What is My Worldview

I love to read free books.  Anytime a book is advertised as free I am quick to download it.  What has this have in common with worldview?  I was cleaning up some files on the computer and I came across this free book I downloaded titled “What’s Your Worldview” by James N. Anderson.

I learned that a worldview is how a person sees the world.

Your worldview represents your most fundamental beliefs and assumptions about the universe you inhabit. It reflects how you would
answer all the “big questions” of human existence, the fundamental
questions we ask about life, the universe, and everything.

James N. Anderson

Now to make this book even more interesting is that it is a “choose your own adventure” book.  I was quite fascinated with a book formatted this way and it reminds me of the flowcharts I use at work to make decisions on certain tax returns.

I did go through the questions and did not like where I ended up in my worldview.  From a quick online search, the internet does say that a worldview can be changed but it is hard.

Here it is….my worldview…..Christianity.  No surprise there.  I have been attending worship services and bible classes since the day I was born.  However, I still had one more question to answer.

Do good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell?

In the book, after the question is written to author then goes and explains some ideas about what he means by the question.

Think back to the Goodness Question: you agreed that some things are objectively
good or bad. This fits perfectly with a Christian worldview, in which
God is the ultimate standard of goodness. Good people are those who
truly love God, the ultimate good, and love their fellow humans, who
are made in the image of God. Conversely, bad people are those who
fall short of loving God and their fellow humans as they should.
In keeping with the teachings of Jesus, Christians also believe in
heaven and hell. The Bible refers to heaven as “eternal life”: never ending bliss in the presence of God. The dire alternative is hell, which might well be described as “eternal death”: permanent separation from God and everything that is good.
But what determines your final destination? One very common
view is simply this: good people go to heaven and bad people go to
hell. Do you agree? Is eternal life the reward for those of us who live a
good enough life here and now?

James A. Anderson

Good people are those who truly love God and bad people are those who fall short of loving God?  My first quick answer is “yes”…the “good” people who love God are those going to heaven and the “bad” people that that don’t love God are going to hell. Everyone knows that the first answer is always correct? That yes answer lead me to the worldview of Pelagianism.  What in the world is that????

Pelagianism gets its name from Pelagius, a monk who lived in
Rome in the fifth century. Pelagius taught that humans enter this
world completely untainted by sin and with perfect freedom to choose
between good and evil. We aren’t born sinful, but we can become sinful by failing to follow God’s moral laws and Christ’s moral example.
Pelagius held that heaven is basically the reward for a good life. If you
follow the example of Jesus and live a good moral life, you’ll receive
eternal life. God’s help (“divine grace”) is available for those who need
it, but the basic principle is that the way to get to heaven is by doing
your level best to love God and love others. In other words, divine
grace isn’t strictly needed to get to heaven—and the less you fall back
on it the better!

James A. Anderson

Pelagius was excommunicated from the church in 418 AD.   Why was he excommunicated? Pelagius was denying that salvation was a free gift from God, not from living good lives.

Upon a little more research on the internet, there is also a worldview called Semi-Pelagianism, but this one was not addressed in the book.

The semi-Pelagians believed in the universality of original sin as a corruptive force in man. They also believed that without God’s grace this corruptive force could not be overcome, and they therefore admitted the necessity of grace for Christian life and action.

Encyclopedia Britannica

So what is a Christian worldview?

  According to the Christian worldview, there is a personal God who
is perfect in goodness, knowledge, and power. God created the entire
universe out of nothing and continually sustains it.We humans
were uniquely created in his image to live in personal love relationships with him and with our fellow humans.It therefore follows that there are objective moral standards for human life: God’s good and wise commandments, which can be summarized in terms of loving him and loving our neighbors.

Tragically, however, we humans rebelled against our Creator and
flouted his perfect moral laws. By doing so, we spoiled God’s creation,
corrupted ourselves, and placed ourselves under his righteous judgment. We are all rebels at heart and deserve only condemnation, yet out of his great love and mercy God sent a Savior, in the person of his divine Son, Jesus Christ, to restore us and reconcile us to God. Jesus accomplished this by his sacrificial death on the cross for our sins and his resurrection from the dead. God has revealed this salvation plan
through his prophets, his apostles, and (of course) Jesus himself.
These revelations are recorded in the Bible, which consists of the Old
and New Testaments.

James A. Anderson

What???  I believe and was taught all those things in the Christian worldview.  I suppose the book has been a success.  How? By making me look at my “worldview” so I can understand how to relate with others and more importantly learn about different ways people think.