Gospel vs Worldview

Greg Matsen had a discussion with Jacob Hansen about Strong’s new book, Torn. This was far more enlightening than anything else I have heard about Strong’s book. The thing that hit me the hardest was Jacob explaining how we are often wasting our time explaining things the way we have for the last two hundred years to Christians. But now we have an audience that either doesn’t believe in Christ, or doesn’t know how to receive His grace and inspiration in a serious way. The problem isn’t a doctrinal issue that merely needs to be cleared up, most of the time. It is an entire worldview built on different assumptions about reality, authority, and human purpose. It one that points people toward the wrong sources of meaning, authority, and happiness.

It isn’t as if people are not searching. They can see that something is deeply wrong. They see institutions failing, communities fragmenting, families weakening, and people becoming increasingly anxious, isolated, and unhappy. The economy, education, politics, family life, and public culture all seem to be deteriorating at once. They may not recognize this as the fruit of secularism—or, perhaps more precisely, worldliness—but they can recognize the fruit itself. They hunger, but too often we answer questions their ancestors were asking rather than the questions confronting them now.

That is where our message should begin. We are not merely defending a collection of inherited doctrines. We are offering an alternative way of living.

Meanwhile, the solutions offered to us are usually shallow: more consumption, more entertainment, more political agitation, more personal branding, more therapy, more technology, or another ideology promising to reorganize society.

One of the central messages of Scripture is that every alternative to God is ultimately impotent. Whether the idol is a carved statue or a human good elevated into an ultimate authority – a political system, a human philosophy, wealth, popularity, or personal autonomy – it cannot lift us beyond the limitations of the people who created it. It is not transcendent. It cannot give us what it does not possess.

We cannot lift ourselves above ourselves.

That does not mean we should be passive or refuse to solve problems. God gave us brains, and He expects us to use them. But changing our thinking is not enough if the new thinking remains bounded by the same human limitations. We need wisdom greater than our own.

I have no objection to philosophy, any more than I object to a hammer or a saw. Philosophy is a tool. It can clarify ideas, expose contradictions, and help us reason. But tools are only that – tools. They cannot replace revelation or divine guidance.

Isaiah 44:9–22 presents this problem through a striking satire. A man cuts down a tree. With one portion, he builds a fire to warm himself. With another, he cooks his food. From the remaining wood, he carefully carves an idol, bows before it, and asks it to save him.

It all came from the same tree.

We immediately recognize the absurdity. No one worships a furnace because it provides heat or asks a stove for moral guidance because it cooks dinner. Yet we often grant comparable authority to things we ourselves have built: ideologies, institutions, philosophies, careers, wealth, and social approval.

These things may be useful. They may even be necessary. But they are still products of human labor and human thought. They cannot become greater than their makers merely because we bow before them.

Our task, then, is not merely to diagnose the deterioration around us. We must make the divine alternative visible, intelligible, and livable.

Our message is not simply that the world is bad and that people should obey more rules. It is that the world’s substitutes for God have failed and that there remains a better way. For Latter-day Saints, that way is made especially concrete through the restored gospel: divine parenthood, continuing revelation, covenant, priesthood, eternal family, and Zion.

That is the alternative we should be offering.