Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (5 page)
Read Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Online
Authors: James W. Sire
The second central mainspring is that of the spirit of apostasy from the true God.
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As Dooyeweerd understands them, worldviews are not philosophic systems; rather they are
pretheoretical
commitments and are in direct contact not so much with the mind as with the “heart,” with experience, with life as lived. The converted have a Christian worldview. The unconverted have a worldview as well. But the Christian’s worldview derives from a regenerated heart and the non-Christian’s worldview from a radically sinful heart. Whatever the agreement or disagreement between the Christian and the non-Christian on structural matters (science, history, economics, etc.), the non-Christian’s worldview is finally unable to provide an accurate explanation of the world and human beings in it.
As philosopher George Pierson says in his critique of some evangelical notions of worldview (including mine in the first edition of this book), naturalists can hold beliefs that are
structurally
accurate but
directionally
flawed:
Everything
is structurally good (there is nothing in creation that is not ordered/structured by God) and everything in varying degrees is directionally bad (all of creation is fallen in sin) but redeemable (all of creation will be regained). . . . My contention is that only “structure-direction” thinking can really explain what is implied in “worldview” analysis—that as sinners our most basic heart-indwelt spiritual commitments, pre-theoretical in character, are capable of twisting and distorting our God-given structures, especially our noetic structures apart from Christ.
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As we will shortly see, Al Wolters bases his worldview analysis explicitly on Dooyeweerd’s concepts of ground motive, creation-fall-redemption and structure/direction.
Meanwhile, note this curious parallel to Dooyeweerd’s notion of ground motive. Kierkegaard in an early work described a conversion experience that leads to the formation of a “life-view”:
If we now ask how a life-view comes about, then we reply that for him who does not permit his life to fizzle out, but who tries insofar as possible to balance the individual events in life—that for him there must necessarily come a moment of unusual illumination about life, without his needing in any way to have understood all the possible particulars to the subsequent understanding of which he has in the meantime [come to have] the key: I say, there must come a time when . . . life is understood backwards through the Idea.
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In other words, conversion—“a
kairos
moment in one’s experience”
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—precedes the formation of a worldview, which one understands retrospectively. It is discovered by reflection, not produced by imagination or rational thought. In later works Kierkegaard expands on this notion, seeing, for example, the religious life-view as incorporating and redeeming the aesthetic and ethical modes.
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Recent Evangelical Definitions
For several decades after Kuyper, the worldview concept was not much discussed by Christian theologians and philosophers. The Reformed community centered in Calvin College, however, kept the notion alive, and in the 1960s it began to emerge as well in the work of philosophers associated with the Christian Studies Institute in Toronto, under the direct influence of Herman Dooyeweerd and the memory of Abraham Kuyper.
Today there is a general consensus among evangelicals who write about worldviews that Orr, Kuyper and, occasionally, Dooyeweerd have influenced their own understanding. Common to the first two and their modern counterparts are the notions that worldviews are beliefs that are (1) rooted in pretheoretical and presuppositional concepts that are the foundation for all one’s thought and action, (2) comprehensive in scope, (3) ideally though not necessarily logically coherent, (4) related in some positive way to reality, that is, to the way all things and relations really are, (5) though not necessarily irrational, nonetheless fundamentally a matter of commitment that is not finally provable by reason.
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James Olthuis.
Perhaps the fullest and clearest brief definition of
worldview
in the tradition of Kuyper is that of Canadian philosopher James Olthuis:
A worldview (or vision of life) is a framework or set of fundamental beliefs through which we view the world and our calling and future in it. This vision need not be fully articulated: it may be so internalized that it goes largely unquestioned; it may not be explicitly developed into a systematic conception of life; it may not be theoretically deepened into a philosophy; it may not even be codified into creedal form; it may be greatly refined through cultural-historical development. Nevertheless, this vision is a channel for the ultimate beliefs which give direction and meaning to life. It is the integrative and interpretative framework by which order and disorder are judged; it is the standard by which reality is managed and pursued; it is the set of hinges on which all our everyday thinking and doing turns.
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Olthuis goes on to comment on how a worldview relates to both persons and their communities:
Although a vision of life is held only by individuals, it is communal in scope and structure. Since a worldview gives the terms of reference by which the world and our place in it can be structured and illumined, a worldview binds its adherents together into community. Allegiance to a common vision promotes the integration of individuals into a group. At times communality of vision not only binds people together, but also, ironically, provides them with the tools and vocabulary to advance with greater sophistication their internal differences.
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Albert M. Wolters.
Canadian theologian Albert M. Wolters similarly defines
worldview
but does so more simply:
For our purposes
worldview
will be defined as “the comprehensive framework of one’s basic beliefs about things.” . . . A worldview is a matter of the shared everyday experience of humankind, an inescapable component of all human knowing, and as such it is nonscientific, or rather (since scientific knowing is always dependent on the intuitive knowing of our everyday experience) nature. It belongs to an order of cognition more basic than that of science or theory. Just as aesthetics presupposes some innate sense of the beautiful and legal theory presupposes a fundamental notion of justice, so theology and philosophy presuppose a pretheoretical perspective on the world. They give a scientific elaboration of a worldview.
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In
Creation Regained
, Wolters is not primarily interested in using worldview analysis to evaluate a wide range of worldviews; immediately after giving the above definition of the term he launches into a basic but detailed description of the Christian worldview. He does this, as mentioned above, by using the categories of Reformed theology and the philosophic work of Hermann Dooyeweerd.
In short, he explains, worldviews from the perspective of (1) the ground motive of
creation-fall-redemption
and (2)
structure
and
direction.
The first of these can be found in the worldview analysis of a broad range of Christian scholars. The second is both unusual and unique. It begins with a distinction between Christian philosophy and Christian theology.
[Philosophy is] that comprehensive (totality-oriented) scientific discipline which focuses on the
structure
of things—that is, on the unity and diversity of creational givens. . . . Christian systematic theology . . . [is] that comprehensive (totality-oriented) scientific discipline which focuses on the
direction
of things—that is, on the evil that infects the world and the cure that can save it.
This sort of analysis can certainly help Christians understand from their own point of view the differences between Christian and other worldviews. Moreover, it helps explain why “very bright and logical people hold such beliefs quite (structurally) logically and apply their logic quite effectively in other areas, yet their naturalism is in error because it is un-Biblical (mis-direction).”
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But it does not provide the categories that will aid us in describing distinctly non-Christian worldviews as non-Christians understand them. Only by walking in the shoes of another person, that is, attempting to see the world from their perspective, can we expect to conduct evangelism among the intellectually aware.
Most Christians are, for the most part, unaware of the unusual distinction between
structure
and
direction
. This, I think, is the reason it does not appear outside the specific tradition of Dutch Reformed theology.
Ronald Nash.
One of the clearest expositions of the worldview concept is that of Ronald Nash. He says, “In its simplest terms, a worldview is a set of beliefs about the most important issues in life. . . . [It] is a conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously place or fit everything we believe and by which we interpret and judge reality.”
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This theoretical scheme is founded on nontheoretical notions, though these notions can be identified and thought about, and changes can be consciously made. Nash identifies five key elements of a comprehensive worldview: one’s understanding of God, of ultimate reality (by which he means the world in its essence), knowledge, ethics and humankind.
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John H. Kok.
Philosopher John H. Kok’s definition deserves mention because it shores up, more than most others I have seen, the gap between the purely intellectual and the embodied character of worldviews.
A worldview may well be defined as one’s comprehensive framework of basic beliefs about things, but our
talk
(confessed beliefs or cognitive claims) is one thing, and our
walk
(operative beliefs) is another and even more important thing. A lived worldview defines one’s basic convictions; it defines what one is ready to live and die for.
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A worldview, he says, is “more than a collection of concepts.” It is as well “the vision that one gets from home or from the public square, the vision that one has assimilated for oneself with difficulty or grown up with, so much so that one almost takes it for granted. It is not a scientific or theoretic conception but a view, a sense—of God, the world, life, human nature, one’s neighbor, oneself—that has become second nature.”
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We turn then to scholars who approach worldviews with a focus on their relationship to comparative religion and to anthropology focused on missions.
Ninian Smart.
Theologian Ninian Smart is often cited as a worldview scholar; his major focus is comparative religion. In fact, his close identification of worldview with religion limits the scope of his contribution to worldview analysis.
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Smart lists six “dimensions” of a worldview or religion: doctrinal or philosophical; narrative or mythical; ethical or legal; ritual or practical; experiential or emotional; and social or organizational. His presentation makes good sense on its own, but given the contributions of other scholars, it has little fresh to offer worldview analysis in general.
Charles H. Kraft.
Christian anthropologists Charles H. Kraft and Paul G. Hiebert have made unique contributions to worldview understanding. Kraft, as our first example, fully adheres to the general notion that
a worldview is the fundamental perspective from which one addresses every issue of life,
and in
Worldviews for Christian Witness
he summarizes and evaluates the major ways the term has been understood, first by non-anthropologists and then by anthropologists. Then he summarizes and evaluates the anthropological conceptions.
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Kraft himself says this:
I define worldview as the totality of the culturally structured images and assumptions (including value and commitment or allegiance assumptions) in terms of which a people both perceive and respond to reality. A worldview is not separate from culture. It is included in culture as the structuring of the deepest level pictures and presuppositions on which people base their lives.
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Rather than the philosophical categories of ontology (metaphysics), epistemology and ethics, Kraft uses the following anthropological categories to classify and explain the specific nature of each worldview: person/group, causality, time/event, space/material world, and relationship.
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He emphasizes the embeddedness of a worldview in culture and the broad extension of its focus beyond purely intellectual categories. Kraft also makes a helpful distinction between the
surface level
of culture where we observe habitual, “pattern/structured behavior” and the
deep level
of culture where “pattern/structured assumptions” regarding value and commitments are invisible.
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Such anthropological approaches make a major contribution to worldview analysis.
Paul G. Hiebert.
Compared to Kraft, Hiebert summarizes and evaluates the work of a broader range of other worldview scholars; his work is more academic and his analysis sometimes deeper than Kraft’s. But like Kraft, he emphasizes the cultural nature of worldviews.
We will . . . define the concept as we use it in this study as the “fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives.” Worldviews are what people in a community take as given realities, the maps they have of reality that they use for living.
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Hiebert is especially helpful in tracing the flow of worldviews from small-scale oral societies to peasant, modern, late modern and postmodern cultures. Either one or both Kraft’s and Hiebert’s books should be read alongside books like my own more philosophically oriented
Universe Next Door
.
