A Ramble About Worldviews

I was teaching a history lesson to my daughter today on the Latter Day Saints and their migration to the Great Salt Lake. It actually surprised me that it was in the US history textbook which I was using, because it had never been in any of my textbooks when I was in public school before. But, there it was, with a whole chapter (all of about four or five pages) devoted to it. It was, in general, a generous treatment which I felt glossed over a number of the negatives of the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The picture it gave was of a sincere religious leader and his devout followers bravely facing persecution, and traveling westward to found a religious haven.

As a result, I had to spend a short time explaining some of the things about Latter Day Saint history which the textbook didn't cover. I had to explain that Joseph Smith was most likely a charlatan and his original six followers were in on it; and that the Book of Mormon was most likely a manuscript which had been stolen from a publisher before it was published and altered by Smith and his men to fit the scam they were trying to impose on sincere but uneducated people.

I then had to explain that while Smith and his original followers had lied to the people who followed them, the people who believed the lie and perpetuated it themselves hadn't been a part of it. They had believed what they were told and then told it to their children as the truth, who then told it to their children, and so on down to the present day. As a result, there are a large number of devout, Latter Day Saint followers who are, on the whole, good people. They do believe in Jesus Christ, and practice their faith with sincerity. When they go out to evangelize others into their Church, they do so with no ulterior motives except to bring salvation to them as they understand it. But for all their good intentions, the things which separate Mormon Christianity from Orthodox Christianity are based on a lie, and there's no getting around it.

Modern Judaism is in much the same position. Almost two thousand years ago, the Sanhedrin which had illegally railroaded Jesus Christ into being crucified told a whopper to their people and said that His disciples had stolen His body after the resurrection. This story, like the Book of Mormon, was perpetuated from the liars to otherwise honest people who then perpetuated it unknowingly to their children and followers down to present day. This lie is what separates Orthodox Judaism from Orthodox Christianity. There are good, honest Jewish people who only want to follow God and His Torah as they've been instructed. They look forward to the coming of their Messiah never coming to terms with the fact that their Messiah has already come.

When confronted with the truth, in the case of either of these two groups, the usual response is disbelief. The first defense the mind has is to defend it and reject the contradiction. You're challenging a “truth” upon which the rest of their beliefs and faith are established. But if you succeed in convincing them, once that “truth” is eroded or removed, the rest of their belief structure can come crashing down and that's not something which the mind easily handles or recovers from once it has happened. Consider that a person's whole belief in Jesus Christ may rest on the belief in the veracity of the Book of Mormon and its origins. What happens when you destroy that belief? When you disrupt a foundational belief like this, how then is the person able to trust that what you're telling them is the truth? How do you keep them from spiraling downwards into a black abyss?

If you think about it enough, you realize that most of our foundational beliefs about our world, other people, and even (and especially) God are themselves based on erroneous assumptions and explanations. They are based on erroneous assumptions because we do not know the absolute truth about everything. Our very nature as created, limited beings precludes this kind of knowledge. We observe things, we theorize about why those things are the way they are, and then we test those theories to see if they have real explanatory power. This is a tried and true method of learning about anything, and the only method we have at our disposal. But if we have learned anything we have learned that the explanations which serve us today may be proven inadequate or completely wrong tomorrow. This is the nature of human knowledge. We must be satisfied with only partial and incomplete explanations on which to base our worldviews so that we can have a worldview that allows us to function. But we must be careful with it or else we run the risk of having it crash down around our ears and we being driven insane when new information contradicts the foundations of that worldview and that new information itself can't be contradicted at the time.

God knows this and understands this about us, far better than we understand it about ourselves. When He works with a person to draw that person closer to Himself, He always works within the worldview of the person in question, and gently leads the person into a better understanding of Himself over time as the person is able to handle it.

Jesus taught “Don't judge so that you won't be judged.” We can all only make sense of the information about the world around us when we filter it through the worldview we each of us possess, and we react to that information based on that worldview. When we pass judgment on another, we run the risk of unraveling that person's worldview, which could then unravel the person beyond recovery of his faith, or even of his sanity.

St. Paul wrote, “Now accept one who is weak in faith, but not for disputes over opinions,” (Romans 14:1,WEB). In his letters to the Romans and the Corinthians he addresses the problem of eating something which has been sacrificed to an idol. For some of the Christians of the time, it wasn't an issue. They realized that the idol was just a carved piece of wood or stone and it didn't bother them in the slightest. For others, however, who had converted from the pagan religions, their worldview saw these idols as being representative of very real and powerful demons. Eating the meat of an animal which had been sacrificed to one of them was the same as taking part in the sacrifice yourself. Paul's instruction regarding this was to respect the worldview of the other, saying “who are you to judge another's servant?To his own Master he stands or falls.”

We should always work to bring a person into a more full knowledge of the truth, but we must always do so with humility, recognizing that our knowledge of the truth is limited at best. And we must always do so with compassion, seeking to recognize the limits of how much “deconstruction” of their worldviews the person we're working with can handle at any point in time. It must always be their choice to make those changes, and they may not be able to safely. Sometimes as in the parable, we must allow the weeds (false teaching) to grow alongside the wheat (faith) until harvest time so that we don't lose the wheat when trying to pull the weeds.