How should Christians think about OPEC? Was the Artemis II mission a good use of funds? Should Australia invest more in submarines? Good Christians may have lots of different views on such questions… or possibly no view at all. And the questions themselves are far too complex to have solved or to expect that everyone must agree.

One of the hazards of intellectual Christian discourse is to anoint ourselves as the amateur evaluators of “the Christian viewpoint” on everything—science, economics, geopolitics, how governments ought to be run, aesthetics, agriculture and whatever other fields of human discourse arise.

This might start innocently enough with the desire to form a biblical worldview, applying broad biblical concepts to every part of life and every human discipline. Does God care about what we think about art or history or economics? If he cares about what we eat or drink (1 Cor. 10:31), it seems that he would. And so we embark on learning to think Christianly—learning and reflecting in ways informed by a Christian framework.

But like any concept or category, “Christian worldview” has morphed, been co-opted, distorted and abused. And among those abuses is the presumption that we can identify a single Christian viewpoint on complex topics. What is the Christian view on inflation? On World War 1? On the current political situation in Argentina? Can we distill a single biblical worldview position on every issue that every Christian ought to agree with? Consider a number of thoughts:

God Defines the One Truth

A hopeful starting point is that there is one truth, not many. Contemporary, popular postmodernism allows us to each have our own truth or settle for something that is “true for me.” It’s an epistemological shrug. “There is no repository for the absolute truth,” postmodernism avers, “only perspectives.”

This is not a Christian way of thinking. God is the final authority on truth, He knows everything, and He has spoken. The very existence of Scripture is a radical assertion that absolute truth can be stated in propositional form using words written in a book, available to anyone willing to take up and read.

It only follows from this foundation that the standard of right thinking is to conform our thoughts to God’s. And so perhaps this answers our opening question. The Christian worldview on any topic is the one that agrees with God’s!

There’s just one problem. None of us are Him.

Our Thoughts are Always Provisional

Theology and philosophy can be heady stuff. Talk long enough about God, man, and the universe and you’re tempted to feel as though you’re shining a flashlight on the underpinnings of reality itself.

But remember how little we actually know about the world, to say nothing of God Himself! A better metaphor: we are like goldfish in an aquarium. Looking out of our glass box at the world outside, we make some very real observations… and a lot of bad assumptions. Whatever our conclusions, you can be sure that they aren’t robust enough to get to the metaphysical core of anything.

As such, are our provisional thoughts untrue? Hopefully not. But neither are they the final word on the matter. In fact, you’ve experienced this. Think of beliefs you held in the past that weren’t exactly wrong but weren’t exactly sufficient either. Our lives and growth in wisdom are construed so that we pass through shallow to deeper layers of truth, holding first to ideas that are true enough but vapid, only thinking at the surface and never grasping the fullness.

So goes all of human wisdom. At our very best, most profound and sublime thoughts are always and only provisional—elementary scratching in the dust; sophomoric ramblings which our future glorified selves can only find cute, amusing, or simply embarrassing.

And yet in the meantime, we have no choice but to go on.

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