8

LIVING WORLDVIEWS: THE PROMISES AND

PERILS OF WORLDVIEW FORMATION

Ante Jerončić

Introduction
My deep-seated interest in the topic of worldview analysis reaches
back to my conversion as an Adventist during my teenage years. The
newfound faith instilled in me a sustained thirst for knowledge not
abated by the conservative ecclesial milieu that surrounded me.
Without a theoretical justification for doing so, I intuited, rightly I
believe, that having a deep Christian commitment brings with it
freedom of intellectual exploration. Rather than narrowing my interests,
it led me to appreciate literature and the arts in a whole new way. Yes,
even as a high school student, I imbued the Great Controversy thematic
with its strong stress on demonic agency in the world, deception and
untruth being one manifestation of the “principalities and powers.” But
no, that did not lead me to infer that non-Adventist literature was
poisonous and dangerous for my spiritual well-being; that I should
avoid the bane of philosophy or detach myself from broader cultural
concerns. For some reason, such thoughts never crossed my mind, nor
would they have been intelligible to me. Why be afraid if we know Him
who is the Truth? Certainly, there was the influence of my pastor who
valued intellectual growth and regularly organized apologetic meetings
for the youth in my church, many of whom were university students. Or
it could be that in the context of socialist Yugoslavia, where religious
literature was scarce, many of my friends were instinctively open to
books that invoked the transcendent and the existential. Thus, I freely
126 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

rummaged bookstores for fares such as Plato’s dialogues, Khalil Gibran’s

poetry, and Erich Fromm’s essays. (Not that I always understood
everything they wrote or even knew much about these thinkers in
advance.)
While different voices shaped my approach to life during that
period and after, I distinctly remember encountering Francis Schaeffer’s
Escape from Reason in a Croatian translation. Even though I would take
exception at his narration of the history of philosophy later in life, one of
his main arguments stayed with me ever since—the idea that all our
practices are always already infused with specific worldview
commitments. In other words, he instilled in me the intuition—and here
I am putting it in a language more appropriate to Martin Heidegger—
that “ideas from the history of philosophy have surreptitiously
infiltrated our ways of thinking so that we employ diluted versions of
Platonic or Aristotelian notions without even knowing it.”1 You might
not care for those broader frameworks, you might not have the patience
for what you deem abstract considerations, but it does not mean that
you can somehow bracket them out. To wit, the very employment of
language—using descriptive categories, forms of appeals, statements of
priorities, assuming a hierarchy of values, and so on—places us
squarely into worldview waters. As Lee Braver put it, again, in reference
to Heidegger: “When we think, we typically do so with other people’s
thoughts, prosthetic limbs for the brain so to speak.”2 In some ways, this
insight provided a needed counterbalance to my dialogical instincts
mentioned above. Caution and discernment are as much intellectual
virtues as are openness and teachability.
With that as a backdrop, I delighted in the opportunity many years
later to team-teach “Western Heritage,” a year-long freshman Honors
course at Andrews University. I look back at that experience as one of
the highlights of my academic career. Taking the idea of worldview as
its Leitmotif, the class slowly unpacked the meaning of the term through

1 Lee Braver, Heidegger: Thinking of Being (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014), 17.
2Braver, Heidegger, 17. The broader implication of this point is that the use of language is
always a part of a broader web of meaning. On the “constitutive” function of language,
see, for example, Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Lin-
guistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2016).
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 127

an interdisciplinary exploration of history, theology, philosophy,

literature, and the arts. As professors, we would repeatedly challenge
students to become self-aware about their respective worldviews and
how they shaped their lives. In other words, we hoped that our students
would think critically and reflexively about their fundamental beliefs,
such as the nature of ultimate reality and morality. “You cannot not
possess a worldview,” we would reiterate our central thesis in a mantra-
like fashion. “Whether we want it or not, we always play by some
worldview tune.” To bring that point home, we employed various tools:
cross-cultural literature, primary philosophical and theological texts,
the Scriptures, museum outings, theatrical performances, Hindu temple
visits, and musical pieces were interchangeably utilized to foster
conversations along such lines. In retrospect, we approached the class—
perhaps a tad too self-importantly—as if it were our one shot to
convince the students about the beauty and depth of the Christian
worldview. In truth, we felt a great deal of responsibility in doing so,
knowing well the intellectual, spiritual, and sociological challenges
those dedicated students would face as denizens of a secular age.
As I think back to that experience, I would say that we were
motivated by several intentions. At the very least, we were eager for our
students…
a. to become aware of fundamental questions of life that comprise
a person’s worldview,
b. to develop an appreciation for the philosophical depth,
coherence, beauty, and relevance of the Christian faith,
c. to have a better understanding of the plurality of worldviews
that are in circulation in our contemporary culture,
d. to be able to defend their convictions on the one hand, and find
contact points with people inhabiting different perspectives on the
other,
e. to reflect on how specific ethical values and actions might flow
from specific worldview commitments,
f. and to recognize and affirm, above all, the supremacy of Christ
over all reality. In the memorable words of Abraham Kuyper: “In
the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of
128 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, ‘That is
mine!’”

In sum, our motives were apologetic, missional, theological,

pedagogical, and spiritual. Not a mean feat as far as aspirations are
concerned!
Of course, there were also personal reasons that informed my
teaching about worldviews. As an ethicist invested in questions such as
the ethics of technology, nationalism and violence, transhumanism, and
consumerism in postindustrial societies, I need to think from within a
worldview. Scouring for biblical passages on their own will not do me
much good in addressing these complex realities. In a world of
unquantifiable complexity and plurality of options, therefore, worldview
crafting and analysis enable us to have a point of orientation, to think
Christianly, as it were, about the whole domain of human affairs. In
other words, it provides us with foundational categories—biblically
faithful ones, hopefully—and a meta-perspective by means of which we
can parse, examine, interpret, and understand the philosophical
assumptions implicit in policies, intellectual trends, and cultural
practices in their value-laden character.
And yet, all these well-meaning intentions could not suppress a
series of misgivings raised in the context of our class discussions. The
reservations were galore and concerned the feasibility, desirability, and
practicality of worldview formation. Among others, we wondered
whether a fixation on worldview inculcation, a veritable industry in
evangelical (and some Adventist) circles, does not reflect a modernist
reflex. Undoubtedly, the idea of worldview formation is itself a
worldview commitment that brings to the table a whole range of
philosophical underpinnings. To the extent that that is correct, is not the
entire discussion about the centrality of worldviews mired in circular
reasoning? And then, what does it mean to construct a worldview? If we
grant implicit beliefs a life-directing force, for instance, what
implications does that have for how we ought to think about worldview
acquisition and analysis? And do worldviews actually do what we say
they do? In other words, do they shape human existence and moral
agency the way we claim them to do? In fact, how is it that students with
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 129

nearly identical worldview commitments end up occupying such

divergent, often incommensurable existential spaces?
Such questions continued to inform my thinking long after I
stopped teaching the course, and it is their pertinence that frames this
essay. My argument will straddle two convictions held in tension. I will
first attempt to defend the importance of worldview thinking by
considering the aesthetics of human cognition in general and the
beneficence of reductionistic thinking in specific. As I will suggest, there
is something fundamentally right with efforts to articulate composite
wholes that worldview beliefs represent, over-generalizing as they
might be. Such macro perspectives, I will contend, track ingrained
meaning-making needs humans possess. The second aspect of my
argument will assume a more critical posture. Not only will I suggest
that worldview discourse readily ossifies into simplistic and adversarial
thinking, but also that it at times fails to account for what directs human
action. In sum, my approach to worldview analysis and formation will
assume a posture of a cautious affirmation marked by a series of “yes,
but…” hops.

The Quest for the Whole

Undoubtedly, worldviews entice us with their bird’s eye
perspectives, perspectives that forgo the granularity and nuances of
ideas, thinkers, religions, or schools of thought in favor of grand images.
Metaphorically speaking, worldview thinking is like viewing the city of
Chicago through the airplane window thousands of feet above the
ground; from such a vantage point, flowerbeds, children’s laughter, road
potholes, filled garbage bins, the noise and hustling of busy urban
streets do not and cannot occupy our sensory field. Instead, what is at
display is a general outline of the city with its topographical features,
relative size, and formidable skyline, depending on the side of the
airplane you sit in. Analogously, a worldview analysis provides us with a
vocabulary and a range of categories for basic orientation. Attentive
engagement with the niceties and subtleties of a particular philosophy,
ideology, or life outlook gives way to a cartographic orientation of the
most generalized sort. As such, worldview analysis is a reductionistic
gesture par excellence.
130 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

While most people have an understandable aversion towards the

notion of “reduction,” there are reasons, I believe, why we ought to
recognize its importance. For one, there is something proper,
fundamentally so, about efforts to think about reality in broad,
composite terms. Of course, I am not oblivious to postmodern
suspicions about meta-categories littering our contemporary landscape;
categories such as “race,” “religion,” “history,” progress,” and “human
nature” are understandably ripe for deconstructive probing. That such
universalizing language would lend itself to practices of exclusion,
particularly when couched in oppositional or binary terms, is hardly
contestable. At the same time, however, I take leave off viewpoints that
present the problem in an essentializing manner, as if invocations of the
Whole, in whatever shape or form, inevitably amounted to some
omnivorous univocity or totality.
With that in mind, I wish to appropriate Iris Murdoch’s treatment of
metaphysics as a proxy for my defense of worldview reasoning. Echoing
Plato’s concept of synoptikos that denotes a person’s ability to see things
“in a unified manner,” Murdoch affirms the centrality of integrated
“seeing” or theoria, that is, the need to have large, overarching macro-
visions.3 The eros for the Whole or the Good, the need to tease out the
connected lineaments of fragmented experiences and perceptions, is
precisely the impetus behind metaphysical thinking. Rather than being
an exercise in alienating abstraction, metaphysics is that intellectual
(and spiritual!) exercise that connects us to the depth of reality; it is a
gesture towards voicing the universal in human experience. Stated
differently, metaphysics prompts us “to make models of the deep
aspects of our lives,” to envision “huge general pictures of what ‘must be
the case’ for human being to be as it is.”4 In the same way that artists try

3 For the wording and insights in this sentence I am indebted to Alister E. McGrath, The

Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 91. For an excellent dis-
cussion of the concept of theoria in Greek philosophy, see Andrea Wilson Nightingale,
Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Edward F. Mooney, Lost Intimacy in
American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell (New York:
Continuum, 2009), 8.
4Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1992),
55, 259. One should not infer from this that Murdoch somehow subscribes to a theory of
mimetic infallibility or a naïve correspondence theory of truth. She tirelessly points to the
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 131

to capture fleeting moments in a unified whole, so too the quest for

metaphysics is a way to do justice to reality, to the intimations of
transcendence in even our most ordinary experiences and endeavors.5
On such terms, metaphysics “is a deep emotional motive to philosophy,
to art, to thinking itself” in that the human intellect “is naturally one-
making. To evaluate, understand, classify, place in order of merit,
implies a wider unified system; the questioning mind abhors vacuums.”6
Murdoch, therefore, reflects A. W. Moore’s basic definition of
metaphysics as “the most general attempt to make sense of things” in
our attempt to understand our existence and commit to a way of life.7
Metaphysics so defined tracks the aesthetic character of our sense-
making capacities. As humans, we are naturally attracted to
predications or descriptions of things as vivid, graceful, elegant,
balanced, integrated, synthetic, coherent, and holistic—all of which are
aesthetic categories of some import.8 So, when John Searle contends
that “there is an aesthetic dimension to all conscious experiences,”

human propensity to self-deception and delusions of grandeur that extends to our de-
scriptions of the real.
5 On a related note, McGrath observes that C. S. Lewis’s “commendation of the Christian
faith rests partly in his belief that it offers a capacious and deeply satisfying vision of
reality—way of looking at things that simultaneously allows both discernment of its
complexity and affirmation of its interconnectedness. The human imagination plays a
leading role in grasping this ‘big picture,’ in that it is more easily perceived than
understood” (McGrath, The Intellectual World, 91).
6 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 1. Murdoch does not mean to suggest, I think, that every single

form of artistic expression valorizes the Whole. For sure, much of contemporary art fa-
vors the fragmentary and the nonrepresentational, and with it the brokenness of bodies,
the “ugly,” the foul air of dystopian disintegration, and the disfigurement of suffering.
7 A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge,

England: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. I have discussed Iris Murdoch’s moral
philosophy at a greater length in “Attending to Reality: Iris Murdoch on the Moral Good,”
Biblijski Pogledi 21/1-2 (2013): 101–114.
8 Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on
Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 421–450. For this reference to Sibley, I am indebted to
Charles Taliaferro and Jil Evans, The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the
Imagination (New York: Continuum, 2011), 38. Sibley lists aesthetic properties such as
unified, balanced, integrated, ingenious, serene, somber, dynamic, powerful, vivid, deli-
cate, moving, graceful, elegant, fitting, and so on.
132 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

perhaps it is such a relationship of aesthetics to thought that he has in

mind.9 And arguably, it is thinking in large, composite images or stories
that is most illustrative of such a connection. To that end, Charles
Taliaferro and Jil Evans rightly note that

in science as in art, one highly valued aesthetic feature is a

cognitive, affective completeness or unity. That we value unity
or wholeness is exemplified in the centuries of recorded human
consciousness that acknowledges an awareness of
incompleteness and lack of wholeness… Whether or not we
will discover it, create, and most of us have only known it in
fleeting moments, we long for unity and wholeness.10

I was reminded of this passage a while ago while reading a review

of Edward Frenkel’s Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Jim
Holt, the reviewer, begins his essay by noting that

for those who have learned something of higher mathematics,

nothing could be more natural than to use the word “beautiful”
in connection with it. Mathematical beauty, like the beauty of,
say, a late Beethoven quartet, arises from a combination of
strangeness and inevitability. Simply defined abstractions
disclose hidden quirks and complexities. Seemingly unrelated
structures turn out to have mysterious correspondences.
Uncanny patterns emerge, and they remain uncanny even after
being underwritten by the rigor of logic.11

The discussion about the “aesthetics of knowing” as outlined here

drags us, invariably so, into the complicated debate about subjectivity
and objectivity, that is, the dialectics of the personal (i.e., the internal,
contextual, situated, existential, and embedded) and the detached (i.e.,
the external, self-transcending, universal, and trans-historical). Not that
I wish to litigate that issue here, except, perhaps, to single out an

9 John R. Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and
Political Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 14. For this reference to
Searle I am indebted to Taliaferro and Evans, The Image in Mind, 39.
10 Taliaferro and Evans, The Image in Mind, 39–40.
11Jim Holt, “A Mathematical Romance,” New York Review of Books 60/19, December 5,
2013, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/12/05/mathematical-romance/.
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 133

important observation by Thomas Nagel. In his essay “Subjective and

Objective,” he pushes against insalubrious forms of idealism that
denigrate the ontologically real. As he puts it, “objective reality cannot
be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality
can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some
things are.”12 He further summarizes his approach as follows:

Although I shall speak of the subjective viewpoint and the

objective viewpoint, this is just shorthand, for there are not
two such viewpoints, nor even two such categories into which
more particular viewpoints can be placed. Instead, there is a
polarity. At one end is the point of view of a particular
individual, having a specific constitution, situation, and relation
to the rest of the world. From here the direction of movement
toward greater objectivity involves, first, abstraction from the
individual’s specific spatial, temporal, and personal position in
the world then from the features that distinguish him from
other humans, then gradually from the forms of perception and
action characteristic of humans, and away from the narrow
range of human scale in space, time and quantity, toward a
conception of the world which as far as possible is not the view
from anywhere within it. There is no end to this process, but its
aim is to regard the world as centerless, with the viewer just
one of its contents.13

All this opens several interesting themes, including questions

concerning transcendence and metaphysical realism.14 For our
purposes, however, it suffices to stress the symmetry between
objectivizing quests, in Nagel’s usage of the term, and arguments in
favor of worldview discourse. Common to both is an aesthetics (and
ethics!) of cognition, one that validates the language of the Whole.

12 Thomas Nagel, “Subjective and Objective,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1979), 212.

13 Nagel, “Subjective and Objective,” 206.
14 For further exploration of these issues, see Ante Jerončić, “The Quest for ‘La Sapienza’:

Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and the Science and Religion Dialogue,” Andrews
University Seminary Studies 53/2 (2015): 355–368.
134 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

The Problem of Reductionism

Apart from the broader questions of metaphysics and the aesthetics
of knowledge, reductionistic language is also a matter of heuristics.
Without recourse to basic denominators and grand sweeps of thought,
we could not have summaries or encyclopedic entries of any kind. To
wit, reductionism is simply unavoidable for finite minds operating with
finite capacities. We talk about civilizations, historical periods,
personality types, philosophical schools, characteristics of nations,
theological trends, and sociological categories in reductionistic terms.
We refer to millennials, the Middle Ages, women voters, Christian youth,
Mexican cuisine, white privilege, liberal theology, and so ad infinitum. In
fact, I don’t know how I would teach without employing reductionist
categories. Not being able to use them, we would be consigned to silence
regarding large swaths of life. Honestly, what do I really know about the
ins and outs of many a thinker that I discuss in my classes, not to
mention subject matters on the periphery of my academic competencies
such as neuropsychology, economics, and climate science?
A helpful way to approach the function of reduction is to consider
Kwame Appiah’s argument in his As If.15 He samples categories —
“idealizations,” he calls them—that we employ to provide overarching
explanations of human behavior and socio-political realities. These
“idealizations” have a twofold nature, he suggests. On the one hand, they
are frequently simplistic and myopic. They single out but one or few
determining factors of human behavior, as in Adam Smith’s view of
human beings as selfish, self-interested agents interested in profit and
material wealth. On the other, idealizations pull a significant
explanatory heft by spotlighting features of reality. (Is Smith not at least
partially correct about what drives people in capitalist societies?) That
being the case, “life is a constant adjustment between the models we
make and the realities we encounter. In idealizing, we proceed ‘as if’ our
representations were true, while knowing they are not.”16 That is to say,
we use them as lenses to make certain issues more salient while at the

15 Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If: Idealization and Ideals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2017).

16 Description on the Harvard University Press catalog website, https://bit.ly/3wX72JJ.
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 135

same time recognizing that that is what they are—mere lenses. We use
them, for a while, in a limited fashion, as if they were true or
comprehensive.
Let me give an example. Someone asked me why I resisted
generational designations such as “millennials.” Here is how I
responded, somewhat facetiously: “Insofar as it describes some people
of that generational cohort in some geographic locations, with certain
life philosophies and social status, in a way that is not valorizing or
demonizing or foreclosing the plurality of identity markers such as
gender, race, religion, and ethnic background, for the purpose of ad hoc
heuristics and ‘as if’ thinking, then yes, to a certain degree, with quite a
bit of caution, and non-dogmatic reductionism, we should give credence
to such categories. So, use them, but then immediately insert the but-on-
the-other-hand of negative dialectics.” The said dialectics, to repeat, is
the essential counterpoint to the heuristic function of idealizations. This
is not a matter of embracing the skeptical epoché, but rather one of
extolling the virtues of humility, caution, and generosity.
My utilization of Appiah’s concept of idealization, then, amounts to
something like the following. We recognize the importance of
worldview analysis both for its aesthetic appeal—along the lines
outlined above—and its pedagogical and missional function. As such,
worldviews are types of idealizations that explain some aspects of
people’s beliefs, highlighting some aspects of a given intellectual trend
or school of thought and some aspects of human behavior and living. We
should be wary, for instance, of conflating the notion of “postmodern
worldview” with distasteful relativism and anything-goism.17 For one, a

17 I will leave aside for the moment that a Bible-believing Christian cannot but be a rela-

tivist of a particular sort. For a good discussion of that point, see James K. A. Smith, Who’s
Afraid of Relativism? Community, Contingency, and Creaturehood (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic, 2014). For instance, he notes: “This Christian reaction to relativism, with its
therapeutic deployment of ‘absolute’ truth, is a symptom of a deeper theological prob-
lem: an inability to honor the contingency and dependence of our creaturehood. There
might even be something rather gnostic (and heretical) in this failure to own up to con-
tingency; indeed, one could argue that the claim to such ‘absoluteness’ is at the heart of
the first sin in the garden. Conversely, appreciating our created finitude as the condition
under which we know (and were made to know) should compel us to appreciate the
contingency of our knowledge without sliding into arbitrariness… Owning up to our
finitude is not tantamount to giving up on truth, revelation, or scriptural authority. It is
simply to recognize the conditions of our knowledge that are coincident with our status
as finite, created, social beings. And those conditions are pronounced ‘very good’ by the
136 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

careful engagement of postmodernism makes us realize that things are

more complicated and subtle. Not only do these thinkers widely differ in
their viewpoints, but their writings, over a period of time or even within
a particular text, indicate shifts in perspectives. In that sense, there is no
postmodernism, just as there is no such thing as modernity, Hinduism,
or Marxism.
Incidentally, this brings me back to Murdoch’s discussion of
metaphysics, one that tracks two tensions marking the history of
Western philosophy: the tension between the universal and the
particular and the one between stasis and flux. We might recall how for
her the impulse to think in “big picture” modalities, of which worldview
articulation is but a type, is a cognitive necessity. Yet, as we have already
noted, Murdoch repeatedly asks: “How do the generalisations of
philosophers connect with what I’m doing in my day-to-day-moment
pilgrimage, how can metaphysics be a guide to morals?”18 In other
words, how can metaphysical thinking not only do justice to the
plurality of human experience but also avoid being put to use for some
miscreant purpose? Murdoch’s response to this most intractable of
conundrums in Western intellectual history is to argue that “there are
times for piecemeal analysis, modesty and commonsense, and other
times for ambitious synthesis and the aspiring and edifying charm of
lofty and intricate structures.”19 As Maria Antonaccio helpfully
summarizes,

a truthful apprehension of individuals requires two kinds of

thinking: a unifying kind of thinking, which renders our
fragmentary lives more complete by imposing some kind of
artful shape on it; and a particularizing kind of thinking, which
resists the impulse to order or classify and instead individuates
phenomena with a kind of laser beam of attention. This
fundamental pattern in Murdoch’s thought is evident in the

Creator (Gen. 1:31)” (ibid., 30).

18 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 146.
19 Ibid., 211.
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 137

movement between metaphysics and empiricism which

structures Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.20

Antonaccio further notes that “Murdoch’s theory of art and her

theory of morals are structured by parallel tensions: the tension
between form and contingency, in the novel; and the tension between
metaphysics and empiricism, in moral theory.”21 Such considerations
are indeed at the heart of Murdoch’s project, and she continually affirms
the potential danger of metaphysics as much as she argues for its
indispensability. Systemic thinking must not erase that which really
matters in life—the nuances, the gradations, the subtleties of difference.
“What makes metaphysical (‘totalizing’) coherence theories
unacceptable,” writes Murdoch echoing Kierkegaardian sentiments, “is
the way in which they in effect ‘disappear’ what is individual and
contingent by equating reality with integration in system, and degrees
of reality with degrees of integration, and by implying that ‘ultimately’
or ‘really’ there is only one system.”22
When appropriated for my argument here, I would say that
worldview analyses should function more as provisional tents than
permanent edifices. Although we can utilize such concepts in the sense
of Appiah’s idealizations—heuristic reductions for sense-making
purposes—employing them univocally will inevitably lead to distortion.
They both illuminate and obscure at the same time and should,
therefore, come with the disclaimer: “If such-and-such means such-and-
such, then I think that this is the case. But most likely, my account is off
the mark.” In the end, what is problematic is not worldview analysis per
se, but that which seeks to pass as finality rightly meriting Nietzsche’s
quip: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system
is a lack of integrity.”23 (I take that by that he does not mean systems per

20 Maria Antonaccio, “Form and Contingency in Iris Murdoch’s Ethics,” in Form and

Contingency, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 112.
21 Ibid., 124.
22 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 196.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Twilight of Idols,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans.
23

Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), I.26.

138 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

se—systems are essential to thinking and life—but, as I have already

indicated, a particular mind-closure to change and particularity).
Ideally, we would have the commitment and patience to shift
between macro and microanalyses, between a bird’s eye perspective on
philosophical trends and paying attention to a particular paragraph or
page in an author’s work. And ideally, we would commit to a
hermeneutical circle in that regard. But often patience, courage, time,
and humility—the whole apparatus of epistemic virtues, in fact—are in
short supply.24 Macro-perspectives tend to leave us with the sense of
drinking water upstream from others, with the sense that we know
better than them what they are about. The empowering nature of such
sentiments cannot be overstated. The ability to look at some thinker,
perhaps without having read any of his work or considered the
possibility of alternative interpretations, and say, “He is a [blank]”
simply feels good. Once the worldview edifice has been erected—once
the individual worldviews have been named and described in a
supposedly value-neutral way—we are set to wield them in a
swashbuckling manner. We are ready to opine on matters we often
know very little about and do so in a monological way. I am
exaggerating things here somewhat, but I do legitimately wonder
whether worldview analysis, in so far as it reflects and fosters such a
mentality, does not amount to a will to power.
While these are complicated issues, we inevitably step in the right
direction whenever we assume a posture of dialogical openness. On that
count, I wish we could proceed with Daniel Dennett’s rules in mind as
we engage our opponents or interlocutors and as we think about
worldview analysis in general:

24 On the question of intellectual virtues, see the following: Jason S. Baehr, The Inquiring

Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011); Robert Campbell Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtue: An Essay in
Regulative Epistemology (New York: Clarendon, 2007); Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Virtues
of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 139

1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so

clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish
I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they
are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your
target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of
rebuttal or criticism.25

Such a basic good faith predisposition will go a long way in

preventing us from becoming liable to the potential ill-effects of
worldview discourse.

Do Worldviews Do What We Say They Do?

As I have suggested so far, there are many legitimate reasons why
worldview analysis should interest us. At a bare minimum, we want to
become intelligent about our faith; we want to probe its philosophical
implications to understand its relevance and depth; we aspire to
understand the worldview commitment of others; and we want to
provide some basic categories and principles—some basic
hermeneutical lenses—that enable us to translate Scriptural truths,
including moral norms, to a vastly different world. But when we begin
to inquire about the functionality of worldviews, that is, their life-
orienting and directing roles, things get murkier. For instance, consider
the words by a thoughtful student of mine: “I believe (a theoretical
worldview) provides a conceptual framework for us so we can operate
within the world. All of our macro-worldview presuppositions actually
make it possible for us to see the actions that we take as a viable option
before we take them, generally speaking.” On some level, that is
undoubtedly true. Certainly, the fundamental belief concerning the
existence or non-existence of God—assuming for the moment that it is
firmly held and thus life-determining—will have enormous

25 D. C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (New York: Norton, 2013),

33–34.
140 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

consequences on the way a person conducts their life. It presents me, to

appropriate my student’s words, with “viable options” for action.
That being said, at least four factors trouble the life-orienting
function of worldview commitments: the problems of emphasis,
hierarchy, coherence, and embodiment. Concerning the first, we need to
remember that it is not beliefs themselves but their arrangement and
inflections that determine the life-orienting role of a particular
worldview. The aspect of “arrangement” concerns the configuration of
beliefs, namely, the way some of them carry a greater weight or
significance for a particular person. Notice how the issue here is not
whether we have the truth, but rather one of salience, that is, what
stands out for me in my worldview and the degree in the way it does so.
That is why we can have two individuals giving identical answers to the
fundamental questions of life—or 28 Fundamental Beliefs for that
matter—and yet end up emphasizing individual components with
different intensity or conviction. For example, one can envision
someone putting a premium on the doctrine of creation as having a
different set of priorities or even lifestyle than someone fixating on the
apocalyptic aspect of the biblical worldview.26 Quite apart from the lack
of theological warrant for parsing beliefs in such a manner, the mere
fact that such difference could and often does lead to divergent forms of
God-consciousnesses and praxis sufficiently underscores this point. Not
to mention that even minor inflections or divergences within a
particular belief—let’s say, whether we subscribe to a Calvinist or
Openness model of divine providence—might result in drastically
different approaches to, let’s say, petitionary prayer.27
On the other hand, the problem of hierarchy reminds us that an
exclusive focus on worldviews neglects the existential pull of more
ordinary, everyday beliefs. Minuscule tenets sometimes
disproportionately affect the way we live our lives. For instance, John

26 I have explored the issues in this and subsequent paragraphs at a greater length in

“Inhabiting the Kingdom: On Apocalyptic Identity and Last Generation Lifestyle,” in God’s
Character in the Last Generation, ed. Jiri Moskala and John Peckham (Nampa, ID: Pacific
Press, 2018), 127–132 .
27Terrance L. Tiessen, Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in the World?
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000).
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 141

might firmly believe in God’s benevolent providence—indeed, a claim

about the “basic constitution of reality”—but when it comes to mentally
processing, let’s say, the warrant of vaccination mandates, it is his
suspicion about the government that assumes the ultimate orienting
force. Accordingly, placing a person in this or that worldview category
might present us with a dehydrated vestige of who he is in the actuality
of his existence—in the concreteness of mundane choices he makes
while working, commuting, socializing, relaxing, and so on. The
question, therefore, is not which of his beliefs are essential in some
ultimate sense, but rather which of them orient or direct this person’s
decision-making. Once we privilege the functionality aspect over
hierarchical arrangements of beliefs, the usual fundamental/ordinary
and complex/simple axes get sidestepped or rendered moot.
The concept of social imaginaries illustrates this point well. Charles
Taylor defines these imaginaries as “something much broader and
deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they
think about social reality in a disengaged mode.” They stand for “the
way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings,” which is “not
expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and
legends.” A social imaginary is a more or less unconscious image or
array of images that prime individuals and communities in terms of
their affective orientations, practices, and priorities. As such, they are a
constitutive part of our worldview, or rather, they shape our
“perceptual” apparatus by which we interpret and relate to, that is,
“view” the world. To recognize that any discussion of worldview has to
account for the life-orienting force of these imaginaries or the “feels of
the age” means “to shift the center of gravity from the cognitive region
of ideas to the more affective region… So imaginary already hints at a
more embodied sense of how we are oriented in the world.”28

28James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 65. Implicit here are the different ways in
which we can define the worldview concept. On the one hand, it is possible to do so in
propositional terms where worldview connotes a set of beliefs about fundamental
questions of life, i.e., metaphysics, epistemology, morality, human nature, and so on. Let’s
call it “worldview A” (WA). On the other, a worldview might connote the totality of a
person’s life orientation, encompassing both propositional beliefs and all other aspects
that lead a person to inhabit and interpret the world in a specific way—desires, social
imaginaries, passion, loyalties, and interests, to name some of those aspects. Such an
142 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

The third issue of significance concerns the lack of coherence

between worldviews and their life-orienting thrust. Take the example of
a self-declared naturalist who subscribes to a conception of justice
rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Based on her worldview, she has
no warrant in employing the language of inherent rights if something
like a divine command theory has any standing. That reminds us that
people acquire values in all sorts of ways, directing them to speak, feel,
and act in ways that are not commensurable to the logical implications
of their worldviews.29 Human agency is an overdetermined
phenomenon that belies a simplistic rendering of the belief-action
nexus.
This brings me to the fourth problem, namely embodiment more
generally and human fallenness more specifically. If we take seriously
the tautological claim that worldviews are acquired by specific human
agents who exist in their particular historicity and identity, we need to
attend to the commonsensical question: “What happens with those
beliefs once they are placed in the hands of particular human beings?”
Few philosophers have addressed this question as incisively and
provocatively than Friedrich Nietzsche. In his relatively short essay “On
Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” Nietzsche offers one of his early
takes on perspectivism.30 Many a student walking the vaunted halls of
my university with the conviction that truth claims are always
subjective channels, perhaps unwittingly, Nietzsche’s programmatic

understanding of worldview, “worldview B” (WB), more adequately reflects the German

word Weltanschauung dating back to Kant’s third critique. Simply put, WB is WA plus the
embodied situatedness of a person. While I primarily have WA in mind when referring to
worldviews, I have nothing against seeing them as WB. In the end, the choice is a matter
of semantics as long as the life-orienting function of embodied existence is given its
proper place in the discussion, and as I hope to do in the remainder of the chapter. On the
history of Weltanschauung as a central philosophical term, see David K. Naugle,
Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002).
29 For a helpful discussion of this point, see C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 110–117.

30 Friedrich Nietzsche, “From ‘On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense’,” in The
Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), 43. For a
helpful discussion of the “discipline of veracity” and pragmatism in Nietzsche’s “On
Truth,” see Robert Brigati, “Veracity and Pragmatism in Nietzsche’s ‘on Truth and Lies,’”
Parrhesia Journal 25 (2015): 78–104.
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 143

statement in that essay. For instance, his claim that truth is nothing but
a “mobile army of metaphors, personal opinions whose origins we have
forgotten” virtually serves as a charter for epistemic relativism. What
such a reading of Nietzsche overlooks, however, is that his take on truth
simply tracks his theory of selfhood. In other words, it is not so much
that truth doesn’t exist, but that we should see ourselves as truth-
seeking animals. After all, even a superficial examination of everyday
human existence will reveal that humans mostly prefer lies over truth.
Somewhat brutally put, exaggerations, manipulation, self-deception, and
predilections for flattery fundamentally mark the human condition. We
are confabulating creatures in that we tell imaginary stories to
ourselves about ourselves—all the time!
Nietzsche will go on to develop a more sophisticated moral
psychology, one centering on the notion of drives. As he sees it, all our
actions and unconscious motives are products of these unconscious
drives that are not mere bodily instincts. Rather, there are quasi-
agential properties to them. That is, drives “adopt perspectives,”
“interpret the world,” and “evaluate.”31 Moreover, they “manifest
themselves by coloring our view of the world, by generating perceptual
salience, by influencing our emotions and other attitudes, by fostering
desires.”32
Much of what Nietzsche says about “drives” has been confirmed by
contemporary cognitive science and neuropsychology that stresses the
dominant force of precognitive elements in directing human lives.33 By
“precognitive,” we do not refer to their origin or the fact that they might
not have some cognitive component but rather their mode of operation.
Instead, it speaks to the automaticity of being manifested in a range of
habits, sensibilities, desires, loyalties, stereotypes, virtues, addiction,
sinful patterns, and character defects—in other words, embodiment in
all its potential and fallenness. To name an obvious example, a clinically

31 Paul Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 78.

32 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 97.
33 For a good treatment of this issue, see David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of

the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2011); Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your
Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (New York: Pantheon, 2012).
144 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

depressed person will not view the world in drab tones because of some
fundamental, perhaps nihilistic, philosophical outlook. Instead, the
outlook itself will be a byproduct of a person’s mental health issues. Or
let us consider acedia and its numerous synonyms:

aloofness, apathy, boredom, carelessness, despondency,

detachment, disinterest, dispassion, disregard, drowsiness,
dullness, ennui, incuriosity, indifference, indolence, jadedness,
languor, laziness, lethargy, lifelessness, listlessness,
mindlessness, negligence, nonchalance, numbness, passiveness,
passivity, resignation, sluggishness, spiritlessness, stupor,
supineness, torpidity, unconcern, weariness, …

How would not such polymorphous stupor wreck havoc with the
most pristine of biblical worldviews?
It is vital to note that we are not here discussing something in
addition to the topic of worldviews. Instead, insofar as our embodiment
shapes how we orient ourselves towards the world—how we feel it,
analyze it, respond to it, act in it, judge events and people—it is essential
to our understanding of the functionality of worldviews.34 Our
embodiment primes us to see the world in a particular light, and it
positions us to respond to these perceptions in ways that elude
intentional thought. This

does not entail a crass determinism; nor does it exclude a role

for reflective, deliberative, conscious “choice.” However, such a
model—shored up by recent research in cognitive science—
does relativize the role of ratiocinative deliberation in action.
More positively, it highlights the significant impact of
environment (and attendant practices) in shaping our
“adaptive unconscious,” which then steers/drives action at a
preconscious level. As such, we should be increasingly
attentive to the formative role of environment and practice in
shaping our desires.35

34 See my distinction of worldview A and worldview B in footnote 28.

35James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Academic, 2013), 9.
 Living Worldviews: The Promises and Perils of Worldview Formation 145

To ask these questions, in other words, is not to invite a certain

anti-intellectualism. Rather, it seeks to deepen the meaning of
worldview formation by recognizing the extent of human fallenness and
the deceptiveness of the human heart that comes with it. It
acknowledges that our intellect needs to be shaped and trained. To wit,
intellectual and moral virtues—honesty, creativity, integrity, open-
mindedness, courage, humility, perseverance, carefulness,
thoroughness, compassion, and so on—are needed to formulate
worldviews and the effort to enliven them. I need to know what I
believe, but I also need capacities to imaginatively envision how I ought
to live out the beliefs in the specificity of my life circumstances. I need
intellectual clarity and coherence, but equally so courageous
authenticity and self-awareness to move towards increasing congruence
of thought and life. My worldview needs to “seep into my body,” it needs
to amount to an automatic “positioning” toward the “world” that
acquires the shape, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, of “praktognosia”—a type
of tacit, implicit know-how. Accordingly, worldview formation is
precisely that—a formative activity that needs to be holistic and
intentional as the Holy Spirit empowers us to live lives of kingdom
faithfulness. Does it need to be cognitive? Yes! Should we strive for
comprehensive visions? Yes, undoubtedly. But we also should be
mindful that a biblical worldview calls for human agents who can live
out its implications in their actual existence. In sum, worldview
formation requires both noetic sanctification and the miracle of a new
heart.
As I think back to my Honors class, the way we teachers
approached the teaching of worldviews, I regret the absence of such a
holism. I wish that we were less beholden to “thinking-thingism” (James
K. A. Smith) or a ratiocinative tick and more attuned to a pedagogy that
sees worldviews—all those different ways in which we interpret and
attend to reality—operating on multiple registers. Wouldn’t such a
sensitivity do proper justice to the holism endemic to Adventist
theology and practice? But then, hopefully, all was not in vain. Perhaps,
we achieved some of our goals, some of our aspirations. Perhaps our
students were able to discern something of the synoptic vision of the
Christian faith in its aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual coherence.
Perhaps such an understanding made them more resilient against easy
146 THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, HERMENEUTICS, AND MISSION

dismissals of religion as a crutch or intrinsically violent. Perhaps it

provided them with an openness of mind and spirit to engage other
perspectives without losing the ground of their convictions. Perhaps it
commended to them a way of life that combines courage and
peaceableness, justice and compassion, truth and love, wisdom and
humility. If our teaching achieved but a portion of all that, what more
could one ask for?