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PeaTota 08-07-94 Total
Truth Liberating
Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity Nancy Pearcey Crossway
Books, 2005, 511 pp., ISBN 1-58134-746-4 |
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Summary Nancy Pearcey is
editor-at-large for the Pearcey Report and the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar
at the World Journalism Institute.
Pearcey has been publishing pioneering works on Christian worldview
since 1977. This follow up to How Now Shall We Live by Colson and
Pearcey is a practical worldview or philosophy text for ordinary people. It all begins with Creation. If origins are ceded to natural causes, a
nontheistic worldview is determined. Part I outlines
the current secular/sacred dichotomy.
Part 2 deals with Creation. Part
3 looks at our evangelical heritage.
Part 4 sets forth the practical, personal application. “It is
not uncommon to find well-meaning evildoers, as it were, who are quite
sincerely convinced that they are Christians, and attend church faithfully,
and may even hold a position of leadership, but who have absorbed a worldview
that makes it easy for them to ignore their Christian principles when it
comes time to do the practical business of daily living.” (12, Foreword by Philip Johnson) “To
survive in modern or postmodern American culture without being overwhelmed by
its concealed prejudices, everyone needs to know how to recognize those
prejudices, to understand what kind of thinking brought them into existence,
and to be able to explain to ourselves and others what is wrong with the
pervasive assumptions that often come labeled only as ‘the way all rational
people think,’ and that will swamp our faith if we are not alert to
them.” (12, Foreword by Philip
Johnson) Highlights The first step
in forming a Christian worldview is to overcome the sharp divide between the
"heart" and the "brain," the public/private split. "We have to reject the division of
life into a sacred realm…over against a secular realm that includes science,
politics, economics, and the rest of the public arena." In our culture "Values have been
reduced to arbitrary, existential decisions." (20) It looks like this: Upper Story - VALUES are matters of
individual choice. nonrational -- -- ---- -- ---- -- ---- -- ---- --
---- -- ---- -- ---- -- ---- -- ---- -- ---- -- ---- -- Lower Story - FACTS are binding on
everyone. rational, verifiable This grid
defines what is to be taken seriously, as knowledge, and what is simply
wishful thinking. Christianity is
trapped in the upper story of private values.
"We need to liberate the gospel from its cultural captivity,
restoring it to the status of public truth." (22) Part I.
What's in a Worldview? 1.
Breaking Out of the Grid For many
Christianity is a thin veneer over a secular worldview core. Faith is a purely private experience.
(32) Christian families are sincere
but have absorbed their views on just about everything by osmosis from the
culture. (33) We inhabit two separate
worlds. (32-35) "'Thinking
Christianly' means understanding that Christianity gives the truth about the
whole of reality, a perspective for interpreting every subject matter."
(34) It is a lens for interpreting the
world. (35) What are your
ultimate premises, the assumptions you accept by faith? (41) There are two groups: "those who
follow God and submit their minds to His truth, and those who set up an idol
of some kind and then organize their thinking to rationalize their worship of
that idol." (42) If we do not consciously develop a biblical approach
we will unconsciously absorb some
other philosophical approach. "Our
worldview is the way we answer the core questions of life that everyone has
to struggle with: What are we here for?
What is ultimate truth? Is
there anything worth living for?" (51) "Christians
need to move beyond criticizing
culture to creating culture."
(58) 2. Rediscovering Joy "Ordinary
Christians working in business, industry, politics, factory work, and so on,
are 'the Church's front-line troops in her engagement with the world,' wrote
Lesslie Newbigin." "The
church is nothing less than a training ground for sending out laypeople who
are equipped to speak the gospel to the world." "We are to be like missionaries,
actively translating the language of faith into the language of the culture
around us." (67) "The
private sphere has become increasingly religious, while at the same time the
public sphere has become increasingly secular." (68) "In practice, the notion that reason is
religiously neutral means that secularism and naturalism are often promoted
under the guise of 'neutrality.'"
"The effect of such a stance, however, is that Christians will
abandon the world of ideas to the secularists. …secularism is itself a philosophical
commitment…. It is impossible to think
without some set of presuppositions about the world." (94) 3. Keeping Religion in Its Place Most believers
compartmentalize their lives, maintaining a personal devotional time but
operating by secular assumptions at work. (98) "The rules of professional scholarship
rigidly enforce the public/private dichotomy, so that Christians are often
made to feel they have no choice but to play by the rules." (99) Darwin completed
the naturalistic picture of the universe and isolated value from fact. If evolutionary forces produced the human
mind, then religion and morality are not transcendent truths, merely ideas
produced by the mind. (106) The idea
of objective truth still reigns in science but not in ethics. (107) Is a human being
a machine (science) or a free agent (ethics)?
While science is insisting that people are simply machines, people are
making choices and claiming freedom and dignity. (108) Scientific naturalism is not an adequate
worldview because it does not explain human nature as everyone experiences
it. (110) If Christianity
is trapped in the upper story, it has nothing to offer. Christianity is "a comprehensive,
unified worldview that addresses all of life and reality. It is not just religious truth but total
truth." (111) "Christians
must find ways to make it clear that we are making claims about reality, not
merely our subjective experience." (119)
"Christianity rests on historical events that are confirmable by empirical
evidence…." (121) 4. Surviving the Spiritual Wasteland The way to
construct a Christian worldview is to ask three sets of questions: 1.
"CREATION:
How was this aspect of the world originally created? What was its original nature and purpose? 2.
FALL:
How has it been twisted and distorted by the Fall? How has it been corrupted by sin and false
worldviews? 3.
REDEMPTION:
How can we bring this aspect of the world under the Lordship of Christ,
restoring it to its original, created purpose?" (128) Autonomous
individualism makes the individual prior to moral communities such as marriage,
family and church. This is a central
factor in the breakdown of American society.
(141) Part Two: Starting at the Beginning 5.
Darwin Meets the Berenstain Bears "To
communicate a Christian worldview, the first step is learning how to make a
winsome case for creation." (150)
A theory of origins plays a foundational role in a worldview. Every worldview starts with some account of
beginnings. Whoever shapes those
concepts will determine the dominant worldview. (154)
"Darwinism
was implacably naturalistic, explaining life's origin and development by
strictly natural causes." (155)
G. K. Chesterton said fifty years ago that scientific materialism had
become the dominant 'creed' in Western culture. (157) "Under the guise of teaching science, a
philosophical battle is being waged.
And if Christians do not frame the philosophical issues, someone else
will do it…." (158) "The heart
of the battle is whether the universe is the result of Intelligent Agency or
of blind, noncognitive forces…." (174)
"Either the universe is a closed system of cause and effect, or
it is an open system, the product of a Personal Agent. Everything that follows stems from that
fundamental choice." (175) 6.
The Science of Common Sense "The heart
of design theory is the claim that design can be empirically detected."
(180) "Both sides of the
evolution debate agree that, taken at face value, living things look for all
the world as though they are designed." (184) Perhaps the most powerful evidence for
design is the DNA code. (191)
"When you see a message, a language, you immediately conclude
that it is not a product of natural causes." (192) Chance processes do not produce complex
information; they tend to scramble
information." (193-4) "Trying to
make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and
wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98.
It won't work because it
addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level." (198 quoting
Paul Davies) Information does not
arise from forces within matter but must be imposed on matter from the
outside. (198) "The key to
interpreting the organic world is not natural selection but
information." There is an author. (201) 7.
Today Biology, Tomorrow the World "Christians
need to engage Darwinian evolution not only as science but also as a
worldview." (208) Once the
evolutionary premise is accepted, applying Darwinian explanations to human
behavior is simple logic. (211) Evolutionary
psychology can explain anything from mothers who kill their newborn babies to
mothers who do not. It says whatever
proponents want it to say. (213) No
one can live by it. Universal human
experience confirms the reality of moral choice. When deterministic theory gets too
restrictive, people simply claim their autonomy from it. (218)
8. Darwins of the Mind Theism
understands mind as prior to matter.
The Darwinian view is that mind was produced by matter and quite late
in the evolutionary process. The mind
is an evolutionary by-product. It has
been naturalized. *230) Prior to Darwin,
human knowledge was considered reliable because human reason reflects the
divine reason. God created our minds
to 'fit' the universe He made of us.
Our cognitive faculties are designed to give us genuine
knowledge. "If blind, undirected
natural forces produced the mind, then it is meaningless to ask whether our
ideas reflect reality. Ideas are
simply mental survival strategies…."
(231) If Darwinian
evolution is true, then the mind is a product of evolution and ideas and
words are merely tools for controlling the environment, including other
people, as postmodernism claims. (243)
Naturalism has some uncomfortable logical conclusions. If people can't live with the consequences
it would be well to reconsider the premises. (244) Objective truth
is possible only if a Creator has given us divine revelation. (246) Part 3.
How We Lost Our Minds 9. What's So Good About Evangelicalism? 10.
When America Met Christianity--Guess Who Won? "Evangelicalism
is growing 'theologically broad to the point of incoherence…. We may even be witnessing the gradual
disappearance of doctrine. This style
may not be so much distinctively Christian as it is distinctly American. (292,
quoting sociologist Alan Wolfe) Wade
Clark Roof concluded that "the real story of American religious life in
this half century is the rise of a new
sovereign self that defines and sets limits on the very meaning of the
divine." "In every aspect of
the religious life, American faith has met American culture--and American
culture has triumphed." (quoting Roof) (293) 11. Evangelicals' Two-Story Truth Historically the
evangelical movement has claimed two wings, one populist (focused on
subjective experience and individual conversion) and one scholarly (focused
on theological orthodoxy and biblical authority). (295) "Those who
attempt to jettison the past [and start over again] are likely to simply
sanction their own current prejudices and preconceptions as unquestioned
truth." "Instead of seeing
farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, they are limited to what they
are able to see from their own narrow perspective within a tiny slice of
history." (302) Christians
themselves "adopted a form of methodological
naturalism, which eventually opened the door to metaphysical naturalism.
After all, if you can interpret the world perfectly well without
reference to God, then His existence becomes a superfluous
hypothesis…" The methodology was
transformed into a worldview. (311) "When
speaking with nonbelievers, our goal is to show them that Christianity is the
only theoretical system that
accounts for the truths we know by pre-theoretical
experience." (313) "The task of evangelism starts with
helping the nonbeliever face squarely the inconsistencies between his
professed beliefs and his actual experience." "We want to help
people see that if their worldview contradicts commonsense experience, then
it cannot be true." "Common
Sense realism points out that no one can really deny the testimony of the
senses." "The entire
scientific enterprise is based on the trustworthiness of sense data…"
(314) "Our claim
as Christians is that only a biblically based worldview offers a complete and
consistent explanation of why we are capable of knowing scientific, moral,
and mathematical truths. Christianity
is the key that fits the lock of the universe." "In
evangelism, our goal is to highlight that cognitive dissonance--to identify
the points at which the nonbeliever's worldview is contradicted by
reality. Then we can show that only
Christianity is fully consistent with the things we all know by experience to
be true." (319) 12.
How Women Started the Culture War "For if
humans evolved from the animal world, the implication was that the animal
nature is the core of our being. This
was a startlingly new concept: From antiquity, virtue had been defined as the
exercise of restraint of the 'lower' passions by the 'higher' faculties of
the rational spirit and the moral will.
But now, in a stunning reversal, the animal passions were held up as
the true self." (339) "Among the
many causes of the rebellious youth culture of the 1960s was a great deal of
'father hunger.'' (344) Part 4.
What Next? Living It Out 13. True Spirituality and Christian
Worldview "It is all
but impossible for people to accept new ideas purely in the abstract, without
seeing a concrete illustration of what they look like when lived out in
practice." "When people see
a supernatural dimension of love, power, and goodness in the way Christians
live and treat one another, then our message of biblical truth becomes
plausible." "A verbal
presentation of a Christian worldview message loses its power if it is not
validated by the quality of our lives." (355) "Knowing the truth has meaning only as
a first step to living the truth
day by day." "And how do we
drive our beliefs down into the reality of daily experience? By dying to ourselves, that we may live for
God." (355) "If it does not
seem hard, then we are probably accommodating to the world without realizing
it." (356) "In a
culture that measures everything in terms of size, success, and influence, we
have to say no to these worldly values as well." (357) "God's strategy for reaching a lost
world is for the church to function as a visible demonstration of His
existence." (361) "Visible
results can be deceptive. In the seen
world, we may appear to make a great advance…[but] have accomplished little
of value in the unseen world. The
opposite is likewise true." (363) Comments: Pearcey puts
together a very rational and understandable description and defense of a
Christian worldview. She also
addresses, in an important last section what it means to Christians and how
to live it out. The difficulty lies in
the difference between understanding something and both living it and arguing
cogently for it in the presence of those who don't share your
understanding. Living out a Christian
worldview is terribly difficult in a contrary culture, but giving a brilliant
rationale for it that is convincing requires deep thought, the ability to
articulate difficult concepts clearly, and considerable practice. Further Reading: How Now Shall We Live, Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey Deliver Us From Evil (and other writings) by Ravi Zaccharias |
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