Rethinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World

by J. Mark Bertrand

Overview

Everyone has a worldview. How did we get it? How is it formed? Is it possible by persuasion and logic to change one's worldview?

In Rethinking Worldview, writer and worldview teacher J. Mark Bertrand has a threefold aim. First, he seeks to capture a more complex, nuanced appreciation of what worldviews really are. Then he situates worldviews in the larger context of a lived faith. Finally, he explores the organic connections between worldview and wisdom and how they are expressed in witness.

Bertrand's work reads like a conversation, peppered with anecdotes and thought-provoking questions that push readers to continue thinking and talking long after they have put the book down. Thoughtful readers interested in theology, philosophy, and culture will be motivated to rethink their own perspectives on the nature of reality, as well as to rethink the concept of worldviews itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433520846
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	10/05/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

J. Mark Bertrand (MFA, University of Houston) is the author of Bible Design Blog and a fiction writer. He is also a lecturer on theology and culture at Worldview Academy.

J. Mark Bertrand (MFA, University of Houston) is the author of  Bible Design Blog and a fiction writer. He is also a lecturer on theology and culture at Worldview Academy.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Thins Unseen: Rethinking Worldview

Reality can be only partially attacked by logic.

FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT

"So you're writing a book about worldview?"

I must have heard it a thousand times from a thousand different people, each one with a wide-eyed, uncomprehending stare. Not because they had no idea what a worldview is — it's a view of the world, obviously — but because it was hard to imagine why another book on the subject needed to crowd its way onto the shelves. After teaching Christian worldview for several years to high school and college students, I knew what they meant. There were already dozens of exceptional titles on this topic and hundreds of competent hangers-on. Everything that needed to be said about world-views had already been uttered, emphasized, repeated, underscored, and capped with a series of exclamation marks.

What could I possibly add to all that?

Nothing, I found myself thinking. There was nothing more to say. The ancient author of Ecclesiastes bookends the problem succinctly: on the one hand, there is "nothing new under the sun" (1:9), and on the other, "of making many books there is no end" (12:12). Whenever people asked about my book, whatever explanations I managed to stutter through, the raised eyebrows never lowered and the tone of mild amazement never evaporated.

"So you're writing a book about worldview? Oh, dear."

Looking back, I am sure that many of the people who heard about this book were not so skeptical. It was my own doubts, my own cynicism, torturing me.

The problem is, I don't see the concept of worldview the way other people do. As far as I'm concerned, it's mine. Of course, I realize I did not invent it and up until now have done relatively little to promote it, but still I'm plagued with the blind, intimate regard of a lover for the object of affection. Yes, I am in love with worldviews. From the moment I first discovered the notion, I have adored it. No matter how often I think about them — no matter how many of their problems and shortcomings become apparent to me — I can never seem to exhaust my fascination with worldviews.

My discovery of worldview, however, was like G. K. Chesterton's discovery of orthodoxy. In his famous book by the same name, Chesterton compares himself to a man who has set sail on a quest and made landfall on an isle of mystery, only to find that it is already inhabited and well known to everyone else. By the time I planted my little flag on the beaches of worldview, there were already skyscrapers towering over the tree line.

So when the urge to write, to contribute a slender volume to the growing literature on the subject, finally came to me, I harbored doubts. Whatever there was to say had already been said. Writing another book would be like composing a sonnet in honor of a beauty queen: you are not telling people anything they don't already know.

But I was wrong. The more I studied and taught, the more I realized that there was something more to be said, something urgent. As much as I love the worldview concept, and as much good as I believe it has done, I am convinced that the time has come to rethink our assumptions about worldviews. We need to take a second look and make sure that, in adopting the concept so widely and making it such a staple of evangelical discourse, we have not gutted it. I suspect that we have. In streamlining the idea of worldviews for mass consumption, we have been simplistic. We have been pedantic. And worst of all, we have been overconfident.

I know because I have been guilty of all this and more, and writing Rethinking Worldview has helped me see it.

What is left to contribute to the conversation about worldview? Plenty. First, we need to recapture a more complex, nuanced appreciation of what worldview really is. Without that, we can't proceed. Second, we need to situate worldview in the larger context of a lived faith, finding out how all this intellectual labor should affect not only the way we think but also how we act. To do this will require a renewed focus on the biblical concept of wisdom, which is one of those things we tend to talk about rather than practice. Finally, this book will explore the organic connections between worldview and wisdom, and how they express themselves in witness.

As Christians, we want to talk to the world about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we want them to listen. I believe that a new understanding of worldview coupled with a life of wisdom leads inevitably to profound, powerful witness — and where witness is lacking, perhaps worldview and wisdom are, too. So in these pages we will rethink worldview, restore wisdom to its central role at the heart of Christian living, and seek to regain a credible and creative witness in the culture where God has placed us.

"So you're writing a book about worldview?"

You better believe it.

Worldview and Its Discontents

What makes the worldview concept, pioneered by philosophers, appropriated by theologians and apologists, and now embraced by evangelicals around the globe, so compelling? Of all the insights that have percolated within the ivory towers over the last century, why has this one captured the imagination of so many thinkers — and why has it found such traction in the popular mind?

In part, the reason lies in how obvious the concept is once explained: the notion that everyone has a unique perspective, that we interpret facts through the lens of some theory about life, seems self-evident. "It's common sense," people say. This is something the average man already knows without needing some academic to tell him so.

Another reason for the popularity of worldview thinking is that, in a fragmented society where each of us feels embattled on some point or another, it is comforting to realize that our opponents in the culture war — whoever we conceive of them to be — are, by definition, blinded by their own perspective. No one is purely objective. Our view of the world is colored by upbringing, class, ideology, and experience. So what if our enemies muster powerful arguments against us? So what if "facts" and "reason" seem to be on their side? They are starting from their own prior commitments, and we are starting from ours. Ultimately, none of our basic assumptions are subject to challenge. We may not be able to prove "them" wrong, but they cannot prove us wrong, either. Or so the thinking goes.

When an idea hits the mainstream, it is invariably simplified and streamlined. This has happened to the worldview concept in spades. At one extreme, it becomes a form of relativism: everyone has a worldview; worldviews are inherently subjective, so everyone's perspective is equally valid. At the other end of the spectrum, the worldview concept becomes the key to establishing the priority of one perspective over all the others: everyone has a worldview, but only one is ultimately coherent, so all the others are equally invalid. The irony is that partisans on each end of the divide employ similar terminology, but to different purpose.

Evangelical Christians have tended toward the latter extreme, and no wonder: the worldview concept offers a way to assert the superiority of our faith and deconstruct every opposing ideology, religious and secular, in one fell swoop. In addition, because it is such a bookish, educated notion, worldview thinking offers a much-needed counterweight to the tradition of anti-intellectualism that so many evangelicals now want to leave behind.

That is certainly what attracted me. My first exposure to worldview came through Christian apologists like Francis Schaeffer, a voice in the late twentieth-century wilderness who gave evangelicals permission to use their minds again in church. Here was a believer who did not shrink from an intellectual challenge. He did not cloister himself in some faraway spot where his faith need never be defended. At the high tide of modern confidence in science and rationalism, Schaeffer was arguing that after all, none of it — the world, life, the mind, the imagination, the body — made any sense unless God, as revealed in Scripture, really existed. Like many others, I was swept up in the confidence of that proposition, buoyed by the hope that, even if I myself could not understand the reason why, ultimately, intellectually, one simply must accept the truth of the Christian faith.

I knew that there was more to faith than intellectual assent. I knew that when Jesus commissioned the church to "make disciples," he had more in mind than changing people's worldview. But as an apologetic tool — and frankly, as a psychological crutch, as a justification for why a well-read, middle-class, academically minded man of the late twentieth century, with an advanced degree and more than a passing knowledge of philosophy (including Nietzsche, who had searched for God's pulse and found none, and Bertrand Russell, who had written emphatically, if not always persuasively, about why he was not a Christian), should not be scorned and dismissed out of hand for his faith — worldview thinking was a panacea.

The first thing worldview thinking established in my mind was that Christian faith is coherent. What the Bible teaches about God, man, and the world holds together. It has the strength of internal consistency. If anything, it is too consistent, too neat, since every challenge, every paradox, can be explained by the fact that God is omnipotent and we are finite.

There are some matters, as God emphasized to Job at the tail end of the Bible's account of that righteous man's suffering, that are simply too dark for us to probe. This sense of consistency was important to me, and still is, because the modern assumption that religion is simply myth and superstition runs strong in our culture. In the early twentieth century, liberal and fundamentalist alike agreed on the radical divide between faith and reason, each seeking to neutralize one by means of the other, and today we still live in the shadow of that settlement. Americans accept, for example, that a person elected to public office will make decisions based on his ideological framework. But if that framework is religious, we grow suspicious. Faith is a private affair, a matter of the heart. In the public square, reason is the arbiter — in name, if not in practice. Is it any wonder that, growing up in these circumstances, thoughtful Christians are drawn toward anything that might explain that we are not unsophisticated dupes — or at least, that our position is defensible from the point of view not only of faith but of reason too?

Evangelicals see themselves as an embattled people. Later, I will take up the topic of siege mentality and how our fear of impending collapse has sometimes led us to justify what in Christ's name is unjustifiable. For now, suffice it to say that we often find ourselves on the defensive, and defensive people tend to be shrill, uncertain, and unconvincing. So the worldview concept instilled me with confidence: there was no need to feel threatened by the world outside — the world that, as a Christian, I was called to be in, but not of. My Christian worldview was intellectually respectable. In fact, it had given birth to a rich and varied (though by no means spotless) tradition. Men and women with a faith like mine and a hope like mine were responsible for much of the good in the culture I had inherited. Instead of apologizing for my faith, worldview thinking convinced me to speak up for it.

When I did, I uncovered another obvious truth: other people have a worldview, too. They are not as impressed as I am that Christianity is a coherent way of seeing the world. The same could be said of Nazism or Stalinism. It is all very well to argue that Christians have a defensible theory of life, but what makes my worldview better than anyone else's? In fact, how can I argue with credibility for the Christian worldview when my own co-religionists cannot agree on what it is? We evangelicals are noted for our divisions — and our divisiveness — so to an outsider, all talk of a monolithic Christian worldview seems absurd.

So I said, "The Christian worldview is coherent."

"Which one are you talking about?" they wanted to know.

For lack of a better answer, I could argue for plain vanilla orthodoxy, the faith embodied in the ancient creeds, or generic evangelicalism, the thin consensus between the denominations that lets us all (mostly, kind of) get along. "That's the Christian worldview I'm talking about."

"Well," they would say, "that's just your opinion. You have your worldview, and I have mine."

Being an astute culture warrior, I pointed out: "That's relativism. You can't say I have my truth and you have yours. There's only one truth, and this is it."

"Says you."

Those two little words — says you — are the most powerful argument in any discipline: theology, philosophy, even domestic harmony. They are powerful because they are true. Whenever you say something, it is you who says it. You. And what do you know? Who are you to speak? Please, get real. You? Why should I listen to you? It is the perfect comeback — just ask your spouse. One of the beauties of the "says you" defense is that if your opponent responds that it is a logical fallacy or some other such rationalist nonsense, you can fold your arms, smile knowingly, and declare, "You've just proved my point." Argument won, game over.

You say your worldview is better than mine? Well, who are you?

Point taken. Somewhere along life's journey, I realized that I could denounce people as relativists for only so long before even I grew bored. After all, it is hard to dismiss as an imbecile the very person you are trying to win over. It is one thing to defend Christianity as a viable option, but quite another to cast it convincingly as the one, the only, option.

We do not fully understand an idea until we grasp its limits.

In coming to terms with this difficulty, I was starting to grasp the limits of the worldview concept. As a defensive measure, it was brilliant. As a contemplative measure, it was also superb. By thinking of the implications of my faith systematically — to the extent that anything can happen systematically in something as disorganized and inefficient as my mind — I was reminded that to be a Christian is, first and foremost, to be one who follows or imitates Christ. My faith involved a transformation: I was called to be like Christ, to be "conformed to his image." That is what we call sanctification. It implies a lifetime pursuit of godliness, and I found that worldview thinking overlaps helpfully with this idea. It reminded me that God's perspective on reality is the correct one — as creator, he has the first and last word — and that my own viewpoint (like my own actions) would be measured against that standard. Worldview consciousness encouraged me to pursue the mind of Christ.

In a sense, worldview thinking helped to justify my position as a believer. I did not come to faith as a result of it, but once I was there, it gave me a way to understand what had happened in my life. It also provided a way to understand why what happened to me did not happen to everyone. But I could not find a way to communicate this insight to anyone who did not already share it.

If you are already a Christian, then worldview is a revelation, but if you aren't, the concept alone will not move you. In fact, it might do just the opposite, driving you to the other extreme where everyone has a worldview and all worldviews are equally valid.

Some worldviews are better than others. This much was obvious. But if I said as much, or if I went further and said that the Christian worldview (however you defined it) was the best of the lot and, as Schaeffer said, the only one that makes sense of the world as it really is, then the unbeliever had a ready answer, one that I could not easily dismiss.

He said: "Oh yeah? Prove it."

I am not such a cynic that I believe this cannot be done. There are arguments — a host of them — that reinforce Christianity's claim. During the course of this book, we will look at more than a few. But this is the moment to shift gears and look at what worldviews really are. Already, we have established that everyone has a worldview. How did we get it? How is it formed? Is it possible by persuasion and logic to change it? Important questions, and before we can begin to talk about "proving" the Christian worldview, we need to explore world-views at greater length.

How Worldviews Are Formed

Here's how they work: first, things happen. Events occur.

You observe them happening to other people; you experience them happening to you. These events produce emotional responses: joy, sad ness, fear, worry, scorn, mirth. They also serve as catalysts for thought. When you think about what happens, you arrange events. You search for meaning, or at least for patterns, in what has taken place. You begin to draw conclusions about the way the world works.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "(Re)thinking Worldview"
by .
Copyright © 2007 J. Mark Bertrand.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface: What This Book Won't Do,
PART 1: WORLDVIEW,
1 Things Unseen: Rethinking Worldview,
2 The Four Pillars: Worldview as Starting Point,
3 God, Man, and the World: Worldview as System,
4 Creation, Fall, and Redemption: Worldview as Story,
PART 2: WISDOM,
5 The Principal Thing: Regaining Wisdom,
6 Not What You Think: The Reality of Wisdom,
7 A City without Walls: Five Lessons for Siege Warfare,
8 Learning to Read,
PART 3: WITNESS,
9 Engagement and Beyond,
10 Three in One: Worldview Apologetics,
11 The Enigma of Unbelief,
12 Imagining the Truth: Christians and Cultural Contribution,
Epilogue: The Final Word,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Rethinking Worldview throws off sparks able to light the dry tinder that many Sunday school classes and seminary seminars have become. Bertrand's four worldview pillars, his explanation of how to move from consumer to critic to contributor, his discussion of personal unity and diversity within the Trinity, and much besides, make this book worth having and giving."
—Marvin Olasky

"The strength of Bertrand's book is its comprehensiveness, as the author turns the prism of worldview until every angle has been illuminated. Bertrand maintains our interest throughout with an incipient narrative thread in which his understanding of worldview is told as the sum of his own discoveries and experiences in relation to worldview. The book actually has the quality of a suspense story in which the reader is led to wonder what Bertrand discovered next in regard to worldview."
—Leland Ryken, Emeritus Professor of English, Wheaton College

"An engagingly written work to strengthen believers in their efforts to engage the world in a winsome and effective manner. This excellent book provides an illuminating and thoughtful way forward for the twenty-first-century church to think, live, speak, and worship. Bertrand has made a splendid contribution to the ongoing conversation regarding Christian worldview thinking. After reading this book I wanted to shout, 'Yes and Amen!' I heartily commend this book and trust it will receive a wide readership."
—David S. Dockery, President and Distinguished Professor of Theology, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; President, International Alliance for Christian Education

"For those of you suffering from 'worldview fatigue,' or who think it's a theologically unhelpful concept, or who are new to the notion altogether, read this book. It's like a satisfying draught of ice-cold, refreshing water on a hot summer day! Bertrand's book is a rich gift to serious citizens of the kingdom of God."
—David K. Naugle, Chair and Professor of Philosophy, Dallas Baptist University