Light of the World
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tom, Member of Delve into Jesus since 4/26/2007
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"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else" - C.S Lewis
It would be a mistake to think that Christianity does nothing more than tell us what happens when we die. It does even more than simply tell us how to live. The Word of God is the lens through which every thing else comes into focus. We need to learn to adopt Christianity as both a philosophy and a world view. Just as we are called to become like Christ in our personal lives, we are called to shape the world into the Kingdom of God, but we cannot hope to do that unless we understand it.
While most Christian thinkers defend Christianity by presenting either some sort of evidence or by offering some logical proof, the late Cornelius Van Til proposed a subtler type of approach. He used to encourage people to investigate Christianity by first getting them to assume it was all false, and then challenging them to explain the universe without it. Why are we here? Where did we come from? What are good and evil? In doing so, Van Til helped people to see for themselves that without a foundation in Christ, nothing makes sense. Christianity doesn't just have the answers to salvation, it has the answers to everything.
For example, Christianity helps us to see why Communism was such a wicked and dismal failure. In the days following the resurrection, Christ's disciples practiced a kind of communism and it was successful because every member placed the will of God first. However, modern-day communism denies God and so there is nothing to keep the power and authority in check. The Bible teaches us that without God, man is inherently sinful and communism has been the ultimate and unfortunate demonstration of that fact. Democracy, though far from perfect, works because it understands that power has the tendency to corrupt and so there are check and balances in place to protect us.
The Bible does not provide solutions for every problem we face in the world. It cannot specifically tell us what to do about gun violence, broken marriages, sexual immortality or rampant famine. What it can do is provide principles and a framework by which we can arrive at the correct solution. Things will get better in our lives and community when we start to see every problem from a Biblical perspective and then apply these principles consistently in our lives, our families, our work, our home and our governments.
If you want to know more about the "Christian worldview", one of the finest books I've found is How Now Shall We Live? It's a long, challenging read, but well worth the effort.
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