Over the last month or so, from the blogosphere to the news, to Facebook, etc., much has been said regarding Rob Bell’s latest book Love Wins.  I commented on this book in my last post and will devote this post to it as well.  Given that this heretical book will probably influence many for years to come, it seems important to interact with Bell’s ideas now so that five years down the road when people research this book they can turn to TVN as a resource!

I want to address a fundamental problem with Rob Bell’s approach to theology.  As you read the following quotation from Love Wins, look for the reason why he prefers one story over another:

It’s important that we be honest about the fact that some stories are better than others.  Telling a story in which billions of people spend forever somewhere in the universe trapped in a black hole of endless torment and misery with no way out isn’t a very good story.  Telling a story about a God who inflicts unrelenting punishment on people because they didn’t do or say or believe the correct things in a brief window of time called life isn’t a very good story.  In contrast, everyone enjoying God’s good world together with no disgrace or shame, justice being served, and all the wrongs being made right is a better story.  It is bigger, more loving, more expansive, more extraordinary, beautiful, and inspiring than any other story about the ultimate course history takes. [...]

Within the next few weeks I am planning to post an article on how believers should determine the will of God for their lives.  Before doing so, I would like to ask our readers a question: how do you determine the will of God for your life?  Feel free to write as much as you want in your response.  Also, you can focus your answer to particular issues like dating, marriage, college, jobs, friends, daily activities, etc.  Thanks!

In this article Ben Montoya encourages Christians begin to develop understanding of contending for the faith once delivered to the saints.  Ben explains an apologetic method that he has found particularly useful for engaging skeptics with the truth of the gospel. [...]

If you are like me then I assume you want to click over to another of your favorite Christian blogs simply to avoid the rather frightening sesquipedalianism plastered across the title of this post. It is a big, unfamiliar word, but it need not scare you. Much like the overlong word used in the first sentence (which is ironically defined as long word), epistemology is easy to understand.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It is a branch of philosophy which attempts to make sense of how humans know things. I beg you not to tune me out because I am discussing philosophy; I assure you that this post will be both understandable and pertinent to your life as a Christian. Trust me.

So, how do we know things? This may seem like a silly and pointless question on the surface, but it has massive implications. Most notably, the American university has allowed this question to shape the way in which they teach the students who come to them for a higher education. To quote Ravi Zacharias, “The modern student goes away to college in order to learn. They come back from the same school knowing that there is no way to know anything.” I would also add that that we leave knowing one other thing – that college is freaking expensive. Sorry for the digression. My point is that the simple, silly question asked at the outset of this paragraph has brought many people and institutions into some strange places.

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Perhaps the most basic issue that should be settled before your exploration of the Veritas internet resource is recognition of your personal worldview. In order to understand this fundamental idea, we will work through the definition of worldview and end with the practical application of this knowledge in your everyday life.

Worldview. If you have not had any formal training in philosophy this word probably means nothing to you, but let me assure you that you have spent the majority of your life working, building, and refining a worldview that is one hundred percent unique to you. Put simply, a worldview is quite literally the filter through which someone interprets, defines, and engages with the world around them. Your worldview assists you in making every decision throughout your day. From flippant thoughts, the ones passed over and forgotten in a second, to the ultimate questions, such as “who am I” and “why am I here,” you operate every moment within this epistemic framework. Let me be clear, this is not an elaborate system of personal philosophy. This is the fundamental result of our experiences during the formative years in our lives, yet most people will live out their life never thinking twice about the reasons behind their presuppositions. James Sire, in his book The Universe Next Door, provides a more explanative, albeit lengthy, definition of this concept.

            A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.

We can work through his definition one point at a time to get a full perspective of the nature of a worldview. As a commitment, we would consider the fact that our worldview has an inescapable depth and dimension to it that goes far beyond our making a rational decision. As Christians, we would hold that our most fundamental belief about God is that he exists. If someone asked you to provide an argument for that, most professed believers could not do so, but it does not change the fact that within their heart, they know or presuppose that He exists. The same is true of the naturalists explaining that God does not exist. They developed a separate worldview, many points of which cannot be expressed or proven, but, nonetheless, it remains fundamental to the way they live their lives.

This brings us to the fact that our worldview can be expressed through propositions. A single proposition does not encompass it, but a group of propositions can be used to form a story that expresses our worldview. For an atheistic naturalist, the story would follow Darwinian evolution pushed by survival of the fittest, or natural selection. For the Christian, our worldview can be expressed by the story of creation, the fall, and the redemptive work of Christ. 

These propositions which we use to express our worldview may be true, consistent, or conscious. They could also be false, inconsistent, or subconscious. If my proposition is that God exists, someone else could just as easily propose that he does not exist. One of those propositions is true, but the veracity or fallaciousness of the proposition does not need to be known in order for it to be incorporated into someone’s worldview. People are frequently inconsistent in their worldview. For example, the naturalistic worldview holds that humans are simply the next animal in the long line of creatures left in the wake of natural selection, but naturalists would also say that humanity has a certain dignity above that of other animals. These people are not acting within the framework of their espoused worldview, which brings us to the final point.

Our worldview is best evidenced by the way that we live, not the words that we say. We could claim any worldview as our own, but in truth, it is something that is so profoundly engrained in our subconscious that we may not even know our own worldview without serious analysis of the way we live our lives.

This brings us to the most crucial aspect of the way that worldview interacts with our daily lives. David Naugle wrote a book entitled Worldview: A History of a Concept. David Naugle rightly claims that “the formation of a Christian worldview among other worldviews is a primary function of grace and redemption in Christ: salvation has fundamentally to do with the transformation and rectification of one’s worldview.” The redemptive work of Christ does not just capture the heart of a believer; it radically reorients the way that a person interprets, defines, and engages the world around them.

With the close of the 18^th Century, we began to see a new form of philosophy begin to shape.  Scientific questions were then a form of the current metaphysical branch of philosophy, known as natural philosophy, which sought answers through empirical knowledge (epistemology).  With the development of modern science and the birth of the scientific method, natural philosophy simply became an empirical and experimental activity, unlike the rest of philosophy.  The birth of the scientific method therefore separated metaphysics from natural philosophy, and metaphysics became a sole philosophical enquiry into the non-empirical and non-experimental questions of life and the nature of existence.  As the scientific method has evolved, it has become the popular belief that metaphysics and the scientific method can no longer co-exist together to be reliable.  Herbert Fiegl contended in the 1954 Journal of Philosophical Studies that there are “no philosophical postulates of science.”  He continues to say that the “scientific method can be explicated and justified without metaphysical presuppositions about the order or structure of nature.”[1]   

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