It was recently brought to my attention that “Green Baggins” tried to argue “Why Theonomy Is Biblically-Theologically Wrong.” I interact with a couple of his points below.


“Lastly, there is nothing in Romans 13 that cannot be explained on the basis of natural law as explained above. The civil magistrate is there to punish evil. He is ordained by God to do that. The moral law has been implanted on his heart. Therefore, he should be a terror to those who do evil.”

It is evil to fantasize about murder and it is evil to murder. Are both evils to be punished by the sword? Which evils are civil magistrates to punish? What should be those punishments? How are we to justify the answers to those two questions? Natural law offers no answers to those questions and natural law proponents rarely try. Natural law is utterly impotent in this regard. We know from special revelation that general revelation reveals to us that all transgressions against God’s natural law deserve God’s wrath; so if we were to apply general revelation and natural law to the realm of the sword, then all sin would require immediate death, a monstrosity indeed. In other words, if "natural law" replaces the civil case laws, then all tansgressions require death by the sword. Is that what GreenBaggins wants to see? (Theonomy is most often construed as harsh. However, apart from theonomy, no argument with concrete, defensible premises can be levied to combat too harsh of punishments in a fallen world. For instance, how would an anti-theonomist combat a civil magistrate that determined stealing a loaf of bread was a crime worthy of death? The epistemologically conscious theonomist has an answer for too strict of laws in a fallen world; whereas the anti-theonomist is left to appeal to an idiosyncratic sense of justice, which reduces to subjectivism, arbitrariness and knowledge falsely called.)


“However, it is not the civil magistrate’s job to execute a boy for cursing his parents (as was true in the Old Testament civil laws).”

If Old Testament revelation informs us to execute a boy for cursing his parents, then general revelation cannot prescribe a lesser punishment for such a transgression let alone abrogate the penalty, lest God’s revelation (general and special) is contradictory. (Now one might dare to argue that general revelation affirmed the putting to death an incorrigible child under Moses but God has since time altered his general revelation on that point. That, however, would be a tall order to prove from Scripture, not that natural law proponents are particularly interested in employing Scripture to justify their philosophy of civil ethics.)

Since God’s forms of revelation cannot be contradictory, general revelation must either affirm special revelation by telling us that a boy ought to be executed for cursing his parents (which is impossible to prove from general revelation), or else general revelation does not prescribe any penalty for a boy who curses his parents; (it only reveals that is wrong to do so.) In either case, it cannot prescribe a different penalty than special revelation ever prescribed lest God is the author of confusion.

In the final analyses, even if the Old Testament case laws have been abrogated, all such would imply is that we are no longer required to prescribe laws and penalties that reflect the general equity of the Old Testament case laws. Now left to ourselves, what would the Christian want to prescribe if he could? I would like to think that the Christian would look to God’s word to justify which sins are best punished by the civil magistrate and what those sanctions in a fallen world might best be in order to please God. Even that, however, is inadequate because if God has indeed left us to our own in this regard, then there is no justifiable fault to be found with any sanction, for all sanctions would be, well, a matter of personal preference. At the end of the day, anything less than theonomy is tyranny.

What does God’s general revelation and natural law teach us with respect to the penalty for rape? Whatever your answer is, now prove it!

Anti-theonomists are simply arbitrary and inconsistent. In some instances they prefer Mosaic laws and in other instances they don't. In all instances they refuse to justify their preferences by the Old Testament scriptures, unless of course they can find a justification prior to Moses, say under Noah!


“It is the church’s job to instruct and to exercise church discipline. Nowhere in the New Testament does any writer say that the civil government is to rule itself according to Old Testament Israel’s civil law. Rather, every time the civil government is mentioned, it is in connection to the natural moral law.”
It is truly remarkable that any anti-theonomist could be a paedobaptist given such a hermeneutic. Latent dispensationalist-baptist - yes indeed.