GAP Year Program

A worldview is simply how you explain things.  It refers to how you (usually without conscious thought) assimilate, interpret, and respond to the events, people, and objects that you encounter every day.  Daily life confronts you with a landslide of events and facts—something that was true even before the invention of the internet.  Add YouTube and social media to the equation, and you are faced with a veritable avalanche of information and experiences every twenty-four hours.  Because you are a rational, thinking being created in God’s image, your mind works incessantly to arrange and interpret those facts and experiences. 

For example, if you have a biblical mindset, when you meet a person, you immediately pigeonhole that person as a man or a woman.  Why?  Because, you know that God created the human race male or female (Gen 1:27).  That distinction is important:  because of sexuality and divinely assigned roles, you don’t respond to men and women in exactly the same way.  Let’s say the person you meet is a man named Billy.  In the course of a short discussion, you discover that Billy is the brother of a one of your friends at church, and moreover, that Billy is also a believer in Jesus Christ.  Male, biological family, believer—each of those facts about Billy alters slightly (or significantly) how you respond to him.  Without consciously thinking about it, you fit each fact that you have learned about Billy into a pre-fabricated mental framework that includes your view of men and women, the importance of biological family, and the priority of spiritual family.

In other words, your daily thinking consist of two components:  facts and framework.  All day long you are encountering facts (specific bits of information).  Furthermore, you are ceaselessly fitting those facts into a framework in your mind that allows you to interpret and respond to those facts.  As a Christian, it is of utmost importance that your underlying mental framework or interpretational grid be biblical, not self-contrived or worldly.  In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that there is nothing more important to your daily walk with Christ than making God’s view of the world, relationships, events, and decisions your view.  Thankfully, God gave us the book of Proverbs to do precisely that.

CLOTHES, CLOSETS, AND HANGERS

Perhaps this concept of a worldview is new to you.  If so, let me explain it by means of an illustration.  Imagine a heap of freshly washed laundry lying on your bed.  The clothes in that pile are randomly intermingled, waiting for you to put them away in your closet.  For the purpose of this illustration, those clothes represent the facts and experiences that you encounter every day.  Preferring not to have a disorderly bedroom (are you paying attention, single men?), you attack the pile.  You place each item of clothing on a hanger, and hang it in its appropriate spot on the bar in your closet.  To make future access easy, you place all the shirts together, arranging them by style and colour.  In the same way, you hang your dress pants in their assigned section of the closet, brown with brown, blue with blue, black with black.  All this careful arranging is important:  tomorrow morning in the pre-dawn darkness when you are trying to decide what to wear, the process of selecting clothes and getting dressed will be conveniently streamlined. 

The shirts and dress pants in that illustration represent individual facts and experiences; the closet, however, represents your mind.  What’s more, the clothes bar and hangers in the closet represent the framework or the worldview that you unconsciously employ to organise and interpret facts and experiences for convenient use later on.  For example, when you met Billy, without thinking about it, you immediately hung all your thoughts about him in the appropriate locations in the closet of your mind:  male, family member of a friend, believer in Jesus Christ. 

Here’s the question:  Is your framework for interpreting Billy—and everything else—God’s framework?  To show you how important it is that your interpretive grid be biblical, let me give you a second, completely different illustration.

COCONUTS AND CONCUSSIONS

Suppose you are walking along the beach of a lovely South Sea island, and a coconut falls from the palm tree above you, hits you on the head, knocks you unconscious, and you collapse into a heap on the sand.  Your worldview—the pre-existing bar and hangers in the closet of your mind—will, to an incredible degree, shape how you interpret that event.

For example, a person who holds an animistic worldview, that is, one who believes that every rock, tree, and coconut is animated by a living spirit, will think, “I must have offended the spirit of the coconut palm by violating some taboo.  Next time I will walk on the left side of the coconut tree, rather than on the right side, and the coconut gods will not be angry at me.”

However, if your worldview is dominated by ancestral spirits rather than tree spirits, after you regain consciousness, you will explain the coconut assault differently:  “My ancestors are angry at me because I have failed to acknowledge them properly.  I will cut open this coconut and pour out its milk as a sacrifice to them to appease their wrath.”

The person with a witchcraft or voodoo worldview will explain the coconut crisis in a third fashion:  “My neighbour is angry at me because my goats got into his mealie field and devoured half his crop.  To take revenge, he has undoubtedly paid a witchdoctor to cast a spell to make this coconut tree bombard me. To counteract my neighbour’s malicious scheme, I need visit a witchdoctor myself and hire him to pronounce an incantation to protect me from further assaults.”

All three of those worldviews focus on invisible, unpredictable, and malevolent interventions by the spirit realm in order to explain the painful occurrences of life. 

The opposite extreme is represented by the western materialist.  He scoffs at what he considers to be childish and superstitious explanations for his throbbing head.  He flatly denies the existence of the supernatural; therefore, there is no space in the closet of his mind for events instigated by the spirit realm—not even events initiated by God.  Therefore, he explains the coconut calamity in an entirely different manner.  He marvels at the random concurrence of time, schedule, wind, and weather that caused him to pass under that tree just as a dehydrated coconut stem snapped due to the persistent tug of the earth’s gravity.  For fun, he pulls out a slip of paper and calculates how f=ma and the laws of trajectory caused the coconut to intersect with his coconut.  For him, chance and choice are sovereign; therefore, the providence of God has no place in his calculations.

Finally, we come to a biblical worldview.  Because he has read the book of Proverbs, the Christian knows that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7).  Therefore, he starts with God, the Person the materialist flatly refuses to acknowledge.  God is the clothes bar on which the Christian hangs every experience, including coconut assaults.  However, because he has a fully biblical worldview, he does not recklessly run to the supernatural to explain the coconut onslaught.  He does not hold what is nothing more than a Christianised version of a magical worldview.  Why?  Based on the Bible’s teaching, he knows that God created the physical universe with an underlying wisdom and order that produces a predictable consistency of physical events—a predictability that we often call the laws of nature (Prov 3:19-20; 8:22-31). 

Therefore, when he regains consciousness, the biblically minded Christian acknowledges the same physical realities of germination, weather, and mathematics that the materialist did.  However, unlike the materialist, he knows that God exercises direct, personal, meticulous control over all natural phenomena, including humidity, wind, weather, gravity, and gradually weakening coconut stems.  Furthermore, he knows that God’s sovereignty extends to the superintending of human choices, including his own choice that very morning about when and where to go for a walk, and at what pace to take his stroll.  He embraces the reality of Proverbs 20:24, “Man’s steps are ordained by the LORD, how then can man understand his way?”  Therefore, when the island stops spinning, the man with a biblical worldview acknowledges both the natural and the supernatural aspects of his coconut experience—physics and sovereignty.  He has space in his mental closet for both factors.  In his worldview, the fear of the Lord includes math, meteorology, and divine providence.

So, what is a worldview?  A worldview is how you explain a coconut hitting you on the head!  Seriously, a worldview is the framework—biblical or otherwise—that you employ in order to arrange, explain, and respond to the events of daily life.  Your worldview is always there, lurking just below the surface, guiding all your thoughts, choices, and actions.  In light of that, could anything be more important than constructing and maintaining a truly biblical worldview from Scripture?  To live under the lordship of Jesus Christ, to walk by the Spirit, to live out the fear of the Lord—however you prefer to say it—you must embrace God’s grid for interpreting the world. 

Joel James is the Pastor-Teacher of Grace Fellowship Church in Pretoria; Academic Dean and Lecturer at Shepherds’ Seminary; Head of Grace School of Ministry Biblical Counselling Training; author of many excellent books, and regular conference speaker.