The twentieth-century struggle between Neo-Calvinists and Dialectical Theologians had less to do with disagreement about specific points of doctrine than with conflicting perspectives on the relation between faith and worldview. Whereas Abraham Kuyper, the most significant leader of the Neo-Calvinist movement, adopted the concept of worldview to promote the ecclesial, social, and political emancipation of working class Calvinists, Karl Barth, the innovator of Dialectical Theology, opposed the concept as socially regressive and theologically defective. The debate between Neo-Calvinists and Dialectical Theologians over the right relation between faith and worldview raises still unsettled questions about the way of public theology in the twenty-first century.
The questions raised by this conflict remain still today: Is the Christian worldview involved in life-or-death struggles with other worldviews—the “modern worldview” (or perhaps the “Islamic worldview”)? Or does faith in Jesus Christ cut across such ideological disagreements between human beings? The past illumines the need to carefully study its content so we might not repeat past mistakes thereby losing out in our engagement of culture.