In my theological training, we made distinctions between alien righteousness (the unmerited gift of God's grace flowing from Jesus' perfect active and passive obedience of His sacrifice on the cross) that gives us forgiveness of all our sins, a clean conscience, joy and peace in the Holy Spirit etc., and civic righteousness (external obedience to the 10 Commandments) revealed in natural law / common law which even unbelievers can do and results in outward peace and quietness which benefits the spread of the Good News. Human law can and should promote civic righteousness -- rewarding good / punishing evil -- the first function (a curb) of the Law of God for all people, believers and unbelievers alike. In addition to this critical distinction, lawmakers need to keep in mind the limitations of human law especially that it must never contradict God's Law as revealed in the Bible also known as natural / common law, written on our hearts (Romans 2:15).
To what I wrote, I might add this thought about "external obedience to the 10 Commandments." Isn't Paul's point in Romans that man's depravity is so universal in relation to all parts of his being that he not only can't he keep them, but he won't keep them, because the "power of sin is the law" (1 Cor. 15) and only God's spirit would actually avail anything toward even civic righteousness? Is there any kind of righteousness apart from some intervening or superintending work of Spirt of Christ?
And, if we can "keep the Ten Commandments," would that not tend toward Pelagianism and away from the Augustinianism of the Reformation? I know you're not Pelagian, but, again, can man, apart from God, "produce" even civic righteousness? Or did the days of Noah not demonstrate where society heads as God was effectively saying, "Have it your way according to your wisdom and what I said would be the consequence of the Fall. See if it doesn't lead to death."? It did.
Just asking and thinking things through with my Brother!
Great comments and helpful to discussion. Probably worthy of a whole commentary exploration or two. And, some of it will be addressed next week as I look at how a Christian magistrate would “work” in relation to the covenant of grace in that sphere. This is a longer answer than you probably wanted.
Let me say right off that I recognize that what I laid out is probably novel in relation to law and the office magistrate that God ordained (a precept no longer recognized by most). And I do not think God’s righteousness can and will ever be ushered in by magistrates, ever. That jurisdiction belongs to Christ and the ekklessia preaching and living out the gospel
However, I hope it doesn’t contradict what was good in the historical outworking of the new covenant and development of the Western Legal Tradition your tradition is part of. I hope it builds on it.
We are here addressing the history of law Western Legal Tradition and the relationship between the ekklesia and the civil magistrate. It is one that the ekklesia has wrested with for centuries, that is, from the Papal Revolution (Investiture struggle), through the German Revolution (Lutheran), and the English Revolution (Puritan).
Each was in a historical context in furtherance of Spirit’s outworking of the covenant of grace (providence) that responded to the “conditions” in which God brought them forth. Each contributed in fundamental ways to the Western Legal, and I believe, each built upon the preceding development until American jurisprudence fell to a Nietzschean cosmology and that of the French Revolution and Justice Holmes’s application of it.
However, each can also become captive to the environment in which its legal and governmental precepts came forth and life under the leading of the Spirit in the consumption of the covenant of grace can grow stale. The written inspirited history of the early Church in Act shows development, as does Christian theological development since.
So, respecting the tradition you mentioned, legal historian Harold Berman wrote (Law and Revolution) that it “asssum[ed] the existence of a Christian conscience among the people and a state governed by Christian rulers.” No doubt that was due to the developments of Christendom flowing from the Papal Revolution and the development and application of canon law to large parts of life.
The application of law to persons under the theological training you received was, I think, rightly moved from the church to the jurisdiction God ordained for the civil magistrate. But as Berman notes, it “made possible the emergence of a theory of law—legal positivism.”
That was not intended, but as the cosmology of Machiavelli’s Prince articulated at around the same time began to influence thought, legal positivism developed, and now the cosmology of Nietzsche envelopes our civic thought (and, even thought in the church).
Thankfully, we now have the benefit of seeing how various theological understandings of relative to the ekklesia and magistrate played out, even later Calvinism with its influence on the English Reformation and Scottish Reformation. Given where we find ourselves now, I would commend the Reformation sola semper reformanda.
Thus, I think we need a scriptural critique of what was good in those developments and traditions. For example, would your tradition have been birthed in the present environment rather the one then existing? I don’t think so because conceding that a magistrate was loosed from God entirely would have been seen as inviting a societal disaster. I think it may be why so many pastors would not exercise their office to speak to our magistrates on the marriage legislation, which I thank God you did! But even Christian legislators feel free now to disregard the religious as a basis for policy.
But I think that critique needs to include what may have been missing. Was something not said or assumed that that has led to our present condition in which atheism is now assumed and Christianity is for children and old women, as I think Kuyper put it in 1898.
My thought is we go back to the beginning of the Word and reconsider our cosmology. Cosmology is absent from our dialogue. But cosmology is the foundation for our soteriology, which seems to be the strict focus of the reformed at this point, and eschatology. I believe they all rise and fall together or we have a jumbled mess—and all of that, in my view, is grounded in how we understand the covenant of grace and who Jesus Christ is.
So, that’s what I’m raising, and I thank you for engaging. The dialogue needs to continue. I’m still working things out, but as I said, what we once did and thought gave way to where we are and we’ve been doing ain’t working!
In my theological training, we made distinctions between alien righteousness (the unmerited gift of God's grace flowing from Jesus' perfect active and passive obedience of His sacrifice on the cross) that gives us forgiveness of all our sins, a clean conscience, joy and peace in the Holy Spirit etc., and civic righteousness (external obedience to the 10 Commandments) revealed in natural law / common law which even unbelievers can do and results in outward peace and quietness which benefits the spread of the Good News. Human law can and should promote civic righteousness -- rewarding good / punishing evil -- the first function (a curb) of the Law of God for all people, believers and unbelievers alike. In addition to this critical distinction, lawmakers need to keep in mind the limitations of human law especially that it must never contradict God's Law as revealed in the Bible also known as natural / common law, written on our hearts (Romans 2:15).
To what I wrote, I might add this thought about "external obedience to the 10 Commandments." Isn't Paul's point in Romans that man's depravity is so universal in relation to all parts of his being that he not only can't he keep them, but he won't keep them, because the "power of sin is the law" (1 Cor. 15) and only God's spirit would actually avail anything toward even civic righteousness? Is there any kind of righteousness apart from some intervening or superintending work of Spirt of Christ?
And, if we can "keep the Ten Commandments," would that not tend toward Pelagianism and away from the Augustinianism of the Reformation? I know you're not Pelagian, but, again, can man, apart from God, "produce" even civic righteousness? Or did the days of Noah not demonstrate where society heads as God was effectively saying, "Have it your way according to your wisdom and what I said would be the consequence of the Fall. See if it doesn't lead to death."? It did.
Just asking and thinking things through with my Brother!
Great comments and helpful to discussion. Probably worthy of a whole commentary exploration or two. And, some of it will be addressed next week as I look at how a Christian magistrate would “work” in relation to the covenant of grace in that sphere. This is a longer answer than you probably wanted.
Let me say right off that I recognize that what I laid out is probably novel in relation to law and the office magistrate that God ordained (a precept no longer recognized by most). And I do not think God’s righteousness can and will ever be ushered in by magistrates, ever. That jurisdiction belongs to Christ and the ekklessia preaching and living out the gospel
However, I hope it doesn’t contradict what was good in the historical outworking of the new covenant and development of the Western Legal Tradition your tradition is part of. I hope it builds on it.
We are here addressing the history of law Western Legal Tradition and the relationship between the ekklesia and the civil magistrate. It is one that the ekklesia has wrested with for centuries, that is, from the Papal Revolution (Investiture struggle), through the German Revolution (Lutheran), and the English Revolution (Puritan).
Each was in a historical context in furtherance of Spirit’s outworking of the covenant of grace (providence) that responded to the “conditions” in which God brought them forth. Each contributed in fundamental ways to the Western Legal, and I believe, each built upon the preceding development until American jurisprudence fell to a Nietzschean cosmology and that of the French Revolution and Justice Holmes’s application of it.
However, each can also become captive to the environment in which its legal and governmental precepts came forth and life under the leading of the Spirit in the consumption of the covenant of grace can grow stale. The written inspirited history of the early Church in Act shows development, as does Christian theological development since.
So, respecting the tradition you mentioned, legal historian Harold Berman wrote (Law and Revolution) that it “asssum[ed] the existence of a Christian conscience among the people and a state governed by Christian rulers.” No doubt that was due to the developments of Christendom flowing from the Papal Revolution and the development and application of canon law to large parts of life.
The application of law to persons under the theological training you received was, I think, rightly moved from the church to the jurisdiction God ordained for the civil magistrate. But as Berman notes, it “made possible the emergence of a theory of law—legal positivism.”
That was not intended, but as the cosmology of Machiavelli’s Prince articulated at around the same time began to influence thought, legal positivism developed, and now the cosmology of Nietzsche envelopes our civic thought (and, even thought in the church).
Thankfully, we now have the benefit of seeing how various theological understandings of relative to the ekklesia and magistrate played out, even later Calvinism with its influence on the English Reformation and Scottish Reformation. Given where we find ourselves now, I would commend the Reformation sola semper reformanda.
Thus, I think we need a scriptural critique of what was good in those developments and traditions. For example, would your tradition have been birthed in the present environment rather the one then existing? I don’t think so because conceding that a magistrate was loosed from God entirely would have been seen as inviting a societal disaster. I think it may be why so many pastors would not exercise their office to speak to our magistrates on the marriage legislation, which I thank God you did! But even Christian legislators feel free now to disregard the religious as a basis for policy.
But I think that critique needs to include what may have been missing. Was something not said or assumed that that has led to our present condition in which atheism is now assumed and Christianity is for children and old women, as I think Kuyper put it in 1898.
My thought is we go back to the beginning of the Word and reconsider our cosmology. Cosmology is absent from our dialogue. But cosmology is the foundation for our soteriology, which seems to be the strict focus of the reformed at this point, and eschatology. I believe they all rise and fall together or we have a jumbled mess—and all of that, in my view, is grounded in how we understand the covenant of grace and who Jesus Christ is.
So, that’s what I’m raising, and I thank you for engaging. The dialogue needs to continue. I’m still working things out, but as I said, what we once did and thought gave way to where we are and we’ve been doing ain’t working!
Tune in next week for what it looks like.