I’m about halfway through Nancy Pearcy’s “Total Truth” and wanted to share a few thoughts about it. Judging by the blurbs on the book jacket and some of the reviews it’s received on Amazon and in the blogsphere, it seems that Pearcy has struck a nerve among thinking Evangelicals. And “Total Truth” is an excellent book. Pearcy does an admirable job demonstrating why we must never separate life into “sacred” and “secular” domains. All truth is God’s truth, and genuine Christianity claims to speak to all of life (hence the title “Total Truth”).
\nYet, there are many ways in which I think this book could have been much better. What I’d like to explore in this post is Pearcy’s description of her own conversion and what it says about the nature of faith.
\n
\nOf course, I don’t question the genuineness of Pearcy’s conversion, and perhaps she leaves many details about it out of the book, but her description seems like something Mr. Spock would say if missionaries visited the Vulcans: “The only step that remained was to acknowlege that I had been persuaded — and then give my life to the Lord of Truth. So, at about four-thirty that morning, I quietly admitted that God had won the argument.”
\nI would be the last person to suggest that a conversion must be “emotional” or “dramatic.” Yet, the suggestion that conversion can be a matter of “God winning the argument” deeply troubles me. What if, at some point further along the journey, you face a question that isn’t answered by the arguments you’ve already heard? What if God seems unwilling to argue for a while or to speak at all? What if some of those “worldview” arguments that seemed so persuasive years ago lose some of their lustre when they get banged up against the pain of real life?<\/p>\n
We can’t put our faith in arguments, and even less so can we put our faith in our own ability to weigh the final merits of any arguments. Arguments and reason can support a faith commitment, but they can’t comprise a faith commitment.<\/p>\n
This may seem like a small point, but I think it has significant implications for how we posture the “Christian Worldview.” Is our main task to help God “win the argument?” Do we presume to serve as proxy arbiters of who “wins?” Or are we called to something more organic and relational, where arguments are only one small part of a continually growing relationship?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m about halfway through Nancy Pearcy’s “Total Truth” and wanted to share a few thoughts about it. Judging by the blurbs on the book jacket and some of the reviews it’s received on Amazon and in the blogsphere, it seems that Pearcy has struck a nerve among thinking Evangelicals. And “Total Truth” is an excellent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-1T","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}