Total Truth (Study Guide Edition - Trade Paperback) E-Book

Nancy Pearcey

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1056

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

Does God belong in the public arena of politics, business, law, and education? Or is religion a private matter only-personally comforting but publicly irrelevant? In today's cultural etiquette, it is not considered polite to mix public and private, or sacred and secular. This division is the single most potent force keeping Christianity contained in the private sphere-stripping it of its power to challenge and redeem the whole of culture. In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey offers a razor-sharp analysis of the public/private split, explaining how it hamstrings our efforts at both personal and cultural renewal. Ultimately it reflects a division in the concept of truth itself, which functions as a gatekeeper, ruling Christian principles out of bounds in the public arena. How can we unify our fragmented lives and recover spiritual power? With examples from the lives of real people, past and present, Pearcey teaches readers how to liberate Christianity from its cultural captivity. She walks readers through practical, hands-on steps for crafting a full-orbed Christian worldview. Finally, she makes a passionate case that Christianity is not just religious truth but truth about total reality. It is total truth. This new study guide edition is filled with fresh stories, examples, and illustrations. Based on questions and comments raised by readers of the book, it is ideal for individual or group study.

Leseprobe

TOTAL TRUTH

Liberating Christianityfrom Its Cultural Captivity

Study Guide Edition

NANCY R. PEARCEY

FOREWORD BYPhillip E. Johnson

Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Study Guide Edition)

Copyright © 2004, 2005 by Nancy R. Pearcey

Published by Crossway Books,a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

First edition 2004

Study Guide edition 2005

Published in association with Yates & Yates, LLP, Attorneys and Counselors, Orange, California.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Cover design: DesignWorks Group; Jon McGrath

Cover photo: “Le Semeur 1” http://www.kmm.nl/index flash.html#voorpagina

First printing 2004

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Scripture quotation marked KJV is from the King James Version of the Bible.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pearcey, Nancy.

Total truth: liberating Christianity from its cultural captivity / Nancy R.Pearcey ; foreword by Phillip E. Johnson. - Study guide ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1-58134-746-4 (hc : alk. paper)

1. Christianity-Philosophy. 2. Apologetics. 3. Christian life.4. History-Religious aspects-Christianity. 5. History-Philosophy.

I. Title.

BR100.P37 2005

261-dc22

2005011392

Q 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 0515 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY PHILLIP E. JOHNSON

INTRODUCTION

Politics Is Not Enough

Losing Our Children

Heart Versus Brain

Just a Power Grab?

Mental Maps

Not Just Academic

Worldview Training

Acknowledgments

1: WHAT’S IN A WORLDVIEW?

CHAPTER 1: BREAKING OUT OF THE GRID

Divided Minds

Bible School Drop-Outs

Subtle Temptation

Enlightenment Idol

Two Cities

Absolutely Divine

Aristotle’s Screwdriver

Biblical Toolbox

Read the Directions

Born to Grow Up

A Personal Odyssey

Manifesto of Unbelief

Like a Swiss Farmer

God Wins

Scolds and Scalawags

In Love With Creativity

Christian Philosophers Out of the Closet

Religion: Good for Your Health

Benevolent Empire

CHAPTER 2: REDISCOVERING JOY

Sealy’s Secret

Capitol Hill Guilt

Becoming Bilingual

The Faith Gap

Disconnected Devotion

Christian Schizophrenia

Why Plato Matters

That Rascal Augustine

Aristotle and Aquinas

Fluffs of Grace

The Reformers Rebel

Escape from Dualism

Creation: God’s Fingerprints All Over

Fall: Where to Draw the Line

Redemption: After the Great Divorce

Christianity Out of Balance

More Than Sinners

God’s Offspring

Jars of Clay

A Higher Consciousness?

The Great Drama

Serving Two Masters

All Together Now

CHAPTER 3: KEEPING RELIGION IN ITS P LACE

Reason Unbound

Collateral Damage

Cartesian Divide

Kantian Contradiction

Intellectually Fulfilled Atheists

Secular Leap of Faith

War of Worldviews

Your Worldview Is Too Small

Imperialistic “Facts”

Conflicted on Campus

Leftovers from Liberalism

Evangelism Today

Spirit of the Age

C. S. Lewis’s True Myth

The Whole Truth

CHAPTER 4: SURVIVING THE SPIRITUAL W ASTELAND

Mystique of the Forbidden

Not a Smokescreen

Hands-On Worldview

Repairing the Ruins

Retooling the Family

For the Love of Children

Mobilizing the Trinity

The Worldview Next Door

Marx’s Heresy

Rousseau and Revolution

Sanger’s Religion of Sex

Buddhist in the Sky

Worldview Missionaries

2: STARTING AT THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER 5: DARWIN MEETS THE BERENSTAIN B EARS

A Universal Acid

Kindergarten Naturalism

Spinmeisters in Science

Darwin’s Beaks

Dysfunctional Fruit Flies

Doctored Moths

Most Famous Fake

Baloney Detectors

Punk Scientists

Birds, Bats, and Bees

Divine Foot in the Door

Evolution Gets Religion

Berkeley to the Rescue

Closed System, Closed Minds

Winning a Place at the Table

What Every Schoolchild Knows

CHAPTER 6: THE SCIENCE OF COMMON SENSE

Little Green Men

Blind Watchmaker?

Marks of Design

Roller Coaster in the Cell

Behe and the Black Box

A Universe Built for You

Cosmic Coincidences

Who Wrote the Genetic Code?

Explanatory Filter

Up from Chance

Against the Law

No Rules for Hamlet

The Medium Is Not the Message

Testing Positive

Three to Get Ready

Christian Relativists

Fairy Dust

Out of the Naturalist’s Chair

CHAPTER 7: TODAY BIOLOGY, TOMORROW THE WORLD

Universal Darwinism

Evolution for Everyman

Darwinian Fundamentalism on Rape

Mothers Red in Tooth and Claw

Peter Singer’s Pet Theme

Darwinizing Culture

The Acid Bites Back

Telling Genes to Jump in the Lake

Mental Maps

Beware Scientists Bearing Values

Dilemma of Leo Strauss

Born-Again Darwinists

The Kitchen As Classroom

CHAPTER 8: DARWINS OF THE MIND

Holmes Loses His Faith

Darwin’s New Logic

Cash Value of an Idea

What’s Religion Worth to You?

Tough Versus Tender

Disciples of Darwin

Transforming America

Let God Evolve

Why Judges Make Law

Dewey’s Dilemmas

Hamstrung Teachers

Inventing Your Own Reality

“Keeping Faith” with Darwin

Tom Wolfe and Darwin’s Doubt

Truth from the Barrel of a Gun

He Is There and He Is Not Silent

The Cognitive War

3: HOW WE LOST OUR MINDS

CHAPTER 9: WHAT’S SO GOOD ABOUT EVANGELICALISM?

Denzel Asked the Deacon

Forward to the Past

Identity Check

And the Winner Is

When Government Help Hurts

Wild West Religion

Riders in the Storm

Frontier Fallout

Whitefield Across America

Heart Versus Head

Defiant Individualism

CHAPTER 10: WHEN AMERICA MET CHRISTIANITY — GUESS WHO WON?

Democracy Comes to Church

A Politician for a Priest

Fetters for Our Children?

Half American

Salvation on the Spot

America the Natural

Leapfrogging 1,800 Years

Christians for Jefferson

No Traffic Cop

Self-Made People

Preacher, Performer, Storyteller

Celebrity Style

In PR We Trust

Pulling Strings

Not a Rogues’ Gallery

Rise of the Sovereign Self

CHAPTER 11: EVANGELICALS’ TWO-STORY TRUTH

Scotch Tip

The Science of Scripture

Campbell’s Rationalist Soup

Old Books for Modern Man

Sola Scriptura?

The View from Nowhere

Becoming Double-Minded

A Science of Duty

Celestial Mathematician

Blinded by Bacon

Religion on the Side

Making Sense of Common Sense

Reid Romans 1

Colors and Shapes

Just a Habit?

Are You Nobody?

Mere Chemistry?

Disinformation Minister

Philosophical “Cheating”

Signs of Intelligent Life

Boxed-In Believers

CHAPTER 12: HOW WOMEN STARTED THE CULTURE WAR

Women and the Awakening

Households At Work

Communal Manhood

Home as Haven

Why Men Left Home

The Passionate Male

Taming Men

Feminizing the Church

Morals and Mercy

Female Standards, Male Resentment

Manly Men

Romper Room Dads

Feminist Fury

What Hath Woman Lost?

Remoralizing America

No Double Standard

Reconstituting the Home

Private and Personal

Blueprint for Living

4: WHAT NEXT? LIVING IT OUT

CHAPTER 13: TRUE SPIRITUALITY AND CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW

Wurmbrand’s Freedom

Schaeffer’s Crisis

Idols of the Heart

Theology of the Cross

Rejected, Slain, Raised

Life-Producing Machines

His Work, His Way

Gold, Silver, Precious Stones

Results Guaranteed

Marketing the Message

More Money, More Ministry

Operating Instructions

From Good to Great

Loving Enough to Confront

No Little People

Real Leaders Serve

Getting It Right by Doing It “Wrong”

True Spirituality

APPENDIX 1

How American Politics Became Secularized

APPENDIX 2

Modern Islam and the New Age Movement

APPENDIX 3

The Long War Between Materialism and Christianity

APPENDIX 4

Isms on the Run: Practical Apologetics at L’Abri

NOTES

RECOMMENDED READING

STUDY GUIDE

FOREWORD

When Nancy Pearcey invited me to write a foreword for her “worldview” book, I hastened to accept the honor. I was honored by the invitation because this is a book of unusual importance by an author of unusual ability.

It has been a treat for me to read and study the manuscript, and I feel that I am doing a great favor to every potential reader whom I can persuade to enjoy these pages as I have done. Nancy Pearcey is an author who is greatly respected by all who know her work. I hope that, with this book, she will receive the acclaim that her thought and writing has so long deserved, and that readers will find in its message of liberation the key to intellectual and spiritual renewal.

It would be an understatement to say that worldview is an important topic. I would rather say that understanding how worldviews are formed, and how they guide or confine thought, is the essential step toward understanding every-thing else. Understanding worldview is a bit like trying to see the lens of one’s own eye. We do not ordinarily see our own worldview, but we see everything else by looking through it. Put simply, our worldview is the window by which we view the world, and decide, often subconsciously, what is real and important, or unreal and unimportant.

It may be that a worldview is commonly a collection of prejudices. If so, the prejudices are necessary, because we can’t start from a blank slate and investigate everything from scratch by ourselves. When somebody tells me that he receives guidance from God in prayer, or that science is our only way of knowing anything for sure, or that there is no objective difference between good and evil, I need to have some verifiable frame of reference to tell me at once whether he is merely deluded or is saying something that is sufficiently sensible to merit serious consideration.

Similarly, when I tell my fellow Berkeley professors that I don’t believe the theory of evolution, I need to know why they find it so difficult to take me seriously or to believe that my objection to the theory is based on scientific evidence rather than on the book of Genesis. The reason is that evolution with its accompanying philosophy is identified with their worldview at such a deep level that they cannot imagine how the theory could possibly be contrary to the evidence.

Every one of us has a worldview, and our worldview governs our think-ing even when—or especially when—we are unaware of it. Thus, it is not uncommon to find well-meaning evildoers, as it were, who are quite sincerely convinced that they are Christians, and attend church faithfully, and may even hold a position of leadership, but who have absorbed a worldview that makes it easy for them to ignore their Christian principles when it comes time to do the practical business of daily living. Their sincerely held Christian principles are in one mental category for them, and practical decision making is in another. Such persons can believe that Jesus is coming again to judge the world and yet live as if the standards of this world are the only thing that needs to be taken into account.

Likewise, Christian education is likely to be an exercise in futility if it does not prepare our young people to confront and survive the worldview challenges that they will surely meet as soon as they leave the security of the Christian home, and probably even while they are still living at home and being educated in a Christian environment, due to the pervasive influence of the media and the Internet. For example, a youngster may be taught very fine Christian principles, but he or she may also grow up understanding that these principles fit into a specialized category called “religious belief.”

Sooner or later, that youngster will find out that secular college professors, and sometimes even Christian professors, proceed from an implicit assumption that religious beliefs are the kind of thing one is supposed to set aside when learning how the world really works, and that it is usually praiseworthy to “grow” gradually away from those beliefs as a part of the normal process of maturing.

Why do those professors think that? Of course they are being influenced by the dominant belief system in their academic culture, which is also the culture of the newsroom at most daily newspapers or television stations. But just to say that people are influenced by their cultural environment does not explain how our culture has come to be the way it is, when it used to be very different. To survive in modern or postmodern American culture without being overwhelmed by its concealed prejudices, everyone needs to know how to recognize those prejudices, to understand what kind of thinking brought them into existence, and to be able to explain to ourselves and others what is wrong with the pervasive assumptions that often come labeled only as “the way all rational people think,” and that will swamp our faith if we are not alert to them.

A fine education in worldview analysis is as basic an element of a modern Christian’s defense system as a shield was in the days when a prudent traveler needed to be prepared to repel an attack by sword-wielding robbers. Today the intellectual brigands rob unwary youths of their faith, and they do it with arguments based on the shifting sand of “what everybody knows” and “the way we think today.” Those youths need to find the solid rock, and they need to know both why the rock is solid, and why the world prefers the shifting sand.

Only a very gifted author is capable of writing a book about worldview analysis that will make exciting reading for the ordinary person, but which is also sufficiently informed by scholarship to convey a deep understanding of the subject rather than merely a superficial acquaintance. Everyone is aware that American culture changed enormously during the twentieth century, but very few people understand how the change was brought about by ideas and habits that seemed at first to be eccentric or of only minor importance, but that eventually crept into the popular culture and proved to be almost irresistible. The situation we find ourselves in today has deep roots in the thinking of earlier times. Conduct that not very long ago was regarded as perverse or criminal has become not only tolerated but the new norm. Those who dare to disapprove of that conduct, or just fail to applaud the new norm with sufficient enthusiasm, are themselves likely to feel the full weight of society’s disapproval. The change in conduct was brought about by changes in worldview, which caused those who followed the new fashions to think differently.

With that much of an introduction, I invite you to read Nancy Pearcey. You will find not only pleasant reading but all the elements and basic information necessary to produce a Christian mind with a map of reality that really works. When Christian parents, pastors, educators, and other leaders learn to give this subject the importance it deserves, and to practice it even as they teach it thoroughly in the home, from the pulpit, and in every classroom, then Christians will find that they are no longer fearful and timid when they have to address claims of worldly wisdom. So let’s get started.

—Phillip E. JohnsonBerkeley, CaliforniaJanuary 2004

Christianity is not a series of truths in the plural,but rather truth spelled with a capital “T.”Truth about total reality, not just about religious things.

Biblical Christianity is Truth concerning total reality —and the intellectual holding of that total Truthand then living in the light of that Truth.

FRANCIS SCHAEFFERAddress at the University of Notre DameApril 1981

INTRODUCTION

Your earlier book says Christians are called to redeem entire cultures, not just individuals,” a schoolteacher commented, joining me for lunch at a conference where I had just spoken. Then he added thoughtfully, “I’d never heard that before.”

The teacher was talking about How Now Shall We Live?1 and at his words I looked up from my plate in surprise. Was he really saying he’d never even heard the idea of being a redemptive force in every area of culture? He shook his head: “No, I’ve always thought of salvation strictly in terms of individual souls.”

That conversation helped confirm my decision to write a follow-up book dealing with the worldview themes in How Now Shall We Live? Just a few years ago, when I began my work on that earlier volume, using the term world-view was not on anyone’s list of good conversation openers. To tell people that you were writing a book on worldview was to risk glazed stares and a quick change in subject. But today as I travel around the country, I sense an eagerness among evangelicals to move beyond a purely privatized faith, applying biblical principles to areas like work, business, and politics. Flip open any number of Christian publications and you’re likely to find half a dozen advertisements for worldview conferences, worldview institutes, and worldview programs. Clearly the term itself has strong marketing cachet these days, which signals a deep hunger among Christians for an overarching framework to bring unity to their lives.

This book addresses that hunger and offers new direction for advancing the worldview movement. It will help you identify the secular/sacred divide that keeps your faith locked into the private sphere of “religious truth.” It will walk you through practical, workable steps for crafting a Christian worldview in your own life and work. And it will teach you how to apply a worldview grid to cut through the bewildering maze of ideas and ideologies we encounter in a postmodern world. The purpose of worldview studies is nothing less than to liberate Christianity from its cultural captivity, unleashing its power to trans-form the world.

“The gospel is like a caged lion,” said the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. “It does not need to be defended, it just needs to be let out of its cage.” Today the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of private personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth—truth about the whole of reality.

POLITICS IS NOT ENOUGH

The reason a worldview message is so compelling today is that we are still emerging from the fundamentalist era of the early twentieth century. Up until that time, evangelicals had enjoyed a position of cultural dominance in America. But after the Scopes trial and the rise of theological modernism, religious conservatives turned in on themselves: They circled the wagons, developed a fortress mentality, and championed “separatism” as a positive strategy. Then, in the 1940s and 50s, a movement began that aimed at breaking out of the fortress. Calling themselves neo-evangelicals, this group argued that we are called not to escape the surrounding culture but to engage it. They sought to construct a redemptive vision that would embrace not only individuals but also social structures and institutions.

Yet many evangelicals lacked the conceptual tools needed for the task, which has seriously limited their success. For example, in recent decades many Christians have responded to the moral and social decline in American society by embracing political activism. Believers are running for office in growing numbers; churches are organizing voter registration; public policy groups are proliferating; scores of Christian publications and radio programs offer commentary on public affairs. This heightened activism has yielded good results in many areas of public life, yet the impact remains far less than most had hoped. Why? Because evangelicals often put all their eggs in one basket: They leaped into political activism as the quickest, surest way to make a difference in the public arena—failing to realize that politics tends to reflect culture, not the other way around.

Nothing illustrates evangelicals’ infatuation with politics more clearly than a story related by a Christian lawyer. Considering whether to take a job in the nation’s capital, he consulted with the leader of a Washington-area ministry, who told him, “You can either stay where you are and keep practicing law, or you can come to Washington and change the culture.” The implication was that the only way to effect cultural change was through national politics. Today, battle-weary political warriors have grown more realistic about the limits of that strategy. We have learned that “politics is downstream from culture, not the other way around,” says Bill Wichterman, policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. “Real change has to start with the culture. All we can do on Capitol Hill is try to find ways government can nurture healthy cultural trends.”2

On a similar note, a member of Congress once told me, “I got involved in politics after the 1973 abortion decision because I thought that was the fastest route to moral reform. Well, we’ve won some legislative victories, but we’velost the culture.” The most effective work, he had come to realize, is done by ordinary Christians fulfilling God’s calling to reform culture within their local spheres of influence—their families, churches, schools, neighborhoods, work-places, professional organizations, and civic institutions. In order to effect lasting change, the congressman concluded, “we need to develop a Christian worldview.”

LOSING OUR CHILDREN

Not only have we “lost the culture,” but we continue losing even our own children. It’s a familiar but tragic story that devout young people, raised in Christian homes, head off to college and abandon their faith. Why is this pat-tern so common? Largely because young believers have not been taught how to develop a biblical worldview. Instead, Christianity has been restricted to a specialized area of religious belief and personal devotion.

I recently read a striking example. At a Christian high school, a theology teacher strode to the front of the classroom, where he drew a heart on one side of the blackboard and a brain on the other. The two are as divided as the two sides of the blackboard, he told the class: The heart is what we use for religion, while the brain is what we use for science.

An apocryphal story? A caricature of Christian anti-intellectualism? No, the story was told by a young woman who was in the class that day. Worse, out of some two hundred students, she was the only one who objected. The rest apparently found nothing unusual about restricting religion to the domain of the “heart.”3

As Christian parents, pastors, teachers, and youth group leaders, we constantly see young people pulled down by the undertow of powerful cultural trends. If all we give them is a “heart” religion, it will not be strong enough to counter the lure of attractive but dangerous ideas. Young believers also need a “brain” religion—training in worldview and apologetics—to equip them to analyze and critique the competing worldviews they will encounter when they leave home. If forewarned and forearmed, young people at least have a fight-ing chance when they find themselves a minority of one among their classmates or work colleagues. Training young people to develop a Christian mind is no longer an option; it is part of their necessary survival equipment.

HEART VERSUS BRAIN

The first step in forming a Christian worldview is to overcome this sharp divide between “heart” and “brain.” We have to reject the division of life into a sacred realm, limited to things like worship and personal morality, over against a secular realm that includes science, politics, economics, and the rest of the public arena. This dichotomy in our own minds is the greatest barrier to liberating the power of the gospel across the whole of culture today.

Moreover, it is reinforced by a much broader division rending the entire fabric of modern society—what sociologists call the public/private split.“Modernization brings about a novel dichotomization of social life,” writes Peter Berger. “The dichotomy is between the huge and immensely powerful institutions of the public sphere [by this he means the state, academia, large corporations] . . .and the private sphere”—the realm of family, church, and personal relationships.

The large public institutions claim to be “scientific” and “value-free,”which means that values are relegated to the private sphere of personal choice. As Berger explains: “The individual is left to his own devices in a wide range of activities that are crucial to the formation of a meaningful identity, from expressing his religious preference to settling on a sexual life style.”4We might diagram the dichotomy like this:

Modern societies are sharply divided:

PRIVATE SPHEREPersonal Preferences

PUBLIC SPHEREScientific Knowledge

In short, the private sphere is awash in moral relativism. Notice Berger’s telling phrase “religious preference.” Religion is not considered an objective truth to which we submit, but only a matter of personal taste which we choose. Because of this, the dichotomy is sometimes called the fact/value split.

Values have been reduced to arbitrary, existential decisions:

VALUESIndividual Choice

FACTSBinding on Everyone

As Schaeffer explains, the concept of truth itself has been divided—a process he illustrates with the imagery of a two-story building: In the lower story are science and reason, which are considered public truth, binding on every-one. Over against it is an upper story of noncognitive experience, which is the locus of personal meaning. This is the realm of private truth, where we hear people say, “That may be true for you but it’s not true for me.”5

The two-realm theory of truth:

UPPER STORYNonrational, Noncognitive

LOWER STORYRational, Verifiable

When Schaeffer was writing, the term postmodernism had not yet been coined, but clearly that is what he was talking about. Today we might say that in the lower story is modernism, which still claims to have universal, objective truth—while in the upper story is postmodernism.

Today’s two-story truth:

POSTMODERNISMSubjective, Relative to Particular Groups

MODERNISMObjective, Universally Valid

The reason it’s so important for us to learn how to recognize this division is that it is the single most potent weapon for delegitimizing the biblical perspective in the public square today. Here’s how it works: Most secularists are too politically savvy to attack religion directly or to debunk it as false. So what do they do? They consign religion to the value sphere—which takes it out of the realm of true and false altogether. Secularists can then assure us that of course they “respect” religion, while at the same time denying that it has any relevance to the public realm.

As Phillip Johnson puts it, the fact/value split “allows the metaphysical naturalists to mollify the potentially troublesome religious people by assuring them that science does not rule out ‘religious belief’ (so long as it does not pre-tend to be knowledge).6” In other words, so long as everyone understands that it is merely a matter of private feelings. The two-story grid functions as a gate-keeper that defines what is to be taken seriously as genuine knowledge, and what can be dismissed as mere wish-fulfillment.

JUST A POWER GRAB?

This same division also explains why Christians have such difficulty communicating in the public arena. It’s crucial for us to realize that nonbelievers are constantly filtering what we say through a mental fact/value grid. For example, when we state a position on an issue like abortion or bioethics or homo-sexuality, we intend to assert an objective moral truth important to the health of society—but they think we’re merely expressing our subjective bias. When we say there’s scientific evidence for design in the universe, we intend to stake out a testable truth claim—but they say, “Uh oh, the Religious Right is making a political power grab.” The fact/value grid instantly dissolves away the objective content of anything we say, and we will not be successful in introducing the content of our belief into the public discussion unless we first find ways to get past this gatekeeper.

That’s why Lesslie Newbigin warned that the divided concept of truth is the primary factor in “the cultural captivity of the gospel.” It traps Christianity in the upper story of privatized values, and prevents it from having any effect on public culture.7 Having worked as a missionary in India for forty years, Newbigin was able to discern what is distinctive about Western thought more clearly than most of us, who have been immersed in it all our lives. On his return to the West, Newbigin was struck by the way Christian truth has been marginalized. He saw that any position labeled religion is placed in the upper story of values, where it is no longer regarded as objective knowledge.

To give just one recent example, in the debate over embryonic stem cell research, actor Christopher Reeve told a student group at Yale University, “When matters of public policy are debated, no religions should have a seat atthe table.”8

To recover a place at the table of public debate, then, Christians must find a way to overcome the dichotomy between public and private, fact and value, secular and sacred. We need to liberate the gospel from its cultural captivity, restoring it to the status of public truth. “The barred cage that forms the prison for the gospel in contemporary western culture is [the church’s] accommodation . . . to the fact-value dichotomy,” says Michael Goheen, a professor of worldview studies.9 Only by recovering a holistic view of total truth can we set the gospel free to become a redemptive force across all of life.

MENTAL MAPS

To say that Christianity is the truth about total reality means that it is a full-orbed worldview. The term means literally a view of the world, a biblically informed perspective on all reality. A worldview is like a mental map that tells us how to navigate the world effectively. It is the imprint of God’s objective truth on our inner life.

We might say that each of us carries a model of the universe inside our heads that tells us what the world is like and how we should live in it. A classic book on worldviews is titled The Universe Next Door, suggesting that we all have a mental or conceptual universe in which we “live”—a network of principles that answer the fundamental questions of life: Who are we? Where did we come from? What is the purpose of life? The author of the book, James Sire, invites readers to examine a variety of worldviews in order to understand the mental universe held by other people—those living “next door.”

A worldview is not the same thing as a formal philosophy; otherwise, it would be only for professional philosophers. Even ordinary people have a set of convictions about how reality functions and how they should live. Because we are made in God’s image, we all seek to make sense of life. Some convictions are conscious, while others are unconscious, but together they form a more or less consistent picture of reality. Human beings “are incapable of holding purely arbitrary opinions or making entirely unprincipled decisions,” writes Al Wolters in a book on worldview. Because we are by nature rational and responsible beings, we sense that “we need some creed to live by, some map by which to chart our course.”10

The notion that we need such a “map” in the first place grows out of the biblical view of human nature. The Marxist may claim that human behavior is ultimately shaped by economic circumstances; the Freudian attributes every-thing to repressed sexual instincts; and the behavioral psychologist regards humans as stimulus-response mechanisms. But the Bible teaches that the over-riding factor in the choices we make is our ultimate belief or religious commitment. Our lives are shaped by the “god” we worship—whether the God of the Bible or some substitute deity.

The word was later introduced into Christian circles through Dutch neo-Calvinist thinkers such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd. They argued that Christians cannot counter the spirit of the age in which they live unless they develop an equally comprehensive biblical worldview—an outlook on life that gives rise to distinctively Christian forms of culture—with the important qualification that it is not merely the relativistic belief of a particular culture but is based on the very Word of God, true for all times and places.11

NOT JUST ACADEMIC

As the concept of worldview becomes common currency, it can all too easily be misunderstood. Some treat it as merely another academic subject to mas-ter—a mental exercise or “how to” strategy. Others handle worldview as if it were a weapon in the culture war, a tool for more effective activism. Still others, alas, treat it as little more than a new buzzword or marketing gimmick to dazzle the public and attract donors.

Genuine worldview thinking is far more than a mental strategy or a new spin on current events. At the core, it is a deepening of our spiritual character and the character of our lives. It begins with the submission of our minds to the Lord of the universe—a willingness to be taught by Him. The driving force in worldview studies should be a commitment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind” (see Luke 10:27).

That’s why the crucial condition for intellectual growth is spiritual growth, asking God for the grace to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor.10:5). God is not just the Savior of souls, He is also the Lord of creation. One way we acknowledge His Lordship is by interpreting every aspect of creation in the light of His truth. God’s Word becomes a set of glasses offering a new perspective on all our thoughts and actions.

As with every aspect of sanctification, the renewal of the mind may be painful and difficult. It requires hard work and discipline, inspired by a sacrificial love for Christ and a burning desire to build up His Body, the Church. In order to have the mind of Christ, we must be willing to be crucified with Christ, following wherever He might lead—whatever the cost. “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). As we undergo refining in the fires of suffering, our desires are purified and we find ourselves wanting nothing more than to bend every fiber of our being, including our mental powers, to fulfill the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come.” We yearn to lay all our talents and gifts at His feet in order to advance His purposes in the world. Developing a Christian worldview means submitting our entire self to God, in an act of devotion and service to Him.

WORLDVIEW TRAINING

This book approaches the topic of worldview by weaving together insights from three strands.12 Part 1 sheds light on the secular/sacred dichotomy that restricts Christianity to the realm of religious truth, creating double minds and fragmented lives. To find personal wholeness, we must be willing to lay bare all aspects of our work and life to God’s direction and power. Worldview thinking proves to be a rich avenue to joy and fulfillment—a means of letting the spark of God’s truth light up every nook and cranny of our lives.

This section also provides practical, hands-on worldview training. It will walk you through concrete steps for crafting a biblically based worldview in any field using the structural elements of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. It will also give you an opportunity to practice apologetics by analyzing non-Christian worldviews. After all, every philosophy or ideology has to answer the same fundamental questions:

1. CREATION: How did it all begin? Where did we come from?

2. FALL: What went wrong? What is the source of evil and suffering?

3. REDEMPTION: What can we do about it? How can the world be set right again?

By applying this simple grid, we can identify nonbiblical worldviews, and then analyze where they go wrong.

Part 2 zeroes in on Creation, the foundational starting point for any world-view. In the West, the reigning creation myth is Darwinian evolution; thus, no matter what our field of work is, we must begin by critiquing Darwinism—both its scientific claims and its worldview implications. In this section, you will discover how the latest findings of science discredit naturalistic theories of evolution, while supporting the concept of Intelligent Design. You may also be sur-prised to learn how aggressively Darwinism has been extended far beyond the bounds of science, even reconfiguring America’s social and legal institutions—with devastating effects.

Part 3 peers into the looking glass of history to ask why evangelicals do not have a strong worldview tradition. Why is the secular/sacred dichotomy so pervasive? Here we step back from the present to take a tour of the history and heritage of evangelicalism in America. By rummaging about in the attic of our past, we can diagnose the way inherited patterns of thought continue to shape our own thinking today. We can learn how to identify self-defeating barriers to worldview thinking and how to overcome them.

Part 4 reminds us that the heart of worldview thinking lies in its practical and personal application. The renewal of our minds comes about only through the submission of our whole selves to the Lordship of Christ. We must be willing to sit at the feet of Jesus and be taught by Him, as Mary of Bethany did, realizing that only “one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:42). Given our fallen human nature, we typically do not really sit before the Lord until our legs are knocked out from under us by crises—sorrow, loss, or injustice. It is only when stripped of our personal dreams and ambitions that we truly die to our own agendas. Union with Christ in His death and resurrection is the only path to sanctification of both heart and mind—to being conformed to the likeness of Christ.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a joyful task to express gratitude to those whose ideas and lives have helped shape this book’s message. Foremost is Francis Schaeffer, through whose ministry I returned to the Christian faith I had rejected as a teenager. After my first visit to L’Abri (described in chapter 1), I returned a year later for another round of study, when I also met the young man who became my husband. Later we both earned degrees at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, where Schaeffer once taught. For further graduate studies we attended the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, where we were steeped in the philosophy of Dutch Reformed thinkers like Kuyper and Dooyeweerd, whose ideas were seminal for How Now Shall We Live? especially its overall framework of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. The same background will be evident to readers of this present book as well, and by making frequent references to the original writings, I hope to inspire readers to discover these rich resources for themselves.

Second, I owe much to Dr. Phillip Johnson, professor emeritus of law at the University of California at Berkeley, who provides strategic leadership for the Intelligent Design movement. I have known Phil since 1990, when I inter-viewed him for the Bible-Science Newsletter,13 and his original way of framing the argument for design has revolutionized the origins debate. His name like-wise appears frequently throughout the text, in order to direct readers to his original works.

In my early years as a young Christian, Denis and Margie Haack (founders of Ransom Fellowship) provided crucial support and stability. At Covenant Seminary, I benefited especially from the fine teaching of Dr. David Jones. At the Institute for Christian Studies, a year-long course on neo-Platonism demon-strated that Dr. Al Wolters has a rare gift for bringing ancient Greek philosophy to life. I also had the privilege of taking the last class on neo-Calvinist philosophy taught by Dr. Bernard Zylstra before his untimely death from cancer.

I am grateful to my uncle Bill Overn, a brilliant physicist, whose recommendation helped open a position for me at the Bible-Science Newsletter in 1977, where I worked for thirteen years, writing in-depth monthly articles for a section titled “Worldview” on the relation between science and Christian worldview. These lengthy articles traced the impact of evolutionary concepts on education, psychology, law, Marxism, sexuality, New Age religion, and much more—material that later formed the basis for much of my contribution to How Now Shall We Live?14 as well as the present book.

The material for this book was honed through interaction with various audiences, and I would like to thank the following groups: World Journalism Institute and its director Bob Case; Faith and Law (a fellowship of congressional staffers); the How Now Shall We Live? reading groups on Capitol Hill; the Megaviews Forum at Los Alamos National Laboratory and its cofounder, former U.S. Congressman Bill Redmond; Regent University School of Law; L’Abri in Rochester, Minnesota; the Association of Christian Schools International; the Renaissance Group (Christian artists and entertainers); Christian Schools International; Trinity Forum Academy; and several Christian colleges and universities. I have also benefited from the opportunity to address events organized by Christian campus groups at Princeton, Dartmouth, Ohio State University, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Minnesota, and USC. Special thanks to John Mark Reynolds, director of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, who invited me to give seminars on the book when it was still in manuscript form, and to the students who contributed by their feedback and comments.

I wish to thank the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and its director Steve Meyer for a grant that underwrote the initial research stage of the book. The center’s staff and fellows form a highly professional group of scientists and scholars who inspire and inform one another’s work in countless ways.

I am grateful to those who read or discussed sections of the manuscript: Ila Anderson, Lael Arrington, Michael Behe, Katie Braden, David Calhoun, Bob and Kathy Case, Nancy Chan, Roy Clouser, Jim DeKorne, Michael Goheen, Os Guinness, Darryl Hart, Dana Hill, David Jones, Ranald Macaulay, George Marsden, Tim McGrew, Steven Meyer, Udo Middelmann, KathleenNielson, J. I. Packer, Dieter Pearcey, Dorothy Randolph, Karl Randolph, Jay Richards, Jim Skillen, John Vander Stelt, Tyrone Walters, Linda McGinn Waterman, Richard Weikart, and Al Wolters.

It is an honor to have as my agent Sealy Yates, a man of enormous integrity and a servant’s heart. The publisher of Crossway Books, Lane Dennis, along with his wife, Ebeth, welcomed the book project with prayerful enthusiasm from the beginning. Many thanks to the Crossway staff, especially vice president Marvin Padgett and editor Bill Deckard.

The deepest gratitude is due, as always, to family. Thanks to my parents, who sacrificed greatly to send their children to Lutheran schools. I owe an unspeakable debt to my husband, Rick, whose unflagging support, professional editorial expertise, and background in worldview studies contribute to a fruitful writing partnership. The perspective he developed through years of editorial experience on Capitol Hill keeps me grounded in the real world. Finally, I dedicate the book to my two sons, Dieter and Michael, in the hope that they will craft a Christian worldview in their own fields of work, liberating the gospel’s power to transform their lives and their world.

—Nancy Randolph PearceyLake Ridge, VirginiaMarch 2004

PART ONE

WHAT’S IN A WORLDVIEW?

1

BREAKING OUT OF THE GRID

Sundays were Sundays,with the rest of the week largely detached, operating by a different set of rules.Can these two worlds that seem so separate ever merge?JOHN BECKETT1

Afashionably dressed college student stepped into the counselor’s office, tossing her head in an attempt at bravado. Sarah recognized the type. The Planned Parenthood clinic where she worked often attracted students from the elite university nearby, and most were wealthy, privileged, and self-confident.

“Please sit down. I have your test result . . . and you are pregnant.”

The young woman nodded and grimaced. “I kind of thought so.”

“Have you thought about what you want to do?” Sarah asked.

The answer was quick and sure. “I want an abortion.”

“Let’s go over your options first,” Sarah said. “It’s important for you to think through all the possibilities before you leave today.”

Sometimes the young women sitting in her office would grow impatient, even hostile. They had already convinced themselves that there were no other viable options. After years of experience in her profession, however, Sarah knew that women who have abortions are often haunted afterward. She hoped to help the students consider the impact an abortion might have in years to come, so they would make an informed decision. If they balked, she fell back on protocol: “This is my job, I have to do it.”

Why did Sarah care? Because she was a practicing Christian, as she explained to me many years later,2 and she thought that’s what being a believer meant—showing compassion to women who were considering abortion. Nor was she alone: The Planned Parenthood clinic where she worked was located in the Bible belt, and virtually all the women on staff were regular church-goers. During breaks they would discuss things like their Bible study groups or their children’s Sunday school programs.

Sarah’s story illustrates how even sincere believers may find themselves drawn into a secular worldview—while remaining orthodox in their theological beliefs. Sarah had grown up in a solidly evangelical denomination. As a teenager, she had undergone a crisis of faith and had emerged from it with a fresh confidence. “I still have the white Bible my grandmother gave me back then,” she told me. “I underlined all the passages on how to be sure you were saved.” From then on, she never doubted the basic biblical doctrines.

So how did she end up working at Planned Parenthood and referring women for abortion? Something happened to Sarah when she went off to col-lege. There she was immersed in the liberal relativism taught on most campuses today. In courses on sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, it was simply assumed that truth is culturally relative—that ideas and beliefs emerge historically by cultural forces, and are not true or false in any final sense.

And Christianity? It was treated as irrelevant to the world of scholarship.“In a class on moral philosophy, the professor presented every possible theory, from existentialism to utilitarianism, but never said a word about Christian moral theory—even though it’s been the dominant religion all through Western history,” Sarah recalled. “It was as though Christianity were so irrational, it didn’t even merit being listed alongside the other moral theories.”

Yet Sarah had no idea how to respond to these assaults on her faith. Her church had helped her find assurance of salvation, but it had not provided her with any intellectual resources to challenge the ideologies taught in her classes. The church’s teaching had assumed a sharp divide between the sacred and secular realms, addressing itself solely to Sarah’s religious life. As a result, over time she found herself absorbing the secular outlook taught in her classes. Her mental world was split, with religion strictly contained within the boundaries of worship and personal morality, while her views on everything else were run through a grid of naturalism and relativism.

“I may have started out picking up bits and pieces of a secular worldview to sprinkle on top of my Christian beliefs,” Sarah explained. “But after I graduated and worked for Planned Parenthood, the pattern was reversed: My Christianity was reduced to a thin veneer over the core of a secular worldview.It was almost like having a split personality.” To use the categories described in the Introduction, her mind had absorbed the divided concepts of truth characteristic of Western culture: secular/sacred, fact/value, public/private. Though her faith was sincere, it was reduced to purely private experience, while public knowledge was defined in terms of secular naturalism.

Sarah’s story is particularly dramatic, yet it illustrates a pattern that is more common than we might like to think. The fatal weakness in her faith was that she had accepted Christian doctrines strictly as individual items of belief: thedeity of Christ, His virgin birth, His miracles, His resurrection from the dead—she could tick them off one by one. But she lacked any sense of how Christianity functions as a unified, overarching system of truth that applies to social issues, history, politics, anthropology, and all the other subject areas. In short, she lacked a Christian worldview. She held to Christianity as a collection of truths, but not as Truth.3

Only many years later, after a personal crisis, were Sarah’s relativistic views finally challenged. “When Congress held hearings on partial-birth abortion, I was appalled. And I realized that if abortion was wrong at nine months, then it was wrong at eight months, and wrong at seven months, and six months—right back to the beginning.” It was a shattering experience, and Sarah found she had to take apart her secular worldview plank by plank, and then begin painstakingly constructing a Christian worldview in its place. It was tough work, yet today she is discovering the joy of breaking out of the trap of the secular/sacred split, and seeing her faith come alive in areas where before she had not even known it applied. She is learning that Christianity is not just religious truth, it is total truth—covering all of reality.

DIVIDED MINDS

Like Sarah, many believers have absorbed the fact/value, public/private dichotomy, restricting their faith to the religious sphere while adopting what-ever views are current in their professional or social circles. We probably all know of Christian teachers who uncritically accept the latest secular theories of education; Christian businessmen who run their operations by accepted secular management theories; Christian ministries that mirror the commercial world’s marketing techniques; Christian families where the teenagers watch the same movies and listen to the same music as their nonbelieving friends. While sincere in their faith, they have absorbed their views on just about everything else by osmosis from the surrounding culture.

The problem was phrased succinctly by Harry Blamires in his classic book The Christian Mind. When I was a new Christian many years ago, Blamires’s book was almost a fad item, and everyone walked around intoning its dramatic opening sentence: “There is no longer a Christian mind.”4

What did Blamires mean? He was not saying that Christians are uneducated, backwoods hayseeds, though that remains a common stereotype in the secular world. A few years ago an infamous article in the Washington Post described conservative Christians as “poor, uneducated, and easily led.”5 Immediately the Post was overwhelmed with calls and faxes from Christians across the country, listing their advanced degrees and bank account balances!

But if that’s not what Blamires meant, what did he mean? To say there is no Christian mind means that believers may be highly educated in terms of technical proficiency, and yet have no biblical worldview for interpreting the subject matter of their field. “We speak of ‘the modern mind’ and of ‘the scientific mind,’ using that word mind of a collectively accepted set of notions and attitudes,” Blamires explains. But there is no “Christian mind”—no shared, biblically based set of assumptions on subjects like law, education, economics, politics, science, or the arts. As a moral being, the Christian follows the biblical ethic. As a spiritual being, he or she prays and attends worship services.“But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularism,” accepting “a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations.”6 That is, when we enter the stream of discourse in our field or profession, we participate mentally as non-Christians, using the current concepts and categories, no matter what our private beliefs may be.

Living in the Washington, D.C., area, I have witnessed firsthand the growing numbers of believers working in politics today, which is an encouraging trend. But I can also say from experience that few hold an explicitly Christian political philosophy. As a congressional chief of staff once admitted, “I realize that I hold certain views because I’m politically conservative, not because I see how they’re rooted in the Bible.” He knew he should formulate a biblically based philosophy of government, but he simply didn’t know how to proceed.

Similarly, through decades of writing on science and worldview, I have interacted with scientists who are deeply committed believers; yet few have crafted a biblically informed philosophy of science. In Christian ministries, I’ve met many who take great pains to make sure their message is biblical, but who never think to ask whether their methods are biblical. A journalism professor recently told me that even the best Christian journalists—sincere believers with outstanding professional skills—typically have no Christian theory of journalism. In popular culture, believers have constructed an entire parallel culture of artists and entertainers; yet even so, as Charlie Peacock laments, few “think Christianly” about art and aesthetics.7 The phrase is borrowed from Blamires, and when I addressed a group of artists and musicians in Charlie’s home, he showed me a shelf with half a dozen copies of Blamires’s book—enough to lend out to several friends at once.

“Thinking Christianly” means understanding that Christianity gives the truth about the whole of reality, a perspective for interpreting every subject matter. Genesis tells us that God spoke the entire universe into being with His Word—what John 1:1 calls the Logos. The Greek word means not only Word but also reason or rationality, and the ancient Stoics used it to mean the rational structure of the universe. Thus the underlying structure of the entire universe reflects the mind of the Creator. There is no fact/value dichotomy in the scriptural account. Nothing has an autonomous or independent identity, separate from the will of the Creator. As a result, all creation must be interpreted in light of its relationship to God. In any subject area we study, we are discovering the laws or creation ordinances by which God structured the world.

As Scripture puts it, the universe speaks of God—“the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1)—because His character is reflected in the things He has made. This is sometimes referred to as “general” revelation because it speaks to everyone at all times, in contrast to the “special” revelation given in the Bible. As Jonathan Edwards explained, God communicates not only “by his voice to us in the Scriptures” but also in creation and in historical events. Indeed, “the whole creation of God preaches.”8 Yet it is possible for Christians to be deaf and blind to the message of general revelation, and part of learning to have the mind of Christ involves praying for the spiritual sensitivity to “hear” the preaching of creation.

The great historian of religion Martin Marty once said every religion serves two functions: First, it is a message of personal salvation, telling us how to get right with God; and second, it is a lens for interpreting the world. Historically, evangelicals have been good at the first function—at “saving souls.” But they have not been nearly as good at helping people to interpret the world around them—at providing a set of interrelated concepts that function as a lens to give a biblical view of areas like science, politics, economics, or bioethics. As Marty puts it, evangelicals have typically “accented personal piety and individual salvation, leaving men to their own devices to interpret the world around them.”

In fact, many no longer think it’s even the function of Christianity to provide an interpretation of the world. Marty calls this the Modern Schism (in a book by that title), and he says we are living in the first time in history where Christianity has been boxed into the private sphere and has largely stopped speaking to the public sphere.9

“This internalization or privatization of religion is one of the most momentous changes that has ever taken place in Christendom,” writes another historian, Sidney Mead.10 As a result, our lives are often fractured and fragmented, with our faith firmly locked into the private realm of church and family, where it rarely has a chance to inform our life and work in the public realm. The aura of worship dissipates after Sunday, and we unconsciously absorb secular attitudes the rest of the week. We inhabit two separate “worlds,” navigating a sharp divide between our religious life and ordinary life.

BIBLE SCHOOL DROP-OUTS

At the same time, most believers find this highly frustrating. We really want to integrate our faith into every aspect of life, including our profession. We want to be whole people—people of integrity (the word comes from the Latin word for “whole”). Not long ago, I met a recent convert who was agonizing over how to apply his newfound faith to his work as an art teacher. “I want my whole life to reflect my relationship with God,” he told me. “I don’t want my faith to be in one compartment and my art in another.”

We would all agree with Dorothy Sayers, who said that if religion does not speak to our work lives, then it has nothing to say about what we do with the vast majority of our time—and no wonder people say religion is irrelevant!“How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life?”11

In the secular/sacred dualism, ordinary work is actually denigrated, while church work is elevated as more valuable. In his book Roaring Lambs, Bob Briner describes his student days at a Christian college, where the unspoken assumption was that the only way to really serve God was in full-time Christian work. Already knowing that he wanted a career in sports management, Briner writes, “I felt I was a sort of second-class campus citizen. My classmates who were preparing for the pulpit ministry or missionary service were the ones who were treated as if they would be doing the real work of the church. The rest of us were the supporting cast.”

The underlying message was that people in ordinary professions might contribute their prayers and financial support, but that was about it. “Almost nothing in my church or collegiate experiences presented possibilities for a dynamic, involved Christian life outside the professional ministry,” Briner concludes. “You heard about being salt and light, but no one told you how to do it.”12 Lip service was paid to the idea of dedicating your work to God, but all it seemed to mean was, Do your best, and don’t commit any obvious sins.

The same secular/sacred dualism nearly snuffed out the creative talents of the founders of the whimsically funny Veggie Tales videos. Phil Vischer says he always knew he wanted to make movies, but “the implicit message I received growing up was that full-time ministry was the only valid Christian service. Young Christians were to aspire to be either ministers or missionaries.” So he dutifully packed his bags and went off to Bible college to study for the ministry.