Welcome to the sessions three and four. This is defining the concept of a worldview and actually in many ways this particular session is extremely important because it sets the stage for how we're going to understand worldviews. And this is important because there are different ways that different groups, people, organizations understand and define the concept of a worldview.
And as you work through the pre-class worksheet and look at the four different little video clips that I put in there to explain how different people actually define worldview, I think you'll begin to see that those differences have a very significant bearing on how we understand and engage with the concept of worldview. In fact, in many ways... The reason that I began to change the way that I taught this class many years ago is because I began to become frustrated with the insufficiency of some of the definitions of the traditional approach to understanding and teaching worldviews.
So we're going to begin to see some of the specific ways in which we define worldviews and the elements that we choose to include have an incredible impact. on what it is that we think a worldview is and how it's helpful for us in understanding both our own worldviews and the worldviews of others. And this has important, of course, for Christian witness. Now, the big question then that we're trying to answer, we've talked about the importance of the worldview, but what is a worldview itself? And the difficulty with this right away is that, in fact, your definition...
of a worldview is going to include your worldview. So this is one of the great problems, is that understanding what a worldview is actually itself worldview dependent. I like what James Sire says about this. He says that this will not be a definition that tries to incorporate all the characteristics of all the worldview definitions, because that's impossible.
The very concept of worldview itself is worldview dependent. That doesn't mean we can't try to define it, but it does mean that if we do define it, we are going to have to be honest about the fact that our definition itself has a worldview dependency. And therefore, we have to hold it with a sense of humility, recognizing that, hey, we are defining it and we are understanding it in a certain way, but there are other ways that we could define it.
And I'm going to advocate to you that the way that we look at it, worldview in this class is going to be, I think, more accurate and more helpful than some of the other ways in which worldview is defined, but that doesn't mean that those ways have no legitimacy or import, and that's why I want you to look at some others and then do some evaluation together before the class comes together. So let's take a look at this, and the first thing I'm going to kind of mention is this potential for... Site-oriented bias. What I mean by that is that in the past, especially with traditional worldview, I mean the very word itself, worldview, puts the kind of understanding and concept into a site-oriented bias.
But what about the possibility that there are other ways that we engage with the world? We don't just see the world, we live in the world. We smell it, we taste it, we touch it.
We engage and embrace the world in ways that are not simply visual. And I think that's important because as we begin to ask the question of how does the worldview really work, how does it really influence and impact us, what we're going to see is that it's much more than sight that influences and impacts the concept and the understanding of our worldview. And this will become more obvious as we go along. So let's start by giving kind of working definition and then I'll unpack that definition just a little bit to give you a better sense of what it is that we're going to pay more attention to and how that might be helpful for us in our worldview conversation. Now the first thing that Paul Hebert says, he says the worldview represents, and let's pay attention to these words, the fundamental cognitive.
Effective and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things which they use to order their lives. World views are what people in a group of people make about the nature of things. community take as given realities the maps they have of reality that they use for living now actually there's a lot in there so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of take specific words out of that definition I'm gonna add a couple of things to that and we're gonna look at how that plays out in terms of understanding what exactly is a worldview first of all there are the cognitive aspects And this has been traditionally kind of the main emphasis or the main focus of worldviews.
The idea is what do you believe? What do you claim to believe? What are the things that you say are true or false and that sort of thing?
But very much in a kind of mental or cognitive sort of emphasis. And this is common with the kind of post-rationalist enlightenment understanding of what matters. That we...
The idea is that our worldview comes out of how we think about things, and therefore what we know and what we consider true is the most important thing. Now, I'm going to actually suggest that our cognitive is not as detached from other aspects of our life as we may think it is, and that in fact the cognitive, as important as it is, is only one element in a holistic understanding of worldview. The second thing that Hebert mentions is what he calls the affective.
And this is essentially the things that we are most passionate about, the things that we really care about. And again, the cognitive makes certain claims about the way things are and what we think is important, but the affective is the demonstration of what we really believe and also what we really care about. It includes things like emotions, it includes the sense of what is it that matters and what are we truly passionate about. Not just what we say, kind of like when parents say, do as I say, not as I do. But in this sense, effective demonstrates that you do as you really do.
That is that you care about things and that's why you live your life a certain way. way. So you can make claims about what's important. I'll give you an example.
I say that spending time in scripture is important, right? But if I don't spend time reading the Bible very often, maybe I only read it every once in a while or only when I go to church, then I might claim the Bible matters to me. But effectively, in my heart and soul, I don't demonstrate that.
What I demonstrate is something else or some other thing. are more important than scripture itself. So we have to be honest about these things in terms of looking at our worldview and what we claim is important versus what we demonstrate in our lives.
A third thing that's closely related but different is what we call the evaluative. And this is more like right and wrong, good, evil, normal, abnormal. The way we look at and assess the various aspects of society.
This will most strongly be covered in the second half of this course when we talk about ethics and the question of morals. So let's keep moving at this point. We'll say a little bit more about this later, but for now, just keep this in mind that this is a major portion of our worldview understanding.
The fourth thing is what we call presuppositions. These are the deep assumptions. These kind of ride below the surface, and they are really things that oftentimes we're not even aware of. We just assume that they are the case, and they don't necessarily even come to our kind of conscious awareness.
These are the, they're sometimes called enthemines, the deep assumptions about what is true, what is right, what is good. And they are often very hard to change because they are so much below the surface. They are not on the surface of our claims.
They are often the kind of soil in which other things take root. And then the fifth thing we're going to talk about is community that is mentioned in that definition. And that is the importance of how we are formed together. We are not individuals isolated.
This is kind of one of the postmodern individualistic fallacies, that somehow we can live outside of our community. and that only by doing that are we truly authentic, or only by being a courageous individual can we truly authentically live our lives. This is actually...
a fallacy. We are not made to live alone. We do not ultimately do that. We take and borrow and incorporate elements, aspects of our community.
And it's incredibly important and formative. We're going to talk more about this when we talk about elements that go into the formation of a worldview. But community is an indelible aspect of our worldview. And then the thing that he also mentions is a map.
Now the interesting thing, the map idea is helpful. We're going to talk a little bit about metaphors and how metaphors can actually illuminate, but they can also obscure our understanding. But a map, I think, is helpful in this sense. As you look at a map, there's a couple of things to notice. First of all, maps do not actually constitute the place itself.
When I take out a map, I am looking at a framework or an illustration of a place. But it is not the place itself. It helps me navigate the place.
As a worldview, it helps us navigate reality. But the worldview is in some ways more like a map than it is reality. Reality is what it is.
But as we interact with and come to ascribe significance and meaning, that becomes more like a mapping of reality. And, of course, we want our... understanding of reality to be the most accurate that it can possibly be. We want to truly know what reality is. But the problem is with a map is that sometimes when you think in map terms, maps represent different things.
This map, for example, is primarily concerned with showing roads, reservoirs, and parks. So all of those things are important, but they're not the place itself. They are only a selection of some aspects of the place.
Now other maps, what this map shows is elevation, right? It shows how rapidly or how steep a different set of hills is and how the steepness is represented by very narrow lines or by broader bands that show that that's more of a gradual slope. So this map again represents only a small or a partial aspect of the real place itself and this this place could be filled with buildings it could be filled with all kinds of other elements but this map is only going to emphasize one aspect of that true as it is but it's incomplete and then of course this is a map of Singapore and this is like the downtown area and on this map you see some of the me major like landmarks, the war memorial, the Armenian church, able Asian civilizations museum, Singapore air museum, and the various aspects of hotels are listed here, raffle city, city link mall, the various downtowns kind of sightseeing and major locations.
But again, that's helpful for what it is. It is not though the same as. actually being on the street there in downtown Singapore.
And then this map, I couldn't help it. I throw it in here, is the treasure map. You know, it's a go past that tree or look at that marker or go through the mountain pass to the stone hanging and then you will find that treasure. You're in.
looking for. So this map only again marks a certain aspect of reality and it only points out perhaps the most important elements. So many of us in our world views we have a kind of map or framework that we look at the world with but that doesn't necessarily fully represent it even though we assume that how we look at the world is in fact an accurate understanding.
We have to look at more elements. to make our map more closely aligned with what reality is actually standing before us now there's another one that Hebert mentioned that's living we're going to talk about this in terms of the aspect of living is really the notion that what we do some of some of our behavioral aspects rituals that we go through Each and every day and how those those aspects of our living are formative for us. They're not just kind of results of what we think or how we feel but oftentimes they are themselves indicative or formative toward what we think is real.
How does our life actually work? Is it is it is our living effective? in the world and if it is then we're going to tend to think that our worldview is correct but if if our living isn't working and if things are going poorly for us we're much more likely to look for something else some other way and lifestyle to bring peace and contentment into our lives we'll talk more about this as well and then there's something else that i wanted to add to this that heber doesn't really emphasize but i think it needs to be said and that's the idea of story or narratives. And we're going to again bring this out a little bit more when we talk about formation. I'm just introducing it here so that we understand all of these elements play a central part in how we live in and view and understand our world.
So worldview is a fundamental commitment of the whole being to a culturally formed grand story, along with its set of primarily tacit assumptions, remember we called those presuppositions, about reality, by which one interprets and interacts with all life. We're going to talk a little bit more about the importance of story later on, but in the meantime, I want you to think about, well, what stories? were told to you growing up, what stories were important, the parents, the culture, and the ways in which there was a kind of narrative frame produced in your own background and in your own culture. So be thinking about that because I want you guys to be able to articulate some of those and to remember some of the things that almost everybody in your group or your society knew about. and how you placed yourself into that grand story, into that kind of plot line.
Now, why is our definition in the metaphors we use, things like maps, things like viewpoint stories, why does it matter so much? Well, first of all, in terms of the definition, as I've already mentioned, is that you actually can help understanding If you choose a more comprehensive and accurate definition, but if you use a more limited definition, that can actually hinder you from understanding how exactly or what it is that worldviews do and how they can actually be useful for understanding. There's a tendency, and this is a great temptation we all have, to kind of simplify our definitions.
And in simplifying those definitions, what we end up doing is we begin to label people. We begin to say, oh, that person is a theist, or that person is an atheist, or that person is a Muslim, or that person is a Hindu. And we begin to say in those labels that we assume we know what that means, therefore, concerning their worldview.
Now, again, those labels may or may not be helpful. But if we don't give... an accurate and comprehensive enough definition, our labels may be too general and they may actually hinder understanding. And I'm going to give an example here. For example, why is it that Christians from different cultures who have the very same conservative commitments about the word of God being the inspired truth revealed to us and given to us by God, that the Bible is that authority?
that Jesus Christ is Lord and that he died on the cross for our sins and that we by placing our faith in him can have forgiveness and eternal life and will live forever with him. All of these things are basic truth claims and we can start making moral claims too about you know premarital sex is wrong and it's wrong to hate your brother and the The call that Jesus makes to care for the poor and the oppressed. These are kinds of evaluative and moral judgments.
In all of that, why is it that if Christians from different cultures agree on all those things, that they often have such a hard time getting along with one another when they're on the same team, in, for example, a Christian ministry? Very often there is a conflict of values and a conflict of what is considered most important. And we're going to look at a case study. and work through a case study later, not in this session, but in our connection time, that will begin to illustrate some of this challenge.
So I want you to begin thinking about that, because how we define our worldview really makes a difference in how useful it can be and how it helps us understand why it is that even conservative Christians can have very, very strong disagreements with one another. Where does that come from? And I think a lot of that has to do with worldview.
Second thing I want to mention is metaphor. Now that's a kind of a mouthful, I admit, but it's a fancy way of saying that the metaphors we choose actually make a huge difference in terms of even the framework in which we will ask questions. If we think of metaphors as limited, and they can be, then we might miss something very, very important. And so metaphors can hit you. hinder us as much as they can help us if we are not aware of their limitations.
And that's why I've tried to kind of emphasize it. Maps can help. Patterns is another way of describing it. Lenses can be another metaphor.
And all of those things can help us, but if we aren't careful, we will assume that that is the kind of controlling metaphor, and that that limits any kind of comprehensive. understanding of a world view. And I want to avoid that because I think that metaphors help us insofar as we recognize their limitations and that they may be kind of parts of a bigger whole that will make concrete what we are talking about in terms of theory.
Again, we're going to unpack a lot of this more. Don't be upset or overwhelmed if you're like, I have no idea what's going on yet. Just be aware that In our definition, we use metaphors, more than one usually, and those metaphors can help us, but they shouldn't become controlling or limiting in our understanding. They should only help illuminate our understanding. So, be aware of that, and then what we're going to do is we're going to say, okay, so where are we going in this class?
What are we trying to accomplish? And let me just warn you right from the start. That we are not seeking comprehensiveness.
What we are seeking is comprehension. That we are seeking to begin to grow and increase our understanding of what a worldview is. But this is going to be a lifelong process.
This is not going to be something that you walk away from this class saying, okay, now I have it all down, I understand everything there is to know about worldview and biblical decision making. That's just not the case. This class is going to begin to try to spark understanding and to set us on a kind of process and a pathway of lifelong learning. And that's why I talk about it in terms of journey versus arrival. We are on a journey together and very often that journey will take unexpected twists and turns.
But at the end of this course, it's not as though you've arrived at a comprehension of worldview. What you've been doing is... You have been set on a pathway and you are either getting closer to comprehension or you are moving further away, but the journey and the trajectory are what matter. And so we're going to look at approximation versus perfection. Again, we're not going to know and understand everything, but we are going to seek to grow in our understanding.
Now, the thing that I want to talk about kind of... to help illustrate what I mean by A worldview is this question of religions, cultures, and worldviews. Because very often in the traditional model, what you had was that different worldviews were kind of depicted as... worldviews in religion.
So it was like you had the Christian worldview, you had the Islamic worldview, had the Muslim worldview, you had the secular humanist atheistic worldview and you had you know a variety of other competing views, but they were religious in the sense that they were kind of framed in, well, the Christians think this, and the Muslims think this, and the Buddhists think that, and the Hindus think that. Now, that's helpful insofar as it goes, but what it doesn't do is it doesn't give us an accurate depiction of how worldviews work, because within those religious frameworks, worldviews... worldviews actually take on greater significance. What do I mean by that? Well, when can we call a religion a worldview?
Obviously, religions seek to say something about the world, and they seek to have a comprehensive view of the world. So far, so good. In that sense, a religion is a worldview, because it makes ultimate claims about the nature of God, the nature of humanity, the nature of reality. nature of good and evil, right and wrong. These are all aspects of worldview.
And I do not discount that at all. Those are incredibly important. And our religion should have a direct impact on the view that we take of the world and of these things. So in that sense, we can call a religion a worldview. But having said that, the reality is there is more to this than simply our religion.
religious beliefs. Now that may be hard to kind of initially fathom. We may think, well, there's only one way to be Christian, or there's only, you know, kind of one right set of beliefs and standards for Christianity.
And therefore, we can't talk about worldviews in the plural with respect to Christianity. There's only one right way to see the world. There's only one right way to live in the world, right? So how can we say that there are different worldviews even within Christianity. But what I'm going to suggest is that the cultural frame in which Christianity finds itself, and we're going to talk a lot more about this in terms of contextualization, indigenization, and how that is related to the kind of transcendent, trans-temporal, trans-cultural aspects of Christianity.
But the point is this, that worldviews have more than just kind of belief claims. corporate cultural values and systems in a way that, to kind of follow Andrew Walls in his conception of it, Christianity becomes infinitely translatable into any number of cultures. That there are ways to be faithfully Christian in a huge variety of contexts, both in this contemporary time and throughout history. So that when you add in and understand how culture shapes our religion in such a way that we want religion to shape our culture. but we also recognize that aspects of culture do shape and deeply impact our religious perspective and our religious values and the ways in which we live out our faith.
And so in that reality, in that recognition, we're going to say that Christianity is a worldview of sorts. because it does claim to have something to say about everything in the world. But at the same time, it is a worldview that has counter-cultural elements.
Inevitably, in any culture, Christianity is going to have elements of it that work against or reject aspects of culture, because culture has, as part of it, the sinful nature of human beings in a kind of collective. way of expression. And not only that, but there are neutral aspects of culture that Christianity incorporates to be relevant, to be able to communicate, and to live within, and to be part of a cultural community.
even when that community is not strictly Christian. So what we see is that there are more elements involved in our worldview than merely our religious beliefs. And the way we express our religion becomes different in different cultures. That may be hard to grasp initially, but I'm going to argue strongly that that's the case.
And the way that we... understand our faith in various contexts becomes a matter of being faithful in that context and understanding how those values and cultural aspects impact and change the way we live out those fundamental values and truths of our faith. So we're going to talk more about that when we get together. and do a case study to kind of help illustrate this. So just if you're having trouble with this or wrestling with it, don't worry.
We are going to try to talk through this a little bit more. So let's end with illustrating some of the relationships that Christianity, culture, and biblical perspective can have, both for Christians and for non-Christians in various types of cultures. Hopefully this will give you a little bit of a clearer understanding of what I'm talking about here. So first of all, we have to understand the relationships between culture, personal perspectives, and a biblical worldview.
And so we're just going to, again, this is incredibly simplified, but just to help us begin catching what I'm saying, there's going to be these three elements. The element of culture. our own personal perspectives, and then the biblical worldview.
How do those things relate together? And we're going to talk about how we look for that convergence or common ground. Now in this case, in this particular diagram, the culture that the person lives in, that personal perspective, this person in particular is not actually that much into the culture. You can see that there's some overlap. But they actually may be a cultural outsider.
This may be somebody who's not in on the mainstream of that culture because there isn't a ton of overlap between their personal perspectives and the perspectives of the contemporary culture. In addition, this person doesn't really have much of a biblical worldview. And they live in a culture that doesn't have a lot of biblical worldview.
So you begin to see, and this is, you know, I put this in balance, but we're going to move these around just a little bit to give you a notion, that the biblical worldview may or may not be heavily influential in a contemporary culture. That culture may be much more influenced by secularism, by Confucianism, by a set of kind of traditional values that have some overlap with biblical understanding, but not much. In this case, this person is probably a cultural outsider living in a culture that isn't particularly influenced by Christianity. And this person is probably not a believer because they don't really have much of a biblical worldview.
Although they could have just come to know Christ, we just don't know. But at this point, we recognize that these three don't really intersect very much. But if we look at this, this may be a person who is part of a culture.
that again doesn't have a lot of biblical influence but this person is much more influenced by a biblical worldview their biblical worldview maybe isn't perfect but there's a lot more overlap and the way i've described it is this could be like a possible global worker somebody who's a believer somebody who loves the lord and is trying to grow and and kind of bring together the biblical worldview and their personal perspectives more and more but The culture that they're in, maybe they're working cross-culturally, isn't especially influenced by Christianity. It may be influenced by many other things, but it's not what we would call a heavily influenced Christian impacted culture. Now this is another way of looking at it. This might be somebody from a biblically influenced culture. You can see that the biblical worldview is much more overlapping with that contemporary culture.
This may be a society that has been significantly shaped by Christian thinking. That doesn't mean the society is a Christian society, but it means that they have significantly been influenced and taken into the society biblical values. And this person may or may not be a Christian. be a Christian.
And the reason I say that is they are obviously very inside the society. They're heavily influenced by the contemporary culture. And because that culture is biblically influenced as well, they may even consider themselves to be a Christian simply because I've heard this statement that I'm an American, so I'm a Christian. The idea that if you're born in America, well, that makes you a Christian.
And this person may have no understanding of what the gospel and what Christianity actually is in terms of how to be a Christian, but they may have a very kind of standard set of Christian morals. They may believe in God. They may think that Jesus was a good, great teacher, a good man, that sort of thing.
But they may not really understand or have a personal relationship with God. Now, another way that this can happen is this is probably somebody who's definitely not a Christian. And they're...
in a culture that's not influenced very much by Christianity. There's always going to be some overlap because the image of God ensures that there is always some commonality within the human race so that it is not a radical differential like some postmodernists want to claim. There's always some common ground there. But this person is probably an insider, a cultural insider, who is not a Christian.
And then this is... probably someone who's maybe a growing Christian who comes from a culture that's not very influenced by the Bible, but is moving toward a biblical worldview, is beginning to be discipled, has maybe come to Christ recently, and is moving now into a different way of thinking about living in and seeing the world. And as I mentioned at the beginning, to come back to where we started. This is probably a person from a non-biblically influenced culture and probably not a Christian and, as I mentioned, likely a cultural outsider. So I hope that some of these, I could go on, I could give many more diagrams, but I hope that this will give you some picture of how we're beginning to notice that the elements of our lives are influenced by more than just scripture and the Christian.
point of view. We are also deeply influenced by the culture in which we are raised and we're going to see that even within that culture we may be insiders, outsiders and our family and our background and our personality and our gifts and talents and abilities will have a deep influence and impact on how we live in and understand and influence and impact the world around us. So The ultimate goal is to bring one's personal perspective increasingly into conformity with the biblical worldview, while at the same time influencing and impacting the surrounding cultural spheres for God's greater glory, so that hopefully and prayerfully the culture moves toward greater conformity with the biblical worldview. It doesn't necessarily mean it will, but that's what you want. You want people and you want the culture in general to become more biblically minded and to think more biblically.
more accurately about the way the world really is and about what God is really like. But ultimately, you will not be able to make that happen apart from the grace of God working in that culture, the Spirit of God moving. We just need to be faithful to try to be a biblical influence in that situation. So let me close by encouraging you. to take a look at the Worldview graphic organizer.
That is going to be a file that later on you will choose whether you're going to teach this file, this organizer, to someone, a friend, a family member, or the one that we're going to look at later on the biblical decision-making portion, the ethical portion of this class. So just have a look, because I want you to look it over. and begin to familiarize yourself with it. We're going to take a closer look in our connection time at the graphic organizer.
So if you look at it and go, I have no idea what's going on. I don't know what to do here. Don't worry about that.
Just look it over and begin to familiarize yourself with this notion of, and I'm going to use another metaphor in that organizer, the metaphor of a web. Okay. And again, this is not meant to limit our understanding, but to help illustrate and elucidate it a little bit further.
So there are various ways that we can look at worldview. And I hope that in this session, you've begun to see the many elements that go into our understanding of and interaction with the world. I look forward to connecting with you guys at the connection time and interacting more on this.