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Evangelical Worldview Philosophy Is “Corrupting” Our Youths

A high view of Scripture is what has traditionally identified evangelicals.1 It is often asserted that non-evangelical doctrines of Scripture are to be attributed to non-Christian worldviews. Evangelical teachers are, therefore, instructing younger evangelicals to “do battle” at the worldview level since non-evangelical estimations of Scripture are invariably linked to non-Christian suppositions.

Of interest to us is how trend-prone evangelical Christian youth teachers and leaders can be. From WWJD to the Prayer of Jabez, evangelicalism-at-large seems to be especially susceptible to vogues. Since evangelicalism is at heart a grassroots movement, it, perhaps, should not surprise that when a particular idea gains in its ascendancy, it is very difficult to keep it in check. Perhaps for this reason, even evangelical academics have set their (and God’s) stamps of approval on the current pedagogical trend involving worldview philosophy.2 For example, Chuck Colson has so strongly affirmed the new vogue that he professes, “I am convinced that meshing prison ministry with worldview teaching is God’s providential plan for Prison Fellowship.”3

Worldviews are presented to young believers as coherent paradigms founded upon Christian beliefs and traditions that ready one for confrontation with alternate and competing paradigms. The philosophy seems to have the advantage of unifying life’s manifold experience into an integrated whole. Even so, evangelical teachers may find themselves guilty of “corrupting” their youths4 and setting them up for a spiritual fall.

Salient features of worldview philosophy (at least as employed by its most influential proponents) typically include: an insistence upon coherence, strategic approaches to effect the nullification of the plurality of “non-Christian” worldviews, and a concomitant validation of the elusive and much coveted “Christian” worldview. In this chapter, I suggest that evangelicals have set their youth up for a serious fall by over-welcoming worldview philosophy into their circles. Though worldview philosophy may prove serviceable to younger evangelicals in eliciting a much needed, critical self-awareness, the worldview mentality should be disseminated more discriminately—making clear to youth groups and college fellowships, for example, that worldview philosophy is a historically and culturally convenient tool that may prove helpful in developing, with varying success, a greater sense of critical awareness. To the consternation of many evangelical leaders and teachers, the worldview vogue may prove particularly insidious to younger evangelicals when they discover or are made aware of its inherent methodological limitations.

The limitations arise naturally on account of the dimension of religion that allows for mystery and paradox. Christianity, as a religion, will produce worldviews that are inevitably 1) inconsistent to varying degrees; 2) inherently plural; 3) “synthesis-frustraters.” Insistence upon the single import of worldview philosophy may be ironically unsettling younger evangelicals under the pretenses of more firmly grounding their beliefs. Evangelical leaders should more openly acknowledge worldview philosophy’s conceptual limitations when promulgating it to its young people in order not to unnecessarily further ostracize them in the course of their spiritual formation.

I. Coherence

“To think intelligently today is to think worldviewishly” reads Os Guinness’ endorsement of the third edition of Sire’s The Universe Next Door.5 Definitions of worldviews vary, but there seems to be a general agreement on what a Christian worldview is supposed to do. According to Sire, “. . . [T]o discover one’s own worldview . . . is a significant step toward self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-understanding.”6 Colson writes that “[d]eveloping the proper worldview is essential, both for properly ordering our lives and for influencing the world around us.”7 Moreland and Craig have suggested that an important function of philosophy is to “help someone form a rationally justified, true worldview, that is, an ordered set of propositions that one believes, especially propositions about life’s most important questions.”8 Within another tradition, a worldview has been said to be “the comprehensive framework of one’s basic beliefs about things.”9 Although the author just quoted and others within his tradition would insist that all areas of human living should be informed and affected by their Christian worldview, the most common assertion regarding worldviews is that everybody has a worldview whether they know it or not. A major task in worldview philosophy, consequently, is to promote the judgment that the Christian worldview is the most coherent one constructible.10

It has been my experience, however, that on account of the mysteries of the faith Christian worldviews must admit a measure of non-coherence. There are several topics pertaining to the Christian faith that possess more than a fair share of mystery and are generally not satisfactorily explicable to the inquiring mind. Among the most famous are the Trinitarian doctrine of God; the Chalcedonian definition of Christ; the nature of the inspiration of the Scriptures; issues dealing with the compilation of the Scriptures; the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; the creation of the universe; the existence and domain of angels and demons; the existence and locations of heaven and hell; the origin of evil; the coincidence of key divine characteristics with human free will; and so on.11

The inherent mystery that attends these topics thins, if even marginally, the strands upon which Christian worldview philosophy is comprised. Such a marginal dwindling is enough, I hold, to undermine the worldview methodology to such a degree that its need for supplementation is intrinsic.

As an example, consider for a moment the coincidence of the traditional “attributes” of God and human free will. Every position that one takes is fraught with mystery. I have not read every available treatise on God’s relation to time or on his means of obtaining knowledge (or lack thereof), but I am aware of the main options and have done a bit of research on the history of the doctrine of inherited sin, for example. I have also seriously wrestled with Sir Anthony Kenny’s God of the Philosophers and how the arguments presented there have moved the estimable philosopher to agnosticism.12 The family of controversies that surround these questions has made it apparent to me that there will always come a point, when pressed, that one has to cry, “Mystery!” Whether it be by proclaiming, for example, that God’s providence “extendeth itself even to the first fall . . . yet so as the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature and not from God”13 and crying, “Mystery!” when asked how God managed to do this; or by believing, “. . . on the part of God’s will and desire the grace is universal, but as regards the condition it is particular”14 and crying, “Mystery!” when asked how such a thing could be; mystery abides. Whether one speaks with a Calvinist, an Amyraldian, an Arminian, a determinist, a compatibilist, a libertarian, whomever, all one needs to do is stress the opposite point (be it sovereignty or free will in these cases) hard enough and the other person will need to cry, “Mystery!”, at some point.15

This inevitable cry for mystery raises little qualms for devout religionists16—in fact, many would object if it were somehow eliminated—but I believe it conceals something intrinsic to the Christian faith that is seldom spoken of among believers. In a famous essay, Quine has helpfully distinguished between three types of paradox:

A veridical paradox packs a surprise, but the surprise quickly dissipates itself as we ponder the proof. A falsidical paradox packs a surprise, but it is seen as a false alarm when we solve the underlying fallacy. An antinomy, however, packs a surprise that can be accommodated by nothing less than a repudiation of part of our conceptual heritage.17

Countless Christian thinkers have exercised their spirits and intellects in exploring these topics and have assured the Church that the antinomies of the faith are indeed antinomies and not falsidical paradoxes. Even so, I do not think it too much to apply Quine’s observations concerning one of the antinomies he touches upon in his memorable essay to these efforts collectively: “Each resort [at resolution] is desperate; each is a departure from natural and established usage. Such is the way of antinomies.”18 Hasker has recently attempted to articulate certain of the antinomies that beset divine providence, but I think that Kenny’s presentation is the most concise: “If God is to have infallible knowledge of future human actions, then determinism must be true. If God is to escape responsibility for human wickedness, then determinism must be false.”19 On account of such an intractable predicament, Christians cannot but concede Quine’s wry comment, “One man’s antinomy is another man’s falsidical paradox.”20 Or, in more existentially relevant terms, the believer’s mystery understandably becomes the unbeliever’s absurdity.

Perhaps for this reason, many Christians insist, in good faith, upon the category of antinomy for their mysteries but practically concede falsidical paradoxes in order to get on with daily living. They do so by pragmatically incorporating competing worldviews to answer dialectically motivated needs that are consequential of the Christian antinomies.21 In other words, a fair measure of inconsistency is intuitively admitted and accepted, perhaps, if I may boldly add, to the effect that believers have intuited at some basic level that the Christian faith does not have the resources with which to answer its own questions.22 I have not the space to elaborate here, but even if something along these lines is granted, the way for plurality has been irrevocably opened.

II. Plurality

Ancient proverbs flourished to the effect that mature persons should be both “wise” and “simple” at the same time. Rom 16.19 preserves one form: “But yet I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil.” Compare the Midrash of the Song of Songs: “God saith of the Israelites: Towards me they are as sincere as doves, but towards the Gentiles they are as serpents.”23 The most familiar expression of the saying is, of course, found in Matt 10.16: “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves.” Note the difference amongst the three but especially that feature which sets Jesus’ words apart from the others. The former two establish that one can be “simple” with respect to one thing and “wise” with respect to another. The Jesus saying insinuates that it is possible and desirable to be both simple and wise with respect to the same thing simultaneously. I suggest that this can serve as an illustration of the indicative plurality that believers are to assume as they engage the world.

Virtually every Matthean commentary harmonizes the serpent and dove perspectives under some grand schema. Let us, however, resist that temptation by positing semantic approximates for the two. Let us, for the sake of the present discussion, allow “wise as a serpent” to mean “critical as a skeptic” and let us say that “simple as a dove” means “naïve as a trusting believer.” This way whether one takes the metaphors to touch upon political outlooks, military and non-military stances, or some other range of activity or relationship we can still emphasize the diametric involved.

Not a few scholars have commented upon the stress that is caused by the dual responsibility of both maintaining a critical mind and preserving a sympathetic naivety when they study Scripture, construct theology, interact with others, etc. Crosby, for example, inquires of similar tensions when, in a review of a recent work, he asks:

And how do openness and conviction relate to one another? Would not the openness tend to make theology a mere ethnography or detached, neutral description of different religious traditions, including one’s own? And would not the conviction lead in the direction of a kind of grit-your-teeth persistence in upholding the particularities of one’s own tradition in the face of all challenges or influences from other ones?24

Familiar to all is a situation wherein a writer is grating toward “outsiders” and gratulatory to “insiders,” but remarkable and scarce is the person who is truly both to both.

It is not uncommon for seminarians and college students to remark on how academic training has jeopardized their church experiences. How do I now engage a sermon with childlike expectation with these newly acquired critical tools? Or, in our terms, how do I remain a dove now that the serpent has awoken within me? Pertinent here may be the fact that early Christian tradition identified Jesus’ generic “serpent” with the serpent of Gen 3.25 Neither is it insignificant that the dove became a wide-spread symbol associated with the Holy Spirit. At the very least, we can say that two opposing moods are indicated here: criticism versus trust or some comparable opposition. On the hermeneutical spiral there is no turning back.26

Seminarians’ and other students’ experiences are not confined to church. We can see how similar things are happening in Christian academia where ideas (and those who come up with them) are often judged and classified with respect to dove or serpent alignment. For example, one may be deemed un-Christian by others for doubting the existence of Adam and Eve. If he explains that the opening chapters of Genesis seem to have been deliberately created with hopes of supplying post-exilic Israel with a much needed Exile-looking cosmology,27 he would likely be chided for operating within an un-Christian worldview. “Presuppositions dictate outcomes” is the platitude. His view of the world in its totality must have gone askew since worldviews—or at least this is what everyone is supposed to believe—are by their very nature so closely knit that one change affects the whole system. As I reflect upon such charges, I rather surmise that life experiences (including religious ones) are sometimes filtered through multiple worldviews at once. What would be wrong with a young person discounting the Eden story while insisting that Christ has risen from the dead?28

A last example can be taken from “the contradictions in the theology of Jeremy Taylor” that Allison has detected.29 In the case of Jeremy Taylor, a well-known 17th century Anglican bishop, competing emphases can be discerned between his public writings and his private prayers. His public discourses taught that a Christian’s good life is that which predicated his being accepted by God for baptismal efficacy, for worthy Eucharist participation, etc., but his private correspondences revealed that he believed that sin prevented such a life and that God’s love toward humans persisted in spite of such a failure. Taylor’s legacy is judged today to be a pastorally unfavorable one, but his two doctrinal faces represent what I think can be called multiple worldviews, each emphasizing its respective vantage in turn. Without opening the proverbial can of doctrinal worms too widely, what I am trying to drive home is the reality that the semi-Calvinistic maxim bespeaks: “Preach as if Calvinism is true, but evangelize as if Arminianism is true.” Just as mathematicians are Platonists on weekdays and formalists on weekends30 and scientists conceive of light as waves or particles depending upon the circumstance, so do Christians exercise worldview flexibility. In other words, believers naturally shift into different worldviews depending upon for what a particular occasion calls.31 In these and other ways, the Christian faith may naturally lend itself to multiple worldviews in order that the faithful may responsibly and practically reckon with their mystery-filled beliefs and their relation to day-to-day living.

III. Synthesis

Every commentary I can remember harmonizes the dove and serpent perspectives. I naturally am led to try the same, but as I attempt to do so, I also keep in mind that Western Christianity is sometimes in danger of over-rationalizing the faith or, at the very least, inordinately given to unifying tendencies. If, in the examples above, I am immediately moved to ask, “but are these really examples of conflicting worldviews (if they are worldviews at all)?” perhaps, it is indicative of an unconscious over-synthesizing drive. I would say, nevertheless, that they are conflicting worldviews that happen to both be Christian (and I would clarify that that was precisely the point that I wanted to make in the last section).32 In any event, such questions, however answered, presumably are themselves posed and addressed within worldviews and I am wont to say that this further exacerbates worldview philosophy’s affinity for synthesis.

Is it a problem that the notion of worldview depends upon a certain worldview? According to Naugle and others, this is not necessarily a problem since it is inevitable of all thinking.33 But perhaps this should be given further thought because when Christians talk about worldviews, the concept in question seems deliberately, and perhaps somewhat tendentiously, posed in Christian terms.34 The lists of seven (or four or however many) questions according to which worldviews are contrived are all ones to which Christians believe that their faith can provide an answer and are ones that are important to Christians. For example, I have not found “Was there ever life on Mars?” or “In how many galaxies does there exist a rationally and morally conscious species?” to be among the key questions to ask. Evangelical worldview definitions revolve around how, on a presuppositional level, one understands the fundamental aspects of reality. It is interesting to note that such a definition heavily overlaps with proposed definitions of “religion” and “metaphysics.”

Yandell defines “religion” as “a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions, and practices.”35 Smith and Oaklander define “metaphysics” as that discipline that answers “(1) What is the basic nature of reality and what are the basic kinds of items that make up reality? (2) Why does the universe exist?”36 Now there is definitely an overlap between these two definitions and it has been notoriously difficult to satisfactorily define either of these two words, but by defining “worldview” in such a way that it so closely resembles “religion” and “metaphysics,” it seems to me that Christian worldview teachers are assuming that the Christian worldview is so comprehensive and so grand that it can accommodate, anticipate and synthesize every other person’s deepest questions.

For example, how does one initiate a conversation that aims to emphasize worldviews? Well, one tack that might be taken—and this is the tack that is promulgated in countless churches and amongst Christian college students especially—is to bring every conversation, in however meandering a way, back to “first principles.” Peck and Strohmer are typical when they instruct, “One enlightening way is to begin with a part. Ask basic questions of an issue or subject, and repeatedly ask them until there is no way of answering further.”37 Or in other words keep asking questions about “more ultimate issues” until, in essence, they have to cry, “Mystery!” James Sire explains that he teaches students to tactfully keep asking “Why?” until the answers stop coming.38 This will take you back to what holds things together for a particular person—what Peck and Strohmer call “god” (or “God,” if they prove to be “biblical” Christians). Take the lead of secular writers:

1. What is the nature of our world? How is it structured . . . ?

2. Why is our world the way it is, and not different . . . ?

3. Why do we feel the way we feel in this world, and how do we assess global reality, and the role of our species in it?39

and run with them back to an “Ultimate” and discern, Is this God or is this an idol? That, in a nutshell, is what will distinguish the Christian worldview from non-Christian ones. But could this not be construed as a “language-game” with the word “why” whose existence or non-existence is not in need of explanation?40 In other words, it is no big deal if not everybody plays this game.

Either way, Christians seem to be engaged here in a variety of “damage control.” I have heard that C. S. Lewis had an especially keen eye for recognizing what he understood to be “loaded questions”, but this is precisely what worldview philosophy aims to do: load the questions.41 Recall the overlap in the definitions of “worldview,” “religion,” and “metaphysics.” At first it was hard for me to appreciate how evangelicals really do stack the deck in favor of an instinctual drive for synthesis. From within the parameters of evangelicalism itself, it is no easy task to perceive, much less appreciate, those things that seem so natural to us but strange to others, yet consider the observations made by Mandair in a recent essay on the philosophy of religion: “[T]he point at which the philosophy of religion originated as a discipline was motivated as much by an intellectual development of religion as by cultural politics and political necessity—the ‘need’ to save ‘us,’ the West, from the impending dangers of encounter, contact and contamination by alien ideas from the East.”42 I interpret Mandair minimally to be saying here that sometimes what first appears to be a decided intellectual turn toward rational and critical reasoning can also be understood as a defensive, protective ideological strategy when viewed from another angle. Although I do not consider myself a postmodern by any stretch of the imagination, I have come to appreciate for myself that worldview philosophy is not an innocent, harmless tool that merely facilitates critical Christian self-analysis and strategic cultural engagement. Worldview philosophy also has a rarely acknowledged ideological underside; a built-in, self-reinforcing feature that makes a believer especially ripe for self-perpetuating, worldview addiction, as it were.

For instance, the probing, question-asking worldview philosophy was initially adapted by evangelicals as a systemic response to real or perceived systemic attack and as such requires that Christians sustain a heavy systematic emphasis whether or not the cultural or intellectual context calls for it. In other words, the potentially helpful conceptual tool of “worldview” morphs all too easily into a dialogical muscling kit in the hands of evangelizing Christians, lending itself to an exaggerated, if not false, sense of accomplished synthesis. Heightened are its dangers when used in response to a culture that, at the moment, is far more fragmented than solid.

To see what I mean about loading the questions, imagine briefly if worldview philosophy were unleashed in such a way that it set Christian against Christian, youth against youth. This is typically what has happened in the denominational struggles that seem to define evangelical churches. The only way to check denominational fragmentation and keep the insuperable denominational differences from the eyes of students is to load the questions in such a way that the denominational problem no longer surfaces. In more than one way, the synthesis provided by worldview philosophy is overstated—at least to the degree that it must allow for a plethora of understandings under the rubric of “evangelical Christianity.”

Add to these the varieties contained within the “liberal” churches, the Roman Catholic churches, the Orthodox churches and Seventh-Day Adventists and so on and it is not hard to see that what was thought to be the Christian worldview as evangelicals understand it is really but a variant within a matrix of Christian worldviews whose continuity is not always readily apparent. Furthermore, how often is what one evangelical denomination holds to be a biblical worldview denied as unbiblical by another? Deciding who is Christian and who is not has never been an easy matter,43 but surely worldview philosophy unduly contributes to an exaggerated sense of solidarity (by way of its heavy emphasis on synthesis) that is simply not reflective of the current, or historical, ecclesial state of affairs.

IV. Concluding Remarks

I have endeavored in this chapter to suggest, albeit in a rather sweeping manner, that evangelical worldview philosophy can “corrupt” youths when accepted as a God-send. Religious worldviews are by their very nature not as consistent as often touted, more inherently plural than typically acknowledged, and overly wistful with respect to synthesis. But vogues, by their nature, will hardly do as historically contingent and culturally convenient tools for self-criticism that can and should be supplemented. Unless their leaders and teachers tell them otherwise, younger evangelicals will have to realize for themselves that (in Donogan’s words) “no matter how tempting it may be to identify an entity asserted as part of religious revelation with an entity asserted by philosophy (or science), their identity should always be regarded as disputable philosophical doctrine, and not as part of the deposit of faith.”44 In short, worldview philosophy can and should be supplemented, allowing younger evangelicals a broader horizon for their evangelical theorizing and greater latitude in intellectual discourse generally.

Younger evangelicals should not be dismayed if there ever comes a time or an occasion during which they happen to espouse a “worldview” that raises questions that are precluded by more accepted paradigms for conceiving Scripture. It is merely part of the course of wrestling with the mysteries of the faith and stretching oneself to conceive how they might impinge upon everyday living. Religious worldviews will have fuzzy bounds on account of their religious nature and a common way for evangelicals to work through them is by shoring up their faith in Scripture by introducing equivocal connotations to the word “Bible.”45 To help us better see this, let us expound upon the case of the believing biblical scholar which was considered only cursorily in the present chapter.

1 Please recall that “evangelicals” in this work refers to those evangelicals of whatever denomination (or non-denomination) who align themselves according to their views of Scripture with the Evangelical Theological Society, the Evangelical Philosophical Society and other like-minded affiliations.

2 As Gregory A. Clark calls it in “The Nature of Conversion: How the Rhetoric of Worldview Philosophy Can Betray Evangelicals” in The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation. (ed. T. R. Phillips and D. L. Okholm; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 201–218. Though worldview emphases in non-evangelical philosophy have for the most part run their course, evangelical worldview philosophy, though initially posited about a century ago, has only recently taken root within evangelicalism-at-large.

3 Chuck Colson, “Prison Ministry and Worldview: A Match Made in Heaven” Jubilee Extra (June 2004): 7.

4 That is, giving them bad advice or leading them astray. See Plato’s The Apology of Socrates.

5 James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog. 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997), back cover.

6 Sire, Universe, 16.

7 Chuck Colson, “Prison Ministry and Worldview: A Match Made in Heaven” Jubilee Extra (June 2004): 7.

8 J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003), 13.

9 Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 2.

10 Note the rhetorical appeal in the idea of the Christian worldview, for example, in the apologetic work, To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (ed. F. J. Beckwith, W. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004). Much better is Moreland and Craig’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. An observation that cannot be pursued here is that it is often assumed that a biblical worldview (or the biblical worldview) and a Christian worldview (or the Christian worldview) are identical. Not only can it be a tenuous road that connects the former to the latter, it is sometimes an unbelievably arduous task to establish the former in the first place. I set out to illustrate in upcoming chapters that biblical studies is not so easily domesticated.

11 How to relate the divine and human, as we shall see in chapters three and four, is a basic dilemma that perpetually plagues evangelical views of Scripture.

12 Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

13 See chapter V of the Westminster Confession (1646) in Creeds of the Churches: A reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present. (ed. John H. Leith; Louisville: John Knox, 1982), 200.

14 As did Amyrald. Quote is from Philip Schaff’s exposition, Creeds of Christendom, 1.481.

15 Ben Witherington III has found occasions to fault Calvinism, Dispensationalism and Wesleyanism for not being able to satisfactorily account for the diversity of biblical data in The Problem with Evangelical Theology: Testing the Exegetical Foundations of Calvinism, Dispensationalism, and Wesleyanism. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005). Compare Trevor Hart, “Systematic—In What Sense?” in Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation. Scripture and Hermeneutics 5. (ed. C. Bartholomew, M. Healy, K. Möller, and R. Parry; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 341–351.

16 William Dembski, for instance, actually counsels readers to cry, “Perplexity!” when faced with an irresolvable error in Scripture. See his essay, “The Problem of Error in Scripture” in Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies. (ed. W. A. Dembski and J. W. Richards; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 79–94, 93–94.

17 W. V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. Rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 9.

18 Quine, Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 9.

19 William Hasker, “The Antinomies of Divine Providence” Philosophi Christi 4.2 (2002): 361–375; Kenny, The God of the Philosophers, 121.

20 Quine, Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 9.

21 See S. Reiss, “The Sixteen Strivings for God” Zygon 39.2 (2004): 303–320.

22 Perhaps in an analogous way to that in which “[a]rithmetic is not sufficient to prove its own consistency.” (J. N. Crossey, et. al., “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems” in What is Mathematical Logic? [ed. J. N. Crossley, et. al.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; repr. New York: Dover, 1990], 45–58, 57.) Compare John Webster’s diagnosis in Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11. The conclusion that Christianity is unable to solve its own problems reaches at least as far back as Nietzsche.

23 Cited in W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), 181.

24 Donald A. Crosby, “The Character of Pragmatic Historicist Theology: Review of Sheila Greeve Davaney, ‘Pragmatic Historicism: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century’ (Albany: SUNY, 2000).” Journal of Religion and Society 4 (2002). Source: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2002/2002-a2.html, italics in original. For Davaney’s response, see “The Character of a Pragmatic Historicist Theology: A Response to Reviews of Sheila Greeve Davaney, ‘Pragmatic Historicism: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century’.” Source: http://moses.creghton.edu/JRS/2002/2002-a3.html.

25 Because the same words for “wise” and “serpent” appear both in Matt 16.10 and Gen 3.1 (LXX)?

26 Naugle, for his part, suggests that we should seek to harmonize this plurality. See David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 320.

27 See, for example, Carlos R. Bovell, “Gen 3.21: The History of Israel in a Nutshell?” ExpTim 115 (2004): 398–403.

28 Regarding the creation story: the strife that the creation-evolution debate has caused evangelical youth is well known. One evangelical church boasted that its youth group studied nothing but creationism for the nine months during which its young people were in school in order to counter the public schools’ effects on its members!

29 C. Fitzsimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter. (Seabury, 1966; repr., Vancouver: Regent, 2004), ch. 4.

30 Reuben Hersh, What is Mathematics, Really? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 39.

31 See Lawrence Beyer, “Keeping Self-Deception in Perspective” in Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. (ed. Jean-Pierre Dupuy; Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1998), 87–111. Years ago, Blamires had noticed that there would be times when Christians must become temporary non-Christians in order to join in contemporary discourse because, if not, she would be “the only Christian present” and therefore engage only in a “private monologue”. See Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1962). I think a reason that Christians find themselves shifting between worldviews lies in the paradoxical doctrines that comprise the core of Christian beliefs.

32 From another perspective, Kraft states that what Schaeffer, Sire and others call “worldviews” are not really worldviews. Charles H. Kraft writes that different cultural contexts will produce different Christian worldviews. See his Anthropology for Christian Witness. (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 67–68.

33 This understanding appears repeatedly in Naugle’s Worldview: The History of a Concept.

34 The assumption, for example, that everyone has a worldview and that it is inherently religious is not gratuitous. Richard Taylor, to use an analogous situation, denies that everyone has a metaphysics. (I compare worldview with metaphysics below.) To automatically assume that everybody must have a “worldview” and to insist further that this worldview is inherently religious unnecessarily flattens the playing field. Consider Chet Raymo’s remarks, for example: “There’s a ‘God-shaped hole in many people’s lives,’ says physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. He’s right, at least about there being a hole in our lives. To call the hole ‘God-shaped’ begs the question . . .” (Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Religion. [New York: MJF, 1998], 1, quoting John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1994], 5, 14.) See also C. G. Prado, “Haunted by Plato and Torquemada” in Walking the Tightrope of Faith: Philosophical Conversations About Reason and Religion. (ed. H. Hart, R. A. Kuipers and K. Nielsen; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 128–132.

35 Keith E. Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 16 (italics in original). This has been called the “functional” definition. Clouser, for his part, wants to do away with references to the like of rituals. If his wish is granted, the resemblance to metaphysics is strengthened. See Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1991), 1–34.

36 Quentin Smith and L. Nathan Oaklander, Time, Change and Freedom: An Introduction to Metaphysics. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.

37 John Peck and Charles Strohmer, Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World. (Sevierville, TN: Wise Press, 2000), 280.

38 James Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004).

39 D. Aerts, L. Apostel, et al. Worldviews: From Fragmentation to Integration. (Brussels: VUB, 1994), 25.

40 What is an explanation anyway? For suggestions, see Paul Teller, “On Why Questions” Nous 8 (1974): 371–380; and in another vain, these and related articles in Synthese 120.1 (1999): Rebecca Schweder, “Causal Explanation and Explanatory Selection,” 115–124; Matti Sintonen, “Why Questions, and Why Just Why-Questions?” 125–135; and Max Urchs, “Complementary Explanations,” 137–149.

41 After all, worldview philosophy has not been developed by Christians for purposes of dialogue but for debate. For suggestions on the distinctions between the two, see Leonard Swidler, “Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious Dialogue,” JES 20 (1983): 1–4, available online at http://www.usao.edu/~facshaferi/DIALOG00.HTML.

42 Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, “What if Religio Remained Untranslatable?” in Difference in Philosophy of Religion. (ed. Philip Goodchild; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 87–100, 88. Compare with the issues raised in Gregory R. Peterson, “Think Pieces: Religion as Orienting Worldview” Zygon 36 (2001): 5–19.

43 See, for example, Wolfgang Wischmeyer, “A Christian? What’s That? On the Difficulty of Managing Christian Diversity in Late Antiquity” in Studia Patristica XXXIV. (ed. M. F. Wiles and E. J. Yarnold; Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 270–281.

44 Alan Donogan, “Philosophy and the Possibility of Religious Orthodoxy” in Reflections on Philosophy and Religion. (ed. A. N. Perovich, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–13, 6.

45 Another reason may be that, by their very nature, theology and philosophy are inherently inimical to the Christian faith. See, for example, Donald Wiebe, The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought. (Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991).