Southern Seminary Magazine (Vol 90.1) The Light of Truth: Apologetics in the 21st Century

playing offense
Making Sound Arguments
Much of my role as an ethics professor at Southern Seminary
is convincing students that on the most controversial
issues of our day, the best answers are not only
Christian answers, but Christian answers are also the
most coherent answers one could offer to their secular
neighbor. To do public apologetics—to make arguments
in hopes of explaining and persuading—requires
us as Christians to understand the relationship
between faith and reason. We must understand the
reasonableness of the ethics we hold as Christians if
we hope to make arguments that would hope to see
individuals converted and culture more humane.
I’ll use a famous illustration to explain my point. In his
Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.
made a profound argument for overturning racist laws.
But it was not just the conclusion he reached that we
should agree with; it was how he got there, too. His argument,
which was intended to be publicly accessible and
persuasive for pricking consciences and changing laws,
appealed to the Christian natural law tradition. Citing
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, King argued that “an
unjust law is not law at all.” He wrote:
How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?
A just law is a manmade code that squares with
the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a
code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put
it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law
is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and
natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is
just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.
All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation
distorts the soul and damages the personality.
What King meant was that a law that purposefully
harms does not retain the actual power to command
obedience; it is thus not true law. Justice can never entail
the denial of what is owed to persons. That is, well,
unjust. A law, after all, is a standard or measurement that
obligates individuals to obey its precepts on the basis that
the precept advances some rational good. All truly sound
laws will reflect an ordinance of reason that directs persons
to their good. To say a law is reasonable means it
accomplishes justice. But a law that obstructs or thwarts
the good cannot be an actual law because it is unjust.
King argues that not only are racial supremacy laws in
violation of Christian theology, they violate all rational
grounds for justice as well. A true law reflects the principle
of justice. A law that does violence to one’s neighbor
is wrong because we can grasp the harm the law perpetrates.
We would ourselves not want to be on the receiving
end of that unjust law’s application. This explains the
logic behind the Golden Rule in Luke 6:31. Jesus assumes
that any action is just toward others insofar as it is the
type of action we would want applied to ourselves. No
one in their right mind goes looking to harm themselves
for no good cause, so likewise, any law that harms others
cannot obtain the grounds of justice, either. Crucially,
it’s worth noticing that King does not pit reason against
“Much of my role as an ethics professor
at Southern Seminary is convincing
students that on the most controversial
issues of our day, the best answers
are not only Christian answers, but
Christian answers are also the most
coherent answers one could offer to
their secular neighbor.”
26 the southern baptist theological seminary