http://japery.newpantagruel.com/2006/01/17/im_too_principled_for_this_church_too_principled_for_this_church_so_principled_it_hurts.php

http://japery.newpantagruel.com/2005/10/18/timid_theoretical_radicals.php

I am not sure what you are driving at though. You will have to make your connections more explicit.

I don’t see how neo-Platonic approach to politics can avoid the same problems that the RO have.

I don’t much like what little I have seen of RO.

While I agree with what you are saying about our problem not being “being” but sin, I am not sure I want to transfer all of that to the secular kingdom. Doing so will invoke the terrible ghost of Richard Weaver upon you.

A covenantal metaphysic does not make us nominalists but modified realists. If politics were a covenant of works the nations would all be in the exact position Israel was… would they not? Rather, the difference between Israel’s experience and ours is that the law is opporating within the context of common grace which, by the way, is a non-saving benefit of Christ’s cross. It is why the nations are under His mediatorial authority.

I am thankful that God does not deal with us according to a strict covenant of works our America would have been vomited from this land long ago. America owes a great deal of gratitude to Christ.

I will be as clear as I can be, though I am not sure if the above is addressed specifically to me. Regardless, this is not my argument at all (which Bill has claimed–perhaps to his ultimate regret!–to agree with).

Rather, the truth is that the law of nature can be known and will often require acts contrary to the law of the spirit. The law of nature says, in the gritty voice of Sean Connory: “If he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. If he sends one of your guys to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” It is largely about survival of one’s kin and tribe in a world of shortage and during a life that is nasty, brutish, and short. We know what the law of the spirit says about that. The kinds of compromises we make between the two in life in the in-between is the seed-bed of tragedy which is the fount of penitence which is the coin of the church as she mediates between the various debts that man owes.

And as such, even the Church herself is a deeply tragic figure in history. See, e.g., Coppolla’s The Godfather.

I don’t think I could reject the re-injection of Plato into Christian theology with any more force. In many respects the difference between the Reformation and Rome is the difference between the Reformed appropriation (and modification) of Aristotle’s categories and the medieval/Roman substantial appropriation of Plotinus.

The fundamental human problem is not lack of being or ontological. It is sin or a moral problem.

The two different ways we analyze the human problem has profound implications for politics. For one, it allows Reformed folk to distinguish between grace and law. Politics is a covenant of works/law not a covenant of grace. Theocrats and Social Gospellers (left and right) don’t understand that distinction. I think Machen did.

What do you make of politics advocated by the Radical Orthodoxy folk?

My point is not that I am skeptical of natural law but that it cannot be anything but Christian (even when advocated by a pagan like Cicero).

Bill, if the Magistrate is supposed: “not only to have regard unto, and watch for the welfare of the civil state; but also that they protect the sacred ministry; and thus may remove and prevent all idolatry and false worship” and “countenance the preaching of the Word of the gospel everywhere” and “it is his duty, to take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire; that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed; all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed; and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed.”

Then shouldn’t they be solid on what the gospel and true worship are?

Of course you’re not a Barthian, but I was teasing about the implied skepticism about NL.

The argument I’m hearing is that, “if we don’t know exactly the “correct” application of NL in any given instance, then it provides no real guidance.”

I reply that there may be a variety of applications to a given circumstance. I suspect that, in reaction to our social/political condition, we sometimes want more certainty than can be had in this life. So long as we’re talking at city council meetings or where ever about the application of norms that are built into creation, then that’s a healthy conversation to be having. It might be a difficult conversation, but at least we can get a hearing. For example, in re the Supreme Court’s redefinition of eminent domain so that higher tax revenues are sufficient ground to take private property, I think a compelling NL argument could be made that it’s contrary to the nature of the state and it’s natural relations to citizens to take property on such a basis since it violate the implied contract between the governed and the governors. It’s an abuse of power.

I agree that, in many cases, NL is inductive or at least the applications of it to a given circumstance would be inductive. This seems to be the way Calvin often approached concrete issues.

I do think that every person has an innate knowledge of the God who is and of the substance of the moral law. We can and should capitalize on that knowledge in civil as well as religious discourse.