Total truth--three key elements

I'm working my way for the seond time through Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey because it is so useful to Christians today. In our western world it is not considered polite to mix public and private (secular and sacred) areas. This division keeps Christianity from having as big an impact as it could have since the truth of Christianity is assumed to be useful only for the private portion of our lives, having nothing to say about our public selves. This is the third blog on the book with more to come because we all need to be reminded of the total truth that Christianity represents--its value for both parts of our lives and for all of society.

Pearcey says the tragedy of the two-story split is that the things that matter most in life (dignity, freedom, personal identity, ultimate purpose) have been cast into the upper story with no grounding in accepted definitions of knowledge. The bottom story is reserved for reason, scientific knowledge, facts, rationality. But no one can live in that lower story because it takes all the joy and beauty out of life.

Pearcey wants all aspects of life to be injected with a Christian worldview perspective. To do this, she says we must ask three sets of questions:

Creation: How was this aspect of the world originally created? What was its original nature and purpose?

Fall: How has it been twisted and distorted by the fall? How has it been corrupted by false worldviews?

Redemption: How can we bring this aspect of the world under the lordship of Christ, restoring it to its original, created purpose?

One example she uses appeals to me since that's where I work everyday as a teacher -- education. Creation says that children are created in the image of God. Education should seek to address all aspects of the human person. Yet the biblical view of human nature is realistic enough because of the fall to remind us that children are prone to sin and in need of moral and intellectual direction. Children are not naturally innocent and shouldn't be allowed to come up with their own morality. Finally, redemption means that education should help equip students to take up vocations to bring about a better world.

Pearcey says we can use the same three-part format to compare worldviews. Creation refers to ultimate origins (where did all come from? how did we get here?). Every worldview will also offer a counterpart 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?). Finally, every worldview has to instill hope by offering a vision of redemption -- a way to reverse the fall and set the world right again.

As an example, she turns to Marxism. Regarding creation, Marxists believe matter itself is the creative power. The fall, according to Marx, was the creation of private property, bringing about all the evils of exploitation and of class struggle. Redemption, for Marxists, involves destroying private ownership of property. This explains why Marxism has such widespread influence today even though it never produces the classless society it claims. It taps into a deep religious hunger for redemption.

The second example comes from New Age thought. The origin of all things is a universal, spiritual essence. The source of evil and suffering is our sense of individuality, and we solve the problem by being reunited with this essence.

This is the first part of Total Truth. Pearcey has shed light on the secular/sacred dichotomy that restricts Christianity to the realm of religious truth, creating double minds and fragmented lives. She tries to overcome this by training Christians to come up with a biblically based worldview using the structural elements of creation, fall, and redemption.
In the next couple of blogs I'll look at Part Two of her book, which zeroes in on creation with a focus on Darwinian evolution. In the meantime, I hope we all think about how we can live whole lives, bringing Christianity into both the public and the private aspects of our society.