The Common Good
Apologetics has served as a fitting foil to the modernist atheist critique. However, I worry that as our culture becomes increasingly postmodern, those lofty abstract arguments will fall on deaf ears. Our efforts to encourage people to look to the heavens will require us to pull our heads out of the academic clouds and reformulate our apologetic arguments from the ground up.
Thankfully, there is hope because, despite the best efforts of our modernist friends, God isn’t dead; rather, He is experiencing what apologist Justin Brierley describes as a “surprising rebirth.” While the data indicate that the percentage of religiously unaffiliated individuals (Nones) is growing, their enthusiasm for spiritual matters hasn’t faded; instead, it has been redirected toward non-traditional spiritualities that focus on shovel-ready social justice projects. Religion isn’t a thought experiment for these Nones but an action item. Young people are less interested in proofs of God’s existence than in tangible demonstrations of His goodness. Rather than reading about His omnibenevolence in apologetic textbooks, they want to see Him walk the great-making talk.
The good news is that the Bible offers the common good they so desperately seek. God’s creative process is uniquely portrayed as a spoken word performance—a six-day lecture series filled with “good” content delivered in a rhetorically “very good” manner. Goodness springs from the soil, swarms in the seas, creeps along the ground and grazes in the fields. Even now, when it seems frayed and worn, we still find a Made in Heaven label tucked inside its collar.
The ability of our young people to hear the heavens declare also makes them exquisitely sensitive to its cries for help. We need to applaud them for attending to a weeping wilderness but then point out that they do so in response to a distant memory of the “good” old Garden days. Our youth not only hear the planet’s groans but also understand that it is humans who have put it in bondage. While their methods for calling out the perpetrators are often extreme, they at least recognize that humans must change if the world is to be set right.
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. (Romans 8: 19-24)
Sadly, they often relinquish the bully pulpit to Big Brother and fail to hear their Father’s voice. Instead of fixing the planet by claiming their place as children of God, they settle for being foster children in the nanny state.
We must show them that their perception of the world as blessed but broken is biblical. We should praise their instincts for tending to a wilderness of thorns and thistles but then ask them why they pine for Eden. We must help them see that the God of the Bible authored the Book of Nature, and their environmentalism is an act of divine textual preservation. We need to congratulate them on their efforts to save rain forests, rescue beached whales, and prevent the extinction of endangered species, but then show them that their ecological instincts arise from a desire to preserve every “good” word that comes from the mouth of God.
The common good that God displays in the rising sun and falling rain is also the common grace He extends to both the just and unjust, providing us with common ground upon which we can build a compelling apologetic for an ecologically motivated yet theologically confused postmodern generation.
God's Screenplay 