Alexander Chernikov
CWP Essay
September 11, 2005

Incorrect Christian Worldviews
     “Harry Potter is the evil thing that was invented from the pit of hell and made by a guy named Stan!” Greenville, Michigan – A burning was held to burn copies of Harry Potter, Shania Twain’s “A Woman in Me” album, and the movie “Coneheads”. The purpose of this event was to show the community that Christians would not tolerate the corruption in this world and that “true” followers of Christ should not own such things. This Christian worldview, among many others, has a truth behind it, but the handling of it was horribly initiated. Yeah sure, Christians really shouldn’t be listening to or reading these things, but really, bonfires for books!? Are those Christians really any better than the people who burnt Bibles so that the Word of God wouldn’t spread? Books, wrong or not, should not be burned because of the message that it sends in our society, and what these Christians did set a bad name for other Christians.     
     A definite incorrect Christian worldview would be that of remarriage after divorce. Churches are now beginning to marry those people who have divorced once or more times before and are also beginning to divorce people for basically any reason whatsoever. This is fundamentally wrong, first of all for divorce, unless there was marital unfaithfulness. And even if there was, that person could not remarry, or else they would be committing adultery. So in retrospect, Christians are beginning to help people sin by forms of adultery by remarrying them or starting dating clubs for people who have divorced someone else.
Some Christians believe that disease and sickness comes from a direct result of sin. Some are related to sin, but if you happen to get a common cold, it isn’t because you’ve sinned and caused the wrath of God to be poured down on you to sneeze and cough for a week (7 days with medication). It is because your immune system hasn’t developed an immunity to that specific disease. In a way though, disease and sickness is a result from the first sin of Adam, if one wants to relate it to anything. Sicknesses that are caused by sin, like from homosexuality and AIDS, or premarital sex/adultery and STD’s are a consequence that happened from that sin. But one may still commit an immoral act and not get a sickness or disease as well. And even if they do, we are not to judge or condemn them. So that brings us back to Christian people that will condemn homosexuals; is it an incorrect viewpoint? They’ll ignore them and avoid them –, saying that God’s curse was brought upon them. Yeah sure, hate homosexuality, it is a sin and it is a choice. But under no circumstance are we to hate the homosexual, we are to love them just as much as we love anyone else – they were made in God’s image after all and God still loves them!
In my church, about a year or so ago, we had a band come over from Russia that played contemporary Russian Christian music at our evening service (the evening services were made primarily for the young adults/teenagers). Their music wasn’t anything like hard rock or death metal type, in fact, it was probably in the range of Jars of Clay music. In any case, all was going well, until they decided to sing an African type song with maracas, just maracas and a xylophone was all it took for some older people of our church to stand up in fits of fury and protest. The protest was made to be something like, “Why do you bring this music into God’s holy house, if they want to play this type of music they should go play outside of God’s holy house!” only in Russian and more yelling. Then the disgruntled old person and his wife left for the night. Now, no one else stood up to complain – why? Because nothing was wrong with the song! Ironically, the band sang a song before that, which talked about people who complain every day and shouldn’t be doing so.
In the essence of it all, I think that incorrect Christian worldviews come about not because people are thinking about others or about what God would do, but it essentially comes from people who want things to go their way, for people to think and act the way they themselves do. They want people to become more liberal to allow more opportunities for sin, or want them to be more conservative to not allow them any chance of interacting with the unsaved. So is the answer to be midline between the two? Nope. The answer is simply to accept God’s word as the truth and have it be the guideline for how you live your life, or put differently, how God wants you to glorify Him through how you live.