And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. Philippians 1:9-10

The very connected yet disconnected 21^st century

Seinfeld, the quintessential show of the postmodern 90’s, was jokingly known as “the show about nothing.” This moniker was due to its frequent dealings with trivial issues. Nothing of significance was tackled in any episode, and it was full of typical Jerry Seinfeld-ish musings where everything, from the sacred to the serious to the menial, were all subject to the same fate of triviality.

Still, the show might also have been known as “the show going nowhere,” since what really made this show different than its predecessors was its lack of a clear story line. While most situation comedies before and since take the viewer from a clear point “A” to a clear point “B,” Seinfeld did not. Each episode was random, made up of mini-episodes loosely and ironically tied together. In this view, the various aspects of life – particularly actions and their consequences – are not connected as parts of a larger story that gives them their place and meaning.

Many of us who grew up watching (and laughing) at Kramer, George, Jerry, and Elaine risked being convinced that real life was actually as random as this, that actions and their consequences are not necessarily connected. In fact, it seems to be a rampant assumption of Generation X’ers and Millennials that life is a series of disconnected mini-episodes lacking any overarching direction or storyline.

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Of course, our cultural backdrop only reinforces this. In the modern West, what is available to center and contextualize our experiences? Previous generations may have started on page 1 and moved to page 2, but not us. We begin on page Google or Facebook, and go anywhere from there. We have only the computer screen on which jump haphazardly across the internet having virtual experiences, identities, and interactions without a story line, connectedness, or any fear of consequences.

Connecting behavior and belief

In particular, the disconnected experience of emerging adults has been thoroughly documented. Social scientists now recognize “the quarter-life crisis” as a real phenomenon describing the struggle for meaning of the educationally and financially privileged twenty-somethings of our time who don’t have a “why” for all the “whats” in their life. Christian Smith’s research on the religious views of young people in America has now expanded to, in his words, “emerging adults.” The moral relativists, religious pluralists, and emotional volatiles he describes in his latest book Souls in Transition: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford, 2010) are clearly the heirs of the “moralistic therapeutic deists” he identified in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2005).

What is missing for this generation is what the postmodernists decry: a metanarrative, or an overarching story that can connect and make sense of the various, seemingly disconnected, aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, church experience for many of us has failed to provide this. We, especially those of us from conservative church backgrounds, learned the Bible verses and the stories. Even worse, we may have even learned how to “get something out of them,” a moral virtue or a therapeutic nugget to “apply to our lives.”

The problem is they came at us without a larger context. We took them in just like the Aesop’s fables we read in school on Monday to Friday, the celebrity self-esteem soundbites interspersed with our cartoons on Saturday morning, and the music we took in by the hours every day of the week. We were so used to the endless switching of channels on all of our electronic devices that it never even occurred to us that the bits and pieces of spiritual stuff we received were actually connected. We had no idea that the Scripture actually offered a Grand Story of all things and all people, one much larger and deeper than the Friday night lineup on ABC. Rather than understanding our lives in light of the great redemptive history of God’s world, we understood the Scripture in light of the culture of disconnection we knew everyday.

A worldview that is “Big Enough” for the world

Steven Garber, in his excellent book The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior (IVP), introduces the idea of a “big enough” worldview. Garber’s extensive experience with college students convinced him that too many students had limited versions of Christianity that was just not able to handle life with all of its highs and lows, failures and successes. What would a worldview “big enough” for the world look like?

First, a “big enough” Biblical worldview would understand the primary purpose of the Scriptures. It’s not a set of rules, a love letter, a collection of moral stories, or a book of heroes. Primarily, it is the story of all that God brought into existence, what has happened in this story to compromise God’s creation, and how God interacted personally in the story in Christ to redeem all things to Himself. Primarily, we are not to break up the story and apply it to our lives. Rather, we are to learn who we are in light of that story. A key question to be asked is, “By which story are we living our lives?”

Second, a “big enough” worldview is not something that limits us. While we are to avoid sin, we are careful to discern the difference between fallen expressions of life, and the good things that God created. No area of human endeavor is off-limits. Thus, discipleship in the Biblical worldview must be broadened. When our faith is limited to the “spiritual stuff,” we neglect the fuller story of God’s creating and

Third, a “big enough” worldview ought to confront the key issues of our day. There is no place in the Christian worldview to hide from the world. Rather, true Christianity takes us directly in the world, never away from it. The primary understanding here is that in Christ we are reconciled to our proper relationships. God created us in relationship with Him, ourselves, others, and the world. Each of these relationships has been fractured by our sin and the curse. And, each of these relationships is restored in Christ. Thus, the scope of our redeemed involvement in the world must be no less than the scope of our created involvement in the world.

Finally, a “big enough” worldview is not measured merely by our assertions and agreements. We can assert that “I believe” in this or that, and we can agree with various statements of faith offered by denominations or developed throughout church history. But a worldview is not merely “viewish,” it’s “orientatish.”

The following four sets of questions, developed by Australian scholar Rod Thompson, are helpful in self-evaluation.

A further thought

According to Garber, worldviews are not merely taught. They are also caught. The story-less generation will not develop a “big enough” worldview if they are not mentored and sharpened by those living that worldview out. If they see the Bible handled only in moralistic or therapeutic ways, we ought not be surprised if those we teach turn out as the “moralistic therapeutic deists” that Smith describes. If the current cultural disconnection is the story of our lives, it will be the story of theirs also. If our posture is avoidance, they will not be equipped to confront real challenges to their faith either.

For more insight to this topic, get the book, The Fabric of Faithfulness, by Steven Garber, from our online store. Or read the article, “William Cowper, the Big Questions, and Worldview,” by David Naugle.

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