David Reece and Stephen Wolfe debate theonomy versus natural law, contrasting Reece's "regulative principle" requiring explicit biblical commands against Wolfe's view of civil power as God-ordained for human flourishing within constitutional limits. They analyze property rights, arguing whether speed limits stem from private ownership or state stewardship of shared commons, while rejecting administrative overreach that creates societal deserts. Ultimately, the discussion urges Christians to engage actively in local politics and city councils, viewing political participation as a natural social function oriented toward neighborly good rather than a result of sin. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Why We Ask for Reviews00:05:24
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
So, Wolf is going to come and give us 10 to 15 minutes opening statement.
Then immediately after that, we'll give 10 to 15 minutes for Pastor Reese.
Then they're going to come and sit in the chairs and begin to, in an informal sense, they're going to discuss.
But what that'll be, obviously, is cross-examination.
And then what I'll do, guys, is I'll just come back up when it's about, when it's probably about, you know, 10, 15 till.
And kind of, you know, politely say, you know, cut you off and then have each of you come back to the podium for some final remarks.
Is that good?
You feel good?
All right, this is Dr. Wolf.
Welcome, Dr. Wolf.
This thing needs to turn on, so give me a moment here.
But let's do some philosophy.
Does that sound okay?
I'm not going to get like tomatoes thrown.
No, I'm just kidding.
You guys are great.
So it's actually great that we can talk about this.
It's been between theonomy and natural law and other issues.
It's been kind of a big topic for a few years, and there is a resurgence of natural law people.
And obviously the theonomists who thought they had the I don't know, they controlled the Christian nation idea.
Now the natural law people are coming back.
Yeah, so let me just get started.
So again, thanks.
All right, so the first principle is that all power is a means to an end.
All right, so all power is a means to an end.
And there's all sorts of different powers.
You guys have a power in your family as parents.
You have a power as, of course, the civil state has power.
There's power in the church.
So there's various types of power, but what they all share is they're all a means to an end.
Okay, they're all for something.
They're all for some end.
You exercise power for something.
So, and the other thing is that all means are sufficient for their end.
Okay, so when you have an end in mind or a purpose or something, some institution or something, the power that's associated with that is going to be sufficient to accomplish the end of that thing.
So Adam's created.
Adam is commanded to multiply, exercise dominion over the earth.
He is given sufficient means to do that.
That means God grants him the faculties such that he can accomplish that ought.
So in other words, if you ought to do something, you also can do something.
So first, think about military power.
I was in the military for a while as an active duty guy.
And the military officer has power.
He has power to command a soldier to do this or that, to take the hill.
And that power, being qualified as military power, means that it's designed to be sufficient to complete that end of military, to win the nation's wars.
But that power is also at times limited, because there's some things that soldiers want to do that might be very unwise, and yet the military officer does not have the power to tell him no.
So if anyone's been in the military before, you know that soldiers sometimes just show up from a night of partying.
And they tell you, I just met a girl and we're going to get married tomorrow.
If you've ever heard that story, please raise your hand.
Come on, there's got to be guys.
A lot of times it's in boot camp.
They get their first weekend and then they want to get married.
Anyway, he comes to you and says that.
And you as a military officer, you can't say no to him.
You don't have the power.
It's not within the bounds of your power.
You can tell him, hey, that's very unwise.
You should not do that.
But you don't have, it's not within that scope of military power.
But that is, forbidding marriage in that way is actually a matter of circumstances.
Because if you're on the front lines in a battle and you had just established a front line and you have foxholes and this soldier is in a foxhole and he comes to you and says, hey sir, yesterday I was at a farmhouse and I met a girl and we're going to get married.
Well if you're in that situation, guess what?
That military officer is going to be like, soldier get back in the foxhole.
You're not getting married right now.
So it is circumstantial.
The same action, the same thing as in getting married or whatever it is, the power applied to that can change based upon the circumstances.
So the same thing can be, you can forbid it or you can permit it or you don't have a power over it.
Circumstances Change Power00:15:33
Same thing in a family.
So you guys have a family and there's certain duties associated with the family.
One of those, let's say it is the power to bring your children in to do family worship.
Now that you have that duty, but you also have to determine things such as when you're going to do it, what sort of order you're going to do it, how you're going to do it, who's going to participate.
Perhaps children do prayer, whatever you do.
Maybe they choose, like in my home, they typically choose the songs.
And so you have to make decisions and determinations in order to fulfill that duty.
You have a principal, and then for your family, you have to decide what time.
Perhaps you work late.
perhaps you do it before dinner, whatever it is, you have to make that decision.
You have that power, and that becomes a sort of law in a way.
We usually don't call those rules of the home laws, but they are, by definition, they actually meet a law.
That is, a legitimate authority issues a command of action accompanied with sanction.
That is, if the children don't show up, they get a correction.
So it is a sort of law.
That means, in a way, you as the person having law over the family, or having the power over that family, Are establishing sorts of laws to fulfill prior duties.
Okay?
Now, to get to civil power, so we've talked about various forms of power.
Civil power is, in its genus, it's still a power, it's a means to an end.
But the species of power that is civil power, what is it for?
It is for a rightfully ordered civil society.
It is that it uses that power to rightfully order that civil society for what end?
The end is to.
Such that the people would procure earthly and heavenly good.
That is, you'd have good vocations, you'd have good social life, but at the same time, it would encourage you indirectly to eternal life.
All right, so that is the definition.
That's what civil power does, rightfully ordered civil society.
The issue, though, is if that is the means to that end, power is that means to that end, it has to do that for all sorts of different civil societies.
That is, it has to operate for.
different peoples, people who have different traditions, ways of life, people who have different characteristics, different perhaps economic situation.
Just the varieties that you encounter in the world today, even in historic Christian societies, you see wide differences between Italy, France, Germany, UK, Scotland, and the United States.
So what this means then is the power ordained of God to rightfully order civil society to the end of earthly and heavenly good must be extensive enough, expansive enough, such that it can order all those varieties of peoples.
Just like your power as a member of a family or in a family has the power to arrange your family according to prior duties in various ways given the circumstances in your particular family.
So that means your familial power is extensive and things can be different in different places, different families.
That also applies just as much to human society.
And so that means that the power, civil power, is extensive.
And that means that it has to be determined by some lawful authority for a given particular situation.
And I'd argue that is just a deduction of the facts.
So far, all I've given you is premises, and I think the conclusion follows, which means that civil power itself, the power to make law, can be different in different places.
It's extensive such that it can meet the end of earthly life in all different sorts of places.
All right.
And why is that?
And that's because whenever God establishes an end for something, he's going to give it sufficient means to accomplish that.
All right.
Now let's talk a little bit.
I don't know how long I've gone, but the limits.
So there are limits to power, limits to civil power.
And that's limited by the nature of civil life.
Just like the military leader himself is limited by the end of military success, civil power is limited by the end of civil life.
And that includes things like natural rights.
So sorry CJ, I do like natural rights.
But this means the right to life, the right to the conscience, that is to not be imposed on your beliefs in the inward sense, the right to liberty, and the right to even property.
I'm pro-property.
And why are these natural rights?
Why are these rights at all?
Well, because exercising these rights, exercising your right to property, to life, to conscience, to liberty, and all those other things you want to say are natural rights, is necessary for you as human beings To achieve your end as human beings in the way God has created you.
And so, civil society, in promoting the good of that society, ought to recognize those rights because that's what it's there to do promote the good.
And so, the limits then would be limited by those natural rights and other things as well.
Now, so I said before that power is extensive.
I think, in the abstract, power is actually extremely extensive.
That means it can do all sorts of things.
The difference, though, is that the people establish constitutions.
So I'm pro-constitutionalism.
And what is constitution?
Constitution establishes the fundamental laws of a land, and it actually primarily directs and limits power.
So in our constitution, we have three branches of government that recognizes three functions of government, executive, legislative, and judicial.
We decided to separate them to three branches.
Didn't have to do that, but we did, and there's checks and balances, and it's limited.
So we took the concept, the abstract concept of civil power, and channeled it through a constitution into what we have today.
And you can go to other places that have different political systems from people who decided to do it differently.
All right.
And this is how we can actually read the debates that produced our constitution.
It's called the Federal Convention Debates.
You can buy it.
It's a thick book.
James Madison and a scribe, you know, were furiously writing stuff down.
And what you find in there is not actually abstract philosophy or theology.
You find the men using experience from the ages, citing everyone from Plutarch to Swiss Confederation to other, just experience among the states.
And they applied experience to say what is suitable, given the experience of humankind over the known history, that would then produce a constitution that would be stable and secure the rights Of the people, and at the same time, have sufficient power to achieve its end.
So, they relied upon experience, and our Constitution, as you read it, is a product of reflection upon human experience, particularly Western experience.
All right.
And so that and but again, that could be different in different places.
Some places seem to require dictators.
Sorry, but Iraq seemed to need Saddam Hussein as much I don't like that.
And perhaps even Syria required Assad to be in power to maintain the peace.
So different places have different needs given on given their situation and that is a determination of the people for for their good.
So Yeah, and I will say, I mean, I guess to preemptively go after what he might say, I think the Mosaic polity is a perfect example of the application of natural law, but it's not the sole, alone, universal example of the application of natural law.
And it was fundamentally connected to a body politic, namely the Israelites.
And whenever a body politic is dissolved, So, to do the laws and its fundamental laws, namely the Constitution.
And so, those laws, as such, as a body of law, are not universal but particular.
And yet, at the same time, they can be used for our own thinking on what law would be suitable and what law would not be.
So, I do think that we can use the Old Testament, or just Scripture, to form civil laws.
But at the same time, I don't think that it is a.
that the polity itself is the sole standard given the variety of institutions of human experience and societies and given the argument I said earlier.
So I'll just leave it at that.
Thank you.
Okay, so I have up here we had the basically an attempt to try to express both of our positions side by side in a way of trying to help to positively put forward positions as opposed to merely some sort of like negative tearing down.
I think one of the things that's helpful when you're trying to charitably debate and to come to unity if possible is to try to have both sides have sort of a duty to positively construct.
And so, I think the question here is not merely whether I could attack what Dr. Wolf has said, but rather I'm trying to put side by side two views for you to compare and contrast and for you to be able to consider those.
And so, the position that Dr. Wolf just explained we had this idea that God has given broad authority to the civil power, which is to be prudently limited by particular peoples in constitutions.
And so, that you obviously heard him just express that and sort of an outline of that view.
So, then for me, this idea that the Bible teaches the regulative principle of the civil power, which teaches that the civil power only possesses the authority to do what God commands it to do in the Bible.
So I'm saying essentially that there's not a broad power, but instead the explicit commandments plus the necessary inferences that you could derive from Scripture.
And necessary inference being strict or rigorous drawing of conclusions.
So that's the idea of what I'm positing.
as my understanding is the biblical or God-ordained order for government, for civil power.
So I have a summary here for some of the basic reasoning.
And Dr. Wolf, my main thing is going to be this idea that I'm still not fully sure what is meant by natural law.
I heard in the speech a reference to the idea of the experience of the ages.
And so I'm going to posit some definitions of natural law, because one of my big goals is to really truly understand what's intended by natural law.
and to then be able to discuss in that.
So I have here four propositions that are if we should glorify God in all that we do and if the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy God is the Scripture.
Three, and if the natural law is anything other than what is revealed in Scripture, then it is no rule to direct us.
Alternately, if natural law, if it is the same as the law in Scripture, then scripture is more clear and it's infallible, and so it is not something to direct us.
So these are the two things here is, is it something outside of and in addition to scripture, and therefore no rule, or is it something that is the same as the content of scripture?
And i've heard dr Wolf express the idea of the natural law as the moral law in the past, and so I I think he's saying uh, number four, that the idea that it's the same and not something just different um, and so I think what we're going to end up doing is to a larger part in the conversation, trying to come to understand what's really being said.
That is different.
So then, when we talk about the origin and nature of civil power, I mentioned before that I believe that Dr. Wolf and I disagree about the origin of civil power.
So I believe he would assert that it is in the garden, that there is a civil power that's inherent in Adam's rule.
And then, whereas I'm saying the civil power comes from Genesis 9, and this key verse is Genesis 9, verse 5, whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed.
For in the image of God he made man.
Okay, so this idea of man punishing.
Now, in past conversations with Dr. Wolf, he's expressed that he agrees that civil power, he thinks civil power is distinct from the idea of this coercive power with the sword.
And if I'm wrong, he can correct me down the line here.
But my understanding is that there's agreement that this is where kind of the coercive power with the sword seems to come in.
So there's some sort of a distinction between the civil power versus the coercive avenging power.
Now, again, the Westminster Confession of Faith, which I believe we're both committed to, says that good works are only such as God has commanded in his holy word, and not such as without the warrant thereof are devised by men out of a blind zeal or upon a pretense of good intention.
So mere intention, or in terms of the pursuit of a goal, is insufficient.
It requires the means to be prescribed, and that prescription is in the law of God.
So if it's a good work to exercise civil power, which we both agree, then the law of God, the commandments of God, provide that.
And so that's my assertion and understanding.
I already read to you in my speech, 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17, but again, the idea that the purpose of the giving of the scriptures was to teach such that the man of God could be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work, not incomplete, not partially equipped for some good works.
So then, if there's a question about the extensiveness of state power, how broad is it?
I think in order to defend a broad view, one would have to take the assertion that there's a grant of power that's sort of normative.
When you talk about worship, there's this language of the normative principle and the regulative principle.
So that's where this language normally comes in.
And the idea that the normative principle is such that you are authorized, the normative principle of worship would be that you're authorized to worship God in any way that he has not forbidden.
The regulative principle of worship would be that you are only authorized to worship God in the way that he's instituted or commanded.
Glorifying God Through Law00:14:31
And so I would take that regulative principle and apply it to authority in general.
And I would say there's a regulative principle of civil government.
So I'm making the assertion that the state and civil power can only do what God commands.
And if we have a normative principle, my concern would be that it turns us into slaves where there's an ability for the state to command us to do all sorts of things.
And that for freedom to be maintained, There has to be a regulative principle of the state.
The danger of anarchy is to say that the state has no power or to limit its powers beyond what God has given to it.
And so, for example, one thing that people who call themselves libertarians would disagree with, I think the first table of the law, in other words, the first, second, third, and fourth commandments, should be enforced by the state.
That there should be a punishing of idolatry, of suppressing those blasphemies, and a protecting of the Sabbath.
That puts me typically in the outer rim of the cocktail parties at the Libertarian Party.
I've never gotten an invitation, don't worry.
So that being the case, when I think about the types of natural law I'm trying to understand is this idea of the way that natural law gets talked about is a number of different ways it gets discussed.
The romanticists would talk about natural law as feeling.
So the book Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen is about one sister who has good sense.
And the other sister who has sensibility, right feeling.
And so, this idea that right feeling is what determines the good, what's the right course of action.
And that's kind of the philosophy of Disney, you know, follow your heart.
And I do not believe that that's what Dr. Wolf is saying at all.
So charitable interpretation, not trying to pretend that in any way.
I don't mean that's his position.
But then there's this question of, okay, what about empiricism?
Is it observation?
And I hear some of that, the idea of looking at the experience of the ages.
Are you determining, you know, what ought to be done or whatever from empiricism or rationalism where you're using reason apart from experience or trying to have like a definition of the nature of man or of the state and reason out from that apart from scripture.
Then there's the scripture, using it as a thing to define that, and you could say, natural law is the moral law of scripture.
And There's also this idea that there's natural law written on the heart, the work of the law written on the heart, which is the basis for inexcusability.
So if those definitions that's what I'm trying to figure out if, or if there's another definition for natural law that's being talked about which, what's the definition that we're working with?
So the biblical uses of natural law are the moral law in scripture is a natural law.
The work of the law in the heart makes men inexcusable.
That moral law in Scripture is infallibly known from Scripture alone.
It's corrupted in the hearts of fallen men since the fall.
Sorry for the repetition, fallen men.
And we are incapable since the fall of rightly directing ourselves by this law apart from Scripture.
So the natural law, if it's the moral law, the way we get it is by going to the law in the Scriptures as opposed to some other means.
So then that's it, and you should go to all my websites.
Thanks.
I guess I've been challenged to define natural law, so I'll do that a bit.
Thank you.
I'll talk about natural law a bit.
So, natural law is a moral law that directs man to his end, his natural end.
And it is the sole means to that end, and that end you can define it as happiness or human flourishing.
Is that okay?
So, that idea, it's a measure, a standard, or it's a means for man, the sole means by which man would achieve his end.
And this is what was established in the garden.
It was the standard, it's for Adam and his progeny.
And it's immutable, meaning it doesn't change precisely because it is the only fitting law given the nature of man himself.
So, God created man in a certain way.
And in creating him a certain way for a certain end, God ordained a law, and that would be the natural law.
And it's called natural for that reason.
It's natural in the sense that it's natural to man as man, it's fitting, suitable for his nature, for the end God ordained for man.
So that's why it's called natural law.
It's also called the moral law.
It's called a moral law, oftentimes to distinguish that law from non rational animals or animals.
And that's because dogs and cats and lizards don't have rationality.
That is, they cannot fulfill a moral law.
That is, they don't have a moral choice.
And so, man, the natural law is a moral law because man is a moral being capable of exercising moral choice.
And that's why we are the highest being on earth, precisely for that, that we can choose, we can have a moral choice.
And because there's a moral choice, that means we can also, we are the beings that can recognize and worship God.
Which is itself part, the principal part of the natural law.
So that's what I mean by natural law.
And I think the important point is that it's immutable, and that's because there's no other law by which man would achieve his end as a human being, which means post fall, that endures as the standard of righteousness for man.
That is, you are all under still that same moral law because you are still human beings, though corrupted.
And it still applies.
It has not changed.
And according to the Reformed tradition, the substance of that law has not changed or abrogated or even, not even, there's been an addition to it.
And so that endures.
Now, when I say talk about experience, what I'm saying is that according to the second table of the law, that is more discernible by fallen man than the first table.
This is why you can read stuff in Plato and Aristotle.
And others like Cicero and Seneca, and you can read their ethical works and their political works and find a lot of truth there because they're speaking of second table things which actually are more immediate in their experience so that they can see that if you're in a society of liars, that doesn't tend to go well.
If you're in a society where children disobey their parents, that tends not to go well.
If you're in a society of murderers, that tends not to go well.
And so they can observe.
Those things end well for societies and individuals, and so they can discern those second table duties.
But that's different than the first table.
And the first table concerns our duties to God.
Those were largely rendered obliterated.
Say that.
So, this is why they created idols, this is why they worship, become polytheistic.
This is why you eventually see human sacrifice, not among the Greeks and Romans, but among others.
And so that was corrupted.
And Calvin says this explicitly in his Institutes.
That the virtues that made your recognition and proper worship of God were obliterated.
But he says that the duties with regard to fellow man were weakened, such that there still is sin, there still is injustice, there still is corruption in individuals and in society.
But nevertheless, because it wasn't utterly obliterated, you can still read and learn from experience with profit, especially if you're going to try to order society.
And individuals.
So there's a lot to learn from Plutarch, who was a pagan, who wrote on people's lives in parallel.
And you can learn from the actions of these men and his analysis various principles of leadership and civil leadership.
So I'll leave it at that, but I hope that explains my position on natural law.
Oh, one more thing.
And you mentioned this, that the Ten Commandments is an inscripturated form of natural law.
So, when you obey the Ten Commandments, you're actually obeying the natural law and you're being fully human.
So, it's not a purely divine law.
It's not that you're simply just obeying God.
You're obeying God, and in so doing, you are fulfilling your human nature.
You're fulfilling what you ought to be as a creature.
And so, in other words, the scriptural law and the natural law.
Are the same in substance.
By scriptural law, I mean moral law.
The moral law in scripture is the same in substance, but it's delivered through two different means.
One would be, natural law would be ordinarily delivered through reason or right thinking.
And that same law through scripture is delivered by faith.
And you receive it by faith.
So you can know that you ought not to murder simply by faith because God told you not to murder.
You don't need anything else than that.
You already know not to murder.
But in principle, you could reach that same conclusion by reflecting upon human nature itself.
And yeah, so reason and faith can lead to the same ethical duties.
So thank you.
So I think you communicated that you're saying natural law is that which is pointed at the goal of human flourishing.
Is that distinct from the goal of glorifying God?
No, well, glorifying, like acting to the glory of God, would be a condition of it being a good work.
Yeah.
Okay, so is human flourishing like a proximate objective on the way to glorifying God?
Or is glorifying God as the goal something that inherently brings about human flourishing?
What's the relationship of those?
I think I know where you're going with that.
Yeah, the idea is that, well, let me, I guess, back up a bit to explain it.
That I think in political society, you're glorifying God when you are.
Choosing the best policy given the circumstances to maximize the good of that society.
And if you were to choose something to the detriment of society, that would actually produce bad and evil in society, like abortion, that is not to the glory of God.
So when you're crafting policy, civil policy, you're seeking, it's a good policy if it's actually bringing about good in society.
It's maximizing the possibility of good.
And that would be to the glory of God.
So it's not.
I think the difference between you and me is I think you have more of an idea of that there are these laws, they're given to us, and they ought to be enacted regardless of considering the ways in which they would affect society.
That it's to the glory of God simply to enact the laws, whereas my argument is that you glorify God by enacting the best policy such that it actually produces good in that society.
And if it doesn't, then it's a bad law.
If it actually results in evil, then it's a bad law.
Yeah.
So I would say that I believe that the way we know a law is good or a law is bad is based upon God's law, that it is the judge of all human law.
And I would say that there are, as far as circumstances go, conditions of order and disorder, a more or less settled civil order or state.
And you can go from chaos and sort of a rule of man where you have wicked human law and you can have reforms that are on the way.
To the mature polity and the mature system.
But so, for example, you look at like Nehemiah, who is, when he's reforming things, there are people breaking the Sabbath.
They're coming, they're like, you know, we'd like to sell grain on the Sabbath.
We find that that's a good day to sell grain.
And Nehemiah's response is to close the gates of the city.
And then he threatens them when they show up again.
And he says, if you show up again, I'll lay hands on you.
And so he's increasing his exercise of coercive power.
But he could have executed them.
And so, the idea that you can use, as you enact power, Christian power, you can use lesser penalties as you're rising to the condition.
So, the perverse persons of the land, I think Hezekiah, as opposed to immediately trying to execute all of them, what he did with the perverse persons of the land was he made it illegal and drove them out.
And basically, if they came back, then they would be executed.
So, there's this idea that you can use lesser force in the process of bringing about reform in getting to the place.
Where you apply the law of God, the force of it in full.
And so, but the reason I know that is not by experience outside of the Bible.
The reason I know that is because all the circumstances and the conditions and the exceptions are laid out in the Scripture.
The Scripture is sufficient to know the exceptions.
When can I break the Sabbath for works of necessity and mercy?
How do I know that?
The Lord Jesus Christ exemplified that.
Interpreting Experience Biblically00:02:09
Right?
So I think all of the circumstances to be taken into account are given to us in categorical or principal form in the law of God.
And I think that one thing, Stephen, I agree about is the idea that the law of God, or what he's calling the natural law, lines up with the nature of man such that man flourishes in the application of it.
I totally agree with that.
I think that the law order lines up with the ontology of man so that the enactment of the law of God and the performance of it, whether it's an individual household, church, or state, brings about that flourishing.
But I would say that the law of God, in more detail, probably, than what you're saying.
So you're saying the moral law.
In its principles.
And I'm saying the civil order of Moses provides us with principles of justice that are moral law.
That they are showing to us the case laws show us applications.
And that the principles of due process show us applications.
And so the details of the Mosaic civil order are providing for us the perfect, divinely inspired consideration of categories that we need to interpret experience.
And if we try to interpret experience, On our own to draw up principles, we'll do it wrong.
That we have to interpret experience through the systematic arrangement of doctrine of the scriptures.
And so it's the, I don't like the language of worldview or lens or whatever, but the sorting mechanism of propositional content.
So that in your mind you can sort out the Excel spreadsheet.
That is the presuppositional structure.
That I would put forward.
And I would say that when you read Plutarch or whatever, you can evaluate and judge the reasoning of Plutarch on the basis of whether it's according to Scripture.
But that you can't know that Plutarch got it right or Xenophon got it right or whatever unless you already have Scripture to judge it.
Scripture vs Human Reasoning00:03:17
And so it becomes useful as a thought exercise to go read the Federalist Papers or the record of the debate of the Continental Congress or the Constitutional Convention or whatever.
When you're applying scripture to evaluate it, but it will not by itself give you the knowledge of what is good for a state.
So, do you have any response or anything you're going to chase?
Yeah, I mean, like, I think knowledge is doing a lot of work for you in a sort of certainty or infallibility.
I think in political life, there's a lot of uncertainty and there's so many dynamics.
Like, if you're involved in an institution or a business and you make a decision, there's uncertainty built into that decision.
You try to mitigate risk as you go through.
Through it, but you don't have an infallible, like, you don't know precisely what that decision is going to result in.
And I think that's the same thing with politics and leadership, and it's the same thing throughout all of life.
I mean, just your own individual life, you make a decision, there's risk involved, and the very fact of risk means that there's uncertainty in the result.
And so, yeah, on the experience side, I see one of the reasons I emphasize experience is I think what made America great was that it was a product of.
Protestant experience.
And a lot of the founders reflected upon the wars of religion that occurred in the 17th century, 16th, 17th century, and they determined that, you know what, at the federal level, there will be freedom of religion, such that the states, and this is where we go wrong in the 20th century, the states will then have the right to regulate religion according to their own fundamental laws and their own laws.
And I think that was a product of wisdom.
It was also a product of the circumstances at the time, because you have Anglicans in Virginia, you have Congregationalists in New England.
Quakers in Pennsylvania and everything between.
So it was a product of experience.
But it's also not only the American experience, it was a product of experience going for centuries.
It was the realization that Presbyterians and all the Baptists, Baptists, please raise your hand.
So it means that it was a product, meaning that we Presbyterians and Baptists could sit in the same room, call each other brothers, and we could be a part of the same society.
Whereas that was not the case in the 16th and 17th centuries.
But we learned from experience that actually, you know what?
We can have stable commonwealths, stable governments, if we acknowledge each other's mutual religion, call each other brothers, and grant freedom to each other.
So that's what I mean in part by experience, that it informs the possibilities of political life that were not considered or not known or not considered possible prior to the experience.
And again, I think our society, what we actually love, I say we, I just assume there's the majority.
Is part of what we love about the United States in its traditional understanding is so much that it was a product of Western political experience and good principles.
So I think, like, again, I go back, I think the knowledge is doing a lot of work.
Infallible Texts and Fallible Truth00:05:55
I don't think another thing, perhaps, unless you want to respond to that, I think there's like scripture is infallible, but that doesn't mean that we can derive from it infallible truth statements.
And so even when it comes to law, you can say, I'm reading an infallible text.
But that doesn't mean an application of a text, you're applying that infallibly.
Like there's a distinction between, right, infallible source and infallible application.
So I just, if you could talk about that, I don't know how you'd respond to that, but it seems to me, again, like that is an element of fallibility.
So, first of all, arrest the Baptists.
I'm kidding, I wouldn't drown any of you.
You, however, would have to punish me for baptizing babies because of the idolatry.
So, you know, you can work through that internal turmoil.
But so as regards this issue of the infallibility.
So there are principles of law.
We get them from the scripture.
There's necessary inferences.
I can infer invalidly.
I can reason wrongly, right?
But if I reason rightly, right reasoning from true premises is infallible.
Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to infallibly reason.
But good and necessary inference is infallible if you properly follow the argumentation.
So, for example, the Lord Jesus Christ argued against the Sadducees, showing to them that by good and necessary inference, just from the Torah, they had to accept the resurrection.
You find the Apostle Paul using good and necessary inference in multiple steps so as to not only have a premise and a conclusion, or two premises as a syllogism to a conclusion, but he has what's called a sorites.
In 1 Corinthians 15, where he has premise, secondary premise, conclusion, take the conclusion, use it as a premise in the next syllogism, do it again, do it again.
And so there's this good and necessary inference.
We're shown right reason in the Bible.
The Bible shows us how to reason rightly.
And so that which is from the Bible and then drawn by good and necessary inference from it is certainly true.
Now, where we don't have certainty is in our observations of things.
So I can go, it's certainly true that murder is.
Evil, it's certainly true that murder is a capital crime, it's certainly true that abortion is murder.
Okay, I can drive those things from the Bible, and then I might go, Here's a particular person, did they commit murder?
That's a one's a determination of law, which I can have certainty about from the scriptures.
The other is fallible, requires two or more witnesses for the due process to occur, and requires due process of law with the right to defend yourself, the right to present your own evidence, to call your own witnesses.
So, there's a due process of law to prevent tyranny to help to slow down bad application of law.
So, the application of law can certainly be fallibly done by human beings, but the law itself is infallibly given by the hand of God, and right reason from it is certainly true.
And so, I'm trying to defend the certainty of the premises, the certainty of the reasoning structure, and then we leave the fallibility to our observations and our attempts to apply in life.
And so, that's the distinction of the fallible and the infallible parts.
And so this idea of knowledge, I would say I can know with certainty what is right.
I cannot know with certainty whether you did the right thing.
And so that's what I would posit for that structure of the issues of knowledge.
And I don't need to infallibly know, but I do have about whether you did the right thing or whether somebody who's being charged with criminal charges with infallible certainty whether they're right.
But there are standards of evidence that we have a duty to follow.
So that's how I would deal with that epistemological issue.
I appreciate you mention sorites, and that's, you can find that in Aristotle, by the way.
But actually, that's great.
I would disagree on, well, okay, yeah, I mean, so a valid argument means that you, it's a, yeah, but of course it depends upon, like any sound argument depends on the truth of the conclusion, of the premises.
So there is that issue.
Like you can have a sound argument, of course, that's infallible because of the nature of the definition of a sound argument.
You can have a valid argument, but that doesn't mean it's actually true or sound because you could have.
So, in other words, the validity, the soundness of an argument depends upon your certainty with regard to the premises.
So, I actually don't totally disagree with what you said there, I don't think.
You're baiting over.
Is there something?
I think the difference, though, is that.
Start the music.
Yeah, yeah.
I think the difference is probably the extent to which.
You can, this goes back to the original question, I think, is that the extent to which we can apply law in different circumstances?
Because, again, I agree that you can use scripture to craft law.
I think that, again, one difference is that I think you can craft law for a specific problem in society, applying moral principles to solve that problem because you're trying to bring about the good of that society.
And you can actually think through it, you can reason through it, and if it doesn't work, you can observe that and then you can change the law.
So, I wonder about the extent of it.
Limits of State Ownership00:14:34
So, I, there's a difference between laws that are bad in themselves, or violations of moral law that are bad in themselves.
So, like, murder is bad in itself, theft is bad in itself.
But there's another category of law called, I'm blanking on it.
But anyway, it's the sort of law in which the action itself is not in itself wrong.
So, like, speeding on a street.
You go in 100 miles an hour down a malum prohibitum, that's what it is, malum prohibitum.
Malaman say, malaman prohibitum.
Anyway, that doesn't matter.
But this would be the sort of law that a civil magistrate regulates to promote the good of society.
So if you drive 100 miles an hour down a residential road, you got lucky somehow.
You didn't hit a kid, dog, or old lady, or a parked car.
And so, therefore, you didn't do anything unjust.
And so, you can't be punished for that.
Because you can only be punished once you commit an act of injustice.
And therefore, there comes the correction of that.
I would say that one function of government is to promote the good by preventing, by seeking to prevent certain bad behaviors that diminish the good of society.
So I think speed limits are okay.
I think regulation is okay in certain respects.
So that is, you punish things that are not in themselves wrong, but in prohibiting them, you are promoting the good of society, broadly speaking.
So I will often mention traffic laws.
We don't realize it because we've been driving long enough, but we have embodied these rules of the road, and we know that the other people hopefully have as well, unless you're in Los Angeles, which good luck.
But in most places, they've embodied those rules, and we have common expectations of behavior on the roads given the rules because society has imposed those, and now there's commonality.
And because we have that commonality, it facilitates your movement.
So when you're on the road, most people are going somewhere else.
They don't have the same interest that you do or the same end as you do.
And yet, the rules of the road coordinate that activity such that you can go from point A to point B, some other person can go from D to E or whatever.
And so it promotes the good.
And I would say that is a legitimate power of the civil government.
And this is true, I would say, on all sorts of regulations as well.
So I wonder if that category of law, you would affirm that category of law.
So, as far as regulations go, typically you're talking about things like.
Can an inspector come into your house or business without there having been probable cause or a warrant on the basis of some sort of crime or harm that's occurred?
So I would say no, I think that's a tyrannical power, but the state does not have the right to just come into my house and see if my smoke detectors work.
I think that the idea of going into a place, into private property, without having some event occurring where there's emergency need to stop an ongoing crime, which is what probable cause is, right, where you're seeing something happen and you need to intervene.
Or there's a warrant, which is our mechanism, that's our form for dealing with this where we have, okay, we're going to intrude upon your private property right, which includes the right to exclude people with badges and guns.
And so your ability to say, I don't want you on my property, is going to be infringed upon by public power because of the idea that there's some basis from the testimony of sworn witnesses.
And so I think that the property right is actually something that there shouldn't be regulatory infringement of entering on, but there should be punishments.
For people who commit harms, who people who are negligent, who leave a hole open and somebody falls in.
You know you don't have a hole inspector who walks around writing tickets for people leaving the holes in the ground.
You have punishments for people when somebody is harmed and that's what you find in terms of the Justice Order of the Old Testament law.
But I would say, as far as like speed limits or rules of the road go, that's actually a question of the property holder's right to regulate the use of the property.
So if there's a private road, you can set rules for speed, you can set rules for how it goes.
If the government owns the road, they are now the property holder.
So the problem we face in America is there's way too much public land.
That's a part of the problem, which makes it so that the government has huge domains where they're trying to control the detail.
Now, if you own property, you have to have rules for how it's used in terms of the way people behave on it.
And so the property owned by the civil order, by the state, is something where it can act as the property owner and therefore set rules as a property owner.
And that's not so much a function As the state, as it is a property holder.
And the state is a legal person that has the ability to own property.
Okay, so you have this idea of holding of a road and you say, here's the rule of the road.
And you know what kind of crime it is when you violate the rules of the road?
It's trespassing.
Because you're using the property that's owned by the state in a manner that's not according to the conditions for the use by the property owner.
And so you start to go, wait, what if the government owns tons and tons of land?
Can they set the conditions for all that?
And now you see why I would love for that to be private land.
In Arizona, the majority of the land is owned by the federal government and the state government and by tribes.
And so there's all these people stuck in the middle of the desert in the gigantic six million person city in this huge area the size of Britain.
And we're all there because you can't get the land away from the government, as opposed to the ability to develop the land.
So you have these desert wastelands.
I mean, deserts are literally curses in the Bible.
It's like you're going to be so bad, your land's going to be a desert.
Ha!
I'm already there.
And so this idea of taking the desert and turning it into a garden city.
I mean, I live in the middle of a desert.
that was turned into an orange grove, I have flood irrigation in Phoenix.
My yard has grass.
A desert has been turned into a garden city.
But the parts that the government owns do not have grass.
They are not places where people want to live.
And so the idea of government ownership of the land I think is a big problem.
And the idea of the right of trespass control, that solves all the problems of road laws.
And so that's, I don't think that there's an issue here where there's an incapability of dealing with it.
Where do you want to go?
You want to keep going on traffic law?
Should we?
Yeah, well, that's an interesting response.
I think it opens up a perhaps different disagreement.
So I guess I'll use the stock line that the government is by for of the people.
So I do think that the government is a different sort of entity than simply a sort of private.
Entity or separate entity such that, because it is something that you elect members.
The difference is that government is by its design, its end is for the people themselves, whereas in a private industry, it is designed principally for the people who own it.
So government is something that serves the people, it should arise from the people by their consent, and there should be some mechanism by which they express their public interest.
So, I would say it's a different entity, and it involves when it owns this land or roads, it's not a private, it's actually a shared space.
It's something that is, in a way, theirs, but also ours.
And it's something that then we would petition the government or through various means come to regulate.
And so, I guess I'm more on the side of that there is a communal shared aspect to this.
That and there's a function of government to for the good of what you might say the commons.
So there is a some there are, I mean, there are some things by the very nature that don't admit of ownership very well, unless it's actually granted by the state.
So you have like a large lake.
Like, in what sense can you walk upon a lake, up upon a lake that's no one's seen before and say, I declare this, you know, Wolf Lake and it's my lake now.
And the moment someone shows up to it, They're trespassing, or they're all the way to the other side of another bank and they're fishing, and you're like, hey, you're taking my fish.
There are certain things that are, by their very nature, common.
And so, at least, you know, I know roads aren't, they are common in a sense.
They're created, go through land on.
But I'm saying that there are aspects to our environment, our world, that are common.
And then the collective interest of the people would be we want a lake for fishing.
And so they might then have an interest, a collective interest as a public, and regulate the way in which that lake is fished.
Because there's a common interest.
And so, government, one government function would be precisely.
For that.
And that's just one example.
I think it extends farther out.
But I just don't think that we can neatly distinguish all these private ownerships and everything's private.
I don't think, even in principle, you can do that really well because we don't just like share.
Like when I think of someone who drives down the road and we talked about this the other night, and throw out like a McDonald's, you ever seen those people that they throw this stuff out there?
And it falls on someone's property, you know, on the side of the road.
And we could think of that as an injustice to the property owner because now they have to clean up the mess, perhaps.
But I see that as an injustice to our shared world because I have to see it.
When you share a visible space, you share more than just a line between land or whatever.
You share a visible space, and you all have a common collective interest in the order and beauty of that space.
And that's where I think what would arise from that, all sorts of regulations as well.
Yeah, anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
I think the creation of a large administrative state to manage all sorts of common areas is one of the great problems of tyranny.
You want to avoid administrative states.
The Declaration of Independence talks about the king sending forth his ministers to eat out our substance as a swarm of locusts.
And I think that you couldn't even name all of the three-letter agencies that exist.
If anybody here can send me a text message in the next you don't have my number.
But if you can send an email to my email that's back there with all of the three-letter agencies with within the next 15 minutes, if you could find them all, I'd give you $100.
I don't think you could do it in 15 minutes.
You couldn't get a comprehensive list of the three letter agencies to get the $100 and email it to me.
The amount of administrative state burden that exists from an effort to manage the commons as opposed to making the commons private.
If you sell something off to people to use, there's private stewardship.
When you have the state own it and it's a public good, you end up with this administrative state to manage it for the people.
And I would suggest that the good of the people is advanced by private property ownership and the wealth being owned by households and individuals and the state focusing on its work of administering justice, waging just warfare, and seeking to maintain borders and to stop ongoing disruption of the peace.
And going beyond that makes it so that the state is this actor that is pretending to be omnicompetent.
But it's really just the DMV.
All right, so who, like, let's take the large lake.
Who has the rightful original claim to own that lake such that they can sell it?
Yeah, so I think that the claiming of unused lands, the Puritans in the common law worked through the idea of best and highest use.
And as a way, how do you glorify God with this?
And you go, okay, there's a grant of dominion to the race of man over the earth.
How do you take property out of the earth and set it aside as private property?
When it is unused, the use of it, the work, the dominion work, is the thing that makes it so that you now, as doing stewardship over it, is a grant of authority.
Otherwise, you stuck with a native form of communism where all things are common when Adam is made.
How do you ever move anything from common possession to private possession?
Well, right.
I understand, like, that's Locke.
I'm talking about Presbyterian parents.
Yeah, I know.
Samuel Rutherford.
No, but there's a difference, though.
It's one thing to come across an open Field or clear the land and plant your crops.
And you, yeah, I agree with that.
That is like the most fundamental claim of ownership is that you've exerted work upon some space and therefore you can claim it as your own.
There's a sort of identification phenomenological, all that, like it feels like it's yours.
The difference though, if it's a large lake, something that is not something that you can easily claim as your own, that is truly common.
That would then be a collective ownership.
That would, in some ways, be something that more than one party would have a claim in some sense to that space.
One guy's on the other side of the bank, one guy's on this one, and they're all.
So, in that sense, by its very nature, it's like, you know, even a mountain.
Like, okay, I got to the top of this mountain.
Does that mean you have rights to the mountain because you travel to the top of it?
So, there's just things by their very nature.
Like, take Yosemite.
Yeah, so Yosemite, there's this great thing called.
Strip mine it.
What's that?
Strip mine it.
Collective Ownership of Commons00:02:59
I know, that's what you do.
No, like half dome, you climb the top of half dome.
Does that mean you have a right to spray paint the side of it because you got the top of it?
You can do your name, like Reese Company or Reese Fund.
Like the first guy to get there, Reese Fund or whatever.
There's just things by the very nature that are common collective that are for the common good.
And for that reason, as a common interest.
And so then the civil government would be, as something of, by, for the people, would then have a role in securing the commonness of that thing, such that there's no exploitation.
Because that is a problem with common.
Like, yeah, you're right.
If you have a private lake, you have an interest in well stocked fishery.
But if it's by its very nature something that cannot be privatized or made under one party, then it's easily exploited.
Get all the fish, take it out.
Now there's nothing there.
So then there's an collective interest in the good afforded by that thing that is not by its nature private.
Same thing with like hiking on a mountain, something like that.
And yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Sorry, so I think scripturally, when you have questions like where does somebody's property start and somebody else's end, one of the examples that's given is if there's a dead body found in the countryside, what you do is you measure where that dead body is compared to the town center of the closest towns.
and the closer one is the one that has jurisdiction over the investigation.
And that's a really easy, quick way to deal with where do boundaries butt up against each other.
So with water, if you're like, well, I made a town on this side of the water, and he built a ranch on that side of the water, and there's one over here, and you go, okay, have you claimed along the shoreline?
Are you doing the work to deal with this stuff?
So you have these places.
Who has rights over what water?
You can determine by the same sorts of things of measuring the distance from the most recent, from the property holders or whatever.
The problem is, the alternative is to have the Department of Lake Five.
And when you have departments that are dealing with this, they just take the rights from everybody.
So now, instead of a private property interest where people are doing stuff, you can just do things.
And if you do have the ability to just do things, you're free.
And even you can't do stuff, and you've got to go through the bureaucratic process of getting the approval of Lake Department 5 to tell you whether you can put a boat that's 14 feet on the water or not.
What you end up with is somebody saying, This is mine.
And it's no longer individuals, it's now the state.
It's the state's property.
And so it's this imminent domain that is taking of property and concentrates it to the state.
And they do not manage it for the public goodwill because the state is not good at taking dominion.
The state's job was not to take dominion.
The Conservative Case for Strong States00:04:50
The state's job is to punish criminals.
And the individual's job is to take dominion in the household.
All right.
Well, you've clearly assessed the means of persuasion.
Which is also an Aristotle.
But so, for yeah, I would say this is a very American audience and a very American form of rhetoric, which is, you know, I'm American too, I guess.
But so it's good.
But you go to other countries and this sort of rhetoric does actually not land on people.
So I'm not criticizing you, but I just like to point out that your argument, I think that the American bureaucratic system.
As it functions now, I would agree with you.
There are all sorts of problems.
But this doesn't land on other places that actually have very efficient government and actually respected government in other places.
If you go to Europe and ask the people about their government, they're going to have disagreements.
But in general, they're actually going to like their state.
In general, they're going to want actually a stronger state or a strong state.
It's a different, I think, given our culture, we have a very antagonistic view of the civil government.
And we tend to think of it as something very separate from us, as something outside of us, as something distinguished from us that comes to oppress us.
And that's part of our culture to think like that.
And frankly, I think it's part of conservatism as well.
I think one of the problems with conservatism is that we want to, instead of engaging in political life where we try to shape the regulations and the function of government in a very active way on city councils, in county commissions, in state government.
We want to, in a way, disengage from politics by establishing these, what I think are very abstract lines of what's allowed and what's disallowed.
And one of the things I've been trying to say is that actually we as conservatives need to engage in the political process to promote the good for our people and society.
And I do think that involves regulation.
But I think part of it, part of our problem, and one of the reasons why as conservatives we talk about the state, which is a very modern concept.
Like, usually when you think of state, it's an old idea using the word state.
But when we think of bureaucracy, we're thinking of 20th century managerialism and managerial bureaucracy, which is very different than civil servants within the 19th century and 18th century.
A very different conception of the role of government.
There was far more activity in politics.
There was a smaller government, limited government, and I actually fully support limited, small government.
But I just think in principle that if we engage thoroughly in politics, then these, instead of creating abstract, Of what's permitted and not permitted, but just sought the good through political activity, I think we'd have a different perspective on this.
Yeah, but I agree.
Like, yeah, there's, in general, the amount of regulation is too much.
You talk to someone from California trying to build a house, and I understand, just too much.
And probably in most states as well.
Though I do think, again, I just don't think there's anything wrong in principle with having inspectors come and make sure that the overpass is not going to collapse on someone or that the parking garage is not going to collapse under a 7.0 earthquake.
And these are all things that.
Can be made sure of through experts in principle, and that something we can do as political people again, political animals seek to form in society.
So, I think we've been wrapping up anyway.
David said he's happy to.
I was gonna let him respond, but he said he's happy just to go to a closing statement.
You guys ready for that?
Do you want to use podium, or would you like to just stay seated?
Podium's good.
Okay.
I think I have five minutes, so just one second to lay out my watch.
So when we think about the difference here between natural law and theonomy, and the difference between the broad power of a civil power versus a narrow regulative principle sense, I think that we've gone into some of the details of things as regards things like the problem of the commons, and so kind of pushing to the edges of some of the more difficult problems.
Rights Derived from Divine Ordinance00:05:18
But on a basic level, The scriptures provide a law that is infallible.
That law teaches us our duties and therefore our rights.
You have a right to do everything God commands you to do.
You are also free from people imposing upon you a commandment to sin.
And Christian liberty is the liberty to do what is right and to not do evil.
And so the law of God as a basis to judge civil power laid out in the scriptures is an infallible rule that allows us to judge all the laws of men.
I think that there are issues as regards the details of law for administration, like where do you go to vote, or how are you going to determine the boundaries of jurisdictions, or how is the method of execution to be carried out, that sort of thing.
Those things are administrative details that were particular to Israel that are not binding on us.
But if it's not particular to Israel, And if it's not a technology thing, right, if we're talking about the civil law, it provides everything besides the technologies and the administrative details that are particular to Israel.
The rest provides us with principles of justice that we must apply because we are not free to invent authorities for people.
We're not free to exercise power over people because God made men equal under law.
Not equal in gifting, not equal in age, but equal under law.
And the distinctions of law come from the ordinance of God.
The Westminster Larger Catechism in the Fifth Commandment talks about the idea that there's honor owed to people on the basis of age, on the basis of gifting, and on the basis of God's ordinance.
And the ordinance of God lays out offices in three institutions, the household, the church, and the state.
And so the ordinance of God creates officers in the household, the church, and the state that we owe honor to, including obedience.
And the nature of those institutions, as well as the nature of the individual, is revealed for us fully in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
And as a result, we can, by looking at the commandments of God, by looking at the apodictic law, which is the big principles like the Ten Commandments, or by looking at the case laws that are if-then statements, you organize those under the Ten Commandments.
or by looking at approved and disapproved examples with blessing or cursing.
And those things are the details that allow us to have all the sorting categories we need to be able to make determinations about rightness and wrongness in every institution, including the state.
Things that are necessary to human action and human societies that are not laid out as elements of power or authority of the state or of the civil power, but still they have to be done by the nature of human action, by the nature of human societies.
Those things are logically derivable from the definitions of men and states in the Bible.
And so we are able to come to infallible conclusions by good necessary inference, to be able to know what states ought to do, and to know the limits of their just powers.
It is not necessary for men to write constitutions that are made up of human laws and precepts to restrain men.
Instead, God has already given chains to bind princes.
And the chains are the law of God.
And princes want to throw off those chains because they want, out of sinful desire, out of their own depraved hearts, to tyrannize men.
At the same time, subjects want to rebel and do criminal things and throw off legitimate power.
As Americans, we have to be careful about the temptation of rejecting legitimate power.
And so I am not advocating anarchy, but I am trying to advocate for an ordered liberty.
Christian liberty, not license, a Christian liberty, and to say that the law of God is the law of liberty and it protects your rights and it also restrains your excesses.
It is the royal law that shows you how you ought to be ruled.
And so it provides the perfect balance.
There is a real danger, and it has shown up over and over again in history, of tyrant princes usurping the rights of the people.
And when the state is centralized and usurping, The people do not have great mechanisms to protect themselves unless the law of God provides all the things we've seen gloriously laid out in American history in terms of federalism and the division of powers and all those sorts of things, the private ownership of arms.
Those things are part of the Protestant tradition.
Political Nature of Shared Life00:05:09
It comes from Protestants applying the Bible.
It's not something that merely arose out of experience.
It is something that arose because the Bible had to be applied.
in times of difficulty and men thought hard and the Holy Spirit enlightened their minds that they would see the truth in the Word of God.
And so I would put forward to you that the state is strictly limited to only do what God commands it and nothing more.
Thank you.
Well, this is fun, so thank you for listening to us talk about this.
I'll say that we are social beings and we share a world.
We share a space with others.
There's a commonness of our life together.
And even the things that we own that we call our private property, they're not just ordered for our good, but for the good of our neighbors.
And so everything in the end, everything we possess, everything we have, our powers, our resources, our property.
It's all oriented to the good of the people we share that place with.
And so I'm in a way pushing back, I think, against a type of individualistic conception of ownership.
I think there's both private individual ownership or single-party ownership and also a common ownership that in a way is concurrent with your own private ownership.
And so this means that our common life, our shared life together, should be ordered to that end.
Now that doesn't mean communism.
That doesn't mean 50% taxation.
But it does mean that for that reason we ought to be political.
And it's in our nature to be political animals.
It's in our very nature to seek after the good of our society by us observing what is occurring in our society and then seeking the good of that society.
And I think one problem is we think as conservatives.
That we're very political because we watch maybe Fox News or listen to Talk Radio, or we shout in the car when, I don't know, some talk radio guy says something, or you hear Joe Biden talk, or whatever.
But that's not politics.
That's just us having fun, I guess.
So I think that as political animals, as political beings who are designed for a collective society in which you determine and decide upon the particular actions for your good, that we as Christians ought to be more political.
and conduct that activity.
I don't think we actually do it as much as we think we do.
How many people, it's not a show of hands, but how many people are involved in their local community with regard to city council, county commission, perhaps state politics?
You might watch national television a lot, great.
I know some people already are and they're doing great things, but that's rare.
I'm in a county that is largely Republican, and yet the commission is largely filled with left-wing Democrats from Raleigh.
And there's a problem with that.
And it's that whoever cares more usually wins.
And you can care a lot by watching television, listening to talk radio, or coming here, listening to us talk.
But I would say we should care more by being involved in the political sphere itself.
And I think we should avoid, I think for David's, I think his tendency, which is common in modern times, is to actually escape politics, to leave politics, to avoid politics.
by creating these abstract barriers between what can happen and what cannot happen.
Now, I think there are barriers.
I just think having a more extensive view of politics means that those abstract lines of division are torn down and actually permits you to engage in political life.
And in that sense, fulfill your human nature in the way God designed you.
And I think this goes back to our nature.
I don't think our political life is rooted as a result of sin.
I think the reason that we care for our community and we care for everything from downtown to your own street is not a function of simply your sin, or it's not like medicine.
There wouldn't be medicine if man weren't fallen, right?
It's not akin to medicine.
It's actually more akin to you loving your own children.
That is a natural thing.
It would be true whether we are fallen or unfallen.
And I think politics is that as well.
And so I think the very desire to see your city council act, your commissioner act, for your state to act, for your federal government to act, is actually a very natural thing.
But it only happens if we as people together act.
And so anyway, well thank you very much for listening.