I am writing from a biblical worldview and seeing contemporary culture from that perspective. I inherited my worldview from my father, and he from his, and it was basically the same worldview I encountered when I was old enough to leave home and go to elementary school and then on to high school. I graduated from high school in 1965 and it was in that time period of the 1960s that the culture and the worldview behind that culture, in the U.S. and the West started changing radically and quickly.

There is an old hymn of the church titled, “This is my Father’s World.” This is no longer my father’s world, but it is still my Father’s world. That is the foundation of the worldview we hold on to in the midst of what is going on around us. The last thirty years have brought in the most radical and rapid changes in culture in the history of the West. This is being written in the second decade of the Twenty-first Century and even the last ten years have seen Western culture turned upside down on many issues.

How radical are the changes? What had been scorned by society, considered too bad to mention in the media, and against the law since the founding of the U.S. and for centuries in Europe, is now, within the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, socially acceptable, promoted in the media and protected by law. This is not a race, gender, or sexuality issue. It is a morality issue. Society has shucked its morals. My point here is that this societal reversal has been lightning-quick as far as cultural change goes, and no doubt there will be more to come. When society crosses the line dividing natural and unnatural, moral and immoral, there are no other lines to cross. If one group has been given rights protected by law to have sex with whoever they want, how could another group be denied the same right to have sex with whoever or whatever they want? This is only one of many Twenty-first Century manifestations of changes in the western worldview that started a few centuries ago.

What we inherited from the previous three centuries

These centuries encompass the Age of Enlightenment, and the Age of Reason, and are generally called Modernity. Before this time, theology dominated the intellectual aspects of Western culture. Christian theologians all basically held the biblical worldview that all of reality was an ordered whole. The order consisted of God at the top, then angelic beings, human beings a little lower than the angels (Ps. 8:5), animals, and the physical earth. God created all things except Himself and theologians taught that God continues to be involved in human lives and human events, directing the flow of history to His appointed end. Divine revelation functioned as the final judge of truth and the human task was to seek an understanding of the truth God revealed. This theocratic worldview was radically altered during the centuries under review.

The Enlightenment and Age of Reason brought profound changes to Western culture. The changes were subtle and were not really intended by the ones that got them going. As the names Enlightenment and Reason imply, the focus of this era became the human mind and human reason as the final source and judge of truth, rather than external authorities such as the Bible or the church. In philosophy, the source of knowledge changed from divine revelation to experience, the truth of which arises from the individual’s unique point of view. The human being is a substance that thinks (Philosopher Descartes: Cogito ergo sum – “I think, therefore I am.”) as an autonomous rational being.

 In science, Copernicus made the bold declaration that the earth is not the center of the universe. This contradicted the church’s view of the cosmos being heaven above earth and hell beneath the earth (The church’s view was not biblical or scientific. It was based on observation only). He did not mean to contradict the church; he just reported what he observed. Copernicus based his declaration upon certain measurements taken from his observation of the movement of heavenly bodies. This became the basis of the scientific method of observation, theory, and testing which was to eventually put human reason on the throne of humanity.

Isaac Newton was another scientist that meant well. Newton was a Christian and he believed “the heavens declare the glory of God,” and he wanted to discover how they did that. He believed that the universe was an orderly machine and that the behavior of objects could be determined by the discovery of the fundamental natural laws that governed them. He believed that by discovering the laws built into the universe, it would only enhance man’s sense of the greatness of God. His science had a theological end. Unfortunately, in the period that followed, philosophy’s rational, thinking man living in Newton’s mechanical universe elevated the scientist as the one who declares truth rather than the theologian or the Bible. If God remained in the worldview of a philosopher or scientist, He was a God of the deist, who believed that the existence of God can be known through reason and observation of the natural world, but that God does not intervene in the natural world and is remote from it.

In the next post we will continue our look at the culture we in the West inherited from previous centuries.