Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (29 page)

21
David Lyle Jeffrey says, “The structure of formative narratives . . . bespeaks a
Weltanschauung
, a worldview” (“Masterplot and Meaning in Biblical Narrative,” in
Houses of Interpretation: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture
[Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2003], p. 16). Jeffrey then outlines the master stories of Islam, Christianity, and ancient Greece and Rome, but the entire essay (pp. 15-38) is a rich commentary on themes dealt with in this section.

22
As much as postmodern scholars try to reject all metanarratives, they illustrate a metanarrative by their rejection. For the notion that all metanarratives are suspect is itself an overarching “story” about other overarching stories, see Jean-François Lyotard,
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).

23
Naugle,
Worldview
, pp. 302-3.

24
Orr,
Christian View
, p. 14.

25
Middleton and Walsh,
Truth Is Stranger
, p. 87.

26
Ibid., p. 101.

27
Ibid., p. 106.

28
Lesslie Newbigin,
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 12.

29
Ibid., p. 89.

30
Ibid., p. 38.

31
See ibid., pp. 27-38, 46, 97-98.

32
Ibid., p. 98.

33
Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 269.

34
Quoted in ibid., p. 88.

35
Kuyper,
Lectures on Calvinism
, p. 11.

Chapter 6: Worldviews

1
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann,
The Social Construction of Reality
(New York: Anchor, 1967), p. 19.

2
Ibid., p. 49.

3
Berger and Luckmann work within the common boundaries of academic sociology; as such, they assume a methodological naturalism and never consider the possibility of a spiritual reality. The causes leading to any human world, that is, any given social construction of reality, include only those that are natural. If people construct a world with God, gods, goddesses or spirits, that is a result of human action in a social context; revelation as an objective phenomenon cannot be considered a factor.

4
Berger and Luckmann,
Social Construction
, p. 49.

5
Ibid., p. 183.

6
Ibid., p. 51.

7
Peter Levine writes and quotes Jürgen Habermas, “All individuals who belong to a single age or culture share a common and contingent shape of consciousness, conceptual scheme, epistemic foundation, ‘form of life,’ ‘life-world,’ ‘practice,’ ‘linguistically mediated interaction,’ ‘language game,’ ‘convention,’ ‘cultural background,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘effective history,’ or what have you . . .” (
Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities
[Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995], p. 45).

8
Philosopher Gregory A. Clark argues to this effect in “The Nature of Conversion: How the Rhetoric of Worldview Philosophy Can Betray Evangelicals,” in
The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Liberals in Conversation
, ed. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), pp. 201-18.

9
David Naugle (
Worldview: The History of a Concept
[Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002], p. 335) quotes Carl F. H. Henry: “But scholars who deplore the notion of a Christian world view are not immune to sponsoring covertly or promoting an alternative world view while professing to purge Christianity of supposed non-Christian commitments. While Barth dismisses every world view as intellectual barbarism, he has a world view of his own, inconsistent though it may be” (see Carl F. H. Henry, “Fortunes of the Christian World View,”
Trinity Journal
, n.s., 19 [1998]: 163-76).

10
Peter Berger,
The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1967), p. 150.

11
Ibid.

12
Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

13
Dawkins’s position has been refuted many times, but David Bentley Hart’s explanation of the theistic conception of God does this very well. See
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss,
esp. pp. 87-113.

14
Leon Wieseltier, “The Trouble with Multiculturalism,” review of
Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future
, by Richard Bernstein,
New York Times Book Review
, October 23, 1994, p. 11.

15
Helmut Thielicke would call it “ciphered nihilism.” See his
Nihilism
, trans. John W. Doberstein (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 30-40, 63-65.

16
Berger,
Sacred Canopy
, p. 179.

17
Ibid., p. 180.

18
Berger (ibid., pp. 163, 182) makes an interesting attempt to show how in a “world of socio-historical relativity” one might arrive at an “‘Archimedean point’ from which to make cognitively valid statements about religious matters.” He is especially interested in the moves to do so made by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

19
I have explained in far more detail how it is that Christians are justified in believing in the objective truth of the Christian worldview in
The Discipleship of the Mind
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), pp. 77-113, and
Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994). Again, more recently I have restated this view of objective knowledge in
Echoes of a Voice
, pp. 52-56, 116-17, 220-21; and in chapter 2 of
Apologetics Beyond Reason
.

20
Gregory A. Clark argues that Christian worldview thinkers recognize they can no longer argue that the Christian worldview is true in the sense that there is a “correspondence between a worldview and reality. For this reason, they flee to a different definition of truth; truth is now ‘coherence’” (“The Nature of Conversion,” p. 208). I know of no evidence that this charge is true. But I do know that this is not the position taken in the present book or in
The Universe Next Door
. The coherence of a worldview is an important test of its truth; it is not what
truth
means.

21
Alvin Plantinga,
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 167-98.

22
Ibid., pp. 241-89.

Chapter 7: Worldview

1
René Descartes, 1639 letter to Marin Mersene, quoted by Stephen Gaukroger,
Descartes: An Intellectual Biography
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 327.

2
Alvin Plantinga,
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 216.

3
See David Naugle’s extended description of the biblical concept of heart in
Worldview: The History of a Concept
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 267-74. The
NRSV
translates
kardia
as “mind”; the
NIV
translates it as “heart.”

4
Ibid., p. 266. John H. Kok calls it “your innermost being, the gut of yourself, the deepest center of your existence, the source of your thoughts, feelings and actions” (
Patterns of the Western Mind
, 2nd ed. [Sioux Center, Iowa: Dordt College Press, 1998], p. 190).

5
Herman Dooyeweerd, quoted in Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 28.

6
Herman Dooyeweerd,
A New Critique of Theoretical Thought
, trans. David H. Freeman and William S. Young (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), 1:128.

7
I did not write the above pages on commitment and heart in order to address Gregory A. Clark’s notion that worldview rhetoric “betrays” Christians by keeping them from properly understanding conversion or having a genuine grasp of what it means for Jesus to be “the truth.” Still, I think they do so, not so much by disagreeing with Clark’s critique of what he understands to be a Christian worldview but by shifting the core notion of worldview from an abstract system of propositions to a fundamental orientation of the heart. See Clark, “The Nature of Conversion: How the Rhetoric of Worldview Philosophy Can Betray Evangelicals,” in
The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals & Liberals in Conversation
, ed. Timothy Phillips and Dennis Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), esp. pp. 211-18.

8
John Searle,
The Rediscovery of the Mind
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 90-91. Searle reflects on responses to a lecture he gave in India. His audience had objected to his materialistic approach by noting that “they personally had existed in their earlier lives as frogs or elephants, etc.”: “Given what I know about how the world works, I could not regard their views as serious candidates for truth” (p. 91).

9
David Bentley Hart,
The Experien
ce of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 77.

10
See chapter six in this book, pp. 133-35.

11
James Orr,
The Christian View of God and the World
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), p. 8.

12
Abraham Kuyper, quoted in Peter S. Heslam,
Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 92. Heslam points out that Orr too “had an independent, unified, and coherent worldview derived from a central belief or principle” (p. 93).

13
To read more about this notion of a benevolent God who is useful only as a buddy to bail you out of difficulty but who need not be thought of as holy and requiring holiness of his creation, see Christian Smith (with Melinda Lundquist Denton),
Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Christian Smith (with Patricia Snell),
Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

14
Dallas Willard,
Renovation of the Heart
(Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), p. 100.

15
Roy Clouser, “Is There a Christian View of Everything from Soup to Nuts?”
Pro Rege
, June 2003, p. 6.

16
Orr,
Christian View
, p. 8.

17
James Q. Wilson,
The Moral Sense
(New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 25.

18
The naturalistic fallacy is well recognized in philosophy; C. S. Lewis has an especially lucid explanation in
The Abolition of Man
(New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 43-49.

19
C. S. Lewis advances such an argument in
Mere Christianity
(New York: Macmillan, 1943).

20
Wilhelm Dilthey, quoted in Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 83.

21
For an approach to worldview analysis with an even more individual and personal focus, see J. H. Bavink,
The Church Between Temple and Mosque
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981). Bavink examines alternate worldviews from five foci: (1) I and the Cosmos, (2) I and the norm, (3) I and the riddle of my existence, (4) I and salvation, and (5) I and the Supreme power.

Chapter 8: Intelligent People Who Clash by Day

1
See Charles Colson,
Born Again
(Old Tappan, NJ: Spire, 1977); C. S. Lewis,
Surprised by Joy
(London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955); and Tatiana Goricheva,
Talking About God Is Dangerous
, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1986). I have summarized the stories of Colson and Goricheva in
Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), pp. 192-95, 198-202.

2
English is not the first language of Sixia Lu. With her permission I have edited her essay for publication here. I have retained her transliteration of the names of the Chinese people to whom she refers.

3
See Paul Johnson,
Intellectuals
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Bryan Magee,
Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) and
Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy
(London: Phoenix, 1998); and Jacques Barzun,
From Dawn to Decadence: Five Hundred Years of Western Cultural Life
(New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

4
See my
The Universe Next Door
, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004) and
How to Read Slowly
(Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 1978).

5
I have treated this topic in much greater detail in James W. Sire,
Václav Havel: The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001).

6
Václav Havel, “A Joint Session of the U.S. Congress” (February 21, 1990), in
The Art of the Impossible
, trans. Paul Wilson and others (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 19.

7
Václav Havel,
Letters to Olga: June 1979-September 1982
, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), p. 359.

8
Ibid., pp. 345-46.

9
Ibid., p. 346.

10
This haiku has probably been translated more than any other. I quote it from the translation in which, so far as I remember, I first encountered it: Donald Keene,
Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers
(Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1955), p. 39. For nearly 150 other delightful translations, imitations and takeoffs on this haiku, see Hiroaki Sato,
One Hundred Frogs
(New York: Inklings/Weatherhill, 1995).

11
The following reading of the poem was suggested by Keene,
Japanese Literature
, p. 39, but I have modified and elaborated on it considerably. For comments by twelve critics, see Makoto Ueda,
Bash
ō
and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 140-42.