1: “Everyone knows that things in this world are seriously out of whack,” Timothy Keller writes in his book Every Good Endeavor.
“No one claims that his or her own life is as it should be, let alone the whole world,” he notes.
“There is something wrong within us. Nothing ever seems to make us happy or fulfilled except in the most fleeting way.
“There is also wrong among us. The world is filled with poverty, war, suffering, and injustice.
“Something seems to have knocked the whole world off balance. But what is it? Who deserves the blame? And what is the solution?”
2: In his classic book, Seven Theories of Human Nature, Leslie Stevenson identified a set of prominent thinkers whose views on human nature influenced entire societies.
“Plato saw our main problem as being the physical body and its weakness,” Tim writes, summarizing Leslie’s insights.
“For Marx it was unjust economic systems;
“For Freud it was inner unconscious conflicts between desire and conscience;
“For Sartre it was not realizing we are completely free since there are no objective values;
“For B.F. Skinner it was not realize we are completely determined by our environment;
“And for Konrad Lorenz it was our innate aggression because of our evolutionary past.”
As human beings, we all have a worldview. A story that gives our lives meaning. Each worldview poses an answer to the following three questions:
1: How are things supposed to be?
2: What is the main problem with things as they are?
3: What is the solution and how can it be realized?
Plato, Marx, and Freud each believed that “some part of the created world [is] the main problem and some other part of the created world [is] the main solution,” Tim suggests.
“The protagonists and antagonists of their respective world-stories are played by finite things.
“Thus, Marxism assumes that our problems come from greedy capitalists who won’t share the means of economic production with the people. The solution is a totalitarian state.
“Freud, on the other hand, believed that our problems come from repression of deep desires for pleasure. The villains are played by the repressive moral ‘gatekeepers’ in society, like the church. The solution is the unrepressed freedom of the individual.”
Many people today have a worldview traced back to Plato and the ancient Greeks. “They think the problem with the world rests in undisciplined, selfish people who won’t submit to traditional moral values and responsibilities. The solution is a ‘revival’ of religion, morality, and virtue in society.”
3: Which brings us to the seventh “theory” in Leslie Stevenson’s book.
“The author points out how different Christianity is from the other alternatives,” Tim writes. “He observes that ‘If God has made man for fellowship with Himself, and if man has turned away and broken his relationship to God, then only God can forgive man and restore the relationship.’
“In other words,” Tim reflects, “the biblical worldview uniquely understands the nature, problem, and salvation of humankind as fundamentally relational. We were made for a relationship with God, we lost our relationship with God through sin against him, and we can be brought back into that relationship through his salvation and grace.”
The Christian worldview answers the three questions above in this way. Plan: Creation. Problem: Sin and the fall. Solution: Redemption and restoration.
Christians believe “the Gospel is the true story that God made a good world that was marred by sin and evil, but through Jesus Christ he redeemed it at infinite cost to himself, so that someday he will return to renew all creation; end all suffering and death; and restore absolute peace, justice, and joy in the world forever,” Tim writes.
“The vast implications of this gospel worldview—about the character of God, the goodness of the material creation, the value of the human person, the fallenness of all people and all things, the primacy of love and grace, the importance of justice and truth, the hope of redemption—affect everything, and especially our work.”
Believing in the Christian gospel prevents us from being “either naïvely utopian or cynically disillusioned,” Tim writes. Otherwise, “we will be demonizing something that isn’t bad enough to explain the mess we are in; and we will be idolizing something that isn’t powerful enough to get us out of it.
“This is, in the end, what all other worldviews do.”
More tomorrow!
________________
Reflection: Which of Leslie Stevenson’s seven theories of human nature most aligns with my views?
Action: Journal about my reflections on this topic.
What did you think of this post?
