Common sense ceases to be common if people can’t agree about the definition of right and wrong. To prove that point let me tell you a story about when I realized how misguided our society’s common sense has become.
I was just about to start my senior year of high school. Our family was visiting my grandparents in Huntington Beach before returning to Southeast Asia, where my parents were working. I had seen some people playing pick-up soccer and I thought it would be great to join them. Maybe I could get some practice in before returning to Thailand, where we played pick-up soccer all the time. I drove over to the field and jumped right in with this group of soccer aficionados. Everything went well until one of the players stopped me because I was too young.
He asked me how old I was. I told him I would turn eighteen in a few months. He told me I couldn’t play because of liability reasons. At first, I thought he was joking. Maybe this was a strategy they used in Orange County to get faster players off the field… I gave him a surprised look and kept playing. He came back around and said, “We can’t run the risk of you getting injured because you are still a minor.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I couldn’t see any miners on the field…
This guy was speaking a different language. He was speaking legalese. He was saying that his pharisaical conscience would not allow him to let me continue playing. I couldn’t believe it. What was this strange world I was living in?
In Thailand we didn’t care how old you were. We would play with almost every age group. We used rules that allowed us to accomplish the goal of the game. We used rules to help us get some exercise, to have fun, to share the human experience. If someone got hurt they would never sue another player. That thought literally never crossed anyone’s mind. But not in Huntington Beach. This man’s knowledge of liability had skewed his understanding of pick-up soccer so much that he thought he was being commonsensical. “Of course you can’t play. You aren’t eighteen.”
That same year I read a book called The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard. It explains how obtuse legal theory is suffocating our country. It is still one of the most helpful books I have read in understanding our modern American society.
That is the curriculum our governor should consider making all high school students take. But, even that wouldn’t go far enough. You see schools can’t bring common sense back from the dead. That is what we need the sixty-six books of the Bible for. The Bible is a supernatural book. It was graciously given to humanity as the supernatural standard of right and wrong. Without God’s definition there is no standard for defining right or wrong. And without God’s definition there is no common sense at all.
Instead of rejecting Christian common sense our society needs to realize it is the only hope we have of discovering what true common sense is. The apostle Paul wrote long before we began using the phrase, but he certainly knew how to describe it, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:1) The more closely we align our minds with the truth of God’s word the more closely we can understand what common sense truly is.
