At our core: Worldview

I have been enjoying CrossTalk Where Life & Scripture Meet by Michael R. Emlet, and I was particularly struck by Emlet's insights into the centrality of man's worldview.  Emlet writes, "Each person (or community) asks and answers foundational questions about the nature of life, consciously or subconsciously. The answers we give to these questions characterize our “worldview,” our “take” on the nature of reality” (p 67).  The most revealing approach to understanding a person is understanding their worldview.  A worldview describes a consistent (to a varying degree) and integral sense of existence and provides a framework for generating, sustaining, and applying knowledge.  However, just as a man's worldview takes a lifetime to develop, it will take thought and consideration to seek it out.

Brain Walse and J. Richard Middlton propose four basic worldview questions:
1. Where are we? That is, what is the nature of the world in which we live?
2. Who are we? Or, what is the essential nature of human beings?
3. What’s wrong? That is, why is the world (and my life) in such a mess?
4. What’s the remedy? Or, how can these problems be solved?

As I serve in full-time student ministry these questions are not overt, but concealed within each conversation.  They are the questions I ask myself; therefore prompting many of the questions I verbalize.  They are important, not so that I can learn the worldview of each student as an end in itself, but because only through understanding their worldview can I minister to them.  I step into their world by understanding how they see the world, by getting behind the lens they wear each day.

On pages 67-68, Emlet states:

These questions – and how we answer them – form the narrative backbone of our lives. They shape the way we interpret life events, from the mundane (no milk in the refrigerator for the breakfast cereal) to the horrific (loss of children in a car accident). They shape our view of ourselves and others. They shape our vision of what constitutes a meaningful life, even a meaningful moment. They shape our beliefs, emotions, and decisions every day. Everybody has an overarching story he or she lives by, moment by moment. Everybody is a meaning marker with categories for making sense of life. Reality does not come to us unfiltered by always through the lens of our perception. The real question is, What lens will we use? What story, what narrative will we use to see the world and interpret our lives?*

Not only must worldviews be investigated and understood, but often they must be challenged and changed.  Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III, Senior Minister of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson contrasted the biblical worldview with 10 “isms” that are at odds with Christianity. His list reveals some of the dangerous beliefs wrongly incorporated into today's worldviews:

1. Life does not revolve around self.
Individualism: The self is the prime reality.
2. Truth exists and matters.
Relativism: there is no such thing as absolutes or morality.
3. What you believe informs everything you do, and what you do shows what you really believe.
Secularism: Religion must be kept out of all public spheres.
4. Real tolerance is not (and cannot be) based on relativism. All roads do not lead up the mountain!
Pluralism: All views, values, and lifestyles must be accorded equal standing.
5. Not everything that works is right.
Pragmatism: Whatever works is right.
6. Not all change is good.
Progressivism: Change is always good and progress is inevitable.
7. Our technology does not give us the ability to solve every human problem.
Rationalization (or Technophilia) Technology can solve all our problems
8. This material world is not all that there is.
Naturalism: Reality is material.
9. Freedom does not mean doing what I want to do.
Antinomianism: Freedom is right and it means I can do whatevery I want to do.
10. You are worse than you think you are. You are what you are alone, when no one sees you.
Privatism: Private life and public life have no necessary connection.

We could all benefit from asking ourselves Walse & Middlton's four questions... and considering where we fit with Duncan's comments.  Perhaps we have grown too accustom to our own lens and fail to question our worldviews stringently enough...

*Joe B. Green, “The (Re-)Turn to Narrative” in Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching: Reuniting New Testament Interpretation and Proclamation