Worldview Analysis, Part 3

The First Component of Narrative/Story

(avg. read time: 2–4 mins.)

The first component function of worldview in my Wrightian worldview model is narrative or story, for which I use Shaun Gallagher’s definition:

narrative is an interpretive account that selectively connects events across time on the basis of their significance or meaning to oneself and/or to others [i.e., characters]…. That narratives involve meaning, significance, actions, selves, and others all points to the assumed and obvious fact that narratives are by and about persons (or events that have significance for persons). One can narrate the adventures of an object or artifact only if one personifies it.¹

Worldviews are stories that people inhabit, use to convey explanations and hopes, draw from to construct their identities, and in general have as a framework through which to see the world and its history around them.² Worldview formation often occurs in the context of story. These stories exist in contexts with competing stories and with crises that can be hostile to any worldview. Individuals and groups may navigate these contexts through engaging in worldview formation by reaffirming their traditional stories, modifying their stories in light of new crises or other worldview stories, adopting a new story with some narrative elements carried over from the old worldview, or radically rejecting the old story in favor of a new one (while perhaps subconsciously importing elements of the old story anyway). Naugle argues that worldviews form as stories because humans are fundamentally storytelling creatures in that, “They provide narrative answers to the fundamental questions about the realm of the divine, the nature of the cosmos, the identity of human beings, the solution to the problems of suffering and pain, and so on. Even the seemingly nonnarratival aspects of a Weltanschauung – its doctrinal, ethical, or ritual dimensions – can be explained by a fundamental narrative content.”³ It is by no means clear that narrative or story is the most fundamental expression of a worldview—assigning such “vertical” dimensions at the level of worldview seems to be simply a result of the analyst’s own presuppositions—but the importance of narrative to humans is undeniable.

Indeed, narrative is foundational to human neurology and the sense of the self. Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver note that, “While we can be trained to think in geometrical shapes, patterns of sounds, poetry, movement, syllogisms, what predominates or fundamentally constitutes our consciousness is the understanding of self and world in story.”⁴ The so-called “default mode network” or “default state network” of the brain—which is activated in daydreaming, thinking of others, thinking of oneself, remembering the past, and planning for the future—operates in the construction and comprehension of narrative.⁵ Neuroscientists have devoted extensive research into how the brain functions in understanding and producing story, and the theory of embodied cognition suggests that even more features of the person are involved in such processes.⁶ Young and Saver posit:

Narrative framing of the past allows predictions of the future; generating imaginary narratives allows the individual to safely (through internal fictions) explore the varied consequences of multitudinous response options. The potent adaptive value of narrative accounts for its primacy in organizing human understanding (as opposed to pictorial, musical, kinesthetic, syllogistic, or multiple other forms). Consciousness needs a narrative structure to create a sense of self based on the features of storytelling, like coherence, consequence, consecution.⁷

One can also see negative demonstration of this idea in neurological and psychological disorders manifesting in some form of narrative impairment.⁸

Gallagher argues that one of the foundations of hermeneutics is the storied self: “The self interprets itself (and gets interpreted by others) in narrative form; the meaning of a narrative or the narration of a meaningful event are subject to interpretation; actions may interpret narrative (and not only in theatrical performance), and are interpreted in narrative; and narrative often contributes to the interpretation of others, and vice versa.”⁹ Narrative also enables the narrator to relate himself/herself to their sense of time by means of a narrative’s internal temporality—the order of events in the “plot” of the narrative—and external temporality—the narrator’s temporal relation to the events in question.¹⁰ Such a connection of events to the narrator allows the person to identify their relation to these events in terms of the events’ meaning or significance (which may or may not include the causality of events).¹¹ Likewise, narrative enables the narrator to establish relations to others who function as characters in the narrative.

Beyond the self, narrative is also a key aspect of community formation in how it inherently objectivizes. Even in autobiography, the person’s reference to “I” points to both the person telling the story and the person narrated within the context of the story (i.e., as an objective entity with whom the narrator identifies).¹² Worldview narratives in particular are crucial for the formation of a symbolic universe to which they orient people, through which they guide people, and in which they enable people to develop identity and a sense of ethics. These narratives have what Naugle calls, “a kind of finality as the ultimate interpretation of reality,” which in turn serve powerfully to integrate the community both as a community and in relation to the world.¹³

1. Shaun Gallagher, “Self and Narrative,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge: 2014), 405–6. For many other definitions of narrative, see Christoph Heilig, Paulus als Erzähler? Eine narratologische Perspektive auf die Paulusbriefe, BZNW 237 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 42–61, 81–113.

2. Naugle, Worldview, 297–303; Smart, Dimensions, 130–36; Wright, New Testament, 38–44, 126–31, 139–43.

3. Naugle, Worldview, 302.

4. Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver, “The Neurology of Narrative,” SubStance 30.94/95 (2001): 73.

5. Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy, Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation Through Story (Rochester, VT; Toronto: Bear & Company, 2015), 2, 65–67.

6. Koltko-Rivera, “Psychology,” 38–40; Mehl-Madrona and Mainguy, Remapping, 235–56; Tamer M. Soliman, Kathryn A. Johnson, and Hyunjin Song, “It’s Not ‘All in Your Head’: Understanding Religion from an Embodied Cognition Perspective,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (2015): 852–64; Young and Saver, “Neurology,” 72–84.

7. Young and Saver, “Neurology,” 78–79.

8. Young and Saver, “Neurology,” 76–78.

9. Gallagher, “Self,” 404. Cf. Mehl-Madrona, Remapping, 67–72.

10. Gallagher, “Self,” 404. Cf. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 103.

11. Gallagher, “Self,” 405; Heilig, Paulus als Erzähler?, 108.

12. Gallagher, “Self,” 409.

13. Naugle, Worldview, 303. Cf. Sheikh, “Worldview Analysis,” 167.