We Are Not Our Worldview

As Christians, we often define ourselves by ideology, but Jesus calls us to a deeper sense of identity.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Sometimes a perfectly good word loses its meaning so much that it ought to be set aside, at least temporarily. Calling someone a “fundamentalist” in 1923—when the word designated Christians who believed in the supernatural—is a very different thing than in 2023, when it conveys sectarian militancy.

Several years ago, I realized another good word had lost its meaning: “worldview.”

“Everyone has a worldview,” the saying went. It was and is true, of course, that the grid through which we see reality shapes who we are. But over the years, I’ve grown weary of hearing the word “worldview” invoked as a list of current culture war controversies with the “correct” Christian view attached.

I’ve also become increasingly convinced that “worldview” talk assumed something I don’t find to be true or biblical: which is the belief that people adopt cognitive axioms and apply them to their lives. Anyone who’s dealt with real people knows that the reverse is found to be true far more often. I have seen countless people with “biblical worldviews” reverse course in an instant when they’re caught in an extramarital affair.

Tim Keller’s foreword to a new translation of J.H. Bavinck’s Personality and Worldview (Crossway) analyzes many of my reluctances. Some of you yawn at even the mention of a long-dead Dutch Reformed theologian, but the book is worth its price if for nothing else than the Keller foreword and the introduction written by its translator and editor, James Eglinton. Both point out the crucial difference ...

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