WORLDVIEWS

'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. This is the confidence that should sustain us when we bring our faith perspective into the public arena, whether in persoanl evangelism or in our professional work.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.396.

WORLDVIEWS

'Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.370.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

'An old spiritual classic says that the Christian life really begins when we understand by hard experience that "apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). It's a verse many of us have memorized and can quote at the drop of a hat. But it rarely becomes real in practice until we encounter an overwhelming crisis that pushes us to the end of our own resources. For people with a lot of resources, that may not be until middle life or even later. But at some point, the realization crashes in on us that life is not what we had hoped for, and we ask, Is this all there is? We realize that in a fallen world, even the good things cannot fully satisfy our deepest hungers, and everything we have loved and lived for turns to sawdust and slips through our fingers. If we are honest, we have to admit that our personal relationships are often driven by what we  want and need from others, not by a genuinely unselfish love for them. Even our efforts at Christin ministry are often motivated more by personal zeal and ambition than by God's Spirit. And the greater our natural zeal, the greater the crisis God has to allow in order to bring us to the end of our rope. Only after dying to everything we have ever lived for do we genuinely come to believe, as a practical reality, that "apart from me you can do nothing." And only then can God really pour His life and power into our work.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.363.

EVANGELISM

'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.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.363.

EVANGELISM

'God's strategy for reaching a lost world is for the church to function as a visible demonstration of his existence.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.361.

SIN & CHRISTIANS

'If we are not saying no in ways that bring us to our knees to seek God's enabling power, then it's likely that we are not standing against the sinful system of the world as we ought.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.357.

WORLDVIEWS & EVANGELISM

'...the truths of experience are not self-explanatory. Instead they merely constitute the data that cries out to be explained within an overarching worldview. Why is it that the bits of matter we call our bodies have consciousness and are able to navigate the wolrd so effectively? Why are we capable of building societies with some measure of justice and compassion? As I write, NASA has just released stunning new photographs of the surface of Mars - but why is it possible for humans to calculate a trajectory and land a spacecraft on another planet? What kind of world permits these fascinating acheivements? Our claims as Christians is that only a biblically based worldview offers a complete and consistent explanantion of why we are capable of knowing scientific, moral and mathematical truths. Christianity is the key that fits in the lock of the universe.

Moreover, since all other worldviews are false keys, we can be absolutely confident, when talking with nonbelivers, that they themselves know things that are not accounted for by their own worldview - whatever it might be. Or, to turn it around, they will not be able to live consistently on the basis of their own worldview. Since their metaphysical beliefs do not fit the world God created, their lives will be more or less inconsistent with those beliefs. Living in the real world requires them to function in ways that are not supported by their worldview.

This creates a state of cognitive dissonance, and at that point of tension, the gospel may find an opening. In evangelism we can draw people's attention to the conflict between what they know on the basis of experience and what they profess in their stated beliefs - because that is a sure sign that something is wrong with their beliefs.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.318.

EVANGELICALISM

'Today evangelicalism is still emerging form the fundamentalist era - still working to regain a more holistic understanding of the Lordship of Christ over all of life and culture. In recent decades, evangelicals have moved up the social and economic ladder. We are more likely to be educated and have high incomes. Yet I would suggest that in our churches and parachurch ministries we still encounter many of the basic patterns from an earlier age - the tendency to define religion primarily in emotional terms; the anti-creedal, anti-historical attitude that ignores the theological riches of the past; the assertion of individual choice as the final determinant of belief; the atomistic view of the church as merely a collection of individuals who happen to believe the same things; the preference for social activism over intellectual reflection. Most of all, perhaps, evangelicalism still produces a clebrity model of leadership - men who are entrepreneurial and pragmatic, who deliberately manipulate their listeners' emotions, who subtly enhance their own image through self-serving personal anecdotes, whose leadership style within their own congregations or parachurch ministry tends to be imperious and domineering, who calculate success in terms of results, and who are willing to emply the latest secular techniques to boost numbers.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.291.

CHURCH & SOCIETY

'It is a common assumption that, in order to survive, churches must accommodate to the age. But in fact, the opposite is true: In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture. As a general principle, the higher a group's tension with mainstream society, the higher its growth rate.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.261.

TRUTH

'...the key to restoring a unified concept of truth is to recover a robust concept of creation. Christianity has always taught that there is "a single reality" because it was created by a single omnipotent and all-wise God, explains one historical account. "Given this creation story, it followed that knowledge, too, comprised a single whole." It was the doctrine of creation that undergirded confidence in the unity of truth.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.247.

WORLDVIEWS

'A wonderfully simple and effective means of comparing worldviews is to apply the same grid of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. After all, every worldview or ideology has to answer the same three sets of questions:

1. CREATION: Translated into worldview terms, Creation refers to ultimate origins. Every worldview or philosophy has to start with a theory or origins: Where did it all come from? Who are we, and how did we get here?
2. FALL: Every worldview also offers a counterpoint to the Fall, an explanation of the source of evil and suffering. What has gone wrong with the world? Why is there warfare and conflict?
3. REDEMPTION: Finally, to engage people's hearts, every worldview has to install hope by offering a vision of Redemption - an agenda for reversing the "Fall" and setting the world aright again.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.134.

MINISTERS & APOLOGETICS

'Despite the common stereotype, intellectual questions are not always merely a smokescreen for spiritual or moral problems. To be effective in equipping young people and professionals to face the challenges of a highly secular society, the church needs to redefine the mission of pastors and youth pastors to include training in apologetics and worldview. We must refuse to dismiss objections to faith as mere spiritual subterfuge, but instead prepare ourselves to give what Schaeffer called "honest answers to honest questions."

When America was a young nation, the clergy were often the most highly enducated members of the community. The congregation looked up to them and respected their intellectual expertise. But today those sitting in the pews are often as highly educated as the pastor; among the general population the clergy may even be looked down as narrowly trained functionaries. In this climate, it is imperative for seminaries to broaden the education of pastors to include courses on intellectual history, training future pastors to critique the dominant ideologies of our day. Pastors must once again provide intellectual leadership for their congregations, teaching apologetics from the pulpit. Every time a minister introduces bible teaching, he should also instruct the congregation in ways to defend it against major objections they are likely to encounter. A religion that avoids the intellectual task and retreats to the therapuetic realm of personal relationships and feelings will not survive in today's spiritual battlefield.'

Nany Pearcey, Total Truth, p.127.  

EVANGELISM

'Traditional evangelism addressed a person's moral "lostness," which can be an effective method when that person is aware of standing guilty before a holy God. But today many people do not believe in a transcendent moral standard; if you speak about guilt, they think you're talking about a psychological problem that requires therapy, not about true and moral guilt that requires forgiveness. 

Yet there is also a metaphysical "lostness" that we can address. The tragedy of the two-storey split is that the things that matter most in life - like dignity, freedom, personal identity, and ultimate purpose - have been cast into the upper story, with no grounding in accepted definitions of knowledge. We must never treat the divided concept of truth as merely academic; it produces an inner division between what people think they know (that we are merely machines in a deterministic universe) and what they desperately want to believe (that our lives have purpose and meaning).'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.119.  

EVANGELISM

'Perhaps the most common imbalance in American evangelicalism is to overemphasize the Fall. Consider the typical evangelistic message: "You're a sinner; you need to be saved." What could be wrong with that? Of course, it's true that we are sinners, but notice that the message starts with the Fall instead of Creation. By beginning with the theme of sin, it implies that our essential identity consists in being guilty sinners, deserving of divine punishment. Some Christian literature goes so far as to say we are nothing, completely worthless, before a holy God.  

This excessively negative view is not biblical, however, and it lays Christianity open to the charge that it has a low view of human dignity. The Bible does not begin with the Fall but with Creation. Our value and dignity are rooted in the fact that we were created in the image of God, with the high calling of being His representatives on earth. In fact, it is only because humans have such a high value that sin is so tragic. If we we were worthless to begin with then the Fall would be a trivial event. When a cheap trinket is broken, we toss it aside with a shrug. But when a priceless masterpiece is defaced, we are horrified. It is because humans are the masterpiece of God's creation that the destructiveness of sin produces such horror and sorrow. Far from expressing a low view of human nature,. the Bible actually gives a far higher view than the dominant secular view today, which regards humans as simply complex computers made of meat - products of blind, naturalistic forces, without transcendent purpose or meaning.

If we start with a message of sin, without giving the context of Creation, then we will come across to nonbelievers as merely negative and judgemental. After an extended trip through Africa (described in Dark Star Safari) the writer Paul Theroux said one of the saddest moments in his journey was "hearing a young woman [missionary] tell me she was heading for Mozambique and adding, "They're all sinners, you know." Theroux concluded that missionaries only make people "despise themselves." We need to begin our message where the Bible begins - with the dignity and high calling of all human beings because they are created in the image of God.

Moreover, in our secularized culture, startrting with the Fall renders the rest of our message incoherent. In an earlier age, when most Americans were brought up in the church, they were familiar with basic theolgical concepts - which meant that the revivalist's simple message of sin and salvation was often adequate. When people heard, "You're a sinner," they had the context to understand what it meant, and many were moved to repentance. But contemporary Americans often have no background in biblical teaching -which means that the concept of sin makes no sense to them. Their response is likely to be, What is sin? What right does God have to judge me? How do you know He even exists? 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.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.87.

THE CHURCH & WORKERS

'Ordinary Christians working in business, industry, politics, factory work, and so on, are "the Church's front-line troops in her engagment with the world," wrote Leslie Newbigin. Imagine how our churches would be transformed if we truly regarded laypeople as frontline troops in the spiritual battle. "Are we taking seriously our duty to support them in their warfare?" Newbigin asked. "Have we ever done anything seriously to strengthen their Christian witness, to help them in facing the very difficult ethical problems which they have to meet every day, to give them assurance that the whole fellowship is behind them in their spiritual warfare?" The church is nothing less than a training ground for sending out laypeople who are equipped to speak the gospel to the world.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.67.  

WORLDVIEWS

'...worldview is not an abstract, academic concept. Instead, the term describes our search for answers to those intensely personal questions everyone must wrestle with - the cry of the human heart for purpose, meaning, and a truth big enough to live by. No one can live without a sense of purpose and direction, a sense that his and her life has significance as part of a cosmic story. We may limp along for a while, extracting small installments of meaning from short-term goals like earning a degree, landing a job, getting married, establishing a family. But at some point, these temporal things fail to fulfill the deep hunger for eternity in the human spirit. For we were made for God, and every part of our personality is orientated toward relationship with Him. Our hearts are restless, Augustine said, until we find our rest in him.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity fropm Its Cultural Captivity, p.55.