Christianity with Cataracts

It’s a normal Tuesday morning. You have your work bag in one hand a travel mug of coffee in the other as you enter the garage. But instead of seeing your Tacoma parked where you left it, it has been disassembled. Every piece of it is there – you think! – but the transmission sits off to one side, doors are scattered on the floor, a tailpipe pokes up through a pile of seats, and so on. You call to out to your wife, “Honey, something happened to my truck!” When she comes to investigate, she simply comments, “It all looks there to me!”

Just as there is a difference between an assembled and functional vehicle, so there is a difference between a Christianity that is assembled and functional and a Christianity that is simply a pile of random truth statements. . The way that we assemble our beliefs about the way the world works is what functionally “drives” our lives, and this is called a world view. A world view gives power, momentum, drive, and direction to the believer. The sobering reality of our age is that only a small percentage of those claiming to be Christians have a consistently Christian worldview. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0q3kQ8uriMBGwBpkLUepW2C910Ykb6mtdCOl8XeXbyy7GHkqgthqhOXfg_aem_IWHccuEFdJlc8keJDsINUQ)

There was a time in the history of the West when a Christian world view prevailed. Even nominal and irregular Christians like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin acknowledged a Creator God who had designed a moral universe. We, however, are raising children at a point in history when that Christian worldview has been fragmented. It has been chipped away at until all that the world offers us is a shrinking sliver of space where we acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ on Sunday morning.

This reality was highlighted to me several years ago when I was up in Michigan and reading the editorial section of the Ann Arbor news. The author was bemoaning the involvement of the Church in a variety of social issues and said something to the effect that the Church was perfectly free to tell people about God, but it needed to stay out of political issues like abortion and gay marriage. To him, God had no authority to speak to the unborn baby (who is created in His image) or the nature of marriage (which is a picture of Christ and His Church). That editorial was written over a decade ago, and if anything the secular world has stepped on the gas pedal much harder since then.

We could quite easily hit some of the highlights of how this has happened. In the 19^th century, German higher criticism found its way into American seminaries and undermined the authority of the Bible. This attack on the authority and inerrancy of Scripture was aligned with supposed archeological studies that undermined the narrative of the Old Testament. In the early twentieth century, the Scopes trial swayed the public towards accepting Darwinism as a reasonable explanation for the origins of life. As the 20^th century wore on, the Vietnam war sparked a decades long distrust of institutions and created a pattern of generational division. The role of the natural family was supplanted by secular institutions such as government schools and welfare. The sexual revolution of the 1960’s that wreaked so much havoc on individuals, families, and the unborn has produced a culture that can no longer tell the difference between male and female.

The sometimes spoken and sometimes implied question I have been periodically asked is, “Why bring kids into this mess?” My wife and I have brought five children into this mess and we are not afraid. We do, however, recognize the need to equip our children to cling to truth in a world that has lost its mind. They are going to stand out. They are going to be scrutinized. We are going to have to raise holistically Christian kids who acknowledge the Lordship of Christ over every aspect of life.

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

― Abraham Kuyper

There are reasons to be confident. Foremost among those reasons is that Christ rose from the dead and really is Lord over all. Our risen and living Savior will cast down Darwinism and Communism and Pluralism and every other -ism that exalts itself against the name of Jesus. The “new atheists” are doddering old men, but the Ancient of Days lives forevermore.

We should also be confident because we have better answers. It turns out that lunacy and stupidity and ignorance make for terrible taskmasters. Christian marriage is full of glory while sexual license is full of shame and scars. Children are a joy to experienced, not a burden to be discarded. Masculinity and femininity are crowns and tiaras to be worn, not bartered away for a self-determined sexual identity. Living under the Lordship of Christ is like being a servant of Solomon: happy are His subjects!

“Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.” (― Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity)

And lastly, we should be confident because God has provided us with the resources we need to raise our children with a biblical world view. One of these tools is education – a responsibility that God has laid on parents. Your children will need to understand that God has written a book with Words as well as a book that stretches across the heavens, grows in the soil on which we trod, and dwells in the deep and unexplored parts of the ocean. And they will need to know that these two books never contradict one another, but interpret one another.

(A version of this blog post was featured by Gloria Deo Academy on their website and can be found here)