Who Is the Natural Theologian?
Part 1 of my interview with New Kinship on secular studies, natural theology, and same-sex attraction.
Dear readers, two years ago, after having written on Substack five months, I received my first podcast invitation.
and invited me on their podcast New Kinship (then, “Communion and Shalom”) to learn about me, what it means to be a natural theologian, studying in the secular academy, and faith and sexuality.I have frequently gone back to this interview to get a sense of my own project and interests, which David and TJ so skillfully and kindly extracted from me. But I doubt that many of my readers have listened to the podcast in its entirety. For that reason, I will be releasing the interview transcript in three parts.
In Part 1, David and TJ ask me about my background and upbringing, the course of my education, and particularly how studying at a secular university shaped me as a Christian. In Parts 2 and 3, we’ll discuss what it means to be a natural theologian, whether sexual ethics is part of Christian orthodoxy, and why I came to support “Side B,” celibate, gay Christians.
Enjoy this first installment, and stay tuned for more!
David Frank:
Welcome to Communion and Shalom.
TJ Espinoza:
In this podcast, we are exploring how the biblical and historic Christian faith can engage sexuality, ethnicity, culture, and our local communities as we pursue the flourishing of God’s kingdom. Our goal is to engage these topics charitably and with nuance.
1. My Life and Background
David:
We are back for another episode with our esteemed interviewee, Joel Carini. Am I saying your last name, right?
Joel:
That’s correct, “Carini.”
David:
Is that Italian? What’s the background of that?
Joel:
Yeah, Italian. Or apparently, if you tell an Italian, they say it’s Sicilian.
(Correction: There is a town in Sicily named “Carini,” but my uncle told a Sicilian that “Carini” was Sicilian, and he said it was not.)
David:
Oh, okay. Interesting.
TJ:
Sicilian. Interesting.
David:
You just want to actually keep telling us a little bit more about yourself, where you’re from, where your people from, what household and local community are you part of?
Joel:
Yeah, absolutely. I was born and raised in Rochester, New York, which is nowhere near New York City. For people who aren’t from there, I have to clarify.
I was raised in a Christian home. My parents were both Christians. Their parents were Christians. And I grew up in a smattering of different evangelical kinds of churches, from the Wesleyan to the Christian Missionary Alliance. And then, for the majority of my childhood that I remember a Pentecostal church. And so that was my upbringing, public school the whole way.
And that was the main shaping thing for me was the Christian household and family there. Having just listened to your guys podcast on ethnicity wasn't too much connection, say, to the Italian roots.
My great grandfather, from what I understand, on the Italian side, had converted from Catholicism to Pentecostalism. And from there, my grandfather married someone on the basis of that shared faith, as opposed to the ethnic group. I’m, therefore, a mutt of the German and the Italian and Norwegian and different stuff.
So on the other side, my grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a Lutheran pastor, and from what they say, his father before him, and so on. So now I live in the St Louis area in Missouri, and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, at least, all went to Concordia Seminary here. So it’s a hub of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and that’s a cool thing to now have a connection to being in this area
But I ended up going to Wheaton College, and that coincided with kind of a time of spiritual growth and awakening for me that came towards the end of high school, as it does for some, a time of deepening and taking one’s faith for oneself. So that was that was then a formative time while at Wheaton, just to speed through and then leave room for you guys to dig into anything you want to.
From there, I met my wife at Wheaton College. We married right before graduation, and then we went to Westminster Seminary together for—we both studied for M.Div.’s.
David:
Her name is Anna, right?
Joel:
Her name is Anna, yeah.
David:
She’s got her own Substack too.
Joel:
She does! I got her on there when I learned about it. So now she’s writing and really enjoying it as well.
From there, we ended up going from Chicago to Philadelphia, for Westminster Seminary (PA). Then as I was discerning my calling, I thought there would be further academic study in my future. I ended up getting into the University of Chicago. We moved back to the Chicago area, and we again lived in Wheaton for another three years, and the degree was only one year. I commuted, but then I taught some classes as an adjunct philosophy prof at community college and different places for two years. During those years, I was trying to get into Ph.D.’s, because I wanted to do a Ph.D. in philosophy and bring philosophy and theology together.
I ended up getting into St. Louis University, which brought us now to St. Louis. And we made that move, as it happened, in the year 2020, as life was upended in other ways. And so we were actually reluctant to make the move, because we wanted to put down roots and plan ourselves somewhere. And God had other plans for everybody, it appeared.
So through all those events, we ended up moving to the St Louis area and and we now live in a community out in St. Charles, Missouri, a little bit outside the city, an interesting little community built on these new urbanist principles. And so, I’m a midway through the Ph.D., and that’s where I’m at in life.
(There have been changes since June 2023, when this podcast occurred!)
David:
Yeah, thank you. Just because the new urbanist communities are of particular interest, how long have you been in that community now, and how’s it been going?
Joel:
Yeah, less than a year into living in the St. Louis area, we stumbled upon it. I’d heard little things about this kind of community before, especially like Seaside, Florida, where the Truman Show was filmed, which is real place.
And, I just couldn’t believe that there had been one ten minutes away from where we were living. And we thought, “This is a place we could see ourselves living.” The one fundamental piece of New Urbanism is being in a walkable community, which many old cities were built on that model.
We are able to walk all sorts of places, including — I’m recording this at the podcast room in a co-working space that my neighbor founded and that I walked to an hour ago. We walk to get our mail. We walk to little restaurants out here. I’ve gotten to know a lot of neighbors, including many of the Christians who are living within walking distance of me.
As long as we’re getting out of the house, we are interacting with these people and having some of those visions of community really come to fruition. So that’s been wonderful.
David:
You know, loneliness is, some would say, the actual biggest epidemic that a lot of the world experiences and, notably, in America. Have you felt a tangible difference from just like the neighborhood layout?
Joel:
Yeah! I do feel like there’s something almost inherent to the architecture. We noticed this. We had ended up renting in, at least by new urbanist standards, the worst of suburbia for several months before we stumbled onto this place, called New Town.
That suburban neighborhood was one of those — there’s a large garage with a small house attached for the people to be stored in while their car takes a rest. You don’t really see the neighbors. The public space that you do have would basically be standing in your driveways, in a space made for cars and a big street that people race down. The fact that somebody stepped out of their house, it’s still a large distance, you can sort of ignore them. But when it’s closer, as it is you just you see each other, and you can’t help but interact.
The additional piece that I found in New Town was a men’s workout group (F3) that meets in the community I could walk or bike to; it’s early in the morning. And it just handed me some of the best men that are within the community and, through them, their families, a lot of Christians, some non-Christians. That facilitated a kind of social lubricant to really get to know people, which — we would have been able to wave to our neighbors and have those interactions, but that has been an added level of building local community.
David:
That’s terrific.
Joel:
Yeah!
2. How did you become Presbyterian?
David:
Well, jumping back into philosophy in first…
TJ:
Before we do that jump, I want to ask, can you tell us about your entrance into Presbyterianism?
Joel:
Sure.
TJ:
And I guess, because when I read your work, it seems like a prominent position that you’re operating from.
Joel:
Hmm, yeah. I mean, I would emphasize the Reformed theology, not so much that it’s gotta be “Presbyterian” per se, but absolutely.
That formative time I had talked about where I was growing in my faith and looking into matters of theology and the Bible more closely, I (not very uniquely) stumbled upon online resources that had a generally Reformed bent, some of them hailing from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where John Piper is. So those types of things started to get into my head.
And over the course of my time at Wheaton, I started to look for a church that embodied some of those principles and theology. Eventually, I stumbled onto something that was even a bit more specific, which was a Presbyterian Church near near Wheaton College, that delivered what I was looking for, and also a few steps and theological niceties more.
But the pastor there really took me under his wing and mentored me, and was a spiritual father to me, more formatively than any professors I had at the college. So that, and very soon after meeting my now wife, definitely wed me to Presbyterianism.
David:
She come from a Presbyterian background?
Joel:
She did. She grew up in a even smaller reformed denomination, the reformed Presbyterian Church, incidentally, the same one as Rosaria Butterfield.
TJ:
Oh, really?
Joel:
So she grew up in that and came to Wheaton and went to that church from from day one. So I’ve followed her and adopted some of her thinking, not on particular matters (exclusive psalmody), but generally, becoming Reformed and other things.
David:
Yeah, I share some of that history and trajectory from from Piper into PCA.
3. How did studying at a secular university shape your faith?
David:
You talked about going from kind of just theology and studies of the Bible into a Ph.D. in philosophy. Could you share how diving into philosophy in not just a narrowly Christian university has impacted your life as a follower of Jesus?
Joel:
Yeah, it very much has.
Half of my intellectual development happened during my time at Christian institutions, seven years at at Wheaton and Westminster, during which certain elements of my kind of intellectual approach were developing, especially this interest in philosophy complementing the interest in theology.
I knew I wanted to go to seminary and study theology, and I was looking into theology a lot in the blogosphere, and as lots of people do, I wanted to level that up to the the books and great works of Christian theology.
But the advice I received was not to study theology at college, given that I was going to do a seminary degree, but to get another discipline under my belt. And, I’ve seen this really pay off for different people who studied English or history, and for me, it was philosophy. It’s something that would complement and give perspective on all the ways that theology and philosophy intertwine. Not to mention, the idea of a Christian worldview, that it’s not just the specific Christian doctrines, but how our faith applies to other areas of life. And philosophy can facilitate that, hopefully.
So I developed that interest. Once again, my wife was already studying some philosophy and dragged me into that. We were both music majors, as it happened, so that was sort of the settled thing. But then I took on a philosophy minor.
But I can remember a switch even while I was at Wheaton. So within contemporary Reformed theology, especially online, there’s this thing called “presuppositionalism” as an intellectual approach, that says we have to start from all and only specifically Christian presuppositions and beliefs. You can’t argue to Christianity from the outside, because that would be assuming secular presuppositions. You have to start from sort of within the Christian circle. And this, this is the way to make sure that your beliefs are purely and truly Christian, rather than corrupted by some worldly or secular influence. And I had adopted that at some point.
But I can remember in a very particular philosophy class, with the same professor who shows up incidentally in Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting…
TJ:
Oh, really? Wow!
Joel:
…that I was dissuaded from that perspective and broadened that there’s truth that's very important to Christianity, that can be known apart from revelation, in particular moral truth. And that if people didn’t have this moral truth, the Gospel wouldn’t even speak to them if they didn't have an awareness of a sort of moral order. And I think this is embodied by the very first chapter—the very first page of Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis, where he’s talking about the way that people interact with one another morally and assume that there’s some moral law that we're all accountable to.
So I began to adopt this approach, and shortly thereafter, this made me interested in the approach of, Aquinas, faith and reason complementing one another.
As it happened, this was then the time that I entered Westminster Seminary, which I knew was committed more to the presuppositionalist approach, only starting from Christian presuppositions. But I wanted to go there for the Reformed theology, and I thought that this would would work out well. My interest in philosophy and in Aquinas was becoming very great at that point.
And from almost day one at Westminster, there was a very strong polemic against both philosophy and against Thomas Aquinas, and that led to intellectual conflict, frustration, isolation, and really a sense that a large portion of the Christian tradition was being left out over the time of my three years studying there.
I was also wrestling with this issue of calling: Should I become a pastor? Should I become a professor? And there was a pretty strong pressure to go more the pastor route. There’s plenty of theology nerds there who wanted to become the next Greg Beale, or Carl Trueman, or whoever the case may be—but a need to have a focus on the pastoral practice.
But over the course of my time there, I was left, and anytime I was tasked with writing a sermon, I’d be trying to stuff philosophy into it and trying to address these other questions. And some of that experience persuaded me that I at least need to go get this philosophy out of my system before, you know, anybody hands me the reins of Christian leadership in any way. So that that led me to want to go that direction.
Okay, so now I'm actually the point of being able to answer your question, which was my time in more secular institutions.
I definitely wanted to study philosophy at a secular institution coming out of Westminster. The degree I got into was a Master’s at the University of Chicago, which was the best educational experience of my life.
Let me share this contrast. So while at Wheaton, to somebody with my theological take on things, it was too intellectually broad. There weren’t enough boundaries or guardrails. That was at least a sense that I had, and I found it confirmed in different ways.
I went to Westminster, I desired to be at a place that had more of a dogmatic, “This is what we believe, and these are the boundaries within which we’re digging deeper into—with a shared perspective.”
But pretty immediately, I started to see the downsides of that. Many of the professors were also pastors, but a certain kind of pastor. So first semester, I came up with this slogan, “When preachers teach, dogmatics becomes dogmatic.” I found that we weren’t being encouraged to think, but being told what to think.
TJ:
Sure.
Joel:
And the fact that I agreed with some portion of what we were being told to think didn’t make me think that this was good enough for the ideal of Christian thought. So I found that restrictive.
I found that when we were assigned to read books, it was either, “This is a trusted source; we believe this.” And we would often be assigned all six of the greatest Reformed theologians on a given topic (all saying approximately the same thing). And we every now and then, we would be assigned someone we disagreed with, in order to disagree with them. For example, Karl Barth, we were given, “Read some Bard or some Neo-Orthodox in order to disagree. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”
TJ:
Yeah.
David:
Did you guys read the church fathers at all?
Joel:
Yes, largely through the the church history program and Carl Trueman, who bucked this trend that I’m describing. He was an exemplar of a broader intellectual approach, including the friendliness to Aquinas, to Catholicism, and and a desire to be more interdisciplinary, as he was an expert historian and had been in secular and reputable institutions before that. So he was definitely an influence in that.
And so then I stepped foot in the University of Chicago, and I didn’t know how this would go. This was very different than either Wheaton or Westminster, and there were some culture-shock moments, and I didn’t end up making a lot of friends or hanging out with people, because I was just on a very different trajectory in life. I was married. We were expecting our first child. I was not where most of the other 25-year-olds studying philosophy at a university were.
TJ:
Sure.
Joel:
So that aside, I stepped into the main reading room at the University of Chicago, this beautiful, Gothic room with a vaulted ceiling. And etched in stone above the doorway was this quote: “Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to weigh and consider.” This is a quote from Francis Bacon.
And this, to me, summed up what had been wrong at Westminster and what I wanted to gain by being at the University of Chicago, and I realized we had been reading books in order to either believe or to contradict.
And so while at Westminster, I had cultivated an additional reading list on the side where I was just trying to learn, weigh and consider, understand. And then the University of Chicago and my courses in the philosophy department allowed me to read works without the assumption that we all agreed on something. Sometimes there were little assumptions that worked their way in. But at least I was there just to weigh and consider and not to take courses from professors who agreed with me, or who, if I told them everything, I would have been okay with that. But it was a sort of neutral, intellectual space in which we could really think and develop our our own thinking, and not be told just what to think, but definitely be given tools of how to think.
There were professors there who greatly influenced me, and they weren’t the ones who shared my theological or philosophical proclivities per se, but the ones who truly taught us to think and broadened our minds. And so that was very formative.
And then, my experience adjuncting at schools that, once again, did not share a doctrinal statement, that was an opportunity then to try to teach things, including ethics, in a way where we don’t all agree on things. I don’t know what you think. I’m not gonna try to tell you to believe what I believe, but I’m going to sort of facilitate this discussion. It was a real exercise there—I mean, there’s some impulse from an evangelical background of, “Somehow I’ve got to sneak in the Gospel, just tell these folks to become Christians, these college kids.” I’m like a missionary in this secular college.
But I started to develop more the sense that I should do what those professors at the University of Chicago did for me, and I might be peculiarly equipped as a Christian, to do that. I don’t have—I was gonna say I don’t have a hidden agenda, but I don’t know if that’s quite true, but I can give them what I was given. And that isn’t salvation, but it’s something really good: People having the capability of thinking for themselves, seeing multiple perspectives. E.g., having an ethics class where they’re told, “Look, on each of these issues, there are coherent, intelligent and good people who think contrary to one another,” and just the broader perspective that that would give.
So now, I’m not at a secular university. Saint Louis University is a Catholic school, though, the professor that I’m working with for my dissertation is not a Christian, and holds a lot of the views of any other secular analytic philosopher. And I view that as a similar exercise of, “What can I learn from him, and what do we have in common?” And, “What is the benefit of just avoiding the stuff we disagree on, because we can have so much in common on other matters?”
Those would be some of the main things of what I’ve learned through that experience.
TJ:
Wow, I appreciate a lot of you said. I feel a lot of similar resonances with my own life as a student. So I appreciate that.
Joel:
Absolutely.
4. What is the spiritual problem with presuppositionalism?
David:
I’m thinking back to the contrast of the presuppositional framework to this kind of embrace of common ground outside of just the Christian worldview. Thing I'm thinking about—on the surface, the presupposition of, “We start in the Bible, we start with our presuppositions, so that we have a solid foundation where Christ is the cornerstone”— it sounds very, very Christian, very solid, very good.
But I’m thinking about, what kind of spirituality does that foster? I wonder how much that’s tied into some of these cultures of fear, of “We need to disengage. We need to disconnect, or even throw up a war against these other people or other perspectives, because we have no common ground.”
Joel:
Yes, I think that’s what it is!
Yeah, a friend and I have been talking about the idea that that thinking includes a risk, and there’s sort of an attempt in certain circles, if more theologically conservative, to just, like an insurance person, prevent the risk. Hedge against any risk. Put up those walls, and maybe put them in a little bit narrower than they they need to be just to be safe.
There’s a real danger there. People aren’t aware of that danger, because it’s the danger of not thinking. It’s the danger of writing people off. It’s the danger of claiming that things are primary issues that are secondary or tertiary issues and or—here’s an important one, claiming that things are “gospel issues,” that are somewhere else, or that there’s greater complexity to what a theological conservative, Al Mohler, called “theological triage.” It’s a term which has always stuck with me. I probably differ on certain elements of how to do that triage from Mohler. But the idea of figuring out what is the relative importance of each doctrinal point, and not prejudging it, but really thinking it through. I think that’s crucially important.
I also think it’s important to have different kinds of intellectual spaces. Within Presbyterianism, I watched these presbytery exams, where a young man who wanted to become a pastor would do a theology exam he’d be tested for, “Are you orthodox on all the points, including our hot button issues, or the places we draw a line that other people don’t draw a line?”
And my test for myself for a long time was, “Can I pass one of these? Can I be orthodox enough? Can I get myself to believe some things that I just don’t quite see in the Bible?” And I beat myself up over this. Eventually I got through, and did get myself licensed in the Presbyterian church.
But eventually I said, “This is the wrong standard. I need to just think things through and let the chips fall where they may. And it’s part of why the calling more of a Christian philosopher became appealing again. I mean, I’ve seen Christian philosophers. My critique of most Christian philosophers is that they’re heterodox. They do philosophize for themselves things that are actually answered in the Bible. And they need to engage with that and the Christian tradition more faithfully. (Catholic philosophers actually tend to be better in this way for that reason.)
But then, I saw at Westminster a more narrow approach that just didn’t allow—the goal wasn’t for people to think for themselves, but for them to think correctly, that having been already determined by previous generations.
And I continue to agree with 95% of the Westminster Confession, but I’m not going to beat myself up over the 5% that just allowing myself to think things through has led me in a different direction, a direction that actually might be more open to other parts of the Christian tradition.
So I do think that presuppositionalism—I’ve also heard it called “the retreat to commitment.” There’s a book by that name that is analyzing mid-20th century theological thought, both Barth, who has a version of this, and Van Til (the character from Westminster, who’s the presuppositionalist). But, it’s broader in the way that David was saying, of the fear of thinking incorrectly.
And so, we just retreat to commitment, as opposed to allowing what’s common, the common ground between believers and unbelievers, namely, the world.
TJ:
Yeah.
Joel:
And having some outside input of, “What is the world like? And how does that shape…”—I remember a day when I heard that the Wesleyan theological tradition said that experience was an essential part of theological method. I remember when I heard that thinking, “I don’t like that.”
TJ:
Yeah! (Laughter all around.)
Joel:
It’s got to be all the Bible!” Whereas, now I’d say, “Of course. That has to be part of it.
TJ:
yes.
Joel:
And so trying to have an intellectual approach that’s open to learning new things and other sources than just the Bible, kind of isolated from everything else which isn't actually how God gave us the Bible.
TJ:
No, not at all.
David:
Just something as insignificant as like Jesus was writing on a donkey that outside of the experience of a donkey, it’ll be a little bit hard to understand what's happening, there in the Bible.
Joel:
Yeah. I mean, do believers and unbelievers have different concepts of a donkey? That's what the presuppositionalist told me!
TJ:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I get that. I’m so glad you came on this podcast! Thank you.
Joel:
Thank you!
Coming in Part 2: Are sexual ethics a matter of Christian orthodoxy?
TJ:
We have a lot of questions, especially on your blog, related to being a natural theologian, natural theology, that sort of topic.
But first, can we get your thoughts on the concept of “orthodoxy?” Because we in the Side B community, or at least on our podcast, we want to start engaging this question orthodoxy related to these contentions over sexual ethics. Is progressive sexual ethics (Side A)—is this outside of orthodoxy? Is this a mistake? Is Side A a mistake, but they’re still within the realm of orthodox? Is orthodox not even the word to use? Those are some options.
But how do you think about this concept of orthodoxy? As a Christian who studied in seminary and is now oriented toward philosophy, how do you put these pieces together around orthodoxy?
Joel:
Yeah, yeah. So, a couple thoughts. One would be…
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