Evangelism

The thing about culture is that it is always changing. That’s because culture is, in a very real sense, created by humans. It’s the result of what we think, what we imagine, what we change, what we legislate, what we invent, what we relate to, and all kinds of other human experiences. 

There are some moments, however, in which the changes are deeper and wider, the shifts in culture more fundamental. Many sense we’re living in such a time where the changes that have taken place over the last several decades have been substantial, to say the least. My friend Os Guinness calls this a “civilizational moment,” where society isn’t just at a critical crossroads in twenty-first century America. It’s instead at a critical crossroads for Western civilization itself. 

Of course, history tells the story about civilizations, how they rise and fall. There are rules to civilizations, and if those rules are broken, then those civilizations no longer have a future. What Os means when he calls this a civilizational moment is that we’re at a time when our future is unclear. Will Western civilization be renewed? Will it enter a time of revolution? Or will we continue in irreversible decline? 

It’s important as Christians to always remember that the decline of Western civilization is not the decline of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God both predates and will long outlast the history of Western civilization. However, its decline will be significant indeed because so many of the ideals of the Western world were shaped and formed by Christian beliefs—specifically those beliefs about morality and about human dignity. Such ideals aren’t found in other civilizations that have long since been swept into the dustbin of history. 

But here’s what Christians can be sure of, whatever the future holds for Western civilization: We belong to an even bigger story. In fact, given the biblical account of reality from Creation to new Creation, from Heavens and Earth to new Heavens and new Earth, the history of this civilization is more like a moment. 

And that’s the thing about moments that can only be properly understood in light of stories: You can never fully understand a story from a moment, but you can make sense of a moment from the perspective of the larger story. In God’s grace, that’s precisely what He has given us: The Story of reality, capital “T,” capital “S.” 

He’s also given us the truth about who we are and what it means to be a human being, which, of course, is something that has shifted dramatically in these latter decades of Western culture. Untethered from these ideological roots that made Western culture what it was, the future for this society is indeed unclear.  

But there’s good news. The most important thing we can know about this civilizational moment is that Christians don’t find ourselves in it by accident. Scripture reveals something very interesting and important about God Himself, which is that He is chronologically precise. In other words, we’re in this time and in this place by His intention … we’ve been called to it. So then, as Francis Schaeffer and later Chuck Colson asked, how now shall we live in the knowledge of this?  

The only way to do that is to get our hands, our minds, and our hearts around four fundamental realities of the Christian worldview, starting with hope. Scripture says that Christians are people of hope, but that means we must fully and rightly understand what hope is and not misdefine it as some sort of wishful thinking. Jesus is our blessed hope.  

We must also wrap our minds, hearts, and heads around what is true, not just the individual truths of Christianity, as important as those are. We must not just know the moral truths of how we ought to behave, but the truth of the Christian story and how that story is so radically different than all the other worldviews that are vying for our hearts and minds right now. 

A proper understanding of identity is another key point to navigating this civilizational moment. The Christian worldview offers the only accurate definition of what it means to be human, made in the image and likeness of God. We must know exactly what it means to be “made in the image of God” and how that impacts our relationship with the world around us, with God, with others, and with ourselves.  

And finally, we need to have a clear sense of calling. Especially in a time like ours, it’s easy to feel like victims against the forces of history. We feel as if we have no say in where civilization is headed. But remember, we have been called to this civilizational moment, and we have the truth about reality and about the human person at the ready in Scripture.  

If Christians can be clear on these four things of hope, truth, identity, and calling, that’s a pretty good roadmap for this civilization. The next Lighthouse Voices event will explore these guidelines with our “A Christian’s Guide to this Civilizational Moment” lecture. The Lighthouse Voices series is a joint project from Focus on the Family and the Colson Center designed to help Christians think well about the culture they live in, especially when it comes to those issues that intersect with family.  

Every so often, a book or article will denounce the concept of worldview for Christians. The claims, which vary from writer to writer, are usually a mix of legitimate critique and odd straw manning.

Some argue that the German rationalist history of worldview makes it wrong, misguided, or even unbiblical for Christians. Others suggest that it reduces authentic faith to something too cerebral, too impersonal or too formulaic. Perhaps the most common critique is that it just doesn’t “work” in today’s cultural environment. 

That last critique extends to all Christian intellectual work, especially apologetics.

For decades now, last rites have been offered for Christian intellectual pursuits but, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment about rumors of his own demise, rumors of the death of worldview and apologetics have been greatly exaggerated. In just the last few months, millions witnessed Wesley Huff use apologetics to share the Gospel with millions on Joe Rogan’s podcast, as well as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger proclaim a new faith in Christ and attribute it to a long intellectual journey which involved a popular apologetics and evangelism website. The long history of Christian intellectual work includes philosophy, science, medicine, art and virtually every area of human understanding. People still have questions, and the Bible provides answers. The life of the mind is a non-reducible aspect of the Christian faith.  

The most common criticisms of Christian worldview as a concept have come from those who doubt objective truth, objective morality, and Christianity’s clear doctrinal stands, and yet still wish to identify as Christian. In the past, these critiques came from those who embraced more culturally and theologically liberal views.

Just recently, however, a critic from the dissident Right complained that Christian worldview ideas, such as image of God and knowable truth, undermined their views about race and nationalism. He’s right. They do. There are clear implications of the Bible’s truth-claims about God, the universe, human dignity, and many other things. 

A smaller set of criticism comes from Christians who found that a formulaic understanding of Christian worldview hadn’t “worked” the way they had either been told or thought. In their experience, the Christian worldview was presented as obvious, and the others as nonsense. Perhaps they were taught objectively that certain sins were, in fact sins, but understanding that didn’t keep them from struggling. Or perhaps they had run-ins with obnoxious Christians who used worldview like a club to badger people into submission on narrow political opinions. 

Worldview has been done badly but, as a movement, it’s been largely self-corrective. Some of the earliest champions of Christian worldview, such as Herman Bavinck and Herman Dooyeweerd, pushed worldview thinking away from the confusions of German rationalism. Almost every popular champion of Christian worldview, from James Sire to Nancy Pearcey to Francis Schaeffer to Charles Colson, argued against reducing faith to cerebral formulas. More recently, many have worked to maintain the political ramifications of Christian truth without allowing the faith to be reduced to political partisanship.  

In his short book on the importance of creativity and art, Francis Schaeffer wrote: 

“If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just ‘dogmatically’ true or ‘doctrinally’ true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.”

Christian worldview is about the realization that if Christianity is true, it’s about everything and it changes everything. As Scottish theologian James Orr, among the earliest Christian thinkers to talk about the Christian worldview, wrote,  

“He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity.”

While I agree that the term “Christian worldview” or “Biblical worldview” is clunky, every alternative I’ve heard (like “Christian social imaginary”) is far worse. Perhaps we should just call it Biblical wisdom, this quest to incarnate Christ’s claim on reality, as articulated by Abraham Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Our job, Chuck Colson often said, is to go anywhere and everywhere and cry out “His!”