Part 1: Defining Worldview

Last week, I got the chance to meet and study under James Sire, one of the few contemporary authors whose work I enjoy and whose ideas have been particularly formative in my own thought. Sire, the former senior editor at Intervarsity Press, is best known for The Universe Next Door (1976, rev. 1988, 1997, & 2004), which according to the cover is “a basic worldview catalog.” Along the way, of course, it defines just what a worldview is—more on that later—and presents a brief apologia for studying them in the first place. A good number of Sire’s other books build on Universe’s foundational ideas, which is to say they tend to repeat its first chapter at various lengths, but he has plenty of other original material as well. On my shelf at the moment are, in addition to my now-autographed Universe, Habits of the Mind, Discipleship of the Mind, Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?, and of course How to Read Slowly. The only other book of his I’ve read in recent memory is Chris Chrisman Goes to College, which is essentially a rehash of Universe in pseudo-novelistic form: it intersperses an allegorical narrative about—wait for it—Chris Chrisman’s experience at college with chapters on the various worldviews and philosophical ideas entrenched in the story. As prose, it’s passable and certainly beats the pants off of Josh McDowell’s similar attempts (but then, so do my students’ papers), but Sire’s writing talents are definitely stronger on the philosophical end of things. His more recent work (which I’ve not read) tends to be more about apologetics, though I believe he’s also dabbled in biography and philosophy along the way.

As you might expect from Sire’s rather lengthy publication list, his background’s in literature—and boy, is he ever an English major! I got the chance to talk with him about English for a few minutes before CGSA’s large group meeting—he spoke there, and gave a seminar in the suburbs the next day—and he was remarkably up-to-date for a scholar past seventy. Of course the bulk of his formal academic training was in the 1960s and 70s, so he knows scholarship from that era best (I believe his area was Renaissance, particularly Milton studies): he’s the only serious scholar I’ve ever known who admits to being, at least partly, a New Critic. Still, though, both in our conversation and his lectures he made plentiful reference (in ideas more than by name) to most of the major critical movements of the past three centuries, and fielded my question about Foucault and Judith Butler with no problems whatsoever.

If anything, actually, his philosophical knowledge actually hurt his presentation a bit: most of the CGSA folks are engineers and scientists by trade, and thus are not as well versed in the humanities. In any case, I enjoyed it—unlike most CGSA (and, frankly, IV in general) lectures, in which I have to work fairly hard to connect the speaker’s ideas to my academic work, this one pretty much matched point for point. I knew the concept of worldview fairly well already, having read Universe sometime in high school. (In fact, I used it as the centerpiece of my first American lit term paper, which prompted my TA to remark that I “shouldn’t use religious texts in [my] papers.” Something tells me The First Church of Saint Karl was exempt.) But for all the headaches and less-sleep (if not precisely sleepless) nights my theory class has engendered (take that, Butler) this quarter, it has made me think long and hard about the big questions concerning epistemology, language, identity, and the like. So, this time around when Sire trotted out his seven-question boilerplate for delineating worldviews, I could trace the non-theistic tenets more concretely to specific texts and critical trends. Actually, we had a brief discussion in class today about authorial attribution vs. Zeitgeist, so I suppose I should take back that bit about specific attribution. Must be that nagging logocentrism in my fundamentalist brain, eh?

In any case, Sire’s talks were as remarkable for their departures from the definition of “worldview” that I’d learned (in Universe, 3rd. ed.) as for their actual content. Sire’s 1997 definition runs like this: “A worldview is a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world.” In practice, or at least the type of practice that involves handouts with reference charts (as our CGSA talk did), this amounts to a set of answers to seven questions:

1. 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?
(Universe 17-18.)

We could, of course, point to a couple rhetorical moves in the list itself that stack the deck against poststructuralist answers—i.e. “why is it possible to know” as opposed to “is it possible”—but by and large the list works fairly well in my experience. Now, once you get past modernism to, say, 99% of contemporary academic doublespeak, the answer to all seven questions is “discourse,” but Sire puts it rather more eloquently than that. And speaking of doublespeak, there are definite affinities between Sire’s concept of worldview and Marxist ideas of ideology, though Marx et al tend to see ideology (ideally) as “those silly bourgeois delusions under which everyone except Marxists suffer” rather than an inescapable and supra-rational mindset.

This brings me to Sire’s revisions, which in my opinion change the tenor of his argument considerably. According to Naming the Elephant, one of his recent books, the new version runs thus: “A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story and/or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously; consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality and upon whose foundation we live and move and have our being” (122). Now, this doesn’t necessarily kibosh the logical model outlined above; Sire in fact still used it in both presentations. But the language itself indicates a move away from epistemology (knowledge) to ontology (existence), which (to mix my metaphors like so much dinnertime leftover-surprise) is a whole other ballgame of a different color.

First, Sire moves from “a set of presuppositions,” which we might associate with logical proofs or legal discourse, to “a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart.” In practice, of course, this is the same thing: as Sire develops further throughout Universe, though worldview charts articulate their respective values in a mathematical fashion (i.e. God is all-knowing and man is made in God’s image, therefore man can know) they rarely appear that way in human expression—particularly creative expression. Granted, occasionally we get fortunate nuggets like Carl Sagan’s “The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be,” but more often we have to read deeper—that’s Sire’s point in How to Read Slowly—to get at the underlying worldview. For instance, I saw a pro-abortion bumper sticker the other day that said “If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?” Under Sire’s system, we could trace this back to notions of human autonomy and eventually to naturalism, but that entails considerably more interpretive work. But my point, which is to say Sire’s point, is that a worldview does not necessarily reside only in the conscious, rational mind but also (and more vitally) flows from the heart (soul, unconscious, essence—pick your poison). I’m not entirely satisfied with the wording “orientation of the heart,” which seems to minimize the psychical mechanisms involved in worldview change, but given Sire’s ontological focus I can’t think of a better phrase just now.

Secondly, where before Sire defined a worldview generically (that is, in terms of genre) as only “a set of presuppositions…which we hold” he now clarifies that it “can be expressed as a story” as well/instead. This, actually, I find a more fruitful alteration. To go back to How to Read Slowly, worldview appears quite often in narrative form, both in the sense that formal narrative choices speak to authorial worldview and in the sense that narration is a common vehicle for expressing (or revealing!) our inner priorities. Put another way, we as humans often narrate—tell stories—where we cannot or don’t want to explain our beliefs.

Let me give an example from my own experience. When I was pursuing Crystal, my first college almost-girlfriend, I wrote a long letter to her parents to introduce myself and explain why I (Big-Scary-Internet-Guy) wanted to meet their daughter. (Yes, I know I’m a nerd. Keep reading anyway.) I filled a good deal of the twelve pages with biography and logistics, where logic unquestionably dominated. However, when I got to the parts where I told them how I felt about Crystal, the pendulum swung the other way back toward storytelling. Now, I suppose I could have given them a tidy bulleted list of my and Crystal’s alleged twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility (no, eHarmony.com was not involved). But besides being rhetorically atrocious and not at all likely to garner parental permission to visit, such a move simply felt wrong: in my then slightly less cynical mind, the depth of my commitment (to use Sire’s word) could best, if not exclusively, shine forth in narrative. Thus is it with worldview in its most crucial (and most human, I would add) representations. In our more systematic modes of expression, we may be able to answer Sire’s seven questions in tidy tabular format. But at least in my experience, behind each answer lies not just flannelgraph theology but actual narrated stories, whether we articulate them in lists or anecdotes.

Sire’s final change in the new edition is a bit more problematic: he anthropomorphizes the “set of propositions” into a personality “upon whose foundation we live and move and have our being.” The latter part, which admittedly is quite poetic, derives from Acts 17:28—appropriately so, as the passage (Paul’s “Men of Athens” sermon) is a central text in Biblical apologetics. But does a worldview really have a personality? To be fair, Sire does distinguish between the actual view and its “foundation”—that is to say, its prime reality—but as a whole the change still troubles me. As I understand it, Sire’s original purpose in Universe was not simply to present a defense of Christian theism (though it does of course do that, with which I have no quarrel) but to establish a discursive framework—a way to define and talk about worldviews. And by and large, the 3rd edition definition (I’ve not read the first two editions, but I assume they use similar language) does just that, particularly in an academic context far friendlier to logic than “orientation[s] of the heart.” In my opinion, it leaves sufficient room to explore questions of conscious intention and articulation without necessarily requiring (or more mildly, hinting at) certain answers. Now, don’t get me wrong—I fully support Sire’s theological goals insofar as his new rhetoric nudges people toward Christianity. But to map Christian language and strictures (i.e. prime reality must be personal if we can “live and move and have our being” in it) onto an academic discourse seems not only counterproductive but potentially alienating to outsiders—and not at all conducive to dialogue, which must be the first step in both apologetics and evangelism.

In my next couple posts, I’ll talk about Sire’s specific arguments from last week’s seminars: picking one’s apologetics battles and the idea of “signals of transcendence,” and apply them to two interesting rhetorical examples I came across recently. But I want to leave you with the passage in Acts that Sire quotes, and let you make up your mind: how does the Bible model this balance between sets of knowledge and commitments too deep for words?

Acts 17:16-34 (NIV) 16While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean." 21(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

22Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

24"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

29"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man's design and skill. 30In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

32When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." 33At that, Paul left the Council. 34A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.