The Importance of Worldview to Evangelism

Gregory Alan Thornbury, Ph.D. - Dean of the School of Christian Studies

“Take every thought captive to obey Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5

Is there anything you can think of which is indispensable to your personal identity? Perhaps your hometown, family or friends come to mind. While all these things are very important aspects of what it means to be you, they do not travel physically with you everywhere you go. They are not present during those private moments while you are sitting in your room. But one thing sticks closer to you than your own reputation: it is your worldview.

The term worldview has been around for a long time. First employed by philosopher Immanuel Kant, the concept of worldview (from the German word Weltanschauung) took on new significance for Christians with the publication of James Orr’s The Christian View of God and the World. But it has only been recently that Christians have taken interest in worldview studies as an essential task in the mandate to become serious Christian thinkers.

Although numerous good definitions for worldview might be offered, philosopher Ronald Nash’s concise wording is superior: “A worldview is a conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously judge or interpret reality.” Notice the total scope indicated by the language. Our worldview acts upon both our conscious and unconscious impressions about everything around us. If you have ever met someone who had a blind spot (anything from body odor to an annoying personal habit) you know that we human beings are not always aware of our own weaknesses. Our blind spots extend to our beliefs about reality, and since we are incapable of going it alone on our own wisdom, or even the collective wisdom of a community (with corporate blind spots), we must rely upon an objective truth-teller. This truth teller is God, the Creator of reality. He alone can steady our rudder in the sea of competing worldviews.

In broad terms, the Christian worldview examines data by placing events in the following theological categories: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. In other words, whenever we encounter an idea, we ask whether the issue relates variously to how God created the world, how human beings through sin have corrupted the world, or how the world through the work of Jesus Christ is in the process of being redeemed and restored.

Developing a Christian worldview is important for the Christian because it tempers the way we interact with and assess the fallen world in which we live. Some Christians fall into the trap of being “shocked” about beliefs which secular persons express on a given issue. For example, numerous Christians exhibited stunned disbelief when it became widely reported that Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer wrote that a healthy chimpanzee is of more moral value than a human infant born with serious birth defects. While we may be saddened or even outraged that a person teaching such nonsense holds an endowed chair in ethics at one of America’s most prestigious universities, we must not be shocked. When encountering such news, the Christian worldview thinker would immediately realize that Peter Singer operates from the modern worldview of naturalism. Naturalism hold that the only thing that exists – and matters – is the material universe. If one seriously holds this view, one cannot believe in God or morality, and in Singer’s case, one cannot arbitrarily discriminate between humans and animals. Our worldviews are roadmaps to the soul: they show us where we begin, and where we will end.

If you are not sensitive about the centrality of worldviews to the way people live, you will be an uninformed – and potentially dangerous – Christian evangelist. Unfortunately, too many well-meaning Christians have tried to share their faith with a non-Christian only to offend unnecessarily the person they are trying to reach for the gospel. In other cases, a simple evangelistic inquiry turns ugly when the non-Christian turns out to be an articulate and intelligent defender of his own worldview, much to the chagrin of our evangelist untrained the very worldview he is promoting. Frankly, if you fail to understand the importance of worldviews, you might very well write your own name in the previous scenario. I offer such remarks not to frighten anyone away from being passionate about sharing the good news of Jesus Christ to the world. Nor am I trying to say that sharing one’s faith is a task reserved only for Christian intellectuals. The gospel message is simple and clear, and can be believed with childlike faith. What I am pointing to is every Christian’s responsibility to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, a task which our Lord himself referred to as an issue of not only the heart but of the mind. (Mt. 22:37) Biblical worldview thinking, like discipleship, is a lifelong art which must be consistently practiced and studied to be done well.