Madness Replacing Reason

Indictments From the Common Lawyers

What does a Christian society look like?  What might be some of the key features of the Second Christendom when it emerges in redemptive history?  There are many.  One central feature will be the grounding of civil and criminal law upon the higher law of God.  This, of course, is not novel.  It is the way it used to be in the First Christendom.

F E Dowrick describes how biblical law (both written and inscribed in the creation itself) was deeply embedded in the English legal tradition.  He writes:

The basic assumptions in this doctrine [of natural justice] are that God exists and that immanent in all creation is God’s eternal law.  St. Germain’s Doctor defines [in the early sixteenth century] the eternal law as:

the reason of the wisdom of God, moving all things by wisdom made to a good end.

The eternal law is not wholly known to men.  It is known in part through revelation, as recorded in the New and Old Testaments, that part being called the law of God or positive divine law; and it is known further through reason, that part being called the law of nature or the law of reason.  So, natural law is unequivocally established on a divine basis.  Since it is part of God’s will or plan for mankind natural law is neither parochial or temporary.  According to the Doctor of Divinity

This law ought to be kept as well among Jews and Gentils, as among Christian men . . . it is never changeable by no diversity of place, ne time (sic).

F.E. Dowrick [Justice According to the English Common Lawyers (London: Butterworths, 1960), p.49]

The divine law provided the primary or fundamental precepts.  Reason assisted in applying those precepts (by means of subordinate premises and the rules and laws of logic) to situations and circumstances.  The fundamental principles laid down in the law of God included:

1. Good is to be loved and evil is to be fled.
2. Do to another that thou wouldst another should do to thee.
3. Do nothing against truth.
4. A man must live peacefully with others.
5. Men should live in society.
6. Actions by which a human life is to be preserved are to be pursued.
7. Male and female should join together and children be educated.  (Ibid., p. 50)

By the nineteenth century, the First Christendom was in terminal decline.  The hearts of the people and their rulers and teachers decided they had a better idea.  The law of God as the foundation of all human law and justice was gradually, yet ineluctably, replaced by the mind of man as the ultimate lawgiver.  We see the fruits on every hand today.  “Reason” now dictates that an unborn child can be killed at will.  It has “discovered” eternal and irrevocable rights to homosexuality, homosexual “marriage”, and no-fault divorce.  It has declared, on the grounds of its own recognizance, that the state must impose “equality” upon its citizens, thereby sanctifying and glorifying envy and covetousness.

All these, and many other perversions, the common lawyers of Christendom would have called madness, not reason.  They would have been right.  They testify against us and the resulting indictment leaves us without excuse.  

Nevertheless, the “reason” and “laws” of autonomous man will inevitably run their course, to produce their fruit, and to bring their self-immolating sentence of death and destruction, before a generation will arise, by God’s grace, to toss this ghastly human idolatry into the lake of fire, and to repent, and to replace it with the principles and doctrines of the First Christendom, thereby building the Second Christendom. 

Modernist Myths

 Sweet and Sour Reasoning

Rationalists constantly mock Believers as being anti-rational.  It is a dishonest slur–on two levels.  At one level the slur represents a confusion of categories as happens when one confuses medicine with poison.  Both alike are pharmacological, but with entirely different outcomes.  Rationalists believe in a particularly noxious kind of reason–that human reason is the ground of all truth and the highest and final court of appeal. Rationalists believe in human reason as master.  Christians believe in human reason as helpful servant. 

At another level the slur seeks to conceal a dirty secret (one which makes rationalism self-contradictory and at root irrational): rationalism is grounded upon a foundation which cannot itself be verified by human reason.  Try establishing rationally the premise that human reason is the ground of all truth, without arguing in a vicious circle (that is, irrationally). 

Here is David Hart’s exposition of the matter.

All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempt to apply logic to experience.  One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.

A Christian and a confirmed materialist may both believe that there really is a rationally ordered world out there that is susceptible of empirical analysis; but why they should believe this to be the case is determined by their distinctive visions of the world, by their personal experiences of reality, and by patterns of intellectual allegiance that are, properly speaking, primordial to their thinking and that lead toward radically different ultimate conclusions . . . .

What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments (some of which–“blood and soil”, the “master race”, the “socialist Utopia”–produce prodigies of evil precisely to the degrees that they are “rationally” pursued).

We may, obviously, as modern men and women, find certain of the fundamental convictions that our ancestors harbored curious and irrational; but this is not because we are somehow more advanced in our thinking then they were, even if we are aware of a greater number of scientific facts.  We have simply adopted different conventions of thought and absorbed different prejudices, and so we interpret our experiences according to another set of basic beliefs–beliefs that may, for all we know, blind us to entire dimensions of reality.  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),  p. 101f.]

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

The Ultimacy of Right Reason

Goo-Mongers – Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I want to expand a bit on what I said about logic and the character and nature of God.

First, the problem. If logic is external to God, and is something that He obeys or conforms to, then we are saying that there is another God, senior to Him, whose dictates He must somehow obey. That is obviously out for the orthodox, on the basis of being ridiculous.

But if we say that logic is a created thing, fashioned as a could-have-been-otherwise sort of thing by God for this world, then absolutely anything goes, and God Himself becomes absolutely unknowable. I will explain this further in a moment.

This leaves the option that the font of all logic is somehow an attribute of God, like His love, like His holiness, and so on. More on this in a moment also.

There are three foundational building blocks for logic — the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. In brief, this means that A is A, it means that A cannot be not A, and it means that for any given assertion about A, there is no middle ground between true and false. Now a great deal of damage has been caused by those who think that these laws are something we came up with down here in this world, and that it is inappropriate or even blasphemous to apply them in any way to God. It is the other way around.

Everything we might truly discover in this world is rooted or grounded in some way in the nature and character of God. The creation declares the glory of God.

We don’t “apply” these rules to God, as though we were laying down standards for Him. That would be impudent and blasphemous. But a moment’s reflection should show us that our ability to say true things about objects in the world depends upon the way He everlastingly is.

There is one fundamental thing that God cannot do. God cannot cease to be Himself. He cannot cease to be the way He is. From everlasting to everlasting, He is the triune God. And in saying this, we do not privilege one of His attributes over another (like His sovereignty over His love). The attributes of God are distinctions we make (following the example of Scripture), but we must not allow these distinctions to morph into separations. God is all that He is all the time, and He cannot be parceled out for the convenience of the theologians.

Nothing is easier than to distinguish height, breadth and depth. A child can do it. But if I remove the height of this book on my desk, I do not have a very, very flat book. I have no book. Height, breadth, and depth are easily distinguishable, as well as inseparable.

Some might want to say they are fine with all this, so far as holiness, justice, love, mercy, etc. go, but to say that “logic” is an attribute of God is just jarring to them. It just doesn’t sound very biblical. First, it is biblical enough. Jesus is the Word (logos), and He is the foundation for all that holy words do. He is the Word, and all righteous words are grounded in Him. This is not limited to logic, of course, but it certainly encompasses it. In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. The Word, the Logos, is the foundation of poetry, but is also the foundation of all righteous reasoning.

Second, if you don’t embrace this, you lose all the Bible words. If God is not necessarily internally-consistent (which is what I am intending by all of this), then He could be holy and unholy as well. He could love the elect eternally and not love the elect eternally at all. Since He is so sovereign over logic, He could even exist and not exist at the same time. And if someone objects to your striking combination of theism and atheism, just tell them that you follow Jesus and not Aristotle. Which, if true, would allow you to follow Aristotle at the same time you are repudiating him.

You see, the three foundational laws of logic were discovered by us, not invented by us. They could be discovered because the God who made this world (in which we discovered these descriptive laws) is eternally triune. This means that the Father is the Father (identity). This means that the Father cannot be not the Father (non-contradiction). This means that there is not a third option beyond true and false when responding to the confession that the Father begets the Son (excluded middle). Those who believe that logic does not apply to God are secretly reserving to themselves the right to be heretics.

When we love one another, we are imitating God. When we show mercy, we are imitating God. When we execute justice we are imitating God. And when we say that a book is a book (identity), and that a book cannot be not a book (non-contradiction), and that “the book is gray” is either true or false (excluded middle), we are imitating God. It is an essential part of our discipleship.

Of course there are pedestrian logicians, who think they are imitating God when all they are doing is revealing how tiny their minds are. This is simply intellectual legalism, conducted in the name of logic. We are petty little creatures and we do the same thing with His other attributes. There are love-legalists, and mercy-legalists, and justice-legalists, and all the rest of it. But whoever thought of denying that God is love because your Aunt Maude thinks that loving your daughters means making them wear their hair in a bun, just like she does?

I said earlier that a denial of an eternal grounding for our ability to reason was reserving the right to be a heretic. This is the heart of all pomo-rot-thot, and I would actually characterize it as the ur-heresy. This is what rebellious man finds necessary to assert in his quest to be as God. He wants the sovereign right to rearrange absolutely everything.

The bad news for all such rebels is that Jesus is Lord, and there is no way to wiggle off the point. Jesus is Lord means Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord cannot coexist with Him not being Lord. And when the holy confession that Jesus is Lord is faithfully made, there are only two possible responses — faith and unbelief — and there is no mystical “third way.” Jesus rose, or He didn’t, and there are no other options.

I believe in the ultimacy of right reason because I believe in Jesus.