Theonomy & Natural Law: A Call to Unity
One fundamental assumption behind my call to unity here is that if both theonomy and natural law were properly defined, all supposed reasons to choose one over the other would fade away. In saying this, the focus will be on both the word and essential concept level rather than on the whole field of iterations in which each “camp” may have presented itself.
In short, the essence of “theonomy” is not a wooden one-to-one application of the Mosaic civil law to all societies at all times; and the essence of “natural law” is not what the animals do, or even what the pagans do. These are myths, and very intellectually lazy ones at that.
Perhaps my introduction here may be accused of over-simplification. Challenge accepted. But to be fair, time prohibits me from a thorough, or academic, treatment of the subject. It will be enough to offer this mini-essay as a “conversation starter.” Let us face the fact that such unity against the menace of global statism is more than a pragmatic need. There just is something morally obligatory that unites us; and if that is true, then it follows that at least something behind my thesis is already true in a way that transcends pragmatics. And of course, one just should be able speak the same language as the other fellow in the foxhole with you, given the common enemy on the horizon.
Definitions & Distinctions
THEONOMY simply means “law of God.” If you are a Christian at all, you are a theonomist. Greg Bahnsen made this point well enough. While I may disagree with his Van Tillian approach to apologetics (and, yes, the biblicist restrictions on objective speech in that realm do feature in this realm as well), the plain fact of the matter is that the theonomist is correct in maintaining that divine law is always perfect, as its Author and his rule are perfect.
NATURAL LAW simply means God’s law revealed in the nature of things. The exact definition of Aquinas will be too cumbersome for our purposes here. Contrary to the belief popularized both by Barth and Van Til, natural law is not reducible to subjective perspectives on moral nature, but rather it regards only objective natures. Paul’s words in Romans 2:14-15 give us the principle text for this.
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them (Rom. 2:14-15).
Much can be said by way of exegesis. For our purposes, let us simply note that what the Gentiles have written on the heart (or conscience, in this context) is the same objective substance as what is often called the Moral Law when it pertains to those standing commandments in the Bible. Natural law does not take notes from “nature,” in the sense of the law of the jungle under sin. Rather, the objective moral nature of what each human action is called to say about God is the nature in view. In the most layman’s terms, it is “the right thing” to be or to do in each case.
That is what Thomas meant by “reason’s participation” in the eternal law. Reason discovers. It does not determine. Yes, I know that still opens up the perennial debate between classicalist and presuppositionalist. But at least be able to translate our claim accurately. Natural law (as to the justice of God in morality) is a subset of natural theology (as to the attributes of God in the whole field of general revelation).
The natural law position is not that the moral law in Scripture and the natural law, as conceived by human reason, are equally clear, nor that they are logically coextensive in terms of all that they “say” (a very dubious word to use here). However, it is instructive that Paul uses the words “what the law requires” here to signify their common field. That is not to speak about how the Gentiles handle this law, but rather to suggest that God requires the same thing of the Gentile image of God as he does of the Jewish image of God. At least that is the case with respect to the moral law (not here addressing the ceremonial law).
As to application of the Mosaic civil law, Bahnsen remarked,
Theonomy does not make the determination of our moral obligations or the elucidation of God’s commands a cut-and-dried, easy, obvious, or simplistic task. It rather advocates a basic approach to ethical questions which still requires (even if it does not always get) skilled exegesis and sensitive application (Theonomy in Christian Ethics, xix).
At face value, this does not seem as though theonomy necessarily cashes out into mere “reduplication” of Mosaic law codes into secular law codes. Leaving aside the intrinsic goodness of all such laws revealed, my only aim here is to show that the theonomic principle can be understood (just as I would plead about natural law) in objective terms. Never mind how this or that person or group has invoked the word or concept. It may be that no one who has ever flown under the banner of “theonomist” will mean what I mean, but we should seek out some common ground at the idea of God as the source of righteous law.
Arriving at a Synthesis Requires a Reappraisal of American Covenant Theologies
Anyone who knows this debate understands that the split between those of Murray (or Robertson), on the one hand, and those of Kline (or Horton), on the other, have forced upon us a monolithic 1K or 2K decision that is as grossly oversimplified as it is unhistoric. We would agree with VanDrunen’s anchor in the covenant to Noah for natural law; though there may be remaining questions concerning the scope of this law and the criteria for when some society has departed from it. Yet we very much agree that Genesis 9:5-6 evidences a moral law to all mankind.
Now this begs the questions that seem most obviously answered by the plain words of the divine command there. What God commands of all mankind (all governments, even on VanDrunen’s rationale, one would think) is grounded in a just force to defend the image of God, which Western political theory has largely mapped out as life, liberty, and property. Israel under Moses was, among other things, still comprised of life, liberty, and property, such that the essence of all of her civil laws was that of the moral law—so, yes, the natural law.
Both parties in the discussion I have in mind will at least sense that the contemporary brand of two kingdom theology has a difficult time avoiding cultural relativism and acquiescing to the coming tyranny. Where might its advocates have gone wrong?
In simple terms, we may be borrowing the lingo of Augustine and the Reformers only to arrive at the vision of the Anabaptists. At the very least, we can use the Anabaptist’s Gnostic hammer of world-resignation to back the church into a Sunday-only bunker, and with the other hand pledge our allegiance to the consensus of the secular intelligentsia. When Augustine drew out the origins, nature, and ends of the two cities (heavenly and earthly) his point was not to divorce the ecclesial sphere from the civil sphere, but rather to divide between the elect and the reprobate, in their two ultimate predestined trajectories. That had implications for ethical engagement, but not in the pluralistic way of conceding the “secular” to the principles of fields to which the church cannot speak. That such models always seem only to count Statists as those “experts” is another matter (or is it?).
At this point, both the Theonomist and Natural Law adherent will jump in to point out how the Bible gives us that sufficiency to speak into those spheres, and / or that those spheres are made up entirely of things with objective natures, many of which are simply not drawn out in Scripture. The idea that these two truths are really dealing with the genus and species strata of the ethical universe, and may actually be all of one cloth, is lost on us. It was not lost on the historic Reformed tradition. The Westminster Confession of Faith includes a phrase that its descendants will nod their head to, but then leave behind the actual theologizing that can dust the principle off the shelf of church history to perform its function.
I refer to the General Equity Principle (hereafter GEP) found in WCF XIX.4:
To them also, as a body politic, he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people, not obliging any other, now, further than the general equity thereof may require.
To cut right to the chase, this concept of “general equity” essentially means what later Western legal theory would mean by the “spirit of the law,” as distinct from its mere letter. It even means something a bit more profound than simply a law’s “intent.” It is inclusive of that. But a law’s intent has a circumstantial dimension. What the Reformers understood—and you will either have to take my word for this for now, or else read Junius’ Mosaic Polity to see his basic agreement with Aquinas—was that the spirit of the civil law possessed not merely its circumstantial intent, but a set of moral principles that made them right, the circumstances being merely particular instantiations of the form of righteousness or justice.
In other words, via natural law reasoning, all civil law (even in a theocracy that was fulfilled in Christ’s reign and existed as a typological people) is a participation in the moral law. Yes, this language is both Platonic and Aristotelian. Apparently, Junius saw no problem with weaving such categories together with the relevant biblical truths. But I digress. That form of the moral law in each civil law of old, subsists in the reign of Christ over all things (Mat 28:18), such that each civil law in every nation is duty-bound to conform more nearly its participation in the being of the eternal law. Lost yet?
If we cannot agree that the GEP demands using natural law reasoning, well, then perhaps my little dream is just that. However one important passage gives us a way forward. In evaluating why Romans 13:1-7 is so often rolled out as a blank check from heaven for the tyrant, it occurs to both our parties that something of delegated authority is being neglected. In short, if the magistrate is God’s servant to execute civil justice, surely Paul’s text is not ultimate in a hierarchy of texts on civil government but subordinate. And that is correct.
Matthew 22:21 is a very important text to any biblical view of political things. It is the place where the religious leaders attempted to trap Jesus into either speaking ill of the Roman rulers, or of taking a light view of that idolatrous coin. We know the story. He makes mincemeat of their dilemma. But it is the actual political theology that I would draw our attention to. We must back up a verse to see the whole.
And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
I will defer to the commentary of D. A. Carson on this, as I think it captures what I want to say in a modest way: “When Jesus asks the question, ‘Whose image is this? And whose inscription?’ biblically informed people will remember that all human beings have been made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26) … If we give back to God what has his image on it, we must all give ourselves to him. Far from privatizing God’s claim, that is, the claim of religion, Jesus’ famous utterance means that God always trumps Caesar” (Christ & Culture Revisited. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008, 57).
Think of the coin like a pie chart, and the “percentages” breakdown goes like this. 100% of our allegiance is owed to God in every area of life. Some of that 100% is subordinated through the proper authorities in the civil sphere. Just as some of that 100% is subordinated through other proper authorities in the home, at one’s place of labor, or school, or finally the church. But all obedience flows from Christ, and some of that 100% (not another) is filtered through God’s design of Caesar. That means that anywhere that the civil magistrate violates the basic terms of the covenant, he is no longer a prince but a tyrant. He is no more to be obeyed at that point than a common criminal, as what he commands is inherently criminal.
Now most professing theonomists I know of would agree to that. I would maintain that in making those last few inferences, we have “gone beyond Scripture.” Or have we? What does it mean to have gone beyond Scripture, or conversely to have been “biblical”? The Westminster divines had an answer to that too. A thing is biblical if it “is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (WCF, I.6). The subordination of the civil law (and magistrate) to the eternal law (and its King) is a “good and necessary consequence” from all that the Bible tells us about divine authority and the design of the civil sphere.
This truth is a construct of natural law and that implies that it is God’s law in the nature of things. But that means it is both theonomy and natural law. Hence there is a general unity, or in other words, some intersecting field (Picture a Venn diagram with the two circles representing whatever you have in mind by the Theonomist and Natural Law positions), in which there is mutual assent within the two views. The point is not that there is “not really” a distance between those non-intersecting portions of the two circles. It is only to say that the common ground will not be insignificant.
A Call for Consistency (or at least Sanity)
If the natural law and the divine law each have the same Author, and if (with respect to civil law) they each have the same formal cause (civil justice), then one must ask how far down do I really want to reject their mutuality? I would appeal first to the classicalist who wants to recover natural law within a Christian conception. A natural law position is always more faithful to the tradition—and more helpful in its articulation to the unconvinced theonomist—when we use the language of “God’s law in the nature of things.”
There comes a point when the disagreement finally boils down to two different sensibilities, one that is hesitant to use extra-biblical language where the Scripture’s own will do just fine (a kind of spiritual Ockham’s razor), and then the other which senses that such will not “do just fine” over a whole set of discussions (such as this one, where both sides have to resort to extra-biblical language to make their points).
This too is oversimplification. I am aware of that. And yet, I still insist that there is a place to let left hands in the body of Christ be left hands, and right hands to be right. Why should I even use the word “theonomy” if it provokes both sides to either think I am putting them on, or else selling them out?
By a call to unity, I mean only a functional unity analogous to what the body of Christ is called to do already over a whole range of issues. Of course at a single congregation, or even a seminary, we would expect unanimity to be a virtue. And a functional unity requires only a functional synthesis: not a fake one.
My thesis here is a practical one, at the end of the day. It is not that one ought to smooth over every disagreement. It is only that there ought to be this functional synthesis: one that at least enables Reformed classicalists and Reformed presuppositionalists to say that a just civil law is always and only one that conforms to the law of God Almighty. Can we not do that?
