Pastor Wayne Larson has posted some valuable thoughts here about Christian worldview and antithesis.
When I read them, it reminds me of some questions I’ve had (about my own past self among other things).
If you wanted to invent an engine for promoting self-righteousness and / or intellectual snobbery in the Christian world, could you find anything more effective than the “Christian worldview and antithesis” industry? Of course, I don’t want to deny the valid points such thinking has. Christian worldview thinking was promoted in the face of what was arguably an intellectual malaise of some sort in the Evangelical world. But there is more than one threat to the Christian community, and perhaps there are some “side effects”to the medicine we’ve been promoting.
One other thought, maybe related maybe not: I’m not happy with the reasons I often hear articulated by Christians for church growth and outreach. Yes, unbelievers need the Gospel. I realize that. But we also need to be sanctified. And it has been established from the time of Adam and Eve, when God withdrew His presence to the other side of the firmament to let Adam and Eve learn how to treat one another, that sanctification comes from other people.
We need strangers. We need the people who make us uncomfortable and offend us even. Does that mean there are no standards for separating from wicked people? Of course not! But that fact simply does not justify our industrious production of subsidiary standards by with we judge and stand aloof from both Christian and non-Christian.
I think, to some measure, my thoughts here are related to this post. It is really all because I’ve repeatedly listened the our Bard of the Bible, Jamie Soles, who sings on my favorite album,
Jephthah was a fighter but he did not have much backing
All his brothers said “You’re not of us!” and sent him packing
How they wished when Ammon came
that they had not so done
For their one hope of victory was in this rejected son
Tell me, doesn’t that remind you of Someone?
Sure, it does. But if I had been one of Jephthah’s “brothers” (the text is ambiguous and could be referring to a nuclear family or fellow residents of a town), I doubt I would have recognized it until the Ammonites forced me to take a second look.
By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord (1 Cor 14.21; Isaiah 28.11).
We want to listen to God, don’t we?
Something I’ve wondered about is whether the teaching of “antithesis” too young promotes intellectual laziness and self-righteousness. The most glaring example is Christian school/homeschool science books that can’t teach zoology at the third grade level without devoting 25% of space to why evolution is wrong. It seems to me that teaching young kids with such a strong emphasis on “we Christians know better” is fraught with dangers, even though it is in fact true that the scriptures reveal truth to us that others do not see.
On the other hand, a lot has been said about the importance of antithesis to thinking at every level, by those whose opinions I respect highly. So I think there’s a fair chance I’m wrong here, but sometime I hope to have the opportunity to hash this out with someone who’s thought it through.
You are correct, pentamom. Everything depends on the teacher or mentor. Without developing in the student an interrogative spirit, a self-critical outlook, “worldview” becomes nothing but another tool of indoctrination.
Mark, you are positively Levinasian in this post. (That’s a compliment.) “We need strangers.” It is interesting to me how we often define hospitality to be as at ease as we can with its demands. By the way we limit it to the niceties of civility, the way we domesticate it to our bourgeois ethos, you’d think that hospitality had nothing to do with its kin, hospital.
Part of it may simply be the issue of maturity, of growing “beyond” the black & white-worldview-type thinking– but not necessarily throwing it out the window. (The first part of that sentence sounds like it could be a liberal let’s-not-be-bound-by-right-and-wrong statement, but it doesn’t have to be).
A four-year-old, for example, may simply need to be told “don’t cross the street.” Eventually you’ll be able to add some nuance to that rule (look both ways first; if you see a car coming wait until it passes, etc.) Eventually you just say, “See you later–be careful.”
The older the child gets, the more these always-do/always-don’t rules become general guidelines. “Don’t hang out with the bad kids” may be necessary at age 12. Eventually the youth needs to learn to remember both “a companion of fools suffers harm” and the story of Jesus eating with the tax collectors & sinners and apply them to his situation.
Perhaps this could be the case with the worldview stuff (though I’m not 100% certain what the worldview stuff is). Maybe a young person needs to have some things put in black and white before they’re asked to make judgments about the gray areas. The problem is when you never grow out of the rules-to-fit-any-situation stage to mature into using wisdom and love to apply the things you have been taught through the years.
hey, thanks for the shout-out, mark.
Thanks for shining a light on something most of us have just taken for granted. I had a recent experience with a group that was convinced they had discovered “the” Biblical worldview. That was OK until they realized I was not in full agreement with them. Its the first time in several decades that I have felt like a pagan.