A Missional Method for Constructive Theology (Part 9)

The next two parts of the series consider what significant evangelical theological methods with underdeveloped conceptions of worldview stand to gain by working with a missiological understanding of worldview. I consider the use of worldview in Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism and in Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine. They deserve consideration in the present argument for three reasons. First, both are widely recognized as noteworthy evangelical expositions of theological method. Second, they are already attuned to missional concerns. Third, they engage profoundly with the post-everything context that concerns missional theology.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke’s book Beyond Foundationalism already bends toward missional theology, claiming the “final purpose of theology” is “the church’s mission.”[1. Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 2001), 26, 50, 273.] This phrasing still reflects an ecclesiocentric missiology that has not been restructured by the priority of God’s mission, but the trinitarian and participatory theology they elaborate resonates with missional theology nonetheless.[2. One reader asked whether we shouldn’t read this phrasing more generously. I can’t disagree: Franke is a missiologist and currently serves as General Coordinator for the Gospel and Our Culture Network; see The Gospel and Our Culture Network, GOCN Board, http://www.gocn.org/network/team. My concern here, however, is the broad tendency of evangelical theology into which this phrasing still plays and which, undoubtedly, many still bring to their reading.] Their proposal is particularly attentive to culture, engaging missiological concerns more than most theological methods. Yet, a clearer conception of worldview could resolve a critical equivocation in their method and make an already fruitful work even more valuable for missional theology.

The authors identify their context as “postmodern,” which they take to designate a “rejection of certain central features of the modern project” that unifies the work of deconstructionists, postliberals, and posconservatives alike.[3. Grenz and Franke, 21.] As the book’s title indicates, their “especially crucial” theological concern is the demise of modern epistemological foundationalism.[4. Ibid., 28.] This is the primary sense of their question, “How should theology respond to the collapse of the modern worldview?”[5. Ibid., 11.]:

The results of the foundationalist approach of modern liberals and conservatives have been astounding. In different ways both groups have sought to respond to the challenge of the Enlightenment and rescue theology in the face of the secularist worldview of late modernity. Although the liberals and conservatives routinely dismiss each other’s work, they share the single agenda of seeking to maintain the credibility of Christianity within a culture that glorifies reason and deifies science.[6. Ibid., 37.]

The question, in other words, is how to do theology when the theological appeal to foundationalist epistemology is no longer culturally appropriate, because the worldview that theology needs to address has passed from modern to postmodern.

Their suggestion for theology “beyond foundationalism” begins with the work of Reformed epistemologists, “which raises the question as to what—if anything—might be deemed basic for Christian theology.”[7. Ibid., 47.] Grenz and Franke’s point of departure becomes, therefore, the “communitarian turn” of Reformed epistemology, identifying as “basic” for theology the “interpretive framework” of the Christian community that shares the experience of the “encounter with the God of the Bible through Jesus.”[8. Ibid., 48–49.] It is here that the confusion about worldview begins, however, because Grenz and Franke are now using the conception of worldview typical of the Reformed theologians discussed above: worldview is “basic beliefs.” Hence, “any such interpretive framework is theological in nature, for it involves an understanding that sees the world in connection with the divine reality around which that tradition focuses.”[9. Ibid., 49; emphasis added.] This “cognitive framework” is not foundationalist, because it participates in a hermeneutical circle in which the articulation of a theological understanding already presumes a theological understanding.[10. Ibid., 49–50.] Worldview is now essentially synonymous with a product of a coherentist theological method, a “belief-mosaic”:

Therefore, while we might view the Christian interpretive framework as in a certain sense foundational for theology, we could more properly speak of theology as the articulation of the cognitive mosaic of the Christian faith. This mosaic consists of the interlocking doctrines that together comprise the specifically Christian way of viewing the world. This worldview is truly theological and specifically Christian because it involves an understanding of the entire universe and of ourselves in connection with the God of the Bible and the biblical narrative of God bringing creation to its divinely destined goal.[11. Ibid., 51.]

The shift in the usage of worldview is subtle and easy to miss: from a description of a culture (modernity) in which an epistemological presupposition set the agenda for theology to an alternative epistemology based on experience and theological reflection among a religious community. The key to this shift is twofold: the conflation of culture and community and the conflation of epistemology and worldview.

A community may be monocultural, or not. The sharper point, however, is that a Christian community always participates in a larger culture. Conflating culture and community, therefore, obscures the extent to which the “theological worldview” of the Christian community does not account for the total worldview of the culture in which it is a participant. Likewise, a worldview serves an epistemological function in the broadest sense: it may be considered comprehensively as the way that a person knows. Yet, reducing worldview to epistemology proper obscures the other theologically determinative dimensions of a worldview.[12. See, e.g., Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 46, where epistemological assumptions are only one aspect of worldview.] Thus, the claim that “scripture mediates a specifically Christian ‘interpretive framework’” that consists of a  “set of categories, beliefs, and values—whether consciously formulated or merely unconsciously presumed—which forms one’s perception of reality and life” may be true as far as it goes.[13. Grenz and Franke, 81.] But identifying this as a worldview[14. Ibid., 85–86.] derails the book’s vitally important discussion of culture in theological method.

Grenz and Franke rightly assert, “Theology emerges through an ongoing conversation involving both ‘gospel’ and ‘culture.’”[15. Ibid., 158.] They characterize this process by contrast with both liberal correlation and evangelical contextualization methods that rely on foundationalism. So far, so good. They continue:

Discerning what characterizes the socially constructed worlds people around us inhabit places us in a better position to address the generation God calls us to serve. Doing so, however, necessitates that we conceptualize and articulate Christian beliefs—the gospel—in a manner that contemporary people can understand. That is, we must express the gospel through the “language” of the culture—through the cognitive tools, concepts, images, symbols, and thought forms—by means of which people today discover meaning, construct the world they inhabit, and form personal identity.[16. Ibid., 159.]

This sounds identical to typical accounts of contextualization, but the contrast they wish to draw is that the “gospel” to be articulated is not a “Christian universal, which in turn functions as the foundation for the construction of the theological superstructure” but an understanding of the gospel that only emerges on the basis of the interaction with culture.[17. Ibid., 158. Their characterization of foundationalist contextualization, taking Kraft as an example, is dubious. By their own admission (citing Bevans in fn. 139), there are exceptions, leaving one to wonder why they do not retrieve a nonfoundationalist account of contextualization given its anthropological sophistication. In one sense, that is what I am proposing.] As I stated in regard to the development of the cognitive framework (which is the theological belief mosaic), this is a hermeneutical circle in which the articulation of a theological understanding already presumes a theological understanding—which is now seen to be a culturally determined theological preunderstanding. This is correct. Yet, by (a) defining worldview as a system of Christian beliefs that function epistemologically, (b) defining the Christian community constituted thereby as a culture, (c) identifying Christian beliefs as the gospel, and (d) stating these beliefs must be conceptualized and articulated through the language of the culture, they have crippled the method. If the gospel is the beliefs that constitute the worldview of Christian culture, then it cannot be conceptualized in another culture, for that would logically be constituted by other beliefs. If the “set of values, beliefs, and loyalties”[18. Ibid., 163–64.] that make Christian community a culture are, as already stated, also an epistemology, how can an epistemology be articulated in terms of “the cognitive tools, concepts, images, symbols, and thought forms” that are by their definition a different epistemology?

The only way to make their method function, I believe, is to clarify the conception of worldview missiologically. This does not entail attributing “neutrality” to cultural forms, but it does require a more anthropologically nuanced account of worldview that does not confuse the pretheoretical dimensions of culture by which communities may speak in a variety of ways with the content of Christian theology. Grenz and Franke go a long way toward a missional theological method, identifying the style of Christian theology as “trinitarian in content, communitarian in focus, and eschatological in orientation,” recognizing the purpose of theology as missional, and indispensably requiring a culturally dialogical method. But they also demonstrate that such a method cannot proceed without a clearer conception of worldview. Only by dealing explicitly with the pretheoretical dimensions of meaning-making can intercultural, interreligious, and interconfessional theological dialogue result in mutual understandings that might serve God’s mission.

Notes

A Missional Method for Constructive Theology (Part 8)

If anything, my survey of the contours of worldview has only established the dizzying ubiquity and ambiguity of the term. A clarified conceptualization remains to be seen, though perhaps what should be clarified is more evident. Moreover, it is evident that what should be clarified depends on the context of the concept’s use. Therefore, I turn to missiology in order to mark the bounds of a theological language game in which missional theology should further develop, according to its own grammar, a conception of worldview that can serve as a theoretical basis for a constructive theological method. Evangelical missiologists Paul Hiebert and Charles Kraft developed missiological models of worldview over the course of their careers, culminating in two important volumes.[1. Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Charles H. Kraft, Worldview for Christian Witness (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2008).] Their understandings have deep affinities, but they are not identical.[2. See Yoshiyuki Billy Nishioka, “Worldview Methodology in Mission Theology: A Comparison between Kraft’s and Hiebert’s Approaches,” Missiology: An International Review 26, no. 4 (October 1998): 457–76; Kraft, 116–24. Neither of these accounts, however, represent the full disclosure of Hiebert’s thinking in his posthumous 2008 volume.] My purpose here is not to sort out the differences or offer a synthetic account but to suggest that their heuristic models of worldview already establish the bounds of the missiological language game for the purpose of further developing worldview methodologically for missional theology. I propose there are four relevant dimensions of the missiological conception of worldview.

(1) Worldview analysis serves God’s mission. It is participatory in nature, developed only by participation with others’ worldviews and meant to facilitate understanding for a dialogical participant in others’ lives. Unlike worldview in ostensibly secular anthropology, the missiological conception of worldview is not designed for purely descriptive purposes but overtly raises the question of how worldviews change (mutually), in order to participate more wisely in God’s transforming work in the world. (2) A worldview is a human, socio-cultural phenomenon. Because it is a feature of humanity, a person may not choose not to have a worldview. The anthropological elaboration of the concept has philosophical roots but cannot proceed on any basis except rigorous ethnography. As such, it is a pragmatic theory concerned with the way people actually make meaning in cultural contexts. (3) Worldviews are pretheoretical, implicit, and explicable. Cultures have a component that is not what people think but what people think with. As the deep structure of culture, this pretheoretical component is largely tacit. This does not mean simply that people tend to live the unexamined life but that the very act of examining life depends on a mostly implicit worldview. Worldview is by definition presuppositional and predispositional, therefore what a person consciously “believes” and “values” is generally a product, not a statement, of worldview. Yet, worldview can be made explicit. This is the most problematic aspect of the concept, because a worldview can only be conceived and articulated on the basis of a worldview, whether reflexively or dialogically. Moreover, explicated worldview tends to take the propositional form of a “belief” or “core value,” but, as Wittgenstein has taught us, this is deceptive. (4) Worldviews are commensurable. Translatability is the fundamental assumption of the missiological conception of worldview, but this does not gloss radical difference. The rigor of worldview analysis is motivated by the experience of radical difference and misunderstanding. Yet, some form of critical realism, or perhaps ontological monism, makes a sort of triangulation between God, world, and worldviews a working theoretical assumption.

In summary, vulnerable participation in mutual transformation, rigorous ethnographic observation, dialogical explication of tacit cultural phenomena, and a functional critical realism in the midst of deep difference designate the contours of a missiological theory of worldview. Of course, these four dimensions only begin to suggest how worldview analysis might become a methodological crux of missional theology. There is need yet to develop a functional model of worldview for missional theology, but that is an undertaking for another time. The task at hand is to argue for the methodological value of the missiological concept per se.

Notes

A Missional Method for Constructive Theology (Part 7.5)

Within the social sciences too, worldview enjoys a diverse history.[1. Despite the oddly reductive portrayal of Sander Griffioen, “The Worldview Approach to Social Theory,” in Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science, ed. Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen, and Richard J. Mouw, Christian Studies Today (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 90, fourteen years prior Michael Kearney, “World View Theory and Study,” Annual Review of Anthropology 4 (October 1975): 247–70, had already surveyed an expansive amount of worldview study, particularly in anthropology. Mark E. Koltko-Rivera, “The Psychology of Worldviews,” Review of General Psychology 8, no. 1 (2004): 3–58, provides a similarly expansive presentation of worldview in psychology. Annick Hedlund-de Witt, “Exploring worldviews and their relationships to sustainable lifestyles: Towards a new conceptual and methodological approach,” Ecological Economics 84 (December 2012): 74–83, explores a number of more sociologically oriented approaches.] I limit my comments here to anthropology. Clifford Geertz is the best representative of worldview conceptualization in anthropology, both because of his influence (including in missiology) and because his work is dated.[2. His well-known essay “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” The Antioch Review 17, no. 4 (Winter 1957): 421–37, is nearly sixty years old.] The latter is important because worldview has seemingly become passé in anthropology, raising the question of whether worldview analysis like that of Geertz has been debunked or proven unsustainable in some way. It appears, to the contrary, that worldview as an analytic construct is alive and well at least in American anthropology.[3. Beine, David. “The End of Worldview in Anthropology?” SIL Electronic Working Papers 2010-004 (September 2010): 1–10, http://www-01.sil.org/silewp/2010/silewp2010-004.pdf.] Geertz has also recently been the object of vindication despite significant critique.[4. Kevin Schilbrack, “Religion, Models of, and Reality: Are We Through with Geertz?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73, no. 2 (June 2005): 429–452; Jung Lee, “Ethos and Worldview Reconsidered: Geertz, Normativity, and the Comparative Study of Religions,” Religion Compass 6, no. 12 (December 2012): 500–510.] Furthermore, much of worldview’s decline in anthropology is related to wider philosophical critiques of representationalist epistemology, along with the rise of antirealism. Yet, ethnographers continue to wrestle with the need to affirm both a common world and socially constructed views of the world.[5. Two recent programmatic essays by João de Pina-Cabral, in which he urges the recovery of worldview, may well signal the resetting of the board in ethnography. See João de Pina-Cabral, “World: An Anthropological Examination (Part 1),” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic  Theory 4, no. 1 (2014): 49–73; João de Pina-Cabral, “World: An Anthropological Examination (Part 2),” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic  Theory 4, no. 3 (2014): 149–84.] The conception of worldview must and can find a middle way between skeptical relativism and naive representationalism—which it already needed to do on the basis of early philosophical conceptions—and ethnography and comparative anthropology is in a unique position to “go beyond the limits of speculation to point to the actual empirical conditions under which humans produce meaning.”[6. De Pina-Cabral, “World: An Anthropological Examination (Part 1),” 59.] With that in mind, I summarize the implications of the preceding subsections en route to the missiological conception of worldview.

Worldview across Philosophy, Biblical Studies, Theology, and Anthropology

1. Worldview has gone through various philosophical articulations and critiques. Three important qualifications have resulted. First, having a worldview does not put one in the position of a subject viewing the objective world. The human perception of the world is mediated by perceptual experience, and worldview is a way of designating the total perceptual system of the human being. Second, the state of being-in-the-world is a given for perceptual experience, so the designation worldview necessarily implies a holistic, embodied experience of the world. Third, worldview is pretheoretical and linguistically mediated. Thus, while a worldview is, to some extent, articulable, its first-order function is not as a theory or philosophy but rather as that which undergirds the articulation of a theory or philosophy.
2. In post-romanticist biblical studies, worldview does not refer to the mind of the author as an object of historical-critical study that, once reconstructed, might render authorial intent. Instead, worldview is the very horizon meditated by an author’s language, which the reader only encounters through her own horizon.
3. Following the above qualifications, it is a mistake for theology to equate worldview with a Christian philosophy or philosophical theology, or even an explicated set of Christian presuppositions. Because worldview is an embodied, cultural-linguistic, pretheoretical phenomenon, it cannot rightly be reduced to a cognitivist belief system. Furthermore, the narrative dimensions of worldview, which come to the fore in the linguistically mediated horizon of an author, orient theology to human narrativity rather than mere beliefs.
4. Cultural anthropology’s continued deployment of worldview is concerned with the ways in which humans both inhabit a shared world and socially construct views of the world. This is once again a holistic investigation, whose accent falls on the concretely cultural aspects of perception.

Notes

A Missional Method for Constructive Theology (Part 7.4)

Since the early 1980s, there has been a flurry of publication on “the Christian worldview.” This has reflected the lack of clarity about the relationship between philosophy and worldview, adding to the confusion the contested relationship between philosophy and theology. Often, worldview is conflated with the articulation of some sort of Christian philosophy or philosophical theology, or at least the mingling of philosophy and theology.[1. See, e.g., William Hasker, Metaphysics: Constructing a World View, Contours of Christian Philosophy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983); Arthur F. Holmes, Contours of a World View, Studies in a Christian World View (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983); W. Andrew Hoffecker, Building a Christian Worldview, vol. 1 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1986); Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992); J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003).] Such approaches are generally in search of a comprehensive system of belief or “theory of everything.”[2. James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 93, notes this common misapprehension.] Others, such as Albert Wolters, characterize worldview as pretheoretical basic beliefs, which the “basic concepts” of biblical theology should constitute—at which point they are apparently no longer pretheoretical.[3. Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005; 1st ed. 1985), ch. 1, offers the prime example; Walsh and Middleton do much the same.] Subsequently, the elaboration of “the Christian worldview” as the framework for Christian university education has morphed into an industry all its own.[4. See, e.g., Walsh and Middleton, chs. 11–12; David S. Dockery and Gregory Alan Thornbury, eds., Shaping a Christian Worldview: The Foundations of Christian Higher Education (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2002); Robert A. Harris, The Integration of Faith and Learning: A Worldview Approach (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2004); Mark P. Cosgrove, Foundations of Christian Thought: Faith Learning, and the Christian Worldview (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006). This stream seems to originate from the affinity between “basic beliefs” and the notion of “control beliefs” elaborated by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), though Wolterstorff himself is none too fond worldview in the Kuyperian tradition; see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “On Christian Learning,” in Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science, ed. Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen, and Richard J. Mouw, Christian Studies Today (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 66–67.] In the context of this final development, especially in the Reformed tradition, James K. A. Smith registers a significant concern about worldview: it tends to be deeply biased toward beliefs and, therefore, assumes an overly cognitive anthropology.[5. James K. A. Smith, Cultural Liturgies, vol. 1, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 24–25.] There is much in the philosophical conceptions already discussed, and more in the social scientific conceptions below, to suggest that the cognitivist Reformed misconstrual of worldview is not representative, yet given the overwhelming tendency in theological circles to reduce the concept to express beliefs—and, indeed, given the cognitivist bent of Western theology generally—Smith’s warning is weighty. While one might argue that Charles Taylor’s “social imaginary” (which Smith prefers over worldview) is synonymous with worldview properly conceived, the point in any event is that the conception of worldview, if it is to be theologically fruitful, needs to move toward its postmodern realization as an embodied, cultural phenomenon.[6. The missiological account of worldview, attuned to cultural anthropology, already moves in this direction. In fact, the most curious thing about Smith’s discussion is that, in order to undertake a cultural analysis, he invites the reader to imagine being a Martian anthropologist doing ethnography in North America (19). Why not just imagine being an actual anthropologist and appeal to established ethnographic methods? Even when it is reduced to mere “practical theology,” missiology already offers at least that much as a discipline within Christian theology. Its absence here is especially glaring because of Smith’s purported attention to culture, but the lacuna is typical of most theology—and a major contrast with missional theology methodologically organized around worldview.]

A second important development in theology is the use of worldview in theological hermeneutics. The leading representative in this regard is N. T. Wright, whose massive series Christian Origins and the Question of God has made extensive use of Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton’s worldview questions.[7. Beginning with N. T. Wright, Christian Origins And The Question Of God, vol. 1, The New Testament and the People God (London: SPCK, 1992), 123, and continuing through his most recent volume in the series.] As a work of New Testament theology dealing extensively with first-century Christianity through the lens of a worldview model, I might have mentioned it in connection with biblical studies, especially given the hermeneutical concerns that relate so directly to Wright’s endeavor to reconstruct the worldview of, for example, second-temple Jews. Yet, his melding of historical worldview analysis with narrative theology places his work in the no-man’s land of theological hermeneutics. Because other theologians have followed Wright in developing a narrative account of worldview, and because it only seems right to disassociate his biblical theology from the objectivist hermeneutics Gadamer has made untenable, the discussion is best placed here. The upshot is that narrative worldview analysis is now at home in biblical theology and, increasingly, missional hermeneutics.[8. Edward W Klink III and Darian R. Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology: A Comparison of Theory and Practice (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), part 3, have gone so far as to classify an entire approach to biblical theology, following Wright, as “biblical theology as worldview-story.” See also Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004); Michael W. Goheen and Craig G. Bartholomew, Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Michael Goheen, “The Mission of God’s People and Biblical Interpretation: Exploring N. T. Wright’s Missional Hermeneutic,” A Dialogue with N. T. Wright, Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar Meeting, San Francisco, November 18, 2011, http://64.64.27.114/~mission/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Missional-Hermeneutic-A-Dialogue-with-NT-Wright.pdf. Mike Goheen and Al Wolters, “Postscript: Worldview between Story and Mission,” in Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 119–43, even take Wolter’s original proposal in a narrative direction.]

Notes

A Missional Method for Constructive Theology (Part 7.3)

Dilthey is also a major worldview protagonist in biblical studies, though for a different reason. Dilthey was the hermeneutical heir of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and together they are the epoch-makers of modern biblical hermeneutics.[1. See, e.g., Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), ch. 8.] But it was Dilthey who brought worldview to the fore as a hermeneutical concern. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s landmark work Truth and Method takes the romanticist hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey to task and, thereby, establishes the essential hermeneutical problem with worldview, including its use in biblical studies. Essentially, Dilthey combined Schleiermacher’s romantic hermeneutics with historical consciousness, which resulted in a conception of all of history as a text to be interpreted through a psychologizing hermeneutic of human “life.”[2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, rev. 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 241–43.] While Dilthey’s specific use of worldview is not at issue in this case, his melding of history and hermeneutics to justify the social sciences epistemologically becomes an abiding basis for interpreting historical texts such as the Bible by identifying a “coherence” in the life of the texts’ authors that is not only a matter of their psychological life but is, furthermore, a coherence of significance beyond what they themselves could have articulated. In other words, by reference to the “objective mind” of biblical authors, the historical method becomes a God’s-eye-view of their meaning.[3. Ibid., 231.]

The idea that a text gives access to an author’s worldview (which is related to “authorial intent”) is dubious, therefore, when such interpretation purports, as Schleiermacher put it, “to understand a writer better than he understood himself.”[4. Ibid., 198.] For Gadamer, however, the problem is not that it is impossible to make valid claims about the implications of a text’s historical cultural context. It is, rather, impossible to do so objectively as Dilthey believed the social sciences must, lest their claims cease to be scientifically valid. Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” has been widely influential in biblical hermeneutics as an account of how tradition encounters tradition in interpretation (though naïvely objectivist historical-critical methods still dominate many sectors). But the important observation here is that worldview finds a new lease in Gadamer’s claim that “the linguisticality of understanding is the concretion of historically effected consciousness,”[5. Ibid., 407.] specifically in taking up Wilhelm von Humboldt’s insight that “a language-view is a worldview.”[6. Ibid., 459.] The way this develops is important for missional theology insofar as biblical hermeneutics is a key methodological concern that can be developed in terms of worldview with great sophistication, but the point at present is that Gadamer’s use links worldview to the Sapir-Warf hypothesis of linguistic relativity with its concomitant problems.

Notes

A Missional Method for Constructive Theology (Part 7.2)

The word worldview (Weltanschauung) first appeared in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and quickly developed in different directions.[1. See David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept, Kindle ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), for the best overview of the concept available. The following accounts of Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein take Naugle as a point of departure.] Three later philosophers represent abiding critiques of the concept (as they had respectively received it): Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Responding primarily to Wilhelm Dilthey’s “science of worldview,” Husserl objected that worldview philosophy ended in relativism. Dilthey had proposed a historicist metaphilosophy that attributed every philosophical system’s failure to account for reality to its historical conditioning.[2. Ramon Betanzos, “Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction,” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, trans. Ramon Betanzos (Wayne State University Press), 29.] While Dilthey sought an objective basis for analyzing the worldviews that produce metaphysical accounts of reality, Husserl (and many others) felt Dilthey espoused subjectivism. From a postmodern perspective, it is not a very substantial critique to insist on “scientific” objectivity, yet Husserl’s concern establishes the persistent need to distinguish between the claim that worldviews mediate human perception of the “world” and the claim that the “world” is therefore not really accessible. Husserl believed the former entailed the latter and devised phenomenology as the means to make philosophy a “rigorous science” in which one might study the human consciousness of objects that precedes scientific theories (or psychological assumptions such as worldviews). The world perceived by consciousness, the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt), is not merely the world a worldview mediates but is always already the object of consciousness through perceptual experience. Thus, while Husserl ultimately espouses a form of direct realism that may not be tenable, his dispute with Dilthey underscores the need to clarify whether worldview necessarily maintains a Cartesian subject-object dualism and, if not, how to characterize the epistemological role of a worldview.

Heidegger, a student of Husserl, makes a similar point but takes it farther. Philosophy has been about the production of worldviews, Heidegger claims, but he desires to redefine philosophy as fundamental ontology. This is similar to Husserl’s desire to define philosophy as the phenomenology of consciousness, but if it were simply a semantic move to limit the meaning of “philosophy,” the traditional task of philosophy (producing worldviews) would become nameless but remain intact. Rather, the being with which fundamental ontology is concerned is by definition being-in-the-world.[3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Kindle ed. (Seattle: Amazon Digital Services: 2013), Kindle locs. 2129–36.] Again, similar to Husserl’s rejection of subject-object dualism, being-in-the-world assumes a sort of ontological holism. The upshot for Heidegger is that worldview has come to signify the modernist human objectification of the world as a “world picture” (Weltbild), which necessarily prevents the recovery of the “question of being” in philosophy, given that being is being-in-the-world, not being-as-subject-over-the-world.[4. Heidegger admits that a better understanding of Weltanschauung as a less objectifying “view of life” is justified. Yet, “the fact that, despite this, the phrase ‘world view’ asserts itself as the name for the position of man in the midst of all that is, is proof of how decisively the world became picture as soon as man brought his life as subiectum into precedence over other centers of relationship.” Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 134.] Subject-object dualism therefore becomes an ontological problem in addition to an epistemological one. Does worldview inherently misconstrue human beings’ relationship to the world? Even if not, it must certainly be conceived so as to rule out a modernist objectification of the world.[5. As representatives, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s concerns relate to those of many others who do not treat worldview per se. Particularly noteworthy from a postmodern perspective are (1) John Dewey’s characterization of representationalist epistemology as a “spectator theory of knowledge,” taken up in Richard Rorty’s discussion of the “optical metaphor,” and (2) Jacques Derrida’s critique of the historical association of sight with knowledge in metaphysics, leading into the burgeoning discussion of “carnal hermeneutics.” A knot of problems entangle sight as a root metaphor for human perception, with which any viable conception of worldview must recon. See John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, Gifford Lectures 1929 (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1929), 23 and passim; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 39; Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” Diacritics 13, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 4; Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christian Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, eds., Carnal Hermeneutics, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University, 2015).]

Finally, not unlike Dilthey’s search for a metaphilosophy, Wittgenstein’s later work seeks an understanding of the linguistic preconditions of philosophical claims. Wittgenstein takes worldviews to be “the form of our representation, the way we see things”[6. “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” in Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, Hackett Classics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 133.]—which amounts to a philosophical understanding (i.e., contra Dilthey, philosophy produces worldview, which is the assumption Heidegger identified as the norm to be rejected in favor of fundamental ontology). In particular, Wittgenstein identifies the modern worldview (“typical of our time”) as a kind of worldview that assembles data hypothetically in order to achieve “perspicuous representation.”[7. Ibid. 131–33. This seems consistent with his early use of worldview, by which he identifies the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow as a hypothesis, not a natural law: “At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.” Notably similar to his comments in “Remarks,” here natural laws elicit the same deference as God and Fate, but the conceit of the modern worldview is that “in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained.” This is the assumption of perspicuity typical of the modern worldview. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Major Works (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), §§6.36311–6.372.] Because he desires to explain how the language of philosophy functions rather than to present an alternative representation of reality, he does not want his work to be taken as a worldview.[8. Yet, he seems to have an ironic awareness that his account of language itself may still constitute a worldview. The irony is clear, because Wittgenstein’s language in “Remarks” is verbatim in Philosophical Investigations, as he claims the problem is that “our grammar is deficient in surveyability” (Übersichtlichkeit being translated as surveyability or perspicuity). But whereas he identifies the surveyable representation of data according to a hypothesis as a worldview, he self-consciously asks of his own quest for a surveyable representation of “grammar”: “Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?] His argument, instead, focuses on the idea of the “world-picture” (Weltbild) that precedes the survey of things that a worldview undertakes: “I have a world-picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting.”[9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty in Major Works (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), §162. Wittgenstein’s use of Weltbild is not related to Heidegger’s objectivized Weltbild.] He continues with a statement that contrasts clearly with the hypothesis-based modern worldview: “I say world-picture and not hypothesis, because it is the matter-of-course foundation for [the scientist’s] research and as such also goes unmentioned.”[10. Ibid., §167.] In short, worldviews are construals of reality that do not take into account the way philosophical language is predicated on world-pictures.[11. I agree with Naugle, Kindle locs. 2174–6, that world-pictures seem to be synonymous with “forms of life.”] Thus, Wittgenstein’s world-pictures occupy a place strikingly similar to that of Dilthey’s worldviews: both precede and determine philosophical understanding.[12. And indeed, Wittgenstein is often taken to be just the sort of relativist that Husserl thought Dilthey was. Yet, Wittgenstein also imagines a virtually pragmatic interaction with the world that produces the world-picture, akin to Husserl’s lifeworld—and Wittgenstein never claims that the world-picture cannot be explained (though he is as uninterested in Husserl’s method as any other), only that some aspects of the world-picture cannot be doubted or investigated for the purpose of justification. One turn of phrase is particularly interesting in the context of the present discussion: “Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end;—but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.” Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §204.] Another question the conception of worldview must answer, therefore, is whether it is truly pretheoretical or is, instead, the product of something more basic—or whether it is both. To some extent, the fuzzy relationship between worldview, world-picture, and lifeworld is already contained in two definitions of perception: (1) the capacity for perceiving and (2) the result of perceiving. Whether two different terms should represent these distinct ideas depends largely on whether Wittgenstein was right to characterize the world-picture as presuppositions that can be identified as such. Presumably, once presuppositions are explicated, they are almost indistinguishable from what Wittgenstein would call a worldview—which is no doubt what caused him to ask whether his own explicated “picture” of language was not ultimately a worldview too.

Notes

A Missional Method for Constructive Theology (Part 7.1)

Having laid some groundwork in parts 1–6, we come to the primary question: why worldview? The next part, broken into various subsections, overviews the significance of the concept and the particular value of its missiological conception.

At first glance, worldview seems to many to be an irredeemable conceptual jumble. The term’s use is both ubiquitous and ambiguous. My initial claims, therefore, are two: (1) ubiquity is a sign that worldview is a conceptual juggernaut that creates common ground between diverse theological methods and (2) ambiguity is not an argument against the use of a term but an argument for its clarification—or better, the specification of the language game in which it is employed. Compare, for example, the chief concern of any theology: God. Neither the ubiquity of the term nor its profound ambiguity is a prima facie argument that it should be tossed on the terminological garbage heap. Granting worldview is not as semantically essential to theology as God, the point remains. The ubiquity and ambiguity of worldview commend clarification, to which I turn.

A Contested Concept, An Enduring Idea

Worldview has been widely contested yet endures in diverse usages. Apparently, a word that straightforwardly denotes the idea of a view of the world is precious currency. Perhaps it comes near the mark to consider view a root metaphor for human perception, making worldview far too felicitous to discard. In any case, it is evident in the debates about worldview that the same basic thing is at issue—a human view of the world. Rather than leaving the term in the possession of previous expositors, and rather than coining a new one for their own use, many thinkers have been compelled to rescue worldview (though there are a number of synonyms and cognates meant to compete with worldview as alternative accounts of the same phenomenon). I am participating in the same tradition. In order to argue missiology should set the rules of the language game in which worldview can function as a theoretical basis for a missional theological method, it will be helpful to consider (in subsequent posts) the contours of the concept in four fields: philosophy, biblical studies, theology, and the social sciences.