Challenge the Cultural Take-aways

Part of our role with our students—and with ourselves—is to continually challenge the big ideas of our culture. We and they know that the “truths” of our society and of the truth of the Bible are often very different things. But it’s easy to get comfortable with keeping those ideas in separate containers and trying to live as if both worldviews are valid.

John Stonestreet offered a good example of challenging the cultural “truths” held by teenagers in a recent Breakpoint commentary.

Several years ago I earned the wrath of a group of teenage girls at a Christian school. No, I didn’t question the divinity of Jesus or the historical reality of the resurrection. I did something worse: I made a sarcastic comment about the movie, “The Notebook.”

My response to the girls was that, in the film, the love that was supposedly unconquerable and inescapable was really nothing more than just strong emotions, strong feelings. And of course our feelings are fickle and transitory. What’s more, the feelings on display in the movie led the characters to break commitments, act selfishly, and otherwise behave badly, all in the name of, and somehow justified by, their “love” for one another.

Stonestreet goes on to compare the idea of love in The Notebook with C.S. Lewis’s take on love in his classic book The Four Loves.

You don’t have to be a Bible scholar to ask your students hard questions about the big ideas presented as truth in entertainment, news, and the rest of culture. You don’t even have to have the perfect answers to your own questions. Just by asking those sometimes annoying questions, we can begin to help students be more intentional about comparing the "truth" of the culture with the truth of God's Word.