Grace presupposes nature

The first time R.J. Snell read that line from Thomas Aquinas—followed by the second, “grace perfects nature”—it blew his world open. Listening to him unpack it on Created in the Image of God, I realized it also names something I’ve been circling around for years: the conviction that God doesn’t come to erase our humanity, but to complete it.

In much of the Christianity he and I grew up around, “nature” meant something like: the stuff you tolerate until you can finally escape to heaven. Music, art, serious study, craftsmanship, even ambition—these were at best distractions, at worst temptations. You get saved, you hang on, and you try not to be too “worldly” while you wait for evacuation.

R.J. grew up in a rural Baptist context where the unspoken assumption was that most of what human beings can do—beyond evangelism and basic decency—was spiritual clutter. There were stories of schools literally building their buildings to last only 30–40 years because they “knew” the rapture would come by then. Why invest in structures meant to outlast the end of the world?

Then Aquinas landed in his lap: grace presupposes nature; grace perfects nature.

In other words, God’s grace doesn’t arrive on the scene to annihilate what we are. It presupposes that what we are is worth working with. It doesn’t stand over against our humanity as an invading army; it enters into our humanity to heal it, elevate it, and bring it to fullness. As R.J. put it: “I didn’t have to be afraid of my humanity, because God was not afraid of my humanity.”

That’s not just personal therapy; it’s a revolution in how we think about culture, education, argument, and hope in a fractured society.

Because if grace presupposes nature, then:

The garden was never meant to be a museum where the sign reads “Keep off the grass.”
The intellect was never meant to be a weapon for tribal combat.
And hope was never meant to be either naïve optimism or pious despair dressed up in religious language.

It was meant to be a way of inhabiting this world—a very physical, political, cultural world—as people who believe God actually likes what He made.

From Pristine Garden to Garden City

R.J. introduced me to a biblical image that reframed Genesis for him: the movement from garden to garden city.

We often imagine Eden as a pristine showpiece: God plants the perfect garden, drops Adam and Eve into it, and their job is essentially to avoid breaking anything. You can almost see the “No touching the flowerbeds” sign.

But if you pay attention to the text and the storyline, something else emerges. The garden is the beginning of something that is supposed to grow, fill, and be cultivated. By the end of the biblical story, what we see is a city—a garden city, full not only of God’s handiwork, but also of human handiwork.

R.J. drew on a colleague’s insight: in Genesis, God first establishes form (light, sky, sea), and then fills the form with content (sun, moon, fish, birds). He creates the structure of a cosmic temple, and then invites us to furnish it.

To borrow his metaphor: God built the house, but He didn’t pick all the furniture. That’s our job.

That aligns closely with an image I’ve used often on this show: revelation as the curriculum, creation as the laboratory. God gives the syllabus—Scripture, conscience, tradition, wisdom—and then sends us into the lab of life with a warning and an invitation: “Experiment. Learn. Grow. Try not to blow things up too badly.”

It also forces us to rethink the so-called “fall.” If God’s plan was always for us to grow up into maturity—into people whose “senses are trained to discern good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14)—then simply freezing us in a childlike innocence was never the endpoint. Somehow, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is intertwined with the tree of maturity.

R.J.’s own theology of the fall is more traditional than mine, but we found common ground here: God did not create us to remain perpetual toddlers. Discernment was always part of the assignment. And whatever else we say about sin and death, we have to say this: in Christ, the second Adam, God has already committed Himself to taking all of that broken history and folding it into something more glorious than a static, unspoiled garden.

Grace doesn’t make us less human. It makes us more truly human.

If that’s true, then the intellectual life, the cultural life, even the political life, are not distractions from spirituality. They’re part of the furniture we’ve been asked to build.

Intellectual Friendship in the Age of Hunger Games Education

But if grace presupposes nature, and part of that nature is a mind made for truth, then we have to talk about what we’ve done to higher education.

R.J. quoted Bill Deresiewicz’s description of elite universities as an “inverted funnel.” Students arrive with a wide spread of interests—poetry, medicine, international development, drama, ranching—and four years later, 60% of them are stamped out as economics or computer science majors, driven by fear of falling behind.

Mark Shiffman captured it in a devastating phrase: “majoring in fear.”

Education, in this model, is not about becoming fully human. It’s about racking up credentials, building a resume, and competing in the intellectual equivalent of The Hunger Games: “young people in life-and-death competition for the satisfaction of adults,” as Shiffman puts it.

That’s one way our culture treats “nature”: as raw material to be optimized for economic output. Grace, in that universe, has no place at all; we’re too busy surviving.

The Witherspoon Institute, where R.J. works, is trying a different approach. It’s not a church. It’s not a seminary. It’s a small, non-sectarian “think and teach tank” just off Princeton’s campus that treats the intellect as something to be befriended, not merely weaponized or monetized.

Their model is deceptively simple:

Voluntary reading groups.
No grades, no credits, no deans, no tuition.
Great texts: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Edith Stein, modern philosophers, literature, even music and art.
Mixed rooms: conservatives and progressives; pro-life and pro-choice; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, undecided.

And then they do something almost subversive: they assume everyone in the room is capable of thinking.

R.J. described a seminar where high school students work through major moral questions—abortion, capital punishment, sexual ethics. Many come in expecting to be armed with talking points “to own the other side.” Instead, they read Peter Singer’s defense of post-birth abortion, and R.J., who personally believes Singer is wrong, defends the argument vigorously at first.

Why? Not to convert them to infanticide, but to force them to take their own positions seriously. Do you really know what you believe? Have you thought through the implications? Do you understand why someone intelligent might see it differently? Can you argue without demonizing?

In another case, they held a reading group at R.J.’s home on Edith Stein’s unusual idea of “male and female souls.” He cooked dinner and then left the room while his wife and a friend led the discussion. Around the table sat both the head of Princeton Pro-Life and the head of Princetonians for Reproductive Justice. No one shouted slogans. They argued about a difficult text, with dogs and kids running around.

That kind of intellectual friendship depends on a conviction that grace really does presuppose nature. The mind is not an enemy of God by default. Reason is not the devil’s tool (though it can be misused). Our differences are not automatically threats. Real people, with real dignity, can sit down, read, listen, argue, and remain friends—even while seriously disagreeing.

Arguing as a Form of Love

That leads into another theme that emerged: what it means to argue well in a culture like ours.

We’ve turned “argument” into a synonym for mutual character assassination: you insult, I insult, we block each other. R.J. pushes us back to a more classical understanding: an argument is “a series of propositions in favor of another proposition.” It’s an invitation to reason together, not a declaration of war.

At Public Discourse, the journal he edits, this shows up in editorial decisions. They routinely reject essays whose conclusions they agree with because the tone is wrong. The posture matters as much as the position.

As he put it, it’s a mark of respect to assume the other person is capable of making a judgment. It’s not disrespect for them to hear your reasoning and not be persuaded. That’s what it means to reason together.

I’ve experienced the same tension. I often get criticized for “tone”—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. But listening to R.J. describe his standard clarified something for me: tone is not about refusing to say hard things. It’s about asking whether what you’re doing with your words is an act of love or an act of domination.

There’s an Abdu’l-Bahá quote I shared on the show: “Kindness clothes the words with meaning.” The inverse is also true: harshness can strip even true words of their power.

This came into focus when we touched the old Reformation tension about the priesthood. I suggested that the rending of the temple veil in Christ’s death symbolized the end of the old priesthood’s monopoly, the fulfillment of God’s promise to make His people “a nation of kings and priests.” In my reading, each believer has direct access to God in the “holy of holies”; we are all, in some real sense, priests under the High Priest.

As a Roman Catholic, R.J. affirmed the “priesthood of all believers,” but also maintained a sacramental priesthood acting in persona Christi. We could have turned that moment into a Fox News segment. Instead, we did what he calls “conspiracy” in the older, positive sense: sharing the same breath, locked together in argument, but not in enmity.

We didn’t stop disagreeing. We also didn’t stop listening.

That, I think, is what arguing as a form of love looks like. It recognizes that grace doesn’t bypass our minds. It works through them, patiently, relationally, refusing to treat another person as either a project to be fixed or an enemy to be crushed.

Hope Without Illusions

All of this—grace and nature, intellectual friendship, arguing in love—would be academic if we didn’t address the obvious: the cultural soil around us is in rough shape.

R.J.’s latest book is about hope, and his wife’s first response to the draft was telling: “This is the most despairing thing you’ve ever written.” The early chapters were an honest diagnosis of our current chaos: polarized politics, brittle institutions, degraded discourse, “excellent sheep” channeled into lucrative but narrow tracks, a fraying moral consensus.

He’s not optimistic in the shallow sense. There is no five-year plan to a sane democracy. We have, as he put it, been spending down our cultural endowment and eroding our topsoil without replenishing either.

And yet he refused to call that the final word. He distinguished between optimism (“I think things will probably turn out fine”) and hope as Aquinas defined it: “confidence about an arduous good.”

Natural hope: confidence that some difficult good—reconciliation, reform, renewal—is possible through human effort and cooperation.
Theological hope: confidence that the ultimate good—union with God, the fullness of the kingdom—is real and already present “among us,” even if not yet in its fullness.

He drew on Benedict XVI’s Spe Salvi to emphasize that Christian hope is not about waiting passively for an escape hatch at the end of history. It’s a way of recognizing that the kingdom of God is already breaking in now, like leaven hidden in three measures of flour, like seed scattered on all kinds of soil.

That image of the sower struck me. God throws seed everywhere: on rocky ground, among thorns, on the path. He knows where it will and won’t thrive. He does it anyway, because His seed bag is inexhaustible.

That’s very close to how I’ve come to view the work we’re doing on this show, and in my own life. We are, all of us, “hidden leaven” in 60 pounds of dough. You may never see the bread fully formed in your lifetime. You may only work a small bit of yeast into a tiny corner of the mass. But the kingdom is at work.

When my wife and I took a group of young people to the Desert Rose Bahá’í Center in Arizona, we turned literal dead dust into living soil: we added bat guano, biochar, drip irrigation, and time. The desert bloomed. It was a small parable of what hope looks like in practice: hard work, long patience, faith that the seeds we plant will one day bear fruit.

R.J. summarized our task in simple terms: faithfulness in the little things, and refusal to give in to despair. Not because we’re confident in ourselves, but because, as he quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins, there is One “who has kept us with far fonder a care than we would have kept ourselves.”

Grace presupposes nature and perfects it. That means God has not given up on human beings, on minds, on culture, on creation itself. The garden was never meant to remain untouched. It was meant to become a garden city.

Our job is to keep planting.

Looking Ahead: Next Week’s Conversations

If these themes—grace and nature, intellectual friendship, arguing in love, hope without illusions—resonate with you, I’d invite you to stay with us for next week’s shows, where we’ll explore some very different “gardens” that also need tending.

On Sunday, May 31st at 7:00 a.m. Central, I’ll be talking with Jocelyn Jones—author, ordained minister, and founder of Faith on the Journey Counseling. She brings a Christ-centered approach to healing from trauma, grief, and shame through forgiveness, emotional freedom, and spiritual restoration. We’ll look at how the “inner soil” of the heart can be renewed, and how hidden pain can be transformed into purpose, healing, and ministry.

Then on Tuesday, June 2nd at 8:00 p.m. Central, I’ll sit down with Eric Davis, a Christian author and storyteller. What began as his dream of restoring a historic plantation turned into a terrifying confrontation with spiritual darkness—demonic oppression, fear—and then into deliverance, healing, and freedom through Christ. It’s a sobering, hope-filled glimpse into another dimension of the same reality: a world where the kingdom is already at work, even in places soaked in suffering and history.

Different guests, different kinds of brokenness—intellectual, emotional, spiritual—but the same underlying conviction: you are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation. Grace does not erase what you are. It meets you where you are, presupposes your humanity, and begins, patiently, to perfect it.

My hope is that these conversations help us all become a little more human—and in doing so, a little more like the One in whose image we were made.