Musings

Against Worldview [a review]

If you've been part of Evangelical culture for very long, you've almost certainly heard someone teach you about the importance of developing what is called "A Christian worldview." The idea is pretty simple, really: Scripture is given to us by God to reveal truth, to instruct in how to live righteously, and to reprove us when we are misguided (2 Timothy 3:16). If we want to know what Christians are to think about, say, whether it is permissible to eat pork, it is a simple matter of going to Scripture and discovering the answer to this question. But what if we want to know whether a Christian can eat genetically modified corn? Scripture doesn't directly answer this question, so we must then do the generative work of faithfully extending what Scripture does say to areas where it is silent.

There is so much of life that Scripture doesn't address, at least directly: whether it is a sin to drive slightly faster than the speed limit, which college one should go to and what to study, what percentage of your income should be dedicated to groceries, whether to vote for or against a local tax measure, etc. This is where a Christian worldview comes in handy: rather than every single Christian having to think through whether something like abortion is right or wrong from first principles, they can simply ask, "How should I approach this from a Christian worldview?"

Here's the kicker, though: Christians don't usually just talk about a worldview, but about the Christian worldview. Perhaps I search the Scriptures and conclude that, for a variety of theological and metaphysical reasons, IVF would be an ethically invalid way for me to build my family. Because I came to that conclusion from Scripture, and because other Christians submit themselves to the same Scripture, I assume that my conclusions represent the way Christians should think about IVF. Because I believe myself to have done my theological homework well, it seems that if you disagree with me on it, then you must be the one who is being unfaithful to Scripture. Christians of like minds then work to codify this inherently extrabiblical ethical reflection into an explicitly spelled-out monolithic worldview that can sort of be "downloaded" into the minds of new Christians.

This problem, among others, is the impetus behind Simon Kennedy's new book, Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom. This provocative title suggests a polemical book that enumerates the problems with the entire Worldview project and then presents an altogether different way to solve the underlying problem. His actual thesis, though, is quite a bit more tame: that it's better for Christian educators to envision themselves as cultivators of wisdom rather than downloaders of a specific set of ideological tenets. This, he argues, is more true to how humans actually learn—that is, inductively. Each one of us starts with a million little data points of knowledge from which we form a bigger picture over time. We all develop our worldviews as we age and mature, and these may be described as more or less "Christian" depending on how well they accord with Christianity's creedal statements. This book is not against Christian worldviews altogether; it's against Christian worldview in the singular.

Such a singular worldview purports to be a "theory of everything," something that is unattainable, untrue, and impossible, Kennedy argues. Even more dangerous is that it is impervious to any and all critique. If a Christ follower suggests that climate change or evolution is real, they can simply be written off as "reasoning from a non-Christian worldview."

Is Kennedy just trying to give cover for Christians who are dipping their toes into unorthodox waters? It seems like if you abandon a monolithic worldview in favor of "to each their own" worldviews, this is similarly resistant to critique. If you press me on evolution, I can pretty easily shrug you off by saying, "That's just your worldview." Kennedy hastens to disavow such moral relativism, though, arguing that there is a monolithic worldview held by God, but that we in our finitude can only subjectively apprehend it in part. Shared moral norms in the Christian community are good, but we should hold with some degree of humility those norms that we have derived by inference.

He pretty quickly turns to what he spends most of his energy on in the book, which is pedagogy. As an educator, Kennedy's interest in the concept of worldviews lies heavily in his need to teach students to think Christianly. This is quite different than someone who would approach the topic from a purely philosophical or theological angle.¹ As a practitioner, his aim is to help (Christian) educators to view their work less as "trying to fit content within the constraints of a preconceived intellectual system," and more as "the pursuit of the real."

In his view, this is much more aligned with how education actually happens. In any given subject, students are taught one small bit of knowledge (be it Chemistry, Mathematics, Writing, Music, etc.) and then their work as human beings is to inductively build up a picture of the world from those pieces as they are gained. This building up of knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom, but it is the foundation those students will need in order to "think and act wisely in God's world."

A few questions naturally arise, if one is listening carefully to Kennedy's argument:

1. How is a Christian chemistry teacher's work any different than that of a non-Christian? Is it ever possible to glean knowledge from non-Christians?
2. For an educator who wishes to teach a subject in the light of Christian belief, how is that to be done if not within the scope of totalizing, universal Christian worldview?
3. If there is no one Christian worldview, but instead Christian worldviews, to what degree can those worldviews differ from each other while still being recognizably Christian?

Kennedy works to answer all these questions, suggesting that his proposal allows for Christian educators to have some degree of latitude as they teach out of their own bank of wisdom and knowledge. He also believes that this sets them free from the need to shoehorn Christian theology or Scripture into every single lesson, whether it fits or not. He does not believe it is valuable, for example, to cite a verse out of context that has some vague surface-level similarity to the lesson's content just so that the lesson "feels" Christian, and yet many teachers within Christian institutions feel the need to do things like this. If someone is teaching physics or literature or music to students, a given lesson may or may not dovetail with a spiritual truth. When it does, that teacher should feel the freedom to draw the connection, and when it doesn't, it is not helpful to force it to happen.

In his discussion of how Christians can glean wisdom from non-Christians, he suggests that Christians do not have a "monopoly on academic knowledge or wisdom" (a claim with which I agree), and he suggests that a better question is to "consider the 'closeness of relation' that the matter under consideration has to our relationship to God and our understanding of the human person." In an effort to be concrete rather than abstract, he offers some examples which I will quote at length:

For example, the discipline of psychology, which reaches into the heart of what it means to be a human person made in the image of God, requires a great deal of care. The Bible speaks quite clearly about the human person and the impact of sin and holiness on the human psyche and our experience of the world. Another pertinent example is biology and anatomy, which in the current day are areas of great controversy in relation to sex and gender. These issues are, in my view, much more important than debates about the age the of the earth or the origins of different biological species, because they touch on the human person and the image of God.

To summarize, he believes that topics such as psychology, biology, and anatomy ought to be taught from an explicitly Christian perspective because they are closely related to what Scripture explicitly speaks about. This is in contrast to debates about creationism/evolution, which he sees as less related to what Scripture explicitly teaches on. This assumes the conclusion, though; he believes that the origin of biological species doesn't "touch on the human person and the image of God," and thus it is less important than questions of psychology, sex, and gender. Ask a Christian who believes in Young Earth Creationism whether they agree with this premise—they surely would not!²

I am not convinced that what he's doing here really "works." He wants to demonstrate how Christian belief can be brought to bear on different intellectual spheres in a way that grants some latitude for disagreement, but I'm not sure that's what he's actually done. It seems to me that in actuality, he wants Christian worldviews to be situated within a slightly different Overton Window than is common among conservatives. At minimum, he's showing his cards here with regard to what his worldview entails and implying that other Christians should operate according to it. This is fine as far as it goes, but then the book should probably be titled, "Against ᵗʰᵉ ᵖʳᵉᵛᵃᶦˡᶦⁿᵍ Worldview: For My Worldview."

The rest of the book continues to circle the plane around this problem of how to dismantle a monolithic Christian worldview without simply erecting a new one in its place. He gets close, I think, when he argues that we ought to evaluate pedagogical faithfulness against the gospel instead of against our worldviews. This would be measured by "adherence to the creeds and confessions of the church." This doesn't really seem to solve the problem, though, in my opinion. The Nicene Creed does not include an appendix on how Christian educators teach about psychology or Critical Race Theory, for example. This would then naturally lead to ever-expanding confessions and institutional statements of faith outlining what is on or off the table. Of course, this is exactly what Christian institutions already do. What is a seminary's statement of faith but a monolithic worldview in miniature?

Lest I sound overly critical here, what he's attempting to solve here is a legitimately hard (or even impossible) problem to solve: how to have both shared moral norms within Christian community without that becoming exhaustive or dictatorial. I think he's mostly on the right track by leaning more into wisdom acquisition, but I think he needs to let go of "worldview" thinking more than he thinks is possible. Consider this re-articulation of his core thesis near the end of the book:

My core claim here has been that the old idea of Christian worldview needs to be reimagined. None of us has access to a complete Christian worldview. Therefore, the Christian worldview is not the starting point for framing Christian education. Instead, we should think of education as the process of acquiring spiritual and practical wisdom.

My contention is that if worldview is not the starting point, nor the frame, nor even something that we can share in any kind of objective way, then it probably deserves far less airtime than we currently give it. If we focus instead on what he suggests—imparting spiritual and practical wisdom to students—then I think that means we will necessarily have to relinquish the kind of control over outcomes that we wish we had. Imparting wisdom means we are giving students tools for thinking Christianly about whatever specific hot-button topic arises, and we entrust the conclusions they reach into their own hands.

This is a genuinely scary thought when I consider my own children: I want them to grow up to hold fast to certain ideas and utterly reject other ideas present in our world, so my temptation is to instruct them what to think instead of how to reason. I do not want to relinquish that control, but I must admit that I actually do not nor will I ever have actual control over what they think. Kids grow up into adults and diverge from their parents in small or large ways. This is always true of every individual. Framing education as inductive wisdom acquisition is at least honest about our lack of direct control over students' ultimate conclusions, and helps us to lean into what we actually can do rather than fantasizing about what we cannot.

What can be said about Kennedy's Against Worldview, in the end? In my mind, it's an intriguing book that aims in the right direction, but I wish that he had more boldly done what the title promised and given a clear and straightforward alternative to worldview thinking. The Bible holds an embarrassment of riches in the "wisdom acquisition" department, and it would have been a significantly less confusing argument if he had simply leaned into that. All that said, I do not wish to be overly harsh here; I would say that this is a good, albeit imperfect, book. Faults aside, I think that this is a directionally correct way forward for Christian educators to go. I hope that what Kennedy has done here spawns an ongoing conversation on how to talk about unity-in-diversity in the church as well as the cultivation of wisdom among Christ followers.

DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.