Worldview Evangelism

Grading down--now just a dissertation to read before 10:00 tomorrow!

As I was winding down from a day of grading, doing my half-hour on the elliptical (a device I refer to as "the sweating machine"), I listened to a podcast from an evangelist named Randal Niles called Think Again (formerly, I believe, Think it Thru). Niles runs a number of evangelical websites aimed at skeptics, atheists, and the Christians who want to reach them. The podcast I heard dealt especially with the notion of worldviews, which I've written about here previously.

Worldview refers of course to a set of ideas, assumptions, and attitudes that shape how one moves through the world. A number of philosophers formal and informal have dealt with ideas similar to worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) for some time (for an overview and comparison/contrast of these notions--from a strictly evangelical perspective--see David K. Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept). The term itself rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century various evangelical apologists latched onto as a way of conceiving of Christianity as a comprehensive, unified mode of interpreting the universe.

Today, worldview apologetics in some form or another has become the preferred mode of outreach for a growing number of evangelicals--thus my interest in the subject. Niles, the podcaster, even hosts a website (one of his "all about" series) called "All About Worldview," which contains a variety of informative and critical articles, many of which come from Summit Ministries, an established purveyor of worldview curricula, conferences, and worskshops.

I have only just begun to sample Niles's particular take on worldview apologetics, but from what I can tell, his version is similar to most others. It's a three-step process. First, Christians have to clarify and become proficient in articulating (and defending, and advocating) the "Christian worldview," more commonly (and more tellingly) called "Biblical worldview." Descriptions of this worldview typically consist of litmus-test affirmations about the inerrancy of scripture, the exclusive verity of Christian doctrines, the superiority of literal-scriptural accounts of science and history (i.e., young-earth creationism), and conservative views of gender and sexuality.

Next in the worldview evangelism approach, Christians should educate themselves about the other competing worldviews operating at present. Different worldview evangelists will categorize these systems differently, but most lists (tables, more commonly) will include, for example, "Naturalistic Humanism" (i.e., materialist science), postmodernism, "new age" or "pantheism," and Communism/Marxism . Also included are worldviews arising from competing faiths: the Islamic worldview, the Jewish worldview, the Hindu worldview, etc. Evangelists in training learn key features of these worldviews, identifying presuppositions and noting salient differences from the Biblical Christian view. Since, as per the Biblical worldview's presuppositions, only the Biblical approach can claim absolute epistemological accuracy, worldview apologetics teaches about other systems in terms of their divergence from the truth of scripture.

The final step involves training Christians to interact with people living in and seeing the world through these other (inferior) sets of lenses. Of course, the approach is more complicated than simply going up to someone and lecturing them about how mistaken their deeply held beliefs are. Worldview apologetics departs from most other confrontational evangelistic approaches, largely eschewing a Bible-thumping, in-your-face approach as unproductive. Instead, worldview evangelists seek to demonstrate that 1) the Christian worldview is in fact cohesive and epistemologically appealing; and 2) other worldviews, in comparison, prove unsatisfactory. The trick, then, is to know the other's (non-Christian) worldview better than the other person does, guiding the person conversationally through an exploration of that worldview, helping the person to see where the non-Christian worldview proves inconsistent ro contradictory (in Greg Koukl's words, showing people how and where their worldview "commits suicide").

This, as worldview evangelists will tell you, is no easy task. It requires training, research, conversational practice, and a willingness to explore--and if necessary repair--one's own faith.

I find much to admire in worldview apologetics of this sort. The openness to others--engage them on their own terms rather than hectoring them from afar--is a refreshing departure from the stereotypical "turn or burn" tactic (or, more gently, from the "if you died right now, do you know where you'd wake up?" gotcha questions of the Way of the Master). I also like how this approach resists the anti-intellectualism that even many evangelicals lament has long afflicted present-day evangelicalism. Worldview apologetics requires that the evangelist be well-read and well-equipped with an arsenal of rhetorical and critical skills. As an educator, I can hardly argue with the value of training people to recognize the difference between logical fallacies and strong arguments. Indeed, I see in worldview apologists the seeds of a new evangelicalism (recognizing, of course, that "the seeds of a new evangelicalism" get discovered by countless writers every day). Worldview evangelism, however, does in fact aim to be an articulation of Christianity that does not just survive but competes in the marketplace of ideas.

That being said, the notion of worldviews as so elaborated by Niles, Summit Ministries, and the like has some features I find less attractive...

More tomorrow,

JF