WORLDVIEW and REASON

What in the World Is Going on?
The skeptical world deserves thoughtful responses from Christians in the form of rational explanations of the Christian faith and worldview.
I am not talking about your personal testimony or your presentation of the Gospel as things in desperate need of thoughtful content. I am not talking about your relative capability compared to other Christians to recite scripture as the means to relay the wisdom of God to the lost world. I am not talking about your ability to eloquently convey religiously oriented doctrines in a way that would have to compel the most hardened atheist to admit you have some measure of credibility.
However, I am talking about the general ability of Christians to think about, reason, and communicate their faith or worldview. I am talking about the present measure of credibility the institutional evangelical Christian church has in American society. I am talking about your own willingness to stand against the strong current of secular ideals for the intents and purposes of exposing false propositions and flawed traditions. I am talking about a mentality shift we may desperately need as a Christian people, which would bring us to a place of having more patience and love for those who we may typically see as the opposition. You know, the ones who—whether out of anger, ignorance, or contempt—insult and dismiss anything related to the existence of God, the organized church, or the need for Jesus Christ to be their Savior.
There is a mentality shift needed among Christians so they can present thoughtful insight exposing the irrational thinking of unbelievers. This contrasts with the all-too-common approach of quietly residing in the margins of society due to our insecurities while thinking we cannot rationally compete in the marketplace of ideas. After all, the pastor hasn’t equipped us. There was no small group with a related study topic. Surely, we have other cares in life to spend our time and mental energy on. There really is no residual long-term side effect with that approach, right? Life goes on. Culture evolves. Society naturally slips further away from the truth of God, and the church people still meet on Sunday mornings to do their thing quietly out of the way.
The cultural battle for the minds of our children and young adults seems like an inevitable losing effort. We gave them a head start when we blessed their little hearts with a public education, a TV in their bedroom, and a cell phone in their pocket for all their premature informational needs. And now we are paying the price. Self-absorbed, sexually focused, and secular minded characterize the offspring living in our own houses. The school raises them five days a week, and maybe the church gets them for one hour a week if Dad and Mom are faithful to attend. As they get older, the battle of worldviews increases. Little Johnny becomes big John the Xbox king; little Bella becomes Isabella the social media poser. While Hollywood continues to effectively train their cultural mind, their parents have no relevant affirmative voice. They were just trying to give them a normal upbringing so they wouldn’t feel weird about their parents’ Christianity. They all went to church every Sunday and even on Wednesday nights but can’t understand what happened when the kids went off to college and abandoned their so-called faith. Now young adults, they are full-fledged participants in society, consuming the diet of the media, voting for elected officials, and pursuing their selfish ambitions apart from any regard for God.
Where or how do we start to advance in the battle? It is a battle for truth in a WAR of worldviews and reason with the salvation of souls at stake. The battles for truth and values within our society are not seen as fights we should be engaged in. Being assertive as a Christian is not a good look, right? Jesus never called the Pharisees offspring of vipers and His own disciples a faithless and perverted generation or flipped tables of commerce within the temple walls, correct? We are good at galvanizing the “Christian bubble,” which is our personalized internal world of church life and activities. We think the condition of the world outside of that bubble is not for us to worry about. The problem is that the very people we need to reach with our message of deliverance, hope, love, purpose, truth, peace, and salvation reside outside the bubble in a world of rebellion, sin, distraction, hopelessness, and deception. Many of these people are creating public policy, instilling systemic educational values, and enacting laws based on secular humanistic agendas.
This book is not about promoting you to puff your chest and pick a fight either publicly or privately through the pride of some newly acquired intellectual ammunition. I defer to our model, the life and character of Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Jesus lived focused on the will of the Father. His actions were directed by spiritual concerns and a love for people. He didn’t pick fights as a sport for defending His doctrine. The fight naturally came to Him. That’s what happens if you are a godly light and salt residing on this earth. It was inevitable for Jesus because the unrighteousness of sinful man was confronted by the righteous truth of the one eternal and holy God. Jesus was ready through a posture of humility, patience, and self-control. He had profound responses because He had the wisdom and truth of God the Father.
Does entertaining the subject matter of confronting your worldview with a systematic rational approach sound like fun to you? Let me anticipate your answer to that question. “No it does not sound like fun to me. Going to Disney World sounds more like fun!” In fact, it sounds so much like “non fun” that we have put our collective selves in a position of looking the other way as the body of Christ. The ignorance-is-bliss mentality has taken us over. The experiential truism of “What I don’t know can’t hurt me” has never been more real to us.
As an example, if we do not know how to begin to rebut the scientifically accepted theory of a “big bang” event and evolution process, then we will probably not find ourselves engaged in evangelizing to people who strictly embrace science as the only truth. Why? Because we have no answer to respond with. We will never find ourselves drawn to those who are trapped in their intellectual strongholds and need deliverance in the form of a rational view of God and our origin. After all, do we not have to know about the science in opposition to the big bang and evolution in order to successfully defend our creationist position with credibility? No, we do not, and this book will help you with that.