Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (17 page)

This description blends the theoretical—God as Creator, humankind as made in God’s image—with the narrative. They are inextricably intertwined. Nonetheless, Orr’s elaboration of the Old Testament worldview is highly intellectual, probably much more so than the worldview of the ordinary Jew living in Old Testament times. Still, its general outline would have been found in minds and hearts of most of the Hebrew community. Orr, of course, identifies the Old Testament worldview from the standpoint of his own place in history. His is the view of a Reformed theologian living at the end of the nineteenth century and attempting to counter the impact of Enlightenment (modern) alternatives to Christian faith. While there is a great deal of objectivity to his description—that is, description that reflects the character of the actual reality being described—there is also a subjectivity reflecting Orr’s overall apologetic aim. One can see this easily by comparing Orr’s description of the Old Testament worldview with that of Middleton and Walsh.

Writing almost a hundred years after Orr, Middleton and Walsh face a radically different cultural situation. They grew up in an era when the Enlightenment or modern worldview was in serious decline. Their context is postmodernism. Postmodernism has charged that both the Enlightenment modernism and Christianity are “totalizing metanarratives”; by the stories they tell and the conceptions of reality they hold, both constrain human self-understanding and act as oppressive narratives, privileging one class of people over another.

Middleton and Walsh, then, counter this charge by presenting the Old Testament (and later the New Testament) worldview as narratives of freedom.

The story of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures is not a story only for the Hebrews. “Israel is called to be the particular, historically conditioned means of mediating a universal story of the healing of the world.”
26
The New Testament is even more explicit about the universal nature of Israel’s story: “As Paul makes clear, the story to which Jesus brings resolution is not simply Israel’s story, but the story of the world, read precisely through the lens of Israel’s story.”
27

Walsh and Middleton’s retelling of the metanarrative that incorporates the biblical stories of the Old and New Testament is set explicitly in the overlapping horizons first of the Bible and second of the world at the end of the twentieth century. Answering the four key questions (Who am I? Where am I? What’s wrong? What is the remedy?), they express a Christian worldview that is immediately relevant to thoughtful people today. That is, it is both a vision
of
life and a vision
for
life.

Of course, in the first three editions of
The Universe Next Door
I too retell the biblical story, following the standard sequence of creation, fall, redemption and glorification. Such is the pattern of most retellings of the biblical narrative, as it is of Orr and also Middleton and Walsh. But again there is a difference. In my account the narrative is held at a distance, more like the “news from nowhere” than like the narrative of a participant, which, of course, I am and all other human beings are.

Perhaps it is Lesslie Newbigin, calling on the insights of Michael Polanyi, who is the most helpful in conveying the existential relevance of seeing worldviews as narratives. His explanations have long held an important place in my own grasp of the Christian faith, not its content but its existential dimension. “The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions: it is a story.”
28
That story comes to us through Scripture. The Bible sets before us, he says,

When we accept this story in the fashion God has intended, we do so not just as intellectual assent. We do not just believe it at a distance. We are to
indwell
it as if it were our own story, because it actually is. “The Christian community is invited to
indwell
the story,
tacitly
aware of it as shaping the way we understand, but
focally
attending to the world we live in so that we are able confidently, though not infallibly, to increase our understanding of it and our ability to cope with it.”
30

To indwell a story is to live so much within its framework that we are not so conscious of the story as of what the story allows us to see.
31
Indwelling is like using a telescope. When we look through a telescope, we see things that we cannot see with the naked eye, but we do not “see” the telescope. Rather we
indwell
the instrument in order to do what we could not otherwise do, to see things we otherwise could not see. As a scientist’s probe reveals “what’s there,” so the biblical story reveals what’s there on the other side of the story—the kingdom of God and its conflict with the kingdom of this world: “The important thing in the use of the Bible is not to understand the text but to understand the world
through
the text.”
32
As our hands, eyes, five senses are extensions of ourselves in contact with the world, so the biblical narrative puts us in contact with the way God, the world and we really are.

As I have been maintaining throughout this book, it is understanding the way things
really are
that is most important. Ontology precedes epistemology. Ontology precedes ethics. Who and what is there directs how we are to behave toward what is there.

“We
indwell
our language, our concepts, our whole plausibility structure [our operative worldview],” says Newbigin. To multiply the metaphors, our worldview becomes our “reading glasses,” our “telescope,” our “place to stand” to view reality, the hub of our world, the heart of our selves. As Naugle says, “The heart of the matter is that worldview is a matter of the heart.”
33

Conclusion

In preparing the first edition my work was cut out for me. Now, substantive changes had to be made in the definition of worldview that I presented in chapter one. The concept needed to be widened, not so much to add new questions as to expand the context to include lived reality. Worldview must incorporate the elements that caused the naturalist Dilthey to speak of “standing in-the-middle-of-life” with worldviews springing “from the totality of human psychological existence: intellectually in the cognition of reality, affectively in the appraisal of life, and volitionally in the active performance of the will.”
34
Kuyper even refused to use the word
worldview
, preferring instead “life system” and “life and world view.”
35
Now in this second edition, we must take that refusal into account. The expanded scope of James K. A. Smith’s
cultural liturgies
will also need to be recognized.

Redefining
worldview
, however, will be the task of chapter seven. First, we must consider the relationship between an individual’s and a society’s or culture’s worldviews.

6

Worldviews

Public and Private

Three degrees of latitude upset the whole of jurisprudence and the meridian determines what is true. . . . It’s a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river; true on this side of the Pyrenees, false on the other.

Blaise Pascal,
Pensées

O
ur discussion so far has assumed
that worldviews have both a private and a public dimension. That is, they are both specific commitments held by individuals and sets of assumptions that characterize a specific community, historical era or entire culture. But we have not yet considered the relationship between them. A second and closely related question is whether worldviews are representations of objective reality or only subjective frameworks that determine what is perceived and how it is understood. Both of these issues will be addressed in this chapter.

Public and Private

Everyone has a worldview. Whether we know it or not, we all operate from a set of assumptions about the world that remain to a large measure hidden in the unconscious recesses of our mind. That worldview is private.

I wake up in the morning not asking myself who I am or where I am. I am immediately aware of a whole host of perceptions that my mind orders into the recognition that it’s morning: I’m home, I’m crawling out of bed. In this immediate awareness I do not consciously ask or answer,
What is the really real?
or,
How do I know I am home?
or,
How can I tell the difference between right and wrong?
Rather, my unconscious mind is using a network of presumptions about how to interpret for the conscious mind what is going on. In some way all of the basic worldview questions are being answered by the way I am acting and behaving.

After I have gone through the daily routines of becoming publicly presentable, I may well deal consciously with one or more these questions, especially if I engage in Bible reading and prayer. The notion of the really real will become conscious. I may even sense the presence of this really real. Later, at work, my answers to the worldview questions will come into play over and over as I decide as an editor, say, which manuscripts to recommend for publication, which words, sentences and ideas to tweak and polish or challenge the author on, how I will respond to an artist’s cover design or an assistant’s request for a more powerful computer. There will be no time during the day or night, not even in my dreams, when my worldview will not be an integral part of who I am. It will be so much a part of what is uniquely me that there will be no other worldview in the universe that is identical to my own. One’s worldview is a matter of the heart. If King Louis XIV could say in arrogance, “Je suis l’état,” I could almost say in a cockeyed, multilingual, humbler way, “Je suis meine Weltanschauung.”

If worldviews are so private and unique, how can we speak of them as public? How can they characterize a community or even a culture? One reason is not hard to see. We are both individuals and members of the human family. Some things about our worldview are common not just to our immediate family, community, nation or century but to the whole of the human race throughout time and space. Among these are the categories noted in chapter three, things like being, time, relation, quantity. Then there are those presuppositions that we hold in common with our broad Western culture: for example, that every individual of any social class is of equal value, or that our senses give us a fairly accurate indication of where we are in time and space. Some presuppositions we hold in common with our fellow religionists. Every human being is in the image of God, say, for Christians. Some presuppositions are common within our nation, community, family. Into this last class falls such a notion as that the people who live in our neighborhood are not to be trusted. As each societal unit becomes smaller, the common presuppositions become more specific and more detailed but, of course, are held by fewer and fewer people. Finally, one’s own worldview embodies some elements that are utterly unique.

All this is obvious. What is not so obvious is how the distinctive worldview of an individual influences, or is influenced by, the common worldview of a community. For an insight into this complex phenomenon we can turn to the sociologists of knowledge, among whom I have found Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann to be the most helpful. “Everyday life,” they say, “presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world.”
1
It is the world as interpreted by people that interests sociologists of knowledge.

In fact, according to Berger and Luckmann, the object of their study is the world human beings construct in symbiotic relationship with each other and the natural world around them. They are interested, then, in “the social construction of reality,” and what gets constructed is what they call a
world
. This concept seems almost identical to what I have been calling a
worldview
, but Berger and Luckmann shy away from using that term because it smacks too much of philosophy. Moreover, they do not pretend to study reality as it is but reality as it is understood, and that is a socially constructed reality. Take their understanding of the concept of human nature: