On Christian Worldview

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” – Matthew 6:21

Jesus’ words ring clear and loud when he claimed, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Either Jesus is telling the truth or otherwise; he can’t be both true and false. The modern day common apologetics may pursue with an iron hand the quest for the knowledge (or possession in most cases) of absolute truth or reality and may dogmatically coax others to their belief. Part of this is to challenge the overpowering rampant relativism in the quest for truth and its meaning. While it is true that relativism challenges the very heart of Christian commitment, it is not that Christians must believe they have a full grasp of the truth. Christians do believe that part of the truth about truth is that truth is one. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1754-1804) first used the word ‘Worldview’ (Weltanschauung in German) in his writings where he defined it as: ‘a worldview is a set of propositions which we hold about the basic makeup of the world’. Many philosophers over the centuries since then have adopted and extended the term in different ways. We see Wilhelm Dilthey’s microcosmic and macrocosmic nature of Worldview; Nietzsche’s blatant proclamation that God is dead; Wittgenstein delving into postmodernism and taking a linguistic turn; Michel Foucault’s observation of Worldview and its connection with power.

But what of the Christian worldview? How do we come to hold a worldview? David Naugle has this to say: ‘Presuppositions are those first principles that people take for granted. They are multifaceted in character, and, knit together, they make up the most basic psychic layer of life. They constitute the background logic for all thinking and doing’. What then do we make of presupposition that is so basic and yet neglected? When we think about anything we cannot neglect the fact that we think in time and space (and in most cases, the acknowledgement of a transcendent being). Without these pretheoretical categories we wouldn’t have been able to conceive anything in our mind. However the Christian story differs in that, we believe in another entity before anything else: God – whom we know as the most absolute reality and understand as a ‘personal being’ and not just another ‘entity’. What difference it makes in the lives of individuals is how this ‘personal being’ corresponds and manifests in their lives. James Orr, the Scottish Presbyterian theologian, who first introduced the notion of worldview in Christian thinking, at the peak of German Idealism adapted the German source of concept for his own apologetic purposes. Orr set out to justify Christian belief by showing how the Christian faith addresses all the major issues of concern to human flourishing. Naugle, too, when the world was caught in the rhetoric of German Idealism sought the veritability of the Christian worldview, said that the truth or aptness of a concept is not dependent on how old it is or where it came from but on whether it comports with reality. On Orr, he said: “That the Christian faith may be conceived as a Christocentric, self-authenticating system of biblical truth characterized by inner integrity, rational coherence, empirical verisimilitude, and existential power is one of his most distinctive contributions.” Naugle then goes on to say that the heart and its contents as the centre of human consciousness creates and constitutes what we commonly refer to as a Weltanshauung (worldview). This reminds us of Jesus’ words when he said, “…it is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come….and they defile a person.” (Mark 7:115, 20-23)

So then, how are we to live? The Christian story begins with going against the tide. The creation story in the Bible was wrought out of sheer hopelessness under bondage of a mighty Babylonian regime to give hope to people whose self-image was thoroughly vanquished. All the prophets were the voices of discontinuity. Jesus’ life and death was the voice of discontinuity – that the status quo must end. That He, Jesus, has come to give new life, and that He alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life. The apostle Paul said, “Test everything [to the faith]. Hold on to what is good.” (1 Thess 5:21) But the reality is quite different. As Brian Walsh would say, “[M]ost of us feel a gap in our lives: a gap between our worldview and our way of life. Or to put this in more biblical terms, most of us sense a gap between our conscious commitment to Jesus Christ and the way we live out our lives.” So what then are we to do? The apostle Paul warns us in Colossians 2:8 – “See to it that no-one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” Matthew 16:6 – “Be careful,” Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”

Christ’s call is a call to commitment, not just of the mind, but of the heart. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Ungshungmi Rungsung
B.Sc(H) Computer Science, Hans Raj College (Delhi University)
email: ungshungmi@gmail.com
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