How Then Should We Live
Two aims. One straight line. Everything else follows.
There is a question I come back to more than any other, and it has two parts. The first part is: what does the Bible actually say? Not what I was told it says, not what the tradition assumes it says, not what a verse pulled from its context appears to say — but what it actually says, to its actual audience, in its actual context, as part of an actual story with a beginning and an end.
The second part follows from the first: given that, how then should I live?
That second question is Francis Schaeffer’s — or at least I am borrowing it from him. He wrote a book with that title in 1976, tracing the consequences of ideas through Western history. The argument underneath it is simple: what people believe about ultimate reality shapes everything else. Not eventually. Immediately. Inescapably.
I find that convincing. And I find that it cuts both ways.
The two aims
The reason Semeion exists can be reduced to two aims, stated in order — because the order is not negotiable.
Understand God better via the Bible.
Consequently — how should I then live?
The first aim is a pursuit, not a destination. Serious people have been working on this for two thousand years. I am one more person in that stream, with my own context, my own reading, my own blind spots. The goal is not to arrive. The goal is to keep moving in the right direction, with the right method, holding conclusions honestly enough to keep reading.
The method matters enormously. Most Bible reading — and I include myself in this — arrives with a question it already knows the answer to, and finds the verse that confirms it. That is not understanding God better. That is using God’s word as a mirror for what you already think. The alternative is harder and more rewarding: read the whole story. Understand who is being addressed, and why, and what the whole narrative arc is doing. Let the text ask its own questions before you ask yours.
This is what biblical theology does, and it is worth the effort. Michael Emerson’s The Story of Scripture and the work of Tim Mackie and the Bible Project are the best starting points I have found. The difference between reading Romans as a series of salvation bullet points and reading Romans as a letter to a specific community wrestling with a specific question about Jews and Gentiles is not a minor academic distinction. It changes what you hear.
The second aim — how should I then live — only works if the first aim is being pursued honestly. Behaviour that flows from accurate belief about a real God is a completely different thing from behaviour produced by moral instruction. One is a consequence. The other is a technique.
The straight line
I tell my children they need to tidy their rooms because God made human beings to bring order to the world, and their bedroom is currently their world. I am not entirely joking.
That is a straight line from a belief about what human beings are and what they are for, to an ordinary Tuesday evening in our house. The behaviour follows from the belief because the belief is — if it’s true — true about everything. Including the bedroom floor.
This is Schaeffer’s point, applied domestically. What we believe about ultimate reality shapes everything else. If God created human beings as his image-bearers, charged with ordering and cultivating the world he made, then work is not a consequence of the fall — it is part of what we are. If Jesus is Lord in the political sense — not a devotional title but a declaration of allegiance — then how I vote, how I spend, how I treat the people around me is not a separate conversation from my faith. It is the same conversation.
Folk Christianity has quietly severed this line. Belief sits in one box — Sunday morning, personal devotion, eternal destiny. Behaviour sits in another — moral effort, self-improvement, trying harder. The connection between them has gone missing. What you believe about God produces nothing in particular about how you live, because the beliefs have been softened to the point where they have no real-world purchase.
The aim of this site is to reconnect the line. Not by telling anyone what to do — that is genuinely between each person and God — but by taking the beliefs seriously enough to ask what would actually follow if they were true.
That is what the next post is for.
Further reading
Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? — the consequences of ideas through Western history. The argument that what we believe about ultimate reality shapes everything else, traced across art, philosophy and culture.
Michael Emerson, The Story of Scripture — biblical theology as a method: reading the whole story before extracting the verses. An accessible introduction to why the narrative arc matters.
Tim Mackie, The Bible Project — the same biblical theology project in video and podcast form. Start with the series on the biblical story if this way of reading Scripture is new to you.