Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (9 page)

We need not consider Hunter’s larger proposal, but we should notice that he uses the term s
ocial imaginary
. He refers to the explicit “social imaginary that serves as a backdrop for the ways in which the majority of those in America who call themselves Christian engage the world.”
113
This is, of course, what
worldviews
are all about. Hunter generally avoids the term
worldview
, which he seems to treat largely as similar to his own terminology.
114
But when he comments on Charles Colson and his friends, Hunter uses
worldview
as if it were insufficient for what is being described.
115
It is clear that Hunter wants to avoid diagnosing our situation in solely intellectual categories.
Social imaginary
sounds and is more sociological than
worldview
;
worldview
sounds and tends to be more philosophically rigorous. Perhaps by associating the term
worldview
with the worldview thinkers whose views are flawed, he thinks he makes a stronger case for his own
social imaginary
and its explanation of how culture changes. When does rhetoric trump logic? Too often, I think. Perhaps the naming of cats is a difficult matter.

James K. A. Smith.
For James K. A. Smith in
Desiring the Kingdom
, the first volume in a series called Cultural Liturgies, the word
worldview
is a tipping point. Early in the preface he sets his sights on clarifying his understanding of the term:

In seeing his book as “a companion volume to classroom texts on worldview such as Walsh and Middleton’s
Transforming Vision
, Wolters’s
Creation Regained
or Plantinga’s
Engaging God’s World
,”
117
it would appear that Smith is comfortable with the term
worldview
. Nonetheless, over and over in the text itself, Smith criticizes and rejects the term and what he describes as the concept of worldview, substituting Taylor’s new term
social imaginary
and giving it a fuller exposition and graphic illustration.
118
Our background beliefs, Smith argues, are formed so much more by our practices than by our cognitive activity that they can scarcely be thought to derive from thinking at all. All thinking about them seems to be afterthought. How different is this from Charles Taylor’s caution not to assume either that action is primary to thought or thought to action, but that there is a symbiotic relationship between the two.
119
At this point Smith veers from Taylor’s concept of social imaginary
.

While I have little to quarrel with in Smith’s positive description of
social imaginaries
, I find his persistent condemnation of worldview thinking unnecessary. One section of his analysis is so anti-intellectual that the very way in which he describes the social imaginary approach borders on incoherence.
120
We are to “consider,” “reconsider” and note that the movement from idea to practice “doesn’t jibe” with the historical record. How do we do that without thinking? How without thinking about it do we know that we begin with practice and move to thinking? Surely there is a symbiotic relationship between knowing and doing, not an almost complete beginning with doing and ending with knowing. Why did Jesus do so much teaching along with his doing? In any case, we must not so question Smith’s criticism of the term
worldview
that we miss his distinct contribution to what is really worldview thinking.

Perhaps the best way to explain why Smith is so critical of “worldview” thinking is simply to notice that (1) his understanding of
worldview
is limited to the intellectual, (2) the basis on which he justifies this limitation is severely limited (he refers solely to Francis Beckwith, Kenneth Samples, the Truth Project and Focus on the Family),
121
and (3) he ignores the rich history and wide recognition of the symbiotic relationship of the intellect to action. Still, it remains the case that, while James K. A. Smith uses Charles Taylor’s term
social imaginary
to emphasize the social practice relevant to his analysis, he defines and uses
social imaginary
in much the same way many worldview advocates use the term
worldview
. Moreover, N. T. Wright comments that he is happy to adjust his notion of worldview to include desire, love and worship as categories, but has “preferred to expand the notion of ‘worldview’ to incorporate these and other elements rather than abandon it and launch out with a different term.”
122

It is important to note that the animus against
worldview
present in
Desiring the Kingdom
is muted in
Imagining the Kingdom
, the second volume of Cultural Liturgies. Here Smith admits the irony of “making a philosophical argument for relativizing the importance of the intellect,” exactly what I have just noted.
123
He continues, then, to insist that he is not leaving the intellect to huddle in the shadows but to find its place in what he takes to be a larger paradigm labeled
cultural liturgy
. As he says, “My criticism here is not that worldview is wrong but only that it is inadequate. . . . We might have a highly developed, articulate ‘worldview’ and yet
act
in ways that can be remarkably inconsistent with such a ‘perspective.’”
124
If, however, one includes, as I do in the fourth edition of
The Universe Next Door
(2004), the notion that one’s worldview is that “in which one moves and has his being,” then inconsistent behavior belies what we say is our worldview.
125

Smith’s notion of cultural liturgy is worth considering because it does seem more than the notion that behavior sparks ideas, a matter noted by many others doing worldview analysis. For Smith, cultural liturgies are “embodied communal rituals” that form our loves and desires. “Secular liturgies,” for example, are “pedagogies of desire”; they shape the character of our ordinary life.
126

Smith rightly ignores trivial cultural liturgies. He is interested in how our cultural liturgies affect and effect the way we worship and the way we understand how best as Christians to go about educating our children. Smith is, as a professor at Calvin College, especially interested in educational liturgies. What should be the aims of a Christian college, and by what cultural liturgies can they be realized? His goal is “to connect worship and worldview, church and college.”
127
Smith’s goals and his suggestions for achieving this are indeed worthy of our attention and, perhaps, adoption.

Ironically, in all his frustration with
worldview
as a term useful for Christian analysis of reality—natural and social—Smith displays his worldview. He cannot help but do so. It’s a term for what orients human life. So long as he is human, he has a worldview. Still, though I am unsatisfied with Smith’s notion that what he is doing is “more” than worldview thinking, I do not wish to end on a negative assessment of his work. After all, his
How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
is an immensely helpful guide to an immensely brilliant analysis of worldview history. Smith is clearly making an important contribution to Christian thought and action, sociology and philosophy, theology and worship. May his tribe increase.

Andy Crouch.
In
Culture Making
Andy Crouch explicitly criticizes the term and concept of
worldview
as understood by Walsh and Middleton, and Pearcey, avoiding any allusion to other discussions of the concept of worldview.
128
His major charge is that they fail to include the “embodied” nature of what actually fuels human beings to do what they understand they should do. As a result the Christian faith is not expressed in such a way that it influences the culture of which Christians are a part.

Crouch offers what he calls a richer concept of
culture making,
and he shifts his focus to the activities people engage in to shape culture. Just thinking about it—what it is and how it works—is not enough. Crouch does not use the term
social imaginary
, but I think he might find this term congenial.

But since Crouch pays no attention to richer sources of understanding of what a worldview might well include, his approach, while providing an important recognition of the embodied nature of what fuels the fire of human thought and behavior, unnecessarily seems to exclude the intellectual factor. S
ocial imaginary
, as Taylor uses the term in his massive examination of the origin and nature of our secular age, does not suffer from this radical shift in emphasis away from the intellect to its embodiment in practice. His
A Secular Age
is heavily intellectual.

Meta-reflection on Naming

So how shall we understand the variety of terms that are equal to or reflective of the supposed content of other terms? Are social imaginaries really so unlike worldviews that it is important to reject one of them or, as Smith does, subsume it under a more inclusive term like
cultural liturgy
?

I am loath to open this can of spiders lest they crawl out and blur with their intersecting webs the clarity of the previous few pages. But something, I think, should be said about what it is we have been doing. The questions are these: Is a worldview a distinct
thing
, say, a set of answers to eight basic questions? Or is a worldview merely a
name
, one that can refer to any number of somewhat different things, that is, things different in their composition?

I am easily at ease with the word
worldview
being defined in a variety of specific ways. My original definition of
worldview
used primarily philosophic categories. So do the definitions given by James Orr, Ronald Nash, Francis Beckwith and many, many others. When more sociological categories are added, such as those in the worldview analysis of Charles Kraft and Paul Hiebert, nothing is lost; the term gains a larger dimension. The intent of worldview thinking is expanded, but it is still worldview thinking. So too when emphasis on the relationships between thought and action become a part of worldview analysis,
worldview
is again enriched. Everyone who uses the term
worldview
should simply be clear about what they are doing and how they describe what they are doing.

The concepts involved in worldview thinking depend on the content of each worldview. Naturalism will not answer all the questions answered by theism. But proponents of each can attempt to understand the other and why they differ.

But, sometimes and even more relevant, the concepts involved in scholarly worldview thinking are also dependent on the academic orientation of the person doing the analysis. Theologians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, pastors, university students and high school students have different goals. All of them are attempting to understand reality. But they ask different questions. No perspective is superior to another. When the answers clash, they do so primarily because the perspectives are different and often the terms used are not defined in the same way. And some scholars are, let’s not put it mildly, quite wrong. Freud is a case in point. In short, “naming the cat” is a matter of overall worldview, academic discipline, personal goals and professional use.

Let me make a suggestion—tenderly, I plead. I suggest we not insist that one term or definition thereof must govern our discourse in cultural and intellectual analysis. That sounds too much like an attempt to protect our own intellectual turf. Or worse, we define our turf in order to prevent anyone else saying anything else about it. This ploy will not work. Our colleagues will simply continue to identify, cultivate, plant and harvest the turf—ours and theirs—as they will.

Okay, let’s grant that a cat must have three different names. Every cat does. First, it’s a cat, not a mouse. Second, it’s a Tabby, not a Peke. Third, it is itself, a singularity, not to ever be repeated, not to be named by anyone but that cat itself. Or to exegete, it’s a
worldview
, not a philosophy or sociological theory or a psychological mind set. Second, it’s a Christian worldview, not naturalism or New Age. Third, it’s yours alone and mine alone. There are eight million cats in New York, as
Naked City
, the old TV film noir, might put it.

A Base from Which to Move Forward

This brief history of worldviews as understood by both Christians and others provides a good foundation for further rumination about the character of worldviews. We will begin that rumination by considering the issue of “first things.” What is the most foundational issue of all? Is it being or knowing or doing or, perhaps, meaning? To this issue we now turn.

3

First Things First

Being or Knowing

God said to Moses, “
I AM WHO I AM
.”
He said further,
“Thus you shall to say to the Israelites:
‘I
AM
has sent me to you.’”

Exodus 3:14