Worlds Apart?
The world is decaying, but why? Is it the Greenhouse effect, the destruction of the rainforests or the population explosion? No! The answer is the sin of human beings.
My sin, your sin and everyone’s sin since Adam and Eve. This is not a popular concept at all; nor is the idea that God judges and punishes sin. There is also less emphasis on God as creator; God’s decisive act of creating chaos and out of that a perfect world has been made more and more vague until it has become as fanciful as fairyland. So how can we be sure about the validity of Christ or the sanity of Paul?
Why are the very fundamentals of our faith, Biblical truths, sinking into a quagmire of doubt? I lay the blame at the foot of all those influences which have produced the worldview held by all around us, taught in every department, underlying every form of media and defining our values. The western worldview of 1992 is profoundly unbiblical. It is crucial for Christians both to recognize this and to stop the rot.
A worldview can be defined as “a set of presuppositions (true or false) which we hold (consciously or unconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic make-up of the world we find ourselves in” (Paul Chambers). It is the framework within which we understand things. The worldview I am talking about is a mixture of humanism, existentialism, “Christian values”, Eastern religious influence and New Age ideals. One of the most obvious, and most damaging, marks is all-pervasive relativism.
No longer sure about anything, everything is equally valid; “it’s all relative”. Reality is seen as highly subjective and Absolute Truths are banished. Each person’s point of view is just as legitimate as the next, and new criteria such as happiness, love and duty have replaced Absolute Truths. “As long as I am happy this must be the right thing to do”, “Just do your duty and no one can blame me”, “Of course it is for the best — we did it for love”.
Have you noticed the centre of this new world? I, me. As long as I am happy, I do my duty, I decide what is good, I make the rules. I respect other people’s rights and views only because I expect respect for mine.
This throws the door wide open for worldview’s special guest — tolerance. We can act as we please, we can question, we can even be wrong — but we cannot be intolerant. Tolerance rules our lives in a way never before witnessed. The reign of political correctness is upon us. I can hear your warning bells sounding! I must qualify myself. I am not arguing for the return of racism, sexism, oppression and injustice (not that theses have ever left) but I am questioning the relentless search for tolerance which can lead to narrow-mindedness and even intolerance.
For political correctness does have a limit — relativism calls a halt at universalism. Where does the person who believes that they know the truth fit into the relativist worldview? At the first whiff of an absolute, universal, truth there is a cry of “fundamentalism” and most people flee. It seems old-fashioned, quaint to mention eternal truths. Stop! Under your own rules I must ask you to tolerate my worldview. I believe that God created the universe as an ordered system and humans in his image. He revealed himself in the Bible so that we can know Him and how He intended us to live. History is linear; it is a meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfilment of God’s purposes for human beings. Unless we believe in God, acknowledge and accept Jesus and live according to His truth, eternity will not be pleasant. We will all be judged one day; death is either the gateway to life or to eternal separation from him. That all these ideas sound somewhat unnatural, discordant, and fairly absurd shows the all-pervasiveness of the worldview lived by those around us.
The Christian worldview is almost entirely incompatible with the non-Christian worldview. Christians have different reasons for life, goals, expectations for the future and concept of the way to live. Not happiness, not duty, not love but for God’s glory. But even as I write this is being chipped away, compromised and changed under the pressure of society. From “Neighbours”, to textbooks and from the “Independent” to a lecture we cannot escape.
How should Christians respond? Should we heavily censor reality, siphon off all that is “unhelpful”, “unbiblical” or in any way “dodgy”? Many Christians employ this attitude but I can not. I would remind you of the German Christians of 1930’s under Hitler and the white South African Christians of more recent years under apartheid. To put this in another (leading) way; does God want us to be forced into a blinkered, narrow-minded sub-culture? Taken to its extreme we would have a restricted circle of friends, library and lifestyle. This does not seem to follow the example of a man who befriended prostitutes, demon-possessed people and tax-collectors. Rather than being forced into a corner by our culture we should be leading it. As Christians, confident that God is with us, we can have the courage to plunge into our culture and, from a point of understanding, question and interact with all that we find. Only we can introduce Jesus into situations where he has previously not been welcomed. Thus we can return to living as we were made to live, to know our Creator, to resurrect Absolute Truths and to give lives of freedom and forgiveness. No amount of political correctness or tolerance could achieve this — these can be tools but must not be goals. The first step is to realize the falsity of the worldview we live within, and the next step is to challenge it.
Acknowledgements: Paul Chambers, Ellis Potter, Mike Neville