{"id":647,"date":"2008-09-17T10:17:23","date_gmt":"2008-09-17T17:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=647"},"modified":"2008-09-17T10:17:23","modified_gmt":"2008-09-17T17:17:23","slug":"worldviews-schmorldviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/09\/17\/worldviews-schmorldviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Worldviews, Schmorldviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

In chapter 3 of Culture Making<\/a>, Andy Crouch begins to contrast his approach to culture with other approaches taken by Christians.\u00a0 In particular, he critiques the evangelical preoccupation with “worldview” analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Crouch notes that “[t]o define culture as what human beings\u00a0make of the world is to make clear that culture is much more than a ‘world view.'”\u00a0 “The danger of reducing culture to worldview,” Crouch says,<\/p>\n

is that we may miss the most distinctive thing about culture, which is that cultural goods have a life of their own. . . . The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving.\u00a0 But that is not the way culture works.\u00a0 Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amen to Crouch’s more holistic sense of “culture!”\u00a0<\/p>\n

I would go further and suggest that “worldview” thinking has become ossified within popular evangelicalism.\u00a0 Too often, what is presented as “the” Christian worldview is, to a significant extent, merely the view of some white middle-class American evangelical-soft-fundamentalists\u00a0living in the aftermath of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.\u00a0 This “worldview” unfortunately often involves a reductionist account of American history, a\u00a0coarse and ineffectual interaction with the natural sciences, a flat theology of revelation, and an alternately hostile and triumphalist approach to the public square.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there is some value in the notion of “worldviews,” and there are some things Christians of all sorts generally presuppose:\u00a0 God is the creator of all things and the author of all Truth; human beings are both glorious creations of great value\u00a0and awful sinners; the universe cannot be reduced to mere “nature”; human moral, spiritual and physical life is accountable to a moral and ethical framework that derives from the inherent character of the creator-God; redemption is real and possible in the crucified and risen Christ.\u00a0 It can be useful to apply these\u00a0themes to the products of the cultures we inherit and inhabit and to seek to\u00a0color the cultures we create\u00a0with them.\u00a0 But we have to take care that “worldview” doesn’t become an excuse for fighting unwise battles over situated and relatively ephemeral expressions of how these themes might interact within a particular context.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In chapter 3 of Culture Making, Andy Crouch begins to contrast his approach to culture with other approaches taken by Christians.\u00a0 In particular, he critiques the evangelical preoccupation with “worldview” analysis.\u00a0 Crouch notes that “[t]o define culture as what human beings\u00a0make of the world is to make clear that culture is much more than a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-ar","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}