You have heard of “isms.” This is the suffix that alerts us to a worldview — or at least, a singular vision of things that is going around beating its chest as if it can function as a whole worldview. There are humanism and secularism and liberalism and conservatism and monism and pluralism and Judaism and Hinduism and postmodernism and many more that could be listed. 

A worldview is a way of looking at all things.1 Everyone has a worldview. No one is really ever wholly consistent in their worldview thinking. We mix and match; and all the more so, we who live in a pluralistic culture. The point is that everyone is shaped by their worldview.

That is because a worldview is not simply “the way one happens to think” when conversation turns to more controversial matters, or to the big questions of life. Rather, it is because those biggest things have never really been left behind at all when we go about the little things. And that is because some of our ideas are more foundational, more basic, than other ideas. In fact, our ideas about very practical matters have long been determined by how we have conceived about what kind of a world this is, and of our place in that world. 

Within a worldview there are presuppositions. These are like the foundations to a house, or like the basic coding of DNA in relation to all of the visible traits of the body. We don’t think about the foundations much when we live in our house, and we don’t think much about our DNA when we move around in our bodies. And yet if the foundations were shifted—if the genetic information were altered—then everything extending from them would be along for the ride whether we were aware of it or not. The basic presuppositions for a true Christian are ideas like: 1. God exists. 2. The Bible is God’s word. 3. Man is the image of God. 4. The problem in the world is sin. And so forth.

While You Were Worldview Sleeping

If the leadership of the Evangelical church had been doing its job, the first few years of one’s Christian walk would have involved (to one degree or another) basic worldview training. Not only should the Scriptures be unpacked “from left to right,” but God’s truth should also be brought to bear “from the top down,” so that not only would the express language of the Bible make up the air we breathe, but that our worldview categories would be consistently mapped out from presuppositions to the rest of life.

In turning away from such “all your mind” and “all of life” discipleship (see Mat. 22:37; 28:20), the church that never mastered the “isms,” now finds itself waking up to a different world, when the next stage of its intellectual development would have explained that too. Here I refer to making the graduation from “isms” (what worldviews are) to “izings” (how worldviews move). Izings? How they move? Yes, ideas move. Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver and R. C. Sproul both told us. But what does this mean?

For one thing, it means what you and I do all the time. We make inferences. That is, starting from certain premises (ideas we take to be true already), we think out what else must be true as a consequence. In this simple movement of the mind, our set of beliefs expands. Now of course, we are hoping that we have been thinking correctly! False conclusions abound: whether because the premise was unsound or because the process was invalid. When this happens, though our field of conceptual categories (our worldview) has expanded, such an expansion may include various fields of “fake news,” as the kids are calling it. So while our set of beliefs may expand, the same may often not be said of our field of real knowledge. The two “sets” or “fields” are not logically coextensive in fallible, finite minds like ours. And yet both sets “move” in the same sort of mental events.

What matters for us here is that this act of reasoning—and worldview expansion—in an individual mind is a microcosm of the same reality among groups of people, and, indeed, within theoretical constructs outside of our minds (constructs that each of our minds can, in a sense, make our own).

As Francis Schaeffer sought to depict by his “staircase” diagrams in a few of his books, ideas move this way both in individual minds and through cultures. When they move through the latter, there are the additional factors that control and channel the flow of those ideas in more or less anti-rational ways: e.g. group-think, plausibility structures, intentional state propaganda, the wide variety of attention-shrinking blinking-bling studied by media ecology, and good old fashion saving face, just to name a few. But to the degree that such thinking is a deliberate process, there is a natural order that can be explained and even, dare I say, predicted.

Mapping out the flow of such thought used to be such an ordinary part of the study of history and philosophy and the history of thought (whether of philosophy or theology), that it hardly had to be given a name. Thinkers simply knew to think in this way. Authors routinely traced lines from more foundational ideas to the present consequences and said, “Here is how we got into this mess.” Of course the study was not simply an exercise in cynicism, though it could always be oversimplified. Our greater problem today is not oversimplification, but over-sensitivity. Americans were already a non-historical people. Throughout our short blip of history, we have preferred “progress” to past roots. Over the past few decades, we have added to that the inability to admit that some ideas are really “that bad.” Such is arrogant and judgmental. And the problem is not merely the phenomenon of the campus “snowflake.”

Statements of intellectual trajectory are utterly unrecognizable in such a climate. To say that X idea will lead to Y consequence is heard as derogatory. In this climate of unthinking, even conservative Christians who were reading a few books and taking a few seminars on “worldview” thinking, thought themselves to be getting equipped to spot this and respond to that.

In reality, they were being desensitized to think of “other worldviews” very much the way Americans were trained to think of Communism during the Cold War — missiles and Moscow, a certain uniform and a certain accent — but the idea of ideas in an ever-advancing and intrusive drama of demonic forays into the citadel of one’s own mind (never mind in and out of the mind of one’s pastor or favorite podcasters!), concerning this, even the New Calvinists were utterly unprepared. It would not have surprised the older thinkers to discover that a globe-spreading movement like the New Calvinism could have had such a healthy emphasis on God and the gospel and the church, only to have its main architects open the gates to the main Trojan horses of Cultural Marxism in just ten short years.

That we have “woken up in a different world” is not mystifying. It happened because of the prior worldview lobotomy. It is another vast subject to trace out how this happened (in fact, it is an example of this very study of tracing worldview trajectory), so I will leave that for another day. The long and short of it is that theological constructs were devised (for those rightly rediscovering the glories of the gospel) that would pit worldview against gospel, specifically by recasting the study of worldview consequences as “not-gospel-issues.” Perhaps you recognize that part at least. What is needed is to recover the study of worldview trajectories or tendencies: or, in other words, growing in our thinking from mere “ism” identification to “izing” identification.

Machen and the Modernizing Tendencies He Uncovered

In Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen did the dirty work that somebody has to do. If your house is moving around, someone has to check the foundations. If your body is sick, a diagnosis is required from physicians. Inevitably there is bad news. But a great deal of such bad news can be preventative of even worse news. Machen was delivering just such a diagnosis of the state of theology. What was going around calling itself “liberal,” and thus billing itself as more “scientific,” more “relational,” and more “practical,” was really, on closer inspection, simply Modernism hijacking the engines of the seminary and pulpit.

In one place, Machen put it in this way: “And modern liberalism, even when it is not consistently pantheistic, is at any rate pantheizing.”2 Now that is an interesting word, isn’t it? Pantheizing. What did he mean by this? In my lecture series on Machen’s classic book, we examined what I called Machen’s “doctrine of doctrine and division.” One takeaway from that was that doctrines are always on the move. Now Pantheism is the worldview that sees “all” (pan) as “god” (theos). I put this lowercase g because such would not be the true God. So how does this “move”? How does it go off “izing” into other frontiers? For one thing, Machen is suggesting that such people do not really even know they have embraced pantheism. They would be offended at the charge.

But so it is, that as the true God is pulled down from the heavens—his more transcendent attributes eliminated or “softened up” so as to make Him more “relational”—what one is left with is a deity that is much more like the creature, determined by the creature, developing along with the creature.

The original intention was not to flatly compare God to man, much less to suggest that God and the cosmos are really one substance. But there is a ruthless law of unintended consequences at work, where the weight of presuppositions following through to their conclusions cares nothing about our best intentions. 

So there is an atheizing tendency, a relativizing tendency, a Judaizing tendency, a mechanizing tendency, and so forth. Bad doctrines move for the worse. They do not remain static or indifferent to other areas of truth. So in that study, we said that distortions divide. Now I think we can add to that, that distortions depart. The distortions that divide are dynamic. Error doesn’t remain static and small or quarantined. Paul says, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (Gal. 5:9).

Let us mature in our thinking, not only to be able to pick the right heresy out of a police investigation lineup (once they have long been arrested in the annals of church history). More than that—let us be able to discern worldviews on the move, from aberrant presuppositions to their mutating effects on the body, or their destabilizing effects on the house. Let us move from the static study of “isms” to the dynamic discernment of their “izings.”

____________

1. In our times of classical retrieval from the Great Tradition, one of the casualties of our critique of the post-Kantian thought stream has been the term “worldview.” The Germans gave us the word (weltanschauung) and the generation of Idealists, most notably Hegel, gave us Historic Worldview Thinking (HWVT). This was the attempt to place all particulars in orbit around some central Idea. Of course, even as they were attempting to rescue reason from the damage of the demolitions under Hume and Kant, the essential starting point found agreement with Kant—namely, that the world as we know it is a construct of a priori categories and the phenomena so shaped within each of our own conceptual grids. Hence the great crimes of HWVT have to do with forcing everything into the “all or nothing” epistemological grid. More can be said. My only point here is to plead with classicalists to not throw away the “worldview” term altogether, since it stands for a very real and important concept that laypeople desperately need to being rising above what Schaeffer once called “bits and pieces thinking.” Do not be so pedantic at X, Y, and Z, that you become a clanging symbol in the way of the A, B, and C meant for the sheep.

2. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1923), 63.