Christian worldview

An agnostic historian recently suggested that Christians who want to be heard in a skeptical culture: “Preach the weird stuff.”

In a culture as secularized as ours, writing or reading an article like this one counts as spiritual achievement. It is easy for Christians who maintain a modicum of spirituality to be lulled into a sense of moral superiority over our more secular friends. The answer is to understand and embrace the standard to which our Father calls us today.

Our cultural emphasis on personal “truth” is literally killing people. How should we respond biblically? The Christian worldview centers in following Christ. It can be pictured by our Lord’s famous metaphor: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me” (Matthew 11:29). This means (a) we follow his leadership, (b) we serve no one before him, (c) we work where he leads us rather than the field of our choosing, (d) our work accomplishes a larger purpose than we can know, and (e) our work is not finished until he says it is.

When Christians use the term "free will," it often refers to the debate over whether we choose God or God chooses us. On the other hand, when the term "free will" is used by evolutionary biologists, the debate is over whether choice itself is real, whether it is an illusion produced by our brains.

With medical decisions becoming increasingly financially charged and the popularity of euthanasia continuing to rise, Christians everywhere should be thinking about medical ethics, joining hospital ethics boards, running for office, and becoming health care workers. And every Christian should embrace our God-given and culturally-escalated task, in this crisis and beyond, of bearing witness to certain eternal truths: that every human being has inherent dignity and value, and no one should ever be sacrificed on the altar of "efficiency."

Scientists who assume that human exceptionalism is a religious hang-up will see any animal spotted resembling human behavior as evidence that there’s nothing exceptional about humans. This same commitment to disproving human exceptionalism is also at work in the search for extraterrestrial life. The view that best corresponds to reality is the Biblical view, described by the audacious proclamation of Psalm 8, that humans were created “little less than God ... and crown[ed] with glory and honor,” and the audacious job description described in Genesis, that humans have “dominion” over all creation, including the “birds of the air.”

As we face an uncertain future, God assures us: “Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6). How can we answer this call to courageous engagement with our fallen culture?

A recent survey has found that nearly a third of self-described evangelicals do not believe that Jesus Christ is truly God.

Our culture-wide unfamiliarity with the great books can be directly attributed it our culture-wide unfamiliarity with the Good Book. An undergrad from a small liberal-arts school, Abel is consistently surprised that his peers do not know even the best-known accounts in the Bible.

According to a new survey, a majority of evangelicals (52 percent), Pentecostals/charismatics (69 percent), mainline Protestants (58) and Catholics (69 percent) say there is no absolute moral truth that applies to everyone, all the time.