Academic freedom + romantic individualism = one huge mistake
Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom by Simon P. Kennedy. Lexham Press, 2024. 152 pp., $18.99
This provocative book confronts the bureaucratic use of the term “worldview” in Christian schools and universities. Happily, this is not a bureaucratic how-to book. Instead, it is a short, thoughtful, well-written exhortation that invites readers to think deeply about the core goals of a faithfully Christian school or university. In other words, Against Wordview is not really against worldview. Rather, “it provides a way of salvaging the worldview concept.”
The underlying problem is the misuse of the term worldview. First developed by nineteenth-century German philosophers, the term was codified in English during the culture wars as a “combat concept,” a “defensive stance,” a term so malleable as to be “reshaped to suit the whims” of educational powerbrokers. In academic settings today the term is used to impose overly rationalistic, narrow, deductive, top-down, frameworks into humanly complex situations, such as faculty hiring, tenure, and promotion.
The alternative Kennedy (no relation to this reviewer) offers is a Bible-based understanding of the role of wisdom in education. He bypasses nineteenth-century German philosophy to revive the optimism of a Christian-Aristotelian sense of purpose-driven wisdom that is not overly rationalistic, narrow, deductive, or top-down. Kennedy upholds the model of Charlotte Mason, who emphasized education as “a science of relations,” education that holistically integrates “relations with the world, with other people, and with God.” Kennedy wants to “drag us away” from thinking “there is one ‘lens’ or one overarching ‘view’ of things.” Worldview needs to be understood within the context of cultivating wisdom—meaning, “seeing God’s world properly, reading his word truly, and acting rightly in light of this.”
In the 1970s when small Protestant colleges began asking their faculty to be more like the faculty of secular universities—PhDs from research universities, publish or perish expectations for tenure, and undergraduate teaching that met the expectations of accrediting organizations—Arthur Holmes, a philosophy professor at Wheaton College, published The Idea of a Christian College. Holmes’s concern was to protect the distinctiveness of Christian education even as secular organizations were setting the structure and rules of the academic game. The Idea of a Christian College offered a three-page, four-point presentation of “The Idea of a World-View.” For Holmes, “a world-view is exploratory, not a closed system worked out once and for all but an endless undertaking that is still but the vision of a possibility, an unfinished symphony barely begun.” Point three noted that the worldview is pluralistic. Diversity exists and should exist among academic disciplines and among Christians. Point four stated that a Christian worldview “need not proceed deductively” but rather was confessional, “an admixture of beliefs and attitudes and values.” Holmes insisted that a Christian worldview is not a theology. Theology looks within the Bible whereas a Christian worldview looks outward from the “standpoint of revelation” into academic disciplines. When Simon Kennedy speaks of “reimagining” worldview, I think he means recentering it in the wisdom of such educational thinkers as Arthur Holmes.
I bought this book because of its title: I myself am devoted to promoting root-and-branch antagonism toward “worldview.” But since the book is not really against worldview and indeed upholds the term in the manner that Arthur Holmes employs it, allow me, as a Christian historian, to explain why I think the use of the term is wrongheaded.
As both Holmes and Kennedy affirm, the term worldview is the English translation of weltanschauung, a word deployed by Immanuel Kant to indicate “a ‘supersensible’ faculty of the human mind” that is “an appropriation and explanation of the world based on the individual’s experience and consciousness.”
The rub is revelation in scripture. Information gained from the Bible, whether divine, human, or mixed, requires no supersensible faculty. It isn’t learned from experience, nor does it bubble up from within our consciousness. We read it or hear it read. Biblical revelation comes from an external source. We accept, reject, or ponder whether we should accept or reject it. Kantian tradition and the language of worldview internalizes knowledge. External social knowledge is collapsed into internal individual knowledge. Both Kennedy and Holmes write of the clarity of divine revelation as an authority. Both agree that the Bible is clear about essential facts, especially historical facts such as the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Both assert that a Christian worldview includes the Bible, but weltanschauung is a concept that turns its back on external authority and promotes an extreme individualism. The rhetoric of worldview promotes “I think,” not “I assent.” It is especially antagonistic to “I submit.”
The rhetorical tradition of Christian worldview—even in the better form of Holmes and Kennedy—has a bait-and-switch dynamic within it. The bait is that it offers a soapbox created by modern philosophy for Christian academics to stand next to non-Christian academics who are standing on their own soapboxes. Everybody gets to claim their academic freedom and indulge their romantic individualism. The switch is that it undermines divine testimony and promotes pride, the ultimate sin against a true understanding of liberal (liberating) arts.
Simon Kennedy is right to oppose worldview. He is right to send us back to Aristotle and Charlotte Mason. Aristotelian tradition offers the epistemological foundation for thinking socially, including assent to divine revelation. The only way people can know anything about past events, far-off geography, or even the simplest facts they cannot intuit or experience is by trusting outside authorities. This is what Aristotle called non-technical knowledge.
Charlotte Mason in An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education (1925) models the classical/Christian pre-Germanic method of education in the way she begins with a chapter on the necessity of authority and docility. She does not advocate top-down imposition; rather, she promotes common sense. Students need to be taught to be passive if they want to learn well the lessons of history, geography, and Christian orthodoxy.
Anyone who has sat on a jury knows the frustration of being told by a judge to stay silent and listen to testimony. Juries don’t begin from worldview. Plutarch and Augustine agreed that education should begin by recognizing the importance of submitting to credible information from sources we can’t control. G. K. Chesterton offers a wonderful first sentence in his Autobiography (1936): “Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874.”
Epistemologically, this is Chesterton being wise and witty at the same time. Epistemologically, it ranks up there with the professor in Narnia who criticizes the logic taught to the schools of his day. Don’t the older children realize they have to decide who is more trustworthy? Birthdays and reports of Narnia cannot be handled by philosophic notions of worldview.
We historians don’t get to rely on our worldview. We have no experience or intuition that tells us whether Napoleon existed. As Christians we shouldn’t expect our worldview to support biblical orthodoxy about the basic facts of Jesus.
The language of worldview deserves to be jettisoned from academia. It doesn’t work. Epistemologically, it is not justifiable. Simon Kennedy is right to call us to think deeply about the terms we use, including within the context of Christian schools and universities. Wisdom should be education’s highest goal. Wisdom—practical wisdom!—is what Aristotle and Charlotte Mason taught.
Rick Kennedy is the author of Faith at State: A Handbook for Christians at Secular Universities (1995), A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking (2004) and The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather (2015). He is professor of history and environmental studies at Point Loma Nazarene University.
