With today’s blog, I’m pleased to introduce the Winter issue of Christian Scholar’s Review. For much of the past century, Christian scholars have turned to the concept of worldview as a primary way to articulate the academic vocation of integrating faith and learning. The popular concept of a Christian worldview is often traced to the writings and speeches of Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch politician and theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who reoriented the concept of worldview first introduced by eighteenth and nineteenth-century German philosophers and subordinated it to Christian theology and practice. Kuyper argued that Calvinism, with its emphasis on God’s sovereignty over all creation, was well-suited to develop a comprehensive and coherent life system capable of critiquing all aspects of life. More than that, it could inform Christian cultural engagement in spheres outside the church, such as politics, family, work, and academia. Over time, the term “worldview” became shorthand for Kuyper’s proposed broader Christian life system.
More than fifty years later, the philosopher Arthur Holmes, building on Kuyper’s work, helped to popularize the concept of worldview by arguing that the work of the academy is never completely objective or neutral but also influenced by worldviews with underlying presuppositions that shape and animate scholarship. As he contended, the Christian scholar’s work is both theological and epistemological, identifying and critiquing presuppositions in others’ scholarship while also advocating for a holistic Christian worldview that unites faith, framing assumptions, methodology, and conclusions in a way that acknowledges God’s sovereignty over all things, including scholarship.
As such, a Christian worldview could be developed to interpret modern thought from a Christian perspective and to create unique lenses for Christian scholarly work. Such efforts would not only challenge existing paradigms but also introduce new ones, helping to advance distinctive scholarship into mainstream academia. It was not only post-modernists who were leading academic discussions that emphasized foregrounding perspectival diversity; evangelical scholars were also arguing for the legitimacy of explicitly Christian intellectual frameworks.
The importance of worldview for Western Christian scholarship cannot be overstated. A quick search of our own blogs and journal (back to 2008) shows over 450 entries related to worldview. How we think and what we think about is central to the vocation of the Christian Scholar.
However, Kuyper did not separate thought and action from formation in articulating a Christian life system. He also emphasized the Christian’s mystical union with Christ, writing that “where head knowledge dominates, the soul often goes hungry.” In his Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary in 1896, Kuyper never discussed worldview without life-view, underscoring this comprehensive approach to a Calvinistic life system.
Similarly, as Holmes consistently argued, a Christian worldview is a way of life. It not only influences thinking but is also moral and formative, affecting emotions and will, which, in turn, shape the habits and practices necessary to cultivate a virtuous character. In this sense, scholars do not just advocate for a uniquely Christian worldview but inhabit it. Left unembodied, worldview risks becoming little more than an abstract concept rather than a foundation for Christian personhood.
However, an embodied worldview is also culturally inhabited, requiring attention to the social mechanisms, structures, and processes by which the beliefs or cultural logic of one’s worldview are mediated through—the practices, norms, institutions, and disciplines of culture. Such a broader understanding of life systems also requires analyzing the logic or “whys” of culture, and the ensuing logistics—its cultural “hows”—through which those values are repeatedly enacted and normalized.
Subsequently, Christian academics are increasingly interested in interrogating aspects of cultural logic and their attendant logistics, which shape not only our own behaviors but also how we judge others’ actions. For example, the typical rewards of tenure and promotion favor individual contributions to scholarship, celebrating the lone scholar burning the midnight oil, while judging the work of multiple co-authors less favorably. Yet, from a theological perspective, being made in the image of the triune and relational God, we value community. Nevertheless, in judging scholarship, we remain deeply influenced by the secular academic norm of individuality. The misalignment between values and rewards, when uninterrogated, not only affects individuals but also mitigates a fuller expression of an appropriate underlying Christian cultural logic, the telos, of why we do what we do.
Thus, there is value in exploring more mundane aspects of the academic vocation—the use of technology, course and classroom design, the purpose of grades, the nature of authoritative claims, or the value of metaphors or non-generalizable qualitative research in the social sciences—to examine how such logistics, which may seem as neutral as presuppositions to previous generations, have or have not been interrogated through a life system that acknowledges God’s sovereignty over all. Just as earlier scholars recognized that a theological approach to epistemology was central to Christian formation, so too may the understanding be that cultural logistics are not neutral tools but formative forces that either align with or distort the Christian life.
In this issue, our authors broaden the ideas associated with worldview in the direction of Kuyper’s original concept of life system by examining the cultural logics and their logistics that frame academia, extending the work of theologically rich epistemology.
In our first article, W. Scott McCullough, associate professor for the division of mathematics, engineering, and computer science at Indiana Wesleyan University, writes about the Church’s historical reception of Copernicus’s scientific discoveries in “Was Copernicus a Heretic? How Protestants Decided ‘No’ and Why It Matters.” In it, he writes about how the public received Copernicus’s findings, showing how trusted cultural logistics, such as sermons and devotionals, mediated the transfer of scientific beliefs to a broader Christian population. He writes:
Furthermore, the shift of most interest is public embrace by persons in the pew, not just assent by theologians and leaders. Consensus starts with assent by thinkers, and that is not difficult to trace from written records, which, by their nature, come down to us through intellectuals. Nevertheless, it is possible to make reasonable inferences about the receptivity of the heliocentric system by the Protestant public from the evidence of three kinds of written records. The first is popular devotional books about ‘natural philosophy,’ the second is commentaries and theological works written for the Christian public, and the third is the use of heliocentrism as sermon illustrations.
But this article is more than just an interesting lesson in the history of science; it offers value for us today. In the last third of the article, McCullough explains that Protestant reconciliation of Copernicanism with scripture was based on trust: in trusted people and the trusted media of its time. It reminds us that knowledge transfer is not driven solely by the quality of information but is mediated through trusted people and institutions that prepare people to engage with science, both theoretically and biblically, without fear.
In our second article, John Anthony Dunne explores how teaching biblical and theological concepts through storytelling offers the dual benefits of providing a strong context for the biblical text and offering valuable formative practices. In “The Stories at Work in the Classroom: Towards an Affective Worldview Approach to Faith-Learning Integration for Biblical Studies,” Dunne, associate professor of New Testament at Bethel Seminary (MN), notes the difficulty integrating faith and learning for Bible and theology professors when there is no other academic field with which to “integrate.” He writes,
In the area of biblical and theological studies, faith-learning integration, however it may operate at the level of ‘conception,’ should have as its telos holistic formation—whole and holy persons. The locus of integration ought to be, therefore, both in the curriculum and in the student. Integration done well is not strictly about information, but about what the instruction leads students to do.
Dunne’s work shows how storytelling functions as a concrete cultural logistic that can shape formation, just as Holmes envisioned “worldview” as an embodied process shaping practices that in turn develop character.
Next, Jared August, associate professor of biblical studies at the Word of Life Bible Institute, writes how theological imagination governs Christian posture toward emerging technologies, especially where design, affect, and spiritual meaning converge. In “A Head with No Body, a Mind with No Soul: Artificial Intelligence and C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength,” he shows us how Lewis, through his science fiction, demonstrated how habits, restraint, and communal practices, when grounded in faith, can address the timely cultural logistics associated with the use of artificial intelligence (AI). August writes,
The Christian ought to be careful of the activities in which he or she participates. The Scriptures assume that the cosmos is enchanted. And they encourage the Christian to avoid interacting with the supernatural apart from Christ. Lewis makes this pointedly clear with the Head in That Hideous Strength, which appears to be the product of human ingenuity yet is controlled by unseen forces.
August thus invites readers to see AI not just as a technological artifact to critique or fear, but as a cultural system that requires intentional and disciplined participation, communal discernment, and practices shaped by a Christian imagination attuned to both earthly and spiritual realities.
In a collaborative, multi-authored contribution, our next article is by a group of Christian agricultural scholars who, over the course of a year spent together at Anselm House, the Christian Study Center at the University of Minnesota, examined both secular and Christian cultural logics in their field. Their work culminated in our next article, “Cultural Logics in Agriculture: A Critical Christian Perspective.” These scholars, John Hill Price, Travis Pickell, Paul Capel, Kyungsoo Yoo, Dominic Christensen, Marie Culhane, Tyler Dick, John Deen, andEric Watkins, make the point that,
Because cultural logics are often held unconsciously and can be molded by any number of sources, a key problem facing Christians in agriculture is the uncritical absorption of primarily secular logics. These logics are frequently encountered through university classes and research. By explicitly naming dominant cultural logics and their underlying assumptions, we hope to better equip educators and students to critically evaluate these ways of thinking.
While centered in the field of agricultural science, this article effectively generalizes its main thesis to other fields by demonstrating how cultural logics, operating through educational and institutional logistics, reflexively create cognitive grooves that influence actions more than explicit beliefs. They write, “We might imagine each of the cultural logics as a particular groove into which agricultural activities tend to be directed. Over time, these grooves guide decision-making, often without conscious reflection. While it is difficult to travel where no path exists, failing to recognize the grooves risks being carried where one does not intend to go.” While all the other articles in this issue exemplify the concept of cultural logic, this article explicitly addresses it.
We publish occasional perspective pieces that are thoroughly researched but highlight a scholar’s reflections on his or her Christian academic vocation. Christine Watson, assistant professor of English at Biola University, shares how institutional norms and disciplinary genres exert formative power in her piece, “Writing Is Belonging: Recapturing the Communal Nature of Composition in a Hyper-individualistic World.”This piece beautifully captures embodied and heart-centered spiritual formation when worldview is enacted through intentional writing practices. Watson writes,
Our writing choices are shaped by the disciplinary community in which we operate. When we envision writing as deeply communal and formed mainly in collaboration with others, we embrace a more profoundly Christian scholarly ethos. Genre expressions are not solely or even primarily individualistic; rather, they represent authors inhabiting the identity of their discourse.
This piece speaks deeply about the pervasive unexamined cultural logic of individualism operating through the disciplinary logistics of teaching, assessment, and publication norms in writing. Moreover, it can be applied to many other academic fields in Western education.
At Christian Scholar’s Review, we generally publish articles in the order they are accepted. However, as we read these five pieces, which were next in the queue, we can see how Christian scholarship is building on the work of Holmes and others over the past seventy-five years to complement and expand the important prior work of thinking theologically and formatively about issues associated with epistemology. The articles in this issue demonstrate how thinking theologically about cultural logics of trust, belonging, and individualism, alongside cultural logistics of institutions and pedagogy, shakes us from unexamined loves that are culturally relevant and professionally rewarding yet theologically thin. The task of articulating and developing a life-system consisting of a coherent world and life-view, where all is surrendered to God’s sovereignty, remains an ongoing challenge and gift.
In our Book Reviews:
Rachel F. Pickett, professor of psychology, Concordia University Wisconsin, reviews Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Kyle J. A. Small, dean of graduate studies at Calvin University, reviews Kevin McClure, The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation (Johns Hopkins Press, 2025).
Christopher Gehrz, professor of history at Bethel University (MN), reviews Arthur Remillard, Bodies in Motion: A Religious History of Sports in America (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Michael N. Jacobs, deputy director of civics at Wright State University’s Center for Civics, Culture, and Workforce Development, reviews Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again (Basic Books, 2024).
Larry G. Locke, professor and associate dean at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, and research fellow, LCC International University, reviews Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa, eds., Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age (Crossway, 2025).
Duane Covrig, professor of religion at Kettering College, reviews A. J. Swoboda, A Teachable Spirit: The Virtue of Learning from Strangers, Enemies, and Absolutely Anyone (Zondervan Academic, 2025).
Adam Ryan Barton, graduate student in literature at the University of Dallas, reviews Nicholas Jenkins, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024).
Thanks to our book review editor, Matt Lundberg, for curating this set of reviews.
