I really like how John Frame, in his The Doctrine of the Christian Life, calls Deuteronomy 6:6-9 the "great charter of Christian education." The verses read:

And these words that I command to you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, an they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The point here—and one that is pervasive throughout Scripture—is that the Word of God is to give shape to our whole lives and our whole being. That, too, is to be the focus of Christian education. And that is why education is something more than just the imparting of objective knowledge. Education is formation.

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This evening as I was again paging through my copy of Political Visions and Illusions, authored by my friend, David Koyzis, I happened upon this great paragraph:

It has often been said that Christians are so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly good. This is a caricature of course, and one to which we should not too easily lend credence. At the same time, it must be conceded that many Christians in a variety of traditions often seem to behave in such a way as to vindicate this charge. Every time a believer says that, say, religion and politics do not mix or that we should concentrate on saving souls and leave the affairs of the world alone, she is implicitly denying the cosmic scope of Christ's redemption and thereby diminishing God's sovereignty. Every time a follower of Jesus forsakes a so-called secular occupation and claims an intention to go into 'full-time Christian service,' she is in effect relegating a huge portion of the total fabric of human life to something or someone other than the Savior of the world. For the biblically astute Christian, however, there are no 'sacred' or 'secular' occupations, only obedient and disobedient ones. The obedient farmer or carpenter is as much in full-time Christian service as the pastor or missionary (190).

David's implicit assertion here is that no part of life is left untouched by the lordship of Jesus Christ. He lays claim to everything, and as such, there can be no neutrality. This is why it can rightly be said that all of life is religion.

For one of, if not the, best expressions of this idea be sure to read Albert Wolters' masterful work, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. It will revolutionize the way you think.

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I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I had the privilege of studying under Mike Goheen when I did my undergraduate studies at Redeemer University College. It is not an exaggeration to say that he played one of the significant rolls in the formation of my thought on the Church and mission. Here he neatly sums up the story of redemptive history and talks about how the Church often sees this story in fragmented bits instead of holistically.

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For those Christians longing to leave the bad, physical earth and fly away to their "home on God's celestial shore," cultural and societal concerns take a distant second to things like personal relationships with Jesus. This sort of passive indifference was a major concern to Paul Marshall when he wrote his excellent book, Heaven is Not My Home: Learning to Live in God's Creation. Why do Christians seem so apathetic about the many components of our earthly life?

There are doubtless many reasons for our passivity, but one crucial one is that we don't take God's world seriously. We have accepted the heretical idea that the body will pass permanently away after death, and that we will only reappear as some type of disembodied wraith. But the Bible will have none of this. When Jesus rose from the dead, he had fish for lunch and overcame the despair of doubting Thomas by telling him to put his finger in his all-too-fleshly wounds. The creeds of the Christian Church universally affirm, 'I believe in the resurrection of the body.'

It is also an unbiblical idea that the earth doesn't matter because we are going to go to heaven when we die. The Bible teaches that there will be 'a new heaven and a new earth.' Our destiny is an earthly one: a new earth, an earth redeemed and transfigured. An earth reunited with heaven, but an earth, nevertheless.

If we think that the earth and everything on it is simply going to disappear, why labor long and hard to write something, perform something, build something, create something that will only be consumed by fire? If we think that being human is only a passing and trivial phase of life, why take the present seriously? Why not regard ourselves merely as apprentice angels, stuck for the moment in an earthly waiting room but better suited to and anxiously awaiting life on some disembodied, heavenly plane?

God created a world that was good. And although sin has horribly marred His creation, it has not, nor will it ever be, victorious. If even one part of God's creation is not touched by His redemptive work, our faith is entirely in vain. But God's redemption is holistic, a redemption of His whole creation, including this world. And that has enormous implications for how we live in this world, our home.

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As I have been reading Desiring the Kingdom, author Jamie Smith has continued to provoke me to thought with his insights. Earlier, I quoted a portion of the introduction, which had pointed to some of the questions he was setting out to answer in the book. On page 68, Smith speaks briefly about Charles Taylor's notion of the "social imaginary" (discussed in Taylor's book, A Secular Age), and then talks about how that notion can help the Christian worldview conversation. In many ways, I think this portion directly addresses some of his earlier questions.

The 'social imaginary' is an affective, noncognitive understanding of the world. It is described as an imaginary (rather than a theory) because it is fueled by the stuff of the imagination rather than the intellect: it is made up of, and embedded in, stories, narratives, myths, and icons. These visions capture our hearts and imaginations by 'lining' our imagination, as it were—providing us with frameworks of 'meaning' by which we make sense of our world and our calling in it. An irreducible understanding of the world resides in our intuitive, precognitive grasp of these stories.

Now, what does this have to do with a Christian worldview? I suggest that instead of thinking about worldview as a distinctly Christian 'knowledge,' we should talk about a Christian 'social imaginary' that constitutes a distinctly Christian understanding of the world that is implicit in the practices of Christian worship. Discipleship and formation are less about erecting an edifice of Christian knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively 'understands' the world in the light of the fullness of the gospel. And insofar as an understanding is implicit in practice, the practices of Christian worship are crucial—the sine qua non—for developing a distinctly Christian understanding of the world. The practices of Christian worship are the analogue of biking around the neighborhood, absorbing an understanding of our environment that is precognitive and becomes inscribed in our adaptive unconscious.

What Smith means with the analogy of biking around the neighborhood is that when we live somewhere, we become intimately familiar with it such that we can make our way around it and to specific destinations without even really thinking about where we are going. Another analogy could be the unconscious way we operate a car with a manual transmission after years of doing it.

Smith's caution against the concept of worldview becoming too intellectual is one I am familiar with, and I think is helpful. The aim of worldview education is the transformation of the whole person; however, there is a tendency for it to get bogged down in thought and conversation. Smith is entirely right to recognize that worship (not just our public worship on Sunday) plays an integral part—in fact, it may even be the crucial part—in forming an holistic understanding of the world.

We must look at the world through the lenses of the gospel, and that begins when our hearts are rightly ordered. What we worship shapes our hearts, dictates what we love, and fosters that intuitive know-how we operate from as we make our way through the world. That Smith should point out how important it is that education be aware of this is not surprising.

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As I was browsing some recent books the other day, I noticed one called Education for Human Flourishing, a recent book by Paul D. Spears and Steven R. Loomis. It attempts to lay out a thoroughly Christian philosophy of education in response to the pervasive pragmatism of modern education. In the preface, they discuss the urgent need for us to rethink how we do education. We are thrown into the educational system at a very early age, the authors write, and because of the structure of that system,

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As someone who plans to be involved in education, this bit from Jamie Smith's latest book, Desiring the Kindgom, is music to my ears.

What is education for? And more specifically, what is at stake in a distinctively Christian education? What does the qualifier Christian mean when appended to education? It is usually understood that education is about ideas and information (though it is also too often routinely reduced to credentialing for a career and viewed as a ticket to a job). And so distinctively Christian education is understood to be about Christian ideas—which usually requires a defense of the importance of "the life of the mind." On this account, the goal of a Christian education is the development of a Christian perspective, or more commonly now, a Christian worldview, which is taken to be a system of Christian beliefs, ideas, and doctrines.

But what if this line of thinking gets off on the wrong foot? What if education, including higher education, is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut—what the New Testament refers to as kardia, "the heart"? What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions—our visions of the "the good life"—and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds?

What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love? (17-18)

The copy of the book I have right now is from the library, but having read the introduction and a bit of the first chapter, I am convinced that it needs to be on my shelf.

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In the last few days I have finally gotten around to reading Andy Crouch's award-winning book, Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. Toward the end of the third chapter he addresses the topic of worldview, one I enjoy discussing, and points out that our calling as Christians in regards to culture goes beyond the abstract tendencies of worldview thinking:

The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking 'worldviewishly' is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which 'worldview thinkers' are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.

But culture is not changed simply by thinking (64).

For someone like myself who has a tendency toward this kind of abstract thinking, this is a key point. It's not that worldview thinking is unimportant, but that it is only one part of our larger calling as Christians. Culture making requires action.

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There are very few things that I am jealous of, but Mike Rowe's voice is one of them. However, that's besides the point.

This talk he gave at the 2008 Entertainment Gathering addresses something that has largely been lost in our culture—the intrinsic value of work. He uses some very vivid imagery (you've been warned!) and colorful stories to make his point. Unfortunately, he misses a couple of key things, such as the fact that work has intrinsic value because it is both a creational norm (and part of the cultural mandate) and an act of worship. Also, our work is good and finds value insofar as it brings glory to God, and only secondarily from what it contributes to society or culture. Nonetheless, there's some food for thought here.

Thoughts?

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Just to be clear, I don't want to seem like the angry guy who is critical of everything. I'm not like that at all. Posts like this and this are just a reflection of my deep concern for the state of the Church, and my hope and prayer that people would learn to embrace a wholehearted faith, one that is fully committed to the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life.

The Church, especially in our day, makes so many efforts to satisfy the desires of its members. People are continually spoon-fed exactly what they want. The Church is marketed this way. It promises an encounter with a God who will fit your agenda, one who will make you feel loved and accepted no matter what. Perhaps evangelicals are not as flagrant about it as figures like Joel Osteen, but subtlety doesn't make it any less of an issue. It is a troublesome concession to a consumerist and individualistic culture.

The problem here is that when you give people what they want, eventually you will come to a point where you won't be able to give them what they need. But if you give them what they need and they come to realize that as a need, it will then become what they want. John Owen is a perfect case in point here. I just finished reading The Mortification of Sin in Believers (which I strongly encourage you to read), and what he writes is very difficult to swallow. Nobody wants to hear about how great their sin and misery are, yet that is precisely what is needed. We easily become complacent with the condition of our hearts and are persuaded by the notion that if we just do a certain number of things right, everything will go well with us now and in eternity. This idea is only amplified when all we hear week after week is that God loves us and accepts us unconditionally if we put our faith in Him, that He is gracious and merciful, and that Jesus will help us make our lives better.

Certainly, these things are true and cause for rejoicing. But it is only half the story. God loves us and accepts us unconditionally in spite of our sin—and not just the occasional commission of sin, but that wretched, natural state of sin that we are all enslaved to and that inclines us to hate God and our neighbor (Rom. 3:23; Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 5). Yes, our God is gracious and merciful, but far more so than many believe. God's grace is not just material wealth or good health, but is the radical love that grasps on to us, rescues us from certain death, and declares, "You are mine!" even as we are striving with everything we have to run away from Him (Col. 1:21-22). Jesus certainly makes our lives better, but not just by improving our marriage or helping us choose which movies to watch, but in that He is our King who brings us under His rule by laying down His own life for us and reconciling us to God (Rom. 5:6-11).

This is what people need. They need to hear how great their sin and misery are. They need to hear how despite their total enslavement to sin, God calls them unto Himself to be His own and brings them into His fold. They need to hear that they are called to be a holy people, set apart, foreigners and aliens in the land. They need to hear that all of life is to be lived in service to Him, for His glory. They need to hear that they are part of a bigger story, that they are God's people, living under His rule, and blessed by Him. They need to hear that the end goal is not some disembodied state of bliss in an intangible, spiritual realm, but that they are wholly involved as God's people in His mission and in bringing all things in heaven and earth under the Lordship of Christ (Eph. 1:9-10).

Our culture, and many in the Church, do not want something that demands so much from us and that makes such a total claim. To them, that is the antithesis of freedom. However, to the contrary, this is freedom in the fullest sense of the word. This is what it truly means to be alive. We know true joy when we, as creatures, live as the Creator intended us to. This only begins when we cease to live for ourselves, and instead consecrate ourselves to God, pursuing holiness.

I was talking briefly with a friend yesterday who made the comment, "I've been quite perplexed lately at the way evangelicals seem to understand 'make disciples' as simply meaning 'share the gospel.'" It is a point well taken. We can tell them all these good things about grace and about love and about Jesus, but that is not enough. A confession of faith requires a complete surrender to Him. Jesus Christ makes a total claim over our lives and demands that we live in holiness. The Gospel, our faith, is radical and transformational. It leaves nothing untouched. If it does, then it is an insufficient Gospel, even a false Gospel.

Augustine has famously said, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee." We will only realize this when we have come to believe the Gospel in its entirety and when we have taken up our cross to follow Him. The Lord has called us to be holy, as He is holy (Lev. 19:2; 1 Pet. 1:13-16). May this become our desire, and may our song be, "Take myself, and I will be, ever, only, all for Thee."

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