A Cruciform Worldview

Worldview Church » September 2008

I have been steeped in biblical worldview teaching since junior high school. I studied the Bible in a Christian college-prep school, majored in Bible and Christian Education at a college known for its worldview curriculum, and earned a masters degree in biblical studies and another in Christian education at one of the world’s finest seminaries. During those years I learned the Bible’s explanation of the nature of reality as well as its answers to the ultimate questions concerning origin, identity, meaning, morality, and destiny. I even learned how to teach the Bible to others, and I have discipled adolescents in the biblical worldview for 20 years.

For many of those years, though, I lived and taught the biblical worldview more as rules to live by and examples to follow than as a way of life transformed by the Gospel. As I look back over my years of church ministry and Bible teaching, I am saddened by how often I urged people to obey the Law of God without also urging them to believe the Gospel of God.

I remember how excited I was to discover that the thrust and aim of biblical teaching is about love for God and others (Matthew 22:36-40; 1 Timothy 1:5). I loaded all of my lessons like bullets into those two guns and fired away, hoping to get my listeners’ feet to dance to the tune of the Great Commandments. I turned the guns on my own feet, working hard at personal devotions and trying with all my might to be a better person.

Three years into marriage and two years into seminary, my pursuit of loving God and others came crashing down when a losing battle to secret sins drove me to the counselor’s office. There I found a Christian counselor who knew how to apply the fullness of the cross-shaped biblical worldview to my life. He did not excuse my lack of love for God and others. He actually raised the bar of these standards to the level of my heart, helping me see how I had violated God’s design to live in right vertical relationship with Him and right horizontal relationship with others more than I imagined.

He also did something that I had not been doing: he taught me how to apply the cross to my ongoing sin. He helped me to see that one of my worst sins was self-righteousness, depending on myself to love God and others. He encouraged me to take my sinful self-effort to the cross, embrace the good news that Jesus loved God and others perfectly in my place, that He died to appease God’s wrath for my refusal to live for God and others, and that He lives to empower me by His Spirit to live a cross-shaped life.

My worldview was not biblical until it was also cruciform. The cruciform worldview teaches us that we are to be shaped by the cross into the shape of the cross. We were made to live a cross-shaped life: to love God and love others in the place where we live. That’s what it means to take the shape of the cross. But that cross-shaped life is not possible unless we are being shaped by the cross, unless we are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next by the grace of the gospel (2 Corinthians 3:18-4:6).

During those painfully redemptive days of seminary, I began to realize that my so-called “biblical” worldview was cross-less, and therefore not Biblical at all. Those of us who ballyhoo the biblical worldview can come dangerously close to the error of the Pharisees, to whom Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40).

Could He not likewise say to us, “You study the Scriptures so that you might develop a biblical worldview, and it is they that bear witness about Me, the key to interpreting and living in accordance with all of reality; yet you fail to see Me in every text and sometimes are willing to build a worldview apart from believing in and becoming like Me”?

We want the Bible to shape the way we look at the world, but our view of the Word is too often Christ-less and cross-less, resulting in the promotion of rules to live by and examples to follow. Jesus Christ crucified is the lens through which, and the life by which, we truly make sense of God's Word and world (1 Corinthians 1:20-25). With all the talk about biblical worldview, we must remember that our worldview is not biblical unless it is also cruciform.

I have not stopped teaching people that all of life is about loving God and loving others where they live, nor have I stopped pursuing that life. I actually find myself practicing it more passionately than ever. But now I’m learning that Bible bullets loaded in the guns of loving God and others will fire amiss unless they’re aimed at hearts marked by the cross-hairs of Christ crucified.

Jimmy Davis is associate editor of Worldview Church and pastor of Riverside Church in Knoxville, Tenn. He maintains the Cruciform Life Blog.