Rethinking Worldview

The Right Exposure

When you first get the worldview bug, everything around you takes on a new theological significance. All the colors are vivid. But then frustration sets in, because the people around you don't seem to "get it." They're still in the shadow world of Plato's cave, and no matter how often you go back, no matter how many thick books you recommend, they don't want to leave. In contrast to your newly found clarity, their thought seems dim and muddled, like an underexposed photo.

I suspect that sense of frustration is what prompts people with a pedagogical bent to teach worldview awareness in the first place. You want to help students to think. You want to show them how to make distinctions, to ask hard questions, to apply logic and experience to the problem of living. This is noble, but if you're not careful it can result not in an encouragement to think, but in instructions on what to think. The language of worldview awareness is often used in polemics -- Christians ought to reject this idea and embrace that one -- particularly in areas where the Bible is silent. The positions advocated are seen as inevitable conclusions (necessary consequences) of a biblical perspective.

Worldview Backlash, or: Why I Wrote This Book

The inimitable Michael Spencer at the Internet Monk has a great post today about the value -- and limitations -- of worldview thinking: "World-Phooey." He expresses very well the frustration that led me to write Rethinking Worldview in the first place. On the one hand, I think the worldview concept is incredibly valuable. On the other, I sometimes feel it's been stretched beyond recognition, so that people are rightly tired of hearing about it. My concern was that, thanks to the excess, more and more of us would turn a deaf ear to worldview talk entirely.

So I appreciate the fact that, while he condemns the extremes, Spencer still teaches worldview analysis to his students and recommends classics like James Sire's Universe Next Door and the more recent Naming the Elephant, which popularizes the history found in David Naugle's Worldview: History of a Concept.

One thing that might help, as I've suggested here before, is a shift in emphasis away from apologetics and public policy toward sanctification. It just might be that worldview thinking fits into a larger framework of a lived Christian life and finds its greatest value there.

Cultural Engagement as "Contribution"

Suppose you had definite ideas about city planning and, as your hometown grew, some of the changes you saw struck you as wrong-headed? What could you do about it? You'd have a number of options. First, you could always just learn to live with it. Change is good, right? Why not let go of your own theories and make peace with what's happening around you? That would involve compromising or abandoning your own ideas, though, so your willingness to go along will depend on just how strongly you hold them in the first place.

If assimilation isn't an option, then what choices do you have? One thing you could do is present your case at a city council meeting. If you persuaded enough people, you could pass ordinances that reflect your ideas. People with different theories would find their building efforts thwarted by the powers that be, and they'd have to adapt to your way of doing things. This would ensure that future construction harmonized with your idea of what the city should look like.

The Biblical Worldview vs. Christian Worldviews

One of the books I recommend heartily -- and cite in Rethinking Worldview -- is Daniel Estes' Hear My Son: Teaching and Learning in Proverbs 1-9. The goal of the book is to derive a theory of education from reading Proverbs 1-9, but before picking up the task, Estes includes a chapter on the "worldview" of this portion of Scripture. The implication is that, if we want to see things as the author of Proverbs did, there are certain assumptions we have to share with him. That is the Christian worldview impulse in a nutshell. We believe there is a perspective inherent in the text (there always is, after all), and as believers we want to share that view. This is what we refer to as the "biblical worldview."

Now worldviews are extracted from a text via a process of interpretation, and with the stakes as high as they are when it comes to Scripture, we want to be careful about confusing our interpretation with the text itself. In other words, our interpretation could always be wrong. We hedge against this in a variety of ways -- by letting Scripture interpret Scripture, reading difficult passages in light of straightforward ones -- but at the end of the day we understand that our interpretations aren't necessarily definitive.

Affecting Culture Through Stories?

Becky Miller is a Christian fantasy author who's done a lot to organize writers and readers, and to make booksellers aware of the demand for such fiction. She also thinks intensely about how her Christian worldview should shape and influence the work she does. She shares the results at her blog A Christian Worldview of Fiction. Over the years, we've had some great conversations -- sometimes agreeing, sometimes not -- so I'm thrilled to see her interacting with a point I made earlier this week in my interview with The Book Report. First, the quote:

In a blog post including information from an interview about his soon-to-be-released non-fiction book, Rethinking Worldview, Mark Bertrand said this: After all, the average Christian has been much more profoundly influenced by non-Christian art and entertainment than he has by non-Christian evangelism and apologetics.

That line made total sense as I thought about the 22% of our population who have converted to belief in reincarnation, without people standing on the street corners handing out tracts about it. Or holding reincarnation tent meetings.

The Worldview Impulse

In Christian thought, "worldview" talk is often situated in the context of (a) apologetics, where the concern is to understand other ways of thinking and develop strategies for dialogue, or (b) public policy, where the attempt is made to formulate positions on various issues from a biblical standpoint. Worldview thinking becomes the fulfillment of two kinds of desire:

(1) "I want to understand the shortcomings of other worldviews so I can better share the truth with the world around me."

(2) "I want to think in a more Christ-like way about a certain topic."