Read Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Online
Authors: James W. Sire
Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (22 page)
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
W
e live in a pluralistic world.
Around the world there are nations where most people deny what our nation holds dear. There are religions in India or Asia or Africa that dramatically oppose our own, whatever it is. And there are enclaves of devoted ideological revolutionaries and terrorists who train for violent assaults on people like us. This
us
, of course, includes not only the
us
who are Christians but the
us
who are Hindus or Muslims or Marxists or secular humanists. There is no simple division between Christians and all others. The others are multiple. They too inhabit a pluralistic world. And in a pluralistic world it is not only ignorant armies who clash by night but intelligent people who clash by day.
Worldview analysis will not solve the problems of pluralism, problems that threaten not just to divide us but to destroy us; it will not bring us together. But it will help us understand why we are both so similar and so different. Without this knowledge we are like a diver caught in the tentacles of an octopus. We chop off one tentacle that has us in its clutches, only to find ourselves in the grip of another. We never really understand the heart of our problem. Worldview analysis brings the large picture into focus. It illuminates the heart of the matter. And it can help us to ferret out why we have such problems living with each other.
So we turn now to seeing how worldview can be a tool of analysis in four ways: self-analysis, analysis of other individuals, cultural analysis and academic analysis.
Naming Your Own Elephant
One of the most important uses of worldview analysis is self-analysis. To become conscious of your grasp of the fundamental nature of reality, to be able to tell yourself just what you believe about God, the universe, yourself and the world around you—what else could be more important? You would be able to live the proverbial examined life. Naming your own elephant does not guarantee that you are right, but it does mean that you know where you stand.
When I have taught formal courses in worldviews, I have often asked students to do such self-analysis. This is an easy assignment, I think, and many of them do too. But some find it puzzling and even traumatic. For doing this well means asking not just what you think you believe about the really real, but what your life tells you about what your worldview really is. Moreover, self-analysis often involves identifying your major intellectual and emotional changes and developments.
In my own case, in broad worldview terms, there has been a wealth of development but only little change of direction. I grew up in a Christian family. My parents and my father’s parents lived together in—I kid you not—a little house on the prairie in Nebraska. Religious instruction was limited to my mother’s Bible lessons on Sundays and an occasional church service in the summer in a country schoolhouse six miles away. My world was that of a dozen or so surrounding ranches, a one-room school with a young high-school graduate as a teacher, a radio bringing in
The Lone Ranger
and news of World War II, weekly magazines, and a handful of books, some of them very good.
Ranch life, rural life in general, is lived close to the soil. If it rains the right amount, the crops grow, the cattle have feed, the ranch survives. If it rains too little, the cattle slowly starve and the ranch is in great jeopardy. If it rains too much, the end result is the same. It is a hard life, not just in the sense of being difficult but in its being substantially real. It’s real dirt you live on, real wood you cut with an ax and burn to cook and to keep warm in winter. I was always interested in books, ideas and the power of the imagination. But when I was growing up, I learned early that we lived in a very hard world. Is this the biographical reason for my insistence on ontology’s preceding everything else? Perhaps, but that does not make the notion less true. It justifies it.
My few religious experiences were all interpreted in the light of basically Christian ideas. For instance, once out on the prairie above our house in the valley, I saw three thunderheads rise from the western horizon and I thought I was being pursued by the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. By age ten or eleven, I had understood God as a Trinity, though I have no idea how I came by that idea. Certainly there was no depth to my knowledge of what that meant. I never remember, for example, being taught a traditional creed. In any case, Mom and Dad moved with my two sisters and me to a small town during the summer before I entered the seventh grade. We began regularly attending an evangelical church, and before the summer was over, I had walked the aisle at the pastor’s invitation and given over my life to Christ.
My belief in God immediately became more personal, and I began to read the Bible, pray, and pay close attention in Sunday school, church and Youth for Christ meetings. It was not long before I had in essence the same worldview I described as Christian thirty years later in the first edition of
The Universe Next Door
(1976). It remains mine to this day. What has changed has been countless details, some trivial, some quite important, but all within the confines of traditional Christian thought.
Certainly, though, the growth and development of my worldview were aided not only by the increased quantity, quality and intensity of my exposure to the Bible and Christian theology but by the context in which that instruction came—a university world that has displayed vastly different and sometimes hostile worldviews. I remember, for example, being told by my anthropology professor, “Sire, you read lots of books, but they are all the wrong kind.” He was not entirely wrong about that, as I came to learn later, but there was no way he was going to sway me from what I knew personally to be true: the Bible is a reliable book, and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. My worldview remained solidly Christian throughout my entire educational experience.
For some—perhaps most these days—worldview analysis will reveal radical shifts. A number of Christians have written about their conversion in ways that show that more was involved than something only vaguely spiritual. I will name only three. Charles Colson, the Watergate conspirator, tells the story, in
Born Again
, of his shift in worldview from self-centered power-hungry materialism to Christian faith. He was greatly influenced by English literary scholar C. S. Lewis, who in
Surprised by Joy
tells of his own movement from early exposure to Christianity to atheism to deep commitment to Christ. Tatiana Goricheva, born into a pervasively Marxist world, tells of her disillusionment with communist ideology, her descent into nihilism, and her grasping for a way out in existentialism and then philosophical yoga. Her
Talking About God Is Dangerous
includes a dramatic account of chanting the Lord’s Prayer and suddenly realizing that what she was chanting was not just a meaningless mantra but the very truth itself.
1
I have been privileged as a teacher to have a number of students who were once Marxists or Maoists or more generically atheists, and friends who have been Hindus, Buddhists and New Agers. Their worldview stories are very different from my own. One of them is, I believe, worth including here.
2
THERE IS ANOTHER SKY
Sixia Lu
All the good things would not fade away,
For all the beauty and the truth lasts forever;
Although they could be frozen as ice in the heart
Still comes the time that they are blooming like the flowers in the spring,
One day, when HE passes by—
It is said that in the beginning we worshiped heaven. It is written that our Chinese ancestors used lamb as sacrifice and prayer as the way to communicate with the One who created the heaven and the earth. Then the lights from heaven shone across the clouds, and the sky looked like seven big stones with seven bright colors. The thunder came with fresh rains of blessing, and the season of harvest followed.
This land was then called China, and it is still called that today. China—the land of God.
Believe it or not, Nietzsche wasn’t mad. In the land of God, God is dead. A third of the world’s population has murdered him in their minds.
Believe it or not, if China today would open her mind, she would find another sky.
The Land of God Without God
“Therefore, the bird which is called Jin-Wei used her beak every day to put the stones and branches into the ocean. Finally, she made the ocean to become the earth.” Mother finished the story, and then she added, “Of course, we all know that this is just a fairy tale. The world is just matter. Only what you can see, touch and feel is real. Fables, tales, myths—they are all the treasures of human wisdom. I told you the story to encourage you to create real miracles by hard work, faith and perseverance. Knowledge is power. Whoever has knowledge has the world.”
That’s the first worldview lesson that I had from my mother. I was six years old at the time. All my subsequent education strengthened and confirmed this as absolute truth: The primary reality is Matter; the world is autonomous; it has formed itself through evolution. When we die, we disappear into the air. Our duty is to make the universe even more beautiful for the next generation.
What, then, was real to me? Science, the things that happened yesterday, history, matter—these were everything that was real to me.
Since human beings can create miracles by their hands and hard work, why God? We don’t need a God. If there is a God, he must be ourselves. Human beings can develop their knowledge. All things are possible with human effort. Besides, there are already a lot of gods in China. We don’t need to import Jesus. Jesus was simply one of the “good guys” in history.
It’s history that is real. It happened. And the wheel of history will never stop for anyone. It forever moves forward; there’s no stopping it. We live and die without mercy.
Good character is necessary in our society—being polite, kind and warm to each other, helping the young and the old. “We must keep our traditional good character, but get rid of the boundaries in the corrupted old culture.” That was the message of my education: the moral standards of socialism combine the best of the old and the new. This is what we should follow. Our country’s leader was our hero, the best model for us. I didn’t realize that the leader and the socialist moral standards had become our gods.
At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the socialist ideal was for everyone to have the same rights; everyone was to be treated as a brother or sister. According to communism, everyone lives in one big family, and eventually we would realize our ideal: social equality, no war, no fighting, abundant food, enough supplies, total harmony, endless and total happiness.
This picture inspired everyone to be good. All private possessions and excess wealth were shameful and selfish. Speaking practically, this special cultural atmosphere created in me, and others too, a kind of happiness. I miss it now. I remember when no one locked their houses; yet no thief was able to get away. It was only later, when I grew older, that I realized that according to the “average wealth” policy, everyone in the nation was so poor that there was nothing for anyone to steal.
Like a string of pearls held together by a thread, every aspect of my basic worldview was shaped by this vision.
In appearance, in personality, I am still the same now as then, but my basic worldview has changed. And as that change took place, little by little every piece of my life changed. I still love to be kind and nice to people; I still laugh, cry, work hard and am confused, but there is now a strong sense of knowing where truth, beauty and love come from. I no longer have a limited internal desire to be good. I know that there is a source that provides a path for my life. My purpose for living has changed. I no longer desire to acquire more things. I am looking for something higher—to be like him—the infinite, good God. I am not trading my faith for his promise of eternal life. I simply need him to be the absolute truth in my life now.
The world without God is cold. With him, we know why there is warmth in the winter.
The Happiness of the Fish
About 380
B.C.
, Zuang-Cuo and Meng-Ji, two famous Chinese philosophers, were traveling together. When they stopped by a river, Zuang-Cuo watched the fish in the river and said, “How happy are these fish!”
Meng-Ji didn’t quite agree. He said, “You are not the fish. How do you know the happiness of the fish?”
Zuang-Cuo replied in a famous statement that still affects how Chinese people think about human beings and their relation to nature: “You are not me. How do you know that I don’t know the happiness of the fish?”
Meng-Ji is a disciple of Confucius, and Zuang-Cuo is a student of Lao-Zhi, the founder of Taoism. It is said that Confucianism and Taoism are the two-sided mirror of the soul for Chinese. In Confucian thought, people learn to be governor, manager and intellectual. It’s the worldview which teaches that “the king is the son of God, and people must obey and support his reign.” Furthermore, high virtue, obedience to all kinds of laws and respect for life are required. In this worldview God begins to be pulled from his heavenly chair and replaced by a national leader or a hero. With my whole heart I came to accept this Confucian/Taoist view of reality.
But Zuang-Cuo’s Taoism focuses on the “self” and the oneness of the “self” with nature. He could not understand the huge power behind chaos and nature, though he sensed that something was there. Following his teacher Lao-Zhi, he calls the one who creates everything the Tao. Hence the term Taoism. For myself, I wonder just what kind of facial expression the wise man would have if he were to learn that God is the Tao, something he could not name.
Communism or Marxism is not the only worldview in China. Though it is the one taught in schools and the one ruling ideology, Confucianism and Taoism still cast their shadow on the land. Before I met the Lord, for example, I was no simple communist. I loved Zuang-Cuo.
Even before I was able to identify Zuang-Cuo’s worldview, I was interested in his words. He is the artist of thinking, both romantic and wise. His attitude toward life is soft and tender. I often felt strong pressure to be smart, intelligent, excellent in mind. But I did not always succeed. So when I failed, when I felt the coldness of people’s hearts, when I became sick of the world of calm and self-control, I ran to Zuang-Cuo’s world of being with nature—to hear the wind and the sound of water. With him I thought death is not so terrible; we just totally disappear from this earth. In his worldview, my spirit would return to the Tao, the oneness which unites all the other spirits into one.
There was a time, then, that my worldview was swinging between Chinese existentialism and Taoism.
I will work hard in school
, I thought. But after school,
I will ride my bike to the riverside, meditate on Zuang-Cuo’s words and rest
. Absolute existentialism made me like a machine, but I am a human being and not a human doing. I need spiritual space. That to me was the happiness of the fish.
The Missing Land and Another Sky
Always use critical thinking to look at things. There is no absolute answer; the world is based on relative answers. Different people see the same object differently. The truth to you may not be the truth to others. Just be yourself. Do whatever you want to do.
In China the dream of “we are rich together or we are poor together” faded. With the open-door policy, we suddenly went into a period of economic expansion. Communism was still taught in class, but Marxism needed to be applied to life, and it wasn’t. Fewer and fewer people believed in it. None of my college friends did, and neither did our teachers. The more we studied, the more questions arose. The theory—the ideal picture of communism—was perfect, it had been said. Then why wasn’t our country moving toward that goal? Why was there more and more trouble in our society?
One day in my study group, all of us came to the same conclusion: communism is just a dream. We realized that if communism were ever to work it would require perfect human beings. We looked in shock at each other; no one could say a word. We knew that none of us could be perfect. What we had been taught was based either on a false dream or on a lie.
We had nowhere to go in our thoughts. What reality could we believe in? Even science could betray us, since people are not perfect. Even the most intelligent one makes mistakes. History is written by people. It too could be mistaken. We dared not go further. Believe it or not, the thirty students in my group broke out in sweat.
“Let’s not think,” one of the group leaders said. “Let’s just try to do whatever we can to make a better life for ourselves. Let’s improve ourselves as much as we can, make as much money as we can and enjoy life today. What’s right and what’s wrong is not important. Just be open to everything. Go for freedom.” None of us were against this. A new page turned in our mind. From here on the intellectual postmodern world took root and began to grow.
“The ideal life is to improve the quality of life,” some genius among my contemporaries suggested. Here came another wave to wipe away my thoughts: we need independence—economic independence, emotional independence!
Go!—Let’s do business! During my last year in college, one teacher kept asking me, “Where are the two-thirds of this class that are missing?” The answer was simple: they had left to find a good job before they graduated, or they had gone back to the countryside where they came from.
Life is short. Let’s have fun! And make good use of each other! Now came a whole bunch of party animals. And a frequent sight on campus: luxury cars picking up the young and beautiful women students. Why not? It’s reasonable. Young women have the choice to choose a wealthy man. Women are free!
What is the standard for being good? With relative principles, nothing can be totally right or wrong. Everything has its own reason. Even a murderer has a reason for murder. After all, human beings are basically good, aren’t they?
After the temporary harmony of a false dream, we entered a chaotic mix of competing worldviews. I was totally confused and lost. No proffered picture of the good life was what I wanted. Where is pure spirit? Where is clear thought? Are the saints only legends? Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.
Then one day someone read to me chapter 8 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Here were the principles of the Christian life, the definition of love and truth. The first time I heard these words, I just knew that this was the truth about right and wrong that I was looking for. The tenderness and grace of forgiveness washed across my heart. It was all the reason I needed.
Romans tells us just how sinful our human nature is, how there is an infinite and good God. From my limitations I saw his unlimited power. History? Knowledge? Science? These are just pieces in God’s puzzle. Life is more than just working, consuming energy and purchasing things. Life is more meaningful when one sees truth and love in the tongues and hearts of people.
Many good things returned to me—a desire to love freely, a passion to serve and a joy to search for truth. Knowing God brings me into a relationship with him, security and a restoration of my strength. Even difficulties have stretched me and made me grow. It’s all more than words can express. Yet I will try to tell you what I see:
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests,
Never mind silent fields.
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been.
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum.
Into his garden, come!