Worldview Discussion: From My Thinking to His

2007-08-31

The following are impressions from a worldview seminar.

I think one impression I received from the Worldview Seminar was the compartmentalized way I (and many others) see life. In a diagram of concentric circles, I witnessed the reality of where we live: our personal biographical story is inside the group’s (or immediate culture’s) story, and the group’s story is inside of God’s story. Oftentimes, I feel like God’s story is just a part of my life story. Such is the age-old story of humankind: “religion” is a product of our imagination that is out there to serve us. Nothing is further from the truth; God created us for His purposes, and as the sovereign Lord of history, we are to conform everything in our lives to Him. There is a meta-narrative that exists independently from my view of the world.

The worldview seminar also stretched me in the area of Biblical interpretation. Jesus, during His earthly ministry, is constantly bringing His discussions with others to a worldview level. On the contrary, people put up a huge resistance to this and constantly try to bring the conversation back to the surface (or to the behavioral level). Nicodemus talked about physical birth when being told about the need to be born again. The woman at the well in John 4 kept talking about well water and mountains to worship on when Jesus referred to living water and worshipping in spirit and truth. I think my interpretation and application of many passages in the Word are often just as shallow and hollow. All of the passages about behavior presuppose the right worldview; the exhortations given by Paul and the other Biblical writers usually follow doctrinal teaching that is written to undo a former faulty worldview. The entire narrative of the Bible exists to bring us back to the worldview we need to have: that we exist in God’s story and are to be a part of His purpose.

I have the same model as Nicodemus and the woman at the well have: Keep things at the surface. I feel as if this is an element found in all worldviews that are alien from Biblical truth. I have found many times, and still do, that there is always something about myself or some image I need to create to make myself acceptable with my peers or with my God. Whatever I come up with, for example, may be accomplishments, or anything that will get attention from others, but it is all smoke and mirrors. It is an illusion that masks the individual that I really am. I have my insecurities and fears. How will I be an effective minister of God’s Word in a different culture when my fruitfulness in ministry has been limited at best within my own culture? There is nothing within me (or anybody) that either impresses God or will be found fruitful in reaching people with the Gospel. It is by the grace of God alone that I securely stand in Him, and by that same grace will I be a minister of His Word in this culture and in other cultures that are shrouded in darkness.

The high god view is not limited to tribal culture. I think sometimes I forget that God is the transcending and relational God that He is. This is evident in the Incarnation. In the West, we have often thoroughly given into the Deism of the Enlightenment and of the founding fathers of America. I subconsciously have done the same. Perhaps, I start to think, that this thinking paved the way for evolution to sweep American thinking by the twentieth century, and the postmodernism of relative truth by the twenty-first. I have inevitably been taken in this thinking, and need the eyes of God to gaze into my innermost being in order for me to see that God’s story is not the foundation of every area of my thinking, as it ought to be.

I have never thought what Jesus said to be the two most important commandments, the love for God and for people, to be the foundation of relationships. I always think of love as being a mystical feeling combined with random acts of kindness. This explains a lot about the necessity of relationships to discover another’s worldview and how to displace it with a biblical one. This could take time. The saving of the thousands in the early chapters of Acts is within the minority of situations. Narrative, the genre mostly used in the Biblical writings, teaches relationally rather than with systematic theology, which is the opposite of what we do in western culture. We may need to teach and evangelize in story, and we need to live out God’s story in loving people, being the only incarnation of Christ’s love that some people may ever see.

I come from a worldview where it is believed there was an impersonal beginning to personal humankind, and where no one was the master of humankind. Starting points and origins matter: God created all things and is above all things. Impersonal elements cannot worry, fear, appreciate the arts, love, or do what the personal being can, and we never notice the contradiction in the naturalistic worldview. Though I have believed in Biblical Creationism for a long time, some of the elements of this worldview still plague my mind. Every time I buy into the individualism of America, which I do either subtly or overtly, I am going back to a naturalistic worldview. But I do not create my own world; I live in God’s history, which He both ordained and maintains. Praise God that He exists outside of my little world, and He is sovereign over all things, from galaxies to atomic particles. Praise God that He transcends the highest heavens, yet knows me intimately.