Scripture and Natural Law

In Paris, and we have a special episode for you today. I mean, every episode's special, but this is a little bit outside of what people know me for, right? I focus a lot on social justice stuff and what's going on in the evangelical world on socio-political matters, I suppose, but I wanna talk about apologetics.

And some of you may know this, some of you may not, but apologetics was a big focus. In fact, before Conversations That Matter, when I just had, I still have the YouTube channel that you're probably watching this on now if you're watching or listening, I started that mostly because I was focusing on apologetics.

It was the, they called it the new atheists, and I was debating them and coming up with videos, and I even did some formal debates, and that was the thing, like, I mean, I guess I'm dating myself, but 15, 20 years ago, and things have progressed and moved on, and there's different debates and so forth now, but that's still something I'm very interested in, and I've taught apologetics at my church and obviously put out videos online, like I said.

So when I saw this article, when I read the article that I'm about to reference, I thought to myself, self, we need to have the author of this article on. And of course, what I'm referring to is an article, it's actually on a sub stack, but it's an article on responding to Brian Mattson.

Brian Mattson wrote an article called An Apologetic Thermopoly, and there was a response to it, and the response is what I want to focus on, and it's from the natural theologian, Joel Carini, who joins us now on the podcast for the first time.

Welcome, Joel.

Thank you, John.

Glad to be here.

The Rise of Natural Law and Presuppositionalism in Christian Debate

So Joel, I see debates in the Christian world concerning natural law versus presuppositionalism becoming more and more prominent. Am I right? Is that becoming a bigger topic of discussion?

Yeah, you might have your finger on the pulse more than I do. I got into the subject, I feel like when this was just getting started, and then I started to see the rise of interest in like classical theism and natural theology, and basically whether Protestants can appropriate and do some of that stuff, or if it's just Catholic, just kind of continuing to arise over the last decade.

But yeah, I do think especially, say, in the social justice discussions and the questions about the future for Christian conservatives in politics and such, there's a question about the foundation of that.

There's a question about how we respond to unbiblical ideologies that are afoot right now. Do we come back with our own set of presuppositions, and we can't get below those presuppositions, and so we just give people the Bible?

Or do we say on secular or philosophical grounds, we can oppose that? Can we team up with secular opponents of social justice or wokeness, et cetera? And do we have to say that those figures really ought to start from biblical presuppositions?

Or can we say they're seeing something that's just correct? So I think some of the natural law apologetics debates have showed up partly because of that as well.

Well, you wrote an article, and the title is The Natural Man Does Not Accept the Things of the Spirit of God, But He Can Accept Natural Theology, which of course is a response to this article I mentioned by Brian Mattson.

And Mattson is a presuppositionalist, a theonomist, I believe. And I am somewhat familiar with that world because I read a whole lot of Greg Bonson. The apologetics is what got me into it, but then I'm reading theonomy.

That's kind of the two-step there. A lot of people have made that progression. And you make a good point, I think, in this article. Basically, if I could summarize the article, you're saying that Mattson is wrong.

When Mattson says that reformed theologians who defend natural law and natural theology aren't actually doing their due diligence in the text. And if they really understood 1 Corinthians 2, six through 16 about the natural man and not receiving the things of the spirit of God, they wouldn't appeal to natural law.

And you're saying that's all wrong. And in fact, Mattson's understanding, which comes from a guy named Richard Gaffin of 1 Corinthians 2 is in error as well. And so what I wanna do in this episode, just so people know, is I want to get into some biblical texts.

And if that's the only one, that's fine. Maybe we'll get into some others. But I want to see whether or not from the text itself, we can determine if there's an anti-natural law bent going on, or if it precludes using natural law.

I think that's an important discussion.

Because as you pointed out,.

I think this is what's bringing the topic up, whether or not you can have co-belligerency or partner in some way, in an uncompromising way at least, with people from other traditions, namely Roman Catholics, to fight some of the social stuff that's going on.

And whether or not people that are unbelievers can get some things right, as far as temporal good, not heavenly good that pleases God, but temporal good. And natural law comes up in that. So, maybe let's start with your article.

You wrote against Mattson. What do you think, where is Mattson off, or Gaffin, I guess, where's Gaffin off in interpreting 1 Corinthians?

Yeah, so the, Mattson was arguing that, you know, this debate between presuppositionalists and natural law folks tends to bypass the biblical, exegetical support for either. There's a lot of kind of philosophical slinging, oh, circular argument, oh, we need biblical presuppositions.

And Van Til himself, Gaffin says this at the opening of the article, he was accused, and he actually conceded that he didn't do a lot of biblical exegesis. Like a lot of his, I mean, what people remember Van Til for is just these sweeping images up on a chalkboard and connecting one philosophy to another, and which inspired a lot of people.

But Richard Gaffin in the article is trying to give an exegetical foundation to Van Til's presuppositionalism. And so he goes to 1 Corinthians 2, which is a totally sensible place to go because it has a statement like the natural man does not understand the things of the spirit of God.

So we've got there potentially noetic effects of sin. We've got the natural man's inability to understand things about God. It sounds like a rebuke of natural theology. It sounds like a rebuke of the attempt to prove things to unbelievers apart from scripture and apart from them, say, being regenerated by the Holy Spirit as well.

And I had someone raise that to me as I write a substack called The Natural Theologian a few weeks back before I was thinking about the Gaffin article. So it's a great passage to go to to explore whether it

So you already had an article and then a situation arose that made it applicable, I suppose.

Well, a little bit of both. Somebody had mentioned that passage to me. So it was on my mind in that way. I had actually read Gaffin's article a decade ago when I was headed to Westminster Seminary myself where Gaffin was professor.

So I had thought about this before and when Brian Madsen said, you can't talk about natural law and natural theology if you're not gonna deal with Gaffin's exegesis, I said, I can do that. So Brian Madsen says he's working on his reply.

So looking forward to that.

Oh, okay.

So you're going back and forth, I see.

Yeah, hopefully.

Oh, that's good. Maybe I should have had you both on or something, but we'll get your side of it. I think people who aren't maybe as deep into this debate need to just kind of understand in simple terms what's going on.

It seems to me like at the root level, this argument hinges on what are the things of the spirit of God? Like what do we contain in that, right? And so more presuppositional minded folks have used this passage to say, and I guess you're saying Vantill has done this perhaps, or at least, or I guess Gaffin came and tried to use what Vantill was already saying, okay.

So Gaffin has said this, but they have used this to say that this includes all knowledge essentially. And you're saying, no, that's not what the passage said. And as a plain reading of the passage, I don't see that jump out at me either.

Maybe we should read the passage. I don't know, just so people have a sense here, but 1 Corinthians chapter two, if you guys want to turn there, I'm reading from New American Standard, 95 edition, but it says, for to us, God revealed, well, actually, maybe let's go back to verse six.

It says, yet we do not speak among those who are mature at wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away, but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age had understood, for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory, but just as it is written, things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.

For to us, God revealed them through the spirit, for the spirit teaches all things, even the depths of God, for who among them knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man, which is in him, even so the thoughts of God, no one knows except the spirit of God.

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those things taught by the spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words, and here's the passage here, but a natural man does not accept this spirit, the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.

He cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised, but he who is spiritual appraises all things that he himself is appraised by no one, for who has known the mind of the Lord that he will instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ, and so when you look at this, there's a contrast between wisdom, it's like a lot of other passages, you have the wisdom of God, wisdom of the world, and there's a certain sense in which unbelievers are on the outside of God's knowledge or wisdom here.

So what do you take it to be then? What do you think the wisdom being discussed here is?

Well, so their case, or Gaffin's case, is that there's a reason to generalize it to wisdom concerning all things. So he does it for a passage from the Gospels that he sees as background to this, where Jesus speaks of these things being hidden from the wise, but revealed to little children, and then he says, look, all things have been given unto me.

And so you see, in the first place, we've got a special set of things that are hidden and only revealed to those who come humbly and with the Spirit of God. In the second place, we have Christ now claiming authority over all things, so if you think about Abraham Kuyper, you've got, there's no square inch over which Christ doesn't claim his lordship.

And so the idea is that now that Christ is Lord over all things, if you don't understand the things, the word of Christ in the language of 1 Corinthians, these hidden things, you now lack the sort of epistemological key to all things, there's a generalization.

And Gaffin finds the same here when, I don't see the exact spot, oh, well, the spiritual person judges all things. There's another phrase, I'd have to look back at the article where it mentions Christ's authority over all things, so yeah, I'm looking for it, but I don't see the exact spot.

So you've got the sense that now knowing about Christ, knowing the word of the gospel is going to matter for everything, we can't just say it's only matters of salvation, it's now matters of politics, it's matters of the world.

It's matters of philosophy, it's matters of morality where not being able to understand the things of the spirit of God is going to matter. So that's Gaffin's exegetical argument. It kind of depends on that, increasing the scope of the things of the spirit of God to include everything.

Okay.

Okay, so I'll let you look for that quote, I guess, if you need it and.

Yeah, I'll just pull this up.

Well, I'm thinking of where to take it next. So this has a lot of implications because if what Gaffin is saying is true, and I guess Matt and who agrees with him and others, then that means, oh, did you find it?

The spiritual person judges all things is the phrase he leans on, which is what I was thinking of. So it's just the same generalization to all things.

Yeah, and you include a few comments or quotes from him. Paul's statement are a virtual commentary on Christ's teachings about hidden things in Luke 10 and Matthew 11. I think that's what you're referencing earlier.

Yes.

He says, it appears that this kingdom qualification somehow limits the scope of all things, but to the contrary, according to the New Testament, there is nothing in the entire creation that is relevant to the kingdom, right?

Absolutely nothing falls outside of the eschatological rule of Christ. And then another quote in some, according to Jesus revelation is the exclusive and comprehensive principium foundation and norm for human knowledge.

So that's his argument or at least his conclusion from the argument he presents, which is an exegetically driven argument. He's saying that scripture teaches this, it's not a philosophical strictly argument.

And the implication this would have is if that is true, then we should not expect unbelievers to be able to really understand anything out there. I think the escape hatch for presuppositionalists is that they have a Christian worldview, at least partially, whether they realize it or not.

They write by Romans one, that that's a Christian worldview and they have that. But you're saying that that's, I think what you're arguing is that no, actually there are some things people do understand because God has programmed them that way.

He's created them that way. It's natural to understand them. And it's not because they're just deceived into thinking they don't have the Christian worldview when in fact they do or something along those lines.

More practically speaking, how do you see this being, because that does sound very heady to some people, like how does this play out in conversations with atheists or social justice warriors, et cetera?

Yeah, I mean, it plays out in whether you are willing to argue with them on common ground. It plays out in whether you're willing to acknowledge that non-Christians sometimes get things right and not for a biblical reason, or not even from borrowing from the Christian worldview, but instead gaining things from the world or by being made in the image of God themselves.

And so the real question for Gaffin's exegetical argument is whether it proves everything he wants it to prove, which he says that it's the death knell for natural theology and natural law. And I think that's where that's contentious.

I was thinking of another passage towards the end of the book of 1 Corinthians, which is 1 Corinthians 15, 46, where you see this contrast between the natural and the spiritual come up again, talking about the resurrection, and you have the contrast between Adam and Christ, and it reads, but it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural and then the spiritual.

And that's a key framework I see in developing a Christian theology of the natural world and the realm of creation and how it relates to the realm of redemption. An idea like grace restores nature, it says we can't just say that nature has been completely obliterated and destroyed.

If man was made in order to have some perception of God, to be morally accountable to him, to have some awareness, both of God's law and of God's existence, then to say that that's completely gone, that he's completely covered up, he's completely suppressed it, would be to deny that he's any longer human.

And so for this passage, back in 1 Corinthians 2, I think the thing is that this is really talking about what it's been talking about since 1 Corinthians 1 .17, which is the word of Christ, 1 Corinthians 1 .18, the word of the cross.

This is about the gospel. This is about this new, the object of special revelation, not general revelation. Romans 1 says, knowing that God exists, has certain attributes, Romans 2, that his law is something that we're accountable to, that's supposed to be given in general revelation.

All reformed theologians agree that that's there in general revelation. The question of not understanding the things of the spirit of God, this is gonna be the object of special revelation, which is gonna be information like, you can be saved from your failures to live up to the law of God.

Things like God is a trinity. Things like God became man, the incarnation. So redemption, incarnation, trinity. These are objects of only special revelation. Now, Gaffin says that they have implications for everything and I'm totally on board with that.

That's Abraham Kuyper's observation. That's what I think everyone who believes in the whole matter of Christ and culture wants to say. Is that our Christian faith matters for everything. The question is, does that require us to say that all of the information we have is from the Bible and our Christian worldview?

Or was some of it prior to special revelation? Like a sense that, like I think a lot of people before becoming a Christian gain a sense of their moral accountability. They gain a sense of guilt. I'm thinking even of some particular people who have been inching towards faith.

Everything that they've come to realize so far is not the trinity, incarnation, or redemption. It's the natural law. It's the pangs of God's

You're thinking of Jordan Peterson, aren't you?

Well, Peterson and people who are kind of following that path. Friends I have who, they've left behind the kind of relativism and pure secular liberalism to now think, they're kind of like Socrates or Plato who believes in moral reality against relativism.

Like, I don't know about this Christianity stuff. I don't know about the details. I don't know about theodicy. But I do know that there's right and wrong. Because I've seen it. I've seen people try to live without it.

I've tried to live without it. And that doesn't seem right. And so I think that fits right in with, for example, Romans 2 in the category of a natural law written on the heart. I think it fits with an apologist like Francis Schaeffer who talked about pre-evangelism.

He talked about the idea of, well, Romans 1 talks about people suppressing the truth. Francis Schaeffer talked about this step of pre-evangelism where the sort of roof that people have built over themselves to keep reality out, you take the roof off.

And all of a sudden, like God gets in, the natural law gets in. And as Mattson and others would say, well, this is only sufficient to render them accountable to God. It's not sufficient for salvation.

Absolutely.

Everybody up to and including Thomas Aquinas says that. It's only sufficient to render us accountable to God. There's some debate about how much can people make use of this. You have neighbors down the street who seem to be living upstanding lives without Christ.

You know, we can basically discuss how much is that them living up to the natural law or is this just pure hypocrisy or what is this? But the natural law seems to be there. It seems to be having some effect.

Yeah, let me see if I can give an example. You tell me whether this fits in with what you're saying. I think it does. For me, one of the things that has caused me to reevaluate some of the presuppositional teaching that I've imbibed and also some of the things that I've said publicly, or at least in public settings to churches and so forth, is the masculinity debate, if you want to call it a debate, but this idea that there's rooted in creation, a masculine and a feminine, that God has established an order there.

And when you look at passages, because the woke folks always challenge you on this, the social justice crowd, the Me Too crowd, they'll say, you tell me, you show me in the Bible where it says that a man has to be this John Wayne type character, this is really tough.

Men can be weak, come on, women can be strong. They can be in the military, they can be in police jobs. And so that drove me to the text on these issues. And when I looked at the various texts on this, in fact, 1 Corinthians is one of them, he doesn't elaborate on what it means to be a man.

Act like men, okay, right, Paul, where's the 10 steps? Give me the definitive, what is a man? And the Philistines say this, I was just reading in Isaiah, I forget which chapter it was the other day, but God is judging one of these pagan countries and saying that your men shall be as women, right?

It's like, right, like he's saying this is a really bad thing, everyone knows it's bad. This is universally understood when you read the passage, but he doesn't go into detail about what that means. It's clear that you can pick up some things about strength from this, and I suppose leadership qualities, that kind of thing.

But it's basically, it's implied, it's assumed that people reading this kind of understand already what being a man is, what being a woman is, these are qualities. And for me, that was a huge thing. I just thought, okay, the Bible's assuming here, the authors of scripture are assuming more.

They're not giving you sort of like an ideological, here's the 10 comprehensive points. And I think that is important, right? Because if that's true, if there are things God's wired into creation, which we're gonna be held accountable for understanding and submitting ourselves to, and the non-Christians as well as Christians, that does mean that there can be a non-Christian, like a Jordan Peterson, for example, who understands maybe a little better what it means to be a man in the temporal world than someone who has the gospel, who's been born again, who seems to think that men can be effeminate and weak.

And I've seen so many examples of that. So is that, am I tracking?

Absolutely, yeah. One, I wanna get back to that one, but one kind of more humorous example I've used is like when the Bible says Jesus rode on a donkey, am I supposed to get my category of donkey from the Bible?

Like, no, I'm supposed to already know what a donkey is. Maybe I've seen one. I'm like, oh, Jesus rode on one of those. Similarly, Contra, Bart, and a lot of the Bartians, Bart's like weird Van Til on steroids, who's slightly heterodox.

Bart says we learn what man is from Christ, which I think we learn new things, for sure, in Christ. But when the Bible says that God became man, it means man, like that thing you are, and I am. This thing that already existed as part of God's creation, God took on flesh, like that.

It's not this brand new category. And I think what you said is important, too, because that's part of sifting through the fact that we live in a time in which what it is to be a man is very contested.

When we say that it's part of the natural law, it's even before the natural law, like the natural order to distinguish the two sexes, that's something that is just like, that's just there. Slightly lost the train of thought here.

It's the same on questions of like, we were talking beforehand about you're Italian, right? And I was saying I live in a very, a lot of, but I'm not. Like, how do we understand that category of Italian if we don't have a natural understanding of it?

I can't look in scripture. I can see Romans and figures that I guess, might've been your ancestors, but I can't understand what a modern Italian is or what pizza is, right? Is that what we're just

Sure, sure.

There's that. What I wanted to get to was, okay, things are contested. Okay, so the fact that there's a natural law does not mean that everyone is getting this right. It doesn't mean that every non-Christian is getting answers to these questions about what man and woman are and what masculinity and femininity are, right?

It just says that there's something to appeal to before we even get to the Bible. The Bible has stuff to say about this. The Bible does pertain to everything, but there's also created realities evident to human senses and our thought and reflection before that, which is why I've been intrigued by secular thinkers over the last decade who are pointing to these realities.

There's philosophers like Alex Byrne, who is at a very high level, spelling out that there are two sexes in the human species and contending this in philosophy journals in which it is very contentious.

But all of us who never studied philosophy already knew that. It was only the people who were corrupted by academia who, which is actually something else that's in the 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 that people don't recognize.

There's a big class analysis there, if you will, of the rulers of this age versus like the low, humble people who become Christians.

It says

Can we read it?

Was it 1 Corinthians 1, verse 20, I think?

Yeah, well, in chapter two, you've got, it's not a wisdom of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. In 1 Corinthians 1, you've got

The wise man, the scribe, the debater.

Yeah, the wise man, the scribe, the debater. These are like intellectual elites, if you will. You've got mention of the rulers here somewhere as well. Well, you know, you're not wise according to worldly standards.

Many of you were not powerful or of noble birth. So you have a sense that, which I think maps onto our own time, that it's actually often the kind of elites of a society that are getting the most confused about these things, whereas the average person is still kind of perceiving the basic structure of morality and God.

And so

Because they have to,.

Because they have to live in the real world, they have to interact with people more than they do ideas. And that just kind of takes away these abstract, you know, innovative claims.

I think so.

You know, another spot I think about as a biblical basis for natural law is the book of Proverbs, where there's a lot about wisdom and God's law being a good thing because it works. Not just because it is revealed in a special book, but because that's the way the world works.

The exceptions being rich and powerful people who can sort of stave off the effects of disobedience. You know, there is discussion of a king or a rich person who is sort of getting away with evil. That's in the Psalms as well.

But a big theme of the Proverbs is, you know, if you, you know, young man, go commit adultery, it's gonna come back to bite you. Like you're not gonna last very long, you know. I was hearing even on like, this is a main theme of Jordan Peterson.

I even heard it on some of these other podcasts like the other day, Theo Vaughn talking to Mark Cuban, and both of them talking about Diddy and how when people get rich and powerful, they think they can get away with anything.

And both of these guys are saying, it seems like that's not the case. It seems like this stuff comes back to bite you in the butt. So, you know, the idea that none, I think it's good to believe that God's law works.

And that means not believing it just on the basis of, of the Bible, but from human wisdom and experience, that actually confirms us in our faith. We say, you know, yeah, the Bible says not to do this stuff, but it's not just a random list of rules.

Like this is actually, as C .S. Lewis says, the laws for running the human machine.

No, go ahead.

Sorry, I don't know. I was gonna say, you know, the presuppositional arguments, like the transcendental argument, right? That is the argument, I guess, right? His argument's plural, that is the argument.

Type of argument, yeah.

Well, that's the one they say, I mean, even Bonson will say like, that's the only one you should use. I've always been more partial to frames like, hey, you can use all these natural arguments, but you gotta start with the premise that God exists and so forth.

But in seeing this on the ground, on college campuses and so forth, the reason this seems to work is actually because I think what you're saying is true. And I guess, you know, I've always believed this, even though I drank deeply from presuppositional guys, but I've always just realized when you interact with someone who's a skeptic on a college campus, there are some things that they know that God has wired into them.

Now, I don't know that I've ever really thought, like, maybe I've said things that contradict this, I don't know, but the presuppositional framework seems to imply that the reason for that is because they adopt the Christian worldview.

They have the same, it's like, they're just deceived. They don't know they have the same worldview as you, so you have to take off the blinders to let them know that, hey, they have the same worldview.

And that's, it's pretty comprehensive. Like, they know about the Trinitarian God of scripture, even if they're speak a different language, you know, in another country, they've never been exposed to scripture or the gospel or any of that.

They have this knowledge. But in actuality, it's because they have these natural instincts that God's given them to not just recognize even design, but just like, I'm thinking of passages where it talks about, you know, what fathers do, even wicked ones, you're worse than an unbeliever if you don't take care of your kids.

Like, the unbelievers do this, right? So you say, Christians, like, hey, if you don't do, you're like, you don't even meet the standard the unbelievers meet, and that's a good thing they're doing. So, so all that to say, like, that's the powerful weapon I think we have is once you start trying to force them to live by their own presuppositions, they can't do it.

And that is the strength, perhaps, of the presuppositional approach. But the reason it's strong is, I think, because of what you're saying, right?

No, that's a very good point. Like, a lot of my discussions, people have to go with sort of, which way do you push people for consistency? Do you say, you know, you're a secular person. If you were a consistent, total atheistic materialist, wouldn't there be no moral reason to do anything?

So why don't you just go kill a bunch of people and rape them, you know? And that's one way to push people for consistency. But another way is to just acknowledge that no one actually really believes that that's good.

And so they already have some sort of moral knowledge. I mean, especially like secular liberal people, some of their main objections to Christianity are deeply moral objections. They are, God is not good if that's what God does or says about people.

You know, if God commanded a Canaanite genocide, if God excludes some people for unchosen features of themselves, you know, those are deeply moral arguments. And so, you know, Nietzsche would come back at them and say, you know, give up the morality completely.

I don't wanna say that. I think we should say, look, you have this moral perception and moral sense and conscience because you're made in the image of God. And you could say that that's presuppositional because it's like getting down to the foundation of why morality is the case.

But I'm not saying you have no right to those moral intuitions. Of course you do. You have a right to them because God made you that way. It's because of the way the world is. It's not because of the worldview you have.

And so there's actually a key philosophical distinction here between the order of being and the order of knowing. This would show up in our classes about Vantill. Like the presuppositional Vantillian idea is that the order of knowing should match the order of being.

So here's what I'm talking about. In the order of being, that's the way things actually are. What is most fundamental? What is causally and, you know, metaphysically dependent on that? Well, why is there a moral law in human beings?

Well, it's because of God and the way he made us and that reality isn't fundamentally just matter in motion. It is personal and moral. Okay, so that's the order of being. But what about the order of knowing?