Dallas Willard, Greg Bahnsen, Law and Theology

Dallas Willard, Greg Bahnsen, Law and Theology

(In Response to a friend)

I know that Dallas Willard was one of Bahnsen’s professors at USC.  Fortunately he was not an overwhelming influence.  Willard is of course one of the most brilliant Christian Philosophers working today but he has theological eccentricities that cause me to be reticent.  For the most part, anyone that is a professional philosopher at a top ranked school that is willing to not only come out of the closet but boldly proclaim their Christian faith is alright by me.  But once we get in a little closer, there is certainly room to say, with all due respect, that I disagree with some of the theological nuances.

(I have no doubt I’ll get mail from the Bahnsen-haters, but please, be sure that you have read the original sources and can intelligently and respectfully engage in fruitful discussion before wasting time with dime store diatribes. We’re all grown ups here. Some of you are typing already and you haven’t even read the blog yet. )

I’ve read everything in print that Pastor Bahnsen had written and also had the pleasure of listening to his lectures, sermons, and debates.  With all that, I am not a Van Tillian, though I do recognize Van Til’s many important contributions in the areas of apologetics and worldview analysis.  “Theonomy in Christian Ethics”, is one of the most important works on the practical interpretation of the Biblical laws as they apply to the current historical conditions of the last few hundred years.  We need to continue to grapple with it’s implications through the coming generations.  In my humble estimation of titans, the works of Rushdoony do not carry the clarity of thought and persuasive power of exegetical detail that Bahnsen brought to bear upon the fundamental issues involved.  I appreciate the economic works of Gary North, his “Tools for Dominion” is still the only serious Christian attempt at the application of the case laws of Exodus to Modern Economics, but I still think that Bahnsen’s works, though perhaps less ambitious in their scope, are attempting to lay a more fundamental groundwork for Ethics.  Law is, to me at least, ethics applied.
 
Bringing together theology, and law, as you well know, is not at all easy, and antinomianism is overwhelmingly dominant in Christian culture.  Part of the problem is that Christians have been persuaded that their best arguments are those that avoid Special Revelation as a source of ethical knowledge.  But ethical knowledge is rooted in one’s view of man in relation to God and other men and this is not easy to know apart from Special Revelation.  If we could easily know good and evil apart from Scripture, the Scriptures themselves become a needless redundancy.  General Revelation makes sure that all men know, even if they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.  But our inborn dilemma of being a fallen people leaves us un inclined to the good except in that which is conducive to our own selfish desire.  As Augustine and Calvin wrote on such things, we of the City of God make laws against theft out of a Spiritual love for God and our neighbor; The City of Man, a merely natural city, makes laws against theft for their own selfish protection.  This is where the two might meet in civics, even if not in intent, teleology, or understanding.  This is the common ground for a common law.
 
This also seems to be the basis for Calvin’s famous denial of the legislative identity between the laws of Scripture and the laws of men.  Scriptural laws are an expression of the eternal moral nature of God applied to the specific historical situation and culture, but there are other specific historical situations and cultures, and as long as it is the justice of God that is exemplified in the laws of men, whatever their outward form might be, the eternal and unchanging laws of Christ are there.
 
As Bahnsen writes in one of my favorite quotes, “One should recognize, we have argued, that the law of God, even the Mosaic revelation of it, reflects God’s essential and unchanging, moral character; the principles of His law are sometimes communicated in terms of concrete cultural circumstances (judicial or case-law forms), in which case it is the underlying moral requirement which binds all men in all cultures.” Greg Bahnsen.
 
This doesn’t seem to be anything different from what Calvin wrote in saying, “What I have said will become plain if we attend, as we ought, to two things connected with all laws, viz., the enactment of the law, and the equity on which the enactment is founded and rests. Equity, as it is natural, cannot but be the same in all, and therefore ought to be proposed by all laws, according to the nature of the thing enacted. As constitutions have some circumstances on which they partly depend, there is nothing to prevent their diversity, provided they all alike aim at equity as their end.

Now, as it is evident that the law of God which we call moral, is nothing else than the testimony of natural law, and of that conscience which God has engraven on the minds of men, the whole of this equity of which we now speak is prescribed in it. Hence it alone ought to be the aim, the rule, and the end of all laws.”  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 16. Unity and diversity of laws.

And this is a clear restatement of that strong Augustinian tradition that was reawakened in the Reformation.  As Augustine writes on this, “Wherever laws are formed after this rule, directed to this aim, and restricted to this end, there is no reason why they should be disapproved by us, however much they may differ from the Jewish law, or from each other, (August. de Civil. Dei, Lib. 19 c. 17.)”

Sometimes, I think, people take Bahnsen’s teaching on these things as having a meaning that is obviously other than his intent.  Part of this is from a lack of familiarity with his works, part from common misinformation, and part from the mere belligerence of those that have a natural hostility to the Good.  It is easier to malign and misrepresent than to actually engage in reasonable discussion.  When we do, we are edified and better equipped to find practical as well as theoretically stable ways to ask and answer the tough questions about the relationship between Law and Theology.
 
All the best,
 
Christopher Neiswonger