Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept by James W. Sire

Author:James W. Sire [Sire, James W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

The story of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures is not a story only for the Hebrews. “Israel is called to be the particular, historically conditioned means of mediating a universal story of the healing of the world.”26 The New Testament is even more explicit about the universal nature of Israel’s story: “As Paul makes clear, the story to which Jesus brings resolution is not simply Israel’s story, but the story of the world, read precisely through the lens of Israel’s story.”27

Walsh and Middleton’s retelling of the metanarrative that incorporates the biblical stories of the Old and New Testament is set explicitly in the overlapping horizons first of the Bible and second of the world at the end of the twentieth century. Answering the four key questions (Who am I? Where am I? What’s wrong? What is the remedy?), they express a Christian worldview that is immediately relevant to thoughtful people today. That is, it is both a vision of life and a vision for life.

Of course, in the first three editions of The Universe Next Door I too retell the biblical story, following the standard sequence of creation, fall, redemption and glorification. Such is the pattern of most retellings of the biblical narrative, as it is of Orr and also Middleton and Walsh. But again there is a difference. In my account the narrative is held at a distance, more like the “news from nowhere” than like the narrative of a participant, which, of course, I am and all other human beings are.

Perhaps it is Lesslie Newbigin, calling on the insights of Michael Polanyi, who is the most helpful in conveying the existential relevance of seeing worldviews as narratives. His explanations have long held an important place in my own grasp of the Christian faith, not its content but its existential dimension. “The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions: it is a story.”28 That story comes to us through Scripture. The Bible sets before us, he says,

a vision of cosmic history from the creation of the world to its consummation, of the nations which make up the one human family, and—of course—of one nation chosen to be the bearer of the meaning of history for the sake of all, and of one man called to be the bearer of that meaning for that nation. The Bible is universal history.29

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