Sermon Illustrations on Worldview

Why Worldview Matters: the Mission of the Church

Acts 2:42

What is the mission of the Church? That was the sermon topic one Sunday two years ago when I visited a friend's church, but as I listened I found my mind wandering. I had just signed a contract to write a book on Christian worldview, and I was experiencing writer's remorse. Did this book really need to be written?

Suddenly the pastor's words caught my attention. The mission of the church, he said, is to prepare for Christ's return in five ways: prayer, Bible study, worship, fellowship, and evangelism. In that instant, all doubts about writing the book evaporated. Of course, these five spiritual exercises are central to the church's life; but we can never overlook our responsibility to redeem all of culture as well. Though well intentioned, the pastor's words were a prescription for the continued marginalization of the church.

Just like this pastor, many evangelicals define faith strictly in terms of personal salvation. Yet soul-winning is not an end in itself. We are not only saved FROM sin, we are also saved TO something-to the task of cultivating God's creation. Genesis teaches that on the first five days, God Himself did the work of creating. But on the sixth day, he made human beings in his image to carry on His work -- to develop the raw materials of the world He had created.

This is the "cultural commission," and it is just as binding as the "great commission." It means our faith is intended to encompass every part of life, every sphere of work, every aspect of the world.

In short, our faith must be a complete WORLDview, the basic set of beliefs that function as a grid or glasses determining how we see all reality. If God is creator and sovereign over everything, as we confess He is, then everything finds its identity and meaning in relationship to Him -- not only our spiritual life but also our work, politics, science, education, and the arts.

Developing a Christian worldview is not some ivory-tower exercise. It is crucial for every believer -- affecting every choice we make. The doctrine of creation tells us that God made the world with a moral and physical order -- that there are God-given norms for every aspect of creation. Moral laws tell us how to govern our behavior. Laws of logic tell us how to think clearly. Norms of justice tell us how to run a government. Aesthetic norms guide the creation of beauty and the arts.

If we don't know the norms God has ordained for every area of life, then we're living blindly and are bound to make wrong choices -- hurting ourselves and others. We're like a person who walks into a room blindfolded and bumps his shins against the furniture.

The mission of the church is indeed prayer and evangelism, just as the pastor said that Sunday. But to be effective, we must also develop a comprehensive worldview. And that, too, is the mission of the Church in a post-Christian world.

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Speaking the Truth In Love: Practicing Pre-evangelism

Acts 14:11

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Bulgaria, which was still in the grip of a Marxist regime. Though the Iron Curtain had fallen, communist officials in Bulgaria had simply adopted new labels and stayed in power. While there, I had a chance to bear witness of the faith to the Bulgarian minister of justice - a fascinating experience that illustrates how important it is for Christians to understand worldviews in order to evangelize effectively in today's post-Christian world.

The minister had heard me contend publicly that the solution to crime is moral reformation and, as we sat down together, he began firing questions at me.

"Yesterday you said crime is a moral problem," he said briskly. "Do you say that in a sociological sense?"

"No," I replied, "crime is a matter of individuals choosing to do wrong -- a moral failure."

He demurred politely. "It seems to me that crime is caused by social and economic forces," he said.

"No," I responded, "the moral dimension transcends social forces."

Back and forth we went, and gradually it dawned on me that the minister of justice did not even understand the concepts I was using. He had been educated within a Marxist system that regards people as merely complex forms of matter. Everything else -- including religion and morality -- is ultimately reduced to economic interests. The minister could not comprehend how I could treat moral choices as foundational for human behavior.

To reach this man with the gospel, I realized that I first had to dismantle his materialist worldview. So I switched gears and talked about Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher who taught the reality of the spiritual dimension. I spoke of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the great Russian novelist, who probed themes of evil and redemption. I progressed to the biblical doctrine of the Fall, and the reality of moral evil-so much in evidence in the totalitarian systems of the 20th century. This same moral evil, I argued, is the real cause of crime.

Gradually, light began to dawn in the minister's eyes, and eventually I was able to share the Gospel with him.

Francis Schaeffer urged Christians to practice pre-evangelism-to dismantle a person's false worldview before presenting the Gospel. In today's post- Christian culture, pre-evangelism is more important than ever. We can not simply begin with the message of salvation, because people no longer understand basic theological terms, such as "sin" and "salvation."

Our model is Paul addressing the Greeks on Mars Hill. Paul did not begin with the message of salvation but with creation. Anyone should be able to figure out that God is no golden idol, Paul argued: Since God created us as personal beings, He Himself must be a personal being -- and thus someone to whom we are personally accountable for our actions. Only after establishing who God is, and our relationship to Him, did Paul preach about sin and resurrection.

This is the approach we must take in our modern Athens as well. To learn how, read How Now Shall We Live? a new book I have co-authored with "BreakPoint" executive editor Nancy Pearcey.

You don't have to travel to Bulgaria - just talk with your neighbors or the parents in your kids' school - and you'll find they no longer even understand basic biblical concepts. We need to learn to how to speak their language in order to demonstrate that Christianity answers the basic questions of life better than any other worldview.

We need to become nothing less than worldview missionaries in our own backyards.

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The Failure of "isms" : Why Speech Codes Exist

A syllabus for a course at the University of Maine contains the following warning: "Any language that may be deemed sexist, racist or homophobic, or may be found offensive by any minority group, is prohibited. Use of such language can result in immediate failure of that paper and possible future action."

It's an example of political correctness, and what makes it especially ironic is that the course in question isn't "Contemporary Feminism" or "Queer Theory 101." Instead, it's a class called "Speech Communication."

Speech codes, it seems, are everywhere. But they don't represent the triumph of liberalism, as you might think. Instead, they represent its surrender.

Harvey Silvergate is the author of the "Shadow University," a book about the restrictions on the liberties of college students. Silvergate says ninety percent of the nation's colleges have adopted speech codes.

The ostensible aim of these codes is to preserve the peace. But, as Silvergate points out, these codes are really little more than attempts at "mind control," designed to preserve a secular orthodoxy on campus.

Silvergate cites the example of a religion professor who quoted biblical passages that describe the role of women and sinfulness of homosexuality. He was brought up on charges of hostility to woman and gays.

Now, the ability to punish politically incorrect speech might seem like a victory for secular liberalism. But, as philosopher Russell Hittinger pointed out at Prison Fellowship's recent Wilberforce Conference on worldview in Colorado Springs, these codes are actually an admission of weakness.

As Hittinger explained, "Once upon a time people really did believe that the modern ["isms"] would provide an order of truth to replace the older worldview of [Christianity.]" It was the belief that "isms" such as Marxism and Darwinism were true that made them so powerful.

But on the eve of the millennium, this faith in secular ideologies is in tatters. It's difficult to find anyone who will argue that any secular ideology describes reality and provides a sure foundation for organizing our lives.

What happened? In a word, postmodernism -- the belief that there are no universal truths or norms. As Hittinger points out, secular liberalism not only doesn't make claims about absolutes, it denies, as an article of faith, that absolutes exist -- including liberal absolutes. In an ironic twist, liberalism, which tried to reduce religion to a private matter, has itself been reduced to a private matter.

This leaves liberals ill-equipped to engage Christians in debates about the fitness of their belief system. Does that mean they're willing to concede the argument to Christians? Not at all. As Hittinger put it, "my fellow faculty is scared down to their socks of Christianity."

This fear produces the speech codes we see on campuses across the country. Knowing that they can't beat the Judeo-Christian tradition in a fair fight, they seek to repress it instead.

Christians are and should be concerned about the imposition of speech codes and other forms of censorship. But that's because we welcome the very debate our opponents fear. We know that it's not our belief system that's been tried and found wanting, but theirs.

And to those who find that assertion offensive, I can only ask, "what are you afraid of?"

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Ideological Seductions: Falling For the Ideas and Isms of the Day

Persecution is becoming one of the hot issues of our day, as Christians around the world, thankfully, are rallying around those who are being martyred for their faith. But it's not the only risk we face as believers. More subtle, but just as dangerous, is the threat posed by the ideas and "Isms" that vie for belief, and for authority over our minds.

Christians are not immune to intellectual seduction. If we take our eyes off of Christ and allow the values of modern culture to shape our worldview, we're just as vulnerable as anyone. And, as author and professor Jay Budziszewski points out, ideological seductions tempt Christians on both ends of the political spectrum.

Among those who think of themselves as political liberals, one such idea is perfectionism. This is the view that human effort alone can cure the evils of our time. Some perfectionists put their faith in education, psychotherapy, or political and economic reforms.

But they all share a common failing: the belief that we can have heaven on earth by our own hand. This view may sound attractive, but it ignores the realities of sin and pride.

The message of Christianity, of course, is different. The Bible teaches that sin can only be erased by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ. The cure for sin will never be complete until we are at peace with God. And we ignore this truth at our peril -- as history teaches.

Dictators and tyrants have haunted human society for centuries, stacking human bodies higher than Nimrod stacked bricks at the Tower of Babel, but they came no closer to heaven on earth than that ancient king.

Christians who think of themselves as conservatives are certainly not immune to seduction either. For them, one of the greatest temptations is "traditionalism" -- the ideas that "whatever is, is right," and that whatever has been done should continue to be done.

Change for the sake of change is foolishness, of course. But the Bible insists that we cannot place our trust in traditions or customs, for what God is doing is beyond imagination. Perhaps the best illustration of the danger of traditionalism in 18th- and 19th-century America was the evil of slavery. Even some Christians defended the practice at one time on the basis of tradition. But every evil eventually calls itself tradition. In our time, some have tried to call tradition to the defense of abortion.

In 1992, when they re-affirmed Roe v. Wade -- the case that legalized abortion -- pro-abortion members of the Supreme Court said that abortion should remain legal because "an entire generation has come of age" depending on it. In other words, never mind that abortion is immoral and wrong; what matters now is that women are used to it.

False worldviews of the day have been a threat to people of faith in every age, which ought to remind us of the need to be alert, and to recognize the risks of intellectual seduction.

To help you steer clear of these temptations, I recommend Jay Budziszewski's penetrating new book, The Revenge of Conscience. It's a valuable resource, reminding Christians of that most important lesson -- that it is loyalty to Christ, and not the Ideas and Isms of our day, that really matters.

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Guilty By Reason of Worldview: Bad Ideas and Murder

Acts 17:10

The jury has returned its verdict: Andrea Yates isn't insane. She's legally responsible, knowing right from wrong, and she'll spend the next forty years in prison. So why did she kill her five children?

The case is intricate and convoluted. But apparently one major factor behind her homicidal behavior was a severely distorted worldview. Perhaps the legal profession should add a new category: "guilty by reason of worldview."

One striking fact distinguishes this case from most murders: Mrs. Yates claims she thought she was doing her victims a favor!

What worldview programmed her to "help" her children in such a bizarre way? A new book details the scenario that allegedly drove her thinking in that direction. Suzy Spencer, author of BREAKING POINT, told ABC's "Good Morning, America" that Yates was profoundly influenced by the hyper-judgmental message of traveling evangelist Michael Woroniecki.

In his native Grand Rapids, Woroniecki was arrested at least five times, primarily for disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. His final arrest there occurred in 1981 when a woman claimed he confronted her while she was waiting to buy tickets to the circus -- calling her a hell-bound sinner and berating her until she burst into tears. In a plea bargain, the city dropped charges in exchange for Woroniecki's promise to stop preaching and to move out of Grand Rapids.

But the vocal denunciations continued elsewhere. Brigham Young University reports that Woroniecki came to its campus where he loudly denounced "Mormon scumbags," shouted "Brigham Young is in hell, along with the pope and Billy Graham," and accused students of crucifying Christ. He left campus in handcuffs, and Brigham Young's academic dean commented, "All he wants to do is create a scene, and he certainly did with his negative message."

GOSPELCOM.NET reports that Rusty Yates first met Woroniecki in the 1980s. The Yates family became financial supporters and later bought a used bus from him when the itinerant preacher upgraded to a newer one. The two families exchanged letters for several years, and Andrea avidly read the evangelist's newsletter, "The Perilous Times." Included were statements like: "At birth a woman inherits the contentious nature of Eve ..." Women are witches, it said, and bad children come from bad mothers.

Andrea's impressionable mind may have fit the pieces together in what would seem to her a logical pattern: She was such a wicked person, that the only way to prevent her children, therefore, from reaping the deadly wages of her sin was to dispatch them to the next world before they reached the age of accountability. Killing them would be doing them a favor.

Twisted thinking leads to twisted actions. The Bible informs us, "As a man thinks in his heart, so he is." It commends the people of ancient Berea as "more noble" because they didn't uncritically take the word of any human teacher. Instead, they "searched the Scriptures daily" to test "whether these things were true."

Would things have been different if Andrea Yates had let Scripture be the arbiter of her teacher's statements? We can't say. But a more scriptural worldview would certainly have improved the likelihood of her not becoming "guilty by reason of worldview."

For further reading:

"Did preacher sway Texas mom?" THE GRAND RAPIDS PRESS, 23 January 2002.

Information about Michael Peter and Rachel Woroniecki can be found here .

"The Evil Inside: Andrea Yates Believed She Was Possessed," ABC News, 21 January 2002. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/GMA020122Yates_fa mily_revelations.html>

Excerpts from BREAKING POINT may be read here.

Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, THE PROBLEM OF EVIL (Tyndale House, 1999).

Bible passages cited: Proverbs 23:7; Acts 17:10-11.

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Shameless Bumper Stickers

I was driving to my office recently when a Chevrolet pick-up truck changed lanes and pulled in front of me. For the next several miles I was treated to the truck driver’s thoughts concerning certain other car manufacturers which he proudly and prominently displayed in the form of window stickers.

The Chevy owner wanted everyone to know his disdain for products produced by the Ford Motor Company. Thus, he sported a sticker depicting a mischievous looking little boy urinating on the Ford logo.

The truck driver also wanted the world to know that he was less than impressed with Toyota automobiles. Hence, another decal portrayed the same little boy having a bowel movement on the car maker’s name.

The pièce de résistance of the Chevy driver’s thoughts was toward anyone who might take issue with his attitudes, displayed or not. A third sticker had the image of the same little boy defiantly conveying the infamous middle-finger salute over the caption “Fear This.”

Classy stuff, huh?

If it is true that “you are what you eat,” and to some degree it is, then I submit that it is even truer that “you are what you display.” Said another way, you reveal your true self by what you choose to display on your vehicle and/or body.

Car bumper and window stickers, T-shirts and tattoos are nothing less than mobile billboards by which we declare to the world the attitudes we hold near and dear to our hearts.

Christians, atheists, hedonists, environmentalists, homosexuals, feminists -- etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam -- all display with great pride values and philosophies they deem important. Some convey their message in a positive fashion. Others, like the truck I recently followed, choose to display their values in ways that are rude and crude. Once upon a time those ways were socially unacceptable.

I am sure that some readers of this column are thinking, “Lighten up. Don’t you know the truck driver was just trying to be funny?” Yes, I do. I also know that we can learn much about someone’s character by what they find humorous. When four-letter words, dirty phrases, sexual innuendo and bodily functions make you snicker or roar with laughter, you reveal volumes about your character and level of maturity.

I was navigating a mall parking lot several months ago when I noticed the window sticker of the car in front of me. It read, “I drink... I fornicate... I forget....” (At least, that’s my sanitized version of what it said.) The vehicle pulled into a parking space. I watched as two young ladies (who looked to be in their late teens or perhaps early twenties) exited the car.

My heart became heavy. If the window sticker accurately reflected the girls’ attitude toward life, it did not require a prophet’s insight in order to predict what pain and sorrow lay ahead for the promiscuous pair.

I will admit to being tired of being treated to crude and vulgar messages via window/bumper stickers, T-shirts, etc. That being said, I am not a big advocate of censorship. I thank God we live in a society that values freedom of speech.

However, the proliferation of crude and crass messages displayed by individuals today is symptomatic of a society that is anything but morally or spiritually healthy.

“Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent,” someone once said. Work that into a bumper sticker or a T-shirt and even I might display it. Honk if you agree!

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Kelly Boggs, whose column appears each week in Baptist Press, is editor of the Baptist Message, the newspaper of the Louisiana Baptist Convention.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #2817]

Christ Calls Out 'Mine!'

Acts 3:21

Is the mission of the Church dealing with culture, or saving souls? We’ll tackle this question head-on.

Here at the Colson Center, you’ll hear us repeat a saying that Chuck absolutely loved. In fact, I can think of no statement that better encapsulates what it means to develop and live within a Christian Worldview. It’s from Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper: “There is not a single square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry out ‘mine!’”

Dr. Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School believes Kuyper’s words really do offer a summary of the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption — and our responsibility as Christians in this world.

But there’s a misunderstanding of Kuyper that affects how people hear what we often say on BreakPoint and about worldview in general. In fact, I’ve had people ask me: “Isn’t all this talk of ‘cultural engagement’ really just code for ‘culture wars’? Isn’t it just another way of saying we want to impose our beliefs and values on other people?”

In fact, after Warren Cole Smith and I released our new book, “Restoring All Things” this summer, we received a few comments accusing us of fifty-cent theological terms like “dominionism” and “reconstructionism.” One person even remarked before he’d even read the book that Warren and I were setting Christians up as “useful idiots for a one-world government.”

These kinds of reactions aren’t all that rare when you start talking about worldview and cultural engagement. When Christians make universal truth claims, especially in this post-Obergefell climate [the Supreme Court decision that legalized homosexual marriage], many inside and outside the church react by telling us to mind our own business. Our job, they say, is to save souls, not restore the world. Or, they might say that the proper scope of God’s concern is only the church, and not the culture.

Look, our culture, its institutions, and many of our leaders may be in rebellion against Christ’s rule right now, but He gets the final word — not presidents, not dictators, not Hollywood, not the news media, and certainly not the Supreme Court.

In Colossians, Paul calls Christ the One in Whom “all things hold together,” and in 1 Corinthians says that through Christ, God is “reconciling all things to Himself.” As Christians, we’re part of that story, and it’s a much bigger story than just the latest political movements or recent cultural trends.

In other words, our work of restoration lies in the here and now because Christ has already overcome the world. Or as theologians like to say, the Kingdom of God is already here — just not yet.

That’s why, in the last public speech that Chuck gave, he urged his audience to remember that we never impose Christianity, we lovingly propose it as God’s plan of restoration for all things. When Christ, Who is sovereign over all, cries out “Mine!” He’s not staking an idle claim. He has joined Himself with creation and human nature to enact restoration. And He’s coming back one day to finish the job.

And here’s the exciting part: in the meantime, you and I — His Body — get to participate in that work of restoration. Drawing lines around our churches and homes, and saying to our secular neighbors, “You stay on your side, we’ll stay on ours,” isn’t just bad theology. It diminishes Christ’s victory and ownership of all of creation.

There is not one square inch of human existence outside of Jesus’ jurisdiction because He has taken on human existence Himself to, as we read in Revelation, “make all things new.” When our King returns, the “not yet” will become the “already,” or as Sam Gamgee put it in one of my favorite lines from “Lord of the Rings,” “everything sad [will] become untrue.”

So when we talk about Jesus crying out “mine!” even over our present culture, it’s because the story found in the Bible is not just our story — it’s everybody’s story — it’s the story of life itself; the story of reality.

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A Turning of the Tide: Reaching the Next Generation

Acts 17:16

At a Christmas party at the home of Prison Fellowship president Mark Earley, I began chatting with two of Mark's children who were home from college and two of their friends. Our small talk quickly became an intense discussion. We talked about natural law and the Christian faith, ontological arguments for the existence of God, naturalism, and the like.

For half an hour, these students strained my intellectual resources to the limit, but I walked away exhilarated. That discussion was but one of many signs that the upcoming generation is finally asking the right questions.

Up until now, the conventional stereotype of today's youth has been of a detached, almost blasé group of channel-surfers happily drifting through life. But this appears to be changing, and the change offers Christians an opportunity we haven't had since the 1960s.

Journalist Colleen Carroll describes why this is happening in her book, THE NEW FAITHFUL. Carroll spent a year tracking a grassroots movement toward serious Christian commitment among America's young. Secure in the wealth and opportunity provided by materialistic parents, they're already asking: “Is that all there is?”

These “new faithful” have rejected our culture's secular values and hedonistic impulses, Carroll writes. Many have had life-changing conversions and embrace the traditional morality their elders rejected.

This is thrilling news. But will kids raised in Christian homes emulate them? Ironically, since these kids take their faith for granted, they may be less likely to ask the hard questions.

Josh McDowell, in his new book, BEYOND BELIEF TO CONVICTIONS, addresses the concerns of Christian parents. As McDowell documents, teens -- even those who sport Christian T-shirts and WWJD bracelets -- often have deeply distorted beliefs about God. Influenced by postmodernism, they're all too inclined to absorb spiritual pragmatism, an “if it works for me, it's okay” approach. The good news is that a majority of Christian kids say they don't have any set philosophy about life that consistently influences their decisions. That is, it's good news so long as we can challenge them with the right questions and help them understand what they need to believe and why.

How do we do this? My friend, Nancy Fitzgerald, from Indianapolis is living the answer. For several years, Nancy has taught worldview lessons to teenagers each Sunday night, using materials from many sources, including HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE? She's prepared a great curriculum. Discussion groups camp out all over her house, following an hour-long lecture in the basement. Some eighty-five kids show up each week, and they're so hungry for worldview teaching that they often don't leave until midnight.

When they do go off to college, Nancy maintains a lively e-mail exchange, answering their questions and emboldening them to stand up to hostile professors.

What a great example for how we need to be equipping our kids to defend their faith. Imagine what would happen if a hundred Nancy Fitzgeralds -- or two hundred -- opened their homes across America. The kids they teach would leave for college confident in their beliefs and knowing where to turn with their questions.

Their faith would become rock solid -- and the secular academy would not know what hit them.

Signs of Intelligent Life?: Faith In the Marketplace of Ideas

Too often, Christians have been depicted as a bunch of backwoods know-nothing Bible-thumpers, incapable of contending for truth in the marketplace of ideas. In the early sixties, a British scholar wrote a book called The Christian Mind, the first paragraph of which read, "There is no longer a Christian mind." That book was a critique of Christians, who failed to think biblically about all of life.

And, sadly, there's some truth to the charge; Christians once preferred to run from controversy, hiding out in their holy huddles. But things are changing. And we've discovered at BreakPoint that lots of Christians are hungry for good resources for defending their Christian worldview. More and more, it is Christians who are taking the high ground in a whole host of academic disciplines today.

One thing that has made this possible is the new generation of Christian thinkers that's coming along -- men and women who think critically about all of life, and do it from a biblical perspective. Over the next few days I'd like to tell you about some of these people. You need to know them; they're valued partners in the work of The Wilberforce Forum and BreakPoint radio, and they're a new breed of Christian thinkers setting the moral agenda for the 21st century.

You're heard me talk about most of them here on BreakPoint: scholars like Phillip Johnson, Robert George, Richard Neuhaus, and J. Budziszewski, as well as journalists like Fred Barnes. These are among the speakers at our upcoming worldview conference in Chicago.

Dr. Phillip Johnson is a law professor at University of California at Berkeley -- the quintessential liberal university. Once a died-in-the-wool atheist, Johnson came to faith in Christ. And since then he has shaken up the scientific community with his books and powerful debates, punching holes in today's Darwinist orthodoxy.

I've also told you about David Larson, a psychiatrist whose ground-breaking research at the National Institute for Healthcare Research proves that religion is good for your health. Too often, Larson says, critics claim we just want to bring back the "good old days." Well, Larson's studies have shown conclusively that Christianity is not about being old-fashioned -- it's about leading a fulfilling life. It shows that a Christian worldview provides the best and most satisfying life.

No one has had a greater influence on the debate over the role of faith in healing America's social ills than Dr. Marvin Olasky, author of Compassionate Conservatism and a professor at the University of Texas. Olasky's insights have helped shaped public policy on faith-based initiatives, debunking the old social welfare model in this country. He's one of today's keenest Christian thinkers and writers. ...

It's exciting to see so many thinkers of this caliber emerging in our Christian ranks. The old adage that Christians are out of touch is giving way to a new generation. So to those on the campuses, I say, "Beware, a change is coming!" We're serving notice on the secular establishment that the Christians are coming, and truth is on our side!

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Real Art: the Hope Beyond Ground Zero

On February 4, the White House announced that New York artist Makoto Fujimura was appointed by President Bush to the National Council on the Arts for a six-year term. Perhaps it's the worldview behind his art that caught the president's attention. Working in his studio three blocks from Ground Zero, Fujimura was deeply impacted by the horrific events of September 11, and it caused him to challenge the artistic community to see the reality of our broken state of existence.

Fujimura says, “Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to literally close our eyes to that beauty of the dying sun setting all around us. Death spreads all over our lives, and therefore, faith must be given to see through the darkness, to see through the beauty of the valley of the shadow of death ... Everyone has a Ground Zero to face.”

Reflecting on his own conversion, he said, “I remember how I used to look at the landscape everyday on my way to work, not believing what I saw was true or able to trust my own vision. I realized after my conversion that there was reality [grounded in Christ that] I could trust, and that I could also trust what was inside of me to express it. Reality is the foundation of creativity, and any artist who is honest has to make that assumption.” Coming from Japan with a Christian population of less than one percent, the worldview shift in his art was radically countercultural and obvious to both his admirers and critics.

For Fujimura, art can be best understood in the context of the Incarnation. In the Lord's Supper, ordinary substances become sacred. The immanent becomes transcendent. If God became man and humbled Himself, this incarnational principle can be applied to every act of creativity, and therefore, the results of artistic creation can become sacred. And this is the theological understanding that flows through Fujimura's work.

Makoto works in Nihonga -- a medieval Japanese technique of painting using minerals. His works are painted in layers of mineral paints that become transparent over time, revealing the layers below.

When asked by art critic James Romaine how this technique relates to his faith, he said, “The underlying worldview of Japanese art is cyclical, and yet the technique lends itself to this notion that there is a beginning and an end.” There is history and story in the painting as this hand-made paint is applied to hand-made paper. “There is this rich fabric of story being woven as you work. That is something that is very significant to me, as I am someone who has come to understand that my worldview is a premise that allows for these stories to come alive. That understanding of the world or looking at yourself, as having a history, is very biblical. Because there is a beginning and an end, there is resolution; even in death itself, there is this purpose.”

As a contemporary artist, creatively embracing and painting his way through the wreckage of September 11, Fujimura is an example of a Christian effectively using art as a vehicle to show us reality: its depravity and brokenness, but also the hope of restoration that the Great Artist Himself, incarnate in Christ, brings to all things.

Faith Attack: A College Survival Guide

Acts 17:16

Once at a major state university, a young woman stayed after class to talk with the professor. "In today's lecture, you said you're a Christian," she blurted out, almost in tears. "I've never heard any other professor say that, and every day at this university I feel as if my faith is under attack."

If you had any notion that the college campus is a friendly place for Christians, think again. The professor in this story was Jay Budziszewski of the University of Texas, who has written a new book called "How to Stay Christian in College." The university campus has changed dramatically, Budziszewski says. And Christian parents and teachers had better prepare young people to defend their faith in an increasingly hostile environment.

Take one of the biggest intellectual fads of our day: postmodernism. The best way to define postmodernism is that it is a reaction against modernism -- which began in the Enlightenment, when many intellectuals proclaimed autonomy from God and sought to find truth by human reason alone. Postmodernism represents the collapse of that hope: It insists that human reason alone is incapable of coming up with any overarching, universal truth.

In postmodernist lingo, we can have no "grand metanarrative" -- no Big Story -- that makes sense of reality.

What does this mean for the Christian student seeking to express his faith in the classroom? If a believer talks about the biblical worldview of creation, fall, and redemption, he's likely to be shot down precisely because what he's telling is a "meta-narrative" -- a Big Story -- that claims to describe ultimate reality. But Big Stories have been ruled out of bounds.

Case closed. Discussion ended.

If that weren't enough to rule out a biblical perspective, consider some further implications. If there's no Big Story making sense of all reality, then reality itself dissolves into bits and pieces. That's exactly what postmodernists say. They think truth is in pieces because they don't believe in a coherent reality that's the same for everyone. They think personality is in pieces because they don't believe in a self, a core identity, that's responsible for everything we do. They think life itself is in pieces because they don't believe it has any ultimate purpose or meaning.

How can Christian students respond to these challenges? The answer may surprise you: We can begin by acknowledging a grain of truth in postmodernism. It is absolutely correct that, apart from God, there IS no overarching Truth, no coherent reality, no ultimate purpose to life.

But we don't need to succumb to despair, as postmodernism does. The solution is to return to God. That's what the Gospel is all about.

Christian students can be confident that biblical faith has answers to the intellectual challenges they face on the college campus. Christian students don't need to be defenseless. If we do our homework, we'll discover that God's truth gives an answer to every ideology -- in the classroom and in the world beyond.

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Impossible To Believe: the Endgame of Secularism

John 15:5

In his important Massey Lectures delivered in 1991, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor spoke of The Malaise of Modernity. The Modern Age, he argued, is marked by two great intellectual moves. The first intellectual move is a pervasive individualism. The second is the reduction of all public discourse to the authority of instrumental reason. The rise of modern individualism came at the cost of rejecting all other moral authorities. “Modern freedom was won by our breaking loose from older moral horizons,” Taylor explains. This required the toppling of all hierarchical authorities and their established moral orders. “People used to see themselves as part of a larger order,” he observed. “Modern freedom came about through the discrediting of such orders.”

The primacy of instrumental reason means the elimination of the old order and its specifically theological and teleological moral order. As Taylor explains:

No doubt sweeping away the old orders has immensely widened the scope of instrumental reason. Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness or well-being of individuals as our goal.[1]

More recently, Taylor has written the greatest work yet completed on the secular reality of our times. In A Secular Age, he describes three successive sets of intellectual conditions. In the first, associated with the Premodern Age of antiquity and the medieval synthesis, it was impossible not to believe. There was simply no intellectual alternative to theism in the West. There was no alternative set of explanations for the world and its operations, or for moral order. All that changed with the arrival of modernity. In the Modern Age it became possible not to believe. A secular alternative to Christian theism emerged as a real choice. As a matter of fact, choice now ruled the intellectual field. As Peter Berger famously observed decades ago, this is the “heretical imperative,” the imperative to choose one’s worldview. The third set of intellectual conditions is identified with late modernity and our own intellectual epoch. For most people living in the context of self-conscious late modernity, it is now impossible to believe. That means, especially in terms of the intellectual elites and the culture formative sectors of society, theism is not an available worldview — if not personally, then at least culturally.

Significantly, Taylor pinpoints this unbelief as a lack of cognitive commitment to a self-existent, self-revealing God. Secularization is not about rejecting all religion. Taylor urges that people in the current hyper-secularized culture in America often consider themselves to be religious or spiritual. Secularization, according to Taylor, is about belief in a personal God, one who holds and exerts authority. He describes the secular age as deeply “cross-pressured” in its personal experience of religion and rejection of the personal authority of God.[2] The issue is binding authority.

Christians are the intellectual outlaws under the current secular conditions. Entering a discussion on the basis of a theistic or theological claim is to break a cardinal rule of late Modernity by moving from a proposition or question to a command and law and authority and to do so in the context of a culture now explicitly secularized, and a culture that either reduces such claims to something below a genuine theistic claim or rejects them to court. Secularization in America has been attended by a moral revolution without precedent and without endgame. The cultural engines of progress driving toward personal autonomy and fulfillment will not stop until the human being is completely self-defining. This progress requires the explicit rejection of Christian morality for the project for human liberation.

The story of the rise of secularism is a stunning intellectual and moral revolution. It defies exaggeration. We must recognize that it is far more pervasive than we might want to believe, for this intellectual revolution has changed the worldviews of even those who believe themselves to be opposed to it. Everything is now reduced to choice, and choice is, as Taylor reminds us, central to the moral project of late modernity, the project of individual authenticity.

As he explains this project: “I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.”[3]

The pressing question is this: can any sustainable moral order survive this scale of intellectual revolution? We hear in the today’s intellectual and ideological chorus the refrains of Karl Marx’s threat and promise as stated in The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air.” The melting is everywhere around us.

________

Article Citations

[1] Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, in the CBC Massey Lectures (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1991), 5.

[2] See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

[3] Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 30.

Darwin's Bulldog: Is Anything Extra-Christian?

Psalms 24:1

When you ask some people what they believe, they'll say they're "agnostic." What they usually mean is that they don't have enough evidence to decide whether or not God really exists.

Agnostics in America today are a lot like Switzerland during World War II -- while the battle rages all around them, they try to maintain neutrality.

It's interesting to note the origins of the word "agnostic." It was coined in the year 1870 by Thomas Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog." Huxley was an atheist at a time when it was socially unacceptable, so he found a more comfortable word to describe himself: agnostic. In Huxley's sense, agnosticism means there's no credible scientific evidence for the existence of God. So, if God does exist, he's irrelevant.

Huxley championed Darwin's evolutionary theory tirelessly -- not because he felt Darwin was infallible but because Darwin's theory helped Huxley ignore the Creator. Privately he admitted that the fossil record seems to suggest that sharks have always been sharks and crocodiles always crocodiles, but Huxley believed it was "more profitable to go wrong than to stand still."

He hid his doubts from laymen, making bold statements like, "The whole evidence is in favour of evolution, and there is none against it."

To Christians who were alarmed by Darwin's theory, Huxley was reassuring. During a lecture to the Young Men's Christian Association, Huxley declared that the sciences "are neither Christian, nor unchristian, but are extra-Christian." And it's precisely this contention that holds many Christians hostage today.

To suggest that science is somehow outside the scope of Christianity is to suggest that Christianity is not a total worldview. Huxley's implication is clear: Christianity deals with the unseen and with faith, while science deals with cold, hard facts and reality. Don't worry if Darwin's description of reality seems to contradict your faith -- just place each one in its own compartment and let them be.

When Christians accepted this point of view, they retreated. Suddenly, Christians couldn't take faith into the laboratory or, by logical extension, into other "secular" places like the courtroom, the classroom, or the media.

Today's marginalization of Christianity is a direct result of our failure to understand our faith as a total worldview. We've lost our voice in the public square because we forgot, as Psalm 24:1 says, "the earth is the Lord's, and everything in it." God is sovereign over all of reality!

Once a Christian understands this, he's prepared to enter the debate. And students who view their faith as a worldview can stand firm on college campuses, even in the face of atheism.

Darwin's Bulldog caused problems, alright, but he also clarified the debate. Because nothing is "extra-Christian." And remembering this helps us understand the sovereignty of God, and the all-embracing scope of our Christian worldview.

For further reading:

Desmond, Adrian. Huxley: The Devil's Disciple. London: Michael Joseph, 1994.

Huxley, Thomas H. "Lectures on Evolution." In "Agnosticism and Christianity" and Other Essays. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992.

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On Happiness

Psalms 16:11

Is happiness truly attainable? Truly, it is a question many have sought to answer. It has been debated in philosophy halls, whispered about at slumber parties, promised in innumerable marketing campaigns. And our countless approaches to pursuing happiness are as diverse as our many definitions of the word. Moreover, the attainability of happiness is intimately connected to our answer to another question: What is the source of your greatest enjoyment in life?

That is, there is a connection between one's worldview and one's capacity to experience happiness. Armand Nicholi, who is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University, agrees — the connection is profound. [1] In a fascinating comparison of the life and work of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, Nicholi observes each cultural giant, both recognized for the remarkable accuracy with which he observed human emotion and experience. And yet, each man defined and experienced happiness in strikingly different manners, through abundantly different worldviews.

Freud's experience and understanding of happiness emerges as fundamental to his materialist understanding of the world, observing happiness to be, “a problem of satisfying a person's instinctual wishes.” [2] Consequently, the possibility of attaining happiness was met with pessimism — for he recognized the human appetite never to be fully satisfied. And he is right, isn't he? Happiness, defined in such terms, is problematic indeed. In fact, we know that money can't buy happiness, yet we feel endlessly compelled to fulfill the longing. And while during the last four decades, the average U.S. citizen's buying power doubled, studies report that the average American is not any happier, but in fact, less happy than reported in studies conducted forty years earlier. Sadly, Freud's life reflected his view of life, his definition of happiness. His letters were increasingly filled with pessimism and depression, even mentioning drug use as the only effective mood lifter.

What makes C.S. Lewis a fascinating point of comparison is that like Freud, he too, was intensely pessimistic about the possibilities of happiness early in life. And yet as emphasized by many biographers and close friends, his life was profoundly transformed in his early thirties, following a dramatic change in worldview. Through an entirely un-materialistic worldview, Lewis observed, “What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.”(3) As he approached the Christian worldview, Lewis thought he was coming to a place, and found instead that he came to a Person. In fact, it was the joy of finding a Person that first surprised him — a joy that marked his life even during times of pain and loss — the joy of knowing Christ to be the Source of all he longed for.

What, dear friend, is your greatest source of enjoyment in life? The psalmist writes of God, “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” (Psalm 16:11) Truly, there is a connection between our capacity for happiness and our understanding of life. When life is rooted in the reality of God, it is filled with the joy of knowing and seeing the transforming love of a Person — Jesus Christ — who stands and calls you nearer, that your joy may be complete. Indeed, He is the Source of all we long for.

____________

1. Armand Nicholi, The Question of God, (The Free Press: New York, 2002).

2. Ibid, 100.

3. C.S. Lewis, Pilgrim's Regress, (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1992), 123.

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The Total Belief System

"Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from dictates of governments or as the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds - sometimes only a little bit." - Willis Harman from Global Mind Change

Nothing is more powerful than a fundamental change in your thinking process. In my studies and experiences of literally thousands of individuals and organizations, I know this to be fact.

In my books and seminars you have frequently heard me speak of "paradigms." Another term for your paradigm is your "Total Belief System" (TBS).

I find that there are 3 distinct levels to your TBS:

1. Surface Beliefs

These are readily available in your consciousness. Simple beliefs like I am a mother, father, man, woman, accountant, distributor and the like. These beliefs are easily changed with new knowledge, learning, and experience.

2. Mid-Level Beliefs

These are more deeply imbedded in your subconscious but can come into awareness if you are open and willing to work. Often these are the beliefs dealt with in various psychotherapeutic interventions. Beliefs about authority, the inner childhood experience, judgments of parents, etc.

3. Core Beliefs

The most deep and fundamental of your TBS. These are your deepest beliefs about your own identity and your relationship with others and the world. Most individuals go through life with these beliefs totally unchanged. If and when they do change it typically is accompanied by a stressful or difficult period in life, what I often refer to as a "Significant Emotional Event" (SEE).

Revolutionary life and business changes can be seen with a "Mid" or "Core" level belief shift. Remember both of these levels are out of your conscious awareness. The evidence of these beliefs is most readily experienced in situations in which you take some action and then after the fact ask yourself "why did I do that?" Ever had that one happen? You do something that is totally counter-productive or destructive and for the life of you don't know why you did it?

The other time these beliefs are evident is when you intellectually know something makes sense or is true and yet you don't apply it in your life. In other words, "you know what to do but don't do what you know."

Exploration of your TBS is vital to your continued success and achievement. That being said, it is very difficult (but not impossible) to accomplish. While shifts in your Surface Level and occasionally Mid Level beliefs can be made over time (most often through discipline and consistent new thoughts). Core Level shifts most often come with a radical or revolutionary event accompanied by tremendous emotion.

What must you do to continue your growth?

1. Hold on loosely. Our beliefs affect our perception but our perception is effected by our beliefs. It often becomes a vicious cycle of limitation. Remain open.

2. Question everything. The truly secure individual has the courage to see every situation from a variety of angles. Allow your mind to ponder and be open to even "radical perspectives." Remember, to consider and understand does not mean you have to agree.

3. Be honest with yourself. Questioning your TBS means your total world and life foundation may shift. Everything you thought to be right and true about yourself and your world could be rattled. This is difficult and hard. If you choose this personal growth route -- be honest. If you are going to be open and question - REALLY BE OPEN don't just go through the motions and allow in only enough information to affirm your existing position.

4. Purposely put yourself in a "comfort zone stretch" on a regular basis. This can be accomplished by:

Attending a powerful seminar, ... taking a big leap of faith, reading

something unusual, attempting things you don't think you can achieve.

Get uncomfortable -- it means you are about to have a breakthrough!

Learn to embrace discomfort and abhor comfort. The only time you and I

are comfortable is when we are doing the same things we have done

before.

If you are not growing you are dying -- there is no standing still.

_____________________

James Ray, Master of The Entrepreneurial Mindset

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Mortimer J. Adler: Philosopher At Large

If you read the obituaries -- and at my age I do -- you no doubt read of the death last week of Mortimer J. Adler. At ninety-eight-years-old, Adler was one of the greatest philosophers and educators of the twentieth century -- a man of remarkable wisdom and learning.

He was a hero to many in my generation for he spent much of his life battling the forces of relativism. In fact, he spent much of it undoing the pernicious influence of his former teacher at Columbia University, John Dewey, the so-called "father of progressive education," who is responsible for most of the ills plaguing public education today.

Dewey, you see, was a pragmatist who believed that schools exist to socialize children for the good of the state. Therefore, he reasoned, education can't be left to citizens but ought to be controlled by a cadre of professional educators, armed with government authority.

Adler, on the other hand, believed that education should not be determined by social engineers, but by unchanging standards of truth. "There are," he said, "universal truths about what constitutes a good education, for all men at all times and places simply because they are men." During his career -- which included twenty-two years as professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago -- he was a staunch defender of classical education. He is best known, of course, for his Great Books program -- a curriculum based on the greatest works of Western literature and philosophy.

Adler was such a prominent thinker and educator that the New York Times devoted some forty column inches to his obituary. They covered his life, his writings, his teaching career, and his work as a director for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

An amazing career! Yet for all their coverage they never mentioned the most significant thing in his life.

In my book, Kingdoms in Conflict, I wrote about Adler's struggles with the claims of Christianity -- which he was inclined to accept as intellectual propositions. He believed in transcendent truth and realized there had to be a source of that truth. But for years he couldn't cross what he called the "great gulf between the mind and the heart." He resisted the moral changes Christianity would demand of him.

Adler's move from belief in "the god of the philosophers" to the God of the cross was a long time coming. But he recognized that if the God he knew must exist really did exist, he would have to make the leap from logic to faith.

In 1984 -- bedridden with illness -- Adler made that leap. Seeking solace in prayer, he received what he called the "gift of grace" and professed belief "not just in the God my reason so stoutly affirms," as he said, "but the God ... on whose grace and love I now joyfully rely."

Adler showed us that faith does indeed have its reasons -- and in that he was a wonderful model for worldview thinking.

Maybe that's why the media ignored his conversion. The idea that the Christian faith is logically coherent and reasonable was too great a leap for secular-minded journalists to make.

But it's something we are to remind our neighbors of and ourselves every day -- even as we rejoice that one day we'll see Mortimer Adler again studying his beloved Great Books in the presence of the author of all.

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Saluting A Culture Warrior: the Estimable Robert George

I've been talking in recent days about good news: the emergence of a new breed of keen Christian thinkers who are beginning on campuses across the country a counter-attack against the entrenched forces of secularism. One bright star is Princeton professor Robert George. You don't just hear about Dr. George on BreakPoint; stories by and about him are almost as commonplace in some of the nation's leading periodicals.

Few Christians in our culture live out their worldview as consistently or effectively as does this brilliant young man, and we would do well to learn from his example.

Robert George holds the most prestigious endowed academic chair at that hallowed Ivy League university, as Cyrus McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence. Woodrow Wilson was the first to hold this chair, and Professor George is only the fifth. And he's earned it: He's a prolific writer with a prodigious academic reputation.

But in many respects, Robert George is a fish out of water. Like many other top schools, Princeton is dominated by a secular elite. Lest we forget, Princeton's other most notable academic figure is the so-called ethicist Peter Singer, who openly defends the indefensible: infanticide, euthanasia, and bestiality, among other things.

But Dr. George is a stalwart Christian. And while his Christian worldview touches every sphere of life, in his field -- of politics -- that can be controversial.

But that didn't deter him from opening his class on The Declaration of Independence with a moment of silent prayer in recognition of the rights of freedom granted by that hallowed document. The other faculty sat with their mouths hanging open and startled expressions. But hundreds of students prayed with him ... at Princeton!

Nor did controversy stop him from challenging this country's leading exponent of postmodernism, Stanley Fish. It was in a debate before the American Society of Political Scientists, and it was on the issue of abortion. It was a debate George won hands down as Fish readily conceded before 200 wide-eyed and startled political scientists.

George's uncompromising position on abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and other life issues have made him conspicuous, and highly respected, on the Princeton faculty.

But respect for Dr. George isn't limited to his academic peers. His courses are so popular that students actually fight to sign up for them. And once they're in, their often unexamined cultural assumptions are confronted with the full weight of the Christian intellectual tradition.

But as the pages of The Washington Post recently revealed, Robert George doesn't limit his cultural engagement to the classroom. He is also engaged in national politics; he's a frequent guest and witness on Capitol Hill and part of an informal advisory group at the White House. He played a similar role in advising the late Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania. ...

Men and women like Robert George are serving notice on the entrenched, politically-correct, secularist establishment -- which has had a lock on America's campuses for a generation. The best in Christian minds are mobilizing and are on the move. And that's very good news indeed!

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Secular Shortfalls: Faith and Suffering

Luke 12:16

One of the best tests of a worldview is how well it stands up to the challenges of real life. When tragedy strikes, does your belief system meet the challenge — or does it let you down? Christian psychologist Paul Vitz says that how Christians handle suffering can reveal the truth of Scripture — and expose the shortfalls of the secular worldview.

Vitz is the author of a book called PSYCHOLOGY AS RELIGION: THE CULT OF SELF-WORSHIP. Modern psychology, he says, is deeply committed to narcissism, egoism, and worship of the self — a phenomenon he labels “selfism.” This commitment has turned psychology into religion — a form of secular humanism based on the rejection of God in favor of self-worship.

Selfist theories assume that self-gratification is the only ethical principle. The idea is to “actualize” ourselves through creativity and self-absorbed focus on our own needs and desires. But selfist philosophy falls apart when its followers begin to undergo suffering. And that's where we find one of the starkest contrasts between Christianity and selfism.

Christians, you see, acknowledge the reality of evil, with all of its attendant agony, heartbreak, and death. But Christians also believe that when we commit ourselves in obedience to Christ, suffering can actually bring us into a closer relationship with Him. This view, Vitz says, is “at the very heart of Christianity, as represented by the passion of the cross followed by the joy of Easter.”

By contrast, “selfist philosophy trivializes life by claiming that suffering” and death lack intrinsic meaning. Suffering, Vitz writes, is treated “as some sort of absurdity, usually a man-made mistake that could have been avoided by the use of knowledge to gain control of the environment.”

This view seems plausible enough when life is going well — but it becomes less and less convincing when people begin to suffer sickness or loss. After all, what do you say to the man who discovers, at age forty, that he's dying of cancer? What do you tell a middle-aged woman who will never have the children she so desperately wants? What do you say to the couple whose only child was killed by a drunk driver?

As Vitz puts it, “Does one say, 'Go actualize yourself in creative activity'? For people in those circumstances, such advice is not just irrelevant, it is an insult.”

Selfist-humanism begins optimistically enough, but it ends in misery. Christianity, on the other hand, offers understanding of the human condition that accounts for the reality of suffering — and holds the promise that suffering is ultimately redeemed.

You can read more examples of the clash of the secular and Christian worldviews in the new HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE? DEVOTIONAL — the only worldview devotional currently available.

Psychology as religion has wreaked havoc on our culture, with its facile justification of divorce, promiscuity, and our fanatical focus on self-fulfillment. As our neighbors discover the shallowness of a life lived for personal glory, Christians must be ready to lovingly offer the true source of life filled with meaning.

And that begins by focusing, not on ourselves, but on the God who sent His only Son to suffer and die so that we might be forgiven and live in peace with Him.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Paul Vitz, Psychology as Religion (Eerdmans, 1994).

• C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001 edition).

• Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, The Problem of Evil (Tyndale, 1999).

• Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (Random House, 2003).

• Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind (Vine, 1997).

• Dr. Armand Nicholi, The Question of God (Free Press, 2002).

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Adrift In the Universe: the Worldview of " Cast Away"

Job 7:16

Recently, Patty and I felt like a relaxing evening with a good movie. But instead of opting for mindless summer faire in the theaters, we rented one that we had missed, "Cast Away." The film stars Tom Hanks and was, artistically speaking, very well done. And some Christians consider it a family-friendly film since there's no profanity or sexual content.

Well, there's a lot more to being "family friendly" than that. The worldview of the movie is of much greater concern.

In this film, Tom Hanks plays a trouble-shooter for Federal Express, named Chuck Noland. On Christmas Eve, just as he had planned to ask his girlfriend to marry him, he is called off to fly to Micronesia to fix a problem.

But halfway across the Pacific, the plane runs into a storm and crashes into the ocean. Noland, the only survivor, washes up on an unpopulated island. For the better part of an hour and a half we watch him honing his survival skills. The acting is brilliant.

Relief from his isolation comes, not in the form of someone like Robinson Crusoe's friend, Friday, but from a volleyball named Wilson -- which Noland talks to. Then, after nearly four years, Noland finally builds a raft and escapes. Adrift at sea, he's picked up by a passing freighter and is returned to a hero's welcome in Memphis. But there he realizes he can't just pick up where he left off.

At the end of the movie, we see Noland -- literally and figuratively -- at a crossroads. Bewildered and lost, he stands in the middle of the road, able to go in any one of four different directions. What does he do? He looks into the camera with an exquisite expression on his face and shrugs his shoulders.

So, what is the film telling us? That life has no intrinsic meaning. The only meaning it has is that which we find through acts of heroic individualism. In that, "Cast Away" reflects the worldview of existentialists like Albert Camus, who wrote that, although the universe is meaningless and God is dead, it is nevertheless our duty to refuse to accommodate ourselves to that meaninglessness. Indeed, we overcome it with our heroic efforts.

This is just exactly what Tom Hanks does on the island. Once rescued, he's not redeemed. His struggle and sacrifice ultimately amounts to nothing because, as the final scene tells us, his choices really don't matter when all is said and done, and he knows it -- hence, the look on his face. Life has no purpose and no meaning.

But what disturbs me is how little Christians seem to understand movies like this. Every Christian I asked about this movie told me how much they liked the film. Not one of them was able to identify the worldview being promoted -- not even close.

Part of our mission here at Breakpoint is to offer guidance on how various worldviews are portrayed by popular culture. We have a list of recommended films you may want to consult before your next trip to the video store. Call us today and we'll send you a copy.

One thing we can discover from films like "Cast Away" is the utter emptiness of life without God. Life gets its meaning, not from self-fulfillment or success or even heroic existential engagement, but from a personal relationship with our Creator.

And any life dedicated to that pursuit will have more than "family values" -- it will have eternal significance.

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Liberation 101: Politicizing the Curriculum

It's back to school month, and across the nation Christian students are heading off to college -- where many will face courses that reflect all the latest political fads. Today's typical course catalog includes a hodge-podge of liberation ideologies based on race, gender, or sexual orientation -- from Stanford's course on "Eco-Feminism" to UCLA's Chicana Lesbian Literature to a Brown University course called Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay/Lesbian Plays.

How can Christian students keep their faith on today's politicized campus?

The answer is to learn to analyze worldviews, and it starts by understanding that Christianity itself is a worldview. The basic elements of the biblical message -- creation, fall, and redemption -- are not merely theological doctrines. They also represent the basic questions that every worldview must answer. Creation -- where did we come from? Fall -- what's wrong with the world? Why is there evil and suffering? And finally, Redemption -- how can it be fixed? How can we create a better world? By applying these categories to any worldview, we can test how well it answers the basic questions of life.

For example, when you probe deeply, the worldview that underlies all the liberation ideologies woven throughout the college curricula today is Marxism. The original concept of the oppression of the proletariat has merely been replaced by the oppression of women, homosexuals, or minorities. And that means we can critique all these ideologies by applying a worldview analysis to Marxism itself.

What does Marx say about creation -- ultimate origins? In Marxism, the ultimate creator is matter itself. Lenin went so far as to call matter "the supreme being, the cause of all causes, the creator of heaven and earth."

And since humans derive their identity from their relationship to the creator, in Marxism our identity comes from our relationship to matter -- the way we shape and produce material things: the means of production. All is reduced to economics.

Marx's counterpart to the Garden of Eden is a state of primitive communism. The original sin is the creation of private property, which caused humanity to fall from a state of innocence into slavery and oppression. Redemption will come from rising up against the capitalist oppressors to reverse the original sin and restore paradise.

As theology professor Klaus Bockmuehl writes, "Marxism is a secularized vision of the kingdom of God."

How well does this secular utopianism stack up against reality? Not well at all -- as everyone knows since the fall of the Soviet Union. The promise of a classless society has never been fulfilled, despite countless Marxist-inspired revolutions around the globe.

And the reason Marxism fails in the real world is that it fails conceptually to give adequate answers to the questions of creation, fall, and redemption. Beginning with matter as the creator, it leads to hopelessly unrealistic definitions of human nature and of the human dilemma. The vast network of contemporary liberation movements that adopt Marxist categories are equally flawed -- and equally dangerous.

Christians are often baffled by the clash of worldviews in today's culture. But by learning our own Christian worldview, each of us can be equipped for the worldview battle -- whether on campus or in the world.

_________________________

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Worldview Blindness: Are the Blind Leading the Blind?

In politics, I learned how important it is to regularly take the public pulse. I try to do the same in ministry by reading my mail and asking questions whenever I meet believers. This regular pulse-taking gives me a pretty good -- albeit occasionally alarming -- snapshot of the health of the Church.

From a recent mailbag came a letter from Gail, a California woman who asked about a chiropractor who claims a gift of healing. Gail told me that all of the young moms in her Bible study group were seeing this chiropractor -- supposedly a devout Christian. She massages their bodies to locate their "field of energy," and emits loud moans and guttural sounds when she (apparently) aligns their energy field with the universe's.

Gail became suspicious when she visited the chiropractor herself. Without touching Gail, the chiropractor announced that she had a bone spur between the second and third vertebrae -- just as Gail's doctor had diagnosed.

I advised Gail to flee for her life. Sure, some people have gifts of healing and discernment. But adding up all the evidence, it's obvious this chiropractor was into New Age teachings. If any supernatural powers are involved, they're on the dark side of the ledger.

An isolated case? I wish it was. It's just one example of a growing evangelical disease I call "worldview blindness." It's a direct result of people compartmentalizing their faith. And since modern society has largely repealed the law of non-contradiction, we blithely practice one thing in church and just the opposite in the chiropractor's office.

The solution is to teach believers to be discerning through a systematic effort, to see Christianity as an integrated life system, an explanation for all of reality, affecting all of life.

Second, we must make worldview training a priority for our kids. It's clear from my mailbag that kids are especially vulnerable to the false ideologies and "isms" of our day; they will have their faith challenged in school, on television, at the movies, by friends -- just about everywhere they turn. We've got to reach them while they're young and impressionable, before the world has turned them into skeptics.

Even if they attend Christian colleges, they'll encounter challenges to their faith, and eventually they'll enter the marketplace -- and the risk is they will being sucked into anti-biblical belief systems. The answer: open their eyes now -- teach them what your own belief system says about all of life, and how it differs from secular belief systems.

You can start your children's worldview education by reading BreakPoint to them, on the Internet, or playing our new Best-of-BreakPoint CD-ROM. When they're in high school, funnel them into classes like those taught by Worldview Academy, with summer worldview programs all over the country. Get them reading good books, like J. Budziszewski's How to Stay Christian in College, Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith, or my recent book, Answers to Your Kids' Questions.

All of this presupposes, of course, that we parents have taken our worldview blinders off -- that we're not suffering from the kind of schizophrenia that allows some people to read their horoscope in the Sunday paper before heading off to church. If we don't do this, it'll be just one more case of the blind leading the blind.

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Renewing the Culture

Ten years ago this month, the first Breakpoint radio broadcast hit the airwaves on ninety radio stations. At the time, almost all programming on Christian radio was devotional in nature. We wondered: Would Christians listen to a hard-hitting, biblically based critique of current events and issues?

Some of the professionals told us it wouldn't work -- that we would be bucking the tide to talk about something so esoteric as a "Christian worldview."

But we felt God's conviction, and, with the help of a few key donors, the ministry of BreakPoint radio was launched. With every commentary, we tried to help listeners think biblically about the world -- to build a grid of truth through which to sift and expose the distortions of our culture. Daily, we urged listeners to use these worldview lessons to impact the culture around them for Jesus Christ.

Now, ten years later, we know the experts were wrong. BreakPoint is heard on more than 1,000 broadcast outlets across the nation with a listening audience of more than five million people. Everywhere I go, people tell me how much they enjoy and use our material -- parents who listen along with their kids, teachers who use the commentaries in the classroom. Even congressmen and senators listen every day so as Christians they can better understand and deal with today's issues.

Over the years, letters and e-mails from listeners convinced us that Christians truly want the tools with which to challenge the secular culture and advance the truth of Christ. For instance, one mother used BreakPoint material to challenge the inaccurate teachings at her daughter's school -- and ended up being asked to join the school's curriculum committee. Others wrote to say that they'd gotten involved in prison ministry.

Two years ago, when we held our first worldview conference in Colorado Springs, hundreds of BreakPoint listeners came to immerse themselves in Christian worldview thinking. Our second conference in Chicago this June attracted nearly five hundred people.

Students who came to the conference from Canada and told me how they use BreakPoint in their weekly Bible studies. A New Zealander said that he heard about the conference on the Internet; he promised that next time he would bring with him a whole boatload of people from New Zealand.

Now even with all the gains we've made this past decade, there's still so much more to do. We hope and pray that this great awakening will spread, much like the one begun by one of my heroes, William Wilberforce. In the eighteenth century, Wilberforce not only led the fight in England to end slavery, he also reformed England's morals.

Wilberforce argued in a time of moral decay that the only hope for England rested in recapturing biblical principles and the shared morality that flowed from them. And I'm convinced that this is our only hope in this time in our culture.

That's why the work of BreakPoint equipping people across this country is so very important. I'm encouraged that already this movement has all the signs of a genuine God-inspired awakening among people -- it's His movement, not ours.

And that's why, as we celebrate our tenth anniversary, I want to thank you for standing with us -- for challenging those in your sphere of influence with the truth of the biblical revelation.

And may God continue -- through the work of all of us -- to renew this culture for His glory.

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Grassroots Revival

Acts 17:17

"Dear Mr. Colson," the letter began, "You don't have a clue!" It was from a twelve-year-old girl named Virginia. She was angry because we'd recently aired a BreakPoint commentary advising parents not to let their kids watch a raunchy television program called Dawson's Creek.

It's just one of the thousands of letters I've received in the ten years BreakPoint has been on the air. Most are positive, some are critical, and a few of them just make me laugh. But all of them tell me that BreakPoint is meeting a need in our culture.

When we first went on the air, BreakPoint was a big experiment; we weren't sure anyone would listen to a worldview program. But over these ten years we've seen evidence that the culture is crying out for biblical truth.

During the first weeks of our broadcast, we found out how right we were. The phones began ringing off the hook, and the letters poured in. We heard from parents and professionals, scholars and schoolchildren. They told us they were using BreakPoint transcripts to prepare letters to the editor, to teach Sunday school classes, and to write essays for school.

One commentary helped a teacher understand why even Christian kids embrace a "salad bar" approach to faith, picking and choosing what they want to believe without regard to the truth. Others have written to say they finally understand why animal rights activists and tree huggers, for example, think the way they do.

And BreakPoint isn't just changing the way people think: It's goading them to action. For instance, commentaries on the debate between Intelligent Design and Darwinian evolution have led many students to challenge their own teachers -- teachers who teach philosophy and pass it off as science.

And after a program about the online giant, Amazon.com, a number of listeners wrote to the company. They gave intelligent, articulate reasons why Amazon should stop carrying books on pedophilia. Not long afterward, the company did.

I've heard from lawmakers, as well, telling me how they were influenced by BreakPoint listeners who urged them to consider the morality of their votes. Your calls, let me tell you, listeners, have encouraged congressmen to fight partial birth abortion, slavery in Sudan, and other crucial issues.

BreakPoint listeners are also buying tens of thousands of books we recommend -- books about science, postmodernism, marriage, and how to help kids keep their faith in college. They ask for our movie reviews, and then teach their kids how to figure out a film's worldview.

On this, the tenth anniversary of BreakPoint, I still enjoy hearing from listeners -- the people who put these worldview lessons into practice. What began as an experiment is now on its way to starting a grassroots revival. And it thrills me to know that Christians are using their own creativity, their own sense of calling, to impact the world for Christ.

So, as we begin our second decade of ministry, I want to thank all of you who have helped keep BreakPoint on the air. I hope you will be part of this reformation. And, oh, yes -- if you have a spare moment, I hope you'll drop me a letter -- even when you disagree with me. Even if, like Virginia, you think I don't have a clue.

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Playing Hardball With Sin: Celluloid Worldview Lessons

It's not often that film graphically illustrates the utter impossibility and bankruptcy of a secular, self-centered worldview. It may not be what the makers of the new film HARDBALL intended, but that's what they've achieved.

HARDBALL is about a compulsive Chicago gambler named Conor O'Neill, played by Keanu Reeves. O'Neill has placed one too many bets he can't pay, and the local bookies are after him with baseball bats. O'Neill turns to a childhood friend -- now an investment banker -- and begs him to bail him out. Instead, his friend offers him a deal: If O'Neill will coach an inner-city baseball team, he'll pay him $500 a week.

O'Neill reluctantly agrees. He begins coaching a half-dozen kids who live in the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project. At first, O'Neill spends most of his time breaking up fights and trying to keep enough kids on the team to prevent them from being expelled from the league. But slowly, his efforts pay off -- and the team begins winning games.

Sadly, what could be an inspiring film ends up with tragedy; neither the coach nor the kids can overcome the consequences of bad decisions made many years in the past -- but this is what gives Christians a window for worldview witnessing.

In all too many movies, you see, the filmmaker subtly promotes a worldview contrary to Christianity -- not only promotes it, but portrays it as workable. For instance, fornication is often depicted as a normal part of life. But how often does the filmmaker show the long-term cost of violating God's command to save sex for marriage? Hardly ever. Celluloid characters routinely violate God's laws with impunity -- giving the impression that moviegoers can do the same.

But not in HARDBALL. In this film, the consequences of sin form a backdrop to every scene. We see what happens when people feed dangerous desires like gambling: These desires become compulsions that rule their lives. We see what happens when couples engage in sex outside of marriage: Their children live in poverty, danger, and despair. We see what happens when too many kids grow up without fathers: They form gangs that prey on the innocent.

Christians often view popular culture as the enemy -- and with good reason: Much of it promotes and celebrates a licentious lifestyle. But the answer is not to hide films and music from our kids. Instead, we need to use them to help our kids think critically about the world.

Parents can use films like HARDBALL, if you choose to see it, as teaching aids to the truth -- to remind our kids that God's commands are for our good, and that the costs of violating them are both real and ugly.

HARDBALL is rated PG-13 for a good deal of foul language and some violence. I don't recommend it. But if your teens or their friends -- or your neighbors -- decide to view HARDBALL, use it as a chance to teach some worldview lessons. Once your kids understand that someone's worldview makes its way into every film, they'll learn to look for it themselves.

For better or for worse, movies are part of our culture. But if we have the proper tools, we can use them to be discerning to see the truth of a biblical worldview when it's portrayed, rarely though that is, and the false ideas generally promoted in secular culture.

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Taming Secular Lions: Rebuilding the Culture

Let me tell you about a BreakPoint listener who sneaked Christian thinking past the secular lions and lived to tell about it. It's one of the stories that, frankly, keeps me committed to doing these BreakPoint broadcasts.

A Michigan teacher named Carl wrote to tell me that he especially enjoyed BreakPoint commentaries on evolution. Carl wrote: "I teach high school history, and [BreakPoint] ... has helped me become bolder and stand up for what I believe."

For example, many of his kids accept Darwin's teachings about natural selection and the survival of the fittest. So recently Carl had his students read excerpts from Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century English cleric who believed that population growth would outstrip food production and bring about mass starvation. Carl says his class was outraged that a Christian minister could be so heartless as to want to allow the world's poor to die.

Then Carl had them read Charles Darwin's autobiography. Lo and behold, the major premise for Darwin's survival of the fittest philosophy came from his reading of Malthus.

"The kids were amazed," Carl writes. "The philosophy they had adopted -- evolution -- is based on concepts the kids are outraged about." It made them think about Darwin in a very different light.

Christians are using BreakPoint to tame secular lions the college campus, as well. One of them is a young woman named Renee.

When Renee arrived at college, she was bombarded with anti-Christian sentiment. Friends attacked her faith claiming that belief in the Bible was illogical and irrational. Renee, a fairly new Christian, did not know how to respond. So she tried to avoid these kinds of conversations.

Then a Christian friend told her about BreakPoint. Renee began listening to the program. She quickly learned about some of the scientific support for God's truth and the logical reasons for her faith. Best of all she learned how to convey those truths to her friends in ways they could understand and respect. Today, Renee no longer shies away from spiritual conversations: She loves to challenge her friends on their secular views.

It thrills me to hear stories like these because this is the vision of BreakPoint -- to be able to reach and equip Christians to stand up for truth in today's culture, a culture in which Judeo-Christian values are so often mocked. When Christians try to speak up for these values, we're maligned as ignorant, intolerant, or bigoted. So many Christians have concluded that the "culture war" is over -- and that the Christians have lost.

But giving up on the culture is a betrayal of our biblical mandate because it denies God's sovereignty over all of life. Christians must never stop trying to help their neighbors understand why God's revelation is the source of all truth, a comprehensive framework to understand all reality.

That's the goal of BreakPoint: To help Christians effectively evangelize a post-Christian culture. And that's why I'm so delighted when I hear stories like these about how listeners use BreakPoint. People like Carl and Renee, who take the Christian worldview right into the lion's den -- and fearlessly defend it.

If you do this or you know people who do, let me hear from you. It's a real encouragement.

What A Pollster Discovered About Biblical Worldview

Pollster George Barna discovered the following about American evangelicals:

Only 9% of born again adults have a biblical worldview. Another 6% have the foundation (i.e., believe in absolute moral truth and that the Bible is the source of truth). That means that 85% of all born again adults have neither the foundation nor the theological perspective required for a biblical worldview.

In a typical week, people with a biblical worldview are:

*Nine times more likely to avoid adult-only material on the internet.

*Five times less likely to use tobacco products.

*Three times more likely to boycott products.

*Three times more likely to intentionally not watch a movie due to

its objectionable content.

*Half as likely to personally give cash to a needy person they meet.

People with a biblical worldview are:

Two-and-three quarters times more likely to Strongly Disagree:

the Bible does not specifically condemn homosexuality.

Two-and-two-thirds times more likely to Strongly Agree:

the Bible is totally accurate in all its teachings.

Three out of four Senior Pastors believe they do an excellent job of enabling people to develop a biblical worldview. 59% pastors say that a majority of their congregants possess a biblical worldview. Only 5% of the adults who regularly attend church actually have a biblical worldview.

Two out of three children receive Christ before age 18 the majority do it before age 9. Most kids by the age of 13 feel they know everything that they need to know about the Bible.

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Our Own Worst Enemies: How the Culture Shapes Our Thinking

This summer, the Supreme Court struck down Texas's sodomy law in what columnist Jeffrey Rosen called “a particularly expansive way,” giving hope to “same-sex marriage” advocates. In light of this decision, can Christians and other social conservatives still influence the culture?

Rosen raised that question in a New York Times article titled, “How to Reignite the Culture Wars.” Rosen takes note of signs of a cultural backlash ever since the Supreme Court case. A major Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans supporting same-sex unions dropped sharply after the Court struck down the Texas law.

As Rosen recalls, another Supreme Court decision thirty years ago — Roe V. Wade — had a similar effect. He writes, “A series of conservative interest groups ... arose in response to Roe in the 1970s and '80s, and they were initially effective. While states had been liberalizing their abortion laws before 1973, they increasingly limited access to abortion after Roe came down.”

So, paradoxically, the unfavorable decision in Lawrence V. Texas could work in our favor after all. But the Supreme Court isn't the biggest foe we have to fight.

It's true that many Americans are coming around to the traditional point of view on marriage and gay rights. But at the same time, many social conservatives are beginning to come around to the other side's point of view on homosexuality. The attitude of the larger culture is starting to rub off on us.

Even if fewer Americans support gay unions today, the laissez-faire attitude toward sexual morality still prevails. Many people see any attempt to encourage moral behavior as an unwarranted intrusion on their privacy. For decades, educators, media, and many of our government leaders have drilled into us that the most “compassionate” attitude on any such issue is “I wouldn't do it myself, but I wouldn't try to stop anyone else from doing it.” And Christians fall for this.

This is why, as Jeffrey Rosen writes, “Even among evangelical and social conservatives, there is a general sense that the effort to stigmatize consensual sexual behavior as immoral has been lost among the younger generation.” And this is why he's wondering just how effective social conservatives can be at this time. He quotes sociologist James Davison Hunter's book Culture Wars: “There is the distinct possibility,” Hunter writes, “that orthodox communities may become so assimilated to a progressive political ... culture that they will not be capable of offering any effective opposition to the worldview that currently plagues them.”

How can Christians keep from getting sucked into a culture that strikes at the very heart of our beliefs? The key is the word worldview: seeing all of life from the perspective of our Christian faith. When we do this, we realize it is never “compassionate” to encourage people to act against God's laws or the natural design of humans.

We will never influence the world for Christ when we're letting the world influence us. Learning to think like Jesus, as pollster George Barna argues in his new book by that title, is the best way to keep from becoming our own worst enemies.

FOR FURTHER READING:

• Jeffrey Rosen, “How to Reignite the Culture Wars,” New York Times, 7 September 2003. (Article costs $2.95 to retrieve.)

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030807, “The Struggle for Marriage.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030729, “The 'Love' That Won't Keep Quiet.”

• James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America (Basic Books, 1992).

• Rebecca Hagelin, “Jolted!” The Heritage Foundation, 12 August 2003.

• “Chuck Colson's Response to the Texas Sodomy Law Decision,” BreakPoint Online, 26 June 2003.

• George Barna, Think Like Jesus (Integrity, 2003). Read this interview with George Barna discussing his new book.

• Peter Kreeft, How to Win the Culture War (InterVarsity, 2002).

• “Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work” — At the April 4-6, 2003, BreakPoint conference, “Christians in the Marketplace,” held in Colorado Springs, CO, Jennifer Roback Morse spoke about the “laissez-faire family” and the new definition of freedom: “To be free is to be unencumbered by human relationships.”

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From Sea To Sea

Luke 19:10

Many Christians do not really understand the Christian worldview. Many do not know the historic biblical plotline and how it all relates. While recognizing they have a relationship with God through Christ, many are unsure as to why this salvation is a universal truth and necessity for all. Many are even unsure as to how their present relationship with Christ relates to history and the future. All this leads to a profound doubt and lack of confidence with respect to the evangelistic task. Why would we share the good news if we cannot fully articulate why it is good?

The plotline and great story of Scripture places the gospel of Christ in its overall context, making it intelligible, meaningful, and compelling. The biblical view of history is paradise lost to paradise regained in the eternal plan of God. The good news of salvation is necessary for all because there is, indeed, bad news. Something is very wrong! We need Christ and his sacrificial death to redeem us from the curse and restore humanity to himself. It is a story worth telling.

As we recover biblical literacy in the church and the consequent appreciation of the Christian worldview Christians themselves will have a coherent and compelling comprehension of the message they will want to share. And when our message is both coherent and compelling, non-believers who find Christianity something of a mystery will begin to grasp what it is these “proclaimers of strange divinities” (Acts 17) are talking about.

True evangelism is a comprehensible communication and announcement of the dramatic action and rule of God in history culminating in the advent of Christ, his life, death, and resurrection. This does not mean that friendship, social action, literature, and the arts do not greatly contribute to people's receptivity to the gospel -- they do. Our call is to be living letters devoted to an evangelistic lifestyle. But without this clear explanation and declaration, our task is incomplete. This is why I believe that apologetics -- giving a reasoned defense and justification for belief -- is inseparable from evangelism itself.

Of course, to share the faith can be intimidating at times, especially with friends and family. But there is perhaps nothing more wonderful or joyous in the Christian life than having the opportunity to lead someone to faith in Christ as we are co-workers with the Holy Spirit in his miraculous activity. Just to be a link in the chain of a person's journey to faith is one of the greatest privileges afforded to us.

People need meaningful friendship, but above all they need Christ. Why not begin praying for two or three people, that God would bring them to faith and use you in the process? Why not take the opportunity this year to begin to step out in a new God-given confidence in sharing your faith? If you have no sphere of influence, pray that God will bring you one. Last year I joined a local soccer league and invested in relationships with my neighbors in order to build more relationships with those lost and without Christ in this world. I am constantly amazed by the work God is doing in every heart to draw people to himself, and how open people can be to hearing about the hope that is in us.

As we find our identity and confidence in Christ, put our faith in the truth of his Word, grow in our knowledge, and depend on the Holy Spirit for his enabling, we can be confident that God will grant us success. Let us remember that God is love and He sent his Son into the world to seek and save the lost. He has a vested interest. And let us look to God that He would move again from sea to sea.

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Joe Boot is executive director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Canada.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #4280]

Is This How the West Really Lost God?

Does worldview determine behavior or does behavior determine worldview? In the end, the process must certainly work both ways. An individual’s basic worldview surely determines moral choices and behaviors. But habits of life and moral context can also lead to modifications in worldview.

Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution looked closely at this question in her recent Policy Review article, “How the West Really Lost God.” Eberstadt argues that decisions about family structure and children can determine how secular individuals and societies become. Her argument points to the central role of the family in the formation of worldviews.

The traditional theory of secularization holds that as a society becomes more secular it also experiences lower commitment to marriage and lower rates of childbearing. The statistical link between these factors is undeniable, but what about causation?

According to the dominant theory of secularization, as persons become more secularized they lose or modify the commitment to marriage as an institution and have fewer children. The rationale behind this dominant theory is clear and understandable -- as God is displaced by other authorities and influences, the idea of marriage as a divinely-ordained institution also recedes, as does the belief that couples are to have children as a part of their marital responsibility.

Eberstadt argues that the dominant theory just doesn’t explain the whole picture:

And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line

about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what

has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain

of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and

practice should always run that way instead of the other, at

least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history

had lined up all the right puzzle pieces -- modernity, belief and

disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families -- only to

press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but

leaves something critical out.

This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece.

It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of

this debate over secularization -- and not as a theoretical

exercise, but rather because compelling empirical evidence

suggests an alternative account of what Nietzsche’s madman really

saw in the “tombs” (read, the churches and cathedrals) of Europe.

In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many

Western European Christians did not just stop having children and

families because they became secular. At least some of the time,

the record suggests, they also became secular because they

stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting

the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe

is correct, then certain things, including some radical things,

follow from it.

Mary Eberstadt offers some interesting evidence for her argument. For one thing, she points to the fact that changes in family formation preceded changes in religious belief. She argues that family decline appeared in Europe before a marked decline in commitment to Christianity. Similarly, she argues that the preservation of the traditional family helps to explain the preservation of high religious commitment in nations such as Poland.

As she sees it, her most important argument is that the reversal of the dominant theory of secularization helps to explain the delay of secularization in a nation like the United States.

Secularization theory holds that as a society becomes more technologically advanced and modern, belief in God and patterns of religious belief quickly recede. This has certainly been the case in much of Europe, but not so much in the United States. This nation has experienced some considerable degree of secularization, but most Americans claim to believe in God and church attendance here dwarfs that of western Europe.

American “exceptionalism” points to this fact -- that has remained highly religious even as it has led the world in so many dimensions of modernity. The dominant theory argues that this exceptionalism explains the greater percentage of traditional families and rates of childbirth in the U.S. Mary Eberstadt argues that the preservation of the family has delayed the loss of faith.

This is more than an academic argument, of course. If Eberstadt is right, the weakening of marriage as an institution will lead to an decrease in those who believe in God.

She also suggests that this explains regional worldview differences within the United States:

Consider as subsidiary evidence this tantalizing fact:

Differences in fertility rates within the United States itself

also track broadly with differences in religiosity. The

Northeast pattern closely resembles that in Western Europe,

whereas the South and border states are correspondingly higher.

And the rate is also high among the well-educated and well-off

population of Latter-Day Saints.

At this point, the reader may be tempted to rejoin that such is

exactly what one would expect; after all, religious people tend

to have larger families; so what? But look carefully at that

common formulation, because it contains the same hidden

assumption as that of secularization theory -- i.e., it assumes

that because people are more religious, therefore they have

larger families. But where is the evidence for putting things in

that order? It is at least as plausible -- in fact, given the

evidence, it is more plausible -- to assume the opposite: that

something about having larger families is making people more

religious, at least some of the time.

In truth, the dominant theory of seculariztion must surely explain at least part of the reality we see -- perhaps the largest part. As Richard Weaver famously insisted, ideas do have consequences. One of the consequences of the secular worldview is a fundamental change in family structure. But Mary Eberstadt is also surely right. Her theory helps to fill out what the dominant theory fails to explain.

Just as important, her version of the theory underlines the importance of preserving family structure and high rates of childbirth in light of spiritual commitments. The experience of getting married, staying married, having children, and raising them, seems to support habits of belief in God and participation in organized religion.

Mary Eberstadt has offered a model of the quality of careful thinking needed for our times. The Christian church should take a careful look at her argument, and ponder what this implies about a transformation of priorities within our congregations -- and within our families.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5779]

Defining Secularization

One of the symptoms of modern and postmodern change is the large stock of new words, or certainly the new use of old words -- terms such as “user-friendly,” “downsizing,” “multiculturalism,” “politically-correct,” “homophobic,” “postmodern,” “poststructuralism,” and “deconstruction.” If the cartographers of our time are working away furiously to draw up new maps as empires get further subdivided each day, our neologists (those who invent new words) are living at a boom time for their preoccupations. One such word that we are all now accustomed to hearing repeatedly is “secular,” or “secularization.” I would venture to suggest that we might find ourselves stumbling when asked to define what this word really means. The word itself has a broad sweep, and in differing contexts brings a different spin to the central idea. For our purposes we will concentrate on the term in its social implications, because it is the process of secularization that is one of the most powerful conditioning influences in cultural formation today. Virtually every major decision that is made, and that affects our mind-molding institutions -- even in the highest offices of the land -- is made on the basis of a secularized worldview.

What does secularization really mean? A secular worldview is admittedly and designedly the underlying impetus that presently propels western culture. The central feature of that outlook assumes that this world -- the material world -- is all that we have by which and for which to live. How all this came about is a historian’s challenge and a sociologist’s occupation. The reality that secularism is the philosophy of choice is inescapable. Any view of a spiritual essence or of otherworldliness is by definition considered irrelevant or irrational. Secularism, or “saeculum,” is implicitly “this worldly.”

Peter Berger, the renowned sociologist and Director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University, defines secularization as “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.”(1) The choice of words Berger makes is very interesting indeed, and the broad sweep that his words encompass is of enormous importance. Secularism is “the evacuation of the church...the emancipation of education.” The former speaks of a fleeing body, the latter of a liberation of the enshackled mind. Simply stated, this definition of secularization asserts that public life is to be governed by laws that are not influenced by religion, or any transcendent sacred notion. Stated with the forcefulness by which the secular will is often carried out, religious ideas have been rendered senseless in the social arena by the gladiators of the intellect.

The contention being made here -- that this is not a mild-mannered drawing of the lines but, more accurately, a hostile take-over -- is not even slightly overstated. No one with any real knowledge of our moral struggles today will deny this philosophical attack upon the moorings of contemporary society. The effect of secularization in rendering religious convictions inadmissible in the public arena is touted in vengeful terms. As a test of this thesis, imagine a scenario featured on a prime time television program. If a volatile moral issue that divides the nation was being discussed by a panel of experts -- an educator, a philosopher, a civil libertarian, a politician, a lawyer, a journalist, and a minister -- who would be considered by the listening audience to be the most “biased” or “irrelevant” on the subject, and therefore, the least credible? Without a doubt, it would be the minister.

As much as one would seek to be irenic and conciliatory on this sad prejudice, it is fatuous to deny that in academia, and even more so in the media, the person in ministry today is often portrayed with ridicule or bias. At the same time, it is implied that it is ONLY the religious who are bigoted and prejudiced, who seek to put culture’s head under their tyrannical heels. This is a radical inversion, is it not? For at one time the educated were the churchmen, and the halls of learning were founded by those in religious leadership.

It is important then to understand how this state of affairs came to be, to be able to see the evolution of secularism from being merely a voice among many vying for allegiance to becoming the reigning mind-set, having the power to grant or ban admissibility of all other views. It is equally important to examine where secularization leads in its logical outworking. To be fair and accurate, both aspects are significant if one is to counter the situation with intelligence. The causes and the results are with us today. Not only are they both important for understanding, but also for appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of a secular perspective. Furthermore, if a secularized worldview becomes sovereign in matters of moral direction, we must come to grips with that result. It will not do to cling to the cause and wish the result away. Reality does not play mind games. What is more, to anesthetize the mind in order to abort what comes to birth when wrong ideas are conceived and borne in the womb of culture, will only kill the very life-giving force of the nation that nurtures the idea. We must learn, in the words of one cultural commenter, to live as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.

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1. Peter Berger, THE SACRED CANOPY (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 107.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #6378]

Hell On Earth - Sin and Redemption In Science Fiction

If you want to get depressed in hurry, watch a lot of science-fiction movies.

Think of BLADE RUNNER, the definitive science-fiction film of our time. It portrays Los Angeles as a decayed ruin, populated by swarms of wretches who speak an unintelligible street dialect. Announcements urge people to flee the wreckage of civilization by settling on other planets.

In theological terms, the vision of the world one often gets from sci-fi films like this is one of devastation due to human sin, but without any hope of redemption: It's existential despair.

This grim vision of the future can also be seen in the MATRIX and TERMINATOR films, where human folly and hubris have destroyed civilization and led to mankind's enslavement and possible extinction. Other science-fiction/fantasy films, like THE CROW and STRANGE DAYS, depict a world where chaos, not order, is the rule. Human civilization is an out-of-control dystopia with zombie-like people escaping into drugs and virtual reality games.

These violent and depressing movies may not appeal to many of us. But as Brian Godawa reminds us in his book, HOLLYWOOD WORLDVIEWS, Christians need to be aware that, like other elements of pop culture, science-fiction films convey worldviews and impact millions.

On the surface, the worldview of many sci-fi films resembles a Christian one. The characters' predicament isn't purely the product of some malevolent force. Instead, it's the tragic consequence of willful human action. In effect, they're punished for sins.

But the similarity is only superficial. As Thomas Hibbs of Boston College has written, this is nihilism, not Christianity. While the films see “violence and ineradicable guilt as the underlying truth about the human condition,” they're missing a belief in Providence: the idea that there's a God who “sustains, nourishes, and cares for everything He has made.”

This lack makes sense when you recall how naturalism — the belief that nature is all there is — permeates science fiction. Without God, redemption is no option.

Instead of heroes acting on Providence's behalf, this leaves us with protagonists who are scarcely more sympathetic than the films' bad guys or who are like the cop in BLADE RUNNER, described as a “one-man slaughterhouse.”

What's more, in these films, the forces of evil and darkness — if you can identify them at all — are almost never defeated decisively. We never learn what happens to the cop in BLADE RUNNER, and there seems no end to the supply of killer machines in the TERMINATOR films. Part of this, of course, is deliberate to allow for sequel films. But part of it is that, in a world without Providence, evil can never be decisively defeated. So, as the credits role, L.A. is still a dystopia.

Given the popularity of science fiction, it's important to understand the worldview at work in these films. We ought to be prepared to help our kids contrast these worldviews with Christian teaching on sin and redemption. If we do, they'll realize that their future isn't nearly as depressing as it might seem when they go to the movies.

Celluloid Philosophy Lessons - What Is Hollywood Teaching Your Teen?

If you’ve got a teenager at home, now that school’s out, he’s going to spend a lot of time studying philosophy. “Not my kid,” you might respond. “He’s not into philosophy.”

Well, he might not be reading Plato or Aristotle, but if he sees a few movies this summer, he’s going to get what amounts to a survey course in philosophy whether he knows it or not.

Everyone embraces one philosophy or another — a worldview that defines his conception of the world, of reality, of human life. These beliefs are woven into movies — often in such subtle ways that viewers miss them.

For example, in the film CAST AWAY, fate is offered as a God substitute when a FedEx employee is marooned on an island after a plane crash. As Brian Godawa writes in his book, HOLLYWOOD WORLDVIEWS, “God is conspicuously absent..... [The man] is all alone in a naturalistic universe.” In the end, he finds his way back home and meets a woman to replace the one he lost. Thus, Godawa writes, “humanity finds meaning in hope for another human being, and the benevolent impersonal fate will work it all out for us in the end.”

Your kids may also meet the Eastern philosophy called MONISM. A monist believes that all of reality is ultimately one: Evil arrives when people make distinctions among things; redemption occurs when we understand this pantheistic oneness.

One recent film that promotes monism is POWDER, about a rejected messiah figure with superhuman intelligence and special powers. In one scene, a sheriff gives up hunting when the messiah figure “connects” him with a deer the sheriff has just shot: Enlightenment comes when the sheriff realizes he is “one” with the deer.

Newer films also feature plots expressing neo-Darwinism. For example, in the computer-animated film DINOSAUR, a meteor strikes the earth, forcing the dinosaurs to migrate to a new home. Along the journey, the dinosaurs fight among themselves and permit larger animals to prey on smaller ones. But then, Godawa says, a wise “Moses-like [plant-eating animal] encourages them to cooperate.” They “learn that they will only survive through helping one another. DINOSAUR thus embodies the theory of evolutionary psychology that cooperation” — not competition — “is a trait of survival of the fittest.”

In the darkness of a theater, kids may also bump into neopaganism, Gaia worship, existentialism, and postmodernism. The question is, will they recognize these unbiblical philosophies when they see them?

Francis Schaeffer once wrote that philosophy — often dismissed as irrelevant — is, in reality, a powerful engine that drives cultural change. Ivory Tower ideas filter down into popular culture, including films. There, they influence millions who often have no notion of what they’re consuming along with the car chases, love scenes, and popcorn.

That’s why it’s so important that we teach our kids how to find the worldview message in EVERY film — including the G-rated ones. The time for philosophy lessons, you see, is BEFORE our kids walk into the multiplex — not when the lights go down.

Defending Design: With Good Jokes

”Charles Darwin didn’t want to murder God,” TIME magazine commented recently. “But he did.” The murder weapon, according to most historians of science, was the theory of natural selection. If all living things, including human beings, evolved by a blind and undirected process of variation and selection, then we become, as TIME puts it, “an accident of natural selection, not a direct product of God.”

Chances are your teenager has heard something like this in high school — or, if not there, on a public television program, or from friends. But the news of God’s death, as Mark Twain joked after reading his own obituary, has been greatly exaggerated. A delightful new book from InterVarsity Press, What’s Darwin Got to Do with It?, makes the point beautifully.

This isn’t a book you’ll have to urge your kids to read. In fact, they won’t be able to put it down. And you’ll probably find yourself sneaking a peek at the book, as well. It’s hard to resist.

"What’s Darwin Got to Do with It?" is a cartoon-format conversation between a young female biologist, Professor Questor, and her older male colleague, Professor Teller. Teller is an advocate of Darwinism. Questor, on the other hand, is skeptical of the claims made for Darwinism. She’s been doing some hard thinking, and the evidence of biology has convinced her that “intelligent design” is a better explanation for what she observes.

Of course, Professor Teller doesn’t give in easily. He throws one argument after another at Dr. Questor. How can anyone invoke intelligent design? he asks her. Isn’t that just religion or fantasy, masquerading as science?

Not at all, she replies. We know that an arrangement of flowers spelling “Welcome to Victoria” has an intelligent cause, even if we can’t personally see that cause. Even Darwin’s favorite examples, Dr. Questor explains, the changes wrought by selective breeding in domesticated animals like pigeons or dogs, show evidence of intelligent design. Great Danes and Chinese Pugs exist only because of careful, deliberate steps in the breeding process.

Well, how about similarities between different organisms? asks Professor Teller. Doesn’t that prove Darwinian evolution?

Not so fast, answers Questor patiently. She then explains that similarity can have many causes, including design, and illustrates her point with a funny story about space aliens and automobiles.

The book What’s Darwin Got to Do with It? is marked by its sense of humor — but it’s still fair and valid. Professor Teller, as the representative of standard neo-Darwinism, isn’t mocked. Rather, the book’s authors — Robert Newman, John Wiester, and a husband-and-wife team, Jonathan and Janet Moneymaker — take care to keep the tone friendly and open.

In writing and illustrating the book, they drew on a wide range of expert scientific advice, in fields like population genetics, paleontology, and the philosophy of science. But What’s Darwin Got to Do with It? is just plain fun to read. Talking panda bears, super-heroes, criminal detectives, and even Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, put in appearances.

If intelligent design isn’t welcome in your kids’ science classroom, why not give them something to read on the bus? What’s Darwin Got to Do with It? will help them understand the powerful insights of intelligent design — and even have some good-natured fun in the process.

Biblical Worldview Is Held By Only 4% of American Adults

Everyone has a worldview, but few have one that is biblical.

That's the conclusion of a national survey by Barna Research, which found that just 4 percent of American adults have a biblical worldview. Additionally, only 9 percent of those categorized as born-again Christians have a biblical worldview, Barna said. The poll of 2,033 adults was conducted September through November 2003.

“Worldview” is a term used to describe the belief system by which a person understands or makes decisions about the world. One of the most prominent modern-day worldviews is postmodernism -- a belief system that rejects the notion of absolute truth. This is often expressed in the statement, “That may be true for you but it's not true for me.”

Not surprisingly, the Barna research found that adults without a biblical worldview and those with such a worldview had vastly different views of immoral and unethical behavior. For instance, those without a biblical worldview were:

-- Around 100 times more likely to endorse abortion (46 percent of those without a biblical worldview believed it to be OK, compared to less than 1 percent of those with a worldview).

-- Around 80 times more likely to say exposure to pornography is morally acceptable (39 percent vs. less than one-half of 1 percent).

-- 31 times more likely to believe living together before marriage is morally acceptable (62 percent vs. 2 percent).

-- 15 times more likely to believe homosexual sex is acceptable (31 percent vs. 2 percent versus).

-- 18 times more likely to endorse drunkenness (36 percent vs. 2 percent).

-- 12 times more likely to accept profanity (37 percent vs. 3 percent).

-- 11 times more likely to say adultery is OK (44 percent vs. 4 percent).

-- 8 times more likely to gamble by purchasing lottery tickets.

“The primary reason that people do not act like Jesus is because they do not think like Jesus,” Barna said in a news release. “Behavior stems from what we think -- our attitudes, beliefs, values and opinions.”

Barna's definition of a biblical worldview included a belief that absolutes exist and a belief that the Bible defines them. Additionally, the definition stipulated a belief that: Christ lived a sinless life; God is the “all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He stills rules it today”; salvation is by grace and not by works; Satan is a real being; Christians have a responsibility to witness; and the Bible is “accurate in all of its teachings.”

The research found that those who attended college were more likely to have a biblical worldview than those who did not (6 percent versus 2 percent). Married adults also were more likely to have such a worldview (5 percent for married people versus 2 percent for singles). Also, 10 percent of Republicans but only 2 percent of independents and 1 percent of Democrats had a biblical worldview.

Respondents were not asked if they considered themselves to be born again, but instead were asked a series of specific questions. Born-again believers were defined as those who “said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior,” according to a news release.

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False Advertising: Da Vinci Doesn't Even Get Heresy Right

Dan Brown's historical thriller THE DA VINCI CODE has now reached its sixtieth week on the bestseller list with more than five million copies sold in the United States alone. Plans are being made to turn the book into a movie. It would seem that the influence of Brown's novel — which is based on the premise that Jesus was only human, not divine — has never been greater.

Yet a number of Christian voices are now speaking out about the flaws and fabrications of THE DA VINCI CODE. The NEW YORK TIMES reports that in the past couple of months, at least ten books refuting Brown's argument have been released. One such book is Dr. Darrell Bock's BREAKING THE DA VINCI CODE.

A lot of people don't understand why Christians are making so much fuss about a mere adventure novel. But in his book, Bock asserts that THE DA VINCI CODE is much more than a novel. The book is an attempt to promote a worldview, one that's deeply antithetical to the Christian worldview.

Through his characters, Brown argues that the divinity of Jesus and the authority of the four Gospels were not decided until the Council of Nicea in the fourth century. He also claims that the church unjustly suppressed the view of the Gnostics.

By examining church history, however, Bock proves Brown wrong on all counts. The Gnostic gospels of which Brown writes were written well after the Gospels in our New Testament, and the church never considered them authoritative. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were always considered the “preeminent” sources of authority on Jesus' life.

Bock also points out what any serious reader of the Bible would realize: The original Gospels proclaimed Jesus the Son of God, and they were accepted centuries before the Council of Nicea. Gnosticism was rejected, in fact, because it differed from this long accepted and practiced belief.

What's really surprising is that Brown doesn't even get his facts about Gnosticism straight. According to the Gnostic gospels, Jesus is a spiritual being who didn't die on the cross; a human “substitute” was crucified by the people while the real Jesus was “laughing at their ignorance.” And Gnosticism teaches that salvation comes not through God's grace, but through secret knowledge that is given only to those intelligent and self-aware enough to receive it — nice if you're one of the chosen ones, but not so nice for the rest of us.

But we get none of this in Brown's account. To the contrary, Brown misstates Gnosticism by asserting Jesus was human. The book is yet another example of what Frederica Mathewes-Green calls “our culture's penchant for pick-and-choose religion.” She goes on to say that, “every pick-and-choose religion has this limitation: The follower can never grow any larger than his own preconceptions. He has established himself A PRIORI as the ultimate authority, and his thoughts will never be larger than his hat size.”

By contrast, Christian truth is rooted in the authority of the Scriptures — tested, reflected upon, and debated over two centuries — and is rooted in the Church and creed, not in personal preferences.

Critiquing THE DA VINCI CODE is a matter of defending truth, and you need to learn to do this from Bock's book or from another. Set your neighbors straight; with five million copies out there we've got a big job.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Darrell Bock, Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Nelson Books, 2004).

• Erwin Lutzer, The DaVinci Deception (Tyndale, 2004).

• Amy Wellborn, De-Coding Da Vinci (Our Sunday Visitor, 2004).

• Laurie Goodstein, “Defenders of Christianity Rebut 'The Da Vinci Code,' New York Times, 27 April 2004. (Free registration required.)

• Kate McCann, “'Da Vinci Code' Author Left Out Material,” Chicago Tribune, 19 May 2004.

• Sandra Miesel, “Dismantling the Da Vinci Code,” Crisis, 1 September 2003.

• Helen T. Gray, “Unmasking 'Da Vinci' author,” Monterey Herald, 21 May 2004.

• Darrell Bock, “The Good News of Da Vinci,” Christianity Today, February 2004.

• Darrell Bock, “Was Jesus Married to Mary Magdalene?“ ABCNews.com, 12 November 2003.

• Frederica Mathewes-Green, “What Heresy?“ Books & Culture, November/December 2003.

• Bruce Boucher, “Does 'Code' crack Leonardo?“ New York Times, 5 August 2003. (Free registration required.)

• Deborah Caldwell, “Da Vinci's Secret Agenda,” Beliefnet, 27 April 2004.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 040120, “The Da Vinci Conspiracy: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction.”

• Collin Hansen, “Breaking The Da Vinci Code,” Christianity Today, 3 November 2003.

• Mark Gauvreau Judge, “Debunking Da Vinci,” BreakPoint Online, 6 May 2004.

• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters (Doubleday, 2003).

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[Original illustration here was a duplicate in HolwickID 25837-26027]

Examine the 'News'

Job 34:4

The expanding controversy over CBS News reports on President George W. Bush's National Guard service -- and the network's acknowledgement that it used faked documents in its report -- raises a host of issues about truth-telling, media credibility and evangelical responsibility.

We live in an age of unprecedented media access, as almost every American home has access to multiple media options. Cable news channels provide a constant stream of reports even as the Internet erases the final geographic barriers to information transfer. Newspapers, talk radio and the older network news broadcasts must be added to the mix, providing citizens with an overload of information and images.

Most Americans never even stop to recognize how revolutionary this level of information access really is. Previous generations relied on word of mouth, handwritten communications, the Pony Express, the telegraph or radio broadcasts. Those over 40 years of age can remember the limitations of a black-and-white television with news packaged in the form of 30-minute network broadcasts, supplemented by occasional special reports. If you missed the nightly broadcast, you were out of luck and uninformed. No longer.

The really important question is this: Are we any wiser? The explosion of media access has provided some real benefits for viewers. Competition has led to improvements in both style and substance, and the expanding number of news organizations has added new checks and balances to the system. Still, much of the additional coverage is more concerned with “infotainment” than information or analysis. Furthermore, many citizens feel as if they are drowning in an ocean of competing reports and programs.

Christian engagement with the news media requires intelligence, thoughtfulness and an awareness of how the media elite really think. As always, knowledge is power.

Let me suggest 10 principles for responsible evangelical engagement with the news media. Our responsibility is to consider the news -- and the making of news -- from a Christian worldview perspective. That makes a huge difference in how we analyze, assimilate and judge media reports.

Principle One: In a fallen world, everyone is biased. There is no such thing as absolute objectivity. As a matter of fact, everyone comes to the news with some bias. We are all creatures of our own limited experience and information, and we all come to the issues of the day -- controversial or otherwise -- with a specific worldview. Even research scientists acknowledge that absolute objectivity is an impossible achievement. This is especially true when dealing with issues of worldview consequence. As Christians, we recognize that bias is not merely a matter of political interest or ideological conviction; it is evidence of sin. In a sinful world, bias creeps into every discussion, every judgment and every news report. Evangelical Christians therefore have no excuse for being surprised when bias appears -- we should expect it, and judge accordingly. At the same time, we should be aware of our own bias and submit our own assumptions to careful analysis. Every single individual confronts the issues of the day from specific worldview commitments. There is no escaping this reality.

Principle Two: News reports are heavily filtered -- and the filters matter. The news we receive on televised broadcasts, in newspapers and in virtually any other form comes to us only after passing through numerous filters. All along the process, reporters, editors, producers, executives and others are making judgments about what stories are important, how stories should be reported, what sources should be used and what perspectives should be included. These filters are extremely significant, and the news reports we receive are but a fraction of what could be published and presented. Someone is making those decisions, and the worldview of those decision-makers is of the utmost importance. The decision about what to cover is as important as decisions about how to cover any given issue or event. If we are unaware of these filters, we will assume that the news presented to us reflects what is ultimately most important. Actually, it may reflect only what individuals in the filtering process want us to see, read or hear. As Marvin Olasky argues in his book, “Prodigal Press,” “Many scholars suggest that journalists have their prime influence on society not so much by coverage of particular stories as by the choice of what to cover; journalists are sometimes called 'gate-keepers' or 'agenda-setters.’ Readers and viewers should keep asking: Why was this story considered newsworthy?”

Principle Three: The media are driven by commercial interests. The vast majority of media outlets are commercial enterprises driven by a bottom-line desire for profit. This has a great deal to do with how the news is presented, how the readers or audience are addressed and how issues are framed. As media analysts Neil Postman and Steve Powers explained, much of what we see on television news is designed “to keep viewers watching so that they will be exposed to commercials.” Thus, producers and news directors are driven to cover stories that offer visual interest, regardless of news value. As the old newsroom adage goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Images often displace words, and a distorted picture of reality results. Furthermore, the commercial interest of broadcast news means that viewers must be held over a period of time by enticements. That is why news anchors advertise upcoming stories and, as C. John Sommerville of the University of Florida explains, “string us along.” As Sommerville argues, “The techniques of stringing us along show that the news industry is not as interested in satisfying a hunger as in creating an addiction.” The media have a commercial product to sell, and that product is television commercials.

Principle Four: The media elite are demographically and ideologically removed from the world inhabited by most Americans. As researchers S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda S. Lichter argued over two decades ago, the news business is now largely in the hands of a “media elite.” As these researchers made clear, these media elite are persons from a very thin slice of the American population. They are highly educated, socially mobile, metropolitan in focus and overwhelmingly liberal in terms of ideological bias. They have often attended America's most prestigious universities, they were often radicalized by the 1960s, Vietnam and the Watergate experience, and they see the news media as an opportunity to revolutionize society. As Robert and Linda Lichter and Stanley Rothman described the media elite, “In their attitudes toward sex and sex roles, members of the media elite are virtually unanimous in opposing both governmental and traditional constraints. A large majority opposes government regulation of sexual activities, upholds a pro-choice position on abortion, and rejects the notion that homosexuality is wrong. In fact, a slight majority would not characterize adultery as wrong.” Does the coalescence of leading journalists into 'media elite' make a difference? Bernard Goldberg, a longtime veteran of CBS News, poses the questions this way: “Do we really think that if the media elites worked out of Nebraska instead of New York, and if they were overwhelmingly social conservatives instead of liberals, and if they overwhelmingly voted for Nixon and Reagan instead of McGovern and Mondale ... do we really think that would make no difference? Does anyone really believe that the evening newscast would fundamentally be the same?” No sane person can believe this would make no difference, and in the case of media bias, naiveté is deadly.

Principle Five: Headlines often lie and language often misleads. Readers of newspapers are often unaware that the reporter usually has nothing to say about the headline of an article or report. Headlines emerge from the copy-editing process and are used to draw attention to a story and attract readers. Furthermore, the headlines are powerful editorial devices, casting a story in a particular context of meaning, even before the article is read. But headlines often lie -- and careful readers often will discover that the claim made in the headline is completely undermined by the content of the article. Some newspapers are particularly offensive in this regard, showing clear bias in their headlines and article contexting. Similarly, language and terminology within an article or broadcast can be used to mislead the public. What words are used to describe principle figures in a story? Will the reporter describe a suicide bomber as a terrorist or as a freedom-fighter? Will an individual be identified as a presidential aide or a political operative? Will a spokesperson be identified as an opponent of same-sex “marriage” or as a defender of traditional marriage? These decisions amount to both distinction and difference and can often mean the difference between understanding or misunderstanding. The choice of language is of vital importance, and with the culture of political correctness now invading newsrooms across America, this usually means that those arguing for an overthrow of moral restraint are referred to in a positive light, while defenders of traditional morality are referred to as repressive and negative. Beware the power of words!

Principle Six: The likelihood of being uninformed and misinformed increases as the number of news sources decreases. Dependence on just a few media sources, whether newspapers, Internet sites or television news programs, is dangerous. We can grow far too comfortable with familiar faces, trusted reporters and patterns of habit. The reduction of news sources means that the filtering process poses an even greater danger, and viewers or readers are far more susceptible to influence and bias. This is also true when it comes to the form of media input. Television reports must be visually interesting, fast-paced and energetic -- regardless of the story. Furthermore, television news broadcasts tend to rely on reductionism, making it more likely that bias can creep into a reporter's summarization without notice. Christian citizens should develop the discipline of wide reading and selective viewing -- checking reports against each other for accuracy and bias. Do not trust just one network, one cable news program, one newspaper or one commentator.

Principle Seven: Beware the error of following the crowd. As a commercial business, the media industry must produce a mass audience and must compete for viewer attention. Thus, the network or program that offers the most drama, controversy and excitement often draws the largest viewership. Similarly, the newspaper that is most salacious, most sensational and most superficial may well draw the largest readership. In other words, the crowd is often drawn to a spectacle, just as the ancient Romans demanded bread and circuses. As the crowd grows larger and larger, the content may grow smaller and smaller, and the opportunity for thoughtful engagement with the issues of the day may virtually disappear. When this phenomenon takes place, celebrities often replace specialized authorities in matters of public debate, energy substitutes for information, and the whole enterprise produces far more heat than light. As your parents warned you long ago -- beware of following the crowd. Far too many Americans rely on superficial reports and on entertainment wrongly packaged as news.

Principle Eight: Those who get their news only from broadcast media are missing much of the story and much of its significance. Limiting news intake to television programming is a special danger. Televised news reports tend to be image-driven, more superficial and more simplistic than the print media. Television news broadcasts tend to be framed as conversations, producing “talking heads” who often provide more drama than content and information. This produces an artificial understanding of reality. As Sommerville explains, “It turns out that being informed really means knowing what the people around you are talking about. Our reality is the news, not the world.” There is no substitute for reading, and a diet limited to broadcast news will impoverish the mind. As Postman and Powers argue, “anyone who is not an avid reader of newspapers, magazines, and books is by definition unprepared to watch a television news show, and always will be.” There is no substitute for careful and thoughtful reading. The visual medium is given to entertainment and visual dependence over content and careful analysis.

Principle Nine: When it comes to issues of importance, turn off the tube and think. As veteran newscasters sometimes lament, matters of grave and great significance are often strung together on the news and mixed with unimportant and inane items with the familiar formula, “and now this.” A report about genocide in Sudan can be followed by the latest development in reducing auto emissions, which can be followed by a story about a talking parrot. This leveling of significance produces a distortion of reality. Christians must learn to think about the issues covered in media reports and resist the temptation to be narcoticized by an endless stream of disconnected reports of unequal significance. This requires discipline and focus, which in turn require silence -- which means turning the television off.

Principle Ten: Use the news media as material for worldview analysis. When watching the news or reading the newspaper, Christians should learn continually to reframe the question. Thinking in explicitly Christian terms, armed with the full measure of Christian conviction, the Christian must reason from biblical truth to the issues of the day. We cannot accept the issues as framed for us by the news media, but we must continually reframe in light of Christian truth. For example, controversies about everything from the economy and abortion to the environment and animal rights must be reframed in terms of a biblical perspective. Otherwise, we will commit the error of attempting to reason to a Christian worldview from a secular premise. We must reverse the question, reframe the issue and subject every controversy and question to careful worldview analysis. This is important for all Christians, but it is especially important for parents as careful engagement with the news media affords an excellent opportunity for training children in Christian worldview thinking. They will be engaging the media for the rest of their lives, and faithful Christian parents will prepare their children for media engagement that is genuinely Christian.

As with every dimension of life, our engagement with the news media reveals our deepest convictions and our true beliefs. Christians must engage the news media as Christians, ready to think, to analyze, to make judgments and to draw accurate conclusions. Inevitably, Christians will either lead or be led.

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And the Winner Is: Death, Depravity, and Dullness

The great Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer once wrote that philosophy — often dismissed as irrelevant — is, in reality, a powerful engine that drives cultural change. Ivory Tower ideas filter down into popular culture, including films. There, they influence millions who often have no notion of what they're consuming along with the car chases, love scenes, and popcorn.

This brings us to the 2005 Academy Awards of Sunday night. If you watched them, you already know that the films Hollywood chose to honor had little to do with quality and everything to do with philosophy and worldview. As Christian film critic Barbara Nicolosi acerbically put it, Hollywood's choices affirm, once again, “just how very, very sick America's storytellers have become.”

Several awards, including Best Picture, went to Million Dollar Baby, a film that promotes euthanasia. Five Oscars went to The Aviator, a film that celebrates billionaire Howard Hughes, the man who bedded dozens of starlets, made unwelcome advances to many others, and ultimately died of syphilis-induced insanity.

Oh, and then there's the nasty little film called Sideways. This film suggests that it's fine — even funny — for a man to engage in an orgy of sex with strangers just before his wedding. That got an award, too. Films that were nominated, but did not receive awards, included one intended as a warning against making abortion illegal, and one that celebrates Kinsey, a twisted researcher whose now-discredited theories continue to degrade America's view of sexuality. Meanwhile, one of the greatest films ever made, one of the biggest box-office hits of the year, worldwide, and the biggest independent film in the history of the world — that is, The Passion of the Christ — was ignored.

It's gotten to the point where you can't help but laugh at the pretense that the Oscars actually honor the best films, and at the intrepid efforts of Hollywood to make its choices seem relevant. And, I might add, laughter is a better response than simply getting mad. Critics who do little more than count up the four-letter words and sex scenes, and then issue an outraged press release, only boost the audience. Instead, Christian critics like Barbara Nicolosi take a more sophisticated approach, pointing out that movies like Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator are mediocre films, and they celebrate degraded values — not worth the price of a ticket.

That is the message we need to press home to our friends and to our impressionable kids. They need to know that everyone embraces one philosophy or another — a worldview that defines his or her conception of the world, of reality, and of human life. These beliefs are woven into movies — often in subtle ways that viewers miss. That is why it's so important that we teach our kids how to find the worldview message in every film.

This week, especially if your kids are home because of the snow, why not teach them a little philosophy. Rent some of the better films and watch them together. Help them identify, not only the filmmaker's philosophy, but also what makes for artistic excellence.

Schaeffer was right. Philosophy is a powerful engine that drives social change. And the time for philosophy lessons is before our kids walk into the multiplex — not when the lights go out.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Barbara Nicolosi, “The 'Passion' Oscar Snub: Revenge of the Blue States?“ Beliefnet, 26 January 2005.

• Gina R. Dalfonzo, “Only in the Movies: Hollywood, Film Critics, and Christians,” BreakPoint Online, 24 February 2005.

• Diane Shreve Singer, “Surrendering to Grief: Another Look at Million Dollar Baby,” BreakPoint Online, 28 February 2005.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 050211, “Fighting for What's Important: Million Dollar Baby and House.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 041130, “Taking Sides: Kinsey.”

• Elbert Ventura, “Best in Show: The Value of an Academy Award,” New Republic, 24 February 2005.

• Robert K. Johnston and Catherine M. Barsotti, Finding God in the Movies (Baker, 2004).

• For more film reviews and articles on movies, visit Thunderstruck. Also see Christianity Today's movies section.

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Color, Form, Balance — and Worldview: How To Judge A Work of Art

Everyday we are engaged in various kinds of art — from photographs to novels to music to films. But how many of us know how to understand and appreciate an excellent work of art and the message that it conveys?

As Francis Schaeffer wrote in his book ART AND THE BIBLE, there are four basic standards of judgment we ought to apply to a work of art: technical excellence, validity, intellectual content — that is, the worldview that comes through — and the integration of content and vehicle.

For example, when it comes to paintings, Schaeffer wrote, “One considers the use of color, form, balance, the texture of the paint, the handling of lines, and the unity of the canvas. By recognizing technical excellence as an aspect of art work, “we are often able to say that while we do not agree with [a particular] artist’s world view, he is nonetheless a great artist.” If we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life, Schaeffer added, “We are not being true to the artist as a man.”

Second, we ought to be able to evaluate a work of art based on its validity. In creating his work, was the artist honest to himself and his worldview, or did he create his art merely for the sake of making money, or being accepted — either by a patron, as in days gone by, or by modern art critics today in New York?

Third, we must judge the intellectual content of a work of art, content that reflects the artist’s worldview. The body of work of an artist “must be seen ultimately in terms of the Scripture” — to “its relationship to the Christian world view,” Schaeffer noted. Thus, we can truthfully say an artist might display great technical virtuosity, and that his work has validity — but also that his worldview is quite wrong.

For example, Rousseau’s notion of unfettered Bohemian freedom — accepted as an ideal for the artist — is wrong from a Christian point of view, Schaeffer wrote. God’s Word “binds the great man and the small, the scientist and the simple, the king and the artist.”

And fourth, we must ask how well the artist has suited the vehicle to the message. In great artwork, Schaeffer wrote, there is a correlation between style and content. When T. S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in 1922, the form of poetry “fit the nature of the world as he saw it, namely, broken, unrelated, ruptured,” Schaeffer wrote; Eliot deserves “high marks for suiting the vehicle to the message.”

If you want to learn more about how to judge an artistic work, I suggest you read Schaeffer’s ART AND THE BIBLE. You will learn not only how to judge the merits of a work of art, but how to recognize whether the worldview he espouses with color and canvas is true or false.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5093]

How Did We Get Here?

Acts 15:20

The question remains, how did all this happen? As already noted, the sexual revolution did not emerge in a vacuum. Modern societies created a context for moral revolution that had never been available in intellectual terms before. In other words, certain cultural conditions had to prevail in order for the revolution to get the traction it needed to succeed. One of the things we need to note is that we are looking at an explicitly cosmopolitan revolution.

Urbanization, Technology, and the Weakening of the Family

Modernity and modernization brought urbanization such that increased numbers of people were now living in cities, and the cities shaped the culture. As odd as it may seem, even as the city is a concentration of human beings, it actually offers an unprecedented opportunity for anonymity. Many observers of the sexual revolution point to the fact that, from the very beginning, this was a cosmopolitan revolution — emerging first in cities and then spreading out to the rest of the culture.

This same period also saw the weakening of the family unit, as new moral voices emerged as both attractive and authoritative in the lives of modern people. For some younger Americans, this meant that arrival on the college campus would present the professor in the classroom as a clear alternative to the morality that had been taught by parents in the home. This was true as early as the 1930s and the 1940s and is now understood to be the expectation on American college and university campuses. At the same time, the secularization of these societies and institutions meant that Christianity and its authorities, including the Bible and its teachers, would be relegated to voices with less and less authority and cultural traction as secularization worked its way through the larger culture.

Technological advances also fueled the sexual revolution. Pornographers, for example, have taken advantage of every new technology from the printing press to the latest digital advances. Of course, the most technological achievement for the new sexual morality was the arrival of contraceptives and antibiotics. Put bluntly, so long as sex between a man and a woman implied the likelihood of pregnancy, there was a certain check on extramarital sexual activity. Once the Pill arrived, with all of its promises of reproductive control, a biological check on sexual immorality that had shaped human existence from Adam and Eve forward was almost instantaneously removed. The sexual revolution could not have taken place without the arrival of effective, cheap, and available contraceptives.

Whereas many scholars recognize the importance of new contraceptive technology in the sexual revolution, fewer scholars have noted that the sexual revolution would not have progressed at the same speed without the emergence of antibiotics. This is due to the fact that one major check on sexual immorality throughout human history has been disease. As Emory University economist Andrew Francis has observed: “It’s a common assumption that the sexual revolution began with the permissive attitudes of the 1960s and the development of contraceptives like the birth control pill. The evidence, however, strongly indicates that the widespread use of penicillin, leading to a rapid decline of syphilis during the 1950s, is what launched the modern sexual era.”[1] That is a very important observation. As a review of medical literature will reveal, the vast reduction in the cases of syphilis that were recorded in the 1950s indicate, not that Americans were engaged in less sexual immorality, but that they now were aided and abetted by penicillin, removing the horrifying effects of syphilis from the moral equation. Clearly we do not want to go back to an age without antibiotics. We are thankful for lifesaving drugs and medical technologies. We certainly do not reject all that modernity has brought. At the same time, Christians must recognize that every new technology brings new ethical and moral challenges — and often unintended consequences as well.

Science and The Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution could also not have taken place without the fundamental intellectual change that would lead Americans to believe that a revolution in sexual morality was inevitable and right. One of the major assists in making this argument was the arrival of “experts” on sexuality who argued that science would prove the need for a revolution in morality. The most important figure in this aspect of the revolution was Alfred C. Kinsey. In two books, Sexual Behavior In The Human Male and Sexual Behavior in The Human Female, published in 1948 and 1953 respectively, Kinsey became one of the major agents of moral revolution.[2]

As we now know, Kinsey’s research was fraudulent from the start. For one thing, he drew his research sample from those who eagerly volunteered for his studies, including a sizable percentage of men in prisons. No credible researcher would give any credence whatsoever to the statistical claims Kinsey made concerning sexual behavior, but the media does. Nevertheless, the actual text of Kinsey’s book was far less important to the sexual revolutionaries than its cultural effect. Those who read the book carefully would have come to the horrifying recognition that Kinsey was tilting his research towards the population most likely to be living outside of what both Christianity and the larger society understood to be proper sexuality. Even worse, his book actually included data that could only have been drawn from the sexual abuse of children.[3]

Among the Theologians

Yet, even as many Christian churches continued to maintain the clear teachings of Scripture, and even as many pastors and theologians defended the Christian moral tradition and biblical authority, there were those within institutional Christianity who did everything possible to join the sexual revolution. The sexual revolutionaries found great assistance in the form of Joseph Fletcher and his book, Situation Ethics, published in 1966. Fletcher, who at one time was professor of Christian Social Ethics at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Cincinnati, argued for a new understanding of Christian ethics that he called “situation ethics.” According to Fletcher, “The situationist enters into every decision-making situation fully armed with the ethical maxims of his community and its heritage, and he treats them with respect as illuminators of his problems. Just the same he is prepared in any situation to compromise them or set them aside in the situation if love seems better served by doing so.”[4]

Thus, Fletcher argued that the Bible and Christian sexual morality could serve as a guide to decision-making, but that all of the Bible’s teachings should be set aside if, in his words, “love seems better served by doing so.” In 1970, Fletcher told a group of Christian ethicists, “I am prepared to argue in the utmost seriousness that Christian obligation calls for lies and adultery and fornication and theft and promise breaking and killing — sometimes, depending on the situation." Fletcher’s clearly left his own indelible mark in liberal protestant theology. But so did others such as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.

John A.T. Robinson, an unbelieving bishop of the Church of England, in his book Honest to God similarly continued this revolution. Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School, famous for his book, The Secular City, said simply, “We must avoid giving a simple yes or no answer to the question of premarital chastity.”[5] Well, as any parent or pastor well understands, if you can’t give a simple yes or no answer, the answer is yes.

The Withering of Vice

Philosopher Philip Kitcher makes the very important observation that the sexual revolution could not have happened without what he calls “the withering of vice.”[6] What Kitcher also understands is that the withering of vice could not have happened without the withering of theism that came before.

The modern or postmodern quest for sexual emancipation cannot be neutral when it comes to the teachings of the Bible and the moral witness of historic Christianity. It must not only be revised, as was the claim at the midpoint of the twentieth century and even into the 1960’s, it must be supplanted.

In terms of understanding the challenge we now face I began my most recent book, We Must Not Be Silent with a quotation from Flannery O’ Conner who says, “push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.” To understand what we are up against is at least part of the problem, part of the challenge. To understand the roots of the moral revolution requires some very careful thinking and the acknowledgment that the sexual revolution could not have happened without secularization and that secularization could not have progressed without producing the sexual revolution.

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This post is the final in a four part series on Secularization and the Sexual Revolution.

Article Citations

[1] Emory University, “Penicillin, not the pill, may have launched the sexual revolution,” ScienceDaily, January 28, 2013, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130128082906.htm/.

[2] Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior In The Human Male (New York: Ishi Press, 2010), and Sexual Behavior In The Human Female (New York: Ishi Press, 2010). Also see chapter concerning Kinsey in R. Albert Mohler Jr., Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2008), 103–112.

[3] Sue Ellin Browder, “Kinsey’s Secret: The Phony Science of the Sexual Revolution.” Crisis Magazine, May 28, 2012, http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/kinseys-secret-the-phony-science-of-the-sexual-revolution/.

[4] Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966), 26.

[5] “The New Protestant Debate Over Sex,” Redbook, October 1964, 56–57, 104–106.

[6] Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 162.

Wide Angle: Live What You Believe

Matthew 7:21

A study by Baylor University on piety in America released this September reveals both good and bad news about the religious landscape. The good news is that Americans are still extremely religious. Nine out of ten Americans affiliate themselves with a congregation, denomination, or other religious group. In fact, less than 5 percent of Americans claim a faith outside of the Judeo-Christian mainstream.

But as the survey digs below the surface, the news begins to look much bleaker, and the need for training in biblical worldview begins to look much more urgent. For example, nearly a quarter of those surveyed would describe God as distant and not active in the world. They think of God as a cosmic force which set the laws of nature in motion, not as the engaging Father we find depicted in the Scriptures.

Among those who would label themselves as mainline Protestants, 22 percent believe the Bible is an ancient book of history and legends, another 22 percent never read the Bible, 12 percent never pray, and 14 percent never attend a weekly service.

It’s no wonder then that when George Barna did a similar survey in 2003, he found that only 4 percent of American adults have a biblical worldview as the basis of their decision-making.

The bottom line is that there is a huge disparity in the numbers of people who claim to be Christians and those who actually hold to biblical faith. This should not surprise us, I suppose, given Jesus’ warnings in Matthew 7:21 that not everyone who calls Him Lord will enter into the kingdom of heaven. But it ought to propel each of us to a deeper concern for the souls of those around us, even many in our own pews.

Christians need integrity. The word INTEGRITY actually means wholeness. In our culture there is such a tendency to compartmentalize faith. Like the designers of the Titanic, we believe that if we compartmentalize the hull, the rest of the ship won’t sink. That’s why the people in these surveys can say they believe in God, but then live lives of practical atheism. But understanding and applying a biblical worldview to all of life means integrating your faith into the nitty-gritty details of Monday through Saturday. It means there is integrity between what you believe and the actions that flow out of that belief.

As Rick Warren says, “Worldview is the most practical thing in your life.” I completely agree.

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The Clash of Civilizations: Revisiting the Radical Islamic Worldview

During the Cold War, there was a great clash of civilizations — communism vs. Western liberal democracy. And it threatened to destroy us in a nuclear holocaust. I was in the White House during those years. I can tell you, it was terrifying getting those daily briefings from the military. But the danger that we face from radical Islam today is even greater than the Cold War.

In the mid-1990s Harvard professor Samuel Huntington predicted that the twenty-first century would see a great clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. Nobody paid much attention. After all, we had just defeated communism. There was peace in the world. All was well.

Then came September 11, when we awoke to the fact that there are people out there who want to destroy us — not just defeat us, but annihilate us.

Why? There has been a lot of hand-wringing in the West about why they hate us. “Maybe if we just got out of the Middle East,” some say, “or elected a new government, or abandoned the war on terror, maybe they would change their minds.”

Well, what the pundits don't realize is that this is a clash of civilizations. Armies of suicide bombers ought to tell us that their worldview matters more to them than life itself.

The hard truth is that members of Islam's radical branches have no interest in coming to terms with non-Muslims, or even moderate Muslims. To put it bluntly, they don't care whether we're nice or not. To this breed of radical Muslim, there are only two options: convert or die.

Does that sound drastic? Sure. But it's a fact.

The history of Islamic hostility toward the West goes back centuries. Radical Muslims are still smarting over the defeat of their armies south of Paris in the year 732, not to mention the catastrophic defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna on September 11, 1683. That's right, September 11. Bin Laden chose his date for a reason. He was avenging the defeat of Muslim armies more than four hundred years earlier. September 11 has roots in an irrational hatred of the West.

There was a brilliant but paranoid Egyptian writer by the name of Sayyid Qutb, imprisoned in Egypt in 1956. In 1970, he published a book, IN THE SHADE OF THE KORAN, attacking the West as totally corrupt. Qutb knew what he was talking about. He lived in the United States for a time and saw our decadence. He also read Western philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida and other intellectuals who hated the West. And he read all the anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic literature.

Qutb's IN THE SHADE OF THE KORAN unequivocally advocates the killing of “infidels.” He was executed by the Egyptian government, but his brother, Muhammad Qutb, escaped Egypt, went to Saudi Arabia, and became a professor at the university. One of his star pupils was none other than Osama bin Laden. Don't tell me worldviews don't matter. This same worldview now influences millions of radical Muslims — up to 10 percent, according to some accounts, 100 million. What we're seeing in the Middle East today are not isolated acts of terrorism, but a widespread, well-organized, hatred-fueled movement.

Now, politicians don't like to say politically incorrect things like this, but it's true. We in the West had better understand that we are in a life-and-death struggle with a worldview that wants to destroy us. To see anything else would be tragically blind.

THIS IS PART ONE IN A FOUR-PART SERIES ON ISLAM.

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Truth In Art: God and the Weather

News reports out of Kenya recently indicated that 10,000 people were left homeless by flooding from the Sabaki River. Too much water in the wrong place and at the wrong time has been the source of devastation throughout history. In 1927, the Mississippi River broke through 145 levees, flooding more land then the entire state of West Virginia.

John Steuart Curry grew up in the Midwest, and witnessed the awesome power of these natural disasters. Painting what he saw, he produced “The Mississippi in 1935”. What is the worldview of “The Mississippi”? Even as it leaves some questions unanswered, it does affirm a biblical worldview of creation, fall and redemption.

First, the painting depicts a recognizable world of water, trees, sky and people. If this seems unremarkable, consider the time period in which Curry painted. Abstract art was all the rage among the cultural elite. Curry, as a participant in the Regionalist movement of American painting, rejected modernist art theories in favor of a new form of realism. While not a perfect theory of art, Regionalism marked a return to creating a recognizable subject. A bowl of fruit looks like a bowl of fruit, not a jumble of triangles, squares and squiggles.

The Mississippi depicts real people -- a father, mother, children -- expressing the emotions of the moment. The imago dei, the image of God, is found in their depiction. Humanity has not been abstracted away into nothingness.

Having acknowledged the reality of creation, “The Mississippi” goes further to tell us that something has gone terribly wrong. We see a battle between man and nature, and nature appears to be winning. Dark grays and blues swirl around in violent commotion. You can feel the fear of the family. This is no utopian view of the cosmos, denying the curse of sin. Death stands close at hand, hoping to pull the figures into the darkness of the water.

It is at this very point that modern man finds no answer to the ultimate questions of life. When a meteorologist takes the place of a theologian as the voice of truth about reality, who can explain the fury of the flood? Living in the shadow of the Enlightenment, we throw everything under the microscope, looking for an answer that science cannot give.

Christian scholar Hans Rookmaaker wrote about the rise of secular naturalism as follows: “Science had been the way to acquire insight into the structure of reality, into the way this world is built, to find out the greatness of God’s creation. But now it was elevated by the rationalist into the tool to know all truth, the foundation of all knowledge. But the world was no longer open to a transcendent God. It had become a closed box, and man was caught in that box.”

As Christians, are we to remain conformed to the thinking of the world in this area? I am not suggesting that we can know God’s specific purposes for particular weather events. However, when our frightened children curl up in our arms during a thunderstorm, do words about God ever fall from our lips? Are we content explaining meteorology apart from doxology?

If we “read” the painting from left to right, what do we see at the end of the sentence? Curry reveals that we are not “alone in the box”, for the father lifts up hands in prayer to God. The Lord who “sits enthroned over the flood” receives a plea for deliverance. The children look up to their father looking up to God.

Will God save the family? We are not told, and perhaps that is not the ultimate issue. Make no mistake, a worse fate than drowning awaits those who sit high and dry, safe and secure in their unbelief. Perhaps the best thing that ever happened to this family is their getting caught up in the storm. Maybe this very event brought the children to consider the frailty of life and the need of a God who saves.

We, too, should consider such things. As the hymn “I sing the mighty power of God” by Isaac Watts says, “There's not a plant or flower below but makes your glories known; and clouds arise and tempests blow by order from your throne.” While reflecting on the message communicated by the biblical worldview in “The Mississippi,” allow your heart to be full of doxology even when you think about meteorology.

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Scott Lamb is pastor of Providence Baptist Church in St. Louis, Missouri.

Christians Have 'Cultural Mandate'

The abandonment of sound Judeo-Christian moral principles foundational to the American republic and the embrace of ideas counter to those values are at the root of the nation’s cultural decline, Ken Connor told a chapel audience at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Christians are under “a cultural mandate” by which God has ordained their stewardship of all of His creation, Connor said in delivering the seminary’s annual Tharp Lecture Oct. 31. Connor is chairman and co-founder of the Center for a Just Society, a Washington-based evangelical public policy think tank.

“We are increasingly in this culture moving away from a sanctity of life ethic that maintains that human beings are special, precious and worthy of protection, to applauding a quality of life ethic that measures the net worth of people ... on the basis of their functional capacities,” Connor said. “This has profound implications for the handicapped, like Terri Schiavo, and the elderly, who live in nursing homes whose quality of life is compromised and who cost more to maintain than they produce.”

An advocate for the sanctity of life, Connor represented former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the Schiavo case, in which the Florida woman died after various legal and legislative challenges failed to stop the removal of her feeding tube.

Connor said the cheapening of life is a byproduct of a rejection of Judeo-Christian ideals: “For all practical purposes [as a culture] we have denied the existence of God, deconstructed truth and demoted man from the status of bearer of God’s image to simply the best of the beasts.”

As a result, Americans are living with the consequences of what Connor called “a new moral and philosophical order.” Among those: 47 million children have been aborted since Roe V. Wade in 1973; the divorce rate has doubled since 1960 while the marriage rate has declined, fueled by the push to abandon traditional heterosexual marriage.

“That new order, I would suggest to you, threatens the weak and the frail and the vulnerable in ways that we have not heretofore witnessed in our society,” Connor said.

Echoing a recent opinion piece he wrote for Baptist Press, Connor said the country was founded on a moral and theological consensus rooted in a belief in the God of the Bible. And of the rights granted by God, the most important is the right to life.

“The right to life is foundational to all others,” Connor said. “It is that right that, without which, no other right can exist. Our right to freely assemble, to worship as we please, to pray in the manner in which we please are all foundational to the right to life, without which, no other right can exist.”

Connor responded to secularists who he charged would toss away the foundational values of the republic in favor of a secular humanist view that gives rise to moral relativism, situational ethics and law determined solely by the state.

“This worldview, I would suggest to you, has led to an erosion of the respect for life and threatens the protection of the individual in our culture, especially for those who are the weakest, the frailest and the most vulnerable among us,” Connor said.

By contrast, Connor said, “The Judeo-Christian worldview, has led to the greatest freedom and the greatest protection the world has ever known.

“Ideas have consequences, folks,” Connor said. “What we believe determines how we behave.”

Connor cited Thomas Jefferson, who, while not evangelical, saw God as foundational to American democracy. “The only firm basis of a nation’s liberties,” Connor quoted Jefferson as writing, “is the conviction in the minds of the people that their liberties are a gift of God.”

In order to stem the tide of moral decline, Connor said, the church must “reclaim and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. We must remind man of who he is and what Christ has done for us. We must remind our neighbors and our co-workers and our friends that we have value because God loves us and gave Himself for us.”

Connor reminded the audience that there are no political solutions to moral problems, and that government reflects the views of the people it represents. It will be up to those in ministry to help shape those views.

Connor said the church should follow the examples of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the Old Testament Book of Daniel. The three Hebrew young men and other biblical role models set an example for the culture.

“The church must be willing to take a risk. We have to be willing to stick our necks out,” Connor said. “Because these young men were willing to stick their necks out, they were able to change the culture.”

While taking a stand will lead to persecution and resistance, Connor urged the seminarians to persevere. The seminary’s resurgence after Hurricane Katrina is cause for optimism, he added.

“As long as this seminary is able to produce people who proclaim the Gospel of Christ, who are willing to stick their necks out and persevere to the end, there is reason for hope.”

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20931]

A Deep and Radical Antagonism — the Bible and Secular Worldviews

Deuteronomy 5:32

“It need not further be denied,” argued James Orr, “that between this view of the world involved in Christianity, and what is sometimes called 'the modern view of the world' there exists a deep and radical antagonism.” James Orr observed this 'deep and radical antagonism' over a century ago. Can we possibly fail to see it now?

As Christians, we are unavoidably engaged in a great battle of worldviews -- a conflict over the most basic issues of truth and meaning. A worldview that starts with the existence and sovereign authority of the self-revealing God of the Bible will be diametrically opposed to worldviews that deny God or engage in what we might call 'defining divinity down.'

At the heart of this controversy lies the irreducible obstacle of biblical authority. As a matter of fact, it may be impossible to overestimate the true depth of postmodern antipathy to the Bible -- at least to the Bible as an authoritative revelation from God.

Just consider what the modern secular mind confronts in the Bible. At the foundational level, the Bible makes a “totalizing” claim to truth. In the terminology of postmodern academic discourse, this means that the Bible claims to present absolute and non-negotiable truth that effectively trumps all other authorities. In an intellectual context of personal autonomy and individual self-expression, this appears to represent an unfair imposition of authority and a violation of the contract theory that lies at the heart of the modern experiment. We can 'contract' with the Bible to serve as a guide, but that contract is open to constant renegotiation.

And the Bible contains so much material that runs against the moral sense of a largely-secularized society. Let's just be honest and admit right up front that the Bible pulls no punches and leaves no room for a public relations effort to clean up the dust storm. The Bible begins with a straightforward declaration of divine creation, complete with a divine design for every aspect of the created order. Then, we confront the creation of human beings as made in the image of God, and thus uniquely gifted and accountable as moral and spiritual creatures. And, we add, human beings are made male and female to the glory of the Creator. There it is -- gender as part of the goodness of God's creation. This is no vision of gender differences as mere social construction. Marriage immediately follows as the divinely -- designed institution for human ordering, reproduction, sexuality, and romantic fulfillment. Marriage -- the union of one man and one woman -- is presented as an objective reality constituted as a moral covenant with legal and moral boundaries, not as a contract to be made, remade, or unmade at will.

Then comes sin. The third chapter of Genesis clearly fails to meet muster in terms of modern psychotherapeutic expectations. Responsibility for sin is laid right at human feet; and the consequences of sin -- downright repressive -- are worse than draconian. Most troubling of all, sin is presented as something that tells the truth about us -- not merely the truth about a sinful world system. From beginning to end, the Bible undermines the modern secular worldview at its very foundation.

Those first four words land like nitroglycerin on the modern mind: “In the beginning, God .... “ From that point onward, everything flows from the fundamental reality of God's existence, power, and purpose. Creation itself is explained as the theater for God's own glory, even as human beings, MALE and FEMALE, are created in God's image. The institution of marriage is shown to be God's gift and command, not a sociological adaptation to prevailing cultural conditions. Humans are given responsibility as both stewards and rulers of the earth, ordered to subdue the earth to the Creator's glory.

Of course, to the postmodern mind, Genesis is hopelessly “speciesist” even as (to use their language) it presents a “totalizing meta-narrative of hegemonistic authoritarianism.” In other words, it tells us in no uncertain terms that God is God and we are not, even as it reveals that humanity fulfills a special purpose for God's glory.

The Pentateuch -- all five books -- presents an unvarnished picture of humanity's sin and its consequences. To a culture deeply committed to a therapeutic worldview, this is just too much. Now that sin has been banished from our moral vocabulary, what are postmodern Americans to do with the Fall, the giving of the Law, the sacrificial system and blood atonement? Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac is now cited by postmodern critics as the Bible's second most egregious example of God-inspired child abuse (the first, of course, is the cross of Christ).

The Law is another stone of stumbling for the modern mind. Moral relativism rules the field of postmodern ethics, with laws seen as socially constructed and needlessly oppressive instruments of subjugation. In many law schools, a movement known as “critical legal theory” claims that laws generally reveal hidden claims of manipulative power that should be de-constructed for the betterment of all humankind. Thus, consistent with the postmodernist's complete embrace of subjectivity, laws exist to be endlessly renegotiated and reinterpreted.

Of course, one of the most cherished maxims of the postmodern mind is the so-called “death of the author.” The reader, not the author, of a text is the ruling authority. Put simply, the postmodernist believes that the text means what the READER says it means, not what the AUTHOR intended. Jump from that to this: “You shall be careful therefore to do as the Lord your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. You shall walk in all the way that the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it might go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you shall possess.” [Deuteronomy 5:32-33] So much for subjectivity, reinterpretation, and renegotiation! The postmodernist demands a hermeneutic of suspicion, demanding that the text meet his expectations. The Bible sets down a hermeneutic of SUBMISSION as God demands obedience from His people -- nothing less.

The Bible presents the living God, Creator of the entire cosmos, as a speaking God who addresses His people with authoritative revelation. “Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live?” [Deuteronomy 4:33] As Israel was to learn, revelation must lead to obedience, lest God's wrath fall upon the people.

The Lord does not invite His covenant people to speculate about His character, His power, or His purpose. He demands total obedience, even as He reveals his saving purpose and His sets down covenant. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other Gods before me.” [Exodus 20:2-3]

The rest of the Old Testament continues the pattern and widens the divide. God elects Israel as His chosen people, inviting charges of ethnocentrism. Then, violating modern norms of war, Israel is charged to wage a holy war against pagan nations. God is presented as the supreme ruler of all nations, the only true Sovereign in a world of contending kingdoms. The prophets attack injustice and the abuse of privilege, within and without.

To these must be added claims of miracles, supernatural occurrences, prophets, and impositions of law. All this amounts to one great obstacle for so many modern people, whose worldview is so firmly established in secular terms that the Bible seems more of a problem than a solution.

And what of the New Testament? Instead of refuting the Old Testament, the New Testament fulfills the Old, pushing the envelope of secular suspicion even further. Now we confront the great claim of the incarnation -- that Jesus the Christ is fully God and fully man. Miracles are documented, the teaching of Jesus is presented in full force, and the Gospel is laid before our eyes.

Then come the cross and the empty tomb. God's determinative plan to save His people from sin come to a climax in the suffering and death of Christ, presented as God's plan set into action before the creation of the earth. The empty cross points to the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and the truth claims of the Gospel contradict any effort to reduce Jesus to a mere teacher or guide, a social activist or a proto-therapist.

The church is established as God's people on earth; an eschatological people eventually drawn from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. And then, looming in the future, lies judgment. The realities of Heaven and Hell are presented as dual destinations for humanity, and the wrath of God is promised to be poured out upon sinners, even as the mercy of God is extended to all who have come to Christ by faith. The way to salvation is narrow; the road to destruction is wide. There is but one Savior and one way of salvation.

All this is just too much for the postmodern mind to handle. A “deep and radical antagonism” separates the Bible and our postmodern culture. But then, since the Fall that antagonism has always existed, separating obedience to God's truth from the demand for human autonomy.

Christians are often perplexed by resistance to the Bible and to the Gospel. We tend to distance ourselves from the reality that the Bible sounds so exceedingly strange to modern and postmodern ears. We underestimate the distance of the divide between biblical Christianity and secular worldviews.

All this should remind us of our constant evangelistic and apologetic task -- and of the fact that salvation is all by grace. After all, it's not that we were smart enough to wade through all this and emerge as believers. Instead, our eyes were opened so that we would see. That radical antagonism James Orr was talking about isn't overcome by force of argument and persuasion alone, but by grace. As we engage in the controversies and debates of this age, we had better keep that great fact always in the forefront of our thinking.

Habits of the Mind: A Mind For God

A few years ago, a professor at Pasadena City College led a class discussion on the famous story “The Lottery.” In the story, a seemingly normal village carries out a bizarre ritual involving human sacrifice. The professor, Kay Haugaard, had taught the story many times over the years and was anticipating the usual shocked reactions from her students.

Instead, she found that she was teaching a room full of moral relativists who thought that the ritual might be all right “if it's a part of a person's culture ... and if it has worked for them.” To Haugaard's horror, she realized that “no one in the whole class of twenty ostensibly intelligent individuals would go out on a limb and take a stand [even] against human sacrifice.” The very mentality that Jackson's story warns us about — “the dangers of being totally accepting followers, too cowardly to rebel against obvious cruelties and injustices” — had become the mentality of this group of intelligent college students.

Haugaard writes, “It was a warm night when I walked out to my car after class that evening, but I felt shivery, chilled to the bone.” James Emery White tells this story in his excellent new book A MIND FOR GOD. White, the new president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, wants us to understand just how dangerous it can be to live life without a worldview that teaches that “each person has value, and there is meaning and purpose to every life.”

To have such a worldview, White explains, we must believe that “there is Someone above and outside of our existence who stands over us as our authority.” Without that belief, our sense of morality can be based only on shifting values in the culture around us. And any sense of morality with such a weak foundation is doomed to erode — and create the kind of minds that are blasé about human sacrifice.

Even those of us who do believe in God can be endangered by a relativistic culture like the one we live in. White tells us of an encounter with a woman, who identified herself as a Christian, who informed him that Jesus “lived a long, full life, got married and had kids.” (And people said that THE DA VINCI CODE would not have any effect on anyone's religious beliefs?)

How do we shore up our faith against a corrosive culture and develop a true “mind for God”? White's book is designed to answer that question. He urges us to read, to study, to reflect on our faith and our culture, and he suggests books, websites, and other resources to help us get started. He encourages Christians to create what he calls “a rule for the mind” — a set of disciplines like those once followed by Christian monastics — to help us develop a pattern of Christian thinking that applies to all of life.

“Our minds are deeply spiritual,” White writes, “and so developing our minds must be a spiritual discipline.” I agree, and I can't think of a better place to start than in this book. Jim White is a gifted Christian thinker, but what I like best is that he writes for laymen at an accessible level. All of us need to learn the disciplines of thinking Christianly about all of life.

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A Sterile Worldview: Vanishing Russia

According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, Russia “has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.” We’re talking about the population of San Francisco or Baltimore — a grim reminder of how fruitless some worldviews can be.

If demographic trends hold steady, Russia’s population, which stands at 142 million today, will drop to 52 million by 2080. At that point, according to Sergei Mironov, the chairman of the upper house of the Dumas, the Russian parliament, “there will no longer be a great Russia ... it will be torn apart piece by piece, and finally cease to exist.”

Mironov isn’t alone in his fears. Russia’s demographic crisis raises “serious questions about whether Russia will be able to hold on to its lands along the border with China or field an army, let alone a workforce to support the ill and the elderly.”

Even more disturbing than the numbers are the reasons behind them: that is, “one of the world’s fastest-growing AIDS epidemics ... alcohol and drug abuse ... [and] suicide” are among the leading causes of Russia’s shrinking population.

What’s more, last year there were 100,000 more abortions than births in Russia. And many women who want children can’t have them: “[A]n estimated 10 million Russians of reproductive age are sterile because of botched abortions or poor health.”

As Scripps-Howard columnist Terry Mattingly puts it, “we have suicide, AIDS, substance abuse, rampant abortion, and a loss of hope in the future ... in a nation that, in the past century, saw the rise of an atheistic regime that tried to stamp out the practice of faith ... Do you think there might be a religion element in here somewhere?”

Well, not according to the Los Angeles Times or the Russian government. The Times’s story did not mention the role of religion — or, in this case, its absence — in its analysis of Russia’s plight. And the Russian government is trying to avert catastrophe by using the same techniques that have failed in the rest of the world: that is, bribing people to have children.

They will fail in Russia, as well, because they don’t address the real problem: The real problem is a loss of faith. Life has always been tough in Russia, and Russians are famously fatalistic. But, as writers such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn told us, Christianity helped Russians to see their suffering as redemptive and not to lose hope.

Seventy-four years of official atheism robbed the Russian people of this source of hope. This, more than a ruined economy and environmental degradation, is what has put Russia on the road to extinction. It’s a tragic reminder that ideas, and the worldviews and attitudes they engender, have very real consequences.

It’s also a cautionary tale, for what happened to Russia is, in many ways, just an exaggerated and accelerated version of the secularism and materialism overtaking much of Europe. There, as in Russia, secularism is proving to be literally sterile. And maybe it is a lesson we had better learn here as courts and cultural elite continue to marginalize the Christian faith in America.

________

Putting the Pieces Together

Deuteronomy 29

I don’t work crossword puzzles regularly, but I love trying to solve them on airplanes. On a recent lengthy flight, my enjoyment of the puzzle I was working waned swiftly as I realized there was no way I was going to be able to complete it. Though I had filled in about ninety percent of the boxes, the remaining ten percent had stumped me, and there was no one in the seat next to me to bail me out. The beauty of crossword puzzles is that as you fill in the answers you know, you become able to fill in even answers to the clues you don’t know, based on the letters that overlap. But it wasn’t working this time.

When I finally gave up and looked at the solution, I discovered the problem. One of the answers I had been most certain about was incorrect. I was sure that a five-letter word meaning “GLOWER” could be none other than “FROWN,” especially since I knew that the fourth letter needed to be a “W”. In fact, the answer that I needed was “SCOWL,” which made the rest of the crossword fall nicely into place. It was an honest mistake, but one with calamitous implications for the rest of the puzzle.

The search for a coherent worldview is not unlike solving a crossword puzzle, in the sense that the pieces of the puzzle must all fit in order to get the solution. There is no one starting place from which one can build a worldview. Premises stand or fall together, and the coherence of the premises as a whole outweighs the importance of any one premise. A coherent worldview must answer the questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. A watertight answer to one of these questions is utterly useless if the worldview can’t answer the others, and answer them in a way that isn’t self-contradictory.

Of course, when I set out to solve a crossword puzzle, my assumption is that someone has designed the puzzle, and it is workable. The same sort of assumption is made by the person who seeks a coherent worldview. He or she follows the clues where they lead. Examining any sort of theistic worldview this way makes sense. If God exists, the clues should lead to Him. Perhaps some of our beliefs about Him may get overturned along the way (just as a wrong answer throws my crossword off track), but in the end, all will be coherent if it has been designed by an omniscient, omnipotent creator.

On the other hand, it mystifies me that people expect to find answers by applying the same sorts of tests to atheistic worldviews. They line up premises and search for coherence, all the while ignoring the fact that if atheism is true, they shouldn’t expect to find coherence. Seeking coherence from atheism is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle without any clues. If God does not exist, we shouldn’t expect to deduce this conclusion through the clues that He hasn’t left for us!

When I could not make the crossword puzzle work, I did not question my initial assumption that there was a solution. I knew that there were pieces of information that I was missing. This did not mean that the puzzle had not been designed. When we come to questions that we don’t yet have the answers to, we do not have to give up our search for coherence. There is a difference in recognizing that we don’t have all the answers yet, and recognizing that we are working from answers that just don’t fit.

In the wilderness, Moses told the people of Israel, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deuteronomy 29:29a). We do not have all the pieces of the puzzle, but we have many of them. We must start from what we know, continually testing for truth, doubting our own understanding, but never doubting the God who made us.

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The Worldviews of Sex Ed: When Sex Goes To School

If you ever want a truly Herculean task, I can’t think of a harder one than diving into the sex education debate in this country and sorting through all the views and claims of both sides. But that’s exactly what sociologist Kristin Luker has done with her new book, WHEN SEX GOES TO SCHOOL: WARRING VIEWS ON SEX — AND SEX EDUCATION — SINCE THE SIXTIES.

Luker deserves full credit for tackling this tough subject and for doing her research so thoroughly that the book took two decades to complete. And she deserves extra credit for coming as close to an objective view of the issue as anyone I’ve ever seen. Although Luker is no conservative on sexual issues, she’s light years away from the pundits and researchers who consider the Christian viewpoint beneath contempt. Instead, she takes both sides seriously and is even willing to acknowledge many of the truths inherent in traditional views of sexuality.

In doing so, Luker gets to the very heart of the sex education debate in a way that few other social scientists have, because she discovers that the debate is not just about sex. What it’s REALLY about is worldview.

“Sexual conservatives,” Luker explains, “...believe that humans are fundamentally capable of the worst, and that it is only the combined power of an internal morality and external constraints that keeps most of us on the straight-and-narrow most of the time.” And this, she shows, is why we argue for “firm structures” and the teaching of moral boundaries. On the other hand, she says, “sexual liberals see a world in which the only way a diverse and heterogeneous group of people can be trusted to make good moral decisions is to ensure that all of them have the maximum amount of information possible.” So sexual liberals fight to give children as much sexual information as possible as early as possible, thinking “that if their children are given education and information, they will grow up to be morally good adults.”

Luker’s observations are right on. As we Christians would phrase it, one side believes in the sin nature, and the other side does not. This insight raises some deeply troubling ideas and questions. For one thing, it suggests that the divide over the issue is even wider and deeper than many realize. It’s not just that we can’t agree on the best way to reach our goals regarding teens and sexuality; it’s that we don’t even have the same goals. We very likely never will, unless we can reach people at a fundamental level, in a way that changes their hearts and minds.

There are a lot of good reasons to read WHEN SEX GOES TO SCHOOL, including a fascinating exploration of the beginnings of formal sex education (very different than what you might think) and some profound thoughts on just how closely the issue of marriage is tied to sex education.

But the best reason to read Luker’s work is this treatment of worldviews at the root of the conflict. Obviously, you’re not going to agree with Luker on everything, but what she will give you is a necessary understanding of what’s really at stake here. It’s not just a question of the body, but of the deepest beliefs of the mind, heart, and soul.

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The Temple of Darwin

Job 40

Efforts to reconcile Christianity and evolutionary theory abound, even as evolutionists bemoan the fact that such a large percentage of Americans simply will not accept a naturalistic understanding of cosmic and human origins.

Writing in the New Scientist, Michael Zimmerman calls for a new public celebration of Darwinism. Zimmerman is one of the proponents of “Evolution Sunday,” an attempt to encourage liberal churches to support the compatibility of evolution and Christianity, scheduled annually for the Sunday closest to Darwin’s birthday.

In an interesting section of his article, Zimmerman cites me as an example of one who argues for the fundamental incompatibility of Darwinian evolution and biblical Christianity. Here is the section [available to New Scientist subscribers only]:

Fundamentalist religious leaders pushing a creationist agenda

regularly assert that the faithful must choose between their

religious beliefs and evolution. Evolution is regularly

caricatured as being incompatible with belief in God; Albert

Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,

has stated that one can’t be a Christian and believe in

evolution. This is particularly dangerous because I believe that

most people, if forced to choose between religion and evolution,

will select religion.

First, a clarification. I have not said that one can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution. It is entirely possible to be a confused Christian or a confused evolutionist ... or both. Nevertheless, the dominant theory of evolution -- the theory as taught and defended by the world’s leading evolutionary scientists -- explicitly rules out any supernatural design or interference at any point in the evolutionary continuum. That fact alone makes the theory incompatible with any legitimate affirmation of divine creation or of biblical theism.

That point is also affirmed, though almost surely not intentionally, in the current issue of The Christian Century. In “God in Evolution,” Amy Frykholm would seem to reassure Zimmerman.

As she writes:

While controversies over evolution continue to arise in some

sectors of American Christianity, most mainline Christians have

made their peace with Darwin. We may not grasp all the nuances

of the scientific debate, but we have concluded that evolutionary

theory is good science and therefore must be compatible with good

theology. Darwin’s name doesn’t send chills up our spines. We

are theistic evolutionists: we believe that natural selection is

evidently part of God’s method of shaping the natural world.

According to Frykholm “most mainline Christians have made their peace with Darwin.” But, even as Frykholm makes this claim, she slips and admits that the “peace” is rather “combustible.” As she explains, “When theology faces off against the account of the world set forth by evolutionary biology, God’s goodness and power and God’s plans for the future seem to be called into question with new force.” Needless to say, those are rather significant issues.

Consider this section of her article:

Still, evolutionary biology makes it hard to discern purpose or

direction in creation. For some theologians, facing a universe

that includes randomness and chance may require a shift in

thinking about how God works. John Haught, Catholic theologian

and professor of theology at Georgetown University, suggests that

we think in terms of a God who offers “a wide range of

possibilities that the world can realize, a universe of

innumerable possibilities.” Realization of any one possibility

happens amid the play between God and creatures.

And then this passage:

The theological problem with going in this direction, of course,

is that such a view leaves little sense of divine direction or

action. Clayton [Philip Clayton, a theologian at Claremont

School of Theology] argues that evolutionary biology severely

limits what we can call divine action, though he believes that

science does allow a small but significant space for interaction

between creature and Creator. Nature can be “biologically

constrained without being biologically determined,” he says. He

calls the divine-creature interaction “the divine lure.” As

evolution occurs, more complex structures emerge. And the more

complex forms that emerge are not reducible to a mere compilation

of the kinds that come before them. In the space between what is

and what is becoming, God might be said to act.

Theologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural,

open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution

than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God. On the

other hand, if Jenson is right, perhaps what is needed is a

richer notion of the God in whom these processes occur. At the

very least, substantial interaction between Christian theology

and evolutionary biology is prompting new metaphors and new ways

of thinking about God.

In other words, the theology that has declared a truce with Darwin is a theology that is required, for example, to see God allowing any number of possible outcomes to history -- a God who is “deeply involved” in creation, but not omnipotent. So I repeat my assertion: This is not biblical Christianity.

Tellingly, Michael Zimmerman sees the public status of evolutionary theory endangered by the fact that so many Christians resist the theory. As he admits, “I believe that most people, if forced to choose between religion and evolution, will select religion.” He is right, of course -- and that is why there is such panic in the temple of Darwin.

She Can Have An Abortion and You Can Be Euthanized

Job 3:20

No one should underestimate the extent to which fundamental worldviews produce very different understandings of reality. These different understandings of reality produce radically different perspectives on the real-life issues with which we are confronted.

One key issue here is the reading of history. In simple terms, these different readings of reality lead to different understandings of where history leads. Western liberal thought has long been shaped by the myth of inevitable progress. This is inevitably fueled by a legitimate celebration of developments ranging from democracy to air conditioning and antibiotics. There are also legitimate grounds for celebrating moral progress on fronts including slavery, racism, and other issues. The liberal mistake is to assume that this means that all moral change is progress. This mistake is accompanied by an assumption that moral progress always means the expansion of individual autonomy.

The clash between fundamental worldviews is often difficult to capture, but sometimes literature does what a news report cannot. Consider this passage from Cormac McCarty’s novel, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. In this passage, one of the main characters reflects on this clash:

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in

Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife

of somebody or other. And she kept talking about the right wing

this and the right wing that.

I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are

mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I

told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was

sayin something bad about em, but of course that’s a high

compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on.

Finally told me, said: I don’t like the way this country is

headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion.

And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the

way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I don’t have

much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin

to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll

be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the

conversation.

That exchange also pretty much sums up the clash of worldviews. Sometimes literature captures a universe of meaning in a minimum of words.

88 Sermon Illustrations on Worldview