I might legitimately be unhinging myself with the study I've been doing of God's personhood. I generally want to parameterize everything I learn -- discover it's rules, etc., ("This is how it works... if A then X"). But it seems all existence is a divine conversation between characters who are so far above my intellect that I can't even begin to expect them to take anything I say seriously. I've got so much material to dump here about what I've been studying, but I really can't seem to articulate any of it. It's all so complicated, and there are so many holes in my knowledge that I'm not sure whether it'll ever be possible for me to organize these thoughts. And yet, having an organized thought life has been a high priority for me ever since middleschool! How can a person live without knowing his own mind? It might be decades before I get enough free time to meditate and get anything particularly lucid out of it.

Lately I'm discouraged a little in the campaign for theonomy. I find myself feeling exhausted at the thought of rebutting articles about it, which is something I used to really enjoy... so I'm gonna rant about it. Here we go!

I think, overall, theonomy is not a complicated sell. The objections are many, but generally it seems like people come into agreement with theonomy as soon as they're able to accurately represent it. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an argument against theonomy which had both (a) a clear dependence on some obviously scriptural teaching, and (b) a lack of dependence on some misunderstanding about what theonomy entails or requires. But then, even after people become theonomists, they still carry with them all these reservations and wild ideas about God's law -- eliminating these, you might think, should be as simple as a read through the book, but that is not quite the case. 

What's really getting me is...Why is it so hard to convince Christians that they should obey God's commands? It feels like (and, if we're gonna be nuanced, it probably isn't like) the excuses from theonomists and non-theonomists alike are basically the same. It goes like this: 

Eventually you can convince just about every Christian that the Bible teaches us that God is concerned about our behavior, and that justice is morally relevant, and that politics are consequently relevant to Christians. So, after concerns about soteriological implications are resolved, the discussion begins about which of God's commands He actually intended us to follow.

Initially, the proceeding conversation revolves around covenants, and, since no participant is able to yield any clear passages linking the whole law to either covenant, except insofar as both covenants describe means of forgiveness for our breaking the whole law, the conversation may turn toward the uniqueness of Israel's particular circumstance. We all agree that the law is given as case law, where the case law illustrates principles and establishes a scope of general equity that the judges are expected to understand well enough to rule against them in broader contexts than what is literally described. And, nobody denies that the case laws are tailored to Israel's circumstances (e.g. Exodus 22:1). Finding, as before, that there are zero passages in scripture indicating that the aforementioned "tailoring" should be taken to mean that changes in location or technological advancement would obsolete the principles or general equity of the law, it usually takes quite a bit of effort to make someone realize that, consequently, the actual quality of that tailoring doesn't in any way imply that modern judges aren't expected to execute Mosaic civil law. 

Included in the above discussion is usually a long list of questions about particular laws, where a certain mode of thinking has to be established so that the person involved will know how to reach their own conclusions about other laws. For example, a common stream of objections comes from the notion that "land is an important theme in the OT". That's true, but let's get into the particulars. They ask how we apply the command for Israel to take Canaan from the Canaanites -- the answer: we distinguish between commands of the form, "you, go accomplish X task right now", and commands of the form, "whenever you are in Y circumstance, you should perform Z task". The command to take Canaan was of the former sort, and was actually already accomplished by Israel, such that even if someone were to argue that it is still obligatory for us (because all commands from God reflect moral imperatives of some sort), we would be left saying that the task has already been done (there are a few other good ways to approach it; in just giving quick examples here). So they move on to ask about the general equity of the allotment of the land to the tribes, the jubilee laws, and the mode by which we expect the theonomic state to grow on the earth; each having a different sort of answer, but all following from the same hermeneutic approach and so dictated by the contents of the text. (I'll reiterate that the theonomic state expands peacefully, without initiating war).

There might also be some conversation about what is meant by Jesus in Matt 5 (where he clarifies and affirms the law), or in Matt 19:8 (where he clarifies a proper understanding of adultery as it pertains to reasons for divorce by citing and affirming Mosaic law), etc. etc... Those are generally not hard to get through with a bit of discussion (making a non-theonomist into a theonomist doesn't happen overnight).

Then, when the person has finally accepted that God expects them to do justice as God defined it, and that God didn't redefine it without telling us the new definition in the NT, the conversation turns to fulfillment. I suppose that most theonomists have a poorly worked-out understanding of the actual means by which Jesus fulfills parts of the law, making those parts unactionable for us. This deficiency is the root of all kinds of disagreements among theonomists, and I think that it should be the focus of argumentation before praxis.

But then, even after all of that is basically agreed upon, one last hurdle remains, and crops up over and over and over. There are always several laws for which the theonomist knows no clear reason why it should not be followed today, but which the theonomist believes should not be followed, and these can be identified easily by their failure to conform to that Theonomist's understanding of the mode of fulfillment mentioned in the immediately prior paragraph. The reasons given for why those laws are abrogated or inapplicable to us boil down to terribly arbitrary divisions in the law -- excuses, really, to squeeze in their own notions about what kind of government would or wouldn't work in reality. Some of my favorite examples of this (which I've encountered) include:

• That law can be seen as symbolic of a particular act Jesus did, and so it was a shadow of the work Jesus did, therefore it doesn't apply to us after Jesus's death.
• Israel did it this or that way, therefore that's what the law meant, regardless of what the law actually said.
• The law was given on two tablets, and the second table of the law is abrogated in a different way from the first, because if you look at them separately, you can construe them in such a way that there is a thematic difference between them.
• This law was intended to protect the seed of Israel from genetic impurity, (as if Jesus's body was a divine eugenics project), and so is not relevant to us.
• This or that law was needed for Israel's cultural/sociopolitical atmosphere, but it isn't needed for ours.
• Moses was speaking as a chieftain, not as a prophet, when he issued this or that law (e.g. the judicial structure). Therefore that law is not necessary for us to follow. 
• The NT says that Jesus performed X act in obedience to that law, and so it was a shadow of the work Jesus did, therefore it doesn't apply to us after Jesus's death.

Some of these sound reasonable on their surface, but they get really "fun" to sort out when their proponents try to justify them using any scripture at all. The irony here is, most of the above bullets come from conversations I've had with people who I suspect are the most well-read about theonomy and legal theory among all of my theonomist friends.

I feel like the formula I most often encounter from theonomists goes something like this:

The Biblical Law does contain a prescription on X topic, but that prescription is not relevant to us because [reason from above bullets], and yet we do evidently need an answer for X topic today, and the Biblical one might work if not for [extra-Biblical argument for favored secular political theory], and so the real answer must be derived from [feel-good-general-principle drawn from broad slashes at some Psalm or random quote from the NT or something], and therefore we should do [proposal for some random secular policy, but willingness to budge toward literally anything else except what the Bible prescribes, given a regular, secular-style political argument].

Political legitimacy, for example, was an issue recently discussed in the theonomy forum. Several options for political legitimacy were examined and found epistemically difficult -- from my perspective, it was nearly impossible to qualify the political and physical boundaries of an entity fitting any of the proposed definitions. I offered the idea that, basically, a government was legitimate if it was elected according to Biblical procedure, conforms to the Biblical model, and carries out Biblical law. This makes legitimate governments more-or-less easy to identify, given some basic terms of agreement on what makes for a reasonable attempt at obedience to scripture. The objection to this was that it was unconscionable that all secular governments were illegitimate, and so any group hoping to follow Biblical law could erect a legitimate political authority at any time simply by obeying God's command to set up a government, and that they would be morally justified in defending that authority from violence in accordance with Biblical laws concerning just (defensive) warfare. Basically, it would be shocking if anyone obeyed God!

But suppose we agree on a theory for how, precisely, Jesus fulfills the law (we don't, and that is a problem, but I don't think it affects my aim here, because I have a hard time imagining even a hypothetical theory which would preserve laws dictating judicial activity without preserving the laws dictating that we should have judges who carry out those activities). After that, the first step toward obedience should be pretty simple. We have some positive commands in scripture requiring that God's people have judges who carry out certain activities. We should be able to agree that the first step in obedience is to simply elect some judges to carry out those activities! And, if we have disagreements about what precisely those activities are, we can at least all agree that "trying to obey some interpretation of scripture" is better than "avoiding scripture altogether". Different denominations all are accepted as "saved", and so I see no reason why different interpretations of scriptural law can't all be seen as "attempts to be obedient" (or maybe "faithful"), and therefore carrying some form of Biblical legitimacy.

But then again, building on the confusion about legitimacy, I keep seeing the existing governments mentioned in people's plans to move forward. It's almost as if people are getting hung up on the idea that we already have judges, and they just aren't acting right, so we need to change the judges or the laws to match scripture. There are a ton of problems with that idea -- first of all, that there's no legislative structure in God's law, and God's law actually includes commands saying that we shouldn't add or remove from it (so no making or changing laws). But second, and more relevant, the judges in scripture are defined in no terms other than that they perform the duties which scripture describes -- if a judge isn't performing those duties, then he isn't a "judge" as scripture defines "judge". We have no judges even attempting to comply with scriptural law over and above secular national laws. That is to say, we don't have judges at all; we have something else with the same name, and so we are simply disobeying God's command to select judges.

Call me obtuse, but I can't help thinking that the Bible isn't all that unclear on this topic. In fact, I have a hard time understanding how we've reached a place where we can look at plain scripture and interpret it to mean something other than what it plainly says -- God gave some commands, and didn't tell us to stop obeying them. This should be pretty simple, I think. It's as plain as Deut 30:11-16. We're just disobedient.

"Note then the kindness and severity of God"