“Typical theonomist category confusion. Nature is the medium of the law, not the source. Law is mediated through nature and Scripture. Both agree. We learn things from Scripture that we cannot know from nature. We learn things from Nature that are not revealed in Scripture.”
Memoria Academy
History Teacher
Bret responds,
It is irrelevant whether nature is medium or source of the law because;
1.) Nature, like man, is fallen.
2.) Even if nature wasn’t fallen and was the perfect medium the problem wouldn’t be with nature. The problem is that man himself is fallen. Being fallen man no longer has the epistemological ability (or even desire) to read a putatively unfallen natural law. The problem isn’t in the sender. The problem is in the receiver. Fallen man, having denied God all the while claiming that God is not necessary to interpreting, has denied, in principle, the essence of everything that man interprets in nature including his own being.
That fallen man can and does get things right only means that fallen man can’t be perfectly consistent in his God denying interpretations and remain alive. As such, fallen man will get various things right but those things he gets right he can’t account, given his beginning presupposition, why or how he gets them right. As Bahnsen used to say … “Man can count but he can’t account for his ability to count.”
Jared Lovell writes errantly AGAIN,
Classic Motte and Bailey. If theonomists mean only what I am saying here, they are not saying anything new at all. They want to take down the entire edifice of natural law underlying western civilization and then when pressed, back track to say nothing new and distinct. Would you affirm that there is content revealed in natural law that cannot be known from Scripture? Or do I have to know Scripture to anything in nature?
Bret responds,
Natural law has been an abysmal failure. The reason we are now at the point we are at in the West is because Natural Law was floated by well meaning but not yet thoroughly Reformed men. Natural law has given us the Marquis De Sade arguing that Sadism is consistent with Natural Law … has given us Darwin arguing that evolution is consistent w/ Natural Law … has given us the gender blenders saying Trannie-ism is consistent with Natural Law…. has given us David Van Drunen arguing that Clergy are to be silent on public square sin. Natural Law is a wax nose that is made to proclaim whatever the reader of Natural Law desires it to say.
God and His Word is the precondition of all intelligibility. If one does not presuppose God and His Word then he is presupposing his fallen self and his fallen word. So yes, in order to knowingly know one must presuppose the Triune God in whom is hidden all the treasures of Wisdom and Knowledge.
The Natural Law position cannot be embraced by those who are consistently Reformed because to be consistently Reformed one MUST begin with Total Depravity and the “Reformed” Natural Law fanboys, have given up being Reformed when they argue that man is not so fallen that his epistemological apparatus (or sometimes his will) is still viable.
Look, I try to be nice. Really I do. But these Natural Law fanboys don’t get the Reformed faith.
