> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://watchmanclarion.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Dilemma Described - URL: https://watchmanclarion.com/the-dilemma-described/ - Published: 2026-09-22T22:02:45.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T23:25:40.000Z - Author: Doug Hawkinson Something is wrong. We all know it. Society is coming unglued. For the first 200 years of our great experiment in social contract, our society had its factions, but overall, we could live together with our differences. But we all know that, increasingly, this is no longer the case. We no longer have factions; we have enemy camps. Disagreements result in conflagration. We are tearing ourselves apart from within. This is our dilemma. How do we solve it? This will be a three-part message. I can’t cover what I plan to in a single message. Entire libraries of books cover the ground I will cover. Therefore, do not expect an exhaustive treatise on the topic. This will be a model or, if you prefer, a framework you can build on. I will point you to resources to help you with that task. In the first two installments, I will describe the problem, how it came to be, and the depths to which we have succumbed. In the final installment, I will present a way out of the dilemma. It is simple, but I warn you it is not easy. Every age has a zeitgeist—a German term meaning “the spirit of the age.” It is the prevailing intellectual and cultural atmosphere: the collection of assumptions that tells us which claims should be treated as obvious, which questions may be asked seriously, and which possibilities may be dismissed without examination. I use this term deliberately, because a zeitgeist is not identical to a worldview. A worldview attempts to provide a coherent account of reality. The zeitgeist is the atmosphere in which worldviews are heard and judged. People often absorb a worldview without examination. We may believe that we are thinking independently while relying upon definitions, categories, and assumptions supplied by the age in which we live. A zeitgeist is cultural and often tribal or cliquish, shaped by the people we associate with. Because of the deficient zeitgeist I was influenced by as a child, I began looking for an enduring worldview as a teenager. The prevailing cultural thought of our age, the zeitgeist, divides reality into publicly accepted facts and privately held values. Science and empirical observation are admitted into the public realm, whereas faith, morality, meaning, and purpose usually fall into the private realm. Christianity may be tolerated there as a personal preference, but it is seldom permitted in public discussion as a claim about reality. In the current zeitgeist, which has crystallized into a worldview, Christianity is regarded as the enemy of truth. It may be illustrated as a two-story building, like this: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a5/07/a507b89a-6229-4884-a097-def9551991fe/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-ea6d4d79-27e5-4c52-8a2a-39899718024d.png) At the beginning of the Church Age, inaugurated with the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ and continuing to the present, the distinction between the upper and lower stories was recognized but not separated. In this earlier Christian understanding, both grace and nature were real. They were distinct categories, but they were not separate realities. Nature described the created order. Grace described God’s action within and throughout that order. Both belonged within one comprehensive cosmos created, sustained, and governed by God. Nature was not autonomous, and grace was not relegated to subjective, private experience. The distinction did not yet require the bifurcation that would later develop. This was the prevailing worldview in the West. Francis Schaeffer shows us that before Aquinas, medieval Christian thought—both Eastern and Western—generally emphasized the created order's dependence on God and resisted treating nature as an autonomous realm. In Western Europe, religious art also retained strong Byzantine conventions that emphasized heavenly meaning over naturalistic representation.1 The art of the early church illustrates this understanding. Let me give a quick example. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a5/07/a507b89a-6229-4884-a097-def9551991fe/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-fc65c5fb-42b7-44a3-ab5a-26095430f71e.png) This Byzantine image of the Transfiguration presents the natural and supernatural as distinguishable but not divided. Moses and Elijah occupy the same created reality as Peter, James, and John. Christ occupies both realms, transfigured with Moses and Elijah, yet still occupying shared space with the disciples. Heaven is not a private realm of meaning detached from publicly accessible reality. The disciples see, hear, and physically experience the supernatural disclosure occurring before them. Grace and nature meet without either ceasing to be real. This image is particularly relevant because it is dated ca. 1200, 146 years after the split between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman branches of the church, and it appears just before the arrival of the next major contributor to this conversation, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). With Aquinas, the emphasis shifts slightly. Pasnau explains that, for Aquinas, “the eternal law governs everything \[…\] through divine law, preeminently through the Bible. \[…\] \[N\]atural law is innate within us.”² Natural law was not independent of God. It was how rational human beings participated in God’s eternal law. Nevertheless, it gave reason a distinct role in discerning moral obligation. Pasnau summarizes its most fundamental principle in Aquinas’s own words: > “The good should be done and pursued, and the bad should be avoided” (ST 1a2ae 94.2c).² Aquinas worked at a moment when newly available Aristotelian writings forced the Latin West to reconsider the relationship among revelation, reason, nature, and grace. He did not invent the distinction between nature and grace. He gave nature a more carefully defined integrity while insisting that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” His synthesis therefore differentiated nature and grace without intending to separate them. This may more clearly define his position: Hence, after the Psalmist (Psalm 4:6) has said, “Offer up the sacrifice of justice,” he adds, as if someone were asking what the works of justice are, “Many say, ‘Who is there to show us good works?” In reply to this question he says, “The light of Your countenance, Lord, is imprinted upon us”—as if to say, the light of natural reason, by which we discern what is good and what is evil. This has to do with natural law, which is nothing other than the imprint of God’s light within us. Hence, it is clear that natural law is nothing other than a participation in eternal law on the part of a rational creature.3 It would be a mistake to equate this statement with a clear separation of Grace and Nature. Aquinas did not teach the autonomy of nature or human reason. Nature remained created, sustained, and governed by God; natural law was humanity’s rational participation in God’s eternal law. Human beings possessed genuine freedom and natural powers, but these operated as secondary causes under God as their first cause. Aquinas’s distinctive contribution was to give nature a more carefully defined integrity within that dependent relationship. However, a crack in the unity begins to appear as humanity is assigned increasing autonomy within the natural realm. Aquinas did not intend nature to become independent of God or grace. Nevertheless, the greater integrity assigned to nature made it possible for later thinkers to investigate the created order with progressively less reference to either God or grace. The later problem arose when thinkers retained the integrity he assigned to nature while progressively detaching it from the God upon whom, in Aquinas’s own system, it continuously depended. A distinction Aquinas understood within a unified cosmos would, over time, be pressed toward separating the two realms. The path from distinction to division was neither immediate nor uniform. It unfolded over centuries, through movements whose participants often disagreed profoundly. What matters here is not every turn in that history, but its direction. Nature acquired increasing explanatory independence, while human reason gradually assumed greater authority to define what could be known. As we move through history to the end of the Medieval period, we can see Nature's growing autonomy through painters like Van Eyck, a Flemish painter at the crossover between the Medieval and Renaissance. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a5/07/a507b89a-6229-4884-a097-def9551991fe/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-541532b4-c803-42b5-a515-6df99b885432.png) Notice the advancement in representing nature's background with more realism, while the people in the foreground are portrayed in a less stylized, more realistic manner as well. By the late Renaissance, artists like Michelangelo accelerated that movement by celebrating human capability and reviving classical sources beyond their earlier Christian setting. We need only look at one of the period's pinnacles: Michelangelo’s Il Davide. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a5/07/a507b89a-6229-4884-a097-def9551991fe/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-0e9fb114-97e3-434b-a43e-7f053d007070.png) I included two shots of *Il Davide* because a photograph can't do the sculpture justice. I saw the sculpture in Florence in 1988\. No photograph I took captured the work's palpable life. Its realism is astonishing. Humanism, at least in art, had reached a zenith: little stylization remained. It unabashedly celebrates humanity. The point is not that Aquinas intended to divide reality or that Renaissance artists simply abandoned God. History is not that tidy. Aquinas understood nature and grace within one cosmos governed by God, and much Renaissance art remained explicitly Christian. Nevertheless, a trajectory had become visible. Nature was gaining increasing explanatory independence, while human reason and human capability moved into the foreground. The Reformation formed about midway in the Renaissance; the distinction between nature and grace had not yet hardened into the divide we now take for granted. The crack was forming, however, and the cultural forces pressing against it were gathering strength. The sense of God's sovereignty seemed to be diminishing while the sense of man's autonomy was rising. No hard evidence shows that the Reformers saw the Renaissance as a direct assault on God's sovereignty. The Reformers themselves were staunch defenders of divine sovereignty. They believed that humans are dependent upon God for being and believing and are never autonomous, neither metaphysically nor methodologically. 4 They challenged important parts of that movement by returning final authority to Scripture and insisting upon humanity’s dependence on God. More pointedly, the antithesis to divine sovereignty is not human freedom but human autonomy—a degree of freedom unlimited by any higher authority—and if God is sovereign, then humans cannot be autonomous, while conversely if humans are autonomous, then God cannot be sovereign, making these mutually exclusive concepts. 5 So, if the proposition was not yet clearly formed as heresy, it was certainly discussed as a warning. For now, the dilemma was forming: how did it happen? That reality —originally understood as coexistent components of Grace and Nature within a unified understanding of the cosmos —became separate realms: one admitted as public fact and the other confined to private belief. I will develop the proposal in the next installment. *continued as: How the Divide Became the Default* --- End Notes: 1 Francis A. Schaeffer, *Escape from Reason*, foreword by J. P. Moreland, Kindle ed. (IVP, 2014), 14. 2 Robert Pasnau. “*Thomas Aquinas*.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2023 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/aquinas/. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026\. Ellipses and bracketed capitalization added; internal citations omitted. 3\. Thomas Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae*, I–II, q. 91, art. 2, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso, St. Thomas Education Project, Thomas International, [https://www.thomasinternational.org/projects/step/treatiseonlaw/delege091\_2.htm. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026](https://www.thomasinternational.org/projects/step/treatiseonlaw/delege091%5F2.htm.%20Accessed%2030%20Aug.%202026?ref=watchmanclarion.com). 4 Stephen Wellum and Matthew Barrett, *Christ Alone—the Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior: What the Reformers Taught…and Why It Still Matters*, The 5 Solas Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2017), 280–281. 5 R.C. Sproul, *Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will* (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997), 27.