Read Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Online
Authors: James W. Sire
Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (8 page)
Wright’s understanding of
worldview
is firmly based in the tradition of worldview analysis stemming from Abraham Kuyper and advanced by his close friend Brian Walsh, whose work is described in chapter five. Wright’s contribution is worth explaining in some detail. First a general statement:
Worldviews have to do with the presuppositional, pre-cognitive stage of a culture or society. Wherever we find the ultimate concerns of human beings, we find worldviews.
94
More specifically, worldviews characteristically do five things:
- “Worldviews provide the
stories
through which human beings view reality.” - They “answer the
basic
questions that determine human existence: who are we, where are we, what is wrong, and what is the solution?” - “The stories that express the worldview, and the answers which it provides to the questions of identity, environment, evil and eschatology, are expressed . . . in cultural
symbols
.” - “Worldviews include a praxis, a way-of-being-in-the-world.”
95 - They ask, “What time is it?”
96
Wright is especially insightful as he explains and illustrates the significance of literary genre—story and epistle, for example. His “reading” of Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants serves as a template for a worldview reading of
stories
, especially biblical parables and narratives. His “readings” of Paul’s letter to Philemon and Roman senator Pliny the Younger’s letter to a friend show that, while both letters seem to say very much the same thing, they embody radically different worldviews.
These five elements—story, praxis, question-answers, symbol and time—interface and interact. That is, they are lived out in individuals and in the social matrix in which the individuals live. Worldviews are embodied and carried forth through religion, theology, imagination, feeling, mythology (i.e., world-orienting stories, not false tales), and more formal literature. “But worldviews normally come into sight, on a more day-to-day basis, in
sets of beliefs and aims
which emerge into the open, which are more regularly discussed, and which in principle could be revised somewhat without revising the worldview itself.”
97
Wright charts the relationships that emerge as one investigates any given society or culture, but in his scholarship on both Jesus and Paul, he focuses his attention on the worldviews of the New Testament and modern scholars. Here, for example, is Wright’s assessment of the value of such worldview analysis:
By studying Paul within “worldview” categories . . . we acquire a new way of seeing not only what was really important within his fully blown theology but also why theology as a whole became more important for him, and ever afterwards within the community of Jesus’ followers, that it was (and still is to this day) within the worlds of either Jews or pagans.
98
More specifically, in his study of Paul, Wright proposes
that there is indeed a way of analyzing and understanding Paul in which these several multi-layered dichotomies [e.g., Jewish/Gentile] can be resolved, not indeed in a flat or simplistic way, but in that kind of harmony which often characterizes profound thinkers whose work not only touches on different topics but does so in different contexts and a variety of styles and tones of voice.
99
Wright focuses his worldview analysis primarily on our correctly understanding the Scriptures. But with his many charts and specific illustrations of worldview analysis, Wright shows us how better to understand both ourselves and our world. His work has spurred controversy not only in the academic world but in the larger pastoral world as well. With Wright, worldview analysis, despite recent criticism, is alive and well.
Charles Taylor.
Philosopher Charles Taylor does worldview analysis but without using or even referring to the term. His work deserves our attention because of its quality and his unique label and focus. He speaks of s
ocial imaginaries
, a term he introduces in
Modern Social Imaginaries
and uses throughout
A Secular Age
, his massive study of the origins and emergence of modernity and his identification of “exclusive humanism.”
100
But why use this
social imaginaries
instead of the much more common term
worldview
? He could define
worldview
in his own peculiar way and thus credit the value of its long tradition in academic discourse. But maybe he thinks the term carries too much baggage from its frequent use elsewhere. In any case, the term
social imaginary
suggests its own peculiar take on intellectual and social history:
By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.
101
Taylor continues to emphasize the broad scope of
social imaginaries
:
There are important differences between social imaginary and social theory. I adopt the term imaginary (i) because my focus is on the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends. It is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.
102
Three elements of this term must be clarified. First, Taylor is not satisfied to use only the categories assumed by intellectual history or the history of philosophy. He wants to include the language and musing of ordinary people.
Second, he is not so much interested in the intellectual content of a
social imaginary
as in its
believability
. Why did we in the Western world come to change not only our conscious minds but those notions our conscious minds assumed as they shifted content and moved toward secularism?
Believability
is not truthfulness. It is the subjective character of that which we come to think of as true. In reading Taylor we should always keep in mind that he is first drawing our attention to the pretheoretical, the “unthought,” the immediately intuited—those elements of our thinking that we take for granted. This tells us what the foundations for our truth-judgments are. Taylor is telling us that these subterranean notions make our movement from one
social imaginary
to another heavily dependent on matters to which we have not given much thought, though we could do so. And Taylor will help us do this.
In his focus on
believability
, the
social
and the
imagination,
and his explicit marginalizing of
social theory
, one might question whether Taylor gives the intellectual aspect enough attention to call
social imaginary
an appropriate alternate term for
worldview
. But
believability
recognizes the role of the intellect in deciding what is believable. And one need have no notion of social theory in one’s worldview in order for it to be a worldview.
Moreover, in his attention to the role of the pretheoretical we can see the long shadow cast by Dilthey, Kuyper and even Dooyeweerd as long ago they stressed the pretheoretical character of worldviews, but it is not at all clear that Taylor has them in mind. My point here is that Taylor’s emphasis on the pretheoretical character of worldviews is not new; he has just given it fresh blood. We will return to this subject again in chapter four.
Third, the term
imaginary
seems to presuppose idealism—the notion that the only reality we know is composed of the ideas we hold solely in our minds. But in a chapter titled “The Specter of Idealism,” Taylor rejects the notion that the social imaginary runs solely on ideas—those of either academics or ordinary folk.
What we see in human history is ranges of human practices that are both at once, that is, material practices carried out by human beings in space and time, and very often coercively maintained, and at the same time, self-conceptions, modes of understanding. . . . Because human practices are the kind of thing that makes sense, certain ideas are internal to them; one cannot distinguish the two in order to ask the question Which causes which?
103
Again, the term
social imaginary
might first appear to be so laden with the categories of sociology or anthropology (i.e., the categories used by Charles Kraft or Paul Hiebert) that intellectual categories would be missing, they are not. Much of
A Secular Age
reads like intellectual history.
Taylor’s notion of social imaginary is not his only contribution to sociology, history and worldview analysis. He has much to say about how these social imaginaries shift and change as history proceeds. In
Modern Social Imaginaries
, Taylor is cautious about making universal claims about the flow of history:
The only general rule in history is that there is no general rule identifying one order of motivation as always the driving force. Ideas always come in history wrapped up in certain practices, even if these are only discursive practices.
104
Economic, political, and religious ideas and practices mix, match and collide, but changes and developments occur and social imaginaries multiply.
105
Taylor is certain, however, that changes do not occur simply by
subtraction
, as if the move toward the modern secular age could be accounted for simply by “the dissolution of old moral ties, submissions, and solidarities.” Rather “it carried its own moral ideals, as Tocqueville noted in relation to individualism in the modern world.”
106
Change came by addition—by the attraction of new ideas and ideals:
Moreover, the new ideal involved a new kind of link to society. The new character ideal, as Appleby describes it, exalts “the man who developed inner resources, acted independently, lived virtuously, and bent his behaviour to his personal goals.” He was a person capable of industry, perseverance, and self-reliance.
107
In
A Secular Age,
Taylor’s goal is to answer one highly complex question:
How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naively within a theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which everyone’s construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbelief has become for many the major default option?
108
In answering this question, he is clear about what will not be his thesis:
I will be making a continuing polemic against what I call “subtraction stories.” Concisely put, I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this process—modernity or secularity—is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside. Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.
109
We do not need to discuss the merits of his explanation of intellectual and social change. For one thing, James K. A. Smith, whose views I will soon discuss, has done this in
How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). But I should admit that my own
Universe Next Door
, when it concerns how worldviews change, is indeed largely based on
subtraction
. If I were revising that book again, I would have to deal with Taylor’s rejection of subtraction.
I will, however, make this initial rejoinder. The traditional Christian worldviews (note the plural) have clearly provided core conceptions that have been lost, abandoned, rejected (subtracted, if you will) from them. The personhood of God and the character of God as the foundation for reality are two of many. This loss must not be ignored, even as at the same time we recognize that some modern conceptions are clearly different from those recognized and embodied by, say, Medieval or Reformation era societies.
110
Taylor’s massive study of the flow of ideas and their social embodiments is brilliant.
A Secular Age
is a tough read. I know. I read it on a long vacation in Hawaii. But it’s worth the effort; it is not just a rich intellectual and social history, but is full of nuggets from which Christians, especially apologists, can glean arguments and evidence for their case for the Christian faith. I am deeply grateful for Taylor’s work.
James Davison Hunter.
In
To Change the World
Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter first examines the ways Christians have understood how the world can be changed to accord more with values and shades of human flourishing that reflect the will of God. Society changes when individuals and their worldviews change, Christians often argue, but, Hunter says, “This account is almost completely mistaken.”
111
Moreover, Christians should not try to change the world. Rather they should honor God and manifest “loving obedience to God” and thus fulfill “God’s command to love our neighbor.”
112
In short, he calls us to “faithful presence,” which he describes at some length. The world will change, but that is not our
goal
.