Three More Reasons Aaron Renn Is Right about Common Grace
We must recognize nature, God's law, and all that is common between believers and unbelievers. With a renewed public theology, evangelicals might, someday soon, be leaders in our society.
In mid-December, Aaron Renn took up the question, “Why Aren’t Evangelicals Leaders In Our Society?” on his podcast. He offered two theological reasons: The first was a weak doctrine of vocation, and the second was the theology of common grace. As I mentioned, that piqued my interest because I had encountered criticism of common grace once before on the lips of one of my fellow seminarians. In short, Renn argued that common grace disguises a weak theology of nature, of the created order, one that hampers Christian engagement and leadership in the public square.
Yesterday, I gave three reasons to think that Aaron Renn was correct in crediting the theology of common grace with some of the ills of public theology. Today I offer three more.
First for today, but fourth overall,
“Common grace” denies the place of God’s law in maintaining order in society.
I have criticized contemporary Reformed theology, and the broader “gospel-centered” movement, for neglecting the law of God in each of its three uses. The Reformation may have given us reason to keep the gospel of grace at the center, but it did not do away with other elements of the Christian message. In fact, the Reformed tradition detailed three different uses of the law that Christians are called to proclaim, without which, I might add, the gospel will fall on deaf ears, never be heard, or bear no fruit: 1) To lead us to Christ, 2) To restrain sin in society, 3) As a guide for the Christian life.
Now, one of my complaints against “common grace” has been that its theological role can be played by other categories, like providence, divine mercy and forbearance, and so on. The use of “common grace” instead of these ends up denying or misunderstanding the role of these other divine activities and attributes.
But talk of “common grace” should also decrease in order to give place to the second use of the law. Common Grace Theologians introduce common grace to explain the order and goodness present in the fallen world in this age. But the law of God already does a lot of the explaining.
The second use of the law involves both a prescriptive and a descriptive element. Prescriptively, the second use of the law tells us that the law should be used by political authority, the civil magistrate, to restrain sin in society. This is contrary to the Anabaptist impulse, which would see civil morays dissolve so that desperation for salvation might increase. It is also contrary to the Catholic impulse which would have the church itself exercise political power, in competition with the state. Today, it primarily serves as a reminder that the legislation of morality is not something from which Christians can shy away. I remember Steven Wedgeworth once quipping, “People object to the legislation of morality. But what else would you legislate but morality?’”
The descriptive element of the second use of the law is that the law of God does in fact have a hold on the rulers and polities of this world, through the law of nature being written on the hearts of men, as evidenced by C. S. Lewis’s catalog at the back of The Abolition of Man. The law is restraining sin.
In this, the law is itself part of nature, of the created order. Men are such that their relations are governed by justice, if imperfectly. Man is a social animal; Christianity agrees in this element of its anthropology with Aristotle, not Hobbes. (Though, many Calvinists are Hobbesians, as theologian Bill Watterson has long tried to communicate to the world.) Jordan Peterson has often pointed out the biological and psychological basis of moral and social interaction. The law of nature goes all the way down to the lobsters.
The second use of the law, along with the law generally, has been discounted by theologians and pastors in their emphasis on the gospel and their invocation of “common grace.” These emphases conceal a not-so-hidden antinomianism in contemporary evangelical and Reformed theology, or perhaps, an Anabaptist element. The assumption is that we can just focus on the sphere of God’s special grace, just preach the gospel, and we can leave the secular and political field to the unbelievers, rather than risk appearing heavy-handed or legalistic by involving ourselves in politics. However, Christianity actually urges us to see that the civil sphere be well-ordered, both so that we might live “quiet” lives, and also that the gospel may gain a hearing (1 Timothy 2:1-4). It seems too obvious to say, but as our society has grown more hostile to the law of God, it has become more difficult to gain a hearing for the gospel, not less. Of course, Aaron Renn is also the leading evangelical analyst of this trend.
“Common grace” should give way to Christian appreciation and promotion of the second use of the law.
Fifth,
“Common grace” leaves us open to progressive or revolutionary social ideas that are contrary to our nature; recognition of nature leads to a measure of social and political conservatism.
While evangelical intellectuals often shy away from providing theological support for political conservatism, the sort of conservatism I favor derives not exclusively from Scripture, but largely from nature. While Christian progressives see in Christ’s teaching a revolutionary message, Christian conservatism should not derive simply from an alternate set of biblical texts. Rather, nature, the created order, should be recognized as something that Scripture also recognizes and that puts constraints on our moral or political vision.
In the modern era, revolutionary philosophies have always denied aspects of nature in order to refashion mankind in political or technological fashion. But the fundamental orders of society are natural: marriage and family, economic activity, political society. (The caveat must be made that these are not purely natural in distinction from being social, as if this division could be made. More on that another time.) Christianity does not overturn these natural orders, even as it promotes an ethic of love that transcends them.
While postmodernists and progressives chafe against the idea of “the natural,” Christians can and should accept “the natural” as an ethical category. The applications to sexual ethics are obvious. There is a long philosophical tradition of recommending a simple, natural life, the “life in accord with nature” that guided Stoic and Epicurean philosophy as well. The natural is an ethical category.
In particular, today, a denial of nature has given way to a philosophy of social constructionism. Progressives deny that there are biological differences between the sexes. They deny that sex has any bearing on how one should act in the world, and even that it can be changed. They deny that facets of social life are biologically determined, like the Pareto distribution with regard to income. All can be refashioned by social will.
When Christians do not accept nature, they open themselves to these arguments as well, placing their biblical convictions on shaky ground. Then the defense of nature is left to the evolutionary scientists, even though, in believing in evolution, they don’t really believe in nature either: All is change. The defense of nature for the good of man must be made by believers in the existence and ethical import of nature. Would that Christians were such.
And finally,
“Common grace” denies the reality of a common sphere of human knowledge and action, the realm of common ground between believer and unbeliever.
This morning, I was reading Emil Brunner as he described how much of Christian action in the world is not distinctively Christian but operates by common, natural principles. For my subscribers, I am making available a document with best quotes and thoughts from the chapter of Brunner’s theological ethics, “Autonomy, Natural Law, and Love.” I’ll write more about Brunner’s contributions to this discussion soon.
What Brunner says, and what I want to repeat, is that so much of the Christian life can and should be lived on common ground and in the public square. If our Christianity becomes private, subjective, and inward, it does the world no good.
But Christian action in public also does not require specifically Christian activity. Much of what we do is materially the same as what unbelievers do. Why? Because “Christian” is not a species! We are all human, and the common world we share has its own principles and laws by which it operates.
“Common grace,” however, implies that the only thing believers and unbelievers share is something that is added to nature. When we imply that cooperation is possible due to–only due to–common grace, we deny our common human nature and the world we share.
Now, in saying that we should operate in a common sphere with unbelievers, a problem we encounter is the lack of public spaces in American life in general. For example, before moving to a new urbanist town and participating in the national men’s workout group F3, I didn’t really have common spaces with unbelievers. These unique spaces and organizations create a public space that unites people on grounds other than their ideological beliefs.
The seminary I attended, Westminster Theological Seminary, set itself strongly against the idea of a common space of interaction and common knowledge between unbelievers: Believers have no common ground with unbelievers. Perhaps someone should start a coffee shop near Westminster Seminary called “Common Grounds.” It would disprove performatively their denial of “common ground with unbelievers.”
When our lives are private and atomized as they are today, we don’t have any common ground across or between religious and political divisions. We should search out places where common ground does exist. And when we find it, much of what Christians need to do is just to be good humans and citizens. All of a sudden, lifestyle evangelism doesn’t seem like a cop-out. You might actually know the same people for years on end. Opportunities to discuss matters of faith might actually arise naturally, once we have a level of trust with people due to our common natural and social lives.
In an atomized world, the only opportunity for evangelism is confrontation of strangers, a common evangelical strategy of Christians in the suburbs and urban areas of America. But this strategy, while I applaud the boldness it requires, gives a sense that grace is utterly disconnected from and contrary to nature. While it can be used by God, in many cases it’s equivalent to giving people the gospel without clothing and feeding them first.
For Christianity, the gospel, to be communicated to unbelievers, we need, first, to act together and cooperate in common spaces. We need the realm of nature as the sphere in which the gospel is introduced, to which it has relevance. The gospel offers a remedy to problems encountered in natural life, and we cannot have a voice to unbelievers unless we know them on this level first. The realm of nature, common ground, is a realm of preparation for the gospel.
There you are: Six reasons why Aaron Renn was right about common grace. The theology of common grace is hampering Christian engagement, leadership, and action in the public sphere. We must recognize instead the place of nature, both our common human nature and the good world God has created, the place of God’s law, and generally, all that is common between believers and unbelievers. On that basis, we can build a better public theology and act with resolve in the world. With a renewed public theology, evangelicals might, someday soon, be leaders in our society.