Christians are those who have a conscious trust and dependence on Christ’s saving work on their behalf (as opposed to all other worldviews). I am called to love. Christians are called to love God, to love their neighbors as themselves, and to love their enemies. This is carried out in the course of their ordinary lives in the world (as opposed to our natural inclinations). Such a mindset will lead a Christian deeper and deeper into church, Scripture, prayer, and holiness, and it will be a bulwark against the falsehoods of the world.
The way we think, the way we feel, our assumptions, our attitudes, our conscience, and other aspects of our mindset are influenced by our upbringing, our culture, and our peers. For generations, Christian parents, a more or less Christian culture, and the community of the church helped to instill a Christian mindset. Today, though, as Christianity has declined in influence in our culture, other kinds of influences from an aggressively secularist society can instill very different kinds of mindsets. So Christians today need to be especially purposeful about cultivating a mindset that is in line with their faith.
Worldview
A Christian mindset includes having a biblical worldview. A worldview can be defined as a comprehensive interpretation and explanation of reality. A person’s worldview involves beliefs and assumptions about the universe and all the experiences of life.
The nineteenth-century Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper taught that the Bible speaks to all of life, and along with other Reformed thinkers such as Herman Bavinck and Herman Dooyeweerd, he developed the outlines of a distinctively biblical worldview. In his book Worldview: The History of a Concept, David Naugle maintained that “conceiving of Christianity as a worldview has been one of the most significant developments in the recent history of the church.”
Indeed, the Bible’s teachings about man, nature, morality, society, and the meaning and value of life—among other important topics—have been profoundly influential, even on secular civilization, and can help Christians know how to live out their faith in every dimension of their lives.
Also, becoming aware of worldviews can help Christians recognize and critique the nonbiblical worldviews that are prevalent today. Francis Schaeffer helped bring worldview thinking into the broader evangelical world, inspiring countless Christian authors and initiatives such as Charles Colson’s Breakpoint radio commentaries on current events and Summit Ministries’ teaching about worldviews to young people.
One Christian thinker suggested eight diagnostic questions to help us explore the differences between competing worldviews:
- What is prime reality—the really real? (God? The material world?)
- What is the nature of external reality—that is, the world around us? (God’s creation? A mental construction?)
- What is a human being? (Someone made in the image of God? Just another animal?)
- What happens to a person at death? (Eternal life? Reincarnation? Nothingness?)
- Why is it possible to know anything at all? (Revelation? Reason? Feelings?)
- How do we know what is right and wrong? (A righteous God? Culture? Our choice?)
- What is the meaning of human history? (Fall, redemption, and consummation? Evolutionary progress? No meaning?)
- What personal, life-orienting core commitments are consistent with this worldview? (What are the implications of your worldview for the way that you live your life?)
Sire’s book used these questions to explore—with the help of philosophy, art, literature, and history—the worldviews of theism, deism, naturalism, Marxism, nihilism, existentialism, Eastern monism, New Age philosophy, postmodernism, and Islam.
Schaeffer’s approach to apologetics and evangelism was to converse with people, asking them questions like these. He would then “take the roof off” by making them face up to the contradictions between their worldview and their lives (e.g., “You think life has no meaning, that we are just animals, and there is no basis for right and wrong? Then why do you love your children?”).
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