Nancy Pearcey Quotes

In many cases students are never exposed to competing ideas within their families, churches, or Christian schools, and as a result they go out into the world unprepared for the intellectual battles they are about to encounter, especially on secular college campuses. America faces a fundamental choice: either the blessings of liberty or the servitude of liberalism. In the political struggle for survival, one or the other is headed for extinction. The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of 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. Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world. Developing a Christian worldview means submitting our entire self to God, in an act of devotion and service to Him. Knowing the truth has meaning only as a first step to living the truth day by day. There are unprecedented numbers of movements for human rights and freedoms. But the dominant worldviews in academia, like materialism and naturalism, deny the reality of freedom, reducing humans to robots. So where does the concept of human rights come from? Because a human is a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone - not the blind, automatic forces of nature, as philosophies like naturalism and materialism tell us. Because humans are capable of choosing, the first cause that created them must have a will. You don't have to be a Christian to recognize that materialism does not match reality. Materialism is not true to universal human experience - what we all know about ourselves. If people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, 'Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined that I will get.' No one lives like a robot. We all make choices from the moment we wake up in the morning. The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines. To use biblical language, those who exchange the glory of God for something in creation will also exchange the image of God for something in creation - and because it is something less than God, it always leads to a lower view of humanity. A part is always too limited to explain the whole. You might picture a worldview as trying to stuff the entire universe into a box. Invariably, something will stick out of the box. Its categories are too 'small' to explain the world. When we encounter the world of ideas for the first time, we easily get overwhelmed. Scripture is telling us, 'Don't be distracted by the details. Cut to the core by asking, What is its idol?' Whatever functions as its God substitute will shape everything else. An idol is anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality - the eternal, self-existent, uncaused cause of everything else. Can reason be an idol? Certainly. The philosophy of rationalism puts human reason in the place of God as the source and standard of all truth. In studies asking why young people left their family religion, their most frequent response was unanswered doubts and questions. The researchers were surprised: They expected to hear stories of broken relationships and wounded feelings. But the top reason given by young adults was that they did not get answers to their questions. An idol is not necessarily something concrete, like a golden calf. It can also be something abstract, like matter. Is matter part of the created order? Sure it is. So the philosophy of materialism qualifies as an idol in the biblical sense. Christian adults need to think about talking to our own children as a form of cross-cultural missions. Cultural change happens so quickly that teens are exposed to ideas and worldviews very different from those of previous generations. I discovered that Christianity does have the resources to meet the challenges posed by competing worldviews after all. I began asking, 'How can we know Christianity is true?' Sadly, none of the adults in my life offered an answer. Eventually I decided Christianity must not have any answers, and I became an agnostic. In high school, I came to realize I had a second-hand faith, derived from my parents and family background. I had no actual reasons for believing it. Urban areas tend to attract members of the 'knowledge class' - people who work with ideas, data, information The first step in conforming our intellect to God's truth is to die to our vanity, pride, and craving for respect from colleagues and the public. We must let go of the worldly motivations that drive us, praying to be motivated solely by a genuine desire to submit our minds to God's Word - and then to use that knowledge in service to others. Many people operate as though the definition of faith were, Don't ask questions, just believe. They quote Jesus himself, who taught his followers to have the faith of a child (Mark 10:15). But I once heard Francis Schaeffer respond by saying, 'Don't you realize how many questions children ask?' 'Biblical worldview'. The term means literally a 'view of the world', a biblically informed perspective on all of reality. A worldview is like a mental map that tells you how to navigate the world effectively. It is the imprint of God's objective truth on our inner life. The loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression. Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny. The most fundamental decision we all face over the course of our lives is what we will recognize as the ultimate reality, the uncaused source and cause of our existence. Everything else in our worldview depends on that initial decision. The Bible speaks of this foundational choice in terms of who or what we worship. We must all answer the challenge Joshua issued to the Israelites as they were poised to enter the Promised Land: 'Choose this day whom you will serve' (Josh. 24:15).