Christian worldview: core beliefs and theological perspectives

Christian Worldview

Between Questions and Answers: The Christian Universe

Doubt and faith are central to the human condition. While different people believe different things, all human belief -- whether explicitly religious, explicitly scientific, or somewhere in between -- is grounded in the dynamic between received assumptions about how the world works and our actual experience of how those assumptions play out in our own lives and those of others. As Mark Cosgrove (2006, p. 25) notes:

Faith and learning are always interwoven, even in the natural sciences and in public high schools….Wise, educated people know the worldview from which they operate, they can test their own worldview for its truth and accuracy for life.

The Christian worldview explicitly acknowledges this interplay between doubt and faith. On one hand, the Christian is informed that the universe is the creation of God, who existed before the world and will exist after everything is gone; this is the familiar logic of Genesis and its counterpoint in Hebrews, which affirms that earth and heaven "will perish, but [God] will remain forever" (1:11, New Living Translation). But the same scripture also warns (11:3) that the divine is not experientially verifiable (it is not "anything that can be seen"), but is ultimately accepted only "by faith."

Hebrews 11 goes on to attribute many of the foundational events of Christian history to faith: Noah, Abraham, and the prophets; the rise and fall of the kingdom of Israel; the instructive examples of martyrs and hermits. All of these exemplary figures, the scripture tells us, were motivated "by faith" even when that faith in the invisible was challenged by circumstantial evidence or the opinions of others. For some, that faith was rewarded, but many died without receiving confirmation (Hebrews 11:13).

Despite various historical attempts to empirically test the existence of the soul and its persistence after death, these are also ultimately "invisible" or non-verifiable concepts that the Christian must accept "by faith" in the scriptural tradition or else deny in the absence of personal experience. The soul may be the "image" of the creative divinity (Genesis 1:26-27) and imbued with God's own "breath of life" (Genesis 2:7), but logical investigation is impossible. Even within the Christian community, the specifics of the anthropology of the soul (Cosgrove, p. 30) are sometimes controversial, as historical debates surrounding the timing of the resurrection of the dead, the disposition of souls to heaven and hell, and the nature of the "life of the world to come" demonstrate. Individual Christians must accept the teachings of others or make up their own minds.

For Christians, God is the judge of right and wrong and scripture represents the accepted body of legal precedent (Cosgrove, pp. 38-40). The Golden Rule, the ultimate statement of Christian ethics, is grounded on "the law of Moses" (Luke 10:25) and "taught in the law and the prophets" (Matthew 7:12), and its universal applicability likewise hinges on accepting the word of Jesus that the "neighborhood" of love theoretically extends to all humanity (Luke 10:36-37).

In fact, given the absence of compelling evidence, even the historical existence of Jesus or any of the other foundational Christian figures must be taken "by faith" or interpreted in metaphorical terms (Strobel, 2002, pp. 96-97). However individual Christians struggle with (or resolve) this dilemma in their own lives, the very fact that the dilemma is meaningful to them at all reveals the depth of their participation in the Christian worldview. While faith "cannot be equated with religious experience" -- that is, it is not a simple matter of successfully receiving empirical validation of the truth -- it "cannot be separated from ordinary ways of learning" either (Cosgrove, p. 36).