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. 

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.

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