Book Review
A Mind in Full
Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity
Crossway Books, 2004
(480 pages; $19.97, hardcover)
reviewed by Angus Menuge
There is no longer a Christian mind.” This is the shocking opening sentence of Harry Blamires’s The Christian Mind. Blamires, writing in 1963, did not mean that Christians could not think, but that they had lost the art of thinking Christianly about all things, sacred and secular.
Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) is among the historical studies that have tried to explain what went wrong with Christian thought. Other writers, such as C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, J. P. Moreland, and James Sire, have offered a philosophical analysis of how worldviews antithetical to Christianity have infiltrated the thought of Christians.
A Distinctive Way
It is in this philosophical tradition that Nancy Pearcey writes (she gratefully acknowledges a debt to Schaeffer’s L’Abri). A senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and with Charles Colson co-author of How Now Shall We Live?, she argues that the central biblical presuppositions of creation, fall, and redemption provide a distinctive way of looking at the world (a worldview), and that this should determine how Christians understand all of life.
The first section (“What’s in a worldview?”) identifies the problem of privatized Christianity and traces it to a series of unfortunate dualisms in past thought. Some readers will dispute Pearcey’s reading of particular figures, but many will agree with her that medieval Christianity went wrong in supposing that living a holy life required separation from the world. This belief easily leads to the idea that there is no distinctively Christian way of thinking about worldly vocations, a view, Pearcey notes, still prominent among twenty-first-century Evangelicals, who often suffer a sense of inferiority for not having gone into church work.
There were theological resources to resist this, such as the doctrine of vocation: In our secular work we serve as masks of God’s providential care for all people. However, theology proved insufficient to weather Enlightenment secularism, because it failed to provide a Christian philosophy that could engage non-Christian philosophies on their own terms.
Followers of the Enlightenment identified reason with scientific materialism and demoted religion, morality, and the arts to matters of subjective feeling. This caused the “modern schism” between “facts” (findings of science) and “values,” which Francis Schaeffer called the lower and upper stories. Christianity’s cognitive claims are thus no longer taken seriously as statements about reality, but are viewed as subjective biases.
In practice, Pearcey shows, this leads to an unlivable worldview. She cites MIT’s Steven Pinker, who wrote the best-selling How the Mind Works. Pinker argues that our cognitive architecture consists of a collection of gadgets that promote the survival of our genes. He admits that this provides no reason to think we have free will, rationality, or even personal identity. Yet he also realizes that an ethical life requires the assumption that we are free, rational persons, so he affirms this by a “leap of faith” quite unjustified by his materialist philosophy.
Here we see what Pearcey calls “the great intellectual lostness of our age: that many are forced to hang their entire hopes for dignity and meaning on an upper-story realm that they themselves regard as noncognitive and unverifiable.”
Discerning the Others
Angus J. L. Menuge is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin, where he is associate director of the Cranach Institute (www.cranach.org). He has edited three books, including C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands, and has recently published Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Rowman & Littlefield).
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