A Book Review: TOTAL TRUTH by Nancy Pearcey (reviewed by Jennifer Bell)

I read this book over the course of several months, which isn’t a bad way of reading it, since it’s big and it covers the history of Christianity, the totality—if you will—of Truth. If I were to sum it up, I might say that it’s primarily concerned with Christians taking all thoughts captive to their worldview. Rather than embracing parts, or segmenting faith (Christians on Sunday, Secular Humanists at the office), Pearcey makes the case that Christianity is an all-pervasive worldview, leaving none of life untouched. By living in a kind of duplicity, we’re hamstringing Truth.

She traces, in a pretty extraordinary way with a strong knowledge of history, how we came to this weird point in which we privatize our spirituality. We sharply divide the secular and sacred, the public and the private. She argues that we’ve allowed Christianity to take the backseat. We’ll keep out of science. We’ll keep out of Corporate America. More than that, we let our faith be this absurd joke that no right-minded thinking person would ever, in a million years, go for. Basically, the church in America has become anti-intellectual, and it’s ugly.

Well, anti-intellectualism has a nasty tinge to it, doesn’t it? On the one hand, believers who are a little cynical by all this emphasis on talking and studying and reading (the anti-intellectual crowd?) shirk from something that sounds stringent, puritanical, and like the over-intellectualization of something beautiful and true like grace. But on the other hand, believers who pull out the Five Points of Calvinism and are dying to debate eschatology or St. Augustine or the role of women in the Church (the so-called thinkers?) cringe at the dumbing-down of theology, the rejection of doctrine, an ignorance-is-bliss model for belief. Where, however, does Truth come into play in this divide?

How about Truth?

Perhaps one might ask oneself the following questions: How much Truth are we personally responsible for? Do you want all of the Truth, or some of it? How much Truth is enough—for you, for your kids?

For those interested in worldview studies and the way Christianity might be applied to all of life, I recommend Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. Author Nancy Pearcey, who draws much from the legacy of Francis Schaeffer, has written quite a bit on worldview, and this book proved to be comprehensive and engaging.