Providing Godbearing worldview pieces
Below I referred to Tomlinson’s idea in The Post-Evangelical that the Church can no longer offer a comprehensive “Christian” worldview that must be taken in all-or-nothing form. Instead, he says, we must offer pieces which people can put together themselves; we cannot put everything together for them.
The evangelical in me says our theology has to be consistent and coherent. We must give people pieces that make sense together, not a vague mass of mismatched doctrines and practices. I would like to reinterpret Tomlinson’s thoughts (more correctly, I think) along these lines: we cannot sell Christianity as a prepackaged worldview, as a complete way of thinking. Christianity is a story for all times and people, but it is not a “theory of everything.”
We need to present the Christian story as coherent, and provide pieces, Godbearing pieces, from which people can construct their own Christian worldviews.
