Ooooo, man, I'm tired of debate. In past years, I was always ready to do a bunch of research and argue. Recently, my book project has me doing so much research, I am barely able to say that I know anything at all. People keep asking me things, and I'm like, "that's a topic on my list, and I haven't gotten to it yet. I'll give you a clear answer when I finish researching it". And, maybe that should have been the way I answered all along. 

But I think I've always been pretty-much willing to admit when I'm clearly proved wrong. So, historically (and maybe still today) my ignorance has been outsized for my confidence, but I don't think I have made a habit of arguing for things that I didn't have good epistemic warrant to believe, and I generally work very hard to separate out the things I'm sure about from the things I'm not sure about. So my public-facing opinions haven't seen very much foundational change in the past 10 or so years. (I've certainly developed on some important topics, but I'm stressing "foundational" in this prior sentence.)

These days, I feel like I've spent my life studying a river to learn about how all of its waters affect one another in-stream, but I've recently caught a glimpse of its outlet into the ocean. The baseline theses of Christianity and Theonomy are solid, but the details are very deep. When someone hits me with an argument about some particular covenantal distinction, I'm exhausted by the thought of rebutting them, because the details which contribute to a thorough justification for any of the various judicial concepts are so very numerous, and I haven't completed cataloguing even half of them! These days I'm all-but ready to just tell people, "dang, maybe you're right", in order to escape the discussion. I am nonetheless confident in my impressions about scripture, to the extent that various common doctrines are easy to defend. But the people who question common doctrines tend to verse themselves in a wide variety of obscure teachings in order to defend their position, and debating them is really tedious.

Am I just one of them?

Does Theonomy need such a thorough defense because of its unconventionality? No, actually, Theonomy hardly needs any defending at all. Who has an argument against it? I'm not aware of any. Am I simply applying too strict epistemic standards to others while giving myself a pass? Actually, that would be the case if arguments against theonomy weren't straight-forwardly bad. It's not like there are some smart arguments against theonomy, and I'm just brushing them off; the arguments are really, face-value, poor arguments on basic terms. You don't need to get into the weeds to find this stuff. It's not that I lack familiarity with them -- I'm knee-deep in them all the time! I understand the stronger arguments, and remain unconvinced. And, most Christians, even very smart ones, don't offer them anyway. How often have I had to answer, "Mosaic law is only for Israel" by simply pointing to the myriad passages where God condemned nations outside Israel for breaking his law -- it's not like this is an ongoing debate even; I've debated that point a bunch of times, and I don't think I've encountered anyone who made that argument and maintained it in the same form after discussing it. It's not like debating Calvinism vs Arminianism on the internet; scoring concessions on this stuff is common.

What does that mean? Doesn't every loony heretic talk like I do? "Prove me wrong! Please!". Only, I don't say this with polemical sarcasm, but begging in earnest! Am I lying to myself? How I long to be wrong! Is this false humility? How I work to disprove myself every day! How eager I am to adopt any perspective other than my own! Am I such an utter fool? Do I dismiss alternatives too easily? I am speaking for myself here, I guess, but I don't think I've been unfair to my interlocutors. 

And yet, it seems that working to disprove myself and building up a strong defense of my position are one in the same act. Is every ounce of labor I put into the task simply increasing my emotional investment into the truthfulness of my own position? If only that were so! The opposite! I am invested in wishing that my nation were not provoking the Almighty God to wrath with their blatant disregard for His Law. If someone would just explain to me how it is that God's Law doesn't tell us what is and isn't sin, and show me where scripture proves their position, my concern would be alleviated as easily as if we all submitted ourselves to God's Law.

"LORD we know you!" But we do not obey his law. We elect princes, but not by Him. We pretend God wants us to rule by means of our own wisdom, examining nature by means of our prudence, instead of looking to God's glorious law. But God describes us by saying, "pretending to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images of created things". 

Am I, as some have said, prioritizing subjective interpretation over the truth which the corporate church arrives at? Where is the prudence in submitting your mind to the masses, even when your mind tells you that the masses are in disagreement with God's word? Theonomists aren't incapable of working together -- we often get a bad rap for being incapable of agreeing about the laws, but that is true in every society. Ask 100 legislators in America to write a bill on the same topic, and they will do it 200 different ways. Yet, every Lancastrian theonomist I've spoken with has always said that they would be happy to live in a place where people, even though they do it imperfectly, were at least trying to obey God's law as written. The problem isn't that theonomists prioritize subjective interpretation over corporate doctrine; the problem is that the church (at least the subset of it which levies this criticism against me) is corporately not engaged in interpreting, but is instead busy shoehorning the Bible into their outside pagan philosophies. 

I'm not asking for anything overly specific here. There's a categorical difference between saying "Here, Moses, this is our law code", and saying, "let's make up some laws that are modeled on Moses". The former is attempting Moses, the latter is attempting something novel while drawing from Moses. I'm not saying we all need to agree with about the particulars of how Mosaic law should work. I'm not suggesting that there's no interpretive work which would need to go into applying the law in practice. I'm arguing that we should make a self-conscious effort to obey God's law instead of making it up on our own. It's not the case that this has been attempted and failed; it's never been attempted -- and I am not arguing that prior attempts were "fake attempts" on the grounds that they tried it but didn't try it the right way. I am simply pointing out that nobody in history ever sat down and said "Moses is our law code" without adding anything else on top of it. Even the Jews added to it -- the Sanhedrin is totally foreign to the text of Moses; they acknowledge themselves that their laws are both from the Torah and the Talmud. I'm not accusing anyone of being a false Scotsman; there is nobody claiming to be a Scotsman so that I could accuse them. It's like G.K. Chesterton said: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”