Total
Truth: Liberating Christianity from It's Cultural Captivity
Book Review - 2005
A recent
addition to the body of worldview literature, Nancy Pearcey’s Total
Truth is a vitally important work for the church today. Worldview
thinking is “a rich avenue of joy and fulfillment—a means of letting
the spark of God’s truth light up every nook and cranny of our
lives” (25). For Pearcey, “every nook and cranny” absolutely
includes the “public square.” As a result, Christianity discovers—in
the midst of pluralistic society—the freedom to be explicitly
Christian, without the necessity of subjecting itself to the
self-appointed authority of secularism by opting for so-called
neutral or objective methods of engagement.
In part one, Pearcey explains the secular/sacred dichotomy that has
and continues to permeate society. By way of Francis Schaeffer’s
two-story building imagery, she illustrates the results of dualistic
thinking (21). This two-realm theory of truth relegates the
nonrational and noncognitive to the upper story, and the rational
and verifiable to the lower story. The cultural divide between
secularism and religion is the result of this lack of integrated
thought.
In part two, Pearcey explains how universal Darwinism is at the root
of secularism. By critiquing evolution as a worldview and thereby
showing the impossibility of living out naturalism consistently
without borrowing from the “upper story,” she explains how we can
avoid a “bits and pieces” approach to the public square. “We worry
about things like family breakdown, violence in schools, immoral
entertainment, abortion and bioethics—a wide array of individual
issues. But we don’t see the big picture that connects all the dots”
(208). Accordingly, Schaeffer held that one’s view of origins would
permeate all areas, resulting in naturalistic moral, social, and
political philosophies. Pearcey suggests that by undermining the
presuppositions of naturalism and offering a positive case for
Intelligent Design, Christians can avoid a piecemeal approach to the
issues and appropriately ground debates in an explicitly Christian
worldview.
The way in which evangelicalism has contributed to this dualism by
its approval of privatized religion is a central focus of part
three. For example, Christian acceptance of the Baconian definition
of science as “religiously neutral,” she says, “is nothing less than
tragic,” and makes Christians at least partially responsible for the
privatization of faith (311). This agrees with her description of
the current state of Christianity in academia, “So long as we’re
allowed to hold our Bible studies and prayer meetings, we’ve turned
over the content of the academic fields to the secularists” (37).
In the final part of Total Truth, Pearcey elaborates on what
constitutes true spirituality. While Christianity is the “best
cognitive system for explaining the world,” knowledge of this fact
is insufficient; this truth must be lived out every day (355). A
robust Christian worldview that can explain origins and refute other
worldviews must also demonstrate Christ-like integrity. By adopting
pragmatism, Christians are in danger of making use of unethical
methods to accomplish their goals, essentially compromising the
worldview we are called to defend. How we live speaks directly to
what we know; a lack of integrity will discredit our message and
reveal that we have not sought to integrate all areas of thought.
We can begin to see Christianity’s liberation from cultural
captivity when we recognize that the privatization of faith is a
byproduct of a godless worldview, not merely a neutral position.
Total Truth is a reminder that Christian bioethics may not always be
well received by its opponents, it still must participate in the
public square.
