What makes the Christian worldview unique? Dr. Gray Sutanto explains three ways in which the Christian worldview offers a unique perspective on problems of human sin and culture.
What makes the Christian worldview unique? This is a massive question, and we can try to really address it in terms of actually just talking about each doctrine and the major topics of the Christian faith. So perhaps we’ll come up with three responses to this.
Christianity Offers a Trinitarian Perspective
I think the Christian faith is unique because it offers a Trinitarian perspective. In other words, in the Christian worldview, we see all of reality as mirroring in some way the Triune God. And so if God is one yet three, if God is unity and yet diversity, Christians will have a capacity to, again, see the world in all of its richness and to try to account for and accommodate and engage with the world in all of its richness. Bavinck would argue that without this Trinitarian understanding, you’re going to end up tempted to reduce the richness of reality to just one of its aspects. If God is one yet three, if God is unity and yet diversity, Christians will have a capacity to see the world in all of its richness.So when we take a look at, for instance, the diversity of cultures around us, we’re going to be tempted to say, “Well, one culture must be superior than all the others,” or “One culture is really the solution to all the others.” Rather than seeing that all of these cultures are really an implication of who we are as made in the image of the Triune God, we’re going to end up isolating one culture and using that as a standard for all others. A lot of problems really do stem from that sort of move. Problems of racial superiority—the problems of racism—Bavinck would argue, is a result of departing from this Christian Trinitarian faith.
Christianity Holds Tensions Together
The second way in which the Christian faith is unique is that, again, it provides a view, therefore, of the image of God that holds together tensions that the world wants to take part. So with regard to the image of God the Christian understanding says that we are image bearers and yet we’re image bearers of God. And in the language of Psalm 8, we’re both, therefore, humbled and yet dignified. We are image and yet divine image bearers. So what this means is that in the Christian faith, we’re both bodies and souls. We have a divine sort of orientation. And yet, like the animals, we are also material things. The world, however, wants to take that apart and say we’re either material creatures or spiritual realities. We either have a divine-like responsibility to determine our own meaning, to determine our own identity. And on the one hand, we also say that we are just material realities and there’s nothing really special about us at all. We’re just living a very brief life in this pale blue dot in an endless universe, right? So are we meaningless or do we create our own reality? Well, again, the Christian worldview tries to sublate these two binaries.
Christianity Offers a Problem-Solution Dynamic
I think the third factor that makes the Christian worldview unique is that it posits the problem of reality not in creation and the solution of all of reality also not in creation. What do I mean by this? In the Christian worldview, the main problem with the world is not anything creational, but rather in sin, which is an alien intrusion to an otherwise good creation. And so therefore, the main solution to this problem of sin is found in God as offered in the gospel. God has promised us to redeem the whole world and to redeem us by way of Jesus Christ. I think if you take away this problem and solution dynamic that Christianity offers, you’re going to end up needing to account for the problem elsewhere and needing to account for the solution elsewhere. You’re going to end up substituting where the problem is and substituting where the solution is.
If you take away this problem and solution dynamic that Christianity offers, you’re going to end up needing to account for the problem elsewhere and needing to account for the solution elsewhere.Because humans instinctively know that there is something wrong with the world, that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. And we instictively, therefore, gravitate toward answers in response to those problems. So if you don’t have sin and God in your worldview, you’re going to end up saying, “What’s the main issue here?” And where the problem is here, it’s not going to be located in sin anymore, but rather in something creational. Maybe the problem primarily is in the fact that people just lack material goods. The main problem is poverty. And so the main solution is if everybody just has more material goods, then all of the problems of the world will go away. Now, from the Christian perspective, the issue with that is that sin cuts across both the rich and the poor. There’s sin in rich communities and there’s sin in the poor communities. And so just giving people more material goods is not going to solve the fundamental issues of the heart.
Another perspective Bavinck again offered was that people are going to start saying, “If the problem is not sin and the solution’s not God, maybe the problem is just in one culture and the solution is in another culture.” And hauntingly, Bavinck argued in 1904 that certain German philosophers were departing from the Christian faith, were suddenly saying, “Hey, the German nation will save the world. The German culture is actually the solution to all of the problems of the world, and other cultures are issues with the world.”
Bavinck argued by departing from the Christian faith and departing from the solution of God and the problem of sin, you’re going to end up identifying the problem in one aspect of creation and identifying the solution with another aspect of creation. And that leads to all kinds of conflict, because we would like to think of ourselves as the main solutions. And we’d like to posit another group of people as the main problem, rather than seeing that all of us are in the same boat of sin, and all of us need the same solution in the gospel. We need the same salvation in the gospel.
