Worldview Essay
yblmgn031
wvc401_-_class_4.pptxWVC301 -
CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION
OF LIFE
Matt Manry
5.24.16
Belhaven University
THE BIG IDEA
Read Colossians 1:15-23
In 1-2 sentences, tell me what this passage is about? What stood out to you in this text?
FINAL WORLDVIEW PAPER
200 points:
The second paper (Due unit 5) wants you to reflect upon what you have learned, and then compare your worldview with the biblical concepts that have been presented and discussed in this class.
A 5-7 minute informal presentation of the student’s thoughts and spiritual growth that stems from you writing your final paper will be presented in the last class.
QUIZ 3
Let’s take 10-15 minutes to take Quiz 3.
REVIEW
Christian Theism:
1. God is infinite and personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign and good.
2. God created the cosmos ex nihilo to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system.
3. Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self- transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness, and creativity.
REVIEW
Christian Theism
4. Human beings can know both the world around them ad God himself because God as built into them the capacity to do so and because he takes an active role in communicating with them.
5. Human beings were created good, but through the Fall, the image of God became defaced, though not so ruined as not to be capable of restoration; through the work of Christ, God redeemed humanity and began the process of restoring people to goodness.
6. For each person death is either the gate to life with God and his people or the gate to eternal separation from the only thing that will ultimately fulfill human aspirations.
REVIEW
Christian Theism
7. Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving).
8. History is linear; a meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for humanity.
REVIEW
Deism
1. A transcendent God was the First Cause and created the universe, set it in motion and left it to run. No immanence, no personality, no sovereignty, no providence.
2. The universe is determined, a closed system based on cause and effect; no miracles.
3. Human beings, though personal beings, are part of this closed mechanistic “clockwork” universe.
4. The cosmos is in its normal state. We can determine what God is like by studying it.
5. Ethics is limited to general revelation; because the universe is in a normal state, it reveals what is right.
6. History is linear, for the course of the cosmos was determined at creation. Deism was a transitional worldview “almost an intellectual curiosity” according to Sire.
REVIEW
Naturalism
1. Matter exists eternally and is all there is. God does not exist.
2. The cosmos exists as a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system.
3. Human beings are complex “machines”; personality is an interrelation of chemical and physical properties we do yet fully understand.
4. Death is extinction of personality and individuality.
5. History is a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect but without an overarching purpose.
6. Ethics is related only to human beings. The major question is: How does ought derive from is?
REVIEW
Nihilism:
1. From meaninglessness, nothing at all follows, or rather, anything follows.
2. Every time nihilists think and trust their thinking, they are inconsistent, for they have denied that thinking is of value.
3. While a limited sort of practical nihilism is possible for a while, eventually a limit is reached.
4. Nihilism means the death of art.
5. Nihilism poses severer psychological problems for a nihilist. People cannot live with it because it denies what every fiber of the waking being calls for—meaning, value, significance, dignity, worth.
REVIEW
Existentialism:
1. an attempt to transcend nihilism
2. basic acceptance of the premises of naturalism and nihilism
3. existence precedes essence
Journey to the East
In the course of Western thought eventually we reach an impasse. Naturalism leads to nihilism, and nihilism is hard to transcend on the terms that the Western world, permeated by naturalism, wishes to accept. Atheistic existentialism, as we have seen, is one attempt, but it has some rather serious problems.
The swing to Eastern thought since the 1960’s is, therefore, primarily a retreat from Western thought.
Journey to the East:
Eastern Pantheistic Monism
Neo-pagan and eastern perspectives say “All is God.” This became attractive to the self-centered postmodern Western mentality which adopted it as “I am god.”
Journey to the East:
Eastern Pantheistic Monism
Defining Eastern Pantheistic Monism:
Pantheism is the belief that God is everywhere and in everything.
Monism is the belief that this God who is everywhere and in everything is impersonal – He is not a He, but an it. Thus the soul of each and every human being is part of the soul of the cosmos.
Journey to the East:
Eastern Pantheistic Monism
Since science and technology are “out of control” there has been a move back toward the ancient and the mystical to find the answers.
Journey to the East:
Eastern Pantheistic Monism
Sire on Pantheistic Monism:
1. Atman is Brahman; that is, the soul of each and every human being is the Soul of the cosmos.
2. Some things are more one than others.
3. Many (if not all) roads lead to the One.
4. To realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond personality.
Journey to the East:
Eastern Pantheistic Monism
Sire on Pantheistic Monism:
5. To realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond knowledge. The principle of non- contradiction does not apply where ultimate reality is concerned.
6. To realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond good and evil; the cosmos is perfect at every moment.
7. Death is the end of individual, personal existence, but it changes nothing essential in an individual’s nature.
8. To realize one’s oneness with the One is to pass beyond time. Time is unreal. History is cyclical.
Journey to the East:
Eastern Pantheistic Monism
“For several decades, young and old have been flocking to various gurus.”
“Going East now has lost some of its attraction, for the Eastern world is becoming more and more Western in appearance and tone.”
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
“Human being evolve toward higher consciousness; societies and cultures evolve toward greater comprehensiveness.”
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
“They read (or, better, misread) the ancient religious teachers—Jesus, the Buddha, Zoroaster—who still have some credibility, see in them a hint of the progress that awaits all humankind, and conclude that there is a New Age coming.”
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
The core experience of the New Age is cosmic consciousness, in which ordinary categories of space, time and morality tend to disappear.
• timeless bliss
• higher consciousness
• peak experience
• nirvana
• satori
• cosmic consciousness
• altered states of consciousness
• cosmic vision
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
The New Age worldview is highly syncretistic and eclectic. It borrows from every major worldview.
Can the New Age, with roots in three separate worldviews, be a unified system?
Not really…
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
Sire on the basic tenets of New Age Consciousness:
1. Whatever the nature of being (an idea or matter, energy, or particle), the self is the kingpin— the prime reality. As human beings grow in their awareness and grasp of this fact, the human race is on the verge of transformed humanity and prototypes of the New Age.
2. The cosmos, while unified in the self, is manifested in two more dimensions: the visible universe, accessible through ordinary consciousness, and the invisible universe (or Mind at Large), accessible through altered states of consciousness.
3. The core experience of the New Age is cosmic consciousness, in which ordinary categories of space, time and morality tend to disappear.
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
4. Physical death is the end of the self; under the experience of cosmic consciousness, the fear of death is removed.
5. The nature of reality takes three forms in the general framework of the New Age:
a. the occult version: beings and things perceived in altered states of
consciousness exist apart from the conscious self
b. the psychedelic version: these things and beings are projections of the conscious self
c. the conceptual relativist version: cosmic consciousness is the conscious activity of a mind using one of many non-ordinary models for reality, none of which is any “truer” than any other.
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
Difficulties with the New Age Worldviews:
The first major difficulty with the New Age worldview is shared with naturalism and pantheistic monism.
The notion of a closed universe—the absence of a transcendent God—poses the problem.
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
Difficulties with the New Age Worldviews:
A second major difficulty in the new consciousness worldview comes with what it borrows from animism: a host of demigods, demons, and guardians who inhabit the separate reality or the inner spaces of mind.
A Separate Universe:
The New Age-Spirituality
Difficulties with the New Age Worldviews:
A third major difficulty with the new consciousness is its understanding of the nature of reality and the nature of truth.
Postmodernism..
“Postmodernism assumes that there is no objective truth that moral values are relative, and that reality is socially constructed by a host of diverse communities. These beliefs by no means rule out religion, as modernism tended to. But the religions and the theologies they promote are very different from both biblical orthodoxy and modernism.” -Gene Veith, Postmodern Times, p. 193.
The Vanished Horizon:
Postmodernism
How does one define the indefinite?
“The term postmodernism is used by so many people to focus on so many different facets of cultural and intellectual life that its meaning is often fuzzy, not just around the edges, but at the center as well.” (Sire, 215)
The Vanished Horizon:
Postmodernism
Lyotard defined postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” No longer is there a single story, a metanarrative (or worldview) that holds Western culture together. (Sire, 216)
“The naturalists have their story, the pantheists theirs, the Christian theirs, ad infinitum. (Sire, 216)
The Vanished Horizon:
Postmodernism
Sire on Postmodernism:
1. The first question is not what is there or how we know what is there but how language functions to construct meaning itself. In other words, there has been a shift in “first things” form being to knowing to constructing meaning.
2. The truth about the reality itself is forever hidden from us. All we can do is tell stories.
3. All narratives mask as a play for power. Any one narrative used as a meta-narrative is oppressive.
The Vanished Horizon:
Postmodernism
Sire on Postmodernism:
4. Human beings make themselves who they are by the languages they construct about themselves.
5. Ethics, like knowledge, is a linguistic construct. Social good is whatever society takes it to be.
6. The cutting edge of culture is literary theory.
The Vanished Horizon:
Postmodernism
“No face of the postmodern worldview displays a confidence in truth, a trust in reality or a credible hope for the future.” (Sire, 243)
The Postmodern Challenge
Havel
Vaclav Havel:
“In searching for the most natural source for the creation of a new world order, we usually look to an area that is the traditional foundation of modern justice and a great achievement of the modern age: to a set of values that were first declared in this building [Independence Hall]. I am referring to respect for the unique human being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights and to the principle that all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the fundamental ideas of modern democracy.
The Postmodern Challenge
Havel
“Even these ideas are not enough. We must go farther and deeper. The point is that the solution they offer is still, as it were, modern, derived from the climate of the Enlightenment and from a view of man and his relation to the world that has been characteristic of the Euro-American sphere for the last two centuries. Today, however, we are in a different place and facing a different situation, one to which classical modern solutions in themselves do not give a satisfactory response. After all, the very principle of inalienable human rights, conferred on man by the Creator, grew out of the typically modern notion that man - as a being capable of knowing nature and the world - was the pinnacle of creation and lord of the world.”
The Postmodern Challenge
Havel
“This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy - that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.”
Postmodernism and Relativism
The emphasis in the postmodern on the relativity of truth is a crucial departure from biblical theism’s dependence upon absolute truth.
How do postmodern people maintain this viewpoint?
Discussion
In the modern era, where the prevailing worldview was only naturalism or existentialism, faith and spirituality had no voice in the public square but was relegated to the private sphere. But with the postmodern mindset, a new openness to spirituality seems to be appearing.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
