Christian Worldview

OPENING:
About 20 years ago I decided to take up the sport of raquetball. It didn’t take much time to get me hooked. I started playing occasionally, then was playing regularly. After a while I was playing frequently, 3 or 4 times a week. In those days court time was cheap ($4 an hour), so I’d invite a friend to play and split the cost. He’d pay $3 and I’d pay $1.
In only a matter of months I was winning almost every game I played. Of course, I was screening my opponents carefully – playing mostly the elderly, the infirmed. So, being slightly competitive and driven by nature, I was pleased to find a sport I could play really well. One day, I noticed a poster where I played that said there was going to be a tournament at the club later that month. I was new to all this, so I read the poster carefully. It said the way the tournament was set up was that there would be 3 skill levels: C-level for recreational novices; B-level for serious raquetball players; and an A-level for the guys who slept with their rackets.
I remember standing there, looking at the poster and asking myself, “If I enter this thing, this being my very first tournament, what would be the appropriate skill level for me?” And because I was a Christian and a pastor, and knew all of what the Bible says about humility, I said to myself, “Let’s face it Dane. You’ve only been playing a few months. There’s probably no way you’re going to win the A-level.”
So I stood there and debated with myself whether or not I should play it safe and enter the B-level, or throw caution to the wind and enter the A-level and try to pull off an upset victory. One thing was certain, I had no interest in the C-level whatsoever – I was way past this recreational novice business. As I was finalizing my decision to jump right into the A-level, an older gentleman walked up to me and asked, “Are you going to enter the tournament this month?” I replied, “Well, I’m thinking about it.”
I could tell he was checking me over and sizing me up, wondering how good I was and what level I’d enter. And I was doing the same thing, wondering what level he’d be in. He was a short, pot-bellied guy. In different sports you look for different things – there were these little short arms on this guy. Then he said, “I entered last month’s tournament.” I asked, “What league?” And he said, “C-level.” I thought, “Figures.” And then he said, “And I came in 10th.” And it was like he was proud of it. I thought to myself, “If I came in 10th in the C-level, recreational novice league, I wouldn’t tell a soul. It would be embarrassing.” Then out of the blue the guy said, “I’ve already played a couple of games today but if you want, I’d be happy to play you.” I agreed, thinking this would be a kind of benchmark game for me – I could see the level of play of a C-guy, then judge the appropriate level for me (A or B, probably A).
To make a long story short, this short-armed pot-bellied bald guy beat me 21-0 in about 7 minutes! I’d never seen a raquetball hit that hard, go that fast, or hit that low. I felt like I needed a spatula rather than a racket. He annihilated me! We chatted after the game back in the locker room. He didn’t even have to shower. I asked him if I could ask a few questions before he left. I said, “You placed 10th in the C-league?” (”Yeah, I had a good tournament).
“If you were to have played the guy who won the C-level, what do you think the score would have been?” “21-5. I’d like to think I could get 5 points on him.” Then I asked, “What would happen if the average B-level guy played the winner of the C-league?” He said, “it would be ugly, murder, slice-and-dice, 21-0.” (I’m feeling weaker all the time). Finally, “What would happen if an A-league guy played the B-level winner?” “Same thing. It’d be over in a matter of minutes. By the way, you ought to see what a pro does to an A-level guy.”

Then he said, “I’m running late. Gotta go. Enjoyed the game.” I thought, “Bet you did.” So, I sat there all alone in the locker room thinking how deceived can a person be? 20 minutes ago I though I was almost an A-level player, I might even win it. I was certainly a B-level player and in the hunt. I didn’t even want to mess with the C-level. Then I got clobbered by a guy who placed 10th in the recreational novice league. How deceived can a person be?

Unfortunately, many of us have been deceived into accepting a popular version of reality without ever really thinking about it. It seems we have accepted by default an inaccurate, incomplete, and totally impotent understanding of reality (or ‘worldview’).
· And believe it or not, ideas matter. The ideas one really believes largely determine the kind of person he or she becomes.
· Everyone has a philosophy of life (worldview). That is not optional. What is optional, and, therefore, of ultimate importance is the adequacy of one’s philosophy of life. Are one’s views rational or irrational, true or false, carefully formed and precise or conveniently formed and fuzzy? Are they conducive to flourishing as a human being or do they cater to one’s fallen nature? Are they honoring or dishonoring to the triune God?

Fortunately for us, the Lord Jesus Christ did not leave us to ourselves when it comes to understanding reality. I want us to read his own statement concerning reality in John 14:6.
[John 14:1-7]

The Gospel of John frequently uses the language of truth, much more so than the other gospel writers, and with John the concept of truth undergoes significant theological development. John uses truth vocabulary in its conventional sense of genuineness/veracity/opposite of falsehood, but he also develops his own particular meaning where truth refers to the reality of God. In John 14:6, Jesus declares boldly and clearly that he is the revelation of the reality of God.
· The word used in 14:6 is aletheia. To understand Jesus’ usage we need to look back at the beginning of John’s gospel where he states: “For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”(1:17). Exodus 34:6 is clearly the relevant O.T. background because of the context which compares the incarnation of the Word with God’s revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
· What’s the point of John’s connection with Exodus 34? Revelation of Reality. The incarnation of God in Christ is presented as the supreme disclosure of the reality of God, who had revealed himself to Moses in the giving of the Law at Sinai.
· As the Law framed reality for the Jews, so now in an even fuller and complete way Jesus Christ frames reality for us. As ultimate reality, Christ is the standard by which all truth or falsehood is measured in this world.
Therefore, every believer must engage personally and intellectually the worldview Jesus revealed and from which he taught and lived .

But we have a serious problem today: Many Christians have been converted spiritually but not intellectually.

Let me explain what I mean:
illustration:
On a clear autumn day in 1980, 25 miles west of Chicago in Wheaton, Illinois, Charles Malik, a distinguished academic and statesman, rose to the podium to deliver the inaugural address at the dedication of the new Billy Graham Center on the campus of Wheaton College. His announced topic was “The Two Tasks of Evangelism.” What he said must have shocked his audience.

We face two tasks in our evangelism, he told them, “saving the soul and saving the mind” and the church, he warned, is lagging dangerously behind with respect to this second task. We would do well to consider Malik’s words:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting
American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-
intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches
is not cared for enough…. People who are in a hurry to get out
of the university and start earning money or serving the church
or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of
spending years of leisure conversing with the great minds and
souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their
powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative
thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among
evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on
their own terms of scholarship?…. For the sake of the greater
effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their
own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the
periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

· These words strike like a sledge hammer. The average Christian does not even realize that there is an intellectual struggle going on in the West and that Enlightenment naturalism and postmodern anti-realism are arrayed in an unholy alliance against a broadly theistic and specifically Christian worldview. Christians cannot afford to be indifferent to the outcome of this struggle, yet our churches are overpopulated with people, whose minds, as Christians, are going to waste.
· They may be spiritually regenerate but their minds have not been converted—they still think like unbelievers. Despite their Christian commitment, they remain largely empty selves. What is an empty self? An empty self is a person who is passive, flaccid, busy and hurried, incapable of developing an interior life.
· Imagine now a church filled with such people. What will be the theological understanding, the evangelistic courage, the cultural penetration of such a church? If the interior life does not really matter all that much, a person will simply not exert the effort to read, preferring to be entertained.
He or she….
Will consider magazines filled with pictures and visual media in general more important than mere words on a page or abstract thoughts.

Will have little patience for theoretical knowledge and too short an attention span to stay with an idea while it is being developed.

What will that person read, if he or she reads at all? Books about Christian celebrities, Christian romance novels imitating the worst that the world has to offer, Christian self-help books with slogans, simplistic moralizing, lots of stories and pictures, and inadequate solutions for the problems facing the reader.

What will not be read are books that equip persons to develop a well-reasoned, theological understanding of the Christian faith and to assume their role in the broader work of the kingdom of God.

· Such a church will be impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to wash away Christian ideas in a flood of thoughtless pluralism and misguided scientism.

Such a church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers—numbers achieved by cultural accommodation to empty selves. In this way, the church will become her own grave-digger—her short-term “success” will turn out in the long run to be the very thing that buries her.

What makes this envisioned scenario so disturbing is that we do not have to imagine such a church; rather, this is an apt description of the majority of American evangelical churches today.

It is no wonder then, that despite its resurgence, evangelical Christianity remains highly limited in its cultural impact.

illustration:
David Wells reflects on this current reality:

The vast growth in evangelically minded people… should by now have revolutionized American culture. With a third of American adults now claiming to have experienced spiritual rebirth, a powerful countercurrent of morality growing out of a powerful and alternative worldview should have been unleashed in factories, offices, and board rooms, in the media, universities, and professors, from one end of the country to the other. The results should by now be unmistakable. Secular values should be reeling, and those who are their proponents should be very troubled. But as it turns out, all of this swelling of the evangelical ranks has passed unnoticed in the culture…. The presence of evangelicals in American culture has barely caused a ripple. (David F. Wells, No Place for Truth)

Here is my best diagnosis of the problem: While evangelicals have for the most part correct Christian beliefs (orthodox religion), far too many of these beliefs lie largely at the periphery of their existence rather than at the center of their identity. At their core, they are hollow men, empty selves. And this trend within the church is combined with two unfortunate features of postmodern Western culture: the rampant pragmatism in society and the nonexistence of raising up a Christian worldview for our children, youth, and university students. The result is that serious intellectual reflection is virtually absent from most church fellowships. This, in turn, has contributed to intellectual shallowness and a lack of cultural discernment in the body of Christ.

Those who know me know that I am a passionate person. I aim toward living by a single God-exalting, soul-satisfying passion. And I do not shy away from the word or idea or outward display of “passion.” Passion is appropriate because God commands us to love Him with all our heart (Mt. 22:37) and Jesus reminds us that lukewarm lives make him hurl (Rev 3:16). But the same Jesus who tell us to love God with all our heart also tells us to love Him with all our mind.
· Yes, we need to feel and display a passionate love for God, but a revival of intellectual engagement is absolutely critical for restoring vibrant, life-transforming apprenticeship under the lordship of Jesus Christ, the Master Teacher.
· No apprentice will become like his or her teacher if he or she does not respect the authority of that teacher to direct the apprentice’s life and activities. However, today the general attitude even among many of Christ’s followers is that while Jesus Christ is holy, powerful, and so forth, the worldview he taught and from which he lived is no longer credible for thinking people. It seems we have accepted by default an inaccurate, incomplete, and totally impotent worldview.

CLOSING:

Why this Chapel theme: “… with all your mind?” Why this message on engaging the mind toward a Christian worldview?
· Frankly, it is because the single most important institution shaping Western culture is the university. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our teachers, our business executives, our lawyers, our artists, our vocational Christian ministers are being trained.
· It is at the university that they will formulate or, more likely, simply absorb the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion-makers and leaders who will shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes our culture.
· If the Christian worldview can be restored to a place of prominence, respect, and centrality at the university, it will have a leavening affect throughout society. And if we change the university, we change our culture through those who shape culture.
· May God help us engage personally and intellectually the worldview Jesus revealed and from which he taught and lived.