I teach at a Christian university founded some 70 years ago by Dutch immigrants. Although it has become more diverse in recent years, the student body and faculty still draw significantly from Dutch enclaves throughout North America.
It’s unsurprising, then, that the legacy of Dutch thinker Abraham Kuyper still looms large. Beyond the buildings and the honors program that bear his name, Kuyper’s insistence that a Christian worldview should account for “every square inch” of reality is repeated often enough to make students roll their eyes.
At the center of campus stands a clock tower with the “founders’ vision” prominently displayed. It states a commitment to a distinctively Christian education, one that goes beyond “devotional exercises [being] appended to the ordinary work of the college.” Under this vision, “all of the students’ intellectual, emotional, and imaginative activities [are] permeated with the spirit and teaching of Christianity.” As one professor framed the school’s philosophy, faith is not just integrated but integral; not frosting spread on top but the yeast that permeates the whole.
Plenty of Christian institutions have similar aspirations, even if they articulate them differently. Indeed, the commitment to “Christian worldview education” has emerged as a common thread connecting many evangelical educators and institutions. Often, the concept is treated as a commodity to attract students. (“At our school, you will get a Christian worldview—or your money back!”) But is a Christian worldview something that can be so easily downloaded and deployed?
To this question, Simon Kennedy answers with a resounding no. In his provocatively titled book Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom, Kennedy argues that “worldview” is a worthy goal but a poor way to go about Christian education. He writes to oppose worldview as an organizing principle, a “combat concept,” or a means or method. Thus, he seeks to reframe and refresh the ideal of a Christian worldview with the biblical category of wisdom. His central argument: Christian educators must teach wisdom to build worldview rather than the other way around.
Kennedy, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, starts by sketching the history of “worldview” from the 19th century onward, with special attention to the Dutch stream mentioned above. He argues that the term was developed as a “combat concept” to demonstrate Christian distinctiveness during times of cultural crisis. As such, worldview excels at drawing the battle lines, outlining boundary markers between Christians and religious others.
But since most definitions of worldview have “very little content and almost no philosophical precision,” the concept begins to feel thin when pressed into the classroom environment. Isn’t good teaching good teaching, regardless of who does it? When a professor is writing a syllabus or teaching a class, how does she know she is teaching the course from a Christian worldview perspective?
I once received a course review from a student who complained that my class (on beauty and the arts) had quoted Kuyper, John Calvin, and Calvin Seerveld (a 20th-century Christian aesthetic philosopher) more than Holy Scripture. A review of the semester’s slides confirmed that this was not the case, but it still raised the question that Kennedy himself asks: “If you didn’t quote the Bible in the class, does it mean you failed to teach from a Christian worldview perspective?”
On the other hand, I also had a student who expressed frustration at the unfair expectations that believing artists often feel. To dramatize her point, she created a piece of pottery that still sits on my desk: a ceramic bowl with a cross jammed awkwardly through the side. Is this what it means, she seemed to ask, to make art from a “Christian worldview perspective”?
Anyone who takes worldview seriously will answer both questions the same way: Of course not. Indeed, speaking as an evangelical adopted by the Dutch Reformed, I know that some of my colleagues think that worldview went bad when evangelicals got ahold of it. They believe that the Kuyperian concept of worldview requires the scaffolding of other Reformed commitments: common grace, “sphere sovereignty,” a rejection of sacred-versus-secular dualism, a cosmic account of redemption. When disconnected from these commitments, the argument goes, worldview becomes a blunt instrument used primarily to put things (and people) in their place.
My Dutch friends have a point, even if evangelicals have resources for avoiding this outcome. But Kennedy does not let the Kuyperian stream off the hook, finding Kuyper himself guilty of an overly deductive approach. In other words, Kuyper starts with the Christian worldview as something already complete, a finished system that needs to be applied to every area of life. In contrast to Kuyper, Kennedy commends an inductive approach in which worldview is the goal rather than the method. It is something we approximate only at the end of a painstaking and collaborative process, not something we can cleanly access from the beginning.
For support, Kennedy turns to two other Dutch theologians, Herman Bavinck and his nephew J. H. Bavinck. Driven by the conviction that created reality is knowable and organically connected, the Bavincks manifest a willingness to start anywhere in creation and to put things together piece by piece. This inductive reorientation means that education is less a matter of deducing details that fit a comprehensive picture of reality and more a matter of discerning relationships that accord with the wisdom of God.
(As an academic aside, I’m not sure that it is appropriate to pit Kuyper against the Bavincks in this way. For all his faults, Kuyper railed against uniformity and insisted on loving attention as the way to true understanding.)
But if worldview is the goal, then wisdom is the way. The biblical concept of wisdom connects the human search for understanding to the structure of created reality, finding its ultimate coherence in Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24). The quest for wisdom means that Christian education is about helping students piece bits of wisdom together, building toward a Christian worldview rather than on top of it.
Kennedy conveys the two approaches in contrasting images. A deductive approach to worldview is more akin to “painting by numbers.” It treats Christian education as an exercise in providing all the “correct answers” and “applying predetermined solutions.” Since we already possess a Christian worldview, we seek to fit everything into existing theological schemata like Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation. But this foreign framework quickly undermines “the intellectual integrity of the educational process,” especially for disciplines like civics or biology where such a schema may feel forced.
Unlike the “paint by numbers” method, Kennedy’s inductive approach reimagines education as the laying of tesserae on a grand mosaic. Educators and their students work as teams who assist the mosaicist by preparing surfaces, cutting the pieces, and laying them in place. The work is vital, but only the master planner can see the whole. While “we might have some sense of the overall plan of the Christian worldview,” writes Kennedy, “it is only God who possesses the entire, perfect view of reality. It is our job to try and ascertain the truth about that reality in whatever limited manner we can.”
In this chastened image, there is not one Christian worldview; there are as many faithful Christian worldviews as there are faithful Christians, and “a person who has imbibed, internalized, and acts on Christian wisdom, wisdom that rests upon truth about self, God, and the world, has a Christian worldview.”
Kennedy hopes that focusing on wisdom will liberate students from seeking worldview compatibility in a superficial way, dismissing anything that does not match what they already believe. More significantly, he writes to liberate educators from the burden of demonstrating worldview compatibility in their teaching: “Teach what you know in a way that honors God and honors your students. You have permission (from me, at least!) to stop trying to force Christianity into every class with Bible verses, theological frameworks, and apologetics. … Your main job is to impart wisdom by teaching truth and teaching well, whatever form that comes in.”
Although Kennedy is more interested in giving permission than prescriptions, he does offer some salient counsel for Christian institutions: “a greater focus on doctrine and catechesis, a prioritizing of great Christian literature, an embracing of rich great books programs, a healthy regard for non-Christian sources and ideas, and an abandonment of bureaucratic markers of ‘Christianness’ like worldview related learning outcomes.”
I can give a hearty amen to all the above. But I also wonder whether most Christian institutions would claim that they are already doing these things. And given the last prescription, I wonder whether Kennedy’s complaint lies less with the concept of worldview and more with “bureaucratic markers” that give shape to the goals of education in the modern world. Although these markers regulate quality, they also tend toward uniformity, which Kuyper identified as the “curse of modern life.”
Unless this impulse is tempered by our humane and theological commitments, it is no surprise when “Christian worldview” gets flattened into a bureaucratic checklist. But when the educational task surrenders to the demand for uniformity, it is questionable whether any of our concepts—including “wisdom”—can survive intact.
I also wonder whether, in Kennedy’s words, “reducing the normative edge” of Christian teaching to something like “teaching truth and teaching well” is sufficient for serious Christian institutions. Although such a reduction may elicit sighs of relief for those just starting out, “teaching truth” remains an incredibly tall order. How do we testify to truth in all its manifold splendor, if all things cohere in Christ (Col. 1:17)? Yes, the Bible celebrates wisdom wherever it is found. But the biblical writers also make clear that there are earthly and heavenly forms of wisdom (James 3:13–18), that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10), and that all treasures of wisdom are hidden in Christ (Col. 2:3).
These claims evoke the whole story of God’s self-revelation, from Creation to Incarnation to consummation. And although there are certainly superficial and suffocating ways of imposing this story on academic disciplines, it cannot be avoided in any domain. What does God want for this part of created reality? How have things developed in both faithful and fallen directions? In light of God’s revelation, how shall we live within this sphere of life? Surely, a core part of academic faithfulness is answering these questions through the biblical story itself, even if it’s possible to do so clumsily. Rejecting “worldview,” in this sense, may lead to far worse failures of imagination.
Kennedy acknowledges that “teaching and instruction always start with some deductive categories.” Indeed, his insistence on “a greater focus on doctrine and catechesis” strikes me as a fundamentally deductive approach. And deduction is often preferable for both developmental and disciplinary reasons (especially for beginners). What, then, is the right mix of deduction and induction? What is the relationship between giving students a stable core and confronting them with views that may challenge their faith? This, too, requires wisdom. Perhaps this is Kennedy’s point.
In any case, Kennedy forces the question about what it really takes to cultivate a Christian worldview. Our aspirations are easier articulated than accomplished, and despite our failures, those who care deeply about worldview should never stop trying, by God’s grace, to get it right.
Justin Ariel Bailey is a professor of theology at Dordt University. He is the author of Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture.
