Worldview Analysis, Part 6
The Fourth Component of Answers to Basic Worldview Questions
(avg. read time: 1–2 mins.)
The question-oriented and topic-oriented models outlined previously show that this is the most commonly recognized worldview component. However, each model differs in what questions they assign to this component. As noted previously, Wright paraphrases the questions of his model from Walsh and Middleton and he later added a fifth question: 1) Who are we? 2) Where are we? 3) What is wrong? 4) What is the solution? 5) What time is it?1 The other models state their questions or topics (with implicit questions) differently but overlap at least in addressing matters of metaphysics or ontology, epistemology, and ethics. These questions and many others that these analyses do not articulate are important means of interrogating and investigating worldviews, but the number and variety must remain limited for the sake of analysis, and the subject matter here must be decisive for such consideration. Given how Wright has demonstrated the usefulness of his questions in relation to two of the bodies of text analyzed in my dissertation, it is appropriate to retain his five questions. As other worldview components in this model address matters of metaphysics and ethics, but since none address epistemology on anything more than an implicit basis, it is prudent to add a sixth question: 6) How can we know these things?
The mundane expression of worldviews in the form of beliefs relates especially to this component. Beliefs may synopsize stories or provide concluding statements to them. Beliefs may restate a symbol’s meaning(s) in more prosaic form. And beliefs may explain, enable, or justify praxis. But statements of belief more directly take the form of answers to implicit or explicit questions. The question-oriented and topic-oriented models recognize this association in how they link questions and answers with taxonomies of belief, as well as worldviews in general with these taxonomies.
All of the four components I have examined as part of this model thus expand the vision of what it can mean for scriptures in particular to be involved in the task of worldview formation. Worldview formation involves the articulation of narrative, including by identifying significant events and characters, describing their meaningful relationships to the narrator and the audience, and supplying a sense of identity by specifying roles and relationships in the story. Another task of worldview formation is to supply people with symbols that represent the world to which they relate and orient them to the same. Worldview formation also consists in the formation of praxis, including of practice, habits, virtues/character traits, and a sense of good and evil, of right and wrong. Finally, worldview formation includes posing questions and answering them, especially basic questions that generally confront worldviews. The formation of beliefs that comes with worldview formation may be part of any of these components, but beliefs most characteristically emerge as tasks associated with the last component.
Wright, Jesus, 138. The “we” in each case primarily refers to the community that adheres to and is formed by the worldview in question.