Worldview, Attitude, and Discipleship

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 8:08 pm by Robert Hunt

Worldview, Attitude, and Discipleship 2015-03-13T20:08:57-06:00 Robert Hunt

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

In a previous blog I suggested that what Christians need in the modern world, or post-modern world, is not so much a Biblical worldview as a Biblical attitude or orientation within whatever framework for understanding of the world best makes sense of the data we have at hand. In this post I want to elaborate – although I would add that I suspect that much of what I’ll be saying parallels the work of emergent church theologians.

At its roots the concept of a Biblical worldview taps into three felt needs: a nostalgia for Christendom as it supposedly existed in Europe before the modern world, the desire for an alternative to a modernity that appears to deny the validity of Christian experience, and a hope that emerging two-thirds world Christianity will rescue the “old world” from itself.

It also provided a great tool for streamlining the evangelistic work of missions. Missionaries no longer needed to spend years in the field learning to understand the people among whom they worked. Instead they could sit in a classroom where they would first learn a Biblical worldview, then learn from anthropologists about the worldview of their target people, and finally in the comfort of their U.S. study hall devise a program of translating the gospel to convert one worldview to the other.

The problem with the concept of a Biblical worldview is that such a worldview never existed until it was constructed by 20th century evangelicals and the first 21st century pope. The Bible itself is a record of multiple emerging worldviews. One of the difficulties faced by New Testament interpreters is that the teaching of Jesus can be understood in different ways depending on which of the then contemporary Jewish worldviews, if any, he and his followers inhabited. (Gerd Thiessen’s “Shadow of the Galileean” offers a lovely fictional representation of this problem.)

The people of Jesus’ time, like the readers of this blog, lived within the constantly shifting intersection of multiple cultures. In this they simply continued a long tradition of diasporic Jews and Greeks. They didn’t have a single worldview – they lived in a worldview marketplace. And, whether they were Jews or Greeks or something else what Jesus brought to them wasn’t a worldview. It was the gospel: a gospel that could reorient their lives within any of multiple worldviews. This remained true throughout the history of Christianity in the Middle East and Europe. Ancient Christians in the ruins of the Roman cultural world didn’t share a worldview with newly baptized Christians in the hinterlands of northern Europe’s dense forests. And almost certainly not with the Indianized Christians on the Malibar coast or the Eastern Christians struggling to survive in Xian China. They didn’t have a common worldview – they had a common Lord.

And this remains true today. Jesus doesn’t call us to a worldview, he calls us to discipleship. This is not comforting in the sense that modern Americans want. Disciples don’t get to chart their course across a well-mapped landscape toward an “X” marking God’s Reign. The maps are ever shifting on the winds of cultural change and the “X” is always just beyond a horizon that encircles us; a boundary rather than an end. Our task is therefore to cultivate a relationship with Jesus, drawing from our treasure house both that which is old and that which is new. The comfort he offers is not that he will show us where we are going, but that he’s going too.

Christian Identity

Previous Post

August 14, 2011

The Biblical Worldview versus Modernity

Next Post

August 19, 2011 Is God a Christian?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Christian Identity Christian Muslim Relations Home Page Inter-Religious Dialogue Uncategorized

Select a Month September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 July 2010 May 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz