Why Think “Worldviewishly?” (Part 3)
Worldview thinking is necessary in order to escape the cultural climate of supposed neutrality. If everyone has a worldview, then on issues on ultimate importance no one can claim neutrality. Either you are for Christ or against Him.
A weakness with much contemporary apologetics is that we are still fighting the war on modernism and haven’t yet properly turned our attention to postmodernism. That is, we assume that the person that we are speaking to believes in such things as scientific, moral, and logical absolutes. Yet, to most postmodernists these are strictly (though mistakenly) modernist ideas. Rather, it is purposed by many apologetics, that we should focus on the issue of truth, and whether absolutes even exist before we can speak of an absolute standard for thought and life in Holy Scripture.
My point is this: during the Enlightenment period the tendency of secular man was to abstract absolutes such as the laws of science, the laws of thought, morality, etc. from the infinite-Personal God of Scripture. As Christian apologists of the 18th and 19th centuries fought to defend the faith is it a possibility that they may have unknowingly been sucked into abstracting epistemology from it’s metaphysical foundation (i.e. God)? Sadly, so many Christians thinkers (for all their legitimately brilliant insights) do not see thinking itself as something that is ordered and directed by a worldview, so many apologists today do not, in practice, take into consideration the noetic effects of sin. But our notion of “thinking” is worldview dependent as well.
Could this “neutral thinking bug” be one that is left over from Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment (i.e. modernistic) thinking? Of course I suppose that I could be way off base- Thomas Aquinas did not properly consider the noetic effects of sin in his apologetic (more on this at a later date). So, obviously, this could be a problem spanning the whole of Christian history. It seems like an obvious oversight to sternly fight for the truth that moral laws can only find their ultimate grounding in an ultimate Person, yet fail to see that this equally applies to laws of science, and thought.
If postmodernism is marked by redefinition of logical laws as merely socially constructed, and modernism is marked by abstracting the various laws of the universe (science, morality, logic, etc.) from the Lord of Scripture, then it would seem as if Christians should be ultra-premodern with our insistence that not only are the Laws of the universe objectively valid but also that they are rooted in the Trinitarian Lord.
Yet, we are also Post-postmodern in our rejection of the modernist abstraction of absolutes. Such absolutes and can have no objective reality apart from God. Like postmodernists, we should insist that everyone views the world from a particular stance, agenda, worldview, sociologically shaped, and linguistically structured vision of life. But, unlike the postmodernists we recognize that ultimately such commitments are spiritually shaped. What does this mean? It means that God has structured the world so that while we always approach things from a given perspective and worldview, the thing that holds us back from the truth is not our “unfortunate” social or linguistic circumstances, but of rebellion to the God who made us.
