All human beings live with a certain set of beliefs or beliefs and the belief, which shows reality and creates a meaning to our view, is a worldview. It is a belief about what is fundamental in our lives and in our relationship towards the others in our society and with whom it matters. A personal view is something that you believe is true and stands as a driving force behind your every emotion, action, or decision. Worldview could be anything from the view of the laws of the land or your philosophical disposition towards your life or any of your social or political cultures or endeavors. Within this framework how much importance is given to the biblical worldview is the fundamental question, the answer to which is sought after by many believers of Christianity and God.
The fundamental aspect of the biblical worldview lies in the faith in the word of God. If you believe that the bible is true then the bible becomes the foundation of every aspect of your life and the most important driving force behind all your actions.
“The Christian worldview sees and understands God’s the Creator and His creation- i.e., man and the world primarily through the lens of God’s special revelation, the Holy Scriptures, and secondarily through God’s natural revelation in creation as interpreted by the human reason and reconciled by and with Scripture, for the purpose of believing and behaving in accord with God’s will and, thereby, glorifying God with one’s mind and life, both now and in eternity. (Henry 1994, 5) For example, many Christians believe in the command of Thessalonians 4:3 and other Scriptures to remain aloof from sexual immorality, but in reality how quite often we fall into lust and indulge in premarital and extramarital sexual sins.
This happens because we are always bombarded with non-biblical themes through television shows, films, music, newspapers, magazine, and books and we are easily lured away by these pleasures and they create an everlasting effect on our personal views and culture. Through the media of the American ways of secularism, law, politics, science, history, etc., the impact is much greater than we can even realize and we are then “taken captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” (Colossians 2:8, Deere 1998, 248)
But if we begin to apply diligently the concept of our trust towards God and its truth in every aspect of our life, we would begin to develop a faith that would stand against strong waves of non-biblical culture bonding our lives towards it. We would also be able to make the right decisions and form the right answers to the questions relating to abortion, same-sex marriage, cloning, stem-cell research, and even choices on media. As in the end, it is only our decisions and actions that would reveal everything that is good in life and aspects we really believe in.
But the truth is different, we are defying the Christian doctrine and through him the will of God. Man’s defiance against God is causing suffering and in the quest for freedom, we are moving away from the ultimate words of God and the result of the same is broken homes, abused and neglected kids, attempts of suicide, sexually transmitted diseases, same-sex marriages, etc. The tragedies are increasing because the most precious aspects of the words of God are being eroded and people are taking more pride in committing sins and gaining worldly pleasures instead of the truth and enlightenment.
Secularism has deviated people from the principles of God, and they frame their own set of doctrines and principles and according to their own way. There are no moral values for them. The separation of the church and state has made the church another piece of materialistic formation and remains indifferent towards the affairs of the people. And, the younger generation of today has to bear the consequences of these changes. Students are deprived of the biblical teachings and are not told that their recluse from the Holy Scriptures and the bible can create a negative impact in their lives only.
Leithart’s Solomon among the Post Modernism is aimed at presenting the postmodern themes and as a way to treat how post-modernism works. Through the positive and negative aspects of post-modernism, Leithart describes how this theory displays the biblical theme of indistinctness and instability in this world. But he also tells us that only biblical faith can take us out of this skepticism about the world and despair, emphasizing Solomon’s call for eating, drinking, and making merry. For Solomon, as said by Leithart, this means that everything that is placed under the sun is worthless and has no meaning, and only God who bestows will definitely give everything of what is valuable.
On the same lines Charles Daryl J in his book, Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things says that Christians believe that human beings are formed in the image of God and there is a purpose behind every creation on this Earth. He further said that “the entrenchment of ideological or philosophical pluralism in our own day has given rise to moral pluralism, whereby it is now broadly assumed that there are no objectives or fixed moral norms, no transcendental ethical standards, by which to judge situations and human behavior. Truth. A term typically placed in quotation marks, and ethics are understood to be multiple, perspective, and relative to the society, situation or contexts in which one finds yourself.” (Charles 2008, 6)
The first line of C S Lewis in his book, The Abolition of Man, conceptualized the concept of learning the importance of our elementary textbooks. It implies “I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text-books.” (Lewis 1944, 1) Likewise, he is also doubting the fact that if we are all showing our complete attention towards the new sciences of moral sense or not? Lewis was more concerned with the inattention being adopted during the texts. He thought that school textbooks of primary classes contained the seeds which when planted among the young and impressionable minds, would naturally make these very people reject the whole of ethics, theology, politics, and, indeed, the future of humanity would be at stake.
It is Nancy whose Total Truth is the direct words of the bible whereby the Gospel speaks on the truth about all lives on this earth, and she agrees with the concept that whatever Bible and Gospel wrote about life is a complete truth. Nancy Pearcy says that it is quite possible for the show to reflect there should be good formulation in the field.
O’Donovan gave the structure of his book The Ways of Judgment in three ways: like the truth about the political life, which is ordained by God to make normative judgments about what ought or ought not to be done; secondly, he said that society justifies actions whose legitimacy has been called into question by human silences and thirdly he raises the question of the concept of judgment itself
is challenged by “Christ’s ‘counter political invocation to ‘judge not”. (O’Donovan 2005, 233) O’Donovans approach is that the coherency of political conceptions “depends in important and surprising ways upon faith expressed in the creeds”. (O’Donovan 2005, xiv)
Wolters criticized the biblical worldview and his ways of the world when he says, “Biblical world view does not provide the answers, or even a recipe for finding answers, or the majority of the perplexing problem with which our culture confronts us today.” (Wolters 2005, 115)
The author provided the way of framing the questions, called Problem-stellung that is distinct and purely biblical. The whole approach that we adopt in this world should be looked at from the lens of the Scripture, where everyone speaks of good creation and drama of recreation by the creator of the world in Jesus Christ. It is a tradition of humanism that has shaped Western civilization since the period of the Renaissance. (Wolters 2005, 115)
Bibliography
Charles, Daryl J. Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008.
Deere, Jack. Surprised by the Voice of God: How God Speaks Today Through Prophecies, Dreams, and Visions. Zondervan, 1998.
Henry, Carl F. H. “The Vagrancy of the American Spirit” Faculty Dialogue 22 (1994): 5-18.
Leithart, Peter. Solomon Among the Postmoderns. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008.
Lewis, Clive Staples. The Abolition of Man. New York: Harper Collins, 1944.
O’Donovan Oliver and O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood. Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdinans Publishing Company 2004.
O’Donovan Oliver. The Ways of Judgment. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdinans Publishing Company, 2005.
Pearcy, Nancy. Total Truth. Wheaton, IL.: Crossway Books, 2003.
Wolters, Albert M. Creation Regained: Biblical Basis for a Reformational Worldview. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdinans Publishing Company, 2005.