Christian Worldview

Christian worldview refers to a collection of distinctively Christian philosophical and religious beliefs. The term is typically used on one of three ways:

• Most commonly, a number of unique Christian worldviews held by those referring to themselves as Christian;
• Alternatively, the common elements of all Christian worldviews;
• Most rarely, a single "Christian worldview" on the full range of issues, in which all views differing from the "Christian worldview" are seen as "non-Christian" or "sub-Christian."

The multiplicity of Biblical worldviews

There is no one "Christian Worldview." (Such terminology constitutes a reification and tendentious conflation into a singular entity of something that is quite pluriform across the ages of history.) Rather, Christian worldviews are the various worldviews held by Christians to be valid views on the world and life for their time. Christian worldviews vary enormously, just as in the different canons of the Bible and different literary sources we can see different "biblical worldviews." True, they all do incorporate the notion of a three-storey universe – the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the underworld – what Northrop Frye indicated as the central clusters of the system of metaphors in the Bible – mountain, garden, and cave. It wasn't until late in the development of the Bible that the notion of Hell appeared, rather than the relatively shallow concept of the Cave or Grave which we still see in the Gospel when the graves open and the walking dead appear between the time of Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. Few Christian worldviews today include the occurrence or possible recurrence of such phenomena. But to accomodate the emergence in the later Apocalyptic literature and the New Testament distinction between the grave and the lake of fire, Frye gives an additional kernel for the fourth metaphorical cluster in the Bible: furnace.

In other respects than the three-storey universe, there are great differences among the biblical worldviews, and these change from canon to canon, both among Jews and later among Christians. For instance, the Sadducean community to which most Temple priests belonged in Jesus' day, accepted only the first five books of the vastly enlarged Hebrew Bible of today. The Sadducees accepted only the Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses – and they had no concept of Resurrection, no Apocalyptic literary genre like the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible of Jews of other worldviews, no Book of Esther (which doesn't even mention the Lord). In Jesus' day, the various schools of Pharisees accepted different sets of books from the Histories, the Wisdom Literature, and the Prophets. The Conservative Jew and sociologist Irving Zeitlin in his very important book, Jesus and His Times, shows the wide diversity of peoples in Palestine in Jesus' day, the wide diversity among Jews as the majority group, and the wide diversity among Pharisees the largest class of learned non-priestly males among the Jews. [1]. What's more whole sections of the Judaic population found the priesthood and the Temple to be false and unacceptable, and refused to go there to worship (this tradition goes all the way back to the Elohists in their refusal of the Yahwist Jerusalem Temple of Solomon). The work of Prof. Felix Just, S.J. Loyola Marymount University is far less adequate and manages to miss many of the most crucial points pinpointed by Zeitlin, but still demonstrates the diversity among Jews [2] and attends somewhat on another webpage to further diversities in the Palestine of Jesus' day among non-Jews and converts to Judaism. [3]

Differences in canons clue to differences in worldviews

These differences in canons among Jews in Jesus day represent in large part differences in worldviews. Likewise, the political affiliations and outlooks, in relation to Messianic ideas and nationalism, differed markedly among the Jews. Today, the main notion of worldview in North America is Protestant and in unlearned discourse the Protestant canon (where the Old Testament differs markedly from the Hebrew Bible of normative post-Second-Temple Judaism, differs as well as from the Ethiopic and the Roman Catholic canons) is aggrandized as the only canon, and then that canon-related Protestant worldview to which no writer in the Bible could possibly subscribe has become doctrinalized in terms of a kernelized Christian story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. This schematic is derived from Herman Dooyeweerd who had a very different notion of worldview from those who use his schematic for a purpose he never envisioned; instead, this borrowed and uncritical derivation obscures Dooyeweerd's usage whereby he defined the Christian "religious groundmotive," in terms of the three points of this schematic. "Religious ground motive" does not equal "worldview" does not equal "doctrine" does not equal "philosophy" – but one can talk philosophically about a given worldview, about Christian worldviews collectively, and about worldviews in general.

Worldviews are a universal of human existence

Worldviews always embrace the world as it exists in one's time, but only in relation to how the world is pictured by this or that person, this or that community or institution, and includes the feedback factor of whatever actions the group wishes to make or is in the process of making toward achieving their perceived goals in their setting. A worldview may be passive and quietist, until some encroaching terrible event overtakes the community and impacts it into a response, where the worldview ante must give way for part of the community at least, thrusting the other part to make strenuous efforts toward a new stance in the midst of everyday-life (the quotidian existence of members of the community). That overarching fact is true also of Christian worldviews from country to country, culture to culture, and age to age. It is inevitable that a large community with its institutions and organizations will introduce elements into its particular worldview that reflect the vicissitudes of its level of knowledge as these change throughout history, but will also contain numerous ideological elements specific to the particular time, place, and culture. Worldviews have to do with the less-than-infinite knowledge, horizons of opportunity, aesthetic sensibilities, and many other factors configured into the background and atmospherics of a community's life in the historical process of its life, subculture, and relations to the broader mainstream culture.

Language factors in worldviews: the case of Palestine in Jesus' day

Another worldview factor has to do with language. On this subject a quotation summarizing an original text © Pauli Huuhtanen and Nils Martola (Kirjapaja 1997, Finland) is in order: "The mother tongue of Jesus was Aramaic. This Semitic language spread from the 7th century B.C. onwards as the administrative language of the Persian Empire as far as Egypt and ousted most other languages of the Near East," including Hebrew. "In Judaea, Hebrew survived alongside its close relative Aramaic as a spoken language up to the first half of the second century A.D," when Hebrew was definitively displaced by Greek among the middle and upper classes after the translaton of the Hebrew Bible into Greek (the Septuagint, which varies considerably from the Hebrew Bible and contains many books that were not canonical to most Jews at the time of translation). It is the Greek Septuagint that is quoted by Paul in his Letters in the New Testament, not the Hebrew Bible in any of its differing canonizations. Aramaic by this time was spoken among the poor and farmers in Palestine, but was largely eclipsed among the cultured. "It is unclear how widespread was a knowledge of Greek in Palestine in the time of Jesus." But by the time of his death, the Greek-speaking synogogues of Jerusalem and other large cities were well attended by Christians like Stephen the Martyr who died at the hands of Saul the Narrow-School Pharisee, Grecized Jews native to Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine, [4] as well as pilgrims and converts who spoke mostly Greek. "... [G]overnment was impossible without a mastery of Greek. Relations with Jews living outside Palestine also required a command of Greek, for in Egypt, for example, the Jewish population seem to have known only Greek." And there Philo the Jewish philosopher who read the Septuagint and worshipped in a Greek-speaking synogogue wrote his defense of the Pentateuch as the Jewish philosophy, using Plato's allegorical method of interpretation, to prove that canon superior to anything the Greeks had to offer in philosophy. Philo was a Sadducean Jew. Philo Alexandrinus was born circa 20 BC and died circa 40 AD. If Jesus went to Egypt at a very young age, as the Gospel says, Jesus could have been living a few blocks from Philo while the Sage was writing philosophy and attending to the Jewish community's relalions with the government of Alexandria, a city where all the Jewish biblical canons, sects, and worldviews were represented and the city's Jews were not only speaking Greek but also presenting Bible stories in dramatic performances. ¶ "The need for a knowledge of Greek in Palestine was also increased by the Greek cities of the country. Among the different social classes the command of Greek was, however, variable. The urban upper class probably had a full command of Greek, but language skills lessened as one moved to the villages." [5]

The efflorescence of worldview-talk among Protestant conservatives today

In the last two decades, a stunning increase in the use of the term "worldview" in North America can be traced to the evangelical Reformed philosopher H. Evan Runner of Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Runner was acquainted with the larger European philosophical usage of the term, and with the narrower expansion of its use in the Reformed community in the Netherlands. But when Runner launched use of the term in his evangelical Reformed community in North America, it was soon broadcast and picked-up by many who had no idea that the term had a technical meaning, and soon it devolved into a buzzward among evangelicals and fundamentalists, not least of all Rousas Rushdoony's theonomists. A new and vulgar meaning emerged where "worldview" was simply substituted for "doctrine" as an "application" of the Bible to "all spheres of life." The sociology of the dissemination of the term and of the phrase has led to a reversal to the extent where it has, in some quarters, come to replace Dooyeweerd's other technical term "religious ground motive" or simply came to function redundantly for fundamentalist biblicism, which is just one among many Christian world-and-lifeviews.

David Naugle, [6] chair and professor of philosophy, Dallas Baptist University, has cast much light on the word in his important book, Worldview: A History of the Concept (Eerdmans, 2000). Albert M. Wolters, a student of H. Evan Runner and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven wrote the first widely disseminated worldview-book in contemporary North America, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985; Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 1996). His student, Nancy Pearcey more in the line of fundamentalist Francis Schaeffer, has produced two worldview-books, one with Chuck Colson (How Now Shall We Live?) and more recently in her own write, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2004). James Skillen has reviewed the Pearcey and Naugle titles in a recent article, "The Question of a Christian Worldview Books by Nancy Pearcey and David Naugle" [7]. In summarizing the sweep of Naugle's work, Skillen brings us through the recent thinkers regarding worldview among evangelial Protestant Christians of different kinds to the philosophical tradition initiated by Kant: "Naugle, a professor at Dallas Baptist University in Texas, begins his book with an exploration of the tradition that so influences Nancy Pearcey and others, namely, the Protestant Evangelicalism of Abraham Kuyper, Carl F. H. Henry, Herman Dooyeweerd, and ]]Francis A. Schaeffer]]. He then moves to the development of worldview thinking in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. And that is just the beginning. For he then goes back to the first use of the word Weltanschauung (world and life view) by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and its subsequent development by nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers and scientists, including Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Marx, Engels, Freud, Karl Mannheim, Donald Davidson, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, Peter Berger, Michael Kearney, and Robert Redfield. All of this is a massive and illuminating undertaking, covering 250 pages." [8]

Resources: books & digital documents online

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume II (1981) – see sections on Worldviews and Worldpictures

David Naugle, Worldview: A History of the Concept (Eerdmans, 2000).

Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Belief (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000)

Joe Bransford Wilson, Religions as Worldviews: The Seven Dimensions of a Worldview {Smart's schematic] [9]