February 1, 2019

Biblically, the human race is one race with various ethnic groups. Every person is born into a lineage that goes back to Noah and, ultimately, to Adam; therefore, each person is born into a multigenerational context of life. A context includes basic beliefs about God and his creation that shape a person’s view of reality. At the root is a worldview defined by theology that is then expressed in philosophy, values, principles, practices, and results.

Organizational leaders hire people to accomplish results, but how well do leaders understand the spiritual root of tangible results and the importance of a person’s context?

The context of a person’s life has been shaped not only by the person’s family of origin but also by historical events. The confluence of family heritage and history, in part, impart a worldview that is the seminal driver of the context and therefore results of a person’s life.

Francis Schaeffer, theologian, philosopher, and evangelist, made this point:

“All men are philosophers, for all men have a worldview.”¹

A worldview is a way of seeing and understanding reality, drawing conclusions, and making choices that produce results.

Every worldview begins with a view of God. All other aspects of a worldview are corollaries of theology. Theology begins with a statement of faith, such as the biblical phrase, “in the beginning God.”² Whatever statement about God that one assumes drives one’s results.

In an organization, people are hired to accomplish individual results that synergistically produce the desired organizational results. To achieve the right organizational results requires the right individual results. Given that individual results is the tangible product of one's intangible worldview, then it is wise for organizational leaders to be excellent worldview analysts.

To be a skilled worldview analyst, a person must understand the history of worldview development. Knowing key historical events, and the implications of these events, will enable a leader to recognize a person’s worldview. Some worldviews yield productive results and others don’t.

Christianity claims to be the most correct worldview because among worldviews it is uniquely based on Christ. All other worldviews may embrace some truth taken from Chrisitanity but, at the root, they are fundamentally flawed because they are not uniquely based on Christ. Consequently, professing and practicing a Christian worldview is the best indicator for qualifing the right workers.

From a Christian worldview, history began with Creation. Before humans procreated, they rebelled against God (the fall). The fall negatively impacted both the material and spiritual universe.³ Because of the fall, a divine metanarrative began that will lead to final accountability and judgment for mankind’s rebellion, redemption of God's people, and a new creation free from sin.

From the beginning, mankind was responsible to be God’s ruling agents on earth, but mankind was impaired by sin and unable to remedy the situation. Therefore, mankind needs a savior. Mankind is totally depraved—a theological term that means, by nature, mankind cannot be good enough to meet God’s righteous standards. Only through Christ can mankind be delivered for sin and death. This will be fully accomplished at the second advent of Christ; an event that will precede the new creation.

The metanarrative is the story of history between the two creations and the backdrop of life today. In building organizations well, one must understand this context.

Because of the fall of man, there are two seminal trends that to a large degree guide history—total depravity and humanism. As noted above, total depravity is the inability of mankind to remedy his fallen condition and humanism is the innate proclivity of fallen mankind to presume the role of God. Historically, both trends have significantly shaped the context of life for all people. Consider, for example, the impact of these realities on epistemology.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge (how the universe works) and wisdom (how to live well in the universe). In the beginning, knowledge and wisdom were imparted by revelation from the Creator to our ancient heirs, who orally transmitted it generationally. In time, special revelation (the Bible) was recorded by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This enhanced man’s knowledge and wisdom.

About thirty-five hundred years after creation,⁴ the Greeks formalized academic training, establishing academies such as those of Plato and Aristotle. After their deaths, however, the momentum of their work declined. By the time of Christ, there were only embers of Greek intellectual influence, but in the third century AD, Plotinus fanned these embers into a small glow through the intellectual movement know as Neoplatonism.

In the fifth century AD, theologian Augustine engaged Platonic thinking and filtered it through Scripture. He rejected whatever didn’t align with Scripture. He documented his work and both Roman Catholic and protestants embraced Augustine as a seminal theologian. The former embraced him for his commitment to the Church and the latter for his commitment to the authority of Scripture.

A few hundred years later, Roman Catholics reacted to the decaying culture by establishing monasteries to preserve and study Scripture. The monks were a remnant who sought holiness through Scripture and communal living.

In the fourteenth century, the Renaissance began with a return to the ancient Greeks, particularly Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas was part of the avant-garde of this movement. Following Augustine’s model, Aquinas filtered Aristotle’s philosophy through Scripture. While Aristotle’s spiritual father, Plato, emphasized the transcendent over the material, Aristotle shifted the emphasis to the material, which exalted the physical world over the spiritual and, in time, emboldened mankind to assume the role of God. Unwittingly, Aquinas empowered humanism. Thomas’ work gave impetus to the scholarship developing at the time. This contributed to the burgeoning formation of universities as venues of learning. Initially, the focus was on theology as the foundation for all epistemology. The means of knowledge was deductive reasoning from Scripture.

In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon challenged deductive reasoning from Scripture and instead advocated inductive reasoning from creation. This eventually led to the presupposition that knowledge is neutral, which is the seminal idea behind secular education and the scientific revolution. That knowledge is neutral means that knowledge exists independent of God—the transcendent Creator. This idea is a fundamental presupposition of humanism.

John Locke, in the eighteenth century, promoted the blank slate theory of anthropology. This view assumed that humans were born with no innate bias to good or evil. Clearly this view denies the biblical doctrine of total depravity.

By the nineteenth century, humanism and the blank slate theory combined to secularize formal education. From primary to advanced education, including theological training, the Bible was progressively marginalized.

By the early part of the twentieth century, most educational institutions embraced a secular worldview. This is the context in which people are educated today and has opened the door for the secularization of all aspects of society such as public policy, economics, business, and ethics.

Now in the twenty-first century, the God who created the material and spiritual universe is regarded as either dead or irrelevant. The Scripture that reveals the Creator to us is disdained. Therefore, doctrines, such as, total depravity as revealed in Scripture are rejected. Mankind now assumes the role of God. Humanism is being worked into every fabric of society. Mankind has, largely, viewed the rejection of Christian norms as progress. But if the Christian worldview is correct, it is not progress; it is ethical and societal regression.

This means that the twenty-first century is simply an extension of the trends of history as the cultures of the world regressively abandon Christian norms. The root is nonbiblical presuppositions that, in the end, will lead to divine judgment. This is the context in which we live today, and this non-Christian context has shaped most people in the world today.

Against this historical backdrop, organizational leaders seek to produce excellent results. To do so, they need people—the right people. People who think correctly and therefore can work correctly.

Excellent results flow most freely from the right people—those aligned with God. To align with God requires a worldview based on Scripture not on the assumptions of humanism.

In time, it may be clear that the world’s experiment with humanism was a colossal failure. But in the meantime, organizational leaders have an enormous challenge. How do they find the people who have a sound enough Christian worldview to build effective, efficient, and excellent organizations?

Though today most people are shaped by epistemology from a humanist worldview, there are some—perhaps just a few—who are shaped by a Christian worldview. Learning to identify these people is a critical skill for organizational leaders. Because only those who truly have a Christian worldview can produce enduring effective, efficient, and excellent results. Great workers will have great Christian worldviews. Wise organizational leaders will learn how to find them and then build with them.

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