Bethany House April 2006
What This Book Is About
Recently I took some high school kids at our church through a seven-week series on the basics of worldview (a course that forms the basis of the book Blah, Blah, Blah). Afterward, I wrote the following words as a summary of what I had been trying to accomplish with them.
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THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY
One of the big points of the whole series has been to explode the myth of objectivity. Nobody can be perfectly neutral on worldview issues. Nobody. You can try, but nobody can actually do it. The best any of us as humans can do is admit our worldview perspective/bias/agenda openly, to try to be as fair-minded and truthful as we can, and to try to develop some empathy for others' points of view.
EMPATHY FOR OTHERS
This series has been an exercise in developing empathy for others – to try to teach Christians how people of other worldviews think and feel. The goal has been for Christians to then use the knowledge of our basic humanity and how worldviews seek to answer the big questions in life as a basis for treating non-Christians as fellow humans and as a bridge toward reaching them with the gospel.
HIDDEN WORLDVIEW AGENDAS
It is spiritually dangerous for naive Christians who are not adequately instructed in worldviews to walk into a college class where the (religion, philosophy, English, history or other subject) professor hides his/her biases behind an aura of objectivity, thereby concealing whatever worldview agenda he/she is trying to promote.
UNMASKING “TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY”
What often happens under the guise of tolerance and diversity is a classic example of hidden agendas. These watchwords mask a militant moral relativism – the kind of relativism that perches itself as morally superior above all other perspectives (especially Christian). No position has a monopoly on moral smugness, but this kind of smug relativism is a transparent contradiction of its own most sacred principles.
THE VALUE OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH
A free marketplace of ideas is competitive; it’s a rough-and-tumble place for the testing of the strength of various opinions. In that environment, our worldview opinions are just as valid as others’. In other words, we have just as much right “to evangelize” for our opinions as anyone else. We have just as much right to seek to persuade others of the correctness of our worldview – since everyone else is constantly doing it, too! Why should Christians alone have to keep their tongues tied?
THE JESUS WAY
Jesus’ whole ethic was based in timeless rights and wrongs defined by God. He accepted the Old Testament en toto. He intensified the Ten Commandments in his Sermon on the Mount. He gave the Pharisees a very hard time because of their hypocrisy. He got violently angry at the rip-off artists in the temple precincts. He accepted sinners, but told them to sin no more. He taught of heaven and hell, which definitely implies boundaries and limits. Yet he was the most loving, tolerant and accepting person who ever lived.
THE AMAZING ATTRACTIVENESS OF GOD’S TRUTH
Moral truth is beautiful and persuasive on its own merits. It calls to our consciences and if we are willing, convinces us to accept it. We don’t have to use dishonest techniques that muzzle dissent. We can have confidence that God’s truth placed side by side with error is beautiful and valid, whether others agree or not. Because we can trust in truth’s innate power, we can wait for truth to act on others’ consciences; we don’t have to have Thought Police or force others to betray their consciences and make them approve things that are abhorrent to them.
EXPANDING THE AUDIENCE
I’d love to have a chance to present this material to mixed audiences of Christians and non-Christians, where people could bring their friends, nobody would be railed on, and the most important ideas that affect all of us would be discussed and genuine conversations would occur. It could happen anywhere: in a cafeteria, a coffee house, or in someone's living room. What do you think?
