I had an opportunity recently to write a piece for Provocations, a journal of the Trinity Forum, on secularism (what else would I write about?). Here's a para I thought might interest the Mere Comments crowd:
I hope too that secularists will think carefully about what might be lost as they proceed to offer their arguments. Some years ago I protested to a fellow student, who was a fan of secularism, that Martin Luther King, Jr. effectively employed Christian theology and appealed to Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as he argued for racial equality. My friend replied that King would not have needed to do so if he had had access to a higher Marxian critique at the time. I wonder. Do we really suppose that something like a “higher Marxian critique” would have moved America to finally reject the dehumanizing logic of segregation? As long as we talk about justice, we will also be talking about God. If we lose (or forbid) the habit of talking about the latter, do we not risk losing the habit of caring about the former?
Prof. Baker: If you mean God's justice, which is no respecter of persons and deals with each according to His divine knowledge of the heart and His mercy mediated through Jesus Christ, yes, that will go away.
If you mean the type of justice expressed in "No justice, no peace," we will have a ton more of it, until we are all "justiced" right out of our homes, our incomes and our sanity.
Posted by: Michael D. Harmon | October 06, 2009 at 02:17 PM
"Do we really suppose that something like a “higher Marxian critique” would have moved America to finally reject the dehumanizing logic of segregation?"
In a word, no.
Posted by: James | October 06, 2009 at 05:28 PM