The term worldview has recently, in the past few years, come under disrepute for various reasons. And now terms like “wisdom” have been used more often. Instead of Christian Worldviews, we are interested in Christian Wisdom. Understandable. Worldviews can carry connotations of clunky, pre-packaged answers, that sometimes don’t adequately deal with the complexities of reality. Whereas wisdom is more flexible and nuanced. But despite this, resources that use the term ‘worldview’ are still generally valuable. Any time someone brings Holy Spirit guided reasoning to any subject we can often benefit from it.

Doug Wilson’s Treasure Island Worldview Guide is very short. It’s literally a few pages. But I appreciate good Christian commentary on works of fiction. I have not read Treasure Island, but I plan to. Sometimes we have a movie night for the children in our parish. One night we watched Treasure Planet, which is a futuristic, science fictiony adaptation of Treasure Island.

I immediately appreciated how Treasure Planet was an adventure story for boys. Given the world we live in now, which labors to turn boys into girls and men into women, Treasure Planet was a breath of fresh air. And I would imagine Treasure Island is the same, if not better.

The author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, was the son of Scottish Presbyterians. Stevenson denounced the Christian faith later in life. Some have speculated that he did so in response to his strict Puritan upbringing. But Pastor Doug Wilson makes a very insightful and, in my estimation, true comment regarding this. He suggests that it wasn’t the strictness of his upbringing, but the lack of strictness that contributed to his apostasy. I’m recalling from memory, but I think he remarks that he was rich and maybe an only child, and that his parents were probably more indulgent and relaxed with him.

Pastor Wilson also makes a great comment regarding the kind of apostasy Stevenson engaged in. A half-hearted, inconsistent apostasy. An apostasy that continues to enjoy the fruits of the Kingdom while denouncing the King.

Wilson writes as follows:

“[T]he Christian faith spent a millennium and a half profoundly shaping the customs and mores of Western culture, you cannot simply reject this or that artifact of it and think you have dealt with the whole. This is like having an architect design your house, live in it for twenty-five years, and then think you have rejected the architect and all his ways by knocking over the mailbox out front. The rest of the house is still there, and you are still living in it.

There is a point when consistent unbelief comes to the place of nihilism and despair. There is a point in unbelief where the residents of the house decide to deny the architect by burning the house down – and it has to be admitted that in our day the culture of unbelief is a lot closer to that place than Stevenson was when he rejected Christianity.”

We certainly are. In fact, one might say we are living in the house that is entirely engulfed in flames. But like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the faithful servants of God aren’t burning. We don’t even smell like smoke.