This year, I’ve had the privilege of taking over the Center for Worldview and Culture at Southwest Baptist University. The aim of the center is the same as that of the University. Our aim isn’t merely vocational training but the formation of the entire person. At SBU, we want to shape our students’ hearts and minds. Far more than merely conferring degrees (which of course we want to do), our hope is that students spend several years of their lives in our carefully curated Christian environment being shaped into mature men and women who are ready to make a Christ-exalting difference in the world.

The Center for Worldview and Culture is one means towards that end. Here’s the mission statement: We aim to prepare students to practice their Christian faith with courage and confidence in a confused world. The mission statement assumes we have the responsibility to prepare students for the world. The school is not an academic playground where we simply retreat into leisure. Instead, it’s a training ground where we instill habits of head and heart into our students so that they are ready (i.e., prepared) to engage the world. Specifically, we want them prepared to practice their Christian faith (of course, not every student will graduate having believed in Jesus). More than merely professing to be Christians, men and women need to live out their faith, to “walk worthy of the gospel” (Eph 4:1–3), to live as Christ lived (1 John 2:6). We do not want to create men and women who simply say they are Christians; we want to shape men and women whose Christianity gets into their bones and works out in the real world. Their faith works (cf. James 2:17). They live for God’s glory in all of life (cf. 1 Cor 10:31).

Living as a Christian requires courage and confidence. It takes courage to live as Christians in a negative world, where Christianity has been increasingly relegated to the margins (though some level of comeback has happened in the last couple of years). And living consistently as a Christian takes confidence. Confident in our God and his Christ; convinced that the Bible is true; living with the knowledge that the Christian story is the one story that makes ultimate sense of reality. The story of the Bible is, as Francis Schaeffer would say, “true truth” (total truth, according to Nancy Pearcy). And, of course, we are trying to prepare students to live as Christians in a world confused about gender, sexuality, politics, religion, and a myriad of other things.

Prepared to live as courageous and confident Christians in a world of confusion. That’s the vision.

One way to talk about what we are doing is in terms of Christian worldview formation. What is a Christian worldview? Nancy Pearcy writes, “The term means literally a view of the world, a biblically informed perspective on all reality. A worldview is like a mental map that tells us how to navigate the world effectively. It is the imprint of God’s objective truth on our inner life…[it comes from] a translation of the German word weltanschauung..(welt = world; schauen = to look)” (Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth, 23). And, as Doug Wilson reminds us, “Living out a Christian worldview is the task of every Christian.”

To change images, move from a mental map to a lens. A worldview is a lens through which we look at reality. For the Christian, this lens should be Bible-colored. John Calvin would say that to see and understand God, we needed to see “through the spectacles of Scripture” (John Calvin, Institutes I.vi.1). So too, to make sense of our world and live as our Creator intends, we need to look at all of reality, the world we inhabit, through those same spectacles. We want to look at the world and the issues of the day through a biblical lens. You should ask what it means to think about life, love, work, entertainment, ethics, politics, eating and drinking, exercise, and international affairs from a distinctly Christian and thus biblical point of view.

Not every Christian believes that “worldview” formation is the best way to talk about such things. Some have argued that worldview training or teaching tends to force neat and clean categories on all the issues and is thus “hostile to learning.” I readily acknowledge that the world is anything but neat and clean and we need to apply wisdom to complex issues. But the Bible does give us categories for understanding what we might call the meta-questions people ask. Where did we come from? Who am I? What’s wrong with the world? How do we fix a broken world? Where is history heading? The Bible provides the ultimate answers to these big questions. Categories are perhaps not neat and clean in application, but having the Bible give us a mental map of reality seems right and good.

Perhaps worldview training has tended to imply that if you merely download the right categories, you are ready to engage the world. I agree, it isn’t always that simple. And, of course, even as we acknowledge the presence of other ways of viewing the world, we need to be careful not to legitimize other mental maps. That is, there is true truth (to borrow from Schaeffer again), and all other views are false (it may sound arrogant and close-minded, but only Christianity is true truth). Other worldviews are illegitimate maps that do not paint a true picture of God’s ordered universe.

Yet, even as I’ve read some of the critics of worldview thinking, I can’t help but come back to this reality (personally experienced): I viewed the world (e.g., identity, morality, relationships, money, romance) one way before I met Jesus. But once the light of the gospel shone in my heart (2 Cor 4:6) and I was awakened from the dead (Eph 2:4–5), I saw the world in a different way. My eyes were opened. Now, as I’ve read my Bible and tried to apply it to my life (by the power of the indwelling Spirit), I’ve come to see all of reality through the lens of Moses, Isaiah, David and Solomon, Matthew and Mark, Luke and John, Paul and Peter, and whoever wrote Hebrews! In that sense, my view of the world is shaped by the Bible. The Bible tells me how to understand the origin of species (not Darwin), the presence of suffering and wickedness (and how to define good vs. bad), how the world will be made right (through Jesus alone), and how to understand the end of all things (both teleologically and historically).

That’s what we want for our students at SBU and beyond. Live out your faith. And do so, seeing all of reality through the lens of the inspired, inerrant, and authoritative word of God. To state it another way, we aim to help students think Christianly. “Thinking Christianly means understanding that Christianity gives the truth about the whole of reality, a perspective for interpreting every subject matter” (Pearcy, 34). So, “If Christian churches [and schools] are serious about discipleship, they must teach believers how to keep living for God after they walk out the church doors [and Christian classrooms] on Sunday [and Monday]” (Pearcy, 66).