Introduction
A fragmented worldview is one that is made up of pieces and bits, and all of it thrown into a cardboard box. When something happens that calls for a response, what you do is rummage in the box until you find something that feels right in your hand, and you pull it out. And by “feels right” in your hand, I am talking about the emotional fit. And by “emotional fit,” I mean that phrase both ways.
The end result of all such fragmented thinking is that people in the grip of it think that what they feel like doing is what they ought to be doing. But those are not the same thing at all.
The Alternative
If Christ is Lord, and He is, then those who confess this truth ought to confess Him as the point of coherence, the point of integration, the place where all reality hangs together (Col. 1:17-18). There are many Christians, however, who understand the Lordship of Christ as meaning that He is Lord of the Sunday piece, or of the private devotional bit. He is the Lord of my happy thoughts, which, come to think of it, are increasingly rare.
This kind of thing is loathsome to God. It is the sort of approach that He judges.
“And there came a man of God, and spake unto the king of Israel, and said, Thus saith the LORD, Because the Syrians have said, The LORD is God of the hills, but he is not God of the valleys, therefore will I deliver all this great multitude into thine hand, and ye shall know that I am the LORD”
1 Kings 20:28 (KJV)
In Screwtape, Lewis says that the modern person has been trained to have a dozen incompatible ideas bouncing around in his head. Lewis’s friend, Owen Barfield, once said that what Lewis thought about everything was contained in what he said about anything. Francis Schaeffer once said that the problem with modern Christians is that they think in parts and not in wholes.
But the Lordship of Christ is the warp, and absolutely everything else in your life, whatever happens, needs to be the woof
“And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their commandment.”
1 Chron. 12:32 (KJV)
But in our day, in the new Israel, the tribe of Issachar is almost extinguished—and those that do remain alive are largely on the lam.
Speaking of Understanding the Times . . .
But not being able to think in this integrated way is not an intellectual problem in the first instance. It is a moral issue, one which Jesus identifies as hypocrisy.
“The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.” (Matthew 16:1–4).
Our usual pattern is to define hypocrisy as saying or teaching one thing and doing another. And this is how the Bible does define hypocrisy in a number of instances. For example, in one place Paul gives a classic example of this kind of thing.
“Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.”
Romans 2:1 (KJV)
That is a problem. This person is doing the very things he condemns others for doing, and this is hypocrisy. But it is only one species of hypocrisy. The sin is larger than that. The genus contains other species.
In the passage from Matthew above, the Lord does not call them hypocrites because of private vice hidden underneath public virtue—at least not in this passage. They did have that problem too (Matt. 23), but what does He rebuke them for here? What He calls hypocrisy here is their utter inability to connect the dots. What they knew in one part of their lives (how to read the weather) they did not know in another part of their lives (reading the cultural weather).
A Brief Apologetic for How I Carry On
Some want to say that I have isolated myself, that I dwell as I do on the outskirts, because I say outrageous things. And I write outlandish things. And my thoughts about this and that are outlier things. Lots of outs being used as prefixes.
In short, I am supposedly out of the mainstream.
Now there really are some fever swamps out there, and there really are people who get themselves into some weird doctrinal juju. That does happen, and it has even happened to some people in Idaho—believe it or not. But there is a difference between the weirdo who believes odd things that are out of the mainstream, and the person who is odd because he actually believes what the mainstream affirms on paper.
When someone actually believes mainstream Christian teaching, and has the temerity to connect it to everything else, the end result is that such a person finds himself seeing what nobody else wants to see, and saying things that nobody wants to hear. You find yourself arguing something like “girls are not boys, and should therefore not be treated like boys,” and you would think from the warp spasm reaction that results that you had said something genuinely outrageous—something like “girls can become boys if they close their eyes and wish for it hard enough.”
As is frequently the case, Chesterton described our generation well, and he was able to do so because he saw the seeds of it in his generation.
“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.”
And so the question, with all the foregoing in mind, is a simple one. Why is it the case that Chesterton could tell us what was going to happen a century beforehand, and the general run of our evangelical solons cannot tell us what actually happened ten years ago?
An Honest Answer
And the answer is an unpleasant one. We have given way to worldview hypocrisy. We refuse to connect the dots because doing so might inform us that the great need of the hour was courage.
Proverbs tells us that an honest answer is like a kiss on the lips (Prov. 24:26). But we have to acknowledge that sometimes an honest answer is like a punch in the mouth.
America is in the state it is in because it is the home of millions of evangelical believers who think in bits and pieces, who try to think in pieces and bits. I have written in the recent past that evangelicals are going to be made into the scapegoat if Trump wins reelection. One of the central charges will be that we are all a pack of hypocrites.
And the honest response to this should be that we deny the charge as it is intended, but we plead guilty to the charge in a more fundamental way. We have been guilty of a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. We have been piecemeal Christians for far too long. If Jesus is not the Lord of all, then He is not the Lord at all. And if He is the Lord of all, then it follows that He is the Lord of economics, the Lord of art, the Lord of music, the Lord of the Senate and the House, the Lord of peer-reviewed scientific literature, the Lord of journalism, the Lord of waste management, the Lord of foreign policy, and the Lord of absolutely everything else.
Jesus is Lord. Is that a mainstream Christian conviction or not? Asking for a friend.