Today on the podcast for Cultural Reformation, I will be joined by Dr. Joe Boot, Dr. Mike Teeson, and we'll be talking about the law, Word of God, the unnatural law, and stedism. Well, welcome back to the podcast for Cultural Reformation. I'll be your host today, Pastor Nate Wright, and I'm joined as always by my colleagues, Dr. Joe Boot and Dr. Mike Teeson, and we're here and we're going to be discussing God's law. And we're in this series where we're going through the content of Joe's newest work, Think Christianly. If you haven't got your hands on that work yet, we would encourage you to do so. And you can use these podcasts that we're doing on the subject as sort of a small group discussion on the content of the book. I'd show how you're doing today. To him, well, Nate, thank you. Beautiful early spring day today in the south here of England. First one, I have to say in quite a few weeks where we've actually got some some sunshine. So very pleased. They'd always put you in a better mood, doesn't it? Saying the sun come out. That's right. Get that vitamin D. And Mike Teeson is not joining us from his sunny, beautiful paradise of Tennessee, but instead he is up here in the cold white north where we still have a layer of snow on the ground. How you doing, Mike? Layer. You mean we still have 45 feet of layers of snow in the berry area. There's just been snowing continually since I've been here, but we're actually enjoying a day of sun. Again, I'm up here to be with my dad and it's been sweet to be with my folks. So yeah, it's really great to be sitting with you guys and we're about to talk about one of the most, I think, important and delightful topics that we could be talking about on a day like today. Certainly one of the topics that we address often, both on the show and our content. This chapter in Think Christianly is called Think Christianly about Law. And this is part one. We're going to be doing a couple of podcasts on this, but this one is the meaning of law, natural law and politics. So why don't we start our discussion by talking a little bit about how some Christians view the law as sort of a moral tips for the soul, you know, simple ways for us to think about living more moral or upright lives. But really what we want to talk about as we discuss law first off is that the law of God is not a human invention. It's actually a creation reality grounded in the word of God. So why don't you start Joe and just give us some structure for how we ought to be thinking about the cosmic reality of God's law and that it's more than just the moral tips that we would see or that most Christians think about in terms of tips to help me live a little bit better. Yeah, it's important to think about law as you say along cosmic, creation lines as opposed to a little bit of ethical guidance here and there for how you're living in the world from a Christian standpoint, every word of God in a sense, but an important sense is a law word. Think about the beginning of creation, for example, where God says let there be and there was. And when God speaks anything into being, there's actually a promise and a command word involved in the in the act of creation, isn't there? Because in let there be and there was you have not just the creation of that entity or thing, but you have the promise of its continuity. Let there be God said, let there be and there was. And so the creation in many respects is the instantiation of God's word and the God's word holds for all of creation. And in fact, Scripture says it holds all things together, who all actually deepens our understanding of creation and creation law when he says that in Christ all things consist or hold together. So the word of God, the the law word of God is the condition of the existence of all created things. And so when you think about law in the cosmic sense, you can think about the law as it exists for the the oceans where God says that you know the sea is not to transgress this boundary. The law that was established for the stars and the movement of the heavenly bodies of the earth itself, the law as it's established for insect life and plant life and the life of the oceans and the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field. And then of course finally for man himself on day six of creation. And so every word of God is a a command and promise as God calls all things into being. And he sustains and upholds all things by his powerful word in him we live and move and exist or how are being. So from the biblical standpoint, law is the condition of life. It is the it is the it is the very thing which orders and holds everything together. Unless there was a law order for the cells in my body, for example, I wouldn't be able to live that the you know as I sit here doing this podcast, I am not giving intellectually giving commands self consciously to the cells of my body to repair and regenerate to to tidy up the toxins to deal with the mess to kill off pre cancerous cells to do that that the constant at the microscopic level that's going on in my body all of the time is governed by God's law word. And at the same time, so from that micro level to the macro level as you know for me, it's now half past three in the afternoon and for you guys there in Canada, it's 10 30 in the morning, the very movement of the planetary bodies, the position of the sun in the heavens is governed by the law word of God. And the connection between creation and the law and the creation law and juridical law and moral law of course is that they both have the same author and that the moral law as it's given to us in the 10 words, the 10 commandments is the lovely connection there scripturally you know creation comes about by God's 10 words and then he issues another 10 words when he creates his covenant people and gives the decalogue and the man is there on the mountain Exodus 24, I think we haven't got time to get into all of that and exegete it but it's a complete marvel when you think about God himself writing his law, his moral law, republishing in many respects, his moral law and making known is redemptive word for creation. So I think as Christians we do have the habit when we hear that the idea of law or moral law to just think impurely in terms of a few ethical commands as you said, Nate, and your moral tips for the living rather than the structuration of the totality of life, you know, Torah, the word Torah literally means instruction which in the English if you break that word down reminds us that we are in structure, right? So we are to be instructed to have to be in structure is the nature of instruction. It reminds me that my entire life, my entire existence is governed by God's structuration of all things. So I think that's probably the starting point for the Christian as we think about law that every word of God is both promise and command, it is a law word. Yeah, that's a really good kind of a way to think about it when we often think about instruction, we think about, you know, those ethical commands for how we live morally within the framework of the world, but to think of instruction as being in structure within God's creation helps us see the totalizing view of God's word. And you have a really helpful quote in the book at this point by Herman Bavink. And I just want to read that and then I'll kick it over to Michael to kind of riff off. You quote Herman Bavink and he says, the Christian worldview holds that man is always and everywhere bound by laws set forth by God as the rule for life everywhere. There are norms which stand above man. They find a unity among themselves and find their origin and continuation in the creator and logiver of the universe. These norms are the most precious treasures entrusted to mankind to live in conformity to these norms in mind and heart in thought and action. This is what it means to most basically to become conformed to the image of God's son and this is the ideal and the goal of man. And so the view of law that simply sees it as moral tips for living, which many Christians fall into that trap rather than seeing it as this cosmic framework that Christians are to find their place in God's cosmos. So as I read that quote Michael, where does that take you in terms of correcting some of the errors of modern Christians thinking about the law? Well, this is where I think this category of our work at the Ezra Institute, and particularly where Joe leads the institute in research and thinking is so helpful because what Joe has done is that it's taken a step back and looked at the scriptural philosophy of law. So I know that one of the most helpful things for me is that when we, I think the Christian church often immediately wants to dialogue about the concept of law out of Galatians and they're wondering what the apostle Paul is doing in the book of Galatians when he he's trying to clarify the difference between hoping in the law for salvation and hoping in Christ for salvation. And so there tends to be this negative view of law coming out of Christians just looking at the book of Galatians. And when you sit back and you rethink about law as a law structure, I know that's a word that Joe uses quite regularly and it's such an important part of just the concept of law. So if I look and I go, what what is the very meaning of law? And then I think, okay, the very meaning of law is that it is a law structure for life. Then the next from there is, okay, God has a particular and specific instruction for us about the law structure of life in the word. And then there are other law structures that we would observe in His creation. And then when we come along and we go, okay, well, what would a false religion do? Well, a false religion would create a false law structure. And so you've taken a step back from the average Christian experience about just trying to figure out the position of law within my within my salvation and within my redemptive life. And you've taken a step back and you've said, okay, wait, whoa, law is good. Like because law helps us bring structure to society, well, the moment you have a positive view of law and that is developed from scripture and then from the Old Testament, particularly as it grows out and then Christ clearly being the great law giver and law clarifier. All of a sudden, when you get to Paul, who is trying to refute legalism and an improper use of the law in the midst of the Pharisees who were literally ready to, you know, hit people over the head with certain parts of the law that they found easy to obey and then totally break the law in murdering Christ, you're far more careful to read the book of Galatians and to have a more biblical and therefore positive view of the concept of law. Because again, this is where the church seems to be schizophrenic. On one hand, you ask any pastor, would you get up in the pulpit and say, God's law is bad? And they would be, of course not. Okay, great. Why don't you get up in the pulpit and say, God's law is good. And it's a stutter, it's a stammer because they're confused. They haven't taken a step back and looked at this concept of law as a law structure, a creational norm. And I think that's just very helpful work. I think once you take that step back, then you're able to really reengage with all of the ongoing Christian conversation about law. Yeah, that's good. And so if we're trying to push forward this view of law, that is, so it's a complex of norms meant to balance human interests and conformity with God's created world. It's actually showing the structure of how life works within the world that God has created. So Joe, I mean, this might seem like an obvious question, but just for our listeners who are connecting the dots, if I guess my question would be, you know, if it isn't law, the here'd be kind of one of the objections that we would hear often is, you know, isn't law just a secular tool for social order? Why does it need a religious foundation? And so why don't you speak to that for a minute? Well, that really comes down to the question of the origin of law and the root of law. So from the, in the biblical worldview, there's actually three elements. This is a Gordon spikeman actually in his excellent reformational dogmatics. He shows and talks about the Christian view being recognizing the triune God of Scripture as a wholly distinct from the creation, but engaged with it, the triune God, his law word for creation, and then the cosmos itself. So that in essentially you have a three factor worldview there and the law is both boundary and bridge between God and his creation. There is a distinction, a radical distinction in the Christian worldview between God and creation. And that is provided for by the fact that there is a mediating law word from God. So although God is engaged in present and involved in his creation, he cannot be conflated or confused with it. So that's the religious root of the Christian view of law. So if you're going to posit law, then obviously you have to, you have to have a grounded source somewhere. And we'll probably talk, I think, a little bit about a couple of the most popular views of law today. But certainly secularism has tried to sell people the past that it is just a neutral apparatus for society and social order that its rules and its laws are just neutral tools for the guiding of society. But law is never simply a neutral tool floating in midair. If you take for example the idea of law as a command word, law is not advice. We make a distinction between advice and law, don't we? We don't say that the police are really laying the advice down today. It's they're laying the law down or the civil authorities really laying the law down or they're reading them the riot act as we say in England to read the riot act. This idea of law appeals to a source of authority or a source of sovereignty. And every source of sovereignty, every idea of sovereignty presupposes a divinity concept, something that has the place of God. So that will either be the living God as the author and ultimate authority behind law as the religious root of law. Or it will be man as the ultimate source of law. That's going to be found either in the reason of man individually as a law purely unto himself or really what we have in the the west today, status law, the idea that ultimately the state is as man enlarged is the source of sovereignty and law. The state in a sense is divinized to the position of God as law giver as the source of law. Not just as the as an agency which positiveizes that's makes concrete or makes valid legal principles that transcend it, but is literally the source of law is the origin of law, is the root of law. And that's a fundamentally religious claim. So there's the when we talk about the idea of secular laws, that doesn't make them non-religious, secular, secular meaning just simply of this world. It just means that from a worldview point of view, the divinity concept is found is being is located somewhere else. But it's just as a religious view of law to talk about secular law, secular principles or neutral laws or instrumental laws and so on, as it is to talk about God's law. Because law can only have one of two sources, can't it? Either a transcendent source for law or an imminent source, a non-transcendent source for the law, either rooted in the living God or some substitute divinity concept. So I think we have to be careful as Christians not to buy that past. There has been sold as Michael kind of alluded to there, sold to the church and the Christian community. That yeah, we can talk about law in terms of the gospel and salvation and just separating law and gospel. But the law out there in society and for the state, that's just secular law and we just go along with that. That's just the accepted status quo. Our concern is only with salvation in the eternal sense and law and gospel and how do we pass that out in terms of Galatians. And we've neglected to think about the religious root of all law as it expresses itself within civil society and within the role of the state. And there is no such thing as a non-religious law, no neutral law. And I think that's one of the things that we need to keep in mind because if, you know, anytime we, we truncate our view of law to merely showing us that none of us measure up to God's law and it's a tool to get us to the foot of the cross, then we've actually abandoned the very tool that God's given us for the discipleship of the nations. And I think, you know, just to kind of get practical in this part of our conversation, I kind of want to wrap up with letting our listeners get a little bit of application from you, Michael, in terms of so what, right? Why does this matter for the Christian? Why is a transcendent view of law and the knowledge that all laws fundamentally religious? How does that change the Christian who's living Monday through Saturday? What's the so what coming out of this, Mike? Yeah, I think that we need to stop treating the Bible as a devotional book. That is so privatized and we need to start treating the historical examples, the explicit commands, as a structural book. We need to sit back the way that the Ezra Institute is trying to help people sit back and do and think about God's created structures and how Scripture helps us obey God in those structures. So it's a structural book. And I'll just close with an illustration, you know, when I teach young people about marriage and about intimacy, a lot of people think they can just be flimp it, they can be flippant with their affection, their emotion, and their physicality. And I use an example of the very physical reality that there are laws within a relationship. And if two people are bound together, the way that God has designed us to be bound together, if those two things are then torn apart, it's like taking two pieces of paper that are glued together and trying to rip them apart. There is a physical and emotional reality that you face when you break God's law word on that very important topic in our life. So the Bible is not just a devotional book, it is a structural book for our lives. And if you believe the gospel but ignore God's law for society, essentially you're effectively living as a practical atheist in the public square, which none of us want to do. This episode of the Podcast for Cultural Reformation is brought to you by Ezra Media from in-depth lectures, conference talks, podcasts, and exclusive content like premium shows and the podcast post show, Ezra Media is the digital home for the Ezra Institutes Teaching and World View Resources, helping Christians think clearly and live faithfully in every area of life. When you sign up for premium plus, you gain access to exclusive content like the Ezra Podcast post show where the guys dive deeper into the topics discussed in the main episode, along with Ezra Press eBooks and even the opportunity to join live recordings. You can sign up today by going to Ezramedia.tv and if you use the coupon code podcast, you'll save 15% off an annual subscription. That's using coupon code podcast and you'll save 15% off an annual subscription. Now back to the show. It's fundamentally religious and so what we want to do is kind of analyze the legal crisis of modern culture and the philosophical roots of humanistic law. Why don't we start with something that seems like every conversation that Joe gets into slips into the totalitarianism of the state. Joe, why don't you talk to us a little bit about what happens when God is removed and the state becomes the new source of law which seeks total competence over every sphere of life. Well, we were talking a little bit in the last segment about divinity concepts and the fact that if you dispense with the living God of Scripture, you don't get rid of the idea of God of the divine, you just replace the living God and his attributes with something else, with some other agency, with some other personage, with some other foundation. It's probably important to just say, first of all, what we mean by totalitarianism because I think when we use that word, the image that people have in their minds is jackboots, great big banners of a dictator like a Stalin or a Hitler or Mussolini, they're thinking of that sort of huge authoritarian regimes. Of course, that is an expression of totalitarianism. But the actual idea of it is where the one particular agency in human life, one actually well-created and God-ordained agency of human existence. The state usurps the role of God and starts to treat other aspects, I should say, of human life and society of God's creation structures in a part to whole relationship when they begin to swallow the other aspects of life and treat them as lesser parts of itself. So if you were to ask where you guys are right now in Canada, well what are the parts of what are the parts properly of the state in Canada? Well, they are the provinces. So the nation state of Canada as a national entity, the various provinces within Canada, you guys are in Ontario. I was writing to a friend of mine today in Prince Edward Island. There are various provinces, so those are parts of the state. Within the provinces there are municipalities. So you've got these divisions of the state where the divisions of its authority, its civic authority right down to the municipalities is considered. But when you think about the church or the family or the school or the business, those are not parts of the state. They may do reside in the territory of the nation state, but they're not parts of the state. But totalitarianism is when we start to define human existence and human life in terms of the political, that is in terms of the state rather than in terms of the politics of the kingdom of God. And instead of seeing the kingdom of God and the rule of God through the Lord Jesus Christ as the ultimate totalizing conception, the only totalizing conception, where the family, the church, the civic authority, the business, the school, etc. are to be parts, expressions of the kingdom of God within their spheres of life. This is where the state actually usurps the position of God, himself, the kingdom of God and says, no, all these areas are lesser parts of the state and man realizes people realize their life, their happiness, their good as political animals only within the life of the state. And we can go back, of course, the basic idea is older than Aristotle, but we can go back to the Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle who wrote their status manifestos, Aristotle's politics. These were visions of human life that saw the divine, basically as reason, as thought thinking itself, and the divine was expressed or manifest in in the rational nature of human beings. So, don't think in terms of a personal God of the Bible, the creator God, the covenant making God, the law giving God, but rather an abstract idea of pure reason, pure form. And in a sense, nature is God and man, as an aspect of nature, his rational thinking participates for the Greek philosophers in that, in divine reason. And the expression, the state, basically, so in divine reason, which is expressed in man's mind, you have the law giver, you have the source of law, the reason of man, that sort of what we might call natural law is then expressed politically as the state. So, the state is basically a divine idea, it's the idea of reason, and the state exists for Aristotle to bring you to perfection. For man to realize his good, his happiness, and his perfection, his moral good and his happiness, he must be a full participant in the life of the state. He mustn't be part of the barbaroid, those who are outside of God forbid the Greek state, but inside, as a political animal, as Aristotle understood human beings, that they can only understand themselves, their true being, discover their true good, true virtue, true justice, and be guided and no happiness within the context of their dream of a totalizing state. And because there's no living God above or beyond the state that transcends human reason and the expression of human reason in the state, then the state is accountable to nobody, therefore its authority is total. There's no appeal beyond the state to the living God and his word, its competence is seen as total, and even worse, perhaps, there is no intrinsic limit on the authority and jurisdiction of the state at all, because the state exists to bring you to your good. It's for you to realize your good, your happiness, your perfection, your virtue. And so the role of the state in the Christian view is the harmony of public legal interest. It's there to be a ministry of public justice. It's not concerned with trying to patronize Nate and Michael into this is virtue and the state will now make you good, bring you to virtue and perfect you. No, it's there to punish the evil doer. It's to be, it's to manifest public justice as a ministry of justice, but there's no intrinsic limit within paganism. And so therefore the state is by definition totalizing. There's no limit on its competence, authority, and its reach. So that's what we mean by totalitarianism. And those were the Greeks, expressed those ideas very carefully and very famously in classic works of early philosophy that have continued to influence us. So when you go to things like the Russo social contract, these are similar utopian sort of communistic ideas of a totalizing state where man surrenders his own personal freedom to the state and the idea of the general will. So that the state itself is not something that God has established that's not there in terms of covenant with God, but is purely contractual and thereby totalizing. So this idea of the state has been around a long time. It's been pushed back against consistently by Christianity, but wherever Christianity wanes and starts to fade in its public influence, you see the re-emergence of this saving totalizing messianic state. Well, and it's interesting because I think there might be some of our listeners who are listening to your assessment of philosophy, Joe, and might be maybe getting a little lost in the weeds here, but we can see the shadow of Aristotle merely in the totalizing view of man. So what we are saying is that man is fundamentally a religious creature created by God, but the kind of end game of Aristotle and Plato's philosophy is that man is primarily a political animal and therefore as a political creature, the highest form of authority comes from the state and man's relationship to the state as a political creature, what we are saying is that man created in God's image is fundamentally a religious creature. And you can see that when you, depending on which fundamental presupposition you have about how man is and who man is, it can show you how if man is primarily a political animal, you can see how religion becomes this individualized thing for your own moral life, it's about your own personal salvation rather than how you live as a creature in God's world. So I hope our listeners can kind of see how fundamental Christian philosophy actually impacts everyday life. I want to come back to Aristotle in just a minute with you, Joe, but I want to ask this because Michael, there might be some people who think that we're being a little bit dramatic by saying that the state is totalitarian simply because it doesn't use the Bible as its primary text. So, so Michael, let me just ask you plainly, is the state really totalitarian just because it's not resting, it's fundamental principles on the Bible? Oh, you're muted there, Michael. Thank you, friend. I was just muted in order to hear the dulcet tones of our president while I was listening there. By the way, I just, as a, you know, when I think of jackboots on my neck, I actually don't think of jackboots, I think of Joe boots. That's kind of funny. That's what wakes me up in nightmares in the middle of the night. So to answer your question, Nate, actually, everything that Joe just explained for every reason that Joe just gave, and then even your summary there, the answer to that is yes, that the state becomes totalitarian when it does not recognize the living God, and we are, God is revealed to us, you know, in his creation, generally, and very specifically in his special revelation. And even when you just said there, Nate, when you said the presupposition is political animal versus religious animal, think about that in your marriage. Like if I'm in my marriage and I am called to serve my wife and my children, if I view myself as a religious animal who is accountable to God, then all of my efforts in serving them, the, the direction of what I'm doing is to be God honoring accountable to the Lord, and it's very clarifying. If I'm, if I'm just a political animal in my marriage, then everything about my, my family is me manipulating relationships. It's literally the difference between ministering to other people and manipulating other people. If I am religiously oriented, and of course, by the true Christian religion, then, then I truly am accountable to minister to people. If I see them myself just as a politician everywhere I go, well, then I'm just, I'm not worried about the truth. I'm not worried about reality. I am simply worried about where I can win how to manage my losses and who can I manipulate. So yes, I think that the state becomes totalitarian. It will overreach its boundaries as Joe has talked about. It will create rules that it's not allowed to create because those are God's creational norms and his revealed laws. In all of those ways, simply because it will not accept the God of the Bible. That's a very important concept. We live in God's creation. When we try to negate the creator, then we end up simply totalizing other people. And again, we end up being manipulators, not ministers. Yeah, that's good. And so to bring this back to you, Joe, you're talking about Aristotle. And I think pragmatically what comes out of the philosophy of Aristotle is sort of law as whatever works within society. So I kind of have two questions for you so you can see where I'm leading you in your answer, but you can play off either one of these. So maybe for some people who look at sort of the impact of Aristotle on modern life, they might say Aristotle's philosophy has served Western civilization well. So what's the problem now? Maybe one of the places you can go is to also address another maybe objection to what we're saying here. And that would be defining law through the Bible sounds like theocracy that ignores modern pluralism. So talk a little bit about how Aristotle pragmatically serves the pluralism of the day and God's law and our understanding of law actually, I don't know, dismantles pluralism in the right way. So talk a little bit about why Aristotle's philosophy, even though it seems to have served Western civilization well, isn't ultimately what's going to bring the nations under Christ. Well, obviously, in just a few minutes, that's a total order, but the fundamentally Aristotle did not know God. He did not know Christ. He did not have the word of God revealed in his hand. It's not something he was subject to. And it's not to say that Aristotle didn't stumble over certain truths, small tea in the world that are a value and that he wrestled with. The fact that he saw that there was a law order within creation, I mean Plato saw that there was a law for creation. He just sort of shunted it up into an abstract realm of being. Aristotle saw that, yeah, but the creation responds lawfully. So there were things that he, as all unbelievers can, as creatures of God in God's creation, he stumbled over certain true small tea within creation. But he was not grounded in the truth, that is in Jesus Christ. So for him, nature is eternal. There is no creation. You can't have creation law in Aristotle. You can't have revealed law in Aristotle because there is no living personal, relational, infinite God. And there is no creation. Nature is God. Man's mind participates in that concept of the divine man is God ultimately. And so the pagan world was a barbarous and cruel place. We live thousands of years, of course, a couple of thousand years later. We've lost contact with that world of cruelty and barbarity and pederacity and so forth. But as you see, repagonizing cultures moved back into all of those things. So Aristotle and the Greek tradition ended up in skepticism and cynicism and hopelessness and desperation and that world felt. And the Christian era was born. Now there were challenges as Christians in the Greco-Roman world began to try and win. Greek thinkers to the Lord Jesus, politicians, the educated class in society and sometimes they compromised biblical truth. We'll come to that in a bit. But ultimately, it was only as the revelation of Christ and His Word began to be the seasoning in the directing force within Western civilization. That real change began to take place. It wasn't Aristotle. It was the brought about the transformation. It was the Word of God. It was Christianity versus classical culture as Cochrane has written about. And it was the conquest of Christ and His Word revelation over the categories and the thinking and behavior of the classical world that birthed and gave us the Christian era. And of course, that Greek world of classical learning is broken out a number of times. It will go out the Renaissance, the so-called enlightenment and so forth. Trying to revive man as the measure of all things. And you've had the reformation and the evangelical openings that have pushed it back. That battle still goes on to this day. And yes, of course, it's a rivalry between two theocracies. Every social order is a theocracy. It just depends which God is at the center and head of that, theocracy in the ancient Roman world when the apostles are preaching the gospel. Caesar was God. Caesar was Lord. And they resisted that theocracy of Caesar. With the enlightenment rationalist man as the measure of all things, man's reason and his that that reason expressed in the state. As Hagel said, the state is the divine idea as it exists on earth. That was the theocracy. It was the theocracy of the state of man's reason as divinized as God. Go to the Islamic world. And the Sharia law, you have Allah and basically Muhammadanism is the divinity concept. So every social order is a theocracy. The question is, will it be the theocracy of the living God or a false God? And actually, the greatest freedom has always been found in the theocracy of the true and living God who provides for unity within diversity, not the totalitarian conceptions of every other religious world and life view. Is there difference between legal pluralism and structural pluralism? We believe in structural pluralism, the various spheres of life that have their freedom under God. We don't believe in a legal pluralism that says there's many gods and many laws and you can follow whichever you like and expect to still have a society. Well, then ultimately what happens following Aristotle's philosophy is that whenever you find what is natural, you've found what's morally good. And we as Christians would reject that idea because what is ultimately good is found in God's structures for the world. This episode of the podcast for cultural reformation is brought to you by the Ezra Foundations curriculum. The Ezra Foundations curriculum equips churches, small groups and Christian educators with a clear biblical worldview for all of life rooted in scripture and aligned with the theology of the Ezra Institute. It's designed to help participants think Christianly about family, education, politics, culture and more. Each curriculum kit includes full access to the Ezra Foundations video courses featuring Dr. Joe Boot, Pastor Nate Wright and Dr. Michael Tisen, along with 10 printed participant guides and a comprehensive leaders guide for group facilitation. Learn more and get started today at EzraMedia.tv slash Foundations. Now back to the show. Now we want to continue our conversation here on God's Law and we talked a little bit in our last session about Aristotle. But I want to, I kind of want to get to where Aristotle got baptized by the church. And so Joe, I know you are used to saying this concisely, but why don't you just talk a little bit about St. Thomas Aquinas and how this idea of natural law, because we've been talking about it in terms of the fundamental principle of man being religious, not political, as Aristotle said. But what happened is as Aristotle's philosophy gripped the world, St. Thomas Aquinas went on a very specific mission of synthesizing those thoughts. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the history and how the philosophy of a pagan like Aristotle became so baptized in the church? Well, obviously, as we sort of track through in this series, some of the ideas that I'm dealing with and think Christianly, we want to really encourage people to go out and get think Christianly so that they can dive into the details here. Because this is so critical for understanding the modern evangelical church, the modern western world and the condition of the church today within the culture. And we understand, of course, that these sort of discussions are not always easy if you're just driving your truck to the job site today or getting the ironing done at home, and you may want to listen to it twice or whatever it may be. But we did do a series as well, actually a couple of years ago on Thomas Aquinas, on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. So we'll encourage people to look back at that podcast series. I think it was a six or seven part series on Thomas Aquinas if you want to do a deep dive into this. But just keeping it on the coffee table level and covering it as best we can in just a few moments here, Thomas Aquinas was a an important thinker who represents the sort of the high point of the scholastic movement. And this is the late middle ages, the high middle ages, where Aquinas is thinking and writing. He is an incredible giant of Christian thought in many respects. And he was trying to respond in part to Islam. But here, Islam had picked up Aristotle in the seventh and eighth century, largely through the translation work of Christian scriptoriums and libraries through the monasteries, conquered Christian peoples, Islam gathered that sort of learning. And they began to try and use Aristotle against Christianity. And they began to argue for Islam and it's unitarian understanding of the being of God and trying to capture Aristotelian arguments, the Calam cosmological, cosmological argument and so forth. Various arguments to try and do apologetics for Islam. So the Pope at the time commissioned Aquinas to interpret Aristotle for the church. So the Roman Catholic church actually said to Aristotle, we want you to go, said to sorry Aquinas, we want you to go to Aristotle's work and we want you to prevent Islam capitalizing on Aristotle against us by utilizing Aristotle in service of the church. And in many respects, what we can say about the middle ages is that they were a synthesis era. It was a synthesis culture. It was a culture that was trying to blend its Greco-Roman past and history with Christianity. And in many respects, this was the zenith of that attempt where Aquinas goes to the work of Aristotle and he begins to try and deal with issues of dogma, of philosophy, of doctrine, of social order in terms of an explicit blend of the thinking of Aristotle principally, although there is platonic ideas in the early Aquinas as well, to try and blend that to try and synthesize his philosophy with Christianity. And that led to all kinds of problems. And we can't talk about all of here. But one of them, of course, was how do you synthesize a worldview that denies the triune living God of Scripture and creation with a faith and a doctrine that says, no, there is a living and triune relational God who created all things from nothing. Well, the Greeks had said from nothing comes nothing. So first of all, Aquinas is on the horns of a dilemma. How does he maintain these two authorities? Greek philosophy and the Bible at the same time, especially when they're at these contradictory elements as basic as the being of God and the law word of God for creation and the very idea of a creation from nothing. So that's the first struggle that Aquinas has. How do we bring these ideas together? So he ends up with this sort of idea of participation that everything that is an Aristotelian idea, everything is somehow participates in God. And that includes the immortal rational soul. And because this immortal rational soul participates in the divine. Remember, we've talked about this many times on the podcast, but just as a quick reminder to people, this worldview, the Greek worldview, was a two story worldview. Think of a double deck of bus. On the upper deck was a transcendent part. The lower deck was a non-transcendent part. The upper deck was an eternal part, the lower deck, a temporal part. So the upper deck was the spiritual or ideas around the immaterial or forms. And the lower deck was a changing material realm of matter. And the lower deck, this lower area was basically considered lesser in theory in Greek thought. And so suddenly Aquinas is wrestling with this idea that the creation of the material world is somehow lesser or lower. And so that's the non-transcendent part. And then there's this transcendent part, which is linked with the divine, the forms, ideas, reason. And so the second critical problem for Aquinas is thinking about what are the effects of sin and disobedience and rebellion against God on the thinking and on the reasoning of human beings. And because for the Greeks for Aristotle, there was no conception of sin or of a falling away from the living God in rebellion and total depravity, as we say within the reformational tradition from the scriptural standpoint, man is dead in trespasses and sins. He cannot obey God's law. He doesn't want to obey God's law. He can't from his heart. He can't obey it. He's an enmity with God. That wasn't part of the Greek worldview. So Aquinas ends up kind of having a fudge. And he sort of says, well, yeah, man, the material realm is this sort of fallen realm. And man's sinful inclinations arise from the body, from the material, lower, non-transcendent part. But his reasoning, his immortal rational soul, which is a Greek idea, is maybe damaged by wounded by what's happened, by sin. But it's basically okay. It's basically functional for when we think about law and politics and economics and social order and all of these things, this room, this lower realm of nature, human reason is fine as far as it goes. Human reason is adequate to the task. He made a distinction between the image of God and likeness of God. We won't go into that technicality. But it was sort of a bit of sophistry in my view, a way to work around the problem of sin so that you could have, in a sense, free nature to be ruled by human reason, the lower part of reality to be ruled by man's thinking and reason. And then a realm of grace, he sort of, so he took the Greek Aristotle's idea of creation as form and matter, but then he put another dimension above it, a realm of grace. And that realm of grace was the, was the porcel to the beautific vision, to heaven, to eternal salvation. But the state and man's reason within nature was what did the rest. And the, you were essentially a political animal. And the state's role was to bring you to this place of virtue, but eternal salvation. He recognized that had to be a connection between Christ and his church and the world. So it was almost as though you had to, wherever you possibly could involve the church institute in the life of the various aspects of society, community and state so that you can, in a sense, bring the grace dust and sprinkle it all over the lower order so that you could bring it to a higher level, ultimately bring people to the beautific vision and finally to perfection. So he was trying to, two sources of authority, Greek philosophy in the Bible and a dualistic worldview, two layered worldview. And he's trying to bring these two things together. And the result is that he's trying to derive law, or from nature, from the is, which is of course a longstanding philosophical problem for anybody listening with a philosophical background and of the, or how do you derive an ethical ought from simply a natural is. And now Aquinas, you know, he said lots of great things about lots of subjects and he even recognized that the law of God was given to correct natural law. So an ideal with that in my book, which makes you wonder, well, what's the point of the natural this, this tortuous concept of divine law, natural law, when God has given his law. And if it's there for the correction of natural law because of man's errors and proneness to error and so forth, why do we need it? But that was the, that's how this idea sort of got ported over. And you can see how this has impacted Christian and evangelical thinking right into the present day with the idea that well, politics, education, law, family, all these things, those are secular, those are nature, those are natural things. And that's just a matter of the neutral politics. But we're concerned with salvation and heaven and the salvation of the soul. And man's reason can govern all these other areas of life. But we need the Bible for the church and some, some ethical pointers and to know about Jesus. And so you, so you see this radical separation, I think, I'll throw it back to you. I've tried to summarize that as simply as I can in just a few minutes, but that's the essence of it. That's the, that's the driving. That's the central point of it. Yeah, and I don't want to, I don't want to rehash all this. I don't want to keep getting into the technical. I want to get a little bit practical now as I throw it over to Mike. But you kind of skipped over it and just alluded to it. But this is one of the reasons why people should grab, think, Christianly and dig deeper into it. Because just as we said, when there, there's a a pre-supposition underneath that man is a, you know, political creature rather than a religious creature. We talked about that in the last session. It leads to all kinds of errors. And similarly, what, what Aquinas is doing here by separating the likeness of God and the image of God, right? He talks about, you know, man's essential nature, the image of God being located in his intellectual reason and free will through. And though it's weakened, was left largely unaffected, it was only the likeness to God rather than the image of God, which was distorted by the fall. So, you know, you alluded to that, but that's actually a really fundamental point because that, that error, when you start building on top of, you know, errors, you get to a place that's totally distorted. And it seems like a small theological sleight of hand that he does, which it is. But when you start building things on top of that pre-supposition, you find yourself, you know, pretty far away from the biblical worldview. Michael, I do want us to get a little practical now because I know that's been a little bit of heavy lifting. When you start to dismantle natural law as Joe just did, one of the objections that will come inevitably is the question, you know, don't we need natural law to talk to non-believers who don't accept the Bible? Like, we, as Christians, can't say, well, the Bible says to a non-believer who doesn't believe in the authenticity of scripture. So don't we need natural law for evangelism? And Joe talked about how this affects our evangelism a little bit. So why did talk to that? Answer that question. Don't we need natural law to talk to non-believers who don't accept scripture? Yeah, again, this is where Joe's work and the Ezra Institute has been so helpful for so many because, again, that's just a false statement for any Christian who is living by faith in Christ. Like, let's re-ask that question. Don't I need to not talk about Jesus in order to evangelize people to Jesus? Don't I need to not talk about God in order to draw them to God's word? You know, in Joe's book, there are a few little things that come up here in this type of conversation. Joe, you've got a quote from E. L. have been Taylor and you say this, just as Aristotle had tried to answer his office critics by trying to prove that the existing institutions of the Greek city, such as slavery and the exploitation of women and the working classes were natural and therefore reflected the very order of the universe. So Aquinas tried to show that such feudal institutions of Serfdom, the monarchy, papal theocracy were also natural and arose out of the very nature of things. So with Aristotle's help, he tried to prove that the feudal state was grounded in nature rather than in sin as Paul and Augustine would have supposed. So when we try to have conversations with the non-believer or we try to develop political theory or we try to comment on the world without God's word, we end up leading into absurdity. And earlier on in the book, there's another part that really jumped out at me. Aristotle did not think in terms of deity who authored nature. Nature itself was designed. Joe, you just was divine. Joe, you've just commented on this at length. He therefore was exposed to the skeptical view that natural and unnatural are synonyms for usual and unusual. And this is where particularly when we talk about the vestiges of Christianity, when Joe earlier on in another section said, hey, really, Aristotle didn't give us the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Canada or the Constitution of Britain. Those are Christian works. He's right. And so many people are confused about that because they do want to make this argument. They do want to say natural unnatural from usual and unusual. In a Christian world, you can get away with that because you've you've defined usual and unusual from God's word. But in a non-Christian world, when when when when when when you want to go and talk to non-Christians and try to win them to Christ, you just say, well, you know, sexual intimacy between a man and a woman is natural and it's usual. And they go, no, it's not anymore. And it's the un-Christianizing of their minds that has now turned what we would have said. Common sense or comes from scripture into now. No, it's not common. It's very uncommon. So yeah, no, you cannot get away. This whole idea that non-Christians are not subject to God's laws, God's norms, God's word is just ridiculous. And it needs to be corrected. We need to approach people with God's word because of course, then we would be led to the absurdity of just defending anything that we see as usual from our human experience as somehow authoritative. And that would be a great error. And actually, it doesn't lead people to the repentance of sin. He actually leads them from knowing who they are and their standing before God. It actually leads them away from understanding that. All right. I think that actually takes us to the to the heart of the whole structure and direction issue as well. Because what we're not saying here is that when we when we when we talk about natural law, we're not saying that human beings don't have an awareness that they are in structure. It's the fact that, you know, people bump into God's structure everywhere. When we have, when people talk about having a sense of injustice or feel outraged that they have been misled or that they are being robbed or that they're being treated unfairly, these all demonstrate an awareness that there is a there is a structural order. But that order isn't nature's order. It's God's order. That's that's the critical thing. And the structuration of reality is God's order. It's not found. It's not grounded in the mind of man or some impersonal concept of nature. It's ordered by and governed by God himself. The problem is, of course, that man because of his sin and his rebellion, will not submit himself. That's what Paul says in Romans 1. He won't submit. And this is so so there's a structural awareness that the believer and the non-believer both have of the moral order for law and justice. But the question is the direction of our hearts and whether we will submit directionally to God's order or whether we will fight it. We look at the Michael alluded earlier to marriage and family. Well, there's one area where we have been in the West in absolute rebellion against our better knowledge to God's structure and order for human relationships, sexual relationships with the whole queer theory, for example. There's a there's a structural awareness that there is male and female. We can't get away from it. But there's no directional submission. And so that's the structure, direction, direction, distinction that is so critical whenever we talk about law, morality and social order. It's interesting just on Sunday, I was having a conversation with somebody from the church who was talking to a friend of theirs who was gay and their friend essentially said that, well, you know, zoologists have found animals who act out act homosexual in the relationships. Therefore, this is a natural thing. And the Christian didn't actually know how to respond. And so this shows us when we rely on natural law, we don't have the tools that it takes to actually inform people about how to live in God's world. So the application here is that we have to reject natural law as the fig leaf that it is. Simply, it failed the attempt to build the just society without mentioning Christ himself. And so Christians must regain the courage to say, thus, sayeth the Lord. That's our conversation today and we just want to remind you, we hope it's been helpful, but we want to remind you as always that from him and through him and to him are all things to Christ be the glory forever. Amen.