Worldview | Not Worldview: Part 3: Third Time is the Charm » Worldview

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.
— old joke of unknown origin

…the very concept of a worldview is itself worldview dependent.
— James Sire, Naming the Elephant, InterVarsity Press, p 121

We started this series of posts on worldview — what a biblical worldview isn’t and now what a biblical worldview is — because of flagrant fouls committed by Patrick Henry College and The Barna Research Group. Both of them claim to have the biblical worldview pretty much locked up. Each has it own list of propositions everyone is supposed to agree to or else we’re not allowed to attend (or work for) Patrick Henry College, and the Barna Group in turn will say we don’t have a biblical worldview.

To which we say, nonsense.

Compiling your own list of faith propositions – whether you attach Bible verses to each affirmation as the college does or simply generalize after the manner of the Barna Group – doesn’t mean you have a biblical worldview in any proper sense of the term. Worldviews are not made from lists.

The word worldview — skip ahead if you already know this — is borrowed from the German Weltanschauung (Velt-an-shong, give or take), where welt = world + anschauung = perception. Weltanschauungen are world perceptions; they are descriptions of what we see from the hill (or valley, plain, heath, canyon, bayou, fjord, savannah, steppe, bog, beach, forest, swamp or hole in the ground) where we stand. For each of us, our worldview is the view from here.

This makes worldviews difficult to complete unless we stand perfectly still, which of course none of us does. So our worldviews are not entirely portable because our perceptions change every time we move — whenever our here changes.

Imagine a man who grows up perceiving the world as it appears from an upcountry village in East Africa (naturally, your worldview colors what you imagine about this man). Suppose one day the man follows a trail that becomes a path that turns into a dirt road on which he walks until it crosses a paved highway. Suppose he catches a bus at that intersection, which he rides until it stops at a train station. He then boards a train to the coast and books passage on a boat that transports him over open water to a port city. Leaving the terminal, he hails a taxi that drops him at an international airport where he buys a ticket for a flight that connects him through a European hub to a jumbo jet that delivers him at last to a major city on the far side of the world.

Can you honestly imagine any circumstance in which this man’s perceptions of the world could remain as they were the day he left home? I can’t. Every new thing he saw, each strange person he encountered, the total of his new experiences would naturally compound to change his perceptions, his Weltanschauung, his worldview.

Our man’s journey is not about concepts or ideas or mental exercises. Having grown up in a culture limited to foot traffic, he has not come to believe in air travel; he has experienced flight — oh, sure, the airport escalators threw him a bit and, rather than risk injury, he climbed the stairs from the ticket counter to the departure gates; and he won’t allow himself to think too much about how an enormous, hollow, winged, metal shaft can be projected so far through the air (and with such accuracy!); and he still keeps an eye peeled for lions and water buffalo and the nearest climbable tree; but he is not wasting time developing a theory about leaving Africa because he has in fact left Africa.

"At its root," says James Sire:

a worldview is pretheoretical, below the conscious mind. It directs the conscious mind from a region not normally accessed by the conscious mind. It is not that the conscious mind cannot think about a worldview and its pretheoretical character. Presumably we are doing that now. It is that normally we do not do this. Rather we think with our worldview and because of our worldview, not about our worldview.
— James Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, InterVarsity Press, page 124

The African man you imagined will continue filtering new experiences through the worldview he brought from home, even as that worldview is being altered by new perceptions and his thinking about what those perceptions mean is changing because he’s changed his point of view.

You can probably see where this is going. Each of us has a worldview composited from the sum of our perceptions of the world. These perceptions are not ideas (those come later), they are physical experiences of sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, pain, pleasure and unprocessed emotion. Those experiences of the world filter and color our ideas and attitudes (and it’s a two-way street because our ideas and attitudes come to filter and color our experiences so that it’s not always clear which came first).

If you want to change your worldview, all you have to do is open your eyes and ears, stretch your arms, stick out your tongue, breathe deep and take a step — forward, back, left, right, up, down . . . any direction you move alters your perceptions a little. Movement doesn’t automatically improve perception, but it can’t help changing it. Every conversation, everything you read, all the images and sounds you see and hear, each turn of your head reinforces, solidifies, refines or alters your worldview. Try to recall how your worldview changed the first time you looked up and saw a jet contrail in the sky, the first time you saw open water or a hundred-story building, a newborn child, lightning, a sex act, a dead person. Those were not concepts, they were existential experiences that changed your perception of the world.

Now . . . If you want a biblical worldview you must leave where you are and go live in the Bible because — it should go without saying — that is where the Bible’s worldview is found. You can hear about it, read about it, talk about it till your ears ring and your eyes burn and your tongue swells, but until the biblical text itself becomes your new here (in synergy with the mystical work of God’s spirit) you won’t have a biblical worldview or anything like it. What you’ll have is the idea of a biblical worldview; the concept of a biblical worldview; the illusion of a biblical worldview. And that is just not good enough.

Simply dipping into the biblical text may alter your perception of the world a bit but it won’t produce a biblical worldview. Mastering the hundred (or 200, or 500) pages that fit comfortably in the confines of a systematic theology will cultivate something that might be called a Bible-based worldview but what’s the point if it doesn’t actually reflect the Bible’s worldview. That worldview is available to those who decamp to the pages of the Bible, not as tourists but immigrants who immerse themselves in the language and culture and practices of their new home. It takes as long it takes; and it’s never quite complete as long as there is still more to see and hear and taste and touch and breathe-in.

Which is to say it’s simply never quite complete. The only person who fully apprehends the biblical worldview is the God whose story the Bible tells. From which we draw two important generalizations:

Whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t worship the book. The Bible is not about itself.
All of us who aren’t God — we know who we are — had better approach God’s Story with humility and approach each other with generosity, kindness and an abundance of mercy.

There are no short cuts; there are . . . rough maps. InsideWork is a site for businesspeople trying to conduct commerce in ways that reflect a growing biblical worldview. In the 1990s a dozen of us spent eight years following the thread of commerce through the biblical text and found that it is inextricably bonded to the Bible’s worldview. In retrospect, we probably could have seen that coming. We took four more years to compile everything we’d learned into a learning design we call the Scriptural Roots of Commerce. The SRC follows the trail we blazed from page one in Genesis to the end of the line in The Revelation of John. For convenience, we organized our findings in six learning modules:

The modules are parallel, not sequential, so wherever you start you’ll find yourself moving through the sweep of the biblical narrative (not every page, you understand, but following the thread wherever it leads through the text).

Free, downloadable QuickStart Guides for every module are tuned for Do It Yourself, Peer-to-Peer and Group Learning. You’ll also find a suite of free learning helps, likewise tuned to different learning approaches.

Test drive a free SRC sample called Rest + Re-Creation and let us know what you think of the approach.

OK, enough for now. We have much more to say about worldviews — biblical and otherwise — but enough for now.