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Hey, what's your Weltanschauung?

Former Dock English teacher Dr. J. Eric Bishop was asked to be the keynote speaker for the banquet and induction ceremony for new members of Dock's chapter of the National Honor Society. The ceremony was held on Monday, October 16, and this is Dr. Bishop's presentation:

Forty-four years ago, on October 16, 1974, my best friend and Dock classmate, Gregory Dean Bishop, was killed in the car he was driving too fast on Cowpath Road. Though we had only known each other for a little over a year, we became as close as blood brothers. We spent hours playing our guitars together. I frequently meals at his parents’ place. We doubled dated, and we laughed at the same things. But even with those connections, I never really knew anything about Greg’s Weltanschauung, and that is unfortunate.

The program you received states the title of my presentation. If you think you know what topic I will be addressing this evening, please raise your hand. I don’t know if it is still there in room D-2, but for a number of years, my colleague in the Dock English Department, Mrs. Rauch, had a poster that asked the question: “Hey…. What’s your Weltanschauung?” I believe she addressed that question at various points in her teaching. I know that I certainly did,…for years, …and if I were still teaching here at Dock Mennonite Academy, I would continue to find reasons and ways to address the topic of Weltanschauung, because I firmly believe that it is one of the most important topics to discuss in obtaining a high quality education, like the education offered here at Dock Mennonite Academy. In the time allotted to me on this important occasion, I will explain why Weltanschauung is such an important topic to explore, especially at the high school level.

But first, in the interest of clarity, let’s define our term. To do that, I would like you to ask someone next to you for a translation of Weltanschauung.

Weltanschauung is German for worldview. It literally means how a person looks at the world, and every single person in this room has one. Several weeks ago, when I told my wife what I was planning to talk about at the NHS Banquet, she said, “Remember who your audience is!” And the more I thought about her admonition, the more convinced I became that the NHS Banquet audience would be the ideal audience to hear about worldview. While teaching at Dock, I served on the NHS selection team several times, so I am quite familiar with the “four pillars” by which an eligible student is evaluated for admission into the National Honor Society. The four pillars are: Academics, Service, Leadership, and Character, and a candidate must excel in each of those four areas during high school to be considered. Therefore, students who are accepted into NHS are certainly students who think about and discuss a broad range of existential topics. So I am going to borrow the image of pillars and state the four pillars of a worldview. For those of you taking notes, the four pillars are:

  • Origin
  • Meaning
  • Morality
  • Destiny

Origin asks: Where did I come from?

Meaning asks: What gives my present life meaning and purpose, if indeed there is any meaning or purpose in life?

Morality asks: How do I determine right and wrong behavior?

Destiny asks: What happens to me when I die?

Your present answers to those four questions comprise your personal Worldview. Go ahead. Try it out. Choose just one of those questions and ask someone sitting near you for his/her answer to the question you are asking. Parents, I want you to participate in this Pair/Share exercise too. I will give you 30 seconds.

Now, to be clear, though each of us has a worldview, none of us was born with one. A worldview is received and constructed as the result of one’s socialization by way of parents; formal and informal education; religious training; language skills; peers, and personal experiences in the world. A person’s worldview is usually re-shaped in both subtle and bold ways throughout life, in accordance with one’s experiences in those aspects of socialization I just cited.

Not only does every thinking person have a worldview, so does every movie, television show and play you watch, every song you listen to and every novel you read. The worldview presented in those mediums may not address each of those pillars, and sometimes the worldview is not readily apparent, but it is nevertheless there. Think about the last movie you watched. How did that movie address one or more of those four pillars of Origin, Meaning, Morality, or Destiny? What about the book Just Mercy, which you seniors were required to read over the summer? The author, Bryan Stevenson, sure had a lot to say about morality as it relates to America’s criminal justice system, didn’t he?

Every religion and ideology on Earth addresses those four questions. They have to, or why would anyone subscribe to them? How does Judaism answer those four questions? What about Islam? or Hinduism? or Buddhism? or the worldview of Atheism? And Christianity. How does Christianity, in its many forms around the world, speak to those four questions? What are the components of a Christian worldview?

I will offer a definition of a Christian worldview that I got from my good friend, Dr. David Greiser, a 1973 graduate of this school who later became a Board of Trustees member here in the late 1990s. Dr. Greiser suggests that a Christian worldview is “the assumption that God is and that God stands outside of the world and outside of time. God created the laws of nature and can and does intervene in the world. For example, God became a human being in Jesus Christ. In so doing, God is, at one and the same time, transcendent over the world, and eminent within it. God speaks in a variety of ways (e.g., Creation; Scripture; witness of God’s people, that is, the Church as the body of Christ on Earth). God continues to be “Emanuel” (God with us) through the Holy Spirit. People have an eternal nature and their behavior has eternal consequences. According to these beliefs, life has a purpose.”

From sitting in many Dock classrooms across the disciplines, I know that your teachers engage you students in discussions about worldview, even if they might not actually use that term. Bible I and Bible II, Story of the Church, Kingdom Living and Faith Walk, which many seniors choose to take, each explore the tournament of worldviews by which people find answers to Life’s biggest questions.

But now I want to say something that I can say more comfortably now that I am no longer on the faculty here: You students and your parents chose to attend Dock Mennonite Academy, one of many private, Christian schools in the Delaware Valley. Did you really know what to expect concerning the middle word in the school’s name? Did you and your parents go onto the school’s website and read the school’s Mission Statement and Graduate Profile? If you did do that, you read these are some of the words you read there:

As schools providing an Anabaptist-Mennonite education*, Dock Mennonite Academy recognizes that its graduates are in transition. The education process seeks to honor and develop the uniqueness of each student and his/her role within the community where their gifts, talents and learning are applied.

The Graduate Profile covers three areas of a student’s life: Academics, Lifestyle and Spiritual. One of the statements in the Spiritual component reads:

A graduate of this educational system is a person who cultivates a Christian worldview informed by Anabaptist-Mennonite theology and tradition.

That statement is significant, especially now that less than 50% of the students attending the high school come from Anabaptist-Mennonite families. And what do Anabaptist-Mennonites believe and do, or at least say they do? The late Mennonite theologian, Marlin Miller, suggested that all Anabaptists share a number of Christian convictions about belief and practice:

  • Believing in Jesus as both Son of God and Savior can never be separated from following him in everyday behavior.
  • Baptism is reserved for those who confess their faith in Jesus Christ and commit themselves to live as his disciples.
  • The Scriptures, not creeds or traditions, provide the primary standard for faith and life.
  • God’s saving Grace in Jesus Christ results not only in newness of life for the individual but also creates and sustains the church, a community called to radical discipleship and service.
  • Discipleship in the new community obligates members to invite unbelievers to: accept the Christian faith, love their enemies, reject war and violence, and seek peace in the church and in the world.

Dock Mennonite Academy does not require you to be an Anabaptist-Mennonite to attend here or to teach here, and it does not require you to become an Anabaptist-Mennonite if you want a diploma. It never has, and I don’t think it ever will. But it does expect that all students, and their parents, will respect and even “share” the Anabaptist-Mennonite lens of a Christian worldview, because that is what you agreed to do when you signed the enrollment papers.

Because I meet for breakfast with many of my former Dock colleagues, I know that our country’s present political climate continues to provide a crucible in which an Anabaptist-Mennonite-Christian Worldview is being sorely tested and challenged, but that is a speech for another time and place, and probably for a different speaker, as well!

However, I do want to address, finally, an aspect of Worldview as it relates to your life after you leave Dock Mennonite Academy. The school’s website states that 95% of its graduates go on to attend college and that the rest take a gap year for service or enter the work force. Regardless of which option you choose, you and your personal worldview will confront, and be confronted by, other people’s personal worldview.

Examples of such confrontations include your professors and classmates; your college roommate; the cultures represented by the community in which you serve, or your bosses and fellow employees in the work place. How will your personal worldview fare in those settings? The answer depends largely on how much time and energy you devote to forming and reflecting on the four pillars of Origin, Meaning, Morality and Destiny, prior to entering those arenas of life. Though no one knows what the future holds for any of us, I can guarantee that your personal worldview will be tested.

So what would I like you to remember from what I shared here this evening? I would love to believe that each of you can define the word Weltanschauung, or at least pronounce it! But more than that, I would love to hear that, if it hasn’t already been happening, you students and parents are taking time to sit down together and share with each other your most current answers to the questions raised by the four pillars of Origin, Meaning, Morality and Destiny. You don’t have to agree with each other, or apologize for your answers, but you really do need to discuss them. They are issues of which the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concern.”

If you want to get to know your high school classmates better than I knew mine, discuss your respective worldview. You could even use it as a pick-up line for a date: “Hey… What’s your Weltanschauung?” Who knows what might follow that question?

It has been a privilege to address you National Honor Society students and your parents on this august occasion. Congratulations and “HuzZAH!” to those of you who are being inducted this evening, and I challenge all NHS members to build onto the qualities that enabled your selection into this national society.