After Worldview

by J. Matthew Bonzo (Editor), Michael Stevens (Editor)

These collected essays represent a communal attempt, by some of the foremost North American worldview scholars, to respond to some of the pressing questions surrounding the many-sided concept that worldview has become in contemporary Christian discourse. Is worldview too modern a concept? Is it too static a way of considering reality? Is it overly intellectual and an invitation for apologetic abuse? Is it hindering more than helping the enterprise of Christian education to use worldview as the point of integration? These and many other questions are wrestled with in these essays. By looking at both the historical development of the term, its present uses and abuses, and possible future alterations, the thinkers in After Worldview have created a foundational conversation and suggested many intriguing ways to revivify this crucial idea from the deadening effects of over-exposure and under-contemplation. These essays provide serious Christian scholarship in an inviting tone, that wonder and suggests, rather than declares, the good aims and good ends that worldview engagement can and should offer to the Body of Christ.

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I try to read everything I can find on the subject of worldview with the exception of those things written with a clearly conservative (political and/or theological) agenda in mind. I recently happened upon this slim volume (131 pp) and was interested in seeing what it had to say. The essays and responses to those essays that make up this book were first presented at the After Worldview Conference at Cornerstone University in 2004. This is not new or even recent material. What I found most interesting was that most of the authors seem to share a discomfort at the way the concept of worldview has been used (dare I say "hijacked") by some zealous evangelicals. The book's introduction states it this way, "These writers express a concern about the increasing tendency among some evangelicals to use worldview "tests" as a measure of orthodoxy. Furthermore, there is a resistance to developing worldview categories as a means to "pigeonhole" thinkers, especially non-Christian ones." I share that concern. I would like to have seen the essays treat this issue in a more head-on fashion.