Worldviews Arise Out of Faith

By anchoring human life in ultimate certainty, faith gives rise to a vision of the whole of reality in the light of this ultimate. As James Fowler has recently put it: “faith ‘forms into one’ and comprehensive image of an ultimate environment, or worldview, as the means by which the commitment of faith integrates and guides daily experience.” A worldview gives fundamental, seminal answers to the ultimate questions: Who are we? Where are we? What are we to do? What is good and what is evil? Where are we going? Tolstoy asks in his Confession: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” At the end of his philosophical reflections, Heidegger exclaims: “Why is there a Being at all and not rather No-thing.”
All such ultimate questions, and their answers about life and death, sin and suffering, hope and healing, finally elude our intellectual grasp and strict logical proof. In the end we say simply, “I am doing this because I believe that this is the nature of life and that my ultimate happiness depends on my acting in accord with my deepest commitment and dearest beliefs.” Every philosophy ends the same way, Gilkey argues, by saying simply, “look, is this not the way things truly are?” Likewise, Wittgenstein says, “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” Finally there comes an end to our reasoning, and we answer such end-questions not in terms of proof or demonstration but rather in terms of the affirmation and surrender of faith.

Paper by: James H. Olthuis
Published in; Stained Glass
Editors: Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen and Richard J. Mouw

Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2Co 4:16-18 )