Critics Say the Christian Worldview Is Outdated, but Millions Disagree
Every so often, a book or article will denounce the concept of worldview for Christians. The claims, which vary from writer to writer, are usually a mix of legitimate critique and odd straw-manning. Some argue that the German rationalist history of worldview makes it wrong, misguided, or even unbiblical for Christians. Others suggest that it reduces authentic faith to something too cerebral, too impersonal, or too formulaic. Perhaps the most common critique is that it just doesn’t “work” in today’s cultural environment.
That last critique extends to all Christian intellectual work, especially apologetics. For decades now, last rites have been offered for Christian intellectual pursuits, but to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment about rumors of his own demise, rumors of the death of worldview and apologetics have been greatly exaggerated. In just the last few months, millions witnessed Wesley Huff use apologetics to share the Gospel with millions on Joe Rogan’s podcast, as well as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger proclaim a new faith in Christ and attribute it to a long intellectual journey that involved a popular apologetics and evangelism website. The long history of Christian intellectual work includes philosophy, science, medicine, art, and virtually every area of human understanding. People still have questions, and the Bible provides answers. The life of the mind is a non-reducible aspect of the Christian faith.
The most common criticisms of Christian worldview as a concept have come from those who doubt objective truth, objective morality, and Christianity’s clear doctrinal stands, and yet still wish to identify as Christian. In the past, these critiques came from those who embraced more culturally and theologically liberal views. Just recently, however, a critic from the dissident Right complained that Christian worldview ideas, such as image of God and knowable truth, undermined their views about race and nationalism. He’s right. They do. There are clear implications of the Bible’s truth claims about God, the universe, human dignity, and many other things.
A smaller set of criticism comes from Christians who found that a formulaic understanding of the Christian worldview hadn’t “worked” the way they had either been told or thought. In their experience, the Christian worldview was presented as obvious and the others as nonsense. Perhaps they were taught objectively that certain sins were, in fact, sins, but understanding that didn’t keep them from struggling. Or perhaps they had run-ins with obnoxious Christians who used worldview like a club to badger people into submission on narrow political opinions.
Worldview has been done badly but, as a movement, it’s been largely self-corrective. Some of the earliest champions of Christian worldview, such as Herman Bavinck and Herman Dooyeweerd, pushed worldview thinking away from the confusions of German rationalism. Almost every popular champion of Christian worldview, from James Sire to Nancy Pearcey to Francis Schaeffer to Charles Colson, argued against reducing faith to cerebral formulas. More recently, many have worked to maintain the political ramifications of Christian truth without allowing the faith to be reduced to political partisanship.
In his short book on the importance of creativity and art, Francis Schaeffer wrote:
If Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just ‘dogmatically’ true or ‘doctrinally’ true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.
Christian worldview is about the realization that if Christianity is true, it’s about everything and it changes everything. As Scottish theologian James Orr, among the earliest Christian thinkers to talk about the Christian worldview, wrote,
He who, with his whole heart, believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity.
While I agree that the term “Christian worldview” or “Biblical worldview” is clunky, every alternative I’ve heard (like “Christian social imaginary”) is far worse. Perhaps we should just call it Biblical wisdom, this quest to incarnate Christ’s claim on reality, as articulated by Abraham Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Our job, Chuck Colson often said, is to go anywhere and everywhere and cry out “His!”
Photo Courtesy:©Getty Images/Arkira
Published Date: April 1, 2025
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
