Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

by Glenn S. Sunshine

I have been working to raise up a new generation of worldview thinkers and scholars to help the church answer the challenges we are facing.

Christianity is a fully formed worldview, with implications for all areas of life.

But if culture is shaped by worldview, as we believe, the shift in the Western worldviews away from the biblical model poses enormous challenges to our culture and the church. Ideas have consequences, and the result of the loss of the idea of the image of God as the foundation for human worth can have catastrophic consequences for human rights and human life.

If we follow the example of those who have gone before us in learning to think biblically and to live out the full implications of the gospel, we can have the same impact on our world today.

What is a worldview?

In fact, everyone has a worldview, because otherwise it would be impossible to learn, to make decisions, to decide on values and priorities —

What is real? Is the physical universe real? Does it exist? Chances are, simply asking these questions on some level seems ridiculous to you (unless you were a philosophy major). The answer probably is, “Of course the physical universe is real! What kind of stupid question is that?” But the problem is that your answer, which seems so patently obvious to you, is not so obvious to people who hold a different worldview. So, for example, many Native Americans have historically believed that the physical universe is secondary to the world of dreams; in this culture, dreams are more “real” than the waking world. Or if you are a Hindu, you may argue that the universe is not truly real; it is simply a dream in the mind of God. Not everyone thinks of the same things as common sense, or, to put it differently, not everyone shares the same worldview.

another aspect of worldview involves understanding what it means to be human. Where did I come from? Are we different from animals?

What you think of other people and your relationship to them is evident in how you treat them; the same applies to animals and the physical world.

Whether you think life has meaning and purpose is evident in the ways you spend your time, treat yourself, express your attitudes, and live out your priorities. So the answers are there, even if we aren’t consciously aware of them. In fact, it is even possible that we may think we have a particular worldview when in fact we do not. For example, if we say we care about the environment, if that is part of what defines our self-image, yet we litter or dump our motor oil down the storm drains, we reveal through our actions what we really think and what our values really are — and thus our worldview. This is how worldviews operate — below the radar, behind the scenes, guiding our thoughts, words, and actions and only rarely being examined or analyzed.

Most of the people who grow up in a society tend to share a common worldview.

cultures also have worldviews, and these world-views shape the society.

Worldviews generally evolve slowly due to either their own internal logic or the force of new ideas and pressures. Sometimes new worldviews are introduced that out-compete their predecessors and become a new cultural consensus, though when that happens the result is generally something of a hybrid of the new and the old. Occasionally, worldviews are overturned in periods of social, political, or religious unrest.

All societies in history prior to the modern West were intrinsically religious, probably because they knew that life was precarious.

religion is essential to understanding worldviews. In Western history, this means particularly Christianity.

The key dynamic that begins the development of a distinctly Western worldview is the interaction of Greco-Roman civilization with Christianity.

The Roman economy and all its engineering feats were products of slave labor. The slaves themselves came from people who had become so impoverished that the only thing they could do was to sell themselves or their children to pay their debts, or from prisoners of war or rebels against Roman rule. Revolts were put down with brutality and efficiency, with rebels being tortured to death on the roads as a warning to others not to dare to challenge Roman authority.

The term pagan comes from the Latin pagus, meaning “the countryside,” and pagani , meaning “rural people.” The term seems to have been applied to followers of the old religions when Christianity became a dominant religious force within the Empire.

Paganism is most often connected to nature worship.

they were at the mercy of the elements. Crops could be destroyed or not ripen if it were too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry; volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, and storms could end their lives or condemn them to a slow death by starvation; disease could lay waste everything they had worked to build. Is it any wonder, then, that they saw in nature a source of transcendence, a force greater than themselves, which they needed to appease if they were to survive?

Most pagan deities originally were connected to the forces of nature.

The primary function of religion was to keep the gods happy so they did not destroy the people and — for the more benign gods — to encourage them to help the people by blessing the natural world.

So in the ancient Near East, one form of worship involved temple prostitutes having sex with worshipers to encourage Baal (a sky god) to have sex with Asherah (an earth goddess) by raining on the earth so that the crops would grow.

Gods were in essence the supreme rulers of a particular sphere of life or of the natural world, and worship was given primarily as a way of acknowledging the god’s authority over that sphere in the hopes of avoiding the god’s unwelcome and hostile attention.

for the overwhelming majority of worshipers, the gods were feared, not loved. Even where the language of love was used (as it was, for example, in Mesopotamia), it meant obeying the gods, not having an emotional attachment to them.

Religious rituals were designed to appease deities, not to please them.

only a desire to placate them so they did not destroy the worshiper. It was all about following the proper forms and rituals and offering the proper prayers and sacrifices so the gods would not be ...

what happened when the father died? In many families, he would join the pantheon of other heads of the family over the generations and be worshiped through the burning of incense at an ancestral shrine in the home. As the supreme authority over the household, fathers (and especially departed fathers) were the proper subjects of religious ritual.

The idea that gods were the supreme rulers over their spheres also explains why emperors were considered gods and had incense burned to their statues. It was a way of acknowledging that the emperor was the supreme figure in the political realm and of showing due loyalty and deference to him. Except for the Jews, who as monotheists were given a special dispensation not to participate in pagan religious activities, anyone who refused to burn incense to the emperor’s statue was refusing to acknowledge his political authority. This was treason, pure and simple, and so any non-Jew who refused to worship the emperor was tortured and killed.

Pagan religions did not require their adherents to worship only one god or even one set of gods. Many pagans believed that deities were local, so that if you moved to a different region, you would naturally change your gods. Adding one or more new deities to the religious system was not a problem; in fact, more educated people in the pagan world frequently thought of this as being broad-minded and inclusive.

also had real pragmatic value. People saw this inclusiveness as a source of strength for the Roman Empire because it helped prevent religious revolts against Roman rule. Besides, the more deities that supported Rome, the better.

they promised their worshipers salvation and a mystical experience of deity.

a worshiper could be initiated into ever-deeper secrets (“mysteries”) of the cult, attaining salvation and union with the deity by ritual participation in her or his myths. This frequently included bathing for cleansing from sin and communal feasts. For example, according to his myth, Mithras fought and slew a monstrous bull; at one level of initiation, Mithras worshipers sacrificed a bull and bathed in its blood — a rather gross image to us but undeniably powerful as a symbolic connection to the mythical actions of the deity and as a means of identifying with him.

All pagan religions inside and outside the Empire had roots in nature worship, and these roots were shaped by the idea that both the gods and humanity were part of nature.

And they were worshipping demons! 1 Corinthians 10: 19–21

what is real determines what we can know.

the one adopted by most people in the modern West, is called realism. This approach, which was taken by Aristotle in the ancient world, argues that the particulars in the physical world — the individual leaves — are the fundamental ground of reality and that they exist independently of the universals or ideas that connect them.

In other words, the universal (the Leaf) does exist, but it has a secondary existence because it is abstracted out of the particulars (the leaves).

Reality has to be built on something that is unchanging and unchangeable. Since the physical world changes constantly, ultimate reality must be based in the nonphysical world of ideas, since ideas are the only things we know of that do not change (at least according to Plato). So the idea of the Leaf (with a capital L), the universal, is primary. The universal Leaf, known as the form or the archetype, casts shadows, and these shadows form the leaves that we see and experience in the physical world. The particulars are real, but they have a secondary existence based on their connection with the Leaf. Since in this approach the idea is primary, it has become known as idealism.

epistemology (how we know) and metaphysics (what is real)

his epistemology was disconnected from his metaphysics,

his approach to knowledge about the physical world was inconsistent with his belief in the priority of particulars over universals and thus of observation over logic.

For now, suffice it to say that the solution to the problem of universals carries over into other areas of life.

Plato and especially his followers in the movement called Neoplatonism developed his idealistic metaphysics into a comprehensive system that explained everything from the nature of God to the existence of dirt.

Plato made the observation that we cannot judge anything to be better or worse than anything else without an absolute standard against which we can measure the two. Every time we make a comparison, we are comparing the particulars to the universal, the form or archetype or ideal, in the world of ideas, which gives us the absolute we use to make the comparison. But some of these areas overlap: the True (with a capital T) is obviously related to the Good (capital G); the Beautiful (capital B) is also connected to the Good (capital G), and so on. But how can there be different forms whose shadows converge to lead to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful? Plato argued that logically there must be a single archetype for all of them. He

called this archetype “the One...

Thus everything in the universe is connected to everything else and ultimately finds its origin and fundamental nature in God. At this point, Platonic philosophy has turned into religion.

This had the side effect of avoiding conflict with the imperial authorities.

Neoplatonism was similar to Buddhism, though with important differences. Both believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, though the Buddhist believes all is one and the Neoplatonist connects them through the hierarchy of being. Both have as a goal a mystical experience of fundamental reality achieved through contemplation or meditation. Both see ultimate reality as impersonal. Both permit the worship of many gods as a lower-order component of their religious belief. Both are essentially philosophies that have been converted into religions.

under the right circumstances, beings could transform from one to another.

it was, after all, a hierarchy.