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

playing offense
true. That may sound like I am investing
too much weight or optimism in reason
itself. That’s not my intention. Instead, I
want us to understand that a secular progressive’s
refusal to agree with Scripture
also signals their refusal to agree with
what are ultimately the sound principles
of morality as such. Principles of morality
will be sound or they will not be,
regardless of the non-believer’s understanding
of their foundation. A non-believer
may want to argue that an apple is
an orange or a man can be a woman, but
if they insist upon an irrational conclusion,
a part of the task of apologetics is
not only offering sound foundations but
also sound principles for determining
the nature of reality and truth as such.
We can and should debate origins, but what we should
be concerned preeminently with, is truthfulness. If God’s
world is one of order, there must be truth to be understood.
If that is true, Christians are called to every sphere
of engagement for God’s glory.
God speaks with one voice in two ways: in Scripture
and in creation. Suppose we pit these two against each
other, as though faith and reason are opposites. In that
case, we do violence to Scripture and send the wrong signal
to unbelievers that they are justified to sever reason
from faith, as though there are degrees of knowledge incompatible
with faith.
Now, some aspects of reason may be incomplete, but
they are never incompatible with faith. For example, an
unbeliever might not know God as triune. Still, the same
triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is also the God
who rationally ordered a universe where all can know
injustice exists and should be rectified. Creation order
speaks (Psalm 19; Rom. 1:19-20). An unbeliever may
not be able to give account for the identity of the triune
God, but they could, in principle, understand that abortion
is wrong. And that’s because the world God created
is intelligible. It explains why non-Christians can make
wonderful discoveries or become experts in medicine:
the world has order to it.
Biblical Morality Is Truly Reasonable
Scripture speaks in a panoramic way when it comes to
morality. The whole edifice of Christian morality should
cause us to point our interlocutor to God because without
God, there can be no stable foundation of morality.
We should not let our secular neighbors off the hook
because they reject Scripture. We should also ask them:
from whence does your understanding of sound ethics
“The whole edifice of
Christian morality should
cause us to point our
interlocutor to God because
without God, there can be
no stable foundation of morality.”
derive? Morality reduces to two options: either (1) A
transcendently given morality that is universally true
and objectively accords with reason and reality as such,
or (2) a contingent, evolving neural mechanism promoting
dopamine-like sensations based upon group, preference,
and power.
If all moral knowledge is known exclusively by Scripture
rather than ultimately by Scripture’s testimony of God’s
sovereignty, we might unintentionally forfeit the ground
on which we’re called to play, which is everywhere. But
neither should we ever grant the premise that the morality
Scripture speaks of is anything ever less than truly
reasonable. Thus, to jettison Scripture, in other words, is
to jettison reason itself because the Lord is a God of reason,
not sheer will. God does not create Christian morality
“over here” and non-Christian secular morality “over
there.” The triune God is not only the God over salvation
but also creation, which means when God rationally orders
the universe, the morality that goes with it is not
bifurcated between “Christian” and “non-Christian.”
We see this in Genesis 1.
Genesis describes a creational order that bears witness
to creation as such, not simply a Christian view of
creation as though the world we inhabit as Christians is
different for non-Christians. No, there is one God, one
cosmos, one world, and one morality. The beauty of
Christian ethics is that properly ordered reason will always
harmonize with what Scripture teaches is true. Reason
is subordinate to Scripture but never at odds with it.
There is no tension and can never truly be. God is not a
God of chaos, irrationality, or contradiction.
Our ethics are never less than biblically rooted, but
biblically rooted ethics necessarily spin us outward. Our
knowledge is not valid insofar as it only agrees with
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