A friend of mine wrote a book and published it amongst the Kindle offerings on Amazon. That’s a cool thing to do these days. The book is called Worldview: The Adventure of Seeing Through Scripture by Randy Baker. Having read it, I can say my friend did a good service to us by writing it. Significant points from the book would include the many-faceted idea that we all have a worldview, none of us are neutral concerning the contents, and we all think WITH it and few of us ABOUT it. Worldview is a growing topic of discussion amongst people interested in the direction our world is going. It helps us make conversation with those who may have very different ways of looking at things. I have had some worldview training and have found it helps me understand the world around me and the people and ideas in it.
A worldview is defined as a framework of assumptions that form our picture of the way we think the world REALLY works. It gives us a lens set before our mental sight, with which we unconsciously explore the world around us. Its main function is to be the stalwart defence against the incursion of every wind of doctrine that may come our way (That part doesn’t work well with some). It remains solidly intact in all significant ways when meeting foreign ideas, protecting our mental framework from chaos, only allowing some adjustment when confronted by irrefutable and loudly delivered evidence, the volume usually controlled by a traumatic experience. All that conspires to help us make sense of the world around us. The term has gained much popularity in recent years because we have all been subject to enormous changes in the culture of late, challenging our particular worldviews.
Please allow me to go back to the introduction of the term “worldview” for a minute. You see, we must be careful because there is more than one type of worldview. The two most prominent ones are the formal worldview and the informal worldview. Much of what I have said so far applies more to the informal worldview. The formal ones constitute a suite of ideas found largely in instruction books with names that end in the suffix “ism.” We are talking here about, for example, Liberalism, Conservativism, or Socialism in the political realm. But this goes much deeper than politics. We have Consumerism, Atheism, Deism, Antidisestablishmentarianism, and Veganism. If you want more, look here for a list of over 200 “isms.” Each one of them is a collection of ideas from which the authors explain their vision of some formal worldview.
It is the goal of the author of the “ism” to get you to read their stuff and think like they think. They want you to include their ideas in your worldview. I am sure that Marx, for example, would be happy with how often his “ism” comes up in conversation these days almost 150 years after he wrote about it. In the Christian Church, theology has spawned various “isms” in the names of different theological ideas, some good, some bad, and some horridly blasphemous heresy from the thinking of Christians down through the 2000 years of the Church. One of the issues with formal worldviews is that few swallow them whole. If you are conversing with a person who identifies with the formal worldview of an “ism”, ask a lot of questions to discover their informal worldview. It saves a lot of time.
The International School of Management probably has many “isms” in their curriculum (and their sign above serves my purposes quite nicely. Thank you).
As I mentioned, the other prominent type of worldview is the informal one. It is the unintentionally built worldview we all struggle with. We can expect some fragments of formal worldviews to contribute to the fabric of the informal worldview we possess, that we picked up along the way from somewhere, but there is so much more that goes into the construction of our informal worldview than what we read about in the worldviews of others. In this one we have the distillation of all of our experiences feeding into our framework; our upbringing, our education, our experiences, our family, our friends, and our enemies. Everything that we have seen, heard, and felt will contribute to the assumptions that make up our informal worldview.
Unfortunately, many of the constituents of our informal worldview will have little evidence of its veracity. Have you ever considered how much of your worldview is built out of whole cloth (that is out of unfounded and probably untrue information)? I have found some ideas, striking in their lack of truth, lurking in my informal worldview. At one time, when I was a boy still in my father’s house, I thought the Second World War was still raging! I suppose that was helped along by the preponderance of movies and comics about war, popular at the time.
If I may talk for the distance of a short rabbit trail… There is an interesting quirk in human nature, I have found to be fascinating. I was clued into this some time ago when reading a random article (building my informal worldview in some way, I suppose). I just recently found out it even has a name. It is called “Vicarious Goal Fulfillment.” To put this into worldview terms, we add a few paragraphs to our worldview by considering a choice without pursuing it. The example most described is when we stand, looking at the menu of a fast-food restaurant, and notice that a healthy choice like a salad is offered. We may order the usual double cheeseburger with fries but feel good about ourselves because the salad was offered. Our worldview is satisfied by the simple suggestion that we COULD choose better. If you are interested you can check out this article.
This is how easily our informal worldview can be in error. There is no guarantee that they are not poorly built while remaining amazingly resilient to restructuring, according to the function of this part of the human mind. We walk along in the path of our lives in our fantasy of the correctness of our assumptions, fending off friends and enemies in their attempts to change our minds and being influenced by them at the same time. The issues may be innocuous or it could be quite serious. We could hear somewhere that automatic transmissions are problematic and will choose to drive standards our whole life. We could be the offspring of a parent who was addicted to something. And, assuming it was normal living, we could end up addicted ourselves. We have unintentionally built a great framework in our minds about how the world works. Our minds are complex and have much less to do with the truth than we like to imagine.
For this reason, I am truly thankful that there is another type of worldview available to us, the intentional one. I will not leave my audience with dark hopelessness in the clutches of their worldview which has been unintentionally elevated to the throne where it heartlessly controls us. We are not caught in an unassailable monolith of thinking. We can change our minds! That includes even deeply held ideas. Just because some influential person in our past, a parent, a teacher or whatever said something or did something in a particular way doesn’t mean we must obey their imprint. If there is a habitual pathway our thoughts take when confronted by a particular circumstance, we can turn onto a lesser-known road. It may even be a great adventure!
But there is a caveat to all that. However logically clear it may be, I still must say it. There is no payoff for changing from one uninvestigated idea to another. The new reality of having a cloud-connected world of data, virtually in our pocket, may not help us as much as we believe it should. I could pull up countless articles about a myriad of issues and find I am still nowhere near the truth. I can consume a dog’s breakfast of information by the end of a given morning and still be hungry. The internet is replete with the seeds of opinions passing as truth, and sweet-tasting nostrums of someone else’s informal worldview. We will choke on them as they mature. They all will be convinced of the veracity of their point of view. If you are going to erect an intentional worldview, the way forward is fraught with pitfalls covered over with the brush of emotional appeal or even evil intent. This intentional worldview building must be based on a frank look at facts, or, at least logical conclusions as the best inference to the facts.
To accommodate the investigation worth anything, one must be honest with oneself, but, further to that, one must ensure there is a foundation somewhere underneath what is being claimed. The statement, “I will seek the Truth, wherever it leads,” becomes foundational in this quest. This is where courage is found. This is where positive change is accomplished. There is no other way.
The true art of living is building, piece by piece, an intentional worldview after being confronted with information that snuck up on your mental happy place and assaulted the usual thoughts there. Allowing a peek at the settled error of our worldview is an enormous step away from the humdrum. It creates a lifestyle of the emotionally rich and the satisfactorily adventurous.
I became a Christian through this dynamic. There was a time when I was atheistic, if not religiously, then by default. Through the excitement of being caught by the formal worldview of the Hippie experience, I “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.” That worldview was not as robust as I was told, quickly fraying about the edges. I held to the ragged pieces of that worldview as it consumed my life, with drug and alcohol use leading to relational breakups with a wife, family, and friends and, predictably, putting me into homelessness. I was blind to any sense that it was the worldview that was destroying me. I had a whole litany of excuses and targets for my blaming to ensure it wasn’t my fault.
For a little over a year, the consequences of my worldview ravaged my life. Burdened by guilt and weakened by my habits, I slowly came to realize I was in serious trouble and could see no solution on the horizon. One of the facets of Hippiedom came to my rescue (in a manner of speaking). If you have never been an adherent, you may not know that Hippies considered themselves “spiritual,” though they probably couldn’t define the term. I couldn’t for sure (I am still not sure what it actually means). Nonetheless, I thought doing something spiritual was a way out of my mess. It would be okay as long as there was little buy-in and it didn’t ask me to become some measure of an ascetic.
The spiritual item I chose was baptism, mostly because I thought it would not cost me too much. Serendipitously, I chose a church that was full of ex-hippies who were loud and boisterous in their worship. There was no escaping the overwhelming joy in their lives and the unmistakable Presence in the service. Being confronted by a real encounter with God was not what I had expected. It was a challenge to my worldview, and I had a choice to make. Having my mind disrupted by the juxtaposition of the wrongness of my lifestyle and the Presence of a Holy God is very uncomfortable. There were only two ways this could go. I could turn around on my heel, ensure my worldview remained intact and probably die in a gutter somewhere, or accept what was being offered as an alternate worldview.
I am still a member of that church almost 50 years later. The early years were spent looking for ways of building this new worldview, intentionally this time. I needed to replace self-worship in favour of worshipping God. Then, I had to ensure it was the true God instead of some fictional Being I hoped He would be. Another big lesson had me leaving a me-first thinking pattern to become aware of the needs of others around me, stepping up to serve like Jesus. Then balancing that with the fact that there are overwhelming numbers of humans on this planet who are needy and I cannot help them all. Choosing the right amount of helping and serving takes wisdom. My Christian worldview has been building piece by piece as I perceive in greater measure what it is all about. And how little it has to do with me.
I read in the bible, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he…” (Proverbs 23:7). Regardless of the emotions we feel or the actions we do, they all have a source in the worldview in our minds. Whether we accept it or not, we all share a great sense of responsibility in the construction of a worldview that is grounded in REAL truth. We need to get with the building program, doing first the demolition work on the spongy assumptions we are force-fed, and searching for the stuff with real substance that is out there. On that, we can build!