Preface
This document is intended to provide an academic underpinning for the worldview considerations that pertain to the Explore project. The aim here is to glimpse worldview through a socio-historical lens to bolster the warrant for use of worldview as a generative medium for faith dialogue in our contemporary setting. The utility and superiority of worldview as such a medium is contrasted with its historic alternatives in the Church. The document also makes the claim that the utilization of worldview as such a medium positions Explore in a more welcome light as it pertains to the interests of the broader world of academics and politics, where worldview is also taking hold as a medium for dialogue and inquiry. The document is not written with public or common interests in mind, but is meant to provide a solid theoretical foundation for the project as a whole. It may prove helpful (and can be elaborated upon) in defense of the underlying approaches in Explore either internally or with any other partner institutions or affiliations that require academic or technical expression from the Explore team.
Worldview as Medium for Dialogue
As a post-Enlightenment culture, we are perhaps the first civilization in human history to attempt to supplant a focus on mythic narrative as the bedrock to the lived experience of the common citizen under the claim that all of life can be viewed as it were through an objective and analytical lens. This shift seems to undergird the host of institutional dogmas—officially scientistic and thereby censorial approaches applied to societal matters on a spectrum from academic policy to modern formulations for definitions on what constitutes health. The intellectual hegemony long maintained by such empirical mandates is well expressed by Maxwell, who nests his critique of Modernity in determined hope:
At present standard empiricism and the philosophy of knowledge predominate in science, and in universities, in a very obvious way… From this it might be concluded that there are few signs of change in academic inquiry, from knowledge to wisdom, and little hope that such a change will come to be in the foreseeable future, however urgent the need may be, and however decisive the reasons may be, for making such a change.
This gloomy conclusion is, I believe, a mistake. There is a growing groundswell of opinion and effort already devoted, in various ways, to bring about changes in science, technology, scholarship, education, medicine, welfare, aid, politics, the media and elsewhere that can be interpreted as pioneer attempts to implement aspects of what has here been called ‘the philosophy of wisdom’. These diverse efforts are, however, scattered and isolated… There is a general failure to appreciate the need for a coordinated and comprehensive change in intellectual aims and methods throughout all of academic inquiry and education” (p.297).
To Maxwell’s helpful remarks and the prospective modes of engagement that he asks us to imagine, I would invite that we submit tired debates over faith into the same hope and revolutionary interest. In order to achieve this, we’ll need a reliable medium for the exchange, not only of ideas, but of the stories that we inhabit as our very lives. The hope here is to identify generative alternatives to the narrow and adversarial modes that have dominated such discourses to date.
Thus, we discover a dilemma—a rather unhelpful, yet unavoidable rift—inside of the modern demand to apply the dictates of the naturalistic worldview to more of human life than it can properly account for. As history plods forward, and as institutional authority rapidly changes
before our eyes, a broadening ecology of ideas invites that we secure means of inquiry, of dialogue and of gathering that allow for kind exchanges of thought and life-praxis with an aim at deep listening; one settled in determined, reverent reflection on the Imago Dei in our human neighbours. Such an approach requires notable courage and maturity, as loving in the name of Christ always does. Accordingly, some have suggested that philosophy itself (i.e., “love of wisdom”) is epitomized by such a focus, as “a summons – to oneself and to every other searcher.” Along this way, the process of globalization combined with the widespread application of a bourgeoning suite of social technologies has served to decenter the Church from her prior status as an official arbour around which Western culture turned. This marking of the end of Christendom occurs in parallel fashion to the loosening of the staunch grip of Modernity on many of our institutional forms. The Church is thus poised to engage the global marketplace of ideas with the brilliance and transformative power of Christ’s mind and heart, aided by his Spirit in novel and culturally informative manners. Along the way, the Church requires that her body members find kind and reliable modes of engagement around this shared table of perspectives and ideas—modes of engagement that reclaim the human person as the primary focus of academic, political and cultural pursuit. The modernist motifs to which the Church has so long been opposed require generative alternatives that “avoid being put into a summary, that cannot be systematized or fully articulated”which thereby avoid recapitulation of such totalizing reflexes as adversarial impulses toward Modernity.
Given that she can no longer presume the interest of those she invites into her sanctuaries, the Church must go with Christ to the very ones who represent Him in the world; she must go to all those in need, all those bereft of hope or insight, meaning and purpose, to those who don the title “least” in whichever domains of life they happen to dwell.
The response of the Church to the restrictive purview enjoined upon the West by empiricism as a dominant mode of cultural inquiry and academic praxis has often been reflexive--yielding an arguably commensurate and unhelpful demand to its supposed opponents. Often (and, paradoxically) such reflexes take shape, however unwittingly, as recapitulations of the same exacting sort, spun in reverse, as fear-based shibboleths established to silence or to vanquish supposed opponents to Christ and his mission. This reflex seems to be employed as a bulwark against such forces for adherents to faith in Christ. Too often, these reflexes are intoned as countervailing certitudes. Dialogue among the those who grant their allegiances to such adversarial approaches—whether those are held consciously and concertedly or diffusely and unconsciously—has remained, to this point and on the whole, a seemingly untenable struggle. This reflex from within certain facets of the global community as the Church—reflexive apologetics aimed at correcting or reforming the supposedly ‘lost’ or misguided ‘other’—often become institutionalized at the level of academics and politics. A cogent example of this is the corpus of work and life course put forward by the Reformist theologian, statesman and politician, Abraham Kuyper, who, as a university professor became Prime Minister of the Netherlands and sought to codify Christian identity into the nation state.
The Warrant for Worldview as Medium for Dialogue:
Therefore, so long as we allow the current, stilted frames on both sides of the divide to remain, we are propelled away from generative dialogue in solidarity with those who do not acknowledge “our” (any actor’s) perspective from the position of “my” (any actor’s) imminent frame of reference. Given the interests of Explore, the subject of worldview provides a generative frame for mutual engagement between those of opposing ideals, philosophical perspectives and general life experience at the level of local culture and lived experience. Once and for all, it acknowledges that all people mete out the demands of their lives inside of a living system, within which they arrange thought and attribute value in manners in which they are deeply invested.
Prior cultures and forms of selfhood were not saddled with such a demand in an open market of ideas and technologies. Worldview was ‘given’ in our pre-Enlightenment societies—just as it remains in much of the East and among indigenous cultures not yet subsumed under the blanket of technology and reach of globalization—and, but for a few outliers, remained thusly hidden and out of view as a conscious experience. That is, one didn’t engage the matter of worldview as something to contend with or to ‘discover’, one simply lived life in an effort to survive the dynamics presented to oneself in the local community with as much adaptive capacity as one could muster. Further to this, in prior contexts rights and identity were deposited into roles.Questions about, “who one truly is,” or the demand to find one’s “true purpose in life” did not reverberate at the centre of culture as a dominant aspect of personal development or as a weight placed at the heart of individual ambition. The average citizen of the West in a pre-enlightenment world thus lived inside of a dominant cultural narrative as the recipient of a worldview in largely homogenous native societies. It is arguable, therefore, that what has shifted is not the inherited aspect of worldview reception, but the native homogeneity of worldviews themselves.
In the global West, therefore, for the first time in human history, now armed with the notion of a disenchanted, rational mind, we seem collectively unable as a society to discern the very myths that guide how we live and move and have our being.That we are the first society not to consciously rely explicitly upon mythic narrative as guiding ethos for communal, professional and religious life is explainable in that the place of the last of these three is currently undergoing massive reorientation as an accepted societal pillar.
de Vries draws from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) for its explanatory brilliance in these domains. In particular, de Vries notes that MacIntyre rejects atomized human rights, efficiency and utility as pseudo-concepts that amount for him to moral fictions. Contrary to
these Modernist conceptualizations, ‘the good life’ is to MacIntyre, inextricable from the virtues, which are perpetually embedded and proven in “practice, narrative and tradition” (p.7). The second of these, narrative, is said by MacIntyre to be the means by which life can and should be experienced as a unity. de Vries summarizes MacIntyre’s narrative emphasis as it regards worldview as follows:
a human life should be understood as a unity. It has intentions, beliefs and history—it is a narrative without which there is no intelligibility and accountability and therefore no personal identity. The quest for this unity is the good life for man and is always an education” (p.7) (italics added).
Naugle, in concert with this assessment MacIntyre, observes that, “because of social and philosophical forces, the narrative unity of life, or of an individual life, was destroyed in the context of modernity. A human self, nonnarratively conceived, cannot be the bearer of Aristotelian virtues, which is MacIntyre’s primary concern. On the contrary, a virtuous life is possible only to the extent that it is conceived, unified, and evaluated as a whole.” (p.301). Naugle continues in noting MacIntyre’s central thesis as it regards the essence of the human dilemma in our contemporary setting. Putting a finer point on the matter as Naugle emphasizes, “Hence, MacIntyre seeks to recover a concept of an integrated human existence ground in the integrity of a narrative which links birth, life, and death, or beginning, middle and end, into a singular coherent story embraced communally…all human conversations and actions are best understood as “enacted narratives” (p.211)… narrative, not free floating, independent selves, is the most basic category” (p.301). Naugle allows MacIntyre the final word:
“Hence,” MacIntyre writes, “there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things… A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (p.216)” (p.301).
Thus, we are invited to reclaim mythic narrative as the heart of the matter, the heart of our worldview(s).
The 20th century adoption of materialist motifs in everything from our institutions of learning to our politics has, thus, resulted in an inability to combine the consistent features of life into an integrated whole, which is the primary utility of worldview as an essentially human matter. Mary Midgley, cited by Stenmark, draws cogent attention to this dilemma citing the cultural treatment of evolutionary theory as a helpful example:
The theory of evolution is not just an inert piece of theoretical science. It is, and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins. Any such narrative must have symbolic force. We are probably the first culture not to make that its main function. Most stories about human origins must have been devised purely with a view to symbolic and poetic fittingness. Suggestions about how we were made and where we come from are bound to engage our imagination, to shape our views of what we now are, and so to affect our lives (italics added).
This has been well enough acknowledged by those who have eyes for the discernment of such dynamics (Shae, et al.). Beyond such critique, however, the demand to find a means for dialogue in solidarity with our neighbour—Dialogos—remains. Put differently, the need for generative forms of engagement in increasingly open domains and mediums of thought and discourse remains an essential need in an increasingly secularized and pluralistic society. Plainly stated, if the Church is to be faithful to the business of loving her neighbour in concert with Christ’s interests and call, she must develop the capacity to have and to host a great conversation.
Accordingly, we arrive at the present as those saddled with the Modern demand to discern one’s living system inside of a global marketplace of ideas. We are yet immature as Modern Selves, a collective mass of adolescents jockeying for position and status as we discern what the constituents of an ‘adult’ response to all of this might be. Amid such churn, we are left with the novel dilemma of finding a manner that allows for generative engagement with solidarity across cultures, religious traditions, national interests and communal forms. In fact, the primary novelty of our modern society may be summarized by this very demand.
Such lines of thought are opening into culture beyond the familiar religious contexts inside of which the dialogue has typically occurred. Examples of this can be found in the interest of psychologists and philosophers alike in promoting worldview as a medium for discernment and assessment of the institutional ethos’ that have driven social innovation and reform in the Global West. The recent subjection of the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDG) to scrutiny against this backdrop is but one example of the quickened pace of change to the Modernist frameworks that have marked institutional vision and philosophy at the global level As de Vries explains, “The worldview space offers a framework for understanding societal dynamics in terms of the construction and maintenance of collective narratives that restrain or inspire the legitimacy of moral rules and power relations.” (p.4) The Church owes it to the culture to submit her assessments of the same into the public square with deep humility and hope with a committed capacity for listening.
As the Church is decentred as the arbiter of ethics and moral life in the local community, and as more and more cultural integration occurs via a mobilized global population, Christians face new challenges and new opportunities in their quest to fulfill Christ’s call to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”As trust in the Church wanes and as authority changes hands with rapidity, reliable social forms and focuses that go to the heart of the matter as it regards our shared humanity become, not only all the more pressing, but all the more precious. Cultural dialects pertain to the group in which they are embedded. What we now need are human dialects that pertain to all. Worldview here presents as that very opportunity, the very lens through which we can find a means of engaging our neighbour in the spirit of solidarity and mutual understanding echoed in Christ’s prayer:
“O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them that we all would be one in God.”
Inside of this quest, and in keeping with the invitations made by others who challenge many of our societal institutional forms and the Modernist presumptions that led to them, it will be helpful to distance from merely categorical appraisals of worldview as staunch tenets, leaving those behind as myopically empirical approaches to the human matters that will always evade such methodologies. As an alternative to such, Koltko-Rivera (2004) proffers dimensional approaches to worldview for their elaborative quality. He cites Clark and Watson (1995) to emphasize this shift as a salutary opportunity: “categorical approaches, “categorize individuals into qualitatively different groups,” whereas dimensional models “differentiate individuals with respect to the degree or level of the target construct” (p.5). A dimensional approach to worldview is, thus, more suited to the goal of dialogue and the kind of multifaceted inquiry that honours the scope and breadth of human experience across all its wonderful domains in a manner that categorical approaches seem to have disallowed.
Worldview as a Common Human Dynamic: Placing Worldview at the Heart of Human Solidarity:
However, as a matter for the common citizen of the Global West, worldview is not an academic construct and is, for many, not consciously held or discerned. It presents as a living matter inside of the very domains that are familiar to us all. In particular, ten worldview domains invite our focus as means to engagement with our neighbour on the street in dialogues of solidarity. They are:
- Theology: Theism, Trinitarian Theology
- Philosophy: Supernaturalism, Faith and Reason
- Ethics: Moral Absolutes (contra relativism)
- Science: Creationism
- Psychology: Mind/Body Dualism (Fallen Nature of Man)
- Sociology: Traditional Family, Church and State (Both individual and societal order are important to God)
- Law: Divine and Natural Law
- Politics: Justice, Freedom and Order
- Economics: Stewardship of Property
- History: Creation, Fall, Redemption
Invitations to dialogue in such domains allow engagement and inquiry across the dimensional spectrum promoted above. The value here in determining exactly how much or how little of any one domain pertains to any given individual is contrasted with the opportunity to hold more of one’s lived experience in conscious and therefore, intentional, view. As we seek to engage our neighbour within the particular interests of Explore, holding in mind these eleven as territories of life allows worldview to be both held and engaged as a continuous thread of inquiry and dialogue as members of an increasingly caring society. Within these domains, we are invited together to first reflect upon and then discern the principles to which we wish to submit our lives. The teaching and life of Jesus—his pedagogy, his own worldview and his central mythic narratives—are thus posited with humility into the open field of ideas alongside any others who lay claim to a way (or, ways) of life.
Koltko-Rivera offers a model of the component dimensions of worldview inside of which individuals could conceivably be aided in their quest for developing richer understandings of themselves as situated in an array of contexts as a more consciously held worldview. For the purposes of the Explore project, Koltko-Rivera’s collation of such dimensions could help to establish what Cushman has promoted as a “hermeneutic circle” through which persons can have their living perspective illuminated and horizon’s of engagement, broadened.