Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey. Ch.1

Just started reading Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey. If you're up for discussing it let me know.

That Biblical Christianity applies to the whole of life and not just personal salvation has always been a no-brainer for me. What I've struggled with sometimes is appreciating exactly where the biblical worldview either reinforces, challenges/"judge's" or redeems 'the world' view of things. Whenever I read someone like Francis Schaeffer or Ravi Zacharias I think, "doh! why didn't I see that?". Sure, these are very smart people, but I think some of the problem with Christians has been that we get all religious about the Bible: we often talk about the spiritual life using purely biblical terminology, as though there's something pure and more spiritual in that. But then we're completely at a loss to respond to the woman in the street who may be saying exactly what we think but because she doesn't use our lingo we think she's an alien, and she thinks we're nut-jobs. In the same way, because of this 'narrow' usage of Scripture in our thinking, we also tend to be unnecessarily adversarial and contrary since we can only suspect, because they're not using any of our words, that this strange thinking we're hearing about is 100% "wrong"- this happened in the Christian response to post-modernism and I think is also happening in people's response (including my own, to be honest) to the "emerging church".

As for the book, I'm still trundling through the intro. The only surprise so far is the outright declaration of support for Intelligent Design, but it's no surprise considering Phillip Johnson wrote the forward. Having read Kenneth Miller's convincing critique of ID (in Finding Darwin's God) I'd be interested to see what she has to say about the apparent evidence for it.

The other surprise was that she seems to say ALL behavior is a result of what one believes. I would think she would qualify that, at a basic level at least. Everything from dancing to Barry Manilow, to walking alone in the mountains, to poking someone in the eye can be called behavior but not all would be a direct result of belief, certainly not in terms of worldview. I'm probably being a bit picky this early on in the reading, but when blanket statements are made like that one wonders if the coming reading will be a little too sure of itself.