The ancients taught us that there are two minds: one which loves wisdom (philosopher) and one which loves opinion (philodoxer). Philodoxie is not bad, per se. It serves a useful function. Aristotle classified the various philodoxies as topoi, or categories of thought that are not real things, but exist only on the level of existential rhetoric. The topoi are “values systems” which create a consensus of belief within a group of people bounded by ethnicity or geography or religious myth or statehood or what have you. But they do not penetrate to reality, or to the true experiences that engender the various values systematized. During periods of relative historical stability, the topoi tend to rigidify and the group enters what Aristotle called stasis, or dogmatomachy—the rule of opinions. Dogmatomachy fosters a degraded human spirit that is closed to the real problems of human existence because those problems have been concealed by wide agreement (or disagreement) over the topoi. According to the philosopher Eric Voegelin … those who enter the foray are limited to a discussion of existing institutions and an apology for their principles, which quickly devolves into a mere defense of the powers that be. The very act of putting a subject in the public’s eye under the reign of dogmatomachy, is, in the words of Walter Baghot, “a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose it. It is an admission too that there is no sacred authority—no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey. … Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal and you can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.” As a remedy to the rule of opinion, at least as it pertains to men’s souls, if not their society, is a recovery of the classic experience of reason. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Voegelin classified Weltanschauungen (or “worldview”) as one of Aristotle’s topoi. I tend to agree with him. … Having a “Christian worldview” gives parochial-and-anxious-about-it Evangelicals and various attenuated Protestants an ersatz catholicity and depth which they need for a variety of reasons—both to meet their honest and well-placed desires for membership, proper beginnings, and to keep the Times from lumping them in with Pat Robertson. Christians are urged to “articulat[e] a Christian worldview [of] … ‘comprehensive and far-reaching power.’” (That is Nancy Pearcey quoting Abraham Kuyper.)

Worldview, like all the topoi, is an identity tool. Its talk is all about the group and its characteristics and principles—a classic dogmatomachy. It is a game of self-fashioning. Here stands A. Gelical Prufrock before the mirror. Do I dare approve the worldview that elects President Bush? Do I dare admit the worldview that permits gay marriage? Do I dare, do I dare?

I am being mean now, as I am wont, but it need not be taken so. Every group does this in one way or another. But it is necessary to health and good order and right reason to be able to recognize the pathetic Prufrock.

Worldview studies suffer additionally from being both a child of, and a reaction against, the Enlightenment and especially its dominant epistemology of positivism. Worldview understandings are thoroughly corrupted with subject-object language. Worldview is both something “out there” which can be “possessed” by exposure to the right sources (witness the proliferation of Worldview studies programs at CCCU institutions) as well as something “in here” that can only be had by a personalist and subjective experience of conversion which brings a new “capacity” with it (witness chapter nine of [David] Naugle’s book [Worldview, the History of a Concept (Erdmans, 2002)], cited in his essay, which details the necessity of this kind of conversion for a proper worldview). Naugle exemplifies how a worldview theorist, especially a Christian worldview theorist, becomes quickly boxed in, when he writes, “Therefore, what a person understands a worldview to be is, interestingly enough, dependent upon that person’s worldview! For this reason, I … unpack the implications of biblical faith on the concept of worldview.”

The positivist tale of conversion which entails the adoption of a certain opinion and requires none of the rigor and hard-to-swallow classical marks such as submission to an institutional order and denial of self is an inherently schismatic and liberalizing force which devolves into mere choice (of dogma), as noted by Baghot above. In response, Naugle insists in his book that “‘worldview’ must shed its relativist and subjectivist clothing and assume new objectivist attire,” but only “within the framework of the Bible.”

This is hopeless! It is this kind of circular, rationalist literal hermeneutic which creates the very crises of philodoxa which, as Mark Noll puts it, “only bullets, not arguments” can resolve. Setting an inherently liberalizing, rationalist view of scripture—fortified by a mechanical understanding of conversion as the only timber against criticisms that worldview analysis is relativistic—necessitates, in turn, the “worldview arms race” being escalated by philodoxers at Worldview Weekend and the Nehemiah Institute (and many other places) as they create an ever rigidifying dogmatomachy to act as herbicide against the “postmodern” and liberalizing weed.

The whole house is of cards. Either get out the rubber cement, or watch it all blow away.

i have always found it odd that evangelicals want to become yet another sub-group amongst many, another clanging voice amongst presumed equals, yet, at the same time, want to maintain the absolute claims of christianity. and it makes it extra snarky to chide “political-correctness” when you yourself have let it in the back door and whine about how nobody sees it your way and that the world is out to get your particular group an dthat you need to “stand up for yourself,” et cetera and so forth and so on and on and on.

where are they getting their pastries? i want to have my cake and eat it, too. i love cake.

zrim