By David Quine
We are living in a “POST-TRUTH” Culture.
Oxford Dictionaries has selected “post-truth” as 2016’s international word of the year. This is the atmosphere of our culture. You can’t escape it. We are living in a culture which has replaced the Protestant Reformation view of Truth which was considered absolute, universal, and objective with the Post-Modern view of opinions, emotions and personal beliefs.
I feel that it is very difficult for us to understand all the implications of the Protestant Reformation. Unfortunately, we take the results of that movement of God for granted. For example, almost no one during that time had a Bible in their own language. But if you did and if you were caught having one, it would certainly mean imprisonment, torture, or death. Before the Reformation the leadership of the Church began teaching the ideas from the Greek and Roman worldview alongside the Biblical worldview. However, it wasn’t long before these two opposing sets of ideas were forged together creating the Renaissance worldview. The Bible was no longer the center of thought or of education.
The door was now opened for the next generation to walk through. But what did they find on the other side? What did they begin to believe? It wasn’t long before the Bible was no longer viewed as the ultimate authority over all of life. The high view of Scripture once held by the Church was no longer accepted. Truth had been compromised and eventually it would be set to the side as irrelevant.
In the meantime, God raised up leaders who stood strong against those compromises and unbiblical teachings, encouraging Christians to trust God’s Word alone (sola Scriptura) as the ultimate source of Truth in every area in which the Bible spoke and to reject the union of two differing and opposing worldviews. The Protestant Reformation was born some 500 years ago in the midst of great conflict and controversy.
The ultimate issue at that time was their view of Truth.
I feel we are living in a similar time. In the beginning of the 20th-Century, the secular culture had mocked Truth and pushed it from culture into the four corners of the Church. The thinking was that there is the Bible and then there is Truth.
In 1984 we started Cornerstone Curriculum with the mission of “Teaching Children to Reason from the Biblical Worldview.” That meant that we would have to create a curriculum in which ALL subjects would fall under the authority and teaching of the Word of God as understood during the Reformation. For example, God has given us a framework for understanding science, history, economics, and all other areas - the Bible. The Reformation worldview started with the Bible as the foundation for understanding and developing every area of study. Cornerstone Curriculum would embrace that same educational and theological philosophy.
Truth, as taught in the Bible, is the essence of STARTING POINTS.
We believe that the Bible should govern every aspect of our thinking and therefore every aspect of our curriculum. It is our passion to help parents preserve the Reformation Worldview by presenting it to their children. Why? So that the next generation of Christians will “stand firm” in it and proclaim it to their generation.
It is because we are living in this “post-truth” culture, that I wrote STARTING POINTS.