Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity

Book Review • Pearcey, Nancy. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Study Guide Edition). Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2008. 512 pp. $9.94.

Read time: 10 min

Though raised in a Christian home, as a high-schooler school Nancy Randolph Pearcey became an agnostic and launched herself into a pursuit of truth, wherever that might lead her. It eventually led her to Switzerland to study the Christian worldview under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri Fellowship. Brought to faith through that community, so many years later, she now functions as the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar at the World Journalism Institute, where she teaches a worldview course based on her book—the subject of this review, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. Pearcey is a writer, editor, and lecturer, holding a bachelor’s degree from Iowa State University (Distributed Studies degree: philosophy, German, music), a master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, and additional graduate education in the history of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, with emphases on ancient and Reformational philosophy (512). In Total Truth, she attempts to establish the legitimacy and framework of a defensible, comprehensive, and distinctively Christian worldview.

Summary

Pearcey’s chief contention in Total Truth is that Christians today should not be satisfied to merely believe various Christian “truths” (such as the cardinal truths of the gospel) but to go on to discover and develop a distinctively Christian understanding and approach to all of life—a “worldview” not based loosely on some biblical “truths” but firmly on the “Truth.” The Truth is that which God has revealed concerning Reality as God himself sees it: things as they really are. God has revealed this Truth most explicitly in the Christian Scriptures and to varying degrees also in nature and in history through his providential acts of “common grace.” A comprehensive worldview integrates the diverse aspects of our human lives (science, philosophy, relationships, meaning, work, economics, morality, evangelism, spirituality, society, culture, etc.) by understanding all things in relationship to the Author and definitive reference point of Reality, which is God.

Part 1

The book is divided into four parts. In Part One, Pearcey argues that a cultural dichotomy of the secular versus sacred (a fact/value split, she also calls it) creates “double minds and fragmented lives” and effectively removes Christian thought from the very discussion in the marketplace of ideas (25). She reasons that developing a comprehensive worldview is necessary for a Christian to avoid adopting this same cultural dichotomy, which leads to the compartmentalization and privatization of one’s faith. A worldview positively equips the Christian to be on the offensive, creating rather than merely critiquing culture. She urges the reader to build a worldview by answering questions associated with the themes of Creation (ultimate origins: where we came from, who we are, why we’re here), Fall (what has gone wrong with the world), and redemption (an agenda for reversing the fall and setting the world aright). She does this by contrasting the Truth of Christianity to Marxism, the ideology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Margaret Sanger’s sexual revolution, the bleakness of Buddhism, and other major non-Christian dogmas of our day.

Part 2

In Part Two, Total Truth presents the Christian conception of origins (Creation and Creationism) and examines the scientific merit of the theory of biological Evolution. Pearcey exposes how recent science tips the scales considerably in favor of Intelligent Design as the philosophical explanation underlying the raw data science seeks to analyze. Beyond the hard sciences, Pearcey shows how Evolution has spread beyond the laboratory and classroom into the social and legal infrastructures of Western culture, and how Evolution is one of the most pervasive and pernicious alternative worldviews of our day.

Part 3

Part Three “peers into the looking glass of history to ask why evangelicals do not have a strong worldview tradition” and why the secular/sacred dichotomy is so pervasive (25). Pearcey tells the story of how Evangelicalism has succumbed to Modernization’s pressure to privatize faith and usher in an allegedly “values-free” secular ideology in its vacuum.

Part 4

Part Four painstakingly walks the reader through the building blocks of a biblical worldview, issue by issue, putting meat on the bones of the earlier ideas in the book. Pearcey calls upon seminaries, pastors, and parents to go beyond simply teaching spiritual insights and piety by also equipping Christians to defend their Christian worldview when it is questioned or contradicted in the marketplace of ideas.

Critical Analysis

Weaknesses

One foundational element to Pearcey’s worldview philosophy is that of the Cultural Mandate, which she draws from Genesis. In arguing for the urgent need of Christians today to apply this Mandate to their lives, she laments that so many churches emphasize conversion to the crowding out of teaching on the Cultural Mandate. She reasons that this oversight prevents many Christians from living out God’s plan for humanity. I share a measured agreement, in principle, with her critique. However, she appears to me to be somewhat imbalanced in arguing for the superior weight that should be given to the Cultural Mandate over traditional doctrines of the new birth and justification, which she listed as examples. Pearcey illustrates her point by saying that while our birth is important, we should not go on talking about our birth for the rest of our lives, which is precisely what most evangelicals do regarding their New Birth. While I agree that understanding the new birth or justification, for example, are not the endgame of divine revelation, I believe that she leaves too little place in her ideal of the Christian life to the contemplation of, the reveling in, the worship of God as he is revealed in Jesus. A supralapsarian, for instance, may find redemption in Christ to be not Plan B but Plan A in God’s economy. The person and work of Christ and the Spirit in Redemption should not be denigrated to the level of mere handmaids of the Cultural Mandate: getting humans back on track to do what Adam should have done. Jesus Christ is not a cosmic repairman to whom slight but due credit and attention are to be given since he fixed the air conditioner. He is the fulness of the glory of God in human form. He is the centerpiece of history, not merely its redeemer. And for eternity, Christians will not be marveling at how much they accomplished on earth in obedience to the Cultural Mandate but magnifying Christ the Lion, the Lamb, the Light of heaven itself. God did not create humans to be tireless worker ants representing God on earth. We are representatives of God on earth, which in a significant way involves joyfully beholding the glory of God in the person of God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, and trusting in his perfect life, death, and resurrection for justification and sanctification. I wish more in Total Truth urged us to revel in and commune with God as much as they are to represent God and communicate about him to others as part of the purpose of human existence.

One more slightly negative critique is that since Total Truth attempts to reason toward a comprehensive worldview, it seeks to be comprehensive in scope. This can be helpful because it’s an introductory one-stop-shop for worldview formation, but it can also be scattered. The content within the book’s four parts develops more like a stream of consciousness than a logical, premeditated format. For this reason, Total Truth is fatiguing to follow since it isn’t a handful of topics considered deeply but a myriad of issues considered briefly. She spends a little over five hundred pages trudging through what would fill an entire bookshelf if each topic touched upon were dealt with thoroughly. One of Pearcey’s peer reviewers called the work her magnum opus: it is her own formulated Christian worldview—and a whale of a work.

Strengths

There is much to praise about Total Truth. First, Pearcey writes with a tone that breathes confidence and hope in readers who are insecure as to just how defensible and rational a Christian worldview is. This work would be fitting for high school students anticipating college and adults neck-deep in a secular workplace. She maintains a contagiously indomitable spirit throughout the project, emboldening the reader.

Secondly, she is detailed enough to be helpful but broad enough in scope to be comprehensive. While this makes the book a little hard to follow, it is a positive in that as a worldview primer. Total Truth introduces the reader to many points where the Christian worldview intersects with competing worldviews. For example, are Christians confronted with an onslaught of unbiblical views of sexual ethics? Pearcey helpfully gives the backstory of the sexual revolution and the ideology that “restraint” itself is the problem. At the same time, the Bible affirms that human nature is self-destructive and restraints are for our good. Are Christians faced with Evolution taught as fact in the classroom, lab, and boardroom? Pearcey waxes wise on the history and progress of Darwinism as it has trespassed beyond being an observational science into an entire philosophy of life. She satisfyingly reveals how its ground-level presupposition is accepted by faith. She addresses Islam, Buddhism, the New Age, and Materialistic determinism. The sheer information, if internalized, would prove ample armament for one’s average encounter with others embracing non-Christian views of the world.

Thirdly, Pearcey does a fine job upholding concrete, real-life stories and examples of (1) Christians floundering in need of a Christian view of all of life, often at the beginning of many of the chapters; (2) examples of key thinkers and movements, and their philosophical foundations and social ramifications; (3) stories of Christians who in their own way have shaped culture powerfully through their worldview, teaching, and testimony, such as Richard Wurmbrand and Francis Shaeffer. While a highly theoretical work, Pearcey has clearly done her homework in bringing the ideas home.

Conclusion

On the whole, I have benefitted greatly from reading Total Truth. Nancy Pearcey gifted Christians with a comprehensive and persuasive guidebook for building their own distinctively Christian worldview. She has introduced the reader to all the major “-isms” likely to be encountered in the marketplace of ideas, and she has demonstrated the viability of answering the greatest questions of life biblically and exposing the self-defeating, self-destructive presuppositions of a host of non-Christian worldviews. ❖