I'll be honest with you, Tim. I didn't read most of that. I am not as Puritanical or "TR" as most people here. While I am Reformed (e.g., baptize babies, covenant, 5 points), LONG quotes by the Puritans don't impress me.

I freely grant that Bahnsen's hermeneutics is not identical to---well, stop right there. I was about to say "The Reformed Tradition," then I realized there is no such thing. No matter, I can grant some novelty to it. But I really don't care. That doesn't make Bahnsen de facto wrong.

But back to the natural law thingy. I was trying to suggest that the Patristic-Medieval-Reformed view of natural law is different from the modern day Reformed view of natural law. The older tradition used natural law to defend Christendom and a quasi-theocratic state. The modern view (e.g., Modern Reformation, D.G. Hart's Secular Faith ) use natural law to attack Christendom and defend a secular state. They simply can't claim continuity on this point. They are just as novel as Bahnsen.

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J. B. Atken
John Knox PCA
Layman, M.A. student at Louisiana College