“The aim of Christian education is to apprehend reality in all its elements: God, self, and the world. In reaching for this reality through the gradual gathering of wisdom, Christian educators are giving students the gift of a Christian worldview.” Against Worldview (page 94)
Against Worldview? Not Exactly
Praxis Circle’s tag line is a community “Building Worldviews.” We operate from what we call a Classical Judeo-Christian (CJC) worldview, and the board and staff involved directly are Christian, Jewish, generally spiritual, or agnostic.
Our June 2025 Book of the Month is Against Worldviews: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom by Dr. Simon Kennedy, published in 2024 (126 pages). Against Worldviews is a wonderful book central to our mission “to renew a free and good society”!
In fact, we could not craft a better statement about our philosophy toward worldview education than the quote from Simon’s book at top here.
But the title, Against Worldview? What?? Huh???
As Executive Director, it places me in the lead role of Steve Martin’s classic 1979 comedy movie The Jerk. In that then (and still to most)-hilarious “life is a journey film,” Navin R. Johnson (Steve Martin) is the white orphan son of black sharecroppers, who doesn’t know he’s white until he realizes he lacks rhythm and can’t dance.
His life journey radically accelerates when a mad sniper randomly picks out his name out of a Los Angeles phone book to be murdered. From a nearby hillside, the sniper zeroes in on Navin doing his job as a gas station attendant, missing several times and hitting nearby stacked oil cans.
The Jerk’s now-famous line, “He hates these cans!” became the film’s most quoted moment.
Is Kennedy truly against worldview? No, of course not. How can he be? He merely hates these cans.
Human beings and their worldviews are a fact of life as imbedded and necessary to human existence as light, water, food, clothing, and shelter and as important to the academic world as theology, philosophy, each of the social sciences, and all of STEM. In my opinion, worldview is the most academically totalizing way to think about life, and thus hard to define.
No, Against Worldview is a deliberately provocative title introducing a tight and quickly digestible book directed to professional and evangelical Christian educators to get their immediate attention. Kennedy wants to inspire new thinking about how to teach Christian worldview, and all worldviews for that matter, the right way.
Much more than seeking to inspire, however, Dr. Kennedy offers a new, detailed approach I heartily endorse. As Simon readily admits, it’s not totally new, but he should get credit for a fresh and insightful presentation. Mission accomplished.
The Controversy About Teaching Christian Worldview
Praxis Circle recently published an eBook entitled What is A Worldview? that has an entire chapter (Chapter IV) entitled “Why is Worldview Study Controversial?” I have been studying this topic since college in the 1970s but intensely for the last 20 years.
In Chapter IV, I list twelve reasons why worldview study is controversial (a few of them are “tongue in cheek”), but suffice it to say a good explanation here is well beyond the scope of this book review and even Kennedy’s book itself. However, any professional Christian educator or evangelical will likely have a decent if not thorough understanding of worldview analysis and why it can be problematical.
Molly Worthen’s 2016 book Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (cited in Against Worldview, page 26) does a terrific job outlining the development, importance, and usage of worldview analysis to American Protestant and Catholic churches during the 20th century, particularly since 1945. (Molly is scheduled for a Praxis Circle interview on August 22. We reviewed her brand new book Spellbound last month.) The issues are legion and wrapped up in her title, which references the place of scriptural authority in Christian life and evangelical calling.
Again, I cannot go into the issues here other than to say that worldview analysis developed as Christianity globalized in the late 18th century and the Western world modernized during the 19th and 20th centuries. These two trends forced Christians—like fish in a worldview tank—to leap out and take a more detached look at all the other fish in order to function better.
The main problem is, once you pull yourself out of the tank, it’s hard but absolutely necessary to put yourself back in. Simon tries to show the way. Furthermore, and most important to evangelicals, because you want to recruit certain types of other fish to your school, it really helps to approach them on a worldview pathway.
In any case, fish get along much better in the tank when they understand each other to the max. It furthers agreement, compromise, or simply keeping a healthy distance in a peaceful way. As Navin R. Johnson discovered, we cannot ignore snipers no matter how hard we try. (See world affairs in the Middle East, the Ukraine, and China.) Yet, even snipers can experience a metamorphosis.
(If you’d like a fairly recent article addressing some of the issues with worldview analysis to Christians, see Russell Moore’s article here in Christianity Today, “We Are Not Our Worldview.” If you would like a good review of Against Worldview also published in Christianity Today, see Justin Ariel Bailey’s article “A Christian Worldview Is a Work in Progress, Not a Finished Product” published February of this year.)
Worldview for Christ
Make no mistake, Simon Kennedy is a dedicated Christian from Australia who places the Gospel first. He is a Protestant, Reformed Christian. For over 225 years, it is Protestants and Catholics like Simon who have done the most with worldview thinking and analysis.
Kennedy appears to be part of a thoughtful cohort of rising global evangelicals who are shaping Protestant Christianity and even applied orthodoxy in the 21st century. I look forward to reading his prior book, Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularization of Political Thought 1531 – 1689 (2022) and following his work on family.
While I am a believer that theism rather than secularism is gaining worldwide and even in the U.S. today, many evangelicals are realizing that one cannot even get certain agnostics and atheists to read or listen to the Gospel—much less the Bible—without approaching them from a thoughtful worldview perspective. More specifically, one must pry open the doorway to God (the supernatural) and truth (philosophy) before many secular people will walk in the room to Christ (salvation and theology).
I’ve mentioned worldview’s definitional issues already. There are many such definitions, and Praxis Circle has a list we are happy to supply anyone. While we do not have our own “official” definition, mine might be something simple like one’s metaphysical view of reality, plus one’s primary narratives used to navigate life within that reality.
I strive to operate from an orthodox Christian worldview (I believe such an orthodoxy exists based on Scripture and our Judeo-Christian personal experience over ~5,000 years of recorded history), but many if not most Americans operate from several worldviews on a selective basis. Dr. Kennedy offers his own definition of worldview early in the book:
“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 insight into right thinking and living.” (page 15)
Notice this definition is of a Christian worldview (including a belief in truth and reality). Praxis Circle also recently published an eBook on truth and will soon be publishing an eBook on Reason, what humans beings use to think about truth. (All of our eBooks utilize Praxis Circle’s extensive video library of approximately 50 interviews.)
We’ve found it useful to use the template below of Christian worldview to think about other worldviews. Note how closely this template corresponds to Mr. Kennedy’s definition. It corresponds to God (see the Supernatural circle and what’s inside), the self (the Human Relations circle), and the world (the Natural circle). Each Praxis Circle “concept” below is really a word designating a whole host of words that would be associated together encompassing most of human thinking and feeling in some way.
This scheme is useful to compare all other worldviews. (Does the worldview believe in “the Supernatural”? Does the worldview have a “Morality”? Does—and how does—the worldview’s God or gods intervene in human affairs, which Christians call “Grace”? Etc.)
We all recognize that people are not born with a worldview. They’re usually born into a family or families who have accepted one or several worldviews. In life they employ these worldviews to orient their daily activity and govern their lives. As people mature, they may change or add new worldviews to their belief system. Individuals pick up worldviews over time from their personal experience, from others, and from the information they encounter. Therefore, worldviews are learned knowledge or belief systems picked up over time. Unless we close ourselves off to learning (perhaps impossible to do today), life is very much about a worldview journey that never ends.
Kennedy recognizes this process and highlights it throughout his book. He describes it in the important quote below, which addresses the apprehension of a Christian worldview. He refers to a “master plan,” which, using my own words, is the objective reality that God constructs and sustains with human beings and nature, and is guided by the Word of God as presented in Scripture. Christ is outside time and space but entered it as a human being. He shaped and entered objective reality or truth.
“A person’s worldview is not given but is constructed through education, and worldview education is a team construction project. This framing of worldviews as constructed rather than given needs a significant qualification, though, as there is always a master plan to which the individual worldview corresponds. . . a constructive project similar to the creation of a mosaic. . . The mosaic is akin to the finished product of the educational process, and for our purposes that finished product is a Christian view of the world. No one has a master plan of this finished product apart from God.” (page 64)
Dr. Kennedy presents two beautiful metaphors to make his case: (1) the Christian mosaics constructed sometime between 430 and 450 A.D. by the mother of the Roman Emperor Valentinian III in the ancient town of Ravenna, called the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and (2) a map of the London subway system.
The theme of Against Worldview is that worldview education needs to be reoriented toward pursuing the virtue of wisdom or prudence in a lifelong discovery of Christian worldview, rather than via top-down deductive teaching that forces religious Christian “dogma,” often driven by strict or fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.
The commonly imposed Christian narrative is something like Creation, Fall (introduced by Genesis 3), Redemption (the Gospels), and Restoration or Consummation (Revelation). While Simon does not in any way deny this orthodoxy, he believes it’s more a key piece of a tapestry for some seekers that can come later. It shouldn’t be used as a Procrustean bed to judge heretics.
At length, Kennedy describes how the Galla Placidia was planned for and constructed by teams of architects and workers piece-by-piece, using Aristotle’s four basic formal causes. The process is impossible without a telos. The tapestry’s mosaics are placed and plastered methodically, tile by tile, to produce a grand masterpiece not fully apprehended by all until the end.
Similarly, one can have a map of the London subway but still not have the slightest clue how to get the most efficient or safest way from Buckingham Palace to the Tower of London. What is required is personal experience on the streets of London above the subway and the helpful assistance of Londoners with more experience than we clueless Americans. This is how God and human beings create worldview together:
“The master plan of the mosaic is set in place by God, who is the one who made all and knows all. God has also made much of created reality knowable. . . I want to frame education as the deliberate, methodical enhancement of the natural inclination that people have to grow in their understanding of given reality. . . All thinking about reality is about relations between the thinker and the objects of thought. . . There are . . . three kinds of relations for every person: relations with the world, with other people, and with God. . . If education is the science of relations . . . then the job of the educator is to help the student ‘apprehend these relationships.'” (pages 68 – 69)
In other words, human beings are truly, with the assistance of many types of educators, “a community building worldviews.” The more Christians improve the skill of understanding and building worldviews, the better off the world will be.
Intervarsity Quibbles
This is not to say that I agree with everything “Simon says.” (I’ve been waiting for that one.)
I believe worldview building is: (1) both an inductive and deductive process simultaneously (not purely taught as deductive, as he claims), (2) both means and end (not purely taught as an end, as he claims), (3) is not overly hampered by bad definitions (worldview is totalizing, defying short definitions because of its complexity), (4) not improperly or unbiblically used as a form of “combat” when necessary, though that should be avoided (often “the other” forces combat, and the Bible does use the metaphor of war with evil quite frequently), (5) based on principles generated over thousands of years via revealed (scriptural) and practical experience (another form of revelation), such that teaching orthodox “dogma” can be helpful; indeed, it can be a must, rather than being off-putting. (I know Simon does not disagree with #5 above—see his list of recommendations below—but at times it seems he does.)
Some specific recommendations to Christian worldview educators are (pages 109 – 114):
- Rely more on Christian catechesis, Biblical doctrine, and the Bible,
- Take more of a broadly-based Great Books approach,
- Offer more study of Christian tradition and history,
- Do not emphasize bureaucratic or dogmatic markers that define one as “in or out of the club,” and
- My final edition after reading the book carefully: Give each person the freedom to discover truth on his or her own.
Back Home Again
Finally, it was so refreshing to read that Dr. Kennedy believes the study of most or all major worldviews is quite a useful exercise for all Christians. Although Simon does not say this directly, I suspect he would agree with a Praxis Circle “ism” that we need to understand the worldviews of others around the globe in order to gain a maximum understanding of our own:
“Truth about reality, about the world that God has made, is not confessionally determined. We are not limited in our epistemology by our religious commitments. Therefore, the scope of education can be as wide and deep as God’s world is.” (page 90).
In the future, Dr. Kennedy’s book from Down Under will become a handbook for all our Christian efforts at Praxis Circle. Even though I am a white guy—Caucasian, as the The Dude might say—never to fear, my Momma still loves me as a worldview fan and all her imago Dei children. Maybe by following Simon’s terrific map we can build a mosaic to get all of us dancing together with more rhythm and soul in this now, irreversibly awakened world.
