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Building a Biblical Worldview

David Quine

Texas Home School Coalition Association REVIEW © May 2005

My passion is to teach and encourage parents to build their lives and their children’s lives upon the biblical worldview. It started back in 1972 when my wife and I were working with Campus Crusade for Christ at a university campus. We realized that most students were ill prepared and inadequately equipped to give a solid, biblical explanation for the faith that they had in Jesus Christ. Whether the student was in a sociology class, a biology class, or a geology class, he was being challenged in his Christian faith.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Francis Schaeffer asked this one, penetrating question, “How should we then live?”  Dr. Schaeffer’s answer was that we should be living according to a biblical worldview, a foundation that is laid upon Christ.

     I believe that question still resounds today in the twenty-first century. How should we then live? Are we going to embrace the biblical or the non-biblical view? Today what we see happening in some segments of Christianity is the fusion and synchronization of the two. We must carefully guard against that.

     In Back to Freedom and Dignity, Dr. Schaeffer said that Christians must pay close attention to the course of events. We are going to be asked questions that we have never considered before and we must be prepared to give an answer. In short, Christians must prepare to take the lead in giving direction to cultural change. If it goes poorly, as well it might in this post-Christian world, then we must be consciously preparing the next generation for the new battles that it will face. We must be consciously working and developing in our children’s lives a foundation that is based only upon the biblical worldview.

     Edith Schaeffer gives a beautiful word picture about the family in her book What Is a Family? She says the family is a perpetual relay of truth. “Watch the children,” she says, “run back and forth as they pass the flag in a relay race. If one drops it, there’s a forfeit—a returning to the starting place. What excitement is generated! Life is like a relay race, in which it matters whether one person gets there because if the flag is not handed on, the next person can’t start his or her part of the course. The primary place for the flag of truth to be handed on is in the family. Truth was meant to be given from generation to generation. There was supposed to be a perpetual relay of truth without a break.”

     Where are you in that relay race? Perhaps you have an entire heritage of Christians in your family and you are in the third or fourth generation. Perhaps you are the first generation in your lineage that has come to know Christ. Or perhaps your grandparents were believers, and then something happened to your parents, and they dropped the baton. You have had to go back and pick up that baton, and God has called you to pass on the baton of truth to the next generation—your children. Paul taught Timothy, who was to teach faithful men, who were to teach others. We home schooling parents are working diligently to pass on the baton of truth to our children so that they will be like Timothy to Paul and in turn will teach others who will teach others.

     Gladys Hunt, in her book Honey for a Child’s Heart, says, “As Christian parents we are concerned about building whole people—people who are alive emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. To train up a child, to train a child’s character, to give him high ideals, and to encourage integrity, to provide a largeness of thought, creative thinking, imaginative wondering, an adequate view of God and His world—that’s a large goal to think biblically. It involves squaring up our thinking with what the Bible says.”

The Bible is the gauge against which we measure our thoughts and ideas. Hunt says that our goal is a valid world-life view. This view cannot be scolded into a person. We can only expose young minds to truth, discuss it with them, and then, of course, leave the results to God.

What Is a Worldview? 

One illustration is that a worldview is like the sunglasses that you look through that give you a certain perspective. Another illustration is that a worldview is like a filing cabinet containing filing drawers in which are answers to the seven basic questions:

1.  “Is there a God, and what is He like?” 

2.  “What is the nature of the universe, its origin, and its structure?”

3.  “What is the nature of man?”

4.  “What is the basis of ethics and morality?”

5.  “What is the cause of evil and suffering?”

6.  “What happens to man at death?”

7.  “Do life and history have any real meaning to them?”

Another way you can think of a worldview is like a picture of a map. A map tells you where you are, where you are going, and how to get there. If you were to draw an outline of the continental United States and then draw the state in which you were born, that state’s outline would be fairly accurate. The states immediately surrounding your birth state would also be fairly accurate. But the farther you moved away from your birth state, the more distorted your map would become. James Sire, Christian author and speaker, says that a worldview is a map of reality. Like any map, it may fit what is really there, or it may be grossly misleading.

     I like to look at old atlases and see the maps of our continent that were drawn as people were beginning to move over here. They were not accurate at the start, but they became more and more accurate. That is what God wants to do in our lives as we teach our children from the biblical worldview. You see, He is correcting our maps. He is erasing a little here and drawing lines over there a little bit as we see Him for Who He is or we see ourselves for who we really are. When He is correcting our maps, it is not necessarily comfortable to have the lines erased or redrawn.

     Several years ago my son Blaine and I were in Minnesota at a home school convention. We went to St. Anthony Falls, which had been the point of the northernmost navigation of the Mississippi River. However, in the 1940s the Corps of Engineers diverted the river, laid a solid concrete “floor” for the bedrock, and created a series of locks. The river had eroded the rocks, which had caused there to be falls that ships could not navigate. With the renovation the ships could go around the falls, go through the locks, and go up farther north. That is exactly what God has called you and me to do as parents—to lay a solid, biblical foundation for our children’s lives so they will be able to navigate in and out of culture, because we are ambassadors for Christ.

Why Is the Biblical Worldview Important to Teach? 

           You only have two basic sets of competing ideas in our culture. The conflict has been primarily the thoughts of the Greeks and Romans against the Judeo-Christian belief. There was a time period in our culture when there was a great overlap between the Christian worldview and the worldview of the culture. But now we live in a time when there has been a great shift in the culture, so it is no longer embracing many of the thoughts of the Christian worldview.

     We are lights to the world. Our children are letters of Christ to the culture. That is why it is imperative that we look beyond sentence diagramming, multiplication tables, and all the things that we do day to day and see the big picture. What in the world are we trying to do here with our children? It is a discipleship process of passing on the life of Christ to them.

We must be careful. Our children are going to get off the path. Do not think that just because we homeschool, have the best curriculum, have everything all lined up perfectly, it is all going to keep our children from getting off the path from time to time. We have an evil nature, and Christ has crucified that nature. Now we are alive to Christ, but there are times when we take control of our own lives.

     Our prayer is that our children would know by revelation, not by experience, that the world is crooked and perverse. We ask that they will not go off the road and say, “Well, I don’t think God is telling the truth, so I am going off the road here and try this out for myself.”

How Do You Teach Your Children from a Biblical Worldview? 

        Scripture can direct you as you formulate your philosophy of education. The following are examples: 

·         Deut. 6:4-7--Use every opportunity at all times to communicate the truth to your children.

·         1 Pet. 5:2-3--Shepherd your children, and be an example to the flock. This passage is speaking about elders in the church, but I personally believe it also applies to us as parents with our children as we tend and care for them.

·         1 Pet. 3:15--Help your children to be ready always to make a defense to anyone who might ask them why they are Christians.

·         1 Thess. 5:21You examine, evaluate, and embrace those things that are good and true.

·         Phil. 4:8--As you teach, dwell on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, etc.         

        Pray that your children will be faithful to Christ even in your absence when they are not under your direct supervision anymore. Paul says in Phil. 2:12-16 that we are living in a crooked and perverse generation. Do not hide from it or leave it. You are rubbing shoulders with it, but be lights in it, holding fast and clinging to the Lord as an anchor for your own personal life. Hold forth the Word of life to others. Let these verses guide you in the development of your philosophy of education.

Meet David Quine

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