Worldview
Brad Green, in Shaping a Christian Worldview, recounts the court case Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) in which an Amish witness was being pressured to admit that the purpose of education was fundamentally secular. The prosecuting attorney asked Mr. Yoder, “The principal purpose to attend high school is to get education, is it not? Isn’t that the primary purpose?” The Amish gentleman replied, “Yes, but I think there is a great deal of difference what education means—education for what?” The attorney pressed his point, “To put it bluntly, education so the child can make his or her place in the world.” Mr. Yoder then astutely observed, “It depends which world” (89-90).
“Which world” is an expression at the heart of Christian education. Christian universities differ from our state-sponsored secular counterparts in a number of ways: Our connection to a particular faith tradition, the requirement of Bible classes and chapel attendance, a more lofty code of behavior, and the presence of Christian faculty. However, even if all of these things are in place, the education offered in a Christian university can still be secular at its very core. It is possible for the sometimes godless assumptions of the academic guild to be carelessly passed along in a Christian university. Students can innocently accept what they are given by their Christian teachers, assuming that they are receiving a Christian education. All the while, the faith of these students can be subtly, even if unintentionally, undermined. Paul Hiebert pointed to this danger when he wrote, “To the degree that the church enters, engages and employs the modern world view uncritically, the church becomes her own gravedigger” (210).
In an attempt to avoid delivering faith-eroding secular teaching in the name of Christian education, some Christian scholars have turned their attention to what lies behind our thinking. It is here that they have found a very useful tool in the concept of “worldview.” Deeper and in many ways more powerful than our conscious behaviors and even our values, worldview assumptions frame both what we think and how we think.
A Definition of Worldview
The concept of “worldview” is derived from the German word weltanschauung. The term appears to have originated in 1790 with Immanuel Kant in his work Critique of Judgment (cf. Naugle 58). Originally, “worldview” was used to express one’s “intuition of the world” (59). G. W. F. Hegel, a younger contemporary of Kant, used the term to describe the view of the world that is shared by a particular nation at a particular time. By 1838, Soren Kierkegaard had encountered the concept and added the expression “lifeview” as a companion for weltanschauung. These early writers saw “worldview” in a very subjective way. For them it was something that spoke much more about “the way it is among a people” than about truth or absolutes.
Friedrich Nietzsche picked up on the idea that worldviews were simply human constructions and used it in his attacks on the concept of absolute truth. David K. Naugle writes that, for Nietzsche, “There is no true truth, only subjective projections, linguistic customs, habituating thinking, and reified cultural models. All worldviews are ultimately fictions” (102). Such usage of the worldview concept to express skepticism toward absolute truth has caused some Christians to reject the term entirely, considering it too tainted for expressing their view of objective reality.
However, a number of Christian writers have found the worldview concept to be not only salvageable but extremely useful. James W. Sire presents the following as his definition of worldview:
A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may or may not be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and move and have our being. (17)
He goes on to describe worldview as “a commitment. It is a spiritual orientation more than a matter of mind alone” (18).
Missiologist Paul Hiebert found the idea of worldview to be useful in understanding Christian conversion. He writes, “Conversion to Christ must accompany all three levels: behavior, beliefs, and the worldview that underlies these” (11). He warns that if the underlying worldview is not changed, the eventual result will be the development of some form of Christo-paganism. Worldview, for Hiebert, became a tool to help the missionary appreciate, explore, understand, and ultimately change the “unnamed, unexamined, and unassailable” assumptions that people hold (320). Near the beginning of Transforming Worldviews, he gives the following as his definition of worldview:
We will, however, define the concept as we use it in this study as the “fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives.” Worldviews are what people in a community take as given realities, the maps they have of reality that they use for living. (15)
Hiebert recognizes that the community aspect of worldviews is what makes them so powerful. He then uses this community understanding of reality to address the personal challenges faced by the individual who becomes a disciple of Jesus.
Perhaps the simplest description of worldview comes from Kenneth Richard Samples. He writes, “Worldview may be defined as how one sees life and the world at large. In this manner it can be compared to a pair of glasses” (20). As it is commonly used today by Christian writers, worldview is, indeed, like a pair of glasses. It colors, focuses, or blurs the way people see the world. We all assume that we are looking through clear glass when, instead, what we see is affected by the worldview lenses through which we gaze. By carefully examining our worldview glasses, we are able to think more clearly about truth, to understand more accurately why we see things so differently than our non-Christian friends, and to protect ourselves from the influence of non-Christian worldview assumptions.
Worldview Questions
How many worldviews are there? Does every person possess, like a fingerprint, a unique worldview? Sire argues that such is not the case. He writes, “Worldviews . . . are not infinite in number. In a pluralistic society, they seem to exist in profusion, but the basic issues and options are actually very small” (244-45). However, there is seemingly no consensus about what those issues are, and every writer on the subject suggests a slightly different list of worldview questions. For example, Brian Walsh (29) proposes a profoundly simple list of four ultimate questions that shape a worldview:
1. Where are we?
2. Who are we?
3. What’s wrong?
4. What is the remedy?
Sire (20) offers a more detailed model for the exploration of worldviews with the following list of seven worldview questions:
1. What is prime reality—the really real?
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
3. What is a human being?
4. What happens to a person at death?
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?
6. How do we know what is right and wrong?
7. What is the meaning of human history?
Whatever the particulars, a set of worldview questions must be able to surface one’s central underlying assumptions. For Christians, these questions must also expose how a way of thinking conforms to biblical revelation or sets itself against it.
Worldview Competitors
James W. Sire’s The Universe Next Door is subtitled A Worldview Catalogue. In it he examines eight different worldviews: Christian theism, deism, naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, Eastern pantheistic monism, new age, and postmodernism. For the purposes of this essay, we will examine the two worldviews that are the most important competitors to Christian theism at the beginning of the twenty-first century: naturalism and postmodernism.
Hiebert observes that with the rise of modernism, science became public truth, and religion was relegated to the status of private truth (73-74). Modernity, which Hiebert regards as the “first truly global culture” (141), has been built on the worldview of naturalism.
Naturalism holds that the material universe is all that exists. It is epitomized by Carl Sagan’s famous statement: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” By implication, naturalism holds that there is no God. Hiebert contends that with naturalism “self became God and self-fulfillment salvation” (170). Death became extinction, ethics became relative, and human beings became nothing more than highly developed animals. This perspective was dominant throughout the modern era and remains very strong to this day. Hiebert suggests that naturalism “is the foundation for the scientific academy, education, the legal system, and the news media” (146). He also holds that the theory of evolution has played a monumental role in the development of the modern naturalistic worldview and has become the “secular substitute for the biblical metanarrative” (202). In addition to this, evolution has also produced the myth of progress and the faith that anything new is good.
Sire suggests that the full implications of naturalism are seen in nihilism, which he calls “the natural child of naturalism” (90). He views it as more a feeling than a coherent philosophy and says that nihilism is intellectual despair, “a denial that anything is valuable” (87). This worldview holds that there is no God, no meaning, no truth, no human dignity, and no free will. Human beings are simply biological and chemical reactors with no real freedom or choice in life. Sire observes, “Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist it is the examined life that is not worth living” (107).
The most widely discussed worldview in the Western world today is postmodernism. Some writers view it not as something new, but as the final movement of the naturalistic worldview. David Naugle describes the transition from premodern to modern to postmodern:
In the premodern period, there was substantial confidence on the part of the average Westerner, the Christian in particular, to obtain a comprehensive view of the universe, its facts as well as its values, based on God, and his self-revelation in the Bible. In the modern period the center of gravity shifted from God to man, from Scripture to science, from revelation to reason in the confidence that human beings, beginning with themselves and their own methods of knowing, could gain an understanding of the world, at least in facts if not its values. In the postmodern period, confidence in humanity as an objective, omnicompetent knower has been smashed, destroying any hopes of ascertaining the truth about the universe, its facts or its values. The result has been what Jean-Francois Lyotard has famously called an “incredulity toward metanarratives,” or to paraphrase, a disbelief that any worldview or large-scale interpretation of reality is true and ought to be believed and promulgated. (173-74)
Because it provides no meaningful answers to life’s big questions, postmodernism gives little reason for optimism. Instead, it asserts that truth is unknowable and that all metanarratives, including the biblical one, are simply the creation of those with power in order to control people. In postmodernity, the self has become God, entertainment has become the new religion, boredom has become the great evil, feelings have become more important than thinking, authority has been replaced with self-expression, and history has been abandoned. Because of this strange assortment of ideas that are associated with postmodernism, Hiebert contends that “there is no unified postmodern theory, or even a coherent set of positions” (217). Sire views the specter of postmodernism as so bleak that he believes “a near future of cultural anarchy seems inevitable” (212).
However, not everything about postmodernism is negative. At the very least, it challenges modernity’s overconfidence and its denial of the transcendent. Sire writes, “Postmodernism pulls the smiling mask of arrogance from the face of naturalism” (241). Though postmodernism is no friend of the biblical metanarrative, it is loosening the stranglehold that other metanarratives have had on American culture. Michael S. Hamilton summarizes three of these metanarratives in the following way: “Modernity is making us happier by making us more free. Modernity is unfolding the meaning of human existence. Modernity’s technological progress will lead to human progress” (34). Postmodernism challenges all three of these powerful metanarratives and, ironically, makes room for a more biblical worldview.
Because of the advances postmodernism is making against modernism, some observers are beginning to label the present as a “postsecular age,” a time when religion is finding greater acceptance than before in the marketplace of ideas. Jacobsen and Jacobsen contend that with the coming of the postsecular age, Christian scholars are beginning to recover from their twentieth- century defensiveness and embarrassment and to flourish once again. Today, postmodernism denies that any scholar can operate from a bias-free perspective. This assertion is starting to crumble a wall that has long existed in the academic world between Christian scholarship and so-called “bias-free” secular scholarship. Based on this fact, Jacobsen and Jacobsen observe, “The gap between church-related higher education and mainstream non-religious higher education has, in some ways, shrunk” (63-81).
A Christian Worldview
So what exactly makes up a Christian worldview? Though there is no single clear answer to this question, the following steps start us on our journey.
Step #1—Faith in God
A Christian worldview begins with faith in the existence of God. Naugle writes, “The existence and nature of God is the independent source and the transcendent standard for everything” (260). Based on this conviction, he gives the following definition of a Christian worldview:
“Worldview” in Christian perspective implies the objective existence of the Trinitarian God whose essential character establishes the moral order of the universe and whose word, wisdom, and law define and govern all aspects of created existence. (260)
Thus he presents the Christian worldview in an objective way. God is the objective source of truth, His word is the objective conveyer of truth, and His nature is the objective foundation of ethics. Times, temperaments, and cultures may change, but the Christian worldview sees truth as eternally anchored in the transcendent God.
Step #2—Trust in the Bible
The next essential component of a Christian worldview is the acceptance of the Bible as the Christian metanarrative. Samples asserts that “the Bible is the Christian’s definitive worldview text” (127) and that “a genuinely biblical worldview requires Scripture to be the supreme authority” (122). Aware of the impact that opposing views of inspiration have on this discussion, Heibert makes clear his view of the Bible when he says, “Scripture, the foundation of knowledge, is not human searching for God, but God’s revelation to us” (275). He elaborates, “The books of the Bible are human documents, recorded in human languages by human authors. But they are ultimately divine documents whose recordings are true because they were superintended by the Holy Spirit in the recording process” (272). The Bible is one magnificent story made up of many different styles, writers, cultures, genres of literature, political settings, and specific messages. Yet they all fold together into one grand story that explains the world and our place in it.
Step #3—Focus on Christ
The center of a biblical worldview must be the person of Christ. Since all Scripture points to Him and radiates from Him, He is the key to a coherent biblical worldview. Long before the language of “worldview” and “metanarrative,” the apostle Paul wrote the following about Christ to the first century church in Colosse:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:15-20, NIV)
Paul later wrote in the same letter that in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3, NIV). In other words, Christ is at the center of a biblical or Christian worldview.
Step #4—Confidence in Our Ability to Know
Built on the first three steps is a confidence in our ability to know. Noting that we live in a time when relativism seems to be in the very air that we breathe, Samples observes, “The Christian worldview highly values logic and rationality, which find their source and ground in God” (41). He begins with the assumption of the existence of God and a correspondence theory of knowledge when he states, “Truth, then, from the human standpoint is discovered not invented ” (76). Though it almost sounds absurd to have to say it, Samples states, “The Christian worldview affirms the five senses as generally reliable and that human beings have the capacity for rational thought because God serves as the necessary epistemological ground for both” (80). In a postmodern context the ability to know is an important truth that cannot be assumed; it must be grounded in some prior conclusion.
Step #5—Application of Steps 1-4 to Key Worldview Questions
Sire builds on the first four steps when he sets forth his worldview description of Christian theism. Based on faith in God, trust in the Bible, a focus on Christ, and confidence in our ability to know, he presents the following responses to his seven core worldview questions:
1. What is prime reality—the really real? God is infinite and personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign and good.
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us? God created the cosmos ex nihilo to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system.
3. What is a human being? Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness and creativity.
4. What happens to a person at death? For each person death is either the gate to life with God and his people or the gate to eternal separation from the only thing that will ultimately fulfill human aspirations.
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all? Human beings can know both the world around them and God himself because God has built into them the capacity to do so and because he takes an active role in communicating with them.
6. How do we know what is right and wrong? Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving).
7. What is the meaning of human history? History is linear, a meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for humanity. (23-44)
Conclusion
“Worldview” has meant many different things since it was first coined by Immanuel Kant in 1790. The term has been used by philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and others to describe the way people look at their world. Eventually it was picked up by Christians and found to be useful in identifying the underlying assumptions of cultures. This proved to be helpful in examining our own beliefs and the subtle assumptions that are embedded in the thoughts that surround us.
Clear thinking about worldview is especially important in the Christian university. David S. Dockery reminds Christian educators that “a Christian worldview is not just piety added to secular thinking” (12). Attending chapel and taking a Bible class is a good start, but a truly Christian education must engage the issue of Mr. Yoder’s “which world.” The underlying assumptions of every classroom should be rooted in our faith in God, our trust in the Bible, our focus on Christ, and our confidence in the ability to know because of God. And when the values of our textbooks or our particular academic discipline collide with our Christian worldview, we follow the mandate of Scripture: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5, NIV).
Works Cited
Dockery, David S. “Introduction: Shaping a Christian Worldview.” Shaping a Christian Worldview. Nashville: B&H, 2002.
green, Brad. “Theological and Philosophical Foundations.” Shaping a Christian Worldview. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2002.
Hamilton, Michael S. “A Higher Education.” Christianity Today. June 2005: 30-35.
Hiebert, Paul. Transforming Worldviews. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008.
Jacobsen, Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen. “The Ideals and Diversity of Church-Related Higher Education.” The American University in a Postsecular Age. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Naugle, David K. Worldview. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
Samples, Kenneth Richard. A World of Difference. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007.
Sire, James W. The Universe Next Door. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004.
Walsh, Brian. “From Housing to Homemaking: Worldviews and the Shaping of Home.” Christian Scholar’s Review 35 (2): 237-57.