During the month of April, I am occasionally sharing some brief excerpts from my new book coming out May 3 about how encountering paradox helps us better experience God. Today we touch on a critical issue discussed in the book–how our worldviews must keep growing if our faith is also to grow.
I used to think birders were a little nerdy. Then I moved to Ethiopia. The variety of colors, sizes, shapes, and variety (eighty species endemic to Ethiopia alone) were mind-boggling for a Midwestern kid who grew up on sparrows, crows, and the occasional robin.
Best of all, I didn’t need to leave our porch: mouse birds fought each other for the rotting avocados that fell from our tree; masked weavers built nests hanging in the branches just above our porch; ibis regularly walked our lawn, pecking for grubs with their long beaks; black kites circled above us with their screeching cries and nested in the tall eucalyptus across the road; herons rose from the river beyond the trees; vultures held court on the rooftops across the way.
I became a bird enthusiast, bettered only by my wife, who kept detailed notes about every new species she saw. She recorded it all in her bird book, which was filled with notations after four years. (One of our Ethiopian friends began calling it her “Bird Bible.”)
At the same time that I was reveling in my new love of birds, I was teaching the theology of creation to Ethiopian graduate students. I was puzzled, then amazed, then alarmed, that most of my students saw no glory at all in creation.
As I described the beauty of their country’s birds, most responded with blank faces. What birds? If they were aware of birds at all, it was mostly as pests, rarely as objects of wonder. Many had grown up in impoverished situations; in their hierarchy of needs, reflecting on the glorious birds around them was rarely a priority.
Similar experiences over my first two years in Africa started me on a journey investigating worldview, with the startling realization of just how pervasively our personal worldviews shape what we see.
As I struggled to communicate this worldview issue, one day in class the analogy of a shell popped into my mind. A crab’s shell provides a safe and secure home. But as the crab grows, it must discard its old shell and create a new one. I described the empty crab shells we would find walking the beaches of California, their former occupants living dangerously until a new shell formed around them.
In a several-week process called molting, crabs separate their bodies from their old shell even as they begin secreting a new soft, paper-like shell beneath it to prepare for moving day. Without this natural process, the shell that was a protective haven eventually becomes a prison to the growing creature.
Our worldview is like the crab’s shell. It provides a coherent perspective of reality, a mental “home” that is essential to our well-being. But as we mature and grow, we must discard our comfortable worldview for a larger one. Just like the crab, we repeat this process again and again as we move through life. Each transition can feel threatening as we discard our outdated picture of reality and create a new one.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. writes, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” Balancing the fear of change is the exhilaration of new ideas or insights.
Daniel Migliore describes the challenge of leaving behind our comfortable worldviews of God:
“We fear questions that might lead us down roads we have not traveled before. We fear the disruption in our thinking, believing and living that might come from inquiring too deeply into God and God’s purposes.”
These fears are live issues for many of us, especially where the mystery of God is concerned. Better to let sleeping questions lie. But Migliore warns that fearing questions comes with a price:
“As a result of these fears, we imprison our faith, allow it to become boring and stultifying, rather than releasing it to seek deeper understanding. When faith no longer frees people to ask hard questions, it becomes inhuman and dangerous. Unquestioning faith soon slips into ideology, superstition, fanaticism, self-indulgence and idolatry.”
Most of us have observed this in others, if not in ourselves. “Faith seeks understanding passionately and relentlessly, or it languishes and eventually dies.” Like the crab’s shell, our unquestioning worldviews can imprison and imperil our faith.
Question: How have you seen your worldview grow or change? How has this helped your faith grow also? Please share a comment.
You might enjoy the Ted Talk “The Gospel of Doubt”. I just watched it Saturday night and enjoyed the perspective.
Hi Dan, great to hear from you! Thanks so much for the recommendation. I look forward to checking it out and am sure other readers here will do so as well. Doubt is often seen as the enemy of faith, but that assumes faith is primarily intellectual: believing a set of ideas. However, if faith biblically is ultimately trusting God, then faith’s enemy is not doubt but trusting anything other than God. Paradoxically, doubt or asking questions can be the friend of genuine faith. Hope you’ll keep reading.
Even before you quoted Holmes, Sr., I was reminded of his poem, “The Chambered Nautilus.” As I recall, I was required to memorize it in high school.