Lately, I’m re-reading Nancy Pearcey’s excellent book Total Truth as part of a book discussion. I haven’t read it since my late 20s, and at that time it was really influential on my thinking as a Christian. It’s interesting re-reading it, because some things in society have changed in the interim, and I’ve matured and changed in some respects, so now I’m visiting it from a rather different perspective.

Today, I’m going to start a series on the book as I re-read it. I’m going through it in part to help discuss the issue of worldviews (see What is a Worldview? for more on worldviews), so you could think of this as a bit of a series on the Christian worldview.

I’ll be going at a rate of hopefully about a chapter a week, so today I’ll just hit highlights from the introduction.

Chapter 1: Introduction

In this book, and even beginning in the Introduction, Pearcey addresses the idea of a “privatized” faith – that is, that Christians have in some ways accommodated to our environment by accepting the idea that Christianity is primarily about what we personally believe, about our private religious views, about our individual faith. While it is all of that, it’s also truth about all of life – Total Truth.

Pearcey notes the increasing involvement of evangelicals in politics in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but argues that some aspects of this were a mistake:

They leaped into political activism as the quickest, surest way to make a difference in the public arena, failing to recognize that politics tends to reflect culture, not the other way around.

Today, I think we see this reflected to a large extent in what has happened with respect to gay marriage. Total Truth came out in 2008; in 2015, gay marriage was legalized in all 50 states. But looking back, it’s easy to see the real change about marriage came far earlier – probably much earlier, in part when we gave up the Biblical definition of marriage to allow divorce to become routine and no big deal. Then, cultural redefinition of marriage continued as attitudes towards gay marriage shifted, and eventually this became enshrined in our laws.

It’s interesting re-reading this book now, as I hadn’t entirely realized how much culture had changed in the interim. At the time, though, I remember being aware of a great number of efforts to change culture/influence politics; now, to a large extent it seems like many of these have faded, and perhaps we’ve gone into a bit more of a defensive mode, hunkering down and trying to hang on to truth while hoping culture won’t interfere with our religious freedom.

In any case, Pearcey highlights how one factor which has contributed to our lack of influence on culture is this divide between “heart” and “brain” or the public sphere and the private, where Christianity is restricted to the realm of personal preferences and the public sphere is the realm of scientific knowledge/universal truth. Or, Christianity is about values and is personal; the public sphere deals with facts, which are true for everyone, so Christianity must be left out of that realm. Pearcey writes:

Most secularists are too politically savvy to attack religion directly or to debunk it as false. So what do they do? They consign religion to the value sphere – which takes it out of the realm of true and false altogether. Secularists can then assure us that they “respect” religion, while at the same time denying that it has any relevance to the public realm.

As I recognized in my 20s when I read this book, ultimately, this comes down to an issue of Lordship. The basic Christian confession is, in part, “Jesus is Lord”. He is Lord of all, not just Lord over my personal religious beliefs. And the Bible gives truth about all of life, truth for everyone. Pearcey writes:

One way we acknowledge his Lordship is by interpreting every aspect of creation in the light of his truth.

Some key elements of a worldview

Pearcey highlights that worldviews all answer these same key questions:

  • Creation: How did it all begin? Where did we come from?
  • Fall: What went wrong? What is the source of evil and suffering?
  • Redemption: What can we do about it? How can the world be set right again?

This is particularly critical. Not everyone thinks of their worldview in these terms, or even is aware they have a worldview – but everyone has one, and understanding the worldviews around can be critical for helping us interact with the culture and minister effectively.

In any case, this is the first post in a series on the book, so I’ll try and update here with links to the others as I proceed.