesus as a moral example.

SOUND: Because the law is a mirror. It shows you how dirty you are. But His critique is, you guys are trying to clean yourself with a mirror. That’s stupid. (Ahhhh) If anything, it’s going to make you more messy. Like, get in the shower. The law is not what cleans you. The law is what reveals that you’re dirty. And so in that sense I think if Jesus as a moral example, it actually misses what I think Jesus actually said about what His purpose was. In that you can’t do enough to actually live up to the standard that God holds you to. And so if you keep striving. You’re actually going to wear yourself out and be exhausted….Like atheist…I didn’t say it. You did Joe. (laughter) a lot of them go crazy.

WORLD Opinions contributor Bethel McGrew thinks that conversation signals a tactical shift in how apologists make their case. What do you think….is this the “new age in apologetics”?

STONESTREET: I always hear that there’s a new age in apologetics because of this. Or a new age of apologetics because of that.

There are some cultural moments where certain existential questions rise to the top of the apologetic to-do list. I think, for example, that’ll be the case as we try to deal with the great suffering we’ve seen in California from the wildfires. The problem of evil is always right there. At times it moves from the second or third question that people have to the first question that people have.

We have to have that sort of flexibility. There's been plenty of people who have announced the end of apologetics, saying that people don’t think rationally anymore, or logical arguments don’t work.

Then you look at this and what do you see? Joe Rogan in pursuit of truth, asking rational questions, seemingly interested in things that are logical. But also open—which this gets into the difference between evidential apologetics and presuppositional apologetics to some degree—he’s actually open to supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. This is something we have seen more and more of when we talk about the fascination with the supernatural both good and bad.

Rod Dreher has been writing about this: the preemptive dismissal of anything supernatural that may have characterized the New Atheist era seems to have changed. I think there’s a lot we can learn.

Most of all, Wesley Huff’s appearance on Rogan was a commitment to being faithful to what is true, the full scope of what is true from a Christian worldview. You got to be willing to do it all: there’s not one “right” approach and all the other ones are wrong.

Lastly, let’s keep in mind that apologetics is about case-making for non-believers. But it’s also about bolstering the faith of believers.

It’s a strange dynamic right now. If there are difficult questions or challenges to the gospel, they have been thoroughly answered. I don’t know very many that haven’t. Yet the number of churches that won’t touch that stuff because they say it’s too hard, no one’s interested. What ends up happening—and I meet people like this who say, “Well, I’ve been in church my whole life and I’ve never heard anyone answer the problem of evil, so therefore there’s no real compelling answer.

I just want to tell them, “Look, this is the golden age of answers right now.” Part of this is, I think, people being really surprised that the answers are really there and the answers are really compelling. I say all that and I still want to say, Wesley Huff did a great job in this podcast across the board. He dealt with a real-life situation which sparked the invitation and he answered very specific claims. And he also made a positive case for things like the truthfulness of scripture and the resurrection. Good for him.

EICHER: I like that “golden age of answers,” John. But really extraordinary to sustain that for three straight hours, no commercial breaks. Really have to tip your cap.

STONESTREET:Well, look, and that should tell you that all the hot takes about social media and new communications techniques were wrong, do you remember?

I’m old enough to remember because it was like five years ago when we were all told that no one thinks longer than a tweet anymore. It wasn’t six months after I first heard someone introduce me to the history podcast where the guy sits there and talks for three hours about World War One? I listened to it and was absolutely captivated.

Joe Rogan has figured out how to be the most popular media platform on the planet by doing this. I think it’s helpful to go back to, what do we know about the human condition? God’s placed eternity in our hearts. We’re made in the image and likeness of God. We have the ability to think, but that ability is fallen. When we start with those assumptions, then you can actually carry out a conversation and an argument. You can be truthful and loving at the same time, you know?

We know that not because we’ve seen that many great examples of it lately, but we know that because that’s what actually the Bible tells us to do. So part of this is where do we get our information about the human condition?

BROWN: John, a few minutes back, you mentioned the fires in California. We live in a fallen world, so should we consider there may be moral evil as well as natural evil at work here? How do we think Biblically about the tragedy of the devastation in California?

STONESTREET: Well there’s going to be a lot more than I can address here. One of the things we can realize is that we live in a fallen world—and a fallen world is a place that is often hostile to those who are tasked by God to care for it.

But those who are tasked by God to care for the world are also fallen. That means they can make bad decisions, even with good intentions. Sometimes they make bad decisions out of bad intentions. Anybody who wants to put this either on the natural world—as if humans are just victims of it—or those who want to put it at the hands of human action are going to have an insufficient explanation because both of those things are part of a Christian worldview.

It should be part of the framework we bring to understand.

First and foremost, as Christians, we should bring the framework that this is devastating. It’s devastating because lives have been lost and lives have been upended. That tells you about the kind of creatures that humans are, that should not be preempted by political disagreement. What we need to do is bring the whole testimony to bear.

I will say that Christians do have the most holistic, robust framework for understanding evil in the world. The Eastern religions say it’s just an illusion. Well, great, it doesn’t feel like an illusion to those who are in Pasadena right now. So I think Christians do have the best explanatory mechanisms to bring to bear here.

We also have the responsibility, because what we believe to be true, to bring that to bear and to be ready to give an answer. Thankfully there are great resources—apparently one of those is, you know, Wesley Huff! So look up his YouTube channel and you can probably have some good answers.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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