Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning—then it can be put back into circulation.” For evangelicals, one example is the word “worldview.”
In Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom, Simon P. Kennedy performs a thorough and overdue laundering for a term ubiquitous in evangelical circles over the past 50 years. “Worldview” has framed curricula for Christian schools and shaped people’s visions of apologetics. It has been routinely deployed in cultural commentary and functioned as a buzzword in marketing for countless ministries.
Kennedy invites his readers to take a closer look at the concept of worldview, its origins, its uses, and the rarely considered assumptions and biases built into it. By rethinking the use of the term, especially in Christian education, we can think more clearly about the nature of formation and become more effective in helping students obtain godly wisdom.
Worldview’s Confusing History
The concept of worldview, or Weltanschauung, traces back to German idealism. Kennedy observes its development through Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. It was appropriated by the Scottish evangelical theologian James Orr in the 1890s, who deployed it to refer to “the widest view which the mind can take of things and the effort to grasp them together as a whole” (29).
In that era, the Christian faith increasingly seemed under assault at the most principial level from an array of opposing comprehensive systems. Therefore, the concept of worldview offered an attractive framing for responding to Christianity’s cultural conflicts. As Kennedy observes, “This early understanding of Christian worldview set up the apologetic use of Weltanschauung as combative from the very beginning” (31).
‘Worldview’ has always been used in vague, inconsistent, and contrasting ways.
“Worldview” has always been used in vague, inconsistent, and contrasting ways. Unfortunately, that ambigiuty has produced more incoherence than contestation among its users.
Kennedy particularly highlights the contrast between “deductive” and “inductive” uses. For thinkers such as Abraham Kuyper, worldview primarily functioned as a deductive concept, denoting a systematic account of a Christian understanding of our life and world, flowing from a set of fundamental and unified principial commitments.
By contrast, Herman Bavinck illustrates a more inductive approach. Rather than starting with an established big picture into which we fit all the pieces of our knowledge, he primarily builds up from our multifaceted engagement with concrete reality. Like the construction of a mosaic, for Bavinck this all fits into the overarching unified, meaningful, and ordered reality established by God’s wisdom in creation—yet our understanding of this big picture will always be more partial and piecemeal.
Worldview Education’s Hubris
Against Worldview is written primarily with Christian educators in mind, as the concept has arguably had its greatest influence in this sphere.
Christian education is often framed as a task of worldview training. Therefore, the concept has functioned as a normative one, pressing all aspects of education into its ideological mold. Much as critical theories have colonized the whole curriculum in some progressive educational institutions, forcing social justice ideas into every class in unnatural and polarizing ways, so, when it’s not well done, “Christian worldview” can ideologize education. This ideologization, among other effects, keeps students from understanding the many ways Christians and non-Christians are seeking to comprehend the world in similar ways.
To heighten our sense of the distinctiveness of the Christian worldview and its oppositional relation with all others, we can also vastly overplay the degree to which our relation to reality is mediated by higher-level ideas. Common uses of the worldview concept can invite us to think of our relation to the world chiefly occurring through an all-encompassing theoretical gaze, a sort of ideological map of reality in its totality. Instead, Kennedy reminds us that our vantage point is limited, located in the hurly-burly of life and, as such, will always be a possible Christian worldview among others.
We aren’t chiefly students of such ideological maps in learning the lay of the land of reality. We’re explorers following partial itineraries and filling in gaps in our knowledge of a realm, or trackers with heightened senses attentive to our environment’s clues. Or, perhaps we’re hikers registering landmarks, finding their bearings, and navigating through varied terrain.
In the task of coming to grips with the often-hidden paths of creation, while we can genuinely find a greater grasp on the whole through the Christian faith, we’ll routinely find common cause with unbelievers. Kennedy’s welcome approach, which is also influenced by Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy, brings Christian education back down to earth.
Worldview Flows from Wisdom
As Kennedy argues throughout the book, practical and spiritual wisdom “ought to be the substantial content of Christian education” (88). Worldview isn’t the means of education but the end: as students gain wisdom through the study of the manifold and complex relations of the creation, a broader understanding of the creation and its relation to its Creator emerges, which we might appropriately call “worldview.” However, the concept so developed will function differently from the ways it typically has.
Worldview is not the means of education, but the end.
Kennedy’s argument isn’t for secular or value-neutral education. Indeed, freed from the ideological forms typically offered by “worldview education,” education can be better positioned to form students deeply in Christian thought. While we ground students in Scripture and the Christian tradition, Kennedy also encourages us to engage appreciatively with the best the world has to offer, since all truth is God’s.
When one overarching ideological system no longer permeates the whole curriculum, Christian education may be more likely to adopt a more focused approach to teaching the faith. In deficient forms of worldview education, when a veneer of Scripture verses is placed over the entire curriculum, it’s easier to excuse deficiencies in the dedicated teaching of Scripture and theology. Taking Kennedy’s approach that focuses on wisdom will allow Christian worldview to rise up from an expansive and open quest for wisdom under wise guides, rather than through indoctrination into a more closed system of thought. For example, studying biology as a means to understand the intricate wonder of creation will likely result in a perspective that explains the world more completely than framing the study of biology around apologetic topics.
Given how load-bearing the concept of worldview is for so much Christian education, Kennedy’s close examination is a much-needed intervention. Against Worldview is short, accessible, and affordable. It makes its case clearly, leaving its readers with a much sharper understanding of a key point and straightforward, actionable proposals. While it’s most suited for Christian educators, it’ll be valuable for laypeople, apologists, pastors, and scholars.
The Gospel Coalition