Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (16 page)

Orr’s questions arise from his desire not just to understand the Christian worldview but to do so in a hostile intellectual environment. The Christian worldview has an apologetic task to perform. What follows in
The Christian View of God and the World
is an elaborate set of answers to the questions he asks.

Theologians Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton select three themes from Christianity as central to the Christian worldview: the doctrine of creation, the fall of humanity into sin, and transformation through Christian redemption. These biblical motifs answer the four fundamental worldview questions that are at the heart of every worldview:

The questions as stated here begin not with God or external reality but with the individual self. Nonetheless, as Walsh and Middleton further explain them, it is obvious that God (or ultimate reality) is central to their concerns and that who we are is to be answered in communal, not individualistic, terms. The first three are covered in my questions 1 and 3. But their question 3 also singles out one particularly complex issue for any theistic worldview to deal with—the problem of evil. This issue is a part of the answers given to my worldview questions 3 and 7, but it is not a focus in my system.

Redfield is the sole analyst who clearly begins with ontological issues. His first two and his fourth questions are ontological; the third is ethical. With Dilthey, Orr, and to some extent, Walsh and Middleton, the questions focus on existential concerns. They are all about us. While the answers will involve God and nature, the emphasis is practical. What are the implications for us as human beings looking for a satisfying life? Orr includes in his larger list of questions all the issues raised by others, with perhaps the exception of the remedy for the human condition. Only Orr addresses epistemology, but while he does so, he does not ask how one can know that any of one’s answers to the other questions are true or even credible (my question 5). Rather, he assumes that answers to epistemological questions will be able to be given “rational justification.”

Charles Taylor adds images—to include metaphors, tropes (stories and sub-stories and legends)—to those categories already mentioned.
10
James K. A. Smith places more emphasis on our ritualistic behaviors, which he calls
cultural liturgies
.
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It appears, therefore, that my seven questions are in fact fairly comprehensive. They include in some way the essence of almost all the questions that others have formulated. This should not be surprising, since the questions address ontology, epistemology and ethics. What else besides aesthetics is left?

What is missing from my seven questions is not content but existential relevance and the role of behavior. True, the fourth question (“What happens to persons at death?”) is existential, but the others are not. We turn, then, to look at worldview as a way of life that is bound up with seeing one’s own life as a part of a master story, a metanarrative.

Worldview as a Way of Life

While worldviews have been overwhelmingly detected and expounded using intellectual categories, from the first there has been a recognition that they are inextricably tied to lived experience and behavior. “Every true world-view is an intuition which emerges from the
standing in-the-middle-of-life.
”
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People are looking for “stability,” says Dilthey, and so they both create and rest in a conception of reality that allows them to live and move and have their being in a universe that is not totally hostile.
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And while Kuyper is aware of the German word
Weltanschauung
, translated as “worldview” in English, in his own English-language lectures on Calvinism he uses, depending on the context, either “life-system” or “life and world view.”
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Walsh and Middleton follow the same focus on lived reality: “World views are best understood as we see them incarnated, fleshed out in actual ways of life. They are not systems of thought, like theologies or philosophies. Rather, worldviews are perceptual frameworks.” This can be seen from two angles, one diagnostic or analytic, the other life-foundational. From a diagnostic angle, we can assess whether we ourselves (or anyone else) hold a particular worldview by observing how we or others act. Worldviews are “ways of seeing,” Walsh and Middleton say, and add, “If we want to understand what people see, or how well people see, we need to watch how they walk. If they bump into certain objects or stumble over them, then we can assume that they are blind to them. Conversely, their eyes may not only see but dwell on certain other objects.”
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Walsh and Middleton then illustrate this by describing how four families in four different cultures from the same social classes care for their babies. Each set of actions illustrates a different “life form” or worldview. “A world view is never merely a vision
of
life. It is always a vision
for
life.”
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Charles Taylor likewise insists that the power of ideas to effect action cannot be severed from the power of action to effect ideas.
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The relationship between
of
life and
for
life is two-way, symbiotic. How we view life affects the life we live; it governs both the unconscious actions we engage in and the actions we ponder before acting. That means that our individual worldview is somewhat fluid. Sometimes, due to a crisis or a sudden insight or realization, our worldview shifts so much that
conversion
is the best term to describe the change. In noncrisis, ordinary interaction with the world outside the self, our worldview varies only slightly.

Sometimes, however, our worldview varies in one direction so slightly and so persistently that we suddenly realize that we have changed our orientation without knowing it. For example, I was raised in a church where I learned the rudiments of dispensational theology. Ten years after high school, I was surprised to discover that I had lost most of my peculiarly dispensational worldview and had become basically Reformed. This is a change within the limits of Christianity itself, but, of course, some gradual changes of worldview end up being much more radical. Small, gradual changes can also lead to conversion.

In their second book,
Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be
, Middleton and Walsh plumb more deeply the connection between culture and worldview. Still working with the four questions in
The Transforming Vision
, they examine the difference between the modern and postmodern worldviews. Note their answers to their first two worldview questions.

They take the story of Columbus as one narrative locus for modernity. “
Where are we?
We are in the New World, the lost Eden which has now been found. . . . We are in a world that is ripe for the taking and that offers up its riches to those who know how to exploit them.
Who are we?
We are the conquistadors . . . who have taken this wild land inhabited by savages and tamed it.”
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Postmodernity gives radically different answers. “
Where are we
? We are in a pluralistic world of our own construction.
Who are we
? We are Legion [like the madman in Mark 5 who was inhabited by many demons].”
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Dilthey and Middleton and Walsh are clearly correct in their judgment. Every operative worldview directs action. This aspect, the practical, lived reality of worldviews, is missing from the definition given in the first three editions of
The Universe Next Door
and needs to be included in any revision. Indeed, it was in the fourth and fifth edition and in the first edition of the present book. It will be tweaked again in this revised edition.

Worldview as Master Story

All worldviews have at least some operative concept of the passing of time and its relation to both human and nonhuman reality. Folklore, myth and literature around the world from the ancient past to the present tell stories that put present human reality in the larger context of universal cosmic and human meaning.
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They act as orienting patterns. In short, they function as worldviews or parts of worldviews.
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The worldviews of Buddhism, Hinduism and primal religion are embedded and embodied in stories. While few of these sets of stories may be easily tied together in one master story, one metanarrative, nevertheless these are the stories by which societies interpret the universe and life around them.

While the Enlightenment with its progeny, modernity, has tried to reject such stories as primitive superstition, happily replacing them with universal rational, propositional knowledge, that very attempt is story-ful. Naturalism itself relies on evolution (cosmic, geological, biological, cultural and psychological) to explain the universe in general, what we are as human beings and how we got this way. Postmodernism tends also to be historicist, seeing the whole of how we understand ourselves and God (if any) to be bound up with the ebbs and flows of culture and societal change.
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Both in the works of most Christian worldview analysts—such as James Orr, James Olthuis, Arthur Holmes and Ronald Nash—and my own
Universe Next Door
, worldview is first described in intellectual terms, such as “system of beliefs,” “set of presuppositions” or “conceptual scheme.” I want now to ask whether this is quite accurate. Does it not miss an important element in how people actually think and act? Isn’t a
story
involved in how we make the decisions of belief and behavior that constitute our lives? Would it be better to consider a worldview as the
story
we live by? Certainly Naugle agrees here: “The most fundamental stories associated with a
Weltanschauung
—those closest to its metaphysical and ethical epicenter—possess a kind of finality as the ultimate interpretation of reality in all its multifaceted aspects.”
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Perhaps the easiest way to see that this might be the case is to examine the Christian worldview. I have argued that the Christian worldview begins with ontology—an abstract concept, but soon ontology becomes lodged in story form. The ancient Apostles’ Creed demonstrates this:

Only the first line is utterly ontological. The second line brings in action, and while it does not take a position on whether creation was in or out of time, it recognizes God as origin of the earth. It is the fourth line that roots the Christian worldview in story:

There is no reason to quote further. The remainder of the creed is steeped in story. None of it, really, is as abstract as most lists of beliefs one assents to before joining a specific church, and certainly it is less abstract than the formulation I offered in
The Universe Next Door
.

I began this section by commenting on the Apostles’ Creed because it is an early attempt by the developing church to encapsulate the essence of the Christian faith. When one turns to the Bible itself, the ground of all Christian theologies—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—the element of story is even stronger. Most of the Bible is story, and all of it is embedded in story—a history, a story of events that really happened (not just-so stories, or likely stories, or myths). The narratives recount events that bear an inherent meaning that is unfolded throughout subsequent commentary by “Scripture” writers, many of them identified as prophets or special religious authorities. Meaning—worldview—is transmitted by these narratives.

One interesting attempt to encapsulate the story nature of the Old Testament is that of James Orr: