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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Good review from O’Dell.
One of his conclusions is that worldview (and wisdom) shouldn’t be treated exclusively as an end product of education. In support of that, I’d say Christians should teach and learn a “worldview” as they do a catechism. A helpful metaphor for what a catechism is and how it should function is a map (and this cuts through a lot of the complaints and criticisms of the use of worldview).
A map isn’t the land itself, and a catechism isn’t Scripture itself, and a worldview isn’t creation or general revelation itself. But as a (good) map orients us to and within some place, so a catechism to Scripture, and so a Christian (biblically-informed) worldview to creation.
There’s new land-surveying, etc, and new cartography to be done, but usually not by those receiving their foundational education without learning from the best maps already made. And that’s how we should view Christian education [in non-theological topics] in relation to a formulated worldview; it should function as a general revelation map.
I appreciate the review and agree that the worldview rhetoric needs to be reigned in. One of the problems I see is that people use this language in different ways.
If by “worldview” we simply mean a way of viewing and understanding the world, then there is no problem. We all have a worldview, and we are continually evaluating and correcting the worldview as we learn. Evan as a Christian, my “Christian worldview” continues to evolve as I learn more.
But often evangelical worldview talk resembles a Kantian framework, where worldviews are treated like mental computer programs. If a person downloads the right program, it solves all of their problems and they have complete understanding of the world. If a person downloads the wrong program, they can’t know anything about anything.
The problem with this second way of understanding worldview is that it simply isn’t the way the world works. For those of us who work in secular spheres, we often see unbelievers knowing a lot of things. In fact, we often learn from unbelievers, and we have to grant that they know some things in order to learn from them. Simply calling the unbeliever a “fool,” while true in a theological and ethical sense, doesn’t really answer the problem. If they can understand language, count the correct change at the supermarket, and even perform brain surgery, then we have to admit that they have some grasp of reality, although incomplete in an ultimate sense.
“Even as a Christian, my ‘Christian worldview’ continues to evolve as I learn more.”
Exactly. And this is where I think Kennedy’s “mosaic” theme is helpful, especially as it refers to the natural process of Christian educational formation. We’re never a completed work this side of heaven and so our growth is going to impact how we understand this worldview over time. How I understood the world from a Christian perspective is not the same at 47 as it was when I was 25. At 25 I had been a Christian for 6 years, so I understood *some* things, but there were a lot of things I didn’t know or understand. As such, even at 47, my knowledge and wisdom bucket may have a few more drops in it, but my formation is still an ongoing process.
For this reason, Kennedy’s book is helpful. I only had so many words to work with in the review, so I could have written more–but I appreciate your comment because it helps me extrapolate a bit more on the positives of his book. But I would still reward this book (on a scale of 1-5), a score of 3, because I am not convinced he sustains his thesis throughout the book, especially given his provocative title.
I suspect if you were to press most Christians what they mean by “worldview” the answer you would get would approximate “a way of viewing and understanding the world”. My criticism, based only on what this review states is fairly mild, in that the author would likely get a wider reading had he chosen a better title for his book. Who is his intended audience?
The intended audience of the book:
“Its questions concern anyone charged with Christian formation: parents catechizing children, pastors shepherding congregations, seminaries preparing ministers, and churches discipling young people.”
As the subtitle suggests, it is aimed at those who are responsible for formation–or Christian intellectual development at various stages.
Of course. My question was more rhetorical given that intended audience.
Thanks for the thoughtful pushback. I actually agree with much of this, and it gets at the reservation I raised in the review: we never encounter reality apart from prior convictions about God, creation, revelation, and human nature. Where I think Kennedy is helpful is in warning against treating worldview as a comprehensive grid from which a distinctively Christian answer must be deduced for every discipline. The Christian and unbeliever can arrive at the same mathematical truth while understanding its ultimate significance very differently. So I would distinguish between knowing something truly and knowing it exhaustively or ultimately. And I agree about the title—it is more provocative than Kennedy’s actual argument warrants.
If the aim is to refine our understanding of worldview, that’s fair. But if this review is accurately representing Kennedy’s book, it doesn’t actually seem to be proposing anything all that consequential. It’s difficult to tell if there is a real critique here of actual curricula or modes of teaching that actual Christians are employing.
I would also push back against the statement “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.” I would ask what features of reality can be fully apprehended apart from one’s worldview? While it is true that “a Bible verse appended to a mathematics lesson does not make the mathematics more Christian”, it also doesn’t make it less Christian by omitting it. If we truly believe that God’s general revelation speaks to us, we might contemplate how mathematics brings Glory to God and how it leaves man “without excuse” as Romans 1 tells us. This is wisdom. At the same time, the most brilliant unbelieving mathematician in the world is a fool, according to God.
In any case “Against Worldview” is a poor title if his aim is to refine what we mean by worldview.
Perhaps he should have titled it Rethinking Worldview?
Like the author, I’m committed to a Christian worldview but there is a lot of sloppy and lazy rhetoric around the word.