Culture Friday: Skipping over Genesis

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 11th of April.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is Andrew Walker. He’s a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary, and managing editor of WORLD Opinions.

Good morning Andrew.

ANDREW T. WALKER: Hey good morning! Good to be with you.

EICHER: Well Andrew, I wanted to start with your recent column, because I think it names something a lot of Christians are sensing but may not yet have put words to. It certainly resonated with me, a frustration I’ve felt.

You write that after years of cultural drift to the left, we’re now seeing some signs—particularly among younger Americans—of a rightward shift. But here’s the irony you point out: evangelicalism, which for so long lamented progressive influence, isn’t actually ready to lead in this moment.

And the reason for that is because too often, we’ve emphasized grace to the neglect of nature. You say, We’ve skipped over creation in our theology—focusing on the Fall, the Cross, and the Resurrection—but with no clear sense of what creation was for in the first place.

So when the culture begins to rediscover some creational goods, like family, masculinity, conscience, limits, the church doesn’t know what to say—or worse, it responds with embarrassment or dismissal.

So I’d love to start right there: What would it look like to recover a theology that embraces both grace and nature?

WALKER: Sure, that’s a really wonderful question.

Getting that relationship properly ordered is at the heart of what I think is going to be our answer for society.

One of the things I think we must understand is that when we consider the New Testament, there’s this phrase you’ll often see—not necessarily in the New Testament per se—but that theologians talk about. They talk about the idea that grace restores nature, that grace does not destroy nature.

What that phrase means in theological circles is that the life of redemption is not the total negation of our earthly life. Meaning, that when God created the earth, he created it very good. 1 Timothy 4 says that all things that God creates are to be received as gifts because they’re inherently good.

Now, obviously sin enters into the equation in Genesis 3. But a part of the redeemed life is having a renewed understanding of the intention for our humanity from the beginning. Then once we’re redeemed, how to relate that earthly life to our redeemed life.

One of the examples I’ll often give is Galatians 3. That talks about how when you’re in Christ, there’s neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Gentile. A lot of people think that is Paul exploding all of these earthly categories in a way that they no longer matter. That’s not what the Apostle Paul is getting at.

He’s helping us to understand that you retain those earthly qualities that you were brought into the world within. But there’s a new sotereological or salvivic horizon within which you now understand your earthly identity within.

So for me, what this means is, I have brothers in Christ that are true spiritual brothers, but the fact that Nick Eicher is my brother in Christ doesn’t mean that I forsake or abandon my earthly brother, Chris.

It means that I am made aware of what the various relationships I have in those various domains mean in their proper order and their proper relationship.

BROWN: You also write that some evangelicals treat creational goods—like authority, masculinity, even national loyalty—as red-state baggage: just politics that distract us from the church’s gospel task. What’s the cost of that? And how do we begin recovering those things without going too far?

WALKER: Sure, so let me say one thing off the bat. We’ve probably all been in churches where there’s maybe an ostentatious display of patriotism in unhealthy ways.

Leaving that aside, I think there’s been a trend in evangelicalism that has wanted to so celebrate our heavenly identity—kind of the idea that the kingdom of God is transnational—that therefore it eclipses your earthly identity to the point where you can’t have national pride in being an American. If you go back to that paradigm of a second ago, what “grace restores nature” means in the context of nationality is that you can love your country.

You can love your nation with a rightly ordered patriotism, but you have to love the kingdom of God more. Sometimes those things may come into conflict, and when they do, you are called to give that higher love to the kingdom of God. But insofar as there is no inherent tension, or there’s no conflict that’s causing a contradiction between the two, you can say, I am an American, I love being an American. I just love being a Christian more.

In fact, the life of the Christian informs our understanding of what our citizenship is going to look like, as we rightly order our patriotism within the boundaries of our country.

EICHER: Andrew, several weeks ago I asked John Stonestreet to respond to your column, and he had a slightly different take. Let me briefly summarize and then play a short excerpt so you can hear it in his own words.

John largely agrees with your framing—that the evangelical church isn’t prepared for a cultural moment that’s suddenly more open to creational goods like family, moral order, and natural limits. But he also offered a diagnosis of his own. He said the problem isn’t just that we’ve emphasized grace over nature—it’s that we don’t have a habit of thinking theologically at all. We’ve lost what he called our “theological muscle memory.”

Here’s that clip.

STONESTREET: So there’s not a sense of the church having a Christian worldview, a Christian view of reality that aligns with the revealed truth of scripture.

… [R]eligious experience is what matters and Christian truth doesn’t. Religious experience is what we’re after, and we go after that. Those are the limits of what we can know to be true about Christianity.

Now, of course, … that’s why I find it somewhere between interesting and bizarre to go back to a conversation we had not too long ago here: when somebody says that what needs to be changed about Christianity is how much they talk about worldview. It’s so ridiculous to me, because the thing that is missing is what we might call “applied theology,” the taking of what is true and thinking about the world through that lens.

Our problem is not that we’re talking about worldview too much. Maybe we’re not talking about it precisely enough. But the bigger challenge is that we don’t even think about faith in those terms.

So Andrew, I’d love to get your response. Do you see it the way John does? Is the real issue a deeper lack of applied theology—just a failure to think Christianly, full stop?

WALKER: It’s interesting. The discussion around Christian worldview is batted around in a thousand different directions. And that’s often a reality of what pocket of evangelicalism that you’re in.

If you’re in intellectual or academic circles within evangelicalism, worldview is talked about a lot. But if you get inside popular evangelicalism, it’s not talked about as often. I think that that is a demonstration of a tension within the evangelical world right now: that you’ll often have the intellectuals and the academics doing their thing and pop evangelicalism doing its thing over here.

I think what we need to be doing is figuring out ways to bring those two lanes together more often than we are.

Now, I want to give recognition to institutions like WORLD, Focus on the Family, and the Colson Center that are doing really good work at bringing Christian worldview to bear for a more popular-level audience. But I think the thing we must recognize is that our sliver of evangelicalism is perhaps smaller than what we want to recognize.

Because when you actually poll for theological beliefs with those individuals who identify as evangelicalism, there’s mass theological illiteracy. So perhaps, Nick, a little bit of this conflict is related to a polling problem of how you identify what an evangelical is.

If an evangelical is someone who has that religious experience and doesn’t really go to church and doesn’t really have a Biblical worldview, I’m not really sure that person is an evangelical.

To me, an evangelical is someone who has a heartfelt commitment to Christ, but that is realized in active engagement in a local church, and then they are trying to cultivate a Christian understanding of the world.

So maybe I can kind of split the baby and say, maybe better polling is the solution here.

BROWN: Andrew Walker is a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary. And managing editor of WORLD Opinions. Thanks!

WALKER: Thank you.

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