Written by Nicholas K. Meriwether |
Tuesday, July 2, 2024
In his magisterial ‘The City of God Against the Pagans’, interestingly, written not long after Rome had established Christianity as the official religion of the Empire (AD 380), Augustine rejects the idea that church and state should or could be combined. He lays out a Christian vision of the meaning and purpose of human history, and locates in this history two “cities.” The City of God is the universal Church, composed of God’s elect from every nation, tribe, and culture. This City is eternal, and will be perfectly instituted only with the return of Christ. The other is the City of Man, the earthly City, composed of all forms of government outside the Church—cities, states, nations, empires, monarchies, aristocracies, democracies. This City is mortal, full of sinful pride. It frequently arrays itself against the City of God, and will be judged harshly when Christ returns (Rev. 20:7-8). However, both Cities are subject to natural law.

There is no civil law, nor can there be any, in which something of natural and divine immutable equity has not been mixed. If it departs entirely from the judgment of natural and divine law (jus naturale et divinum), it is not to be called law (lex). It is entirely unworthy of this name, and can obligate no one against natural and divine equity.
Althusius, Politica
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.
George Washington, Farewell Address
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. 
John Adams
[NB: Please see the following previous articles in this series: 1, 2, 3, and 4.]
We’ve now reached the point where the question can be asked, What role does natural law play in government and society?
Two stipulations to begin. First: Christians should be fully involved in civic affairs, vote, influence legislation through petitioning public officials, seek elected office, etc. Of course, Christians have at times acted imprudently, and even destructively, nor do I mean to suggest that involvement in politics does not incur moral risk, as does political quietism. But let us not neglect the immensely positive impact Christians have had upon their state and society, such as William Wilberforce, William Booth, Abraham Kuyper, and Evangelical opposition to slavery prior to the Civil War.
A second stipulation: While there are fine works on natural law and the state written by Catholics, and much of it is compatible with Protestant approaches, the work of Protestants, especially Reformed Protestants, has been comparatively neglected. A comprehensive program for Protestant political engagement can be developed from within its ranks, as it were, with one critical addition, which is the political theology of Augustine. It is wholly unnecessary that Protestants rely on Catholic thought, even when Catholic ideas are compatible with Protestantism. My thoughts below reflect engagement with John Calvin (d. 1564), Peter Martyr Vermigili (d.1562), Heinrich Bullinger (d. 1575), Richard Hooker (d.1600), Johannes Althusius (d.1638), Samuel Rutherford (d.1661), John Winthrop (d.1649), Richard Baxter (d.1691), Samuel Willard (d.1707), James Wilson (d.1798), Friedrich Stahl (d.1861), and Groen van Prinsterer (d.1876).
The Program and the Conundrum
These theologians would all agree with the following:
1) The purpose of law is to serve the common good. The laws of the state are not merely for protecting citizens from harm, or protecting private property, rather they are for encouraging virtue, or moral decency, in the citizenry in order that the society may flourish.
2) The common good is based upon the Ten Commandments. Recall that the Ten Commandments include the First Table, requiring the worship of God. Thus, laws should also encourage spiritual development in the citizenry.
As an example, here is a quote from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which provided a policy for admission of new states to the union. Note the integration of religion, morality, and learning:
Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.[1]
3) The consent of the governed is the basis for state authority. This is the most “modern” part of their consensus.[2] Almost any formulation of the basis of state authority in the modern period draws from the consent of the governed, including our American constitutional order.
The Conundrum: Does Consent of the Governed Undermine Natural Law?
Unfortunately, as most of us know by now, the third point does not comport well with the first two. One has only to consider that laws that codify and extend abortion, LGBTQ ideology, and socialist redistribution, violations of the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 10th commandments, respectively, and thus inconceivable on the basis of natural law, are the products of democratic voting procedures that have elected legislators, governors, and in some cases, judges, who affirm such rights and policies.[3] In fact, the most electorally powerful plank in the Democratic Party’s current political campaigns is to protect and extend abortion rights, arguably up to and including the birth of the child. This would be political suicide if there were not millions of Americans, arguably a majority, who want elective abortion to be fully legal and accessible to all women. Our country is essentially divided between “Red States,” which generally support natural law, including recognition of the First Table as well as a natural law understanding of human sexuality, marriage, and family, and “Blue States” that reject it, including the rejection of the First Table, and the celebration and promotion of non-Christian religions and recognition of and support for alternative sexual identities. The affirmation vs. rejection of natural law is the most fundamental division in Western politics, because this division is both moral and spiritual, the most fundamental human commitments.
The American people have it in their power to uphold the original, natural law-friendly US Constitution through voting for people willing to do so to restore prayer in the public schools, outlaw abortion, and end same-sex marriage, but there are seemingly no longer enough voters to achieve this. And increasingly, the Christian faith is coming under attack, such that citizens who are known to hold to traditional natural law are no longer able to win elections in many parts of the country.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Think Christianly, friends. When you do, you’ll find that the world is not just an arrow pointing to the heavens but a gift from the hand of the God who loves you. Delight in it, explore it, discover it, conquer it, and exercise dominion over it. When you know how to look you’ll find that written through the core of everything is Jesus’ smile, beckoning you in love to die and rise again.

We have an intellectual problem in the modern West. We’ve forgotten the intellectual underpinnings of all knowledge.
That’s Jesus by the way.
The resurrection of Jesus is the central beating fact of all existence. Our response to it is the core of our lives. Christians whose lives look the same as their neighbours are a deep sadness, a withered tree.
Anderson, who my writing has been meandering with for a little while now, states it like this:

God’s love in Jesus Christ is the open secret of the cosmos.
Called into Questions, 111
Our intellectual inquiry is supposed to start here. All our thinking is to start here. All our lives are to start here. Whatever you do for a living is dramatically shifted and changed by Jesus, as is everything else in your life.
This is what it is to think Christianly: to start with the revelation of God in Christ and then move outwards towards other disciplines.
How is Mathematics different? Or tax law? Or plumbing?
I suspect most of us want to say that I’m over-spiritualising things and that honestly most of life continues on unabated. I simply don’t think that can be true. The way we view the world has to start with Jesus.
There is no such thing as being ‘unbiased.’ You cannot start your thinking, or your doing, from a neutral place. That standpoint doesn’t exist. This all sounds very critical theory, but that isn’t what I mean. What I mean is that we are never formless and void, we are given as children a way of looking at the world. We are, as Anderson puts it, ‘indoctrinated into a way of seeing things.’
Everyone is. We all have it. This is what some people call ‘worldview.’ I’m not sure that’s the best framing, but the lens that we look at everything through is what we mean. You see life through lenses you’ve been given. I’m saying we should see life through Jesus lenses. We should also think through Jesus lenses.
This all sounds very academic, I appreciate. That is my propensity. What difference does it make to the average person? Well, everyone is thinking about their lives all the time. Everyone needs to learn to think Christianly.
How do you decide who to marry? Or what house to rent or buy?
Read More
Related Posts:

Genuine Reformed catholicity…appreciates the wider tradition and heritage of Christian churches both past and present. It acknowledges both the areas in which Reformed Christians agree with various historic Christian traditions and areas in which the Reformed are distinct. True Reformed catholicity is committed to robustly expressing the beauty of Reformed worship, piety, and theology as well as winsomely engaging and working with those outside of Reformed churches.

Numerous elders have attempted to explain the current moment in our beloved PCA family. TE Derek Radney recently offered his own assessment attempting to explain the reason for the differences and tense discussions within the PCA of late.
His essay was published on the SemperRef collaborative.1 Radney identifies the trouble in the PCA not as one in which doctrine is disputed, but rather how the two sides “handle difference relationally.”
Radney winsomely counsels that both sides need to learn to
“stay connected to each other amidst our differences and to remain in the struggle with charity and humility that seeks to understand and learn before critiquing.”
Radney explains further, urging all sides in the PCA to ask:
“Do our words accurately represent the positions of our opponents? Do our words assign motives to our opponents?”
On the surface Radney presents a beautiful way forward for a less fractious Assembly and life together as the PCA.
But as one reads his essay, it becomes clear Radney not only has ignored his own counsel, but uses his counsel as a club to beat those with whom he disagrees in the PCA.
I. Identifying the Parties
Radney seems to identify the two major groups in the PCA as what he describes as the “Reformed Catholics” and the “Reformed Fundamentalists.” The group with whom he affiliates is the former. Everything wrong in the PCA apparently comes from the “Fundamentalist” portion of the PCA and everything good, beautiful, winsome, and hopeful seems to be expressed in the “Reformed Catholic” portion of the PCA.
Radney asserts:
“Reformed Fundamentalists hold Reformed distinctives in such a way that they cannot stand to stay connected to others relationally amidst disagreement of almost any kind. Rather than humble curiosity that slowly seeks to gain understanding about difference, distrust grows, motives are assigned to others, and many, if not all, disagreements are treated as matters of orthodoxy. This posture involves constant suspicion of outsiders and regularly seeks to purge insiders who appear to be compromisers.”
But he’s not finished describing his brothers in the PCA:
“The posture lacks generosity and charity through its inability to listen well such that others are really heard and understood. More basically, it lacks humility because this radical suspicion of others is absent in regard to one’s own motives or possible ignorance.”
In contrast to these “Reformed Fundamentalists,” are the “Reformed Catholics,” who are the only hope of a “beautiful future ahead” for the PCA. Radney characterizes “Reformed Catholicity” as
…a posture of curiosity, charity, critical appreciation, and cooperation grounded in and faithful to Reformed distinctives.
That’s quite a contrast. I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of those mean, ignorant, suspicious, proud, fearful “Fundamentalists.”
“Fundamentalist,” however, is an odd way to describe Reformed people given that “fundamentalism” in Christianity is more typically associated with folks who “don’t smoke, drink or chew, or run with girls who do.”….
….Radney acknowledges he’s not using the term “fundamentalism” in a “strict historical sense.” But on the other hand, Radney recently did assert he sees one of the major challenges of the PCA is how many are stuck in last century’s crisis (presumably the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy):
Recent cautions from Jon Payne about excessive alcohol consumption and his calls for pastoral piety when contrasted with the statements in the National Partnership documents cited above might, I suppose, lead the uninitiated to conclude one side of the PCA is a bunch of “Teetotaling Fundies” and the other takes care to “SCHEDULE YOUR DRINKING” during General Assembly. But that seems a bit of a stretch and not very nuanced.
II. Projection and the PCA
My seminary education at RTS Jackson didn’t have much training in psychology, but I can recognize psychological projection when I see it (I did, after all, watch a few Frasier episodes back in the day).
What is “psychological projection?” Britannica defines it as, “the mental process by which people attribute to others what is in their own minds.”
While Radney warns us all not to misrepresent the positions of our opponents and not assign motives to them, he does exactly that. First he describes his opponents with a pejorative “fundamentalist” label. But then he goes further.
He asserts his opponents are dominated by “relational anxiety,” grounded in “pride,” and motivated by a fear of “losing control” over the denomination. And – he asserts – that is the reason they are opposed to what he calls “the presence of difference.”
It’s hard to believe the author of those allegations is the one who also – in the very same article – cautions about assigning motives. Is it acceptable to assign motives if one does so in the spirit of “Reformed Catholicity?”
But Radney turns from psychoanalysis to spiritual analysis. Even going so far as to suggest those with whom he disagrees at best have no confidence in Jesus:
“If we have confidence in Jesus, the presence of difference will not throw us into combat mode (at least not right away), nor will it lead us to distance ourselves from other Christians over our differences in fear of a slippery slope.”
And at worst do not even know the gospel:
“Rather than being filled with pride and fear, the good news of Jesus can fill us with humility and hope. Because we are saved by grace alone, we have nothing to boast about and no ground to stand on to exalt ourselves above others.”
Shockingly it is Radney’s opponents whom he accuses of trying to exalt themselves above others. Even as he as the audacity to imply their lack of acquaintance with Christ is the reason for their “Fundamentalist posture.”
Read More
Related Posts: