The Explanation: Before (1)

¹Before the universe began to be,
and all that it consists of and contains,
the Word already was.

                  -          John 1.1

Spotting silly things
Reagan and I enjoy reading her monthly “High Five” children’s magazine, a publication of “Highlights.” Our favorite part is the “That’s Silly!” page. A colorful drawing covers two pages of the magazine. It is filled with people, animals, activities, and things of all sorts. The pictures are familiar – we’re at a farm, out in the country, in a shoe store, or at an airport, and so forth. Reagan is only four, but she knows how to spot silly things when they appear on the pages in front of her.

The “That’s Silly!” picture is populated with things that are, well, just silly. People wearing socks on their heads or sledding in the summer. Animals strolling together, pushing a baby carriage. A sheep playing with a hula hoop, a turtle skateboarding down an aisle, a pig showering in mud, a man fishing in a fish tank. That sort of thing. Every time Reagan identifies one of these she points at it emphatically and we say together, “That’s silly!”

Which is four-year-old talk for, “That just doesn’t make sense.”

But before we can begin identifying all the incongruities, disparities, inconsistencies, and other silly things in the picture, we first establish the overall theme. This is a picture of a park in the winter time. This is a summer’s day at the airport.  We’re at a farm. Whatever.

Then the fun begins. We start looking for things that don’t make sense.

Things for which there is no other explanation than, “That’s silly!”

Worldviews and silly things
Worldviews are like this. Everyone has a worldview. You have one. I have one. Your friends at work, your neighbors, the guy checking you out at the grocery store, the lady at the post office. Everyone has a worldview. A worldview provides your overall general understanding of the “pages” spread out before you, consisting of people, places, things, work, culture, events, ideas, and all the rest. A person’s worldview provides a feeling of order, understanding, meaning, and sensibleness to his or her life.

Your worldview is like Reagan and me reading the “Silly Pictures” page in her magazine: “Here’s the picture I see.” Yeah, that makes sense.

A worldview is an explanation of the world and everything in it, as it appears to you. Everyone has a worldview. Everyone has an explanation of life and the world and everything these consist of and contain. In a worldview things have to make sense. We want to keep the silly things to a minimum, because a worldview that has too many silly things – inconsistencies, things we can’t explain, that don’t work the way they should, or that we can’t fit together or can’t account for – too many silly things makes a silly worldview.

And a silly worldview may be silly, but it can also be scary and threatening. After all, if I can’t explain or account for even the most basic aspects of the picture of life I see, might not some of these things be dangerous? And if I can’t account for them, how can I be sure I can account for anything I see? Is it possible I could be living a lie? Thinking the world and my place in it are one way, when it fact, it’s an altogether different place from what I have supposed?

A worldview is an explanation. And everyone needs an explanation.

The problem with worldviews
The problem with some worldviews – maybe even yours – is they don’t explain enough, some of their explanations don’t satisfy our questions or curiosity, or their explanations just sound silly against the larger picture of life as we see it. Silly worldviews can’t be trusted.

But clever people don’t let silly worldviews get the best of them. They study their worldviews carefully, and every time they come across some “silly thing”, they point to it, label it for what it is, and then try to account for it, so that it doesn’t mar the overall landscape of their worldview. Reagan and I can “live with” the silly things we discover on our “That’s Silly!” page. People whose worldviews have too many silly things, however, shouldn’t feel quite so comfortable.

So it’s best to make sure that your worldview makes sense. Because, to paraphrase Socrates, “Silly worldviews aren’t worth living.”

First questions
But before you can begin to think seriously about your worldview – or any worldview – you need to understand the parameters of worldview thinking. You need to know the questions to ask and how all the questions fit together and relate to one another.

And one of the first questions you want to ask is, “Where’d all this stuff come from, anyway?”

As Reagan and I have learned, when you’re examining worldviews, it’s probably a good idea to work with somebody else. Reagan sees most of the silly things before I do, and so it’s her duty to point them out and explain what it is about them that makes them silly. Sometimes, however, Grandad gets there first, and then the duty of explaining the silly things falls to me.

What I’m proposing in this series, which I’m calling, The Explanation, is that we sit down with the Bible and have a look together at the worldview spread out within its pages. You may never have undertaken such an effort, so this could be interesting and, yes, even fun.

The overall picture is clear, but I promise you, you might see some “silly things” that you’re not used to seeing in your own worldview. That’s OK. We’ll see if we can explain them. We’ll weigh them against your own explanations, or some of the more popular explanations of such things provided in the worldviews that swirl around us in the media, the academy, and the thinking of our friends.

And maybe, in the process, we’ll discover some “silly things” that we’ve never seen before?

Let’s try this: Take some time to read John 1.1-5. How much is included in the “worldview” introduced here? How does John’s worldview explain the stuff you see in your own worldview, where it came from and how? Talk with a friend about your observations, and start writing down your thoughts. That way you’ll have a record you can return to, expand, modify, and meditate on as we go forward in this series.

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