Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Christians did not invent the idea of worldview. The modern concept emerged from European philosophy. Though some critics of Christian worldview thinking like to point this out as if it's a problem, Christians have long taken ideas from the surrounding culture and then corrected them in light of Scripture and put them into service of truth.
Saint Augustine described this as plundering the Egyptians, borrowing from the account in Exodus, where Israel departed from Egypt while carrying off so much silver. And likewise with worldview, Christians took a useful concept and made corrections. In fact, there are two especially significant corrections made in order to Christianize the term. The first is recognizing that our worldview is deeper than the ideas that we consciously think about. We all hold beliefs about all kinds of things, but beneath those beliefs are more basic assumptions about the world we think we're living in.
Consider the resurrection. Beneath the many disagreements between A Christian and a materialist about whether Jesus actually rose bodily from the dead is a much more fundamental disagreement. Does anyone rise from the dead? And that depends greatly on whether there's a God more powerful than the natural forces in the universe, and whether humans were created by this God or are they too just merely matter in motion? To anyone who assumes that nothing supernatural exists, the resurrection is ruled out before any evidence is even considered.
These deeper assumptions are our pre-theoretical beliefs. Before we think about the world, we're all thinking with certain assumptions about what the world is like. And Scripture demonstrates this from its very opening words. When God gave the law to Moses to give to Israel, they were emerging from centuries in Egypt, a civilization filled with many gods. Before God gave His people instructions about how He expected them to live, He first gave them a radically different understanding of the world in which they lived.
In the creation account, in the beginning, God created the heavens and earth. In fact, in that first chapter, God gave Israel a new theology, a new cosmology, and a new anthropology. Creation is not the product of conflict among competing deities. There's one God who ordered the creation with purpose and declared it good. And then God said, "Let us make man in our image." Imagine the significance of those words to a people whose identity had been shaped by generations in slavery.
No, they're not Pharaoh's property. Human beings bear the image of God and are given responsibility within His creation. That gave Israel an entirely new understanding of the human person.
So, an understanding of God, an understanding of the world, an understanding of people—that's a worldview. It's there in the very first chapter of the Bible. Christians eventually brought another important biblical correction to the modern idea of world view: that human beings aren't merely thinking creatures. We don't see the world according only to what we think. We see the world mostly according to what we love.
Romans one tells us that God's reality is evident to everyone in what He's made, but also that as fallen human beings, we often suppress the truth. In other words, it's not that we lack information; sin has affected our ability, our willingness to see reality as it is. Saint Augustine understood that human flourishing requires rightly ordered loves, beginning with the love of God. What we love, desire, worship, fear, and trust affects how we will think about everything else.
Someone can possess impeccable doctrine while loving money or status or autonomy or political power or personal comfort more than God, and eventually those loves will exert pressure on what that person believes and how those beliefs are lived out. And that's why Christian worldview formation is not limited to correcting ideas. God intends to redeem the whole person. Thus, Jesus described the greatest commandment as loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and second as loving our neighbor. Humans are not detached reasoning machines.
What the heart desires, the will chooses, and the mind is remarkably capable of justifying.
So, our loves and our allegiances matter profoundly to our world view, our habits, our imaginations, our relationships, and cultures are all constantly forming our loves. Often, without us even recognizing it, so worldview is not just philosophy diagrammed on a whiteboard. It's the deeper framework through which humans encounter reality, and that involves the whole person. Sin disorders not only our minds but also our actions and our loves, and that distorts what we see. That's why Christian worldview formation is, in the end, just the formation of the Christian.
It's about pursuing correct ideas. It's about pursuing renewed minds and reordered loves and rightly placed allegiances. It's about seeing his world truthfully, loving what he loves, and then living faithfully within this reality that he has made for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Michael Craven.
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