What is a Christian View of Law?

Today I examine the question, “What is a Christian view of Law?”

I wonder how many would unapologetically and confidently declare that the answer depends on a person’s metaphysics, because that informs our understanding of what law is and what it is for.

For that statement to make sense and for my answer to today’s topical question to make sense, I believe some background and context about metaphysics is required. I believe that because I usually get funny looks when I bring up metaphysics and the related subject of cosmology with fellow believers, elected church officers, and even pastors.

I’ll get to what metaphysics is momentarily, but I think the reason for this reaction is found in an observation by Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck. More than 100 years ago he wrote: “[T]heology . . .. tries as much as possible to exclude all metaphysics . . . and to restrict itself to the realm of the religious. It has become ashamed of its own name and has allowed itself to be re-baptized into a science of religion.”

Christianity has a metaphysic? To modern Christian ears, that sounds philosophical, speculative, and outright unbiblical. They say, “We just want to know what the Bible says.” And that is the reason I shared earlier in the week my sermon on the secret of God being for imaginative children. The imagination of some Christians about the nature of the cosmos has no room for metaphysics. And for them, I promise I will get to what the Bible says.

How Metaphysics and Cosmology Disappeared.

Metaphysics and its philosophical progeny, cosmology, were dealt what today seems like a mortal wound by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. He put a damnable crack in the belief held in earlier centuries that God had created a fully integrated and harmonious cosmos that could be reconciled back to God. Let me explain.

Following the German and English Reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively, eighteenth century Europe found itself beset by a full blown crisis concerning knowledge, particularly the knowledge of God. Philosophers would call it a crisis of epistemology, which is a fancy word for the study of how we know things, assuming we really can. Such a crisis may sound silly to us, but that was the problem of the day. Of course, if we think about it, abortion rights, gay “marriage,” and transgenderism demonstrate that we still have a crisis of knowledge.

Anyway, in an effort to keep all knowledge from speculative dissolution, Kant said reason and empirical observations could give us true knowledge of the physical world. That’s why, in our day, empirical, data driven science is applied to our understanding of everything, including what a woman is.

But, the “crack” Kant introduced between the physical world and the invisible and spiritual world left the crisis of knowledge to continue with respect to all that was beyond the physical, such as God and the objectivity of any values. But such is the stuff of metaphysics, and that determines one’s cosmology! Both were left in doubt.

Nietzsche Sort of “Rescues” Cosmology

By the end of the 19th century, Abraham Kuyper saw that the metaphysical and cosmological speculation of those who in the 18th century denied a creation ex nihilo by God was ready to give way to the Frederick Nietzsche’s way of looking at the world. Kuyper wrote that the ideological speculations of these philosophers were being “left far behind by Nietzsche's blasphemous utterances on the Christ.” He said “Nietzsche is the author whose works are being most eagerly devoured by the young modern Germany of our day.”

In other words, Kuyper saw in Nietzsche what was left when nothing beyond nature—like God— informed our knowledge of what we observed in nature: Nothing but stuff. It’s called philosophical nihilism. This is not just a moral relativism. Philosophical nihilism means nothing has a given nature, meaning, or purpose, only that which we supply by the names we call things. A human version of creation by words, this time spoken by man.

Nietzsche was flushing Romans 1:18-20 down the metaphysical drain. The invisible things of this world could no longer be seen at all.

The Response of the Protestants

Sadly, protestants conformed to this new way of thinking about the cosmos. On the one hand, some protestants began to treat Christ as the way to escape history and a sin-infected cosmos for a spiritual life in heaven. On the other hand, the shrinking number of reformed succumbed to what Kuyper called “the wrong idea that Calvinism represented an exclusively dogmatical and ecclesiastical movement.” As the earlier quotation from the reformed Bavinck had noted, even reformed theology was grinding to a metaphysical and cosmological halt. The doctrines of grace (soteriology) and how to order the institutional church were all that remained of the Reformation.

Bavinck summed up protestantism’s metaphysical and cosmological fall into the abyss as follows, and I think it is even more true today from what I see.

The worship of God is much more necessary than the knowledge of God. . . . It was as if people had lost all sense of the majesty and grandeur of God. Disregarding all so-called metaphysical questions, people rushed on to the will of God in order to know and to do it. Eternal life, they maintained, does not consist in knowing God but in doing his will.

What Does This Have To Do With Law?

So, what does all this talk of metaphysics and cosmology have to do with a Christian view of law? Why is it important? Because the Apostle Paul made it important when he wrote what we find in Romans 7:14: “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.”

A Christian view of law must take fully into account the metaphysical and cosmologies verities entailed in this statement. And in my view, any view of law that does not do so is not Christian.

I say that because my view of law most of my life was not Christian. That also explains why most of what I thought I was accomplishing during my 12 years as a state senator was either ineffective or consumed by the fires of the philosophical nihilism that is burning down our nation and world.

But for more on these verities that inform a Christian view of law, you will need to join me next week.

Announcement: If you are a law student, lawyer, public policy advisor, politician, or otherwise actively engaged in law or politics and today’s commentary sparks something in you, please let me know. Jason Farley and I are facilitating a dialoguing type conference you may find helpful. It is Saturday, July 27th in Nashville. It begins at 8:30 a.m. (central) and will conclude at 3:30 p.m. Four spaces remain.