Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (12 page)

Nietzsche often shocks the intellect. He does so here. Is the “I” the active agent, the one who thinks? Or is the “I” simply produced by thought? Is it only thinking that exists?
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If it seems too extreme, too odd, to think that there could be “thinking” without a “thinker,” then notice how it is we perceive that thinking is going on. Whether or not the mind can think without language, the moment that we detect thinking, language is involved. We know we think because we can put our thoughts into words. The words we put them into come with all the baggage of a specific language—a specific grammar and vocabulary. Perhaps when I say, “I think,” I am saying this in a language (English) that requires a predicate (
think
) to have a subject (
I
or
she
or
they
). When I use Latin the word
cogito
contains with its inflection both the predicate and the subject. In either case, if I say only the word
think
, I have not said anything.
Think
alone does not imply any subject. But it is just such a subject that I am trying to prove exists. Perhaps “I” is only a creation of language; perhaps the self is only a linguistic construct.

Nietzsche’s blows have struck home. Descartes’s doubt has not been sufficiently radical. The “I” of the
cogito
may just be the
cogito
, the thinking thing (if it need be a thing) constructed by the thinking.
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More important for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the view expressed by some postmodernists. Consider first Richard Rorty’s proclamation that language (a necessary condition of conscious thought) just happens:

Not only does thought just happen, it is this thought that creates the self: “the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary.”
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Rorty credits Nietzsche with the notion. Nietzsche, he says, saw that “self-knowledge as self-creation, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language—that is, of thinking up some new metaphors.”
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For Rorty, the creation of the self by language is liberating. It frees people to change themselves and society. The formula is neat: Change the language and you change the self and society. In fact, “changing languages and other social practices may produce human beings of a sort that had never before existed.”
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It looks as if Nietzsche was prophetic: some have learned “to get along without the little ‘it’ (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego).”
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Nietzsche was right to question whether much is accomplished by the
cogito
argument. There may be thinking; there may be a thinker. But what is that thinker? “What is the ‘I’”? is still a pointed question. If one begins from the subjective self, one ends by losing any reason for thinking there is a subjective self. The human self has died.

Doing First

Could
doing
or behavior be a first thing? Yes, I suppose it could. I don’t know any worldview scholar—philosopher, sociologist, anthropologist or missiologist—who advocates this.
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Still, the temptation to undisciplined creativity lurks behind a call for developing new cultural liturgies. Which ones should we develop? That’s a question of value. It demands careful theological (biblical, intellectual) consideration. We do not learn to ride a bike by reading a book or listening to a lecture. But riding a bike does not contain its own reason for doing it.

It is easy, for example, to create a routine practice, a
cultural
liturgy that brings a seemingly Christian presence into an otherwise secular or pagan culture. Let’s say that a church’s goal is to do just that: become a more visible presence in their community. They notice that talk shows have begun to attract a wide audience. So they create a Christian talk show. Successful talk shows involve a clever, good-looking (cool) host and his or her sidekick, an attractively dressed, well-coifed man and a not-quite-dressed beautiful woman. Then come lots of celebrities, clever sketches, tragic and tearful stories of miracles and amazing encounters with God, spectacle—lots of spectacle—glitz and humor, and pop music. Each of these routines embeds ideas and values inimical to Christian character. The talk show becomes a rite for a wrong religion. The show is thus a form of worship; the god worshiped, however, is an idol.

In whatever Christians do the goal must be to embody and present genuine Christian faith and character! Our success in that is not measured by our success in attracting an audience. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but far from our primary goal to seek first the kingdom of God. So we do not
know
what this kingdom is by seeming to succeed by whatever we choose to do. We only know it by how our actions correspond to a Christian worldview—our
Lex Credendi
(as Naugle puts it), Christianity’s “rule or law of faith.” Then we respond with
Lex Orandi
, the “rule or law of the church’s worship” and live out the
Lex Agendi
, the church’s “rule or law of action and practice.” These three rules or laws are intimately connected, but for Naugle, worldview comes first, for it defines what the whole is supposed to be.
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Acting by worship and service fleshes this out.

Revelation as the First Thing

Perhaps the strongest objection to my contention that ontology precedes epistemology is that I have forgotten that as Christians we get our knowledge about what first things are supposed to be not from human self-reflection but from revelation. As human beings we are finite. We can know nothing about God unless he tells us. This he has done in small part in the natural order but mainly in Scripture. Revelation—the gift of knowledge about what we would scarce have any knowledge at all—must necessarily precede what we understand God to be. So it must come first.

Indeed this is true in terms of the order of knowing. We receive what is put before us through the general revelation of God in the world and the special revelation of God in Scripture. But in a worldview the order of being precedes the order of knowing. Before there can be revelation, there must be something to be revealed and someone or something to reveal it. Revelation can never be first, as if we or God depended on it. It always depends on God.
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It is interesting to see how this plays out in various attempts to construct a systematic theology. John Calvin begins with the knowledge of God and ourselves, then quickly argues that it is God who imbues everyone with the knowledge of his existence so that without special revelation all people know of God’s existence, though that knowledge is inadequate and misleading. Scripture is necessary for a proper knowledge of God. It is God, however, that is his focus.
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Calvin, in other words, believes that every human being has a concept of God. In worldview terms, Calvin—though he begins with epistemology—quickly shifts the focus to ontology. It is because of who God is that everyone first has an immediate pretheoretical knowledge of his existence and some of his attributes and then, if they are exposed to the Scripture, has special revelation that will clarify and correct their understanding.
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Theology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, is conditioned by the basically hostile environment in which it has been produced and which it seeks to counter. Much of this environment is characterized by the Enlightenment that followed quickly after the work of Descartes and John Locke. Both took their start from epistemological rather than ontological foundations. Descartes, as we have seen, placed his confidence in human reason to find truth, and Locke trusted in the mind’s ability to order and perceive with the senses. In both cases, the autonomy of human reason replaced confidence in special revelation or any previous human authority such as Plato or Aristotle, Augustine or Aquinas. As Peter Medawar says, the notion of the “
necessity
of human reason” slowly gave way to “the
sufficiency
of human reason.”
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Thenceforth all intellectually respectable beliefs had to pass the bar of human reason.

Twentieth-century Christian theology has largely accepted the challenge and has attempted in a variety of ways to show how it satisfies this notion of reasonability. Some theologies abandon the traditional Christian distinctives because they do not measure up. Others attempt to show how even the notions that seem most unreasonable to modern people actually are reasonable by the criteria of modern human reason.

Apologists, for example, often argue that the resurrection of Jesus is the most rational explanation of the evidence we have available in the Gospel narratives and that these narratives themselves can be shown by human reason to be historically reliable. There is good reason for such apologists to take this route as a starting point for dialogue with nonbelievers and, as a prologue to the doctrine of God, for believers. Few thoughtful people today will easily grant the authority of the Bible on any topic whatsoever, let alone on the key issues of Christian faith. But apologetics is not the foundation of either theology or Christian faith in general.
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It is rather the theological and philosophical discipline of showing how the Christian understanding of God and the world is the best explanation we have for what we experience as human beings living in a complex world.

In any case, a Christian worldview is not the same thing as a Christian theology. Both deal with the same or similar issues. A worldview includes a consciousness of a pretheoretical dimension. A theology normally assumes this dimension rather than inquiring into the nature of its presuppositions.

Hermeneutics First

Finally, we return to the addition to worldview analysis made by David Naugle and described in the previous chapter. A worldview, he writes, “is a semiotic system of narrative signs that has a significant influence on the fundamental human activities of reasoning, interpreting, and knowing.”
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In the postmodern world of the early twenty-first century, we might expect that approach to be lifted to the realm of ontology. We might easily imagine that a worldview could be defined primarily in relation to semiotics or hermeneutics. If this happened, then ontology would collapse into hermeneutics.

“What holds up the world?” the son asks. The postmodern dad would answer, “Meaning holds up the world, Son, just meaning. It’s all interpretation. Come, let us interpret.”

Then, captured by language not invented by either father or son, both would become victims of language itself. Indeed, in the words of Nietzsche, truth would be “a mobile army of metaphors.”
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The world would then spin off into linguistic space, where “the earth is unchained from the sun” and “strays through an infinite nothing.”
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The world would not so much hang in space as hang on deconstructed language.

Of course, if the father and son were “strong poets” capable of controlling the language that people use, then their linguistic usage would become the definition of reality.
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There would be no way to test whether their language comported with nonlingustic reality. As Foucault says, “‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements.”
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Their locutions would merely be “pseudointerpretations of an ultimate reality all dressed up in a linguistic power suit.”
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What counts against putting meaning first is the common-sense notion that
something has to be
before there can be meaning. A worldview certainly can be “expressed in a semiotic system of narrative signs.” But it has to be something else first; it is not created by the signs by which it is understood. The pretheoretical categories themselves seem to be universal:
being
and
not-being
(
is
and
isn’t
) are fundamental and carry truth value; that is, they label something that is not just linguistic.

I recall a rabbi a number of years ago who was trying to help a small group of evangelical professors understand what the Jews mean by “the land.” He said, and I paraphrase, “The land is not defined by a geopolitical line on a map. It’s material stuff.” He bent down as if to pick up a handful of dirt, but we were in a synagogue and he came up empty-handed.

The world has substantiality. Yes, it is also a sign. Evangelicals have missed much of the richness of the biblical worldview when they have dismissed sacramental theology as medieval and misguided. It has taken writers such as C. S. Lewis to bring us back to considering its riches. In
The Great Divorce
, heaven is more substantial than earth, hell less substantial.
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I think Lewis got it right.

I do not want to miss the substantiality of God by seeing our view of him as a set of signs. Moses asked God, “Show me your glory.” Moses was not ready for that yet, and neither are we. But the Logos has been incarnated on earth. He retains his body in heaven (whatever that means).

Naugle gives an example of reading Jesus’ life and death in terms of signs: