Do Christians Have A Worldview?
by Graham A. Cole
He took the blade. It was bright silver. He loved the way it glistened. It felt good in his hand. He cut deep into her chest again and again. He showed no emotion, no recognition of her humanity. She lay motionless, her life gone. He made no attempt to cover the body. Later that night over a beer he openly talked to a stranger in the bar about what he had done. The stranger felt ill.
What are we to make of this? Should someone have called 911? Should he have been arrested? Is this a Hannibal Lecter story? It all depends. To make sense of it, this narrative fragment needs placing in a larger picture or frame of reference. We need to know more.
Now suppose I were to inform you that the setting earlier that night was a back alley late at night and that the woman had been alive but drunk when she entered it, then you would be entitled to think that this is a case for CSI. The man listening to the story in the bar ought to have called the police. However, if I were to say that instead of the alley, the setting earlier that night had been a CSI autopsy room, then the complexion of the event changes your reading of it. The man with the knife is no serial killer but instead a forensic scientist. Maybe he shouldn’t have talked about the details to a stranger over a beer. But if that was misconduct it was unprofessional, not criminal.
Frames of reference are keys to understanding, to reading the world of our experience. Eric Fromm found that out as a young man before he became a prominent therapist and humanist thinker.1 He contemplated the carnage of the First World War and wondered, “How come such violence? How could cultured peoples slaughter each other in the millions?” That thought led him to study Karl Marx and the outer world of human history. He wanted to make some kind of sense of the world of his experience. He also knew a young woman who committed suicide at the grave of her father. She was very beautiful and refined. “How come?” he asked. On the surface she had so much to live for. How could some kind of sense be made of it? That tragic story led him to study Sigmund Freud and the inner world of the human psyche. He found that he needed a frame of reference in which to place such events, great and small, in order to make some sense of them.
The need for a frame of reference is all the more urgent given the “meteoric shower of facts” that pour on us (to use Neil Postman’s borrowed phrase). Postman quotes the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay to good effect:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.2 [my emphasis]
If the fabric is to be woven, Postman argues, we need a “god” in the sense of a “grand narrative” [This is an odd use of the word “god,” I might add.]—one that “tells of origins and envisions a future.” It must be some story “that it is possible to organize one’s life around.”3 And, I might add, it must help us cope with the “meteoric shower/Of facts.”
Our frame of reference matters. We all have at least one, or maybe bits of different ones that we have never been able to connect up into some sort of coherent whole. Perhaps this is a question to which we have not really turned our minds in a sustained way. If we do then the real question becomes: So where do we find a frame of reference or a worldview that tells a coherent and consistent story that really understands us and illuminates the actual world in which we live? We need—if we want to be thoughtful about it—a frame of reference that is thinkable, that is, one that is not riddled with self-contradiction. It also needs to be livable—that is, we can actually live as though this frame of reference really does correspond to the world of our experience, so that we do not have to pretend that it does. (More about those criteria at a later stage.) That is not to say, however, that there may not be puzzles and mysteries left unresolved. As Moses said in ancient times, there are secret things that belong to the Lord (Deuteronomy 29:29).
Having said all that, though, a word is needed about the tricky term “worldview.”4 How does it relate to the expression I prefer, which is “frame of reference”?
Questioning the Question
C. E. M. Joad made a name on British radio as a brain. He was a professional philosopher at the University of London and was on a BBC radio panel called “The Brains Trust.” Listeners supplied the questions. The panel would try to answer them and entertain at the same time. Invariably Professor Joad would start an answer to a question with “It all depends on what you mean by. . . .”5 He became famous for it. He was right to ask questions of the question, whether the question was stated or implied. So should we. For some, “worldview” is a term that covers a set of answers to questions about who we are, where we have come from, why we go wrong and what we may hope for as far as change for the better is concerned. I like to call this an existential worldview because it centers on real questions about my actual existence. This understanding of worldview and my frame of reference are synonymous.
For others, worldview is a grand project of human reason that aims in a logical and coherent way to account for all that comes before human consciousness, ranging from math to economics to physics and all points in between. I call this grand project the quest for an encyclopedic worldview. Some of the biggest names in Western thought have attempted this enterprise: e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. In fact it was Kant who coined the term “worldview” (German Weltanschauung).6 Put another way, this ambitious project attempts to write a book of knowledge that encompasses all there is.
About this quest I have my doubts—unless, that is, the quest is shaped by an appropriate humility. Without such an attitude, there really is something valid in the postmodern criticism—Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “incredulity towards metanarratives” comes to mind—that big picture thinking can become an expression of arrogance and a set of ideas by which to marginalize others.7 Cold War Marxism is a case in point, as the 2006 Academy Award winning film “The Lives of Others” shows. The film sets its story in East Germany in the years just prior to and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989) and brilliantly depicts the brutalizing effects of an ideology that shows utter contempt for human value.
So when I mention “worldview” in this piece I am not talking about the encyclopedic worldview project, which is like a frame of reference on steroids.