Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Thought Life

Home
Evangelical
Making Men Moral: Greg Thornbury on the Enlightenment, Natural Law, and Christian Witness

Making Men Moral: Greg Thornbury on the Enlightenment, Natural Law, and Christian Witness

Last updated on: February 27, 2009 at 3:51 pm by Owen Strachan

Making Men Moral: Greg Thornbury on the Enlightenment, Natural Law, and Christian Witness 2009-02-27T15:51:28-07:00 Owen Strachan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

moral19 The biography of the conference’s last session speaker, Greg Thornbury:

“Gregory Alan Thornbury, PhD is the founding Dean of the School of Christian Studies at Union University, where he teaches philosophy and theology. Since 2002, He has served as Senior Fellow for The Kairos Journal (New York), an online research tool designed to help pastors and church leaders engage public square issues. The editor of two volumes and the author of numerous essays, his work has appeared in The American Spectator, Breakpoint Magazine, and other publications. In addition to his work at Union University, he has become a popular campus lecturer and conference speaker on the intersection between theology and culture.”

The following are the remarks of Greg Thornbury from his talk “Mugged by the Enlightenment: The Prospects for gregthornbury-1501 Natural Law & Christian Witness in a ‘Show-Don’t-Tell’ World.”

Irving Kristol memorably said, a neoconservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” According to Thornbury, a young evangelical today is one who has been mugged by the ugly idea that their beliefs make them a social leper.

Are fewer and fewer people listening to evangelicals today, we wonder? If, as I will argue, people are irrepressibly religious beings, why is secularism advancing so rapidly in Europe and now America? I will attempt to trace this out. If some of this sounds like a mea culpa, then that is certainly intentional. If the Christian community is indeed interested in a future for “making men moral.” then perhaps it is appropriate to begin not with an apologetic, but with the words “I’m sorry.”

Having noted the foibles and subsequent decline of Western institutional religion, I move on to discuss the persistence of transcendence and the reality that secularism fails to offer a better solution for cultural flourishing. Finally, I want to look at two key ideas: reason and revelation, and ask if there is hope for rapprochement between natural law and theologies of revelation when it comes to the project of re-introducing the Christian witness to the Western world?

In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche inscribed in his notebook that “God is much too extreme hypothesis.” Depsite earnest attempts to do away with it in modern times, however, it seems clear that religion cannot and will not go away. Faith shapes culture. It is simply a matter of which belief system a society chooses and how effective that faith is at nourishing the animating impulses of a people. Which religious expression/identity will capture the minds of this generation? Goethe put it well: “The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinions of its young men under twenty-five.”

Wars of Religion: Public Damage to Christian Credibility
Secularism becomes plausible in light of certain events in 17th and 18th-century Europe. The first event is Savanarola’s attempt to purify the church in 15th-century Florence. Despite his best efforts, he was condemned by Rome and eventually burned at the stake. Niccolo Machiavelli took note of this and concluded that what mattered for the supposedly religious prince was not religious zeal but the power to enforce one’s will on others. Those who have followed Machiavelli have concluded one of two things about the Church: it is either corrupt or moralistic.

The 16th and 17th centuries did little to help this situation. The French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), with such awful events as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, still live on in infamy. It seemed clear in this age that religion was inextricably connected with violence, a claim that is hard to shake. Martin Luther also did not help the situation much. With his “two kingdoms” model, Luther sowed the seeds for the demise of religion’s role as a source of cultural authority. Certainly Luther could not have imagined a Germany in which the princes would no longer take stock of their religious heritage. On the heels of the Reformation, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) further besmirched the reputation of religion’s involvement in matters of the state.

The Plausibility of Secularism
The wars of religion had a deep influence on leading European thinkers. Voltaire cried, “Crush religious superstition!” And when Kant declare, “Sapere aude,” or, have courage to use your own reason (the Enlightenment’s motto), we can see the impetus behind this declaration of cultural independence from the dictates of the clergy and the theologians.

In the English-speaking world, no philosopher levied a more trenchant critique of theology’s role in forming government than Thomas Hobbes. The author of Leviathan sought to remove political questions from the arena of theological debates, and turned them into a science of common sense and natural justice. The 20th-century did not realize the inflated dreams of the Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Voltaire. The First and Second World Wars, Mao’s Revolution, Stalin’s slaughter of innocents, and the killing fields of Cambodia wrought horrors of proportions never previously seen. In the place of a literal hell to punish those who did evil in this life when they die, George Steiner observed in 1970, modern ideologies had instead relocated hell above ground. The problem, then, seemed not to be religious ideas about man, but man himself.

Certitude, resultingly, is in short supply today. As a result of these disillusioning events, many people today buy fully into the postmodern project to subvert, resist and undermine ideologies that oppress groups who live on the boundaries of culture. And yet nihilism seems scarce today. Thornbury heard an NPR interview with David Bowie some time ago in which Bowie confessed that his music had become more hopeful and transcendent with the birth and growth of his child. Despite this kind of thinking, prevalent today, a more substantive response is necessary to best handle the renewed cultural interest in transcendence.

Hope for Rapprochement Between Natural Law and Theologies of Revelation
I have been something of a skeptic when it comes to the persuasive power of natural law in matters related to public square issues. I was profoundly influenced by theologian Carl F. H. Henry, who had little truck with natural law theory. He mentored me and exercised a profound influence on my thinking, for he had a staunchly revelation-centric epistemology. Others in recent days have also questioned the efficacy of natural law in questions of morality that don’t get into theology and revelation. Straussians, for example, doubt the potential of the natural law approach to solving matters like the marriage debate. The consense on natural law seems to have weakened some.

Sometimes, Jedi mind tricks work, as in Episode Four with the storm troopers. Sometimes, however, you run into Jabba the Hut. Stephen Pinker is Jabba the Hut (showed a picture of Pinker, much laughter). Quoted Pinker at length, noting that his assessment was neither right or insightful, but proceeds from a strong sense of gamesmanship. Try as you might to persuade an audience that your position on human dignity is derived purely from natural law, Pinker claims, as long as bear the stigmata of being a Christian, you might as well go ahead and cite Scripture passages in support of your position. We’re going to fall prey to guilt by association one way or the other.

Also, people often embrace truth through their passions, their pre-theoretical faith commitments, not always through the exercise of reason. Michael Polanyi has pointed this out.

Despite these concerns, all hands are needed on deck. These concerns about natural law are being addressed. Example: John Wilson-Michael Novak exchange in Books and Culture over Novak’s No One Sees God. On the one hand, Wilson notes, Novak forcefully counters the New Atheism by use of the rational proofs for God’s existence. On the other hand, Wilson notes that both the atheist and the believer must live in darkness. At first, Thornbury thought Wilson had Novak in a bind. However, Novak countered in National Review that in the world of the heart, there is a “dark knowledge of “the cloud of unknowing.” The heart has its reasons that reason cannot comprehend.

Thornbury also read J. Budziszewski published his essay “Natural Law Revealed” in Firs Things, where the professor spoke eloquently of the ways in which the book of revelation affirms and narrates the mirror of nature. This resonated. Nothing could restore the fortunes of historic Christianity more in postmodern times than a unified thesis of public reasons for traditional morality complemented by an authentic recognition that there is an existential dimension for why people disagree with our views on marriage, abortion, and other related life issues.

Hope for the Church After the Crisis of Faith in Institutional Religion
The church’s failure to resist the Nazis weakened its cultural position, and understandably so. It was not the Protestants but the Catholic German territories that protested against the Nazis, while many German Christians of other groups welcomed the Fuhrer with open arms. Quoted Bonhoeffer at length to make the point that he believed that the church from this point forward would need not to seek great things for itself, but rather needed to seek the welfare of the actual communities in which churches find themselves. Therefore, everyone should see that the church is there, for them and for their children. We need this kind of Bonhoeffer-like witness. It is not quietism–Bonhoeffer protested all the way to the gallows. He called on fellow Christians to be prophetic. But he realized that the church’s structures of power had failed in the Second World War. The prophetic tradition must be strong, as it had been in protesting slavery, and the excesses of Roman culture, and in many other eras. This must be manifested in a life–it was Christians who stayed behind in times of plagues in centuries past, while the elites and bluebloods fled. This had a powerful effect on the culture.

Conclusion
We pray now that young evangelicals would not be so concerned that the culture does not like us, but that would seek to be “in the city, for the city,” being the moral conscience of the culture.

My Take
Following the talk, Francis Beckwith of Baylor University responded to the talk. Here’s where things started to heat up, as Beckwith responded to Thornbury’s critique of natural law. There wasn’t time for heated debate, but it was clear that much could be said.

I’m not going to get into the natural law-theology of revelation debate here. I don’t have the time or energy right now to do so. I would commend the audio to you for further inquiry into this subject. I will say that I very much appreciated Thornbury’s call for the church to retain its prophetic witness in the culture. I liked very much that he called for young evangelicals especially to not bury their heads in their hands over their loss of cultural influence, but to work very hard to be salt and light in the broader culture. This is surely the right approach to the loss of Christian influence in our society, and in all societies.

Thornbury is a fun speaker with a lively mind, an eloquent pen, and a clear heart for the church. I like very much that he doesn’t join the chorus of commentators who slam Carl Henry, but instead recognizes that he was a tremendously gifted Christian leader who is far less intellectually spotty or unaware than is sometimes claimed. Carl Henry had his faults, as we all do, but he does not deserve to be swept under the rug. He is the most significant evangelical theologian of the 20th-century, and he deserves to be remembered as such and appreciated for it.

We are now heading off to chapel, where Robby George is speaking. Following that, I’ll be blogging the final event of the conference, a lunch at which Hadley Arkes of Amherst College will speak. The conference, just for the record, continues to be intellectually stimulating and very well-executed.

theology of revelation

two kingdoms

voltaire

Previous Post

February 27, 2009

Making Men Moral: A Conversation with Robby George, David Novak, Jeal Belke Elshtain, and Harry Poe

Next Post

February 27, 2009 Making Men Moral: Robby George's Chapel Message, the Conference Keynote

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category "heaven is a world of love" 9Marks abortion academics Adam Sandler adoption adultery adulthood aesthetics aging ajith fernando al mohler alice walker America american education american shaolin apologetics architecture atheism atonement august rush barack obama baseball basketball batman beauty berry mauve or muted wine Bible biblemesh biblical studies biblical theology biblical womanhood billy wolfe blogging bob kauflin body book culture book reviews boston celtics boston college bowdoin college bowling alone boyce college boyhood Brooke Fraser Bruce Ware bullies bullying business business ethics C.S. Lewis calling calvinism canada Capitol Hill Baptist Church carl henry carl trueman carolyn mahaney cbmw celebrity Chicago child's play children Christ Christ and culture Christian education christian hedonism christian ministry Christian vocation christian womanhood christianity and culture church government church history church internships church life church matters blog church membership church planting cities CJ Mahaney colin adams college college admissions college life college ministry collin hansen complementarianism conferences congregational worship conservative thought consumerism conversion council on biblical manhood & womanhood council on biblical manhood and womanhood covenant life church creativity credo magazine credobaptism cross movement crossway books crucifixion culinary culture cultural engagement cultural theology culture culture shift d. a. carson dads daily mail dan barry dancing with the stars daniel dennett darrell bock dating David Barash davy rothbart death death of God debt desiring God developmental league devotional thoughts dick morris dining disability discipleship doug sweeney douglas groothius economics economy education egalitarianism eliot spitzer ella rose strachan enlightenment entrepreneurs entrepreneurship environmentalism Eric Metaxas ethics evangelical theological society evangelicalism evangelism extended adolescence extreme home makeover family fatherhood feminism fiction film flame food foodstuffs football four gospels frank miller friendship gay gay Christianity gender roles genderblog george marsden girltalk gk chesterton God gospel gospel of John gospel risk gq greek mythology guillermo del toro happiness harold ockenga Harvard health heaven height hell henry center herb london higher education hillsdale hip hop historical theology history holidays holiness Holy Spirit home-school homemaking homes homosexuality hope human dignity human flourishing human life image of God imagination intellectual Christianity intellectual life iron man Islam J.I. Packer james mcavoy James Q. Wilson jeremy lin Jesus Christ jim hamilton joe namath John Calvin John McCain john owen john piper john rockefeller jonathan edwards journalism justice justin taylor kairos journal keira knightlet la times leadership lesbian life of the mind Lifeway links literature Lord's prayer louie giglio love male sex drive mall manhood manners Mark Dever Mark Driscoll marriage mars hill martial virtue martin luther masculinity materialism matthew hall maureen dowd memoirs of an ordinary pastor mentoring military millennials ministry missional missions monergism moral argument morality motherhood music national review nba new atheism new england New Testament new york new york times new yorker newsweek nietzsche northeast notre dame npr obedience oprah oprah's big give orphan care overheated prose award owen wilson pain parenting Park Community Church pastor-theologian pastoral ministry pastors persecution philosophes philosophy political philosophy politics poverty prayer preaching presidency presidential race pro-life professors proverbs psychology public school public square public theology publications quebec quilting race racism radical womanhood rap music rc sproul rebecca walker Reformation 21 relevant magazine religious liberty resources revelation revival richard dawkins richistan risky gospel robbie george robert putnam ron chernow Russ Moore salvation salvo magazine sam harris same-sex attraction sanctification scholarship science scripture secularism seminaries seminary life sex sex drive sexual ethics sexuality sexualized culture shooting sacred evangelical cows shootings simple church singleness social justice social media social networking Southern Baptists southern seminary sovereign grace Spanglish spirituality sports sports illustrated sports injuries stanford steve mccoy suburbia suffering superhero t. suzanne ellder Tea Leoni technology television the darjeeling unlimited the gospel coalition the southern baptist theological seminary the wackness theological journalism theology theology of work thinking Thom Rainer tim challies tim keller time magazine titan Together for the Gospel tom carson tom wolfe tragedy transgender travel trinity trinity evangelical divinity school truth twitter ty pennington unashamed workman Uncategorized violence virtue vocation voddie baucham war wayne gretzky wayne grudem weddings wikipedia will smith williams winnie hu womanhood work world magazine worship writing youth sports

Select a Month August 2021 July 2021 May 2021 March 2021 December 2020 October 2020 June 2020 February 2020 January 2020 October 2019 August 2019 June 2019 May 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 October 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 November 2017 October 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which Psalm is often read at funerals: "Even though I walk through the valley..."?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Psalm 51 Psalm 90 Psalm 137 Psalm 23