The Sacred-Secular Split
Posted
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
by
Brian Beers
Categories:
Apologetics
This week my alumni newsletter from Corban College arrived with its feature article entitled, “Eliminating the Sacred/Secular Split: Restoring a Biblical Worldview.” I was very interested to see how the ideas in it were interchangeable with the Spiritual reality vs. Reality distinction that I brought up in Stewards of Reality. The article is about Nancy Pearcey’s recent lectures at the college. Nancy and her husband Rick are editors of the Pearcey Report and are influential thinkers and writers in Washington DC.
In the newsletter article Nancy is quoted as saying, “Our lives are often fractured and fragmented, with our faith firmly locked into the private realm of church…it rarely has a chance to inform our life and work in the public realm.” The focus of the Pearcey’s efforts is on reversing the marginalization of the Christian worldview.
The Pearceys pour their public efforts into communicating the Christian worldview to others. Nancy wants Christians to:
1. Learn to identify other people’s worldviews.
2. Translate ideas into concepts that people with other beliefs can understand.
3. Build a bridge, a Christian philosophy that encapsulates biblical thinking on specific issues.
4. Distinguish between data and interpretation and show how the data fit a Christian worldview.
The best quote from the whole article is, “The only worldview big enough to encompass all human experience is Christianity.” A corollary to this could be, “The Bible is the only adequate description of reality.” While communicating the Christian worldview to others is important, we still need to improve our understanding of the Biblical worldview. It is lazy to assume that our understanding is sufficient.
Go and check out the Pearcey Report and the newsletter article.
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