What Went Wrong In the Western World?

For although they knew God,
they did not honor him as God
or give thanks to Him,
so they became futile in their thinking,
and their foolish hearts were darkened.
(Romans 1:21 ESV)

The Personal Rebellion

One of the central questions that Worldview has to deal with is, “Is the World the way it is supposed to be?” or “Is there anything wrong with the world?”

Any worldview based on the Bible has to realize that there is something VERY wrong with our world. What went wrong on Earth begins with Adam and Eve and their rebellion in the very beginning. Their proclivity to sin and rebellion has been passed down to all their descendants: the human race.

It is easy to think about how things have gone wrong “out there.” It is more difficult to realize that something has gone wrong “here” with me, with you. Each of us has to come to grips with our own disposition and inclination to think and act in ways that are at odds with our Creator’s desires for us.

Whatever is wrong with our world begins with what is wrong on the individual level. More specifically, whatever is wrong with our World is centered in what has gone wrong in our hearts. We will go into more detail on this in a future session.

The Cultural Rebellion

Understanding what has gone wrong with us on the individual level prepares us to talk about what has gone wrong on the larger cultural and societal levels.

As we have already said, Culture is a powerful influence in the shaping of theology. The mindset and values of people are largely shaped by the “spirit of their times” (zeitgeist). If we do not understand how culture has developed and is developing the shape of human thought we will be blind to the effects that it is having upon us in the present. 

Here in the 21st Century, one question that must be addressed by Biblical Christianity is that of despair and hopelessness. Western culture is now plagued by the belief that life is not getting better, nor is there any relief in sight. For many, life has become meaningless. As we study the Lord-God’s purposes in human history, we must address this important issue and try to discover not only why this has happened, but also how it can be healed by our beliefs, values and practices.

In order to understand where we are culturally, we need to understand where we have come from historically. In this session, we are going to trace the development of the Worldviews that have shaped the Western World.

All of the material here is an EXTREMELY CONDENSED version of the presentations in James Sire’s The Universe Next Door.

*Sire, James W. The Universe Next Door. 2020. 

The standard for Christian worldview studies. Sire discusses the basic concepts of worldview, and also explains 10 major worldviews and their differences. This is a great book for worldview comparison.

The overview that we are presenting over-simplifies the complexity of some of these worldviews. However, it is only meant to be a bare-bones presentation to help trace the worldviews that have shaped our current culture.

PLEASE TAKE NOTE: When presenting summaries of Worldviews, we are analyzing the most most distilled and potent form of these views. Many of the things that we analyze are from the writings of philosophers and scholars and teachers who write from the high perspective of the philosophical. MOST PEOPLE do not live out these extreme, condensed forms. Many do not even think about these ideas specifically, but they are affected deeply by them nonetheless. That is why it is important to understand how these ideas have formed.