Why You Think the Way You Do
The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home
Author: Glenn Sunshine
Publication Year: 2009
Started on: 2021-08-22
Finished on: 2021-08-31
How is the Book Organized?
What Is a Worldview and Why Should I Care?
A worldview is the framework you use to interpret the world and your place in it. You should care because worldviews are the foundation for culture, and they change over time, either for better or worse.
The Worldview of Ancient Rome
Though the ancient Roman world permitted a wide variety of pagan and mystery religions, it was neoplatonism that really laid the foundation for its epistemology. The heierarchy of being gave the necessary justification for practices such as human sacrifice, slavery, contraception, abortion, and infanticide.
Christianity and the Transformation of the Pagan World
The life of those in the early church displayed a vastly different underlying worldview from the ancient Roman world around them, specifically in terms of valuing the individual as made in the image of God. As Christianity grew, some of the gnostic and neoplatonic philosophies of the day started to make inroads into the church. With the legalization of Christianity under Constantine, the dominant worldview within the Roman empire began to shift.
The Emergence of the Medieval Worldview
As the empire started to collapse, the clergy largely picked up the pieces because they were the ones educated and trained in things like administration. Irish Christianity largely preserved education, and as the Germanic and Roman cultures intermingled, they produced feudalism and manorialism. Urban populations began to grow. The inquisitorial and adversarial legal systems developed. Platonic humanism developed—meaning God created the world, and thus it can tell us about him—along with scholasticism—which consists of a five-part method of investigation. Science developed, in terms of both inventions to improve every-day life, and broader concepts of understanding the cosmos. Similar developments were squashed under non-Christian worldviews.
Medieval Economics and Politics
The idea of work being good led to monasteries reinvesting profits to increase productivity. That mindset, along with the concept of private property, laid the foundation for capitalism. The guild system developed to regulate the production standards. Technological innovation progressed to do away with drudgery. Merchants arose as middlemen to transport goods from here to there. Augustine’s City of God set the stage for political thought. Tensions between the church and the state, and between the church and the people, grew. Aristotle’s breakdown of forms of government (monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/oligarchy, and republic/democracy) was helpful in assessing how sin plays into rule. The concepts of limited government, natural law, and inalienable rights developed.
The Breakdown of the Medieval Model
The Italian Renaissance rediscovered ancient Rome as the epitome of civilization. They shifted the emphasis in education from logic (from scholasticism) to rhetoric (from ancient Rome). They sought to study past authors to achieve a grand synthesis of all human knowledge, but the systems of thought that went into that synthesis were incompatible. Scholars had previously assumed everyone was speaking the same truth from different directions, but this raised the question of who was right and wrong. Protestantism hit the scene, and then Catholicism rebounded, adding more questions to the “who’s right and wrong” pile. Resistance theory developed, as well as the notion of the divine right of kings. The discovery of the New World raised questions about the truthfulness of biblical history. Pyhhronical skepticism laid the early groundwork for postmodernism.
A New Paradigm of Knowledge
The Copernican Revolution changed our mental model of the universe. A heliocentric universe had been proposed a number of times, gaining little traction and causing minimal religious consternation; Galileo just happened to be the first person to be a jerk about it, an calling the pope a simpleton in a treatise he commissioned is bound to create problems for you. The question of the appropriate model of the universe wasn’t science on one side and Bible on the other, but science and Bible on both sides of the debate. Descartes sought to answer the Pyhhronists, and came up with “I think, therefore I am,” followed by “I exist, therefore God exists,” and finally “God exists, therefore clear and distinct ideas must be true.” Pascal developed probabilism, and believed truth could be found through experimentation and observation, setting the stage for Newton to “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Though we think of Newton as a scientist, he didn’t distinguish between his theological and scientific investigations.
Enlightenment and Revolutions
In the age of the Enlightenment, rationalism started prevailing in both science and religion. In Christianity, God is infinite and personal, creator and sustainer, and transcendent and immanent. Deism arose holding to just the first characteristic in each of these pairs. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations laid the foundation for both classical (free market) economics and classical liberalism. Edmund Burke became the father of classical conservatism, agreeing with Smith that government regulation was bad for the economy. The philosophes prized intellectual independence and original thinking, and paved the way for philosophical naturalism. Worldview began to shift in the direction of materialism. Religious revivals happened all over trying to bring more of the scriptures to bear on daily life. The revolutions in England, America, and France showed how the worldviews of Locke and Rousseau played out. The results were dictated by a combination of those ideas and the histories of the countries involved.
Modernity and Its Discontents
Deism had set the stage for a transition to materialistic naturalism, just as soon as a mechanism could be discovered that could explain how everything came to be. Darwin’s natural selection was that mechanism. Science no longer meant knowledge, but rather only that which is knowable via the scientific method. Darwinian evolution, ironically, isn’t subject to the scientific method. It becomes the basis for both racism and eugenics. Utilitarianism arose as an alternative ethic, along with the notion that ethics are situational and relative. The survival of the fittest mentality also found its way into economics and industrialization, which then laid the groundwork for Marxism and all it entails. Materialism led to nihilism, meaning there is no meaning, but when that wasn’t palatable, it bred existentialism as a sort of nihilism-lite.
The Decay of Modernity
In the wake of the two world wars, most Western nations adopted some version of Keynesian economics, along with expanded state powers to intervene on behalf of society. Deconstructionism led to reinterpretations of anything previously known. Postmodernism, with its rejection of objective truth, and its insistence on cultural and moral relativity, is essentially deconstructionism-lite, not following through on all its implications. This gave rise to feminism and the sexual revolution, with their attempts to undermine the traditional family structure. While all this was going on, transcendental worldviews started having a greater impact, with the advent of New Age and Neo-Paganism. The postmodern and transcendental thinking merge in movement like eco-spirituality, which lies behind things like the Gaia hypothesis (e.g., Pandora in Avatar) and the global warming movement functioning as a religion.
Trajectories
Basically we’ve come full circle back to ancient Rome. Abortion, infanticide, human rights violations, slavery… Whatever you believe in is totally fine, as long as you pay homage to Caesar.
Questions
Read Chuck Colson’s Foreword and Glenn’s Acknowledgments to get some background of Glenn’s involvement in the Colson Fellows (formerly Centurions) Program. Now look over the Contents page. What can you tell from the book by how the contents are organized?
First you need to start with the pre-evangelism of getting people to understand what worldview is and why it’s important. Once that’s established, you can start walking through the various thought patterns in any given age, analyzing them from a worldview perspective.
The best way to grasp the flow of Glenn’s explanations and arguments is to summarize each of the chapters and note any key ideas that strike you as important. A brief paragraph for each is sufficient.
See How is the Book Organized? above.
The closing section of the book, The Image of God, is a call for Christians to recover the ideas and values of the biblical worldview. List some of the key ones.
When Western civilization embraced a robust vision of the image of God, we had our greatest successes; when we ignored it, we had our greatest failures.
In terms of human rights, the image of God is the source of human worth.
We must resist calls to consider other creatures on par with humanity.
Christians should be at the forefront of environmental concerns and creation care.
In science and technology, we need to be as concerned about the ethical dimensions of our research as we are about the results—particularly with regard to biotechnologies.
God gave humanity both intellectual and physical work to do in the garden of Eden, and thus we should view work as a positive good, not a necessary evil.
We must provide for the needs of others, honoring them as individuals and serving them rather than sub-contracting our responsibilities to care for our neighbors to the government or to any other entity.
In political life, we must keep the importance of the image of God shared by people of all nationalities front and center in our thinking.
We also need to insist on the right to dissent. Everyone has the right to freedom of conscience and the right to express themselves without fear of repercussion, whether or not they agree with us.
What are three things you will do differently as a result of reading this book?
For those who don’t understand worldview or its implications, I’ll ask them to read through this book with me.
I’ll see if Glen has references to back up all the claims he’s made, particularly the ones of the form, “What you usually hear about this period is history isn’t quite accurate.”
I’ll be on the lookout for other ways our current cultural moment is beginning to mimic ancient Rome, such that I can call attention to it.