Category Archives: Worldview

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.

Islands in the Sun: Overtures to a Caribbean Theology

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As a representative of Global Scholars Canada, I will be presenting a virtual talk for the Library Reading Group of the Society of Christian Scholars on Friday, 5 June at 1400 UTC (10:00 AM EDT).

The Reading Group meets once per month with the stated purpose to “discuss a resource from the Library concerning how to grow in our vocation as Christian academics for redemptive influence among our students, colleagues, academic disciplines, and universities.”

I’ve been asked to introduce the chapter “Islands in the Sun: Overtures to a Caribbean Creation Theology” that I contributed to the book I coedited with Garnett Roper, called A Kairos Moment for Caribbean Theology: Ecumenical Voices in Dialogue (Pickwick, 2013). My presentation will be followed by a time of discussion (Q&A).

If you would like to attend the June 5 presentation, you can register here (it is free); a Zoom link will be sent to you.

If you would like to read the chapter in advance, you can download it as a PDF here.

In my presentation, I will analyze some of the key themes of the article and give some background on why I wrote it (originally for a 2010 conference held at Jamaica Theological Seminary in Kingston, Jamaica) and what theological and cultural issues it was intended to address. I will also touch on how the article became the basis for my book A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Baker Academic, 2014).

In preparation for my June 5 presentation, a Christian scholar from Kenya (Sam Sani Nzevela) has written a brief review of the article.

Review of “Islands in the Sun: Overtures to a Caribbean Creation Theology”

By Sam Sani Nzevela, Software Web Solutions Architect, Machakos, Kenya

Having reviewed Richard Middleton’s chapter, I find it as one of the most compelling theological works of our time. It offers a robust and biblically grounded bridge connecting:

Creation → Stewardship → Governance → Justice → Human Flourishing → Ecological Sustainability

At a time when humanity faces growing social inequality, ecological degradation, governance failures, and moral uncertainty, Middleton returns us to a foundational truth: God’s redemptive purpose extends beyond individual salvation to the restoration and flourishing of all creation.

His work challenges the false separation between the spiritual and the material, between faith and public life, and between salvation and stewardship. Instead, it presents humanity as God’s image-bearers, entrusted with the responsibility of caring for creation, advancing justice, and promoting the common good.

I consider this chapter to be an inspired piece of modern theological scholarship. While Scripture alone remains the ultimate authority, Middleton’s contribution powerfully illuminates biblical truths that are urgently needed in our generation. His insights deserve serious consideration by churches, universities, policymakers, and educational institutions. Indeed, aspects of this creation-centered stewardship theology ought to be taught in schools as part of forming responsible citizens, ethical leaders, and faithful stewards of God’s creation.

For Africa and the wider world, this framework offers a practical pathway toward sustainable development, ethical governance, environmental responsibility, social justice, and human flourishing rooted in divine purpose.

May 2026

The Ultimate Victory of God’s Kingdom (The Kingdom of God, part 6)

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This is the sixth (and final) installment of an article on the Kingdom of God.

Part 1 began with Jesus’s proclamation at the start of his ministry about the kingdom of God. Part 2 looked at Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth, in which he explained the nature of the kingdom he was inaugurating.

Part 3 shifted to the biblical backstory of the kingdom, beginning with the royal calling of humanity created to image God, including how we squandered our calling through sin and violence, culminating in the tower of Babel. Part 4 traced the story of Israel from Abraham to the Babylonian exile, with a focus on the theme of “rule” (power and agency).

Part 5 picked up the story with the messianic ministry and mission of Jesus, leading to his confrontation with the powers in Jerusalem at Passover.

The current installment examines the climax of the story of the kingdom of God, as God’s purposes for creation and history come to fruition through the Messiah.

After the Babylonian exile, when Israel had returned to the land, the prophetic expectations of restoration and blessing had not been fulfilled. Israel was still oppressed by various empires (the latest being Rome) and the people were still mired in sin and injustice.

There was a growing sense in the Old Testament, however, that the problem Israel faced was greater than either the external oppression by empires or the internal sinfulness of the people—though both were certainly real.

The Supra-Human Powers of Evil

Various biblical texts make this point by using the metaphor of the chaotic sea or dangerous sea beasts to represent the supra-human power of evil that lies behind human action.

Examples include Ezekiel’s description of the Egyptian Pharaoh as a great water-monster whom God will pull out of the Nile with hooks or haul up with a net (Ezekiel 29:2–7; 32:2–4) and Jeremiah’s picture of the king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon as a sea serpent swallowing Israel, which will be forced to disgorge its prey (Jeremiah 51:34 and 51:44). It is as if there are destructive powers that lie behind human embodiments of evil.

The book of Daniel portrays a series of four oppressive empires as ravenous, devouring beasts arising from the sea (Dan 7:1–8), noting that they will be judged by God and their power taken away (Daniel 7:9–12).

Granted, neither the sea nor great sea beasts are always used as symbols of chaos or evil in the Bible; they are portrayed positively as aspects of God’s good, though wild, creation in some texts (Genesis 1:21; Psalm 95:5 and 104:26; and Job 41:1–34).

Yet elsewhere God is said to oppose and battle the sea, Leviathan, or some form of sea serpent (Job 26:12–13; Psalm 74:14 and 89:9–10). In Isaiah 27 this symbol is used for God’s final, eschatological judgment on evil: “On that day YHWH will punish with his fierce and great and strong sword Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1).

The sense that there were supra-human powers of evil, which had human individuals and even empires in their grip, developed in the period between the Old and New Testaments. This led to the explicit doctrine of personified evil, both in the form of demonic forces (also called unclean spirits or principalities and powers in the New Testament) and the devil or Satan, which the book of Revelation, drawing on Old Testament imagery, calls the “great dragon” and the “ancient serpent” (Revelation 12:9).

Although many of our popular ideas about the devil and the demonic come from post-biblical literature and not the Bible itself, the Bible clearly endorses the idea that there are systemic meta-human powers of evil that constrain human behavior.

Angels (lit. “messengers”) from God often appear in the Old Testament, though there is no systematic explanation of who they are. It is not until the book of Daniel that we find the first explicit reference to angelic opposition to God, in the form of a struggle between “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” and an angel (who seems to be Gabriel), who had to be aided by another angel, Michael, “one of the chief princes” (Daniel 10:13). By the time we get to the New Testament, the idea of supra-human powers that oppress human beings and have them in their grip is standard in Jewish thinking. This underlies the Gospel stories of Jesus’s confrontation with demonic powers throughout his ministry.

Jesus could counsel his followers to love their enemies (Matthew 5:43–44; Luke 6:27–28) because he did not regard even his human opponents (Jewish or Roman) as the ultimate enemy. As Ephesians 6 puts it: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

The Clash of the Kingdoms

The clash between God’s kingdom and the powers of evil is clear from Jesus’s response to the accusation that he was casting out demons by the power of Satan, here called “Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” (Luke 11:15). He responded that if this were true, it would mean that the kingdom of evil was divided against itself (Luke 11:18). However, “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Luke 11:20).

Jesus then used a vivid metaphor to describe his work of overcoming the dominion of the Evil One: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his castle, his property is safe. But when one stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his plunder.” (Luke 11:21–22) This metaphor points to Jesus’s mission to liberate Israel and all people—indeed, the entire creation—from bondage to evil. Since Passover was the symbol of the expected liberation, Jesus chose that central Jewish festival as the time of his confrontation with the powers in all their raw opposition.

But how did Jesus overpower the “strong man”? In line with his teaching about an alternative form of rule—different from gentile overlords—Jesus did not come to overcome evil by the violent use of power. Rather, he came “to give himself a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

By submitting himself to Roman crucifixion, Jesus disarmed the powers of evil and absorbed into himself all the brokenness and corruption of human life, all the selfishness and the violence that mars this world—to suck it out of creation, to drain the mortal wound of sin, and give us back life and health and peace instead. Although any explanation of the sacrifice of Jesus on behalf of others always falters—it is ultimately a paradox—the New testament affirms that when the Messiah offered himself as the Passover lamb for a new exodus, he effectively “takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

From Inauguration to Consummation—A Comprehensive Kingdom

Through his death on a cross and resurrection victory, Jesus inaugurated God’s kingdom as an alternative to the corrupt empires and dominions of this world. His resurrection is the “first fruits” of those who have died (1 Corinthians 15:20); the harvest of new creation has begun—the promised reversal of sin and death has been inaugurated.

But the reversal doesn’t happen all at once. The Bible is ruthlessly honest about the continuing struggle against evil; the clash of the kingdoms continues in our time. Yet the Scriptures envision a day when the kingdom will be consummated—bodies will be healed and human society will finally reflect God’s purposes for mercy and justice.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom of God anticipates God’s ultimate triumph over the powers of evil. In one of his parables, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a woman who put some leaven (yeast) into a large amount of dough, in preparation for baking a loaf of bread. The yeast eventually permeated the entire loaf (Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:20–21). It may be a slow process, but the leavening of creation by the kingdom of God will be comprehensive, “far as the curse is found” (to quote the Christmas carol, “Joy to the World”).

The comprehensive nature of the kingdom of God is also portrayed in Daniel’s vision of a huge statue confronted by a small stone. The statue represents all the kingdoms of the world, whereas the stone is “not made by human hands” (representing God’s kingdom). Yet this seemingly insignificant stone strikes the statue and demolishes it; then the stone grows into a mountain that fills the entire earth (Dan 2:31–36, 44–45).

This transformation is envisioned in the book of Revelation when an angel announces, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

The growth of the messianic kingdom is nothing less than God’s redemptive purposes becoming manifest in history, till the earth is filled with the knowledge of God (or of his glory) as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14). On that day, the prophet Zephaniah proclaims, “YHWH will be king over all the earth” (Zechariah 14:9).

The Human Role in the Coming Kingdom

When God comes to bring justice to the earth, even the non-human created order will respond in praise to its maker (Psalm 96:11–13). Just as earthly life was subjected to corruption by the distortion of human rule, so in the kingdom of God the earth will be restored when redeemed humans take up their rule again—this time in accordance with the principles of God’s peaceable reign.

In the Beatitudes, Jesus affirmed that “the meek [not the powerful oppressors] will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5) and the book of Revelation pictures a great number from many nations formed into God’s royal priesthood (God’s redeemed people), who will “reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:10); this is the restoration of the original human calling as the image of God (Genesis 1:26–28). Indeed, the redeemed will “reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5).

When the kingdom of God is fully established in human life, and humans image their Creator by their loving and generous exercise of power, then creation itself, which has been groaning in its bondage to corruption (Romans 8:22), will be liberated from this bondage to share in the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:19–21).

The entire biblical story from creation to eschaton—from origin to climax—testifies to God’s unshakeable purpose for the flourishing of the world. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1); and in the end there will be “a new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

That new creation is the fulfillment of the kingdom of God.