Today we will consider how Christians can be deceived into thinking they are employing a Christian view of law. We will also see how they, along with rank-and-file Christians, could unjustifiably think progress toward a Christian worldview was made when, on June 18th, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Tennessee’s law prohibiting medical interventions to treat a minor’s gender dysphoria.
I submit that the reason we can be deceived is that we do not understand what kind of world we are speaking into. In other words, if we have not correctly diagnosed the “climate of opinion” into which we are speaking, the following will happen:
legislators will not draft legislation on human sexuality correctly,
Christian lawyers and policy advocates will not make arguments consistent with a Christian view of law, and
Christians who are told about those laws and legal wins will think a Christian worldview has been advanced.
However, to explain this, a brief review is needed.
Summary of the Christian View of Law
Our previous examination of Romans 7:14 and Psalm 25:14 told us that the essence of law, its essential nature, is spiritual and that the secret behind God’s work in the world is covenantal.
We’ve seen that law is fundamental to that covenant. We know this because it was visually represented by the Ten Commandments being placed in the ark of the covenant and the Ten Commandments are propositionally called God’s covenant.
What This Christian View of Law Necessarily Means
Given these two premises, Christian lawyers, policy advocates, legislators, and justices are dealing with what philosophers would call a metaphysical understanding of law, meaning law has an essence that is beyond mere phenomenal “laws” of matter or motion or words in a Code book or written judicial opinion.
So a Christian view of law would frame legislation and legal arguments in light of metaphysical considerations.
This un-empirical (metaphysical) understanding of the nature of law and reality rests in the Christian doctrine of creation. Christians know that “mere nature”—the physics of our experience that can be measured or mathematically quantified—is pointing us to a greater, more real, ultimate reality.
This form of knowledge and thinking about our world is critical for Christians. Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck wrote that “our religion is done for” when Christians and those around us “despair of the knowability of the metaphysical.” God and Creation, p. 256.
So, if Christians are not thinking of law in this way, they are not thinking in terms of a Christian view of law.
How to Avoid Working in Vain
Taking into consideration the ultimate (teleological) purpose of God’s covenant, we concluded that Christians involved in legal, legislative, and political endeavors must work in ways consistent with what God is doing by His covenant of grace. Christian citizens need to evaluate their work the same way. Otherwise, the Biblical word “vanity" will characterize what is being done.
Finally, and this brings us to our purpose today, God’s covenantal purpose with respect to humanity is to restore the image of God. The Fall impacted both body and soul, bringing physical and spiritual death. Of course, the image of God is also metaphysical—something real that is beyond “mere nature.”
The “Climate of Opinion” We Live In
In the 17th century, the phrase “climate of opinion” was coined to describe how thinking in various ages had more influence on the way we think than logic. See Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. Or, as C.S. Lewis once put it, we rarely reason ourselves to a position and then hold it; rather we have a position and then reason backwards to justify it.
Today, the climate of opinion is a “position” that can rightly be called metaphysical nihilism. It means we no longer believe there is anything beyond nature. Exploded is the notion that we live in a divinely ordered cosmological drama pointing us to something real and ultimate that exists independent of our mind—what we can reason to—and of our observational capacities.
In today’s climate of opinion, there is nothing that can “give” anything a nature, an essence. Nature, as we think of it today, is just discrete bits of phenomenological data.
The Implications of Today’s Climate of Opinion
The implications of this prevailing climate of opinion were described well by Roland Van Zandt in his book that I’ve referenced in recent years, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History.
Van Zandt said that the things we observe—the phenomenal world that can be measured and manipulated—has no meaning until “organized by man.” That is what most scientist today believe.
That data, as organized, is then “‘embodied in and correlated with socially agreed-upon linguistics symbols,’” the meaning of which are simply “standardized words whose meanings are defined in dictionaries.”
The Christian View of Law Applied in the U.S. Supreme Court
Last week, I noted that the brief I submitted to the recently decided Supreme Court transgender case addressed the issue in terms of a “given nature,” which is an historic category for legal reasoning.
The word “given” in law once meant there is something beyond the raw empirical data scientists can empirically determine. (I’ll look at what that means, and what we have lost in today’s climate of opinion.) The argument asserted there is a nature to male and female by which certain actions, even if denominated as “medical” or “health care,” can be objectively judged throughout the nation.
In other words, the brief asserted that male and female are not, as Van Zandt put it, mere kinds of data that we have “organized” and to which we have “assigned linguistic symbols,” whose “meaning” is simply “defined in dictionaries.”
What Did the Christian’s Scientific Approach Achieve?
To answer this question, recall that Christians routinely argued for these laws based on what medical science said about gender dysphoria and the efficacy of medical interventions for treating it.
With that, let’s return to the statement by the Christian lawyer on a recent Breakpoint broadcast about the Supreme Court’s transgender decisions. He said:
[T]his decision is consistent with the idea that sex is, biological sex is an embodied reality. It’s part of the truth of who we are, it’s part of the created word, and thanks to this decision, now states can align their law and the policies with that truth, with that reality.”
It is good that states can choose to prohibit these medical interventions when it comes to minors. However, no metaphysical nihilist would deny that biological sex is a reality.
So, what did the Christian approach reliant on science achieve?
Missing the Real Existential Question in Today’s Climate of Opinion
The question in our culture isn’t about the existence of two biological sexes. The question in a society informed by metaphysical nihilism is, “So what?”
In other words, the metaphysical nihilists Christians are arguing with—lawyers, jurists, policy influencers, and perhaps your neighbor—would mean what Van Zandt was pointing out. If we don’t understand who we are in conversation with, we will this paraphrase of Van Zandt:
Who cares there are two sexes? We still have to “organize” that data to give it meaning, and the linguistic symbols of the past, “male and female,” as we have “defined [them] in dictionaries,” are no longer the best way to understand and express our humanity. New conceptual models are needed, and gender identity is the one that should now give meaning to biological sex.
Not appreciating today’s climate of opinion, we can overlook the Christian lawyer injecting into the words “biological sex” a meaning that the world around us says is no longer there. He said biological sex is an “embodied reality. But there is no reality in our climate of opinion that can be embodied in raw biological sex data. Without metaphysical categories of knowledge and meaning, nothing—no reality—is “embodied” in biology.
The imported word “embodied” is the only thing that allows a person to say the decision was consistent with a Christian worldview.
Summing Up the Nature of Our Deception
While I would have been right with this lawyer a few years ago, the point is Christians can deceive themselves into thinking the Court’s decision is consistent with a Christian worldview. But that is true only when we import meaning into a word that the world says has no meaning except as defined in a dictionary.
The real nature of what the Court decided is evident in this fact:
States are free to allow pharmaceutical and surgical interventions to align the body with an individual’s subjective mental understanding of what biological sex means, namely, nothing. Or put in more familiar terms, some individuals are simply born into the wrong body.
In the climate of opinion in which we now live, move, and have our being, I don’t think the view of law Christians applied to this issue moved God’s covenantal needle forward in any way. In fact, I believe metaphysical nihilism was aided by Christians applying a strictly scientific empiricists approach to the issue. We conformed our approach to the way the world thinks.
Next week, I’ll look at how metaphysical considerations once informed the law of marital relations, and what has changed since Christians abandoned those considerations. We got Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. I think you’ll find it fascinating.
Share this post