by Keith Bassham
During our summer hiatus, it was inevitable that we should return to a truckload of issues and news, and hardly any of it can be ignored even if we wanted it so. Politics, entertainment, science, religion, sports, economics, and health are today all so culturally intertwined that the old conversational taboo — religion and politics — no longer makes any sense. Welcome to life in the 21st century. And the question of worldviews.
A worldview is a lens we use to make sense of the world around us. We all have a worldview, and our worldviews are shaped and are being shaped often without our knowing it. The Apostle Paul acknowledged that shaping pressure, writing, “ … be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind …” or as one translator puts it, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds” (Romans 12:2).
Worldviews are revealed fairly quickly. If you ever find yourself thinking, or hear someone else saying, “That’s just the way things are,” you have found a part of a worldview. You see that quite a bit in social media discussions. We like to think we have formed our conclusions about life coolly and objectively and logically. Nonsense. Much of what we think and believe is in bags that were packed for us – by our ancestors, by our teachers, by the songs and stories we hear — you get the idea. Some is placed there by our experience, and some we actually thought through, and some, if you are a believer, comes to us by faith.
And often, when we see a worldview that seems as though it came from another planet, we are dumbfounded. This is the case, for me at least, when I remember Palestinians dancing jubilantly at the news of the World Trade Center attack, when I see reports of Muslim mass executions of Christians in the Middle East, when an American, Dylann Roof, admits to wanting to start a race war by killing nine people in a church in South Carolina, and when a Planned Parenthood executive is filmed discussing the best way to cause the death of an unborn baby so as to preserve certain “valuable” body parts (who is to receive those body parts, what Planned Parenthood is pleased to call “tissue” is not entirely clear at this point). I wonder how the worldviews that presaged these events came to be.
And then I wonder how we, as those who possess Christ, those of us who have become containers of “the hope of glory,” (Colossians 1:27) can best manifest that hope and do some squeezing of our own. If anything has been made clear to me by the recent events, including the recent Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage covered in this issue of the Tribune, it is this: the preaching — and the demonstrating — of the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be our priority now and always.