Assumptions and worldviews

Posted at 6:17 PM

It’s always interesting watching stuff by Russell T Davies (most recently known for Doctor Who and Torchwood) because quite often his worldview seems to rise to the surface of the script. Take this example from the current Torchwood miniseries:

Rupesh: My first case – my first death – was a suicide. D’you know why she did it? ‘Cause—she’d written all these letters; she’d been a Christian all her life – and then, alien life appears. She wrote this bit: she said “It’s like science has won.”

Gwen: Lost her faith?

Rupesh: More than that. She said she saw her place in the universe – and it was tiny. She died because she thought she was nothing.

Gwen: I went through that. Even now I get terrified. But at the same time, it is brilliant, and beautiful, and … magic. It’s bigger you know. It’s like the whole wide world is bigger. My life is bigger.
(From Children of Earth – iPlayer link will no doubt expire soon.)

Ignore the fictional aliens for a moment. The underlying assumption is that science and Christianity are in conflict – the case for this isn’t argued, it’s merely assumed. Often Christian truth isn’t argued against; our society’s base assumptions are such that there is no longer an argument.

Without God, our significance is lost – and that leads, in this story, to an increase of suicides. Davies goes further, though, by trying to put something on top of this nihilistic view. The world is nonetheless brilliant, beautiful and magical – which makes the pointlessness, the smallness of it all irrelevant. Perhaps we can make our own significance.

Maybe I was the only one who was struck this way, but it seems that this is Davies making any need for God seem both unnecessary and incomprehensible. God doesn’t fit the worldview of the Torchwood universe. This recurring theme comes up in so much of both Doctor Who and Torchwood: the universe is huge and beyond our understanding, but isn’t it just marvellous anyway? Scientific advances, new planets – these are the things we wonder at and take delight in. Doctor Who is like a small child making discoveries. In this Torchwood scene, Gwen is similar – but also, her final sentences read like a convert speaking of new spiritual life to an unbeliever, but with this new big universe in the place of God.

The worldview of Torchwood and Doctor Who strikes me to be making an idol out of science – and as such, is very in keeping with the zeitgeist. How many people hold these sorts of assumptions? I don’t know, but we absorb them from the things we see, hear and read. It’s in scenes like this one I feel that Davies is pushing something onto us. (Let’s pray for more Christian writers for TV!)

I’ll try and close this rambling entry. There are certain ideas that are almost in the air we breathe; even Christians can be influenced by the worldviews and values portrayed in entertainment, news and comment. We need the revolution of theology. Mike Reeves (quoted in the entry just linked to) is excellent on this:

Theology is the “true research: as we re-search reality afresh in the light of how God has revealed it to be. It’s walking through life with a torch on. It’s refusing to drift with the zeitgeist”. We Christians need to “wash our brains with the Mediator, rather than being brainwashed by the media”.

Another way of putting this is: we need to critically engage with what we’re watching, hearing or reading, and not be mindless consumers.

With regards to the worldview portrayed above – well, I love science and scientific discovery, but science is too small. I can say about life with God: “it’s like the whole wide world is bigger. My life is bigger.” We were made for something bigger.

True Belief

Posted at 5:19 PM

I’ve written before on why theology is not dull and irrelevant. In Theology is the Revolution I talked a little about how we do theology – by trying to think Christianly about everything, getting rid of the idols in our hearts and minds, and above all getting to know God better.

There’s a potential pitfall here, and that’s an intellectual-only understanding of truths about God. For example, it’s perfectly possible to have a fully fleshed out view of the atonement, that encompasses propitiation, justification, redemption and reconciliation, without that moving you to love God more and give him the praise he is due for sending Christ to die in our place. James writes:

You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder. (James 2:19)

Even the demons have an intellectual belief in God, but we know Christian belief is different because it results in a changed life. A sign of whether I truly believe something is whether it affects my actions. To take the common and silly example of a chair: if I claim to believe a chair will take my weight, but refuse to sit down on it, then my actions show my lack of belief. James writes later:

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. (James 3:13)

There’s another aspect to true belief too. If our emotions are not engaged, then how can we say we truly believe? If I don’t love Jesus more because of the cross then I’ve not fully grasped the cross, however great my intellectual understanding. If I say I know that God is glorious but that doesn’t delight me, I either don’t truly believe he is glorious, or worse, I’ve no delight in his glory because of my unredeemed nature. Jonathan Edwards said:

He that is spiritually enlightened… does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good thing, but there is a sense of the loveliness of God’s holiness. (Jonathan Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light)

Jesus says to the Pharisees:

Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’” (Mark 7:6)

It’s possible to say the right things – maybe even do the right things – but still have our hearts far from God. We often say that love is a choice, not a feeling – but that’s not the whole story. John writes: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16) – Christ showed his love for us by dying in our place. The writer to the Hebrews says: “[Jesus,] for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2) – Christ died for us because of the greatness of his resulting joy, having saved a people for himself. John Piper’s famous thesis is that obedience and joy go together; our hearts are warmed when we show our love for God through following him, because that is how we are made. True love is never mere decision; it stems from and flows into our hearts.

So here we have three aspects of true belief: the intellectual side, the emotional side, and the behavioural side. You could call them Doctrine, Behaviour and the Heart. They affect our thinking, our feeling and our doing. True belief must affect all three. They’re like three sides of a triangle, which must go together, otherwise the triangle is distorted.

We might naturally have a tendency towards one or another. For example, the rationalist philosopher might tend towards thinking as ultimate, ruling out emotions and objective tests. The existentialist might concern themselves much more with feelings. Or, perhaps closer to home, the conservative evangelical might expend much effort getting their thinking straight, but not letting what they “know” affect their hearts or change their lives; parts of the church might play down the importance of doctrine as long as we’re doing something (about the environment, the poor, the marginalised); other parts might be tempted to base truth around experience and not Scripture. All have distorted the triangle in some way; all need correction.

When we read the Bible, or a Christian book, it should never remain intellectual only. If what we’re “learning” isn’t changing our lives, we’ve not really learnt it. If it’s not warming our hearts, we don’t truly understand it. God’s truth should change us from the inside out, and not just inform our minds: it must warm our hearts and change our wills, too.

When I open up the Bible, I might read a passage for the umpteenth time and say that I know it – but most of the time my life won’t look like I believe it, and my heart is still cold to its truths. I need to take the chance to refresh my understanding so as to affect more than just my mind.

When I come to theology, it should turn my world upside-down, affecting the way I think, the way I feel, the way I act. It can’t just be limited to one area – it’s got to affect them all. It’s only then that theology will be truly revolutionary.

Theology is the revolution

Posted at 1:23 PM

Mike Reeves helps explain what theology is, in the context of Judges 6:25-28 (quote taken from 9 minutes into DIY Theology):

Theology is smashing up idols – smashing up the idols in our mind and in our world. And not just smashing them up but replacing them with (v26) proper kinds of altars to the Lord our God: replacing them all with Jesus Christ. So the story here is: Gideon is surrounded by the idolatry of the Mideonite regime. and he begins the revolution against it by bulldozing Baal. And that is theology! It’s not just reading books, studying languages, whatever: it is about rebelling against the world order, not just the Mideonites little regime, rebelling against the whole world order as it rebels against God. Rebelling against it, bringing down the system, utterly replacing it: that is theology. Theology is the revolution.

Ranald Macaulay writes of Francis Schaeffer:

From the very beginning, then, Schaeffer had a mind for what he called “True Truth.” He loved the Bible and its message of salvation first and foremost because it is “true.” It accurately reflects the reality within which all human beings find themselves and against which, ultimately, they cannot revolt – try as they may.

The corollary of this was a sense of inescapable responsibility to unmask and challenge falsehood. Other religious and philosophical worldviews, he realized, are basically “lies” and/or distortions of the truth, as much in relation to the created order as in relation to God’s acts of salvation through history. So Schaeffer’s approach to “apologetics” was already “presuppositional” from the start. Begin with the Christian worldview and everything makes sense: Start elsewhere and nothing does.

Sometimes I’ll say “the Bible is true” with my mouth, but be relativistic in my thoughts, thinking that it’s not true for others. That makes no sense, though. “True Truth” is true for everyone.

Blaise Pascal wrote:

Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true.

So often I don’t have confidence in any of these points. Our culture defines faith (a better term than religion for Christianity) as being irrational, only worthy of ridicule, something to be hated, to be got rid of so we can stop worrying and enjoy our lives, but above all, as dangerous, nonsensical falsehood.

But why do I listen to our culture, the “world order [that] rebels against God”? Later on in his talk (twelve minutes twenty seconds in), Mike Reeves says:

Christian theology is about clearing out all the junk in our minds that we’ve accumulated through years of just listening to the world, and replacing it with truth. It’s putting on the mind of Christ and so sifting out the lies in our culture. It’s washing our brains with the Mediator, rather than being brainwashed by the media.

God is a God who speaks. Ultimately, he has spoken to us “by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he also made the universe” (Hebrews 1:1-2). Without God’s revelation of himself, we can’t know True Truth. But God has revealed himself through Jesus, through the words of the Bible, through history, through creation – “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). The Teacher’s cry of “Meaningless!” in Ecclesiastes can be answered. We can have confidence in God’s truth, because it is True Truth.

Theology is the “true research: as we re-search reality afresh in the light of how God has revealed it to be” (Reeves again, twelve minutes in); “It’s walking through life with a torch on. It’s refusing to drift with the zeitgeist” (thirteen minutes). The world is constantly bombarding us with its own truth, but it doesn’t describe reality. The Bible makes sense of how things are. It’s true for everyone, and not just me. Christian faith is rational, and there are many ways I can show this to others; it will be ridiculed, because the message of the cross is foolishness, but I know that God’s folly is greater than man’s wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:18-25); it is something to be loved, because it shows how things really are, gives a wonderful solution to our greatest need, and shows us Christ, who is infinitely desirable; and it is true.

We Christians need to “wash our brains with the Mediator, rather than being brainwashed by the media” (cf. Romans 12:2). We need to think Christianly about our lives, our careers, our relationships; about politics, poverty and public morality. We need to “rebel against the whole world order as it rebels against God”. Theology should turn our lives upside-down, because it’s through theology that we see the world as is really is; we see ourselves as we really are; and above all, we see who the God of the universe really is.

It turns out that not only is theology incredibly practical, it’s incredibly exciting too.

(Read more by Mike Reeves: Fear and Loathing in Las Vagueness.)