Natural, Secular, Worldly - Why Does a Christian Theologian Use These Words Positively?
An Answer to Recent Questions
As a writer, it is a joy when someone discusses my writing with me.
As a philosopher, it is as much a joy when they disagree with my writing as when they agree with it.
In the last month or so, several people - readers, friends, family members - have questioned me about my writing. Particularly, they have questioned my use of three words: “Natural,” “secular,” and “worldly.”
Why do I, a Christian theologian, use these words positively?
The Natural
Let’s begin with the word “natural.”
It is a relatively novel idea that the “natural” is a godless category.
Western Christendom was once largely unified in its belief that nature was the theater of God’s glory. (That’s the title of a book about, not Aquinas, but John Calvin, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin.)
Modernity and the scientific revolution modified our account of nature. But Newton was as concerned as Calvin to affirm that nature, while it could be understood by human reason, was dependent for its working on God’s activity.
In fact, I believe that Christian suspicion of the category of “nature” can largely be traced, not to the Reformation, but to the mid-19th century. It was then that the four horsemen of naturalism, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, revolutionized Western thought. Naturalism is the claim that the natural is all that exists; nothing supernatural exists. Accordingly, Darwin and ilk argued that nature could be explained without appeal to God and that God was but a projection of human psychology.
It was then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that we saw the rise of theological epistemologies that conceded the realm of nature and science to the atheists. (See Lecture 7, “The Theological Case for Fideism” of my online course Theological Epistemology.)
Abraham Kuyper conceded the realm of nature when he denied the possibility of apologetics, and holding that Christians needed to have their own species of science. (I think he did this unknowingly; see this point in my interview with Simon Kennedy about Kuyper’s accomplishments and contradictions.) Karl Barth did so quite knowingly, hoping to be free of the need to rationally argue for the faith and simply to proclaim the content of special revelation.
Kuyper’s and Barth’s concession of the natural world to naturalists indelibly shaped 20th century Christian thought. Evangelicals received Kuyper’s thought via Van Til and Schaeffer. Mainliners received Barth, as his theology took over in many previously theologically liberal circles.
In the process, Christians have conceded that Christianity is something foreign to human nature. It is an irrational leap of faith with no connection to what came before.
But the Christian religion is not foreign to human nature. Rather, it answers to the fundamental longings of human nature. We human beings were created by God. And God took on our nature in order to redeem it.
Some Christians prefer to speak of “creation” and not “nature.” The idea is that “nature” communicates the independence and autonomy of the world from God’s action. “Creation” acknowledges them.
But let me ask, what did God create? That’s right, he created nature. What was God’s creation? The natural world, human nature, and the natures of many other things.
The hymn-writer urged us to “join with all nature in manifold witness.” (Thomas Chisholm wrote those words in 1923.) And nature witnesses no matter what we call it.
In fact, it is better to use the common terms of human language. “Nature,” that thing that scientists study, that favorite subject of Richard Dawkins’ reflection, the title of that magazine - that very thing, no matter what you call it, bears witness to its creator.
The radical claim of the believer is this: Nature, the natural, was created by God.
It is, therefore, no concession to naturalism for Christian theology to speak about nature. It is, rather, a concession to naturalism to concede the entire realm of nature to the naturalists.
And that is not a concession we should be willing to make.
The Secular
Next, consider “secular.”
Growing up, I thought this word was a variant on “sexual.” (And that both were bad.) And my experience captures the implicit attitude of many Christians toward the secular realm.
Now, the temptation to devalue the secular has always been with people of faith. But, the idea that we could do without the category of “the secular” has not.
This is because the division between “secular” and “religious” used to be a division within the Christian life. In medieval Christianity, it became a distinction between two types of vocation. To become a priest, a monk, or a nun was to enter the religious life. To become a politician, a lawyer, or a doctor was to take up a secular calling.
In the Reformation, Luther and Calvin did not deny the realm of the secular. They embraced it.
The Reformers argued that the divide between the sacred and the secular runs through every Christian and even every activity. On the one hand, this meant that ministers could, and even should, marry. On the other, it meant that lawyers, doctors, and even barbers could come before the throne of God, as priests, in prayer.
Etymologically, “secular” means “of this age,” the “saeculum.” The secular realm is the temporal realm. It contrasts with the age to come, “the eternal.”
Secular things are those that pertain to this age and not directly to salvation or the eternal. Cutting someone’s hair well is secular. Knowing how to balance one’s accounts is secular. Educating children to improve their life outcomes is secular.
Many of us Christians, however, hope to apply our faith to all elements of life. We don’t want to leave the secular untouched. In our work, we want to work “as unto the Lord.” In our finances, we see ourselves as stewards of God’s gifts. In our activities, we hope to obey the first and second greatest commandments. In effect, we hope to make all our activities religious activities. We want to sacralize the secular.
Should we, therefore, not call these things secular? Should we deny that anything is secular anymore? Is all now sacred?
I don’t think that would be right, for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it deprives us of a real distinction within our lives between 1) explicitly religious speech and activities and 2) those that are common to people of all faiths and none.
Dropping the category of the “secular” fails to be honest about this distinction. How to cut hair well, how to fix a leak in plumbing, how to create a valid syllogism, how to balance a budget - these are, by nature, secular tasks. They concern the workings of this world in this age. They are common to people of all faiths or none.
Our answers to the question how to be saved from the wrath to come are neither common nor secular.
We must admit that there are secular things, that they are good, and that Christians are involved in them all the time. But happily, Jesus Christ is with us in these things, until the end of the saeculum.
The second reason I believe in the category of the secular is that we need to understand the order of our actions. We are to order our secular activity unto eternal ends. (That was the teaching of Jesus’ Parable of the Dishonest Manager, which I discussed in my recent article on faith and secular work.)
This involves recognizing the limits of secular activity. If you feed and clothe a person, this is wonderful, and Christ says, “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me” (Matt 25:40). However, you still haven’t dealt with their spiritual needs.
Jesus told the paralytic, “Stand up and walk.” But he also told him, “Your sins are forgiven.” The first helped the man only in this age, for he would age and die and lose the use of his limbs. The second helped the man for all eternity.
But the apostle James equally cautions that we must not simply wish people well and offer them a gospel presentation. Both are necessary, the secular and the eternal. And the secular is subservient to the eternal.
The secular is penultimate; the eternal is ultimate. We must recognize and do both in the proper way and order.
The Worldly
The origin of Christian suspicion of “the world” is not difficult to locate: “Do not love the world or the things in the world” (1 John 2:15).
“The world” is frequently used by New Testament authors to refer to the world as it stands, under the effects of sin, and the influence of the devil.
So, it seems like an open-and-shut case that “the world” is something for Christians to eschew.
But, it is always interesting to me which verses Christians absolutize. For consider some others:
“For God so loved the world.” (John 3:16)
“For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim 4:4).
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen 1:31).
The world is God’s creation, and he called it “good.” While it is affected by sin and “was subjected to futility,” it remains good in its fundamental nature, awaiting the time when it will be “set free” (Romans 8:20-21).
What is more, key apostolic teachings are about the goodness of created things, including 1 Timothy 4:4 above, and 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”
In a kind of “first Reformation,” Paul encouraged the early Christians to recognize that Jewish restrictions on unclean foods were no more and that food sacrificed to idols was not unclean, because those idols were nothing.
This has relevance to Christian participation in many aspects of culture, watching certain movies, reading certain books. The intentions of the author or director do not inherently corrupt the work of art or literature. Aspects of God’s creation have a way of revealing truth whatever their authors’ intentions.
But why affirm the “worldly?” After all, in Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Worldly Wiseman represents ways of life and thinking that are opposed to God.
Well, Leland Ryken beat me to answering that question.
Ryken, my former professor of English at Wheaton College, wrote a book Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were. In it, Ryken argued that the Puritans were not the prudes as which they have since been portrayed. They believed in the enjoyment of God’s world, his good gifts. This was a kind of worldliness that a saint could and should exhibit.
My other reason is Jesus’ affirmations of a kind of worldly wisdom: Shrewdness.
“For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light” (Luke 16:8).
“Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16).
“And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:9).
There is a kind of worldly wisdom Jesus wants us to exemplify. (Not to mention three other secular virtues I considered in my recent post.)
The world was the object of God’s creation, which he declared “good.” What is more, Jesus came to redeem and renew the world.
Our attitude toward the world must not be one solely of wariness and concern. It must also be one of enjoyment and love.
Look no further than C.S. Lewis, or our contemporary Joe Rigney for elaboration on this theme. (See Rigney’s The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts or any of Lewis’s works.)
Am I “Two-Kingdoms?” Am I a “Dualist?”
One of the major objections to this account of the Christian life comes from the “one kingdom” view: Christ is Lord of all. Nothing is secular. There is no realm of life that remains free from the supernatural, from redemption, from the claims of the age to come.
On this view, my account reflects an unhealthy dualism: One dimension of life is under Christ’s kingship. A second is not. This would make me “Two kingdoms.”
(For those unfamiliar with this debate, consider Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism on the one hand - influential in the “One Kingdom”/“Transformationalist” camp - and David VanDrunen’s Living in God’s Two Kingdoms on the other.)
Something I wrote in my recent piece can serve to illustrate the disagreement. I stated, “The secular is sacred.” From the “one kingdom” perspective, this is true, and it means that nothing is secular any longer. All is sacred.
My counter is that, when I said, “the secular is sacred,” I meant every word of it.
The secular - this stuff, broken by the fall, sin-soaked, destined for destruction - this secular stuff is now sacred. That is the radical claim I meant to make with that sentence.
The secular does not cease to exist; it does not cease to be, by nature, secular, of this age, not inherently ordered to redemption. Rather, the secular receives a new purpose.
Likewise, I believe in the radical claim of Christ over all creation. But it is a claim over creation, a claim made over things that previously did not have that claim over them.
Something had to happen: What was unholy was made holy. Nature, the Secular, the world was, is being, and will be renewed. Without the duality, we do not have the Christian gospel.
This means that, in practice, I agree with the “one-kingdom” people, with Van Til, with Kuyper, with Schaeffer, with the Covenanters. But I think the “one-kingdom” theory is missing a crucial puzzle piece.
There is, indeed, a duality in this account, but it is the duality of Creation and Redemption. No Christian can or should deny that duality.
“Christ Above Culture”
How does my view fit into the taxonomy of views of Christ and culture?
To answer that, we have to broaden out from the simplistic contemporary taxonomy of “One Kingdom” (“transformationalist”) versus “Two Kingdoms.”
In Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, one finds several views of Christ and culture, rather than simply a “one kingdom” and a “two kingdoms” view. (I discussed the five views in my “Niebuhr’s ‘Christ and Culture’ Revisited.”)
At the extremes, we have “Christ Against Culture” and “Christ In Culture.” Christ Against Culture represents a kind of fundamentalist opposition to culture (not to mention Kingsnorth’s opposition to Christian civilization). Christ In Culture is an almost total accommodation to culture.
But in the middle were three mediating views, “Christ Above Culture,” “Christ and Culture in Paradox,” and “Christ the Transformer of Culture.”
The last is quite popular, under the name of “transformationalism.” It embraces the claims of Christ’s kingdom over all of life and seeks for transformation of the world in accord with this.
The popular understanding of two kingdoms, and David VanDrunen’s particular theory of it, appears in the traditionally Lutheran view, “Christ and Culture in Paradox.” According to this view, transformation is not really possible because most of human life is secular and not capable of redeeming. On this traditionally Lutheran view, the state and the secular should more or less be left to themselves. Christians can enter these professions, but they will not do anything “distinctively Christian” as a plumber, barber, lawyer, or even philosopher.
That might sound like some of what I have been saying.
But my view is actually the other, “Christ Above Culture,” which Niebuhr traces to Thomas Aquinas. Nature and culture have their own autonomy and significance as products of God’s creation. But Christ and redemption build upon them, not destroying or denying the role of nature and culture, but fulfilling and advancing beyond them.
I do not advocate that we live merely secular lives. I advocate that we live Christian lives in the secular world. To do so requires mastery and competence of secular disciplines, the workings of the world, things over which Christians have no distinctive competence. Yet we are to direct these penultimate activities ultimately toward redemptive ends. We are to utilize “unrighteous wealth” to secure our and others’ eternal reward.
This view has had few Protestant exponents in recent decades. The last and most prominent advocates I have found have been Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Emil Brunner.
However, it has recently been revived by The Davenant Institute, who argue that the Reformers’ doctrine of two kingdoms did not have the implications of VanDrunen’s theory.
Our affirmation of secular life, natural law, and the like makes it tempting to slot us into the recent Reformed category of “two kingdoms.” But there is a crucial difference.
I affirm, with Kuyper, that there is no square inch over which Christ does not say, “Mine!” Yet, I simultaneously affirm that every square inch of territory in this world is common ground, secular, natural, worldly territory.
I don’t think we can accomplish the transformational task without recognition of the distinction between the secular and the explicitly Christian. After all, God has prepared many good works for us to do, and you can’t do good works if you don’t know how the world works.
In short, to transform the world for Christ, we must become worldly saints. To join with all nature in manifold wisdom, we must study nature. To further Christ’s lordship over the secular realm, we must master secular virtues and learn from secular sources.
In order to redeem us, the second person of the Trinity took to himself a human nature. In order to be and to see others be redeemed, we must become comfortable in our own worldly, secular, human nature once again.
Dear reader, thank you for reading my writing. I really enjoy sharing my thinking about theology and philosophy, and how Christians can learn from secular sources.
A lot of my attention has also been taken up recently by my dissertation, “Content Empiricism: The Case Against Content Rationalism.” (I know, informative.) I hope to share more about this and its connection to my writing soon.
As I’m nearing the end of that writing (fingers crossed), I’ll hope to redouble my efforts at The Natural Theologian in the new year. I have several ideas for a book. I may collect this year’s essays in a volume, as I did last year. (Get your copy here.) But I also have the idea to arrange some of the essays in smaller, more topical volumes. “The Effective Evangelical” is one working title for my essays on faith and work. “Our Unnatural Nature” is a working title for my writings on faith and sexuality, and especially homosexuality.
I appreciate your reading and your support. Consider becoming a paid subscriber if you appreciate my writing and want to get access to the more in-depth course material I’ve created and will continue to create going forward.
Merry Christmas!
Can I ask what you mean by the category "natural"? If nature is a synonym for creation, then angels and immaterial human minds are natural, and this is not what we usually mean by the word.
Good discussion.
About 15 years ago, I took a "worldview test," not out of any real curiosity whether I would "pass it" and be considered to think Christianly, but out of curiosity for what the questions would be on such a quiz. Well, I gave the "right" answer to every question but one, as per the grading of the test: I said that there was a distinction between the sacred and the secular (much like the biblical distinction between the holy and the common, I would add).
BTW, there are two or more definitions to many words, and I would point out that not all "naturalists" believe that nature is distinct from creation. That is, a person who studies nature, but is not a scientist, is called a naturalist. I consider myself a naturalist by that definition, and I use "nature" and "creation" interchangeably.
I haven't particularly studied the two kingdom/ one kingdom distinction, but some of my favorite theologians are convinced of two kingdoms. My understanding is that two kingdoms has a more thorough understanding of the already/not yet of eschatology. Christ is already Lord over all, but He is not yet acknowledged by those who haven't come under His rule.