Kraft, Hiebert, and Conn: A Comparison

I have found the work of Charles Kraft, Paul Hiebert and Harvie Conn very helpful as I have tried to get my head around the topics of religion, culture and worldview. But the three authors use the terms quite differently. Here is a comparison of their terms and below an attempt to diagram that and add my own proposal.

	Worldview	Religion	Culture
Kraft	“the culturally structured assumptions, values, and commitments/allegiances underlying a people’s perception of reality and their responses to those perceptions”[1]	“… a means of relating to and dealing with an important part of the nonhuman universe.”[2] “A religion, then, is a set of cultural forms in terms of which a faith is expressed.”[3]	“a society’s complex, integrated coping mechanism, consisting of learned, patterned concepts and behavior, plus their underlying perspectives (worldview) and resulting artifacts (material culture).”[4]
Hiebert	“A worldview provides people with their basic assumptions about reality.”[5] “the foundational cognitive, affective, and evaluative assumptions and frameworks a group of people makes about the nature of reality which they use to order their lives.”[6]	“Religion provides them with the specific content of this reality ….”[7] “Religion … is the model man uses to explain the reality of all things.”[8]	“the more or less integrated systems of ideas, feelings, and values and their associated patterns of behaviour and products shared by a group of people who organize and regulate what they think, feel, and do.”[9] “… the integrated system of learned patterns of behavior, ideas, and products characteristic of a society.”[10]
Conn	“…the prescientific factories and bank vaults of presuppositions…”[11]	“[Religion] is the core in the structuring of culture, the integrating and radical response of humanity to the revelation of God. Life is religion.”[12]	“[Cultures] are integrated, holistic patterns structured around the meeting of basic human needs.”[13]

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This is very tentative - an attempt to create a mediating space for worldview that acknowledges that there are some aspects of life, e.g. views of time and space, that are basic but nevertheless culturally relative. (The software sadly doesn't let me draw lines in all the right places.)

Kraft	Culture
	Worldview	Religion	Other aspects of culture
Hiebert	Culture
	Religion		Other aspects of culture
	Worldview	Religion expressed
Conn	Religion/Worldview		Culture
My Proposal		Cultures/Religions
		Worldview
	Religion

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[1] Charles, H. Kraft, Christianity with Power (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant, 1989), 20.

[2] Kraft, Anthropology for Christian Witness, 197.

[3] Charles, H. Kraft, “Is Christianity a Religion or a Faith?” in Appropriate Christianity (Charles H. Kraft, ed.; Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2005), 87 (original emphasis).

[4] Kraft, Anthropology for Christian Witness, 38.

[5] Paul G. Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 371.

[6] Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 25-26.

[7] Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology, 371.

[8] Ibid., 356.

[9] Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 30.

[10] Hiebert, Cultural Anthropology, 25.

[11] Conn, “Culture,” 254.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 253.