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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?”). He would then address those points of conflict with the Christian worldview—invariably involving sin—leading to its promise of everlasting life through Christ’s atonement.
This sort of worldview thinking helped me greatly in navigating graduate school, with its multitude of non-Christian perspectives, and in giving me direction for my own Christian scholarship. And it certainly helps in forming a Christian mindset.
But here are a few caveats about worldview.
1. Beware of relativism. It was Immanuel Kant who first articulated the concept of worldview, coining the term Weltanschauung (literally, “world-and-life-view”), which was taken up by a host of other German philosophers who would be instrumental in giving us the worldview of postmodernism. Kant believed that we cannot know objective reality in itself; rather, our minds create and shape our perceptions, according to various mental and social constructions, including our Weltanschauung.
This would lead to cultural relativism, the notion that different cultures have their own worldviews and therefore their own “truths,” and to critical theory, the notion that worldviews are constructions of those in power to oppress groups that lack power. And to the notion that we all construct our own worldviews according to our choices, so that we all have our own individual truths.
So this talk of Christian worldview thinking can actually and even strangely fit uncomfortably well with postmodernism, which may be why I got through grad school with it. The difference, of course, is that Christianity asserts something that relativism refuses to accept: The Christian worldview is true, whereas the competing worldviews, though perhaps containing elements of truth, are, overall, false.
2. A Christian worldview is not the same as theology or saving faith. You can find elements of a biblical worldview in Judaism, Mormonism, and versions of Christianity such as Roman Catholicism and legalism that do not hold to the gospel. You can frequently find it in writers of the past, especially before the 1700s, even among overt non-Christians such as Christopher Marlowe. Still, Christians can find allies this way, even though they are not brothers or sisters in the faith. Conversely, one can have saving faith without having a consistent Christian worldview. The latter can be learned, but faith in Christ is paramount.
3. Philosophy isn’t everything. Worldview analysis focuses mainly on philosophical ideas. Sometimes it gets rather abstruse. Sire does a lot with epistemology, which has to do with how we know what we know (“Why is it possible to know anything at all?”). This is valuable, even though most Christians know that they know nothing about the subject.
The fact is that our minds—and thus our mindset—consist of more than our intellects. We also have imagination, memory, will, senses, emotions, conscience, and other powers. Various versions of worldview are taking account of that.
But let me make it simpler.
the christian mindset for all Christians
Here are just a few principles of the Christian mindset that all Christians of every background should hold to that will set them apart from the non-Christian mindsets of our day.
1. God exists. But not just any god. He is personal, not just a “force,” but not just any person. He is love—that is, a unity of distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is transcendent, and yet He became incarnate. He has spoken to us by His Word incarnate (Jesus Christ) and His Word written (the Bible) (as opposed to atheism, pantheism, and Islam).
2. Reality exists. The material realm exists, as does the spiritual realm. Both are creations of God (by contrast, Hinduism teaches that the world is an illusion, Gnosticism teaches that materiality is evil, and postmodernism teaches that the world is a mental construction).
3. Right and wrong exist. Morality is transcendent and objective, being grounded in the righteousness of God (as opposed to the views that morality is relative, a social construction or a matter of the individual’s choice).
4. Human beings are contradictions. We were created in the image of God and so are innately valuable and capable of great achievements, and yet we are fallen and so are pervasively sinful. We are limited mortals, and yet we will experience everlasting life, whether in damnation or beatitude (as opposed to humanism, naturalism, Darwinism, and utopianism).
5. Jesus saves. Deliverance from our sins is the work of God and the gift of God. Jesus Christ, true God and true man, died to atone for our sins and rose from the dead for our salvation (as opposed to legalism and all other religions).
6. I have faith in Jesus. Christians are those who have a conscious trust and dependence on Christ’s saving work on their behalf (as opposed to all other worldviews).
7. 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.