Allthings2all Special: An Interview with Nancy Pearcey

I recently read Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey, who is the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar at the World Journalism Institute, Visiting Scholar at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. Since then I have had the privilege to interview her, and she provided an interesting discussion on Christian community, politics, science, and a Christian worldview:

Catez: Hi Nancy. I understand from reading Total Truth that you spent time with Francis and Edith Schaeffer at L'Abri. Could you tell us a bit about that time, what it was like living there, and what it was that most influenced you there?

Nancy: When I was in high school, I very consciously and intentionally gave up my Christian faith. Though I had grown up in the Lutheran Church, I began having questions about whether or not Christianity was really true. Back then, most churches did not teach any kind of apologetics, so I did not get any solid answers to my questions. Eventually I decided that the only intellectually honest course was to reject my faith, and try to make an objective search through various religions and philosophies to discover which one was true.

This was my mindset when I came across L'Abri in Switzerland (I was going to school in Germany at the time). What struck me most forcefully was that this was the first time I had encountered Christians who actually engaged with the intellectual and cultural world of the day. They treated my questions seriously and thoughtfully, helping me to see how Christianity answers the issues raised by modern culture. I did not become convinced that Christianity was true during my first visit to L'Abri (I left after only a month because I wanted more space to think about it). But later, when I did become a Christian, it was largely a result of the arguments I had encountered there. I was persuaded that a Christian worldview does offer better answers to the fundamental questions that all philosophies or ideologies seek to address.

The ideas taught at L'Abri were reinforced by the presence of a genuine community where the ideals of Christianity were clearly lived out. Jesus says people will know that the gospel is true when they witness visible love in the Body of Christ. L'Abri addressed the whole person - both the intellectual quest for answers and the emotional longing to participate in an authentic community. After being persuaded with my mind, I returned to L'Abri for four months with a focus on making those truths real in my practical and personal life.

L'Abri also encouraged the arts, nurturing artistic and creative people, who sometimes sense that they are on the margins of the church. In the Swiss chalets where we lived as students, even everyday events were done with an aesthetic touch, like putting a small vase of wildflowers on the dinner table. Because we are made in the image of the Creator, we are called to be creative in everything we do. You might say that at L'Abri I witnessed a very rich form of Christianity that included the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

Catez: The word "worldview" is often used by evangelicals. I have to admit that I used to think it meant having opinions on the world. How do you define a worldview?

Nancy: We all have some inner "roadmap" that guides us in life, some mental picture of what the world is like and the best way to live in it. That's what a worldview is. It may be only partly conscious, but every person has to make sense of life somehow. Biblical discipleship calls on us to become fully conscious of our worldview - to sort out the ideas we've absorbed from the secular culture around us, and then to intentionally build up a vision of the world consistent with God's revelation in Scripture.

One reason "worldview" has become such a vital issue today is that during the fundamentalist era, Christians lost sight of the fact that the Bible speaks to all of life. They tended to apply it to only one part of life - the one labeled "religion" - then treated areas like politics, economics, business, and management as merely technical fields with no connection to their religious life. This compartmentalized thinking created an inner divide, a mental dualism, sometimes called the sacred/secular dualism. Most people who are attracted to the concept of "worldview" today are eager to overcome that divide and discover how biblical truth relates to every area of life. All of creation comes from the hand of God, and can only be understood truly in light of God's word. It is not a light to only some of our paths, but to all our paths.

We will only experience the power and focus and joy that God wants for us when His life-giving truth is no longer locked up in a separate compartment of our lives. By developing a Christian worldview we allow God's truth and power to flow through into every corner of our hearts and minds.

Catez: One of the points that you make in Total Truth is that evangelicals have tended to "put all their eggs" in one basket by embracing political activism. Some people say all Christians should be involved politically and some say we shouldn't be involved at all. Is it as clear-cut as either of those two positions? Would you say our calling is a determinant in deciding our position?

Nancy: Working out an intentional Christian worldview certainly includes a biblical view of politics, but that it is only one part of our cultural engagement. We are also called to have a Christian worldview on economics, education, entertainment, and every other area of life. Of course, we all have to specialize in some field or profession. Because I live in the Washington, D.C., area, many of my friends are political professionals. But they are keenly aware that they are part of the larger Body of Christ, and that cultural renewal requires all of us to be faithful in the sphere of influence and responsibility where God has called us.

In fact, I would go further and say that if we are not working out an overarching, comprehensive Christian worldview that applies across the board, we will not be effective even in politics. Why? Because we will get caught up in sheer activism. We may win elections, but we will not know how to address the deeper, underlying ideas that shape our culture. We will always be reacting to the latest outrage instead of acting intelligently in ways that establish justice and protect the public good.

Catez: One really interesting aspect of your work is your interest and study of scientific trends. What started your interest in science? Are Christianity and science compatible?

Nancy: I began writing on the relationship between science and Christianity in 1977 because I realized that in the modern world, science is considered the final arbiter of truth. All other fields - religion, psychology, history - are expected to adapt to the pronouncements of science. That's why every Christian needs to become familiar with the basic ways science is used as a weapon to undercut Scriptural truth. Otherwise a biblically based perspective will be dismissed as merely a private, subjective belief with no relevance for the public arena.

The main point of conflict, of course, is naturalistic evolution, and all of us ought to have a basic grasp of the case against Darwinism. There are exciting new arguments being crafted by the Intelligent Design movement that are not merely negative (i.e., that natural forces alone can't do the job) but actually positive (i.e., that nature provides empirical evidence of an intelligent source). The most persuasive is the argument from DNA, the genetic code. There are no known natural causes that produce a code, a language, or communication system. Language exhibits a form of specified complexity that is diagnostic of intelligence.

We can also step back and make the more fundamental argument that Christianity made science possible in the first place. Historians tell us that even ideas that seem obvious to us today, like the existence of "laws" of nature, were not held by any other culture at any other time in history. This idea came only from medieval Europe, at a time when it was saturated with a Christian worldview. Medieval thinkers regarded the world as the handiwork of a rational God who created it with an intelligible order. Today virtually all historians of science (whether they are personally Christian or not) agree that Christianity provided the foundational view of nature necessary for modern science to emerge.

The highlight of my writing on this subject was my earlier book The Soul of Science. In the process, I discovered that, because science is so central to the modern world, the history of science gives a good handle on the history of ideas as a whole. So even if you are not a scientist, the book's approach can be helpful. In order to communicate the gospel effectively to the people around us, we need to know how they think and where their ideas came from.

Catez: Recently I had an interesting discussion on the use of the word "objective". Total Truth is about having an objective view and approach to the world I think. Does objective just mean factual and rational?

Nancy: Western thought is divided into two contradictory streams, often called the fact/value split. Francis Schaeffer used the imagery of two stories in a building - the lower story is what we know by science and reason, which is supposedly objective and publicly verifiable (fact), while the upper story is the realm of religion and morality, which has been relegated to subjective private experience (value). Once we understand this pervasive split, we will realize that "objectivism" and "subjectivism" are each only part of the story. As Christians, we want the complete truth.

This has become an issue today among Christians who adopt the label postmodern. They tell us that the church must leave the modernist age behind and move forward into postmodernism, or risk becoming irrelevant. But this is based on the mistaken idea that modernism and postmodernism are sequential stages in history. In reality, they coexist within the same two-track divide I just talked about, which is endemic in Western thought. Modernism remains firmly entrenched in the lower level, in the hard sciences and the world of politics, finance, and industry. (No one designs an airplane by postmodern principles.) And postmodernism is simply the current form of the upper level.

The two-realm theory of truth can be diagrammed like this:

POSTMODERNISM
Private, Subjective, Personal
MODERNISM
Public, Objective, Rational


This is not to deny that something new is taking place in our day. But a more accurate way to picture the change is that the two stories are moving farther apart from one another. In the lower story, modernism is growing increasingly materialistic and reductionistic. Today many scientists consider humans to be nothing but mechanisms - complex data-processing machines. At the same time in the upper story, postmodernism is growing ever more subjective and relativistic, reducing truth to private, individual experience ("true for me, but not true for you").

As Christians, our goal should be to reject this dichotomy altogether. All truth is God's truth, in every area or field. God has created a multi-dimensional world with many forms of truth - scientific truth, religious truth, moral truth, mathematical truth, artistic truth, and so on. That's why the title of my book declares that Christianity is Total Truth.

Catez: I realize that by asking questions like this I may miss something that you consider very important. Is there anything you'd like to add here about your work or your own worldview?

Nancy: It is crucial to put the discussion of worldview within the context of discipleship. I end Total Truth with a chapter showing that developing a biblical worldview is nothing less than learning to love God with all your mind - as much as your heart, soul, and strength. Growing in our mental understanding of the faith is part of our overall spiritual growth. It must be kept squarely within the process of sanctification.

Just as in other areas of sanctification, we often experience the greatest growth through times of crisis and suffering. Because we are fallen sinners, we all have what Ezekiel calls "idols of the heart" - the things we think we must have, above all else, in order to feel significant, to have a sense of worth, to be successful, to make life worth living. Even though we may be sincere in our belief in God, these are the things that really get us up in the morning and give us a reason for living. Yet these idols are harsh taskmasters - they are the reason we are so driven to get ahead professionally, to gain power and influence, to find the perfect relationship, to raise high-achieving children.

How do we recognize the idols hidden deeply in our own hearts? Only when they let us down. When we suffer loss, disappointment, injustice, failure, betrayal. These moments are opportunities, for only then do we realize how much we have really been living for other things instead of for God. When Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ," he's talking about dying to the idols that have taken the place of God in our heart. We must ask God to allow our suffering to become a participation in the sufferings of Christ, with a redemptive purpose.

Only when we die with Christ can we truly have the mind of Christ. This is the mystery at the heart of developing a Christian worldview. Each of us needs to ask God to conduct a searching examination of our own hidden motivations, to reveal the idols in our heart and then set us free to serve Him alone.

Today many of our churches and para-church ministries are starting to teach about Christian worldview, but typically they treat it as a new apologetics technique or a strategy for the culture war. American evangelicals are also quick to take any good idea and turn it into a commodity, a slogan to be used in fundraising letters and donor appeals. It is far too easy to take a biblical concept and use it in nonbiblical ways. As Schaeffer put it in a famous sermon, the Lord's work must be done in the Lord's way - not in the world's way - if it is to have the Lord's blessing. Worldview thinking applies not only to our message but also to the methods we use. Our lives are meant to be a living demonstration of the existence of God to a watching world.

Catez: Nancy thankyou for taking the time to be interviewed. It's been interesting, challenging, and a pleasure.

Nancy Pearcey writes in depth on the themes she has discussed here in her latest book Total Truth.

Note: Please do not post long excerpts from this interview on your site. You may post a short excerpt with a link back to this interview. Thanks.

Also related: My Review of Total Truth