Leadership Personal Reflection
LDRS 490: Worldview Lecture
Copyright: Carol C. Molcar
Worldviews
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men. Ecclesiastes 3:11
Introduction
Foundational to our understanding of Personhood is our basic worldview.
Our view of human beings and what it means to be a person is part of our worldview.
Philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) wrote, “In truth the ideas and images in men’s minds are the invisible powers that constantly govern them.”
Psychologist Gordon Allport in 1937 wrote,
“As soon as an individual’s philosophy of life is known, his personal activities which taken by themselves are meaningless, become understood.”
Philosophy professor Arthur Holmes has written:
The quest for a unifying world view that will help us see life whole and find meaning in each part is as old as humankind…
The perennial quest for a world view goes further: It is also a quest for a life that is good rather than bad, for purpose in life rather than emptiness, for something that promises hope rather than despair.
World views differ in this regard…the credibility of a world view may be seen to depend on the capacity of its unifying perspective to effectively unify all aspects of life and thought in a meaning-giving way.
Worldviews
*Sire: From Intro: “For any of us to be fully conscious intellectually we should not only be able to detect the worldviews of others but be aware of our own—why it is ours and why in light of so many options we think it is true.”
A Little History of the Concept
Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant, coined the term Weltranschauung in his work Critique of Judgment published in 1790.
One of the first to explore the concept of world view (Weltanschauung) was the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911).
To Dilthey, a thinker’s Weltanschauung was his comprehensive answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?”
According to Dilthey every Weltanschauung was composed of factual beliefs, value judgments, and a set of ultimate goals.
Dilthey related these three constituents to thought, feeling, and will.
Theologians in the Calvinist tradition, James Orr in Scotland and Abraham Kuyper in Holland, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a bit later Herman Dooyeweerd in Holland (among others) applied the term to the Christian faith.
In the 1970’s and later many Christian evangelical thinkers began to make use of the concept of worldview. Among them are Arthur Holmes, James Olthuis, Brian Walsh and J. Richard Middleton, James Sire, Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey.
Francis Schaeffer is notable among them as a Christian philosopher who “helped people understand the importance of understanding Christianity and its competitors in terms of world views…Christianity is… a total world and life view” (Nash, biographer of Schaeffer).
Definitions
Worldviews
Sire’s general definition—“ a universe fashioned by words and concepts that work together to provide a more or less coherent frame of reference for all thought and action..”
Sire’s More Formal Definition
“A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental
orientation of the heart, that can be expressed
as a story or in a set of presuppositions
(assumptions which may be true, partially true
or entirely false) that we hold (consciously or
subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently)
about the basic constitution of reality, and that
provides the foundation on which we live and
move and have our being.”
Dr. Francis Schaeffer describes presuppositions in the following way:
…People are unique in the inner life of the mind—
what they are in their thought world determines how
they act…The results of their thought life flow through
their fingers or from their tongues into the external
world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel, and it is
true of a dictator’s sword.
People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic world view, the grid through which he sees the world.
Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions.
W. Andrew Hoffecker in his volume Building a Christian Worldview writes:
World views are pretheoretical—they are so fundamental to what we believe and know that they actually precede our conscious acts of thinking.
Our world view determines which ideas we consider to be most important. These fundamental assumptions are more than abstract, inert ideas.
Like sunglasses, they “color” how we perceive the rest of the world. But unlike sunglasses, which we consciously put on or take off as we choose, our world view is such a part of us that we rarely reflect on how it shades our perception of all things.
Only with conscious effort can we isolate, identify, and then evaluate the fundamental ideas, convictions, commitments, and feelings that constitute our world view. Only our unique human capacity of self-transcendence enables us even to think about the ideas with which we think (Hoffecker, 1988, p. xi).
Walsh and Middleton in The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview believe that a worldview should answer
4 Basic Faith-life questions—
1) Who am I? What is the nature, task and purpose of human beings?
2) Where am I? What is the nature of the world and universe I live in?
3) What’s wrong? What is the basic problem in life including the question of evil?
4) What is the remedy? How do I overcome the problem?
Evaluating a WV: Reality, Coherence, and Openness to new information.
James Sire: 8 Basic Life Questions that a worldview should answer:
What is prime reality—the really real?
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is the world around us?
3. What is a human being?
4. What happens to a person at death?
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?
6. How do we know what is right and wrong?
7. What is the meaning of human history?
8. What personal, life-orienting core commitments are consistent with this worldview?
“Only the assumption of a worldview—however basic or simple—allows us to think at all…To discover one’s worldview is a significant step toward self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-understanding.” Sire
David Benner, psychologist, writes,
“When the self is dependent on something
outside itself (ie. God or something else) it can then serve as a
point of integration for all other aspects of
personality.”
This includes human needs.
Benner believes that most human needs are not only psychological but spiritual. These include:
The Quest for Identity
The Quest for Relatedness
The Quest for Happiness
The Quest for Success
The Quest for Perfection
The Quest for Truth and Justice
The Quest for Beauty
The Quest for Stimulation
The Quest for Mystery
James H. Olthuis has written in “On Worldviews” in Stained Glass: worldviews and Social Science, that a worldview or
“vision (of life) is a channel for the ultimate beliefs which give direction and meaning to life.”