Mark Noll casts the vision for the comprehensive nature of this kind of thinking by speaking of “the life of the mind”: “By an evangelical ‘life of the mind’ I mean . . . the effort to think like a Christian—to think within a specifically Christian framework—across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts.”
This is the essence of the idea of a Christian worldview. The term worldview, from the German Weltanschauung (literally, “world perception”), suggests more than a set of ideas by which you judge other ideas. It is, as Gene Edward Veith has written, “a way to engage constructively the whole range of human expression from a Christian perspective.” Or as Jonathan Edwards, arguably the greatest intellect America has ever produced, once contended, the basic goal of any mind is to work toward “the consistency and agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.”
So the Christian mind gives radically different answers to what James Sire reasonably puts forward as the seven basic questions for any worldview: What is ultimate reality? What is the nature of the world around us? What does it mean to be human? What happens when I die? On what basis are we able to know anything at all? How do we determine right from wrong? What is the meaning of history? Or from a more theological point of view, consider the worldview questions posed by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey. Where did we come from and who are we? What has gone wrong with the world? What can we do to fix it? How now shall we live?
-James Emery White, in A Mind for God, p. 73-74
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