The Colson Center and Focus on the Family have provided Christians another offering in the category of Biblical worldview training. It is a film called “Truth Rising.” It is accompanied by four lessons taught by John Stonestreet, head of the Colson Center. It was well done, and the content was good. But for some it may need a warning sticker. As I explain, Biblical worldview can become a Hellish attraction.
The first two-thirds of the approximately 90 minute film consists of interviews of various scholars. They say that Western Civilization or Tradition is on the brink of collapse. The remainder of the film tells inspiring stories of three Christians who, in recent years, have publicly stood up for their faith. It encourages other Christians to do the same, thus “Truth Rising.”
The accompanying lessons were well-presented. They are a development and expansion by Stonestreet of the Biblical worldview categories found in Chuck Colson’s book published in 1999, How Now Shall We Live. The book identified those categories as creation, fall, and redemption. Stonestreet added a fourth, restoration, which some would call consummation. In my view, the lessons could stand on their own.
I offer the following assessment knowing that every communicative project (Christian or otherwise) has an intended audience. It also has a particular message it wants to convey.
For “Truth Rising,” the audience is professing Christians. The message is that the death and resurrection of Christ gives us hope in the midst of the confusing times that God has placed us in. And God has given each Christian a calling to be part of Christ making all things new. To that I say a hearty “Amen.”
This message gripped me in 1990. That year I was introduced to Francis Shaeffer’s works. A year later I began listening to Colson’s “Breakpoint Commentary” every morning. I started devouring worldview books. I bought into this conception of a Biblical worldview story and calling big time.
Specifically, my calling was to use my law degree to oppose the A.C.L.U.’s use of law and legal theories to cower untrained legislators into enacting unbiblical public policies. I was so convinced of this calling that my first run for public office was against a 26-year incumbent in the Tennessee state Senate. He was Chair of the chamber’s education committee. I won. Barely. I served 12 years.
About six years into my Senate calling, I was sobbing into my hands at the conclusion of a Sunday evening prayer service. I repeatedly said through my tears, “God I’m so tired. I’m just so tired”
Elders and friends gathered round to encourage me. They affirmed how much they valued what I was doing and it was good. The tears ended, but not the burdensome weight of my calling.
About 15 years later I summarized my worldview experience and calling in my monograph, A Month For Glory. (Request a free pdf by clicking this link):
Sixty plus years in evangelical churches did not mean I knew that the evangel, the Gospel, was Jesus Christ Himself. I took the greatest, most beautiful, and most dynamic story about the nature of reality that has ever been told and reduced it to a code of ethical values I tried to live by to escape the wrath of God stored up in the fires of Hell for code breakers.
In recent years, though, the Holy Spirit graciously showed me that I really wanted Jesus, God the Son veiled in human flesh, to escape God’s wrath against sinners more than I wanted to know in the depths of my soul the God who has revealed Himself as pure and infinite love, pursuing sinners. . . .
My only solace in not “getting it” for so long is that Saul of Tarsus, who is familiar to us as the Apostle Paul, spent the first part of his life perfecting a wrong-headed reading and understanding of the Bible that was available to him, what we now call the Old Testament. It took a blinding light from Heaven for him to realize he didn’t know anything about the glory of God either.
Christ is often mentioned in the four lessons, which is excellent. But nothing is said about who he is other than the Son of God incarnate who died and was raised from the dead, He is the central point of the Biblical story of history, and He is making all things new. Nothing goes to the knowledge of the “glory of God” Himself that we have “in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
That’s fine if that is not part of the intended message, but the danger is viewers thinking that agreeing to the precepts and the story of history laid out by Colson and others means they know God and, therefore, the Spirit of Christ must dwell in them.
For example, I substituted the ideas of a Biblical worldview story about history for an actual knowledge of the person of Christ and what He revealed about God. And I attributed that knowledge to my choice, my decision. It was a great trade—I choose Christ and He gives me heaven in place of hell.
However, that is not the Gospel. The Apostle Paul repeated says Christ, himself, is the gospel.
What the foregoing means is I would have been one of those at the final judgment to whom Jesus would say, “Depart from me” because “I never knew you.” (Matthew 7:23). My calling him Lord and my pursuing such a noble and visionary calling because I believed in God and Jesus was no substitute for Him knowing me.
“No one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit, (1 Corinthians 12:3, emphasis supplied). My story proves that the initiative is always God the Father’s, in the person of Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit. Ours is always and only one of thanks and gratitude.
What the church needs is a “Who is Christ and What Does He Reveal about God” project. Until then, I recommend the two books that awakened me from my worldview slumber of death, both by John Owen: Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ and Christologia.
This Holy Spirit revealed knowledge of Christ in the Word of God that Owen expounds will prepare you for the “Jesus Christ” I reference next.
A person in a Christian clerical collar provided the following testimony to the Tennessee House of Representatives about three years ago:
I am here in the name of the God of inclusive and expansive love, Jesus Christ. And I oppose House Bill 239 defining sex as a person’s immutable biological sex as determined at birth. . . . We each of us hold identities that change over time. None of us are immutable.
And I know from walking with God’s children in the church that when we must be immutable, it creates a sense that our true and vulnerable selves in all our changes cannot be valued or held with dignity or worthy of love. I’ve seen this harmful interpretation drive folks out of the place where they are supposed to come and know they inherently belong in all of who they are and in all of the ways in which they are becoming.
How does the “Truth Rising” project provide a Christian the knowledge of the Trinity needed to respond to this supposed knowledge and acknowledgement of Jesus Christ? (I say Trinity, not creation, because creation is revealing God who is triune.) To be honest, it doesn’t. I presume that was not part of the message intended, but it is vital to a wholly-developed Biblical worldview. I’ve provided that answer in my book, Transgenderism: Raising Ancient Issues Only the Ancient of Days Can Answer, endorsed by Dr. George Grant.
The foregoing explains why the mission of my podcast in the sphere of law and policy, God, Law & Liberty” and Substack page, is “Conforming law and civil government to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.” The Lord’s mercy finally helped me see that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” that I need for law and public policy are in “the knowledge of the mystery of God, both of the Father and of Christ” (Colossians 2:2). But that knowledge is necessary for every sphere and every relationship.
As Herman Bavinck wrote, “[I]n the confession of the Trinity,” which those verses point to, “we hear the heartbeat of the Christian religion; every error results from, or upon deeper reflections is traceable to, a departure in the doctrine of the Trinity.” Bavinck, God and Creation, 288.
Without that knowledge, we can be “deceive[d] with persuasive words” (Colossians 2:3). That is what happened to this cleric. And she is instilling that lack of knowledge in others who profess to be Christians in her church.
Christ have mercy upon us. We need the whole Christ, not just bits and pieces of Him.
