Culture Friday: Made in God’s image

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 21st of March.

This is WORLD Radio and we’re so glad to have you along today. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for 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.

MAST: John, Australia’s government has been contending with new speech laws that have proved to be quite controversial. This week conservative news magazine The Spectator asked the question, “Did multiculturalism cost Australia free speech?”

It highlighted recent comments by the premier of New South Wales Chris Minns, heard here on Sky News:

CHRIS MINNS, NEW SOUTH WALES PREMIER: I recognise and I've fully said from the beginning that we don't have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States and the reason for that is that we want to hold together our multicultural community and have people live in peace free from the kind of vilification and hatred that we do see around the world.

So John, what do you think about how multiculturalism affects free speech, and vice versa?

STONESTREET: I mean, multiculturalism has to be defined. If by that we mean individuals who represent various places, various homelands, various backgrounds, that’s one thing. Multiculturalism, often, for example, includes the LGBTQ movement, and that's not the same thing as being from a particular ethnic, national or cultural background at all. That’s a lifestyle choice that one makes and then superimposes on the rest of life and imposes on individuals. And that now has become a priority. And then that has basically created an enormous conflict in Western cultures based on taking something, calling it an identity when it actually is not.

And free speech, in and of itself, needs to be defined. What do we mean by that? Speech is not unlimited in our rights to say things. We can’t say things in such a way to cause direct harm, but then we have to define harm, because disagreeing with someone sometimes is called harm. So these things have to be rightly understood, rightly defined and then rightly ordered. And when that happens, I think both a diversity of cultural backgrounds and speech can bring good to people. We can enrich each other’s lives by being sharpened by ideas that are different than our own, by being forced to defend the things that we value, and also by being exposed to the way other people express the image of God that God has put in all people from all times and all places. Maybe this is a little idealistic, but I think it comes across as idealistic because we’re so far down this hyper extending what we mean by multiculturalism and then adding other concepts like wokeness and intersectionality and all the other things which basically prioritize a particular set of cultures and a particular set of moral values over others.

BROWN: John, you mentioned the image of God in your response to Lindsay’s question. The Imago Dei is at the heart of a recent Breakpoint article I read on Disability Awareness Month, which is this month.

You’re talking about so much more than an annual observance aren’t you?

STONESTREET: I oftentimes will ask students, how many of you know someone with a disability or have a disability, and if anyone doesn't raise their hand, I remind them that in the Biblical framing of things, all of us are disabled. We’re disabled by human sin that infected a world that was made very good according to the language of Genesis, and in various ways, has fallen. And because we have a sense of what we have fallen from, we have a sense of always interacting to some degree with a world that has been fractured, that is fallen in various ways, and individuals that are too. And that takes the form of sin, that takes the form of just frustration and futility when you have good intentions in sending an email, and it gets read all the wrong ways, or all the other ways we experience of fall.

And it also takes the form of disability that can be inflicted either in some sort of long term way, at birth, genetically, or for some other reason, or because of an act of evil, or an act of, you know, what’s called Natural Evil. Think of cancers or things like that that can cause long term impairment, either, you know, mentally or physically. It’s a corruption. It’s a twistedness. It’s taking something that is good, and it’s good because God made it that way. And that assumption is how we have to begin looking at all individuals, that they are made in the image and likeness of God. The dignity and worth and value is secure and it’s inherent. It’s not acquired. It’s not attained. It’s not assigned by cultural values. It is something that exists and of every single person and a world that recognizes that dignity and value is a better one.

That’s not the way that it’s been throughout most of human history, which is one of the many reasons that the idea, the doctrine that humans are made in God’s image, has been so revolutionary. It’s been perhaps the most publicly consequential theological point of Christianity that has changed the world in terms of cultures and civilizations, other than just the hope of forgiveness in Christ.

At the Colson Center–and this is something that’s near and dear to our hearts–we have long had the privilege and honor of working with one of the most lovely and delightful and loving people that I know, and that’s Joni Eareckson Tada, whose life has been dedicated to advancing this idea, as well as sharing the gospel with individuals and families and providing assistance to those who have disability. Of course, her own story is one of those stories of dealing with disability in that same sort of way. It’s a remarkable story where you can actually look and think to yourself, “Man, the world will be a worse place without Joni Eareckson Tada in it.” It’s not just this is a community of individuals that need us. We need them, and we need them to remind ourselves of what it means to love and care, what it means to accept the truth about reality that we’re made in the image of God and yet disabled in a fallen world in various ways. And it’s also close to our hearts because of Chuck Colson. This was something that was near and dear to his heart, upholding human dignity, but particularly for this group, which he foresaw would be particularly vulnerable and historically have been particularly vulnerable to discrimination and worse. The first group of people that were targeted by the Nazis, by the Third Reich, were communities with disability. They were taken out into the woods by the hundreds and shot. And because they were referred to or understood to be useless eaters, to use the phrase that they used, it’s horrific. It’s awful. That is an idea that has never gone away in human history, and is only countered if you have a better idea, a bigger idea, about human value and human dignity. And that’s the image of God.

MAST: John, before we let you go, I want to shout out NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, back home now after spending nine long months in space. Before returning to Earth in a Space X capsule, he was asked by a network reporter about his take away from his time in space. Here’s what he had to say.

WILMORE: My feeling on all of this goes back to my faith. It’s bound in my Lord and Savior, Christ. He is working out His plan and purposes for His glory throughout all of humanity and how that plays into our lives is significant and important and however that plays out, I am content because I understand that. I understand that He’s at work in all things. Some things are for the good. Go to Hebrews chapter 11. Some things look to us to be not so good, but it’s all working out for His good for those that will believe. And that’s the answer.

John, would that have been the first thing out of your mouth?

STONESTREET: I don’t claim to be nearly as spiritual as some of these things, which are really remarkable when you hear something like this coming off this sort of experience. I mean, we’ve all who follow Christ hopefully have read Paul’s lines about contentment and being content in every situation. And it’s probably among the easiest parts of Scripture to read out loud and the hardest to actually live out when you’re in that sort of a situation, when you’re dealing with such huge disappointment, when you’re forced to live, for example, just in the mundane of everyday life. It’s interesting, this is a lesson that is easy to say, hard to live.

I’m sure it was difficult, day in and day out to think that way. I mean, you remember when we first heard about this story and how long they were going to be stuck up there. I just think that is remarkable. I had a friend last night stuck on a snowy interstate for four hours, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that would drive me crazy.” That’s four hours. This has been, I mean, how long up in space, in a cramped place, and not having good food or anything? This is one of the lessons that Christians are given in Scripture to learn that God is in control of our days. We make decisions attempting to be faithful to His plan. We have ideas of what success will be, what impact or influence or significance will be, and a lot of times that’s not it at all.

And I love that he used the words like “significance” and “importance,” because another day up there must have seemed quite mundane. I think there's something really spiritual about the mundane and finding that contentment. I’ve been fascinated by that idea for a long time, and I have no idea how to live it. Literally living out the sorts of things that Paul talks about in Philippians and what he talks about in Hebrews 11, about trusting the Lord, trusting the Lord’s plan, even when things seem to be going south. Easier said than done, but it’s awesome to see it, you know, on this kind of a stage.

Also, I think it’s worth mentioning how many people have visited space and come back with a testimony of God on their lips. There’s been very few exceptions, one being the Russian cosmonaut who said I didn't see God in kind of a cynical sort of way. But most of the others, I think there’s obviously something about being up close and personal to this to the heavens that declare the glory of God. So that seems to be a constant theme, at least.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you.

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