Sociologists speak of plausibility structures, those shared community assumptions that make shared assumptions make sense. If you grew up Mormon in southeast Idaho, celestial marriage makes sense. If you grew up in Alabama, not so much. This undeniable truth is one of the things that tends to make educated sociologists, and those who love them, into relativists. Look at all these people, believing all their different stuff, and how can there possibly be one, absolute truth? But of course, this pressboard quality relativism is itself the result of yet another plausibility structure, laboring quietly away throughout the course of grad school. Somehow the great thinkers never include themselves in their observations.
The point of the digression in my very first paragraph is simply to let you know that I believe that when nonbelievers see and point out something obvious, we don’t have to deny that obvious thing, simply because they don’t know what to do with what they have seen.
But plausibility structures do not just operate on truth claims like celestial marriage, geocentricity, global warming, and everything else we think. They also operate on ethical claims (what is considered to be good and bad) and societal membership claims (who is considered to be an outlaw and who not). When it comes to this latter place, plausibility structures are also justification structures.
This is the reason why Christians will never successfully get “a place at the table.” The secularists fence their table. There are only two tables in the world, the apostle tells us. Those two tables are the table of the Lord and the table of devils (1 Cor. 10:21). There is no third neutral table, wiped down and bussed by spiritual robots that are neither angel nor devil. If nonbelievers try to sit down at our table, we fence that table. If we try to sit down at theirs, so do they. God has structured the world in such a way that there is really no way around this.
Whether or not we have read Meredith Kline, they have not. We might have all kinds of Escondido workarounds in our heads, and yet there is a reason our plan cannot work smoothly. The problem is because Scott Clark and Darryl Hart still love Jesus (which they certainly do) — and it turns out nonbelievers fence the table.