I appreciate the discussion of natural law going on under the previous post. I’d like to respond to a few of the points made, and develop everything just a tad further. First, when I say the teaching of Scripture “trumps” natural law, I was doing nothing more than applying a standard rule of hermeneutics within …
Eleven Theses on Natural Law
1. At the foundational level, natural law needs to refer what nature teaches us, and not to what any particular men have said about it. Natural law theorists are commentators on the text, and commentaries on a great text always differ among themselves. We should not make the mistake of rejecting the text because we …
Our Happiness-Is-A-Warm-Gun Celebrities
In a constitutional republic, the normal ways for an arrogant politician to come a cropper would be through personal scandal and resignation, and/or repudiation at the polls. That’s the way we do. Very few pols, however much they may deserve it, are struck by lightning bolts or small meteorites. Not to probe old wounds, there …
Natural Law and the Lordship of Jesus
“The idea of a binding moral covenant on all persons, with salutary relevance even for the spiritually unregenerate, gave the covenant of works tremendous impetus for political theology” (Glenn Moots, Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology, p. 80). Of course all Reformed thinkers know that everything is connected, but we can still sometimes …
Thick Skin, Tender Hearts
Lee Habeeb recently wrote a piece here for National Review Online, in which he was encouraging Christians to engage winsomely with our surrounding culture, and to make our peace with the way some things were going. He used the example of gay marriage in the civil sphere. David French wrote a very fine response here, …
On Being a Responsible Bad Boy
I offer this in the spirit of dispassionate analysis, and not with any sense of complaint. One of the things that conservatives have to quit doing is whining about how the foul deeds perpetrated upon our persons are never publicly identified for what they are. The most recent example was the union thuggery in Lansing …
Going Splash in the Sea of Japan
One other point needs to be made about sexual egalitarianism, but let me, if I may, move it (somewhat) away from N.T. Wright’s support of women’s ordination. We need to address, in a more general way, the idea that milder feminism (in those manifestations which are for some reason palatable to evangelicals) is “not about …
It Is Confusion
Comes now word that Germany has (perfectly legal) barnyard brothels, where pimps get to rent out the livestock for sexual purposes. We are not surprised to find that Scripture prohibits this kind of thing. Adam searched for a helper suitable to him among the animals, and there were none. God established His image in male …
Reductio Ad Infernum
A college in Washington is allowing a man who thinks he is a woman (where? down in his heart!) to make free use of the women’s locker room. So although he is a male, his internal confusions qualify him as one of those T things that the progressives love to go on about when they …
Bluestocking Feminism
Rachel Held Evans was recently on the Today show, promoting her new book A Year of Biblical Womanhood. Rather than address the whole stunt (designed to see if, in the grand tradition of Rocky III, this particular cash cow has any milk left), I thought I would just riff off one thing she did with …