In an obscure verse in the Old Testament, it was said of the tribe of Issachar that they understood the times to know what Israel should do (1 Chron. 12.32). The thing they understood at that time was that David should be king over Israel. We can take that verse and apply it to ourselves: it is critical for us to know the times in which we live.
A perfect New Testament example of someone who knew the times was the Apostle Paul. In the book of Acts, we read of Paul in the ancient city of Athens. Even though Athens was the cultural center of the world, it was filled with idols. Paul was upset by the idols all around him and he preached a message to the philosophers on Mar’s Hill (Acts 17.16-34). Paul knew the times and he knew what to say to his generation.
Understanding the times is more important than ever because we find ourselves in a time of increasing secularization and hostility towards the Christian Faith. If we are seeking to understand the times in which we live, we need to know something about how the people around us think about the world and understand the meaning of life. We need to understand how we develop a worldview. To help us in this study we will enlist a writer named Albert Wolters who wrote a classic book called Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. Another useful source to consult is by Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, who together wrote a book called The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview. This subject seems rather philosophical and academic because it is! We are not replacing Scripture with philosophy. We are attempting to apply the teaching of Scripture to the times. When we do this, we will immediately see that God’s Word is always relevant to the needs of mankind.
A Basic Definition
Our first order of business is to understand what makes up a worldview. Al Wolters defines a worldview as “the comprehensive framework of one’s basic beliefs about things.”
Let’s dissect that definition.
When we use the word “things” we are being intentionally broad because a worldview must also be broad. A true worldview must embrace everything about life in the world, even spiritual questions and the existence of God. No part of life may be excluded from a worldview.
A worldview is about our beliefs. Beliefs are often confused with feelings. Our beliefs certainly give rise to feelings, but beliefs are not just feelings. A real belief makes a claim about knowledge of something that stands true no matter how we feel about it. A belief can even be defended by rational argument. In fact, if we really believe something, we will be willing to defend it. We are committed to our beliefs and we will sacrifice for them and even suffer if necessary. Modern people are very concerned with preserving freedom of thought or opinion. But everyone understands that we must think thoughts that are both rational and in agreement with reality.
A Model for the Good Life
A worldview is a belief about how life ought to be. It is like a model that we all hold in our minds and we are constantly comparing that model with the world around us. We have hopes and dreams about how the world could be and we strive to make that a reality. Therefore, worldviews are deeply spiritual and religious in nature.
Modern people get very uncomfortable with religion, mostly because of the narrow definition that has been given. In a manner of speaking, everyone is religious, but not in the same ways. Religion is more than ceremony, it is a comprehensive view of life and especially of values. Religion is usually a term that has a moral flavor as well. Our views about good and evil, right and wrong, are a crucial part of world-view. So, in many ways, world-view and religion are synonymous.
Modern people are much more comfortable with the term spirituality. If spirituality is taken to mean the values that we hold about what is important in life or those things that give life meaning, then this term can also be equated with a worldview.
We often come face to face with our beliefs during times of great stress, pain, or crisis. Our worldviews are expressed by the stories that we tell each other as we experience the world (N.T. Wright). The Christian Faith and the whole message of the Bible is really a story that is the basis for a worldview. Most people do not overtly articulate something they would call a worldview, but everyone tells stories about life. Even if we do not express it, we all have beliefs that form a worldview. We interpret life experiences through the lens of our worldview.
Most of our experiences in life involve either experiencing or witnessing pain. Wrestling with the meaning of life against the backdrop of pain and suffering raises some of the most difficult questions that we face. How we interpret pain and suffering and the whole question of evil is a crucial part of a worldview. In fact, having a worldview that helps us cope with pain is a necessity.
We will never understand all the mysteries of evil, but if we cannot find a way to cope, we will end up in despair. Old Testament Wisdom literature, such as Job and the book of Ecclesiastes, is wrestling with the issue of suffering.
What we call culture is really the externalization of worldviews. The term “culture” has been used ambiguously. For many, it simply means how people dress, or the music and food they enjoy. But this is only the shallow aspects of what makes culture.
To go to another country and sample the local restaurants, buy a native hat, and see a traditional dance might be enjoyable and different, but we can hardly say we have really come to know a culture by simply being tourists. We must ask what is behind or beneath culture and that gets us to a worldview. Culture has more of an impact on us than we realize or are likely to admit. Even becoming a Christian does not remove a person from being influenced by culture. Culture is like a giant puzzle. All the various pieces are the normal functions of society: marriage, family, politics, education, business, and religion. The way people live their daily lives and pursue their goals and passions grow up in the soil of worldviews. Worldview is passed on to children through cultural norms, practices, and tradition. Our own cultural indoctrination may go undetected until we reach adulthood and begin to question things. It is a strange but universal truth that every culture believes itself to be superior to all other cultures. We believe that our way of seeing the world is normal and it can be very uncomfortable to be forced to reconsider our fundamental beliefs about how to live our lives. Young adults who suddenly find themselves on a university campus can experience a kind of culture shock without even leaving their native country! Parents who are from a more conservative worldview often fear to send their children into environments that will challenge the traditional views. But meeting people with other worldviews can also be the best way to solidify one’s own worldview. Still, this can be an uncomfortable experience that we often avoid.
A Source of Conflict
Sometimes we must define our beliefs over and against someone else’s beliefs. Not every culture contains a single worldview. Society is more likely to be an amalgamation of worldviews. Some of these will naturally be in conflict. When worldviews collide, a society can experience severe unrest.
This is often best observed in political and religious conflicts. The results of worldview clashes can be violent. It is common to see a majority worldview attempting to oppress, silence, or even eliminate a minority worldview. There are people who insist on total cultural assimilation and reject the idea of cultural pluralism. Movements on both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum have been guilty of cultural oppression and exclusion. Groups of people who compete for power in society often come from radically different worldviews. Conflicts can erupt over any number of issues because behind it all is a difference in worldviews. Sometimes worldviews are so divergent it almost seems that people are living in separate realities and can barely even communicate with one another. It is important to understand worldview so that we can begin to see why people believe the things they do. Much of the religious and political unrest in the world comes from an inability to understand how to speak to one another.
Worldviews are always shared. In fact, true community is only possible when there is a common worldview. In every group, there is a “dominant vision of life” (Arnold DeGraaff).
Despite all the individualism of Western society, we still tend to move in herds, and we identify with other people who think as we do. Human beings need community. Unfortunately, we identify with a group so that we can also differentiate ourselves from other groups. Because of sin, this can lead to hatred, prejudice, and even violence. Isolating ourselves from people with different worldviews can lead to prejudice and stereotypes that only strengthen the alienation. At some point, we feel free to make broad, sweeping generalizations about huge groups of people while we never have any interaction with anyone from that group! In his classic book “Bowling Alone”, Robert Putnam argues that Americans are spending less time together generally, but we spend much less time specifically with people who are different from us.
A Guide for Making Choices
We need a worldview because we cannot go through life without some reference point or guide. We cannot escape our sense of responsibility. Despite what some people claim, we simply cannot believe anything or do anything, at least not without certain consequences. We are constantly being called upon to make decisions and these decisions will be made according to our worldview. The choices that people make about what is important to them say much more about their worldview than they might say about it themselves. We will spend our time on those things we believe to be important in life. That might be a career, relationships, entertainment, or any number of other pursuits. Many of these things are not inherently bad or evil. But the fundamental question must be about values. We cannot assign the same price tag to everything in life. Some things must be more important than other things and we must act accordingly. It is crucial that we make the right judgment calls about values or we will end up wrecking or wasting our lives. The central issue with values is usually one of balance.
While there are some black and white issues in life, most of the value decisions we make are according to weight and cannot be categorically good or bad. Money is a good example of this principle. Are we to conclude that money is of absolutely no importance and is inherently evil? That would be absurd. On the other hand, what would happen to a person who makes money his one, absorbing passion? We would conclude that this person has put too much value on money and will suffer the consequences with being so far out of balance.
Sometimes we even fail to act according to our own worldview. When this happens, we must either change our worldview to justify our behavior, or we must change our behavior. The fact that we fail does not in any way negate our need for a worldview or that we need to be guided by something outside of ourselves. It is very important to come to terms with the ways we fail to live according to the worldview we claim to have. We may discover that we are not being honest. A hypocrite is someone who wears a mask and is playing a part rather than just being himself. Religious hypocrites get all the criticism but are by no means the only kind out there.
How do World-views Form?
How we come to form our worldviews is a complex and controversial question that is itself subject to interpretation by our worldview. Some people have said that we really do not form our own worldview but are programmed by our family, culture, class interests and other external factors. We cannot completely dismiss these observations. There are many things that press in on our minds. As Christians, we cannot forget that we are sinful and are subject to many wicked influences. Other people believe that we choose our worldview and that we are completely free to do so, as we apply our ability to reason objectively and independently.
Many of the Enlightenment and Modern thinkers belonged to this latter school of thought. Most people today are more willing to consider how outside influences impact our worldview and our decisions in life.
According to Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, in order to form our worldview, we must, either consciously or unconsciously, answer the following questions:
· Who am I?
· Where am I?
· What is wrong?
· How can we fix it?
We must have basic beliefs about the nature and purpose of human life, the nature and purpose of the natural world around us, the nature of the problems that keep us from finding fulfillment, and the possible solutions that can remove the hindrances to finding fulfillment. Everyone has some type of answer to these basic questions, even if they do not express these beliefs. To a large extent, the whole history of human civilization is an attempt to answer these fundamental questions about life. How we answer these questions will inevitably move us to act in certain ways. For example, how would a Marxist give answers to these questions? He would probably say that we are in a world that is fundamentally unfair where the common man, like himself, are oppressed by class distinctions. The only way to fix it is through a revolution where the common people rise and take control by overthrowing those who oppress and establishing a classless society.
How can we Evaluate a Worldview?
But how do we know that our answers to these questions are right? We must evaluate a worldview, even though there are some people who say it is impossible to know one way or the other if a worldview is right or wrong. This is misleading, however, because even the people who say that worldviews cannot be evaluated themselves have a worldview by which they evaluate all others!
All worldviews must be based on “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (C.S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man”). The fact is, every rational person believes there is something that is objectively right and therefore there must be somethings that are objectively wrong. The trouble is that we do not always agree on what those things are. But we cannot shake the basic, underlying assumption that there is a standard or a norm by which all things must be compared. We know what is crooked by comparing it to something straight.
Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton suggest several ways to evaluate a worldview:
· Our worldview must open and illuminate all aspects of life. If we focus on certain aspects while ignoring or minimizing other areas, we will not have a true worldview but only a partial or unbalanced view of life. For example, our worldview must include some view of what constitutes healthy sexuality. While some people are uncomfortable with the topic, if we cannot address this important part of what it means to be human, then our worldview is half-baked.
· Our worldview must be coherent. If our view of life does not hang together, we will be carried off in different directions and will be at war with ourselves. People who try to divide life into different compartments, each compartment having its own rules, will eventually find themselves living a fractured, schizophrenic existence. This can become like living with a double or even a triple identity as we divide and subdivide our lives and our worldview into isolated areas. The classic example of this worldview fallacy is an attempt to divide reality into categories of sacred and secular.
· Our worldview must not blind us. Sometimes our worldview hinders us from seeing areas of good and evil. Americans had to come to terms with the fact that on one hand, we enshrined values of liberty while we directly engaged in vicious racism and oppression of black Americans. This blindness was even more apparent in the Christian community. On the one hand, we hold up the Bible, which teaches us to love our neighbor, while on the other hand, we found ourselves either ignoring or even directly supporting segregation and the toleration of an unjust social system that discriminated against black people. Even though Americans claimed to love liberty, and even though most Americans claimed to be Christians and to accept the Biblical worldview, these racial evils festered in our society for decades and have not completely disappeared.
· Our worldview must be open to correction. If everything tends only to legitimate our worldview then we are probably guilty of pride. A person who is prideful cannot be taught and is also incapable of repentance and of renewal.
The Gospel is the ultimate worldview correction. But even after we become Christians, we often retain our old ways of thinking that must be brought into submission to Christ and the Gospel (See Gal. 2.11-16). Christians are notorious for claiming to be right and for telling everyone else that they are wrong. But the first attitude of a true Christian is that he or she is a sinner who needs to repent and to be forgiven. We must never think we are right about everything or that we can be made right by our own efforts. Our worldview is like a window we look through to see the world. That window can become dirty and smeared and must regularly be cleaned. Only a fool would refuse to accept instruction and to acknowledge the truth in broad daylight. If we say we are in the light but walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth (1 John 1.6).
The Biblical Evaluation
The ultimate Biblical test of any worldview is if that worldview brings life or death, blessing or curses (See Deut. 30.15-20). The Biblical worldview puts the glory of God at the center of life. With God there is life and apart from Him, there is nothing but death. That was the original choice offered to mankind in Eden and the choice of ways is still before us today.
Obviously, not everyone has a Christian worldview. We can perhaps begin to see the great gulf that exists between a Christian worldview and other worldviews. Because there are so many competing worldviews, we must be constantly checking ourselves in the light of Scripture. We face a constant temptation to get our worldview from somewhere other than Scripture. The Bible is God’s revelation to mankind. A Christian worldview must be based on a careful reading and study of the Bible.
We want to base our worldview on the Bible rather than on any worldly philosophy or even Christian tradition, though we can glean much help from what other Christians have said about the Bible. We desire to constantly be reforming our worldview based on reading Scripture with the goal of being faithful to God in all areas of life.
When Christians appeal to Scripture we are appealing to a higher authority. We believe that the Bible is God’s word and God has the final say on every issue. One thing we must resist is the idea that the Bible only has jurisdiction over spiritual or religious matters. This is popular teaching used against Christians today. They will say that we may have our personal religion, but we must not bring those things out into the public sphere and try to “bind” them on other people. Anyone who tries to have one worldview for their private life and another for their public life will end up living a fractured and incoherent life. It is our responsibility to live according to our worldview all the time, even if there are people who do not agree with us or like what we have to say.
The central purpose of Scripture is to instruct us (Rom. 15.4). Reading the Bible is part of renewing our minds (Rom. 12.2). We must then think Biblically about every area of our lives. There can be no sacred/secular division. Everything in life can be thought about Biblically or in a way that is contrary to God’s revelation. Strangely enough, even theology can be thought about unbiblically! And some things that are usually labeled as “secular”, like the Arts, philosophy, or politics, can be thought about in the light of Scripture. One Christian writer observed that “there is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about Christianly” (Harry Blamires). We must not be in a position where we allow our worldview to be at variance with Scripture and with our confession of Jesus as Lord.
The good news is that you do not have to have special education or even a high level of intelligence to think about worldviews. Our purpose in thinking about worldview, especially our own, is not just to become more intellectual but to be equipped by the Scriptures for a life of good works which please the Lord (2 Tim. 3.16-17).
