Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom KennedySimon P., Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2024, $18.99 pbk, ISBN 9781683597810, 133 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As suggested in the title of this book, Kennedy is unhappy with the approach to Christian worldview education as developed largely by Reformed philosophers and theologians.While not discarding Christian worldview education entirely, he wants "to reframe Christian worldview education from a philosophical, theological and historical standpoint" (p.2).Kennedy proposes a wisdom approach to Christian education drawing on the biblical emphasis on wisdom.Kennedy sees "Education as growing in wisdom," the subtitle of Chapter 4.There are two types of wisdompractical wisdom, which is "evident in the person who knows a lot about living in the cosmos that God has created," and spiritual wisdom which "is connected to having a relationship with the Creator" (pp.85-6).Chapter 3 addresses the question of how we learn.Here Kennedy draws extensively on Dutch philosopher, Herman Bavinck, and his realist account of epistemology.Education is trying to help the student live in the real world that God has created.In this chapter Kennedy also compares education to creating a mosaic as found in the ceilings of the great cathedrals of Europe.Contrary to the Reformed model of worldview education, we don't start with a Christian worldview and then via "deduction," determine what this means for each subject area.Instead, a Christian worldview is the "goal" of a person's education, which we arrive at "inductively," helping each student insert "wisdom tiles" piece by piece into the growing mosaic (pp.74, 95, 99).Why is Kennedy so opposed to education based on the notion of a Christian worldview?Here I am limiting myself to criticisms that I believe need to be taken more seriously.In Chapter 2, Kennedy traces the history of Christian worldview, suggesting that it emerged as a "a tool of combat" in "contexts of perceived cultural crisis" (p.27).But times have changed and so the traditional notion of Christian worldview "doesn't serve the purposes of Christian education today" (p.44).Another major objection is that the notion of a Christian worldview is "so vague as to be indefensible" (p.121).Kennedy also argues that the grand themes of the Christian worldview are "arbitrary" and "artificial" (pp.119, 104).Some questions: Have times really changed so much as to rule out the need for intellectual combat?Jesus was combatting the prevailing ideas of his time and Paul used
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".