Every so often, a book or article will denounce the concept of worldview for Christians. The claims, which vary from writer to writer, are usually a mix of legitimate critique and odd straw manning.
Some argue that the German rationalist history of worldview makes it wrong, misguided, or even unbiblical for Christians. Others suggest that it reduces authentic faith to something too cerebral, too impersonal or too formulaic. Perhaps the most common critique is that it just doesn’t “work” in today’s cultural environment.
That last critique extends to all Christian intellectual work, especially apologetics.
For decades now, last rites have been offered for Christian intellectual pursuits but, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment about rumors of his own demise, rumors of the death of worldview and apologetics have been greatly exaggerated. In just the last few months, millions witnessed Wesley Huff use apologetics to share the Gospel with millions on Joe Rogan’s podcast, as well as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger proclaim a new faith in Christ and attribute it to a long intellectual journey which involved a popular apologetics and evangelism website. The long history of Christian intellectual work includes philosophy, science, medicine, art and virtually every area of human understanding. People still have questions, and the Bible provides answers. The life of the mind is a non-reducible aspect of the Christian faith.
The most common criticisms of Christian worldview as a concept have come from those who doubt objective truth, objective morality, and Christianity’s clear doctrinal stands, and yet still wish to identify as Christian. In the past, these critiques came from those who embraced more culturally and theologically liberal views.
Just recently, however, a critic from the dissident Right complained that Christian worldview ideas, such as image of God and knowable truth, undermined their views about race and nationalism. He’s right. They do. There are clear implications of the Bible’s truth-claims about God, the universe, human dignity, and many other things.
A smaller set of criticism comes from Christians who found that a formulaic understanding of Christian worldview hadn’t “worked” the way they had either been told or thought. In their experience, the Christian worldview was presented as obvious, and the others as nonsense. Perhaps they were taught objectively that certain sins were, in fact sins, but understanding that didn’t keep them from struggling. Or perhaps they had run-ins with obnoxious Christians who used worldview like a club to badger people into submission on narrow political opinions.
Worldview has been done badly but, as a movement, it’s been largely self-corrective. Some of the earliest champions of Christian worldview, such as Herman Bavinck and Herman Dooyeweerd, pushed worldview thinking away from the confusions of German rationalism. Almost every popular champion of Christian worldview, from James Sire to Nancy Pearcey to Francis Schaeffer to Charles Colson, argued against reducing faith to cerebral formulas. More recently, many have worked to maintain the political ramifications of Christian truth without allowing the faith to be reduced to political partisanship.
In his short book on the importance of creativity and art, Francis Schaeffer wrote:
“If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just ‘dogmatically’ true or ‘doctrinally’ true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.”
Christian worldview is about the realization that if Christianity is true, it’s about everything and it changes everything. As Scottish theologian James Orr, among the earliest Christian thinkers to talk about the Christian worldview, wrote,
“He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity.”
While I agree that the term “Christian worldview” or “Biblical worldview” is clunky, every alternative I’ve heard (like “Christian social imaginary”) is far worse. Perhaps we should just call it Biblical wisdom, this quest to incarnate Christ’s claim on reality, as articulated by Abraham Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Our job, Chuck Colson often said, is to go anywhere and everywhere and cry out “His!”