Worldviews 101Sample

Irreconcilable Differences

If Postmodernists, for example, are correct in their belief that no metanarrative can describe reality, then Christianity is doomed; Christianity depends on understanding real universal truths, such as all people having sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Rom. 3:23); God loving the whole human race (John 3:16); and Christ dying for our sins (1 John 2:2). If these universal claims are false, than Christianity is implausible.

If the assumptions of Secularism and Marxism are correct, anyone proclaiming the existence of the supernatural is potentially dangerous. Secularists and Marxists understand this quite clearly. For instance, Marx viewed all religion as a drug that deluded its adherents—an “opiate of the masses.” Some Secularists even portray Christians as mentally imbalanced. James J.D. Luce, the assistant director of Fundamentalists Anonymous, says, “The fundamentalist experience can be a serious mental health hazard to perhaps millions of people. His organization works to “heal” Christians of their “mental disorder”—their Christian worldview. Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson takes this a step further, contrasting liberal theology with aggressive “fundamentalist religion,” which he describes as “one of the unmitigated evils of the world.”

On the other end of the spectrum, New Spiritualists reject the personal God of the Bible as a dangerous myth separating people into religious factions. They seek instead a “higher consciousness.” Best selling New Spiritualist author Neale Donald Walsch claims that God revealed to him personally that “no path to God is more direct than any other path. No religion is the ‘one true religion.’” In an interview with Bill Moyers, filmmaker George Lucas said, “The conclusion I’ve come to us that all the religions are true.” Lucas and Walsch’s conviction is shared in the wider population, even among many Christians. According to George Barna, 63 percent of the teenagers surveyed agree that “Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and all other people pray to the same god, even though they use different names for their god.” So the claim continues, if we don’t have peace on earth yet, it is only because some wrongly persist in their exclusionist beliefs.

Either Christians correctly describe reality when they speak of a loving, wise, just, personal, creative God, or they are talking nonsense. The basic tenets of the Bible cannot blend well with the non-Christian claim that we are good enough to save ourselves. We say only one view fits the facts: Christianity. God, Creator of the universe, saw its importance, loved it, loved us, so that he sent his son to redeem it—and us.

Clearly adherents of other worldviews strongly disagree with our conclusion that only Christianity fits the facts. Some of them are prepared to attempt to dismantle our arguments. So the battle for truth is on. What case can each worldview make for itself? That’s what we’ll discover in the full book.

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