Category Archives: Spirituality

Redeeming the Biblical Worldview: Q & A with J. Richard Middleton

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I was recently interviewed by Shiao Chong (he goes by Chong), Associate Director of Global Scholars Canada (GSC). I came on board as a scholar with GSC at the end of 2025, with a mandate to help Christian academics in public universities in Canada and beyond reflect more deeply on their calling as Christians, in relationship to their teaching, scholarship, and institutional participation.

Since the idea of a Christian (or “biblical”) worldview, which I have been promoting over the years, is at odds with the way this term has come to be used among many Evangelical Christians, Chong focused the interview on why I want to retain this terminology.

What follows is Chong’s introduction, followed by the interview, which is published on the Global Scholars Canada website.

Marcia & J. Richard Middleton

Dr. J. Richard Middleton, a Jamaican American Canadian who joined Global Scholars Canada in 2025, is an eminent scholar on Christian worldview. Together with Brian Walsh, he co-wrote the bestselling The Transforming Vision (1984) that practically popularized the concept of a biblical worldview to Christian circles. Currently, Richard is rewriting that seminal work, on his own, with the tentative title of Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws: The Bible’s Liberating Worldview.

Recently, I had the privilege and pleasure of conversing over video and subsequent emails with Richard about this book project. Below is a co-edited version (by Richard and me) of the main questions of our communications.

SC: Currently, the concept of a biblical worldview is very common among Christians. Do you think Christian faculty and graduate students still need to learn about a biblical worldview?

Yes, for two reasons. First, the concept of a biblical worldview has often been distorted in Christian circles, especially among Evangelicals. It has been reduced to a package of ideas, which Christians are supposed to link somehow to their field of study or research. It becomes almost an entirely cerebral affair that does not seem to affect the whole person. Christian philosopher Jamie Smith, for example, often avoids worldview terminology for this reason as it is often reduced to a rationalistic concept.

Beyond that, the actual content of what is often portrayed as a biblical worldview isn’t really what is taught in Scripture; the term “biblical” is used by many Christians as shorthand for what we think is right, which is often a set of so-called “absolutes.” I want to help educate the Christian community about the genuine biblical vision of life, which is empowering for our life and has implications for the vocation of Christian scholars.

I envision the biblical worldview as a river in which we are invited to swim. We get carried along by the current, which is the biblical story as told in Scripture, taught by the church, embodied in Christian worship, and in which we participate as a Christian community. All of this shapes us to be a certain kind of people; it is formative spirituality, a mode of Christian discipleship.

I like to use the quote from The Karate Kid (1984) movie to illustrate how learning a Christian worldview is an immersive experience. There is one scene where Mr. Miyagi asks the boy, Daniel, “You learn Karate from book?” That’s what Daniel was trying to do, whereas Mr. Miyagi learned karate by doing it experientially, in real life. Likewise, I tell my students that they can’t learn a Christian worldview from a course.

Don’t get me wrong: serious immersion in Scripture and intellectual grappling with ideas are important (they have been crucial for me) and I hope that my courses on a Christian worldview were helpful in guiding my students towards a deeper understanding of biblical faith. But a worldview is not a set of ideas. It is a lived vision, a whole-person orientation to the world.

When we indwell the biblical worldview and allow ourselves to be shaped by its values, we are able to engage the world and our specific fields of study as whole persons. We begin to ask questions of our discipline and to see things that others may not see. For example, during my MA studies at the U of Guelph, I was asking all sorts of questions in my philosophy classes, which got my professors’ attention. The kind of questions I asked were born out of my whole orientation to life (not just ideas), which was shaped by the biblical worldview.

SC: Why do you still wish to keep using the term “worldview” when it has been so distorted and when so many other Christian thinkers have tried to use different terms?

I don’t want those who have distorted the term to “win,” so to speak. They should not get to own the term they have distorted. The concept of worldview did not originate with Evangelicalism or even in theology. It was in circulation in other fields before Christians took hold of it. In fact, it is still being used in sociology and psychology in its original sense, as a preconceptual framework of meaning that orients people to the world. Just because Evangelicals have distorted and abused the concept does not mean that everyone else must abandon it. I want to reclaim its original sense.

SC: In your upcoming Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws book, you plan to include an analysis of our current “postmodern” tribalism. Can you elaborate a little on that?

Sure. Almost all premodern cultures have affirmed that there is some standard of truth or reality outside of us to which we should conform in order to live a good life. In the modern period people continued to affirm this but introduced the idea of human autonomy into the mix.

As a Christian, I certainly affirm that there are universal truths – non-negotiable truths as theologian John Stott calls them – and these truths are external to us human beings, which we can, in our fallible and limited ways, understand to some degree. I also believe that Scripture affirms the reality of human agency. In the Bible, we see that God takes us seriously as human subjects, empowering us to represent him as his image in the world and responding to our prayers, both on behalf of ourselves and others.

But modernity has distorted human agency into autonomy, thinking that we decide, ultimately, what the non-negotiable truths are. But this is untenable. It is obvious that human autonomy has not led to any agreement about what is universally true. I have come to think of modernity as an unstable hybrid of the claim to universal truths with the belief that these truths are in some sense grounded in (or discoverable through) autonomous human reason.

This instability has led to the postmodern crisis, where people have given up on the belief in universal truth, though they have continued to affirm (even emphasize) human autonomy. If we no longer share truths in common, but each of us autonomously decides our own truths, then we devolve into a “post-truth” culture.

But people aren’t isolated individuals. We end up banding together with those who share our views into a “tribe”. Postmodern tribalism is almost reverting back to paganism – the sort we find in pre-Jewish and pre-Christian times – when tribes clash with other tribes for ideological and political dominance.

Richard, teaching on the Temple Mount steps

When Christians distort their worldview into a re-packaged set of absolute truths they only feed into this postmodern tribalism. They become another tribe, who believe that a certain set of ideas are absolute truths from God, which often results in seeing anyone who disagrees with the tribe as evil and demonic. It closes off dialogue. Instead of the biblical worldview opening you up to others, to share God’s love, you end up using a supposedly “biblical” worldview to shut others down and defend yourself against the other tribes.

SC: You also plan to add two chapters in the rewrite that addresses a Christian approach to suffering and the biblical pattern of discipleship respectively. Why focus on suffering and discipleship?

The theology I learned growing up in the church had a low view of humanity and did not value God’s creation. It was, therefore, transformative for my spiritual life when I discovered the biblical vision of God’s desire to redeem creation, instead of destroying it. God’s intent to bring shalom with peace and justice to this world gives Christians a much more positive and hopeful view of the ultimate end, the value of creation and of our human lives.

However, this begs the question: if it is God’s plan to redeem creation, why hasn’t God done it yet? Why are we still facing all sorts of injustice and challenges? Why is the redemption of all things seem so far off? Why are we still suffering as we live “between the times”?

That is why I think it is important to look at the concept of suffering in Scripture. And when you do that, you will find that God cares about the suffering of his creatures, so much that he became one of us in the incarnation to suffer on our behalf. And God listens to our laments that come from our experience of suffering.

Suffering is also part of the pattern of discipleship in the New Testament. Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23 NIV) Taking up the cross involves suffering for the sake of Christ. Similarly, the apostle Paul talks about sharing in Christ’s sufferings: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” (Rom. 8:17 NIV) And again: “For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” (2 Cor. 1:5 NIV)

This is why I think we need to have a Christian approach to suffering and to understand the biblical pattern of discipleship. This honest recognition of suffering in Scripture shows that the authentic biblical worldview isn’t just a rationalistic package of ideas but is grounded in the reality of the world as we know it.

SC: What do you plan to do with your fresh teaching on Christian worldview, especially with regards to your work with Global Scholars Canada?

The first thing I’m doing, as already mentioned, is writing an updated version of The Transforming Vision, my very first book, which was an attempt to introduce a Christian worldview to a wider public. At the time, I was a graduate student and campus minister at the University of Guelph. Since then, I’ve expanded (and deepened) my understanding of the Bible’s theology, so the new book will reflect that.

Another change will be in what you might call contextualization; I want to continue breaking down our unbiblical dualism, our separation of faith and the sacred from the rest of life (including our academic work), but I’m also writing the new book with an eye to the relevance of the Bible’s vision for our contemporary culture of postmodern tribalism.

Beyond writing, I hope to work closely with Global Scholars Canada to discern how best to use my gifts of teaching and mentoring. I particularly want to help Christian academics discern their calling to participate in God’s purposes for the redemption of earthly life. Given my primary expertise as a biblical scholar, my mission with GSC is to raise the level of biblical literacy among Christian academics through immersion in serious study of the Scriptures. I would love to see Christian academics inspired by the relevance of the Bible’s worldview for all they do, both on the job and in the rest of their life.

If you want to hear more about what I mean by a Christian “worldview,” check out “Reclaiming the Christian Worldview | J. Richard Middleton,” an interview from September 2025 on the UpWords podcast of Upper House (a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison).

For those interested, I have posted my own reflections on joining Global Scholars Canada.

This is a short piece introducing me to the GSC community, written by Peter Schuurman, the director of Global Scholars Canada.

My Signature Course on “Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology, Ethics”

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This Fall (beginning August 26, 2025), I will be teaching my signature course on the Biblical Worldview as a radical, liberating vision for the church and the world. The course has had a number of different names over the years, including “Exploring the Christian Worldview” (the undergraduate version at Roberts Wesleyan University) and “Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology, Ethics” (the graduate version at Northeastern Seminary).

I’ve taught non-credit versions of this course since I was a campus minister in Canada (at the University of Toronto, McMaster University, the University of Guelph, and Brock University) and in the US (at the University of Rochester, Cornell University, and Syracuse University).

My first book, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (IVP, 1984), which I co-authored with Brian Walsh, was based on this course.

When I began to teach the course for graduate and undergraduate credit at the Institute for Christian Studies, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Roberts Wesleyan University, and Northeastern Seminary, I was able to develop the content further with a deeper dive into Scripture and further analysis of our changing cultural contexts.

This Fall the course will be offered as a dual modality course, which means that it may be accessed in person (in the classroom) or remotely (by Zoom link). It may also be taken for undergraduate or graduate credit.

Although the term “biblical worldview” has been used and abused by Christians with a rigid, absolutist stance, I want to reclaim the term for the Bible’s liberating vision of shalom and flourishing. That’s the orientation of this course. 

I am planning a complete rewrite of my earlier book The Transforming Vision along these lines. It is tentatively entitled Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws: The Bible’s Liberating Worldview (to be published by Baker Academic).

I have been authorized by Northeastern Seminary to invite anyone interested to register for the course (in either modality—in person or online) for credit or for audit.

Auditors receive all the same resources as those taking the course for credit, without submitting any assignments. These resources include links to the professor’s weekly video lectures, along with links to PDFs of readings and handouts.

The course will meet for fourteen weeks on Tuesdays at 7:00–8:30 pm Eastern. The format will be a flipped classroom. Participants view the video lectures and do the readings in advance (auditors are encouraged to do as much or as little of the reading as they desire).

This weekly preparation gives participants a chance to formulate thoughtful questions that arise from the lectures and readings, which they are invited to bring to our hour-and-a-half synchronous meeting each week. These weekly meetings are a rich time of discussion and sharing, as we explore matters of biblical interpretation, worldview, theology, culture, and ethics, and their bearing on our lives.

“Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology, Ethics” (GBHT 5210) is a 3-credit course. The tuition is normally $575 per credit hour (thus $1,725 for the course). The fee for auditing is only $199.

If you are interested in taking the course (for audit or credit), you may use the NES Fast Application link (Fast App for short) to submit some preliminary information about yourself. Auditing students (and those desiring credit, yet not registering for a degree program) should select “Non-Degree Seeking” on the drop-down menu under “Application Type.” You don’t need to fill in all the information boxes in the app, just those with an asterisk.

When you have filled out the required information, you should email Jess Newcomb (Asst. Director of Recruiting and Admissions for Graduate, Professional Studies, & Seminary) at admissions@nes.edu to let her know you have completed the Fast App and that you want to audit the Biblical Worldview course; she will take you through the next steps for registering as an auditor. You can also call or text her at 585.565.6533.

You can read a full course description here.

You can see the course outline and topics covered here.

Here are the course objectives.

This is the list of core readings.

What Did Jesus Mean by the Kingdom of God? (The Kingdom of God, part 2)

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In my last post, I addressed the reversal of power dynamics in the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. But beyond that, what did Jesus mean by this term?

The Nazareth Manifesto

To understand Jesus’s use of the term “kingdom of God,” it is helpful to turn to Luke’s Gospel, which does not use the term “kingdom of God” in Jesus’s opening message. Along with Matthew and Mark (the other Synoptic Gospels), Luke tells us about Jesus’s baptism by John (Matthew 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–22), followed by his temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4: 1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13). Then all three Gospel writers note that Jesus returns to Galilee and begins his preaching (Matthew 4:12–16; Mark 1:14; Luke 4: 14–15).

But whereas in Matthew and Mark, Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom in a short, succinct statement (Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:15), Luke has an extended account of a synagogue message that Jesus delivered in Nazareth, his hometown (Luke 4:16–30), without, however, any explicit mention of the kingdom.

Yet we know that Jesus was expounding on the nature of the kingdom in Luke’s account, since a bit later Luke notes that after Nazareth, Jesus moved on to Capernaum, another town in Galilee. And when he was about to leave Galilee to continue his mission in the province of Judea, Jesus explained: “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose” (Luke 4:43). In other words, Luke’s account of Jesus’s sermon in Nazareth is an example of his preaching about the kingdom of God.

It is likely that Luke gives us this more extended example of Jesus’s preaching instead of the succinct summary about the “kingdom” found in Matthew and Mark because he wanted to clarify the nature of the kingdom of God (a distinctively Jewish concept) to non-Jewish readers. Luke addressed his Gospel to “most excellent Theophilus,” who may have been a high-ranking gentile (Luke 1:1–4).

The way Jesus unpacks the nature of the kingdom in Luke 4, then, is particularly helpful for us—living in the twenty-first century—in cultures very different from first-century Galilee.

After his testing in the wilderness, Jesus began teaching in the synagogues of Galilee (Luke 4:14–15). When he arrived in his hometown, Nazareth, he attended the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom (Luke 4:16). He stood up to read the Scripture and was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the scroll to Isaiah 61 and read these words:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
       because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
       and recovery of sight to the blind,
       to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18–19)

Quoting Isaiah

The Scripture Luke quotes Jesus reading is Isaiah 61:1 and part of verse 2, with a line inserted from Isaiah 58:6 (“to let the oppressed go free”). In their original context, both Isaiah 61 and 58 were addressed to those Jews who had returned to their ancestral land, after having experienced exile in Babylon. Following a devastating series of attacks by the Babylonian empire in the late sixth century, which killed many Jews and destroyed the city of Jerusalem—along with the temple, the center of Jewish religious life—the Babylonians took a portion of the remaining population into exile, relocating them in the center of the empire.

Now, after a hiatus of nearly seventy years, as a result of a regime change (Babylon was conquered by the Persians), some Jews had returned to their homeland. Yet their society was still in shambles, characterized by internal injustice and oppression. Speaking in a post-exilic context, to those who had returned to the land, the prophet announced the “good news” of a new era (“the year of the Lord’s favor”) when God will act decisively on behalf of the poor, releasing captives, restoring sight to those who are blind, and setting the oppressed free.

Why does Jesus draw on this passage? And what did he mean by these phrases: “good news to the poor,” “release to the captives,” “recovery of sight to the blind” and “to let the oppressed go free”? In what way do these actions signify “the year of the Lord’s favor”? And how do they clarify the nature of the kingdom of God, which is being fulfilled in Jesus’ ministry?

The Problem of Spiritualizing Jesus’s Message

It has been very common for Christians through the ages to spiritualize Jesus’s Nazareth sermon, reducing the message to one of freeing people from internal captivity (bondage to sin) and spiritual blindness. Even the term “poor” in “good news to the poor” has been understood to mean those who were “poor in spirit” (aware of their “spiritual” needs).

Now, Jesus certainly did bring internal restoration (the forgiveness of sins) and a fundamental reorientation of values; this is clear from his call to repentance—radical change is required to be aligned with God’s kingdom. But to reduce Jesus’s message at Nazareth (or the meaning of God’s kingdom) solely to something internal is to misread his words in terms of an unbiblical value distinction of sacred/secular, spiritual/physical, or personal/social.

This framework, derived from later Christian tradition, which downplays outward action and the importance of social realities in relation to the importance of the inner person (the “soul”), is often imposed on the text from the outside. But no-one in Jesus’s day would have understood his words in this sense.

This spiritualizing interpretation is blown out of the water by the phrase “to let the oppressed go free,” which is taken from a prophetic passage in Isaiah 58:1–14. Here the prophet pointedly challenges landowners and others with power who exploit their workers (which included withholding their wages); yet these powerful people attend religious ceremonies and perform religious rituals (like fasting), while continuing to act unjustly towards others (their religious rituals even end, the prophet says, in quarreling and fighting).

Biblical Spirituality and Justice

This passage is one of many in the Old Testament that critique those who attempt to practice a form of religion (or spirituality) that is contradicted by their actual way of life. By contrast, Isaiah 58 describes the form of spirituality that pleases God.

Is not this the kind of “fasting” I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
      and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
      and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry
      and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
      and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
(Isaiah 58:6–7)

These are concrete actions to remedy social injustice, which involve meeting the real needs of actual people. Isaiah 58 goes on to promise that if the people fulfill God’s requirements for justice with their neighbors, then the social order will be healed:

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
      you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
      the restorer of streets to live in. (Isaiah 58:12)

A similar statement is found in Isaiah 61, just two verses after the section Jesus quotes: 

They shall build up the ancient ruins,
      they shall raise up the former devastations;
They shall repair the ruined cities,
      the devastations of many generations. (Isaiah 61:4)

The Kingdom and Social Transformation

It makes sense that Jesus (or Luke) connected Isaiah 61 and 58; both have to do with social renewal in postexilic Judah. So the insertion of Isaiah 58:6 at the end of Isaiah 61:1 further affirms the this-worldly nature of the kingdom Jesus was proclaiming.

Both Isaiah 61 and 58 were addressed to the dysfunctional social reality of post-exilic Israel and envision a new social order in which justice would be restored. Jesus draws on this message in his Nazareth sermon, applying it his own day, since centuries later Israel was still in a similar situation. Beyond Roman oppression, Jewish society was full of political jockeying and economic inequalities. But Jesus announced that things are about to change—the kingdom of God is coming! This kingdom refers, most fundamentally, to a world conformed to God’s standards, where that which is broken is healed and society is ordered according to God’s priorities of justice, generosity, and love.

But where did this idea of the kingdom of God come from? What are its roots, its origin?

That’s the topic for the next post.

This is the second installment of a longer piece I am writing on the Kingdom of God for a volume of essays introducing Christianity to a broad, international audience (to be published by Routledge). Part 3 may be found here.