30 Key Quotes on the Biblical Worldview

All believers should know what the Christian worldview entails:

Even if most folks may not know it, everyone has a worldview – a basic way of looking at the world. But not all worldviews are equal. Some are false and some are true. Tests of a good worldview include consistency, coherence, and consistency with reality.

These quotes from 20 authors speak to the importance of the Christian worldview, and how it must speak to every aspect of life. They all come from Christian writers over the past 80 years or so. Many more could be offered here, but this is a helpful collection:

D. A. Carson

“Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. . . . “[The biblical] vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns.” Christ and Culture Revisited

Charles Colson

“The church’s singular failure in recent decades has been the failure to see Christianity as a life system, or worldview, that governs every area of existence. This failure has been crippling in many ways. For one thing, we cannot answer the questions our children bring home from school, so we are incapable of preparing them to answer the challenges they face. For ourselves, we cannot explain to our friends and neighbours why we believe, and we often cannot defend our faith. And we do not know how to organize our lives correctly, allowing our choices to be shaped by the world around us. What’s more, by failing to see Christian truth in every aspect of life, we miss great depths of beauty and meaning: the thrill of seeing God’s splendor in the intricacies of nature or hearing his voice in the performance of a great symphony or detecting his character in the harmony of a well-ordered community.

“Most of all, our failure to see Christianity as a comprehensive framework of truth has crippled our efforts to have a redemptive effect on the surrounding culture. At its most fundamental level, the so-called culture war is a clash of belief systems. It is, as Kuyper put it, a clash of principle against principle, of worldview against worldview. Only when we see this can we effectively evangelize a post-Christian culture, bringing God’s righteousness to bear in the world around us.” How Now Shall We Live?

“The world is divided not so much by geographic boundaries as by religious and cultural traditions, by people’s most deeply held beliefs – by worldviews.” How Now Shall We Live?

“Understanding Christianity as a worldview is important not only for fulfilling the great commission but also for fulfilling the cultural commission – the call to create a culture under the lordship of Christ. God cares not only about redeeming souls but also about restoring his creation. He calls us to be agents not only of his saving grace but also of his common grace. Our job is not only to build up the church but also to build a society to the glory of God.” How Now Shall We Live?

William Lane Craig

“Evangelicals have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or outmoded, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint. This is a war which we cannot afford to lose.” Reasonable Faith

T. S. Eliot

 “The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians. A Christian education would primarily train people to think in Christian categories.” Christianity and Culture

Os Guinness

“Thinking Christianly is thinking by Christians about anything and everything in a consistently Christian way – in a manner that is shaped, directed, and restrained by the truth of God’s Word and God’s Spirit.” God In the Dark

Carl F. H. Henry

“There is not a sphere of learning and life that should fall outside the Christian vision.” Twilight of A Great Civilization

“The Christian life must be lived out among the regenerate, in every area of activity, until even the unregenerate are moved by Christian standards, acknowledging their force.” The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism

Arthur Holmes

“The genesis of a world view is at the prephilosophical level. It begins, without either systematic planning or theoretical intentions, with the beliefs and attitudes and values on which people act. There are feelings about one’s world, too, as well as beliefs and attitudes, and the values that different things in that world offer us. In this sense everyone has the beginnings of a world view, and from reflection on these unanalyzed and unsystematic beginnings a more carefully examined and systematically developed view takes shape.” Contours of a World View

Abraham Kuyper

“There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’” (Commenting on Ps. 24.1: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”)

 C. S. Lewis

“We are now getting to the point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different behavior. Religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set.” Mere Christianity

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The Weight of Glory

J. Gresham Machen

“The church must seek to conquer not merely every man for Christ, but also the whole of man.” Education, Christianity, and the State

J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig

“The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual struggle going on in the universities and scholarly journals and professional societies. Enlightenment naturalism and postmodern antirealism 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. For 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, will be 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 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 and respect at the university, it will have a leavening effect throughout society. If we change the university, we change our culture through those who shape culture.” Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview

Ronald Nash

“The case for or against Christian theism should be made and evaluated in terms of total systems. Christianity is not simply a religion that tells human beings how they may be forgiven, however important this information is. Christianity is also a total world-and-life view. Our faith has important things to say about the whole of human life. Once Christians understand in a systematic way how the options to Christianity are also worldviews, they will be in a better position to justify their choice of Christianity rationally. The reason many people reject our faith is not due to their problems with one or two isolated issues; it is the result of their anti-Christian conceptual scheme, which leads them to reject information and arguments that for believers provide support for the Christian worldview. Worldviews in Conflict

Nancy Pearcey

“Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.” Total Truth

Kenneth Richard Samples

“The way a person sees life and the world as a comprehensive whole is his world-and-life view. This perspective is analogous to a pair of glasses. The collection of belief an individual holds about the most important questions of life—such as God, the world, knowledge, values, humanity, and history—colors his interpretation of each day’s experiences and observations. That view then shapes and influences his entire existence including his ideas and actions.

“This general context for life, this vision of what is authentically real, functions as a road map to guide and direct a person’s living. Virtually everyone has a worldview, though people’s belief systems often tend to be underdeveloped and poorly articulated.

“Because various worldviews come to fundamentally different conclusions about the big questions of life, logic and reason mandate that not all perspectives can be true. The rational choice of one particular position ought to be made—and can be made—via testing and evaluation.” A World of Difference

Francis Schaeffer

“Christianity is not just involved with ‘salvation’, but with the total man in the total world. The Christian message begins with the existence of God forever, and then with creation. It does not begin with salvation. We must be thankful for salvation, but the Christian message is more than that. Man has a value because he is made in the image of God.” Art & the Bible

“Most people catch their presuppositions [or worldviews] from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.” How Should We Then Live?

“As Christians we are not only to know the right worldview, the worldview that tells us the truth of what is, but consciously to act upon that worldview so as to influence society in all its parts and facets across the whole spectrum of life, as much as we can.” How Should We Then Live?

 “The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.” A Christian Manifesto

James Sire

“A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and move and have our being.” Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept

 C. Fred Smith

“Far from being limited to a particular aspect of life, the biblical worldview is comprehensive. It includes everything related to the doctrines, values, priorities, and understanding of how the world works that the Bible commends and promotes. It looks at the modern world through the lenses of the Bible rather than looking at the Bible using the lenses of the modern world The Bible should determine how you understand reality, yourself, and those around you, and how you solve problems. It is not something we ‘adopt’ in a single moment, but rather it is something we ‘develop’ over a lifetime. This is why it is more complex than a mere list of doctrines and moral values.” Developing a Biblical Worldview

John Stott

“Many people are rejecting our gospel today not because they perceive it to be false, but because they perceive it to be trivial. People are looking for an integrated world-view which makes sense of all their experience. We learn from Paul that we cannot preach the gospel of Jesus without the doctrine of God, or the cross without the creation, or salvation without judgment. Today’s world needs a bigger gospel, the full gospel of Scripture, what Paul later in Ephesus was to call ‘the whole purpose of God (Acts 20:27).” The Message of Acts

N. T. Wright
“The work of ‘salvation’ in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely ‘souls’; (2) about the present, not merely the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.” Surprised by Hope

The kingdom of heaven is not just about “people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth. When Matthew has Jesus talking about heaven’s kingdom, he means that heaven – in other words, the God of heaven – is establishing his sovereign rule not just in heaven, but on earth as well.” How God Became King

Ravi Zacharias

“Nothing for the Christian is essentially secular. It can only be secularized by leaving God out of it or by engaging in that from which God, by his nature, must be excluded.” The Real Face of Atheism

“I am convinced that the most effective defense of the faith and offense against falsehood must be based on an examination of worldviews.” Beyond Opinion

“Every questioner has a worldview. If you do not appeal to the legitimacy or the illegitimacy of the worldview, you will never give satisfactory answers to the skeptic. In short, apologetics may begin in specifics but inevitably moves to the general, which then explains the specifics.” Beyond Opinion

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