The NXR Podcast - THE CONFERENCE - Natural Law & Theonomy w David Reece and Stephen Wolfe

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00:00:16.280 You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.

00:00:21.860 We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.

00:00:26.800 So Wolf is going to come and give us 10 to 15 minutes opening statement.

00:00:31.340 Then immediately after that, we'll give 10 to 15 minutes for Pastor Reese.

00:00:35.300 Then they're going to come and sit in the chairs and begin to, in an informal sense, they're going to discuss.

00:00:41.960 But what that'll be, obviously, is cross-examination.

00:00:44.740 And then what I'll do, guys, is I'll just come back up when it's about, when it's probably about, you know, 10, 15 till.

00:00:51.880 and kind of, you know, politely say, you know, cut you off

00:00:57.840 and then have each of you come back to the podium for some final remarks.

00:01:01.640 Is that good? You feel good?

00:01:02.960 All right, this is Dr. Wolfe. Welcome them.

00:01:15.020 This thing needs to turn on, so give me a moment here.

00:01:18.780 But let's do some philosophy.

00:01:21.880 Does that sound okay?

00:01:23.180 I'm not going to get like tomatoes thrown.

00:01:25.100 No, I'm just kidding.

00:01:25.700 You guys are great.

00:01:27.820 So it's actually, it's great that we can talk about this.

00:01:31.620 It's been, between theonomy and natural law and other issues, it's been kind of a big

00:01:37.380 topic for a few years, and there is a resurgence of natural law people.

00:01:43.040 And obviously the theonomists who thought they had the, I don't know, they controlled

00:01:48.120 the Christian nation idea.

00:01:49.540 now that the natural law people are coming back. 0.55

00:01:55.880 Yeah, so let me just get started.

00:01:58.360 So again, thanks.

00:01:59.360 All right, so the first principle is

00:02:00.980 that all power is a means to an end.

00:02:05.540 All right, so all power is a means to an end.

00:02:07.720 And there's all sorts of different powers.

00:02:09.660 You guys have a power in your family as parents.

00:02:13.320 You have a power as, of course, the civil state has power.

00:02:17.780 There's power in the church.

00:02:19.540 So there's various types of power, but what they all share is they're all a means to an end.

00:02:26.300 Okay, they're all for something.

00:02:28.160 They're all for some end.

00:02:29.500 You exercise power for something.

00:02:32.040 So, and the other thing is that all means are sufficient for their end.

00:02:39.340 Okay, so when you have an end in mind or a purpose or something, some institution or something,

00:02:45.520 the power that's associated with that, is going to be sufficient to accomplish the end of that

00:02:52.260 thing. So, Adam's created. Adam is commanded to multiply, exercise dominion over the earth.

00:02:59.920 He is given sufficient means to do that. That means God grants him the faculties such that he

00:03:05.280 can accomplish that ought. So, in other words, if you ought to do something, you also can do

00:03:12.400 something. So first think about military power. I was in the military for a while as an active duty

00:03:18.060 guy. And the military officer has power. He has power to command a soldier to do this or that,

00:03:24.260 to take the hill. And that power, being qualified as military power, means that it's designed to

00:03:31.900 be sufficient to complete that end of military, to win the nation's wars. Okay. But that power is

00:03:40.840 also at times limited because there's some things that soldiers want to do that might be very unwise

00:03:47.840 and yet the military officer does not have the power to tell him no. So if anyone's been in the

00:03:52.980 military before you know that soldiers sometimes just show up from a night of partying and they

00:03:59.680 tell you I just met a girl and we're going to get married tomorrow. If you've ever heard that story

00:04:04.940 please raise your hand. Come on, there's got to be guys. A lot of times it's in boot camp. They get

00:04:11.360 their first weekend, and then they want to get married. Anyway, he comes to you and says that,

00:04:17.060 and you as a military officer, you can't say no to him. You don't have the power. It's not within

00:04:22.600 the bounds of your power. You can tell him, hey, that's very unwise. You should not do that.

00:04:30.000 But you don't have, it's not within that scope of military power.

00:04:34.300 But that is, the forbidding marriage in that way is actually a matter of circumstances.

00:04:40.640 Because if you're on the front lines in a battle, and you had just established a front line,

00:04:45.800 and you have foxholes, and this soldier's in a foxhole, and he comes to you and says,

00:04:50.460 hey, sir, yesterday I was at a farmhouse, and I met a girl, and we're going to get married.

00:04:55.700 Well, if you're in that situation, guess what?

00:04:57.800 that military officer is going to be like soldier get back in the foxhole you're not getting married

00:05:02.460 right now so it is circumstantial the same action the same thing as in getting married or whatever

00:05:08.860 it is the power applied to that can change based upon the circumstances all right so the same thing

00:05:17.560 can be you can forbid it or you can permit it at or you have don't have a power over it same thing

00:05:25.560 in a family. So you guys have, you have a family, and there's certain duties associated with the

00:05:31.120 family. And one of those, let's say it is the power to do, to bring your children in to do

00:05:38.960 family worship. Now that you have that duty, but you also have to determine things such as when

00:05:44.200 you're going to do it, what sort of order you're going to do it, how you're going to do it, who's

00:05:48.140 going to participate, perhaps children do prayer, whatever you do. Maybe they choose, like in my

00:05:53.640 home they typically choose the songs and so you have to make decisions and determinations in order

00:05:59.480 to fulfill that duty you have a principle and then for your family you have to decide what time

00:06:05.320 perhaps you work late perhaps you uh or you do it before dinner whatever it is you have to make that

00:06:10.960 decision you have that power and that becomes a sort of law in a way we usually don't call those

00:06:16.300 rules of the home laws but they are by definition they actually meet a law that is a legitimate

00:06:22.380 authority issues a command of action accompanied with sanction. That is, if the children don't show

00:06:28.620 up, they get a correction. So it is a sort of law that means, in a way, you as the person having

00:06:36.160 law over the family, or having the power over that family, are establishing sorts of laws to

00:06:42.760 fulfill prior duties. Okay. Now, to get to civil power, so we've talked about various forms of

00:06:51.180 power. Civil power is, in its genus, it's still a power. It's a means to an end. But the species of

00:06:57.760 power that is civil power, what is it for? It is for a rightfully ordered civil society. It is that

00:07:05.160 it uses, that power is to rightfully order that civil society. For what end? The end is to,

00:07:12.740 such that the people would procure earthly and heavenly good. That is, you'd have good vocations,

00:07:18.200 you'd have good social life and but at the same time it would encourage you indirectly to eternal

00:07:23.760 life all right so that's that that is the definition that's what civil power does rightfully

00:07:29.200 ordered civil society the the issue though is if that is the means to that end power is that means

00:07:35.220 to that end it has to do that for all sorts of different civil societies that is it's a it's a

00:07:41.260 it has to operate for different peoples people have different traditions ways of life people

00:07:47.840 who have different characteristics, different perhaps economic situation, just the varieties

00:07:53.240 that you encounter in the world today, even in historic Christian societies, you see wide

00:07:59.220 differences between Italy, France, Germany, UK, Scotland, and the United States. So what this

00:08:05.700 means then is the power ordained of God to rightfully order civil society to the end of

00:08:11.880 earthly and heavenly good must be extensive enough, expansive enough, such that it can order

00:08:18.300 all those varieties of peoples. Just like your power as a member of a family or as in a family

00:08:25.240 has the power to arrange your family according to prior duties in various ways given the

00:08:32.960 circumstances of that familiar, given the circumstances in your particular family.

00:08:38.800 right so that means your familial power is extensive and things can be different in different

00:08:44.540 places different families that it also applies just as much to human society and so that means

00:08:52.640 that the power civil power is extensive and that means that it has to be determined by some lawful

00:08:58.820 authority for given the particular search situation and i'd argue that is just a deduction of the

00:09:06.300 facts. So I, so far, all I've given you is premises, and I think the conclusion follows, which means

00:09:12.500 that civil power itself, the power to make law, can be different in different places. It's extensive

00:09:19.000 such that it can meet the end of earthly life in all different sorts of places, all right?

00:09:26.960 And why is that? And that's because whenever God establishes an end for something,

00:09:31.940 he's going to give it sufficient means to accomplish that all right now let's talk a

00:09:37.660 little bit i don't know how long i've gone but the limits so there are limits to power

00:09:41.560 limits to civil power and that's limited by the nature of civil life just like the military

00:09:47.080 leader himself is limited by the end of military success civil power is limited by the end of

00:09:54.180 civil life and that includes things like natural rights so sorry cj i do like natural rights

00:10:00.000 But this means the right to life

00:10:03.060 The right to the conscience

00:10:05.140 That is to not be imposed on your beliefs

00:10:07.260 In the inward sense

00:10:08.860 The right to liberty

00:10:10.260 And the right to even property

00:10:12.500 From pro-property

00:10:13.720 And why are these natural rights?

00:10:17.200 Why are these rights at all?

00:10:19.220 Well because

00:10:19.720 Exercising these rights

00:10:22.260 Exercising your right to property

00:10:24.300 To life, to conscience, to liberty

00:10:26.720 And all those other things you want to say are natural rights

00:10:28.920 is necessary for you as human beings to achieve your end as as human beings in the way god has

00:10:35.140 created you and so civil society in promoting the good of that society ought to recognize

00:10:41.820 those rights because that's what it's what it's there to do promote the good

00:10:46.280 and so the limits then would be limited by those natural rights uh and uh and and other things as

00:10:53.200 well. Now, so I said before that power is extensive. I think in the abstract, power is

00:10:59.320 actually extremely extensive. That means it can do all sorts of things. The difference, though,

00:11:04.620 is that the people establish constitutions. So I'm pro-constitutionalism. And what is

00:11:11.140 constitution? Constitution establishes the fundamental laws of a land, and it actually

00:11:16.700 primarily directs and limits power. So in our constitution, we have three branches of government

00:11:22.640 that recognizes three functions of government,

00:11:25.260 executive, legislative, and judicial,

00:11:27.080 we decided to separate them to three branches.

00:11:29.580 Didn't have to do that, but we did,

00:11:31.240 and there's checks and balances, and it's limited.

00:11:33.600 So we took the concept, the abstract concept of civil power,

00:11:37.860 and channeled it through a constitution

00:11:41.240 into what we have today.

00:11:43.240 And you can go to other places

00:11:44.320 that have different political systems

00:11:45.860 from people who decided to do it differently.

00:11:50.260 All right, and this is how,

00:11:51.360 you can actually read the debates of our that produced our our constitution it's called the

00:11:57.420 federal convention debates you can buy it's a thick book um james madison and a scribe you know

00:12:02.440 furiously writing stuff down and what you find in there is not actually abstract philosophy or

00:12:07.800 theology you find them the men using experience from the ages uh citing everyone from plutarch

00:12:15.000 to Swiss Confederation, to other, just experience among the states, and they applied experience

00:12:23.160 to say what is suitable given the experience of humankind over the known history that would

00:12:29.300 then produce a constitution that would be stable and secure the rights of the people

00:12:35.140 and at the same time have sufficient power to achieve its end.

00:12:38.580 So they relied upon experience, and our constitution, as you read it, is a product of reflection

00:12:44.620 upon human experience particularly western experience all right and uh and so that and

00:12:50.420 but again that could be different in different places some places it seemed to require dictators

00:12:56.320 uh sorry but iraq seemed to need saddam hussein as much i don't like that um and perhaps even

00:13:03.340 syria required uh assad to be in power to maintain the peace so different places have different

00:13:09.880 needs given on a given up their situation and that is a determination of the people for uh for their

00:13:17.120 good um so uh yeah and i will say i mean i i guess to pre to uh to i guess preemptively go after what

00:13:27.440 he might say um i i think the mosaic polity the the mosaic polity is a perfect example of

00:13:36.100 the application of natural law, but it's not the sole alone universal example of the application

00:13:43.500 of natural law. And it was fundamentally connected to a body politic, namely the Israelites.

00:13:51.400 And whenever a body politic is dissolved, so too do the laws and its fundamental laws,

00:13:58.580 namely the constitution. And so those laws as such, as a body of law, are not universal but

00:14:04.240 particular, and yet at the same time, they can be used for our own thinking on what law would be

00:14:11.220 suitable and what law would not be. So, I do think that we can use the Old Testament or just

00:14:17.520 scripture to form civil laws, but at the same time, I don't think that the polity itself

00:14:27.380 is the sole standard given the variety of institutions or of human experience and societies

00:14:33.900 and given the, as the argument I said earlier.

00:14:37.040 So I'll just leave it at that.

00:14:38.880 Thank you.

00:14:55.100 Okay, so I have up here,

00:14:59.700 we had the, basically an attempt

00:15:02.020 to try to express both of our positions side by side

00:15:06.120 in a way of trying to help to positively put forward positions

00:15:11.340 as opposed to merely some sort of like negative tearing down.

00:15:15.260 I think one of the things that's helpful when you're trying to charitably debate

00:15:18.240 and to come to unity if possible

00:15:20.780 is to try to have both sides of sort of a duty to positively construct.

00:15:26.220 And so I think the question here is not merely whether I could attack

00:15:30.820 what Dr. Wolfe has said, but rather I'm trying to put side by side two views for you to compare

00:15:37.180 and contrast and for you to be able to consider those. And so the position that Dr. Wolfe just

00:15:43.300 explained, we had this idea that God has given broad authority to the civil power,

00:15:48.500 which is to be prudently limited by particular peoples in constitutions. And so that you

00:15:54.180 obviously heard him just express that and sort of an outline of that view. So then for me,

00:15:58.860 this idea that the bible teaches the regulative principle of the civil power which teaches that

00:16:06.980 the civil power only possesses the authority to do what god commands it to do in the bible

00:16:12.280 so i'm saying essentially that there's not a broad power but instead the explicit commandments

00:16:18.720 plus the necessary inferences that you could derive from scripture and necessary inference

00:16:24.620 being strict or rigorous drawing of conclusions.

00:16:28.620 So that's the idea of what I'm positing

00:16:30.480 as my understanding of the biblical

00:16:32.680 or God-ordained order for government,

00:16:35.480 for civil power.

00:16:37.320 So I have a summary here

00:16:39.780 for some of the basic reasoning.

00:16:43.740 And Dr. Wolf, my main thing is going to be this idea

00:16:46.760 that I'm still not fully sure

00:16:48.480 what is meant by natural law.

00:16:50.860 I heard in the speech a reference

00:16:52.660 to the idea of the experience of the ages

00:16:54.460 And so I'm going to posit some definitions of natural law, because one of my big goals is to really truly understand what's intended by natural law, and to then be able to discuss in that.

00:17:04.500 So I have here four propositions that are if we should glorify God in all that we do, and if the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy God is the scripture, three,

00:17:19.760 And if the natural law is anything other than what is revealed in Scripture, then it is no rule to direct us.

00:17:29.360 Ultimately, if natural law, if it is the same as the law in Scripture, then Scripture is more clear and it's infallible.

00:17:39.420 And so it is not something to direct us.

00:17:42.080 So these are the two things here is, is it something outside of and in addition to Scripture and therefore no rule?

00:17:48.020 or is it something that is the same as the content of scripture and I've heard Dr. Wolf express the

00:17:53.680 idea of the natural law is the moral law in the past and so I think he's saying number four that

00:18:00.480 the idea that it's the same and not something just different and so I think what we're going to end

00:18:05.620 up doing is to a larger part in the conversation trying to come to understand what's really being

00:18:10.680 said that that is different so then when we talk about the origin and nature of civil power

00:18:17.180 I mentioned before that I believe that Dr. Wolf and I disagree about the origin of civil power

00:18:23.060 so I believe he would assert that it is in the garden that there is a civil power that's inherent

00:18:28.760 in Adam's rule and then whereas I'm saying the civil power comes from Genesis 9 and this key

00:18:35.480 verse is Genesis 9 verse 5 whoever sheds man's blood by man his blood shall be shed for in the

00:18:43.100 image of God, he made man. Okay, so this idea of man punishing. Now, in past conversations with

00:18:49.020 Dr. Wolfe, he's expressed that he agrees that civil power, he thinks civil power is distinct

00:18:54.880 from the idea of this coercive power with the sword. And if I'm wrong, you can correct me

00:19:01.440 down the line here. But my understanding is that there's agreement that this is where kind of the

00:19:04.500 coercive power with the sword seems to come in. So there's some sort of a distinction between the

00:19:09.620 civil power versus the coercive avenging power. Now, again, the Westminster Confession of Faith,

00:19:17.540 which I believe we're both committed to, says that good works are only such as God has commanded in

00:19:22.340 his holy word and not such as without the warrant thereof or devised by men out of a blind zeal

00:19:28.260 or upon a pretense of good intention. So mere intention or in terms of the pursuit of a goal

00:19:33.600 is insufficient it requires the means to be prescribed and that prescription is in the law

00:19:40.120 of god so if it's a good work to exercise civil power which we both agree then the law of god

00:19:47.660 the commandments of god provide that and so that's my my assertion and understanding

00:19:53.480 i already read to you in my speech second timothy three verses 16 and 17 but again

00:20:00.280 the idea that the purpose of the giving of the scriptures was to teach such that the man of God

00:20:05.640 could be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work, not incomplete, not partially equipped

00:20:11.800 for some good works. So then, if there's a question about the extensiveness of state power,

00:20:19.060 how broad is it? I think in order to defend a broad view, one would have to take the assertion

00:20:24.860 that there's a grant of power that's sort of normative.

00:20:28.900 When you talk about worship,

00:20:30.540 there's this language of the normative principle

00:20:32.500 and the regulative principle.

00:20:34.100 So that's where this language normally comes in.

00:20:36.560 And the idea that the normative principle

00:20:38.520 is such that you are authorized,

00:20:42.500 the normative principle of worship would be

00:20:44.000 that you're authorized to worship God

00:20:46.440 in any way that he has not forbidden.

00:20:49.660 The regulative principle of worship would be

00:20:52.240 that you are only authorized to worship God in the way that he's instituted or commanded.

00:20:58.840 And so I would take that regulative principle and apply it to authority in general. And I would say

00:21:04.500 there's a regulative principle of civil government. So I'm making the assertion that the state and

00:21:11.780 civil power can only do what God commands. And if we have a normative principle, my concern would be

00:21:19.200 that it turns us into slaves where there's an ability for the state to

00:21:23.160 command us to do all sorts of things and then for freedom to be maintained there

00:21:29.100 has to be a regulative principle of the state the danger of anarchy is to say

00:21:34.640 that the state has no power or to limit its powers beyond what God has given to

00:21:39.600 it and so for example I would one thing that people who call themselves

00:21:44.580 libertarians would disagree with I think the first table of the law in other

00:21:48.660 words the first second third and fourth commandments should be enforced by the state

00:21:52.560 that there should be a punishing of idolatry of suppressing us blasphemies and a protecting of

00:21:58.380 the Sabbath so that puts me typically in the outer rim of the cocktail parties at the libertarian

00:22:04.060 party I've never gotten an invitation don't worry so so that being the case when I think about the

00:22:14.100 types of natural law I'm trying to understand is this idea of the way that natural law gets

00:22:20.140 talked about. There's a number of different ways it gets discussed. The romanticists would talk

00:22:25.000 about natural law as feeling. So the book Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen is about one sister

00:22:32.620 who has good sense and the other sister who has sensibility, right feeling. And so this idea that

00:22:39.020 right feeling is what determines the good uh what's the right course of action that's kind of

00:22:44.440 the philosophy of disney you know follow your heart and i do not believe that that's what dr

00:22:48.760 wolf is saying at all so charitable interpretation not trying to pretend that in any way i don't mean

00:22:52.940 that's his position but then there's this question okay what about empiricism is it observation

00:22:57.180 and i i hear some of that the idea of looking at the experience of the ages are you determining

00:23:02.600 you know what ought to be done or whatever from from empiricism or rationalism where you're using

00:23:08.200 reason apart from experience you're trying to have like a definition of the nature of man or

00:23:11.940 of the state and reason out from that apart from scripture well then there's the scripture using

00:23:17.900 it as a thing to define that and you could say natural law is the moral law of scripture and

00:23:24.660 there's also this idea that there's natural law written on the heart the work of the law written

00:23:28.820 on the heart which is the basis for inexcusability so if those definitions that's what i'm trying to

00:23:34.840 figure out if or if there's another definition for natural law that's being talked about trying to

00:23:38.920 figure out which what's the definition that we're working with so the biblical uses of natural law

00:23:45.440 are the moral law in scripture is a natural law the work of the law in the heart makes men

00:23:51.280 inexcusable that moral law in scripture is infallibly known from scripture alone

00:23:56.900 it's corrupted in the hearts of fallen men since the fall sorry for the repetition fallen men

00:24:03.780 And we are incapable since the fall

00:24:06.860 of rightly directing ourselves by this law

00:24:10.380 apart from scripture.

00:24:11.720 So the natural law, if it's the moral law,

00:24:13.560 the way we get it is by going to the law

00:24:15.380 in the scriptures as opposed to something,

00:24:18.140 some other means.

00:24:20.120 So then, that's it,

00:24:22.460 and you should go to all my websites.

00:24:23.460 Thanks.

00:24:23.640 Thanks.

00:24:32.920 I guess I've been challenged to define natural law, so I'll do that a bit.

00:24:39.640 I'll talk about natural law a bit.

00:24:45.100 Natural law is a moral law that directs man to his end, his natural end.

00:24:54.700 and it is the sole means to that end and that that end you can define it as happiness

00:25:00.200 um and uh or human flourishing is that okay uh so that that it's it's a it's a measure

00:25:08.640 a standard where it's a means for man the sole means by which man would achieve his end and this

00:25:15.820 is the what is was established in the garden it was the standard it was it's uh for adam

00:25:21.940 and his his progeny and it's immutable meaning it doesn't change precisely because it is the

00:25:29.840 only fitting law given the nature of man himself so god created man in a certain way

00:25:36.680 and in creating him a certain way for a certain end god ordained a law and that would be the the

00:25:45.120 natural law and it's called natural for that reason it's natural in the sense that it's natural

00:25:49.800 to man as man. It's fitting, suitable for his nature, for the end God ordained for man.

00:25:58.960 So that's why it's called natural law. It's also called the moral law. It's called a moral law

00:26:03.400 oftentimes to distinguish that law from non-rational animals or animals. And that's

00:26:12.300 because dogs and cats and lizards don't have rationality. That is, they cannot fulfill a moral

00:26:18.760 law that that is they don't have a moral choice and so man the natural law is a moral law because

00:26:24.940 man is a moral being capable of exercising moral choice and that's that's why we are the highest

00:26:32.900 being on earth precisely for that that we can choose we can do have a moral choice and because

00:26:38.860 there's a moral choice that means we can also where we are the beings that can recognize and

00:26:43.780 worship God, which is itself part, the principal part of the natural law. So that's what I mean by

00:26:50.760 natural law. And I think the important point is that it's immutable, and that's because there's

00:26:56.900 no other law by which man would achieve his end as a human being, which means post-fall that endures

00:27:05.580 as the standard of righteousness for man. That is, you are all under still that same moral law

00:27:11.980 because you are still human beings, though corrupted, and it still applies. 0.96

00:27:16.720 It has not changed, and according to the Reformed tradition,

00:27:19.880 the substance of that law has not changed or abrogated

00:27:23.040 or not even there's been an addition to it.

00:27:28.840 And so that endures.

00:27:31.240 Now when I say talk about experience,

00:27:33.920 what I'm saying is that according to the second table of the law,

00:27:38.500 that is more discernible by fallen man than the first table.

00:27:43.100 This is why you can read stuff in, you know, Plato and Aristotle

00:27:47.600 and others like Cicero and Seneca

00:27:50.180 and you can read their ethical works and their political works

00:27:53.680 and find a lot of truth there

00:27:56.040 because they're speaking of second table things

00:27:59.500 which are more immediate in their experience 0.74

00:28:03.540 so that they can see that if you're in a society of liars

00:28:08.260 that doesn't tend to go well if you're in a society where children disobey their parents 0.54

00:28:13.480 that tends not to go well if you're in a society of murderers that tends not to go well and so

00:28:18.400 they can observe those that those these things end well for societies and individuals and so

00:28:24.940 they can discern those second table duties but that's different than first table and the first

00:28:31.440 table concern our duties to God, those were largely rendered obliterated, say that. So this is why

00:28:42.400 they created idols. This is why they worship, they become polytheistic. This is why you eventually

00:28:48.540 see human sacrifice, not among the Greeks and Romans, but among others. And so that was

00:28:56.420 corrupted, and Calvin says this explicitly in his Institutes, that the virtues that made your

00:29:04.240 recognition and proper worship of God were obliterated. But he says that the duties with

00:29:11.020 regard to fellow man were weakened such that there still is sin, there still is injustice,

00:29:17.680 there still is corruption in individuals and in society. But nevertheless, because it wasn't

00:29:23.700 utterly obliterated, you can still read and learn from experience with profit, especially if you're

00:29:31.860 going to try to order society and individuals. So there's a lot to learn from Plutarch, who was a

00:29:37.760 pagan, who wrote on people's lives in parallel. And you can learn from the actions of these men

00:29:45.080 and his analysis, various principles of leadership and civil leadership.

00:29:53.020 So I'll leave it at that, but I think, I hope that explains my position on natural law.

00:29:57.580 Oh, one more thing.

00:30:00.200 And you mentioned this, that the Ten Commandments is an inscripturated form of natural law.

00:30:07.920 So when you obey the Ten Commandments, you're actually obeying the natural law,

00:30:13.220 and you're being fully human.

00:30:15.820 So it's not a purely divine law.

00:30:20.060 It's not that you're simply just obeying God.

00:30:23.980 You're obeying God and in so doing,

00:30:26.620 you are fulfilling your human nature.

00:30:30.640 You're fulfilling what you ought to be as a creature.

00:30:36.340 And so in other words,

00:30:38.200 the scriptural law and the natural law

00:30:41.120 are the same in substance.

00:30:43.220 By scriptural law, I mean moral law.

00:30:45.120 The moral law in scripture is the same in substance,

00:30:48.180 but it's delivered through two different means.

00:30:51.000 One would be, natural law would be ordinarily delivered

00:30:53.840 through reason or right thinking.

00:30:56.700 And that same law through scripture is delivered by faith.

00:31:02.260 And you receive it by faith.

00:31:04.080 So you can know that you ought not to murder

00:31:06.240 simply by faith because God told you not to murder.

00:31:10.120 You don't need anything else than that.

00:31:11.420 You already know not to murder.

00:31:13.220 But in principle, you could reach that same conclusion by reflecting upon human nature itself.

00:31:18.640 And yeah, so reason and faith can lead to the same ethical duties.

00:31:26.200 So thank you.

00:31:27.200 So I think you communicated that you're saying natural law is that which is pointed at the goal of human flourishing.

00:31:33.800 Is that distinct from the goal of glorifying God?

00:31:37.020 no

00:31:39.000 well

00:31:39.560 glorifying

00:31:40.480 like acting

00:31:41.740 to the glory

00:31:42.380 to the glory

00:31:43.040 of God

00:31:43.400 would be a condition

00:31:44.280 of it being a good work

00:31:45.160 yeah

00:31:45.660 okay so

00:31:46.720 so is human flourishing

00:31:48.520 like a

00:31:49.280 proximate objective

00:31:50.320 on the way

00:31:51.160 to glorifying God

00:31:52.420 or is glorifying God

00:31:53.900 as the goal

00:31:54.840 something that

00:31:55.440 inherently

00:31:56.300 brings about

00:31:57.180 human flourishing

00:31:58.060 what's the relationship

00:32:00.260 of those

00:32:00.720 yeah

00:32:01.500 um

00:32:04.320 I think I know

00:32:04.920 what you're going

00:32:05.320 with that

00:32:05.660 uh

00:32:06.040 Yeah, the idea is that, well, let me, I guess, back up a bit to explain it, that I think

00:32:14.340 in political society, you're glorifying God when you are choosing the best policy given

00:32:21.120 the circumstances to maximize the good of that society.

00:32:25.300 And if you were to choose something to the detriment of society, that would actually

00:32:30.400 produce bad and evil in society, like abortion, that is not to the glory of God. 0.50

00:32:35.540 So when you're crafting policy, civil policy, you're seeking, it's a good policy if it's

00:32:41.940 actually bringing about good in society.

00:32:44.680 It's maximizing the possibility of good, and that would be to the glory of God.

00:32:49.720 So it's not, I think the difference between you and me is I think you have more of an

00:32:55.120 idea of that there are these laws, they're given to us, and they ought to be enacted

00:33:00.060 regardless of considering

00:33:02.600 the ways in which they would affect society.

00:33:06.600 That it's to the glory of God

00:33:08.020 simply to enact the laws.

00:33:10.300 Whereas my argument is that

00:33:11.540 you glorify God by enacting the best policy

00:33:14.100 such that it actually produces good in that society.

00:33:17.140 And if it doesn't, then it's a bad law.

00:33:19.640 If it actually results in evil,

00:33:22.180 then it's a bad law.

00:33:24.940 Yeah.

00:33:25.920 So I would say that I believe that

00:33:27.880 the way we know a law is good

00:33:29.440 or law is bad, is based upon God's law, that it is the judge of all human law. And I would say that

00:33:35.920 there are, as far as circumstances go, you have conditions of order and disorder, a more or less

00:33:42.540 settled civil order or state. And you can go from chaos and sort of a rule of man where you have

00:33:51.160 wicked human law, and you can have reforms that are on the way to the mature polity and the mature

00:33:59.120 system. But so, for example, you look at like Nehemiah, who is, when he's reforming things,

00:34:04.920 there are people breaking the Sabbath. They're coming, they're like, you know, we'd like to sell

00:34:09.040 grain on the Sabbath. We find that that's a good day to sell grain. And Nehemiah's response is

00:34:15.120 to close the gates of the city. And then he threatens them when they show up again.

00:34:20.080 And he says, if you show up again, I'll lay hands on you. And so he's increasing his exercise of

00:34:26.900 coercive power, but he could have executed them. And so the idea that you can use, as you enact

00:34:35.300 power, Christian power, you can use lesser penalties as you're rising to the condition. 0.99

00:34:42.060 So the perverse persons of the land, I think Hezekiah, as opposed to immediately trying to 0.97

00:34:47.020 execute all of them, what he did with the perverse persons of the land was he made it illegal and

00:34:51.740 drove them out. And basically if they came back, then they would be executed, right? So there's 0.85

00:34:57.220 this idea that you can use lesser force in the process of bringing about reform in getting to

00:35:04.340 the place where you apply the law of God, the force of it in full. And so, but the reason I know that

00:35:10.100 is not by experience outside of the Bible. The reason I know that is because all the circumstances

00:35:14.700 and the conditions and the exceptions are laid out in the scripture. The scripture is sufficient

00:35:20.440 to know the exceptions. When can I break the Sabbath for works of necessity and mercy? How

00:35:26.080 do I know that? The Lord Jesus Christ exemplified that. So I think all of the circumstances to be

00:35:32.560 taken into account are given to us in categorical or principial form in the law of God. And I think

00:35:39.820 that one thing, Stephen, I agree about is the idea that the law of God, or what's calling the

00:35:45.840 natural law, lines up with the nature of man such that man flourishes in the application of it.

00:35:51.260 Totally agree with that. I think that the law order lines up with the ontology of man so that

00:35:57.580 the enactment of the law of God and the performance of it, whether it's an individual household,

00:36:02.340 church, or state, brings about that flourishing. But I would say that the law of God in more

00:36:08.380 detail probably than what you're saying. So you're saying the moral law and its principles,

00:36:12.640 And I'm saying the civil order of Moses provides us with principles of justice that are moral law, that they are showing to us the case laws show us applications and that the principles of due process show us applications.

00:36:29.500 And so the details of the Mosaic civil order are providing for us the perfect, divinely inspired consideration of categories that we need to interpret experience.

00:36:43.220 And if we try to interpret experience on our own to draw up principles, we'll do it wrong.

00:36:49.220 That we have to interpret experience through the systematic arrangement of doctrine of the scriptures.

00:36:56.220 And so it's the, I don't like the language of worldview or lens or whatever, but the sorting mechanism of propositional content.

00:37:08.520 So that in your mind, you can sort out the Excel spreadsheet.

00:37:13.520 That is the presuppositional structure that I would put forward.

00:37:18.540 And I would say that when you read Plutarch or whatever, you can evaluate and judge the reasoning of Plutarch on the basis of whether it's according to Scripture.

00:37:29.360 But that you can't know that Plutarch got it right or Xenophon got it right or whatever unless you already have Scripture to judge it.

00:37:38.920 And so it becomes useful as a thought exercise to go read the Federalist Papers or the record of the debate of the Continental Congress or the Constitutional Convention or whatever when you're applying Scripture to evaluate it.

00:37:54.280 But it will not by itself give you the knowledge of what is good for a state.

00:37:59.840 So, do you have any response or anything you want to chase?

00:38:03.000 Yeah, I mean, like, I think, like, knowledge is doing a lot of work for you in, like, in a sort of certainty or infallibility.

00:38:10.300 I think in political life, there's a lot of uncertainty, and there's so many dynamics.

00:38:16.480 Like, if you're involved in an institution or a business, and you make a decision, there's uncertainty built into that decision.

00:38:24.140 You try to mitigate risk as you go through it.

00:38:26.220 But you don't have an infallible, like you don't know precisely what that decision is going to result in.

00:38:34.620 And I think that's the same thing with politics and leadership, and it's the same thing throughout all of life.

00:38:39.340 I mean, just your own individual life, you make a decision, there's risk involved.

00:38:43.740 And the very fact of risk means that there's uncertainty in the result.

00:38:47.220 um and so uh yeah on the experience side i see one of the reasons i emphasize

00:38:53.640 experience is i think what made america great um was that it was a product of protestant experience

00:39:00.720 and uh a lot of the founders reflected upon the wars of religion that occurred in the 17th century

00:39:07.260 16th 70th century and they determined that you know what at the federal level there there will

00:39:12.020 be a uh will be freedom of religion such that the states this is where we go wrong in 20th century

00:39:17.140 The states will then have the right to regulate religion according to their own fundamental laws and their own laws.

00:39:24.840 And I think that was a product of wisdom.

00:39:27.460 It was also a product of the circumstances at the time because you have Anglicans in Virginia, you have Congregationalists in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and everything in between.

00:39:36.820 So it was a product of experience.

00:39:40.200 But it's also not only the American experience, it was a product of experience going first century.

00:39:47.880 It was the realization that Presbyterians and all the Baptists,

00:39:51.980 Baptists, please raise your hand.

00:39:54.120 So it means that it was a product, meaning that we Presbyterians and Baptists

00:39:58.220 could sit in the same room, call each other brothers,

00:40:00.660 and we could be a part of the same society.

00:40:03.700 Whereas that was not the case in the 16th and 17th centuries,

00:40:07.420 but we learned from experience that actually, you know what,

00:40:09.820 we can have stable commonwealths, stable governments,

00:40:13.420 if we acknowledge each other as mutual religion, call each other brothers, and grant freedom to each other.

00:40:19.820 So that's what I mean in part by experience, that it informs the possibilities of political life

00:40:26.120 that were not considered or not known, or not considered possible prior to the experience.

00:40:34.020 And again, I think our society, what we actually love, I say we, I just assume there's the majority,

00:40:39.640 is part of what we love about the United States

00:40:42.480 in its traditional understanding

00:40:44.520 is so much that it was

00:40:46.320 a product of western

00:40:47.760 political experience and good principles

00:40:50.480 so I think like again

00:40:53.860 I go back I think the knowledge is doing a lot of work

00:40:56.460 I don't think another thing

00:40:58.040 perhaps unless you want to respond to that I think there's

00:41:00.140 like

00:41:00.960 scripture is infallible but that doesn't mean

00:41:04.200 that we can derive from it infallible

00:41:06.200 truth statements

00:41:07.020 and so even when it comes to law

00:41:09.940 you can say I'm reading an infallible

00:41:11.920 text but that doesn't mean an application

00:41:14.160 of a text you're

00:41:15.220 applying that infallibly

00:41:17.140 there's a distinction between

00:41:20.120 infallible

00:41:22.140 source and infallible application

00:41:24.060 so

00:41:25.460 if you could talk about that

00:41:27.960 I don't know how you'd respond to that but it seems to me

00:41:29.940 again like that is an element of

00:41:32.260 fallibility

00:41:33.080 so first of all 0.96

00:41:35.820 arrest the Baptists. I'm kidding. I wouldn't drown any of you. 0.99

00:41:47.240 You, however, would have to punish me for baptizing babies because of the idolatry. So,

00:41:52.280 you know, you can work through that internal turmoil. But so as regards this issue of the

00:41:59.900 infallibility. So there are principles of law. We get them from the scripture. There's necessary

00:42:06.100 inferences. I can infer invalidly. I can reason wrongly, right? But if I reason rightly, right

00:42:12.800 reasoning from true premises is infallible. Now that doesn't mean I'm going to infallibly reason,

00:42:20.860 but good and necessary inference is infallible. If you properly follow the argumentation. So for

00:42:27.380 example, the Lord Jesus Christ argued against the Sadducees showing to them that by good and

00:42:34.040 necessary inference, just from the Torah, they had to accept the resurrection. You find the

00:42:40.800 apostle Paul using good and necessary inference in multiple steps so as to not only have a premise

00:42:47.840 and a conclusion or two premises as a syllogism to a conclusion, but he has what's called the

00:42:52.380 sorites in 1 Corinthians 15, where he has premise, secondary premise, conclusion, take the conclusion,

00:43:00.920 use it as a premise in the next syllogism, do it again, do it again. And so there's this good and

00:43:06.300 necessary inference. We're shown right reason in the Bible. The Bible shows us how to reason

00:43:10.660 rightly. And so that which is from the Bible and then drawn by good and necessary inference from it

00:43:16.460 is certainly true. Now, where we don't have certainty is in our observations of things.

00:43:23.560 So I can go, it's certainly true that murder is evil. It's certainly true that murder is a

00:43:28.320 capital crime. It's certainly true that abortion is murder. Okay, I can derive those things from 0.98

00:43:33.900 the Bible. And then I might go, here's a particular person, did they commit murder?

00:43:40.760 One's a determination of law, which I can have certainty about from the scriptures.

00:43:46.020 The other is fallible, requires two or more witnesses for the due process to occur,

00:43:52.920 and requires due process of law with the right to defend yourself,

00:43:55.960 the right to present your own evidence, to call your own witnesses,

00:43:59.380 to this due process of law to prevent tyranny, to help to slow down bad application of law.

00:44:05.760 So application of law can certainly be fallibly done by human beings,

00:44:09.800 but the law itself is infallibly given by the hand of God.

00:44:15.260 and right reason from it is certainly true. And so I'm trying to defend the certainty

00:44:21.640 of the premises, the certainty of the reasoning structure, and then we leave the fallibility to

00:44:27.900 our observations and our attempts to apply in life. And so that's the distinction of the fallible

00:44:35.220 and the infallible parts. And so this idea of knowledge, I would say I can know with certainty

00:44:40.860 what is right. I cannot know

00:44:43.000 with certainty whether you did

00:44:44.940 the right thing.

00:44:47.380 And so that's what I would posit

00:44:48.780 for that structure of the issues of knowledge.

00:44:50.820 And I don't need to infallibly know, but I do have

00:44:53.060 about whether you did the right thing

00:44:54.400 or whether you did the right thing

00:44:56.540 or whether somebody who's being charged with criminal

00:44:58.940 charges with infallible certainty

00:45:01.060 whether they're right. But there are standards of

00:45:02.900 evidence that we have a duty to follow.

00:45:05.620 So that's how I would deal with that

00:45:06.900 epistemological issue.

00:45:08.180 I appreciate you mentioned sorieties

00:45:11.460 and that's

00:45:12.200 you can find that in Aristotle by the way

00:45:15.240 but

00:45:18.680 but

00:45:20.860 actually that's great

00:45:22.300 I would disagree on

00:45:24.600 well okay yeah I mean so a valid

00:45:26.900 argument means that you

00:45:28.420 it's a yeah but

00:45:29.920 of course it depends upon like any

00:45:32.860 sound argument depends on

00:45:34.660 the truth of the conclusion of the

00:45:36.800 premises. So there is that issue.

00:45:39.000 You can have a sound argument, of course

00:45:40.660 that's infallible because of the nature of the definition

00:45:42.880 of a sound argument. You can have a valid

00:45:44.660 argument, but that doesn't mean it's

00:45:46.620 actually true or sound because you could have

00:45:48.620 so in other words

00:45:50.560 the validity, the soundness of an argument

00:45:52.600 depends upon your

00:45:54.400 certainty with regard to the premises.

00:45:58.000 So I

00:45:58.760 actually don't totally, I don't disagree

00:46:00.700 with what you said

00:46:02.320 there, I don't think.

00:46:04.420 Is there something

00:46:05.680 I think the difference, though, is that...

00:46:07.980 Start the music.

00:46:09.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:46:10.300 I think the difference is probably the extent to which you can...

00:46:18.000 This goes back to the original question, I think,

00:46:19.960 is the extent to which we can apply law in different circumstances.

00:46:24.340 Because, again, I agree that you can use Scripture to craft law.

00:46:29.800 I think that, again, one difference is that I think you can craft law

00:46:34.460 for a specific problem in society,

00:46:37.200 applying moral principles to solve that problem

00:46:39.620 because you're trying to bring about the good of that society.

00:46:42.660 And you can actually think through it,

00:46:44.520 you can reason through it,

00:46:45.880 and if it doesn't work, you can observe that

00:46:47.700 and then you can change the law.

00:46:50.740 So I wonder about the extent of it.

00:46:52.420 So there's a difference between laws that are bad in themselves

00:46:59.000 or violations of moral law that are bad in themselves.

00:47:02.360 So, like, murder is bad in itself, theft is bad in itself.

00:47:05.840 But there's another category of law called, I'm blanking on it, but anyway, it's the sort

00:47:12.540 of law in which the action itself is not in itself wrong, so like speeding on a street.

00:47:18.840 You go in 100 miles an hour down a malum prohibitum, that's what it is, malum prohibitum. 0.83

00:47:23.580 Malumans say malum prohibitum.

00:47:25.720 Anyway, that doesn't matter.

00:47:26.420 But this would be the sort of law that a civil magistrate regulates to promote the good of society.

00:47:34.280 So if you drive 100 miles an hour down a residential road, you got lucky somehow.

00:47:39.740 You didn't hit a kid, dog, or old lady or a parked car.

00:47:44.160 And so, therefore, you didn't do anything unjust.

00:47:46.580 And so you can't be punished for that because you can only be punished once you commit an act of injustice.

00:47:52.560 and therefore there comes the correction of that.

00:47:58.160 I would say that one function of government

00:48:01.320 is to promote the good by preventing,

00:48:05.020 by seeking to prevent certain bad behaviors

00:48:07.740 that diminish the good of society.

00:48:09.920 So I think speed limits are okay.

00:48:11.700 I think regulation's okay in certain respects.

00:48:15.540 So that is you punish things

00:48:17.620 that are not in themselves wrong,

00:48:20.040 but in prohibiting them,

00:48:22.560 you are promoting the good of society, broadly speaking.

00:48:25.500 So I will often mention traffic laws.

00:48:28.780 We don't realize it because we've been driving long enough,

00:48:31.260 but we have embodied these rules of the road,

00:48:35.160 and we know that the other people hopefully have as well,

00:48:38.060 unless you're in Los Angeles, which good luck.

00:48:40.320 But in most places, they've embodied those rules,

00:48:44.680 and we have common expectations of behavior on the roads,

00:48:48.080 given the rules, because society has imposed those,

00:48:51.080 and now there's commonality and and because we have that commonality it it facilitates your

00:48:58.240 movement so when you're on the road most people are going somewhere else they don't have the same

00:49:03.960 interest that you do or the same end as you do and yet the rules of the road coordinate that

00:49:09.760 activity such that you can go from point a to point b some other person can go from d to e or

00:49:15.500 whatever. And so it promotes the good. And I would say that is a legitimate power of the civil

00:49:22.420 government. And this is true, I would say, on all sorts of regulations as well. So I wonder if that

00:49:28.640 category of law, you would affirm that category of law. So as far as regulations go, typically

00:49:34.540 you're talking about things like, can an inspector come into your house or business without there

00:49:39.140 having been probable cause or a warrant on the basis of some sort of crime or harm that's

00:49:43.760 occurred. So I would say, no, I think that's a tyrannical power that the state does not have

00:49:47.120 the right to just come into my house and see if my smoke detectors work. I think that the idea of

00:49:53.240 going into a place, into private property, without having some event occurring where there's emergency

00:49:59.160 need to stop an ongoing crime, which is what probable cause is, right, where you're seeing

00:50:04.060 something happen and you need to intervene, or there's a warrant, which is our mechanism,

00:50:10.720 that's our our form for dealing with this where we have okay we're going to intrude upon your

00:50:14.840 private property right which includes the right to exclude people with badges and guns and so your

00:50:21.220 ability to say i don't want you on my property is going to be infringed upon by public power

00:50:25.620 because of the idea that there's some basis from the testimony of sworn witnesses and so i think

00:50:32.360 that the property right is actually something that that there shouldn't be regulatory infringement

00:50:37.920 of entering on. But there should be punishments for people who commit harms, people who are

00:50:43.340 negligent, who leave a hole open and somebody falls in. You don't have a hole inspector who

00:50:48.640 walks around writing tickets for people leaving the hole in the ground. You have punishments for

00:50:54.560 people when somebody is harmed. And that's what you find in terms of the justice order of the

00:50:59.460 Old Testament law. But I would say as far as like speed limits or rules of the road go, that's

00:51:05.060 actually a question of the property holder's right to regulate the use of the property.

00:51:09.340 So if there's a private road, you can set rules for speed. You can set rules for how it goes.

00:51:14.300 If the government owns the road, they are now the property holder. So the problem we face in

00:51:19.920 America is there's way too much public land. That's a part of the problem, which makes it so

00:51:23.840 the government has huge domains where they're trying to control the detail. Now, if you own

00:51:31.120 property, you have to have rules for how it's used in terms of the way people behave on it.

00:51:36.140 And so the property owned by the civil order, by the state, is something where it can act as the

00:51:42.600 property owner and therefore set rules as a property owner. And that's not so much a function

00:51:47.640 as the state as it is a property holder. And the state is a legal person that has the ability to

00:51:54.100 own property. Okay, so you have this idea of holding of a road and you say, here's the rule

00:52:00.220 of the road. And you know what kind of crime it is when you violate the rules of the road?

00:52:03.960 It's trespassing. Because you're using the property that's owned by the state in a manner

00:52:09.680 that's not according to the conditions for the use by the property owner. And so you start to go,

00:52:14.660 wait, what if the government owns tons and tons of land? Can they set the conditions for all that?

00:52:18.400 And now you see why I would love for that to be private land. In Arizona, the majority of the

00:52:22.380 land is owned by the federal government and the state government and by tribes. And so there's

00:52:28.120 all these people stuck in the middle of the desert in a gigantic six million person city

00:52:31.740 in this huge area the size of Britain. And we're all there because you can't get the land away from

00:52:38.160 the government, as opposed to the ability to develop the land. So you have these desert

00:52:42.640 wastelands. I mean, deserts are literally curses in the Bible. It's like, you're going to be so

00:52:47.580 bad, your land's going to be a desert. Ha, I'm already there. And so this idea of taking the

00:52:55.340 desert and turning it into garden city. I mean, I live in the middle of a desert that was turned

00:53:00.340 into an orange grove. I have flood irrigation in Phoenix. My yard has grass. A desert has been

00:53:09.020 turned into a garden city. But the parts that the government owns do not have grass. They are not

00:53:16.740 places where people want to live. And so the idea of government ownership of the land, I think, is a

00:53:20.760 big problem. And the idea of the right of

00:53:22.640 trespass control, that solves

00:53:24.760 all the problems of road laws.

00:53:27.460 And so that's, I don't

00:53:28.540 think that there's an issue here where there's

00:53:30.680 an incapability of dealing with it.

00:53:33.020 So,

00:53:34.600 if you want to, where do you want to go?

00:53:36.460 Do you want to keep going on traffic law?

00:53:39.700 Should we?

00:53:41.140 Yeah, well, that's

00:53:42.260 an instant response. I think it opens up

00:53:44.940 a perhaps different disagreement.

00:53:46.640 So, you know, I guess

00:53:48.740 I'll use the stock line that

00:53:50.580 The government is, you know, by four of the people.

00:53:54.060 So I do think that the government is a different sort of entity than simply a sort of private entity or separate entity such that.

00:54:06.140 Because it is something that you elect members.

00:54:10.340 There is a, the difference is government is by its design, its end is for the people themselves.

00:54:18.520 whereas in a private industry it is designed for principally for the people

00:54:24.420 who own it so government is something that serves the people it should arise

00:54:28.420 from the people by their by their consent and there should be some

00:54:32.060 mechanism by which they express their their public interest so I would say

00:54:37.420 it's a different entity and it involves when it owns these this land or roads

00:54:43.840 it's not a private it's actually a shared space it's something that is in a way theirs but also

00:54:51.680 ours and it's something that then we would petition the government or through various means

00:54:57.740 come to regulate and so i i guess i'm more on the side of that there is a that there is a a

00:55:05.640 communal shared aspect to this that and there's a function of government to for the good of what

00:55:13.380 you might say the commons so there is a some there are i mean there are some things by the

00:55:18.320 very nature that don't admit of ownership very well unless it's actually granted by the state

00:55:24.780 so you have like a large lake like in what sense can can you walk upon a lake up upon a lake that's

00:55:32.260 no no one's seen before and say i declare this you know wolf lake and it's my lake now and the

00:55:37.580 moment someone shows up to it they uh they're trespassing or they're they're they're you know

00:55:42.160 they're all the way the other side another bank and they're fishing and you're like hey you're

00:55:45.200 taking my fish there are certain things that are by the very nature common and so at least you know

00:55:52.520 i know roads aren't they are common in a sense they're created go through land on but there are

00:55:56.540 i'm saying that there are aspects to our our environment our world that are common and then

00:56:03.440 the collective interest of the people would be we want a lake for fishing and so it's actually they

00:56:10.060 might then have an interest a collective interest as a public and regulate the way in which that lake

00:56:16.000 is fished because there's a come there's a common interest and so government one government function

00:56:21.520 would be precisely for that and that's just one example i think it extends farther out

00:56:28.380 but i just don't think that we can neatly distinguish all these private ownerships and

00:56:33.800 everything's private i don't think even in principle you can do that really well because we

00:56:38.640 we don't just like share like when i when i think of someone who drives down the road

00:56:43.700 and we talked about this the other night and throw out like a mcdonald's you know ever seen

00:56:48.480 those people that like they throw this about there and it falls on someone's property you

00:56:52.920 know on the side of the road and like we could think of that as an injustice to the property

00:56:57.260 owner um because now they have to clean up the mess perhaps but i see that as an injustice to

00:57:03.380 our shared world because i have to see it right i like when you share a visible space you share

00:57:10.440 more than just a line between land between land or whatever you share a visible space and you all

00:57:17.820 have a common collective interest in in the order and beauty of that space and so that's where i

00:57:23.760 think it would arise from that all sorts of regulations as well um uh yeah anyway go ahead

00:57:30.680 I think the creation of a large administrative state to manage all sorts of common areas is one of the great problems of tyranny.

00:57:39.600 You want to avoid administrative states.

00:57:42.540 The Declaration of Independence talks about the king sending forth his ministers to eat out our substance as a swarm of locusts.

00:57:49.980 And I think that you couldn't even name all of the three-letter agencies that exist.

00:57:54.420 If anybody here can send me a text message, you don't have my number.

00:57:57.560 But if you can send an email to my email list back there with, like, all of the three-letter agencies within the next 15 minutes, if you could find them all, I'd give you $100.

00:58:06.860 Like, I don't think you could do it in 15 minutes.

00:58:09.180 You couldn't get a comprehensive list of the three-letter agencies to get the $100 and email it to me.

00:58:16.260 The amount of administrative state burden that exists from an effort to manage the commons as opposed to making the commons private.

00:58:24.520 it. If you sell something off to people to use, there's private stewardship. When you have the

00:58:32.960 state own it and it's a public good, you end up with this administrative state to manage it for

00:58:39.900 the people. And I would suggest that the good of the people is advanced by private property

00:58:46.040 ownership and the wealth being owned by households and individuals and the state focusing on its

00:58:52.700 work of administering justice, waging just warfare, and seeking to maintain borders and to stop

00:59:00.100 ongoing disruption of the peace. And going beyond that makes it so that the state is this actor

00:59:06.620 that is pretending to be omnicompetent, but is really just the DMV.

00:59:14.780 All right, so who, like, let's take the large lake. Who has the rightful original claim to own that

00:59:21.820 lake such that they can sell it. Yeah. So I think that the claiming of unused lands, the Puritans

00:59:27.940 in the common law worked through the idea of best and highest use. And as a way, how do you glorify

00:59:33.460 God with this? And you go, okay, there's a grant of dominion to the race of man over the earth.

00:59:37.860 How do you take property out of the earth and set it aside as private property? When it is unused,

00:59:44.120 the use of it the work the dominion work is the thing that makes it so that you now as doing

00:59:52.980 stewardship over it there's a grant of authority otherwise you stuck with a native form of

00:59:58.360 communism where all things are common when adam is made how do you ever move anything from common

01:00:04.620 possession to private possession well right i i understand like that's that's lock

01:00:08.700 No, but there's a difference though

01:00:14.340 It's one thing to come across an open field

01:00:17.080 Or clear the land and plant your crops

01:00:19.140 And you, yeah, I agree with that

01:00:21.820 That is like the most fundamental claim of ownership

01:00:26.460 Is that you've exerted work upon some space

01:00:29.780 And therefore you can claim it as your own

01:00:32.280 There's a sort of identification, phenomenological

01:00:34.680 It feels like it's yours

01:00:36.760 the difference though if it's a large lake

01:00:39.080 something that is not something

01:00:40.980 that you can

01:00:41.760 easily claim as your own

01:00:44.560 that is truly common

01:00:46.140 that would then be a collective ownership

01:00:49.220 that would in some ways be

01:00:51.260 a something that

01:00:53.120 more than one party would have a claim

01:00:55.100 in some sense to that space

01:00:56.940 one guy's on the other side of the bank

01:00:58.940 one guy's on this one and they're all

01:01:00.980 so in that sense by it's very nature

01:01:03.240 it's like you know

01:01:05.080 you like even a mountain like okay i hiked i got to the top of this mountain does that mean you

01:01:10.180 have rights to the mountain because you you you travel to the top of it so there's just things

01:01:16.400 by their very nature like take um take like yosemite anyone yeah so yosemite there's this

01:01:22.260 great place strip mine it what what's that i said strip mine it i know that's what you do

01:01:28.440 no like half dome you know like you climb the top of half dome does that mean you have a right to

01:01:33.780 you know uh spray paint the side of it because you got the top of it you can do your name you

01:01:38.780 know like reese company or like reese fund like the first guy to get there reese fund or whatever

01:01:45.820 you know there's just things by the very nature that are common collective that are for the common

01:01:50.460 good um and and for that reason there's a common interest and so then then the civil government

01:01:56.280 would be as something of by for the people would then have a role in securing the commonness of

01:02:01.560 that thing such that there's no exploitation because that is a problem with common like yeah

01:02:06.780 you're right if you have a private lake you have an interest in well-stocked you know fishery but

01:02:12.320 if it's by its very nature something that cannot be privatized or made you know under one party

01:02:17.620 then it's easily exploited because then you could just go up and get all the fish take it out now

01:02:23.300 it's there's up in there so then you would there's an interest collective interest in the good

01:02:28.580 afforded by that thing that is not by its nature private same thing with like hiking on a mountain

01:02:34.520 something like that and and yeah sorry go ahead sorry so i think scripturally when you have

01:02:41.700 questions like where does somebody's property start and somebody else's end one of the examples

01:02:46.140 that's given is if there's a dead body found in the countryside uh you what you do is you measure

01:02:51.940 where that dead body is compared to the town center of the closest towns and the closer one

01:02:58.220 is the one that has jurisdiction over the investigation.

01:03:01.120 And that's a really easy, quick way to deal with

01:03:04.280 where do boundaries butt up against each other.

01:03:06.780 So with water, if you're like,

01:03:08.240 well, I made a town on this side of the water

01:03:10.220 and he built a ranch on that side of the water

01:03:12.380 and there's one over here,

01:03:13.320 and you go, okay, have you claimed along the shoreline?

01:03:16.780 Are you doing the work to deal with this stuff?

01:03:18.620 So you have these places.

01:03:21.600 Who has rights over what water?

01:03:23.460 You can determine by the same sorts of things

01:03:25.780 of measuring the distance from the most recent,

01:03:28.580 from the property holders or whatever.

01:03:29.880 But the problem is, the alternative is

01:03:31.820 to have, you know, the department of Lake Five.

01:03:35.760 And when you have departments that are dealing with this,

01:03:39.540 they just take the rights from everybody.

01:03:42.260 So now instead of a private property interest

01:03:44.940 where people are doing stuff, you know, you can just do things.

01:03:48.040 And if you do have the ability to just do things, you're free.

01:03:51.940 And when you can't do stuff,

01:03:53.320 and you've got to go through the bureaucratic process

01:03:55.280 of getting the approval of Lake Department 5 to tell you whether you can put a boat that's 14 feet

01:04:00.880 on the water or not, what you end up with is somebody saying, this is mine. And it's no longer

01:04:06.440 individuals, it's now the state. It's the state's property. And so it's this eminent domain that is

01:04:13.720 taking of property and concentrates it to the state. And they do not manage it for the public

01:04:19.400 good well because the state is not good at taking dominion. The state's job was not to take

01:04:26.500 dominion. The state's job is to punish criminals. And the individual's job is to take dominion in

01:04:32.920 the household. All right. Well, you clearly assessed the means of persuasion, which is also 0.92

01:04:42.260 an aristotle um but uh so for yeah i would say this is a very american audience and a very american

01:04:49.400 form of rhetoric which is you know i'm american too i guess but um so it's good but i i you go

01:04:55.740 to other countries and this sort of rhetoric does actually does not land on people so i'm not

01:05:01.000 criticizing you but uh i i just like to point out that that your your argument it i think that of

01:05:08.040 the American bureaucratic system, as it functions now, I would agree with you. There are all sorts

01:05:15.220 of problems. But this doesn't land on other places that actually have very efficient government

01:05:21.880 and actually respected government in other places. If you go to Europe and ask the people

01:05:26.600 about their government, they're going to have disagreements. But in general, they're actually

01:05:30.180 going to like their state. In general, they're going to want actually a stronger state or a

01:05:35.480 strong state. It's a different, I think, given our culture, we have a very antagonistic view of the

01:05:42.420 civil government, and we tend to think of it as something very separate from us, as something

01:05:47.660 outside of us, as something distinguished from us that comes to oppress us, and that's part of our

01:05:52.780 culture to think like that. And frankly, I think it's part of conservatism as well. I think one of

01:05:59.980 the problems with conservatism is that we want to, instead of engaging in political life, where we

01:06:06.000 try to shape the regulations and the function of government in a very active way on city councils,

01:06:12.840 in county commissions, in state government, we want to, in a way, disengage from politics by

01:06:18.520 establishing these, what I think are very abstract lines of what's allowed and what's disallowed.

01:06:25.580 And one of the things I've been trying to say is that actually we as conservatives need to engage in the political process to promote the good for our people and society.

01:06:36.240 And I do think that involves regulation.

01:06:38.120 But I think part of our problem and one of the reasons why as conservatives we talk about the state, which is a very modern concept.

01:06:44.940 Usually when you think of state, it's an old idea using the word state.

01:06:49.800 But when we think of bureaucracy, we're thinking of 20th century managerialism.

01:06:54.920 managerial bureaucracy, which is very different than civil servants within the 19th century and

01:07:00.420 18th century. A very different conception of the role of government. There was far more activity

01:07:06.040 in politics. There was a smaller government, limited government, and I actually fully support

01:07:11.160 limited small government. But I think in a, I just think in principle that if we engage thoroughly

01:07:17.560 in politics like uh than than these uh instead of creating like abstract lines of what's permitted

01:07:25.100 and not permitted but just sought the good through political political activity um i think we'd have

01:07:31.040 a different perspective on this um yeah but i but i agree like yeah there's in general the the amount

01:07:40.080 of regulation is too much you talk to someone from california trying to build a house and i

01:07:43.840 understand. Just too much. And probably in most states as well. Though I do think, again, I just

01:07:50.020 don't think there's anything wrong in principle with having inspectors come and make sure that

01:07:53.460 the overpass is not going to collapse on someone or that the parking garage is not going to collapse

01:07:59.540 under a 7.0 earthquake. And these are all things that can be made sure of through experts in

01:08:07.820 principle and that is something we can do as political people again political

01:08:13.260 animals seek to form in society so I think we've been rapidly

01:08:37.820 I think I have five minutes

01:08:47.640 so just one second to lay out my watch

01:08:50.420 so when we think about the difference here

01:08:56.140 between natural law and theonomy

01:08:57.320 and the difference between the broad power

01:08:59.180 of a civil power

01:09:00.420 versus a narrow regulated principle sense

01:09:04.900 I think that we've gone into some of the details of things

01:09:09.540 as regards things like the problem of the commons

01:09:11.400 and so kind of pushing to the edges

01:09:13.940 of some of the more difficult problems.

01:09:17.540 But on a basic level,

01:09:19.640 the scriptures provide a law that is infallible.

01:09:24.060 That law teaches us our duties

01:09:26.340 and therefore our rights.

01:09:28.800 You have a right to do everything God commands you to do.

01:09:31.400 you are also free from people imposing upon you a commandment to sin

01:09:36.980 and a christian liberty is the liberty to do what is right and to not do evil and so the law of god

01:09:44.140 as a basis to judge civil power laid out in the scriptures is an infallible rule that allows us

01:09:52.860 to judge all the laws of men i think that there are issues as regards the details of law for

01:10:00.440 administration like where do you go to vote or you know how are you going to determine the

01:10:07.580 boundaries of jurisdictions or how is the method of execution to be carried out that sort of thing

01:10:14.220 those things are administrative details that were particular to Israel that are not binding on us

01:10:20.060 but if it's not particular to Israel and if it's not a technology thing right if we're talking

01:10:27.940 about the civil law, it provides everything besides the technologies and the administrative

01:10:33.580 details that are particular to Israel. The rest provides us with principles of justice

01:10:39.740 that we must apply because we are not free to invent authorities for people. We're not free

01:10:49.520 to exercise power over people because God made men equal under law, not equal in gifting,

01:10:58.600 Not equal in age, but equal under law.

01:11:01.960 And the distinctions of law come from the ordinance of God.

01:11:06.000 The Westminster Larger Catechism in the Fifth Commandment

01:11:08.720 talks about the idea that there's honor owed to people

01:11:11.740 on the basis of age, on the basis of gifting,

01:11:15.600 and on the basis of God's ordinance.

01:11:17.940 And the ordinance of God lays out offices

01:11:21.020 in three institutions, the household, the church,

01:11:24.780 and the state.

01:11:26.600 And so the ordinance of God creates officers in the household, the church, and the state

01:11:30.920 that we owe honor to, including obedience.

01:11:34.120 And the nature of those institutions, as well as the nature of the individual,

01:11:38.300 is revealed for us fully in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

01:11:43.920 And as a result, we can, by looking at the commandments of God,

01:11:49.040 by looking at the apodictic law, which is the big principles, like the Ten Commandments,

01:11:54.680 or by looking at the case laws that are if then statements you organize those under the ten

01:12:00.440 commandments or by looking at approved and disapproved examples with blessing or cursing

01:12:05.660 and those things are the details that allow us to have all the sorting categories we need

01:12:11.020 to be able to make determinations about rightness and wrongness in every institution

01:12:15.740 including the state things that are necessary to human action and human societies

01:12:23.320 that are not laid out

01:12:25.180 as elements of power

01:12:26.420 or authority of the state

01:12:27.560 or of the civil power

01:12:28.500 but still they have to be done

01:12:31.320 by the nature of human action

01:12:32.560 by the nature of human societies

01:12:34.400 those things are logically derivable

01:12:37.320 from the definitions

01:12:38.500 of men and states in the Bible.

01:12:42.620 And so we are able

01:12:43.620 to come to infallible conclusions

01:12:45.240 by good necessary inference

01:12:47.820 to be able to know

01:12:49.640 what states ought to do

01:12:51.040 and to know the limits

01:12:52.220 of their just powers.

01:12:53.320 It is not necessary for men to write constitutions that are made up human laws and precepts to restrain men.

01:13:05.500 Instead, God has already given chains to bind princes.

01:13:11.040 And the chains are the law of God.

01:13:13.620 And princes want to throw off those chains because they want, out of sinful desire, out of their own depraved hearts, to tyrannize men.

01:13:25.680 At the same time, subjects want to rebel and do criminal things and throw off legitimate power.

01:13:33.000 As Americans, we have to be careful about the temptation of rejecting legitimate power.

01:13:37.060 and so i am not advocating anarchy but i am trying to advocate for a ordered liberty

01:13:44.200 a christian liberty not license a christian liberty and to say that the law of god is the

01:13:50.780 law of liberty and it protects your rights and it also restrains your excesses it is the royal law

01:13:57.320 that shows you how you ought to be ruled and so it provides the perfect balance

01:14:02.000 there is a real danger and it has shown up over and over again in history of tyrant princes

01:14:09.660 usurping the rights of the people and when the state is centralized and usurping the people

01:14:17.480 do not have great mechanisms to protect themselves unless the law of god provides all the things

01:14:24.400 we've seen gloriously laid out in american history in terms of federalism and the division of powers

01:14:30.660 and all those sorts of things,

01:14:32.280 their private ownership of arms.

01:14:34.120 Those things are part of the Protestant tradition.

01:14:36.220 It comes from Protestants applying the Bible.

01:14:39.760 It's not something that merely arose out of experience.

01:14:43.420 It is something that arose

01:14:44.760 because the Bible had to be applied

01:14:47.100 in times of difficulty

01:14:49.040 and men thought hard

01:14:50.800 and the Holy Spirit enlightened their minds

01:14:52.980 that they would see the truth in the word of God.

01:14:56.540 And so I would put forward to you

01:14:58.820 that the state is strictly limited

01:15:00.840 to only do what God commands it

01:15:02.880 and nothing more.

01:15:04.620 Thank you.

01:15:15.020 Well, this is fun,

01:15:16.260 so thank you for listening to us

01:15:18.020 talk about this.

01:15:20.020 I'll say that

01:15:21.040 we are social beings

01:15:23.680 and we share a world.

01:15:25.880 we share a space with others there's a certain calm there's a commonness of our of our life

01:15:33.260 together and even the things that we own that we call our private property they're not just

01:15:39.640 ordered for our good but for the good of our neighbors and so everything in the ends everything

01:15:44.640 we possess everything we have our powers our resources our property it's all oriented to the

01:15:51.200 good of the people we share that place with. And so I'm, in a way, pushing back, I think,

01:16:00.580 against a type of individualistic conception of ownership. I think there's both private

01:16:09.000 individual ownership or single-party ownership and also a common ownership that, in a way,

01:16:15.820 is concurrent with your own private ownership. And so this means that our common life, our shared

01:16:20.540 life together should be ordered to that end. Now, that doesn't mean communism. That doesn't mean

01:16:27.000 50% taxation. But it does mean that for that reason, we ought to be political. And it's in

01:16:36.200 our nature to be political animals. It's in our very nature to seek after the good of our society

01:16:43.380 by us observing what is occurring in our society and then seeking the good of that society. And I

01:16:49.660 think one problem is we think as conservatives that we're very political because we watch maybe

01:16:54.640 Fox News or listen to talks right talk radio or we you know we shout in the car when I don't know

01:17:00.240 some talk radio guy says something or you hear Joe Biden talk or whatever but that's not politics

01:17:05.860 that's just us having having fun I guess but I so I think that that as political animals

01:17:12.020 as political beings who are designed for a collective society in which you determine and

01:17:19.120 decide upon the particular actions for your good, that we as Christians ought to be more political

01:17:24.660 and conduct that activity. I don't think we actually do it as much as we think we do.

01:17:30.020 How many people, it's not a show of hands, but how many people are involved in their local

01:17:35.440 community with regard to city council, county commission, perhaps state politics? You might

01:17:41.420 watch national television a lot, great. I know some people already are and they're doing great

01:17:46.440 things but but that's that's rare like you go you look at I'm in a county that

01:17:51.780 is largely Republican and yet the Commission is largely is largely filled

01:17:57.840 with left-wing Democrats from Raleigh and there's a problem with that and it's

01:18:02.520 the it's that whoever cares more usually wins and you can care a lot by watching

01:18:07.260 television listen talk radio or coming you know coming here listen to us talk

01:18:11.040 but I would say we should care more by being involved in the political sphere

01:18:15.780 itself and I think we should avoid I think for you know David's I think his

01:18:20.500 tendency which is common in modern times is in is to actually escape

01:18:27.280 politics is to leave politics to avoid politics by creating these abstract

01:18:32.500 barriers between what can happen and what cannot happen now I think there are

01:18:36.620 barriers I just think having a more extensive view of politics means that

01:18:41.260 that those abstract lines of division are torn down

01:18:45.020 and actually permits you to engage in political life

01:18:48.220 and in that sense, fulfill your human nature

01:18:51.640 in the way God designed you.

01:18:54.200 And I think this goes back to our nature.

01:18:56.200 I don't think our political life is rooted

01:18:57.840 as a result of sin.

01:19:01.560 I think the reason that we care for our community

01:19:03.720 and we care for everything from downtown

01:19:07.100 to your own street

01:19:08.180 is not a function of simply your sin,

01:19:13.240 or it's not like medicine.

01:19:14.580 There wouldn't be medicine if man weren't fallen, right?

01:19:16.600 It's not akin to medicine.

01:19:18.460 It's actually more akin to you loving your own children.

01:19:21.620 That is a natural thing.

01:19:23.000 It would be true whether we are fallen or unfallen.

01:19:26.980 And I think politics is that as well.

01:19:28.880 And so I think the very desire

01:19:30.220 to see your city council act,

01:19:32.500 your commissioner act,

01:19:34.380 for your state to act,

01:19:35.440 for your federal government to act,

01:19:36.640 is actually a very natural thing,

01:19:38.840 but it only happens if we as people together act.

01:19:43.440 And so, anyway, well, thank you very much for listening.

01:19:45.960 Thank you.

The NXR Podcast - June 07, 2025

THE CONFERENCE - Natural Law & Theonomy w David Reece and Stephen Wolfe

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