Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Eleven Theses on Natural Law 

Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 05 January 2013

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 have rejected any or even most of the commentaries.

2. Accepting the authority of natural law in the sense I am describing does not require a nature/grace dualism. That dualism is found in some of the commentaries, but not in the stars. What is nature but one vast repository of grace? And what is the grace of God but something manifested in all of His works?

3. If we accept what special revelation teaches us about natural revelation, we need to have some sort of doctrine of natural law. This is because natural revelation creates the profound and ongoing moral obligation to worship the true God.

4. The God who speaks through nature speaks in Scripture, and the God who speaks in Scripture was born of a virgin in Bethlehem.

5. Those who accept natural law in this sense do not believe that natural law operates independently of what God has told us more specifically in the Scriptures. Special revelation is consistent with natural revelation, but it also trumps it. Moses outranks the natural order, and Jesus outranks Moses.

6. Every form of natural law that tries to evade the exhaustive authority of Jesus Christ over every last molecule in the cosmos is to be rejected. But it is also true that every rejection of natural law that tries to evade the exhaustive authority of Jesus Christ over every last molecule in the cosmos is to be rejected.

7. If a man rejects natural law in all its formulations, but insists that special revelation is authoritative over the public square, whether it has been baptized or not, his error is a trivial one. But if he insists on the “Bible only,” and then restricts its authority to those who have voluntarily submitted themselves to it, he is guilty of a serious error.

8. The most serious dualism to avoid is not a nature/grace dualism, but rather the dualism that tries to pretend that the God who speaks in Exodus and Romans is a different God than the one who speaks in Andromeda and the Pleiades.

9. The list given in Romans 1:29-32 demonstrates that, according to special revelation, natural law provides a rather extensive amount of detail when it comes to what God will judge in us. Natural law contains considerable detail.

10. The Reformers held to a chastened form of natural law theory. So should we.

11. The current test case for all theologies of natural law is homosexual marriage. If they allow for it, they are contradicting, in ascending order of importance, what the Lord God has said in the Milky Way, in the human conscience, in the law of Moses, and in the words of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Creation By Divine Command

The Regular is the Miracle

Christians believe in the God Who is the Cause of all causes.  Here is an excerpt from one of the most comprehensive confessions ever made by the Church, written about four hundred years ago:

God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. (“Of God’s Eternal Decree”, Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1)

Natural causation exists only because God has ordained and commanded all.  But this confession, this aspect of the undoubted Christian faith, has never been understood by materialists and Unbelievers in general.
  To them god can ever only be nothing more than a warranting concept, a bucket if you will, to hold all that we don’t know and understand about natural causes.  As scientific knowledge increases, and our understanding of natural causation grows, the “bucket”, and therefore god, shrinks.   This is known as the “God of the gaps” theory. 

Materialists cling to it like petulant children because the identification of god with all that we are agnostic about is already required by their materialist pseudo-religion. It is the only god their religion allows them to acknowledge.  For them it is always “matter versus God”.  For the Christian it is always “only matter and natural causes because of God”.  Thus, the dichotomy of matter versus God has only and always been a straw man.  When materialists talk of god they always are making reference to an idol–to a god as they have conceived it to be, not to God as He has revealed Himself to be.

Marilynne Robinson reflects on this circumstance.

For almost as long as their has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists amongst us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,” associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual.  But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial. We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 9f]

Robinson, of course, is making reference to the astounding discoveries over the last century in particle physics.  It turns out that matter is not “hard” at all.  It is all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  We are all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  Robinson continues:

It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful.  An older vocabulary would offer the world “miraculous.”  Knowing what we know now, an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself, and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested.  A truly theological age would see in this divine Providence intent on making human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos. 

But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual.  So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone.  And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.  [Ibid.]

Given what we now are learning about the cosmos and the natural order, the old dualism between matter and spirit is exploding to pieces.  This is not to say that men will cease clinging to it with stubborn ferocity.  It is to say, however, that their intractable stubbornness will be increasingly plain.  The material realm’s testimony to the God who created all things is getting louder and more scintillating as our understanding of the material grows.  The chaotic, wild roar of the cosmos makes the plain, the hard, the ordinary, the predictable, and the regular character of the creation appear comprehensively and utterly miraculous. 

Heavenly Good of Earthly Work, Part V

A Kingdom of Blood, Sweat and Tears

The apostles, infallibly inspired by the Holy Spirit, took up common Greek concepts of their day but changed their meaning so as to carry the Truth and testify to God.  A prime example is the word “logos”.  The word “logos” in the classical and Hellenistic worlds had a pedigree.  The Apostle John took up the word, emptied it of its Hellenistic content, reference, and connotations, and used it to reveal glorious truth about our Lord.

The same can be said for “spirit” and “spiritual”–which was a widely used concept in the Hellenistic world–but with this difference: “spirit” also had an Old Testament pedigree. To rid the modern church of pagan notions of spirituality we must submit to the Bible’s denotation and connotation of these terms.  And as we said in our previous post, those who are not aware of the issues and what is at stake has probably imbibed the pagan concepts of “spirit” and “spiritual” not biblical truth.

Heavenly Good of Earthly Work, Part II

Luther Restates the Dualism

The Western Church has long been afflicted by an enervating dualism that placed a priority upon heaven at the expense of earth.  Heaven had to do with God, spiritual realities, eternity; earth had to do with physical and material reality, the body, and atoms.  It was temporal.  It would pass away.  The realm of matter, and service in it, was only a means to an eternal end. Therefore, it was relatively unimportant in the big scheme of things.

There are many problems with this perspective–which is essentially a re-presentation of Greek pagan thought.  Not the least is that most Christians spend the majority of their time, energy, and attention on work, on activity and labour in the material world.  In the end, it is all going to come to nothing.

Heavenly Good of Earthly Work, Part I

It’s All Going to Burn

For over one thousand years the Western Church has been undermined by an unbiblical dualism.  The evangelical stream flowing out of the Reformation was unable to shake off its shackles, largely because of the influence of Luther.  Now, however–and not before time, serious efforts are underway to attack this unbiblical nostrum head on, with the Scriptures. The critical issue turns around the place and value of work.

We are going to publish a short series of posts on this issue.  They will interact with a helpful introduction to these matters in a book by Darrell Cosden, entitled, The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work (Milton Keynes, Buck: Paternoster Press, 2006).

Many years ago we recall being told that there are only three things which are going to last for eternity: God, redeemed people, and the Word of God.  Therefore, we were admonished, above all else devote your life to these three.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Cutting Off the Buttons

Political Dualism – Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The world around us is an unfolding story. The world around us is not a plastic diorama behind the glass in a museum. The kind of objective truth that the faithful Christian insists upon is not to be found in plastic objects that never move, even if their immobility might be a catechetical aid to the bus tours of schoolchildren who come through.

To change the metaphor, conservatives tend to be Maginot Line defenders, always fighting the last war. Liberals and trendy evangelicals try to help us out of this jam by suggesting that we should busy ourselves with surrendering in the current war. Shouldn’t there be more alternatives than this?

Objective truth, final truth, ultimate truth is a sword, but it is not a sword hanging on the wall. It is a sword in a faithful hand, and though it is as rigid and unyielding as the sword on the wall, being made out of the same kind of steel, it looks like it is a living creature — because it moves in the story. A warrior fights with it in the story. It shines, it flickers, it strikes. How can objective, unchanging truth adapt to the challenges of these our post-modern times? I’ll tell you — by cutting a cool-looking Z on the vest of our post-modern times, and then cutting off all the buttons.

Jesus is king, not Descartes. Jesus is the truth, not Kant. Jesus is the meaning, not Derrida. Jesus is the way, not Darwin. Jesus is a living Lord and Savior, both now and forever. For our au courant brethren, this means that He is not post-anything.

Now in a story, the faithful characters are the ones who finish one episode, prepared for the next episode. They don’t believe the concluding episode is the conclusion of the book. Overcoming one challenge is the best preparation for the next challenge.

The blowback against Washington insolence in the elections last night provides us with a good example. Almost everything about it made me happy, but what kind of happy? End of the chapter happy or end of the book happy? If every last incumbent in Washington went down in defeat this coming November, I would be a lot happier — in the full recognition that two years from now we would still be dealing with the same basic problems.

This is a shock to activists everywhere, who always want to fix things now, and this surprise of theirs is a function, not only of not knowing that we are in a story, but also of having no real sense of how long the book is. If we think we are in a story at all, we think it is a short story, when we are actually in the longest novel ever written, with billions of characters. And we are only about halfway through it, if that.

To extend this metaphor, we should want our efforts, our labors, our plot lines to extend over many pages, and to contribute significantly to the final denouement. But to do this, we have to think on multiple levels, and not just in terms of the immediate battle. In this example, I mean that conservative Christians should be preparing to mount a faithful prophetic witness against the established powers after the progressives are routed (and good riddance, yay) and the conservatives win. If our thinking is, “What do you mean, after the conservatives win? Doesn’t the millennium come then?” — this illustrates our problem.

Ambrose Bierce once defined a conservative as one who is enamoured of the existing evils, as opposed to the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. Each one of these parties can warn you against the “existing” or the “pending” evil, right? But that is because they are only defending their own turf. In our day, we would have to flip Bierce’s observation around, because it is the liberals who are the insiders, who run the establishment, and the conservatives who are the outsiders. But the point remains the same. Statist idolaters like President Obamafail do need to be chased off the stage, no question. We can’t afford him, for starters.

But what do we think we are actually accomplishing when we do this necessary thing? Without an eschatology to govern the direction of our efforts, our efforts are aimless. And secular eschatologies (of the right or the left) are either damnable or stupid or both. The teleology of all human history, and everything it contains, has to be Jesus Christ. How can we as Christians say that it could possibly be anything else? Now I know there are decent Christians engaged in our political life who don’t know this, but they are decent Christians who are in the process of being suckered. And one of my assigned tasks in life is to talk Christians away from the pleasures of being suckered.

H.L. Mencken once trenchantly observed that trying to reform Washington by electing new guys was like trying to reform prostitution by staffing all the brothels with virgins. Now the only way out of this is to think in terms of the teleology of it. The brothel needs something other than new, fresh faces. The brothel needs to become something else. But that is a teleological question. That is eschatology. And no Christian can have any eschatology that leaves Jesus out of it. If Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, then we can turn the brothel into something else. And not otherwise.

Party-line thinkers are always short-term thinkers. Ideologues care only about the moment. When Christians succumb to this kind of thinking, they are still Christians, and they still go to Heaven when they die. But they are playing their roles in this grand story as extras or bit players. The Author of all this can use them wisely and well, and they will rejoice in His wisdom forever and ever. But it would be far better for us to understand more of the story now. It glorifies His name, and it blesses our souls and hearts. And it advances the plot.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Full Tank of Gas and Lots of Wyoming Ahead, Part II

Political Dualism – Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, May 16, 2010

In the gnostic order of things, the material world is always convicted, damned. It is the problem. In the Christian world tugged on by gnosticism, the material world is not condemned — the orthodox faith forbids this because God made the world, and Jesus rose from the dead in it. But, when idolatry occurs, this doesn’t keep the material world from always being rounded up as one of the usual suspects.

It is assumed that where creation is thick — where the music is glorious, the beer stout, the women beautiful, the lawns rich, the architecture splendid, and so on — it presents a greater temptation to idolatry than where someone has mixed the paint thinner of ascetic striving into the created order in order to avoid the idolatrous distractions. But this does not work.

The apostle Paul says that this maneuver is of no value in checking fleshly indulgence. “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh” (Col. 2:20-23, ESV). Paul grants an appearance of wisdom here, but he says that it doesn’t work. A man can get the created order around him completely thinned out, and be as much in danger of idolatry as ever he was.

Read Augustine’s Confessions (33/49-50) for a good example of this mistake concerning where the temptation to idolatry actually lies. And I hasten to add that, while pointing out this mistake of Augustine’s, in a church with any decent standards I would not be qualified to be Augustine’s boot boy.

A man can worship an ornate idol, decked with gold and silver, and he can worship a Euclidian stick figure. The divide is a moral one. The divide has to do with whether God has given the man eyes to see. If God has given eyes to see, it does not hurt him to see a lot.
Here is the word of the Lord to Israel:

“Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee . . . Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things (Dt. 28:45, 47).

Here is a poem I wrote about this once.

Rocks in the Drive
When strings are pulled taut, the cello is tuned,
The wood holds the wine that is seasoned and old.
Dark music poured out and emptied the cask,
And rolled in my goblet, rich, tawny and told
How holiness tastes, how righteousness laughs.

You shall be as God, the great dragon had said,
Philosophers argue their shapes in the fire
And each to his shadow tenaciously clings;
They miss that our great father Abram aspired
To a city of solids, celestial marble.

But our earthly solids are fleeting, like faerie,
Far closer to ether than what we conceive.
Our granite is balsa, our oceans are floating,
Our atoms are rootless, and we, not believing,
We miss that this world speaks a fortiori.

Stop thinking that heaven means standing on clouds.

Why falter when told that our God remains good?
Why think the Almighty exhausted in sadness
His strength on the Alps or the plains of Dakota?
Will He not speak solid and substantive gladness
And bid all His people emerge from the shadows?

The carpets of heaven are thicker than moss.
With paint on the walls that is glossy to stay.
Hard wood for the tables is grown on the hillsides,
And rocks in the drive are all sapphire gray.
The breezes move curtains that are facing the sea

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Full Tank of Gas and Lots of Wyoming Ahead, Part I
Political Dualism – Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, May 13, 2010

A week or so ago, I wrote about Piperian Hedonism 3.0. Following that, a friend helpfully pointed me to Chapter 11 of John Piper’s book, When I Don’t Desire God. That chapter is entitled “How to Wield the World in the Fight for Joy.” And that chapter is filled, of course, with Piper’s usual exegetical good sense, along with his careful framing of the question before the house. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1581346522&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrHaving read it, and having agreed with a bunch of it, I still want to urge us to go further up and further in. Here are a few thoughts on that.

Piper leans on C.S. Lewis’ argument in an essay called “Meditation in a Toolshed,” which is found in God in the Dock. Piper does well in acknowledging that opting out of a bodily recognition of God and His gifts is not actually possible, and the only question is how we do it, not whether. He draws on the distinction that Lewis makes between looking at something (in this case, a sunbeam), and looking along the same beam, back to the sun.

In this chapter, Piper says:

So the question must be faced: How do we use the created world around us, including our own bodies, to help us fight for joy in God? In God, I say! Not in nature. Not in music. Not in health. Not in food or drink. Not in natural beauty. How can all these good gifts serve joy in God, and not usurp the supreme affections of our hearts” (p. 178).

Gratitude is occasioned by a gift, but is directed to the giver (p. 186).

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0802808689&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

And this brings us to the heart of the problem — the relationship between Giver and gift. But before addressing this, I want to appear to change the subject for a minute.

I said in my previous post on this that we needed to work through this in an explicitly Trinitarian way. But this means more than just counting everything we see in groups of three. One of the essential Trinitarian doctrines that we need to apply to this is the doctrine of perichoresis, the truth that each member of the Trinity fully indwells each of the others. For example, Jesus talks about this in the gospel of John: “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:20-21). Note that the Father indwells the Son completely, and the Son indwells the Father completely. Notice also that Jesus wants the same kind of thing for us, and so perichoretic indwelling must not be a prerogative of divinity. And so I want to argue that an understanding of perichoretic indwelling helps us to address the vexed question of relating the Giver and His gifts.

Given my finite limitations, I have to think about the gifts God gives to me a lot. I have to think about the fact that my feet are not cold anymore, that it is time for dinner, that one of my shoulder blades itches, and so on. To use Lewis’ conceit from the toolshed, I have to spend a lot of time looking at the sunbeams, and a fraction of my time is set aside for direct worship of God, looking along the sunbeam. The temptation we have is that of treating all this as a zero-sum game, assuming that any time spent on the gifts is necessarily time away from the Giver. But though this sometimes happens, it does not need to happen. Rightly handled, a gift is never detached from the one who gave it. Wrongly handled, a gift can be the occasion of selfishness, which is a common problem. But it can also be the occasion of a higher form of selfishness, one which pretends to be above the whole tawdry field of “gifts in themselves.”

Picture a particularly “pious” little child who was impossible to give gifts to, because he would always unwrap it, abandon it immediately, and run up to his parent and say, “But what really counts is my relationship with you!” A selfish child playing with a toy ungratefully is forgetting the giver. This pious form of selfishness is refusing to let the giver even be a giver.

We should not assume that in the resurrection, when we have finally learned how to look along that beam, in pure worship, that our bodies will then be superfluous. God will not have given us eternal and everlasting bodies because we finally got to such a point of spiritual maturity that we are able to ignore them. In the resurrection, we will have learned something we currently struggle with, which is how to live integrated lives. If God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, it should not be necessary, in order to glorify God, to drop everything. We shouldn’t have to keep these things in separate compartments.

Incidentally, this kind of integration will prevent dislocations from arising in families that are sold out to the glory of God. Integration will keep our neighbor (or wife, or husband, or kids) from feeling like a means to an end. There is a delicate balance here, but God is most glorified in me when I love what He has given to me, for its own sake. This is teleologically related to the macro-point of God’s glory being over all, of course, but we still have to enjoy what He gives, flat out, period, stop. Otherwise, in the resurrection, God will be looking at all the billions of His resurrected saints, standing there contentedly, looking at Him, and He will say, “You know, you people are impossible to shop for.” Which is, of course, absurd and impossible. In the resurrection, it will be possible for us to be absorbed by God’s gifts in ways that are impossible to conceive of now.

How might perichoresis help us with this? In a perichoretic world, the gift need not displace the Giver, as though they were two billiards balls. In the material world, the space that one object occupies is space that another object cannot occupy. We carry our assumptions about this over into the spiritual world, and we consequently assume that if we are thinking about meat on the grill, bees in the honeysuckle, a sweet wife in bed, beer in a frosted glass, or a full tank of gas and lots of Wyoming ahead, then we cannot be thinking about God also, or be living in gratitude before Him. But I don’t think this is the case at all.

When we think about the gifts in exclusion of the Giver, it is because we are being prideful, or selfish in some way. If we think about the Giver only, we are trying hard to be disembodied spirits — which is not how the Giver made us, and if we were paying all that much attention to the Giver, we ought to have noticed that He didn’t want to make us that way.

If I turn every gift that God gives over in my hands suspiciously, looking for the idol trap, then I am not rejoicing before Him the way I ought to be. There will likely be more on this.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Tornado With Boots

Christian Dualism
Written by Douglas Wilson

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The perennial temptation for modern Reformed Protestants, especially after they get college degrees, is to float toward the sky in wisps of gnostic vapor. Doctrinalism is one kind of gnosticism, and pietism another. Literary structuralism is yet another one. Note that I did not say doctrine, of which the apostle Paul approved, and I did not say piety, of which my mother approves. Nor did I say literature, which feeds the right kind of soul.

I have often quoted that glorious passage in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, where a junior officer in the War Between the States was being reprimanded by the general for his unit’s reluctance to charge. “Sir,” the hapless lieutenant replied, “I am convinced that any further demonstration of valor on the part of my troops will bring them into contact with the enemy.”

The early Reformers were not like this at all. They were about the most un-gnostic bunch ever assembled in the history of Christendom.
They were the most Christ-loving, world-affirming, money-making, beer-drinking, sword-wielding, music-making, kingdom-overthrowing, love-making, poetry-writing bunch of Christians the world had ever seen up to that point. And they kept it up, by and large, for several centuries.

But then the drift set in. Many of their intellectual heirs have become wan and pale in the more recent centuries, despite the occasional nuisance of eruptions of people like Kuyper. People like that come into the story like a tornado with boots, and they have all the history and all the theology on their side. Nothing can be done about it, so the curators of the Reformed museum are discomfited for a time, and do a sort of twiddly thing with their toe in the carpet, and wait for this affliction to pass. In their patience, they possess their deracinated souls.

But here is the odd thing. At the time of the Reformation, if there had been a gnosticism susceptibility line on the blackboard, on a scale of 1-to-10, the papists would be hitting the eights and nines. The monks would be sweating out sexual temptations in their dreary cloisters while the Puritans with plumes in their hats and lawn tops on their boots were striding home to make love to their wives.

But in recent years, most of the intellectual heirs of the Reformation have decided to switch places on that line, ceding the fight against gnosticism to the conservative Roman Catholics. It makes me want to say things like, “Hey!” Historically embarrassing, that’s what it is. And if any of us plunge into the fray, and get one of the horns on our helmet knocked off, we are likely to hear about it at presbytery. “Not very confessional.”

Modern airy-fairy Reformed theology, whether the conservative or liberal kind, wants to float off like a helium balloon, and if you want to anchor it to Christ’s love for this world, this earthy world, you will need more than stout beer and pipe tobacco to do it. That kind of thing teaches seminary students to feel very anti-gnostic because they can talk heady theology through wreaths of smoke — but they still leave the heavy lifting of world-engagement and real gospel proclamation (to actual sinners) to the baptists. And they learn to watch with real dismay if any of their Reformed brethren start to show signs of wanting to make actual contact with the enemy. It is enough to make them suspicious. Wielding a sword is a form of works, is it not?