Warren Cole Smith and Alastair Roberts on Simon Kennedy's Against Worldview, considering the evolution of "worldview" from early 20th century neo-Calvinist theology through to Cold War and post Cold War Anglo-American shibboleth

https://lexhampress.com/product/305968/against-worldview-reimagining-christian-formation-as-growth-in-wisdom

 

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/against-worldview-review/

January 24, 2025  |  Alastair Roberts

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning—then it can be put back into circulation.” For evangelicals, one example is the word “worldview.”

 

D. G. Hart and other Reformed writers have had a worldview aversion for years.  An expression that gets withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning in music theory might be “tonality” (per my post on Ethan Hein discussing Jason Yust discussing the freighted nature of “tonality” in music theory). Terms do change over time and with changing usage.  Worldview is a term that has taken on a lot of connotations in Christian evangelical and fundamentalist circles.  It is one of the most reliable shibboleths of the entire evangelical media field.  So a book writing against the use of the term getting published in December 2024 is … not a surprise. 

 

But one of the joys of reading criticism is saving yourself the need to read a book you realize, from reading reviews, you don’t even need to read.  That worldview has turned into the kind of shibboleth that pre-empts rather than encourages Christians to think through complex issues is not something I personally need to read about.  I’ve seen it over the course of thirty years.  That said, a book that attempts to describe how and why the term “worldview” became a shibboleth should be out there.  I can benefit from reading reviews of the book even if I don’t read it because reviews and criticism can reveal the state of the discourse.

For instance … I just read Warren Cole Smith’s review and this stood out.

 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-worldview

February 5th, 2025 By Warren Cole Smith

…

For example, Kennedy is wrong when he blames this debasing of the word on such figures as Frances Schaeffer and Chuck Colson. Kennedy, an Australian, is not fluent in the dramatis personae of the American Evangelical Industrial Complex, especially those cogs in the machine that interface with conservative politics. Blaming the weaponization of the phrase “worldview” on Schaeffer and Colson while ignoring Jerry Falwell, James Robison, Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and a host of others who were and are explicit culture warriors is a confusion of category that leaves this American reader scratching his head. The worst you can say about Schaeffer and Colson in this regard is that they didn’t fully appreciate or arrest the debasement. 

…

 

I think we really can blame Schaeffer and Colson for debasing the use of the concept of worldview but I think Smith is on to something by suggesting there’s something wrong with “just” doing this blame game. But what that thing is Smith doesn’t address is historical context.  Pitting Kuyper against Bavinck helps nobody, sure.  But I think the historical setting is the big thing that needs to be mentioned. 

 

The real problem with how worldview was deployed by men like Schaeffer and Colson is the potentially under-examined context within which they wielded the term.  One of the joys (or frustrations, if you don’t like his work) in reading Richard Taruskin’s music history is he situates the 20^th century firmly in the context of the Cold War.  By explicitly shifting the history of classical music away from Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union Taruskin aggravated Brits and Europeans who regarded him as having summarily dismissed Europeans as having nothing to contribute to the history of the music that “they” invented.  Taruskin’s counterpoint was that the geopolitical reality of the Cold War meant that Europe had become a functional extension of American power rather than America being an extension of the European powers.  The imperialists and colonizers of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries had become the vassal and buffer states of American empire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and there was no gainsaying that.

 

So, that’s where we get back to the Dutch Reformed neo-Calvinist pioneers who died in 1920 and 1921.  What Dutch Reformed theologians meant by worldview as men who both died at the onset of the 1920s is not the same thing as what figures like Schaeffer or Colson meant by worldview at the height of the Cold War and the summit of pax Americana.  By the time the Cold War began and even more so after it ended worldview had been transformed, in part by men like Schaeffer and Colson, into a kind of buzzword similar to the way Marxists wielded the term ideology.  When a Christian evangelical author waxed eloquent on the impact of worldview it could be like reading a Marxist going on about how the base and the superstructure related to each other.  When I belatedly got around to reading Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury’s turgid Stockhausen Serves Imperialism I couldn’t help but notice an overlap in their denunciations of John Cage the man and his music much like Francis Schaeffer denounced John Cage in his trilogy of books. Thus …

The Music of John Cage and a Self-Extinguishing Avant Garde: revisiting Francis Schaeffer's criticism of John Cage in comparison to Maoist criticisms of Cage

 

I do think a case can be made, and sustained, that by the time Schaeffer and Colson were writing books “worldview” had devolved into a political theological shibboleth.  Maybe those two men were not more to blame than others for the way the term became a shibboleth and I read Schaeffer in my teens.  I think it’s possible what Smith has referred to is the distinction between people who read Schaeffer and people who used Schaeffer as a kind of shortcut for intellectual engagement.  Now in my older years I regard Schaeffer as having made a lot of embarrassing blunders in his appraisals of artists, musicians, writers and philosophers.  He didn’t address Wagnerian art mysticism at all, which I consider a disastrous misstep on Francis Schaeffer’s part.  He also seemed a bit too eager to lambast Kierkegaard. 

 

But even when Schaeffer was bungling the primary sources he was reading those sources and that is where worldview discourse in the last forty years has steered people wrong.  To pick on a very specific example, if Douglas Wilson says that X said Y I never take it as given.  If even Roger Scruton claimed “Adorno said this” I’m going to go back and read Adorno.  Adorno could probably still be wrong but if I hadn’t slogged through swaths of Current of Music I would have never known that Adorno took the trouble to say that “Deep Purple” was an okay pop song and “Two in Love” was a tedious knock-off of “Deep Purple”.  What!?  Adorno was doing musical analyses on American pop songs?  Yeah, but Current of Music was never published in his lifetime.  I’m ambivalent about Schaeffer’s legacy because I felt I benefited greatly from him in my teens and twenties but as I got older I began to feel his influence was largely negative, that he became the go-to figure for people who wanted him to give a Christian worldview pre-digested set of answers to questions.

 

Which is more than I strictly needed to say.  I think Christian scholarly examination of worldview as a shibboleth is worth doing even if I don’t get around to reading those books that come in the wake of such an examination.  

a further thought on John Borstlap's simplistic invocation of Schleiermacher as positive and Herder as negative influences in history, dipping a toe into a contemporary discussion of latent Eurocentric and white supremacist elements in Schleiermacher's work

I have written in the past about how I find John Borstlap's references to Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johan Gottfried Herder troublesomely simplistic by way of writing about other things.  Borstlap valorized Schleiermacher as someone who used the idea of art religion and was a forebear of Wagner, who really got the idea going of art doing for religion what religion could no longer do.  Borstlap has claimed that religions don't make people people make religions.  Conversely, he has contended that Herder was responsible for developing a chauvinistic, jingoistic form of ethnic nationalism that led, eventually, to National Socialism.  

I found multiple levels of problems with Borstlap's approach.  First and foremost he treated two famous Christian theologians who were pioneers in the liberal Protestant tradition as if they were philosophers.  They were that, too, of course, but Borstlap's simple valorization of one and demonization of the other does not reflect an engagement with their respective works.  Now who am I to begrudge someone for not wanting to read Schleiermacher's Christian Faith since it is, in its recent 2016 English translation, at least a thousand pages long! Philip Bohlman's assembly of the writings of Herder on Music is much shorter and cheaper.  I have said in the past that I simply can't take Borstlap at his word when he claims Herder was a forerunner of chauvinist German nationalism.  Why?  Because I've read Herder and Herder specialists are swift to say there was a nationalist streak in his work but he was also, just as much, an aesthetic pluralist and translator.  Herder complained of his generation of Germans they were too busy doing garbage knock-offs of Greek and Latin poetry to benefit from knowing the Hebrew Scriptures better and he produced a modern translation of Song of Songs that was considered a landmark act of translation. 

My point today, however, is that if Herder was not necessarily as proto-Nazi as Borstlap implied in The Classical Revolution, Schleiermacher's influence has not been considered uniformly positive.  Even if contemporary liberal Protestants regard the neo-orthodox fusilades of Emil Brunner or Karl Barth against Schleiermacher to be unfair there are contemporary theologians who regard Schleiermacher's work as being full of latently Eurocentric and white supremacist defaults.  They were not as pernicious as those of, say, Richard Wagner, but they have come up for discussion just in the last few years.  

Theodore Vial's Modern Religion, Modern Race is a book that digs into the theological and philosophical writings of both Herder and Schleiermacher to argue that both men had Eurocentric and racist defaults.  Herder and Schleiermacher were (and are) considered significant contributors to the liberal Protestant Christian project and yet they both had Eurocentric and racist aspects to their work.  I haven't gotten to Vial's book and as my sympathies are more Swiss Reformed, Anglican and even a few Puritans I am not in a rush to read Vial's book.  I have, however, read that the book is out there and it's germane to my disagreement with Borstlap about what I regard as his simplistic take on Herder and Schleiermacher.  That Schleiermacher was influential can be attested by the fact that, for instance, even the orthodox Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck felt obliged to attempt to salvage from Schleiermacher the ideas he thought were actually good ideas.  

Guy Beck has contended that Schleiermacher's legacy via Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leeuw has waned in the last century and that both Otto and van der Leeuw sustained Schleiermacher's aesthetic pluralism.  Ironically, Roger Scruton, who openly cited Otto as an influence, did not seem eager to embrace the aesthetic pluralism of Otto's approach.  It's one thing for a Swiss Reformed theologian like Emil Brunner to dissent from Otto's art mysticism because it abandoned any commitment to Christian scripture.  Among Christians writing about matters of Christian concern Brunner had every right to register that complaint. The Hebrew Bible is notoriously uninterested in discussing the nature of music, so most discourse on what the Bible does or doesn't say about music revolves around the presumed dualism of Orphic and Pythagorean traditions.  The world is far bigger than what the Greeks kept debating about.  When the African Christian bishop Tertullian rhetorically asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem a contemporary Copenhagen school minimalist might say that the Hebrew Bible was a knock-off of Plato's laws and only came into being during the Hasmonean era.  But in his day Tertullian was arguing that Christians had the Bible and they didn't need to be beholden to categories of thought imposed by Greek philosophy.

Now, regarding Schleiermacher, I think at this point I can add a few links for your consideration.

https://readingreligion.org/9780190212551/modern-religion-modern-race/

https://www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/race-difference-and-religion-is-there-a-universal-humanity

https://brill.com/view/journals/pneu/44/2/article-p285_15.xml

It's obvious from the way scholars have interacted with Vial's book that they can take his point that Schleiermacher did have Eurocentric and white supremacist defaults and yet still regard Vial as having misread Schleiermacher on important issues (there are liberal theologians who have felt ardently Barth and Brunner misread Schleiermacher for about a century now).  

Even the concept of religion itself is, in contemporary scholarly discussion, something regarded as a scholarly invention of the long 19th century.  Jason Storm, for instance, has a book on the invention of religion in Japan. Piety can overlap with religion or religious customs but is not necessarily the same thing.  He also wrote a whole book called The Myth of Disenchantment showing that belief in spiritual and supernatural elements is more common now than in the past and that founding figures in the social sciences had substantial occult interests (Carl Jung perhaps foremost among them).

Now Vial's project may be stymied from the outset by a desire to demonstrate racist elements in Schleiermacher and then contend that the categories of religion he introduced have thus been problematized.  I'm slogging through an annoying book called The Music of Theology where three European theologians annoyingly mix metaphors and seem to take as given that Christianity is "Western" or "European".  No on both counts.  Christianity started in southwest Asia and made its way to Africa as well as Europe.  That trans-Atlantic academic norms take as given an Orphic and Pythagorean dualism is pretty obvious to me at this point even if Ted Gioia weren't jumping up and down on that soapbox at his Substack.  That Schleiermacher is important is basically beyond dispute, but at a lay level I think we can suggest that if Schleiermacher was a racist he wasn't the same kind of racist as H P Lovecraft, who was really virulently white supremacist.  As a half Native American and half white man I'm the kind of guy that Lovecraft would have regarded as an abomination.  

Even if Vial's work is tendentious that's literally a debating point for scholars of Schleiermacher and scholars of race.  I mention this all, of course, to highlight my simple point that when I read Borstlap's books over the years I knew enough to know that he was making claims about Herder and Schleiermacher that, alas, can't hold up under even the briefest possible scrutiny.  If anything Borstlap is more eager to valorize or demonize authors for what he imputes to them as their one big good or bad idea than Ewell does with Schenker.  

I've read Ewell and Borstlap so I'm not just saying this for purely rhetorical effect.  I've got my disagreements with both authors but Ewell is a self-identified atheist and a son of an atheist who stays in the wheelhouse of music theory.  So I don't take any offense that someone who has advertised he wouldn't know the first thing about liberal Protestant theology doesn't go there.  Borstlap, by contrast, implicitly takes the stance of a polymath without necessarily showing that he's ever done his homework.  What makes Schleiermacher good and Herder bad?  Can Borstlap cite works?  He hasn't, not in a decade, and has relied on sweeping generalizations.  It comes off almost as if he took survey courses in philosophy and religion half a century ago and took in those accepted norms.  People can do that but an academic consensus can change in a generation or two. If Herder was a Eurocentric chauvinist there has to be proof provided from the writings.  Borstlap never provided it.  The same can be said about Schleiermacher.  

Even the very category of "religion" that Borstlap has invoked is, here in the 21st century, regarded by anthropologists and historians of religion as an actually freighted and problematic concept itself.  Obviously religious convictions and beliefs have existed for some time but the way German writers in the long 19th century used the term "religion" has not escaped scrutiny.  

I wrote previously that one of the biggest problems with partisans of Art Religion is they never stipulate what kind of religion Art is supposed to be a surrogate for.  I grew up Pentecostal and am currently Anglican so I know the differences between high and low liturgical practices and I can tell you that within just global Anglicanism itself a wide variety of practices exist.  Borstlap's Art Religion seems tacitly tethered to the highest of highbrow forms of liturgy but that's not a sustainable assumption.  Chiara Bertoglio's monumental work on sixteenth century Christian debates on music and liturgical norms in Europe, all by itself, should disabuse anyone of the idea that Christian music and liturgy was uniform.  Not that Borstlap ever said that, rather, the European Christian musical norms of the sixteenth century (and before) were full of genres cross-pollinating across what we'd colloquially identify as folk, pop, art, and so on.  Particularly in nascent Lutheranism a lot of cross-form and cross-genre and stylistic exchange was going on.  

Borstlap and folks at the formerly called Future Symphony Institute have committed to a future for the symphony. But that's precisely the problem, the symphony is a mere fraction of what is retroactively called The Great Tradition of Western European classical music.  Before that there was Byrd or Palestrina or Josquin or Perotin or Schutz or, ah, right, we're seeing a ton of overly liturgical music in that history.  But there was also dance music.  Charles Garside Jr. contended in Zwingli and the Arts that, by banning music from church services altogether Swiss Reformed notables like Zwingli and Bullinger paradoxically created a realm of secular music that was not tethered to either the throne or the altar.  What liberated music in Europe, depending on which scholars we read, was the process of being desacralized.  It's hardly a surprise that a scholar of Swiss Reformed theologians would regard that as an innovation of the likes of Zwingli, much like fans of the Enlightenment want to believe that it was their pet movement that liberated music. 

Maybe the zeitgeist has it that liberal theologians are doing handwringing about the unexamined racism of their heroes.  This would, if anything, mightily underline Ewell's point in On Music Theory that confronting racist legacies is happening in seemingly every other field of academic except music theory.  

For my part I am just coming back to my earlier point that I can't take Borstlap's claims about Herder and Schleiermacher as given.  My reading on contemporary debates about theologians in the liberal Protestant tradition has just underlined my hesitation to take Borstlap as having any authority (or even basic competency) on matters of Christian theology. 

E. J. Hutchinson at Ad Fontes Journal on how Buddy Holly was Homer and Bob Dylan is Ennius

 Follow the link to read excerpts from Bob Dylan speeches and riffs on invocations of poetic invocations of muses and transmission/transmigration of inspiration in the old Hellenistic sense of the concept.

https://adfontesjournal.com/ej-hutchinson/holly-as-homer-dylan-as-ennius-the-rock-and-roll-singer-as-epic-bard/