I have spent my teaching career in classical Christian schools, where the language of “worldview” is nearly impossible to escape. It appears in mission statements and curriculum guides, in faculty meetings and lesson plans, and in conversations about everything from literature and history to mathematics and the sciences. Teachers are encouraged not merely to teach their subjects well but to teach them “from a distinctly Christian worldview.” Students, likewise, are expected to develop a Christian worldview through which they can understand and respond to the world around them. Trying to extricate worldview from contemporary Christian education would therefore be something like McDonald’s announcing that it was removing the Big Mac from its menu. You certainly could do it, but one might reasonably wonder what would be left of the institution we have come to recognize. Yet the significance of worldview extends well beyond the Christian classroom. Parents catechize their children, pastors teach congregations, seminaries form future ministers, and churches disciple young people with the same basic aim: helping Christians understand God’s world and live faithfully within it.
Still, I was not entirely unfamiliar with the pitch to reconsider—or even abandon—the language of worldview before encountering Simon P. Kennedy’s Against Worldview. In a personal exchange on the subject, theologian J. V. Fesko expressed his own reservations about the concept. Among his concerns is the tendency of worldview thinking to suggest that Christianity supplies a distinctive answer to virtually every field of human inquiry: a Christian approach to mathematics, grammar, language, science, and so forth. Fesko questions whether this asks Scripture to do something it never claims to do. Scripture itself draws on wisdom found outside the covenant community, while the Reformed tradition has historically recognized both the light of nature and the legitimate learning of non-Christians. His preferred alternative is the less comprehensive language of a Christian “outlook”—one that recognizes distinctly Christian convictions where Scripture speaks while remaining receptive to truth wherever it may be found.
Kennedy’s argument therefore entered territory with which I had already begun to explore. Yet Against Worldview does something somewhat different. Despite what its provocative title might initially suggest, Kennedy does not ultimately propose that Christians dispense with the category of worldview altogether. His argument is subtler than that: Worldview has been placed at the wrong end of the formative process. Rather than beginning with a more-or-less complete Christian worldview and teaching Christians to deduce from its principles what they should think about history, literature, science, politics, and culture, Kennedy argues that formation should proceed largely in the opposite direction. We encounter reality piece by piece, acquiring knowledge and growing in practical and spiritual wisdom. Through this gradual and largely inductive process, a Christian worldview is formed.
Kennedy develops this argument through the recurring image of a mosaic. We do not possess the completed picture of reality, nor should Christian teachers or leaders imagine that they can simply hand one to others. Instead, the pieces are gradually laid as we encounter and understand the particulars of God’s world. The resulting worldview is therefore less like a comprehensive blueprint possessed in advance and more like a picture that becomes increasingly visible as the pieces come together (ch. 3). The goal is not merely the possession of correct propositions but wisdom: the capacity to perceive reality truthfully and live fittingly within it.
From Worldview to Wisdom
Kennedy arrives at this proposal through a combination of intellectual history, epistemology, and biblical theology. He traces the development of worldview as a concept employed increasingly in intellectual and apologetic conflict, eventually functioning as what he calls a “combat concept” against rival comprehensive accounts of reality (ch. 2). He then turns especially to Herman Bavinck’s Christian realism to argue that human beings know God’s world gradually and within their creaturely limitations rather than by possessing an exhaustive conceptual system.
From there Kennedy retrieves the biblical category of wisdom as the proper aim of Christian formation. Knowledge matters, but wisdom entails knowing how to live fittingly within the reality God has made. Kennedy distinguishes practical wisdom from spiritual wisdom while refusing to separate them; both belong to the formation of Christians capable of judging and acting faithfully within God’s world. Scripture, the Christian intellectual tradition, and the world itself become three principal sources through which this wisdom is acquired (ch. 5). Worldview remains, but as the developing fruit rather than the predetermined framework of formation.
Strengths
Kennedy is particularly persuasive when challenging superficial approaches to Christian integration. A Bible verse appended to a mathematics lesson does not make the mathematics more Christian, nor does forcing every subject or question into a predetermined theological schema necessarily produce Christian wisdom. Kennedy instead calls for careful attention to the realities before us and resists treating Christianity as a ready-made answer key. This insight extends beyond the classroom. Christian formation is not accomplished merely by attaching Christian answers to every conceivable question.
Relatedly, Kennedy’s recovery of wisdom as a central aim of Christian formation is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Formation should produce more than people capable of identifying correct propositions; it should cultivate judgment, prudence, virtue, and the ability to live faithfully within God’s world. A seminarian may know Greek, Hebrew, systematic theology, and church history while lacking the wisdom necessary to shepherd actual people. A child may memorize a catechism without yet possessing the judgment to apply its truths faithfully. Kennedy’s account also makes room for common grace and the legitimate wisdom of non-Christians. Christians need not fear Plato, Aristotle, or other thinkers outside the Christian tradition because truth does not cease to belong to God when an unbeliever discovers it.
The mosaic metaphor serves this point particularly well. Creaturely knowledge is real without being exhaustive. We may genuinely know the pieces before us without pretending to possess exhaustive knowledge of the master plan according to which every piece of reality fits together. This encourages attention, curiosity, and humility rather than the assumption that possession of the correct worldview supplies ready answers to every question.
A Significant Question
Yet it is precisely here that Kennedy’s proposal raises what I regard as its most significant unanswered question: What makes wisdom wisdom? Knowledge and wisdom are no more pursued in a vacuum than worldview. Kennedy identifies Scripture, the Christian intellectual tradition, and the created world as sources from which wisdom is acquired, but these are not self-interpreting, nor do they possess equal authority. To identify Scripture as divine revelation already requires convictions about God, revelation, and authority. To receive the Christian tradition critically requires some standard by which that tradition is judged. To discern wisdom in Plato or Aristotle while rejecting what conflicts with Christian truth requires prior judgments about reality, humanity, sin, goodness, and the proper ends of human life.
This complicates Kennedy’s attempt to move worldview primarily to the end of Christian formation. Christians never approach the pieces of reality from nowhere. Even the claim that creation is ordered, intelligible, and capable of yielding wisdom is already a theological judgment about the world and its Creator. Scripture does not provide an exhaustive blueprint of the mosaic, but it does tell us something authoritative about the picture we are assembling. We therefore possess genuine, if incomplete, knowledge of the whole before encountering many of its particulars.
The relationship between worldview and wisdom may consequently be more reciprocal than Kennedy’s largely inductive model allows. Christians begin with a rudimentary understanding of God, creation, humanity, sin, redemption, and revelation. Those convictions shape our encounters with the world; those encounters, in turn, deepen and mature our understanding, producing greater wisdom and a richer Christian worldview. Kennedy is right to resist treating worldview as a prefabricated grid through which answers can simply be deduced, but it does not follow that worldview functions only as the product of Christian formation.
Recommendation
In this respect, the title Against Worldview is somewhat misleading. Kennedy’s argument ultimately has less to do with abandoning worldview than with reconsidering the work we ask it to do. Indeed, when he finally considers whether the category should simply be discarded, his answer is explicit: “I don’t believe so. Rather, we need to rethink it” (ch. 6). Like other critiques of worldview thinking I have encountered, the book has made me more attentive to the danger of treating worldview as a comprehensive grid through which every feature of reality must first pass before it can be understood.
For that reason, Against Worldview deserves attention beyond the Christian classroom. Its questions concern anyone charged with Christian formation: parents catechizing children, pastors shepherding congregations, seminaries preparing ministers, and churches discipling young people. In each case, the question is not simply whether Christians possess the right answers, but whether knowledge is producing wisdom—the capacity to judge and live faithfully within God’s world. Even if Kennedy draws too sharp a distinction between worldview as the product of Christian formation and wisdom as the means by which it is acquired, his insistence that formation requires more than handing Christians a comprehensive grid of correct answers deserves serious consideration. Those of us who have become accustomed to speaking the language of worldview may finish the book still using the term—but, perhaps, using it more carefully.
©Erik Warren O’Dell. All Rights Reserved.
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Erik Warren O’Dell
Erik Warren O’Dell is a Christian educator, writer, and curriculum developer in the classical humanities tradition based in the Houston, Texas area. He holds an MA in Theological Studies from Westminster Seminary California (2018) and teaches and develops homeschool curriculum from a confessional Reformed perspective. He also leads a church-history-as-apologetics Sunday school series at Christ Presbyterian Church, where he worships with his wife, Jessica. His work focuses on helping students and readers think clearly, historically, and faithfully about Christianity in a skeptical age.
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