Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
What are your thoughts on the below extract?
Another common tendency of worldview thinking is that, to the extent that it can seek to offer a pre-packaged framework of knowledge, it can be remarkably hostile to learning. Paul warns about those who are “always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7) but some worldview warriors seem to suffer rather from an “always already at knowledge of the truth and never learning” syndrome. If the key thing is to have the right worldview, then once you have that worldview, well, you already have a view of the world, you already know your way around. …
Perhaps the most serious danger of worldviewism (though this tendency is more likely to arise only within so-called “presuppositionalist” circles) is that it might tacitly—if inadvertently—endorse a kind of postmodern relativism. …
But it is easy to see how the metaphor might lead this way. Worldview-as-map, perhaps, may not—if there are different maps, but only one reality, then only one of the maps can genuinely orient you. But with the worldview-as-lens metaphor, it is easy to think in terms of different lenses that one can switch between, yielding different internally-coherent world pictures, without ever having (or being able?) to encounter the world-in-itself. This, in fact, is no coincidence, but testifies to the intellectual genealogy of “worldview,” which translates the German Weltanschauung, a term coined by Immanuel Kant in 1790.
Kant’s philosophy made a hard distinction between the world-in-itself and the-world-as-constructed-by-our-minds, a distinction that is ironically a favorite whipping boy of many Christian worldview teachers. To talk of a “Christian worldview” risks buying into this idealist and subjectivist construal of the world, in tension with the philosophical realism that characterized almost the entire previous Christian tradition.
Bradford Littlejohn, What’s Wrong with “Worldview”? (Leesburg VA: Davenant Institute, 2019), pp 5, 7-8.
Another common tendency of worldview thinking is that, to the extent that it can seek to offer a pre-packaged framework of knowledge, it can be remarkably hostile to learning. Paul warns about those who are “always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7) but some worldview warriors seem to suffer rather from an “always already at knowledge of the truth and never learning” syndrome. If the key thing is to have the right worldview, then once you have that worldview, well, you already have a view of the world, you already know your way around. …
Perhaps the most serious danger of worldviewism (though this tendency is more likely to arise only within so-called “presuppositionalist” circles) is that it might tacitly—if inadvertently—endorse a kind of postmodern relativism. …
But it is easy to see how the metaphor might lead this way. Worldview-as-map, perhaps, may not—if there are different maps, but only one reality, then only one of the maps can genuinely orient you. But with the worldview-as-lens metaphor, it is easy to think in terms of different lenses that one can switch between, yielding different internally-coherent world pictures, without ever having (or being able?) to encounter the world-in-itself. This, in fact, is no coincidence, but testifies to the intellectual genealogy of “worldview,” which translates the German Weltanschauung, a term coined by Immanuel Kant in 1790.
Kant’s philosophy made a hard distinction between the world-in-itself and the-world-as-constructed-by-our-minds, a distinction that is ironically a favorite whipping boy of many Christian worldview teachers. To talk of a “Christian worldview” risks buying into this idealist and subjectivist construal of the world, in tension with the philosophical realism that characterized almost the entire previous Christian tradition.
Bradford Littlejohn, What’s Wrong with “Worldview”? (Leesburg VA: Davenant Institute, 2019), pp 5, 7-8.