★★★★★ 5
Clear thinking on contemporary confusion about our bodies.
Format: Hardcover
We live in a sound-bite society. A 30-second commercial exceeds our attention span unless it is cute, provocative, catchy or unusually funny. Many cannot sustain a thought longer than the time it takes to breathe. Our convictions are strong, they are popular, but they are typically backed by only a thin layer of thought. How can so many be wrong? I will go with the flow of the cultural consensus.
As a new Christian, I read “The Christian Mind,” by Harry Blamires. It convinced me that Christians should think. Perhaps true Christianity begins as an admission of sin and an experience of the love and grace of God that we call conversion, but that is only the beginning. We are welcomed into a new found wealth of wisdom for living in God’s world. Growing holiness is the long, slow and sometimes painful journey back to Eden and the way things were meant to be.
The Christian life involves the mind and living by revealed convictions. Yet, almost everyone in our culture today lives by a set of convictions of their own. They live by a set of self-discovered rules, ultimate convictions about life, love and the way things are supposed to be. They construct their own ethics out of these convictions. This ethic is fiercely held and savagely defended, but the foundation is very thin. The culture wars are fought on the worldview battlefield.
It is the ethics behind the conviction and the thinking behind the thought that needs to be examined, challenged and ultimately changed. When we confront a non-Christian with the holes in their worldview; when we apply thought and fact and truth and history to their ultimate convictions we are shouted down with angry rhetoric. The thinking behind most practical worldviews is paper thin and ill-founded. And when the law of unintended consequences bites them they do not know why. We need to show them why.
Christian apologetics is the intentional deprivation of another’s ‘God-Suppressor.” They know God, but they suppress that truth down because of their independent ethic and their perceived freedom in sin. Yet, it is God’s world and his rules apply. Reality bites and apologists show them why. Nancy Pearcey is a worldview apologist.
Christians ought to live by a set of revealed convictions about God and man and truth and law and ethics. We are radically different from the world around us because we grow, like plants, out of another kind of fertilizer. We are nourished by divine wisdom. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ. (Colossians 2:3)
In many ways, I cut my spiritual teeth on the writings of Francis Schaeffer. Through him, I learned to think like a Christian, and that the Christian need not be ashamed of his intellectual heritage. Now that my teeth are cut, I brush them with Nancy Pearcey writings. She is the echo of Schaeffer updated and applied to the modern world that Schaeffer prophetically warned us about. Her latest book, "Love Thy Body", applies the Christian mind to contemporary issues regarding our bodies. (Abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, transgenderism, stem-cell research, sex, marriage, and homosexuality.) It shows how to understand the thinking of the modern world and apply logic, fact, research, from a Christian mind to the hot-button issues of the day.
It is a book that you really should read. It will make you think; like a Christian.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2018
