Findings

This excerpt from last Friday night’s Newshour on PBS illustrates one of the foundational insights of Total Truth: we live in a culture that has split reality into two realms, private and public. Private truth is seen as noncognitive, nonrational, and relativistic, and includes faith and morality. Public truth is regarded as empirically verifiable, “objective,” and rational. Pearcey writes that this split perceptual grid functions as “a gatekeeper that defines what is to be taken seriously as genuine knowledge, and what can be dismissed as mere wish-fulfillment.”

I heard this in action in this excerpt from a Miller Center debate about the role of faith in politics. “How do you think religion is going to creep in, and is that good or bad?” asks the moderator. The first answer comes from Bishop Harry Jackson, who answers that a person’s faith is relevant to their decision-making, and is therefore a legitimate subject in a political campaign. He’s talking about worldview, not matters of religious doctrine:

Well, I think in the final analysis faith will be the spoiler and will determine who doesn’t get in, meaning that people who hold our religious values, as they find out where people are, they believe that someone’s belief system will actually inform their decisions. So we can judge some things by the caliber and the quality of their faith and their testimony.

So I think you’re going to find that, as things progress, that there are going to be a lot folks asking questions about who these people really are. The discussion about their faith and its content is not meant to x people out, but to understand how to make decisions.

EVAN THOMAS: And should each candidate be very explicit about the very nature of their faith, and how they worship, and reveal all about the nature of their faith?

BISHOP HARRY JACKSON: I don’t think they need to go that far, but they do need to talk about the quality of their decision-making, what is going to inform their judgment and their framework, what worldview will they use, what peace-making structure will they use if they want to make peace. And I think all of that comes down to practical worldview and someone’s theological perception of what makes things tick.

The debate continues, illustrating the different terms used by the two sides. This next exchange implies that religion is a private matter, classed with your favorite color or your literary tastes, but not relevant outside of its personal compartment:

EVAN THOMAS: Reverend Lynn, you think religion is going to have a negative effect on the election?

REV. BARRY LYNN, Americans United for Separation of Church and State: I think it already has. I think we’ve already had too many of the wrong-headed questions asked about religion and its role in politics. I don’t think we’ve had the right questions asked.

But I’ve got to tell you, the idea that we’re going to make these judgments on the basis of the faith and the testimony of people running for office just flies in the face of everything that distinguishes this country from every other country that even is moving in a direction of a theocratic state.

We need to judge people — there’s even a Bible verse about this — by the fruits, not by what they say. And I think when we get off the mark and start asking people whether they literally believe in the virgin birth, is this a metaphor or not, the kinds of questions we’ve seen in debates so far, we are on a very dangerous road toward a theocracy. I don’t want a theocracy in America, even if it comes in by democratic vote.

Who said anything about individual articles of doctrine, like whether a person “literally believes in the virgin birth”? Bishop Jackson was speaking about worldview, the grid through which you filter all of life; he was pointing out that our decisions come out of our way of seeing the world. He wasn’t suggesting making a litmus test of individual points of religious doctrine. (Apparently someone has, though, and that’s who Rev. Lynn is referring to.)

I also find this statement interesting: “I don’t want a theocracy in America, even if it comes in by democratic vote.” Here is the head of “Americans United for the Separation of Church and State,” presumably a champion of democracy, saying that even a so-called scientific measure like democratic vote wouldn’t enable him to stomach “theocracy.” (I’m not sure I agree that acknowledging the relevance of a leader’s faith constitutes a “theocracy.”) His philosophical assumptions — that science is objective, religion subjective; science is publically verifiable, faith is nonrational – force him to be inconsistent with his own stated aims.

I started Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity in 2007. This site contains some information about the book and its author (though the table of contents only gives the first section), and when I was working through the early pages several months ago, I wrote enough about it here to justify its own blog category. In fact, I was getting bogged down and put it aside for awhile, but this week I finished it using the audiobook.

Pearcey is a distinguished academic, a former agnostic who studied Christian worldview under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri in Switzerland in the 1970’s. I’m a big fan of L’Abri, and though I may feel twinges of envy, I felt no surprise when I found frequent warm tributes to Frances Schaeffer’s thought and his influence in these pages.

Pearcey takes on a huge subject in this book. As its title suggests, the book’s thesis is that instead of shaping culture, Christianity has been shaped by culture, to its detriment. Many Christians end up doing what our culture does, compartmentalizing their faith in a private sphere but living their lives according to the naturalistic notions that underlie thinking in the public sphere. The solution? Develop a true Christian worldview that reflects the adequacy of the Bible to speak to all of life, not just to private religious feelings.

This book is an excellent introduction to doing so. Pearcey leads us through an extensively supported history of ideas, distinguishing Christianity among all the various intellectual currents, and explaining clearly how various cultural influences have shaped it into the insipid creature it is today. She talks at length about how regaining credibility in the public square of ideas depends on being able to engage at the level of worldview — as well as modeling an authentically Christian way of life.

I needed the audiobook to keep me moving all the way through the book, but now that I have the whole picture I’ll need to either go back through it more carefully, or regard it as a reference. There’s simply too much information to absorb in a first reading. (Sometimes I felt overburdened with evidence.) This would be great to study together in a group, and discuss along the way. I would love to have had that opportunity.

My favorite sections were the ones that dealt with the history of evangelicalism, and the feminization of Christianity. I was fascinated by these passages. There was plenty of good discussion of Darwin’s influence in various ways. And I found the discussion of the modern day church/mega-church to be insightful and personally healing. My husband and I left a mega-church last year after 9 years of considering it “home,” and our departure was largely because we felt like it was morphing into a corporation, and using the manipulative, possibly deceptive, anti-intellectual techniques of the commercial world. Souls as widgets. Industrialized religion. What Total Truth gave me was an understanding of the great momentum of history and culture that fuel such a derailing of Christianity in its institutional forms. I come away from the book feeling something less like brittle resentment, and more like compassion. I’m grateful for that.

Total Truth is a hard book to “review.” Its massive substance exerts a gravitational pull toward writing more… and more… and more about it. But for now I’ll just say that I recommend the book to anyone who’s bugged by institutionalized Christianity’s failures to practice what it preaches, and curious to know from whence these failures come. It leaves me tired, but also strangely hopeful.  

I want to record a few excerpts from Buechner’s Listening to Your Life and Pearcey’s Total Truth. I’m getting them in before year’s end because they confirm some observations about church that have pretty much flattened me under a boulder of disillusionment this year. But thankfully, after some wrestling, some prayer, some whining (okay maybe a lot of whining–?), and some positive church experience, I’m beginning to pull out of disillusionment and into the certainty that there are Godly alternatives to what’s described here. The challenge for 2008 is to be clear-eyed, and at the same time, to let God renew my mind. (Hmm, that sounds like a definition of maturity. Never my strong suit.)

First Buechner. He gives a visceral description of some problems, but no solution:

The church often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the dysfunctional family. There is the authoritarian presence of the minister– the professional who knows all of the answers and calls most of the shots– whom few ever challenge either because they don’t dare or because they feel it would do no good if they did. There is the outward camaraderie and inward loneliness of the congregation. There are the unspoken rules and hidden agendas, the doubts and disagreements that for propriety’s sake are kept more or less under cover. There are people with all sorts of enthusiasms and creativities which are not often enough made use of or even recognized because the tendency is not to rock the boat but to keep on doing things the way they have always been done.

Now for Pearcey. Her book is about developing a Christian worldview, and the following excerpt is taken from a context of moving toward solutions. She touches (with the objectivity and expertise I desperately lack) on phenomena I’ve written about, especially here and here:

Many ministry leaders have uncritically absorbed a nonbiblical view of business and success. “They are deeply infused with an American capitalist culture concerning the gospel,” writes historian Joel Carpenter. They unconsciously assume “that God measures success by the numbers, that more money means more ministry, which means more success for God’s kingdom. So they tend to measure their own success as disciples and servants of the Lord by the size of their ministry.”

Do we recognize a pattern here? We are witnessing history come home to roost. In earlier chapters on revivalism, we watched the seeds being sown. The appeal to emotions. The pragmatic attitude of using whatever works. The habit of borrowing marketing techniques from the commercial world. The celebrity style of leadership. The focus on measurable results. “Religion is a work of man,” Charles Finney said, meaning that conversions can be induced simply by manipulating the right conditions. All too often, today’s ministries exhibit the same naturalistic attitude, the only difference being that they have access to vastly more sophisticated marketing and promotional techniques.

“The nonprofit economy has become more like the for-profit world,” writes Thomas Berg. . . . Sometimes the marketing hype shades into subtle deception. . . . This is the ultimate danger of doing the Lord’s work in the flesh: It may eventually lead to outright sin. We can be so driven by ministry goals that we are blinded to the use of unethical methods. Without really thinking, we begin to stretch the truth to enhance our image and attract donors. A former high-ranking executive in a parachurch organization told me he had resigned after discovering an internal “culture of lying”– a regular pattern of shading the truth and cutting ethical corners in order to look better and win influence– all for the good of the ministry, of course. It is a modern form of thinking we can “speak lies in the name of the Lord” (Zech. 13:3).

I’ve been following a 61-day chronological Bible-reading plan I got from Biblegateway. (It’ll take me longer than 61 days.) Leviticus 26 is strong medicine. It shows me how God’s character is the source of truths I’ve read in 2 other books lately–Boundaries with Kids and Total Truth.

God is the ultimate boundary-making parent. “If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit” (26:3) He will make all of nature an abundant resource and give peace, safety, and protection from enemies (26:4-13).

BUT the results are pretty chilling if you make idols or fail to carry out his role for you: “I will destroy your sight and drain away all your life,” he says. You’ll be defeated by enemies. Your crops will fail. You will “flee even when no one is pursuing you” (26:14-23). Yikes! God sees this as “correction,” and if we refuse to accept it, it gets worse: “I will abhor you,” he warns (26:30). All kinds of death and destruction and hardship will come. 

Finally, he says that repentence will trigger his mercy (26:40-46). But even then, the sin must be paid for. He’ll stop “abhorring,” but he’ll let the Israelites stay slaves for awhile in foreign lands while the land continues to recover from their bad stewardship. “They will pay for their sins because they rejected my laws and abhorred my decrees,” he says. “Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely” (26:43-44).

God is laying out the boundaries very clearly here–how he interwove the spiritual and physical worlds to work according to his just laws. He spells out what the consequences will be for breaking these laws. Boundaries with Kids outlined exactly this method in parenting. You have to spell out the consequences beforehand so the kids can read the outcome in terms of their own decisions.

But wow, what consequences are laid out here! I shared it with my husband when I read it, and we talked for awhile, going back over some big decisions we’ve made over the last year, just to make sure we had nothing to hide from God. It was a good, confirming, heart-searching time, and we ended up reassured that we were on the right track. But I’m thankful for a passage like this that makes me really, REALLY want to be sure I’m being honest with God.

The emphasis on paying for sin even after you’ve repented reminded me of I Cor. 3:12-14: “If any man builds on the foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through flames.”

This teaching has always been a favorite of my husband’s, a good measuring rod for any endeavor. It shows that even in the New Testament, God is a parent that allows his children to learn from consequences. It’s worth thinking about how to translate this into my earthly parenting.

This passage appeared in Total Truth a few days after I read it in the Bible. (I love it when that happens.) Pearcey is talking about doing God’s work in God’s way, not man’s way. She writes, “We can go so far as to say that if Christians win their battles by worldly methods, then they have really lost. Visible results can be deceptive. . .  The opposite is likewise true: If Christians use the weapons God has ordained~if we lay our talents at His feet, dying to our own pride and ambition, obeying biblical moral principles, empowered by His Spirit, guided by a Christian worldview perspective~then even if by external standards we seem to have lost, we have really won. Outsiders looking on may conclude that we have failed. Even Christian friends and leaders may shake their heads disapprovingly and advise us that we’ve made a mistake. But if we have genuinely given our lives over to God’s purposes and are being led by Him, then we have won a battle in the unseen world.” (363)

I’m thankful for the way God communicates with us through several sources at a time. It gives me peace.

These words from Nancy Pearcey are food for thought (and confirmation of thought already fed):

“A Christian church may be biblical in its message and yet fail to be biblical in its methods. Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, said that the Lord’s work must be done in the Lord’s way, if it is to have the Lord’s blessing. We must express the truth not only in what we preach but in how we preach it. A Christian organization may be doing the Lord’s work–but if it is acting on human zeal and willpwer, using secular methods of promotion and publicity, without visible love among staff and coworkers, then it is merely another form of human achievement, accomplishing little for the Kingdom of God….

Working in the flesh, they may well produce impressive results in the visible world. Churches and parachurch ministries may generate a great deal of publicity, hold glamorous conferences, attract huge crowds, bring in large donations, produce books and magazines, and wield political influence in Washington. But if that work is done in the flesh, then no matter how successful it appears, it does little to build God’s kingdom. When the Lord’s work is done in merely human wisdom, using human methods, then it is not the Lord’s work any longer.

The only way the church can establish genuine credibility with nonbelievers is by showing them something they cannot explain or duplicate through their own natural, pragmatic methods~something they can explain only by invoking the supernatural.” (363)

(In church on Sunday, the pastor made a similar point about not hindering the power of the gospel by focusing on the way it’s presented.)

Pearcey writes, “When the only form of cultural commentary Christians offer is moral condemnation, no wonder we come across to nonbelievers as angry and scolding.”  Our first response to art, she argues, should be to celebrate it for its reflection of God’s creative nature and its level of technical excellence–coupled with a burning compassion and an honest alternative.

I agree. Last year at the church I attended there was an art show on the theme of “brokenness.” Churched and unchurched artists were invited to participate, and the whole event was much vaunted by its producers as an outreach. But I’ve seldom been more oppressed by art. What was missing was any articulated Christian perspective~any element of discernment among the depictions of “brokenness” showcased. The Christian story doesn’t end with brokenness, after all.

The impulse to have an art show was an attempt to break out of mere scolding and connect with the world, but it crumpled under the weight of a godless worldview rather than offering an alternative. If we truly respect artists, we won’t simply scold, but neither will we fail to engage with them in the field of ideas.

Nancy Pearcey writes about something in Total Truth that I’ve experienced. As a college student and new believer, she sought help from one of the leaders of a campus ministry group she associated with. She was looking for help in defending the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth in the face of the “persuasive relativism” in her sociology class.

 The leader’s response was to “steer the conversation out of intellectual territory and into familiar spiritual territory: ‘Nancy, it sounds like you’re having a problem with assurance of salvation.’” Her concerns were not theological, or psychological. She didn’t doubt her own salvation; she was looking for intellectual tools, but it was interpreted as a smokescreen for spiritual or moral problems.

Diagnosing legitimate questions as symptoms of psychological problems can be very harmful, I think. It’s like prescribing the wrong antibiotic for a bacterial infection: not only does it fail to treat the disease, it can kill off healthy bacteria and create a secondary infection. Only the right kind of answer puts a question to rest; the wrong kind just makes the question chronic–a truer symptom of ill-health than questions.

“The church needs to redefine the mission of pastors and youth leaders to include training in apologetics and worldview,” Pearcey writes. “A religion that avoids the intellectual task and retreats to the therapeutic realm of personal relationships and feelings will not survive on today’s spiritual battlefield.”

Nancy Pearcey writes, “As Schaeffer explains, the concept of truth has been divided–a process he illustrates with the imagery of a two-story building: In the lower story are science and reason, which are considered public truth, binding on everyone. Over and against this is an upper story of noncognitive experience, which is the locus of personal meaning. This is the realm of private truth, where we hear people say, ‘That may be true for you but it’s not true for me.’” (p. 21)

Pearcey traces manifestations of this split from Plato forward, through church fathers like Augustine and Aquinas, to the modern era, where we find it reflected in divisions between private vs. public, values vs. facts, and postmodernism vs. modernism. Faith is  relegated to the “upper story” in every case.

Pearcey writes later, “This is not merely an intellectual analysis. We are talking about a split that divides a person’s inner life, creating enormous tension. When we evangelize among people who have accepted a divided field of knowledge, we must press them to face squarely the terrifying reality of this jagged split running through their own thought world. The very fact that they have to make a leap of faith shows that the scientific naturalism they have accepted in the lower story is not an adequate worldview. It does not explain human nature as everyone experiences it–as even they themselves experience it.” (110)

I’m beginning to get bogged down in Total Truth. I’m not sure I need such an in-depth history of ideas before I’m ready to say, “Yeah, we tend to separate public from private, reason from faith, etc.” This book goes deeply into the “etc.”

However I read something today that helped reinforce the sense I had when the Franklin Graham Festival came to our area recently. As a believer, I remember sitting in the midst of it thinking, “I’d never respond to an event like this as an unbeliever.” I also remember a comment from a college student quoted in the paper: “I expected him to talk longer. I felt like I came in for the last 5 minutes of a two-hour class.”

At the time I chalked it up to a culture gap; the ambience of the Festival seemed to belong to southern culture. But Pearcey gives a better perspective. She says we need to start our talk about faith with Creation, not the fall (”You’re a sinner!”) because the basic concepts familiar to people brought up in the church aren’t familiar anymore. “Beginning with sin instead of creation is like trying to read a book by opening it in the middle. You don’t know the characters and can’t make sense of the plot,” she writes. We need to be like Paul, who built his case from Creation before expecting people to understand the message of sin and salvation.

“If we’ve gone through the public education system,” writes Nancy Pearcey, “‘we have been trained to use a language that makes sense of the world without the hypothesis of God.’” She’s quoting Lesslie Newbigin. This looks like another feather in the cap of the homeschooler. But…

Question: If I’ve gone through that system, and I use language that way, how will it be any different for my children schooled at home? I must admit, even as a believer I catch myself trying to sound “neutral” at times–as if (for example) I can just lay out all these other civilizations with their respective gods, and expect it to be self-evident why the Christian God is unique. (I just did it again: “unique” instead of “real.”)

But the Bible teaches that God created the world. We must start from that ground if we’re going to get a true picture of things. Otherwise we start from the hypothesis that He didn’t. There is no neutral ground. There is no God-free language for the Christian.