Part I: What is a worldview?

“Whachu talking ‘bout Willis?”—TV show Different Strokes

In any discussion, at least those that are profitable, one must define terms. Yes, it is boring, and maybe picky, but even as you all communicate, you demand clarity, otherwise there is confusion. One striking example is of Johnny, a 16-year-old, who is told by his father that under no circumstances is he to go to any party. Now he may take his father very literally, and never go to a party. But Johnny’s girlfriend, also sixteen, invites him to a rave (which is another name for a party) and he consents to go. Why? Dad said I can’t go to a party, but he didn’t say “Don’t go to a rave.” Hopefully the point is made. We are certainly made in the image of God, yet at the same time woefully sinful. While many are charitable and grant that rave falls under the category of party, nonetheless, defining terms helps clear up confusion and sinful tendencies of the human heart and motive to suppress the truth (Romans 1:18ff). Picky? Yes! Helpful? Yes, and YES!

What then is a worldview? Simply put a worldview is the way you understand everything, from the little stuff (why do squirrels hop around instead of walking?) to the big stuff (why are we on Earth, what is our purpose)? Some have called it a grid, laid over life, by which you interpret meaning and significance. Only humans have it, and all humans have it. Whether you are an atheist, a Buddhist, a materialist, or a Christian Scientist—everyone has a worldview.

This is a big topic, and rightly divided and delved would take thousands of pages. I will attempt to impart a basic Christian worldview in less than fifteen pages over the next five months! I am glad for men now dead who recorded their thoughts and have done the hard work. My favorite saint is Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus (5th century). It was said of him that he had “no original thought” in any of his writings. This was meant as an insult. But I take that to be the highest of praise. For in reading his work I find the quotations of Scripture and early church fathers to be the best way “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” All of that to say, I have little, if no original thought in these articles. I borrow heavily from the saints, and of course sacred Scripture. It would be my greatest joy to have written on my tombstone, “Herein lies a man who had no original thought in his bones!” To God be the glory!

With that said, here is a basic scheme for understanding and even formulating a worldview. I take it from Lesslie Newbigin, the great missionary of the last century. He proposes the following questions for how everyone builds a worldview:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. What is wrong with the world?
4. How can what is wrong be made right?

Four simple questions, yet the answers are as diverse as the Amazon jungle! Maybe a good place to start would be to zoom in on our own western culture. Let’s examine this dominant worldview as a backdrop to a Christian worldview. Hopefully we will develop a Christian worldview by answering these same questions in future articles.

Voddie Baucham, a minister and professor, has called the dominate worldview of our age, postmodern, materialistic relativism. That’s a mouthful! Let me unpack that phrase through illustration, using popular music, especially the most influential, hip-hop rap.

1. Postmodernism—Artist: Outkast. Song: “Hey Ya” This song is a postmodern classic. And it teaches us the meaning of postmodernism beautifully. The song begins with a wonderful reminiscing about his parents sticking together and teaching him the meaning of love. Sounds legit. Truth is honored. Faithfulness and love lauded. But, the song takes a quick turn with these words: “Y’all don’t wanna hear me you just wanna dance!” The following lines move from a shallow reverberation of a quick sexual experience in his car (as opposed to meeting the girlfriend’s parents!) to the final call for all the females to get on the dance floor and “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Two opposite, even opposing moralities are put side by side in one song: faithfulness, love, commitment, and meaningless sex and dirty dancing. This song is postmodernism at its best. We as a culture sustain a few moments of sanity about truth (even costly truth), but what we really want is what feels good and is easy and so often immoral. And that is where we end each day. What your parents or grandparents would find to be opposite and untenable views are joined together now without thinking anything is wrong!
2. Materialism—Artist: T-Pain. Song: “Buy U a Drank” This one is pretty straightforward. T-Pain is in a club, and he is singing to a girl trying to woe her to come home with him for a one night stand. Here are his pickup lines: “Imma buy you a drank ooo wee/oh imma take you home with me/I got money in the bank/shawty watchu think bout that/find me in the grey Cadillac.” T-Pain, like many hip-hop artists, thinks that money, material possessions and the human body are the summa bonnum of life. That is, they are the chief end of living. What is most important is stuff. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, and use it to manipulate women to get sex (and girls use your body to get men and their money!). Truth be told, this is our culture. We live for the material. We are happy when we have it, and we whine when we don’t. Peter Kreeft, a philosopher, once said, “If your friend comes up to you smiling, you will probably ask, ‘Did you just win the lottery?’” Put postmodernism and materialism together, and you have a powerful worldview that moves easily past truth and ethics and highly values the material for personal selfish gain above valuing people made in God’s image and even God himself.
3. Relativism—Yo Gotti, “9–5” Relativism has overlap with postmodernism yet emphasizes more the interpersonal relationships. After all, if we are all chucking truth when we feel like it (postmodernism) and all wanting what we want when we want it (materialism), then what is to keep us from killing each other? Relativism! It’s the pseudo-peacemaker in our culture’s worldview. Yo Gotti is a Memphis rapper who tells his story in “9–5”. He grew up with parents who taught him to work hard and get an honest job. They also warned him against drug use. The father turned out to be one of those “do as I say, not as I do” types because his son caught him doing drugs. Nonetheless he pressed on, and tried to go to college and work a nine-to-five job. This didn’t last. The money was poor. He got hurt by a girl. Response? His new goal in life was to have sex with as many women as possible, and his new job was running drugs. More fun, more money. The refrain goes like this, “Tried me a 9–5 but didn’t work, put my trust in [girl] and wound up gett’in hurt.” For Yo Gotti, if a 9–5 had worked, and his girl remained faithful, he would’ve continued as is. But, when it didn’t work, he turned to a life of sexual immorality and illegal drug trafficking. The relativist motto could go like this, “That’s fine for you if it works, but if it don’t work for me, I can do my own thing.” This of course has infected everything in our culture!

So let’s put these three together: postmodern, materialistic relativism. Get what you want, regardless of truth and wisdom, in anyway possible, as long as it doesn’t hurt or show intolerance to others. Of course we need to ask the four questions of this worldview, but we will do that in future articles as we formulate a Christian worldview. For now let’s familiarize ourselves with the terms.

If I could give you one passage of sacred Scripture to study till our next article, it would be Judges 17–21. See if you can find these three terms at work even in Israel who was in covenant with God. You probably won’t see a one-to-one correspondence, yet the frequent refrain in the book of Judges is this: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That would be a good summary of postmodern, materialistic relativism! But what was the reason given for such personal moral decay and foolish philosophies? Verse 25 begins, “In those days there was no king in Israel.” Our culture’s worldview, which so often we in Christ’s church adopt, is absent of our true King. We are ruled by anything and everything. And the King is ignored, erased, and made out as irrelevant to daily life. I hope these articles assert God’s rightful rule and restore for us his worldview!

I would encourage you, if you are reading this article, to listen to music, watch TV and movies, and read magazines together with your friends, parents, or teachers/mentors; and see if you can smoke out these three things. Our first need is recognizing our own adoption of such philosophies (i.e., postmodernism, materialism, and relativism) that are contrary to sacred Scripture. Then we can begin to see God’s worldview more clearly.

Rev. Nate Smith is Assistant Pastor and Director of Youth Discipleship at Riveroaks Reformed Presbyterian Church, Germantown, Tennessee.

1. Jude 3.
2. Voddie Baucham is an African American pastor in a virtually all-white suburb of Houston, Texas. He is also an adjunct professor at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. You can get more information about him and books on worldview at www.voddiebaucham.org.
3. Rap lyrics can be found at www.songlyrics.com. I would encourage all youth to find lyrics to the songs y’all listen to. Get a friend or one of your parents, or even a youth worker (pastor, intern, etc.) and walk through the lyrics line by line and see what they are saying. I know a lot of the music youth listen to has curse words, sexual innuendos, and much more, but do we ever really stop and think about what we are hearing? What you hear does shape you in ways that often you don’t recognize.
4. Rap lyrics can be found at www.songlyrics.com.
5. Listened to sample on iTunes, www.itunes.com.
6. See paragraph 5 above.
7. Judges 21:25