Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items.
I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag Mark in San Diego, California. He writes, Dr. Ventrella, you ended the dicta with the question that no doubt you answered in the dicta next week. Could you wet our whistle a bit more on the podcast? And this was the question that you ended the dicta with. What is the relationship between scripture and natural law precepts? The theories conflict and these this produces uncertainty if not confusion.
Further, what are the bounds of natural law? Is there a book of every jot and tittle? It seems that some of the Christian nationalist crowd are huge proponents of natural law.
Is this why presuppers do not get along with the Christian nationalist crowd? What is the relationship?
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Well, that's a. That's a very packed and potent question. I'll try to unpack parts of it and I will say that The Dicta Part 2 on Natural Law does drop next Monday, God willing. And it's about 4, 000 words, so it's probably got everything you want to know in there with respect to that.
But I would say this a couple of things. One is that the ethical content of natural law, however conceptualized or theorized, the ethical contact cannot contradict divine law, that is to say, special revelation, the mind of God. So there's going to be a correspondence between the ethical conduct. Now the characteristic of natural law is that it lacks the granularity and specificity of, of special revelation.
So people would say, the natural lawyers would say we must protect life.
But Scripture tells us the distinction between murder and self defense and manslaughter. It specifies it has greater granularity.
So that's one difference. Another difference is that natural law seems to be and I would say is under inclusive.
So while its content would be the same as generally special revelation, it's actually under inclusive. For example, In Romans chapter 7, Paul says something fascinating. He says, I would not know about covetousness unless the law special revelation said do not covet.
So here's Paul who says that the work of the law is written on the heart of every man, chapter two. And by chapter seven he's saying I wouldn't know about covetousness unless the law had told me do not covet. So at that point Paul makes an epistemological claim saying that you know what it's not coextensive. The law written on the heart doesn't give me everything I need for ethics.
Now turning to the the question of some of the Christian nationalists. They have been very specific that they don't want special revelation to impact their calculus. They say they are doing natural law. Now I know a number of leading natural law thinkers and they would vomit at some of the concepts that, for example, Stephen Wolf and some of his friends have put forth. They would say the natural law does nothing of the sort. But here's the problem methodologically, okay, what can we know about nature and natural revelation this side of the Fall? We can only know in a fallen way, right? We can't know anything pre lapserian pre fall, except if we consult special revelation.
And so when these folks are saying we don't use special revelation, they are excluding a corrective to help them understand creation as God ordained and as God designed.
And finally, I think there's a problem with what we call the noetic effect of sin. That is to say that the Fall was a total fall. It affected every part, not only of the creation, but of man and its faculties. And the writers in the New Testament make very clear that our very mechanism of reasoning is impacted by this.
Can we know things?
Yes, but our reasoning is hostile to God and our reasoning is flawed. It's vain. And so we need two books. We need special revelation and natural revelation. We need the spectacles, as Calvin said, of special revelation to be able to have a full understanding. And this is where a lot of these guys, natural law only guys, go off the rails. They don't understand what, what the Scriptures say about God, about the fall, about mankind, about the impact of sin, and about how redemption enters into the picture. So it ends up looking like confirmation bias. They look out in the sea of humanity and go, wow, people seem to flock together with their own kind. Aha. That's because that's a, a natural law. No, it could be because of partiality, it could be because of sin, it could be because you're not seeing accurately. So that's in, in a nutshell, kind of what we looked at there.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: And you need them sign those tools.
Do you always need those tools simultaneously?
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Well, you know, I don't know if there's a temporal relationship with respect to them, but you ought not to go off. Look, man cannot live except by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So everything we do must be taken captive to the obedience of Christ, including our thinking. Okay, so it's, I don't Think we just pick up the toolbox of special revelation on occasion. I think we need to immerse ourselves in that and then develop Hebrews 5, our discernment. Then we can understand what is good and what is bad, what is good and what is evil. But it takes discernment. We don't just do that on so called unaided reason. Unaided reason is a Trojan horse because of the noetic effect of sin.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Right. Three questions for you, one for our listeners. I know you've, you've described this in our, in your dictas recently.
Describe what the noetic sin is. The other is, is natural law a closed canon like we view scripture as close Scriptures closed that God is not giving new revelation for us to live by? Or does natural law expand and we learn something new?
We won't believe the Same way in 50 years what we believe today.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah, so there's a couple of thoughts there. First, noetic is just a fancy way of saying sin of the mind. Our very thinking and reasoning process. It comes from the Greek word noose our mind. And so people are saying that the mind is, is. Is flaw fallen. And consequently we don't always reason correctly. Cornelius Van Til had an illustration. He said the natural man is like a sharp saw, but it's off kilter, so it cuts at an angle instead of straightly. It's still a good saw, but it's not oriented correctly. With respect to that, I've never had that question. But I, I believe that the transcript of God's holiness imprinted upon what he has created would be a closed cannon, not unlike scripture. Now our understanding of that may expand, but I don't believe that natural law because the way they formulate it, and this gets to the theory of natural law. You have the eternal law and then you have the divine law, and then you have the natural law. The eternal laws is known really only unto God. The divine laws, that which he speaks and his special revelation. And then the natural law is what we apprehend through reason.
So those I think would be immutable. With respect to that the application course is not right. Okay, so we, we have to use prudence to take a precept of natural law.
A good example of that would be understanding the functions of the human body.
To a certain extent we have a teleology, that is to say we're designed as humans. Now I believe we can only know that if we bring the Creator and special revelation into it. But be that as it may, you know, the lungs purpose is to oxygenate blood Well, I can inhale water. It's certainly possible naturally to do that, but it's not a good thing to do that because it would be injurious to life and the function of my lungs. And so we learn these, these boundaries of design as we continue to live in God's world.
So in that sense our understanding based upon the natural law expands. But the law doesn't change, in my view.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Right, yeah. So here would be, I guess, an application of that is.
And you've heard this men of their time, and maybe it's more on an anthropological sense of understanding natural law where, where people are time bound. He was a man of his times, but he was wrong. Had he known maybe what we know now today, he would have been on the different side. What makes people bound by as, as being people of their time?
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think a part of that is there are paradigms that shift in intellectual history. And if you lived and worked and had your being before some of those bells rung on the new paradigm, you're going to be kind of bound by the Overton window, to use a more modern term with respect to that.
So I think that's part of it. But of course we have moral agency and so we ought not to be constrained by sin. We ought to continue to look at the scriptures. And this is part of the problem with some of the retrievalist methodology. If you transport yourself back, you're carrying something back with you. And if you're saying we're going to get rid of everything that came after, that's a very dangerous proposition for exactly the reason you articulate. You're going to be bound historically. And we've written a piece on this, of course, where we can idolize history, whether the fruit future or the past. It's, you know, it's very interesting that it wasn't until the medieval era that people began to understand history as past, present and future. And it began to conceive of revolutions as rooted in the past to protect the future. And so we've got to reform the present.
That, that really didn't occur until the 10th, 11th, 12th century.
Intellectually, people just said, well, I'm just here and then I die, then I'm, you know, get the beatific vision and that's it. Whereas actually having a vocation to improve the here and now, that that was part of a Christian thing, that, that not only does the resurrection and ascension conquer death, but the cross conquers sin. And so consequently we can both work for ethical reform publicly as well as have the assurance that we will be with the Lord upon our death. It's fascinating to see how theology correlates with ethics.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Jerome from Dallas, Texas wrote, given the recent and heightened context in which we find ourselves regarding immigration and the LA riots, I am concerned with the way my friends are referring to illegal immigrants, to those who have even come and gone through the process of becoming citizens of the United States.
They remind me that Paul would be considered racist by today's standards.
Would you comment and discuss the Apostle Paul's words about the Cretans and the broad brush way he describes them as liars? Was Paul racist? Was he hat tipping to immutable and temporal characteristics of race?
That's a good question.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very timely and a very fine question and a nuanced question. Thank you so much for that.
A couple of thoughts here. First, understand that the whole concept and construct of race is fairly recent in intellectual history. It stems kind of post Darwinian kind of thinking. So we're talking 19th century. And then when we had eugenics and that sort of thing, which the Progressive era, race became something to fixate on. So we have to be careful not to transport the concept, the modern concept of race back into the biblical texts. Let's be very clear, Paul was not racist in the modern sense whatsoever. In fact, he reasoned against and commanded against the sin of partiality, which is in essentially underneath a lot of the claims and stereotypes of racism. So let's be very clear about that. And he's just being consistent with the Older Testament as well as other aspects of the Newer Testament when he condemns partiality as a sin.
Now, with respect to that little passage in Titus where he says all Cretans are liars. But what's going on there? First of all, he's quoting a Cretan poet.
So if the Cretans are all liars, each and every one of them, and a Cretan says all cretins are liars, then he's lying and therefore all Cretans aren't liars. So Paul's playing a little bit of a linguistic game here. It certainly reminds me knowing about the actual Star Trek from 1960s of the episode I Mud, where they are able to lock up the Norman computer by saying and telling Norman that everything Harry Mudd says is a lie. Everything Harry Mudd says is a lie. Now listen to me, Norman, I'm lying, says Harry Mudd. And of course he gets in a logic loop and it's like, well, if. If he's. Everything he says is a Lie. And he's lying. He means he's telling the truth. But he can't be telling the truth because everything he says is a lie. But if everything says a lie and he's telling you, well, that's kind of what Paul's doing here. Pre, prefiguring of what's going on, it is the case. He's not talking about anthropology. All Cretans are liars. What he's talking about is the culture that was predominant in a particular geographic area gave a, a characteristic, a generality, not each and every, not genetic, not racial, as to what was predominant in that culture. Culture. So for example we saw in the 20th century, oh well, he was a cool, calculated German mind or he was a hot blooded Italian. Those are not racial statements. Rather they're characteristic of particular cultures that were happening there. And there are cultures that are more sanctified and cultures that are less sanctified. And cultures of course reflect predominant characteristics. So I think we can say, and we ought to say that some cultures are preferable to other cultures. Some of those are preferences, some of those are actually, actually ethic, not ethnic. But ethically. And so there are cultures today where lying is acceptable. There are cultures like that. There are cultures today where you have to say yes to a stranger because to, to not say yes, to say to help them would be to bring shame upon yourself and not help them. So for example, I've been in Africa in a number of countries and you ask someone, hey, could you help me get to. I, I don't seem to be know where I'm going. Can you help me get to X place? Oh yes, yes I can. It's a three blocks this way, two blocks that way and then four blocks that way.
That may be true, it may not be true, but the greater shame in that culture is not addressing a stranger's question.
So it's more important to show hospitality in entertaining the question than it is to be accurate in, in the actual answer.
They're not trying to deceive me, it's just that's the nature of the culture. Unless you know that you're going to get, you know, bamboozled a little bit.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at ww.
You can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host Joshua Gilo and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
