Christian Worldview
Different from the Rest
One cannot live without developing opinions about the nature of reality, so
every well-defined culture and faith naturally introduces its members to a way
of seeing the world. While we can easily name many different worldviews,
perhaps the five most important ones are: 1) the Chinese, 2) Indian, 3) Muslim,
4) secular humanist, and 5) the Christian view. These views are usually shared
by many nation-states and are civilizational in nature.
Standing Apart: China and India
The classical Chinese view is that
the Middle Kingdom, by its dignified, virtuous ways, draws all the nations to
itself. Human life is confined to this world. Man should be about the ethical
ordering of this life. Careful, even meticulous, attention is paid to
scholarship, work, family, customs, and, today, technology and social control
that best satisfy man’s earthly lot. Man’s dignity relates to where he and his
ancestors are located in the ethical and social order. Generations and
dynasties come and go—even imposed Marxist ones—but the ordered way of life
remains much the same.
The Indian view, informed by Hinduism, is that man
is a spiritual being. He tries to control himself in order to attain spiritual
knowledge and union with God through the cycle of death and rebirth. By seeking
“liberation” or total self-knowledge, each individual is ultimately subsumed
into unity within the cosmos. All beliefs can be absorbed into this system because
there are many paths to “salvation.” While India’s caste system of designating
one’s place in the social hierarchy has been formally abolished, much of the
customary attitudes remain.
Neither in China nor in India, however, does a
personal God who transcends the world have a place. India has many names for
God which is understood as an abstract supreme “Reality.” China has practically
no gods. It has ancestors. Neither of these worldviews actively seeks to
convert others, however. Their cultural power rests in their enormous
membership.
The Shade of the Koran
The Muslim view, held by
approximately one-fifth of the world’s population, maintains that the purpose
of the world is that all human beings, including non-believers, are, by force
if necessary, to submit to Allah. He is one and alone to be praised. Man can
know nothing of his ways. Man is to submit to the will of Allah, whatever it
is, peace or war. The central task of Muslim believers over time is to convert
or submit all non-believers, by jihad if necessary, to the will of Allah as set
down in the Koran, the Hadith, and Sharia.
Allah is will, not reason. His commands are found
in the sacred book, the Koran. They cannot change. The Koran contains the
literal words and mind of Allah. Life is organized around dutiful attention to
prayer, law, and custom as found in the Book, lived in the tradition that in
time flowed out of its commands. The world cannot be at peace until the entire
human race is subject to the law of Allah. Muslim missions and armies are the
instruments of Allah’s universal rule on earth. Islam’s adherents are commanded
to probe for opportunities to grow the faithful peacefully or, more usually in
its history, with arms.
The 46 Muslim-majority countries are consistently
among the least developed in the world, except where they find oil. But the
discovery, usage, and value of oil have little to do with the mission of Islam
itself, except to finance it. Indeed, one of Islam’s great challenges for
markets flows from the way it discourages risk-taking and entrepreneurship.
When a Muslim says “Insh’Allah”—God willing—they are not simply expressing
hope, but pointing to their view of reality itself: all events rest on God’s
will, and man’s role is to submit. Alertness and initiative suffer.
Saudi Arabia, in recent years, has financed the
building of thousands of mosques throughout the world, including Europe and the
United States, but it allows only Sunni mosques within its own borders. Oil is
valuable, however, only because other societies have found ways to use it on a
large scale. In effect, most of the modern wealth in oil-rich Islamic states
comes from a modern political sovereignty, itself not of Muslim origin. It
enables Islam’s rulers to control, often on a personal basis, their underground
wealth. In effect, wealth is derived, not from their economies, but from taxes
levied on the actual producers and users of their petroleum.
Islam is not primarily concerned with economic
growth, but with its religious mission to subject the world to the rule of
Allah. Few outside the Muslim world fully comprehend the on-going Islamic
expansionism, even now with the problem of terrorism. These so-called
“terrorists,” in fact, consider themselves to be faithfully following
religious, not economic, political, or personal, ends.
The Loss of Transcendence
Secularist and humanist views are not
simply a return to paganism. Chesterton said that modern thought is itself
indelibly marked with the Judeo-Christian background, from which it seeks to
shake itself. Whether they intend it or not, leaving behind Jewish and Christian
teaching tends to force secular humanists into denying all forms of
transcendence.
Humanism relocates its fundamental
tenets into the ideas of individualism and progress, now under the control of
man rather than God. This relocation, courtesy of the Cartesian dubito or doubt, borrows modern
thought from Mill and Comte. They elevate man to take the place of God.
This transformation means that they also must
refashion man’s beginnings and development on a non-theistic basis. The cosmos
gradually evolves by various chance encounters to be what we have today. Within
this cosmic evolution, man shares this same chance origin. He comes forth
finally able to take control of the evolution himself, once he has developed
science enough to see how this can be done.
Eventually, man becomes the architect even of his
own body and soul, embracing the idea that he can configure his body and entire
life in defiance of any God. Medicine ceases to look for the cure of patients
according to their given nature. It hopes to become a morally neutral art or
science, not a prudential craft. It repudiates the direction of nature. It
embraces the ideas of man dictated by the patient’s will. If a male decides he
is a female, the doctor’s task becomes the effort to make it so, not to inform
him that it cannot be done. The given glory of the human body and person, once
reserved for the transcendent order, is now a scientific project to lengthen
the span of human life, even to a kind of transhumanist, worldly immortality.
Such is the era in which we now live.
The individualist side of secular humanism elevates
the individual into becoming his own god. His will, not the ground of reality
(i.e., what is), becomes the arbiter of truth. Individualism, like all these
views, contains and presupposes a truth, that of the autonomy or uniqueness of
each person. What it lacks is any binding standard by which we can identify the
limits of man’s freedom. Again, he becomes his own god.
A secondary aspect of this new humanism is
analogous to God giving man dominion over the earth to increase, multiply, and
subdue it. The various environmentalist movements want to establish their own
temporal version of Eden. In practice, these efforts are largely based on the
pseudo-scientific belief in man-made earth warming. But as Paul Johnson said,
if established, it will soon become one of the greatest empowerments ever
delegated to the state. Under its impulse, it can now control the lives and
numbers of all citizens under the rubric of protecting the fragile planet.
Instead of seeing to the worship of the divine, the
environmentalist orients man toward the planet’s well-being. The collective
human mission is to keep the human race alive on this—or some other—planet for
as long as possible. Ethics is no longer about personal sin and transcendent
redemption. It becomes focused on caring for the planet—even if this “care”
ultimately involves reducing, by whatever means, the earth’s population to a
stable two or so billion people.
After this ethical transformation, it is thought
that the remaining human race will be sustainable for many more eons (though
the reduction in human labor and brainpower will also lead to an unintended
rise in poverty). The earth’s fragile resources will be stretched out as long
as possible; man’s highest end becomes the salvation of the Earth itself.
Unraveling Dignity
Humanity was classically said to have
a given, normative nature. As a result, man’s finite life pointed to God as its
origin. Man’s life was sealed and ultimately judged after death in the
transcendent order according to what he individually did in actual families,
states, and societies. Once man takes control and becomes the sole maker of his
own nature, however, his abandonment of the good in himself will lead to a
systematic unraveling of the man/woman creation we read about in Genesis and
again in the New Testament.
The path of spiritual decline, now
called progress, is seen most graphically in the family, and was portended by
Plato in Book V of The Republic. We passed from no-fault
divorce to contraception, and from that to the acceptance of abortion. We moved
from tolerance of homosexual acts to acceptance of gay marriage, and now to the
transgendered frontier. We took command of reproduction through in vitro
fertilization in the laboratory, and now imagine designer babies. As a people,
we have totally separated sex from the responsibility for new life. Human life
has become free of the burden of children. The genetic structure of each new
human life may soon fall under the power and authority of the state.
Christianity and Nature
This background brings us to the
Christian worldview, with roots in Israel. God and the world are separated. God
had no need of a cosmos; creation itself was the result of a free plan to
create something besides his Trinitarian life. Within this plan, God’s purpose
was to associate in his inner, eternal life, not by creating other “gods,” but
spiritual and intelligent corporeal beings. The physical cosmos was designed to
support this intention. Man, as a race of rational, free beings, was given
dominion over the earth.
Much of modern science and technology traces itself
back to a secular form of individualism, but this contradicts the Christian
view. God’s grant of dominion meant that man was to discover and use what
nature had provided him over the ages. The world was not created perfectly so
that everything would be provided for man without any human effort. Rather, he
was given an imperfect world with abundant resources to see what, over time, he
could do with them. Through the exercise of his reason and imagination man
would reveal his own personal character.
Thus, in the process, each human person revealed
his soul by what he did and how he responded to his craft, political, and
contemplative powers while performing the ordinary tasks of mankind. Each
existing human person was also to be judged and assigned either heaven or hell
based on the way he lived. The Socratic principle—“It is never right to do
wrong”—governed all human inter-relationships. Christianity affirmed and
deepened this principle.
Human dignity and virtuous activity thus elevated
the worth of each individual person. Now the ordinary activities of human
beings in all phases and walks of life indicated before God and the world the
real soul of that person. He is to love his neighbor by acting justly. The
Christian tradition meant that both the transcendent world and the earthly city
were joined in a non-contradictory interrelationship that gave ultimate meaning
to the human person both in this and the next world.
The turmoil, suffering, and sins of mankind that
permeate his entire earthly history are primarily due to each individual’s
willful rejection of the order of nature and grace. This supernatural destiny
was freely offered to him by God who desires each person, including the
aborted, to gain eternal life. But because God respects the freedom given man
to accept or reject the divine invitation, he allowing each person to determine
his own fate.
Here, I have traced briefly the five worldviews
that contend with each other to guide human life and action. We do not often,
perhaps, think of ourselves locked in a struggle to define what we are. To see
the alternatives is to understand what is open to us and to clarify how we see
ourselves and our purpose in life.
