Review of Worldview as Worship

Worldview as Worship, by Eddie Karl Baumann

Baumann is a Christian educator who desires to be thoroughly biblical in the way he approaches education, particularly surrounding the issue of how one integrates biblical faith with content, irrespective of the particular teaching discipline. His goal is that education would be properly transformative for the student, not merely informative.

In order to introduce his ideas to the reader, Bauman very creatively assembles a fictional faculty at a Christian high school, and uses the characters as a foil for building his case at the beginning of many of the chapters. This is especially effective as he presents the faculty as attending a series of conferences conducted by a specialist who is challenging them to develop a truly biblically transformative educational environment.

Baumann has several basic points he wants to get across. He makes a case that the common conception of worldview as a rationally qualified philosophy actually confuses philosophy with worldview. Baumann argues that worldview is in fact inculcated by culture and is, in that sense, pre-rational. He contends that a particular worldview can actually support several disparate philosophies.

Second, Baumann argues that worldview formation (and transformation) is more akin to an apprenticeship model than to an academic model. As he says at the end of his book, it is more caught than taught (312).

His conclusion is that a genuinely biblical integration of faith and content must take place in the context of a faith community that is actively obeying Christ, fulfilling His commands to love our neighbors as ourselves. Merely having the right answers to questions does not display a genuinely biblical worldview. Hence the title, Worldview as Worship.

It is a well-written, carefully-argued book. Not all of his thoughts do I agree with, especially when he veers into areas such as economics. His division of the varieties of biblical worldview into types is interesting (pp 216-240). I think it is a little more tied to one's eschatology than Baumann does, nonetheless it was provocative.

Strengths of the book: exhaustively researched, theologically astute, carefully argued, well illustrated with examples and scenarios. Some of his thinking I would characterize as profound. He does a wonderful job of assembling the biblical data and then interpreting it in a theologically accurate way, all the while using numerous quotes from other writers to buttress his own thinking.

Weaknesses of the book: it was almost too much. His argumentation was so close and so detailed that I was frequently losing the larger picture of the points he was seeking to advance. It would help the readability of the book to use more subheadings that would guide the reader through the labyrinth of his argument with single sentences. At times I also lost the sense of the progression of the argument. I have to admit, however, that this might be less of a problem for most readers, as it took me a long time to read the book (my fault, not Baumann's), and therefore I may have lost track of the argumentation simply because of my own slowness in reading.

Worldview as Worship is an excellent book for thinkers who are at least somewhat conversant with philosophy and philosophical terms, and who are solidly biblically literate. It is college-level material, if not graduate-level, in my opinion.