In my previous post entitled “Thinking About God”, I cited A. W. Tozer’s statement: “The most important thing about us is what comes into our mind when we think about God”. I am convinced of the validity of Tozer’s statement but it begs a number of questions. One question that I have been considering is how do I think about God? Or to put it another way, what is my worldview through which I interpret God? In Frost and Hearst’s reJesus, they briefly examine the implicatons of worldview on our understanding of Scripture and ultimately God. Consider the following:
Much of what gets in the way of a true and life-altering encounter with Jesus can be traced to the problem of worldview. … This is because worldview is effectively the lens through which we engage and thus interpret the world. This issue of worldview plays itself out rather strangely in the Western spiritual and theological tradition when it comes to the understanding of knowledge, or apprehension, of God. The Western church is largely influenced by the more speculative and philosophical worldview ushered in by the Hellenistic world. The problem is that our Scriptures are formed by a significantly different way of seeing things – the Hebraic. We addressed this at length in The Shaping of Things to Come, which surprised some readers. Why introduce Hebraic thinking into a book on the missional church? For us, though, it goes to the heart of why the Western church has moved so far off course. The church is operating out of a Hellenistic worldview that makes it difficult to appropriate all that the New Testament is saying. If this is the case in the area of ecclesiology, it is all the more important in the study of Christology.
To try to get to the essential difference between Hellenistic and Hebraic worldview, some writers have called Greek thinking step logic and Hebraic thinking block logic The Hellenists used a tightly contained step logic whereby one would argue from premise to conclusion; each step in the process is linked tightly to the next in a coherent, rational, linear fashion. “The conclusion, however, was usually limited to one point of view – the human being’s perception of reality'” In contrast, Hebraic thinking tended to express concepts in self-contained units, or blocks, of thought. The blocks did not necessarily fit together in an obviously linear or harmonious pattern, particularly when one block represented a human perspective on truth and another the divine. “This way of thinking created a propensity for paradox, antinomy, or apparent contradiction, as one block stood in tension-and often illogical relation-to the other. Hence, polarity of thought or dialectic often characterized block thinking”. This creates problems for us, trained as we are in Hellenistic approach to thinking, when we try to grasp Scripture. In reading the Bible, in recalibrating, we need to “undergo a kind or intellectual conversion” from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic mind.