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Nine Big Questions of Every Worldview

Author Darrell Johnson, drawing inspiration from James Sire and N.T. Wright, says that every worldview is asking and trying to answer the following nine questions:

1. What is prime reality? What is the "really real"?
2. Who or what are we? What does it mean to be a human being?
3. Is there such a thing as "morality," right and wrong? If so, what is its basis; how does one know the good and the bad?
4. What is the meaning of history? Or, is there any meaning?
5. What is wrong with us? Something is off—what is it?
6. Is there a solution; can things be fixed? By whom? How? How quickly?
7. Is there a God? If so, can this God be known? And is this God involved in the world, especially relative to human suffering?
8. What happens to a human being at death?
9. What time is it? "There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven" (Eccles 3:1). Where are we in the flow of history?

Darrell W. Johnson, The Glory of Preaching (InterVarsity, 2009), 67-68; Johnson credits James Sire, The Universe Next Door and N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, saying, "My compilation is inspired by those proposed by Sire and Wright."

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