Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (7 page)

Naugle continues, “Jesus shares this point of view, teaching that the heart is the spiritual nucleus of the person about which life orbits.”
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In short, “the heart and its content as the center of human consciousness creates and constitutes what we commonly refer to as a
Weltanschauung
.”
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How then does the heart become constituted? How is it shaped and formed?

Naugle puts it this way:

Naugle then lists such “heart-shaping influences” as “religious, philosophical, and cultural traditions; socioeconomic conditions; various institutions such as marriage, the family, and education; human relations and friendships; vocational choice and work experience; psychological and physical health; sexual experiences; warfare; and so on.” There is indeed an
interactive or reciprocal
relationship with the external world.

In such a way a worldview is formed and continually shaped and modified by one’s life in the world—in crisis and in ordinary times.

Likewise, “out of the heart go the issues of life.”
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On the one hand, our actions act to form and re-form our heart. On the other hand, our actions display what the content of our heart actually has come to be. Who we are is not just who we think or proclaim ourselves to be. It is who we show ourselves to be by the way we behave. Likewise, what our worldview actually is is not just what we think it is but what we show it is. As the letter of James proclaims, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? . . . Show me your faith apart from works, and I by my works will show you my faith” (Jas 2:14, 18).

When Jesus’ disciples were eating food without ceremonially washing their hands, the Pharisees objected. The disciples were being unfaithful to the law, they said. But Jesus replied by giving a number of illustrations of how the Pharisees were able to keep the letter of the law and yet violate its spirit. Then he said,

It is clear from the context that Jesus is affirming the close connection between the heart—the central core of a human being, characterized by a fully operative worldview—and the actions one takes. The issue is an issue of the heart. Worldviews have both an objective referent and a deeply subjective character.

Thus far, it seems to me, Naugle has brilliantly brought together the insights of Idealism and biblical Christianity. He further strengthens the biblical features of a Christian worldview by specifically noting the “catastrophic effects of sin on the human heart and mind,” the “cosmic spiritual warfare in which the truth about reality and the meaning of life is at stake,” “the gracious inbreaking of the kingdom of God into human history in the person and work of Jesus Christ,” which makes a “knowledge of the true God” and his creation possible to believers. These particular concepts are, however, unique to the Christian worldview and need not concern us as characteristics of all worldviews.

But Naugle makes a third move that concerns all worldviews, not just those purporting to be Christian. Notice what he adds to his definition of a worldview as such:

Elsewhere he says that a worldview is “a
semiotic phenomenon
,” “a system of signs generating a symbolic world,” “a network of
narrative
signs,” “a semiotic system of world-interpreting stories . . . [that] provides a foundation or governing platform upon which people think, interpret, and know.”
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In semiotic terms his fullest definition is this:

At first Naugle appears to be defining a worldview primarily as language. A worldview is a
semiotic system of narrative signs
, he says. If this were taken without being set within his earlier characterization of a worldview as both realistically objective and mentally subjective, a worldview would not be a
set of mental categories
(Dilthey), a
way of thinking
(Wittgenstein), the
widest view a mind can take
(Orr), a
set of fundamental beliefs
(Olthuis, Wolters, Nash), a
comprehensive framework of one’s basic beliefs
(Wolters) or my own
set of presuppositions
. None of these focus on the linguistic character of these categories or frameworks or beliefs—that is, the fact that a worldview can be expressed in a language.

Naugle presents a detailed biblical and philosophic argument for his semiotic definition, basing his conclusions on suggestions from a wide range of philosophers, theologians, psychologists and even a folklorist. Among them are Augustine, Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, C. S. Peirce, Ernst Cassirer, Rollo May, Bruno Bettelheim and Linda Dégh. Key to his view is the idea that God has imbued the whole of the cosmos with meaning and human beings with the ability to grasp that meaning. “The entire universe should be conceived pansemiotically and interpreted as the sign of God and his glory and power. . . . The totality of creation is divine iconography. Everything in this enchanted sacramental symbol-friendly universe is drenched with
sacred
signs.”
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As the psalmist says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). Human beings themselves, says Peirce, “are thoroughly semiotic in their basic nature,” and Naugle appears to agree.

In short, Naugle combines the notion of the Christian worldview as (1) an objective
ontological
commitment to the triune, personal and transcendent God of Scripture, (2) a subjective, deeply embedded, heart-oriented perspective and (3) a semiotic system of narrative signs. I take this to be his attempt to preserve the commonsense notion that reality is objective in essence, subjective in apprehension, and able to be meaningfully comprehended and communicated in language.

The main point to be made here, however, is that while Naugle may appear to place semiotics (or meaning or language) prior to what we ordinarily take to be ontology, he does not do so. I am assured by Naugle himself that he does not want the semiotic character of a worldview to displace his commitment to the notion that ontology is prior to both epistemology and hermeneutics.
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He cites the following preface to his presentation of a worldview as a semiotic system:

In short, Naugle has added a perspective to worldview analysis that deserves wide attention. It will be seen later in this book to be very like my own.

Since publication of
Worldview: The History of a Concept
, Naugle has probed the relationships between worldview, worship and way of life, offering further depth to the concept and the practical value it has for individual and communal Christian character and for culture building. His work, without abandoning the term
worldview
, is in line with that of James K. A. Smith and Andy Crouch, as we will see below.

Naming the Cat

Recently, several major contributors to worldview analysis have not been satisfied with either the term
worldview
or how it has been defined, or both. The issue of naming does not end with labeling the different worldviews. It extends to whether we should think in worldview terms at all. A presentation of the problem of naming makes a good backdrop to noting the more recent scholars who work in the area of intellectual and cultural analysis.

Scholars use various names for the animal I’ve been calling the elephant. I don’t mean the different elephants we name (theistic God, impersonal Spirit, mere material, etc.). I mean what makes an elephant an elephant rather than a monkey. In other words, What is a worldview? A single answer is not easy to come by. In fact, I don’t think it exists. T. S. Eliot plays with this issue in “The Naming of Cats,” one of the poems in
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
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The poem itself is a philosophical hoot. Enjoy it online.
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“The naming of cats,” Old Possum says, is surprisingly difficult. You see, a cat has to have “three different names”—first, a common household name, say, Miton or Millicent, then a name that acknowledges its specific individuality. Old Possum suggests Jellyloram and Bombalurima. But most important is its third name—one so singular that only the cat knows. It must not be a name that signifies; it must the thing itself,
die Katze-an-sich.
It’s a private name. Miton can’t tell his master or Millicent or any other cat. But Miton contemplates that third name; he comes to know it intimately. When Miton sits silent on the sofa with eyes closed, he is doing just that—collapsing name and thing, knowing by being what he knows. As Old Possum says, he is being his own “ineffable effable / Effanineffable” self.

Think of it this way. In German we have
Weltanschauung, Weltanschauung philosophie, Weltbild
and
Lebenswelt
. In English we have
worldview, world picture, paradigm
(Kuhn),
sophisticated reifications
(Foucault),
mindset, ideology, pattern of belief, habitus, social imaginary
and
cultural liturgy
. The issue is this: we have all these names, each tweaking and polishing a concept it takes to be the most adequate to our understanding of the pretheoretical and presuppositional character of that in and by which we live and move and have our being. Usually these multiple ways of speaking do not get in the way of each other. That is, as we attempt to understand the worldview phenomena, we move among these different names, respecting their individual contribution to our overall understanding of our lives of individual and corporate thought and action.

Sometimes, however, especially in the past couple decades, scholars have begun to quarrel over what to call this thing we’ve been referring to as a worldview
.
Some believe that one or another of these labels is inadequate, that a particular label distorts our understanding of the phenomena. They react in two ways. Scholars like Charles Taylor, following Benedict Anderson, avoid any hint of the common terminology and invent a new term—
social imaginary.
James K. A. Smith creates the term
cultural liturgy
, thus shifting further from the connotations of worldview when defined in a primarily intellectual manner. Andy Crouch rejects the form in which worldviews have been defined by the most well-known scholars. These definitions forget or fail to emphasize that for Christians especially, a Christian worldview must be
embodied.
Christians must do more than merely
analyze
; they must live out their understanding. This quarrel over the naming of pretheoretical, intellectual and social phenomena provides a good introduction to the analyses of the highly significant recent work of N. T. Wright, Charles Taylor, James Davison Hunter, James K. A. Smith and Andy Crouch. We begin with N. T. Wright.

N. T. Wright
.
Nicholas Thomas Wright is best known as a biblical scholar who approaches the New Testament Scriptures with a hermeneutic involving a scholarly self-consciousness of the radical differences between the worldview undergirding most modern biblical scholarship and the worldview undergirding the New Testament. He explains this hermeneutic in detail in the opening 144 pages of
The New Testament and the People of God
.
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Twenty years later, he restates that hermeneutic, slightly revised, to fit the context of the apostle Paul, in the opening 74 pages of his two-volume
Paul and the Faithfulness of God
.
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