The Center of It All
It is strange that the summer is heating up and winding down all of a sudden. School is upon us. Those of us who teach are looking forward to the new year with new students and subjects. I have yet to learn exactly what I will be teaching this year, so I have been focusing my thoughts on the skill of teaching. As with anything, when considering a subject, it is important to start at where the subject starts. Teaching, as with life, starts at the center of a person. If a teacher is going to teach anything, it is going to start with what is at the teacher’s center or worldview.
There is one word that I would use to define each and every worldview that has ever existed. No matter the time period, there has been one thing that has been at the center of everything that is often ignored today. Yet, it is still the center today, even if it is ignored. Lots of people don’t like it. They would rather avoid it. It makes them uncomfortable. It is one of the things that you don’t talk about at a dinner party. It is a thing that people keep trying to push out, yet it comes seeping back in. It is like chasing an eggshell with a spoon, no matter what you do or try, it will still be in the bowl. It is inevitable. It will always come back to the center no matter what anyone tries to do to it. If your eyes have happened to jump down before this point, you’ll know what this thing is.
Faith.
Many people would baulk at my using this word as the center of every worldview. Yet it is. The thing about this word is that it is everywhere. Anytime there is a hardship or a problem that needs to be solved, faith is involved. Every person will call upon the faith that they have. It has been like this since the beginning. In early human times, each person would call upon their own personal deity or god to help them in their times of trouble. As people were conquered, certain gods gained more fame than others. Some notable ones would be El for the Akkadians, Baal for the Philistines, Ra for Egypt, and the Greek and Roman pantheon. All of these gods rose and fell with their perspective people. With the coming of Christ and the rise of the Church, one faith spread farther than any other faith had ever done before. To be fair, many religions have spread throughout the whole known world, Christianity came during the time when the whole world was known, so it gets the bragging right of going farther than any other religion.
By going over the whole world, the church gained influence and power. Once it did, the same thing happened whenever there is large quantities of power: corruption spread throughout. With this corruption, many sought ways to get out from under the corruption. There were two main responses to it: the protestant reformation and the scientific revolution. They happened at the same time in reaction to the same problem with very different results. Both of these movements were started by Christians, yet one quickly lost sight of its center. The protestant reformation grew and splintered, making branches of various theological flavors depending upon how a group of people interpreted the Bible. Many of them flourished through persecution and the church is better for all these things. The faith is stronger because of the work that was done back then. Throughout the reformation, Christ was always the center of the faith.
For the scientific revolution, something else occurred. I would say that it started with a man named Francis Bacon, who, as far as I can tell, was a strong Christian. He wrote a book called Novum Organum. In it, he set forth the idea of Empiricism, that the only way that something can be called a fact is if it can be tested and measured. This changed the foundation of Epistemology, the study of how we know things. In Empiricism, we can only know things if we can test and prove them. Beliefs stopped being as important as facts because anything that was believed was no longer a fact. It was an opinion. Opinions were not as valid as facts in arguments. As such, beliefs became second class citizens in the realm of debate. All things had to be proved. This led to the slow erosion of established religion in academia and set forth a new faith.
With the world being seen as a matter of cause and effect, philosophy became lost. The concept of metaphysics became meaningless, and ethics was individualized. This can be seen in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and how it leads to Nihilism, that nothing has meaning beyond what an individual gives to it. Faith became something that was up to the individual which means that it is meaningless as well. By allowing each individual to come up with their own metaphysics, morality, and faith, it is making each person to have a faith unto themselves. It elevations the individual as their own deity. This puts the burden of proof unto the individual to figure out how they want the world to work and make sense of everything that is happening in the world. This must lead to one of two places, either that the individual is in control and must work to right all the wrongs that they see or that the individual has no power, and their existence is meaningless, and life is pointless. Both of these path lead to the same location which is where no person wants to be: answerless with no hope for the world. The faith at the center of these worldview is a faith in self.
This faith in self is troublesome though. Take the idea of metaphysics, where do things come from? The current hypothesis that is in vogue today is The Big Bang (I do understand that they are looking for a theory to replace it and have several that they are trying to get to catch on). All matter in the universe was condensed into one location and as it became more and more compressed, eventually, it exploded on itself and BANG! It all blew apart. Through time, things settled, cooled, and condensed into what they are today. A question though, where did all the stuff come from? There is no certain answer to this. In fact, The Big Bang can’t be tested so it also can’t be proved. It is taken on faith. It is a faith based upon what an individual can see, project, and image the world to be if there is no god. There is no provable answer though. It is still a worldview of faith.
For the Christian, the answers are all quite easy. They are contained in the Bible. The problem with the answers in the Bible is that some of the answers do go against human reason. How is God three in one? How can God be sovereign and good, and there still be evil in the world? What is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility when it comes to man’s salvation and sin? How did God flood the earth? Did Jesus really create matter when He feed the thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a few pieces of fish? Will God really blacken the Sun and Moon and cause the stars to fall? Will Jesus really rule in the New Jerusalem that is 1,380 miles cubed? All of these things are addressed in scripture and are taken by faith. Faith that God is faithful to do what He says He will do.
Where do these two faiths lead though? Belief in something that can be accused of being unreasonable allows the rest of the world to be reasonable. Belief in only the things that are reasonable makes it so that the whole world is unreasonable. If one starts with Christ and scripture, the whole world will make sense. If one starts with only the things that man can prove, then there is no solid proof in the whole world because the past does not prove the future.
So, one is left with a problem. What is at your center? Do you have Christ and a world that makes sense? Or do you have self and a world that is meaningless? This is the problem of the center. This is the starting point for all teachers no matter what their subject is because teachers always teach out of themselves. As the school year is about to start, teachers, parents, and students, consider your centers and the foundations that you want to build upon. Be sure that those around you have the same starting point or be aware of the differences. A shift in center can lead to some very troublesome paths. It all comes down to faith.