Gates Unguarded

In my most recent interaction with John Piper’s views on guns, I said something in passing about the “heirs of the reconstructionists.” Having been asked what I meant, or more importantly what I did not mean, I thought I needed to clarify a bit more.

I was responding at that point to Gary North’s post hoc downstreamery. He was basically arguing that Christians who make an appeal to natural law based on an “assumption of human autonomy” are leaving the gates unguarded. When you do that, bad things happen — things like same sex mirage, like abortion on demand, or like a disarmed citizenry.

My response was that you can always leave the gates unguarded if you want to. This is as true of groups that formally deny human autonomy as groups that don’t. There will always be a way to “retreat to commitment.” There will always be someone who will present a rationale, consistent with the tenets of whatever group you happen to be in, that will allow you to buy a few more days of peace.

Now the reason for this clarification. I was not referring to the good folks at American Vision, who are not exemplars of the kind of drift I am talking about. I apologize for any confusion I caused.

So what was I talking about then? Let me give a few examples of our unguarded gates, the kind of thing I had in mind. Many of the “erstwhile recons” I had in mind have glided slowly from theocratic libertarianism (which I continue to advocate) into a compromise with plain old vanilla libertarianism, which is systemically godless. Ron Paul, and now Rand Paul, represent certain sane economic policy proposals connected to certain other assumptions about human autonomy that are deadly.

In short, I agree with Gary North about the poison of human autonomy. I differ with him about where such temptations are likely to arise. He believes they arise where Christians have made their peace with various forms of statism. I believe they arise everywhere. Consequently I believe that alliances with Ron Paul’s version of capitalism are just as dangerous as alliances with Mike Huckabee’s version of socialism.

Lest anybody think this is just an exercise in finger-pointing elsewhere, a second example of this kind of drift (thankfully arrested in time) occurred in the pages of Credenda a number of years ago. You can read more about that little adventure here.

A third example of an unguarded gate would be found in the debate over regeneration, of all things. If you have followed this blog for a few years, you know that I have urgently argued that evangelical and Reformed Christians must ardently defend the absolute necessity of the new birth. In order for the doctrine of the new birth to make any sense, we must have an old nature in Adam that needs to be transformed, and we must receive a new nature in Christ that is the result of the transformation.

Now Biblical Horizons is an organization containing many downstream reconstructionists (not to mention friends of mine). But in the Biblical Horizons theological framework, we don’t really have “natures” that can be transformed by regeneration. As a stand alone point, this might not be all that important, but in theology there is no such thing as a stand alone point. If I don’t have a nature that could be transformed by the new birth, then how could I have a nature that would be insulted by a sex change operation, or violated by a sexual approach from another man?

Please note that by pointing this out I am not talking about a position that anybody is advocating yet. I am simply talking about unguarded gates. And we live in a time when every unguarded gate is dangerous.

So I do believe that there are forms of natural law theory that give away the store. But thus far the natural law guys on the Supreme Court have done more to keep our fat out of the fire than the biblical law guys have.

There is probably more that needs to be said about all this.