We all live our lives through a cultural lens that gives us the ability to interpret reality and make choices.  We know this system of values and meanings as a worldview.  Most of us live out our lives each day without ever questioning why we live as we do.  However, sometimes we find ourselves clashing with others who hold worldviews different from ours.  Such clashes can lead us to consider why people in the same community can approach life from such different perspectives.  A worldview answers the following four questions. 

1. Who am I?
2. Where am I?
3. What’s wrong? and,
4. What is the remedy?

When I consider the distinctions of the Biblical worldview, I am forced to consider the radical nature of Christianity.  From the Christian perspective, the reality that we find ourselves in is a universe created by a Creator.  This basic distinction is one of the fundamental principles of a Christian’s perspective of the world.  The Bible teaches that God created.  It matters that creation exists because of a creator.  It matters because it gives us purpose and identity.  God created humans to be like “ourselves,” in “our image.”[i] 

Humans were to be masters over all created life.  God provided food for them and blessed them.  God gives humans, unlike other animals, response-ability.  We are able to be in a relationship with God and co-humanity, giving and receiving love to each other and to the one who created us, sustains us and is with us.  We are able to respond and participate with the inner life of the Trinity.  God takes pleasure in this relationship.  God is able to give from the very core of who God is so that we can give from the very core of who we are.  This is a right relationship.  It is dependent on trust, vulnerability, openness and love. 

            The story of Adam and Eve disobeying God and eating from the tree of good and evil is a story of rejection.  This is the predicament, humans, made for relationship, reject this fact and instead say, “I can do it on my own.”  This rejection is a breach of trust, not only between God, Adam, and Eve, but also between God and all of creation.  Without trust, we cannot give or receive the fruit of who we are in our core being. 

            Therefore, in solution to our fallen predicament God sets off on a mission of healing to redeem the relationships between creator and creation and within creation itself.  This is the Christian idea of grace.  God enters into the world to bear the burden of our rejection even though we do not deserve such an act. 

            The western worldview revolves around the individual.  It teaches that we are autonomous.  Self-made through our own effort, freedom of choice preserved at all cost.  The world of potential that we find ourselves in offers choice but conflict comes when others take advantage of our hard work, or try to benefit from our generosity.  The solution is education, hard work and self-reliance.  

 I find personal conflict between these two worldviews frequently.  This conflict usually rises around several key themes.  These themes are poverty, community, and justice.  I struggle with my own prosperity in light of the poverty of the world.  I struggle with a lack of community, and understanding of community and fellowship, in my church, neighborhood and work environment.  I struggle with the injustice that is seen all over the world. 

The church that I am familiar with in the Southern US unfortunately more often than not walks in step with a western worldview.  Take for example the significant emphasis on “individual” salvation, conviction, and accountability.  Why would we ever consider being submissive to a group of peers for the purpose of spiritual growth?  It is isolation that breeds the opportunity for sin to occur.  The revelation of God cannot be isolated in an internal attempt to understand for the benefit of the self.  Internal reflection is a part of the process, yet this internal reflection finds meaning outside of self as dialog occurs in community.  This dialog in community also cannot occur absent the presence of God who reveals himself and sends the Spirit to refine the dialog into a truth that brings us corporately and individually, closer in relationship with God.       

Another similarity between our church practice and the western worldview is the dualistic outlook between public life and private faith, and professional mentality.  Ministers and Missionaries are professionals and expected to know more, be more spiritual, and guide the rest.  Why would anyone consider carrying their faith into their work week let alone understand their call as a Christian to be the presence of Christ as a banker, mechanic, doctor, or neighbor.  However, the most striking evidence for cohesion between the worldviews is the scorecard by which we evaluate the local church.  Success is all about the size of membership, buildings and budgets, not unlike many businesses born out of the western worldview.

The problem is that many of us feel no tension between biblical and Western worldviews.  The church of the West has assumed that its view of Christianity is all encompassing and forgotten that the Spirit of God, as Samuel Escobar writes, is moving from everywhere, to everyone.   The result is a church that is narcissistic and exists as the body of the West rather than the body of Christ.  So maybe I am being a bit hard and sweeping here in my rhetoric.  A question that might be interesting, assuming that we buy into the merge of church and West, is…What holds the church under the “spell” of such Western narcissism, and how might it be set free?