Getting back into Baduk lately. I wrote this post slowly over a few days, because I don't have much time to blog these days. I listened to this on the first day and thought it was pretty good (heads up, it has profanity):

I saw this article by T.D. Gordon recently, and I very much appreciated the time and effort which the author put into making it into an organized and well-structured overview of his understanding of the status of things regarding judicial Theonomy (I'm making a distinction between "Judicial Theonomy" and "Ethical Theonomy" in order to help the reader, but heads up: I don't think there is actually a significant difference, and this lack-of-a-difference will inform some of what I'm about to write). Gordon is opposed to theonomy, so he ends each section with his favored rebuttals to the arguments for theonomy.

I think it would be valuable for me to address the first argument he makes. He structured it well enough that I feel I can respond to him "point-for-point". Idk if he'll ever see this, but I certainly hope that what I write is good for the edification of any readers (google analytics says I get an average of 2 viewers, excluding myself, per post, and they both appear to be in eastern Europe. I'm not expecting much here.).

So, getting to the point: the argument I want to discuss is what he has called "The Argument from Necessity". The argument from necessity is an argument in favor of Theonomy. He presents it and then rebuts it from several angles.

He says that the argument from necessity is this: "we need to know how to function in the civil arena, and therefore the word of God must provide us with such instruction."

The first part of his rebuttal is (summarily): that knowledge of "statecraft" is a "want", not a "need", and the Theonomist must provide grounds to distinguish statecraft from other affairs, such as medicine and science, in order to justify the notion that we need guidance in statecraft and therefore God must provide that, but we apparently don't need guidance in these other areas, and so the Bible has not provided guidance there. 

My response: I reject the distinction he makes between God's commands relevant to "statecraft" and the other commands which I suppose he might say are not relevant to statecraft (such as the command to not murder, etc). That is, I see the command to carry out a specific prescribed penalty for thieves as similar in weightiness to the command to abstain from acts of theft. Why should he say that the second one is binding and not the first? Moreover, as far as categorical necessity goes, the fact that God has provided a comprehensive set of guidelines indicates that the guidelines are, themselves categorically similar in such a way that they (as a whole) distinguish themselves from whatever pieces of information are not presented to us in scripture (i.e. medicine and agriculture). Thus, the grounds which T.D. Gordon requests for distinguishing statecraft from other scientific fields, in terms of our need for its description from God, is thus: the commands which we need are the commands given. The commands which we do not need are the commands not given. 

In short, in order for him to make his case, he should produce scripture which dictates a hermeneutic which substantially distinguishes between laws pertaining to "statecraft" and not. I recognize he makes some effort to do this in his discussion of covenant theology, and I don't intend to address all that in this rebuttal, but I pick out a few points I found valuable to respond to at the end of this post. 

As to whether the law is a "need" or a "want" -- given my above responses, I'm not sure that the distinction is still relevant.

The second part of his rebuttal is (summarily): that natural revelation has proved sufficient in the field of science, and likewise proves sufficient in the field of government. He asks, "If we could not develop and refine statecraft by this method, then how can we account for the fact that many governments have proceeded, with varying degrees of success, by this method?"

My response: The "varying degrees of success" you mention are all, in their conclusion, failures. Just because one government lasts an extra hundred years or so before failing, it does not make it any less of a failure. If we could develop and refine statecraft by this method, then how can we account for all these failures?

The third part of his rebuttal is (summarily): Why would Paul urge obedience to the Roman government if he thought that the Roman government was fundamentally wrong?

My response: The premise that Paul urged obedience to a government which was fundamentally wrong is flawed. Paul urged obedience to governing authorities, and then he said "Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.". Was the Roman government in his day a terror only to bad conduct? Weren't they in the business of punishing people for spreading the gospel and worshipping God? What better conduct is there than to worship God? Clearly, inasmuch as Rome was terrorizing good conduct, they were not a ruler as Paul defines here -- otherwise, submission to them would have been precisely to abandon the faith whenever they demanded it (and they did demand it). So, ultimately, we obey rulers and authorities only inasmuch as they act according to the authority given to them by God (indeed, "there is no authority except from God"). It is therefore providential that God has given us an outline for what practices and means are delegated to human governing authorities. Any exercise outside of God's delegation is not "an authority instituted by God".

The fourth part of his rebuttal is (summarily): that Theonomists, leaning on the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture, see statecraft as being "necessary for man's life", but that this is dependent on an erroneous understanding of the sufficiency of scripture. He argues that scripture is a guide to "faith and life" in the religious sense, but not something intended to "answer all of our questions". He supports this using WCF 1:6 "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture." He then calls back to his request for a rule for distinguishing between statecraft and other fields of knowledge (see my response to his first rebuttal).

My response: Typically when I hear Theonomists mention the "sufficiency of scripture", they reference the Bible rather than the confessions. I don't intend to poo poo the confession here, but I just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing so that we understand each other well. I think his rebuttal here is partially dependent on a misunderstanding of Theonomy (although not necessarily a misunderstanding of what the authors of the WCF intended; I have never met them, and I wouldn't know). Usually I've heard Theonomists utilize 2 Tim 3:16-17 to say "Scripture is sufficient to thoroughly equip the servant of God for every good work". I want to emphasize: "thoroughly" and "every good work". It isn't the case that curing cancer is a "good work", but rather the effort to cure cancer can be called a "good work", and the Bible equips a person to know that pursuing the well-being of our neighbors is a good work. If we don't succeed at curing cancer, then was our research not a good work? And if we succeed, is it because we're "more good", or rather because we were "more skilled"? So, to the distinction between "statecraft" and "science", I refer back to my first response: the rule for distinguishing what explanation is "needed" to equip us for good works, and what explanation is "not needed" to equip us for good works (the same distinction which enables us to specify that these commands in the category so-called "statecraft" are required whereas instructions on how to cure cancer are not) is, "what explanation do we have in the Bible?". If we have it in the Bible, then it contributes to equipping us for every good work.

A few other items I wanted to respond to, variously, in the document, include these:

Gordon seems to be under the impression that Theonomy lives or dies on a specific interpretation of Matthew 5:17-21. This is not the case, and illustrates some unfamiliarity with the rest of the Biblical argument for Theonomy. Any reader who sees this and agrees with Gordon must be thinking, "ok, then give me the rest of the Biblical argument for Theonomy!" .... I'm not going to do it justice here; I really want to keep this as short as possible. That verse is maybe the shortest Biblical case for Theonomy, but it isn't the only case for Theonomy. For starters, I don't think I agree with the idea that "fulfill" should better be said "ratify". I think "fulfill" is appropriate to illustrate the distinction between laws which present us with an actionable obligation, and laws which Jesus makes non-actionable by means of his own actions on our behalf. For example, the Bible makes clear that we still have a sacrifice (better yet, a Passover sacrifice in particular), it's Jesus. We still have a priest, it's Jesus. We still have a temple; our body is the temple. etc. etc. etc.. It doesn't make sense for teachings such as these to be in the New Testament if the law was removed from us. If the law could simply be "changed" and "removed" from us, then why would we need Jesus to be our sacrifice and priest? Those distinctions only make sense in the context of a hermeneutic rule where OT Law is assumed to be continuous unless explicitly abrogated in this way by some action of Jesus. I am fine with supposing that any any or all of the OT laws have been removed from us, but given that we all agree at least some of the OT laws abide (e.g. "do not murder"), it is unsafe to say that any of them have ceased to abide without also providing an explanation such as the ones above (Jesus is our priest/temple/sacrifice etc). If some obligation in the law is to be removed from us, then there must be an explanation for its removal. 

Gordon also seems to argue from a nuanced understanding of "the law and the prophets", which I don't think has much warrant -- it seems to me that every example he gave of its usage remains coherent if the phrase is taken to mean "the entire OT".

Gordon proceeds to argue that imposing the requirement of the law will cause the Jerusalem council to be condemned, as well as the author of Hebrews and Paul. 

The Jerusalem council seems to be a problematic argument for Gordon, since they seem to have limited their injunction to dietary restrictions and sexual abstinence. I doubt that Gordon would agree that the dietary restrictions here are obligatory for us, or that sexual sin is the only kind of sin we should abstain from. Furthermore, if we grant that the Jerusalem council appears to have been rebutting Judaizers, who taught that the law should be followed completely *for salvation*, then perhaps the commands begin to make sense, because sexual sin and the eating of food sacrificed to idols are known to have been practiced as part of the pagan religions there, and we know from elsewhere in the Bible that we should avoid violating the consciences of our weaker brothers. 

I don't see any clear argument in Gordon's paper to the effect that Paul and the author of Hebrews would be called "least" on account of Bahnsen's confirmation of the law. I see that he discusses how the bloody ritual, circumcision, has been replaced with a non-bloody ritual, baptism, and he asks how that should inform our understanding of capital punishment -- as if the summation of meaning in the transition from circumcision to baptism were its change from "bloody" to "not bloody" (which I'm not sure is even a distinction mentioned in the Bible), and as if capital punishment were in summary a "bloody ritual" -- that simply isn't the case. Circumcision was more than blood letting, and capital punishment doesn't confirm criminals into the covenant. The connection here is a weird category conflation.

In rebutting the Westminister Assembly's teaching that the decalogue was given to Adam and Eve (I do not think the Ten Commandments were given to Adam and Eve, but I think that the abstraction stands without that detail), Gordon seems very nearly to make my case for me. He quotes Romans 5:13, saying "sin was in the world before the law", and says that this means that the law was not in the world prior to the establishment of the covenant. But then, what were they sinning against? Let's quote verse 13 and 14 together: "for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned form Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning  was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come". They sinned in ways unlike Adam's sin, and were penalized with death even though the law had not been given. How is this possible unless the law was in-effect before it was given? How could death reign before the law was given, if "sin is not counted where there is no law" unless the law is timeless, and so ignorance is no excuse? So "giving" the law was not "creating" the law, but simply formalizing the standards of righteousness which all men are already obligated to follow. If this is not the case, then why was Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed? Why was Abimelech's household almost destroyed when he took Rebekah? And why was Cain's murder of Abel penalized? 

The rest of Gordon's argument after that, equating the ten commandments with the covenant, appears to liberate Christians from the decalogue in particular, without quite addressing the rest of the law -- I was confused by it. If the Ten Commandments were only for that covenant, then do we not have to follow them now? If Jesus's advocacy for OT law were carried out only because he was giving his teachings prior to his own death, then does that mean that the only moral injunctions with any abiding validity are those in the epistles? The argument appears to be advocating either a complete removal of all OT moral injunctions or a removal only of the ten commandments; in the former case, we're in a very difficult situation because the epistles are not as specific about sin as the OT enumerations of the law, and they repeatedly reference the OT law when repeating their injunctions. In the latter case, we're still left with every OT law except for the 10 commandments, which is a very bizarre conclusion, which I've never heard advocated by anyone.

That's it, guys. I hope somebody finds this valuable.

Before I close the blog, I want to let everyone know that all of Bahnsen's lectures are free now. You can get them at https://www.cmfnow.com/mp3-bahnsen.aspx, and they will later be remastered and rehosted on apologiastudios.com as well as bahnsenproject.com. Praise God.

"There's no problem with your understanding"