Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is the weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrell where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, addressing issues about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. This is the director's bag. Dr. Ventrell, welcome back to the program. We are going to be tackling the issue since it is political season and elections are just around the corner. Our discussion, rule of law and why that matters with a Christian worldview. So let's take it all the way back upstream. What does. Why is law important?
Where does law come from and how should Christians apply it?
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Yeah, no, thank you. Josh was glad to be here. And this is a really important piece of understanding. And so let me just jump in and talk about something. You know our global creeds, for example, the Apostles Creed, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. And so this creed begins not with Jesus died for my sins, though that's a precious truth. It begins with the created order. And so I think there's a lot to learn when we go back to the creation. And with respect to creation norms, let's consider paradise free fall. Paradise is governed by the rule of law. In other words, God creates everything and he creates Adam and Eve. And interestingly enough, he doesn't say, okay, now just go view what I've created and figure out how to do things, figure out the norms, figure out ethics. In other words, view the natural law. No, what God does instead is actually communicates to them. Paradise is governed by the rule of law and in particular, special revelation. And this means that society, Adam and Eve, were a society. The first, marriage requires order and it requires coordination.
And that stands to reason. Secondly, because Adam and Eve as creatures are finitude, they have, they're finite. Which means that finite people need both predictability and reliability of certain assumptions in living. That's what the rule of law helps stabilize, predictability and reliability.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Is rule of law a common grace or in a common grace category? Or is it a special revelation category?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Well, law is a gift. It is a creational norm. We see this also in the imago dei, which is again, creation. It tells us that there's human exceptionalism.
We have, as we get ahead of this, we'll be giving a cultural mandate. Well, there has to be rules that apply to fulfilling that cultural mandate. The imago DEI also tells us about human equality, equal indignity, equal in valorization, contrary to partiality and tribalism. Well, if that's true, then the law of the society, the law of ordering society has to protect against things which undermine human equality. Things like Jim Crow laws, segregation, the demeaning of one sex or the other, political inequalities.
That is a direct attack upon human dignity and thus human equality. The cultural mandate. The cultural mandate is pretty important because part of that involves economic productivity. And so we ought to have an understanding of law that protects makers and punishes takers. You know, even the Magna carta back in 1215 did this same thing. And so the rule of law, in the sense that it protects all humans against fraud, misrepresentation, unjust weights and measures, dealing with boundaries and protection of property, proverbs, admonishes us to have hard work and industry, and don't be the sluggard. The idea of associational norms, including marriage, family, collaborative associations, and so forth. And then we also see in the create order that there is a cosmology.
Truth exchange has been hammering this for decades. But there's the creator creature distinction. There's a hierarchy. And we see Jesus appeal to this hierarchy in terms of law. When he's in court, he speaks to Pilate. Pilate tells him what in John 19, well, you know, don't you know I have the authority to, you know, do bad things to you? And Jesus said, look, you would have no authority over me unless it had been granted to you from above. Here we see Jesus echoing the creational norms that law comes from outside of the created order. Law comes from the eternal God, in fact, and then God delegates and appoints legitimate authorities in the creation. This is what Paul talks about when he talks about the creature creator distinction in Romans 1. And interestingly enough, he tells us that we either worship and serve the Creator or the creation. And when we fail to worship the Creator and worship the creation instead, what happens? We have unrighteous practices. In other words, we have wrong ethics. In other words, we have wrong ethics that we try to impose upon Society Romans 1:32. And thus it impacts law. So as N.T. wright says, you know, you can have a compass and we can follow the compass or disregard the compass, but when the compass miscalibrates what is true north, then we have a lot of problems with respect to that. And that's what we're really seeing in the culture. And yet again, God has been gracious to us. Notice the lesson of Exodus. Exodus involves the story of a liberated people. And interestingly enough, we see that law is necessary to regulate a newly freed people. What does God do after the Exodus? He gives them Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, once again denoting that the source of law is God. It's from above, just as Jesus said in John 19.
What is the purpose and content of the rule of law? To provide structure for society. It provides that by substantive precepts dealing with coordination problems. It tells us about interpersonal justice. And the law of the covenant, talks about tort law and property. Law deals with boundaries and animals and crops. It also deals with justice on a societal level, deals with issues like murder, the distinction with murder and manslaughter, theft, sexual assault, and so forth. It also deals with the rule of law as it relates to procedural precepts. Moses established appellate courts. He articulates about evidence and witness requirements. He talks about punishment being proportional and no more. He speaks about the remedies of restitution. And so over and over again, we see that a society must have a structure. And that rule of law is what holds that structure together and provides for the coordination problems to deal with justice and injustice and rectifying things, in fact, to prevent violence. So the rule of law is indispensable. It was indispensable pre fall, it was indispensable post fall. It's indispensable to the cultural mandate, and it's indispensable to how we live our lives. And we see this historically played out, the appeal to the rule of law, not just to the official, but to the authority upon which the official is accountable. So when there was a speech code imposed upon Peter and the other disciples in Acts chapter five, what does he do? He says we must obey God rather than man, invoking again this cosmological idea that law ultimately comes from the outside. It comes from above. We see the Apostle Paul invoking Caesar's law, basically saying that he needs to be face to face, and in fact, that is granted to him. It's the custom of the Romans. Very interesting that even the United States supreme court quotes Acts 25 as being a fundamental matter of justice, that is to say, confronting one's accusers. And so over and over we see this, the rule of law, and I'm just kind of going on here. But the rule of law also requires us to understand jurisdiction. This is the bit about giving to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God's what's God's. So there is legitimate jurisdiction with respect to that. And thus we have the clash between Christ and Caesar. And this is where a lot of things happen, and it's been murky and it's been messy. Which points out, you had mentioned in your prefatory remarks something about the natural law. Well, that's Fine. There is such a thing as an order to the universe. Paul calls it in Romans 2, the law written on our heart. But we have an epistemological problem because we're falling. And since the natural law is going to be equivalent, that is to say, identical with that which is God's will, his revealed will, special, revelatory, legal will, why don't we use that instead? Because very quickly there are epistemological barriers to an exclusive natural law component. And again, that's not the way it was in creation. And if we are now restored, which is what the cross and the ascension and the resurrection do, well, then the natural revelation is going to be actually actuated by special revelation. So the rule of law, I guess my big burden here is to show that it is necessary and essential to functioning. And then, of course, we have, for example, the psalms talk about there are rulers who frame injustice by statutes. So then we have to look into this whole idea of, okay, well, what we've got to do is determine whether the law as instantiated by the civil magistrate, is it truly just? Does it conform to the law above the law? Does it reflect true justice and righteousness? And sometimes it does, and many times it does not. And hence we have the rub between Christ and Caesar. That's probably a long, long winded answer to the introductory framing. But I want us to understand that it's not as simple as, oh, the Bible says this or that, that it's always in this context that we are to be ruled. We're ruled by a king, and that king rules by law, and that law governs the entire cosmos.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Is it too simplistic of a question to ask? Is it a clash between the powers of the gods or the law of the gods? The law of God of Yahweh versus Mammon, or insert whatever. I mean, so for. So let's look at abortion. We say abortion is murder. Well, how do we know this one? Because God says it is murder, okay, Thou shalt not take life. Whereas they would say, well, taking the life allows the mother to be in a better position financially later on. It taking the life of this child or killing the fetus allows the mother then to become successful down the road and so on. And so they are serving their God in that sense.
And so in application, is it a clash between the gods and who has the better argument, or who has the. Which God has the most, has the greater power?
[00:12:47] Speaker B: I think that if we're going to frame it theologically, that's exactly how we should frame it, because what happens is if you look at the various pagan religions, there's always ritual and there's always bloodshedding.
That is the nature of how we are built as humans. We need atonement and atonement typically comes from bloodshedding. So what we're actually seeing when the false religions become self conscious, we are seeing a sacrifice essentially that this is going to appease me. We are appeasing the gods that way. Remember that those who hate God, Proverbs 8 says love death.
Well, death involves bloodshedding. And so it's clearly framing the theological and correlating it with the ethical. And so yeah, we.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: What about politically then? So, I mean, so you, as a lawyer who has served on a number of cases, you would not go in and say this is a clash between the two, the gods and the true God. You are appealing to a different argumentation.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Well, I think, I think it depends. Generally speaking, that's exactly right, because the job of an advocate is to persuade the decision maker a wise man makes knowledge acceptable. And if you put up roadblocks to what they're hearing, you're not going to be wise. We see this in the well intended but legally foolish notion of the abolitionists and abortion. I can tell you, having been in that battle for years and then having been with the law firm that ultimately overturned Roe versus Wade and we directed the strategy that the abolitionists almost wrecked the train here doing that sort of thing. And so stupid for Jesus is still stupid. So you've got to be wise in how you do that. So point being though is we have to understand what's underneath these issues. We can't divorce the rule of law from, from the culture that's animating that rule of law. And so I might understand that, but I have to figure out a way to really deal with this. And so you can talk about it in terms of, well, what's the ultimate interest here? You know, they're citing this particular statute, but what's really going on, your honor, is this, this has become more important than this, than that, that sort of thing. So you've got to understand that so you can, how can I put it, get underneath what's really going on there. And that's where the theology comes to bear. What's really interesting, I had lots of discussions about this decades ago with John Frame because he was going to be a lawyer before he decided to become a pastor and theologian. I think a couple of his siblings were lawyers or doctors or something like that. He's always fascinated by how this worked. And I was just very gratified that he helped me in much of his writing understand ways to think and to advance things. And so, you know, the decision maker in our civil courts are typically not going to deal with these kinds of issues, though they can. And though they do mention things, you've got to pick your battles. Again, we see Justice Scalia, I think, quoting Acts 25 with respect to our confrontation clause of the amendment. And so that's kind of important. And so there's ways to begin to percolate that sort of thing with respect to that.
Some of it is. Depends upon the plausibility narrative that's out there. You know, our legal system right now has been essentially. It's not, I don't use the word secularized. It has been de Christianized. And other gods and principalities are driving things.
Their name is legion. And so we need to be very careful with that.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Okay. Earlier you had talked about hierarchy and cosmology. Obviously all of our listeners are familiar by now with Romans 1.
We exchanged the truth of God for the lie. Worship and serve creation rather than the Creator who is blessed forevermore. Law comes from the lawgiver, who is God. Then you can fast forward then into like Romans 13.
And law is for the purpose of the magistrate yielding the sword, to execute justice and righteousness.
What happens when the.
The lawkeeper or the king or the magistrate doesn't uphold God's law, but their own will?
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Yeah, so when they don't do that, they are sinning in their discharge of their offices and they need to be held to account with respect to that. One great example of this is it happened in the late 6th, late 4th century.
Christianity had been made not illegal.
It wasn't quite yet the official religion that was. That was about this time as well. And there was immigration that occurred. And actually welcoming people of every kindreds and tongues is a Christian thing if done with decency and order and legally. And so in Thessaloniki, there was a lot of immigrants that occurred and they were there. This was part of the Roman Empire. And what happened? There was an uprising. There was a riot that occurred there. And during that riot, that unrest, an officer of the Roman garrison was killed. Well, you know, people say, don't mess with Texas. Let me tell you, as an Italian, don't mess with the Romans. And so the emperor there heard about this, that an officer of the Roman garrison had been killed and he dispatched the Roman army and they slaughtered, I think 6,000 or 7,000 innocent immigrants, men, women and children. Just slaughtered him. Don't mess with Rome. Well, a clergyman who was, you know, we had this idea, this dualism that says, oh, the clergy, they deal with higher things, ethereal things, spiritual things. No, this clergyman understood the lordship of Christ, understood that the magistrate, though generally we are to respect them, honor them, pray for them, and obey them when they violate precept of the law of God and violate their duty, they need to be confronted with that. And so this clergyman, his name is Ambrose, Bishop Ambrose of Milano, Milan, went to the emperor and said, look, you know, as a professing Christian, killing one innocent violates the law of God. How much more? Sanctioning the death of 7,000. And you are now barred from the communion table. You may not consider yourself. And he barred him. He did church, what we would call church discipline with respect to that. Now, he could have had his head lopped off, but Theodosius, after several months, recanted and repented. Now, those people were still dead. But here we see an official making a humble recanting and that sort of thing. So when, to answer your question, what do we do? We confront them. Now, we do so respectfully. We do so with understanding. Notice he did a common ground argument. Hey, he appealed to something. He knew, you know, taking one innocent life is wrong. How much more. He used an a force your argument, and he just confronted him with it. It's kind of like what Dave, what David got from Nathan. Right? Oh, I'm just so outraged. I'm real. This is just terrible. Who is that guy? You're the man. You are the man. It's like, oh, yeah, exactly. Right. So, you know, those Perry Mason moments can occur if you set the thing up. Right? So this shows us that the manner of the gospel is just important as the message of it. They didn't just tweet saying, oh, man, you're a stinky emperor. Went to him face to face, used the standard law of God, the law above the law, and made the. You know, and implored him to do it. Now, that was a great risk. The most powerful man in the world was Theodosius. But now we remember Theodosis because he humbled himself and he repented of the evil that he sanctioned. So we have an obligation to do that, to call them out. So what does that mean when the state exceeds its jurisdiction? We should be talking about that. That's a theological issue. It's not a political issue. Because the jurisdiction is, while legitimate, it is to be limited. What is it limited to? It is limited to overt wrongful conduct that's the idea. If you look at first Timothy 1, if you look at Romans 13, it is always focused on overt wrongful conduct. Not our attitudes, not our affiliations, not what is going on in our hearts. That is not the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate. It is when we act out in a way that of course, satisfies due process. Are there multiple witnesses, those sorts of things and so forth. And so if they don't do that, then we start speaking that the problem is we either think it's merely political and don't get involved, or we think it's merely political and think that the answer is some election down the line. Neither of those is a satisfactory solution. The solution is to actually roll up our sleeves, take a risk, and humbly and respectfully appeal to their authority and say, you've exceeded your authority. This is not the right sort of thing. Now, I'm not Pollyanna enough to think that that's going to work.
Just recently, I see that one of the presidential candidates has saying, there's not going to be any religious exemptions for religious entities with respect to the provision of healthcare. That's code language to say that the nuns are going to have to supply abortion and abortifacients and that sort of thing. Well, that's nonsense. That needs to be called out. It's not a proper thing. Proper thing and that sort of thing. So. But see, those are theological matters. Those are jurisdictional matters as well. They're not near. They express themselves politically, but way upstream. We've got to understand that that's our calling. And so we need to hold them accountable if we're going to pray for them, for goodness sakes, we should. We need to also speak to them and we need to show them what we're praying about. So that's how I think we answer that, that particular question. We always get into the debate, Joshua, and you know, from our readers and just, you know, being a reformed Christian, that, okay, well, how much of God's law then should the magistrate, you know, enforce or apply?
And that's a debatable question. There's people that say more or less, my view is that there's a general continuity between the older covenant and the newer covenant. But I think we do have to take into consideration the uniqueness of what covenanted Israel was. There's no longer a covenanted nation. I don't believe that's the ideal. I don't believe that that is a requirement at all. I do think, though, that the norms that are affixed to God's law need to be adapted. It's very interesting that the Westminster divines talk about, they call, you know, the so called moral law, all of God's laws moral. I kind of bristle at that. God can't propound immoral law, but, you know, but so you have these general precepts, these rubrics contained in the decalogue and that sort of thing. You have the, what we call ceremonial law, those that prefigure the redemption we have in Christ. And then of course, we have the judicial laws which were designed for particular aspects. So what does that look like what the Westminster divine say? They say one has been abrogated, one has expired. In other words, their time has set.
Oh, that's interesting. Well, that's good to know that. So we have to make distinctions as well.
And it's interesting that threefold distinction is not particularly reformed. I mean, Quinas said the same thing. And so this has been a Christian tradition to try to grapple with how the magistrate should understand this. Okay, so if that's the case, we need to think about, okay, redemption, the ceremonial loss, you know. Is attending worship services on Sunday a good thing? Yes. Is attending worship services consistently a good thing? Yes, it is. Would that benefit society at large if more people attended worship services on Sunday regularly? Yes. Oh, okay. So the civil magistrate should compel people to attend church services? Oh, I don't think so, because that violates the nature of the human person. A coerced faith is no faith at all. So we need to understand there may be a good involved. We need to understand the means to those goods. And so the civil magistrate does not enforce everything with respect to that, though it may apply in a different way. Good example. You know, we've got this idea of putting a fence upon the parapet of our ceilings, of our roofs. Well, are we supposed to then change the building codes to require that? No. But as Divine say, the general equity say that you need to, you know, have your home, that you own your land, safe, that should be safe. So it minimizes risks under the sixth commandment. So where I live in Arizona, everyone has a swimming pool. Well, you better have a access code to that. You might even have to have a fence around that to prevent a tragedy of accidental drowning and that sort of thing. So we see that in general equity. And so it's not like, oh, I'll go to a photocopier photocopy, Exodus 21:23, and then tell my legislator to pass these laws. No, we forget there is a wisdom issue here. We have got to understand that those who forsake the law, the Torah, praise the wicked. So we are compelled then to be searching the scriptures, understanding them, using wisdom to see, okay, how then shall we live? What then are the regulations of society? What is the civil magistrate's role with respect to the regulation of society, so on and so forth. That's a long answer, but I think it's important to clear away the cobwebs of simplistic ideas that are out there. We see particularly in social media, because the alternatives. Let's just be clear, if it's not Lex Rex, the Rule of law, it's Rex. It's Lex Rex.
So if it's not Lex Rex, it's going to be Rex, Lex, the Rule of Men. We don't want that. There's no appealing after that.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's something that's going viral, speaking of social media and whatnot, is there's the. And I'm sure you've seen it, Jeff, is there is a clip of a presidential. Well, it's just say the name Kamala Harris and somebody shouts, jesus is Lord.
And she says in response, you're at the wrong. You're at the wrong conference.
And then there's a new video that's circulating with J.D. vance, who is the vice president candidate.
And somebody says, jesus is Lord. And he says, yes, Jesus is Lord.
And which excites a certain crowd of young people who are thinking, oh, good, we're going to get a presidential candidate who's going to impose now God's law everywhere on everything.
And that gets some people concerned. Does that mean fourth commandment issue? Are we shutting down all businesses? Are we obligating and forcing everyone to church and so on?
How would you respond to that and correct that kind of thinking?
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So Jesus is Lord, but he exercises His Lordship in accordance with his word. And his word tells us that his law for the magistrate is one of legitimacy, but it's one of limited jurisdiction. And so we've got to understand the sausage being made there. Certainly, we have a new book coming out. Some of the scholars who are truth exchange scholars, in fact, all of them are called the sanctified state. And we address some of these questions to understand. Okay, it's one thing to say, what is my obligation under Jesus Lordship? It's quite another to say, what is the state's obligation under Jesus Lordship? My obligation as a creature made in God's image is to worship and serve him, which includes my voluntary attending and being involved with the saints on Sundays and So on, so forth, going to worship services. Whereas the states is a very different calling still under Christ's lordship, still accountable to that Lordship. Lordship does not mean conduit. To impose everything that's Christian, far be it.
The state is actually under a Christian understanding to be a protected sphere where humans made in the image of God can flourish, can team, can innovate, can trade, can rear their families. So freedom and liberty are very important. We see this again even in the Exodus narrative with respect to that. So, you know, I've seen some of those contexts and that sort of thing. And it is sad to see any political candidate using Christ and his Word as a prop to try to garner votes, irrespective of what party or what their positions are. That is not the Jesus of the Bible, using him as a prop to advance your own personal agenda. Let's just be. Let be very clear. There's been some apologetics and I lived in San Francisco and where the vice president supposedly attended under Amos Brown. Amos Brown is essentially a Marxist guy. He's like Jeremiah Wright, where President Obama did. It's an inner city church, totally opposed to a number of things, totally for a number of things like abortion on demand and LGBT things, uprooting creational norms. And so to label that as Christian and then to use that and say, well, I'm, you know, I'm a Christian or whatever, it stretches credibility, shall we say?
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
When you began that segment, I instantly thought about when you use the name of the Lord as a propagandal Presbyterian manner, as a Good Presbyterian, I would go to the Third Commandment.
It is an abuse of the name of the Lord to further your own scheme.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Exactly right. That's exactly right. And we should call them out on that, whether that's in writing or in this podcast or, you know, a proper appeal to them. I can tell you the way the sausage is made that most of anything you approach to these public figures is, you know, shredded or you get some.
They're not going to see it unless you have access.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Jeff, tell us a little bit more about the new book coming out through ccl.
I have one of their more recent copies of Virtuous Liberty. I have wore this book out. In fact, the pages are falling out.
But I know that you're a contributor to it as well as P'ANDREW Sandlin. Tell us who else is a part of that work and do you know when it's gonna drop so we can shoot our listeners to it.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: Thank you. It's called the Sanctified State. I just Saw the COVID proofs a few days ago. I believe it will be out by December 6th, actually. The contributors of which I know are Dr. Sandlin, David Bonson, Dr. Matson and myself. So it probably won't be as hefty as virtuous liberty. But there may be others, I think Maybe.
I think Dr. Secord, Levi Secord, I think, has a contribution in that. Maybe Jerry Boyer, the economist, may have one in there. I just don't know. I've not seen the table of contents, but I know Andrew's been working on this. I'm real excited about it.
He really liked my chapter and he wasn't just, you know, blowing smoke. He thought it was quite, quite effective and good in what I dealt with there kind of a theology of the State, in short, you know, 3,000 words or 2,000 words. So I think it's going to be very accessible, very well written. I know that David Bonson's is an apologetic against market constraints and that sort of thing. It's an economic liberty piece. My understanding is it just nukes in an unbiblical way, but does so with charity, honesty and without name calling and rancor and that sort of thing. So I'm really looking forward to it. So really we're talking six weeks should be in our. In everyone's hands.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: This concludes our recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. 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.
