Worldviews matter, and many of today’s secular perspectives offer little in their attempts to uphold a God substitute. Answering fundamental questions and addressing foundational principles of belief has been Nancy Pearcey’s passion for years. She joins the show to draw out five key principles from Romans 1 for unmasking atheism, secularism, and other ‘isms’ as described in her latest book Finding Truth. We hear clear teaching and real-world examples on this latest Connecting Faith. Here’s where the conversation takes us:
Nancy says that our job as Christians is to communicate the gospel. To do that effectively, she believes we need to know our audience. To understand the beliefs and assumptions of the people we’re trying to reach, Nancy offers five principles to help us get to the core of any worldview we encounter:
• Identify an idol or a God substitute.
• Find a way it dehumanizes people & identify the idol’s reduction-ism.
• Test the idol: does it contradict itself?
• Test the idol: does it contradict what we know about the world?
• Make the case for Christianity.
We need to learn how to better defend our convictions as Christians. Why do people de-convert and lose their faith? Nancy says the most frequent answer is that they couldn’t find answers to their doubts and questions. As part of the answer to that problem, she believes we need to develop more intense apologetic teaching for our high school and college students.
Across our world today, the number one worldview we can expect to encounter is scientific materialism. In the face of the dominance of that belief system, many Christians have retreated to the sidelines of the public square. Yet how can we share our faith if we’re hiding? We have to know and understand the worldviews of our friends and neighbors.
