THE POWER OF THE BIBLE'S STORY

'In a confused and contradictory world, the grand theme of Scripture offers a coherent worldview. Instead of the choppy narrative of the single-person play, the gospel invites us into God's great story, of which our singular part contributes to the great mosaic of salvation beauty, in which we are invited to partner with the Creator God Himself in the redemption of the world and the marriage of heaven and earth. This story, even whispered between people on a suburban train, is grander and more resonant than the biggest budget Hollywood blockbuster or the cleverest viral marketing campaign.' 

Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church, p.144. 

SEX & WORLD VIEWS

'...sex is never just about sex. Rather, one's beliefs about sex, gender and marriage mediate their broader views of life. The meaning we attribute sexuality is inseparable from the stories we live by, the wounds we have received, and the relationships we have (or do not have). The contemporary debates over sexuality, therefore, are not ultimately conflicts about what happens under the covers but are a collision of world views.' 

Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church: How Pastoral Ministry Shapes a Theology of Sexuality' in Beauty, Order and Mystery: A Christian Theology of Human Sexuality (Edited Hiestand & Wilson), p.46.

SEARCHING FOR TRUTH

'...each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position she or he already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some of the individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, p.105.

DISCIPLING CHILDREN TODAY

'The remarkable power of technology to shape worldview along with the enormous amount of time young people spend with its many forms make the small amount of time they spend in Christian nurture seem almost negligible by comparison. The best preaching, worship, and education programs of a church simply cannot compete with television, movies, the internet, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and the ever-expanding list of technologies that shape our vision of the world. If families are not taught to make radical, costly, and time-consuming commitments to nurturing their children, the future of the church as a missional community in the West will be bleak.' 

Michael Goheen in Jason B Hood, Imitating God ion Christ, p.215. 

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

'...I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry - which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination - is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the (evangelical) church. In other words, I think we must admit that the marketing industry is able to capture, form, and direct our desires precisely because it has rightly discerned that we are embodied, desiring creatures whose being-in-the-world is governed by the imagination. Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they "get it": they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures - creatures who are orientated primarily by love and passion and desire. In sum, I think Victoria is in on Augustine's secret. But meanwhile the church has been duped by modernity and has bought into a kind of Cartesian model of the human person, wrongly presuming that the heady realm of ideas and beliefs is the core of our being. These are certainly part of being human, but I think they come second to embodied desire. And because of this, the church has been trying to counter the consumer formation of the heart by focusing on the head and missing the target: it's as if the church is pouring water on our head to put out the fire in our heart.'

James KA Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.76. 

WHAT DRIVES US

'...an orientation toward a particular vision of the good life becomes embedded in our dispositions or "adoptive unconscious" by being pictured in concrete, alluring ways that attract us in a non cognitive level ... By "pictures" of the good life I mean aesthetic articulations of human flourishing as found in images, stories, and films (as well as advertisements, commercials, and sitcoms). Such pictures appeal to our adoptive unconscious because they traffic in the stuff of embodiment and affectivity. Stories seep into us - and stay there and haunt us - more than a report on the facts. A film like Crash gets hold of our hearts and minds and moves us in ways that textbooks on racism never could. This is because it is a medium that traffics in a wavelength, as it were, that is closer to the core of our being. Such compelling visions, over time, seep into and shape our desire and thus fuel dispositions toward them.' 

James KA Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.58. 

THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW

'Only the Christian worldview locates the problem with the world not in any part of the world or in any particular group of people but in sin itself (our loss of relationship with God). And it locates the solution in God's grace (our restoration of a relationship with God through the work of Christ). Sin infects us all, and so we cannot simply divide the world into the heroes and villains. (And if we did, we would certainly have to count ourselves among the latter as well as the former). Without an understanding of the gospel, we will either be naively utopian or cynically disillusioned. We will be demonizing something that isn't bad enough to explain the mess we're in; and we will be idolizing something that isn't powerful enough to get us out of it. This is, in the end, what all the other worldviews do. 

The Christian story line works beautifully to make sense of things and even to help us appreciate the truth embedded in stories that clearly come from another worldview.' 

Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavour, p.162.

WORLDVIEWS

'The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way that culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk of thinking "worldviewishly" is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyse it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosphers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers rather than artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which "worldview thinkers" are privilege while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.

But culture is not changed simply by thinking.'
Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.64.

WORLDVIEWS

'The purpose of a worldview is to explain our experience of the world  - and any philosophy can be judged by how well it succeeds in doing so. When Christianity is tested, we discover that it alone explains and makes sense of the most basic and universal human experiences. This is the confidence that should sustain us when we bring our faith perspective into the public arena, whether in persoanl evangelism or in our professional work.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.396.

WORLDVIEWS

'Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.370.

WORLDVIEWS & EVANGELISM

'...the truths of experience are not self-explanatory. Instead they merely constitute the data that cries out to be explained within an overarching worldview. Why is it that the bits of matter we call our bodies have consciousness and are able to navigate the wolrd so effectively? Why are we capable of building societies with some measure of justice and compassion? As I write, NASA has just released stunning new photographs of the surface of Mars - but why is it possible for humans to calculate a trajectory and land a spacecraft on another planet? What kind of world permits these fascinating acheivements? Our claims as Christians is that only a biblically based worldview offers a complete and consistent explanantion of why we are capable of knowing scientific, moral and mathematical truths. Christianity is the key that fits in the lock of the universe.

Moreover, since all other worldviews are false keys, we can be absolutely confident, when talking with nonbelivers, that they themselves know things that are not accounted for by their own worldview - whatever it might be. Or, to turn it around, they will not be able to live consistently on the basis of their own worldview. Since their metaphysical beliefs do not fit the world God created, their lives will be more or less inconsistent with those beliefs. Living in the real world requires them to function in ways that are not supported by their worldview.

This creates a state of cognitive dissonance, and at that point of tension, the gospel may find an opening. In evangelism we can draw people's attention to the conflict between what they know on the basis of experience and what they profess in their stated beliefs - because that is a sure sign that something is wrong with their beliefs.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.318.

WORLDVIEWS

'A wonderfully simple and effective means of comparing worldviews is to apply the same grid of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. After all, every worldview or ideology has to answer the same three sets of questions:

1. CREATION: Translated into worldview terms, Creation refers to ultimate origins. Every worldview or philosophy has to start with a theory or origins: Where did it all come from? Who are we, and how did we get here?
2. FALL: Every worldview also offers a counterpoint to the Fall, an explanation of the source of evil and suffering. What has gone wrong with the world? Why is there warfare and conflict?
3. REDEMPTION: Finally, to engage people's hearts, every worldview has to install hope by offering a vision of Redemption - an agenda for reversing the "Fall" and setting the world aright again.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.134.

WORLDVIEWS

'...worldview is not an abstract, academic concept. Instead, the term describes our search for answers to those intensely personal questions everyone must wrestle with - the cry of the human heart for purpose, meaning, and a truth big enough to live by. No one can live without a sense of purpose and direction, a sense that his and her life has significance as part of a cosmic story. We may limp along for a while, extracting small installments of meaning from short-term goals like earning a degree, landing a job, getting married, establishing a family. But at some point, these temporal things fail to fulfill the deep hunger for eternity in the human spirit. For we were made for God, and every part of our personality is orientated toward relationship with Him. Our hearts are restless, Augustine said, until we find our rest in him.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity fropm Its Cultural Captivity, p.55.  

WORLDVIEWS

'...everyone tends to have two worldviews: a confessional, professed worldview and a functional, actual worldview; the one they claim - even to themselves - and the one they really live. We may carry around a well-crafted, theologically precise, and biblically consistent worldview. But against the tug of daily living, that professed worldview does not always exercise the pull it should. At the street level of daily life, the way we actually live reveals what we truly believe.

For example, many Christians who have the sovereignty of God as a principle element of their professed worldview still fret over their circumstances or work too hard to establish control over things. Many Christians say they are sinners, yet stubbornly defend themselves when confronted with an area of sin in their life. Many Christians claim to believe that the most important things in life are unseen, yet they invest their time, energy, and resources in a life-long pursuit of physical pleasure and comfort.'

Paul David Tripp, Broken-Down House, p.216.

MEANING

'I had a motive for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to to, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in a way that they find most advantageous to themselves...For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.'

Aldous Huxley in Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelism: Engaging People's Hearts the Way Jesus Did, p.67.

IDEOLOGY

'The essence of ideological statements is that, unless our political senses are developed, we will fail to spot them. Ideology is released into society like a colourless, odourless gas. It is embedded in newspapers, advertisements, television programmes and textbooks - where it makes light of its partial, perhaps illogical or unjust take on the world; where it meekly implies that it is simply stating age-old truths with which only a fool or maniac would disagree.'

Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, p.214.