Most of us do not consciously espouse a worldview. We usually function at the level of attitudes and behaviors, occasionally surfacing the values that drive what we feel and do. Those values, acknowledged or not, flow out of a worldview — the core assumptions and convictions that drive our lives.
Worldview is the internal gyroscope by which we make sense of reality and keep our balance — or at least make the attempt. I am of the opinion that worldview is so deep and pervasive in shaping and conditioning how we live our lives, it cannot be easily changed. One cannot reconstruct one’s basic take on reality during an evening seminar!
So, for example, our thoughts on democracy or the Arab-Israeli conflict or multi-cultural tensions in Europe or competing tribal claims in Africa or culture wars in the United States are shaped by some fundamental assumptions that we usually do not even try to articulate. Unless something happens to reconfigure our assumptions then for all practical purposes (and for better or worse) our assumptions simply are as we make our way through the existential mess of daily life in the marketplace.
Into this deep but flawed stability, one then introduces Jesus Christ, who described himself as the way, the truth, the life. He embodied what the Jews call shalom…the state of being in harmony together, when the community of our relationships is complete, rightly related to God and living according to His specification.
Jesus projected the character of his Father into our world, with beauty and accuracy (”grace and truth” as John has it at the beginning of his gospel). Jesus modeled the permanent trans-cultural virtues — virtues that are, I think, more than mere values. He dignified and illuminated what it means to be human; he reconnected us with the ground of our being. He was — we discover — the good news about everything.
Putting it very simply, Jesus taught us how to live and die well…and gave us the power to do both. He helped us see, if you like, that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a (temporary) human experience.
The apostle Paul wrote of “being transformed by the renewing of your minds” and of Jesus Christ “being formed” in us. Quite a process, which may perhaps be why most of us are allowed quite a few years on this earth!
The Christian faith has begun to lose its privileged position in the United States, as it did some time ago in most of Europe, and I think this is probably a good thing for making serious people think seriously about their faith. Unfortunately, the Christian faith has also lost much of its relevance for the shaping of daily life — there don’t seem to be as many of us thinking seriously about our faith as may be required to keep the conversation fresh and vital. Occasionally, as in the events that resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, some horrific experience raises its beastly head…then it is gone again. Life goes on, deeply indifferent to the sea change offered in Jesus Christ.
150 years ago, in the haunting Dover Beach Matthew Arnold wrote:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges dread
And naked shingles of the world.
It does not seem to me that things are much improved. Nowadays, I’m afraid even faith’s withdrawing roar seems to be audible only as an occasional mumble.
The climate in which most people have been raised assumes that commerce is a little dirty by nature — that people who want godly significance to their lives will find it through the ministry, on the mission field, by Christian education, in giving humanitarian relief…or pursuing the study of theology. More recently I suppose one might tack the adjective Christian on the front of music, publishing and counseling, thus sanctifying what otherwise looks much like producing and selling CDs and books and administering therapy. There is nothing wrong with these pursuits; in fact the best examples of each are quite good enough without having a cross painted on them. But it seems there is always something counter-intuitive in our culture to claim that commerce is important to God.
What we are finding, though, is that men and women in the marketplace struggle with the pursuit of profit at any price, and the seemingly unjust and arbitrary actions and treatment of people as means to an end. Doug Sherman and William Hendricks in their book Your Work Matters to God describe an environment in which “every day, millions of workers go to work without seeing the slightest connection between what they do all day and what they think God wants done in the world.” Working people long to live integrated lives. We are desperate to glue the fragments back together, eager to make our marriages and families and businesses “work.” This is why the times are ripe for exploring the architecture of the kingdom of God.
Nearly everyone wants to do the right thing — to be faithful — to keep our priorities and values intact. Most of us deal on a daily basis with simple behavioral tensions between what we say we believe and the way we act. When we follow Christ those tensions do not dissolve — in fact they may seem even more intense. Some tensions we resolve… some we ignore… some we just live with.
These tensions, while they frustrate us, are not necessarily wrong. They can become catalysts to compel us to dig for truth and launch us on a quest to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.” This is when we discover we have been operating within a worldview that has shaped our assumptions and conditioned us far more than we realized — a worldview that pulls us away from what we claim we want most.
We discover that our first tension is really with God. Since the great crash by which humans sought autonomy from the creator, we prefer to run things “our way”… and our pride blocks the connections with God for which we were made. We find ourselves challenged if not outright offended by the New Testament Gospel of Matthew 22:37 “… Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
Our second major tension is with the people around us because they too threaten our freedom, our comfort, our self-centeredness. We want “community” on our own terms. The battle of the sexes… wars between nations… unfair competition between companies… turf wars in the marketplace… personnel issues in the workplace… fights between neighbors… divorce… family squabbles… sibling rivalry all erupt out of our determination to “get our own way”. Again, the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 22 verse 39 opposes us: “… Love your neighbor as yourself”.
Out of these two underlying tensions emerge seven common tensions that permeate the experience of those who find ourselves involved daily in the marketplace of global commerce.
- Caring for people yet seeking profit
- Humility and the drive for success
- Ethics, justice and the misuse of authority
- Family, business and social responsibilities
- Handling personal possessions well in a needy society
- Upholding moral values in a corrupt environment
- Personal drives versus corporate demands
We are convinced — and our flagship product, The Scriptural Roots of Commerce series, embodies the conviction — that the great sweep of the biblical narrative carries in it a compelling and significant message about a business person’s worldview and the resultant tensions in the marketplace and life in general. What is helping us, from the foundation up, is an integrated worldview that radiates from the centrality of Jesus Christ in that narrative and the worldview it shapes. It is a paradigm shift… a new way of organizing our perceptions and understanding — a new way by which we handle reality.
Books and sermons are fine, even useful, but adults learn best from interactive and experience-based wrestling with concepts, not monologues be they sermonic or literary. This is why The Scriptural Roots of Commerce modules take one on a journey of discovery, rather than offering a glossy brochure about the destination. Working the modules brings the Bible off the shelf to be experienced as irrepressibly relevant in the daily mess of reality.
It is a demanding process. Not intellectually so much as in its insistent demand that we rearrange our mental and emotional furniture. We are not selling “right answers.” We are working to develop the practical tools for creating an internal platform to live authentically in the midst of the existential mess of daily life in the marketplace.
Business as usual is not good enough. We are going after foundational changes that will support the weight of the lives we are building. We don’t want to see our daily behavior reformed; we want to see our lives transformed. The kind of change we’re after is not built upon list making and dutifully ticking things off as they are accomplished. We are replacing our old and inadequate worldviews with a robust biblical worldview. However demanding it may be, nothing less will do. What we want requires heavy lifting; fair enough. It requires wrestling again and again with ingrained habits and patterns of life; so be it. What we’re after is what a colleague calls, wrestling with the biblical text till it pins us! If that is what it takes, we are all in.
