Looking at the Christian worldview

When his cosmic battle came to an end, the heavens shook, the stars were near to falling, the sun was darkened for a time, stones were split open, and the world might well have perished, but Christ gave up His soul – Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. And then, when He ascended, His divine spirit gave life and strength to the tottering world, and the whole universe became stable once more, as if the stretching out, the agony of the Cross, had in some way gotten into everything.

-St. Hippolytus, martyr and saint

A Christian worldview puts God at the center of everything as the ultimate and sole authority. He’s the foundation of all facts (because he created reason) and value judgments (because right always lines up with his nature, and wrong always goes against it). Because a worldview impacts every part of life, the Christian’s understanding of God proceeds to have a ripple effect through each and every field:

Theology: God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as expressed in the Bible (see Chapter 7).

Logic and philosophy: A supernatural God created reason and fact.

Ethics: Absolute values based on his nature and independent of circumstances do exist.

Physical sciences: God created the world and the systems that keep it running.

Psychology: People are created with a need for God but are also sinful. Positive and negative emotional and mental issues arise based on how people handle their built-in needs and deal with the side effects of sin.

Arts: God created humans with imagination and creativity.

Politics and government: God ordained government for order and justice (see Chapter 14).

Economics: Personal and national economics should be based on stewardship and justice.

Sociology: God created humans as social creatures and instituted basic structures, including the family, the nation, and the Church.

Figure 13-4 illustrates the Christian worldview.

Figure 13-4: A Christian worldview is centered on God.

God

Reason

Absolute right/wrong

Politics

Church

Entertainment

Family

Career

Finance

Community

Because the concept of a worldview is so all-encompassing, it’s not surprising that Christians wrestle with the idea of their faith as something this broad. As a result, unless a Christian explicitly surrenders all aspects of her life to the Lord (see the “Being a Disciple” section, earlier in this chapter), she consciously or unconsciously tries to skirt the all-or-nothing nature of biblical Christian faith. Christians who do this are in danger of two pitfalls:

Compartmentalizing life: Christians who do this don’t consider their worldview as a whole as they live their lives. Instead of trying to make sense out of life, they simply work with each piece in isolation. But because each piece is on its own, they have no broader perspective on how everything fits together. Remember, a Christian isn’t born with a Christian worldview. It’s something that one gains as he matures in the Christian faith and continually submits to it.

Trying to maintain control: Christians in this category prefer to mix and match worldviews, because they want to put God and themselves in the center position. They much prefer the idea of renting out the inner circle as a timeshare with God, letting him take the Sundays so long as they get the rest of the week. But authentic Christianity doesn’t have a timeshare option.

When Christians fall into one of these pitfalls, they become confused and wonder why God doesn’t seem to make a difference to them and why their lives don’t make any sense, because they have conflicting values across the various areas of their lives.

In the end, a Christian must embrace the Christian worldview so that all compartments of life are in synch with his or her faith. Authentic Christianity, as it turns out, is a 24/7 gig.

A must-read: How Now Shall We Live?

The inconsistent Christian suffers even more than the consistent atheist. The most miserable person of all is the one who knows the truth yet doesn’t obey it.

-Chuck Colson, How Now Shall We Live? (Tyndale House, 1999)

One of the best-known contemporary Christian authors, Chuck Colson describes How Now Shall We Live? as his legacy work. In it, Colson discusses why Christian belief must go beyond personal faith and instead be a complete framework for understanding your world, impacting what you believe about the origin of humans, sin, science, politics, art, music, and more. Colson does a great job making the subject matter readable and relevant to today’s readers.

Bringing the Christian binoculars everywhere you go

The modern-day world is a place that someone like Leonardo Da Vinci would find alien: It’s become a world of specialists. In higher education, students are becoming more specialized as they orient their careers in narrow fields of discipline. Similarly, in the field of medicine, doctors aren’t just doctors anymore; they are general practitioners, pediatricians, brain surgeons, ENTs (ears, nose, and throat specialists), ophthalmologists, or sports medicine doctors, to name a few. In the United States, television is now far greater than the “Big Three” networks; instead, hundreds of cable channels exist, each of which has a narrow area of interest. You don’t, for example, have a single sports station, but a slew of them, all having a slightly different focus – such as ESPN (general sports), ESPN News (sports news), ESPN2 (youth-oriented sports), ESPN Classic (sports stories from the past), and the Outdoor Life Network (adventure sports).

As society splinters itself into more and more compartments, it’s not surprising that people follow suit and do the same, partitioning their lives and treating each part independently. Christians are as susceptible to this same compartmentalization as everyone else, divorcing their faith from the rest of their lives. It’s so commonplace that people who put their faith in a box have a nickname: Sunday Christians.

Take, for example, Daniel (a guy I’ve made up for the sake of illustration); he’s the Sunday Christian poster child. Daniel attends church each and every Sunday morning, worshiping in the service and teaching junior high Sunday School. Daniel and his wife even go the extra mile by attending a Bible study on Sunday evenings. Yet, on Sunday night, Daniel either consciously or unconsciously says to himself, “Tomorrow, I’ll get on with the rest of my life.” He gets up for work at 5:30 a.m. the next morning and fights with thousands of other commuters for the quickest lane into the city and the best parking spot in the parking garage. At work, he was recently promoted and is now in charge of pursuing an acquisition of another company. At lunch, Daniel flirts with his secretary and then kids around with his fellow co-workers over the saga of the latest hit reality TV show. He leaves work early at 4 p.m. to attend a marital counseling session with his wife, because they’re battling communication and anger problems due to their rebellious 16-year-old daughter. Daniel then leaves the counseling session to go straight to a political rally. The rest of the week is similar for Daniel – that is, until the next Sunday morning, when he puts on his Sunday best and heads to church again.

What makes Daniel a model Sunday Christian aren’t necessarily his activities during the rest of the week. Instead, it’s that he doesn’t see any relationship between these activities and his Christian faith. Daniel never even considers that his personal Christian faith might impact his morning commute behavior, career goals, the ethical issues surrounding the potential acquisition, his rapport with others in his office, the TV shows he watches, his priorities as a husband and father, and his politics. As a result, although he may appear to be a Super Christian to fellow churchgoers, Daniel’s behavior is far different in the real world that he inhabits.

Many Christians lead fragmented lives like Daniel, with their faith having no bearing on the rest of their lives. To them, Christianity is nothing more than a Sunday morning obligation; the rest of life is their own personal business. Divorce rates, for example, speak to this problem. In spite of the specific teachings against divorce in the Bible, the sobering fact is that faith appears to make little difference on this important issue – various studies have shown that the divorce rate among people who call themselves Christians is identical to that of non-Christians.

To avoid living a disjointed life and dealing with all its shortcomings, Christians should take two steps:

Recognize the central role that God plays in all compartments of their lives.

Submit to the Lord in each of these areas.

In addition, the more Christians spend time with the Lord daily through prayer and Bible reading, live like a disciple, and lead a life of faith, they can be assured that their worldview is transformed as the Holy Spirit works in their hearts. (Check out the other sections in this chapter for the details on these aspects of Christian life.)