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.

Secularism's ongoing debt to Christianity--an atheist perspective

On his radio show (Stand to Reason), Greg Koukl mentioned a powerful essay by an atheist. The title was different than what I expected from a non-believer: "Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity." Doesn't sound like Christopher Hitchens, does it? I want to explore his points in some detail in the future, but for now here's a good response from a website (rustylime.com).


In his recent post in the online journal American Thinker called “Secularism Ongoing Debt to Christianity,” Secular Atheist and author John D. Steinrucken made quite a surprising admission. One only need to read the title of the article to see that what followed was a drastic departure from the normal anti-religious rhetoric coming from more prominent Atheists and Secularists. And what a change indeed. Rather than claiming that “religion poisons everything,” Steinrucken actually asserts that religion, more specifically the Judeo-Christian conviction, actually is the efficient cause for the wide-spread liberty and freedom that secularism has enjoyed in the West since its inception. Not only does he assert that Secularism was fostered in what could loosely be called “Christendom”, but actually that the fate of Western Secularism is intertwined with the survival of the Judeo-Christian worldview in the West as well. As goes the latter, so goes the former as it were.

What is most striking about his article is the forthright admission of the inability of Secularism to ground any kind of moral standard. This has been a topic of interest on RL for quite some time now, and on this, Steinrucken seems to be on the side of the faithful. Score one for the home team. Now, before all my fellow theists get too elated, Steinrucken is not making the case that such morals are REAL, only that the BELIEF in objective morals, such as can only be grounded by religious convictions about the justice of God, objective truth, and the real and universal value of human persons, is pivotal to the survival of a free Western society.

To that end he says, "Those who doubt the effect of religion on morality should seriously ask the question: Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion. For the great majority in the West, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition which offers a template assuring a life of inner peace toward the world at large -- a peace which translates to a workable liberal society."

Well put. Later he even goes so far as to say, “Secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion.” He briefly alludes to the failed attempt at Secular utopias that ended up causing some of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated in the history of mankind. Those secular attempts for utopia, “when actually put to the test, have not merely come to naught. Attempts during those two centuries to put into practice utopian visions have caused huge sufferings. “ Sadly, we have no want of examples that affirm his statement – Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Hoxha’s Albania, Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and on and on. It is no small thing that the most secular century has been, hands down, the bloodiest century in human history – a fulfillment of Nietzsche’s dark prediction that the death of belief God would mark the beginning of the most violent era in human history. People would replace their faith in God with faith in the state – “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods” as he called them.

We get a sense that Steinrucken has read Nietzsche and has imagined the same fate. What most people don’t know is that Nietzsche did not only make a prediction about the 20th century, but also the 21st - and it doesn’t get any better. Nietzsche saw that the 20th century would at the very least have some residual moral sentiment left over from the 19th century and such a sentiment would curb the barbarism. The 21st century however would have no such sentiment. He predicted a “total eclipse of values.” If it was so easy for the Secular Utopias to marginalize, then criminalize, then euthanize vast swaths of their citizens even with residual values, how much more easy will it be to do so when values are entirely passé? However, where Nietzsche saw the inevitable, Steinrucken desires to avoid such a societal collapse.

Here again I must remind my fellow theists not to get too excited. Steinrucken is not advocating for some widespread conversion to faith. His point is that it is in the secularists’ best interest to see to it that the moral grounding found in the Judeo-Christian tradition is preserved. This is because should secularism do away with that foundation, and then one day find itself in disfavor and itself under the thumb of some radical ideologue hell-bent on purging society of the godless and the infidel, the secularist will have no one to defend them because no one will be left to decry the real injustice of it all.

I will end where he ends, “It is not critical that they themselves believe, only that they should publicly hold in high esteem the institutions of Christianity and Judaism, and to respect those who do believe and to encourage and to give leeway to those who, in truth, will be foremost in the trenches defending us against those who would have us all bow down to a different and unaccommodating faith.”