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Originally Posted by Ivanhoe  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. | The long citations of the Puritans on moral law= decalogue was not aimed at you but, at another who had argued that the claim that the Reformed equated the moral law and decalogue as being "ridicluous" and undeserving of a reply.
I am well aware that the Puritan view of Natural law differs from the Modern view and contemporary Christians such as those you name. But I still say that one can avoid a lot of confusion by identifying the specific version of "natural law" that you are promoting. If you say natural law = moral law = decalogue, you have just distinguished yourself from both the secular moralist and the Modern Christian who use a different concept of natural law to justify a secular state.
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In Christ's love and service
Mr. Tim Cunningham, Dip. CS (Regent College)
Member, First Baptist Church
Vancouver, BC
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"The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar of 1500-year-old, 200 proof grace—a bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the gospel—after all these centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your own bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home-free before they started. Grace was to be drunk neat: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale." – Robert Farrar Capon
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