What Truth Is Truth ... and Why It Matters
by Rusty Benson
December 6, 2005
(AgapePress) - - Anyone who has ever used the term "worldview" should tip their hat to the late Francis Schaeffer, the Presbyterian minister who in 1955 founded L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. Schaeffer popularized the term in writings and in conversation with those who came to his chalet looking for answers to the big questions of life. Nancy Pearcey was one of those seekers who spent time at L'Abri during the early 1970s. As Schaeffer lectured and led discussion groups on Christian apologetics, Pearcey began to see Christianity as the final truth of reality and, therefore, relevant to all areas of life.
Some 40 years later, Western Christians owe Pearcey a similar appreciation for her landmark book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Crossway, 2004). With remarkable clarity and keen analysis, Pearcey builds on Schaeffer's views arguing that what ails the modern church is the prevailing view among believers that Christianity is only a set of private beliefs rather than objective truth. Pearcey contends that this divided view of truth -- applauded by a growing secular society -- renders Christianity publicly irrelevant.
In this second in a series of interviews with Christian culture watchers, Pearcey reflects on her personal passion to promote worldview thinking among Christians and summarizes some of the major themes of Total Truth.
Read first in this series, 'Christians & Culture: Untying the Knot'
AFA Journal: In an earlier book with Charles Colson and Harold Fickett, How Now Shall We Live?, and now in Total Truth, you have made an invaluable contribution to the Church. What do you see in your own personality and gifts that has apparently made this pursuit of understanding the concept of worldview a lifelong quest?
Pearcey: Discovering that Christianity is an entire worldview was crucial in my own conversion. I had been raised in a believing home, but as a teenager I began having questions, and, unfortunately, neither my pastor nor any other Christian leaders seemed to know how to answer them. Eventually I decided that if I did not have good reasons for knowing why Christianity was true, then as a matter of intellectual honesty I needed to reject it -- to examine it objectively alongside the other religions and philosophies in the marketplace of ideas.
I literally began going down the hall to the school library and pulling books off the philosophy shelf, trying to find out where people even talk about such questions -- What is truth? What is the purpose of life? Are there any moral principles solid enough to base my life on?
Some years later I ended up at L'Abri in Switzerland where Francis Schaeffer lived and taught, and there I encountered a form of worldview apologetics that finally addressed the intellectual questions I was struggling with. That's why I am so passionate about the need to continue working out a biblical worldview on the issues faced by each new generation. Schaeffer said, we to offer "honest answers to honest questions."
AFA Journal: The subtitle of Total Truth is Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity. Explain that subtitle.
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Nancy Randolph Pearcey is the Francis A. Schaeffer scholar at the World Journalism Institute, where she teaches a worldview course based on the study guide edition of her book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. |
Pearcey: The book explores how a secular understanding of reality can gradually penetrate even the minds of Christians. The main culprit is a tendency to compartmentalize our faith. We think of religion as something we do in church and Bible studies, but often we don't see how it applies to our professional work or the issues we read about in the newspaper. For example, a journalist told me, "When you enter the newsroom, you have to leave your faith behind." This divided mentality is often called the sacred/secular split.
Mainstream culture is perfectly happy for us to keep our faith compartmentalized. We often hear phrases like, "Don't bring your religion into politics, or into the law, or into Hollywood. You can believe whatever you want as long as you keep it in the private sphere."
For example, last year when presidential candidate John Kerry was asked about abortion, he assured critics repeatedly how much he "respected" their beliefs, but he made it clear that he would never vote that way.
This is the nonreligious version of the sacred/secular split, and it is often called the fact/value split. The idea is that science gives us "facts," which are objective, testable, and value-free. But if values are banished from the realm of objective truth, what happens to them? They are reduced to private preferences, which are not considered relevant for the public arena.
So, both inside and outside the Church, there is a kind of compartmentalization that locks Christianity into an isolated sphere of life, and that prevents it from filtering down and having an impact on all the rest of life. If we want God's truth to have power and impact, we have to unlock it and liberate it to penetrate every area of our lives.
AFA Journal: You give four chapters in Total Truth to the issue of origins (Darwinism, Intelligent Design, etc.). Why do you see this issue as so important?
Pearcey: In modern culture, science has been given a privileged role in defining what is accepted as truth. And if Darwinism is true, then Christianity cannot be. If purely natural causes acting on their own are capable of doing all the creating, then the Creator is out of a job. There's nothing left for Him to do. And if God's existence doesn't serve any cognitive function in explaining the universe, then the only function left is an emotional one. Religion becomes something that can be tolerated for people who need that kind of crutch.
This explains why controversies over Darwinism keep boiling up around the country. The main impact of the theory has never been in the details of mutation and natural selection, but rather in the way it reinforces the fact/value split, relegating religion to the realm of emotional need or "values."
AFA Journal: You write that "thinking Christianly" means understanding that Christianity offers the truth about the whole of reality. How have you tried to communicate that to your children?
Pearcey: The key thing for parents to accept is that we are our children's primary educators, whether they are homeschooled, in Christian school or in public school, and my own children have been in all three at various times. As parents, we are not off the hook just because we put our children in Christian school or homeschool, using Christian textbooks. Why not? Because they typically follow a sacred/secular approach instead of teaching how to develop a comprehensive worldview.
This is a problem right up to the university level. A Lutheran scholar, Robert Benne, did a study finding that the vast majority of Christian colleges teach what he calls an "add-on" approach. By that he means that the content of the courses is essentially what you would get in any secular university, with Christianity added on the side, in chapel and prayer groups. At one major Christian university, more than half the faculty said they would not even know how to give a biblical perspective on the subject they teach.
The weakness of an add-on approach is clear: If we do not teach our children to apply Christian worldview principles to the entire range of the curriculum -- to politics, economics, science, and the arts -- then they will almost inevitably absorb a non-biblical view in these areas. After all, you can't think without assuming some principles.
Imagine your ideas being like a toolbox: If you don't have biblical tools of analysis in your toolbox, then when you need to understand some issue, you will reach over and take tools out of someone else's toolbox -- ideas developed by someone operating from some other "ism." Over time, more and more of the way you think about the world will be shaped by "isms" that may be contrary to biblical truth.
A young writer who had just graduated from a Christian high school wrote that on the first day of theology class her teacher drew a heart on one side of the blackboard and a brain on the other side. The teacher explained, "The two are as divided as the two sides of the blackboard. The heart is what we use for religion, and the brain is what we use for science."
This is a radical bifurcation. And it means that many of our schools and churches are turning out people who are Christian in their religious life, but secular in their mental life. The result is that they easily absorb secular worldviews without even realizing it.
AFA Journal: You are critical of parts of contemporary evangelicalism for being anti-intellectual and anti-doctrinal. How do you see that impacting the Church's voice in culture?
Pearcey: If we do not develop a Christian worldview, then we have no distinctive voice in the culture. The opening story in Total Truth tells about a young woman I call Sarah, who worked for Planned Parenthood. Sarah went through a crisis of faith as a teenager and came through it with a strong Christian commitment. So how did she end up in a job referring women for abortions?
The answer is that when Sarah went to college, she majored in the social sciences, which are permeated with cultural relativism -- the idea that there are no objective or universal truths, that every culture has its own beliefs about religion and morality, and who can say which one is right? Sarah had no idea how to respond to the challenges she was facing in the classroom. Her church had helped her find assurance of salvation, but it had not given her the conceptual tools to handle the hostile attacks on her faith in the secular college classroom. So eventually she ended up absorbing ideas like cultural relativism as part of the professional ethos of her field.
Sarah's story is a chilling example of how Christians can hold correct doctrines on theological issues and still absorb a non-biblical worldview. When this happens it is impossible for Christianity to have a redemptive impact on culture.
AFA Journal: In Total Truth you offer a grid for analyzing worldviews: creation/fall/redemption. How does this work?
Pearcey: Christianity is primarily a story, a narrative about events that have taken place from the creation of the universe. In crafting a worldview, we merely draw out abstract principles from that story. It is a story with three fundamental turning points: God's original creation of the universe, the tragedy of the Fall into sin, and God's plan of redemption, which unfolds throughout history until finally He will create a new heaven and a new earth.
Everything in the universe participates in this great drama, which makes it a handy three-step strategy for framing a Christian worldview on any topic. Whether we're talking about the family, the state, economics, or the arts, we can ask three questions: (1) How was it originally created? What was its original purpose? (2) How has it been distorted by sin, infiltrated by false worldviews? (3) How can we be a redemptive force to bring it back under the Lordship of Christ?
People often say to me, "I hear so much about the need to develop a Christian worldview, but no one ever tells us how to do it." This three-part grid gives basic but foundational steps in spelling out a Christian worldview in your own field of work.
Of course, non-biblical worldviews or philosophies also tell a story. They offer an alternative story about how the universe got here. So this grid gives a simple but effective tool for analyzing them as well.
Every worldview: (1) starts with a creation story, an account of where everything came from; (2) offers an account of what's gone wrong with the world; and (3) gives people a hope and a plan for action to set things right again. This is a streamlined and effective method for analyzing the worldviews you or your children encounter, from New Age thinking to Darwinian naturalism to Islam.
As I speak to various groups around the country, I sense a growing hunger for worldview thinking. Christians in all denominations are starting to realize that they simply will not survive with a compartmentalized faith. They are eager to learn how Christianity is not just religious truth, and how it is truth about all of life. That's what I mean by calling my book Total Truth.
Rusty Benson, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is associate editor of AFA Journal, a publication of the American Family Association. This article, reprinted with permission, appeared in the November/December issue. Nancy Pearcey can be contacted by visiting PearceyReport.com or the "Total Truth" website.
