Reflections on Simon Kennedy's Against Worldview
The term worldview is ubiquitous in Christian discourse and has been for several decades now. Most believers assume the term is unproblematic and has a clear meaning. Yet these assumptions can be called into question, and this is what Simon Kennedy does in his new book Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom.[i] The title seems to have been selected to garner attention, for it is unfortunately somewhat misleading and hyperbolic. Kennedy does not think we should cease speaking of worldview. What he believes is that we should reconceive what a Christian worldview is and the role it can serve in Christian thought and education. Despite the ill-chosen title, the book makes a thought-provoking argument and raises important issues that scholars, pastors, and teachers should carefully consider.
The Idealist Concept of Worldview
Kennedy sees several problems with the traditional or conventional concept of worldview. The root of these problems is the origin of the notion in German idealism. Conventional thinking about worldview bears the fingerprints of this eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical movement all over it. Not only did idealist philosophers introduce the term worldview (i.e., Weltanschauung), but they also did much to establish its meaning and possible uses.
Idealist philosophers generally taught that the character of objects is dependent on how they are conceptualized by subjects. Thought is in some sense prior to reality. This basic presupposition underlies the conventional understanding of worldview. On this account, worldviews are all-encompassing intellectual frameworks or conceptual schemes. Within any given worldview, everything has a specific place, significance, and value. A worldview defines what counts as true and false, right and wrong, plausible and implausible.
Worldviews can be all-encompassing in this way because they are not derived from the study of objective reality. Such study could only generate partial and limited conclusions due to the finitude of human knowers. These conclusions would always in principle stand open to correction by the uncovering of new data. Worldviews are instead derived from presuppositions that are taken for granted. This enables worldviews to give a deductive order to reality. They do not discern the objective meaning of things or perceive the real relationships that are constitutive of the world; instead they impose meaning on things and provide the categories that frame the world. This entails that a worldview functions as an a priori lens through which everything comes into focus and apart from which there is no meaning or intelligibility. A worldview is thus a fundamental starting point of inquiry, and there can be no meaningful thought or action apart from a worldview. This being so, a worldview is incredibly important, since what one will come to regard as true or right will entirely depend on whatever worldview one starts with.
This idealist concept of worldview could very easily lead to relativism, and in many secular thinkers it has done that. Worldviews are often said by such thinkers to be disparate, incommensurable, and unable to be evaluated by any common standard. Each appears true on its own terms. People may leave one worldview for another, but not on rational grounds. Christians who have adopted this notion of worldview have adapted it in some ways, so that they affirm there is one true worldview and many false worldviews. However, they often agree that there is little point in arguing with those who have a different worldview. If our worldviews are predicated on presuppositions that determine the entire scope of truth for us, then people with different worldviews will be like proverbial ships passing in the night.
Three Problems with the Idealist Concept
One difficulty Kennedy sees with this idealist notion of worldview is that it tends to ignore the fact that people are more than repositories of ideas and propositions. They are strongly influenced by habits, practices, relationships, and attachments of various kinds. Ideas have consequences, but so do many other aspects of human existence. If we make intellectual frameworks the only factor in our efforts to understand people and their actions, we will fail to grasp many important truths about man and society.
Another issue is that this concept of worldview is inherently vague and tends to bear the features of a wax nose. People rarely spell out in any detail what ingredients are necessary to constitute a discrete worldview or what is required for people to share a worldview. When theorists do attempt this kind of work, they are typically in disagreement with others who perform the same task. People also rarely attempt to analyze or define the content of specific worldviews to any significant degree. When they do, they also tend to reach different conclusions. Ask ten Christians what the Christian worldview is, or what someone must believe to have this worldview, and one will most likely get ten different answers. The concept therefore does little to clarify or illuminate how people actually think and behave.
A further problem is that the notion of worldview enables the quick and easy dismissal of viewpoints that are seen as belonging to false worldviews. If every belief has its home in a distinctive worldview, then all that is needed to say that a belief is wrong is to allege that it comes from or is an expression of a mistaken or corrupt worldview. This feature of the conventional concept of worldview has been appealing to some Christian apologists, but it generally leads to anti-intellectualism and highly superficial engagements with critics of one’s beliefs. If every opponent’s objections are always due to their presuppositions, and presuppositions can have no proof, then one can easily dismiss all opponents by dismissing their presuppositions. No real intellectual labor is required. One will also see little point in trying to glean anything of value from those who are deemed to have a wrong worldview, since such worldviews can only give rise to false beliefs. Conventional worldview thinking thus tends to stifle interest in learning, inquiry, and debate.
A Realist Concept of Worldview
Due to these problems, Kennedy is convinced that the idealist concept of worldview stands in need of revision. It provides few if any genuine benefits, particularly when applied to the area of education. In its place, he suggests a concept that is predicated on a realist view of knowledge, one which sees knowledge as built up through continuous interaction with and apprehension of objective reality. Whereas the idealist understanding is deductive, in that its content must be unfolded from its fundamental presuppositions, the realist understanding is inductive, or based on generalizations from pieces of knowledge and wisdom that are gained through experience and reflection. The idealist notion functions as an intellectual point of departure from which thought and action proceed; it is a prefabricated mold into which all subsequent material must be made to fit. The realist notion, by contrast, is a goal or end to which one is always moving on a quest to understand reality.
A Christian worldview is what one acquires when the process of growing in understanding is deeply informed by the spiritual wisdom of the Bible and the Christian tradition. Kennedy defines wisdom as “seeing God’s world properly, reading his word truly, and acting rightly in light of this.”[ii] Spiritual wisdom is not the only element in a Christian worldview, but it is of crucial importance. Kennedy defines a Christian worldview as follows: “a Christian worldview is a true apprehension of reality that is attained through the process of learning about God, the self, and the world. In other words, people have a Christian worldview once they apprehend reality in a way that provides them with holistic insights into right thinking and living. Reality encompasses three elements: God, self, and the rest of creation.”[iii] Since worldview formation is a process and involves the whole of reality, the project of acquiring a Christian worldview is never fully completed in this life. This doesn’t mean that no one actually has a Christian worldview, only that the Christian worldview a person does attain can always be further clarified and augmented.
Kennedy notes that the realist conception will not insist that there is one Christian worldview that all Christians share. Every Christian will be engaged in constructing his own worldview, and the specific ideas and beliefs that comprise it will depend on the teachers, books, ideas, and experiences that are formative for him. Worldviews are thus unavoidably tailored to the people that have them. Since all sincere Christians will share certain beliefs, there will be many points of contact and similarities between various Christian worldviews, but there will not be a one-size-fits-all Christian worldview. Instead, each Christian worldview will be composed of intricate patterns and relationships between the particular pieces of knowledge and wisdom that the Christian has slowly brought together in an elaborate synthesis. All will be very imperfect efforts to reflect in some limited way God’s own infinite understanding of things. Kennedy compares the process of crafting a worldview to creating a mosaic; both efforts require time, persistence, planning, and integration. He writes, “I want to suggest that worldview education ought to be understood in terms of the construction, or crafting, of a work of art. A Christian worldview is the aim of the education process, just as a completed mosaic is the aim of the artistic and construction process that goes into completing a mosaic. Education is akin to the process of crafting a mosaic. It is the process of crafting a worldview.”[iv]
The job of a Christian teacher, on this conception of worldview, is not to lay down the right presuppositions and then proceed to show students how everything must fit into the resulting framework. Teaching for the sake of constructing a worldview is not the same thing as transmitting an intellectual system. The teacher’s task is to show students where pieces of knowledge and wisdom can be acquired and to help them to see how they are and should be related. It is to enable students to arrive at a cogent, compelling, and beautiful representation of reality. For Kennedy, “education ought to be understood as the presentation of, imparting of, and pursuit of wisdom.”[v]
We might say that the teacher ought to be a guide leading students into mines where rich veins of intellectual, spiritual, and practical ore can be discovered and appropriated. This work takes time and a willingness to separate and purify what is precious from the impurities and worthless material that might be mixed in. It is thus a truly intellectual work, in that it depends on exercising discernment, making careful distinctions, seeing connections, and navigating tensions and disagreements. Humility is required, too, because there will always be more wisdom to discover, and sometimes one will not know how to proceed or resolve problems. No human being has the truly comprehensive grasp of objective truth that God has. He alone knows where all the wisdom is and he alone can perfectly distinguish wisdom from folly. Yet by diligent effort we can make progress in understanding God, ourselves, and the rest of creation.
Assessment
From a Lutheran standpoint, the book’s proposals are generally welcome. The idealist notion of worldview tends to be rationalistic and leaves little room for mystery. It basically sees a worldview as an all-inclusive system in which everything should be clearly related to everything else. Anything opaque to human reason is therefore regarded as a problem in need of a solution. This notion evaluates all truth claims in terms of logical or formal coherence and denies there are material principles, such as truths about metaphysics and morality, that all people naturally share. It therefore is opposed to traditional Lutheran teaching on natural law and common notions. Its claim that subjective factors invariably determine our apprehension of the world can promote relativism and stands in tension with the emphasis on objectivity that is pervasive in Lutheranism.
Kennedy’s view that Christian education is about diligently and patiently gathering and organizing pieces of knowledge and wisdom is also preferable to the view that it is more like being given a prescribed template that all facts must somehow fit into. The latter approach can lead to anti-intellectualism and simplistic dismissals of opposing views. It can stifle ingenuity and inquisitiveness. Better by far is the view that gaining a Christian worldview is the result of growing in one’s grasp of objective reality by a slow and steady process of gathering insights from many sources.
That said, it is possible to go too far in rejecting a deductive approach to learning. There are certainly heuristic guidelines and procedures that are necessary even with an inductive method, and presuppositions invariably play a role in everyone’s thinking. Without looking to reliable standards of truth and wisdom, moreover, it will be impossible to make good judgments in evaluating and assimilating knowledge claims. It takes wisdom to acquire wisdom. These considerations entail that some things do need to be taken for granted in learning. If we don’t accept certain things on faith, if we don’t “believe in order that we may understand,” then we will never get very far in our quest for wisdom. Thus, there should be a place for a priori commitments in education, but they should not have the outsized, decisive, and incorrigible role they are given in conventional worldview thinking.
In sum, Kennedy is correct to think that conventional worldview thinking stands in need of reform. Generally speaking, idealism was not a true or helpful philosophical movement, and the concept of worldview that it has passed down to the church is not true or helpful either. Kennedy’s contention that a Christian worldview should be seen as a result of carefully and patiently acquiring and arranging pieces of knowledge and wisdom in an effort to grow in one’s understanding of reality has much to recommend it. His book is therefore a significant and valuable contribution to current discussions about Christian education and intellectual life.
[i] Simon P. Kennedy, Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom (Lexham Press, 2024).
[ii] Ibid., 88.
[iii] Ibid., 15.
[iv] Ibid., 17.
[v] Ibid., 89.
Nathan Greeley is the managing editor of The Conservative Reformer.