Does anyone know if this book [VanDrunen's more scholarly treatment of natural law] has come out yet, or when it's expected to become available? Thanks.

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Casey Bessette
Westminster OPC • West Suburbs of Chicago • My Blog: Paradise Regained

"It is part of the calling of the ekklesia to learn to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge and also to make known within the world of science 'the manifold wisdom of God' in order that the final end of theology, as of all things, may be that the name of the Lord is glorified. Theology and dogmatics, too, exist for the Lord's sake." — Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, p. 46

Sounds interesting. I wonder if he will interact with O'Donovan's expression on natural law. I wonder if he will note, as John Milbank, that natural law underwent a shift from participation in the divine law to a law that would be valid even if God didn't exist. Would that change his argument any? It would be interesting.

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

Hi Casey,

I'm not quite sure what book you are talking about, but Dr. VanDrunen does have a book in the works on the two kingdoms, but not natural law, per se. He does hope to write more on natural law.

Are you referring to a book or article you heard about?

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Rev. Daniel R. Hyde
Pastor, Oceanside United Reformed Church
www.oceansideurc.org
Carlsbad/Oceanside, California

I have his "A Biblical Case for Natural Law."

I heard he is coming out with a longer treatment as the above book is 69 pages of text.

But, there are plenty of scholarly books out on natural law. Not only are there writers in the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition, who have been churning out good material for a while, there's also another book I have by Grabill, Rediscovering The Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics. It is detailed, and attended by copius amounts of foot, er, end notes.

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Regards,

J.J.
PCA
Suffix

I have mixed feelings. On one hand "natural law" is a part of the Christian tradition, but on the other hand, the political theologies of Aquinas and Augustine are noticeably different (and both are noticeably different from the secular faith proponents today).

Augustine saw two societies. Aquinas saw a unified society comprising that was not (at least overtly) dependent on divine revelation.

Modern political theories, suffering from the Enlightenment strain of trying to unify everything, have given us (or will give us) a cracked society, the brokeness of which we already see in postmodernity.

Therefore, appeals to Aquinas' natural law (of which I have become more fond recently) have the ironic task of doing what they aren't supposed to do: Prolegomena. It was supposed to give us a common ground but with postmodernity denying precisely that, where are we?

In this case, Augustine's 2 Cities might be more helpful. But even then, facile appeals to the 2 Cities are not without there problems. For Augustine defines a society as a group of rational members united by a common object(s) of love. A common object? A common telos? We are back where we started. What if the telos is faulty or idolatrous? Is it still a true society? Would then the only true society be a Christian one?

Thanks for the note, Rev. Hyde. Maybe my memory has failed me. I was under the impression that a more scholarly treatment of natural law was going to be published soon after the popular monograph. Maybe I misunderstood. Do you know when his book on the two kingdoms may be becoming available?

This is what I am referring to in the OP.
Thanks for the recommendation.

While I still quibble at a few points, Budziszewski's A Case for Natural Law is very readable and offers many good critiques of inadequate theories. I am still not convinced at his conclusion/proposal, but it was worth the read.

I wonder if Van Drunen's larger work on Two Kingdoms is the Natural Law book in question.

I have actually found St. Thomas' work on natural law to be quite sane, sensible, and corrective in many areas:

Eternal Law: Includes God's foreknowledge and creation of human events/contingencies. Largely inscrutable to man.

Natural Law: appropriation of rational creatures of the divine exemplar; inner apprehension of right.

Human Law: Constructed from natural law and conditioned/applied in historical circumstances. I have always wondered if this could parallel general equity.

New Law/Old Law: Figure it out on your own.

Interestingly, Thomas does allow in some degree the OT model to be a model for nations: On Kingship, 105, 1.

Not really the direction I intended the thread to go . . .

Just a question: I know where Calvin identified Decologue with natural law, but where did Bucer do so?

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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

If memory serves, De regno Christi among many places. It was a commonplace in the Reformation.

I disagree with P. D. L. Avis on Bucer's view of NL. He thinks Bucer's a Thomist. This is parallel to the argument about Calvin -- some see him as a Thomist too because of his NL rhetoric. The case for Bucer's Thomism is perhaps stronger, but the crucial difference, as I see it, between Thomas and the Reformers is that Thomas was willing to identify NL with a universal rational principle to which both God and humans are obligated. That's partly why he made NL broader than the decalogue.

I'm not saying that Bucer never spoke in any other way about NL but only that Bucer identified the NL with the decalogue. There are other expressions of the same basic law principle in Scripture that could be called NL that aren't the decalogue, but the main point still holds -- that NL isn't some ethereal amorphous subjective entity but a fixed, objective, revealed law expressed in nature and in special revelation.

rsc

[quote=timmopussycat;372332]

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R. Scott Clark, D.Phil
Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology

"For Christ, His Gospel, and His Church"
Associate Pastor
Oceanside URC
The Heidelblog

Professor Clark,

Where is NL revealed in special revelation?

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Stephen
Reformer, SBC
Faith Defenders
Anaheim, CA
[URL="http://biblicalthought.com"]biblicalthought.com[/URL]

"Resolved, never to give over, nor in the least to slacken, my fight with my corruptions, however unsuccessful I may be." --Jonathan Edwards, The Resolutions, #56

Another Scholarly work due soon on natural law/natural theology is Reason and Worldviews: Warfield, Kuyper, Van Til and Plantinga on the Clarity of General Revelation and Function of Apologetics by Owen Anderson.

Reason and Worldviews (University Press of America)

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Hermonta Godwin
Christ The King PCA
Raleigh, NC

The whole deal with Van Til is kind of tricky. While I don't remember him saying he believes in natural law, I will grant that he did for argument's sake. But at the same time, he also believed that the bible spoke authoritatively about everything (Defense of the Faith, 1955, first 5 pages or so).

Dooyeweerd and Carl Henry explicitly denied natural law, but they don't have many followers in the Reformed camp anyway.

It comes after the part on how to do a heart translplant and before the part about how to fix your car.

[quote=Tom Bombadil;372496]Dr. Clark can speak for himself, but isn't NL recorded in Scripture in Rom. 1:19-31?

I think you got your quote function mixed up. It was "Biblcial Thought" who asked that, not me.

But, yes, that's one of the places NL guys go to show their view in Scripture.

DVD gives other examples in his little booklet mentioned above.

Romans 2:15 says the works of the law are written on the heart. A lot of NL guys say that means natural law is written on the heart. I actually don't think that verse supports NL, though I do have a room for NL in my theology.

Per Rom 1:18ff I don't think "without excuse" implies a good NL. I think other things do, but not that. One could turn it around and say that "they suppress the truth" proves the non-truth of NL. I buy a form of NL, but I don't use those verses.

A lot of people look at general revelation and immediately infer natural theology (The HCSB Apologetics Study Bible, for example). I don't think that is a good move.

Casey, if you are still here among this drivel, Dr. VanDrunen is a friend and we've talked about his two kingdoms manuscript a bunch. I'm pretty sure it's done but it'll take a while for editing and publishing if it comes to that. I wouldn't expect anything in the next year.

He did recently have another article published in the Journal of Church and State . . . no doubt some non-Christian somewhere donated money to Baylor University and its publishing wing and that makes Dr. VanDrunen an unbeliever . . . but his article is pretty good!

Baylor University || J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies || Autumn 2007

DVD published an essay in a legal journal that documented how the Reformers used natural law to resist and kill tyrants. Pretty good, essay. I quibble on a few points on Knox, given Knox's use of the OT law, but it was good anyway.

I just went to go see Guy Waters speak at WTS and he argued that the law in Rom 1 and 2 was the moral law. It was an exegetical case based around Rom. 10 and 5. He ws ultimately arguing for bi-covenantalism.