Slowly chipping away at a long writing project for my son. At the moment, my notes are disorganized and un-polished in the extreme, but I am not done generating notes. I have a clear end-goal for my notes; when I've achieved that I'll begin the work of seriously compiling and polishing all of this. I'm anticipating paternity leave later this year (woohoo!) and I don't think I'm going to be so crazy busy during that time that I won't be able to work on this project. So, I'm hoping to complete all of my notes by that time. 

At the moment, my notes are broken into four groups. Here are the groups, and the number of pages of notes I'm sitting on (if I just open word and paste them in; these are mostly in .txt files): 

- transliterations (76 pages)

- dialogues (42 pages)

- topical notes (111 pages)

- verse commentary (330 pages)

The transliterations are from my pocket steno notebooks, where I write down topics of interest as they come to me. The dialogues are transcriptions and copy/pastes of debates I've participated in. They'll be sifted and converted into stand-alone arguments. There's likely much overlap in the contents of the various groupings here. The topical notes and verse commentary were made using my Bible Notes application. The roadmap is to complete the verse commentary and then distill it into the topical notes, then sort everything into chapters aligned with an overall rhetorical vector.

Here's an excerpt from today's transliteration:

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I hear a lot about people saying it's a good thing for a country to "base" its laws on God's law. What does it mean for a law to be "based on" God's law, though? Either it's the same as God's law or it's different from God's law. 

A more refined approach to this idea of "basing" laws on God's law might be to say that Christian legislators are doing the same thing that an SGE theonomist advocates -- drawing out the general equity and underlying moral precepts from of God's laws, as a judge might do if he were ruling in ancient Israel and encountered a new case, only afterwards the Christian legislators are making it into a law "based on" God's law. For starters, if this were really their intent then there would be no instance where they instituted a penalty which was not described by the law expressly, because the criminality of an action is determined by casuistry, associating it with a penalty according to the descriptions of what acts fall under that penalty in the law, but the penalty is not determined by the same kind of examination of general equity. So there's no room in the general equity to invent new penalties. Second, they cannot claim to be reaching for an underlying principle in the scripture without being able to point to some statement in the scripture which tells us that such an underlying principle can exist without its stated manifestation in the scripture -- I mean, they are looking at a law and saying that the underlying principle which motivates the law should exist without the law that describes it, so they must point out a statement in scripture to that effect, or else they are claiming that scripture is motivated by underlying principles which are not in perfect agreement with what scripture says. Finally, and importantly, it is impossible for them to legislate new laws without breaking God's law in Deut 4:2, 12:32, and so no such new legislation can claim to be drawn from the underlying principles in God's law, because those very underlying principles prohibit the legislation itself. 

If they say that they believe God's laws are perfectly just for their original audience, but not applicable to our circumstances, then they are again in the same boat — they are trying to ascertain the underlying principles in the law and generalizing them for our modern context. We need a reliable metric for determining what differences in circumstance warrant what changes to judicial procedures. Certainly, no such metric can be derived from scripture, because their very premise states that the scriptural prescriptions concerning judicial procedures are inapplicable to our circumstances. This is, first of all, in contradiction with 1 Tim 3:16-18, which says that the scripture can thoroughly equip a man of God for every good work. That being true, they cannot claim that the Bible lacks a prescription for our modern context. 

It is also in contradiction to their stated aim: They self-consciously avoid the what the Bible says while adhering to underlying principles which they claim are derived from what the Bible says, on the basis that these underlying principles motivate what the Bible says. If those principles really motivate what the Bible says, then we should see textual/grammatical clues concerning them, so that we would not need to rely on a kind of "wisdom" that reduces (in legislative practice) to "feelings" and "vibes" about how the Bible intends something other than what it says.

So, I am firmly convinced that it is incoherent for a Christian nation, believing that God's law is just and that the Bible is inerrant, to say that any laws not-identical to God's law are tolerable on the grounds that they are "based on" God's laws.

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Maybe someone will find that edifying, or tell me why I'm wrong.

"Let's keep reforming."