James Sire: Some Personal Reflections

Jim
Fundamentalism & Evangelicalism
James Sire
Doug Groothuis
Worldview

Jim [Sire] was the father of the Christian worldview movement. Loosely defined, this movement is made of writers, speakers, and educators who advocated that Christianity be understood and promoted philosophically. C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer were key as well, but Sire consolidated the Christian view in a clear and captivating way. Christians should be able to explain what the Bible teaches and what the church has always affirmed according the rudiments of Christian theology and confession. However, worldview isn’t an in-group way of explaining Christianity. It is not a catechism. Rather, it specifies broad and neutral conceptual categories that can be applied to any belief system, not simply Christianity. Although he refined it in subsequent editions of The Universe Next Door, I still appreciate Sire’s first definition of a worldview.

James W. Sire (1933–2018) was a widely-respected apologist, author, and lecturer who served for more than thirty years as senior editor at InterVarsity Press. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the seminal apologetics title The Universe Next Door, which was first published in 1976 and has sold over 350,000 copies in five editions and has been translated into eighteen foreign languages.

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