The Natural Theologian

§ In a recent lecture, popular science and philosophy communicator Curt Jaimungal presented an argument against the simulation hypothesis.The Simulation Hypothesis: The idea that we are in a realistic computer-simulation like The Matrix.Advocates argue that surprising features of reality, like false collective memories (“The Mandela Effect”), are what you would expect if the simulation hypothesis were true. Therefore, it probably is true.But Jaimungal demonstrates that this argument rests on a logical fallacy. (Relevant clip: 16:42)Consider its structure:* If the simulation hypothesis were true, you would expect false collective memories.* There are false collective memories.* Therefore, the simulation hypothesis is probably true.In other words,* On hypothesis H, you would expect evidence E.* There is evidence E.* Therefore, E indicates the probability of H.But this reasoning is precisely backwards.In order to demonstrate the probability of H given E, we cannot use the probability of E given H. We want the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence, not the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis.Logicians call this a “transposed conditional” or “the prosecutor’s fallacy.”And several common Christian apologetic arguments commit the same logical fallacy.§ Seven years ago, William Lane Craig met atheist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in debate.But this was not any ordinary atheist-theist debate, because also on stage was psychologist Jordan B. Peterson.In his remarks, Craig argued that, given the hypothesis of atheism, we would not expect life to be meaningful or morality to be objectivity, and that given the hypothesis of theism, we would.Yet both his interlocutors argued for moral realism (the objectivity of moral truth), independently of the God hypothesis. As a result, Craig was left trying to argue his opponents out of their moral realism, because it is not what you would expect on an atheistic worldview.I recently listened to and reacted to the whole of debate and discussion. I’ll be posting my (very long) reaction to YouTube soon. Here’s the first clip from the video:Why did Craig end up in this unenviable position? Because his argument, the “No meaning without God” argument, is—like the above simulation argument—backwards.Consider its structure:* On the God hypothesis, you would expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).* Life is meaningful. We all want life to be meaningful.* Therefore, if we want life to be meaningful, we need to adopt the God hypothesis.It’s paired with the opposite argument about atheism (or naturalism):* On naturalism, you would not expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).* We do find meaning. It would be nice if life were meaningful.* But, if you believe in naturalism, you should conclude—in order to be consistent—that life is not meaningful.Like the argument for the simulation hypothesis, the reasoning proceeds by considering the probability of the evidence given the two hypotheses on offer.If God exists, it is probable intuitively that he would create meaningful rather than meaningless forms of existence. But that’s not what needs demonstrating.What needs demonstrating is that it is probable that God exists, given the evidence of meaning and morality.We need to prove the probability of God given meaning/morality, not the probability of meaning/morality given God.Therefore, we need first to demonstrate the existence of meaning, morality, or mind independently of either hypothesis. And of course, that’s where we encounter another wrinkle.§ Rather than admitting the independently-evident existence of meaning or morality, Christians often object to it.As you may have noticed, I had to strike through the middle premise of each argument. Unlike in the simulation case, the evidence is not even granted.Instead, when Christians encounter a non-believer who believes in morality or meaning, we pressure them to call this into question, given its improbability on an atheistic view.But if there is no meaning or morality, then there is no reason to postulate God as the explanation of meaning and morality.How do you explain morality on an atheistic worldview? Well, if there’s no morality or meaning, then there’s no explaining to do. Unless we grant that morality and meaning are demonstrable independently of one’s worldview, the argument cannot get started.§ The proper order of natural theology is not to begin from a hypothesis and postulate what we would expect to find if it were true.Rather, the first step of a natural-theological argument is to demonstrate the phenomenon that will serve as evidence, whether meaning, morality, or mind.That means that, in this debate, Goldstein and Peterson are engaging in the appropriate first step of natural theology, demonstrating the relevant phenomenon independently of metaphysical hypotheses.The second step is to demonstrate that the explanation of that phenomenon requires the existence of something else as its minimal, sufficient explanation.But notice what Popular Christian Apologetics does instead. It fallaciously reverses step two, by considering the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis, instead of the hypothesis on the evidence. And it undermines nonbelievers’ confidence in the phenomenon of step one.In effect, this is worse than the problem with the simulation argument. There, the evidence is granted. Here, the evidence is not even granted.It’s as if the simulation people tried to argue everyone else into thinking that hallucinations and false collective memories don’t exist. But those phenomena were supposed to be your evidence for the simulation hypothesis!Popular Christian Apologetics argues in just about the opposite direction it should argue.§ What are the steps to demonstrate that meaning or morality—let’s pivot to morality—indicates the existence of God?1. First, you must demonstrate the truth of moral realism, that moral statements express truths about reality. This is no easy feat. But let’s imagine you were able to do so.(I think that page one of Mere Christianity, Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” and Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology all do this work, in a certain way. By demonstrating that we all engage in moral thinking and can’t help but doing so, I think we are forced to recognize that we all are moral realists, whether we like it or not. See my video on natural law.)2. Second, you must argue that moral realism cannot be explained naturalistically. My late professor Helen De Cruz carefully considers these arguments in her chapter on the moral argument for God’s existence. When it comes to moral psychology, there are many available evolutionary explanations of moral psychology, even if I would raise questions about them.But for moral realism, evolutionary explanations tend to be “debunking.” We believe these things, not because they are true, but because they contribute to group survival. As a result, many thinkers—both religious and secular—think it is difficult to see how naturalism can account for the truth of moral statements. From scientific ‘is’ statements, you don’t arrive at any moral ‘ought’ statements. Hence, a moral argument against naturalism has good odds of success.But what follows? Many folks who adopt moral realism “from below” adopt either a kind of Platonism or a kind of social constructivism (a non-reductionist one). For example, in analytic philosophy, Iris Murdoch proposed a kind of Platonism to explain the reality of the good and the truth of moral statements in contradiction to the ethical emotivism of the logical positivists. On the other hand, John Rawls resurrected moral philosophy by introducing a kind of constructivism, which many take to have realist implications. As a result, most secular analytic philosophers today are moral realists.(Even Peter Singer recently came out as a moral realist.)3. Step three is to argue for the minimal, sufficient non-naturalistic explanation of moral realism. This could be the Platonism or constructivism mentioned above, or true Kantianism, where moral statements express not truths of theoretical reason but of the form of practical reasoning.Most Christians are not so chastened in their reasoning. Rather, we propose God as explanation and jump to the conclusion that we’ve hit the jackpot.But given the Euthyphro dilemma, it is not at all clear that this is so. Trying to explain morality (or logic) by God rather than Platonism is suggestive of voluntarism.In fact, I think that moral realism indicates either something like Platonism or something like Kantianism. Natural reality is an inadequate explanation of morality, so either a non-natural moral reality (vaguely akin to Platonic forms) is suggested, or something endemic to practical reasoning, a kind of logic of action introduces moral categoricity.4. Step four is the one you’ve been waiting for. We ask what metaphysically explains the existence of this non-natural moral reality or what follows from Kantian practical reasoning. Only at this stage will we be led to appeal to God.If we think moral realism requires a kind of Platonic moral reality in addition to nature, then we ask a causal question about what could explain and give rise to it. A naturalistic causal explanation is not even an option, since this reality is non-natural. A supernatural source of moral reality must, arguably, be postulated.If moral realism leads to Kantianism, then, at least according to Kant, God arises not as a causal explanation of the world, of human beings, or of moral reality. No God himself is another postulate of practical reason, the being that must exist in order to bring about cosmic justice in accord with the categorical imperative.But either way, there are more steps until we arrive at anything like God, and those steps are not obvious.The Four (4) Steps of a Non-Fallacious Moral Argument for God’s Existence:* Argue for moral realism.* Rebut naturalistic explanations of moral realism.* Determine the min

§ Recently, one of the world’s most downloaded podcasts hosted a debate between a Christian, an atheist, and a psychologist.Their topic?The meaning of life.Christian apologist Greg Koukl argued that, without belief in God, a materialist worldview holds no hope to provide meaning.The atheist—young and dapper Alex O’Connor—countered that, even if there is a God, who’s to say he hasn’t given our lives a meaning that we find meaningless? Say, designing us so that our purpose in life was to produce paperclips?However, at other points the Christian and the atheist seemed to be in complete agreement:Koukl: “There either is meaning objectively, or not.”O’Connor: “I think so too, to be clear.”Meanwhile, a third participant, “Dr. K,” trained psychologist with a background in Eastern spirituality, had this to say:Countering both sides of the metaphysical debate, Dr. K continued, “For me, finding meaning and purpose…is a very practical thing.”Rather than answering the perennial questions of metaphysics and religion, Dr. K is concerned to intervene in a recent, acute crisis of loss of subjective meaning—the very crisis with which Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary, framed the discussion.As Dr. K puts it, “If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know. But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”And in saying this, Dr. K exposed the deep failure of several decades of both Christian and atheist apologetics, a failure that comes down, in this case, to a single preposition.The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.1. The Setup§ The Diary of a CEO is one of today’s top podcasts. Host Steven Bartlett is a young, successful entrepreneur who interviews the best minds in a wide variety of areas, from psychology, to politics, to—more rarely—religion.That is why it was exciting to see him host this discussion on meaning and religion with a Christian apologist among the participants.Even secular audiences have become interested in religious questions as a result of what many term “the meaning crisis,” a combination of psychological down-turns that have prompted a resurgence of religious belief and participation.And that is the setup with which Bartlett frames the podcast discussion:The reason I wanted to speak to all three of you today is to discuss meaning and purpose. And there’s some stats that I wanted to share that kind of frame the discussion:Three in five young Americans believe that their life lacks purpose. Nine in ten young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose.And to give some further stats, which I found really interesting around the rise of religiosity in the UK, a belief in God amongst 18-24 year-olds has risen from 18% in 2021, to 37% in 2025. According to YouGov and in the UK, monthly church attendance has risen from 4% up to 15% in 2025.There is something going on, and that’s what I want to talk about today.Bartlett identifies two trends.First, there is an increase in the number of people in Western countries who report lacking purpose in their lives.Second, in only the last couple years, there has been an increase both in religious belief and attendance.What is interesting about this is that, for a long time, there have been intellectuals—from Friedrich Nietzsche to Francis Schaeffer—arguing that the decline of religious belief is the cause of contemporary purposelessness. This argument has ramped up in intellectual spaces in the last nine years, chiefly through the influence of Jordan Peterson.However, until the last two years, there was little evidence that this had had an impact on the religious beliefs and practices of the population at large. This recent turn of events lends empirical, sociological credence to what was previously only a philosophical postulate.But the connection between religious belief and felt purpose remains opaque. Does one need to resolve questions of religion in order to gain a sense of purpose in life? Or is religious conviction merely a psychological remedy that happens, sometimes, to be effective?2. Team Metaphysics, Unite!§ Over the course of the discussion, it is revealed that the Christian apologist and the atheist are strongly aligned in their answer to that question.For both Greg Koukl and Alex O’Connor,the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology.So Greg Koukl:“I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness’s hunger for meaning and significance.”In other words, you need to decide between metaphysical naturalism and theism before you can satisfy the hunger for meaning and significance.And Alex O’Connor:“You asked, ‘Do I know my own purpose?’ That assumes that there is a purpose to know.”On the other hand, they both throw bones to psychology, acknowledging its significance in measure.Koukl rightly points out that, because God made the world with objective purpose:“People can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don’t know God.”Effectively, Koukl acknowledges the doctrine of the natural law in a way I applaud.For O’Connor, the New Atheists neglected the psychological dimension, and he acknowledges that religion serves an important role in strengthening us against the existential threat of death:“The New Atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn’t seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place.”However, in spite of these concessions, when pushed, both Koukl and O’Connor express their view of meaning as 1) turning on questions of metaphysics, and 2) being all or nothing.At one point, Greg Koukl bluntly says, “There either is meaning or there isn’t,” to which O’Connor responds, “I completely agree.”In short, the atheist and the Christian have teamed up on team metaphysics.Their program is this:“Want meaning in life? First determine the meaning of life.”But the psychologist is having none of it.3. Psychologist: “I hard disagree.”§ Several years ago, Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, who has long been YouTube-famous for rattling sabres with atheists in heated philosophical debates, was caught off-guard by the introduction of a third participant: Psychologist Jordan Peterson.In debate with Peterson and atheist Rebecca Goldstein, Craig’s directly metaphysical approach to defending Christianity seemed preachy, dated, and out-of-touch.Something similar occurs in this discussion.While Koukl and O’Connor are clearly poised to engage in some classic atheist-theist exchanges, Dr. K presses a different question:“If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know.But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”At one point, Dr. K brings the discussion back to the statistics with which Bartlett framed the podcast:Steven started this out with some really scary statistics that we’re seeing, right? There’s a mental health crisis. I think a lot of what we’re seeing is, while it may be perennial, I think it’s like seems more acute right now.Dr. K also challenges Alex on an important point. Alex argues that the discussion they are having is a perennial one. People for all history have had existential questions, questions of meaning and metaphysics, and so these are the perennial questions which will not be answered in one conversation.But Dr. K points out that their discussion is not framed by a perennial problem, but an acute one.That acute problem is not the perennial problem of metaphysics: What is the meaning of life?Instead, it is the personal problem: How can I find meaning in life?The difference is but a preposition.Because he thinks the problem of meaning is perennial, Alex emphasizes more than once that it will be impossible, in the course of one conversation, to settle the matter.But Dr. K disagrees. He does think their conversation can provide an answer.4. Incremental Improvement§ Moments later, Dr. K reveals why he thinks the meaning crisis is manageable.While, for the atheist and the theist, the problem of meaning is all-or-nothing, for Dr. K, meaning is measurable along a sliding scale. He describes how psychologists measure a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They give people a series of surveys that get responses to questions related to meaning, control, and purpose (all of which clump together psychometrically, suggesting that they measure the same psychological variable).He surveys the debate participants on the spot, asking how they would rate their subjective sense of purpose on a scale of 1 to 10: Koukl offers 10, Bartlett 5, and Dr. K presses Alex to admit that he would score greater than five on such a scale.But what is Dr. K’s goal in the conversation? Not to get people from zero to ten in a single conversation, but to help people move “some vague percentage points, I’m shooting for about 20%.”Yes.This is it.Dr. K wants people to move some small percentage along a vague scale that he doesn’t understand, but that we kind of all know is there: More meaning and purpose, less meaning and purpose.That’s what he’s going for. It’s incremental improvement.Meaning in life is not a grand, metaphysical sense of the purpose of all existence.Meaning can be as simple as moving from doing less well to doing a little bit better.5. A New Apologetic§ In much of popular Christian apologetics, a certain kind of argument predominates.While I have previously made much of the presuppositionalist-classical distinction, this argument predominates on both sides, whatever the apologist’s professed methodology.The argument:* If there is no God, there can be no meaning.* The atheistic worldview has no God.* Therefore, people with an atheistic worldview have no meaning.But the conclusion doesn’t follow.My freshman year at Wheaton College, I remember being struck by the t

In A Natural History of Natural Theology, my late professor Helen De Cruz (1978-2025) and husband Johan De Smedt write that “most modern versions of the design argument do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75).Advocates of the design argument have not proven that the argument remains valid after Darwin; they—we—have simply ignored natural selection.Dr. De Cruz, who served on the committee for my dissertation prospectus, died this June at the age of 46 of an aggressive illness. She left behind two children and a husband. Her work in philosophy was truly remarkable, not to mention her prior Ph.D. in art history, her fiction-writing, and lute-playing(!). While this article engages in criticism, it arises from deep respect for her amazing, cross-disciplinary scholarship.However, while De Cruz and De Smedt argue that contemporary natural theologians ignore natural selection, their own description of natural selection is simplistic.They illustrate the process with an example of Richard Dawkins’. And they begin with an important admission:The likelihood that a computer program that generates random combinations of letters will produce by pure chance a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, such as METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL, is vanishingly small.(I did the math; that’s less than 1 in 1032!)But here’s how natural selection can overcome this probability threshold:However, allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt?That’s not natural selection. That’s cheating.What I greatly respect about Dr. De Cruz’s work is its careful integration of science with philosophy and theology. For example:But on this point, I find myself disappointed.I had hoped for a robust analysis of wherein modern evolutionary science conflicts with the design argument. Instead, I find an inaccurate overestimate of the power of natural selection, with the assumption that natural selection is the sole causal source of biological evolution.De Cruz and De Smedt are also dismissive toward Bill Dembski and the theory of Intelligent Design. (At least they are willing to cite Dembski!) As a result, I find myself craving more accurate analysis of the power and limits of modern evolutionary theory and the remaining viability of teleological thinking in science and philosophy.In this article, I’ll argue that De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of natural selection assumes the presence of design and, citing Bill Dembski’s recent article on “the conservation of information,” argue that natural selection explains only a fraction of biological diversity.While structural biologists, admitting the problem, propose additional mechanisms of evolution, I conclude that no naturalistic explanation of the origin of biological diversity yet exists. The design argument, therefore, remains as viable as ever.To support research exploring academic heterodoxy on evolution, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to The Natural Theologian. You’ll also get exclusive access to paid posts.1. Natural Selection…Plus Additional ProgrammingIn his analysis of the origin of biological forms, Aristotle discussed three kinds of cause: Chance, Necessity, and Purpose.(This is distinct from his “four causes” idea.) In his contemporary defense of the design inference, Dembski discusses the same three, calling them “chance, regularity, and design.”But De Cruz and De Smedt argue that this is to ignore a fourth causal option that modern science has turned up: Natural selection.Admittedly, natural selection is not independent of the other three causes. It is a combination of chance and regularity, and purportedly, it mimics or creates the appearance of design.On this analysis, Aristotle’s trichotomy has been superseded by Darwin’s tetrachotomy. Hence, contemporary teleologists, including intelligent design theorists, are working with an outdated palette of options.For pre-Darwinians like Aristotle and Cicero, and even William Paley, “natural selection was not in the pool of possible explanations,” De Cruz and De Smedt admit. But for modern advocates “of the design argument,” De Cruz and De Smedt allege that they “do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75). Modern advocates of design are simply ignoring the advance made by Darwin’s discovery of natural selection.But as revealed in the above example, De Cruz and De Smedt confuse natural selection’s combination of chance and regularity with the workings of a pre-programmed filter.While the chance of producing METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL by chance is prohibitively low, they argue that, by the “principle of cumulative selective retention,” a computer could reduce the odds from <1 in 1032 to something that could be produced in less than 600 attempts:Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.But a computer program that “retained the correct letters at each attempt” would not be a combination only of chance and regularity, but of chance, regularity, and design.Chance is involved in the mechanism of random-letter-generation.Regularity governs the mechanical working of the computer’s selection mechanism.But allowing, i.e., programming, a “computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt” would require design.While De Cruz and De Smedt are confident that “Darwin…came up with natural selection as a naturalistic explanation of design,” their own description of its workings—even as highly-educated, scientifically-informed philosophers over a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species—tacitly invokes design.2. Information In, Information Out This week, mathematician and philosopher Bill Dembski shared on his Substack an academic article he published earlier this month: “The Law of Conservation of Information: Search Processes Only Redistribute Existing Information.”In that article, Dembski argues the following: Conservation of information sparked scientific interest once a recurring pattern was noticed in the evolutionary computing literature. In grappling with the creation of information through evolutionary algorithms, this literature consistently revealed that the information outputted by such algorithms always needed first to be programmed into them.Thus, the primary goal of this literature—to uncover how information could be created from scratch or de novo—was shown to be misconceived: the information was not created but instead shuffled around or smuggled in, implying that it already existed in some form or other.Information output in these situations therefore always presupposed a counterbalancing input of prior information.In other words, mechanistic processes are incapable of producing new information. The most a mechanistic process can do is shuffle it around or destroy it.Accordingly, while natural selection was an important scientific discovery, it does not have the power to produce new biological information (or lines of Shakespeare). It can only reshuffle or destroy existing information.Consider an example of biological evolution for which the mechanism of natural selection is adequate: The evolution of the polar bear.Scientists believe that the polar bear shares a common ancestor with the brown bear and the North American black bear. The evidence of this is their shared genetic material, less two notable mutations.One mutation is to a geneinvolved in fat metabolism, which allows the polar bear to have a diet that ‘contains a very large proportion of fat (much higher than in the diet of brown bears)’ (Behe, Darwin Devolves, 16). The second gene “is associated with pigmentation, and changes in it are probably responsible for the blanching of the [polar bear] ancestors’ brown fur” (17).(I wrote about this here.)Yet both mutations, when they occur in other mammals, are damaging.“When the same gene is mutated in humans or mice, studies show it frequently leads to high levels of cholesterol and heart disease” (Behe, 17).Likewise, the loss of pigmentation in the fur was a loss of functional genetic material, not the creation of a new gene for white fur.As I once summarized it,“Scientists have reason to believe that both variations that occurred in polar bears [involved] a loss of genetic information that, as we saw, is shared by mammals, up to and including humans.”In other words, in a scientifically demonstrable instance where biological evolution was caused by natural selection, no new information was created. Biological information was lost. And this loss of biological information was, by accident, beneficial. It was selectively retained without any pre-programming—without any design.Importantly, however, while natural selection can explain how the polar bear evolved from the biological kind of bear that was the common ancestral population of the brown bear and the North American black bear, it cannot explain the origin of the biological information that gave rise to that ancestral kind of bear in the first place.Natural selection explains the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest.Natural selection explains the speciation of an off-shoot, whose differentiating mutations are damaging to existing functional genes.But what natural selection cannot explain is the origin of biological kinds.3. Evolutionists, Don’t Give Up!In What Darwin Got Wrong, philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report that, among structural biologists, no one believes that natural selection is sufficient to explain biological diversity: “None of them is ‘that kind’ of Darwinist any more” (xiv).However, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini report that this admission from structural biologists has yet to influence “informed

In response to my recent post on J. Gresham Machen, readers offered thoughtful pushback on several fronts.Some questioned whether Machen’s later turn away from “objective” methods wasn’t the right move after all.Others raised concerns about the dangers of free inquiry, especially when it risks undermining Christian convictions.Still others debated the wisdom of staying and reforming corrupt institutions rather than leaving them to act authentically.Here are a few reflections in response to those critiques.1. Should Christians Strive for Objectivity? A common objection was:“The theological modernists claimed objectivity, but they were, in fact, biased. Doesn’t that vindicate Machen’s later turn toward Christian perspectivalism?”This strikes me as a category confusion.The problem with theological modernists wasn’t that they tried to be objective. The problem was that they weren’t. They imported philosophical and theological assumptions while presenting their conclusions as neutral scholarship. Their failure wasn’t in aspiring to objectivity, but in failing to live up to it.The right response isn’t to embrace perspectivalism as if all truth is merely a projection of our ideological priors. It’s to strive for greater objectivity, not less.I’ve described this elsewhere as civilized empiricism—a pursuit of truth grounded in a recognition of one’s biases, tested through dialogue with dissenting voices and institutions designed to expose blind spots. This is distinct from a kind of naïve or “brute empiricism,” where a lone thinker imagines they can arrive at truth without community, history, or correction.If our institutions are prone to dogma, the answer isn’t to surrender to subjectivity. It’s to lean more fully into practices that counterbalance our partiality.That means that students of faith should study with secular professors and peers, and secular scholars should welcome religious students into their classrooms.We need shared spaces of inquiry across disagreement, not echo chambers of our own convictions.2. Should We Pursue Truth Before Christ?Another objection was more spiritual in nature:Is there not danger in pursuing truth wherever it leads, especially if that pursuit might lead us away from Christ?I take this concern seriously. The fear isn’t just about what we might find out if we looked deeper. It’s about our own susceptibility to pride, to the allure of intellectual respectability, or to temptation masquerading as insight.There is wisdom in spiritual caution. Not everyone is ready for every branch of philosophy or science.But while maturity matters, I don’t believe the answer is to foreclose hard questions for fear of where they might lead. Christians often speak of the need for moral commitment to Christ prior to intellectual inquiry. But the New Testament seems to assume the reverse: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Our faith depends on something being true, and that truth is, in principle, open to examination.Faith seeks understanding, yes, but it also rests on good reasons. We are not asked to believe blindly, but to weigh, inquire, and discern.To do that well requires what I might call a “philosophic temper”—a posture of non-anxious, open-minded interest in truth. Some secular scholars model this better than many Christians.(This is very different from the kind of student who learns a bit of textual criticism and suddenly becomes pro-abortion. That’s not inquiry; that’s reaction.)One helpful way to cultivate a philosophic temper: Ask yourself what kind of worldview you’d hold if you lost your faith. Don’t just assume you’d become a Nietzschean or a nihilist. Perhaps you would continue to “act as though God exists,” like Jordan Peterson, or maintain the best insights of “religion for atheists,” like Alain de Botton. Thinking through those scenarios helps clarify what’s at stake, and what’s not, in our beliefs.3. Should We Stay or Leave Broken Institutions?Finally, some readers defended Machen’s own institutional departures, asking:Wasn’t Machen right to leave the mainline Presbyterian church and Princeton Seminary? Aren’t some institutions working at cross-purposes with their founding principles?In my earlier post, I only revealed my views on Machen’s decision to paid subscribers, but I will say this here: Burnett’s biography has me reconsider my Protestant impulse to take doctrinal purity as the deciding factor in favor of leaving corrupt institutions.The question applies far beyond Machen’s choice to leave his denomination and academic home. Many of us wrestle with similar choices in our relationship to academia, to the church, or to legacy institutions in general. Should we remain, or break away and start afresh?Often our conclusions reflect our own sociological positioning. Those outside academia often see only its ideological flaws and institutional failures. Those within it, especially those embedded in its better corners, see the benefits it still offers: peer review and intellectual collaboration and camaraderie.I’m part of academia, though not at its center. I see both its value and its limitations. (See my “Don’t Let Academia Stop You Being an Intellectual.”) I envy the acknowledgements pages in academic books, in which top scholars credit tens, if not hundreds of other academics for conversations, criticisms, and challenges that shaped the final work. That kind of collaborative refinement can’t easily be replicated on Substack. Substack has its strengths, but it doesn’t yet foster the same kind of rigorous back-and-forth.The same dynamic plays out in the church. Many evangelicals ask, “Why stay in a theologically liberal denomination?” But consider what was lost when evangelicals abandoned the mainline: beautiful buildings, central properties in every city, and a visible presence in the cultural square. By leaving, we may have preserved our theology, but at the cost of place, heritage, and public witness. There’s a kind of escapism in that.Doctrinal purity matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Institutions do more than just preserve doctrine: they order life, preserve memory, and embody truth in social form. When they lose their way, leaving is tempting, but rebuilding outside the institution is costly. You lose the infrastructure, financial, intellectual, and even architectural, that once supported your mission.Those supports aren’t ultimate, but they’re not irrelevant either. There’s a kind of radical Protestant, or Donatist, impulse in assuming we can do without them.“Donatism was a schism from the Catholic Church from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.” from “Donatism,” WikipediaWhat Comes Next?As I continue reflecting on Machen’s biography, I find myself drawn to an earlier generation of Christian leaders—those turn-of-the-century college presidents who pursued academic excellence while holding firm to the faith. There was a window of time when Christian intellectuals helped shape the modern university—before ideological conformity closed that door.In one sense, you could see what I’m doing as reconsidering the idea that the seminary theologian is the ideal of the Christian intellectual. Perhaps the ideal of the Christian intellectual is somewhere closer to the interface of the modern research university, the Christian faced with the objective pursuit of truth in a whole variety of areas, with empirical research, with philosophy, and so on. It’s for such an individual that the conflicts between faith and reason are raised in an institutional calling.I’ll be drawing attention to some of these figures in the near future.This post was written with the editing help of ChatGPT.The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive free posts like this one, become a free subscriber. To get access to premium paid essays and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Natural Theologian. Get full access to The Natural Theologian at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

My theological education took place at Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism.Presuppositionalism: Christian thinking must begin from all and only Christian presuppositions.And this thesis had a noticeable effect on our studies.95% of the time we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said.5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them.But after Westminster, I did a program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. In this beautiful, gothic reading room, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation:“Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.”And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositional seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago.Now, my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions.Now, my Christian perspective suggests that even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine.Readers, last week, I argued that the theology nerd mindset is that of a closed system, a self-reinforcing circle of Bible and theology, with no outside inputs.While much evangelical theology makes this error implicitly, presuppositionalism endorses and radicalizes this error explicitly.The presuppositionalist avows that theology should utilize circular arguments, beginning all and only from Christian presuppositions.And even if you haven’t encountered presuppositionalism, I think you’ll recognize the tendency to ideological thinking that refuses to be challenged and protects its ideas from outside interference.Not so the Christian humanist. Outside interference, from reality, is what the humanist desires.That’s why the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist is also the story of how I became a Christian humanist.In the rest of this post (originally a YouTube video I made in February), I tell the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist. Thank you for reading.If you want to learn more about transcending the theology nerd mindset, sign up for my upcoming (July-August) course, From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist.I. What Is a Presuppositionalist? The story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist begins back when I was one.A presuppositionalist is someone who believes that, to have a consistently Christian worldview, you need to start from all and only Christian presuppositions.The underlying theory is that people of different worldviews all start from their own presuppositions. If you’re a materialist atheist, you start from those presuppositions. If you’re a Christian, you start from a Christian set of presuppositions, and never the twain shall meet.Nobody really bases their beliefs on just an objective look at the evidence. We all bring a set of lenses, interpretive schemes to the world, and a Christian ought to make the Bible their interpretive scheme.Now for me, this was compelling as I was first taking my faith seriously. I’d had a lot of time where I just was a Christian on Sunday, and I didn’t know how to apply my faith to the other days of the week. That’s a lot of people.But as I was trying to take that faith more seriously, reading the Bible more, studying theology—the idea of having Christian presuppositions for all that you do sounds really compelling.I was also getting into the Reformed theology space where there’s an argument put forward that presuppositionalism is the consistent Calvinist or Reformed approach to apologetics, instead of classical or evidential apologetics, where you start from common ground and evidence to argue to a Christian worldview.Now I remember going off to college, at a Christian college. I thought, “Hey, I can get a Christian perspective on things!”And my now wife showed me her homework from a philosophy class, and it was about Thomas Aquinas, who is the opposite of a presuppositionalist. He’s a natural theologian. And he was arguing that there’s a distinction between the preambles of faith, the things you can know apart from faith or revelation, and the articles of faith, the things that are taught by faith.Aquinas would say that the Trinity, the Incarnation, and redemption you can only get from the Bible. But that God exists, that there is a moral law, and that we’ve sinned, these things can be known apart from Scripture. They might be even what gets you interested in Scripture. If you start to think, “I think there’s a God out there. Maybe I should read this Bible people keep talking about.” That’s the preambles versus the articles.But I denied that. I remember at the time thinking: “No, everything’s got to start from the Bible. That’s how you’re going to have a consistently Christian perspective on things in the world.”II. The Turning Point: Moral Attitudes in P. F. StrawsonBut there was a time in a final philosophy class I took at that college, we were reading about free will and moral responsibility.And there’s an important essay by Peter Strawson, British philosopher from the mid-20th century—“Freedom and Resentment.”In it, Strawson was arguing against the hard determinists. These are philosophers who think that free will and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is true and that therefore free will is false.And the hard determinists thought that therefore, we should rid ourselves of all emotions that assume that other people are moral response morally responsible. Think, e.g., resentment, from the title, that assumes that the other person has free will and purposefully did something to you. Or gratitude on the positive side: to be grateful towards somebody assumes that they were free, deserving of praise for what they did, and not just, “Well, they were pre-programmed to do it.”And Strawson’s argument took an interesting form, because Strawson was not a Christian. He was not somebody who argued that we have a soul or a metaphysical basis for free will, that we're not physically determined by our psychology or something.No, he just said, “There’s no way that we’re going to rid ourselves of these emotions of resentment and gratitude, blame and praise. These are part of being human, that we are equipped with the ability to make these evaluations.”And so from there, he said, no metaphysical thesis that pointy-headed philosophers or physicists come up with in the lab is going to affect this practice and its validity. If you bump into me, what decides whether I should be mad or forgiving is whether you intended to do so, not whether physicists have figured out whether quantum mechanics is true.So that idea, I didn’t realize it, but that was already incompatible with presuppositionalism.Hey, if you enjoy content like this, hit like and subscribe to The Natural Theologian. If you want to support my work further, consider becoming a paid subscriber.How? you say. How was Strawson’s idea incompatible with presuppositionalism?Well, let’s take an example of a presuppositionalist argument. A prominent one was the way Doug Wilson debated Christopher Hitchens in their recorded debates.Wilson is officially a presuppositionalist. (He’s got some other C. S. Lewis, natural law influences that we’ll leave aside for the moment.)But Wilson kept pressing Hitchens on Hitchens’ morally fervent critiques of the God of the Old Testament and the New. He would say, “Where do you get this morality by which you can judge—by what standard can you judge that God is evil, for having the Israelites go and kill the Canaanites? By what standard can you judge that penal substitutionary atonement is morally repugnant? You must be assuming a moral standard that has no place in an atheistic, materialist universe.”Now there are two ways you can go with an argument like that. The presuppositionalist essentially says:“You, atheist, have no basis for morality. Stop it. You need to be consistent. Go become a nihilist and go kill other people or yourself.”That’s the extreme version, but that’s essentially, “Go take your presuppositions to their logical conclusion.”But that’s not the direction that Strawson goes.Strawson is not a Christian, but he’s saying there’s something else beyond metaphysical inklings (i.e., do you believe in God or materialism).There’s our ingrained human ability to evaluate things on a moral level and to feel the emotions that are part and parcel of that.And that’s not going away.To read and understand Peter Strawson’s article, sign up for From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist. I’m adding it to the syllabus for “philosophy week.” Grab a copy of the syllabus by clicking this link.III. C. S. Lewis and my Agnostic ProfessorAnd that’s actually where C. S. Lewis starts his argument for Christianity, in the very opening pages of Mere Christianity.C. S. Lewis says people are doing this all the time. They’re saying, “That’s mine!” “Don’t take that.” “You pushed me.” “I didn’t mean to!” They’re arguing in these moral terms based on these practices of praise and blame that we all already participate in.And C. S. Lewis says, “We all already know about that, but that thing is a clue to the meaning of the universe.”So both the presuppositionalist and the natural theologian hold that you can’t make sense of morality without God, but they do different things with this claim.The presuppositionalist says, “You need to be consistent and give up on morality.”The natural theologian says, “You need to be consistent with what you already know—that morality exists—and adopt a worldview that explains why the world is more than just material.”The presuppositionalist says, “There’s no common ground between believer and unbeliever; there’s nothing we have in common. All that morality you’ve got is, at best, stolen capital. You don’t have a right to it.The natural theologian says, “Of course, you have a right to that. That is your birthright as a human being.”And now we’ve got common ground together, and we can look at the w

Hello, readers! The last several weeks, I’ve been deep in work on my Ph.D. dissertation. I’m excited to share some of the fruits of that research here. I’ll begin with my reflections on why I’m getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in the first place. Thanks for reading.Hey, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.And in this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m getting a PhD in philosophy and not theology.1. Biblical Exegesis Is Not EnoughMy first intellectual love has been theology, the study of Christian doctrine and what the faith teaches. That led me to take an interest in studying at seminary where we would study the sources of Christian theology in the Bible and the history of Christian interpretation of the Bible and the systematization of that into systematic theology. A whole coalition of disciplines that explore the contours of what Christianity teaches. And by attending seminary, you become competent. You can learn the original languages of the Bible. You can learn how to use the Bible in theological debate, what are the main arguments for and against different positions, and how to ground one's own position in those texts.(For background, see my post, “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Seminary.”)But what I realized over the course of my seminary studies was that the resources of biblical exegesis alone are not enough to do Christian theology.I noticed this in each of the main evangelical debates.Take the debate over complementarianism and egalitarianism, the relationship between men and women in the home and the church.Now both of these arguments were presented as if they were purely exegetical arguments. They rested on the meanings of certain Greek words like kephalé, for head, the husband is the head of the wife (Eph 5:23). What does this mean, authority, source, or what? The “helpmeet,” the “companion” in the book of Genesis (Gen 2:18). These Hebrew and Greek words were supposed to be the linchpin of theological arguments.Yet it wasn’t plausible to me that biblical exegesis alone was even the reason people held the positions they held. Did the evangelical feminist really hold their view just because of a dictionary definition of kephalé? Or was something more going on? (And the same applied to the complementarians, by the way.)No, I started to think people get their ideas from outside the Bible. They’re shaped by the Bible, but their reading of the Bible is also shaped by what they already think.And so we’re kind of thrown back on ourselves to actually examine the fundamental assumptions that we hold and the reasons for and against those, in conversation with the Bible, but not with the Bible alone.Specifically, I started to see the way that different theological debates reduced down to philosophical debates.The feminist one remains a simple example. If someone thinks that the reason churches, certain churches, ordain only men and not women is because of the patriarchy, we’re not dealing with a specifically Christian argument. That’s not a knock against it, but it is to say that this is an argument that shows up elsewhere.To actually understand the merits of a key feminist argument like that, you have to go into feminist philosophy, look at the history of that argument. What is the sociological evidence for it? What is the philosophical grounding of it? And what are the contrary claims of the other side? Well, this would enmesh you in philosophy, that universal human discipline, rather than the parochial Christian theology of adherence of the Christian faith.And so, I began to think in that, as in so many other debates, what we really need to do is get down to the philosophical arguments that are at the heart of things.And this just dovetailed with the fact that, as many people criticize evangelicals for, debating from Bible verses actually doesn’t solve our problems. There are contested interpretations. There are different interpretations on completely opposite sides. There are views on completely opposite sides that both claim a basis in the Bible.Now, this isn’t to say that there’s no way to read the Bible aright, but it is to say that the idea that you can do it all from the Bible is a bit shallow and narrow.If you enjoy content like this, hit “like” and subscribe to The Natural Theologian. That will help me make more content like this and get it out to more people. Thanks for your support.2. Attending to RealityNow another reason to go outside the Bible in order to understand Christian teaching is because the message of the Bible is actually about those things themselves. It’s a message to human beings about human beings. It addresses the various aspects of their lives. It addresses the world, the natural world, the human world.And if you don’t understand those things on their own terms, as it were, you're liable to ignore them or misunderstand them or not even to comprehend how the Christian faith speaks to them. If you try to speak about those things just from the Bible and theology, you’re likely to be missing a lot of the relevant information.An obvious one is politics. Whoever claims that their view of politics comes directly from the Bible immediately invites suspicion. Because there are people who can argue the exact contrary position and claim that it’s from the Bible.And more importantly, because politics is a complex and messy subject in the real world. We have to use our eyes and our senses to gather empirical information about how the world works. And this is done in political science, political philosophy, sociology, history, and many other disciplines. The idea that we can do this from the Bible alone, get that sort of magic shortcut to the right answers, is deeply misguided.There are other areas as well. Broadly, we could think about anthropology, the study of human beings. Can human beings be understood through science? Can we understand ourselves through the disciplines of psychology? What are the limits of that scientific understanding? Are there ways that human beings cannot be reduced to their scientific and natural substrate?We see debates about counseling and psychology and their legitimacy for Christians. Can we use this information that’s gathered, not from the Bible, but by secular study and by secular psychotherapy to understand the human mind, to help people? Can we differentiate spiritual problems from psychological problems and properly relate these? Again, you can’t do that if you just say everything's going to come from the Bible, as some do. You’re liable to to mistake psychological problems for spiritual ones. (See “Are Thoughts Sin?” by Anna Carini and myself.)If the Bible is to help human beings live human lives, we actually have to pay attention to human beings, how they work, how their minds work. We can’t just look at the Bible.Now that’s not to say that the Bible can’t correct secular understandings. It’s not to say that the Bible can’t, for instance, emphasize human responsibility in ways that a kind of determinist psychology ignores. We should emphasize human moral responsibility. In fact, when you don't people become helpless, and science can even confirm that. (See discussion of “learned helplessness.”) But you need a healthy discussion and dialogue between between faith and science to even get that right.There are other areas. In the church, when we try to reduce everything to theology, we often ignore power dynamics, ways that people are driven by narcissism or fame, psychological motivations. If we understand the church as another human institution, trying to exemplify something greater, but still subject to those infirmities and patterns, we're going to be on a lot better footing.We can pay attention to how social media is shaping the Christian life, shaping online Christian personalities. We get a better sense of what’s really going on.Example: Homosexual OrientationMaybe more controversially, same-sex attraction is an important topic for the contemporary church. It’s where the church is frequently accused of homophobia, of misunderstanding and lacking sympathy with one particular human experience. And the church can easily do this. We can say, we’ve got our answers straight from the Bible. There's no mention of a homosexual orientation. Our desires are themselves sin. We can make these blanket proclamations.This is an area of theology where I think the church needs to really grapple with reality that we can learn through philosophy and empirical science. We can learn from people’s experience and from scientific study that some people have a sexual orientation that is ordered contrary to how the Bible says we ought to direct our sexual activity. (See my “Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct.”)If that’s the case, that presents a real obstacle to just stating the Christian truth simply.If there’s a fact that some people are same-sex attracted or gay, then we cannot simply assume that every desire is sin. We cannot simply assume that the Christian message of sexual fidelity in male-female marriage is easy for everyone. We must understand that it is more costly for some than others because of the way some people’s nature has been made, even though that's affected by the fall.Empirical reality, things that are known from outside the Bible have to be allowed in if we are to be sympathetic to human nature, to the human beings that are around us as we know that Jesus Christ himself is.3. Openness to Experience and ThoughtWe’ve moved further afield than just philosophy. Why does this explain that I'm getting a philosophy Ph.D. instead of a theology Ph.D.?Well, it's because of this openness to other fields of learning. Now, philosophy itself acts as a kind of bridge between all these fields. It’s been remarked before that philosophy doesn't really have its own subject area. It studies all phenomena. There’s a philosophy of biology. There’s a philosophy of language. There’s a philosophy of man, and so on.Philosophy stands at the boundary of these disciplines

Yes, that’s right — “defence,” with a ‘c.’That’s because my guest on this episode is an Anglican priest and Substacker Father Thomas Plant (Fr Thomas Plant).Father Plant recently responded to Paul Kingsnorth’s lecture “Against Christian Civilization” with his well-titled reply, “Kingsnorth’s Radical Protestantism: In Defence of Christian Civilisation.”Fr. Plant writes:“Do we want civilization,” he asks, “or do we want Christ? What if we can have only the one or the other?” The question is rhetorical, the presumed answer clear. Christ and civilisation are antitheses. To follow one is to reject the other. They are rival masters, and woe on him who tries to serve the two.This dualistic principle governs Kingsnorth’s recent diatribe for First Things, Against Christian Civilisation. It is an ascetic principle of sorts, grounding Kingsnorth’s quietist distaste for politics and technology. But despite his newfound profession of Orthodoxy, it is a principle closer to the Puritans and Levellers than to the Hesychasts and Stilites he admires.Read the whole thing.Given my own take on Kingsnorth’s talk, I had to have Fr. Plant on the podcast. Here is our conversation.For the video version, watch our interview on YouTube. (And be sure to subscribe to The Natural Theologian YouTube channel.)Chapters:00:00 Intro01:57 Kingsnorth's Mistake07:03 The Puritan Error?11:00 Contemporary Radical Protestantism16:50 Kingsnorth's Critique of Jordan Peterson26:42 Good without God?33:01 Pastoral Implications37:00 How to be a Christian in abundance?44:35 Christian culture v. civilization?Fr. Plant’s Article: “Kingsnorth’s Radical Protestantism.”Paul Kingsnorth’s Address and Article: “Against Christian Civilization.”More from Father PlantBook: The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided WorldSubstack: Get full access to The Natural Theologian at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

Recently, Jordan Peterson spoke at ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, his organization for international leadership. This article contains the transcript of his talk and my reaction to it, taken my from most recent YouTube video.Hey! I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.In this post, I'm going to react to Jordan Peterson’s speech at ARC 2025, the text of which is transcribed below.The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is Jordan Peterson’s sort of global policy and vision network, kind of an antidote to Davos and the elite culture. And he’s been casting his culturally Christian, conservative/classical liberal vision over last year’s and now this year’s conference.This video just came out, so I’m gonna react and see what we can say about the philosophical and theological significance of his talk.Jordan Peterson:What is the defining characteristic of this civilizational moment? I would say that what lies in front of us, perhaps for the first time, is the opportunity to make the foundational principles of our civilization, conscious, explicit and propositional, and in so doing, to pave the way for a genuine and mutually appreciative union of traditional conservatism and classic liberalism.To undertake such a venture, the first question that we must address is the nature of motivation, for life, for being and becoming. And I think we've proceeded far enough in our philosophical, theological, and psychological, biological investigations to provide an answer to that.The default drives that motivate us, or personalities that possess us might be regarded as those that foster a narrow and self absorbed hedonism. And I would say that that's the default state that characterizes human immaturity.That possession by implicit, fragmented whim must be transcended by a more sophisticated, uniting principle in order for the psyche to be integrated and to be sustainable across time in an iterated manner, and for community itself to exist. Hedonistic pleasure, seeking the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure is not a principle that can improve when it's implemented, or unite people in productive cooperation and competition, so that a society can be established.The dominance of the personality by local, narrow and self serving whim is not a playable or noble game, and it allies itself necessarily with the force that cynics, like the postmodernists, like the Neo-Marxists, believe is the only viable uniting force, that of power. If you're motivated by nothing but the pursuit of your own subjective desire in the moment, or your desire to avoid the necessary pain that mature conduct involves, you have to turn to power to impose your narrow will on others; because if you're dominated by the immature longing for your immediate self gratification, then it's all about you in the narrowest sense, and the only option you have in terms of your relationship with others is to turn to the force and compulsion that make them involuntary servants of your will.We've seen forever, the dynamic between immature hedonism that fragments and that degenerates as it's played out, and the demand for the power that subjugates others to the will of the moment.Hey, let’s stop there for a second.Refounding Our CivilizationSo the setup is giving an intellectual foundation to our civilization. And it’s really interesting because all the questions about, “Is this Christianity just cultural?” come to the fore as well as just like, “What is Jordan Peterson's project?”He isn't bringing us back to religion kind of for its own sake in a a pietist way, to just get us close to God. It's not even narrowly psychological, for us to sort ourselves out, though that's obviously part of Peterson's program. It's for our civilization. If you think about the foundational questions that have driven Peterson, it was the Cold War. It was ideological conflict and the ability of human beings to do collective evil.And part of that is to say that those two – psychology and politics – are connected. Like tyranny, a tyrannical state is one in which everyone is lying all the time, as Peterson says. And so very much the way that Socrates and Plato spoke in the Republic, the soul of the individual and the soul of a community are connected.And I think that's important for those on the kind of religious side who really want Peterson to profess to be a Christian and to get other people to profess Christianity from the heart, with true piety, kind of à la Billy Graham. That's not what Peterson is about, but I think it's also a corrective that, “Isn't that too narrow a goal?”You could think, as many do, that Peterson is instrumentalizing Christianity to political and social ends. But on the other hand, he's saying Christianity has at least to be something that can give foundation to society. Maybe it's more. Maybe it can bring you into the kingdom to come. But if it has nothing to say to the life here and now, in our political situation, what worth really is that?Now he's really spelling out the poverty of what you could call “metaphysical liberalism.” So John Rawls is supposed to be a theorist really of classical liberalism. Rawls's liberalism was the idea that we're going to choose a society where you don't know what religion you're going to be. You don't know what your social or economic position is going to be. We're behind this veil of ignorance and we want to choose something fair for everyone.And so it's not going to be based on any partisan doctrine. It's going to be metaphysically agnostic as to those things. And it's also going to be generally egalitarian social safety net, because if you don't know if you're going to become a poor person, you're going to want to be cared for. You're not going to want to just be blamed. We allow the kind of inequality that actually benefits everyone and especially the least well off.Now, Rawls, early in his life was a Christian. He left behind that faith to be kind of this ethical figure spelling out political liberalism. But he never intended for [his theory of liberalism] to be metaphysical agnosticism. In response to critiques of his view, he argued that he was just after political liberalism, which is just a principle of pluralism. “Here's how we're all going to operate together, even though we don't agree on every point.” He's like, “If you can get there by thinking about natural law, as a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. Great. That's not my foundation. If you can get there and you’re postmodernist, if you can just get there by mutual respect for other beings, great.”But as it's played out, the lack of a coherent vision of the good or metaphysics has allowed society to become more about everyone seeking pleasure, with side constraints on your action so that you just don't hurt other people or inhibit their pursuit of pleasure. It's basically become organized hedonism, hedonism with maybe a little bit of Kantianism to respect other people's right to pursue their own hedonism.And as Peterson is saying, that's just not adequate. We need a deeper foundation for society than that. Even the principles of classical liberalism that Rawls was for, those need a metaphysical foundation. We need to truly believe that people are ends in themselves, that humans have dignity. We need at least the mythical mythological version of the doctrine of the Image of God that Peterson is so famous for. So I want to see where he keeps going now.He's going to have an argument against hedonism but let's just think about that setup. That seems like a very legitimate thing to be after and very necessary, especially the idea that it's time to become self-conscious as a civilization about our foundational principles.For a long time, religious societies were very self-conscious about their foundational principles. They just thought of it as doctrine, though. They didn't think, “Well, we need this to be the foundation of civilization.” Maybe the kings and princes were thinking that way.But there's something interesting about a society that has left that behind now saying, “Well, hold on, what do we actually need, simply in a political or pragmatic sense?” There’s a possibility for a civilization to become self-conscious of its own intellectual foundations. I'm excited for that.Friends, my publication, The Natural Theologian, is supported by readers like you. If you want to receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you.Let’s hear what Peterson has to say about hedonism:Why is hedonism wrong? Why is power wrong? Technically, I think it's because both of those motivating forces, or sets of motivating forces, degenerate when they're iterated. You can't go through life like an immature two year old, because you can't sustain your own existence while pursuing immediate gratification in the present, and you can't sustain a society in a productive and abundant manner over the medium to long run if you use power to subordinate the will of others involuntarily to your desires. The reason that the hedonistic proclivity the fractionated, hedonistic proclivity and the drive to power are immoral is because they degenerate when they're implemented and iterated.The skeptics, that's particularly true of the post modernists – this is the definition of post modernism. Literally, the skeptics proclaim that there's no uniting metanarrative other than that of power, and that's wrong. There is a uniting metanarrative, and as I intimated at the beginning of this discussion, I believe we're now in a position where we can explicitly understand it; and that explicit understanding, in principle, could allow us to regain the necessary faith in the self-evident…axioms in which our liberal democracies are nested.The biblical library, that lays out the narrative principles upon which free, Western societies are founded, is an elaborated exploration of the theme of sacrifice.Taken at face value, the dramas o

Dear readers, the following article is taken from the transcript of my latest YouTube video. I hope you enjoy!I've learned many things from Jordan Peterson since he came on the public scene in 2016. I've learned things about psychology, morality, philosophy and even about Scripture and the Christian faith, things that have bolstered my understanding as a Christian philosopher and theologian.So without further ado, ten things I learned from Jordan Peterson.1. The Reality and Importance of PersonalityJordan Peterson is a personality psychologist. Following Carl Jung, he believes in the divisions between different personality traits that can be discovered through empirical study. He’s an advocate, in particular, of the recent Big Five model of personality. In the Big Five, there are five traits along which human beings can vary, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, assertiveness and neuroticism.Now, I used to be a bit of a skeptic about psychology in general, but personality in particular. Anytime someone tried to put me in a psychological box, I would resist it. I would hear about the Myers Briggs scale and be put into a category, whatever it was, INTJ, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It never made any sense to me. It never felt accurate to me.The interesting thing is, the Big Five is not about putting people in personality types. It's about traits that vary independently.And so since I've learned about this, you start to see it everywhere. Some people are more extroverted, some less so and more introverted. Some people are more assertive than others. Some people more open to intellectual experience and ideas and so on.And I think a lot of us resist this out of a sense that it puts us, of course, in a box or that it limits what we can change, what we can become. But there's also a deep reality to this. Not everything about human personality is malleable, and more importantly, some things in human personality are given.What was even cooler to understand about personality was that so many other aspects of human differences can reduce down to personality differences, differences of ideology, whether that’s in theology or politics.Try to tell me with a straight face that the difference between a Pentecostal and a Presbyterian isn't a difference of personality!The same goes for liberals and conservatives. These are very much personality types. People who are extremely high in the trait of compassion, are strongly inclined to be liberal. It doesn't mean they're automatically more moral or righteous for doing so that compassion can lead them astray. It can lead them to be compassionate when it's time for judgment or boundaries.But it really helps to understand that people don't get their ideas out of nowhere. We can also lower the temperature of ideological disagreements when we realize that we're all mostly just expressing our existing personalities.2. The Psychology of EvilNow this is one I'm still processing, but Jordan Peterson, following other psychologists, identifies the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as the psychological causes of evil behavior.And I used to think that it was just liberals, in the fundamentalist Christian sense, that believed that there were psychological causes of evil. Isn't evil just caused by sin, just by doing the wrong thing. “BAH — I want to do evil!” Isn't that how evil is explained?But when you think about it, people vary greatly in their capacities and tendencies to do evil. Not everyone is evil in the same degree, and that creates a kind of catch-22, which is that if some people are more violent by nature, aren't they to that extent, off the hook? Isn't there a sense in which, by explaining their behavioral tendencies, we no longer view them in an explicitly moral sense.Now you might just say this is the problem of free will, and to some extent it is, but I think it's a problem we all have to wrestle with.No one does evil without a cause.No one does evil without some kind of explanation or backstory.It's not all Freudian backstories about how we were brought up.Many of them are naturally existing differences in personality traits and tendencies, including the dark triad.3. The Interest of Allegorical, Moral and Psychological Readings of ScriptureNow, throughout my theological education in a Christian seminary, I was taught to be wary of moral and even allegorical interpretations of Scripture.Scripture has a literal sense. It says this is what happened, and that's what it means.If it has a moral application, we risk the idea of moralism, of trying to justify ourselves before God or save ourselves through our own moral action, rather than by accepting the grace of God. All the Old Testament stories, which we might interpret as morality tales, actually foreshadow Jesus Christ and everything that he did for us. So we shouldn't try to be like David fighting our giants, we should accept that Jesus was the David who fought Goliath for us.But now I've seen that this is very narrow, and it gives up an extremely appealing and compelling dimension of the scriptures.Jordan Peterson, contrary to all those Protestant Christian theologians, packed auditoriums by talking about the allegorical and moral and psychological dimensions of Scripture, the things that these could mean and the ways they could apply to our lives even caveat if they weren't true.And now I see more and more the poverty of trying to do with just the story of what Jesus did for us. One recent author calls it “The Abridged Gospel.” (Check out Jordan Raynor’s The Sacredness of Secular Work.)And Jordan Peterson, while we don't actually know if he believes that specific part of the gospel, believes in the further dimensions of the scriptures, both those that precede Christ's coming, the moral teaching, the Old Testament, law and those that come after it, the third use of the law, the application of the Christian scriptures, the Christian message to our life, the life of self, sacrifice and denial that Christ called us to.That I think should transform Christians view of what our preaching and our message and our evangelism ought to look like.If you enjoy content like this, please hit like and subscribe below. That'll help me to make more articles like this and videos like the one this is based on. If you like consuming this in video form, check out my YouTube page.The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.4. The Existentialist Argument for the Limits of MaterialismNow I wouldn't be surprised if you had no idea what I was talking about here, but this is actually something from the very earliest lectures that I heard of Jordan Peterson, and from the opening pages of his book, Maps of Meaning.Jordan Peterson, philosophically, is a Heideggerian, and Heidegger was an opponent of anyone who reduced human life and metaphysics down to the material, to pure science. And he did so not on the basis of a kind of Cartesian or spiritual dualism or an argument that mind was more than matter.He did so on the basis of the idea that human beings fundamental orientation to the world, our fundamental way of knowing the world, is not scientific or theoretical. Our fundamental mode of being in the world is practical. It is to see things as ripe for action, to see the value in things, the valence, to see affordances for our action.And Jordan Peterson put it this way:It’s not only matter that exists; what matters also exists.— Jordan Peterson (somewhere)Other Heideggerian philosophers have echoed this, like John Haugeland and Hubert Dreyfus. John Haugeland’s festschrift is called Giving a Damn, because if you give a damn about things, then you're not a materialist. You believe that there is value and disvalue.And so by that alone, Jordan Peterson disproved materialism.5. Wisdom and Morality Don’t Have to Come from the Bible (especially wisdom)Now, as a Christian by background, there's a tendency for Christians to think that all moral truth comes from the Bible. There's no other source for it. You can't get it from just human reflection or philosophy or reading books of ethics by secular philosophers. Now, instead, you've got to go straight to the Bible and find out what God directly commanded us.But this is a very narrow view of morality. As CS Lewis said in the opening pages of Mere Christianity, everyone's making moral claims all the time. You took a bit of my orange. Now, give me a piece of yours. The smallest little moral attitudes we have that we give expression to show that we actually all believe in morality. We can't get rid of it.Now Jordan Peterson doesn't get his morality, ultimately, from the Bible, or even what he does get from the Bible, he confirms, through psychology, science and biology. And this is important because it's very narrow to try to get all your morality from the Bible. We also have the book of nature. We have the world itself and human nature laid out before us. Why can't we use our eyes and observe it and gain good things from it?Otherwise, we try to force Bible verses to give us the details of how we should live every part of our lives. We assume things like I've assumed that our problems in marriage are going to be solved by really understanding Ephesians 5 or some Greek word like kephalé — that's not going to solve our marriage problems.Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson, looking at the sciences and psychology and the personality bell curves for men and women, can give you much better advice and wisdom about life. He can recognize, on the one hand, the complementarity of the sexes, that they really do vary in their distribution of personality traits. At the same time, he can tell you that the best relationship between a man and a woman, as between any two mammals, is one that is controlled by the spirit of play, by a kind of give and take, not by a command and subservience.And that is this gre

[Doorbell buzzes]“Hello! Would you like to change religions? I have a free book written by DJEE-ZUS!”While the Broadway show from which that line comes is not about evangelicals but Latter-Day Saints, it fits.The average evangelical is liable to think that their free afternoons and weekends ought to be spent engaged in similarly abrupt evangelistic conversations.After all, people are dying! If we don’t act quickly, they’ll soon face God’s throne of judgment; and then they’ll go to hell.But our Christian forefathers would have had us behave with more circumspection and preparation. Since the second century, Christian theologians have recognized the reality and even necessity of what Francis Schaeffer called pre-evangelism. The Church Fathers called it praeparatio evangelica, preparation for the gospel.But since the 19th century, American Christianity has been shaped more by tent revivals than patristic treatises. We have cultivated an urgency to share the gospel as soon as possible, to drive the unbeliever toward conversion, to immanentize the personal eschaton.Theological theories have sometimes reinforced this. Cornelius Van Til criticized Francis Schaeffer for holding that there was a work of pre-evangelism prior to the acceptance of a Christian worldview. This was to concede too much to autonomous man and his felt need of proof or persuasion.However, in the absence of Christian pre-evangelists, God gave us a non-Christian one. Theaters fill to hear Jordan Peterson lecture about the Bible. Secular podcast hosts press him on his Christology. And just as the wokeness Peterson opposed was experiencing defeat in last year’s election, the long ebb of the sea of faith began to reverse.Rather than asking whether Peterson is a Christian, we should understand Peterson’s work as a praeparatio evangelica. In doing so, we join a long tradition of Christians who hold that non-Christian philosophers can and do prepare the way of the Lord.This Just In: Justin Martyr Finds Seeds of the Word Among the GreeksJustin Martyr (c. 100 – c. 165 AD) was a Gentile and a pagan who took up the study of philosophy in pursuit of truth and spiritual guidance. He found himself dissatisfied first with his Stoic tutors, then with a Peripatetic philosopher, and then the Pythagoreans. He adopted Platonism as a result of this search.But, encountering a Syrian Christian while walking on the beach, the old man told him of the ancient prophets and “spoke of the testimony of the prophets as being more reliable than the reasoning of philosophers.” Justin was converted. He came to regard Christianity as “the true philosophy.”However, Justin did not therefore conclude that all he had learned before was for nought, that all the rest of philosophy was falsehood. Rather, he concluded that the transcendent God in whom he had believed as a Platonist was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who was the very form of goodness was he who had taken on the form of a man.In his First Apology, Justin wrote that the philosophers before Christ had happened upon seeds of the Word, logos spermatikos, which led them along a path whose fruition was Christ himself.Justin concluded that many before Christ who had followed these seeds of the Word, living in accord with God’s Logos, were proto-Christians: “Those who have lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists.”Justin speculated that Plato may have had access to the writings of Moses. And he lauded Socrates as a martyr pre-figuring Christ.Rather than becoming an evangelist, Justin dressed as a philosopher. Like Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus and others before him, Justin founded a school of philosophy. While he believed that Christianity was the true philosophy, he led others toward its truth by instructing them to detect the logos spermatikos in the great philosophers before Christ.Justin was first in a long line of Christian theologians recognizing philosophy and secular wisdom as preparation for the gospel.What the Old Testament was to the Hebrews: Clement of Alexandria on Greek PhilosophyClement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215 AD) was, like Justin before him, a convert to the faith. Born a pagan, he rejected paganism “for its perceived moral corruption.” He traveled across Greece, searching for religious training, eventually studying Christian doctrine at the Catechetical School of Alexandria.In his writings, Clement rejected the Greek mystery religions of his upbringing. But in his Stromata, Clement argued just as fervently for the preparatory value of Greek philosophy. Philosophy was for the Greeks what the Law had been for the Hebrews, argued Clement. It was a propaedeutic, or “schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind to Christ” (See Gal. 3:24).Clement described the benefit of philosophy both before and after the advent of Christ:“Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith through demonstration. … For God is the cause of all good things; but of some primarily, as of the Old and the New Testament; and of others by consequence, as philosophy. Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law, the Hebrews, to Christ. Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.” (Clement, Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 5)Christian critics of philosophy fear that we will study it uncritically, or hail one figure as having the whole truth. But Clement denied that Christian appreciation of philosophy should be either uncritical or partisan:“The Greek preparatory culture, therefore, with philosophy itself, is shown to have come down from God to men, not with a definite direction but in the way in which showers fall down on the good land, and on the dunghill, and on the houses.…And philosophy — I do not mean the Stoic, or the Platonic, or the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian, but whatever has been well said by each of those sects, which teach righteousness along with a science pervaded by piety — this eclectic whole I call philosophy.” Sophistry is dangerous, not philosophy.” (Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 7)The Christian approach to philosophy should be critical and eclectic.Clement also criticized the folly of Christians denigrating philosophical study for bare faith:“Some, who think themselves naturally gifted, do not wish to touch either philosophy or logic; nay more, they do not wish to learn natural science. They demand bare faith alone, as if they wished, without bestowing any care on the vine, straightway to gather clusters from the first. … So also here, I call him truly learned who brings everything to bear on the truth; so that, from geometry, and music, and grammar, and philosophy itself, culling what is useful, he guards the faith against assault.” (Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 9)The Christian thinker and apologist must prune the vine and till the soil, rather than trying to gather the harvest immediately and without sufficient preparation.Contemporary Christians need to hear Clement’s exhortation for preparation for the gospel.Eusebius: Van Til of the Fourth Century?The phrase praeparatio evangelica, however, is best known as the title of a work by the 4th century theologian Eusebius (c. 260/265 – 339 AD). In Praeparatio Evangelica, Eusebius actually disputed the idea that Greek philosophy was a preparation for the gospel. In fact, he argued that it was Hebrew wisdom and Scripture that was a preparation for Greek philosophy.Now, Justin had, of course, toyed with the same idea, suggesting that Socrates had taken a page from Moses. Yet even Eusebius’ counter-argument was only necessary on account of the Church Fathers’ shared sense that Greek philosophy contained truths whose source could only be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.In Eusebius, I detect more than a hint of Van Til’s 20th century claim that non-Christian thinkers operate, at best, on “borrowed capital.” But, if the evidence for Socrates’ and Plato’s access to Moses is slim, the evidence that all non-Christian thinkers operate only on borrowed capital — rather than the light of nature or the seeds of the Logos — is even slimmer.The Necessity of Pre-EvangelismOver Van Til’s protests, Francis Schaeffer urged the necessity of pre-evangelism. He argued that the first things the unbeliever needs to comprehend are the truths already displayed in reality itself:The truth that we let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures, but the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is. This is what shows him his need. The Scriptures then show him the real nature of his lostness and the answer to it. This, I am convinced, is the true order for our apologetics in the second half of the twentieth century for people living under the line of despair.— Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There.While Schaeffer argued for this method from his contemporary intellectual situation, he had the support of Justin and Clement from a very different time. We, in turn, are in yet another cultural and intellectual moment, yet the necessity of pre-evangelism remains.In Schaeffer’s time, a confident logical positivism was ascendant in certain quarters. Yet simultaneously, existentialist philosophers pointed to the meaningless of a reductively material philosophy. At that time, the Christian apologist, perhaps, had an obligation to direct unbelievers from positivism to existentialism.In recent times, New Atheism was ascendant; and yet, following the division of the atheist movement over social justice ideology, Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web stepped in to explain the inevitability of religious and ideological thought. On this basis, Peterson urged us to find a deeper ground for our psyche than shif

“Secular.” It’s a word my teenage, Christian brain assumed had to be more or less synonymous with “sexual.”Many people know better than that, but even highly-educated Christians still assume that “the secular” is intertwined with secularism. The category of the secular, they think, is a pillar of an anti-Christian worldview, or, at best, a purportedly neutral pluralism or liberalism that, in fact, crowds out religious faith.But the secular is a category of the Christian worldview. It denotes the dimensions of life that are not specifically religious, but common to human beings in the present age. The distinction between “secular” and “religious” marks a divide, not between Christian and non-Christian people, but within every person.In fact, I warrant that, prior to the rise of secularism, the word “secular” would not even have had negative connotations to Christian ears.Let me explain.Life in the Saeculum — This AgeThe etymology of the word “secular” begins with the Latin word “saeculum,” meaning “generation,” “age,” or literally, “century.” From the adjectival form saecularis came the Old French seculer and, thence, the English “secular.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of “secular” is:1. denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis. [E.g.,] “secular buildings.”Its synonyms include everything from “nonreligious,” “lay,” and “temporal,” to “worldly,” “earthly,” and “profane.” (Profane used to be much more innocuous as well.)The second entry in the OED brings us to our first historical point of contact:2. [Christian Church](of clergy) not subject to or bound by religious rule; not belonging to or living in a monastic or other order.As reflected in this definition, Medieval Christendom distinguished between secular and religious clergy. The religious life was lived in monastic community or otherwise subject to a particular religious order. Those in the religious life vowed to follow Christ’s “counsels of perfection”: Celibacy, poverty, and obedience. These were the religious clergy.Secular clergy, on the other hand, ministered in parishes amongst ordinary people. If, to our ears, “secular clergy” sounds like a contradiction, this simply demonstrates our distance from Medieval Christian understanding. For Medieval Christians, “secular” simply meant participation in common life.Nevertheless, the Medieval distinction between religious and secular life and vocations reveals that Catholic Christianity did suffer from the temptation to escape the secular, to rise above it. The religious life was held to be higher than secular life. While society needed people to perform secular tasks, like government, warfare, and trading, those in the religious life purified themselves of these worldly enterprises. (I wrote about this tension in Catholic Christianity in Christian Realism: A Philosophy of Christian Action.) The Catholic Church even claimed to be above the jurisdiction of secular authorities.Until a certain German friar took them down a few notches.The Protestant Embrace of the Secular Martin Luther, in his “Letter to the German Nobility,” criticized the Catholic Church for purporting to be above the realm of the secular.Luther denied the Church’s claim to be free of the jurisdiction of secular, political authorities. He lambasted the artificial wall the Church had raised between “the spiritual estate” and “the temporal estate,” between religious and secular callings. He argued that all Christians were of the spiritual estate, even as they inhabited a variety of temporal professions:“All Christians are truly of the ‘spiritual estate,’ and there is among them no difference at all but that of office.”— Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation”Luther’s word for these ordinary professions and callings was weltlich, literally, “worldly.” In English translation, it is primarily translated “temporal.”The word translated “secular” also appears once in the letter: zeitlichen. (Zeit is time.) In that use, Luther jokes that, if the popes, bishops, priests, and monks are above secular life, then “the tailors, cobblers, masons, carpenters…and all the secular tradesmen, should also be prevented from providing [them] with shoes, clothing, house, meat and drink, and from paying them tribute” (p. 70).In this polemic, Luther accomplished two things at once. First, he acknowledged the ordinariness and secularity of life: Even the pope needs someone to make his shoes.Second: At the same time, he was dignifying secular life, even sanctifying it. Every Christian, simply in virtue of baptism, was of the spiritual estate, whether butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.Now Luther did not take a secularist position. He did not say, “This whole ‘spiritual estate’ thing is balderdash. You’re all secular.” He said that all Christians are of the spiritual estate, in the variety of their secular and religious callings. The spiritual and the secular interpenetrate.This is the actual content of Calvin and Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms. The spiritual and secular cut across all human lives. Even pastors need shoes and functioning plumbing. And even cobblers and barbers are priests who may approach God’s throne of grace, without the mediation of the Church. (I learned this lesson from the Davenant Institute and the writers at The Calvinist International.)If I say, then, that “the secular is spiritual,” it must be recognized that is no less secular for all that. (I did write, and mean, those words in “Giving Up on the ‘Jesus Juke.’”)Protestantism does not say, after all, that each Christian is part of a special religious order, holy and separated from secular things. No; Protestantism says that all Christians are of the spiritual estate, whether employed as preachers, politicos, or plumbers. And that preachers are as enmeshed in the secular world as politicos and plumbers.Every Christian life is both spiritual and secular.The Vibe Shift in a Secular Age The history of how “secular” came to have negative connotations to Christian ears is one I’d like to know better. But I surmise that the rise of secularist and naturalist worldviews has a lot to do with it.In response to the French Enlightenment and mid to late 19th-century thought – Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche – contemporary Christians were put on the defensive. They took solace in separating from secular life, spiritualizing their vision of Christian calling, and viewing the world as a source of temptation and godlessness.In so doing, we left behind the classical Christian worldview in which the secular, the temporal, and even the worldly had their place.In our time, it is easy for Christians still to remain on the defensive. After all, secularism has proceeded apace. The world has, in certain respects, gotten more hostile toward Christianity.But even when the world, i.e., the contemporary culture, is hostile toward Christianity, the right posture is not a defensive one. Aaron M. Renn, coiner of “the negative world,” said recently that it is time for Christians to seek friendship with those of the world. Our religious majority is gone. A posture of assertive domination is completely counter-productive. We need to find friends and allies outside the fold. In Renn’s words: “How can we make more friends than enemies?”At the same time, “the vibe shift” is leading some to ask whether our culture’s antipathy toward Christian faith is beginning to reverse. I think it, quite obviously, is. (At least in certain corners of the Internet, now breaking out into the real world.)In this new context, it remains exceedingly important for Christians to offer our countrymen a faith free of anxiety, a faith that sees the world as revealing God, that doesn’t ask for unreasonable asceticism or parochial fundamentalist strictures — a world-embracing faith.Several of us have been trying to describe this world-embracing faith. Paul Vanderklay calls it “metagelical.” Nicholas McDonald, in his forthcoming book, The Light in Our Eyes, spells out a confident and beautiful vision of Christian faith free of the hangups of the American evangelical subculture.And I, at The Natural Theologian, aim to offer a vision of the Christian faith that welcomes the influence of the world, created by God, with its secular sources of knowledge.This is not an uncritical acceptance of the world in John’s sense: “Do not love the world or the things in the world” (1 John 2:15).It is an embrace of everything in Paul’s sense: “For everything God has created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim 4:4).And while we remain in this age, everything includes a whole lot of secular things.And that, it turns out, might not be such a bad thing.The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Articulating This Vision in VideoI’ve begun to articulate this vision of the Christian faith through video. Check out my latest YouTube videos:Wesley Huff Is WRONG About Jordan Peterson: ReactionIs Natural Law Compatible with Scripture?We’ve NARROWED the Gospel Get full access to The Natural Theologian at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

All across the internet, and in the academic presses, pundits and philosophers place blame for secularization on Protestantism.Scholars and streamers complain that the Reformation precipitated the disenchantment of the world.Orthodox converts waft their smells and ring their bells before evangelical noses and ears. Catholics look on evangelicals with pity, beholding our strip-mall sanctuaries, as they find shade below their towering, ancient cathedrals.And many Protestants feel the Roman nostalgia. I admit I’m among them.More than just nostalgia, we admire the intellectual tradition, Christian humanism, and ethical guidance of the Catholic Church. But even that has its limits.This morning, Anthony Bradley displayed the enduring appeal of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions to Protestant observers. In his article, “Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Views of Marriage,” Bradley argues that Protestants’ theology of marriage, as symbol and secular creation ordinance, falls short of the Orthodox and Catholic view of marriage as distinctly sacred and spiritual.I think Bradley is wrong about this. But let’s hear him out.Orthodox and Catholic v. Protestant Views of MarriageBradley presents Orthodoxy and Catholicism as offering a high view of marriage as sacred and spiritual, and Protestantism as offering a low view of marriage, as secular and merely instrumental.Orthodox and Catholics view marriage as sacred and even sacramental. They hold that civil marriage, while it ought to mirror Christian marriage, is less than the same thing. This added layer of sacrality reinforces the moral seriousness of the marriage bond, discouraging divorce.The Catholic Church teaches that divorce is a metaphysical impossibility. It forbids divorce and remarriage, providing only for annulment. The practice of annulment depends on understanding that annulled “marriages” were never true marriages. The parties failed some condition of marriage, such as that both parties fully intend exclusive commitment for life, with an openness to children. By implication, many modern civil marriages are not true marriages at all.Both traditions also emphasize the procreative purpose of marriage, without denying the primary significance of marriage as a conjugal union.By contrast, Protestant theologies of marriage treat marriage, not as sacramental, but symbolic. Marriage is a secular institution, common to both believers and unbelievers. Civil marriage is no less marriage than ecclesiastical marriage. Many Protestant traditions permit divorce and remarriage, at least on conditions of adultery, abandonment, and abuse.Some Protestant theologies of marriage, like that in Tim Kellers’ The Meaning of Marriage, neglect the procreative aspect of marriage. (Keller does not mention children, at least prominently, in his treatment of Christian marriage.)Bradley writes that this Protestant understanding “primarily emphasizes marriage as a practical framework for serving God through procreation, intimacy, and social order, treating it as a functional institution rather than a sacred mystery or sacrament.”He argues that “this view reduces marriage to a utilitarian role, overshadowing its deeper spiritual and mystical significance.” He knocks Protestantism for failing to “place marriage within the context of worship or liturgy,” separating it from “the Church’s sacramental life.”Instead, on the dominant Protestant view, marriage is not sacred, but secular. Bradley concludes, this view “lacks the depth and theological richness found in the Orthodox and Catholic understandings.”Marriage Is SecularBut Bradley is wrong; marriage is secular. And it has its sacred significance in virtue of being a secular ordinance.When Martin Luther rejected clerical celibacy, it wasn’t because he wanted to add marriage to the list of holy callings. (The Catholic Church already considered it a sacrament.) He rejected clerical celibacy because he rejected the whole sacred-secular divide.In his letter to the German nobility, Luther railed against the division between sacred and secular callings that Rome had taught:It has been devised that the Pope, bishops, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate; princes, lords, artificers, and peasants are the temporal estate. This is an artful lie and hypocritical device, but let no one be made afraid by it, and that for this reason: that all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone.- Luther, “Letter to the German Nobility”As all men were of the spiritual estate, Christians who exercised temporal or secular callings were as holy as any pastor or priest.But the ordinances of human life themselves remained secular. It was, therefore, as participants in secular life that Christians could fulfill their universal spiritual calling.Accordingly, Christian and civil marriage do not differ in kind. Marriage is an ordinance of creation, not redemption. It is rightly administered by the civil magistrate as much as by a minister of the church.The secularity of marriage also means that it is affected by the fall. In post-fall conditions, many marriages do not last. The misery of our present estate requires that we make permission for both husbands and wives to sue for divorce on grounds of, at least, adultery and abandonment, as Calvin introduced in Geneva.The divorced should be permitted to remarry, since one does not receive a binding calling to life-long celibacy in virtue of adultery or abandonment by one’s spouse. To say that these permissions amount to the same as Ronald Reagan’s “no-fault divorce” laws is to confuse 20th-century secular liberalism with Protestant Puritanism.Likewise, a complete Christian view of marriage must recognize that marriage is ordered to the bearing and rearing of children. Protestant theologians and pastors have sometimes neglected this to focus only on husband and wife. But Protestant theology is also correct not to overemphasize procreation, which risks making the marital union itself only a means to procreation. (See my natural law defense of contraception if you want to know what I really think, and also, my piece on “Pronatalism After the Fall.”)A “Low” View of Marriage?One of Bradley’s main criticisms is that the Protestant view of marriage is lower than Catholic and Orthodox views. This criticism presupposes the principle that it is always superior to think something sacred, rather than secular.But this is precisely to take a “low view” of the secular, too low because God made the secular and natural realm. The natural realm is as such theonomic; it already displays God’s rule, through governance by his natural law. It does not need the superimposition of grace, of sacrality, to make it into something that gives us contact with the divine.Is the Protestant View of Marriage Too Utilitarian?Another of Bradley’s criticisms is that the Protestant view of marriage is functional, instrumental, and utilitarian.While the three paragraphs in which he describes the Gospel Coalition’s statement on marriage do not seem utilitarian to me — “Marriage is a living picture of the gospel, showcasing Christ’s love for His Church” — Bradley is correct that Protestant theology views marriage as contributing to civil order. The civil institution of marriage is part of the second use of the law, to restrain sin in society.But is that supposed to be a bad thing? Sixty years since no-fault divorce, the sociological results are in: Divorce is terrible for children. Having two married parents is essential for children’s greatest flourishing. Mothers and fathers make distinct and necessary contributions. Secular sociologists and psychologists, political conservatives, and advocates of cultural Christianity can all get behind these results. Marriage should be held in greater honor in our society than it currently is.Christians should affirm the same. And some, like Brad Wilcox and Mark Regnerus, are doing so — at the forefront of sociological research. Christians can add to the sociological the theological. Marriage contributes to our sanctification; it typifies Christ and his church.But we can’t think that we are above the sociological. The church needs to get in the business of giving good advice about secular life, something for which Aaron M. Renn has pled repeatedly. Relative to that end, adopting a sacramental view of marriage is a step in the wrong direction.Secular Principles for Secular MarriagesFor the longest time, I thought that the key to a good marriage lay in a few biblical texts about how marriage symbolizes Christ and his church. If I could just understand and practice “biblical headship and submission,” then marriage would work right.This is just an epistemological variant on the view that marriage is sacred. If marriage is sacred, then theological teaching should hold the key to a good marriage. If marriage is secular, it might not be so.Indeed, I’ve found that the secular advice of psychologists John and Julie Gottman has done more for my marriage than the Greek exegesis of kephalé. Their advice, in books like Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and The Love Prescription, is based on decades of empirical research, including observation of couples in their “Love Lab.” (Couples book a weekend stay, during which they interact in a suite with hidden cameras and heart-rate monitors.) The Gottmans have found that almost all secular and religious marriage counsel, which reduces to “communicate better,” fails to improve marriages. Their insights, on the contrary, reliably save marriages (and predict divorce with almost mechanical accuracy).If we want to improve our marriages, to prevent divorce, and to symbolize Christ and his church, we would do well to view marriage as secular. We should view our Christian marriages as relationships that work according to the same principles as everyone else’s. We shouldn’t think that being Christian will protect our marriage

A woman was interviewing for a philosophy professorship at a Catholic university. Though she respected the intellectual tradition of the university, she was not herself Catholic. She hoped to find there similar respect for her own thinking, whatever its metaphysical conclusions.The interview began well. Potential future colleagues discussed her research and gave her an opportunity to display her considerable knowledge of epistemology and continental thought.Then a new voice chimed in. A crotchety but not-yet-old Catholic man began to dig into her moral and political views. He settled on the topic of abortion. How could she condone the murder of innocent unborn children? What other wickedness would she countenance?She tried to respond that, while she was not a Catholic herself, she admired the moral tradition of Catholic theologians and philosophers. Nevertheless, respectfully, she disagreed with it. That was not good enough for the crotchety Catholic philosopher.While the interview was otherwise successful, its final phase sapped the woman of energy. It left her desiring to be employed as far from this university as possible.In her place, the university hired a different pro-choice secular philosopher: My dissertation advisor, who fortunately was not subjected to the same treatment.As a Christian philosopher, I struggle to comprehend why a secular analytic philosopher’s failure to be pro-life would be surprising. And anyway, why would we focus on our points of disagreement, rather than our points of agreement - the rigor of philosophical thought, the merits of the candidate’s research, and the mission of the philosophy department?Yet often, we approach people who hold different views than us in exactly the way this professor approached the interviewee. In those moments, we are tempted to think that our ideological differences are so fundamental that there is no common ground between us.But there is common ground, and we’re standing on some of it.There Is No Common Ground“There is no common ground between believer and unbeliever.”That was a dictum of the seminary I attended. Its presuppositionalist philosophy held that Christians and non-Christians do not differ merely in our conclusions. We differ at every level of thinking down to the most fundamental presuppositions of thought - even on the principles of logic and mathematics themselves.“No common ground” was intended as a pious affirmation of our commitment to have a distinctively Christian worldview. Yet in our zeal to be as Christian as possible, we ignored the deeply divisive and partisan effects of the statement.Imagine if a progressive activist said, “There is no common ground between progressives and conservatives!” Would that person strike you as open-minded and willing to hear opposing perspectives? Would you be likely to feel comfortable having a conversation with them about matters moral or political?Personally, I would fear being written off for my beliefs, or being thought evil or irredeemable.But that’s what we Christians do if and when we say: “There is no common ground between believers and unbelievers.” And even if we don’t say those words, we often act like it.I wrote about this a few months ago in “Berating the Godfearers.” My friend “Brent,” who is interested in Christianity, was dismissed and shouted at for not being a six-day creationist by a number of evangelical Christians on a Zoom meeting. What had happened? The evangelical guys found one point of disagreement and went hard at it. But that’s not the path to a productive conversation.As I put it then, the evangelical guys pursued conversion rather than conversation. And ultimately, it was a poor means of persuasion, forget conversion.Common Ground at F3: Fitness, Fellowship, and FaithA couple weeks ago, I hosted a philosophy night with my friends from F3, “Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith.” I was especially excited to talk about common ground with them because F3 itself has been for me a major object lesson.At the end of every workout, someone says, “F3 is not a religious organization. All we ask is that you believe in something higher than yourself. It could be Jesus, Buddha, Allah, or the man next to you.”But then, if the person is a Christian, he continues, “But I am a Christ-follower, so I’m going to close us out in a Christian prayer. Join me or respect the time. Dear God…”There’s something very remarkable about this. Americans think that any public display or mention of religion is an attempt to impose faith on others. And many religious Americans publicly express their faith in a very impositional way.But at F3, I learned a different way of interacting with non-Christians. Our faith or religious commitments are known, but they are not imposed on others, and they are not the source of our commonality. Our commonality is that we just sweated and lifted a concrete block (“the coupon”) together for forty-five minutes. Our commonality is that we want to escape “sad-clown syndrome,” a problem which afflicts many American men. Our commonality is that we believe that there is something higher than ourselves – that living for self-gratification is the wrong goal.This commonality clears enough ground actually to discuss both normal life and deeper things. We have weekly “QSource” discussions in which we touch on themes of faith, virtue, manliness, community, and more. These discussions go deeper and engage more men than any church men’s group you’ve seen. I even instituted approximately monthly “philosophy nights” when we discussed a book over beer.The key is that F3 discussions place Christians and non-Christians on a level playing field; we enter conversation as equal partners in the search for truth and goodness. I have indeed seen people become Christian through this. I’ve seen other people at least soften their stance on religion. And at a bare minimum, we are able to be open and understanding of one another’s perspectives.This is the religion-friendly pluralist ethic on which America was founded. These days, most have more of a more secularist understanding - that religion shouldn’t be brought into the public square. Much better to do it in the manner of that polis within the polis, “F3 Nation.”Finding Common Ground in PhilosophyMy studies in philosophy are another of my attempts to disprove, “There is no common ground between believers and unbelievers.” In the first place, I’m studying philosophy, so none of my arguments can start from Christian premises. We proceed by reason alone, as it were.But in the second place, I sought out a non-Christian dissertation advisor as a test of the thesis that there can be common ground between believers and unbelievers.Now, I first took a course on Plato’s ethics with Dr. B____. I detected that he took a very secular view of Socrates; Socrates was a purely secular guy, whom Plato had corrupted and spiritualized. Whatever seemed to point in a Christian direction could therefore be attributed to Plato, or to later Neo-Platonist interpretations, rather than to Socrates. Socrates was a utilitarian; he didn’t believe in an afterlife; and Platonism was and is consistent with a scientific worldview.Almost the whole semester, my mind kept thinking of paper topics where I disagreed with Dr. B____. But finally, I realized that I would learn the most by writing about the one topic I’d discovered on which he and I agreed.After that was a success, I asked him about advising my dissertation, and we followed the topic to the next point of agreement. Eventually, I realized that Dr. B____ and I agree primarily on one thing: Reality exists. We just disagree about what reality is like (i.e., everything else).But I relish that point of agreement for this reason: I believe that the common ground between all of us, no matter what our different views, beliefs, convictions, faiths, is reality itself. Even the postmodernists who think that reality is nothing but a mental construct - we drive on the same streets, breathe the same air, encounter the same objects in our visual field and so on. No worldview, philosophy, belief, metaphysics, or any of it can obscure the fact that reality itself is the common ground between us.The common ground between different worldviews is reality itself.A Philosopher and an MS-13 Member Walk Into a Bar…The process I went through with my professor can work with anyone. You may disagree with them about ten things, all of great importance, but you agree on one thing. Start there! Revel in that point of agreement.Short of morality and politics, revel in all the other things you can share. Maybe you like the same food, root for the same sports team, or send your kids to the same school. You can always find points of commonality.But aren’t there still limits? Some people are just so evil, we couldn’t have any common ground. Like an MS-13 gang member, right?Well, I recently heard a story about a former member of the gang MS-13. He had become a rat, telling on other members, after reaching a moral line in the sand. Though he had previously murdered twenty people in cold blood, he happened upon several other gang members poised to murder a baby. “What are you doing, guys? It’s a baby!” Inside, he knew that there, he drew the line. It’s not right to murder an innocent baby!Hey, I agree with that! It’s not right to murder an innocent baby. I just extend that courtesy also to grown-ups.There it is. A point of common ground! It could be the starting point for a conversation. Even a philosophical dialogue.If I can find common ground with an MS-13 murderer, then I’m pretty sure you can find common ground with your laptop-class interlocutor whose views differ slightly from yours.My song “Common Ground” was inspired by seeing failures of people to do exactly that: “I heard that you don’t think like me/I bet that means I won’t like you.”I even accidentally described the story at the beginning of this post about the pro-choice professor being taken to task

Scripture is the only source of theology that evangelical Christians all accept. As a result, the methodology of evangelical theology is to argue deductively from premises of a single source: the Bible. Excluded from theology are philosophy, empirical science, and literary imagination. Accordingly, evangelical theology is functionally biblicist.If a theologian introduces a premise that is not biblically-derived but is based in experience, that theologian invites suspicion that his premise is unbiblical. “The earth is 4.5 billion years old” - unbiblical. “Sexual orientation is a real feature of human psychology” - unbiblical. “Christianity is at least socially useful, even if this does not prove its truth” - unbiblical.People who reject these “unbiblical premises” are led to specific theological conclusions: “The earth was created in six 24-hour days.” “A Christian may not describe himself as ‘gay.’” “We should believe in Christianity only because it’s true, independently of its fruits.” With a narrow range of theological sources, our theology itself narrows.But theologians who utilize experience in addition to the Bible have a greater wealth of resources on which to draw in their thinking. What is more, their thinking takes into account human nature itself, resulting in a humane theology, rather than one that feels foreign and unsympathetic to who we are.The eminent Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar is an example of a theologian whose theology draws on human experience in addition to the Bible.In a perfect case study of theology from experience, Biggar questions the Christian pacifist conclusions of Richard Hays by transcending his Bible-only method, and introducing a premise from experience: Human violence is not always motivated by hatred, vengeance, and anger. A theology that takes into account the full breadth of human experience cannot condemn all violence.Biggar’s argument is a perfect case-study in Christianity’s need of the theological source of experience.If you appreciate the integrative writing and research I publish here, consider becoming a subscriber of the Natural Theologian. If you’re already a subscriber, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.The Bible-Only Case for PacifismA long-time New Testament scholar at Duke Divinity School, Richard Hays made the case for Christian pacifism in his The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hays argues that, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out the ethic of a new kind of community, radically different from ordinary human communities. This radically new ethic is “one in which ‘anger is overcome through reconciliation … retaliation is renounced … and enemy-love replaces hate’. … In sum, ‘the transcendence of violence through loving the enemy is the most salient feature of this new model polis’” (36).To this Hays adds Jesus' frequent refusal of political violence, desired by the zealots of his time, and his injunction to “turn the other cheek.” Hays also appeals to Jesus’ rebuke of Peter, when he draws a sword in Christ’s defense; Hays “takes [this] to be ‘an explicit refutation’ of the justifiability of the use of violence in defence of a third party” (36-37).The Bible also condemns the motives that inspire violence. The rest of the New Testament “forbids anger, hatred, and retaliation–and the violence that issues from them” (47). Hays concludes, from appeal exclusively to the biblical text, that Christianity supports non-violence.In the following section, Nigel Biggar introduces a premise from outside the Bible that calls Hays’ argument into question.But even Bible-only interpreters have reason to question Hays’ Christian pacifism. Both Christ and the apostle Paul speak about soldiers without condemning their calling; Jesus’ words for soldiers are, “Do not take things from anyone by force, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be content with your wages.” Likewise, Paul in Romans 13 recognizes civil government as appointed by God and having the right to bear the sword against evil. Biggar raises these biblical counter-arguments.Even if Hays’ biblical argument is not airtight, there is something appropriate about the Bible-only perspective being a pacifist one. Bible-only theology is a facet of what what Richard Niebuhr calls the “Christ Against Culture” perspective.This school of Christian thought, which includes everyone from Tertullian (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) to Tolstoy, argues that the Bible brings a distinctive perspective from those of the world. The world frequently operates on the basis of power, hating one’s enemies, and retaliatory violence. But the New Testament introduces an antithetical principle into history - Christ’s New Commandment of love even for the enemy.If you wanted a distinctively New Testament perspective on violence, one that stood at odds with the powers and principalities of this world, you might very well adopt Christian pacifism. Tertullian and Tolstoy both did. And so did the entire Anabaptist tradition - including Mennonites and the Amish.Hays’ Christian pacifism claims to be the position that is most exclusively and distinctively biblical.Is Violence Always Motivated by Hatred?In In Defence of War, Nigel Biggar introduces a premise from experience that contravenes Hays’ conclusion. While Biggar also makes biblical arguments, it is his empirical argument that raises questions about theological methodology.For instance, one of Hays’ arguments began from the New Testament’s prohibition of hatred, vengeance, and anger. Since these are the motives from which violence flows, violence itself is thereby also forbidden.But, Biggar points out, Hays has just introduced an assumption about the motives for violence: That violence only flows from vindictive motives. If any violence does not flow from hatred, vengeance, or, as Biggar distinguishes, unloving anger, then such violence would not be prohibited. Indeed, if any violence flows from motives that are commanded, like love and justice, such violence may even be obligatory.Biggar devotes the entire following chapter, “Love in War,” to demonstrating that many military actions are divorced from vindictive motivation. He summarizes, “Soldiers in battle are usually motivated by loyalty to their comrades and by fear of shame, rather than by hatred for the enemy” (56).In fact, many soldiers would cross lines to shake hands with their opponents if given the chance, though during battle, they will need to fire at them, often lethally. Ernst Jünger wrote about the First World War:Throughout the war…it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them. (78)Biggar writes about the military preference for cold, dispassionate violence rather than “hot violence.” He quotes Vietnam vet Karl Marlantes:Contrary to the popular conception, when one is in the fury of battle I don’t think one is very often in an irrational frenzy … I was usually in a white heat of total rationality, completely devoid of passion, to get the job done with minimal casualties to my side and stay alive doing it. (79)Biggar surveys other examples and motives, “love for one’s comrades,” something than which Jesus said there was no greater love; love for one’s family; the desire to prove oneself, the desire to be worthy of the heritage of one’s regiment, and so on.He acknowledges, however, that sometimes rage comes over soldiers. This motivation and the violence that flows from it, Biggar condemns. However, even there, “sometimes what inspires [rage] is the death of comrades.” But “what appears to anger combat soldiers most…is not the death of a comrade, but enemy conduct that breaks the rules…treachery, gratuitous sacrilege, wanton cruelty.”Other times, soldiers’ rage has no justification and leads to great wrong; yet soldiers are often conscious of this moral danger. Marlantes wrote, “There is a deep savage joy in destruction … I loved this power. I love it still. And it scares the hell out of me.” Soldiers have a duty to control “the beast that lies within us all” (89).The assumption, therefore, that all violence is motivated by hatred, vengeance, or anger turns out to be false. Biggar summarizes his conclusion:It contradicts the charge that military violence is mainly and necessarily motivated by hatred. … It confirms the thesis that soldiers are usually motivated primarily by love for their comrades. And it supports the claim that they can regard their enemies with respect, solidarity, and even compassion–all which are forms of love.Given this information from human experience, a crucial premise of Hays’ argument is overturned. The Bible does not condemn all violence. The Christian call to love our enemy is not incompatible with, and may sometimes require, killing him.If you’re enjoying this post, consider sharing it with someone else!Other Premises from ExperienceConsider what occurred in the last section: A theologian’s exclusively biblical argument was undermined by a premise from human experience. And even for those of us who have never been pacifists, the Bible’s warnings about anger and Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek” often induce worries about the legitimacy of violence and war, even in self-defense.Biggar’s examination of first-hand accounts from the frontlines reveals, however, that these worries cannot be absolutized. Not all violence is motivated by motives that the Bible proscribes.Biggar introduces yet another premise from outside of the Bible: The doctrine of double effect. According to that ethical doctrine, we can distinguish the intended consequences of an action from side-effects that are foreseen,

This article is the text of my presentation at a working group on theology and DEI hosted by the Princeton Initiative in Catholic Thought.Today, there is a confusion of moral equality with mathematical equality. Ethicists and theologians are out; number-crunching nerds - empathic as they may be - are in.Today it is held - especially by proponents of the doctrine of equity - that those most qualified to speak on the subject of human equality are social scientists: Whether human beings are equal turns on the mathematical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment.I would like to reclaim equality as the terrain of ethicists and theologians. Why? Because equality is moral, not mathematical.In particular, human equality is the claim that human beings, as people, are essentially and individually bearers of dignity, unaffected by accidental and empirical differences between them, at individual or group levels.The doctrine of human equality is latent in ordinary moral discourse, in Christian and post-Christian societies. But its Christian foundation deserves reiteration. After justifying and exploring the claim that moral equality has been placed on the empirical and falsifiable foundation of mathematical equality, I will present a theological foundation for human equality, across five anthropological dimensions. By the end, I hope the presentation will prompt questions about whether and how the doctrine of human equality can be maintained in a secular society.The Mathematical Doctrine of EqualityHow can I say that the proponents of equity think that the doctrine of human equality depends on the empirical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment? Here’s how:I once was trying to retrieve some artificial flowers at IKEA. As I searched, I asked a woman for help locating the flower section and made a quip about men not knowing where the flower section is. She responded, quite evangelically, that men can be interested in flowers too, so she wouldn’t assume my ignorance of the location of the flower section (though she did direct me there). In the hard edge of her comment, I heard her rationale, “Because humans are equal…you sexist.”Human equality entails mathematical equality across group means on accidental features - like interest in flowers.But if human equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality, then social-scientific studies could determine whether human beings are equal. By putting the doctrine of human equality on an empirical basis, this IKEA-goer has made it falsifiable.Now, if I gathered the relevant data and demonstrated to her that women are, on average, more interested in flowers than men, she would likely respond that this is due to cultural factors.Once again, however, this puts the doctrine of human equality on an empirical and potentially falsifiable basis. But this time, it is on a basis that requires data to be gathered from a yet-incomplete human experiment: Raising a generation of boys and girls with an utter absence of stereotypes and cultural depictions of women having greater interest in flowers than men.While technically falsifiable, this puts the mathematical doctrine of equality beyond the range of what will likely ever be tested. It is unlikely that society will purposefully carry out this experiment and gather the relevant data.Now my claim is not that the difference of interest in flowers between men and women is biological; I lack the kind of expertise to adjudicate that claim.My claim is that this entire discourse is irrelevant to the question of human equality.Human equality does not, and should not be made to, depend on the outcome of social-scientific studies or yet-incomplete human experiments. That is too flimsy a basis for a claim as central to Western polities as the doctrine of human equality.Likewise, the premise that moral equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality is a premise that the cultural left shares with the racial right: Differences in group averages on accidental features are relevant to moral status.I would have thought that the proper response to rejecting the racial right would be to reject that premise. Instead, the cultural left has assumed the truth of that premise and banked their moral worldview on a falsifiable empirical claim: That human beings, in a utopian, newly-reconstituted Rousseauian state of nature, would have equal group averages on accidental features.I want to offer a distinct basis for the doctrine of human equality, one independent of the vagaries of empirical, mathematical observation.The Doctrine of Moral EqualityFirst, we need a different gloss on human equality itself, the moral rather than the mathematical.While the mathematical is about the outcome of social scientific studies, the moral is a normative claim about how human beings ought to be treated.One way to cash out the moral doctrine of equality is by appeal to an old principle of law: “Treat like cases alike.”Here’s a violation of that: “I would serve a white person in this situation, but I won’t serve this black person. After all, they are different.”But are they in a morally relevant sense?This provokes the question what forms of likeness are morally salient. And I would claim that race is not morally salient, but personhood.Whether you treat them as a moral person possessing dignity and an equal claim on your esteem is determined by whether they are a person, which depends on nothing but membership in the human race.From this example, I generalize a principle:Accidental differences between human beings are irrelevant to moral status.Just as race and sex are irrelevant to the moral status of personhood, more fine-grained differences between individuals and groups on accidental features are all the more irrelevant to moral status. This is not to claim that any particular group differences are natural or biological. It is to claim that no such differences are relevant to the doctrine of human equality.It is a further and separate question what should be done to help those who suffer and are disadvantaged. Recognizing that equality is a moral and not a mathematical claim, we see that it has to do with a status man has by nature and not accidental features. We reach contested questions of human nature, essentialism, and meta-ethics.Contemporary discourse is divided primarily between postmodernists who do not believe in essences or natures at all, and naturalists who believe that nature is without moral significance and, by the way, that things do not have natures or essences.Western moral intuitions still point to an implicit belief in human equality, but philosophy often conflicts with these intuitions. What can possibly ground the Western faith in human moral equality? A Christian theological anthropology.Human Equality in Five Theological DimensionsA Christian theological anthropology maintains the equality of human beings across five dimensions: Human Nature, Responsibility, Sin, Suffering, and Human Destiny.Human NatureFirst, all human beings are equal in possessing the same nature.Biologically, Christianity teaches, or assumes, that all human beings are the same species. Population-differences, including purported race differences, are not just gradations from species-differences, like the distinction between humans and non-human apes. I’ll leave the details of making this claim concordant with science aside.So far “equality” would apply to any species. The same, after all, would apply to dogs: All dogs are equally dogs.To arrive at moral equality, we must introduce a category that is not merely biological but moral: “Person.” We determine membership in the kind person by virtue of membership in the kind human being. Persons are not some kind of advanced being with certain cognitive abilities; they are members of a species which is unique in its cognitive abilities and linguistic capacity, and upright stature, and distinction between feet and hands, and they reproduce facing each other. All of which are reflective of personhood.The crowning feature of the Christian doctrine of human nature is that the human difference, call it rationality, personhood, or something else, is reflective of our being made in the image of God. All human beings are ultimately moral equals in that they are made in the image of God.ResponsibilityA particularly salient feature of the human difference, of our being in God’s image, is human responsibility. If a dog kills a person, we may put it down; but this is not punishment. If a person kills another person, we hold him responsible for his actions.Human beings are also equal in responsibility. Equality in responsibility is contradicted by any ideology that frees some groups from responsibility while laying responsibility exclusively on another group’s shoulders.This occurs in contemporary racial ideology, for example. As Shelby Steele argues, in “The Culture of Deference,” the effect of left-wing ideology and action since the 1960’s has been to put American whites in a relation of deference to American blacks. All moral responsibility is on the shoulders of whites; blacks have no responsibility. Whatever the wrongs of the past, it is the wrong response to treat a group that has suffered as now free from the responsibility that all humans are subject to, equally.SinHuman beings are also equal in being subject to the power of sin. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose theology inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism, made the doctrine of sin the core of his “Christian realism.” He measured ideologies by whether they recognized human fallibility, error, and mixed motives as universal to human beings or limited to one’s outgroup.For instance, he praised Marxism for recognizing that people’s beliefs could be motivated by economic factors. But he criticized Marxists for thinking themselves above such criticism:“This is the truth in the Marxist theory of rationalization

What I found most difficult about evangelism as a child was the disinterest of my audience. Those whom I was supposed to evangelize - secular liberals in an affluent society - saw no need of the message I peddled.But today, secular ex-liberals approach me from every direction, desiring to talk about the failures and inadequacies of liberalism and secularism. Their minds are open to a word of wisdom from the Christian faith.And some even have open hearts.In Christian apologetics, the traditional arguments for God’s existence appeal to universal features of the world: Causality, design, beauty.But in our moment, a new, historically-contingent theistic argument is made available: The argument from the failure of liberalism.The political philosophy of John Lennon’s Imagine has been tried. Its outcome has been censorship, political tribalism, new forms of genital mutilation, sky-rocketing rates of anxiety and depression, and increasing racial division.The victims of the liberal experiment are looking for a new paradigm. And the Christian paradigm, if we are willing to translate it anew, has a ready audience.Which Liberalism Failed?In 2018, Notre Dame professor of political science Patrick Deneen argued that liberalism had failed. Deneen identified liberalism with both the contemporary target of conservative sneers (“Liberals.”) and the classical liberalism of the American founding and contemporary American conservatives.On this perspective, both “the rights of man” and “drag-queen story-hour” have their origins in the classical liberal political philosophy of John Locke and company.But my target is not the classical liberalism of the 17th and 18th century, which, whatever its claims of philosophical paternity, was nothing like contemporary liberalism in its social application. My target is the mainstream cultural liberalism of American life in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century.This cultural liberalism promised freedom and prosperity for all people regardless of skin color, political affiliation, religious beliefs, or sexual identity. It emphasized toleration, with an implicit intolerance for political conservatism or traditional religion. However, that intolerance was the - by today’s standards, innocuous - political correctness of the ’90s and ’00s.This liberalism culminated in the presidency of Barack Obama, especially in the racial universalism of his first presidential campaign and term and the victories for the gay rights movement of his second term.If we knew nothing about what had happened thereafter, we might think that the story of liberalism had had a happy ending.How Liberalism FailedYet that is not what happened.On February 26, 2012, a young black man, Trayvon Martin, was shot by a neighborhood watchman. That shooting, along with those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, galvanized the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Martin’s shooting, occurring in the year of Obama’s second campaign, inspired his comments, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”From what I understand, this shooting was correlated with a change in Obama’s rhetoric on racial matters. Whatever the causal story, Americans’ stated opinions of the health of race relations in the US have plummeted since that year, in spite of little evidence that trends toward racial equality have changed.Since then, galvanized also by the perception of a white backlash in the Trump election and presidency, a large portion of liberal America has come to believe that America is a systemically racist country, that whites are congenitally racist, that so-called “anti-racist” ideology and training must be widely enforced, and that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) departments must be instituted at universities and corporations.This was further expedited with the 2020 death of George Floyd and widespread “Black Lives Matter” protests in response, this time with the participation and support of almost all the major institutions and corporations of American life.It is now widely believed by liberal Americans that color-blindness is racism, that reverse discrimination is not only allowable but necessary, and that America is a country that is systemically racist against blacks and other dark-skinned, non-Asian minorities.On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court, including two Obama appointees, decided that traditional marriage was unconstitutional and that gay marriage was the law of the land. The gay rights movement had won. An American majority supported gay marriage, and prejudice against gays and lesbians was only declining further.But only two months before, in April 2015, Bruce Jenner had announced that he would henceforward be known as “Caitlyn.” Without much public opposition, one would have thought that the “T” might have been quietly smuggled in with the “L,” “G,” and “B.” But instead, a new civil rights struggle began, with fights over bathrooms, the normalization and popularization of manifold gender identities, and the pushing of gender ideology onto young children.Men began to enter women’s sports, women’s colleges, and women’s prisons. In the UK, secular feminists began to raise alarm bells: The sex-based rights of women would not be defended if the definition of woman expanded to include a great number of men.Across the Western world, stories of detransitioners who regretted their “sex-reassignment” surgeries - and having the irreparable wounds to prove it - began to speak up, often facing violent opposition from trans-activist groups, manned (literally) by “trans women” exhibiting characteristically masculine strength and force in favor of their ideology.Again in the UK, the British gay rights group Stonewall was split over the issue of transgenderism, with defectors founding the LGB Alliance. They raised alarm bells over the conversion of young effeminate gay men and butch lesbians into heterosexual trans women and trans men - what gender transition effectively does.While gender transition for minors became only more available in the US, the Nordic countries were already beginning to wind down gender clinics. Eventually, the UK Tavistock clinic was shut down given concerns about the scientifically untested character of hormone “therapies” and surgeries being offered to minors. Opposition to such medical abuses has begun to mount in the US, though it has only recently begun to be permitted on the mainstream left.Liberalism had hoped to create a world in which a black man can be president and gays can marry one another. But it was unable to produce a successful, liberal end-state. What is less evident is why.Why Liberalism FailedThere are two explanations: Some people say that we left liberalism behind and just need to return to it. Others argue that liberalism was the problem in the first place. There was a phase from 2016 to 2019 in which public intellectuals mostly argued for a return to liberalism. Individuals from Dave Rubin to Jordan Peterson to Bari Weiss called themselves “classical liberals,” taking up the term of political philosophy or the British sense of “liberal.” The Intellectual Dark Web was the home of these liberal defectors from the left.Classical liberal criticisms of wokeness focused on its departure from liberal norms. Woke censorship was undermining freedom of speech. Equity, i.e., equality of outcome, was undermining equality of opportunity. Racial tribalism, and even segregation, were replacing a focus on our common humanity.Individuals often made appeal to what being a liberal or a Democrat had meant to them a decade or two before. This dovetailed with the critique of wokeness as a religion. Bill Maher had mocked religion in his documentary Religulous; he now found himself critiquing the religion of wokeness for these same qualities of tribalism and irrationality.Even the religious elements of the Intellectual Dark Web argued that religion provided justification for classical liberalism. Peterson mainstreamed this argument, that the recognition of the image of God in each individual, mythologically represented in Christian teaching, was the foundation of Western liberalism. Ben Shapiro, himself a classical liberal in the sense of the American right, argued this same perspective in The Right Side of History. (I made it the central claim of an unpublished book I penned at the time, The New Idealism.)For a variety of reasons, the defense of classical liberalism has not been able to hold a new political center. While there remain defenders of this liberal approach, public discussion has shifted in a new direction.It was liberals and their moral intuitions, after all, that wokeness hijacked. Trans rights, for instance, appealed to liberals’ concern for oppressed minorities, just as gay rights had. Black Lives Matter tugged at the heartstrings of liberals, whose moral imagination is shaped by the black-white conflict of the civil rights movement. A return to liberalism would arguably be susceptible to the same problems all over again. Also, liberalism has no tools to adjudicate the claims of competing minorities. Trans rights, for instance, have come into conflict with women’s rights and even gay rights. Being a good liberal does not tell you how to square that circle.Some classical liberals want to use science to adjudicate those claims. For instance, instead of religious fundamentalists, today it is evolutionary biologists who defend the sex binary, not to mention the empirical differences in personality and behavior, on average, between the sexes.But again, it was secular liberals who “believe in science” who fell for this ideology in the first place. This suggested that religious thinking was endemic to human beings. While a small number of professional scientists appear capable of being liberals but not woke, the masses are not.This, in turn, suggests a new moral to be taken from the failure of liberalism and secularism alone: That only a religious alternative could withstand wokeness.The problem with lib

I’m currently deep in the weeds of writing chapter two of my dissertation, “Content Empiricism: The Case Against Content Rationalism.”If I had to drop the jargon and say what I’m arguing for in English, I would say I’m against concepts.Concepts. They’re like the curtains of the mind. Whenever I want to argue that our minds are related to the things of the world, my discussion partner mentions “concepts.” The opaque curtains of the mind are drawn, and the room darkens.We only ever see the world through our concepts, they say. But I’m looking toward my curtains right now. I don’t see anything through them.I object to concepts most strongly when they are appealed to as blocking our view of the world itself. This happens chiefly in postmodernist and social constructionist accounts, broadly, anti-realist accounts. The world as we see it is a construction out of our concepts, which are themselves constructs.But I’ve come to object to concepts more broadly. In analytic philosophy, there is a strong tradition that combines adherence to concepts with realism. It views our access to the real world as mediated by concepts. Concepts do not occlude our view of the world but rather enable it.It’s a nice thought. But I fear that no view of our access to the world as mediated by concepts will do the job. No set of curtains helps us see better out the window.What are concepts supposed to be anyway?I take it that a concept is supposed to serve several roles:* Concepts are more fundamental than words.* Concepts can be expressed in definitions.* Concepts can exist even if what they refer to does not.First, concepts are fundamental than words.I and a Frenchman, say, have a completely different set of words, but we share many of the same concepts. I say, “snow,” and he says, “la neige,” but we’re utilizing the same concept. That’s why, if I learn French, I’m learning a new word, but not a new concept when I learn the French word for “snow.”Of course, there’s a popular theory that concepts do differ across languages, such that Eskimo languages, with their multiple words for different kinds of snow, possess more concepts as well. Still, the idea is that the Eskimos don’t just have more words; they have more concepts - so concepts are a kind of thing deeper and more fundamental than words.Still, so far, we seem to be identifying concepts as corresponding one-to-one with a language with words. But concepts are supposed to be expressible in different words within a language as well. For instance, “donkey” and “ass” would express the same concept, even though they are different words. Once again, concepts are distinct from and more fundamental than words.Second, concepts are expressed in definitions. In popular discourse, experts are often asked to “define terms.” The expectation is that they will offer a brief verbal description that covers all and only the instances that fall under that term or concept.If different individuals are working with different definitions of terms, we take it that they have different concepts. This impedes communication and leads to people talking past each other.This search for definitions has a philosophical basis. Socrates sought for the essence of certain key terms of human life, like justice, truth, knowledge, and the like. He and his interlocutors would try out various verbal descriptions that look much like our idea of definitions. They would test these against counter-examples, usually finding some counter-examples to any purported essence or definition.Third, concepts exists even if what they refer to does not. For example, this is how many atheists and agnostics view the term “God.” Even if God does not exist, there is a human concept of God, more fundamental than the mere word “God,” and expressible in various traditional definitions, “the greatest possible being,” “a transcendent person,” “the prime mover,” “the creator,” and so on.If I had to utilize the term, I would say that, here, I have expressed the very concept of a concept.The Conceptual Theory of ThoughtNow the concept of a concept gives rise to a theory of thought:Human beings think about the world by utilizing concepts. The concepts are human constructions, but they can refer to the world insofar as things in the world match the descriptions offered in the definitions of concepts.Think of this as a set of criteria: A concept has a set of criteria for falling under it. Nothing is a cup, for instance, unless it is concave and designed for holding liquid. We think about the world by way of concepts that provide criteria for their own membership.Now, an important feature of definitions or descriptions is that each of the terms in the definition itself expresses a concept, and so, when we determine whether something matches the description, we are ultimately making appeal to the application of other concepts.For example, my definition of “cup” made appeal to “concave,” “designed,” “holding,” and “liquid.” (We’ll leave aside the semantics of the other words in the phrase.) Each of these words expresses a concept, which could be spelled out in a definition, which in turn, would utilize words that indicate concepts.It is a key question of philosophy whether there are a fundamental set of concepts or whether there is a kind of perception of reality that is non-conceptual. This would provide a touchpoint, without which, it appears that we are trapped within a circle of concepts, of coherence rather than correspondence.Many twentieth-century empiricists tried to provide this in terms of sense-data, the Given, or logically-proper names. (Bertrand Russell thought, or hoped, that we had “logically-proper names” that directly referred to something, though he thought we could only refer to sense-data.)But even the chief twentieth-century empiricist, W. V. O. Quine concluded that we ultimately could not determine, nor did we need to, the reference of our words. Coherence was sufficient, so long as our conceptual scheme worked, pragmatically.I think this demonstrates the degree to which even realist and empiricist philosophers have been beholden to concepts and the theory of thought they supply.Frege and His Concepts as Case StudyIn the dissertation chapter I’m currently working on, the object of my study is a quite different figure, the founding father of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege.Frege was a realist who gave concepts a quite prominent place in his theory of thought. He held that concepts were objective, immaterial entities called “senses.” We successfully refer to objects in the world based on whether they match, or meet the criteria, of the senses we grasp.While the immaterial aspect of Frege’s thought has been abandoned by many contemporary analytic philosophers, they are beholden to his picture of thought in other ways.But examining Frege provides an important opportunity to put my theory to the test, that is not just postmodernist and social constructionist theories of concepts that are problematic. Concepts themselves are the problem.If even Frege’s objectivist and realist account of concepts leads to subjectivist results, then concepts themselves turn out to be nothing but curtains, occluding the mind’s view of the world.So far, that is what I’m finding.Our theory of thought is due for a clean-out, and it’s concepts that have got to go.“Against Concepts” is a distinct section of The Natural Theologian, in the pages of which I’ll be detailing and summarizing the content of my Ph.D. dissertation. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to it separately if you choose at the Substack “Settings” page.The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Natural Theologian at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

To evangelical ears, this title will seem to read as an attempt to revivify the spirit of Jerry Falwell. And it will be said that his spirit seems alive and very well - too well.But I have a different audience in mind. In the intellectual circles of the political right, there are many open questions about the direction of the movement, chief among them whether and how religious the right ought to be.You see, while the popular voting bloc of the Republican party is relatively religious, the intellectual elites of conservatism are less so, and the online avant-garde of the Right is even less so.I am not arguing that Christians ought to take up the cause of the political right.In this essay, I am arguing that the intellectual right ought to heed its religious impulse.Why should the right be religious?Without a religious impulse, the intellectual Right tends almost inevitably to become a racial movement. And if it is between a religious right and a racial right, then we should choose a religious right.The Intellectual Right Is Not the Same as the American Political RightNow this will all sound odd to American ears. The American right is a movement based on race-neutral, libertarian capitalism, plus a dose of American civil religion. It can avoid the charge of racism by appealing to the principles of classical liberalism: freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equality before the law.In contemporary politics, of course, standing for classical liberalism has begun to code right, and many liberals who would formerly have identified themselves with the left have found themselves more aligned with the American right.In fact, the alignment of classical liberalism with the Western right has been going on for a long time. Friedrich Hayek was a liberal. And the Neo-conservatives were liberals who had been mugged by reality. The Intellectual Dark Web’s defense of classical liberalism was but the latest iteration.In contemporary politics, such people are considered to be on the political right.But in philosophical discussion, someone whose fundamental moral appeals are to principles of classical liberalism is a liberal and not a conservative.When I address the right, I am addressing those on the intellectual right, from conservatives right-ward, to the radical right. Their fundamental moral appeals are not to neutral, liberal principles but to something more substantive.What Unifies the Intellectual Right?Now what unifies the group I am identifying as the intellectual right?The Right is unified by a commitment to the preservation of a culture, which it perceives as threatened by intentional actors committed to egalitarian and liberal ideologies and by cultural forces beyond human intention including technology and capitalism.The deep debates on the intellectual right are about the identity and content of that cultural heritage. If we say, “Western civilization,” almost everyone on the intellectual right will be on board. But opinions divide about the relative priority of Christian, philosophical, and classical dimensions of Western civilization.The deepest divide on the intellectual right is about whether Christianity is the cultural heritage we seek to preserve, or whether Christianity is a precursor to contemporary leftism and wokeism. Christians and their sympathizers, “god-fearers,” accept Christianity as the cultural heritage they seek to preserve. But a secular or neo-pagan, Nietzschean, vitalist right rejects Christianity as but a precursor to contemporary leftist decadence.For more on the contrast, see Johann Kurtz’s essay, “Choose boldly between Christianity and Vitalism.”The Christian and Classical Currents of CivilizationNow Christianity is not the whole of the cultural heritage that the Christian Right seeks to preserve. The classical heritage is there as well. Christians are the source of contemporary classical schools, for example.But how to relate the Christian and the classical is another way to frame the Right’s debate. The vitalist Right favors the classical over the Christian. The Christian right seeks to integrate them.(There are also facets of the Christian right that repudiate the classical, about which I’ve written elsewhere.) The Nietzschean right wants to regain the virtues of classical, pre-Christian civilization. While Christianity valorized weakness and suffering, classical civilization celebrated strength and manliness.In identifying a conflict between Christian and classical thought, Nietzscheans are not wrong. Christ says, for example, “Do you love those who love you? Even the Gentiles do that. But I say to you, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.”The Nietzschean right responds, “What is this leftist drivel? Our nations will break down if we do good to those who hate us! We need to insist on particularity and love those who love us and hate those who hate us.”(It’s called, “the friend-enemy distinction.”)The Nietzschean Right sees a direct through-line from Christ to contemporary leftism (and wokeism). It wants to depose these and return to the classical affirmation of strength, natural hierarchy, and inequality.Christian CriteriaNow, while contemporary Christianity is indeed subject to some of the failings of leftism and of slave morality, the Christian Right believes that Christianity can avoid these criticisms. They believe that there are both resources within the Christian tradition for doing so and that Christianity can accept resources from the outside for doing so.In these webpages, I have made both arguments: On the one hand, I have argued that some of the very features that make evangelicals evangelicals lead us to be ineffective in public action. Our preference for piety over competence is one example. I have pointed to Christ’s parable of the dishonest manager as an example of shrewdness as a Christian virtue.At the same time, I have encouraged Christians to look outside of their own Scriptures for knowledge about the world, to science, philosophy, and common human experience. This will include recognition of the classical tradition, of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and even aspects of classical and contemporary vitalism as sources of wisdom.One of the reasons I am able to adjudicate between different facets of the Christian tradition is that I am a Christian. When someone tells me that Christianity leads to x, I don my theologian cap and examine x as a Christian theologian. If I find it wanting, by the criteria of Christian theology, then no number of historical examples or arguments can persuade me that Christianity leads to x. X is a theological error.For example, many - now from the left - will argue that Christianity leads to homophobia. Having considered a Christian theology of same-sex desire, I can argue strongly that Christianity does not teach homophobia, even if many Christians have taught it and exhibited it.In fact, this is one of the main reasons why I think the right needs religion. It needs to utilize the resources of religious morality to distinguish between right and wrong. It needs to be able to follow in the path of a Bonhoeffer or a Niebuhr and say, “While many Christians defend x, x is incorrect by Christian criteria.”If we conclude that the whole of Jewish and Christian religion has been a failure because its secularized step-children have, we strip ourselves of many of the resources of moral thought.The Corruption of the Best Is the WorstI want to appeal to philosopher Ivan Illich to make this point. (Not to be confused with Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilyich.) Illich argued forcefully that contemporary society is a secularization of Christianity. The entire schooling system Illich identified as a secularization of the process of catechesis and discipleship, universalized to the whole society and backed up by force.But Illich did not consider this to be evidence against Christianity. Rather, he thought it provided evidence of a principle: “The corruption of the best is the worst.” Christianity is the best thing. Modern secular progressivism is a step-child of Christianity, yes, but it is the worst thing for that very reason.Likewise, the moral idealism and egalitarianism of Christianity is a beautiful thing. When stripped of love for the natural and fallen world, it becomes a deadly thing in the hands of idealists and communists. Their idealism justifies any wrong in the name of bringing heaven here upon earth. More deaths were committed in the name of this corruption of the best then had been by the evils of barbarism that Christianity itself replaced. The solution is not to throw away Christianity altogether but to return to it.Dead ConservatismWithout Christianity, the Right is adrift. It appeals to classical civilization and to paganism, but it cannot claim truly to embody these either. These traditions are dead, and the secular Rightist cannot claim to believe in the classical gods of paganism any more than he can claim to believe in the Christian God.As a result, the Right ends up arguing for the perpetuation of our tradition, our people, merely because they are ours. And who is this “we” who speaks? Ultimately, it must be identified with either a nation or an ethnicity, an existing political community or an underlying community of actual historical and biological relatives. And given the arbitrariness of nationhood, ethnicity is the natural conclusion.By the experience of the twentieth-century and the promptings of Christian conscience, I do not believe that to be the correct path.In short, for the Right to have a conscience, it must be, whether by remaining or becoming so, a religious right.A Way ForwardOf course, there already is a religious right on a popular level. To that group, my counsel is to become philosophical and intellectual, to lose the moralism and to up its morality. But I have made and will make such arguments elsewhere.What about for the intellectual right?Return to and preserve the synthesis of classical and Christian

I recently spent some time with Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man and Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. This comes on the heels of my writing about Christian realism, a theology and philosophy indebted to Niebuhr.Niebuhr reminds me of Jordan Peterson. Like Peterson, he brought the claims of Christianity to public and political debate. Also like Peterson, Niebuhr arouses suspicion for whether he was really a Christian, this in spite of him being the most influential American theologian of the 20th century.Here are five ways that Reinhold Niebuhr is still relevant to contemporary Christianity.1. Niebuhr Is Not an EvangelicalThank God.Niebuhr is, for me, the answer to the questions I began to raise in “The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority” and “Three Mindsets that Make Evangelicals Ineffective.” In the former essay, I registered the critique of the evangelical majority coming from believers disaffected with the subculture of evangelicalism and its alignment with partisan Republican politics. In writing it, I began to think that a sufficient Christian public theology must bridge this divide, rather than firmly take up the cause of majority evangelicalism.In “Three Mindsets,” I began to detect that the cause of the problems with the evangelical majority was a mindset of pious and internally consistent virtue-signalling within the evangelical tribe. I contrast that with a hard-bitten realist approach concerned with prudence and effectiveness in public action.People critique Niebuhr for being outside of that evangelical movement, and even for being a theological liberal. In fact, Niebuhr was among the foremost critics of theological liberalism, the others being the Neo-Orthodox theologians Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, Niebuhr and Barth were outside of the American movement of evangelicalism. I would argue that they were the most able critics of liberalism because they had been theological liberals, something few evangelicals could claim. As a result, their critique of theological liberalism was most persuasive and cutting to the liberal theological movement.2. Niebuhr’s Historical Analysis Beats the Trad-Cath OneThe Reformation did not lead to the downfall of Western Civilization.When in the belly of presuppositionalism, I ran toward Catholic intellectuals to teach me about the natural law. I took several summer seminars at The Witherspoon Institute, with Robert George and the other authors of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. At that event and others like it, I was told that my conversion to Catholicism was imminent.It was there that I also first heard the Catholic critique of the American founding, that its lack of religious establishment was, implicitly, secularism. From there, I learned that the Catholic critique went deeper: The Reformation was the ultimate cause of “drag queen story-hour.” Purveyors of this incredibly partisan and anti-American narrative are - strangely enough - some of the most well-respected religious public intellectuals in America today.In Niebuhr, I read a better defense of the relationship of Protestantism to liberalism and modernity than I have seen even in contemporary attempts. (I applaud those of The Davenant Institute and associated intellectuals.) If we want to blame today’s optimistic humanism on an early modern movement, Niebuhr argues, the Renaissance would be the culprit, not the Reformation. What is more, the idea that a return to 13th-century conditions would heal our woes is another version of the kind of perfectionism and utopianism that Niebuhr critiques evangelicals, Marxists, and liberals for alike.It’s time for a renewed Protestant public theology. And Niebuhr should be a guide and model.3. Niebuhr Was a Public TheologianAnd we should be public theologians too.Reinhold Niebuhr is a striking example of the kind of theology I aim to offer and the kind of theologian I aspire to be. His theology avoids unprofitable intra-Christian debates and is focused on the engagement with fields of knowledge and human action beyond Christian circles.The publicity of his theology was effective. Niebuhr had the role of American thought-leader as a theologian in the 1950s in a way we can no longer imagine. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. His theology moved and motivated key players in American history and politics at the time, chiefly, Martin Luther King, Jr.No one perceived Niebuhr as a partisan Christian, only speaking in Christian-ese to other Christians. Rather, he spoke to all people, all Americans, by arguing on grounds that were commonly accessible. Even when he argued for the relevance of Christian doctrine to secular debates he presented Christian doctrines as empirically defensible and relevant. I had previously attributed the following quotation to G. K. Chesterton, but apparently it belongs to Niebuhr: “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”4. Niebuhr Was an Orthodox PetersonAnd evangelicals still don’t think he was a Christian.A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the way Jordan Peterson is perceived by evangelicals. This perception is due to the unique role Peterson plays in communicating Christianity to secular and Christian alike by arguing on publicly accessible grounds and not publicly professing faith but purely the pragmatic utility and psychological significance of Christianity.Guess who played a similar role and was perceived in a similar way by evangelicals as a result? You guessed it: Niebuhr. To this day Niebuhr’s own faith has been called into question by Christians up to and including even Stanley Hauerwas. (Is Hauerwas even an evangelical?) Niebuhr made sufficient statements to make clear his departure from liberalism and adherence to orthodox Christian belief in the resurrection. Nevertheless, he often focused on and spoke about the Christian faith in terms of its philosophical significance and its status as true myth.Personally, I am struck by Niebuhr’s capacity to play the role of Peterson as a believing Christian. It inspires me that I and others might attempt to do the same.5. Niebuhr Used Theological Doctrines PracticallyGrrr… Liberal.Much in the way I recommended in “The Post-Theology Nerd,” Niebuhr abides by the test of theological significance I proposed there: “A theological distinction is significant if it has implications for living out the Christian life.” For example, he avoids quibbles about predestination that are divorced from practical significance. Instead, he fronts a kind of Augustinianism that had deep implications for liberal philosophy, international politics, and a sober approach to racial justice.For instance, Niebuhr takes the doctrine of sin to mean that no faction can take itself to be without conflicted motivations. In particular, he applies this to political radicals, whether of the economic or racial variety. These groups are inclined to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the actions of their political adversaries, but not themselves. Recognition of the universality of human sin undermines a kind of activist spirit and belligerence that is equally apparent on both sides of the political and religious aisle:“This is the truth in the Marxist theory of rationalization…that all culture is corrupted by an ideological taint. The unfortunate fact about the Marxist theory is that…the enemy is charged with this dishonesty, but the Marxist himself claims to be free of it. … This is, of course, merely to commit the final sin of self-righteousness and to imagine ourselves free of the sin which we discern in the enemy.”The Niebuhr OptionWhile Niebuhr’s ideas have been claimed by both right and left, Niebuhr’s own heritage is ecclesially homeless. He would certainly have been canceled from his own Union Theological Seminary had he been employed there today. But his views and his methods are outside the mainstream of American evangelicalism.This might suggest a failure on Niebuhr’s part. His theology has not borne fruit. It hasn’t lead to a persisting Neo-Orthodox, Christian realist movement.Rather, I would say that his theology clearly bore fruit, but in American public life rather than in the building of a religious tribe.Likewise, a lack of followers today does not indicate the failure of Niebuhr’s theology. It indicates that his theology remains an option, but one - so far - not taken. Get full access to The Natural Theologian at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

The evangelical takes on Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle With God” tour are coming out. Jake Meador attended Peterson’s lecture in Omaha and says that Peterson’s ideology is focused on excellence to the exclusion of mercy. Aaron Renn attended in Indianapolis and says that Peterson’s message is, at the end of the day, a New Age alternative to Christianity.Anna and I attended on Valentine’s Day in St. Louis. It was a moving experience. Here are some of our reflections.Anna’s ReflectionsGoing to hear Jordan Peterson was quite a life event for me. Like many others, I started listening to him in 2016 when he splashed onto the stage after protesting Bill C-16 in Canada. I spent much of 2017 struggling with depression, and the best help I found was in the hours I spent listening to him talk about meaning, mental health, and motivation for living. I still remember the streets I walked as I listened to his lectures and the puzzles I did as I listened to his debates with Sam Harris. Since then, I was greatly moved by his health issues and identified with much of his suffering and depression. I am also deeply grateful for the world of people to which he has introduced me: Jonathan Haidt, Camille Paglia, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jonathan Pageau, Andrew Huberman, Abigail Shrier, Slavoj Zizek, and countless others. Going to see him was like going to meet my hero in real life, and even though I’d heard much of the material before, I was no less amazed by his talk. These days, I don’t get to listen to much undistracted. I struggle to get things from sermons because three kids clamor for my attention. Some of my euphoria probably came from sitting uninterrupted, just listening and thinking, for two hours straight. However, there was much more to my enamor with Peterson. I have never heard someone be able to “riff” on Genesis 2–3 for that long with that much insight. I’ve been in the evangelical world all my life, so I have heard countless sermons, read many books and articles, and taught on that passage many times. Yet I hear more new truths from Peterson than from anyone else. Peterson’s greatness comes from being one of our day’s greatest conversationalists. I don’t care for his writing (I won’t read his books) or Twitter habits, but he is incredible at leading you through a conversation, which is a skill that is sorely lacking today. Most pastors and professors talk at you, whereas Peterson helps lead you through truths, even when monologuing for 90 minutes. He is even better when having a conversation with someone like Camille Paglia, Sam Harris, or Douglas Murray.“Wrestling with the truth” is how Peterson talks and thinks, and I am dismayed to hear criticisms of him from Christians that neglect this. They come from both the more conservative who don’t find him pure enough and from the more liberal who say he’s too capitalist or right-wing. But both miss the actual content and truth of what he is offering to millions of people. Peterson’s project to help others with the problem of pain is also my goal in counseling. Suffering in this life is our greatest issue and what keeps people from believing in God. And even as a Christian, I am not finding answers to suffering in the Christian world but in Peterson’s material and interviews. Jungianism, symbolism, and archetypes are all vehicles to get at the truth, not hindrances. His interview with Pageau on suffering after his health scare was one of the greatest “how-to-talk-about-suffering” conversations I’ve ever heard. His interview with detransitioner Chloe Cole was an incredible window into how a great therapist can pull out someone’s story. His conversation with Camille Paglia opened my eyes to insights on postmodernism, gender, and other forms of feminism. In a Joe Rogan podcast, he offered an incredibly powerful take on Scripture.  Lastly, Peterson’s words on, and example of, marriage and family seems better than anything I have heard taught on in the church. Because we attended on Valentine’s Day, (so romantic, I know,) there was a lot about love and marriage. I loved seeing him and his wife Tammy do the event together. Much of Christian teaching on Genesis 1–3 tends to get caught up in the submission-in-marriage debate, but Peterson transcended this.The church is in crisis, especially because of how many marriages fail and a lack of integrity in leaders. In his own marriage and life, Peterson has displayed integrity, love, and honor to his wife, so I want to listen to him on the subject of marriage.Given our appreciation of Peterson, Joel and I may end up like these guys:Peterson’s Rebuke to EvangelicalsAt the beginning of his lecture in St. Louis, Jordan Peterson addressed directly those who would have him confess Christian faith.This is my own rendition of what he said, constructed out of things he has also said elsewhere:“People ask me, ‘Do you believe in God?’And it’s like, why do you want me to say that I do? And to say it publicly?It’s like you’re asking me to stand on a street-corner and loudly proclaim my own righteousness, my alignment with the highest good. It’s like, I’m not going to do that.And anyway, who are you to declare that you are on the side of the highest good? Who are you to claim the name of Christ or God and to say that you really and truly believe it?Because if you really believed that God existed, you would act as though he did in every moment and every way. I’m not ready to claim that. Are you?So my answer remains, ‘I act as though God exists, and I’m terrified that he might.’Prepare Ye the Way of the LordSome criticize Peterson for his focus on Jungian and literary archetypes over literal truth. They say that he offers an alternative religion of self-help and New Age instead of Christianity.But this is a failure to hear Peterson. Peterson is not offering a religion. He is exploring the universal dimensions of morality and myth, the psychological significance of religion, both what religious stories mean for everyone even if they aren’t literally true, and what they would mean for our behavior if they were true, if we truly acted as if God exists.Let’s deal with the theological objection first: Evangelicals read Peterson as offering a Pelagian gospel of self-salvation.But what Peterson is actually articulating is the content of the natural law and the moral teachings of Christ.Of course, evangelical theology, especially of the more intellectual variety, has recently been neglecting these for a gospel of free grace. Jesus’s “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees” has been disemboweled:“Unless your righteousness exceeds theirs - which it can’t and won’t by your power, so you need the righteousness of Christ! Then you can be justified even if your life is not exceptional.”Peterson is raising the bar as high as Christ raised it. There is no salvation disconnected from bearing the fruit of righteousness.One of the reasons we accuse Peterson is because we think that the content of revelation in Scripture is totally disconnected from God’s revelation in nature: The gospel story has no continuity with the rest of human religion, philosophy, and literature - all of which promote self-salvation. But Peterson’s message is that the biblical story is one that has resonance with all the rest of human religion, philosophy, and literature, and that is even built into biology.This brings us back to the question of the allegorical, moral, and psychological reading of Scripture. If we think that this is just an attempt to avoid the literal meaning of Scripture, we place ourselves outside of the mainstream of Christian theology through the centuries.The consensus of Medieval Christian theology was that Scripture had a four-fold sense, in addition to the literal, there were the allegorical, the tropological (moral), and the anagogical (eschatological). Contemporary Protestants, the Reformed Evangelical in particular, are inclined to speak as though we have left behind the allegorical and moral altogether. Our Christ-centered preaching is the literal sense combined with seeing how it points to Christ. But…that’s what the Medievals called the allegorical. The way in which the Old Testament could be read as embodying “types” of Christ (typological), is in turn deeply connected to seeing Christ as an archetype through all of history and literature. The depth of meaning of Scripture should indicate to us the depth of meaning of all literature and prime us to see Christ as distantly as the places where Peterson sees him.At Wheaton College, Leland Ryken taught his evangelical students about the literary and archetypal reading of Scripture. This was necessary because the evangelical populace does not read the Bible as literature, but only as either a book of isolated one-liners or a textbook of true doctrine.In showing believers and non-believers alike biblical archetypes throughout culture, history, and biology, Peterson is preparing the way for openness to wrestling with Scripture and with God.Jordan Peterson presents believers and unbelievers with the archetypal and moral dimensions of biblical teaching. He argues for the psychological import of what the Bible presents.Now, does Christianity teach more than what Peterson teaches? Yes, but it does not teach less than what Peterson teaches.Unfortunately, for decades, if not centuries, Christianity has been teaching less than Peterson teaches. The realm of imagination and archetype has been abandoned.In the first half of the 20th century, Christians were at the forefront of the realm of imagination and archetype. J.R.R. Tolkien exercised a Christian imagination in his works. But importantly, Tolkien resisted attempts to read his writing as allegory. A work is not a true work of imagination, but propaganda, if a heavy-handed writer moralizes to his audience. While Lewis’s allegory was relatively transparent (not that this has prevented non-Christians from enjoying the Chr