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Textbooks and Holy Books
By Shiao Chong, Christian Reformed Campus Minister
& Director of Leadership, Culture &
Christianity
Serving at York University, Toronto
www.logoscrc.ca |
chaplain@logoscrc.ca
The following is a short talk that I gave during
an Inter Faith event at York University in the winter academic term of 2001-02
called “Textbooks and/or Holy Books”. I was the Christian representative on a
panel that also included Jewish and Muslim representatives. We each had 5-8
minutes to talk on the subject from our faith perspectives. The following is
what I had to say.
Worldviews
Sociologists tell us that people interpret their lives through basic narratives
that provide a framework within which to understand the world and to establish
goals and values. Post-modernists call them metanarratives, overarching stories
that explain reality for those who adhere to them.
My Christian tradition has something similar. We call it worldviews, a view of
life and reality. Worldviews are collectively-held stories that answer basic
belief questions and, thereby, guide and shape communities. There are
collectively-held because members of a community share a common worldview. And
they answer basic belief questions.
Basic Belief Questions
There are, at least, four basic belief questions: Who are we? Where are we?
What’s wrong with the world? What’s the remedy? The answers we give to these
basic philosophical questions, which everyone and every culture asks at some
point or assumes, shape our view of reality, of our world, of who we are and of
what we are doing here. Often, these answers take the form of a story or a
narrative. Every community has a story, whether articulate or inarticulate, that
is shared among its members that shape how that community views the world and
itself. This includes scientific communities or academic communities.
Textbooks & Holy Books
Our theme today is Textbooks and Holy books. What is the relationship between
them? How does a holy book, in my case, the Christian Bible, relate to an
academic text? I think the answer is worldviews, or metanarratives. Holy books,
religions, provide answers to those four basic belief questions of where are we?
Who are we? What’s wrong? And what’s the remedy? In fact, for the three faiths
represented today, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, our holy books all present
us with a big story, a historical narrative. And the narratives of our holy
books are our metanarratives, our worldviews.
My Christian Bible provides me with a worldview that becomes a framework that
shapes my thinking. My biblical worldview shapes how I interpret data and
reality. It shapes my values, what I regard as important and what is less so. It
shapes my philosophy of life. So, when I read a textbook, the worldview from my
holy book, the Bible, acts, so to speak, as a pair of glasses. I interpret,
understand and evaluate, agreeing and/or disagreeing, with the contents of what
I read in my textbook, based on my Biblical theoretical framework.
How Worldviews Affect Scholarship
What I am saying is not unique to Christians. At the start of my talk I
mentioned how everyone, religious or otherwise, interpret their lives and their
reality through basic narratives. I talked about how every community, including
academic communities like York University, or various disciplinary communities
at York, they all have worldviews that shape them, that direct their research,
that produce, what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn calls, paradigms in their
fields. And these paradigms and worldviews are often themselves not the object
of study. They are not scrutinized or analyzed. They are, in fact, often
accepted as normative, and accepted uncritically. They are actually accepted by
faith. You do not prove your worldviews or paradigms first before using them.
Rather, you accept your paradigm and then you work out of it and see how well it
actually explains reality and the data for you. If your worldview explains the
data and experience in reality adequately, then it confirms your belief in that
worldview. Otherwise, you start to question it. It is like a hypothesis, except
on a larger scale.
So, the point I want to make is that scholarship and research, whether it is
Feminist, Marxist, Liberal, Post-modernist or Post-colonial, all scholarship and
research start from worldview assumptions; assumptions that are accepted,
initially, by faith. So, all scholarship is ultimately rooted in some kind of
faith. Not religious faith, but faith nevertheless. And so, this faith-based
scholarship and research is what produces textbooks.
Holy books, of course, are written and produced by communities acting out of
faith, religious faith. Now, it seems, that textbooks are also, ultimately,
written and produced by academic communities that also act out of ultimate faith
commitments, maybe not specifically religious in nature, but commitments of
faith nevertheless.
So, in summary, textbooks and holy books may not be that different after all.
Thank you.
Copyright © Shiao C. Chong 2002
This article can be copied and distributed freely provided its content has not
been changed. This resource cannot be sold or distributed for financial gain. It
must be free. And it must be unedited. Otherwise, the author reserves all rights
to the resource.
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