Why Aaron Renn Is Right About Common Grace

Leadership requires the assumption that at least some of our instincts are not totally sinful. It requires an anthropology in which our nature is, at root, good.

Last night, I listened back through the podcast of Aaron Renn’s in which he suggested that the theology of common grace hampers Protestant leadership and public engagement, “Why Evangelicals Are Not Leaders in Our Society.” (The relevant section begins at 20:56.)

It was the first I had heard “common grace” blamed as the source of our problems since my friend Joel Zartman had identified it as such at Westminster Theological Seminary. (Apparently, he had identified it as such several years before.) “Hocus pocus,” he called it, referring to the way it allowed Reformed theologians to claim that nature was radically depraved and destroyed after the fall.

While we two Joels found “common grace” lacking for its denial of the possibility of natural philosophy, Aaron Renn is a bit more practically attuned. His argument is that this theology plays out in a lack of leadership and action in the public square by evangelicals but more a plan of retreat or quiet, “faithful presence.” The suggestion that an otherwise esoteric theological quibble had massive practical import appealed to me. I have now spent five posts discussing the shortcomings of Common Grace Theology, as well as discussing related matters in other posts.

After listening again, several more reasons came to mind why the doctrine of common grace leads Christians away from a faithful approach to public engagement. Today, I’ll discuss three, and tomorrow three more.

1.

First:

“Common Grace” suggests that what Christians need to perform well and faithfully in their callings is distinct from that which is necessary and present everywhere else.

How so? By attributing all good outside the church to “common grace,” Christians implicitly accept that all they really need is God’s special grace and special revelation. We have parallel paths to truth for believers and unbelievers, but neither of them is rooted in the shared nature of both as human.

For example, the Christian will get Christian parenting advice, while the secular people make do with secular parenting advice, for which Christians have no use, and which is of value only if it was affected by common grace.

Now, here as elsewhere, proponents of Common Grace Theology will argue that “common grace” does exactly the opposite: Given that it gives God’s gifts to unbelievers, Christians have every reason to embrace those gifts and receive God’s common grace also, gleaning insight from secular sources. I am glad for this practical outcome, but it still devalues the insights of unbelievers by misinterpreting their origin. The account is that Christians get truth from special revelation, unbelievers get it from common grace, and Christians can also benefit from common grace. But there is no recognition here of the commonality of Christians and non-Christians as created, as human. This means there is a misunderstanding of what it means to be Christian and what it means to be human. After all, aren’t Christians also, or perhaps first, human?

2.

This leads us to a second problem with common grace:

“Common grace” suggests that this world, nature, and the secular are entirely evil.

Think about the idea of the “secular.” As others have noted before me, the Latin root of “secular” and what is still the fundamental meaning of the word is “of this age.” Christians often use the word as a synonym for the basically “godless.” That is, it refers to the world, to nature, as obliterated by the fall.

But doesn’t the Christian life have an important and ineradicable “secular” element? We live in the world. We act in the world. We have a nature that is part of the fabric of this world.

To be even more concrete, the secular element of life comes to the fore in the sphere of Christian good works, a point Emil Brunner made well. Doing good works requires operating in accord with nature and with the nature of the people for whom we are acting.

This means it requires an understanding of nature on its own principles, autonomously. It also means Christians have no exclusive expertise on the matter. If Christians and Christian organizations want to do good in the world in financial matters, they would do well to practice good accounting, something on which they have no exclusive expertise. What is more, hiring a Christian accountant will not be as good as hiring a good accountant, whether Christian or not. The principles of accounting must be understood and followed, and these principles are “autonomous” in the sense that they do not arise from Christianity itself but from the nature of the thing, in this case, money and the relevant legal and financial structures.

Another example of recognizing the goodness of the secular and of our nature is what Aaron Renn describes as a condition of leadership. To lead or take any action in the world requires a sort of confidence. In acting, we take ourselves not to be totally controlled by bad motives. Leadership requires the assumption that at least some of our instincts are not totally sinful. It requires an anthropology in which nature is, at root, good.

Renn also comments on how Christianity often makes you worse at leadership, which means, worse at acting in the world. He identifies this element as Buddhist, and I might add Anabaptist. You think that grace is contrary to nature, which is the view that arises when you view nature as empty or as totally depraved. “Common Grace,” as used today, implies that view of nature and total depravity. As a result, it must view grace, whether common or special, as acting against nature. Thus, even if a Common Grace Theologian affirms explicitly that grace restores nature, we must ask whether it restores a nature that has been destroyed or merely mortally wounded.

3.

And third:

“Common grace” suggests that only specifically Christian forms of knowing are legitimate or necessary for the Christian life.

The idea that we must always go to the Bible and adopt a uniquely Christian worldview can, in fact, betray the lack of a Christian view of nature. On this approach to knowledge, you can’t trust the eyes God gave you or common, human methods of knowledge-acquisition. If Christian knowing must be separate and unique, then Christians will end up siloed off from the rest of society in their thought and action.

This is why, on political and worldly matters, I trust most those Christians who became so later in life (like Aaron Renn himself, C. S. Lewis, Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw, Luke Smith). Their “worldliness” is not all bad. The world is good as created by God, though bad as fallen. But even then, it is the world’s goodness that is reflective of its created nature; the fall causes a privation with respect to a fundamentally good creation.

Christians want Christianity to do or take credit for doing way more than it does. Culturally, Christianity may be responsible for a ton (as even Tom Holland, not himself a believer, has argued). In principle, even this Christian influence on the West is the fruit of human nature, even if as restored by grace.

Still, much of what we need to live fully Christian lives is fully available to the secular world, and the secular world often does it better. We actually need to have good organizational skills to run churches and other institutions, and this expertise can be found all throughout the secular world. We need wisdom from observation of human nature, and many bestselling books of psychology offer it. We need to maintain intact families, and contrary to their own messaging, American elites are remarkably adept at doing so, even while they recommend sexual freedom for everyone else.

So far, three reasons why “common grace” hampers Christian engagement in the public square. Tomorrow, I’ll detail three more.