What's Your Worldview?

What's Your Worldview? by James N. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For what it is, I'm giving this book four stars.  This is a relatively quick overview of worldviews and I think something like it is much-needed today.  It's written in a "choose your own adventure" style, which I think works for this.  The reader is posed a series of questions and based on his or her answers, follows the path to read an explanation of his or her worldview.

I read through all the various choices because I was curious to see how each would be explained.  This is a simplistic overview compared to many I've read before (such as Assumptions That Affect Our Lives or The Universe Next Door or How Should We Then Live) but I think it is a good book to hand to a young teenager for a first exposure to worldview, or even through a person's 20s just to challenge someone to think about WHY they think what they think.

The author bias is from a christian worldview and he makes no effort to hide that he is trying to point the reader to that worldview as he asks questions to challenge the reader to re-evaluate choices that led them to their current worldview.  There was only one section I disagreed with, which was in the author's rebuttal of the worldview of Pelagianism (which I don't remember from any of the other books) and stated:  "the Bible teaches we are born in a sinful and spiritually dead state, unable to live good moral lives apart from divine grace" (83).  My understanding is that Pelagianism teaches we don't need the grace of God, but can "earn" heaven by living a good life.  Obviously, this teaching is untrue as 1) heaven is the GIFT of God and cannot be earned and 2) no one is able to live without sin--only Jesus did that--and all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

My disagreement is with his statement that "the Bible teaches we are born in a sinful and spiritually dead state."  Ironically, in his description of the Christian worldview, I think he had a much better description:

"Tragically, however, we humans rebelled against our Creator and flouted his perfect moral laws.  By doing so, we spoiled God's creation, corrupted ourselves, and placed ourselves under his righteous judgment" (59).  

Each of us make this choice to rebel against our Creator and thus need the grace of God.  I wish he had stuck to this explanation in his rebuttal to Pelagianism as well since it is both more accurate and more consistent.

Otherwise, I think this is a very good book for an overview of worldviews and a handbook to help individuals examine why they believe what they believe. 

I received this book in return for my honest review from www.crossway.org/blog