Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (26 page)

50
James H. Olthuis, “On Worldviews,” in
Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science
, ed. Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen and Richard Mouw (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), p. 29.

51
Ibid.

52
Albert M. Wolters,
Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview,
2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 2, 10.

53
Pierson, “Evangelicals and Worldview Confusion,” p. 12.

54
Ronald Nash,
Worldviews in Conflict
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), p. 16.

55
Ibid., pp. 26-30.

56
John H. Kok, “Learning to Teach from Within a Christian Perspective,”
Pro Rege
, June 2003, p. 12.

57
Ibid., p. 14.

58
Ninian Smart,
Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs,
3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000).

59
He pays detailed attention to non-anthropologists Ninian Smart, David Naugle and me, and anthropologists Louis Luzbetak, David Burnett, Michael Kearney and Paul Hiebert, the latter with whom he taught anthropology for many years at Fuller Theological Seminary (Charles H. Kraft,
Worldviews for Christian Witness
[Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2008], pp. 75-128).

60
Ibid., p. 12.

61
Ibid., pp. 167ff.

62
Ibid., pp. 13, 23-27.

63
Paul G. Hiebaert,
Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), p. 15. Both Kraft and Hiebert want to limit the term
worldview
to cultural analysis; it should not be used for individuals, a view to which I and other non-anthropologists take exception.

64
Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 87.

65
Dilthey seems not to have noticed the self-referential incoherence of this position: If all worldviews are a product of their time and place, so is his, and so are the specific views that flesh it out, including his view that all worldviews are a product of time and place. This is the situation of much postmodern thought. See James W. Sire,
The Universe Next Door
, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), chap. 9.

66
Orr,
Christian View
, pp. 32-34.

67
Ibid., p. 32.

68
Ibid.

69
Kuyper,
Lectures on Calvinism
, pp. 21, 46.

70
Ibid., p. 21.

71
Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 253.

72
Ibid., p. 260; italics his.

73
Ibid., pp. 261-62.

74
Ibid., p. 266.

75
Ibid., p. 267; italics his.

76
Naugle’s insight that what German Idealism calls a
Weltanschauung
is almost identical with what the Bible terms “heart” goes a long way toward answering Gregory A. Clark’s charge that “the notion of worldviewness first becomes possible with the work of Kant” (“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], p. 205). Clark holds that the notion of
Weltanschauung
is so utterly idealistic that biblical thought cannot be seen in worldview terms. Mark Noll, on the other hand, says, “The construction of Christian world views has been an ongoing task throughout the history of the church” (“Christian World Views and Some Lessons of History,” in
The Making of a Christian Mind: A Christian World View and the Academic Enterprise
, ed. Arthur Holmes [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985], p. 30). The apostle Paul was aware of worldviews that contrasted with his own in his speech in Athens (Acts 17:16-34). Even the creation account in Genesis may have been cast in terms that deliberately countered the Babylonian concept of creation (Joseph Spradley, “A Christian View of the Physical World,” in
Making of a Christian Mind
, p. 58). In any case, the truth or aptness of a concept is not dependent on how old it is or where it came from, but on whether it comports with reality. Moreover, I find no reason to think that most Christian definitions of
worldview
, including my own original definition or the revised version proposed in the present book, are essentially idealistic.

77
Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 268.

78
Ibid.

79
Ibid., p. 269.

80
Ibid., p. 270.

81
Ibid., p. 271.

82
Ibid.

83
Ibid., p. 272.

84
Ibid., p. 253.

85
Ibid., p. 291.

86
Ibid., p. 330.

87
Ibid., p. 293.

88
David Naugle, personal communication.

89
Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 292. He adds this in his personal communication: “Ontologically grounded worldviews, regardless of whether that ontology is theistic, deistic, naturalistic, pantheistic, and so on, consist of a system of signs, especially narrative ones, that reside in the human heart and there generate a perspective on reality. That of which worldviews are made is a system of signs; that about which they speak is being or reality. Formally, they are semiotic, materially they are established ontologically.”

90
T. S. Eliot,
The Collected Poems and Plays 1909–1950
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), p. 149.

91
See
www.allpoetry.com/the-naming-of-cats
.

92
N. T. Wright
, The New Testament and the People of God
. Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). I read this book prior to writing the first edition of the present book but failed to recognize its distinct contribution to the worldview analysis.

93
N. T. Wright,
Paul and the Faithfulness of God
. Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013).

94
Wright,
New Testament
, p. 122.

95
Ibid., pp. 123-24.

96
In
New Testament
, Wright lists four things. In
Paul
he adds a fifth, p. 33.

97
Wright,
New Testament
, p. 125.

98
Wright,
Paul
, p. 30.

99
Ibid., p. 45.

100
Charles Taylor,
A Secular Age
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

101
Charles Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23.

102
Ibid.

103
Ibid., pp. 31-32. As we will see below, James K. A. Smith and Andy Crouch do not seem to agree.

104
Ibid., p. 33.

105
My language, Taylor’s notions.

106
Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries
,
p. 149, citing Alexis de Tocqueville,
La Démocratie en Amérique
,
vol. 2, part 2, chap. 2; 125.

107
Ibid., citing Gordon S. Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 197.

108
Taylor,
Secular Age,
p. 14.

109
Ibid., p. 22.

110
Meanwhile, we may note the prevalence of Taylor’s rejection of
subtraction theory
; in the 776 text pages of
A Secular Age
, Taylor alludes to and rejects the theory seven times (pp. 22, 26, 90, 157, 170, 437, 572). James K. A. Smith, in
How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), singles out subtraction theory for analysis; see pp. 23-24, 26, 35, 40, 47, 74, 96, 138n.

111
James Davison Hunter,
To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 17.

112
Ibid., p. 234.

113
Ibid., p. 5. Cf. p. 168.

114
Ibid., pp. 103, 131, 210.

115
Ibid., pp. 6, 25, 131.

116
James K. A. Smith,
Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Transformation
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), p. 11.

117
Ibid.

118
Ibid., esp. pp. 63-71, 133-38.

119
See above, p. 61.

120
Smith,
Desiring
, pp. 133-37.

121
Ibid., pp. 31-32, citing Francis Beckwith, introduction to
To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview
, ed. Francis Beckwith, William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 14; Kenneth R. Samples,
A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test
(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), and “The Truth Project” from Focus on the Family (
www.thetruthproject.org
). Smith could have also cited Groothuis’s criteria for evaluating worldviews in
Christian Apologetics
, pp. 52-60.

122
Wright,
Paul
, p. 28, n. 80.

123
James K. A. Smith,
Imagining the Kingdom
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), p. xii.

124
Ibid., p. 8.

125
For a review and critique of Smith’s understanding of the worldviews that confirms my own analysis, see Tawa J. Anderson’s review of
Imagining the Kingdom
in
Christian Scholar’s Review
43, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 187-91.

126
Ibid., p. 7.

127
Ibid.

128
Andy Crouch,
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), pp. 60-64.

Chapter 3: First Things First

1
Scholastic philosophers would say that in him and him alone essence and existence are one (see E. L. Mascall,
He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism
[London: Libra, 1966], p. 13).

2
This definition is based on the first two propositions of Christian theism in James W. Sire,
The Uni
v
erse Next Door
, 5th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), pp. 28, 31.

3
John Henry Newman,
The Idea of a University
, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 37.

4
Ibid., p. 57.

5
Ibid., p. 45.

6
Josef Pieper,
In Defense of Philosophy
, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), pp. 74-75.

7
George MacDonald,
Creation in Christ
, ed. Rolland Hein (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1976), p. 145; Lewis’s comment on MacDonald comes from his preface to
George MacDonald: An Anthology
and is quoted on the cover of
Creation in Christ
.

8
Gregory A. Clark says, “The idea of ‘worldviewness’ emerges to solve a set of problems in epistemology. . . . The idea of a ‘worldview’ has its natural home in the field of post-Kantian philosophy” (“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], p. 203). This may well be a fact of intellectual history, but it does not mean that any specific worldview must itself make the epistemological issue the first of its concerns. A Christian worldview does not need to do this in order to be a worldview, and in my estimation it should not do so. Neither do I think that a Christian conception of a worldview should put the epistemological issue first. A Christian is
first
of all one who affirms the existence of an infinite-personal God, not one who takes the Bible as a revelation of God. A naturalist, call him Berty, reflecting on why he is a naturalist may well assume the autonomy of his own human reason (his lack of need for God as his creator), but in order to reason at all, he has to
be.
He assumes his own existence, with or without knowing it, when he reasons anything at all. The precise concept of worldview is worldview dependent. No worldview excepting an idealist worldview is necessarily wedded to idealism, post-Kantian or otherwise.

9
Fifty some years ago as a graduate student I was able to convince my philosophy professor in a term paper that this is the case. Had I read Étienne Gilson’s
God and Philosophy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), I might have added this quote: “True enough, the God in whom, as a Christian, Descartes believed was the selfsame God whom, as a philosopher, he knew to be the supreme cause of all things; the fact however remains that, as a philosopher, Descartes had no use for God taken in himself and in his absolute self-sufficient perfection. To him God was an object of religious faith; what was an object of knowledge was God taken as the highest among the ‘Principles of Philosophy’” (pp. 36-37).

10
René Descartes, “Meditation I,” in
The Philosophical Works of Descartes
, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1955), 1:145. Elsewhere Descartes writes, “We should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstrations of Arithmetic and Geometry” (“Rules,” in
Philosophical Works of Descartes
, 1:5). As Frederick Copleston puts Descartes’s view, “There is only one kind of knowledge, certain and evident knowledge.” See Frederick Copleston,
A History of Philosophy
, vol. 4,
Descartes to Leibnitz
(London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1958), p. 70.

11
See, for example, Bernard Williams,
Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1978); Margaret Dauler Wilson,
Descartes
(London: Routledge, 1978); and Stephen Gaukroger,
Descartes: An Intellectual Biography
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).