The nature of truth is under attack in our culture and we are woefully unskilled in debating truth. Truth is debated in the public square with snarky memes. I’ll admit that I like snarky memes, but let’s be honest, memes do not educate or persuade. We need church leaders who will stand for truth regardless of whether truth is popular in the larger culture. Further, we need church leaders who will teach about how truth is established. Archbishop Welby has failed us in this regard.

Who better than the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to report on a conference of Anglican bishops? The BBC is satisfied that the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has brokered a compromise on one of the most controversial issues of the day, namely, which sexual expressions the churches in the Anglican Communion should countenance.
How does one compromise irreconcilably different positions? Archbishop Welby’s solution is that the traditional doctrine remains on paper, but those who flout the doctrine will not be sanctioned. So, everyone is happy?
In a piece headlined, “Lambeth Conference: Welby unites bishops with compromise on sexuality,” the BBC states that the archbishop has “found the formula for now,” which suggests that even the BBC knows the compromise will not stand the test of time. Indeed, archbishops from Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda chose not to attend the Lambeth Conference, believing that compromise was inconsistent with the truth-preserving role of the church.
The bishops from these and other African countries support maintaining traditional teaching while those bishops who want to liberalize the church’s teaching are from Western nations. This same geographic divide prevails in parallel debates within the United Methodist Church. It is not unique to Anglicanism. And therein is a significant spoiler alert: the United Methodist Church has begun splitting over such issues. Past compromises to preserve traditional teaching on paper but not in behavior have not unified.
As the BBC explains the situation, the positions of both the African churches and the Western churches can be best understood by understanding the surrounding cultures in which they serve. Thus, the African churches will be most respected by those in their surrounding culture if they maintain traditional teachings about sexuality while the Western churches will have more respect from their cultures if their teaching is liberalized.
Missing from the BBC analysis is a consideration of how bishops, or anyone else, knows what is true. What is truth? Both the BBC and Archbishop Welby seem to argue for the position that truth must be acceptable to the larger culture. Experiencing “derision” or “contempt” would be dangerous for the church.
Yes, Christians are to avoid antagonizing the larger culture for the sake of antagonizing it. We should not bring suffering upon ourselves by doing evil. But Jesus told us that as the world hated Him, it would hate us. Neither approbation nor condemnation from the larger culture determine the truth of Christian doctrine.
Fidelity to Biblical teaching is the standard by which doctrine must be judged. It is disappointing that the BBC does not even consider the possibility that doctrine should have a Biblical foundation. An educated reader, however, should understand that historically Christians have used the Bible as the foundation for church doctrine.
I am not sure the BBC is demonstrating ignorance or neutrality with its news report. Rather, I think the BBC is showing a complete disregard of the claim that the church offers truth authored by God; truth that applies in all times and cultures. The BBC is going beyond disagreeing with the African bishops. The BBC is undermining the relevance of the African bishops and the faith they represent by pretending that the church makes no meaningful truth claims.
The BBC would have the church promote whatever makes people in each time and place feel warm and safe. This appears to be Archbishop Welby’s approach, too. But this has never been the church’s mission. Jesus was not crucified because he made everyone feel warm and safe.
Ultimately Welby’s compromise will please no one for more than a moment. Worse, the archbishop has weakened the church’s claim to be a possessor of cross-cultural timeless truths and has undercut a historical approach to ascertaining the truth.
The nature of truth is under attack in our culture and we are woefully unskilled in debating truth. Truth is debated in the public square with snarky memes. I’ll admit that I like snarky memes, but let’s be honest, memes do not educate or persuade. We need church leaders who will stand for truth regardless of whether truth is popular in the larger culture. Further, we need church leaders who will teach about how truth is established. Archbishop Welby has failed us in this regard.
The issue of truth has implications that go beyond an international gathering of bishops. We must consider what our schools and colleges are teaching about truth. Is truth knowable, and if so, how is truth knowable? Education should move us to a more sophisticated understanding than memes can provide. May God bless us with more institutions that educate well.
Dr. Joseph J. Horton is professor of psychology at Grove City College and the Working Group Coordinator for Marriage and Family with the Institute for Faith and Freedom. He is also a researcher on Positive Youth Development. Used with permission.
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It is in man that God has implanted his law, the rule of right action according to the created order that reflects it. It is eternal law, the law of God’s essence, given by divine condescension to the creature for his good, unto his temporal and eternal happiness. Man is meant to live with others; this requires order, which, in turn, requires law—even in paradise this would have been so. In short, man’s nature requires him to participate in God’s law by making law too. That human law must then reflect, respect, and reinforce human anthropology—now under assault—for which it is made, and glorify the God who made it.

Whatever its genesis and cause—some suggest Karl Barth’s infamous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner—Protestants largely abandoned the natural law tradition sometime amidst the tumultuous twentieth century. It should be noted that this abandonment conspicuously coincided with the advent of a positivist Supreme Court led by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his militant campaign from the bench to detach law from a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.”
Unsurprisingly, Protestant-positivist conceptions of law (like theonomy) have filled the void in the interim. Originalism—a sort of first-in-time positivism now generally identified with the Constitution’s original public meaning—albeit popularized by a Roman Catholic, dominates the Protestant jurisprudential posture. Like many American Protestants, Originalists—there are some, heavily qualified exceptions—decry judicial use of the classical natural law tradition as tantamount to so-called living constitutionalism and judicial overreach. But recent social trends evince that this form of originalism is radically insufficient. It inordinately fixates on method to the detriment of a substantive vision of justice.
Consider that two ethical concepts presently captivate the popular political imagination: justice and the common good. One currently serves as the causa belli of the progressive-woke left and the other saturates the rhetoric of the nascent post-liberal right. Both bewilder many observers. Both, in their own way, spring from the demand for a thoroughly moral socio-political regime, a comprehensive vision of life oriented to something higher.
Protestantism, if it is to have a political future, must recover a moral vision that rightly defines, orders, and mediates these contemporary emphases, which–if taken in isolation–drive many to dangerous ideological and political extremes. Rightly understood, the apparent dichotomy between the two is false, one manufactured by recent, shrewd efforts of rhetorical capture. Law is the common denominator of justice and the common good, although such a notion has been lost as of late. As Thomas Aquinas defined it, law is an ordinance of reason, promulgated for the common good, made by one who has care of the community.
In a very real sense, then, justice and the common good are inseparable according to the tradition only lately jettisoned by Protestants. The way back is the way forward. Protestants need to play catchup to remain players. This isn’t demagoguery or pandering. It is about recovering a coherent vision of a moral order and the goods toward which said order must be oriented to be just. It is about rediscovering a proper understanding of law by, inter alia, rejecting Justice Gorsuch’s now (in)famous positivist quip in Bostock, “Only the written word is the law.” For law is more than pure fiat; it must attend to reason and nature and conform to something ethically and metaphysically higher.
Such a recovery project requires an extension of the ad fontes enthusiasm amongst Protestants over the past couple of decades to the Protestant legal thought once firmly planted in the natural law tradition. Scholars like Stephen Grabill and Jordan Ballor have already begun this project. The works of Matthew Hale (1609-1676), Johannes Althusius (1557-1638), and Franciscus Junius (1545-1602), to name a few, are now accessible thanks to these scholars and many others. The Angelic Doctor is increasingly appreciated by Protestants (as he was in the past) as much as the Fat Doctor.
Yet, this is about more than resourcement. Protestants must readopt and embrace the child they once forsook, namely, a classical understanding of law, its source, rationale, and function in society. Shockingly, even at this late hour, by an acquired instinct of recent vintage, much of orthodox Protestantism still shuns, or is ignorant of, the natural law tradition.
Without it the future of political Protestantism is bleak indeed, in part because Protestants will be far less equipped to answer the most pressing ethical questions of the day, and will not be as able to adjudicate all-powerful rights claims like those in Bostock, Obergefell, and Roe. Neither will they be able to offer a positive politics, nor a metaphysically coherent account of human nature powerful enough to bring certain inseparable political themes  together, themes such as justice and the common good. (Politics, after all, is but an actionable, lived extension of metaphysics.) They will, rather, remain political infants, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness.
Under a natural law-based jurisprudence, positivist, mechanical, proceduralism is insufficient. Law as law must be reasonable, which is to say, the means law employs to attain its ends must be fitting to the ends themselves. Most importantly, law must be cognizant of, and congruent with, the metaphysical realities of creation, especially an appreciation of the givenness of nature and natural limits.
As Pierre Manent put it recently, “the most precise way to designate what afflicts us, what troubles and demoralizes us, is to say simply: we no longer know what law is.” The key question is, “If our actions are not to be regulated by law, then what shall regulate them?” Ryan Anderson has identified the same problem plaguing debates within conservatism writ large. Responding to common good skepticism from a (typical) right-liberal (who essentially accepts that government mostly only exists to protect individuals from harm, and to protect their individual rights) Anderson asked how “the scope of […] rights” can be determined “without some account of human flourishing and the common good?” For instance, how can the conflict between the woman’s bodily autonomy and a baby’s right to life be mediated otherwise? What about rights of conscience? All exercise must have limits. A rule of right action must apply else we fall into the chaos of mere competing rights claims without means of adjudication—no lodestar to guide us. That way lies devolution into pure power politics. That way lies madness.
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In God’s decree, the law was not designed to restore from sin or to recover from the wages of sin—the law brings death, and the reader of the Scriptures needs to ask concerning that other way. The law “could not do” as far as restoration was concerned. The law brings death rather than life. Living unto God is only through the person and work of Jesus Christ, rather than through the law. This was true in the Old Testament as well as in the New.

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: Romans 8:3

The law of God has great value in the Scriptures and for the Christian life. Thomas Manton would not doubt the value of the law nor its place in the Christian life; he was not a Neonomian. A high view of the law of God, as described in chapter 19 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, section five, necessitates that there are things the law can and cannot do:
“The moral law doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof; and that, not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God, the Creator, who gave it. Neither doth Christ, in the Gospel, any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.”
Manton would understand and propound these moral-legal duties as a minister and an assemblyman at Westminster. Despite this high view of the law, Manton understood the limitations of it. Following the Apostle Paul who confessed there were things “the law could not do,” Manton gave four limitations of the law, demonstrating what the law could not do for fallen humanity. He said in summary, “It was impossible for the law to do away sin, and justify man before God…that is, through the corruption of our natures, we being sinners, and are unable to to perform the duty of the law (Works of Manton, 11.420).” The impossibilities of the law are four.
Cannot Free Us From Sin and Death
Our father Adam was given a command in the Covenant of Works. The law, being written on his heart, was a law of full obedience. The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 19.1-2, tell us that the same law that was given to Adam “continued” as the moral law given at Sinai. Was that law able to free the people of God from sin and death? No.
Despite the law not being able to free us from sin and death, God’s will—his heart, his purpose, and decree—was that man would be free. Manton said,  “It was necessary in respect of God’s purpose and decree, that we should be free from sin and death. For God would not have mankind utterly to perish…(Ibid).” God’s will was that humanity, or a people chosen from humanity, would not perish in sin and death.  God “would not lose the whole creation of mankind. God hath showed himself placable and merciful to all men, and hath forbidden despair, and continued many forfeited mercies…(Ibid).”
Sin and death are unable to be overcome through the law of God, and Manton then turns his attention to the fact that restoration is unreachable through the law as well.
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