This tendency to affirm Scriptural fiats “for whatever reason” while isolating them from the natural theology employed by the human authors of Scripture is an attempt to be—as C. S. Lewis called it—“more spiritual than God.” But it will result—and already has resulted—in dramatic concessions to the anti-Christian culture. 

A conservative evangelical author was recently quoted in the Washington Post as saying that “Christ was God come to Earth, and for whatever reason He chose to come as a man.” I couldn’t help but cringe. “For whatever reason”? This seems to imply that the reason God became incarnate as a male is either a mystery we can never hope to solve, or even that the male incarnation was arbitrary. Perhaps Jesus could have accomplished His salvific work just as well as a woman! Statements like this one get to the heart of the evangelical crisis of authority—a crisis we could boil down to one question: Is there a discernible moral and social order built into creation, as the old Christian theologians thought—an order which Christ came to this world to restore and glorify—or do the graces of salvation and special revelation abolish the natural order in favor of something unprecedented? Is our journey toward the New Jerusalem to some extent a return to Eden, as John implies in the closing chapters of Revelation, or is it a journey to a different world entirely alien to Eden, and to this? Put more simply and less wordily, what are the ultimate reasons for God’s rules and revelation?

The implications of how we answer this are far-reaching. For instance, do we need explicit statements from Scripture to reach certain moral conclusions, or are these conclusions evident in nature and accessible via reason? Do we need chapters and verses condemning women in military combat roles, LGBT “spiritual friendships,” masturbation, or surrogacy, or can we reach conclusions about these things by reasoning from the created order? Catholics have historically said “yes,” producing a rich body of natural theology that gives moral guidance (however imperfectly followed) to members of that communion. I suggest most evangelicals, by contrast, can’t answer this question, or else they will answer it in the negative, believing that the doctrine of Sola Scripturarequires them to “remain silent where Scripture is silent.”

To offer a more controversial example, evangelicals who see my social media posts about intentionally childless couples often reply that not everyone is “called to parenthood.” There is a superstructure of philosophy and assumptions buried beneath that sentence. It implies a theology of marriage as an essentially companionate institution which is fulfilled without even the intention of being fruitful. It also implies that parenthood is a supernatural, rather than a natural calling. Instead of being a major part of the telos or purpose of marriage, it is an optional side-quest to which God may summon a couple via new revelation. For many evangelicals today, there is no prior mandate evident in creation to reproduce, or for that matter, to do or refrain from doing much of anything. Roles, duties, and moral facts which generations of Christians before us would have seen as self-evident now puzzle evangelicals, who take the view that whatever the Bible doesn’t forbid is allowed.

This puts them in awkward postures when it comes to arguing against things like same-sex marriage. After all, if we have already embraced the companionate model of marriage, what is the difference between two intentionally childless heterosexuals and two necessarily childless homosexuals? It’s hard to make the case that marriage, shorn of its procreative telos, is something of which complementary sexes are uniquely and exclusively capable. This is one of the main reasons we evangelicals have lost the cultural and legal wars on this issue. We already accept many of the culture’s premises, and have little besides special revelatory fiat with which to answer the inexorable chant of “marriage equality!” Even those feeble quips about two male electrical plugs not functioning which I used to hear from Christians so often growing up—crass-sounding but unintentionally shrewd natural law arguments that they were—are all but absent in evangelical discourse today.

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