:: Monday, December 6, 2004 ::

Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. By Nancy Pearcy
Wheaton: Crossway, 2004, 479 pp., $19.97 hardcover.

Total Truth stands in stark contrast to the current postmodern fad in evangelical circles. Nancy Pearcy draws on the tradition of Frances Schaeffer as she skillfully examines the historical roots of evangelicalism and the connections to philosophy and science, including Darwinism. Like Schaeffer, Pearcy describes the upper/lower story view of reality dating back to Plato, and the impact that this deficient view continues to have today.

The book title comes from the need for Christianity to break free from relegation to the upper story so that it can impact all of life. Too many Christians take a pragmatic approach, believing that Christianity is the religion that works for them, but failing to understand the ramifications of Christianity's truth claims, such as Paul's insistence that the resurrection is paramount:

1 Corinthians 15:14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.

Pearcy speaks of her time as a relativistic agnostic, when her brother asked Nancy and a skeptic friend how they viewed the Resurrection. Nancy responded,

"The Resurrection could be a kind of parable--not historically true but expressing some spiritual truth for those who believe it." In this exchange, my friend represented the older, rationalist skeptic, who still thought in categories of true and false and empirical verifiability. I was already swept up nto postmodern subjectivism, where religion is not even susceptible to such categories anymore. President Eisenhower presaged the same attitude when he said, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith--and I don't care what it is." In a postmodern world, it doesn't matter whether a religion is objectively true but only whether it performs a beneficial function.

Pearcy is especially convincing because of that background of unbelief, and she writes convincingly of her experience as Schaeffer's apologetic approach influenced her move to a Christian worldview and active faith in Christ. After explaining worldviews and their need to address questions about Creation, Fall and Redemption, she shows how Christianity resolves these questions, and goes into detail as she explores Darwinian thought and how it attempts to answer these same questions as a naturalistic counterpart to Christianity.

I highly recommend Total Truth and will be bribing my teenagers to read it.

:: Randy Brandt :: Comments :: ::