Rethinking Worldview

Teaching Outline for Rethinking Worldview

Thinking about teaching a course based on Rethinking Worldview? In the past, I've linked to a number of resources that will help out. Here's a new one. Scott Lerwick is the Pastor of Student Development at First Christian Church in Tillamook, OR. He's just completed a three month study of Rethinking Worldview with his students, and has graciously allowed me to post the handout he developed for the course. Click on the link for the PDF:

Rethinking Worldview Course Outline (PDF)

Thanks, Scott, for sharing the results of your hark work! 

Wonderful, Mind-Opening, and a Little Tedious

Nate Hufstutler, who teaches literature at Maranatha Baptist Bible College, has been reading Rethinking Worldview, and recently posted about the experience on his blog, Literary Redemption. He writes:

Although I have virtually no time to read, I've been reading a wonderful, mind-opening book lately: Rethinking Worldview, by J. Mark Bertrand. It's a little tedious, but this book is really opening my mind and heart in new ways. I am finding it to be life-changing as I've kept at it.

One of Bertrand's ideas that I've taken to heart is the fact that both the Gospel and my personal sanctification are not mere doctrines. They are stories. 

He quotes a relevant passage from the book, then expands on it in interesting ways. The goal of the Literary Redemption blog is one close to my heart, to "provide literary analysis from a Christian perspective." My thanks to Nate for recommending Rethinking Worldview!

The Problem with Metaphors

If you've read Rethinking Worldview, you know that early on, I explore a series of common metaphors people have used to describe worldviews: eyeglasses, navigational charts, and so on. My goal is to illuminate the sense in which the metaphor is helpful, and also to suggest limitations. Sadly, no metaphor is perfect -- no matter how similar two things are in one respect, they're always going to be different in another, and sometimes the difference is more misleading than the similarity is helpful. 

I was reminded of this while reading Eric Rauch's piece posted on AmericanVision.org, which quotes extensively from the first chapter of Rethinking Worldview. Rauch sees my discussion of the eyeglass metaphor as indicative of the problem with the "old" worldview thinking -- i.e., it intellectualizes what is really a spiritual process -- and says that what we need is not a new prescription but new eyes. Here's the heart of his critique:

But as helpful and necessary as his eyeglasses are for driving, Bertrand tells us that he really doesn't need his glasses to read. This is where I think the analogy for worldview breaks down. We typically think of glasses as something we need to help us do a particular task. Bertrand needs his glasses to drive and catch footballs, but not to read. But this is exactly the opposite of a worldview. A worldview is something that we are never without. There is no activity or moment in the day when our worldview doesn't filter "reality." The idea of glasses puts us back in control, deciding when and where to put on our "worldview corrective lenses." This completely misses the point that there are a multitude of times each day when we think we are seeing clearly, but in reality, we aren't. Like Bertrand, we assume that how we see the world is the objective standard, that we only need to get out our "worldview specs" when things begin to get fuzzy.

Reading this puts me in an odd position. I agree with the point Rauch is trying to make. In fact, one of the aspects of worldview I'm attempting to "rethink" in the book is our assumption of objectivity, the view that we are detached, rational thinkers evaluating potential worldviews like diners at a buffet. But Rauch seems to think we disagree, and I suspect it's because my metaphor is being taken too literally. I don't believe for a moment that "how we see the world is the objective standard," and that whenever things get blurry we need to whip out our glasses. It's just that, well ... I don't happen to need my glasses to read. 

In other words, the point of my narrative in Chapter 1 isn't to suggest that worldviews function in every way exactly like my glasses. All I'm saying is that, until you've had an experience like mine, it never occurs to you that there might be another way of seeing. There's a difference between saying reality exists and that we perceive it perfectly. I'm affirming the former while rejecting the latter. Rauch is right on when he writes that "the cold, hard facts of most worldview education leaves out the key component of the entire process: the heart." Which is why, if you keep reading to the end of Chapter 1, you'll find me saying this:

So the key to changing your worldview turns out to be, not some profound philosophical quest, but the fundamental journey to Christlike sanctity that every Christian is called to undertake. If you want to change your worldview, to make it a more consistently biblical worldview, then the first and most important thing you must do is work out your salvation in fear and trembling, knowing that it is God working in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. The concept of worldview is one that Christianity inherited from philosophy. We couch it in high-sounding words. But it would be a mistake to think that this intellectual language describes an essentially intellectual process.

So all this to say ... while I naturally think Rauch has chosen the wrong bad example to illustrate his point, his point is very much worth making. It's part of what motivated me to write Rethinking Worldview in the first place. By the way, if you're reading Rethinking Worldview, and want to take this point further, I'd suggest taking a look at the "Idiosyncratic Aside about Knowledge" starting on p. 67. 

Rethinking Worldview in Promise Keepers Devotional

The Promise Keepers devotional Men of Integrity used an excerpt from Rethinking Worldview for its February 15-16 entry. The topic was "Healthy Fear," and each day's material is posted online at Christianity Today:

A Good Scare - February 15

A Time for Trembling - February 16

My Review of Living at the Crossroads

If you're looking for some more excellent reading on the subject of worldview, be sure to check out my review of Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview, now online at Reformation 21. Here's the skinny:

Like The Drama of Scripture, Goheen and Bartholomew's earlier collaboration, Living at the Crossroads is the sort of book you begin recommending before you've finished the first chapter. Drum-tight, comprehensive, and wonderfully suggestive, it will be invaluable as much to teachers of worldview thinking as their students.

As a matter of fact, while speaking at a conference in Minneapolis over the weekend, I recommended the book to several students as a superb introduction to the topic. 

Back in January of last year, Reformation 21 reviewed my own book, Rethinking Worldview. For a peek at that review, you can click here.

Dystopia and Depravity

An entire chapter of Rethinking Worldview is devoted to the skill of critical reading, helping readers become aware of assumptions and themes in cultural products -- books, films, songs, etc. -- and analyze them. At Worldview Academy camps, a highpoint of the week for students is when we break out the movie projector and discuss popular films from a Christian worldview perspective. It's interesting to look beneath the surface of the stories out there. When you've done enough of it, you start to make big-picture connections. A perfect example of this can be found at Decompose, the blog of author Mike Duran. I've had the pleasure of publishing Mike's work in Relief Journal, and I'm an avid reader of his blog, which is consistently lucid and profound.

In his post "Destined for Dystopia," Mike takes a recent Top 50 list of dystopian films as a jumping off point for worldview thinking. Why is the dystopian vision of the future -- a world of darkness and dehumanization -- so prevalent in our stories, even though so many people now think of our time as the pinnacle of history? We've been liberated from want and oppression by a blend of progressive ideas and technology, so why don't we envision utopia around the corner? Where are all the stories about the happy, shiny future?

Thinking About Justice

Mike Schutt, one of my colleagues at Worldview Academy, has written a fascinating new book called Redeeming Law: Christian Law and the Legal Profession. Not only is Mike a lawyer, he's also a professor of law at Regent University. Although we teach on different teams, we hit it off right away our first summer at Baylor -- too understand that, all you need to know is that Mike's lectures include more references to cannibalism than mine (which is saying something). When he isn't fascinating audiences with an account of the protein-rich diets of stranded mariners, though, Mike thinks deeply about what the law means for a Christian. At Justitia, his heady new blog, he has posted a "framework" for thinking about the law from a biblical perspective.

Obviously if you're a Christian lawyer, or a believer who's considering the legal profession, you'll want to read what Mike has to say. But even if you're not, it's instructive to see how, beginning with biblical data, we can build a context for pursuing a vocation in the twenty-first century.

Seminary on Your iPod

Whenever I'm tempted to wax cynical about the way technology has impoverished our lives -- turning us into undisciplined, over-entertained, inauthentic consumers -- something good comes along to dispel the mood. In this case, it's news that Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando has made hours and hours of seminary lectures available for free via the iTunes Music Store. If you've ever wanted to hear Dr. J. I. Packer lecture on the Puritans, or Dr. John Frame on philosophy and apologetics, now you can (and if you listen via headphones, no one around you has to know that you're tapping your feet to good theology instead of top forty music).

Downloading the courses couldn't be easier. The RTS site will launch iTunes for you, then you can browse through the various class recordings and decide what you'd like to hear. You can download individual lectures or entire courses. I clicked on "The Church and the World in the 20th Century," and all 28 tracks downloaded to my hard drive, creating a folder called "Reformed Theological Seminary" and a playlist for the course. As I added more courses, they appeared as new playlists in the folder, keeping everything nice and neat. I have downloaded plenty of lecture recordings over the past few years, and none of them have worked as smoothly as this.