In The Universe Next Door, James Sire’s classic text on worldview, he argues that worldviews can be expressed “as a story or in a set of presuppositions” (5th ed., IVP Academic, p. 20). However, even if a worldview is expressed in a set of presuppositions, these statements nonetheless create a “story” that explains its perspective on reality.
In order to describe and analyze worldviews, Sire proposes seven basic questions (p. 22-23):
- What is prime reality—the really real?
- What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around?
- What is a human being?
- What happens to a person at death?
- Why is it possible to know anything at all?
- How do we know what is right or wrong?
- What is the meaning of human history?
The answers to these seven questions end up telling an overall story about reality.
In line with this approach, in Introduction to Christian Worldview:Pursuing God’s Perspective in a Pluralistic World (IVP Academic, 2017), a book I co-wrote with Tawa Anderson and David Naugle, we describe and analyze worldviews by answering four key questions:
- What is our nature?
- What is our world?
- What is our problem?
- What is our end?
These four questions generally align with the overall storyline that God has revealed to us in the Scriptures. Although the Bible was written over 1,500 years by over forty or so different authors, the Bible tells a cohesive and comprehensive story about reality. The four-part metanarrative presented in the Bible can be summarized as 1) Creation, 2) Fall, 3) Redemption, and 4) New Creation.
God created all things good for his glory and our good. He created humanity in his image that we might know, love, and enjoy him, and rule over his creation as his vice-regents. Yet, through Adam, humanity rebelled against God, bringing sin and death into the world and separating us from God. To redeem his creation, God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life of obedience, died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, and rose again on the third day. He now reigns over creation at God’s right hand. Through repentance and faith in Christ’s atoning work on the cross, we are forgiven and can know, love, and enjoy God as we were created to do. Now we await the return of Christ, which will bring about a new heaven and new earth where God’s people will dwell forever with God in a world free from sin, pain and suffering, and even death.
As we seek to help our kids develop a Christ-centered, biblically-faithful worldview, we not only want them to repent of their sins and trust in Christ for their salvation, but we also want them to understand their place in God’s redemptive plan. Understanding how they fit into each of the four parts of the biblical story provides them answers to who they are, why they are here, and what their future holds. They do not have to figure it out. They don’t have to guess. They don’t have to invent their own meaning and purpose. God in his grace and through his Word, has already told us.
The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) begins by answering one of the greatest questions in life: What is the chief and highest end of man? Using today’s language we might say, “What is the purpose of life?” The catechism answers with, “Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God and fully enjoy him forever.”
This is the God-centered vision we pray our kids will believe, live out, and cherish all their days.
Soli Deo Gloria
W. Michael Clark, Ph.D., J.D.
Founder, Golden Oak Society
