some follow up within/on the Theopolis Institute conversation about the late Michael Heiser and the field of demonology and spirit possession in scholarship

I'm belatedly coming back to the Theopolis Institute conversation on the work of the late Michael Heiser.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning—then it can be put back into circulation.”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  An expression that gets withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning in music theory might be “tonality” (per my post on Ethan Hein discussing Jason Yust discussing the freighted nature of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.  

links for the weekend: Ethan Hein on songs covered by Norah Jones and The Allman Brothers; Norman Lebrecht on the day the symphony died; Anglican high and low liturgy and why that matters with art snobs; Brad East on providence as a doctrine of consolation and Matt Jantzen on the same as doctrine of racial entitlement and theologians against that paradigm; Alastair Roberts on providence and ambition; riffs on Leviathan; and Jim West will be happy to know there are new books on Emil Brunner this year

We haven’t had a links for the weekend in a while and there’s some catching up to do.

Theories of aesthetic judgment; art critics as theologians assessing spiritual food; and the problem of advocating theories of judgment when James 2:12-13 teaches to live and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty

(Update 7-14-2024, I apparently forgot to include the blog post(s) that spurred this set of thoughts, over at The Music Salon, http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-survival-of-culture.html) and On an Overgrown Path a bit earlier, https://www.overgrownpath.com/2024/07/great-music-has-no-independent-existence.html)

James 2:12-13 NIV

Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet have, I hope, probably noticed that while I have written about the reception history of powers and principalities language in the Pauline epistles and touched on interpretations that apply this to spiritual warfare or empires I have been generally disinterested in what is known as political theology. To be more blunt, I have never really had any use for it.  I have quoted John Neville Figgis a few times and he contended that it was not profitable for Christians to bloviate about theories of political sovereignty for regimes which only exist in their own imaginations.  Figgis gave that warning back in 1911 or so.  His warning was, let’s just say, summarily ignored by conservative Christians of just about every stripe in Anglo-American Christendom.  I was only aware of the life and work of John Neville Figgis in roughly the last five years so I admit he is a thoroughly obscure and literally academic figure.

links for the weekend, riffs on celibacy at Mere Orthodoxy, Freddie deBoer on the mania for the sexual orientation of cartoon characters as a wrong kind of entitlement, Alastair Roberts on the probably not-helpful nature of Aaron Renn's `negative world' taxonomy

A bit unusually for a weekend of posting I decided to retroactively make this the penultimate post of the night rather than the formal close.  I just felt that what I wrote in "You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror" is more what I wanted to close the weekend with in publication order even if I 'technically' wrote this links for the weekend later.  That's how choosing a publication time can work.

There's variations on a theme for this one, though in the new iteration of Mere Orthodoxy you might not even be able to read the first link by the time you see this.  Stuff is now visible for a week and if you didn't catch it the week of you have to be a subscriber to read older entries.  Such is not the case with the materials in the chain.