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<\/figure>\nAcademic freedom + romantic individualism = one huge mistake<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom<\/a> by Simon P. Kennedy. Lexham Press, 2024. 152 pp., $18.99<\/em><\/p>\n This provocative book confronts the bureaucratic use of the term \u201cworldview\u201d 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 <\/em>is not really against worldview. <\/em>Rather, \u201cit provides a way of salvaging the worldview concept.\u201d<\/p>\n The underlying problem is the misuse of the term worldview. <\/em>First developed by nineteenth-century German philosophers, the term was codified in English during the culture wars as a \u201ccombat concept,\u201d a \u201cdefensive stance,\u201d a term so malleable as to be \u201creshaped to suit the whims\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201ca science of relations,\u201d education that holistically integrates \u201crelations with the world, with other people, and with God.\u201d Kennedy wants to \u201cdrag us away\u201d from thinking \u201cthere is one \u2018lens\u2019 or one overarching \u2018view\u2019 of things.\u201d Worldview needs to be understood within the context of cultivating wisdom\u2014meaning, \u201cseeing God\u2019s world properly, reading his word truly, and acting rightly in light of this.\u201d<\/p>\n In the 1970s when small Protestant colleges began asking their faculty to be more like the faculty of secular universities\u2014PhDs from research universities, publish or perish expectations for tenure, and undergraduate teaching that met the expectations of accrediting organizations\u2014Arthur Holmes, a philosophy professor at Wheaton College, published The Idea of a Christian College<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> Holmes\u2019s 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<\/em> offered a three-page, four-point presentation of \u201cThe Idea of a World-View.\u201d For Holmes, \u201ca 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.\u201d Point three noted that the worldview <\/em>is pluralistic. Diversity exists and should exist among academic disciplines and among Christians. Point four stated that a Christian worldview <\/em>\u201cneed not proceed deductively\u201d but rather was confessional, \u201can admixture of beliefs and attitudes and values.\u201d Holmes insisted that a Christian worldview <\/em>is not a theology. Theology looks within the Bible whereas a Christian worldview <\/em>looks outward from the \u201cstandpoint of revelation\u201d into academic disciplines. When Simon Kennedy speaks of \u201creimagining\u201d worldview, I think he means recentering it in the wisdom of such educational thinkers as Arthur Holmes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I bought this book because<\/strong> of its title: I myself am devoted to promoting root-and-branch antagonism toward \u201cworldview.\u201d<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n As both Holmes and Kennedy affirm, the term worldview <\/em>is the English translation of weltanschauung<\/em>, a word deployed by Immanuel Kant to indicate \u201ca \u2018supersensible\u2019 faculty of the human mind\u201d that is \u201can appropriation and explanation of the world based on the individual\u2019s experience and consciousness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The rub is revelation in scripture. Information gained from the Bible, whether divine, human, or mixed, requires no supersensible faculty. It isn\u2019t 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 <\/em>includes the Bible, but weltanschauung <\/em>is a concept that turns its back on external authority and promotes an extreme individualism. The rhetoric of worldview promotes \u201cI think,\u201d not \u201cI assent.\u201d It is especially antagonistic to \u201cI submit.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The rhetorical tradition of Christian worldview\u2014<\/em>even in the better form of Holmes and Kennedy\u2014has 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Charlotte Mason in An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education <\/em>(1925) <\/em>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t begin from worldview. Plutarch and Augustine agreed that education should begin by recognizing the importance of submitting to credible information from sources we can\u2019t control. G. K. Chesterton offers a wonderful first sentence in his Autobiography <\/em>(1936): \u201cBowing 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n We historians don\u2019t get to rely on our worldview. We have no experience or intuition that tells us whether Napoleon existed. As Christians we shouldn\u2019t expect our worldview to support biblical orthodoxy about the basic facts of Jesus.\u00a0<\/p>\n The language of worldview deserves to be jettisoned from academia. It doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s highest goal. Wisdom\u2014practical wisdom!\u2014is what Aristotle and Charlotte Mason taught.<\/p>\n Rick Kennedy is the author of <\/em>Faith at State: A Handbook for Christians at Secular Universities<\/a> (1995), <\/em>A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking<\/a> (2004) and <\/em>The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather<\/a> (2015). He is professor of history and environmental studies at Point Loma Nazarene University.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201cworldview\u201d in Christian schools and universities. Happily, this is not a bureaucratic how-to book. Instead, it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":123468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[3749,37375],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-123467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-review","tag-worldview"],"yoast_head":"\n