Calvin University professor James K.A. Smith made news this week by calling for the university to effectively “divorce” or, in his words, “unhook” itself from its denominational affiliation, the Christian Reformed Church.
According to Smith, Calvin University will fail to be authentically “Reformed” if it stays wedded to a “narrow dogmatism” that does not honor “courageous curiosity” while maintaining its commitment to upholding biblical views on sexuality and gender.
One can at least respect Smith’s honesty that issues such as biblical anthropology, which are upheld in Reformed confessions, are now, by his personal decree, matters of reasonable disagreement.
This column isn’t really about Smith as a person. It’s more about how certain ideas can influence someone’s beliefs over time. If you paid close attention to what Smith wrote years ago, it was already clear where his beliefs were heading.
In an earlier volume, Awaiting the King, Smith devotes an entire chapter to undermining appeals to natural law and natural law theory—the very things one would need to reject to affirm what Smith wants to affirm nowadays. The whole chapter simplistically caricatures the natural law tradition and fails to represent it accurately. He only sets up a strawman version of natural law to tear it down. According to Smith, natural law is too minimalist and ineffective in a world marred by sin. It fails to give a robust explanation of the revelation of who Christ is. In that chapter, he upholds some generic notion of “nature” as a feature of the biblical storyline, but he then says that nature itself cannot be rightly known apart from Special Revelation. This common critique does not withstand scrutiny when held up to sound interpretation and human experience.
Yes, people reject natural law—but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it. God’s moral law doesn’t misfire. Part of the reason people reject it is because sin has distorted human reasoning (Romans 1:21). But Scripture also says that people can knowingly suppress the truth that’s clearly seen in the created world (Romans 1:18–20). Nowhere does Scripture speak of creation order being wholly unintelligible or humans being entirely ignorant of its order. In fact, in the same set of verses, Paul says that God’s creation order is so teeming with moral order that people are “without excuse” when they disobey it (Romans 1:20). The Apostle Paul, in fact, focuses on sexual ethics to make this exact point. Homosexuality is a vivid rejection of the Creator’s design for our bodies.
Since both the Bible and natural law point to the same moral truths, it’s no surprise that Smith’s rejection of natural law in Awaiting the King eventually led him to reject what the Bible says about sexual ethics. You can’t keep rejecting natural law—especially the parts of natural law you don’t like—and still fully hold to the authority of Scripture. Morality is a package deal.
Christians can sometimes act as though nature is neutral and contestable, which fuels the unbeliever’s (ultimately vain) attempt to justify their ideological imposition on reality. But reality is not up for grabs. Creation order is a reflection of the Creator’s design, no matter what “cultural liturgies” one adopts.
The younger Smith questioned the usefulness of natural law theory, while the mature Smith now ostensibly questions the very existence of natural law concerning sexual ethics altogether. In effect, Smith’s commitment to Scripture really amounts to a deracinated biblicism that eventually leads him to reject the concept of nature altogether.
James K.A. Smith’s example shows that even a theology that claims to be “biblical” or “Reformed” can go wrong if it ignores what the Bible says about creation and natural law. If someone rejects the idea that creation has an order we can understand, their Christian ethics will eventually break down. In this way, Smith has become a theologian who stands against nature.
It now seems that Smith doesn’t just think unbelievers can’t understand natural law—he seems to reject it for himself, too. Only someone deeply skeptical that the created order can be understood at all would eventually reject the idea of creation order altogether.
Though Scripture reigns supreme over human reason, a better understanding of the relationship between revelation and natural law is to understand them as complementary. As I write about in my book Faithful Reason, moral truths taught in Scripture can be reasonably explained by appealing to reason because Scripture and natural law testify to the same moral order. The moral order of God is not divided between a morality for believers and a morality for non-believers. God is not schizophrenic in the moral order He creates. Faith and reason teach the same moral truths from different starting points. All of this follows from our understanding that the moral order God has created is orderly, observable, and intelligible. Yet, if you reject what Scripture teaches, we should not be at all surprised that you reject what nature teaches, too.
Leave aside all the ironies of Smith making this pronouncement, ironies like Smith warning evangelicals away from allowing corrupting loves to pollute orthodox faith. I cannot think of a greater contemporary example of theological tragedy than the parable of James K.A. Smith. He has become the very thing he has spent a career writing against, but we should not be surprised that this is where his journey has taken him. He already told us.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on April 10, 2025.
