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Worldview Work Isn’t Optional

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Some are saying that Christians have lost the culture. But what if it was never a war to win, instead it was a calling to embrace? If there is an overarching theme for BreakPoint—starting with Chuck Colson and now with Eric Metaxas and me—it’s culture.  Specifically, how Christians can understand it, engage it, confront it, even restore it—through the clarity of a Christian worldview. As Brett Kunkle and I explain in our book, “A Practical Guide to Culture,” what we mean by culture is not some mysterious thing cloistered in art museums. No, culture is the sum of everything we as human beings create, write, say, do, and think—the marks we leave on our world. In that sense, “engaging the culture” isn’t really optional. It’s human. It’s as much a part of being alive as breathing is. We don’t decide whether we’ll engage the culture. Just how.I say this because lately, a few people have suggested that Christian efforts in the culture have failed. One gentleman recently wrote me saying that worldview-style training like the kind we do in our Colson Fellows Program or at Summit Ministries or other places like that just hasn’t worked. We’re losing the next generation, he said, and mainstream culture is as dark as ever.

But I want to push back against this idea, at least on a couple of fronts. First, it just isn’t true! You can’t convince me that the work of people like Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson, David Noebel, or the work of groups like Summit Ministries or the Colson Center, teaching Christians how to approach culture from a Christian worldview hasn’t made a difference. I’ve seen young faces light up when they get this Christianity thing for the first time, realizing it’s true, and that faith relates to culture. I’ve seen too many to believe that it hasn’t made an impact. I was one of those faces in 1994 thanks to Bill Brown and Gary Phillips.

And stats back me up on this. Far from the doom and gloom we often hear in the media, and from Christian sources, the Church isn’t collapsing in America. In fact, evangelicals have one of the highest retention rates of their young people of any Christian group.

And to say that “worldview hasn’t worked” is to ignore the incredible inroads made in the academy in our lifetime. Consider that the entire discipline of philosophy was flipped on its head in the late 20th century by people like Alvin Plantinga. Consider the amazing progress in law, not only now, but the seeding of jurisprudence by the folks at Alliance Defending Freedom. Consider the gains of the pro-life movement. All of these were either directly or indirectly inspired by Christians taught to engage culture armed with Christian worldview thinking.

What this thinking has done, through ministries like Colson Center and programs like BreakPoint, is offer an antidote to the toxic assumption that Christianity is just something you do on Sunday in the pews; that Christianity is personal and private. No way. Christianity is personal, but it’s not private. Every square inch of human existence belongs to Christ.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m under no illusion that things are going great in the culture. No, Christians are facing incredible challenges around the world. And in Western culture, it’s all but lost any sort of privileged position it once had.

But here’s the kicker: at the Colson Center, we don’t teach worldview or champion the idea that Christians should “engage culture” because it “works.” It’s not a strategy, folks. We do it because we’re redeemed human beings, and because redemption is in line with, not opposed to, our created purpose.

Christians shouldn’t make art, write literature, compose music, build businesses or any of these things to win a kind of war against secularism. We do these things because they’re part of what it means to be truly human. And that’s what Jesus saved us to be—fully human worshipers of God with all of our lives.

So yes, the worldview movement and its emphasis on culture has made a difference. I know the beneficiaries by name. But we don’t teach worldview or engage culture for strategic purposes. We do it because Christianity isn’t Christianity without it.

As Chuck Colson would often say, Christians are to “make the invisible kingdom visible.” We do just that by intentionally engaging the culture around us in every sphere of life God has called us to. A great way to take a deeper dive into engaging the culture is to become a Colson Fellow. Click here to find out more about applying for the next class in the Colson Fellows Program.

Resources

A Practical Guide to Culture

  • John Stonestreet, Brett Kunkle | David C. Cook Publishing | 2017

How Now Shall We Live?

  • Charles Colson, Nancy Pearcey | Tyndale House Publishing| 2004

The Mark of the Christian

  • Francis Schaeffer | InterVarsity Press Publishing | 2007

Worldview Conference May 5th

Worldview has never been so important than it is today!  The contemporary culture is shaping the next generation’s understanding of faith far more than their faith is shaping their understanding of culture. The annual IFI Worldview Conference is a phenomenal opportunity to reverse that trend. This year we are featuring well-know apologist John Stonestreet on Saturday, May 5th at Medinah Baptist Church. Mr. Stonestreet is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “Making Sense of Your World” and his newest offer: “A Practical Guide to Culture.”

Click HERE to learn more or to register!



Atheist Ignorance on Holiday Billboards

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~Correction/Update: Although Neuqua Valley High School still lists Hemant Mehta on its Math Department faculty webpage, he no longer works there. Linked screenshot below* was taken today, Dec. 19, 2014.~

A new Chicago-area billboard campaign from the aggressively offensive Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) exposes again this organization’s hostility to and childish misunderstanding of Christian faith.

The FFRF has announced that eleven billboards are going up with these special holiday messages:

  • “Kindness comes from altruism, not from seeking divine reward.”
  • “We are here to challenge you to think for yourself.”
  • “I believe in reason and logic!”
  • “Equality for all shouldn’t be constrained by any religion.”
  • “Free of faith, fear and superstition”
  • “I put my faith in science.”
  • And this featuring Neuqua Valley High School math teacher* Hemant Mehta (aka the “Friendly Atheist”): “I’d rather put my faith in me.” (It’s curious that the billboard doesn’t identify Mehta as a public high school teacher. To learn more about Mehta, click here, here, and here.)

A few brief responses to the FFRF’s shallow slogans:

1. Kind acts are “friendly, generous, warmhearted, charitable, generous, humane, and/or considerate acts.” Altruism is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Kind acts may be motivated by ignoble, selfish sentiments—perhaps even a wrong theological belief that one earns salvation through one’s actions. But kind acts can also be motivated by altruism that derives from faith in Christ.

Kindness can be the result of the regeneration that God performs in the hearts of believers, which deracinates selfishness and naturally results in desires more in line with God’s nature. Kindness can result from an overflowing of thankfulness for God’s great gift of salvation, which makes followers of Christ love and give more unselfishly, often even sacrificially.  They act kindly and altruistically not to gain reward but to thank God and to express his love to others.

2. Finding the Old and New Testament writers to be persuasive no more constitutes a failure to “think for yourself” than does finding the ideas of Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins persuasive. And believing that reality is not exclusively material does not constitute a failure to think logically.

Are the members of the FFRF actually arguing that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth,C.S. Lewis, G.E.M. Anscombe, Pope Benedict XVI, John Finnis, Hadley Arkes, Alvin Plantinga, D.A. Carson, Eleonore Stump, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, Francesca Aran Murphy, Doug Wilson, Robert George, Francis Beckwith, David Bentley Hart, and Alex Pruss did or do not think for themselves and/or that they reject reason and logic?

3. Equality—properly understood—is advanced by Christian faith. Equality demands treating like things alike, and increasingly both those who embrace an atheistic scientific materialism and people who embrace heterodoxy are incapable of recognizing fundamental truths—including even facts—about human nature. Therefore, they are incapable of identifying which phenomena are in reality alike.

4. First, one can make an argument that those who most fear, for example, death are those who have an unproven faith in the non-existence of an afterlife.  Second, a superstition is “a belief held in spite of evidence to the contrary.” As such, the Christian faith does not constitute a superstition, because there is ample evidence for the existence of God and his human incarnation, Jesus Christ. Atheists reject the evidence based on their a priori assumptions about what constitutes evidence.

5. Christians too put their faith in science. Christians, including Christian scientists, trust and have confidence that science proves what it can prove. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of an immaterial reality. And science cannot prove whether altruistic acts are objectively morally good acts or merely acts that humans have evolved to believe are objectively good because such a belief serves to enhance survival.

6. Faith in self alone reflects the kind of hubris that leads more often to intellectual and moral error than it does to altruism.

“The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross.” ~J.I.Packer

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Illinois Family Institute
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