Sw - Session 1 - Homework

How People View the World Five Basic Worldviews

Session 1 Homework

introduction Everyone believes in something and what we believe in shapes what we do and how we do it. e way we view the world is a matter of faith, whether we are Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, agnostic, or atheist. Worldviews provide a picture of the nature of things and comprise the basic assumptions that people use to interpret and organize reality: where is heaven, where is earth, what is visible and invisible, what is real and unreal, how do spirit and matter relate, what is the connection of the divine to the human, how can we explain evil, what constitutes a better human future and how should we get there. A worldview, then, is a way of seeing. It’s like a pair of glasses or contact lenses through which we see and make sense out of our world and our experiences. Unlike glasses, however, our worldview is not just what find another pic of person in glasses we see, but how we see everything else. It includes our assumptions, beliefs, images, metaphors, values, and ideas that we inherit and construct from our family, our teachers, our peers, our community, and our culture about how the world works and the way things are. Even though we normally can’t articulate our worldview and are even unaware of its existence – it oftentimes functions on an unconscious level – our worldview is literally part of who we are. Indeed, worldviews are not philosophies, theologies or even myths or tales about the origin of things. ey are the bare-bone structures with which we think; the building blocks of the social structures in a culture; they empower us to provide some sense of order in our world; they are the foundation of the house of our minds on which we erect symbols, myths, or systems of thought. Not surprisingly, then, as we go through life, many of us find it next to impossible even to want to question our inherited worldview. Others of us do exactly that: we rethink, we imagine other ways of seeing things, and we sometimes experience radical conversions out of one worldview and into another. Given this definition, worldviews do not stay in the dusty pages of the obscure tomes of a professor’s library. ey are diffused across oceans, through societies, and over the centuries, shaping individuals, cultures, nations, and the flow of history. Interestingly, there has only been a handful of basic worldviews in all of human history. In this article we will examine a simple typology of these basic worldviews that have shaped human existence over much of human history. is is an important task since understanding the biblical worldview against the backdrop of other existing worldviews will help us better appreciate the world out of which the biblical writers composed their poetry, philosophical essays, narratives, sermons, sayings, songs and prayers. The Integral Mission of the Church



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all is one worldview is worldview slides the spaces of heaven and earth, spirit and matter, divine and human, together. Since God, as seen in this worldview, doesn’t hide in a corner of his territory, but fills it all with his presence, God’s space and ours are basically the same, spirit and matter are interwoven in a seamless whole; or to put it another way, they are two ways of talking about the same thing. Within this “All is One” worldview, there are three variations which slightly differ from one another. e first, animism or paganism (including its modern forms, the Esoteric and New Age), is rooted in the Far East and the world’s folk religions. Spirits animate everything, and everything moves toward oneness of spirit. ere are gods of the sea and the sky, gods of fire, or love, or war; the trees are divine, the rivers are divine – everything is divine or at least has the spark of divinity about it. Even though animists distinguish between the various gods, in the end most of them would acknowledge that all gods worshiped are rolled into one. Even humans are part of the whole, they assert, and the sooner we surrender our delusional individuality to the whole, the sooner we aid the healing of the world. Animistic Hinduism forms the pinnacle of this point of view. While not all animists go as far as adherents of animistic Hinduism , all accept the reality of a world of high religion which is occupied by the great gods and lies in a realm that transcends worldly phenomena. ese gods should not be bothered or disturbed, since they don’t mingle with the seen world anyway. Instead, animists believe they can connect with the world of spirits, which occupy a middle space between ultimate reality and the seen world. e interrelationship with this spirit world is mediated by shamans, sacred books, spirits, ancestors and others who have access to both worlds. Curses, amulets, charms, crystals, sacrifices and other attempts to bargain with or ‘handle’ the unseen world are commonplace for people operating from this worldview. A major drawback to animism is that even while filled with evil, the universe, according to animists, is basically amoral. at kind of amoral polytheism can get messy and complicated. In a multi-godded The Integral Mission of the Church



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world, when something goes wrong, you never fully know who to blame or what to do. You could blame it on some god or goddess who is out to get you, perhaps because you’d forgotten to buy him or her off. But then again, the gods themselves can be capricious and you often live in fear of their erratic behaviors, which you may or may not be able to placate. As a consequence of the messiness of amoral polytheism, many ancient thinkers suggested that it was easier, neater, and cleaner to suppose that the ‘divine’ is a force which permeates everything. Known as pantheism, this second variation of the “All is One” worldview states that God and the world are basically the same thing: the world is, if you like, God’s self-expression. God is everywhere, and everywhere is God. Or, God is everything and everything is God. e main obligation of human beings, thus, is to get in touch with, and in tune with the divinity within themselves and within the world around. Apart from Eastern religions – foremost philosophical Hinduism and Buddhism – pantheism was popular in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds of the first century, mainly through the philosophy called ‘Stoicism’. After centuries in decline in the West it has once again become increasingly popular in our own times. In reaction against the deadness and decay of the modern materialistic worldview (see below), many people in the West are turning to the New Age for answers. So we are seeing a revival of Eastern animistic and pantheistic religion, which teach people to transcend this physical world and concentrate on the ultimate goal – spiritual enlightenment via the encountering of divinity in and around us. Proper pantheism is quite demanding, however, and lacks good explanations for the nature of evil. You really have to try hard to believe that there’s divinity in everything, including wasps, mosquitoes, cancer cells, tsunamis, hurricanes and oppressive governments. at’s at least partly why some thinkers today have opted for a third variation of the ‘All is One’ worldview, called panentheism (‘pan’ = everything, ‘en’ = in, ‘theos’ = God) – the view that, though everything may not be divine as such, everything that exists is ‘within’ God. In contrast to pantheism, where everything is God, in panentheism everything is in God and God in everything. Spirit is at the heart of everything, and all creatures

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are potential revealers of God. e panentheistic worldview sees heaven and earth as the inner and outer aspects of a single reality. It affirms spirit at the core of every created thing. But this inner spiritual reality is inextricably related to an outer form or physical manifestation. God is not just within me, but within everything. e universe is suffused with the divine. Panentheism among others is evident in the Native American representation of Sky Father and Earth Mother, and in the Chinese yin/ yang figure. ere are some things to be said in favor of panentheism. Indeed, it is the worldview which most resembles the theistic worldview, embraced by the biblical writers. Yet, as with animism and pantheism, the problem with panentheism is that it too has a hard time giving a serious account of the radical nature of evil. When everything (including yourself ) shares in, or lives within, divinity, there’s no higher court of appeal when something bad happens. Nobody can come and rescue you. e world and ‘the divine’ are what they are, and you’d better get used to it. e only final answer (given by many Stoics in the first century and by increasing numbers in today’s Western world) is resignation to the way things are or suicide.

the dualist worldview e dualist worldview holds the space of heaven and earth, spirit and matter, divine and human firmly apart. God’s space and ours do not intersect; they are a long way away from one another in this worldview. e gods, supposing they exist, are in their heaven, wherever and whatever that is. ey’re enjoying themselves – not least because they aren’t involved with us here on earth. Indeed, according to this worldview, the gods do not intervene, either to help or to harm us. So the right thing to do is to escape life, either by death itself, or by some kind of super-spirituality which would enable us to enjoy a secret happy life here and now and hope for an even better one after death, or to enjoy life as best as we can, since that’s the only life we have. Within the dualist worldview there are two variations, which significantly differ from one another. e first variation of the dualist worldview became the breeding ground for the philosophy broadly known as Gnosticism, which emerged in the latter part of first century A.D. Historically it is also associated with The Integral Mission of the Church



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Manichaeism, Platonism and Neoplatonism. In this worldview, creation was the fall. Spirit is good, matter is evil. e world is a dark and evil place; a prison into which spirits have fallen from the good heaven. Having become trapped in bodies, these spirits became subject to the deformed and ignorant powers that rule the world of matter. Consequently, sex, the body, and earthly life in general were considered evil. e religious task was to rescue one’s spirit from the flesh and these powers and regain that spiritual realm from which one has fallen. is could be accomplished by “gnosis”, a special knowledge of hidden truth, which would rescue us from the evil world. Gnostic philosophy already infiltrated the early church. In first-century Ephesus, for example, the apostle John fought a heretical Gnostic sect led by Cerinthus, strongly condemning them for spiritualizing important concepts of the Christian faith and downplaying the goodness of God’s creation. Notwithstanding, over the course of the church’s first four centuries of existence, aspects of Gnosticism grafted themselves, like a virus, into the Christian church, pushing Christians to uncritically embrace the ancient Greek dichotomy dividing the universe into a spiritual realm, considered sacred, and a physical, viewed as profane. Particularly under the famous North African church father Augustine, Neoplatonic dualism was introduced into the church’s doctrine, and influenced the Western church for centuries to come. ough Augustine rejected important aspects of Platonic dualism, he embraced the basic notion that a human’s soul was superior to his or her body. e church ever since has been unable to purge Gnostic and Neoplatonic philosophy from popular Christian teachings. e legacy endures in Western culture, if not throughout the entire church as we will see below. Gnosticism furthermore continues to be a powerful factor today in spiritualism, sexual hang-ups, eating disorders, negative self-images, and the rejection of one’s body. e main issue with Gnosticism is that it promotes escapism from this-worldly affairs as the solution to the problem of evil and denies the goodness of God’s creation. e second variation of the dualist worldview is related to both Epicureanism and Deism. e Greek Epicurean philosophy, which was propagated during the centuries surrounding Jesus’ life, surmised that human beings should get used to the idea that they are alone in the

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universe; the gods will not intervene, either in helpful or harmful ways. e best we can do is to enjoy life as best as we can, since that’s the only life we have. For the Epicureans this meant being quiet, careful, and moderate. Even though some have subsequently taken ‘Epicurean’ to mean a life of sensuality and hedonism, Epicurus and his followers reckoned that sort of life didn’t work. You got more genuine pleasure, they thought, from being steady and sober. Separating God’s sphere and ours in the Epicurean fashion, with a distant God whom you might respect but who wasn’t going to appear or do anything within our sphere, became very popular once again in the Western world of the eighteenth century as the movement known as Deism. Intellectuals of the time – the so-called age of Enlightenment - were seeking to free humans from established church dogmas steeped in a Neoplatonic worldview and free humans for their own autonomy. For the Deist, the world may indeed have been made by God (or the gods), but there is now no contact between divine and human. e Deist God wouldn’t dream of ‘intervening’ within created order; to do so would be untidy, a kind of category mistake. Indeed, like a clock maker, God wound up the universe, founded it on natural laws, and allowed it to run its course. In this perspective, then, our universe is best compared to a machine; humans are at the center of this machine, encouraged to enjoy it, study it, control it, operate it, and make use of it for human progress. In this machine-like universe humans were at the center, encouraged to enjoy creation and make us of it for the purpose of human progress. Deism continues to be widespread, as many people in the Western world assume that when they talk about ‘God’ and ‘heaven’ they’re talking about a being and a place which – if they exist at all – are a long way away and have little or nothing directly to do with us. e real problem with Epicureanism in the ancient world, and Deism in ours, is that it provides no basis for human spirituality, and the establishment of justice. Indeed, if you were reasonably well-off, you could shrug your shoulders at the injustice experienced by those less-privileged, enjoy life in modesty, and still expect to do all right.

the materialist worldview is view became prominent during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, but is as old as Democritus (who died about 370 BC). In many ways it is the antithesis of the world-rejection of Gnostic spiritualism and a natural progression from Deism. If God does not communicate with humans and is not immanent, why do we need a god at all? e The Integral Mission of the Church



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materialist view, then, claims that there is no heaven, no spiritual world, no God, no soul; nothing but what can be known through the five senses and reason. e spiritual world is an illusion. ere is no higher self; we are mere complexes of matter, and when we die we cease to exist except as the chemicals and atoms that once constituted us. Matter is ultimate. Over the past two hundred years the materialist worldview, which provides the skeleton of modernism, has become the dominant ethos of most universities, the media, and popular culture as a whole. It is no longer just a Western phenomenon, since modernity is deeply embedded in the modern world economic system and in contemporary information technology, both of which are being extended wherever Coca-Cola is sold. It generally advocates for a view of history, which assumes that the Western type of democratic capitalism is perfect, complete, the climax of a long process stretching back to the Magna Carta; a blueprint for progress, for all other nations to follow. Within the materialist worldview, then, there are two variations, which are slightly different. ere is the ‘hard’ or philosophical materialism that sees the universe as devoid of spirit. All being, processes, and phenomena are explained as manifestations of matter, since reality is ultimately physical. Some also call this variation atheistic materialism, secularism or naturalism. According to philosophical materialism, truth is what the senses can perceive and is thus relative. Morals are relative. Values emerge from social consensus. e real problem of evil is that people are not thinking and acting rationally, and Enlightenment rationalism is going to teach them how and create the social and political conditions to make it happen. Philosophical materialism has penetrated deeply even into many religious persons, causing them to ignore the spiritual dimensions of systems or the spiritual resources of faith. Materialism has become so pervasive in modern society that it is virtually identified with the scientific point of view, even though the new quantum physics has moved beyond materialism into a reenchanted universe.

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e second variation of the materialist w o r l d v i e w c a n b e c a l l e d ‘s o f t ’ materialism associated with consumerism, self-gratification, and an absence of spiritual values. Since there can be no intrinsic meaning to the universe, except self-gratification, people have to create values, purposes, and meanings for themselves. ere is no right and wrong except what society agrees upon for purposes of survival and tranquility. Hedonism, greed, and sexual license are natural outcomes of ‘soft’ materialism. Another outcome is the increasing nihilism of postmodernity. Truth, according to many postmodernists, is in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, truth – including the modernist ideology of ‘progress’ – as such does not exist, because it is always the result of someone’s claim to power. erefore, the best way to deal with truth is to deconstruct it. Meanwhile evil is real, powerful and very present. Yet, postmodernism, while rejecting modernism’s naïve view of evil, puts no solution to the problem of evil in place. Not surprisingly, postmodernity encourages a cynical approach to life: nothing will get better and there’s nothing you can do about it. e problem with both philosophical and ‘soft’ materialism is that people want to believe that the world is more than a consumer’s paradise, that they themselves are more than food for worms, and that some clue as to what we should do about the pervasiveness of evil around us, does indeed exist. e horrors of the twentieth century were evidence for many that reason – that great hope of children of the Enlightenment – often degenerates into rationalization, and is frequently powerless to restrain recalcitrant passions. Indeed, the recent eruption of spirituality in the West proves that millions of people have become disenchanted with the materialist worldview.

the theological worldview As the materialist worldview began sweeping through the academy and influencing popular culture, Western Christians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adopted two basic positions which show great resemblance with the two variants of the dualist worldview: Deism and Gnosticism. Indeed, the theological worldview is most closely connected to the dualist worldview, though there are differences. So-called liberal theologians and mainline Christians of The Integral Mission of the Church



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Protestant and Catholic persuasion, embraced aspects of the materialist worldview; but in reaction to atheistic materialism they created or postulated a supernatural realm, paving the way for the so-called supernaturalist wor ldvie w, the first variant of the theological w o r l d v i e w . Acknowledging that this higher supernatural realm could not be known by the senses, they conceded earthly reality to science and preserved a privileged ‘spiritual’ realm immune to confirmation or refutation. e materialists were only too glad to concede to the theologians the ‘heavenly’ realm, since they did not believe it existed anyway. e slogan that many clergy were taught in seminaries was ‘Science tells us how the world was created, religion tells us why.’ is means splitting reality in two and hermetically sealing off theology from the discoveries of science and science from the wisdom of theology. In contrast to Deists, however, for many liberal Christians faith is a reality. ey assert that God can and does supernaturally intervene in worldly affairs (calling these types of interventions ‘miracles’), but only chooses to do so very seldom. ey also acknowledge that by God’s grace it is possible to enter into communication and even a relationship with God. Yet, this relationship often has no real connection to everyday life. In practice, liberal Christianity is often akin to functional Deism, albeit with more openness to spiritual experiences. Another difference is its view on afterlife. Proponents of liberal Christianity claim that after death, they will spend eternity in God’s realm, heaven; something Deists simply don’t say much about. As the materialist worldview spread, with few exceptions, fundamentalists and evangelical leaders opted out of the debate. In effect, they abandoned reason and called the church to ‘just believe’. Faith was removed from the public square and privatized. Instead of defending the eminently defensible Judeo-Christian worldview, the evangelical (including Pentecostal and charismatic) church disengaged from all that is considered ‘secular’ as it retreated to a constricted place called the ‘sacred’. Adopting the second variant of the theological worldview, tens of millions of evangelical believers today operate from a worldview, which we can call

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“ e v a n g e l i c a l G n o s t i c i s m” . “ E v a n g e l i c a l G n o s t i c i s m” i s a descendant of the Gnostic heresy and much more connected to the ancient Greek wor ldview than the Biblical Worldview. Its i n fl u e n c e o n t h e e vangelic al church’s theology, and the daily life of its people, can be seen in numerous areas. For space reasons, this article will only mention four such areas: a) Faith, theology, morals, missions, the devotional life, and evangelism are placed in the spiritual realm and considered of first importance. Reason, science, business, politics, art, music, sex, and meeting people’s needs, on the other hand, occupy the lower, physical realm. is separation of the physical and spiritual realms, of the body and soul, is part of the explanation for how evangelical Christians have come to understand Christian witness, and specifically evangelism, as being unrelated to community development and social action. Loving God is spiritual work, and loving neighbors takes place in the material world. So evangelism (restoring people’s relationship with God – saving their souls) is spiritual work, while social action (restoring just economic, social, and political relationships among people – aiding their bodies) is not. Typical mission statements, hence, include such assertions as ‘the principle objective of the church is to win souls for Jesus Christ and safeguard them against eternal hellfire and damnation in the life beyond the grave’. b) Many evangelical Christians consider the greatest callings those of the pastor or missionary. In doing so, they betray their dualistic worldview – since they declare that the pastor or missionary is in “full-time ministry” and engaged in “spiritual pursuits”, implying that all other Christians engaged in “secular pursuits” are “part-time Christians”. c) Similar to the supernaturalist worldview, evangelical Gnosticism asserts that God can and indeed does intervene in earthly affairs. In contrast to liberal Christians, however, evangelicals (particularly those of charismatic and Pentecostal persuasions) believe that God does not do this occasionally, but desires to intervene as often as his children muster the faith to ask him for a miracle. us, miracles are not rare, but occur quite frequently in certain branches of the evangelical community.

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Despite their frequency, however, miracles are still interpreted from within the confines of the theological worldview which separates the spheres of the natural from the supernatural. What’s more, since miracles are considered supernatural and thus connected with the spiritual realm, they are given more weight than say a transformational health initiative that reduces child mortality rates by half and brings new hope to an entire region. d) e evangelical Gnostic viewpoint furthermore seems to say that God sent his own Son to teach us how to escape our sphere on earth and go to live in God’s sphere, heaven, instead. Indeed, in the final analysis this false dichotomy to limit salvation to individual people’s souls and remove the restoration of creation from God’s will, has led many evangelical Christians to believe that God’s redemptive work takes place only in the spiritual realm, while the world is left to the devil. Accepting the heretical Gnostic worldview which presupposes that the earth is bad and beyond redemption, it is no wonder, then, that a great majority of evangelical churches around the world are indifferent to environmental protection and embrace the view about a grand apocalyptical disaster in which the earth will be destroyed. According to many ‘end-times theologies’, nuclear cataclysm is, in fact, a central part of God’s plan for the near future of the earth. So since things are going to continue much as they are or even get worse in this wicked, dark vale of tears, until the Lord returns, we shouldn’t even try to make things better; at best we’d only be repairing a car which is in any case soon going to plunge over a precipice. In both the supernaturalist and evangelical Gnostic variations of the theological worldview, the price paid for this schizoid view of reality has been the loss of a sense of the whole and the unity of heavenly and earthly aspects of existence. us Christians of all persuasions today suffer from “split personalities”, unwittingly acting like functional atheists. eir lives are divided into compartments: the “religious”, what they do when attending church on Sunday morning or a Bible study; and the “secular”, their jobs, recreation and education during the rest of the week. Never hearing the challenge to be consciously and integrally Christians in their daily lives, they are conformed to the pattern of this world and are often seduced by the consumerism of ‘soft materialism’ , which – in parts of the evangelical community – has been theologically dressed up as prosperity gospel.

the theistic (biblical) worldview e theistic worldview has significant parallels with the panentheistic worldview, and to a lesser extent with aspects of the animistic worldview. Yet, there are also substantial differences. Rooted in the ancient Near East, and embraced by the Judeo-Christian community, theism asserts that The Integral Mission of the Church



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heaven and earth, matter and spirit, divine and human, are not coterminous. Nor are they separated by a great gulf. Instead, they overlap and interlock mysteriously in a number of different ways. More organic, and less mechanistic, God, according to the theistic worldview, created the universe both animate and inanimate, spiritual and physical, separate from himself but not independent from him. He is both transcendent (outside of his creation) and immanent (present within it and involved in history); at work from within the world as well as from without. Ultimate reality thus, is personal and relational. While there is order, there is also breathing room and real possibilities to choose and make a life. Ultimate reality is not unchangeable, as Platonism asserts; we have a measure of freedom, but our freedom doesn’t eradicate God’s freedom. God has freedom, but God’s freedom doesn’t extinguish ours. In contrast to the dualist and materialist worldviews, then, the universe is not a closed system; it is open to God’s purposes and intervention; it allows communication and interaction between the physical and spiritual realms. Indeed, in the theistic worldview everything earthly has its heavenly counterpart, and everything heavenly has its earthly counterpart. Being permeable, there is constant activity and movement going on between both worlds. Every event thus is a combination of both dimensions of reality where every material reality has a spiritual dimension, and every spiritual reality has physical consequences. ere can be no event or entity that does not consist, simultaneously, of the visible and invisible. e theistic worldview, then, embraces the complexity which we ought to expect if human life is in fact as intricate and many-sided as we often experience. While the theistic worldview was not solely embraced by classical Judaism and early Christianity (Islam is a slightly different version of the theistic worldview), theism is the one worldview which has most significantly shaped the Bible. In the remainder of this article, we will seek to flesh out the biblical worldview embraced by biblical writers, particularly in terms of their cosmology and anthropology. It is encouraging to note, that a significant number of evangelical and liberal Christians in recent decades are turning their backs on the supernaturalist and evangelical Gnostic worldviews, respectively, and seeking to re-appropriate the theistic worldview into their theology and way of life.

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C o s m o l o g y : Fo r t h e ancient Israelite and the early Christian, the creation of the world was the free outpouring of God’s powerful love. e one true God made a world that was other than himself, because that is what love delights to do. And having made such a world, he remained in a close dynamic, and intimate relationship with it, without in any way being contained within it or having it contained within himself. e Old Testament, for example, insists that God belongs in heaven and we on earth. Yet it shows over and over again that the two spheres do indeed overlap, so that God makes his presence known, seen, and heard within the sphere of earth. First the ‘Tent of Meeting’ and later the Temple in Jerusalem, became the main focus of ancient Israelite belief in the overlap of heaven and earth. is was the primary place, according to Israelite tradition, where heaven and earth met. When pilgrims and worshippers went up to Jerusalem and into the Temple to worship and offer sacrifices, they wouldn’t have said that it was as though they were going into heaven. ey would have said that they were going to the place where heaven and earth overlapped and interlocked. is sense of overlap between heaven and earth, and the sense of God thereby being present on earth without having to leave heaven, lies at the heart of Jewish and early Christian theology. is means that God is at work in both worlds and that what he does in heaven will inevitably happen on earth. You see that magnificently expressed in the Lord’s Prayer; since God rules in heaven, he will someday fully rule on earth. e biblical worldview, thus, doesn’t offer escapism as the solution to the problem of evil, but asserts that God is working at restoring his reign on earth. One day his kingdom will be fully established on earth as it is in heaven. Indeed, through Jesus, God’s reign on earth has already begun. In Jesus and his reign heaven and earth overlap. Anthropology: In contrast to the Greek dualism of the Gnostic worldview, the ancient Israelite and early Christian did not affirm that the soul is like a bird caught in the cage of the body. ey thought that the body, animated by the soul, integrally constituted the human being. Both body and soul were good. Indeed, they never separated the body and soul, as the Greeks did, and never spoke of humans as consisting of two or three

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substances: body, soul and mind. Human beings, to the ancient Israelite and early Christian, were a unity made in the image of God. Consequently they did not see the human body as having immortal and mortal aspects that separate after death. ey affirmed the belief that the spiritual dimension of human beings, is not, by nature immortal; their souls could not outlive their bodies. Death didn’t release the bird from the cage (i.e. the soul from the body), showing a transition from mortal life to eternal life. Instead, they understood that death caused a person’s existence to cease; when the body died, the soul too ceased to exist. ey believed, however, that the resurrection overcame death by raising the deceased person to new life. In Judeo-Christian thought, then, a person did not go from physical life to spiritual life, but went from bodily life to death to a new, resurrected bodily life. It is vital to understand the place of death and bodily resurrection in the holistic worldview of Judeo-Christian thought. Most likely because of their holistic anthropology, the ancient Israelite and early Christian, showed an interest in the whole person, and thus cared for both the spiritual and the bodily needs of people.

reflection questions Worldviews determine what we are allowed to believe about the world. While many people are influenced by different worldviews, there is always a primary worldview by which we live. Examining each of the basic worldviews that exist today will hopefully allow us to gain a better understanding of the biblical worldview embraced by the writers of the Bible. It may also allow us to identify those chunks of worldviews present in our psyches that contradict the biblical worldview. Without first examining each of these basic worldviews and then identifying which of them influence our thinking and acting, we may continue to read the Bible through worldview lenses that have us completely misinterpret a writer’s intent. us, it is crucial that we take time to reflect on our lives, values and thought patterns, so that we can make a conscious choice between these worldviews and take off those worldview lenses that contradict the basic assumptions of the biblical worldview. Write your answers and thoughts to these questions into your Application Journal and be prepared to share your findings in the next class session. The Integral Mission of the Church



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Of the five basic worldview structures and variations presented in this article, which worldview most closely describes the actual practice (activities, lifestyles, behaviors, decisions) of you and your church? Are there assumptions and thought patterns from other worldviews that also influence your thinking and acting? Would you say that aspects of the Gnostic worldview have affected you and your congregation? How do these effects play out in the life of your congregation? In the graph below circle either “Gnostic” or “Biblical”— to best describe the actual practice. Circle one number that describes how much these worldviews influence you. If you circle 6, you believe your actions are based solely on a biblical worldview. If you circle 2, you believe your actions are based on a secular or Gnostic understanding of life, with minor biblical influence.

Add the numbers from the two graphs. Stop and ask God to reveal how to “change your score.” What worldview lenses would you need to take off to better understand the Bible and its implications for your life? What steps could you or your church take to live according to a more biblical worldview?

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application journal

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endnotes

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