What Is a Christian Worldview? E-Book

Graham A. Cole

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Questions for Restless Minds
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 75

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

How Jesus makes sense of the world. Everyone believes they see the world rightly. But with so many different viewpoints, it's as though everyone were wearing different--colored glasses. How do you know which view is right? In What is a Christian Worldview?,Graham A. Cole asks how Christians should see the world. Everyone has a worldview, a frame of reference through which we understand our experiences. A worldview must be coherent and able to be lived. So what does it look like to have a Christian worldview? And how should Christians live? Understand how to think and live in a distinctively Christian way. The Questions for Restless Minds series applies God's word to today's issues. Each short book faces tough questions honestly and clearly, so you can think wisely, act with conviction, and become more like Christ.

Leseprobe

QUESTIONS FOR RESTLESS MINDS

What Is a Christian Worldview?

Graham A. Cole

D. A. Carson,

Series Editor

What Is a Christian Worldview?

Questions for Restless Minds, edited by D. A. Carson

Copyright 2022 Christ on Campus Initiative

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Print ISBN 9781683595335

Digital ISBN 9781683595342

Library of Congress Control Number 2021937699

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abigail Stocker, Jessi Strong, Mandi Newell

Cover Design: Brittany Schrock

Contents

Series Preface

1.Introduction

2.Questioning the Question

3.The Book That Understands Me

4.Describing: Is It Enough?

5.Understanding the Book That Understands Me

Acknowledgments

Study Guide Questions

For Further Reading

Series Preface

D. A. CARSON, SERIES EDITOR

The origin of this series of books lies with a group of faculty from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), under the leadership of Scott Manetsch. We wanted to address topics faced by today’s undergraduates, especially those from Christian homes and churches.

If you are one such student, you already know what we have in mind. You know that most churches, however encouraging they may be, are not equipped to prepare you for what you will face when you enroll at university.

It’s not as if you’ve never known any winsome atheists before going to college; it’s not as if you’ve never thought about Islam, or the credibility of the New Testament documents, or the nature of friendship, or gender identity, or how the claims of Jesus sound too exclusive and rather narrow, or the nature of evil. But up until now you’ve probably thought about such things within the shielding cocoon of a community of faith.

Now you are at college, and the communities in which you are embedded often find Christian perspectives to be at best oddly quaint and old-fashioned, if not repulsive. To use the current jargon, it’s easy to become socialized into a new community, a new world.

How shall you respond? You could, of course, withdraw a little: just buckle down and study computer science or Roman history (or whatever your subject is) and refuse to engage with others. Or you could throw over your Christian heritage as something that belongs to your immature years and buy into the cultural package that surrounds you. Or—and this is what we hope you will do—you could become better informed.

But how shall you go about this? On any disputed topic, you do not have the time, and probably not the interest, to bury yourself in a couple of dozen volumes written by experts for experts. And if you did, that would be on one topic—and there are scores of topics that will grab the attention of the inquisitive student. On the other hand, brief pamphlets with predictable answers couched in safe slogans will prove to be neither attractive nor convincing.

So we have adopted a middle course. We have written short books pitched at undergraduates who want arguments that are accessible and stimulating, but invariably courteous. The material is comprehensive enough that it has become an important resource for pastors and other campus leaders who devote their energies to work with students. Each book ends with a brief annotated bibliography and study questions, intended for readers who want to probe a little further.

Lexham Press is making this series available as attractive print books and in digital formats (ebook and Logos resource). We hope and pray you will find them helpful and convincing.

1

INTRODUCTION

He took the blade. It was bright silver. He loved the way it glistened. It felt good in his hand. He cut deep into her chest again and again. He showed no emotion, no recognition of her humanity. She lay motionless, her life gone. He made no attempt to cover the body. Later that night over a beer he openly talked to a stranger in the bar about what he had done. The stranger felt ill.

What are we to make of this? Should someone have called 911? Should he have been arrested? Is this a Hannibal Lecter story? It all depends. To make sense of it, this narrative fragment needs placing in a larger picture or frame of reference. We need to know more.

Now suppose I were to inform you that the setting earlier that night was a back alley late at night and that the woman had been alive but drunk when she entered it, then you would be entitled to think that this is a case for CSI. The man listening to the story in the bar ought to have called the police. However, if I were to say that instead of the alley, the setting earlier that night had been a CSI autopsy room, then the complexion of the event changes your reading of it. The man with the knife is no serial killer but instead a forensic scientist. Maybe he shouldn’t have talked about the details to a stranger over a beer. But if that was misconduct it was unprofessional, not criminal.

Frames of reference are keys to understanding, to reading the world of our experience. Eric Fromm found that out as a young man before he became a prominent therapist and humanist thinker. He contemplated the carnage of World War I and wondered, “How come such violence? How could cultured peoples slaughter each other in the millions?”1 That thought led him to study Karl Marx and the outer world of human history. He wanted to make some kind of sense of the world of his experience. He also knew a young woman who committed suicide at the grave of her father. She was very beautiful and refined. “How come?” he asked. On the surface she had so much to live for. How could some kind of sense be made of it? That tragic story led him to study Sigmund Freud and the inner world of the human psyche. He found that he needed a frame of reference in which to place such events, great and small, in order to make some sense of them.

The need for a frame of reference is all the more urgent given the “meteoric shower of facts” that pour on us (to use Neil Postman’s borrowed phrase). Postman quotes the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay to good effect:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour

Rains from the sky a meteoric shower

Of facts … they lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun, but there exists no loom

To weave it into fabric.2

If the fabric is to be woven, Postman argues, we need a “god” in the sense of a “grand narrative” (this is an odd use of the word “god,” I might add)—one that “tells of origins and envisions a future.” It must be some story “that it is possible to organize one’s life around.”3 And, I might add, it must help us cope with the “meteoric shower / Of facts.”

Our frame of reference matters. We all have at least one, or maybe bits of different ones that we have never been able to connect up into some sort of coherent whole. Perhaps this is a question to which we have not really turned our minds in a sustained way. If we do then the real question becomes: where do we find a frame of reference or a worldview that tells a coherent and consistent story that really understands us and illuminates the actual world in which we live? We need—if we want to be thoughtful about it—a frame of reference that is thinkable, that is, one that is not riddled with self-contradiction. It also needs to be livable—that is, we can actually live as though this frame of reference really does correspond to the world of our experience, so that we do not have to pretend that it does. (More about those criteria at a later stage.) That is not to say, however, that there may not be puzzles and mysteries left unresolved. As Moses said in ancient times, there are secret things that belong to the Lord (Deut 29:29).

Having said all that, though, a word is needed about the tricky term “worldview.”4 How does it relate to the expression I prefer, which is “frame of reference”?

2

QUESTIONING THE QUESTION

C