Summary
Iain Provan explains what he believes, and how it underpins our culture.
Transcript
I think, I believe, it’s very good news to know that there is one personal God who is good and who creates in order that creatures should flourish, and is working in the story to redeem what’s gone wrong, and gives us a robust hope in the future because we know the story will end well.
So to me, that’s extremely important – if true. I believe it to be true. It gives me a compass for my direction through life. And in fact, it stands underneath a lot of things that the modern secular person values already. But there has been a loss of cultural memory about why we value these things, and I think it’s a very big question how many of these things that are valued can survive when you cut off the branch from the tree that it grew out of initially.
So to the secular person I would say, very often I agree with your noble aspirations and your values and all the rest of it, but are you aware of where they came from, and on what do you ground those? Can those be sustained in the long run? I find it difficult to see how that can be so. So we’re at a very significant moment, I think, in Western culture, under enormous pressure from other worldviews that teach different things. And there are some very grave and serious decisions to be made about these matters.
