Whenever we speak about the kind of law that defines a crime, we are talking about making certain people conform to a pattern they don’t want to conform to. Law in this sense is a function of coercion. This is why I am a minimalist when it comes to law. The fact that something is …
Because . . .
“You may not institute homosexual marriage because __________________________” Your pastor is being interviewed by a reporter and he has just been asked to fill in this particular blank. There are different ways he can go. 1. He can decline to answer the question for manifestly craven reasons.2. He can decline to answer the question for …
When We All Say Whooosh Together
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 …
Gun Ownership As Civic Virtue
A few posts ago, I mentioned in passing that gun ownership was not a sin, not a vice, and was in fact a virtue. This generated a few questions, which I thought I ought to address in a separate post. So here goes. The first issue concerns what is meant by “virtue.” Do I mean …
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 …
A Black Swan Revival
Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the phrase black swan in the title of his fine book The Black Swan. A black swan event is a surprise, it has a major impact, and there will be those (after the fact) who claimed they saw it coming. But in actuality, virtually no one saw it coming because these …
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, …
That Will Be Soon Enough
Lest it be misunderstood, I wanted to follow up on my post about the propriety of certain kinds of arguments in the immediate aftermath of something like the Connecticut tragedy. The issue is not relevance, but demeanor and spirit, in this case measured by timing. The issue is not whether you are right, but whether …