The purpose of developing a Christian worldview is not to tell the world how wrong they are so we can feel better about our faith. Quite to the contrary, when we develop an authentic Christian worldview, we find goodness, truth and beauty wherever it is to be found, even in a fallen world. This is why people go on Holy Land tours to feel closer to their faith and celebrate who they are. It is a view of the world that empowers people to be truly successful in life by calling them to be good stewards of the grace of God and fulfill their calling as God’s image bearers in the earth. It is a worldview that gives purpose and significance to people and has the power to transform culture. Developing a Christian worldview is one of the most important things we can do as believers and is therefore one of the key objectives at Fortis Academy. The most powerful way we can impact our students to become lifelong learners that continually mature their Christian worldview is to lead by example. That is why we have a Christian worldview book club that meets at Fortis on Monday nights at 7:00 p.m. As our students see the passion we have for learning and the fruit it bears in our lives, hopefully they will learn that it is far more important than just an element of a Fortis education.
Tomorrow we will begin reading “The Drama of Scripture” by Bartholomew and Goheen. You are welcome to join us. The purpose of the book can be summed up from a quote: “Australian sociologist John Carroll, who does not profess to be a Christian, believes that the reason that the church in the West is in trouble is because it has forgotten its story. In his view the “waning of Christianity as practiced in the West is easy to explain. The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task- to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to the times.” This is serious because the “whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world. It is public truth.” And so an essential part of our theological and missional task today is to “tell this story as clearly as possible, and to allow it to subvert other ways of telling the story of the world.”[1]
One of the goals of a Fortis education is to reconnect with the educational tradition of the West that was birthed from the story of Christianity. Throughout history, Christianity has been able to grip the hearts and imagination of generations so completely that many were willing to die, not only for their faith, but that we might read the scriptures in our native languages. They had a Christian metanarrative that was contagious. They read the same scriptures, but those scriptures were synthesized into a comprehensive worldview that was worth living and dying for. An example of how different people can see the story of scripture can be seen from another quote:
“A Hindu scholar of world religions once said to Newbigin: I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion- and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.[2]
That Hindu scholar was able to look at the whole drama of scripture and became excited because of its radical implications. Such convictions wed with passion are contagious and is the type of worldview we will need to develop for Christianity to once again have a powerful impact on our culture.
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