A Symposium on Worldview
At Worldview Camp, there were few s’mores but many seminars on what the Christian worldview entailed for politics, science, art, and dating. A young camper named Nicholas learned there “something that I never realized: Jesus had one clear opinion on everything.”1
While the instructors undoubtedly intended to teach the implications of Christianity for all of life, what they actually communicated was that Christians must have a narrow range of opinions on all things.
Nicholas and his fellow campers also learned that secular music, like the lyrics of Linkin Park, contained a nihilistic worldview. Nicholas thought to himself, “I thought those lyrics represented an honest worldview.” Apparently, having a Christian worldview meant that everyone else had an anti-Christian worldview.
Advocates of worldview-discourse will think this anecdote unrepresentative or a misperception on Nicholas’ part. But I would argue that it represents a tension inherent to the discourse of Christian worldview.
On the one hand, advocates introduce Christian worldview in order to develop a world-embracing faith rather than a narrowly ecclesiastical one. “There is no square inch,” says Abraham Kuyper, “over which Christ does not cry, ‘Mine!’” This expansive vision has inspired generations of Christian scholars to exercise their faith in the many fields of humane learning.
On the other hand, Christian worldview narrows our sights from the world to the interior walls of our own worldview. Non-Christian thinkers, lacking our worldview, must be purveyors of dangerous, alternative worldviews. And the Christian worldview must be utterly distinctive, sharing no common ground with unbelievers.
The first, world-embracing motive of “worldview” I wish to affirm and even to advance. Yet the discourse of worldview and, more importantly, its accompanying epistemology, Christian coherentism, is, I argue, at odds with this aspiration. A world-embracing faith is better underwritten by the philosophy of Christian realism. Rather than having a Christian worldview, Christians should aspire to have the world in view.
Worldview and Presuppositionalis
While Nicholas experienced a perhaps simplistic, pop version of “worldview,” I suffered a similar experience at the graduate level. At Westminster Theological Seminary, I faced a virulent strain of worldview-thinking, Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositionalism. On this account, to have a Christian worldview required beginning from all and only distinctively Christian presuppositions. There was no common ground between believers and unbelievers, and no common, objective evidence to ground our faith or to communicate with our fellow man.
Therefore, Christian philosophers, theologians, and apologists who defended the faith from secular sources had to be considered syncretists. Chief among these was Thomas Aquinas, but C.S. Lewis, and even Francis Schaeffer were objects of Van Til’s critique.
In principle, Van Til affirmed common grace and natural revelation. But in practice, if you tried to find truth in scientific, philosophical, or cultural discourse that did not come from a Christian worldview, you were castigated as a compromiser or even, as one professor called me, “an Arminian.” (I was, at the time, a seven-point Calvinist.)
This narrowness played out in our curriculum. Ninety-five percent of the theological authors we read were Reformed theologians. We read them to believe. Five percent of the time, we were assigned someone with whom we disagreed in order to figure out where they were wrong. We read them in order to contradict.
Whenever I could, I holed up in the library reading philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Roger Scruton and theologians like Thomas Aquinas in order to test the boundaries of our Christian worldview. Could non-Christian philosophers discover truths of faith by natural reason? Were there any secular grounds for a believing worldview?
Seeking escape from this narrowness after graduation, I found myself in a master’s degree program at the University of Chicago. Entering the gothic, vaulted stone Arley D. Cathey reading room, I turned and read these words etched in stone above the doorway: “Read, not to contradict nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.”2 A weight fell from my shoulders.
I spent the next nine months studying and learning from non-Christian philosophers more than I had ever studied or learned before or have since.
Many Christian scholars go through a similar process. They enter academia having heard many warnings about the dangerous worldviews present there. Yet then they find great light and wisdom in at least one of the disciplines. They pursue this scholarly knowledge against all the warnings of their Christian community. Sometimes, the tension is too much and leads to loss of faith; the Christian community feels confirmed in their sense that academia corrupted them with dangerous worldviews. But isn’t the Christian community partly to blame for having suggested there was no light or wisdom in the world?
Other times, it leads not to loss but to transformation of faith. The Christian scholar leaves behind the combative sense that other worldviews are sources of danger and cultivates a healthy intellectual openness to learning what he or she did not already know. The Christian scholar no longer believes that individuals must share a worldview in order to investigate the world together; scholarship is done best when it transcends differences of worldview. Just as we hope that the secular liberal scholar will not allow his worldview to divert him from the truth, we pursue truth without being diverted by the preconceptions of our own worldview.
Common Grace
Proponents of worldview will, at this point, be protesting one of two things: “Common grace!” or “But we all interpret evidence through the lens of our worldview.” The first is correct, but we must consider why common grace is so often overshadowed in worldview discourse. The second is the doctrine of Neo-Kantianism or postmodernism. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is very much a presupposition borrowed from a non-Christian worldview.
Common grace, in Herman Bavinck, describes God’s staying his hand of judgment after the fall, allowing the created, natural world to continue to operate. Such grace is not salvific, but it provides space for human history, in which individuals may live better and worse lives and, perhaps, find the special grace of God (Rom 2:4, 2 Pet 3:9).
But importantly, common grace does not fundamentally explain the workings of things, the civil righteousness of our countrymen, and the truths discovered by non-Christian philosophers. It is nature that explains those. “Common grace” refers simply to the fact that God has allowed nature to continue to work rather than allowing it to be completely corrupted. Mothers do not love their children because of the causal power of common grace; they love their children because of nature and the maternal instinct, implanted and designed by God3. God’s common grace is but a negative condition.
Yet Abraham Kuyper and those after him shifted explanatory power from nature to common grace itself. Our nature had been completely corrupted by the fall; the only explanation of its workings was the “hocus pocus” of common grace.
This is the source of Van Til’s doctrine of the noetic effects of sin. These are not merely the familiar ways in which humans deceive themselves and fabricate theories to suit their desires. Rather, the noetic effects of sin are thought to introduce a complete antithesis between regenerate and unregenerate minds. The intellect’s ordination to truth has become an ordination to falsehood. Then, to explain the plenitude of truth among unbelieving thinkers, we appeal to the magic of common grace.
But the appeal to common grace does not give credit where it is due. We strip God of all praise as creator of human nature, psychology, and society. We offer God praise only for his gracious providence after the fall. At the same time, we deny the goodness of nature, human and non-human. Aristotle’s wisdom was not due to divine intervention any more than to Plato’s having discovered a scroll of Moses. His wisdom is due to God’s endowment of human beings with intellect and sense and a desire for the good.
Common grace is too little, too late. Having assumed that natural human faculties were destroyed by the fall, we introduce a codicil into our theology to explain why humans aren’t as bad as they could be. But human nature was not destroyed by the fall; it was only wounded, if mortally.
Christian Coke-Bottle Lense
What about the other objection concerning worldviews as interpretive lenses?
Before Westminster, I attended Wheaton College, where Christian postmodernism was all the rage. My fellow philosophy students studied Gadamer and Nietzsche, and gradually came to believe that our Christian perspective was no more than that, a perspective, not objective truth. It may be a helpful interpretive lens for many of us. But other people have other helpful interpretive lenses.
I resisted with all my might. Christianity was not merely a perspective. It consisted of objective truth claims about the world. It stood or fell on the accuracy of those claims.
I thought things would be better when I attended a conservative, Reformed seminary. Yet there, I encountered exactly the same claims but with a different tone of voice. While at Wheaton, philosophy professors uttered, “Christianity is a lens through which we view the world,” with a kind of postmodern skepticism in their eyes. At Westminster, they intoned the selfsame proposition with dogmatic conviction.
At Wheaton, I had come to think that a Christian worldview required being a realist rather than a postmodernist, rejecting standpoint epistemology and the theory-ladenness of observation and biblical interpretation. At Westminster, I was told that objectivity was impossible, and we had to insist on interpreting all things through our Christian worldview, just as the queer theorists, the critical race theorists, and the radical feminists did with their worldviews.
The trouble with all these theories was twofold. By claiming to be only a perspective on the world or a lens through which we view the world, each of these theories implicitly retreats from the objective claim that the world really is that way. You need to put on your Christian coke-bottle glasses in order to see Christian things. But, I found myself asking, what if I take off the goggles and the Christian things aren’t actually there? (Even if Apple Vision Pro operated on Christian principles, what it imposed on our vision would not be part of reality but of virtual reality.)
Second, these theories, both postmodern and presuppositionalist, retreat from persuading anyone of their perspective. Obviously, if you start from all and only Christian presuppositions, you will end up at Christian conclusions. But what of all the people who do not start from a Christian worldview? What can I say to them to persuade them that there is moral truth, that God exists, and that we are sinners?
In the absence of Christian theologians to make these arguments, non-Christian thinkers have, in the last decade, taken their job. Jordan Peterson persuades secular people from psychological and biological observations that the world is charged with resonances of Christian archetypes. He argues for a moral fabric to reality. He urges us to act as though God exists and be “terrified that he might.”
Louise Perry, in her The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, compiles psychological and sociological evidence that the sexual revolution has been a disaster for women, for men, for children. As a result, she and her audience have warmed to faith.
Bari Weiss, and many a liberal “mugged by reality,” says she has given up the liberal, optimistic view of human nature (the very one that Francis Schaeffer and others often attributed to Rousseau, and rightly so)4. She has adopted a constrained view of human nature, as another non-Christian thinker, Thomas Sowell, puts it.
In each of these cases, a non-Christian looks at reality, and reality directs them one step closer to Christian convictions. We had articulated those convictions as a worldview to be swallowed whole or not at all. We failed to articulate them in ways comprehensible to people who did not share our worldview. They, therefore, had to discover these truths without Christians’ help.
Christian Coherentism
I do not object to the very category of “worldview.” I certainly hope I have a Christian Weltanschauung. However, I object to the epistemology that often accompanies the language of worldview. Above, I identified it as a kind of Neo-Kantianism, postmodernism, or standpoint epistemology. But to be precise, it is Christian Coherentism.
Coherentism is the view that our beliefs can only be, at best, a coherent whole, a consistent worldview; they cannot be based on direct experience of the world, on cold, hard, objective evidence.
One of the foremost coherentists of recent years, philosopher Donald Davidson, put the point this way: “You can only get a belief from another belief.” From this, Davidson concluded that it was impossible to ground one’s worldview directly in experience of the world. After all, this would require “a confrontation between what we believe and reality.” He mocked the idea of such confrontation as “absurd.”5
Davidson’s coherentism marked a return to aspects of British Idealism. The British Idealists had demeaned as “crude empiricism” views that countenance the possibility of mind confronting world without the mediation of concepts or worldview.
Van Til echoed the British Idealists, the object of his Princeton dissertation, by dismissing crude empiricism with its “brute facts.” On the contrary, all facts are interpreted, and the mind cannot confront objective facts directly.
Davidson’s coherentism also resurrected another doctrine of the idealists, “wholism,” the doctrine that all truth hangs together and that individual truths cannot be considered in isolation. This forces us to treat truth as coming in packages, whether whole theories or worldviews. This wholism was the ground of Van Til’s argument for the impossibility of brute facts and of natural theology. To even get a Christian argument going, you needed to begin from the Christian worldview, whole cloth.
Yet the great analytic philosopher John McDowell best expressed the danger of this coherentism: It risks the possibility that human thought might be nothing more than “frictionless spinning in the void.” Our beliefs might indeed be coherent. We might be able to interpret all our experience in evidence in a way that fits together and coheres with our worldview. But mightn’t we, at the same time, be completely incorrect?
After all, that is exactly how conspiracy theories work. It’s how the insane reason: Coherently, but falsely. It is how cults maintain belief. They forbid unmediated encounter with the evidence.6
There is a great deal of psychological and sociological truth in coherentism and wholism. Human beings do love to think in packages of coherent ideological beliefs. We cling to our existing theories in the face of counter-evidence. As Thomas Kuhn demonstrated, we add codicil after codicil to our theories, even as they are on their last legs.
But there is nothing crude about the idea that our beliefs can confront and be corrected by reality. In fact, it is the height of both scientific and humane learning to facilitate such confrontation.7
While people are often motivated to maintain their worldviews in the face of contrary evidence, it is equally possible for people’s worldviews to buckle once counter-evidence reaches a breaking point. There are many interviews with people who have experienced such paradigm shifts. (The stories of Larissa Phillips, Kier Adrian Gray, Bari Weiss are several examples currently on my mind.)
Van Til and his fellows argued that their circular argument for Christianity was a virtuous circle. But how could they know? Like a rider on Six Flags’ “Spinsanity,” but one who never got off the ride, how can you know how (or if) this thing is securely attached to a foundation?
For advocates of a Christian worldview, this is the real question. Is our Christian worldview true of the world? To check, we must be willing to risk a direct encounter with the world – not mediated by our worldview – and with the best of human learning and science.
In place of the coherentism of a self-enclosed worldview, McDowell offered “having the world in view.”8 And that summarizes what is, I think, the alternative to a Christian worldview.
Now having the world in view is indeed difficult to accomplish. Our preconceptions and biases certainly obstruct our view. But to give up this aspiration as an epistemic possibility is to give up on the hope of human knowledge. No appeal to divine revelation will get us out of this either. For how can we receive a purported revelation if we are not even capable of having the world in view?
Christian Realism
In place of Christian coherentism, consider Christian realism. To know reality as it is the aspiration of all human cognition. The aspiration of Christian cognition is to know that what the Christian faith teaches is true of the world. Even without the lens of a Christian worldview, we see a world that gives indication of the divine, a world that independently confirms the claims of the prophets, the apostles, and our Lord. And then, as believers, we freely investigate the world God created, unfiltered, with the naked eye.
Today, I am completing a philosophy Ph.D. under an agnostic supervisor. While he does not share my worldview, I have learned much from him. My doctoral thesis has no Christian presuppositions or principles at its foundation. Yet he and I agree on each of its principles on philosophical grounds alone.
At the heart of that on which he and I agree is realism: There is a reality, and it is the object of human knowing. This is not to say that knowing objective reality is easy. It is not to claim that my professor has apprehended all the preambles of faith, by reason alone, apart from revelation. No, he and I agree that reality exists and is the object of human knowing. But we have many disagreements about what reality is.
But reality itself provides the common ground upon which we may argue. And this provides a much better foundation for interaction across different worldviews. (Better than the mutual, postmodern respect of competing, self-enclosed perspectives.) Rather than “pressing the antithesis” between our worldviews, I may locate and build upon our common ground. I can even learn from him because who says that, just by having a Christian worldview, I am knowledgeable about any particular domain of the world?
What if we Christians, instead of being confident in the sufficiency of our worldview, approached the world hoping to find out when and where we were wrong? This is what billionaires do, reports venture capitalist Codie Sanchez, who knows many of them: “They don’t want to be right… All we care about is we want to information-gather; we want to always be connecting dots, and we can only connect dots if we see more of them.”9
It is this posture that I fear Christian worldview discourse hinders us in adopting. “Worldview” is an effective concept for circling the wagons, shoring up dissent, and maintaining ideological conformity. However, it is radically insufficient as a model of Christian scholarship and intellectual engagement. We would do better, I humbly submit, to aspire simply “to always be connecting dots.” And we can only connect dots “if we see more of them.”
And to see more dots, we must encounter the limits of our own worldview and come, slowly but surely, to have the world in view.
