Category: Journal Issues

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.

This article illustrates how the misconception that “gospel communication” is free from the bias of ones cultural underpinnings can be a dangerous and often destructive assumption. Twiss defines what the underlying and clashing worldview assumptions are and how the ethnocentric impulse distorts the gospel of Jesus Christ; the result is a hegemonic and truncated gospel among the First Nations People of the United States.

This essay gives an overview of how American Federal policy and missionary enterprise led to the devastating negative conditions faced by Native North American people today. Great strides are being taken to correct the neo-colonial, ethnocentric, and hegemonic tendencies in the American church. We will do well to heed George Hunter’s exhortation for a return to an earlier period where there was indeed an indigenous movement.