"All people have a worldview and nobody, whether ditchdigger or professional thinker, can live without one."Worldviews are the foundations of cultures, societies, and personal lives.
The term "worldview" may sound abstract or philosophical, a topic discussed by pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed academics. But actually, a person's worldview is intensely practical. It is simply the sum total of our beliefs about the world, the "big picture" that directs our daily decisions and actions. And understanding worldview is extremely important.
Chuck Colson, How Now Shall We Live?
What are worldviews?
Worldviews are like the picture on the box of a jigsaw puzzle. With hundreds of pieces to arrange, having a well-formed image of what it is you’re piecing together is essential to being able to determine where the jigsaw piece in front of you fits. If you start with the wrong ‘big picture’, getting the puzzle to go together well can be challenging. But, start with the right picture, and it becomes relatively easy to work out what each piece is, and where it fits.
Worldviews are like prescription sunglasses. You forget that they are perched on your nose, but everything that you see is coloured and brought in to focus by them. If your prescription is wrong, or your colour tint is too strong, your glasses filter out or distort the light reaching your eyes, making important things like traffic lights harder to see.
Worldviews are like the foundations of a building. They are almost never visible, and digging down to see them is difficult. But if they are mislaid, everyone in the building suffers.
Worldviews are like stories. They have plot-lines, scenes, themes, characters (heroes, bad-guys and extras), and a whole host of other information that helps us work out what meaning and importance the author intended to convey when they chose to retell a particular collection of events. Likewise, it is the themes, plot-lines and other narrative elements that we assume are at work in our lives that serve to give meaning and purpose to the whole of life.
For example, Pragmatism is the spin-off of a secular worldview that maintains that "right" is that which "works" to solve a problem. The right thing to do is the expedient. Identify the problem, find a quick fix, move on to the next problem. How has this impacted how we do church today? How people make choices?
Harvey Cox has summarized the cultural phenomenon this way in his much-acclaimed and dated, but not irrelevant, The Secular City:
"Urban, secular man is pragmatic. He devotes himself to tackling specific problems and is interested in what will work to get something done. He has little interest in what has been labeled 'borderline' questions of metaphysical considerations. He wastes little time thinking about ultimate or religious questions."R.C. Sproul says:
"for the secularist, there is no ultimate answer because there is no ultimate truth … It's a message that's being proclaimed, indeed screamed, from every corner of our culture."There are, of course, many worldviews. Some are mono-theistic (e.g., the worldviews of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), others are pantheistic (e.g., New Age and some eastern religions), and still others are agnostic, maintaining that the nature—and the existence—of god is ultimately unknowable, as in secularism or naturalism.
Understanding a person's worldview aids in communication. Assumptions and ignorance, a lack of understanding of the questions, leads to miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Contextualising our message is no longer just what is done in foreign contexts, but is a fact of life in our multi-cultural societies.
The Apostle Paul modeled this well at Mars Hill when, in seeking to evangelize the intellectual elite of Greece, he built his argument within their own worldview. He said:
"Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an alter with this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you" (Acts 17: 22-23).
Seek out some good old writing on worldviews. I love pre-loved books.
Some valuable reference books on worldviews:
- The Universe Next Door by James Sire (InterVarsity, 1976)
- Is Man the Measure? by Norman Geisler (Baker, 1983)
- Ronald Nash, Worldviews in Conflict, 1992
- Charles Colson, How Now Shall We Live? 1999
- R.C. Sproul, Battle for Our Minds: Worldviews in Collision
- Augustine, The City of God
- Harvey Cox, The Secular City, 1966
- Francis Schaeffer, How Then Shall We Live?
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