“Whatever you write down will be important even if it is only important to you.”
In the novel Strangers in Time by David Baldacci, there is a tender moment that stayed with me. Mr. Oliver, sensing something special in Charlie, gives him an empty journal that once belonged to his deceased wife and later lends him one of her ink pens. As he does, he tells him, “Whatever you write down will be important even if it is only important to you.”
The line landed with unusual force. It did not feel like advice meant only for a fictional boy living through wartime London. It felt like advice meant for anyone who has ever wondered whether their words matter. For me, that question has taken on new shape since retiring in September 2025.
Retirement created a space that had not previously existed in my life: time to think, time to read carefully, and time to write. Since then, I have completed several writing projects, each one emerging from curiosity, reflection, and a desire to better understand the world around me. In a quiet way, writing became one of the ways I began to take stock of a life that had already accumulated many decades of experience.
Who Is the Audience?
Yet whenever people ask about these projects, the same question often appears: Who is the audience? What is the purpose? Beneath the question lies a familiar assumption in our culture—that writing only justifies itself if it quickly finds a sufficient readership or immediate public recognition.
The wisdom expressed in that quiet exchange between Mr. Oliver and Charlie offers a different framework for thinking about writing. Writing can possess value long before it finds an audience, and sometimes regardless of whether it ever does. Narrative, after all, begins long before there is an audience. Its first purpose is internal, not public. To write is, in a sense, to exist narratively.
Writing Gathers Our Experiences
Human beings do not simply accumulate experiences; over time they gather those experiences into stories that allow them to understand who they are. Writing becomes one of the ways we participate in the slow work of assembling a self. When we write, we clarify our own thoughts, preserve moments that might otherwise disappear, and give shape to reflections that would remain fleeting if left only in memory.
For this reason, writing also functions as a counterweight to erasure. Without some form of narrative expression, much of what we experience simply vanishes into the passage of time. A thought occurs, an observation is made, a realization briefly surfaces—and then it is gone.
Writing interrupts that disappearance. It records the moment and gives it a durable form. The opposite of narrative is not silence but chaos: a scattering of impressions with no structure that allows them to be understood. Narrative gathers those fragments and arranges them into meaning.
Writing as an Attempt to Understand One’s Life
This is exactly what happens when someone writes later in life as well. After decades of living, reading, working, and observing, a person carries within them an enormous accumulation of impressions and reflections. Writing becomes the means by which those fragments are gradually organized into a narrative that makes sense of the whole. In this way writing is part of the deeply human process of integrating a life.
At seventy years old, writing has therefore become more than an activity of passing interest. It is part of the ongoing effort to understand a life as a whole.
Human beings become who they are through the narratives they construct about their experiences, and writing provides one of the most deliberate ways of participating in that process. Each page becomes a small act of assembly—gathering memory, reflection, and observation into a form that can be seen and considered. In that sense, writing allows a life not merely to be lived but to be understood.
The journal Mr. Oliver gives Charlie once belonged to someone who had lived before him, and that detail carries a quiet symbolism. One life leaves traces that another life may one day discover. Writing participates in that same continuity. Words written today may never travel far beyond the moment of their creation—or they may one day reach someone unexpectedly, perhaps years or decades later. The writer rarely controls that outcome.
The Decision to Write Honestly
What can be controlled is the decision to write honestly and attentively. In that sense, the value of writing does not ultimately depend on the size of its audience but on the seriousness of the act itself. Each page becomes a small declaration that thought, memory, and reflection deserve to be preserved.
Mr. Oliver’s advice to Charlie therefore speaks far beyond the boundaries of the novel. It reminds us that writing is one of the ways a human life refuses to disappear unnoticed. To write is to say that the experiences one has lived, the questions one has struggled with, and the insights one has gathered are worthy of being set down.
Sometimes the audience may be the writer alone, seeking clarity. Sometimes it may be a reader years from now who happens upon the words and recognizes something of their own life within them. Either way, the act remains meaningful. The page receives the trace of a life thinking about itself—and that, in the end, is reason enough to write.
Bill McDonald Bio
Bill McDonald is a retired small business owner with over 40 years’ experience. He holds a Master of Arts in Religion from Ashland Theological Seminary. In retirement, he devotes time to reading, thinking, and writing about human beings and the concrete realities that shape their lives. He has been married for 51 years and has three children and five grandchildren. He enjoys books, playing guitar, walking in the woods on the acreage where he lives, and good conversation with friends and family.
I was recently interviewed by Shiao Chong (he goes by Chong), Associate Director of Global Scholars Canada (GSC). I came on board as a scholar with GSC at the end of 2025, with a mandate to help Christian academics in public universities in Canada and beyond reflect more deeply on their calling as Christians, in relationship to their teaching, scholarship, and institutional participation.
Since the idea of a Christian (or “biblical”) worldview, which I have been promoting over the years, is at odds with the way this term has come to be used among many Evangelical Christians, Chong focused the interview on why I want to retain this terminology.
Dr. J. Richard Middleton, a Jamaican American Canadian who joined Global Scholars Canada in 2025, is an eminent scholar on Christian worldview. Together with Brian Walsh, he co-wrote the bestselling The Transforming Vision (1984) that practically popularized the concept of a biblical worldview to Christian circles. Currently, Richard is rewriting that seminal work, on his own, with the tentative title of Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws: The Bible’s Liberating Worldview.
Recently, I had the privilege and pleasure of conversing over video and subsequent emails with Richard about this book project. Below is a co-edited version (by Richard and me) of the main questions of our communications.
SC: Currently, the concept of a biblical worldview is very common among Christians. Do you think Christian faculty and graduate students still need to learn about a biblical worldview?
Yes, for two reasons. First, the concept of a biblical worldview has often been distorted in Christian circles, especially among Evangelicals. It has been reduced to a package of ideas, which Christians are supposed to link somehow to their field of study or research. It becomes almost an entirely cerebral affair that does not seem to affect the whole person. Christian philosopher Jamie Smith, for example, often avoids worldview terminology for this reason as it is often reduced to a rationalistic concept.
Beyond that, the actual content of what is often portrayed as a biblical worldview isn’t really what is taught in Scripture; the term “biblical” is used by many Christians as shorthand for what we think is right, which is often a set of so-called “absolutes.” I want to help educate the Christian community about the genuine biblical vision of life, which is empowering for our life and has implications for the vocation of Christian scholars.
I envision the biblical worldview as a river in which we are invited to swim. We get carried along by the current, which is the biblical story as told in Scripture, taught by the church, embodied in Christian worship, and in which we participate as a Christian community. All of this shapes us to be a certain kind of people; it is formative spirituality, a mode of Christian discipleship.
I like to use the quote from The Karate Kid (1984) movie to illustrate how learning a Christian worldview is an immersive experience. There is one scene where Mr. Miyagi asks the boy, Daniel, “You learn Karate from book?” That’s what Daniel was trying to do, whereas Mr. Miyagi learned karate by doing it experientially, in real life. Likewise, I tell my students that they can’t learn a Christian worldview from a course.
Don’t get me wrong: serious immersion in Scripture and intellectual grappling with ideas are important (they have been crucial for me) and I hope that my courses on a Christian worldview were helpful in guiding my students towards a deeper understanding of biblical faith. But a worldview is not a set of ideas. It is a lived vision, a whole-person orientation to the world.
When we indwell the biblical worldview and allow ourselves to be shaped by its values, we are able to engage the world and our specific fields of study as whole persons. We begin to ask questions of our discipline and to see things that others may not see. For example, during my MA studies at the U of Guelph, I was asking all sorts of questions in my philosophy classes, which got my professors’ attention. The kind of questions I asked were born out of my whole orientation to life (not just ideas), which was shaped by the biblical worldview.
SC: Why do you still wish to keep using the term “worldview” when it has been so distorted and when so many other Christian thinkers have tried to use different terms?
I don’t want those who have distorted the term to “win,” so to speak. They should not get to own the term they have distorted. The concept of worldview did not originate with Evangelicalism or even in theology. It was in circulation in other fields before Christians took hold of it. In fact, it is still being used in sociology and psychology in its original sense, as a preconceptual framework of meaning that orients people to the world. Just because Evangelicals have distorted and abused the concept does not mean that everyone else must abandon it. I want to reclaim its original sense.
Sure. Almost all premodern cultures have affirmed that there is some standard of truth or reality outside of us to which we should conform in order to live a good life. In the modern period people continued to affirm this but introduced the idea of human autonomy into the mix.
As a Christian, I certainly affirm that there are universal truths – non-negotiable truths as theologian John Stott calls them – and these truths are external to us human beings, which we can, in our fallible and limited ways, understand to some degree. I also believe that Scripture affirms the reality of human agency. In the Bible, we see that God takes us seriously as human subjects, empowering us to represent him as his image in the world and responding to our prayers, both on behalf of ourselves and others.
But modernity has distorted human agency into autonomy, thinking that we decide, ultimately, what the non-negotiable truths are. But this is untenable. It is obvious that human autonomy has not led to any agreement about what is universally true. I have come to think of modernity as an unstable hybrid of the claim to universal truths with the belief that these truths are in some sense grounded in (or discoverable through) autonomous human reason.
This instability has led to the postmodern crisis, where people have given up on the belief in universal truth, though they have continued to affirm (even emphasize) human autonomy. If we no longer share truths in common, but each of us autonomously decides our own truths, then we devolve into a “post-truth” culture.
But people aren’t isolated individuals. We end up banding together with those who share our views into a “tribe”. Postmodern tribalism is almost reverting back to paganism – the sort we find in pre-Jewish and pre-Christian times – when tribes clash with other tribes for ideological and political dominance.
Richard, teaching on the Temple Mount steps
When Christians distort their worldview into a re-packaged set of absolute truths they only feed into this postmodern tribalism. They become another tribe, who believe that a certain set of ideas are absolute truths from God, which often results in seeing anyone who disagrees with the tribe as evil and demonic. It closes off dialogue. Instead of the biblical worldview opening you up to others, to share God’s love, you end up using a supposedly “biblical” worldview to shut others down and defend yourself against the other tribes.
SC: You also plan to add two chapters in the rewrite that addresses a Christian approach to suffering and the biblical pattern of discipleship respectively. Why focus on suffering and discipleship?
The theology I learned growing up in the church had a low view of humanity and did not value God’s creation. It was, therefore, transformative for my spiritual life when I discovered the biblical vision of God’s desire to redeem creation, instead of destroying it. God’s intent to bring shalom with peace and justice to this world gives Christians a much more positive and hopeful view of the ultimate end, the value of creation and of our human lives.
However, this begs the question: if it is God’s plan to redeem creation, why hasn’t God done it yet? Why are we still facing all sorts of injustice and challenges? Why is the redemption of all things seem so far off? Why are we still suffering as we live “between the times”?
That is why I think it is important to look at the concept of suffering in Scripture. And when you do that, you will find that God cares about the suffering of his creatures, so much that he became one of us in the incarnation to suffer on our behalf. And God listens to our laments that come from our experience of suffering.
Suffering is also part of the pattern of discipleship in the New Testament. Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23 NIV) Taking up the cross involves suffering for the sake of Christ. Similarly, the apostle Paul talks about sharing in Christ’s sufferings: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” (Rom. 8:17 NIV) And again: “For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” (2 Cor. 1:5 NIV)
This is why I think we need to have a Christian approach to suffering and to understand the biblical pattern of discipleship. This honest recognition of suffering in Scripture shows that the authentic biblical worldview isn’t just a rationalistic package of ideas but is grounded in the reality of the world as we know it.
SC: What do you plan to do with your fresh teaching on Christian worldview, especially with regards to your work with Global Scholars Canada?
The first thing I’m doing, as already mentioned, is writing an updated version of The Transforming Vision, my very first book, which was an attempt to introduce a Christian worldview to a wider public. At the time, I was a graduate student and campus minister at the University of Guelph. Since then, I’ve expanded (and deepened) my understanding of the Bible’s theology, so the new book will reflect that.
Another change will be in what you might call contextualization; I want to continue breaking down our unbiblical dualism, our separation of faith and the sacred from the rest of life (including our academic work), but I’m also writing the new book with an eye to the relevance of the Bible’s vision for our contemporary culture of postmodern tribalism.
Beyond writing, I hope to work closely with Global Scholars Canada to discern how best to use my gifts of teaching and mentoring. I particularly want to help Christian academics discern their calling to participate in God’s purposes for the redemption of earthly life. Given my primary expertise as a biblical scholar, my mission with GSC is to raise the level of biblical literacy among Christian academics through immersion in serious study of the Scriptures. I would love to see Christian academics inspired by the relevance of the Bible’s worldview for all they do, both on the job and in the rest of their life.
If you want to hear more about what I mean by a Christian “worldview,” check out “Reclaiming the Christian Worldview | J. Richard Middleton,” an interview from September 2025 on the UpWords podcast of Upper House (a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison).
The book has found a wide audience in both English and other languages (especially Korean, where it has just about outsold the English original). To date, it has been translated and published in Korean (1987), French (1988), Indonesian (2001), Spanish (2003), and Portuguese (2010); with new Korean (2013), French (2016), and Indonesian (2013, 2019) editions.
Over the years, many people who were using the book in teaching asked us for a second or revised edition, where we would update aspects of our analysis. Although the publisher did give the book a new cover, we were each too busy working on other projects to devote the time needed to a second edition.
Worldview Book and Worldview Courses
Brian and I wrote The Transforming Vision based on non-credit courses we were teaching through IVCF campus ministries at a number of Canadian universities. For a few years after the book was published, I continued teaching non-credit courses on a Christian worldview at universities in the USA and Canada as I moved around for graduate studies and university chaplaincy.
Since I began doctoral studies in 1990, and especially since I started a faculty position in the mid-nineties, I have been offering the course for credit to undergraduates and to graduate/ seminary students, while also giving papers and publishing as a biblical scholar—especially in the area of Old Testament.
Changes to the Course (and the Book)
The course has gradually changed over the years, in accordance with my expertise and context. The new version of the book will follow the content (and outline) of the course as I have been teaching it most recently (it’s a solo rewrite, since Brian hasn’t been teaching a comparable course).
Some changes have to do with Scripture, while others are aspects of what you might call contextualization, changes that reflect the cultural (and academic) contexts I have been living and teaching in.
An Expanded Exposition of the Biblical Story
First, I’ve expanded (and deepened) my understanding of biblical theology over the years, so the book will reflect that. Instead of three chapters on Scripture (in The Transforming Vision), I have eight chapters tracing the biblical story from creation to eschaton (the biblical worldview as a coherent story wasn’t explicitly addressed in the original book). Each chapter will be a theological dive into a biblical text (or set of texts) that advances the story (creation, imago Dei, fall, Israel, monarchy, prophets, Jesus, eschaton). I will draw out practical implications for Christian living from each of these “soundings” into Scripture.
An Analysis of “Postmodern” Tribalism
The second change is in my analysis of the history of western culture. I still find it helpful to begin with the otherworldly dualism that impacted the church (from the early middle ages onward) and trace the rise of the modern impulse to autonomy and conquest (over the last five hundred years). But my analysis of the crisis of modernity now includes our current “postmodern” tribalism—how modernity has devolved into the toxic “post-truth” culture we now experience.
The Contested Meaning of the “Christian/Biblical Worldview”
A third change is that I won’t start the book with much analysis of the nature of worldviews (which is how The Transforming Vision began). The new book will focus more on showing than telling. However, I plan to include an Appendix or Afterword on the problematic nature of worldview discourse among Christians. I’ll explain why I am reclaiming the terms “Christian worldview” and “biblical worldview” from those who use these terms to designate a pre-packaged absolutist system of so-called “truth,” which is often nothing more than an oppressive framework for control. In contrast, I think these terms are helpful markers for the Bible’s liberating vision, disclosed especially through its overarching narrative of God’s desire for creational flourishing and shalom.
Living between the Times
Also, I won’t have a section on the implications of Christian faith for academic disciplines. That section of The Transforming Vision came from the campus ministry context the course was developed in; that’s not been my present context. Instead, I’ll close with two chapters on “living between the times,” one addressing a Christian approach to suffering (drawing on the lament psalms) and one on the biblical pattern of discipleship (from the Gospels and Pauline epistles).
The title is meant to capture the sense of freedom and joy that being grounded in Scripture can bring, while realistically acknowledging that our joy comes in the face of personal brokenness and systemic evil, both of which are ultimately overcome only by God’s saving action in Christ.
I decided to keep the term Worldview in the subtitle, as a gesture towards reclaiming that term as valuable and helpful; indeed, I believe that the Bible discloses a Liberating Worldview!
I plan to keep the reading level of the new book close to that of The Transforming Vision, so it is accessible to early undergraduates and Christian lay people (The Transforming Vision was even used in Christian high schools in Canada and the US).
If you have used The Transforming Vision in teaching or if the book has been important to you personally, please contact me. I am looking for a few key people to read portions of the draft of the new book and give me helpful feedback.
CREATION to ESCHATON 