What is a "Biblical Worldview"?

By WCS Headmaster Dr. Roger Erdvig

We hear a lot about biblical worldview as it relates to a Christian school education. But what exactly is a biblical worldview and how can a school help to shape that kind of worldview in students?

Our approach to perceiving, interpreting, and living in the world around us includes our desires, our behaviors, and the propositions we hold to be true. Ideally, all three of these (also described as inclinations, actions, and truth claims) are consistent and cohesive. They make up our worldview and combine to form a pattern of ideas, beliefs, convictions, and habits. We use these to make sense of God, the world, and our relationship to God and the world. So a person with a biblical worldview is one who thinks, desires, and acts in ways that are consistent with God’s thoughts, desires, and actions as revealed through Scripture.

Though truth claims are not the sum total of a person’s worldview, they do form its foundation. And for a well-formed biblical worldview, these truth claims are not random, unrelated ideas. Together, they make up an integrated narrative framework that accurately describes the way things are. A narrative framework is essentially a story of the world that provides a context for understanding why things happen the way they do and how we should respond to what happens. The narrative framework for a biblical worldview can be summarized in four key words. They are chronological in nature and provide meaning for all our experiences: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration.

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Creation refers to God’s original design, structure, and function of the cosmos. Fall represents all that has catastrophically and progressively gone wrong with creation after Adam and Eve chose to throw off God’s authority in favor of their own self-rule. Redemption is the work of Christ (into which he invites us) in restoring all things to their proper pre-fall position, purpose, and possibilities. Restoration is the future and final fix for the entire universe, where all things will once again be brought into proper alignment with Christ.

To make these concepts more memorable, I like to substitute four simpler words which mean the same things: ought, is, can, and will. The original creation is the way things ought to be. The fall has given us the new reality that is. Redemption is the promise and power to transform things into what they can be. And at the final restoration, all things will be made right.

The biblical worldview is a way of thinking, desiring, and acting consistently within this four-word framework for human experience. It’s a way of being in which we as human beings participate in God’s grand plan to transform parts of what is to the way things can be, in anticipation of when all things will be as they ought to be. An education rooted in this reality will be immersed in these concepts at every turn and in every subject area and classroom.*

And this is what we are committed to at WCS.