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

couldn’t understand it until I grasped such notions as the Great Chain of Being (an intellectual model that forms the backdrop to hierarchy in both church and state), the Tudor myth that illuminates Shakespeare’s history plays, the Copernican breaking of the circle and the ensuing rejection of the medieval model of the spherical universe (which makes sense of the poetry of John Donne). It was not long before worldview analysis became for me one of the most important tools of literary analysis.
    Worldview analysis relates to literary study not just in helping readers grasp the meaning of specific texts but in revealing the assumptions of literary theory. Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction bristles with remarks, some of them reflecting deeply held assumptions, that are in conflict with a Christian worldview. 14 Here are only two of many:
    Literature, in the sense of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist. 15
    “Value” is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purpose. It is thus quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare. . . . In such a situation, Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti. 16
    The not very hidden assumption here is that human beings have no essential common nature, that they are constructed by their language or their actions. Not so, a Christian must protest. We are what we are not by being creatures in society but by being in the image of God. There is a Presence that makes our identity distinctively what it is. Shakespeare—the writer who most fully displays the character of humanity—will always be able to be understood and appreciated, as will be Aeschylus and Homer, Cervantes and Goethe, Dante and Tolkien, Dickinson and Woolf. We grasp the humanity of those who left their marks on the caves of Lascaux thousands of years ago. There is a human nature.
    In the past several decades, Christian literary scholarship has begun to become more self-consciously Christian, and while I have not noticed much use of worldview analysis in this scholarship, I am delighted to see it begin to proliferate. 17
    The field of philosophy is certainly the discipline where one finds the fullest penetration of Christian thought. Encouraged in the mid-twentieth century by Harry Jellema at Calvin College and Arthur F. Holmes at Wheaton College, Christian students have gone on to major universities, received their PhDs and contributed at the highest level of academic performance. Working from the perspective of a self-consciously held Christian worldview, they have done important scholarly work in every field of philosophy. 18
    But that’s literature and philosophy. How do worldviews relate to other disciplines? 19 The story is the same. Every academic discipline, including the sciences, is undergirded by a set of assumptions that may not even be conscious. Here are a few that relate not just to the sciences but to all disciplines.
    First is the notion of the orderliness of the universe. If the universe is not lawlike in its operations, no theories can be tested even if they were able to be formulated.
    Second is a reliance on the intellectual capacity of the scholar. The mind is assumed to be able to understand what it investigates.
    Third, academic work since the Renaissance, rejecting the notion that we can deduce the nature of the universe from self-evident premises, assumes the contingency of the universe. The universe does not have to be the way it is. It could have been otherwise. So the task of understanding involves looking to see it more clearly, again with the assumption that the human mind is capable of doing this.
    These assumptions cannot be proved, but they must be true if