Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey is a wonderful read. It puts into words many thoughts I have had over the few years. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Nancy provided so much information in the book. It was very thought provoking and challenging.

The book is broken down into 4 sections. They are:

1. What’s In a Worldview
2. Starting at the Beginning
3. How We Lost Our Minds
4. What Next? Living It Out

What’s In a Worldview delves into how a worldview involves everything we do, how we live, and how we interpret and think about events and circumstances in our lives. She explains how it is more than just going to church on Sunday and leaving our religion at home when we go to work or involve ourselves in politics.

In many churches, the message of justification — how to get right with God — is preached over and over again. But much less is said about sanctification — how to live after you’re converted.

This is very true in many churches today. So many churches are becoming “seeker friendly” to the point of never helping Christians grow past their conversion experience. This is a great weakness in the church today. It is allowing our youth to grow up without knowing how to defend their faith when they get to college. It does not help adults be able to defend their faith in the workplace. They are leaving us as little children in the faith. How can we tell someone about Christ if we cannot defend our faith adequately? This is a topic my wife and I are having regularly about the church we attend.

Martin Luther liked to say that our occupations are God’s “masks” – His way of caring for creation in a hidden manner through human means. In our work, we are God’s hands, God’s eyes, God’s feet.

This is a great way of explaining that we do not have to be involved in a ministry to be doing the work of God. We all do our part in some way wherever God has called us to work. Even if we don’t know the purpose, God has one and will lead us if we let him.

To do this effectively though we need to make our worldview permeate all that we do, not just keep our religion a private matter. Our religion should be who we are and it will shine through to those around us.

We all need to learn about apologetics. We need to be able to defend our faith intellectually instead of just emotionally. We have to be able to provide arguments and reasons for the truth of Christianity.

Christians are beginning to be involved in Philosophy again. This has been due mostly to Alvin Plantinga.

Then came Pantinga’s influential God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Cornell Paperbacks) which demonstrated that theists could match their naturalistic colleagues in “conceptual precision, rigor in argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of the original worldview.”

Why has Christianity taken the emotional approach and allowed secularist and naturalist take over many fields like philosophy where Christians once dominated? This is answered in part 2, “Starting at the Beginning”.

The beginning leads straight to Darwin.

As we have seen, every worldview starts with an account of Creation, which shapes its concepts of the Fall and Redemption. As a result, whoever has the authority to shape a culture’s Creation myth is its de facto “priesthood,” with the power to determine what the dominant worldview will be. To break the power of today’s secular “priesthood,” Christian’s need to have a basic grasp of the origins controversy, with its wide-ranging impact on American thought. ……… Darwinisn led to a naturalistic view of knowledge in which ”theological dogmas and philosophical absolutes were at worst totally fraudulent and at best merely symbolic of deep human aspirations.”

Nancy explains the impact of these statements. This is the time in which religion was segregated to personal belief and values while Darwinism became public facts. I won’t go into the explanations she gave in debunking some of Darwin’s theories. I will leave that for you. I will also point you to another book that goes into a lot more detail and that book is I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. You can read my review of that book here.

The basic question comes down to the following:

Either the universe is a closed system of cause and effect, or it is an open system, the product of a Personal Agent. Everything that follows stems from the fundamental choice. ….. In a similar way, the Intelligent Design argument wonderfully streamlines the debate over origins. It cuts through the conflicting claims of a vast variety of positions by grouping them within two basic categories: Either nature is a closed system, and science is permitted to consider only blind, material forces; or else nature is an open system, and intelligence is an irreducible reality along side natural forces.

We need to learn these basics and how to defend them intellectually. This is not about our values as much as it is about the intellectual arguments that show Creation and nature are open systems. Once we move to the values argument we have lost because we have left religion as a personal choice again.

Part 3, “How We Lost Our Minds” takes us back to the both the first and second Great Awakening in America. The first Great Awakening was the beginning of Evangelicalism. Nancy defines Evangelicalism for us from the historical perspective and not what we would call Evangelicals today.

American historians typically use it in a more technical sense to refer to a movement that grew out of the First and Second Great Awakenings, embracing a revivalist style of preaching and an emphasis on personal conversion (the “New Birth” ). Because it was a renewal movement within the church, its goals was not so much to convert nonbelievers as to enliven the faith of nominal believers – to bring individuals to a subjective experience of the saving truths of the gospel.

Evangelicalism allowed the early American Church to grow rapidly. But in its wake it had removed the intellectual arguments for salvation and left it with only the emotional side. It was a movement that advocated personal reading and understanding of the Bible with animosity to the Church Establishment. This was the mechanism that left all the intellectual power and arguments of the Church behind in favor of the exciting, enlivened and personal freedom of the emotional Church.

This intellectual breakdown is what allowed Darwinsim to take root and grow to where it is today. It is threatening to completely secularize America by relegating Religion to the personal realm having no place in the public square.

The Second Great Awakening saw the church integrating the best practices of the secular business word into it. It again relegated Christian business principles to the sidelines. This has continued to today. Christian companies and churches are run like the world runs their businesses and not like God would have them run. God has been removed from many churches in favor of the best practices of the business world.

“What Next? Living It Out” is the final section of the book. We must first know the truth and then we must live the truth daily. We need to imitate Christ. We need to rid ourselves of idols of the heart.

In a culture that judges people by reputation and achievement. Not that these things are wrong in themselves. But when they fill our hearts and define our motivations, then they become barriers to our relationship with God – which means they become sin for us. As Paul says, anything not of faith is sin, because it blocks our single-minded devotion to God and hinders our growth to holiness.

Nancy explains that we need to speak to those in love when we see a sinful situation. It is wrong not to speak to those who are sinful. It is not showing love if we say nothing.

She also explains that more money does not equate to more ministry. Ministry should not be all about making money, but about doing what God want and if he wants the ministry to do away, then so be it. It is not our responsibility and it is wrong to try and force a ministry when it does not serve God anymore. We need to handle ministries and our jobs according to God’s will and not according to secular world practices.

I would recommend this book to Pastor’s, and Christians. You will greatly appreciate this book and learn a great deal. It will also inspire you to learn more about apologetics so you can intellectually defend your faith.

This is not a book non-believers would enjoy. It is specifically aimed at Christians.

I received this book for free to review. It is linked to Amazon for tracking purposes for the book companies to see the effectiveness of Blog for Books.