Glenn S. Sunshine - Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

ZONDERVAN

WHY YOU THINK THE WAY YOU DO
Copyright 2009 by Glenn S. Sunshine

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ePub Edition August 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-32354-9

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sunshine, Glenn S., 1958
Why you think the way you do : the story of western worldviews from Rome to home / Glenn S. Sunshine.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-310-29230-2
1. Philosophy History. 2. Christianity Influence. 3. Christianity Philosophy. I. Title.
B72.S86 2009
190 dc22

2009005601

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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This book is dedicated with love to my children, Elizabeth and
Brendan Sunshine, who have attended worldview conferences with
me for several years now and have put up with more discussions of
worldview over dinner and in car rides with far better humor
than I had any right to expect. Thanks for your patience!

CONTENTS

BY CHARLES W. COLSON

A merican culture is at a crossroads. The Judeo-Christian foundations of the society are facing an unprecedented assault from within, both through the crisis of truth in postmodernism and the assault on religion of the new atheists, and from without, with the rise of Islamofascism and the growing demographic power of Muslim immigrant communities in Europe. Each of these is a clash of worldviews, a conflict over the fundamental ideas we have about the world and how we fit in it, and all of them are aimed squarely at the biblical worldview that helped frame Western culture. Unfortunately, much of the church has been slow to recognize the nature of the threat, instead ignoring the challenges or at best offering piecemeal rebuttals of individual points without dealing with the underlying worldview issues at stake. Much of my work over the past decade has been focused on alerting the church to the nature of the dangers that we face, to the threats not only to our way of life but to the gospel itself, and I have been working to raise up a new generation of worldview thinkers and scholars to help the church answer the challenges we are facing.

Dr. Glenn Sunshine is one such scholar who has become an active partner in this work. After hearing one of his lectures, I invited Dr. Sunshine to join the faculty for the Centurions, a world-view training program we established through the Wilberforce Forum of Prison Fellowship. It was a good call. He proved to be a remarkable teacher and thinker, bringing not only his knowledge of history but also the ability to synthesize and communicate that knowledge clearly and winsomely. He has consistently been one of the most popular teachers in the program, and the Centurions have benefited tremendously from his teaching and mentorship. In addition to working together with the Centurions, Dr. Sunshine and I have collaborated on a number of other worldview projects.

In this book, Sunshine offers the church a sorely needed corrective to much of the pop theology that characterizes American Christianity. Rather than being limited to the moral and spiritual realms, Christianity is a fully formed worldview, with implications for all areas of life. Sunshine demonstrates that biblical ideas left their stamp on economics, politics, science, education, and, in fact, on the entire course of Western civilization for the past 1,700 years. All of the Wests distinctive achievements come from Christian foundations a bold claim, but one echoed even by atheists, such as Germanys Jrgen Habermas. For example, the concept of universal human rights and equality comes exclusively from the biblical idea that all people are created in the image of God. This book is thus an unabashed defense of the power of biblical ideas to shape culture and of a Christianity that unites heart and mind to bring the gospel of the kingdom boldly into all areas of human life.

But if culture is shaped by worldview, as we believe, the shift in the Western worldviews away from the biblical model poses enormous challenges to our culture and the church. Ideas have consequences, and the result of the loss of the idea of the image of God as the foundation for human worth can have catastrophic consequences for human rights and human life. But just as the church changed the Roman world by living out the truths of the gospel faithfully, we today have the opportunity to do the same. This book shows how much of an impact the biblical worldview can have in transforming society. If we follow the example of those who have gone before us in learning to think biblically and to live out the full implications of the gospel, we can have the same impact on our world today.

I highly recommend this book, which is well written and is delivered in a style accessible to the laity. Church members, pastors, and teachers need to read it and then pass it on to non-Christian friends. It is a powerful and winsome apologetic for the Christian faith.

Charles W. Colson,
founder of Prison Fellowship

T his book is the product of a long and implausible chain of events, every one of which was necessary for the book to come to fruition. The book began as a single lecture. Alan Johnson and the Jonathan Edwards Tercentenary Commission of First Church of Christ in Wethersfield, Connecticut, asked me to speak at the Tercentenary Conference in 2003. The lecture I prepared was called Worldview, Edwards-style (a title supplied by First Churchs communication coordinator, David Gilbert). The talk compared the worldview of Jonathan Edwards day with our own. Paula Vining, wife of Jon Vining, the head of Prison Fellow Ministries New England, passed a copy of the recording to Charles W. Colson, the keynote speaker at the conference.

After listening to the recording, Mr. Colson asked me to teach in his newly formed Centurions worldview training program. I expanded the lecture into a survey of the evolution of worldviews from the early modern period to the present under the title of How We Got Here. The Centurions asked me annually if I had plans to turn the talk into a book, and so I began to organize it and realized I would need to go much further back than the early modern period if the story was to make sense. The vision that emerged was certainly a fools rush in where angels fear to tread project, but Ive lived by those words for so long that I decided to go ahead with it anyway.