Worldviews and World Changers

The Christian worldview is not just theoretically true:

Yesterday I wrote an article featuring 30 quotes on the biblical worldview. Some folks might think that this is all rather esoteric and ethereal stuff, with not much practical application to everyday life. And some Christians can also think this way, believing it does not have much relevance for them.

But they would be quite wrong. Not only is the Christian worldview something that can be discussed and debated by theologians and philosophers, but it has a direct bearing on the sorts of lives we live in the here and now. At least it SHOULD have a real and concrete impact on us and the surrounding culture.

Christianity has never been about just sitting around and waiting for heaven. It is about having our lives transformed by Christ, and then seeing other lives – and even our culture – impacted and transformed as well. I quoted N. T. Wright on this in my earlier piece:

“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)

We all know of the old saying which goes like this: “Don’t be so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly good.” It has been around for a while now. American writer, physician, poet, and educator Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) may have been among the first to say it.

And one person to especially popularise it was country singer Johnny Cash. In his 1977 album “The Rambler” was the song, “No Earthly Good”. The lyrics include:

Come heed me, my brothers, come heed, one and all
Don’t brag about standing or you’ll surely fall
You’re shining your light and shine it you should
But you’re so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good

 

If you’re holding heaven, then spread it around
There’s hungry hands reaching up here from the ground
Move over and share the high ground where you stood
So heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good

 

The gospel ain’t gospel until it is spread
But how can you share it where you’ve got your head
There’s hands that reach out for a hand if you would
So heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good

But plenty of Christian thinkers, apologists and worldview experts have also said similar things – although perhaps not in song form! Five of them can be cited here. Back in the 1940s C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity said this:

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

In his 1971 volume Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, Norman Geisler has a chapter on “The Christian and Social Responsibility.” In it he speaks to the responsibility believers have to the whole person. He is worth quoting at length: 

What sometimes escapes Christians is the fact that the responsibility to love other persons extends to the whole person. That is, man is more than a soul destined for another world; he is also a body living in this world. And as a resident of this time-space continuum man has physical and social needs which cannot be isolated from spiritual needs. Hence, in order to love man as he is – the whole man – one must exercise a concern about his social needs as well as his spiritual needs.

 

Some of the neglect of the “whole man” stems from a non-Christian platonic stress on the duality of man. This emphasis was imbibed by Christians in the Middle Ages and has been passed on to the present. In essence it contends that man is essentially a spiritual being and only functionally connected with a body which at best is a hindrance and at worst a great evil. The corrective of this error is found in the biblical teaching of the essential unity of man and the goodness of the physical and bodily creation of God (cf. Gen. 1:31). Both the unity of man and the goodness of the body are made evident in the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, a fact repugnant to the Greek mind (cf. Acts 17:32. The resurrection of the body would not make good sense if men were complete without their body (cf. 1 Cor. 15:53f; 2 Cor. 5:4) or if the body were evil. On the other hand, if man is essentially and permanently to be a souled body, then the neglect of either aspect is a serious mistake. If man is to be loved as man, then one must love him as he is (and as he will be) viz., as a physical and social creature as well as a spiritual one.

 

Even if one rejects the doctrines of the unity of man and the immortality of the body, it is short-sighted to show concern for only his spiritual dimensions in this life. For men in this life do have bodies and cannot live here without them. Therefore, if they are to be reached for the next world – if we are to save their “souls” then this must be accomplished through their bodies. Starving bodies are not likely to be impressed by the message about the bread of life if we refuse to give them food for this life. Jesus fed the hungry multitude with physical bread before he preached to them about spiritual bread (John 6:11). Men are not as likely to feel the thirst for the water of life when they are overwhelmed by bodily thirst. In other words, if Christians show no concern for the basic physical and social needs of men, then they cannot expect much of a positive response from them to their spiritual message.

Another key Christian thinker and apologist, Francis Schaeffer spoke much to this as well. In his 1971 book True Spirituality he said this:

I think very strongly that Christianity is a good philosophy. I think it is the best philosophy that ever has existed. More than this, it is the only philosophy that is consistent to itself and answers the questions. It is a good philosophy precisely because it deals with the problems and gives us answers to them. Nevertheless, it is not only a good philosophy. The Bible does not just speak in abstractions; it does not tell about a religious idea far away. It tells about man as Man. It tells about each individual, as each man is that individual. And it tells us how to live in the real universe as it is now. Remove this factor, and it becomes only a dialectic.

And in his 1982 volume A Christian Manifesto he wrote:

True spirituality covers all of reality. There are things the Bible tells us as absolutes which are sinful – which do not conform to the character of God. But aside from these things the Lordship of Christ covers all of life and all of life equally. It is not only that true spirituality covers all of life, but it covers all parts of the spectrum of life equally. In this sense there is nothing concerning reality that is not spiritual.

Charles Colson, in his very important 1999 volume How Now Shall We Live? put it this way:

Evangelism and cultural renewal are both divinely ordained duties. God exercises his sovereignty in two ways: through saving grace and common grace. We are all familiar with saving grace; it is the means by which God’s power calls people who are dead in their trespasses and sins to new life in Christ. Bur few of us understand common grace, which is the means by which God’s power sustains creation, holding back the sin and evil that result from the fall and that otherwise would overwhelm His creation like a great flood. As agents of God’s common grace, we are called to help sustain and renew his creation, to uphold the created institutions of family and society, to pursue science and scholarship, to create works of art and beauty, and to heal and help those suffering from the results of the Fall.

And again:

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.

Finally, Nancy Pearcey, who was a student of Francis Schaeffer, said this in her important 2004 book on worldviews, Total Truth: “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.”

The book’s concluding paragraphs are worth closing with here:

In a world of spin and hype, the postmodern generation is searching desperately for something real and authentic. They will not take Christians seriously unless our churches and parachurch organizations demonstrate an authentic way of life – unless they are communities that exhibit the character of God in their relationships and mode of living….

 

In the days of the early church, the thing that most impressed their neighbors in the Roman Empire was the community of love they witnessed among believers. ‘Behold how they love one another,’ it was said. In every age, the most persuasive evidence for the gospel is not words or arguments but a living demonstration of God’s character through Christians’ love for one another, expressed in both their words and their actions. The gospel is not meant to be “a disembodied message,” Newbigin writes. It is meant to be fleshed out in “a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it” – who exhibit in their relationships the beauty of God’s character.

 

In one sense, this chapter should have come first, because its message is the pathway to everything else. The spiritual reality of rejected, slain, raised lies at the heart of everything in the Christian life, including the work of developing a Christian mind. Only as we cooperate with God in dying to sin and self are we open to receiving the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16). May God give us the grace to be worldview missionaries, building lives and communities that give an authentic witness of his existence before a watching world.

We are to proclaim the biblical worldview and live the biblical worldview.

[2006 words]