Worldview Lens: Blueprints

Dear Readers,

Click Worldviews in a Nutshell: Two, to read the previous post, in this series on Worldviews.

“Worldviews are the basic stuff of human existence,

the lens through which the world is seen,

the blueprint for how one should live in it and, above all,

the sense of identity and place which enables human beings to be what they are.”

“They are that through which, not at which, a society or an individual normally looks;  they form the grid according to which humans organise reality — not bits of reality that offer themselves for organisation.”

“In order to answer the question ‘Why?’ in relation to the past, we must move from the ‘outside’ of the event to the ‘inside’; this involves reconstructing the worldviews of people other than ourselves.”

“To ignore worldviews, either our own or those of the culture we are studying, would result in extraordinary shallowness.”

[Image:  First Century Jerusalem]

“Worldviews, as I said earlier, are like the foundations of a house: vital, but invisible.”

1. . . . “[they] provide stories through which human beings view reality.  Narrative is the most characteristic expression of worldview, going deeper than the isolated observation or fragmented remark.” 
2.  . . . “from these stories one can, in principal, discover how to answer basic questions that determine human existence:  who we are, where are we, what is wrong , and what is the solution?”
   
3. “Stories and the answers provided to the questions are expressed in cultural symbols.”
   
   
4. “Worldviews include a praxis, a way-of-being-in-the-world.”

   All quotes are from the book, The New Testament and the People of God, by N. T. Wright, pages 121-125.

Nicholas Thomas Wright (born 1 December 1948)  is an Anglican bishop and a leading New Testament scholar.  He is published as N. T. Wright when writing academic work, or Tom Wright when writing for a more popular readership.  His books include What St Paul Really Said and Simply Christian.  Wright was the Bishop of Durham in the Church of England from 2003, until his retirement in 2010.  [Wikipedia]