SOUTHERN SEMINARY'S WALKER URGES "CIVIC THEISM."
MOUNDS
VIEW, Minn., April 26,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- "Christians should be willing to
confront secularism head-on," said Dr. Andrew T. Walker of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in remarks
delivered at The North Church, Mounds
View, as the last event in Bethlehem College and Seminary's 2024 Spring
Lecture Series. Walker currently serves as Southern Seminary's
Associate Dean in the School of Theology, and Associate Professor
of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is also the Director of
the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement.
"It is a privilege for us to host someone whom I
personally regard one of the leading Baptist theologians of our
day," said Bethlehem College and
Seminary President Dr. Brian J.
Tabb. "The church and academy are both blessed
by his scholarship on religious liberty, statecraft, and political
theology," he added.
In an address entitled "The Naked Public Square is Very Cold in
Winter," Walker borrowed on a phrase coined by Richard John Neuhaus in 1984. Surveying the
current situation, Walker said, "If America was on the verge of a
naked public square in the 1980s, we've learned that without God,
the public square has grown quite cold and inhospitable to human
civilization."
He told an audience of students, faculty, church members, and
guests from the general public, "Modern secular morality is
bankrupt, barbaric, and brittle. It is deeply irrational. Where it
isn't, it is borrowing from Christianity." Walker further stated
that "Secular morality has no satisfying answers to humanity's
deepest questions. It is a cesspool of relativism, therapeutism,
and hyper-individualism."
Walker called for a new season of "Civic Theism," a doctrine
arguing that human beings have an innate, non-salvific awareness of
God's moral laws that makes them eligible for participation within
political communities. "It is good for regimes to establish their
own way in determining how to acknowledge God within the apparatus
of government and the broader public order, but acknowledge him
they must," said Walker.
Widely recognized for his scholarship on religious liberty,
Walker hastened to add, "We should call for a theocentric moral
vision for America but do so with humility, which is why the First
Amendment's commitment to religious liberty matters as much for
Christians as it does for America more broadly."
"I have no pretenses for 'taking America back for Christ' in
some God-and-country sense; no, we need to preach the Gospel of
Jesus Christ amid the ruins of
secularism," Walker said. "Christians need to be there when reality
snaps back and people find themselves burned out and dejected from
bottoming out on secularism," he added.
Bethlehem College and Seminary
is a churches-based, degree-granting institution with its main
campus located on the site of Bethlehem Baptist Church,
Minneapolis, and evening classes
conducted at The North Church, Mounds
View, Minnesota. The school offers both undergraduate and
graduate degrees. The college is in the model of classical and
Christian education, while the seminary focuses on equipping of
biblical elders for the tasks of pastoral, missionary, and academic
ministry. The seminary maintains a separate location in Yaoundé,
Republic of Cameroon, in
cooperation with Église Baptiste Bethléem, a church planted by one
of its graduates. Bethlehem
College and Seminary is accredited by the Association for Biblical
Higher Education Commission on Accreditation.
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SOURCE Bethlehem College and
Seminary