What if your ‘Christian worldview’ is based on some

sinful ideas?
baptistnews.com/article/what-if-your-christian-worldview-is-based-on-some-sinful-ideas

Jacob Alan Cook October 26, 2021

I suspect that few people who frame their ideas, or their disagreements with others,
in terms of “worldviews” have felt the need to deliberate on what that word means, let alone
whether it is valuable or valid. Few, that is, outside the evangelical circles that have labored
to develop this sensibility in churches and schools over the last many years.

This notion has a common-sense appeal and authority in 21st-century American life.
Worldviews or world visions have become increasingly necessary in naming and talking
about the many ways people see, reason about and live within our highly connected, densely
diverse world.

It is relatively easy to understand what worldviews are about in

their simplest form. We are talking about the different ways
people frame and answer life’s most important questions. As Brian Walsh and Richard
Middleton put them in their popular book Transforming Vision these questions are: Who am
I? Where am I? What’s wrong? What’s the remedy?

You might have your answers to those questions ready. But if I were to ask what your
worldview, or “the biblical worldview,” had to say about more specific questions like race, sex
and economics, I suspect answers to these would bubble up too.

How should Christians engage contemporary problems generated along the color line? What
economic forms (such as capitalism or socialism) fit the Christian vision of life together? In
what ways should gender order human activity in this world? The very notion of a world-view
(hyphen intended here), in itself, tends toward an increasingly comprehensive set of
commitments. And as we expand into such realms of knowledge, we court the wedding of
theology, science and political ideology.

What’s your worldview?

Just think for a moment about how you might illustrate what a worldview is. That is precisely
what I tried to capture with the cover for my new book, Worldview Theory, Whiteness, and
the Future of Evangelical Faith. A worldview is a perspective on the whole world held by an
individual or (we might think) a group within the world that establishes a framework for
understanding and engaging the world. It gives us handles on the world and its people so that
we can intentionally do something with them. Some theorists have made the analogy to when
Archimedes claimed that he would move the earth if given a place to stand and a lever long
enough. Could the biblical worldview present just such a place to stand?

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I must admit this all sounds pretty exciting. It’s energizing. Not a few people have been
roused to service by the statement, issued forth by Abraham Kuyper as he marked the
founding of the Free University in Amsterdam, “There’s not a square inch in the whole
domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim,
‘Mine’!” The biblical worldview, some say, lifts us to the heights of understanding so that we
might get about the business of transforming the world to suit God’s will.

Yet, even on the surface, I sense a deceptive simplicity and a dangerous lack of humility in
the sense that one can have a God’s-eye view of good and evil and everything and everyone, if
not in detail, at least in the abstract.

For my part, I did not set out to study worldview theory. (Or whiteness, for that matter.) My
initial questions centered on just how complex human identities really are — and the
problems that inevitably arise as complicated people try to represent their beloved groups in
public. I was especially curious about the varying moral judgments and policy platforms of
folks engaging in American politics “as evangelicals.” What does it mean to advocate for this
or that policy as an evangelical? And, just as importantly, what is the significance of the many
other evangelicals who argue differently in public? Or abstain from such engagement?

Evangelical diversity

After the last few years, it should be clear that not all who identify as evangelical share all the
same worldview elements. But the prevailing evangelical use of worldview language makes it
hard to explain how and why such folks disagree with each other (within a named worldview)
about how to see and respond to specific issues.

This is all the truer as rank-and-file evangelicals have learned to think of their approach to
the Bible as a reasonable, literal reading of God’s word. Early neo-evangelical leader Carl
Henry appealed to “the authority of the Bible alone uninterpreted by traditions,” arguing this
point as a mark of Protestantism’s genius. But if the Bible comes to us unmediated by church
or academy, might we say something of the individuals sitting before the Bible themselves?

More personally, my doctoral work took me to Fuller Theological Seminary, where I studied
with the late Baptist peacemaker Glen Stassen. At the flagship evangelical seminary, I found
myself conversing with more folks who cared about the past, present and future of
evangelicalism than I ever had before.

“At the flagship evangelical seminary, I found myself conversing with more folks who cared
about the past, present and future of evangelicalism than I ever had before.”

And here I heard colleagues say things like, “I am an evangelical, and that is all that matters
about my view of the world.” This, in response to a simple question about how that
individual’s social location and history impact their judgment about a specific issue. Even at
first blush, this response seemed demonstrably false to me. We all pick up ideas and
convictions over time from a number of places, and we are bound to have blind spots.

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I also met the incredulity of evangelicals who could not understand how another evangelical
or “biblical Christian” could come to different conclusions about hot-button issues.
Worldview-style thinking appears to amplify the divisive and polarized dynamic of American
life. In the political arena, regular conventions of the two major parties have come to
dramatize grand visions of American society — and frame the other side as a threat to all
“we” hold dear.

Is worldview helpful?

Up to now, I have found few evangelical thinkers (even fewer in print) genuinely exploring
whether worldview is a worthwhile concept. Many just assume its validity and build from
there. If a particular way of talking becomes problematic, it can be amended.

When I looked for the roots of worldview theory in contemporary evangelical life, I zeroed in
on Abraham Kuyper and Harold John Ockenga as ranking among the worldview concept’s
most powerful expositors. The former was a Dutch theologian and statesman, among many
other things; the latter was a pastor-theologian and co-founder of both the National
Association of Evangelicals and Fuller Theological Seminary. As I pored over their writings
and speeches, I discovered that these influential, publicly engaged Christian theologians
simply were white supremacists and Christian nationalists. For example, both made use of
the antediluvian argument around the curse of Ham in Genesis 9 as a rationale for modern
racial differences. Such details were part of how they narrated the world around them, and
they grounded even these terrible ideas in the Bible itself.

When points like this come up, many theorists retort that we can excise the bad ideas from
what is, overall, a good and helpful framework for organizing our thoughts and engaging the
world. It is incumbent on later generations to continually sift the original-creational or
eternal principles out of the faulty applications of those principles in time and place.

A better way of thinking?

At the very least, we can conclude that believing one has the “biblical worldview” does not
guarantee better thinking or improved character. Bear in mind that Kuyper, for all his
historical situatedness, did not have to arrive at the conclusions he did about race and colony
merely because of his cultural milieu. Even as he developed and defended his theological
worldview, other Christians advocated a radically different racial sensibility — even a century
earlier, as in the famous case of William Wilberforce (1759–1833).

More devastatingly, we might conclude that world-viewing, as a posture within the world,
tends to lend divine gravitas to all one’s beliefs. And, at least for the folks who function as
exemplars, it does not seem to nurture the humility to keep deliberating upon the details,
looking for blind spots and errors. (In the next article, I will begin to argue that world-
viewing has been far more wrapped up in white supremacy and colonialism than its
contemporary apologists can admit.)

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In raising up “the biblical worldview,” evangelical thought leaders have produced a signifier
with little-to-no settled content but lots of invested passion and interest. Terms like this can
absorb whatever meaning individuals bring to them, get people energized for activism, and
provide conceptual cover for what turns out to be not very thoughtful ideas supplied by
extrabiblical sources.

Given the entrepreneurial nature of evangelicalism, built as it is upon individual free agents,
voices are amplified based not on biblical appeal but on mass appeal, which all too often
gives way to authoritarianism and demagoguery. Now people have the language for naming
their defense of the biblical faith but need not deliberate much on the social-ethical import of
Scripture to make use of the concept.

All this frenetic activity in service of the Christian worldview has fabricated a hollow shell
around what has been, in fact, a massive discipleship failure. As Peter Wehner uncovered
in The Atlantic, this situation has been set to implode at the right stimulus.

Worldview has persisted as a tool for imagining everyone in the world, ordering and judging
their lives — but no one in particular. The impulse to apply abstract ideals to the concrete
world does not encourage us to be moved with pity as we look into the eyes of those affected
by our judgments. Or, put differently, thinking of oneself as a proxy agent for the biblical
worldview provides a kind of escape hatch when we start to see how our abstract judgments
might negatively impact real life others. It is not about us — we love the person — but God’s
will is black and white. This sentiment makes it far too easy to evade responsibility for what
are, in fact, our interpretations of God’s will.

Many others have worried about the fixation on belief or intellectual assent in evangelical
circles. Once we have established the correct worldview, we more or less know that if and
when we sin, we will know it — or could recognize it according to our worldview. Scarcely
could it occur to us that our worldview could itself be harboring some sinful ideas — that we
have blind spots. Looking outward, this is one reason we can at least tentatively embrace bad
actors who represent our worldview: They may be sinners, but at least they are sinning
within the correct worldview. Thus, worldview thinking embeds us in team-sport loyalties.

As evangelicals have engaged in political activism in the name of their worldview over the last
many years, this rhetorical move has not invited others to live in a new way, to see and
inhabit the world differently as they walk with the living God. Instead, worldview thinking
has asked people to live the same old way but play for a new team.

What’s the alternative?

Of course, we struggle to imagine an alternative to world-viewing. My goal here is less to

make an argument than to open some of the conduits of energy coursing around the
worldview concept, for good and bad. The concerns I have flagged above belong primarily to
the everyday, practical variety. Over the next several weeks, I will connect with conversations

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around whiteness in church and society, beginning with an explanation of what I even mean
by “whiteness.” And I will introduce critical angles on worldview theory emerging in
psychology, sociology, and sound theology. Before all is said and done, I will also do my best
to present a compelling alternative.

What I am after is a patient, thorough exploration of why world-viewing gets who we are —
individually, together and before the living God — wrong. And I hope to encourage a faith in
which we become more open to the living God, more likely to grow in Christlikeness, and less
anxious (and combative and polarizing) as we live truthfully with and for others.

This is the first in a series of articles introducing the

hypothesis of the author’s new book, Worldview Theory,
Whiteness, and the Future of Evangelical Faith.

Jacob Alan Cook is a postdoctoral fellow at Wake Forest University

School of Divinity. He is the author of Worldview Theory, Whiteness,
and the Future of Evangelical Faith as well as chapters on Christian
identity, peacemaking and ecological theology. He earned a Ph.D. from
Fuller Theological Seminary.

Related articles:

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The deconstruction of American evangelicalism | Opinion by David Gushee

California and the making of American evangelicalism | Analysis by Andrew Gardner

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