Page:A Vision of and for Love.pdf/1



 A vision of and for love: Towards a Christian post-postmodern worldview 

The theme of this article has to do with the identification of distinctive features that need emphasis in a biblical worldview attuned to the postmodern world of the 21st century. The first of these features is the embrace of difference as non-oppositional, as challenge to meet, rather than a threat to resist. The second is that with a postmodern understanding of the existence of limited rational knowledge (Reason and Science) and of the crucial role of faith, worldviews need to be seen, not in the first place as conceptual systems, but as faith-oriented, sensory expectancy filters, operating implicitly and largely beneath our conscious awareness. The third is the recognition that responsibility-to the other rather than freedom-from the other needs to be emphasised. Such responsibility involves recognising that voluntary sufferingwith the other is crucial to a post-postmodern biblical worldview. Indeed, the final feature proposes that such a worldview needs to be rooted and grounded as a vision of and for Love. As God is Compassionate Love, and as God is with us (Emmanuel), so we, image-bearers of God, are to embody love and resist evil, living out our confession that we live by Grace and not by Blind Chance.

 Introduction 

For 75 years, Koers, from its base in South Africa, has championed the crucial importance of reformational worldview in science and in education throughout the world. When Koers began publishing, worldview was neither a widely used nor a widely understood concept. Now, 75 years later, the notion of a worldview is both commonly recognised and broadly deployed in a wide variety of academic as well as non-academic contexts throughout the world. With the growing realisation that there are no innocent, unbiased ways of looking in the world, that everyone wears glasses and looks at the world through a particular lens, window or frame, the idea of worldview has become common currency.

At the same time, the growing recognition of the usefulness of the concept has turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, although it is now generally acknowledged that everyone comes outfitted with a wide array of pre-judgements, that everyone has built-in biases, worldviews are frowned upon, even anathematised, because they are considered euphemisms for ideologies with their dogmatism. We need, it is said, to move beyond such exclusivism into an era after worldviews. On the other hand, the recognition that all knowledge is perspectival, worldview-ish, rooted in a particular historical and cultural setting, rather than universal or absolute has raised fears of an ‘anything goes’ relativism. Truth, it is feared, is being dismissed or, at least, certainly compromised.

It is this high stakes context, on the occasion of Koers’ anniversary, that gives rise to the theme for this article: How best do we advocate – and if necessary, rework or recalibrate – a biblical