As we reflect on our discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers, we touch on two main highlights. The idea of understanding worldview as a pattern of thought and how to align this pattern with God and His Word. This is what Scripture refers to as "renewing our minds." This is a discipline that Christians need to practice intentionally. If we neglect to, our patterns of thought will almost certainly align with the increasingly unbiblical culture around us. We also cover the idea of the power of words in more depth. We hope our discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers and this bonus talk help you continue to renew your mind in God's Truth.
As we reflect on our discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers, we touch on two main highlights. The idea of understanding worldview as a pattern of thought and how to align this pattern with God and His Word. This is what Scripture refers to as "renewing our minds." This is a discipline that Christians need to practice intentionally. If we neglect to, our patterns of thought will almost certainly align with the increasingly unbiblical culture around us. We also cover the idea of the power of words in more depth. We hope our discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers and this bonus talk help you continue to renew your mind in God's Truth.
Hi friends, thanks for joining us today. This is a bonus discussion to our episode that we just had with Dr Jeff Myers from Summit Ministries. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I would highly recommend that you go back and give that a listen. We really enjoyed it. We just got off the call with him and we just want to debrief real quick about some of our thoughts and takeaways. We covered a lot of ground, I learned a lot. I was taking notes the whole time. It was just a great discussion. So, yeah, we just want to debrief that real quick. If you haven't listened to the episode yet, maybe just pause this one. Go back and listen to that and then you can join us here for the debrief discussion. Dad, just what were some of your highlights and takeaways coming off that call?
Scott Allen:Yeah, thanks Luke, it was great. Jeff is a guy that I've run into from time to time. I certainly have heard of Summit Ministries I haven't experienced it myself but I know of people that have gone through the program and been really helped by it. And, again, there is this kind of community, if you will, of Christian organizations and ministries that are doing kind of work in the area of biblical worldview and discipleship and Summit really is, I would say, one of the most influential, most prominent organizations. So for me today I was really excited, just with that background, to talk to Jeff and to learn from him and just sharpen my own thinking.
Scott Allen:But for sure, you know happened. He's just really, really thoughtful, I thought. You know, I think the thing that I want to kind of reflect on more is he had a lot of very clear and very articulated ways of describing worldview and biblical worldview he talked about. I can't reiterate it from scratch here off the top of my head, but he introduced the idea of patterns of thought or patterns of thinking, and that's new for me. You know that's not something that we've used in our definitions of worldview, but I want to think about that and that could be a very helpful idea or concept. You know he's correct that in. You know, whenever you're learning something, you look for patterns, right, you know? And he mentioned sports if you're learning basketball, you know you're. Yeah, you're anything, right, you try to. I mean, luke, you were trying to teach me Texas Holden poker, right, you know.
Scott Allen:I'm a pretty slow learner, you know and yeah, I'm looking for patterns, trying to figure it out here a little bit, but anyways, all that to say, I would love to go back myself, listen, think through you know what he has, because he's clearly I mean, he's built his whole ministry and life around this. I want to hear, I want to understand it more. So I was really grateful for that. I loved you know that he brought up. You know, my highlight for me was just the discussion on you know, when we were talking about his book. How truth can you know people, people in history that have had a real commitment to the truth and have really sacrificed for that? And he said that John Wycliffe, the translator of the Bible into English you know this is back in the early Reformation times was an example that he used and he brought up in that.
Scott Allen:How many words were introduced into the English language that didn't exist before in people's common everyday conversations and writings, but they were introduced through that biblical translation and just the translation of the Bible. How it has completely changed and transformed cultures. We, I just I love that and I think we take that for granted because we assume oh well, you know, there's always been these translations of the Bible in Spanish and all these different languages, I mean in almost every language. Now, that's the work of groups like Wycliffe Bible translators, which takes its name from John Wycliffe. But the power of that, I think, is something we have to just keep coming back to and just never take for granted, the power of these biblical words.
Scott Allen:And so and you know, for Wycliffe that story, if people aren't familiar with what it cost him to do that, the sacrifice that these people had to make, you know it was. They didn't just, you know, skip in there and say I'm going to, you know, translate the Bible into English. The Catholic Church at that time, you know, had a monopoly on power by keeping the translation limited to Latin, right, because they were the ones then control the distribution and the knowledge that was in the scriptures, because they were the ones that spoke Latin and and they literally, you know, put to death people that would be bold enough to say, no, we're going to try to translate it out of Latin and into into vernacular languages like English, you know. So they paid a huge price for that.
Dwight Vogt:Yeah.
Scott Allen:Dwight? What about you? What are some things that you? I'm really I'm sorry again on this podcast. I dominated this discussion too much I always love your questions and I didn't give anyone a chance to ask questions.
Dwight Vogt:So I love them early on. So, yeah, I too grab the word pattern when he said that, because I started thinking pattern pattern. We use sets of ideas, assumptions, basic foundational beliefs, you know important key beliefs. But I thought pattern that works because I just it, just it just felt like a really powerful word all at once. So I think I think we should start to work with that word and see how we might use it in our definition to help people understand.
Dwight Vogt:The other thing was I thought how are we different from the DNA? And summit, and and it goes back to some of his history he came out of a Marxist understanding and he was in the US and he was seeing what was happening in the, in the universities in the US. And we come out of this world, this belief in development world, and we're looking at the effects of animism and impact on image of God and women and their beings inferior in communities of extreme poverty, how they're impacted by different types of false ideas in worldview.
Dwight Vogt:So I thought that was just a richness I saw and I thought, yeah, we still have some things that we see that are unique. Yeah, words, wow. I was reading an article this morning and I thought it was. It had a kind of a inobtrusive title, so I read it. But it, but it had words. It's all at once. It was full of intersectionality, exclusivism, inclusivism, words that I'm thinking. I know these words but I couldn't understand. But they did. How do I put it? They're they're new words.
Scott Allen:I mean, this is, this is the new lexicon of social justice.
Dwight Vogt:Yeah, Also a bit of a vacuum, because I thought what does that word really mean? And I thought it's a little bit mysterious because it's a word without depth. When I thought about them, maybe I'm maybe the next person will say, oh, you're completely wrong, you just don't understand the word.
Dwight Vogt:But when I think of compassion, I think deep, deep understanding of compassion, you know, but inclusiveness it's like, well, that could be the world Anyway, um, yeah, maybe. One other point was uh, you guys jumped into Gnosticism and I'm thinking that is still a huge barrier to understanding why we should be engaged in cultural transformation at the level of worldview and the biblical worldview, because we still have a Gnostic view of the gospel.
Scott Allen:Yeah, it's worth it. Luke, I want to hear from you. But I just want to underscore that because and for those of you who you know this idea of Gnosticism is not, you know, you couldn't define it it's so helpful to understand that it comes from a Greek heresy, people like Plato even that they saw reality in terms of kind of a perfect world and then a what's the word? You know, kind of a degraded, you know, world. And the perfect world was this heavenly world of ideas. It was immaterial. And then the material world was this degraded world that you know you needed to kind of get out of or flee from into this perfect world.
Scott Allen:And that idea isn't biblical, right, I mean, but it came into the church in the early church and in very practical ways, like Jesus incarnated as a person, right in a body. You know he wasn't an idea, he was a human being, he was born, you know, in a stable with blood and you know, and that for Gnostics was like they just couldn't know, that can't accept that, and it denied the what's the word, the incarnation, the physical incarnation of God in human flesh, right, like that just couldn't have happened. So that got, you know, kind of rejected as a heresy, but because the Bible doesn't separate these things. It says that God, who is Spirit, created the heavens and the earth, you know, and the earth is his handiwork, it's good, he loves his creation, he's redeeming it, you know, and that includes human life and human bodies and rocks and fish and trees and everything else. You know, there isn't a separation.
Scott Allen:But that Gnostic idea crept into the early church and now it's back and you see it in evangelical Christianity because of this idea that this fallen world is kind of the domain of Satan and it's all broken, it's all evil. I'm not denying it. You know that Satan exists and he prowls around like a roaring lion. But it's the idea that God has kind of handed it over, given it over. He's not involved, you know, he just wants to save people out of it. You know, the imagery is the lifeboat right on a ship that's sinking. You got to get people into the lifeboat, get them off of that sinking ship. Don't bother with the sinking ship, it's just, it's a waste of your time, it's going down, okay. So you know, this is kind of the Gnostic idea, right? This world isn't worth bothering with, you know. And that's back now big time.
Luke Allen:So yeah, I think of with the power of words. I mean, just at first you kind of think well, it's just a word, why does that matter? What do you mean? It has power. It's just something you say, you know. But then when you think about a word and the thoughts that come to mind, the emotions that invoke, I mean, if we say Coca-Cola, everyone immediately has a thought of what that is, whereas it's just some letters in a row, you know. But then when we say a word like sin, if you had never heard that word before, what would you replace that with? I think today we're kind of losing the idea and the concept of sin. I mean, we're talking about Gnosticism. Gnosticism in a way says, you know, I always kind of associate it with a sacred secular divide.
Luke Allen:I don't know if that's totally accurate, but that's a simplified way of saying it If there's a sacred secular divide, then the secular world, sin doesn't apply there in a way, and if you just rip the sacred out of it, then where do we fill that gap? You know you come up with new terms, you say, oh, it's just, this person was affected by its society growing up and now it has this issue. This person does, or you know, you can throw a lot in the mental illness category. I'm not just. You know.
Luke Allen:I'm not saying that that doesn't exist at all but I think we put a lot of too much weight on that and we say like it's kind of replaced the concept of right, exactly yeah. Yeah, so that's just. I'm just pointing to the power of words there. If you don't have that word in your vocabulary, a lot of things in life are not going to make sense, because a lot of things in life are just an effect of sin. We live in a fallen world and it affects all of us.
Scott Allen:Yeah, I love to think of words. As you know, there are these powerful windows into reality that if you don't have them, you don't see a part of reality and you don't live in it. So like, for example, you know, we talk about Arturo Cuba's story in Guatemala so much, and that indigenous tribe didn't have an understanding of the word dominion, so they didn't. For them that did you know? Dominion over creation didn't exist. It literally wasn't something that they could even conceive of. And you know that becomes real in that story of the rats. Well, they said the rats always eat our corn crop. That's just the way it is right.
Scott Allen:And Arturo had to introduce this concept of dominion from the Bible. And that, no, you know, you as a human being are to have dominion. You have dominion, you have rule over this created world and you can exercise that rule in a way that leads to the flourishing of your families. And then, when they understood that concept from the Bible, they could walk in that. Then they all of a sudden, they could develop their own corn cribs and things that protected their crop from the rats in a way that they never could have. They just couldn't. It would have never been a possibility before.
Scott Allen:And it was a word, you know, it was a biblical word, you know. And so that's what words are. That's the power of words, that they create windows into reality. That reality of dominion exists, but if you don't know the concept, you don't have no window into it. You can't walk in it, you can't live in it. Now, words are wonderful gifts.
Dwight Vogt:They really are.
Luke Allen:Yeah, we talked a lot about biblical worldview today and we talked about worldview I thought I did enjoy his definition of that A pattern of ideas, beliefs and convictions and habits that help make sense of God, the world, our relationship to God and the world. I like that definition Did you memorize that?
Scott Allen:Yeah, totally memorized. It Isn't that crazy, incredible.
Luke Allen:That's amazing. Good job Luke.
Scott Allen:Good job, Young brain.
Dwight Vogt:Yeah there, Young brain not my brain, I just heard pattern. I just heard pattern, I know, that's me too.
Scott Allen:I was just kind of like pattern, pattern. I got stuck on that. I couldn't go any further.
Luke Allen:Anyways, we talk about worldview all the time. We talk about biblical worldview all the time. I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between biblical worldview and justification. I think a lot of people think that if you're a Christian, oh, you have a biblical worldview. That's a package deal. What do you guys think about that? Is it a package deal, Is it not?
Scott Allen:No, it's not. When you become a Christian, when you accept Jesus as your personal savior, you make that decision. Yes, I believe Jesus is who he said he was and I bow the knee to him as my Lord and my savior. Yeah, there are certain things that happen immediately. Like you are justified, all of a sudden your sins are wiped away and they're not counted against you. You don't work towards that, that's a gift, that's a given. There are certain things that happen immediately.
Scott Allen:I do believe that God fills us with his Holy Spirit, empowers us, but the worldview is all of these. It's the way you think. It's that whole sum of all of these ideas that you have grown up with, from the time that you were just an infant on your mother's knee, and the stories that she read to you and the way that you saw people around you living and functioning and what they did, and in a fallen world. All of those things aren't biblical. They're fallen in different ways and we can lump that fallenness together in categories like animism or Marxism or whatever it is, but those are the ideas that you have. Now. Do those ideas all immediately just fly out of your mind and are they all replaced with completely biblical ideas, you become Christian? The answer is no, although you begin. Certain things for sure begin to change.
Scott Allen:But I think of the Apostle Paul when he admonishes believers Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, in other words the ways of thinking of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That's a discipline, it's something that Christians have to be. It's part of our discipleship. I believe has to be really intentional. It doesn't just happen automatically. And if it doesn't happen either, you can be a Christian for a long time and this is true of me even and still function from a largely non-Christian set of ideas, I mean for years. No, so that's definitely possible and often very common, I would say so what do you?
Dwight Vogt:what do you reckon? I want to ask what do you recommend, scott?
Scott Allen:You know, for me I just the concept of worldview is so helpful. It's kind of like a code that unlocks something here. Oh, okay, I have a worldview, like and it may not align with biblical truth, you know, but it answers. It's a way of seeing the world, of who I am, of what is ultimately real, or what's the purpose in life. Or, you know, I have this worldview. And then, once you understand worldview, the question that immediately becomes are my ideas about these things in alignment with what the Bible teaches? Like? That's a question we don't often ask. Until you understand the concept of worldview, it's hard to even ask that question. But once you understand worldview, then you can start going okay, okay. And then it's like oh my gosh, so many of the ways I think aren't aligned with the Bible. It's interesting he used the word metanoia and that's what that word means. Transformation means change your mind. It literally means change the way you think.
Dwight Vogt:Oh, I was just. Some people wonder why we even teach worldview globally, because that seems like such a Western concept and it's so ideological in a sense, idealogical in a sense. And yet, just because, just what you said, if we help people understand that they have we've seen this if you help people understand that they have a worldview, then they can start questioning their worldview.
Scott Allen:That's right. Before that they really it's like a fish in a fishbowl. You don't see it.
Dwight Vogt:So we actually take some effort to help people understand they have a worldview and then lead them out of animism or Hinduism or whatever it is they're trapped in.
Scott Allen:So that's why it's such a powerful concept and it's so essential for discipleship, this kind of discipleship of the mind, of our thinking, our patterns of thought and just yeah, for anyone out there who wants to start thinking this way, who wants to start recognizing what type of worldview they have, what are some basic questions?
Luke Allen:We have some basic questions that it's good to ask yourself and really be honest with yourself. Ask these basic questions and you can really quickly form and understanding of what type of worldview you have.
Scott Allen:Well, the big worldview questions are kind of the ultimate types of questions. These big questions like what is ultimately real? Is there a God? What is God like? Who am I? What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be made in God's image? I mean, even as Christians we throw that out. Yeah, I'm made in God's image, but what does that really mean to be made in God's image and how does that shape a life? Questions like what is history? Where's history going? Is there a guiding hand, a providence if you will, in history, or is it just kind of one darn thing after another? And what happens after I die? So we all wrestle with these big questions. But these questions are gonna be answered by our worldview and, I think, a lot of people, because we're busy and those questions don't interject in our daily lives very often when we're eating breakfast or going to a group, I don't wake up in the morning and ask what does it mean to be human?
Scott Allen:You don't ask those big questions. What does it mean to be a human being today?
Dwight Vogt:And I wouldn't know how to answer anyway.
Scott Allen:And you tend to accept whatever answers you absorb, from your friends and family.
Dwight Vogt:The culture, right, I mean it just runs in the background like software and computer. Luke, they could watch our core video. What is a worldview?
Scott Allen:What is a worldview? We're trying to take some of the core teachings of the DNA and kind of boil them down to their essence so that it's easy when people ask this question what do you teach? You know it's like. Well, watch these five videos.
Luke Allen:I have a pretty good idea of what we're teaching Start there.
Luke Allen:I'll link them in the show notes for anyone who wants to watch that. It's a great video. Yeah, that was. I really enjoyed the discussion with Dr Jeff Myers today. Just so many takeaways. I think you guys could all agree with that, and this little debrief discussion has been great. I enjoy having these after the podcast. Hopefully these are helpful for you guys who are listening. As always, thanks for listening to Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. Join us next week here on the podcast. We have episodes come out every Tuesday, so I hope you're able to join us then. Thanks again for listening. Music.