Simon Kennedy. Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom. Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2024. $18.99, 150pp.
The phrase “Christian Worldview” has spawned an industry. A list of Christian ministries with the phrase in their titles is substantial. Ministries, schools, colleges, and publications that invoke the phrase to help define their mission would be longer still.
Into this moment steps Simon P. Kennedy, whose book Against Worldview asks if the Christian worldview movement – especially in its application in educational settings -- is built on false premises. He notes, for example, that the word “worldview” is derived from the German weltanschauung, a word that owes more to Kant than Aquinas. It’s a word that began with cultural baggage and has accrued more over the past century.
Kennedy’s book has struck a nerve, perhaps in part because “Christian worldview” has been adopted so completely into the evangelical milieu and canon. Alistair Roberts, in a glowing review for the Gospel Coalition, acknowledged this near universal adoption when he wrote, “‘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.”
Roberts and Kennedy are right that the word “worldview” and the phrase “Christian worldview” have been turned into buzzwords. In this ideological and tribal age, “worldview” has suffered the same fate as words such as “love” and “liberty.” John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, describes this pollution of meaning when he says, “We use the same vocabulary, but we have different dictionaries.” That’s why Roberts (and I) would affirm that one of the virtues of Kennedy’s book is that it “performs a thorough and overdue laundering for a term ubiquitous in evangelical circles over the past 50 years.”
The early part of Against Worldview includes a history of the term “worldview” that is helpful and accurate. Those of us who use the word so freely today, almost as an incantation to sanctify our activities, should not forget that it is not a biblical term, and over time it has acquired a lot of cultural baggage. A word has largely lost its meaning when thoughtful scholars and pastors such as Carl Trueman and Tim Keller invoke the word to mean one thing, while Christian nationalists such as Sean Feucht and Lance Wallnau use the phrase to conjure entirely different meanings.
Another strength of the book is Kennedy’s observation that “worldview” has become a “battle” term. It is now being used freely, unashamedly, and unironically by those who care more about populist politics than the faith formation of Christians.
However, even acknowledging these virtues, it’s important to note what the book either gets wrong, or simply ignores.
For example, Kennedy is wrong when he blames this debasing of the word on such figures as Frances Schaeffer and Chuck Colson. Kennedy, an Australian, is not fluent in the dramatis personae of the American Evangelical Industrial Complex, especially those cogs in the machine that interface with conservative politics. Blaming the weaponization of the phrase “worldview” on Schaeffer and Colson while ignoring Jerry Falwell, James Robison, Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and a host of others who were and are explicit culture warriors is a confusion of category that leaves this American reader scratching his head. The worst you can say about Schaeffer and Colson in this regard is that they didn’t fully appreciate or arrest the debasement.
What could have been a strength of Kennedy’s project – but which turns out to be, in the end, a weakness -- is his invocation of Herman Bavinck. Bavinck was a friend and colleague of Abraham Kuyper, who might be called the grandfather of the Christian Worldview movement. Chuck Colson, for example, often referred to Kuyper, and Kuyper’s famous “every square inch” quote has become a rallying cry for those who think a Christian worldview, or (as Bavinck himself preferred) a “Christian world and life view,” should be applied to every area of life.
English translations of Bavinck’s work have poured out from American publishers in the past 20 years. Of special note is Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, in four volumes, published from 2003-2008. In the last years of his life, Tim Keller referred to Bavinck constantly.
So, Kennedy’s reference to Bavinck is both helpful and welcome. However, his appeal to Bavinck is selective, and in some cases, he simply misstates Bavinck’s position. Kennedy draws too great a distinction between Bavinck and Kuyper. He calls Kuyper “deductive” and Bavinck “inductive,” borrowing from Bavinck’s early biographer J.H. Landwehr. Landwehr (and Kennedy) clearly favor Bavinck over Kuyper in this battle of heavyweights. But is this distinction overstated? It’s hard to find a lot of daylight between their theological positions. We should also not discount the fact that Landwehr had his own agenda in attempting to make these overly sharp distinctions between Kuyper and Bavinck. He wanted to elevate Bavinck’s influence (and the significance of his own work as the Bavinck’s Boswell) by bringing him out from the long shadow of Kuyper.
That’s a worthy project. Bavinck certainly made unique contributions and deserves the attention he is now finally getting. But it must not be pursued at the expense of the historical record. I would submit as Exhibit A in the argument that Bavinck is not “against worldview” is Bavinck’s own book on the subject, which he titled Christian Worldview.
Further, Kennedy uses Bavinck to assert that we should be pursuing “Christian worldview” so much as “Christian wisdom,” as if the two were in opposition. The translators of Bavinck’s Christian Worldview (N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory C. Brock) refute the notion that they are opposed in the introduction: “Worldview is (at least) closely related to a ‘comprehensive wisdom’ [Bavinck’s phrase] or, in the case of a particularly Christian worldview, to a “Christian wisdom.” Bavinck’s translators go on to address the “worldview vs. wisdom” conflict directly, noting “the recent trend in Anglophone Reformed theology to pit worldview against wisdom, as though the former were a largely cerebral affair, in contrast to the wholesome embodied nature of the latter."
My bottom line is that Kennedy is right to question the overly broad application of the word “worldview” in the current evangelical milieu, but he allows his honest question to become a dogmatic answer. The title of the book itself is a symptom of the book’s primary flaw. I would have liked the title better if it was After Worldview rather than Against Worldview. For wisdom is not, as Kennedy asserts, against worldview. As Kuyper and Bavinck would assert, they are irreducibly of a piece.