How Now Shall We Live?

How is the Book Organized?

Introduction—How Now Shall We Live?

Our culture today is falling apart in its rebellion against God. The church generally doesn’t realize that Christianity is a worldview, a framework that speaks to absolutely everything in existence. As such, it is ill-equipped to carry out the cultural mandate of being God’s redemptive agent of blessing in the world. Our culture is showing signs that it is starting to wake up to the lies it has been operating under for centuries. The time to reach the world with the message that all truth is God’s truth is now.

Part One. Worldview: Why It Matters

Christianity is not merely a collection of doctrines and practices, but a comprehensive framework for understanding all of reality—it is a worldview. Living our lives in accordance with what God says is true about life, the universe, and everything will transform the world—its cultures, social and economic institutions, etc.—from what it is into more of what God intends it to be. To do so we must understand that the truths of Christianity are attacked (often subtley) on all sides by ideas stemming from the assumption that God does not exist. We must familiarize ourselves with such ideas so we know how to identify how they differ from a Christian worldview, and how they fail to adequately answer the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? Why am I here? What’s wrong with the world? How can we fix it?

  1. A New Creation

    Understanding Christianity as a worldview leads to substantial change in the world around us.

  1. Christianity Is a Worldview

    A worldview is the sum total of your beliefs about the world, and it shapes how you live your life, the decisions you make. A Christian’s worldview should be based on the truths revealed to us in Scripture, but many believers don’t realize that those truths are meant to inform all of life. Understanding that they are enables us to live more rationally, as we’ll be living in accordance with the laws and ordinances God built in to his creation. Only when we do so can we live the best life possible; defying the natural or moral law leads to consequences. The culture war is a clash of worldviews. We must understand the ideas that seduce people away from the truth.

  1. Worldviews in Conflict

    Broadly speaking, belief systems fall into the two categories of the naturalistic, stating that nature is all that there is, and the theistic, holding that there is something beyond nature. The naturalistic perspective gives rise to a number of philosophical frameworks that are rife with logical flaws and internal inconsistencies. Tolerance of multiple perspectives has been redefined and elevated to such a status that questioning the implicit assumption that all perspectives are equally valid, or morally equivalent, is no longer tolerated. This climate of apathy, in which no idea is worth fighting for, means we can’t pursuade people with rational arguments, which makes it that much harder to convince people of the truth of Christianity.

  1. Christian Truth in an Age of Unbelief

    We will often come up against people with false ideas, but before we can address the ideas themselves, we first need to address the worldview gap between us. If we don’t, we’re effectively speaking a different language and nothing will even begin to make sense. Start by listening for their answers to the four fundamental questions, paying attention to where their thoughts differ from those of Christianity. You can’t get to why Christianity matters unless you first have an understanding of who God is and why we owe him our obedience. Our commission is not merely to save souls, but also minds, and to do so in a way that brings the truths of scripture to bear on all of life, such that we revive the culture around us and awaken it to what God desires it to be.

Part Two. Creation: Where Did We Come From, and Who Are We?

All worldviews start with the question of origins, and the answers generally fall into the categories of the naturalistic and the theistic. Naturalism is a philosophy that goes back centuries that claims that nature is all that is, or was, or ever will be. As it was gaining in popularity, Darwin’s hypothesis of natural selection and its implications for the evolution of all life from base ingredients gave naturalism the pseudo-scientific rationale it was looking for. Scientists have tried to show you could create life in a test tube, but their efforts fall far short and only support that if such a thing were possible, it would only happen under the careful direction of an intelligent agent. What we now know from breeding, mutation, and the fossil record indicates that natural selection is not the engine for unbounded change required by evolution. Yet despite the evidence, the world today is saturated with naturalism, and attempting to question it isn’t a fair fight, because what’s at stake isn’t a scientific theory, but a worldview with implications in every aspect of public and private life. If naturalism is wrong, and if the scientific evidence actually supports the idea that the only thing that could’ve created the world was an intelligent being outside of the physical universe, then we need to go home and rethink our lives, and we don’t want to.

  1. Dave and Katy’s Metaphysical Adventure

    The world is currently saturated with the idea that science can explain everything about our existence, and your religious beliefs are fine if you want to have them to make you feel good. However, honest questions about theories of naturalistic origins are not tolerated, and there’s no applying scientific methodology to “scientific” theories of origins. For young people growing up in this environment, it can be excruciating to go against the flow of what they’re being inundated with day in and day out. Naturalism is a philosophy, a worldview, bent on eradicating the idea of God as creator. If God isn’t the creator, all of Christianity goes up in smoke, but if he is, then it’s not a matter of “my beliefs” or “your beliefs,” it’s a matter of the ultimate truth of reality.

  1. Shattering the Grid

    Whatever you take as the starting point of your worldview functions as your religion. Naturalism begins with assumptions (e.g., that nature is all that was, or is, or ever will be) that can’t be tested with scientific methodology, and as such those starting premises are taken on faith. The naturalist worldview is proclaimed all around us as absolute truth—hilarious, as naturalist philosophy leads to postmodernism, in which there is no absolute truth—while other religious beliefs are claimed to be simply matters of personal, subjective opinion.

  1. Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

    Most ancient cultures have believed that the universe was more or less eternal, and science also held this viewpoint until relatively recently. As our scientific investigations into the cosmos has progressed, however, we’ve determined that the universe did, in fact, have a beginning—what’s been called “the big bang”. The first two laws of thermodynamics (conservation of matter, and entropy) indicate that there must have been a beginning, and that beginning must have been triggered by something outside the physical universe itself. Determining what triggered the universe into being is outside the purview of science, as there is no way for us to scientifically observe something outside the physical universe. Unfortunately, many scientists, seeking to avoid the theological implications of the origin of the natural world, have started proposing ever more ludicrous hypotheses (many universes, self generation, imaginary time, etc.) to explain our origin without resorting to an intelligent transcendent mind as the agent behind it. Additionally, the natural world we observe seems eerily well-suited to both support life itself, and support our observation of it. If the fundamental constants of physics were slightly different, or if Earth’s situation were slightly different, either the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist, or we wouldn’t. The denial of the straightforward implications of our scientific discoveries demonstrates the committment to the atheistic agenda of many in the scientific community.

  1. Life in a Test Tube?

    Scientists have attempted to show that life could spontaneously arise from the conditions of a supposed primordial earth by replicating those conditions in the laboratory. However, what such experiments actually show is a far cry from what media reporting on them claims. What they have shown is if you want to get even the most basic building blocks for life, you need an intelligent agent diligently controlling the conditions of the experiment, the reactions taking place, etc., and with all our technological prowess, we haven’t come anywhere close to producing life. The thought, though, is that over millions of years the improbable becomes inevitable; however, simulations indicate that the probability of life arising spontaneously is essentially zero, regardless of the timeframe you examine. The key problem for the naturalist is the difference between order with low information content (as in the lattice structure of crystals) versus order with high information content (as in the structure of DNA). Empirical evidence makes it clear that natural forces do not produce structures with high information content, and that’s not to say we don’t know how it works, but rather everything we’ve observed says it doesn’t work. There are times when it is more rational to accept a supernatural explanation, and this is one of those times.

  1. Darwin in the Dock

    Darwin’s hypothesis was that behind the cyclical variations he observed in animal traits was an engine for unlimited change that, given enough time, could take nothing and produce the diversity he saw around him. It was conjecture, nothing more—an extrapolation into the distant past, with the feeblest of backings—and it turns out he was simply mistaken. First, we have centuries of breeding to show that the best efforts of shuffling the genes in a population lead to specializations of the same animal; that is, organisms stay true to type, and variation away from the mean leads to a decrease in “fitness” (specifically the abilities to stay healthy and reproduce). Second, random mutations, which are the only natural way of introducing new genetic information into a population, alter the details in existing structures, but don’t lead to the creation of new structures, and the mutations again lead to a less fit organism. Finally, the fossil record bears out that the intermediary forms predicted by Darwin simply don’t exist. An organism is a highly complex integrated system. If a single subsystem were to evolve on its own, that would likely lead to the catastrophic failure of the system as a whole. To transition from one complex integrated system into another one, a whole host of corresponding changes need to be made immediately, and this is something natural selection can’t do. Darwin made his conjecture with far less information available to him than we have today, but the question is why the scientific establishment sticks with it so dogmatically in the face of the last 150 years of evidence. The reason, of course, is that this isn’t about science, but about a conflict of worldviews, and if the universe is governed by an intelligent personal being, then that’s something I need to reckon with.

  1. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

    When Darwin came on the stage, it was in the midst of the naturalistic philosophy fighting for purchase against the Christian worldview in the western world. Though the evolution hypothesis was admittedly weak scientifically, natural selection became the linchpin that finally gave naturalism its credibility. As a worldview, naturalism shapes our understanding of everything. For instance, ethics are merely ideas we get once we’ve evolved to a certain level, so there is no objective standard for morality, and we can create and recreate our own standards as we continue to progress; law is nothing more than a collection of policies deemed to be socially advantageous, not based on any concept of right and wrong; etc. With no transcendent truth, we default to the perspectives of our affinity groups (ethnicity, gender, etc.), which vary across time and space. Though Darwinism is put forth as science, it is philosophy—one that fails to reflect reality accurately. Only Christianity consistently stands up to the test of practical living.

  1. A Matter of Life

    The story of a helicopter gunner shot down in Vietnam, and the Army surgeon who saved his life. Though no one would have questioned allowing the private to die, having lost both legs, shattered both arms, lost one eye and erreparably damaged the other, and sustained shrapnel in the brain, the surgeon knew he had to do whatever he could to save the man because he was human. The image of God is not to be taken lightly.

  2. Whatever Happened to Human Life?

    We used to think that human life was sacred, as we humans were created in the image of God, but since naturalism tells us we are ultimately no more than the highest-evolved primates, we shouldn’t let a concept like the sanctity of human life get in the way of our further progression. Where natural selection says we got to where we are by the least fit in the population dying out, the logical extension asks, “Why don’t we help the population along by weeding out the weaker members?” Thus we have the three horrors of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia backed by the cold (il)logic of natural selection, all in service to further propagating the superior genes that got us here. When naturalistic philosophy eliminated God from the public consciousness, it necessarily jettisoned all concrete notions of morality and meaning, but the image of God within us ceaselessly searches for the meaning and purpose we know we were created for. We find the answer in creation.

  1. In Whose Image?

    The Christian worldview

    • corresponds with the scientific evidence,

    • provides the strongest basis for human dignity,

    • gives a sense of meaning and purpose,

    • provides a sense of assurance about our ultimate destiny, and

    • provides the most certain motive for service and care of others.

    The naturalistic worldview falls short in all those areas. Humans long for fulfillment, dignity, meaning, and purpose. The naturalist has no real hope here, but the Christian has the assurance of the creation narrative.

  1. God Makes No Mistakes

    Chuck’s story of his autistic grandson is a reminder that those the naturalists think we should simply get rid of, for the betterment of the species, are often the ones who most naturally live a life of unadulterated joy, wonder, and compassion.

Part Three. The Fall: What has Gone Wrong with the World?

  1. The Trouble with Us

  2. A Better Way of Living?

  3. Synanon and Sin

  4. We’re All Utopians Now

  5. The Face of Evil

  6. A Snake in the Garden

  7. Does Suffering Make Sense?

Part Four. Redemption: What Can We Do to Fix It?

  1. Good Intentions

  2. In Search of Redemption

  3. Does It Liberate?

  4. Salvation through Sex?

  5. Is Science Our Savior?

  6. The Drama of Despair

  7. That New Age Religion

  8. Real Redemption

Part Five. Restoration: How Now Shall We Live?

  1. The Knockout Punch

  2. Saved to What?

  3. Don’t Worry, Be Religious

  4. God’s Training Ground

  5. Still at Risk

  6. Anything Can Happen Here

  7. There Goes the Neighborhood

  8. Creating the Good Society

  9. The Work of Our Hands

  10. The Ultimate Appeal

  11. The Basis for True Science

  12. Blessed Is the Man

  13. Soli Deo Gloria

  14. Touched by a Miracle

  15. Does the Devil Have All the Good Music?

  16. How Now Shall We Live?

Questions to Answer

Part 1

  1. Read Chuck’s introduction. Why did he write this book? How has our culture changed from what he describes?

    He wrote the book to remind the church that its mission is to act as God’s redemptive agent of blessing within the world. We can only do that if we bring God’s truth to bear in all areas of life.

    While Chuck had an optimistic perspective on where things were headed 20 years ago, it seems what he saw as a course change was perhaps more just shifting gears before continuing on our course “to hell in a hand basket.” Some of his encouraging statistics haven’t quite panned out. E.g., divorce rates are decreasing, but so are marriage rates. Instead we see the significant rise in cohabitation. Birth rates for unwed teen moms are decreasing, but birth rates for unwed moms are increasing. We’re just waiting longer before having kids. Welfare spending topped $1 trillion in 2016.

    Chuck thought all the ideologies marking the 20th century had proven themselves bankrupt (and they have), but they’re now rearing their ugly heads again with a shiny new mask, and our inability to be aware of, let alone learn anything from, history means we’re going to give them another shot, thinking this time we’ll get it right.

  2. How has the book been organized?

    • Part 1: What is worldview and why is it important?

    • Part 2: Who am I?

    • Part 3: What’s wrong with the world?

    • Part 4: How can what’s wrong be made right?

    • Part 5: Why am I here?

  3. How does Chuck define and describe a worldview?

    Worldview is intensely practical. It is simply the sum total of our beliefs about the world, the “big picture” that directs our daily decisions and actions.

  4. What is the real “culture war” according to Chuck?

    The real war is a cosmic struggle between worldviews—between the Christian worldview and the various secular and spiritual worldviews arrayed against it. This is what we must understand if we are going to be effective both in evangelizing our world today and in transforming it to reflect the wisdom of the creator.

  5. What does Chuck mean by “discipleship of the mind?”

    The Christian calling is not only to save souls but also to save minds. Sadly, many Christians have been misled into believing there is a dichotomy between faith and reason, and as a result they have actually shunned intellectual pursuits. Pastors must begin to redefine their task to include intellectual evangelism, for if they do not preach to issues of the mind, they will find themselves increasingly alienated from their own flock.

Part 2

  1. Why is the view of creation such an important part of any worldview?

    Our view of creation answers the question, “Who am I?” and how we answer that impacts our answer to the next question, “Why am I here?” What we believe about origins necessarily impacts what we believe about God, man, truth, knowledge, and ethics; that is, it impacts every other aspect of our worldview.

  2. Chuck discusses the implications of atheistic Darwinism (chapter 10). List a few of these.

    • Ethics: These are merely ideas we get once we’ve evolved to a certain level, so there’s no objective standard for morality.

    • Law: This is nothing more than a collection of policies deemed to be socially advantageous. It’s not based on any concept of right and wrong. We make it up as we go and can change it whenever a change becomes more advantageous that what we have currently.

    • Education: “Good” ideas are just the ones that do the best job of getting us what we want. There are no right or wrong ideas, just whatever works best for you.

    • Truth: Since there is no transcendent truth, we’re necessarily held captive by the perspectives of our affinity groups (ethnicity, gender, etc.). All perspectives are equally valid, as they’re all just social constructs.

  3. How do the practices of abortion and assisted suicide reveal worldview commitments (chapter 12)?

    We used to think that human life was sacred, as we humans were created in the image of God, but since naturalism tells us we are ultimately no more than the highest-evolved primates, we shouldn’t let a concept like the sanctity of human life get in the way of our further progression. Where natural selection says we got to where we are by the least fit in the population dying out, the logical extension asks, “Why don’t we help the population along by weeding out the weaker members?” Thus we have the three horrors of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia backed by the cold (il)logic of natural selection, all in service to further propagating the superior genes that got us here. When naturalistic philosophy eliminated God from the public consciousness, it necessarily jettisoned all concrete notions of morality and meaning, but the image of God within us ceaselessly searches for the meaning and purpose we know we were created for. We find the answer in creation.

  4. What other key ideas and truths did you find particularly helpful?

    The Christian worldview

    • corresponds with the scientific evidence,

    • provides the strongest basis for human dignity,

    • gives a sense of meaning and purpose,

    • provides a sense of assurance about our ultimate destiny, and

    • provides the most certain motive for service and care of others.

    The naturalistic worldview falls short in all those areas. Humans long for fulfillment, dignity, meaning, and purpose. The naturalist has no real hope here, but the Christian has the assurance of the creation narrative.

Part 3

  1. What is the “human dilemma” (Chapter 15)?

    It’s the question of what’s wrong with the world. Why are we plagued with war, suffering, disease, and death?

  2. Why does Chuck call this the most formidable stumbling block to the Christian faith (Chapter 15)?

    First, it’s a very difficult question to answer, but beyond that, it’s significantly harder for us to truly believe whatever answer we might intellectually assent to in the midst of the suffering and pain. We believe the universe was created by a being who is infinitely wise and infinitely good. How, then, do we explain the presence of evil? Could not an all-loving, all-powerful God instantly put a stop to the suffering and injustice in the world?

    Though he could, he chooses not to because, in his infinite foreknowledge, he knew that making us free moral agents, with the ability to choose good or evil at any moment, would be better than any alternative. Why? We won’t know until the end of time when we can ask him face to face. In the meantime, we can trust his judgment, given everything else we know of him.

  3. What are the four common consequences of the Fall and sin that Chuck mentions (Chapter 20)?

    1. Sin disrupts our relationship with God.

    2. Sin alienates us from each other.

    3. The fall affects all of nature.

    4. Death and its preliminaries—sickness and suffering—would become part of the human experience.

  4. What are the five false solutions to the problem of evil (Chapter 21)?

    1. Deny that God exists at all.

    2. Deny that suffering exists.

    3. Place God beyond good and evil.

    4. God’s power is limited.

    5. God has created evil to achieve a greater good.

  5. What other key ideas and truths did you find particularly helpful?

    The fall being a historical physical reality is necessary to making sense of the world. When searching for what’s wrong with the world, if you don’t identify the root problem as sin in the human heart, any solutions you’ll come up with will miss the mark (and might make things worse).

Part 4

  1. How is the conversion of Dr. Bernard Nathanson an example of the redemption offered in the Biblical worldview?

    It’s an example of God taking something that was once good and had gone bad and restoring it back into something good again.

  2. Chuck lists a number of false answers to the question, “How can we fix what’s wrong with the world.” List them:

    • Chapter 24: We need to overturn the systemic oppression in society to usher in an earthly utopia.

    • Chapter 25: We need to liberate ourselves from oppressive notions of sexual purity.

    • Chapter 26: We need to discover scientific/technological solutions to the problems of the world.

    • Chapter 27: We need to understand that ultimately everything in life is meaningless, so there’s no sense fixing anything.

    • Chapter 28: We need to realize we’re part of the eternal oneness such that we can return to a state of peace with the universe.

  3. Why does Chuck call Christian redemption “a restoration” (chapter 29)?

    It restores us to our created condition in which we have a right relationship with God, man, self, and creation.

  4. What other ideas and truths did you find particularly helpful?

    I’m skeptical of Colson’s conflating of the concepts of consummation—Christ’s making all things new at the end of time—and restoration as described in this part of the book. I worry there’s too much emphasis on ushering in the eternal kingdom here and now through the efforts of the church, though we know that’s not possible until Christ’s return.

Part 5

  1. What is “Cultural Commission” (p. 295)?

    Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.

  2. Read the last paragraph of chapter 31 (p. 305). How does this perspective give you insight into how you should live for Christ?

    The great commission and the cultural commission are inseparable.

  3. What is “real shalom” (p. 365)? How is this a goal of the work of restoration God has given us?

    Right relationship with God, man, self, and creation. This was the state mankind was created in. Sin destroys those four relationships. Christ’s work of redemption makes possible the righting of those wronged relationships.

  4. What other key ideas and truths did you find particularly helpful?

    I found it interested that Touched by an Angel was held up as a shining example of a Christian being a Christian in whatever their field is, as I remember that show pretty consistently being called out when it was on the air for its misrepresentation of God and Christianity.

  5. What are three things you are going to do or think about differently after reading this section?

    1. Remember the concept of shalom.

    2. Try to figure out what God wants me doing right now.

    3. Try to encourage my fellow Colson Fellows in training to think more critically about the content we’re ingesting.