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Total Truth (Study Guide Edition / Paperback Edition): Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity

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Christians in North America tend to view their Christianity strictly in terms of their individual commitment to Jesus Christ, and they see their part in the Great Commission as sharing their faith and bringing others also into such a saving relationship. Yet they are frustrated by a feeling of having their hands tied, of unspoken assumptions which they may sense but not be able to put their finger on. More than in any other nation, professing American evangelicals make up a sizable percentage of the population, but in terms of cultural impact, they are almost invisible. Nancey Pearcey argues that this is because they have implicitly accepted a secular/sacred divide which keeps the power of the gospel locked up, like a caged lion. Her purpose is to give us the tools to recognize where and how this has happened, so that by liberating Christianity from its cultural captivity, it may become a redemptive force that really permeates our culture.

The cultural captivity that Pearcey refers to is the banishment of Christian ideas to the private sphere of values and subjective feelings, and out of the public sphere of facts, objective knowledge, and science. This two-tiered division of truth that our culture (and many Christians) accepts results in both the truth claims of Christianity not being taken seriously since they are not seen as belonging to the realm of knowledge, and in Christians themselves not knowing how to integrate their faith to the whole of reality. Worse, evangelicals (conservative Bible-believing Christians) have gone from dominating the culture of the nineteenth century, to being completely marginalized today. And it is largely their own fault.

Though they controlled all the cultural institutions at that time, nineteenth century evangelicals, as a result of the First and Second Great Awakenings, had come to view Christianity primarily in terms of non-cognitive categories of emotion and experience. Their religious beliefs were still an integral part of their "lower story" activities such as science, but because they did not view their Christianity as "total truth", a worldview which orders all of reality, they could not recognize the threat of competing worldviews which came along at that time. When the Baconian view of science that Enlightenment intellectuals had become intoxicated with, promised that knowledge could be based on bare empirical facts, unfiltered through any religious or philosophical grid, Christians were persuaded to set aside their own religious framework. But this view of science, or any other activity, as religiously neutral, is false, and so the withdrawal of Christian presuppositions created a vacuum that was quickly filled by alien philosophical frameworks, namely naturalism and empiricism. These were introduced under the banner of "objectivity" and "free inquiry" whereas Christian views were seen as biased. As a result Christian perspectives were driven out of the lower story to the upper, where they have remained to this day.

"It is nothing less than tragic that Christians themselves were partly responsible for the privatizing of religion", Pearcey notes. Then and even today, many embraced as perfectly reasonable the subsequent principle of methodological naturalism, thinking that it was simply a refinement of scientific practice to limit the scope of investigation of the natural world to natural explanations. They did not recognize that this 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." Historian George Marsden is quoted as saying that "the naturalistic definition of science was transformed from a methodology into a dominant academic worldview."

All worldviews, Christian and non-Christian, seek to provide an overarching metanarrative that answer the questions of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. The worldview of naturalism, that the natural world is all there is, has been around since the ancient Greeks. But it never really caught on because it was not able to answer the fundamental question of Creation without smuggling in concepts from a theistic worldview. Darwinian evolution finally provided this creation myth and so laid the foundation for a century and a half of naturalism as the dominant worldview in our culture. If we understand this, we can understand why the biblical teaching of Creation is under such relentless attack today. What is at stake is the first principle of the Christian worldview; everything stands or falls with its teaching on ultimate origins.

This concept is absolutely critical, and so Pearcey devotes a third of the book to discussing evolution. It was not just a mere scientific theory which sought to explain the facts of the natural world; its significance rather was that it signalled a revolution in what counts as knowledge. Christians, then and now, who do not know how to construct their own worldview and critique competing ones with the grid of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, have missed this clash of worldviews, and have either retreated into Fundamentalism, or have attempted to reconcile their theism with evolution, a move which, because of what is at stake, is very dangerous.

When Christianity is articulated as a full fledged worldview, it is liberated from the two-story division that has reduced it to an upper-story private experience and is restored to the status of objective truth. We can then recognize the non-Christian assumptions and methods that have permeated our thinking. We will once again begin practicing theistic science (and economics, and law, etc.) because it will once again seem appropriate to consult all that we know when doing these activities. Intelligent Design is seeking to do just that in the realm of science, but is encountering resistance among Christians who don't yet recognize the conflict as one over competing worldviews. This resistance is even among Reformed Christians, where worldview thinking has a long and rich history. What this tells me is that the conflict runs deep, and that time, wisdom, and humility are needed before we can purge all worldly ways of thinking and take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.

I have often lamented the overuse of the term "life-changing" amongst Christians. It is not unusual to hear people walk away from a particularly captivating sermon or conference saying "that changed my life!" The real measure and test of life change is time, for only in time will we really know what has made a significant impact on our lives. Having established that I do not use the term lightly, I would like to suggest that Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey may just be a life-changing book. As believers we collectively spend millions of dollars and countless hours reading about Christian living - making our homes better, making our families better, making our lives better, discovering our purpose, rediscovering our masculine soul or our feminine soul and so on ad infinitum, ad nauseum. There are some who love to supplement with the study of theology or church history, and those are great pursuits. But if we buy so many books and read so much, why do we dedicate so little time to examining and studying worldview? I do not mean to indict the reader and clear my own name, for in all the reading I have done, this is the first book that deals predominantly with that topic.

Total Truth is subtitled "Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity" and this is the task to which Pearcey dedicates the book. She shows how Christians have adopted a worldview that is bound and influenced by our culture, so that we now understand Christianity through a secular worldview. She teaches that the opposite needs to be true - that we need to see society through a distinctly Christian lens, allowing a Christian worldview to interpret all that we see, do and think. She says "This book will address [the hunger for a Christian worldview] and offers new direction for advancing the worldview movement. It will help you identify the secular/sacred divide that keeps your faith locked into the private sphere of 'religious truth.' It will walk you through practical, workable steps for crafting a Christian worldview in your own life and work. It will teach you how to apply a worldview grid to cut through the bewildering maze of ideas and ideologies we encounter in a postmodern world." (Page 17) In short, the purpose of the book is to help Christians free their faith from its cultural captivity and to see that Christianity is not merely religious truth, but is Total Truth - truth about the whole of reality. "The purpose of a worldview is to explain our experience of the world-and any philosophy can be judged by how well it succeeds in doing so. When Christianity is tested, we discover that it alone explains and makes sense of the most basic and universal human experiences."

As a devotee of Francis Shaeffer, Pearcey borrows heavily from his writing and ideas. Most notably, she understands, as did Shaeffer, that Christians have mimicked the world in adopting a two-level worldview which she calls a fact/value split. It can be represented as follows:

VALUES
Individual Preferences
---------------------
FACTS
Binding on everyone

In the upper level are values which are mere individual preferences and on the bottom level are facts which are binding on everyone. Facts represent knowledge drawn from and proven by science and in this way they are considered objective and rational. On the other hand, on the top level are values which are considered subjective and a product of tradition. Thus are not binding beyond the individual's conscience and are essentially irrational. They have little to say about reality. This split has pervaded all aspects of society.

The thesis of this book is "the key to recovering joy and purpose turned out to be a new understanding of Christianity as total truth - an insight that broke open the dam and poured the restoring waters of the gospel into the parched areas of life." The first step in recovering a Christian worldview is to understand the bifurcated worldview which is inherent in our postmodern world. Having understood that we have made false disctinctions between secular and sacred, we can begin integrating our faith into every area of life so that we bear a consistent witness throughout. Politicians are beginning to come to the realization that politics is downstream from culture. In order to change the politics of our nations, we must first influence the culture, and to do that we must reclaim a Christian worldview. "Ordinary Christians working in business, industry, politics, factory work, and so on, are 'the Church's front-line troops' in the spiritual battle. Are we taking seriously our duty to support them in their warfare? The church is nothing less than a training ground for sending out laypeople who are equipped to speak the gospel to the world." That is the subject of the bulk of the book - training and sending laypeople who can share the Gospel with the world. Pearcey continually exposes those areas that have been polluted by a secular worldview and explains how Christians need to reclaim them.

After Pearcey thoroughly deconstructed our society's postmodern worldview in the first few chapters of the book, I found I did not have as clear an idea as to how I could rebuild a Christian worldview. But perhaps this is because there are no easy answers - there is no happy W.O.R.L.D.V.I.E.W. acronym that will allow me to follow a 9-step program to worldview reconstruction. The key is to acknowledge the deficiency of holding a two-level worldview and by immersing myself in Scripture, allowing God to shape and mould me as He sees fit. A Christian worldview must necessarily flow from the study and application of God's Word. I need to understand and believe that Christian Truth is a unified whole, equally encompassing all of life.

In reading books written by intellectuals, rather than pastors and teachers, I have often found that their theology is shaped more by the Catholic intellectuals of days past than by the Protestant theology. This is not the case for Pearcey. She strikes a good balance of praise and criticism in her presentation of Protestantism, generally defending the actions and motives of the Reformers and believers of history. Similarly she praises various Catholic scholars (such as Aquinas) for contributions they made, but is necessarily harsh when discussing their shortcomings. Throughout the book, the author maintains this important balance. It was wonderful to see that Pearcey presents significant, deep theology that clearly aligns with the Reformed understandings of the Scripture.

I am in agreement with Al Mohler who said "Total Truth is one of the most promising books to emerge in evangelical publishing in many years. It belongs in every Christian home, and should quickly be put into the hands of every Christian young person. This important book should be part of the equipment for college or university study, and churches should use it as a textbook for Christian worldview development." Pearcey has crafted a masterpiece that is intellectually stimulating but still accessible and practical. It will challenge, motivate and change. I give it my hearty recommendation.

"We need to liberate the gospel from its cultural captivity."

What Nancy is saying is our "worldview" is lacking in areas such as social issues, history, politics, and anthropology. Christians often live in two separate worlds: the secular and the sacred; this dualism sets the ground for our cultural worldview. We then believe in: keeping faith in its place (home and church). Christianity is not just religious truth it is total truth-covering all reality.

Pearcey credits Francis Schaeffer for much of this "worldview" after she went through a period of darkness and questioning. Well written and colorful, with excellent analogies; full of ism's. A study guide for each chapter is located at the rear with questions to test yourself. There is also extensive "recommended reading material" to help in building our knowledge for defense. Ism's are an unending progressivism.

Interesting history, with a section covering design, creation, evolution, and darwin's influence. "All dots connect back to your view of origins"------Francis Schaeffer. The church adopted new (worldly) doctrines and evangelicals followed. This powerful book is important for all Christians; will strengthen hot Christians and waken the luke-warm. You will come away seeing the world in new light.

Paul urges us to offer up your entire selves and grow through suffering. Be prepared to make a defense. What are you putting into your head? Can you give up your old life? Sin: "anything not of faith" (not directed towards God's glory)

"The overall pattern of evangelicalism's history is summarized brilliantly by Richard Hofstadter in a single sentence. To a large extent, he writes "the churches withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone"."

Wish you well
Scott

I've read hundreds of books but have found little time to review them. This book deserves for me to make time. THIS IS UNDOUBTEDLY ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS I HAVE EVER READ.

This book has been of immense help to me in understanding and crystallizing numerous issues that I have been grappling with and struggling to convey to others. (I've been teaching on these issues for over 25 years--10 years as a pastor--and I'm currently in charge of teaching apologetics at the non-denominational evangelical church where I attend with my family.)

This appears to be a synthesis of Pearcey's own learning and writing over the last 30+ years of searching, learning and grappling with Biblical truth under the guidance of such excellent mentors and fellow travelers as Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson, etc. that the Holy Spirit has used in her life.

In this book, Pearcey skillfully unveils the blind spots in the evangelical intellect (and the intellect of Western culture in general).

It's not without reason that the edition of this book that I have contains 5 pages of enthusiastic reviews by more than 50 of the Church's most respected leaders.

Al Mohler (President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) comments: "May well be one of the most important Christian books of our times." No disrespect intended, but I think Al may be hedging here. Personally, I have no problem saying that this IS one of the most important Christian books of our times.

James Sire (author of The Universe Next Door) says: "Best work of cultural analysis from a Christian standpoint available today."

Gene Edward Veith (Culture Editor, World magazine) writes: "Breaks new ground in worldview analysis....the most insightful applications since Francis Schaeffer."

I could go on and quote the other 50 (Ha!).....Let me just say, in summary, that Pearcey has done a great service to the evangelical church and to the world. She has reviewed the difficult and complex history of western philosophy and summarized it succinctly and clearly--drawing out numerous profound and relevant insights that burst forth page after page.

WHETHER YOU'RE A CHRISTIAN OR NOT, IF YOU HAVE TIME TO READ ONLY ONE BOOK THIS YEAR, I URGE YOU TO MAKE IT THIS ONE.

Does God belong in the public arena of politics, business, law, and education? Or is religion a private matter only-personally comforting but publicly irrelevant?

In today's cultural etiquette, it is not considered polite to mix public and private, or sacred and secular. This division is the single most potent force keeping Christianity contained in the private sphere-stripping it of its power to challenge and redeem the whole of culture.

In "Total Truth", Nancy Pearcey offers a razor-sharp analysis of the public/private split, explaining how it hamstrings our efforts at both personal and cultural renewal. Ultimately it reflects a division in the concept of truth itself, which functions as a gatekeeper, ruling Christian principles out of bounds in the public arena.

How can we unify our fragmented lives and recover spiritual power? With examples from the lives of real people, past and present, Pearcey teaches readers how to liberate Christianity from its cultural captivity. She walks readers through practical, hands-on steps for crafting a full-orbed Christian worldview.

Finally, she makes a passionate case that Christianity is not just religious truth but truth about total reality. It is total truth.

This book should be REQUIRED READING for every student at some point in time during their education. It does a great job of explaining the Christian worldview outside of the culture of individual churches that often drag that same worldview in the mud at times.

I highly recommend this work for religious studies classes and students, for those in the Church that are interested in becoming equipped as Christian thinkers, and for those investigating the claims of Christ and Christianity.

After reading over 3000 books on theology and Christianity in my life, I find that "Total Truth" does as good a job of explaining the Christian worldview as anything I've read.

My husband and I have only read about 1/3 into the book, but already it has greatly influenced our thinking. Nancy Pearcey's observations are astute yet readable, insightful and thoughtprovoking. This addresses the problems of lazy thinking that has pervaded evangelical American Christianity for a century. I highly recommend it.

Recently, I talked to a college roommate of mine, who is now a missionary. He said he had read a book that he highly recommended to be able to understand people with differing views, and mentioned the name "Total Truth". It so happened that I was in the ninth or tenth chapter of the book at the time, and agreed whole heartedly.

This book is a textbook at World Journalism Institute, and it is textbook quality. It is well researched, with 54 pages of endnotes and a 15 page recommended reading section at the end. It is definitely intellectual, and calls for a clear, focused mind in reading, but it is written easy to follow.

This book is divided into four sections, followed by three appendices. The first three sections have four chapters each, with the final section being a solitary chapter.

In section 1, we are introduced to the concept of a world-view, and the split between upper and lower stories in thinking in classical history. The Platonian model sees reality/truth being in the upper story of form, as opposed to matter (creation), a view that found acceptance in the middle ages Christianity thanks to Augustine, and is represented by the post modern movement. The Aristotlean model puts more value to the lower story, and Thomas Aquinas helped revive this view prior to the reformation, and is reflected in determinism today.

In this first section, Pearcy also introduces the elements of a Christian world view, which also shows up in countering worldviews. These elements are
1. Creation (why are we here),
2. Fall (why we have left the ideal), and
3. Restoration (how do we return to our original state).
She concludes the section by showing how Rosseau and Marx and Sanger apply this structure.

The second section deals with evolution. First, she effectively points out that evolution is not only scientific, but also dishonest. She next shows how intelligent design is a superior model in explaining the origin of our planet. She shows that evolution is not just a biological option to Christianity, but also psychological, being used to excuse immorality. Finally, she shows how Darwinism affects other areas of life, such as education and judicial activism.

The third section focuses on evangelicalism, and how this movement opened the door for our society to become secularized. She looks at both Great Awakenings, and notices how evangelicalism fit into the format of American culture, and how it added to the two tier problem.

The final chapter in the third section is the role of women in the culture war. This shows how the industrial revolution changed the dynamic of the family, and the dominos that fall as a result.

The fourth section deals with the solution. Pearcey states that a Christian worldview touches all areas of life. She gives some examples how ministries use worldly methods and philosophies and gives some wise direction in this area.

The four appendices deal with the secularization of American politics, the similarities (believe it or not) of Islam and the New Age movement and their threat, the battle between materialism and Christianity, and personal experience at L'Abri on answering the problems of various "isms".

I do not agree with everything Pearcey says. She believes that in debating evolution, Christians should focus on that enemy rather than debating the age of the earth. While I see her point, I firmly believe that a recent creation is important theologically. Also, the most critical she appears to be is of those who encourage others to read the Bible as if it was written to them instead of consulting with history. I strongly disagree. I see, again, her concerns for this being anti-intellectual, but I believe one should read the Bible first, analyze what it says, and afterwards look at commentaries or historical views and see if these correct your view or if they happen to be wrong. But those are minor points: I agree with her views overall.

This book was very eye-opening, and as I said, I believe everybody should read this book.

After reading reviews on Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth by Francis Beckwith, Tim Challies, and Al Mohler, writing my own seemed daunting. Al Mohler wrote, "In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey offers a solid theological engagement with the critical intellectual issues of our times." Such a bold statement is characteristic of thoughtful books reviews. In light of other reviews, my goal is to provide a concise analysis of Pearcey's book, stating its main argument and identifying salient points.

It would be impossible to understand Total Truth apart from its connection to Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer himself was instrumental in Pearcey's conversion to Christianity. The skeptical author first encountered this 20th century intellectual giant at the L'Abri community in the Swiss Alps. Perched on the side of a mountain, he influenced Pearcey and many others who were disillusioned with religion in the 60's. Schaeffer's scathing critique of modernism and its inability to answer the deep questions of the human soul led to Pearcey's conversion, which resulted in a lifetime of intellectual work on behalf of the Christian faith.

This is Pearcey's book though, not Schaeffer's. She breezes through centuries of philosophical systems--deconstructing them as she goes--in order to show that the Christian worldview is the only one that can truly account for all of reality. The Christian worldview is total truth.

Why is developing a Christian worldview important? Postmodern America is awash in a "sea of secularism." There are many ideologies competing for attention in today's marketplace of ideas. However, are any of them capable of providing a comprehensive account of all of reality? This is the question Pearcey poses... and answers.

Pearcey's thesis is that the majority of Christians have been subject to cultural captivity and must be set free, hence the title of the book, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. We are in a state of intellectual bondage where a sharp divide has been drawn between the sacred and the secular. There has been a bifurcation between religion and reason, science and faith, that has inexorably driven Christians to retreat from the public sphere and succumb to the prevailing cultural norms and mores of their day.

Pearcey states her thesis in the introduction: "This book addresses that hunger [to have a Christian worldview] and offers new direction for advancing the worldview movement." One of the reasons Christians have a truncated, lifeless worldview is because they've bought into the fact/value distortion which has permeated Western culture for centuries. The onslaught of the Enlightenment and the impact of revivalism within the sphere of the emerging Evangelical empire has created this distortion.

The fact-value distortion is described as a two-story way of looking at the world. In the "lower" story are facts, which are binding on everyone. The "lower" story of Science is built on empirical knowledge, rational thinking, and objective facts. In the "upper" story are values, which are based on individual preferences. A person's religious beliefs would fit here. The "lower" story is what is universally accepted by the public and accepted as "objective" truth, whereas the "upper" story is both cursorily dismissed and not taken seriously by the public.

One of the strengths of this book is Pearcey's ability to analyze and explain large strata of the intellectual, economic, and religious foundation of Western Culture. Schaeffer's influence is certainly evident as she explains how the two-story divide has played out in the various strands of Western thought. For instance, postmodernism can be seen as the "upper" story in today's prevailing worldview; it is subjective and relative to particular groups. The "lower" story, on the other hand, is modernism with its accompanying emphases on what is objective and universally valid.

This dichotomy, she explains, "is the single most potent weapon for delegitimizing the biblical perspective in the public square today." Those who don't believe in God have been able to subvert Christianity by relegating its tenets to that which belongs in the private sphere. Religion, particularly Christianity--which is what is professed by most Americans--is no longer taken seriously; not because it's true, but because religion is seen as a matter of preference. Christianity opposed America and lost the fight.

There are four parts to this book. The first part explains how the secular/sacred split came into being. The second part "zeroes in on Creation, which is the foundational starting point for any world-view." In this section she assesses Darwinism, which is the prevailing worldview today, and shows how this particular worldview fails to hold up when evaluated in light of recent scientific findings; it falls well short of providing a coherent, comprehensive worldview for all of life. The third part criticizes the author's own tradition, Evangelicalism, and looks at how we arrived at where we're at now. The fourth part shows how "submission of our whole selves to the Lordship of Christ" is the only way to develop a Christian worldview.

I even found Pearcey's method for the development of a Christian worldview to be theologically supple. Her explication of suffering in context of a vibrant, lived-out faith is a much needed slice to the prideful, therapeutic, flabby Christianity that has developed over the years. She advances Martin Luther's theology of the Cross as a means by which we die to ourselves and the idolatry of our hearts on a daily basis. She writes, "True knowledge of Christ comes only as we are willing to give up up our dreams of glory, praying to be identified with Him on the cross." Ouch.

Furthermore, her incorporation of Schaeffer's "Rejected, Slain, Raised" concept of sanctification shows that she's not afraid to swim upstream against the currents of much of the Evangelical self-help chicanery. A slight criticism might be that Pearcey relies too heavily on Schaeffer here and the concept of "Rejected, Slain, Raised" doesn't fully capture other means of grace, such as the importance of reading the Bible, prayer, and service, which serve to develop a full-orbed view of Christianity.

This book is a must-read for all young people heading off to college, pastors, lay leaders, and anyone interested in learning more about the Christian worldview. This is a primer on why a Christian worldview is important and how we should go about identifying competing worldviews while developing a solid, mature, biblically-informed one of our own.

In my seminary class, Shaping the Mind of a Leader, this book was assigned for us to read. After reading it, I realized that this book isn't just a book that should be read in classrooms, this book should be shared in our churches!

Nancy Pearcey's book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity addresses the need for evangelical Christians to apply their biblical worldview into all aspects of their lives. Not just for Sunday mornings or Bible studies, but even at work and in the home.

Pearcey brings up several examples in order to reiterate her point, that really help illustrate the necessity for Total Truth (a biblical worldview in every aspect of our lives) in our world.

She also combats Darwinism and the theory of natural selection. After that section she "throws a few jabs" at the evangelical church which some may find offensive.

But if you are a theology student, or an evangelical Christian, this book is a must read! The insights that she brings forth and the way that they are presented are well worth the time to invest in reading this excellent work.