Developing a Biblical Worldview: Seeing Things God’s Way

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Introduction

The world bombards us every day with ideas and perspectives on just about everything. We are encouraged to adopt a liberal or conservative perspective on just about every matter. There is also a feminist perspective and even a Christian perspective on practically everything. Underlying these perspectives is always a worldview. Ideas and perspectives do not exist in a vacuum. There is a whole set of assumptions about how the world really is that lies behind every one of these perspectives. In fact, everyone has a ­worldview, a comprehensive picture of reality, which affects everything they do. ¹ These are not unique; in fact most people within any particular subculture, or demographic group, have a shared worldview that enhances the quality of community life and facilitates communication between group members. Our own worldview is affected by the perspectives that we see and hear. This is why we should avoid evil influences such as pornography, hate speech, and other negative influences. They will affect our worldview. Even some seemingly positive influences, however, can have a false worldview underlying them, and we must learn to be careful and discerning.

The Bible too has a worldview. Because it is God’s revelation of himself, the Bible gives us insight into God’s way of seeing things. The Bible is the final authority, the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried,² and therefore we should seek to adjust our worldview to God’s, that is, to the biblical worldview.

Many Christians do not know how to do this, nor even sense the need. They assume that they have a biblical worldview simply because they practice a basic Christian morality or because they do not believe in certain worldly ideas such as evolution, abortion, and gay marriage. It is commendable to live morally, and we should follow the Bible on these matters. This does not in itself, however, demonstrate the presence of a biblical worldview. If the Bible is relevant for all parts of everyday life—and it is—then the biblical worldview must govern how we see every aspect of our lives, how we make decisions, and even our attitudes, every day.

What Is a Worldview?

David Naugle has said that a "worldview is an inescapable function of the human heart and is central to the identity of human beings as imago Dei."³ In other words, we all have a worldview, and that worldview is shaped by our culture, our experiences, and our personal backgrounds, including what we have read and heard. Worldviews are not systematic, nor even always conscious. They are perceptual frameworks or ways of seeing.⁴ We often assume the truth of our own worldview without carefully examining it. Worldviews include philosophies, and even theologies, but are not identical with them.⁵ In this light, if we are to see things God’s way, the Bible must be for us a dominant influence in our lives, the source of the worldview we live by. The Bible must be more than merely something we pick up and read for inspiration, but something that determines our thinking, our behavior, and our destiny.

Sometimes we get to something best by beginning with negation. We will be better prepared to understand what a biblical worldview is if we first determine what it is not. This will clear away misconceptions so that we can see clearly what a biblical worldview really is.

What a Biblical Worldview Is Not

Many misconceptions abound about the biblical worldview. This section will lay out some of these and explain why they are not biblical worldviews, or at least, not fully developed ones.

Not Just a Moral System

Some people identify the biblical worldview mostly with moral behavior. Certainly someone who holds to a biblical worldview will behave differently from someone who does not. However, morality alone is not the biblical worldview. This error takes several forms.

Traditional morality, where people are friendly, honest, hard-working, and exercise good manners and taste, is one of these. Being like this is not bad by itself, and in fact the Bible commends these values as part (but only part) of the godly life. Traditional middle-class morality and respectability have deep roots in biblical teachings, and someone who lives a biblical lifestyle will look superficially like someone who practices this kind of respectability. However, the Christian lifestyle is much more than mere respectability.

Others identify the biblical worldview with a more radical morality, such as those who, following the lead of Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger,⁶ call for a radical lifestyle change. Sider called Christians to devote time and resources to world hunger, but others have called believers to devote themselves to missions or something else. This looks attractive partly because it emphasizes the radical difference between the way Christians should live and the way most of the world lives. Living a biblical lifestyle will definitely put one on a very different path from most people, and part of the popularity of Sider’s call for radical living, as well as that by David Platt⁷ and many others, lies in the fact that many of us suspect that Jesus Christ wants more from us than mere middle-class suburban respectability.

Not a Political Statement

Some have identified biblical worldview with a certain type of political stance, or a set of positions on current issues. This may be a left-wing stance⁸ but is more often associated with a right wing conservative stance on the issues.⁹ Both stances take the Bible seriously, but they read it very differently.¹⁰

These political stances arise from one’s worldview, but it is a mistake to identify one’s own political beliefs or favorite issues as if these were the biblical worldview. It makes the Bible captive to something of this world. The Bible becomes subsumed under the cause and is interpreted in light of it. While many causes have a biblical dimension and it is perfectly appropriate for Christians to be concerned and involved with political matters, especially on moral issues, such matters should never obscure "the counsel of the

Lord

that stands forever" (Ps 33:11). The Bible should be primary in how we view politics, rather than letting politics determine how we read the Bible.

Not Just One Doctrinal System

Finally, the biblical worldview should not be identified solely with a particular doctrinal position such as Calvinism, or Dispensationalism, nor with details of eschatology or a particular view of sanctification. The Bible as a whole is much richer and much more complex than any -ism or school of thought. This book is written to help you place such theological and spiritual considerations into the larger perspective of the Bible itself. Let us turn our attention to what a biblical worldview is, now that we know what it is not.

What a Biblical Worldview Is

Far from being limited to a particular aspect of life, the biblical worldview is comprehensive.¹¹ It includes everything related to the doctrines, values, priorities, and understanding of how the world works that the Bible commends and promotes. It looks at the modern world through the lenses of the Bible rather than looking at the Bible using the lenses of the modern world.¹² The Bible should determine how you understand reality, yourself, and those around you, and how you solve problems. It is not something we adopt in a single moment, but rather it is something we develop over a lifetime. This is why it is more complex than a mere list of doctrines and moral values.

Defining the Biblical Worldview: Paradigms and Rubrics

Some people summarize the biblical worldview in terms of a quick overview. We are familiar with schemes like Creation, Fall, Redemption¹³ that offer a framework for understanding the Bible’s story. It works quite well, and the system offered in this book fits into that framework. Others see it in wholly political terms, or as in some way affirming their own lifestyle choices. It is, in fact, testimony to the richness and depth of the Bible that it can be worked into such schemes, though all of them ultimately oversimplify and distort the Bible’s message. A fully developed biblical worldview will require much more than this. It will require deeper thinking, much deeper than the creation-fall-redemption paradigm or working Scripture into a man-made system.

Harold Turner

Harold Turner, late professor at Selly Oak Missionary College in Birmingham, England, developed a broad scheme within which worldviews may be understood. We will refer to it from time to time throughout the book as it shows the contrasts between worldviews very well. Turner says that there are only three possible ways of understanding the world: atomic, the oceanic, and the relational; symbolized respectively by billiard balls, the ocean, and the net.¹⁴ The atomic worldview is the worldview of most Americans. Like billiard balls on a table, each person is a unit, separate from everyone else. They touch and jostle one another, but in the end, they do not really affect each other much.

The oceanic worldview says that all things are really manifestations of one underlying reality. The Hindu worldview is like that; all is Brahmin. The visible world is really an illusion, and we must overcome the illusion and be absorbed back into Brahmin because we are really one with Brahmin ourselves but unaware of our Brahmin nature.¹⁵ The ocean represents this view well. If you are standing waist deep in the water and scoop up a little into your hand, then let it slip through your fingers, then scoop up another handful, you really cannot tell whether you scooped up the same water or different water the second time. The second scoop of water appears identical to the first and identical to the water in the rest of the ocean, for it is, in reality, one with it.

Between these two extremes is the relational worldview. All things in life are interconnected; they exist in relationship to what is around them, so that what is done in one place affects the rest.16 This is the worldview of the Bible and of many traditional rural and tribal societies. The Bible sees us as interconnected. What is done by one affects others, even affecting future generations. Exodus 34:7 tells us, God will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ wrongdoing on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation. In the New Testament, the church is likened to a body, with the parts all joined together (1 Cor 12:12–27). Because of Adam’s sin, all die (we are all affected by Adam) and in Christ all will be made alive (what he did 2,000 years ago affects our spiritual condition today) (1 Cor 15:22). Much moral teaching in the Bible is based on the idea that one person’s actions have effects on others in the community. Like a net where what happens in one place affects the rest, so also one’s actions have ramifications beyond oneself.

This is one reason why we have trouble with the biblical world­view. We live in an atomic worldview culture and try to read the Bible through that lens, and the Bible presents reality in relational terms. When the Bible says we are all in Christ we tend to see that as meaning we all agree on who Christ is and we all have similar moral and spiritual practices. The Bible actually means much more than that; it means we are all connected to Christ in a mystical spiritual union, and therefore connected to one another. The Scripture that says, Now you are the body of Christ, and individual members of it (1 Cor 12:27) cannot be reconciled with a view of the church that sees it like a set of billiard balls racked up together for a short time before being scattered. The church as a net makes much more sense of numerous Bible passages. One of our first challenges in believing and living a biblical worldview is to change our mind-set from atomic to relational. Evangelism, the call to repentance and faith, must include repentance from the kind of hyper-individualism that American culture encourages in every way. We must show an atomic-thinking world that our lives are interwoven and that we are responsible for one another and accountable to one another.

The atomic worldview lies behind many of the ills that plague American society. For example, people who see themselves as separate individuals, whose lives and actions have no real effect on others, are far more likely to divorce. It also lies behind belief in abortion. Much of the defense of abortion rights assumes that the woman is an individual whose actions affect no one but herself.

The atomic worldview results in many people segmenting their lives into different parts: their work life, social life, family life, and religious life. Each segment exists on its own apart from the others.This is why many people can say Amen on Sunday when the pastor says God created the world in six literal days and then say Wow, all those millions of years; incredible! on Tuesday night while watching a documentary about evolution. It never occurs to them that they have contradicted themselves; one is religion, the other is real life. We may not see this tendency to compartmentalize our lives, but it is likely that we do it to some extent. The Bible challenges us to see all of life as a whole, in relational terms.

A Rubric Approach to Worldview Analysis

While the Atomic-Oceanic-Relational framework allows us to broadly categorize worldviews, it is too general to help us sort out the details. Many cultures have a relational worldview, and the Bible is just one among many.¹⁷ If we are going to discover the elements of our own worldview, the worldview of the culture around us, and the worldview of the Bible, we need a rubric that will raise questions and challenge us to examine all this much more deeply.

Rubrics set up a series of questions that reveal details of a world­view. Jim Denison offers the following seven questions that reveal one’s worldview: What is real? How do we know what we know? How should we think? How can we communicate meaningfully? What is valuable? What is beautiful? Where is history going?¹⁸ These are valuable questions, but seeking to answer that many questions becomes too complicated. We do not easily remember them in the midst of looking at the Bible, or even a television show or movie. Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey offered a simpler scheme a few years ago, based on the creation-fall-redemption outline. They say that all worldviews can be analyzed according to the following three questions: Where did we come from and who are we (creation)? What has gone wrong with the world (fall)? And what can we do to fix it (redemption)? These three questions form a grid that we can use to break down the inner logic of every belief system or philosophy that we encounter. . . .¹⁹

That, in fact, is a basic premise of this book: that we can use a set of questions to analyze and understand worldviews of all kinds. The Colson-Pearcey rubric, however, conflates two important questions into one: Where did we come from? and Who are we? These should be separate questions. A similar rubric was developed some years earlier by Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton that does separate these:

(1) Who Am I? Or what is the nature, task and purpose of human beings? (2) Where Am I? Or, what is the nature of the world and universe I live in? (3) What’s wrong? Or, what is the basic problem or obstacle that keeps me from attaining fulfillment? In other words, how do I understand evil? And (4) What is the remedy? Or, how is it possible to overcome this hindrance to my fulfillment? In other words, how do I find salvation?²⁰

Walsh and Middleton credit Alan Storkey and James Sire for the inspiration for this series of questions.²¹ Sire raised seven questions, later expanded to eight, in the fifth edition of The Universe Next Door. Storkey’s eight questions more closely contain elements of the Walsh/Middleton rubric: What is my identity? is the Who Am I? question. What is wrong treatment of others? is an aspect of the What is wrong? question, and What will make me happy? is one way of framing the What is the remedy? question.²² Again, eight questions is too many for most people to keep in mind.

This book will use a form of the four worldview questions: Who am I? Where am I? What is wrong? And what is the answer? While we will explore these questions in ways quite different from Walsh and Middleton, I am deeply indebted to them for putting forth a schema that is simple enough to be adaptable and flexible enough to be applied to a variety of worldviews. I share their passion for seeing Christians move beyond giving lip service to the Bible to making the Bible’s view of reality an everyday part of life. Walsh and Middleton, and Harold Turner, are foundational to this book, but this one seeks to go well beyond their discussion and to offer the four worldview questions as a rubric that you can use every day to understand the worldviews that arise to challenge the biblical one, as well as to undergird your own study of the Bible.

The four-question format offered here can make the basic outline of the biblical worldview clear through a series of short statements: Who Are We? We are beings created in God’s image. Where Are We? We are in the world God created. What Is Wrong? Sin. What Is the Answer? Faith in Jesus Christ. This, however, is only a beginning, a set of hooks on which to hang everything else. There is much more to hang on these four questions. This book is intended to help you develop the tools to spend a lifetime developing and refining a biblical understanding of the world and to engage critically the competing worldviews that are out there both now and in the decades ahead. The effort here is to be complete enough to give you more than minimal tools and yet flexible enough to equip you to apply it in a variety of settings and at whatever stage of spiritual growth you have reached.

With these things in mind, this book begins with a chapter exploring each of the four worldview questions: who are we? (chap. 1), where are we? (chap. 2), what is wrong? (chap. 3), and what is the answer? (chap. 4). Then we will look at how various heroes of the faith in the Bible might have answered these questions in the midst of their circumstances and challenges. The general answers affect the specific answers given in specific situations. Seeing how Noah, Moses, and David answered these questions in specific circumstances, while facing specific challenges, will help us bring the four world­view questions down to our daily lives (chap. 5).

Then we will look at the worldview that characterizes much of America (chap. 6). We are called to live out a biblical worldview in the context of this country and its culture, and if we are to do so, we need to understand how many Americans typically answer these four questions. This will help us see more clearly both the similarities and the differences between the bibilical and the American worldviews. This analysis will also help us detect places where the world’s influence has affected our own thinking.

Chapter 7 examines various aspects of popular culture today. You will learn how to apply the four worldview questions to movies, television shows,