18: Kingdom Worldview & Theology

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Here we are in episode 18. We’re continuing today with a look at Kingdom Worldview and Theology. Hello, Father.

[00:29] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be back with you.

[00:32] Stephanie: Always. And what a happy autumn day we’re having.

[00:34] Marcus: It is a beautiful day. We’re in the month of October while we’re recording this, and there’s a beautiful sky, hardly a cloud out there. It’s 60 degrees, and you can start to see a little color in some of the leaves. It’s pretty cool.

[00:49] Stephanie: I’m so glad that autumn is being autumn.

[00:52] Marcus: Yes.

[00:54] Stephanie: I’m also delighted to dive back into this topic with you. Worldview. It informs how we understand and interact with reality. I’ve heard you quote an ivy league professor saying, “What we get students to assume to be true is far more powerful than what we have to argue is true.” I think that has universal application outside the classroom.

So today let’s start by talking about why grasping the kingdom worldview is so important for Christians in particular.

[01:23] Marcus: I sometimes look at discipleship as learning to live in a new culture. It’s just like when a missionary has to go into a cross-cultural context. Not only do they have to teach the Bible and teach Christianity, but they have to do it in a cross-cultural way.

In a sense, Jesus came from a different culture. [When we believe in him] we are brought into that culture with him, and so you could define discipleship as learning to live and act with a kingdom worldview, which is the essence of Christianity.

My dad was an anthropology professor, and worldview was really central to a lot of what he taught. That has formed my opinions about [culture/worldview] too, and really helped to open my eyes to its importance.

The other side of it is that, as Christians, if we don’t have a kingdom worldview, what worldview are we going to live with? We’re just going to be clones of the culture.

[02:24] Stephanie: At best it would be a syncretist worldview.

[02:28] Marcus: And that is a problem with Christianity all around the world. We have our core cultural worldview and then we slap a little Christianity over the top of it. That’s syncretism, as opposed to actually transforming our worldview to be conformed to the Bible.

[02:44] Stephanie: Can you talk a bit about apologetics? How would worldview affect Christian apologetics?

[02:49] Marcus: When I was your age, they used to call it presuppositionalism, so they got a shorter word now as a worldview approach to apologetics. The idea is that you can look at the exact same evidence and it means totally different things depending on the filter that you’re using .

I’ll give you an example. There were some researchers at a university in Arizona who were doing studies on the power of the mind. They had a worldview that said there are no spirits, that Christianity is not true, everything that happens in this world is physical and material and energy. They believed that the mind could generate energy.

So they were doing a classic, occult parlor trick, trying to make a table levitate. Well, in the middle of their session, it levitated. Not only did it levitate, it started going around the room, and they were chasing this table around the room. Yet that experience was not enough to convince them that spirits are real. They were convinced that it was just the power of their mind doing this and that it was out of control.

We even see this in the life of Jesus when he did miracles. He taught people things, they experienced it, they saw it. But their worldview was so locked into what they interpreted from what they saw Jesus doing, it did not change their lives.

Worldview has that much power. It’s the filter through which we look at everything in life. Apologetics-wise, this is why it is often hard to even have a conversation with some people, because our worldviews are so different that our words don’t mean the same thing.

[04:38] Stephanie: Yes. Even just defining terms can get hairy because you have to have the same worldview, or at least understand each other’s worldview [before you can agree on a definition].

[04:46] Marcus: Yes.

[04:46] Stephanie: When talking about a kingdom worldview and theology, we look at questions like: How do I look at God? How do I look at myself? Where have I been? Where am I going? That sort of thing. Do you want to talk about that?

[04:59] Marcus: Yes, those are the classic questions of theology. Somebody showed me how Biblical theology and systematic theology are different. Biblical theology is me studying the Bible and trying to organize what it says into categories. Systematic theology is when the world asks us questions and we try to give them biblical answers.

I taught systematic theology back in my twenties, and it was just one of those God things that he dropped in my lap. It was the opportunity to realize that as systematics go, when somebody asks you a question and says, “What does the Bible have to say about this? What would be a biblical perspective on this?”, then you go through and try to systematize everything the Bible has to say about that particular topic.

Well, that’s huge, because we all have questions about life, and we want to know, is there a biblical way to look at this? Is there a kingdom way to look at this? And if we don’t get those things clear in our minds, we’re just going to default to what everybody in our world does. It tends to be more our subculture than our larger culture. That is, whatever our people with whom we most identify do tends to be our default culture.

[06:16] Stephanie: When I think of Grandpa Warner being a teacher, I think of him teaching worldview. We’ve already talked about him a little bit in a prior episode, but I would love to give him more space in this episode. I have some thoughts, but do you want to?

[06:34] Marcus: Well, what do you remember? I mean, we were very different ages. We had a very different relationship with him when we were experiencing that. But, he was famous for his worldview teaching. In fact, I know Wycliffe had him come in, and they used to have their missionaries go through his worldview training. Yeah, it’s pretty good stuff.

[06:55] Stephanie: I remember the apple and the core. I don’t know if I could just explain it off the top of my head. I don’t have your brain, but I remember the apple, and I especially just remember him talking about spiritual warfare and worldview. I thought that was what made him especially unique in his teaching.

[07:18] Marcus: Yes, my dad taught a warfare worldview. That was kind of his core topic. In talking about warfare worldview, he liked to explain the difference between a Christian perspective on spiritual warfare and animism.

The way he would explain it is that animism is a belief that there is an impersonal power in the universe. You can think of it like “the force” in Star Wars. This is the most pervasive worldview in every culture on earth, the idea that there is a spiritual force or spiritual power at work, and this power is neither good nor evil, it is simply powerful.

My dad likened this spiritual force to electricity. He said that electricity can heat up our house and it can light up the room, but it can also kill us. So, is electricity evil when it kills us and good when it’s lighting up, or is it just neutral? Most people in the world who live with an animistic worldview believe that this power is just neutral.

Animists also believe that the power can be controlled, and so they look at shaman, witch doctors, as sort of like electricians. They’re the people who are specialists on how to manipulate this power to get it to do what you want it to do. Such people also believe in spiritual beings. They just don’t believe that all power is personal. Whereas a kingdom worldview, a biblical worldview, teaches that all power is ultimately personal.

This difference between a personal and impersonal spiritual power is huge. We see it today in psychology and medicine, in our universities, and more and more in the United States and around the world, is this acceptance of what used to be an occult worldview that says if you can use it for good, then it must be good, instead of understanding that underneath all this there is the biblical worldview that says there’s only God power and demonic power. There’s not a neutral power that can just be manipulated.

So your grandfather’s teaching on worldview tended to focus on things like this. And he loved, particularly, distinguishing animism from a biblical perspective on spirituality.

[09:39] Stephanie: And he had direct relation to it because of his time in Africa.

[09:43] Marcus: Right. He and my mom were missionaries in Sierra Leone.  And he tells me, too, that they were completely unprepared for it. They didn’t get this kind of training.

[09:55] Stephanie: Which is why he had a passion for giving people training.

[09:58] Marcus: Exactly.

[10:02] Stephanie: Since I brought it up, do you want to explain the apple? What is the apple?

[10:09] Marcus: I’m going to mix metaphors here. If I were an alien coming to the world and trying to figure out what’s going on, it’s a little bit like a missionary coming into a culture and trying to figure out what in their world is going on. When my parents went to Sierra Leone, they had to figure out the culture.

My father used an apple as a way to understand what’s going on in a culture. The first thing you run into is the outer layer of the culture. It’s the observable behaviors and institutions.

For example, architecture is often different in various parts of the world, not just because of what’s available for making it, but because it expresses the values of what is important in the culture.

For instance, there was a time in medieval Europe when the cathedrals and castles were the dominant architectural buildings because the church and the king were the two great institutions of the culture. Well, today, what dominates our landscapes?

[11:07] Stephanie: Skyscrapers.

[11:09] Marcus: Yes, financial institutions, for the most part, because what we value is money. And that dwarfs everything else that’s going on.

So the outer skin of the apple is what is readily observable habits and traits and customs and things like this. Underneath is the fleshy part of the apple which are the values. The idea is that our values drive how we behave, what we create, and the things that we see on the outside. And then the core of the apple that drives our values is our worldview.

This is how he taught that at the core of every culture is its worldview, and the worldview drives its values, and the values drive its behavior. That was the apple analogy.

[11:56] Stephanie: And would you add anything to that now or make any changes?

[11:59] Marcus: The only thing I would add to it, I think, is that deeper even than worldview is belonging. When it comes to belonging and why I would add belonging, I think of my parents’ experience in tribal Africa.

One of the things that became apparent was that what was core to that culture was who their people were. In other words, they looked around and they had an extended family system, in which your second cousin was called brother or sister. We in America often don’t even know our first cousins, much less our second cousins.

In the Sierra Leone culture, you were actually responsible for your cousins’ debt, so you stayed engaged in their lives to make sure they didn’t get too far off track  because you had some kind of responsibility there. Their whole way of looking at it began with the idea that these are my people. Then everything flows out of, “What do my people believe? What do my people think is the way life works? What do my people value? How do my people behave? How do we do this?”

So the only other thing I would add is this idea that belonging is often a deeper motivation even than our worldview. We are predisposed to adopt the worldview of the people to whom we feel most belonging.

[13:24] Stephanie: That makes sense. And you can see that at work in modern culture in the political climate.

[13:36] Marcus: There’s no question about it. If I’m surrounded by a people group and I want to belong to that people group, it’s very difficult to oppose their worldview and oppose their value system because [if you do] you’re not going to feel like you belong. That motivation to belong is a very powerful force that drives us toward particular worldviews, and it can be used for good or for evil.

In the church, what’s supposed to happen is this belonging energy that drives us collectively to promote a biblical worldview and biblical values and to make that the norm in our churches. Paul talks about that regularly.

[14:21] Stephanie: Can you give us some practical ways we Christians can cultivate our worldview, aside from the three pillars we’re going into later? Just some things that we could be on guard for or things that we should have on our radar?

[14:43] Marcus: Part of it is knowing the worldview of your culture so you can recognize when it’s creeping into your biblical worldview. This is why we study theology. Part of it is to make sure that I have a clear theological foundation for the way that I think.

I love the way we’re going to talk about Joseph Stone in our next session. I remember him saying that he thinks theologically, which means that he is always asking, “What is the Christian way of looking at this?” Rather than using the term worldview, he liked to say “my conception of life”.

The analogy he gave was, if I’ve got a car, and my conception of the car is that it runs on diesel, but it actually runs on unleaded gasoline, I can do major damage to that car because my conception of it is wrong. In the same way, if my worldview is not in sync with reality I can do major damage.

The way I promote these core beliefs is that I listen to podcasts like this, I study my Bible, I begin to think theologically about things in life a little bit more, and I hang out with people who help me.

[16:08] Stephanie: I see it also in counseling terms. We talk about fruit picking versus getting at the roots. I think that a lot of times, Christian worldview, overtly, at least, has tended to be fruit picking that has turned legalistic or even the opposite of legalistic. People will fruit-pick instead of understanding why. Why do I believe, and how do I apply that “why” to everything in life.

[16:33] Marcus: Yes, it makes sense because we live in a buffet culture called postmodernism, we pick a little bit of everything and bring it together and create your own worldview and that’s okay even if it’s completely illogical. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.

Sometimes, just knowing what cultural tendencies are, recognize them. I also know that the more I read the Bible, and the more that I’m in the Bible, the more I tend to see the stories of my life in terms of the stories of the Bible. Just like mythology teaches the worldview of a culture, so the stories of the Bible teach us the worldview of life in the kingdom.

When we read stories like Balaam and his donkey, it affects our worldview. We read stories about the angel of the Lord killing 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, it affects our worldview. When we see David confronting an angel on what was to become the temple mount, it affects our worldview. I can go on and on and on.

The Bible presents a world in which spirits are very active in our lives. For most American and western christians, the spiritual realm has become what I call the attic of the house. That is, we know it exists, we know it’s real, but we kind of stuff the things up there and forget about it because we don’t see any practical application to the way we live our everyday lives. It’s not functional. That’s what we’re really trying to change.

[18:08] Stephanie: In the next episode, we’ll be looking more at the three pillars of a kingdom worldview. But for now, any final thoughts on theology?

[18:18] Marcus: One of the reasons we’re going to talk about the three pillars of a kingdom worldview is that to begin thinking theologically, you have to have your foundation set. Where do we start? That’s what the three pillars are going to be about. Where do we start in putting together a biblical worldview? I’m looking forward to this. We’re going to introduce them next week, and then we’re going to take a deeper dive into each one of them in the weeks to come.

[18:42] Stephanie: Huzzah. Well, thank you, Father, and thank you all for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk Podcast and share with your friends.

You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.