Quotes from Nancy Pearcey

Biblical truth is rich enough to satisfy all the hungers of the human personality.

Today religion appeals almost solely to the needs of the private sphere—needs for personal meaning, social bonding, family sup-port, emotional nurturing, practical living, and so on. In this climate, almost inevitably, churches come to speak the language of psychological needs, focusing primarily on the therapeutic functions of religion. Whereas religion used to be connected to group identity and a sense of belonging, it is now almost solely a search for an authentic inner life.

John Calvin defines idolatry as worshipping "the gifts in place of the giver himself.

Outside the ivory tower, ordinary people are not interested in a worldview that spins out a logically coherent system, and yet contradicts human experience. They are looking for a worldview that makes sense of the world we actually inhabit. They want one that explains the undeniable facts of human experience, not one that suppresses those facts for the sake of its own internal logical consistency.

In order to communicate the gospel in the West, we face a unique challenge: We need to learn how to liberate it from the private sphere and present it in its glorious fullness as the truth about all reality.

People who have the power to control the "'official' definitions of reality" are in a position to impose their own private worldview across an entire society.

a Christian worldview is not reductionistic. It does not reduce reason to something less than reason, and therefore it does not self-destruct. A Christian epistemology (theory of knowledge) starts with the transcendent Creator, who spoke the entire universe into being with his Word: "And God said" (Gen. 1:3). "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1).

An undefined "mysticism with nobody there" is not enough. It does not fill the hunger in the human heart for connection with a personal God who knows and loves us.

Christianity liberates us from any life-denying reductionism that dishonors and debases humanity. It affirms the high dignity of humans as full persons made in the image of a personal God.

The existence of personal beings constitutes evidence that they were created by a personal God, not by any non-personal cause.

What the dominant classes hold as true tends to shape social and political practice. If the elites hold a materialism that reduces humans to computers, then they will treat people like computers. Thinking will be reduced to computing: the neuroelectrophysiology of the brain. People will be judged solely by how well they perform their assigned functions. And when they stop functioning, they will be tossed in the garbage heap with the other electronic trash.

Anything we must assume in order to function in the world is part of general revelation. The undeniable facts of experience reflect the created structure of physical nature or human nature, or both.

a mind capable of forming an argument against God's existence constitutes evidence for his existence.

Even if a group of children were put "on an island and they raised themselves," Barrett adds, "I think they would believe in God." 13 It appears that we have to be educated out of the knowledge of God by secular schools and media.

Not believing in God is a far more arduous affair than is generally imagined," Eagleton concludes.

All human endeavors depend on God's common grace.

children tend to hold a concept of God even if their parents are atheists.

Romantics deified the imagination;

Calvin taught that all people have an innate sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis).

To get a message across to people, you must address their assumptions, questions, objections, hopes, fears, and aspirations.

why should we acquiesce in letting philosophical naturalists prescribe the definition of science itself? The only reason for restricting science to methodological naturalism is if we assume from the outset that philosophical naturalism is true—that nature is a closed system of cause and effect. But if it is not true, then restricting science to naturalistic theories is not a good strategy for getting at the truth.47

South Korea now has five of the world's ten biggest churches.

More Chinese attend church each Sunday than are members of the Communist Party.

And if there is no objective or universal truth, then any claim to have objective truth will be treated as nothing but an attempt by one interpretive community to impose its own limited, subjective perspective on everyone else. An act of oppression. A power grab.