Also listen to episode 18 in which we address this topic: https://reformedlibertarians.com/018
Presented at the Summer 2021 conference of The George Buchanan Forum
Abstract: This paper addresses the definition of theonomy, the historic Reformed rejection of theonomy in favor of the principle of “general equity,” and the Reformed explanation of general equity in terms of the “law of nations” (ius gentium). The paper concludes by relating libertarianism to both the Reformed principle of general equity on the one hand and the theonomic regulative principle of the state on the other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm2sKn7-18o
Introduction
In this paper I want to consider three important political-philosophical ideas that are each competing for the attention of Reformed Christians today. These political ideas are, first, theonomy; second, the historic Reformed rejection of theonomy according to what is known as the principle of general equity; and third, libertarianism. My aim in considering these three ideas together is twofold.
First, I hope to provide some needed clarity to many of the discussions and debates Reformed Christians have had and are likely to continue to have regarding these ideas. Second, my hope is that, in clarifying these ideas, I can provide a new perspective on and helpful framework for how libertarianism in might be seen as relating to theonomy on the one hand and historic Reformed political theory on the other.
My analysis in this presentation is not intended to be a deep or detailed scholarly examination of any of these topics, nor is intended really to break any new ground philosophically. My aim, rather, is merely to initiate a conversation on these ideas amongst Reformed Christians, and hopefully to provide some guidance as to the direction this conversation can and possibly should take going forward.
Theonomy
As many readers will be aware, the word theonomy is composed of the Greeks words for God —theos, and law —nomos. Contrary to a claim often heard, however, theonomy does not mean “God’s law.” To confuse the linguistic origins of a word with its meaning is to commit the etymological fallacy: etymology does not determine meaning. In the context of Reformed political thought, rather, theonomy is the theory that the Mosaic civil or judicial code remains binding or obligatory for civil societies, and especially Christian civil societies, today.
Thus defined, we might say that the thirteenth century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas had what we mean here by theonomy in view when he asked “whether the judicial precepts of the Old Law bind forever?” (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 104, a. 3.) Aquinas’s answer, incidentally, was “no, they do not bind forever.” Likewise, Calvin, who also rejected theonomy, had what we mean by theonomy in mind when he speaks in his Institutes of those “who deny than any commonwealth is rightly framed which neglects the law of Moses, and is ruled by the common law of nations” (Institutes bk. 4, ch. 20).
As the examples of Aquinas and Calvin illustrate, the theory that the Mosaic judicial or civil precepts still apply today is not a new one. Nevertheless, the use of the word theonomy to refer to this theory is a fairly recent practice, and may be traced to the Christian Reconstructionist movement of the 1960s and 70s. The Reformed philosopher and apologist Cornelius Van Til, although arguably not a theonomists in our sense of the term, nevertheless helped popularize the term when he famously wrote that “There is no alternative but that of theonomy and autonomy.” Here Van Til was likely using the word theonomy in its etymological sense to mean simply “God’s law.”
In the hands of Vantillian writers such as R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and Greg Bahnsen, however, the term came to assume the much more specific definition by which we are understanding it here. Their unique fusion of the three strands of Van Til’s presuppositionalism in epistemology and apologetics, postmillennial optimist and triumphalism in eschatology, and theonomy in politics and ethics formed the core of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement aiming at the complete reformation of the Church and society according to God’s word. Greg Bahnsen, for example, defined theonomy this way:
Theonomy … teaches that we should presume that Old Testament laws continue to be morally binding in the New Testament unless they are rescinded or modified by further revelation…1
Another aspect of theonomy stressed by Bahnsen is what has become known as the “regulative principle of the state.” As Bahnsen again puts it, in addition to civil rulers being morally obligated to enforce those laws found in Scripture, theonomy also teaches that civil rulers are morally obligated “to refrain from coercion in areas where God has not prescribed their intervention.”2 So theonomy involves not only a requirement that civil governments today enforce the Mosaic judicial precepts, but also a requirement that civil governments not legislate beyond the Mosaic judicial precepts either. This is theonomy’s regulative principle of the state.
The Historic Reformed Critique of Theonomy
With this summary of theonomy in hand, we turn now to what the historic Reformed view of theonomy has been. I already mentioned Calvin’s awareness of theonomy as a political position a moment ago. What I didn’t mention was the rather caustic terms Calvin uses in discussing theonomy. He refers to it as a “dangerous error,” a “perilous and seditious” view, one that is held by men who are “stupid and false.”
Calvin affirms the traditional distinction between the ceremonial, judicial, and moral precepts of the Mosaic law and he expressly rejects the view that the ceremonial and judicial necessarily belong to the unchanging moral precepts. Instead, Calvin says that “each nation has been left at liberty to enact the laws which it judges to be beneficial,” though any law which they enact must be “tested by the rule of charity, so that while they vary in form, they must proceed on the same principle.”
The Westminster Confession of Faith codified the Reformed rejection of theonomy in somewhat less pejorative, though no less definitive, terms. In chapter 19, “On the Law of God,” the Westminster Confession similarly divides the Mosaic law into ceremonial, moral, and judicial precepts, and says of the people of Israel that God gave them as a political body judicial laws “which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require.”
Where theonomy, then, could be summarized as the view that Mosaic judicial precepts do apply today, except where Scripture specifically says that they don’t, the historic Reformed position represented by the Westminster Confession is that the Mosaic judicial precepts do not apply today, except where the principle of “general equity” says that they do. It’s for this reason, incidentally, that I think the expression “general equity theonomy” that is used by some moderate theonomists is actually quite confusing and misleading, since the formula “general equity” was used by the Westminster Confession to distinguish the Reformed view from the very theory most commonly understood by the term theonomy today.
This brings us to the question of just what the Westminster theologians meant by the term general equity. Reformed writers have typically given two lines of response which they saw as being broadly the same as or at least compatible with each other. The first line of explanation says that the term general equity is a way of referring to the natural law in general, or to the moral precepts of the Mosaic law in particular, or even more specifically still to the Ten Commandments. On this interpretation of the general equity principle, accordingly, what the Westminster Confession and other Reformed sources are saying is that the judicial precepts do not apply today except insofar as they also happen to be unchanging moral precepts or at least contain a moral precept.
Calvin, for example, reflects this perspective on the “equity” of the judicial precepts when he writes in the Institutes:
It is a fact that the law of God which we call the moral law is nothing else than a testimony of natural law and of that conscience which God has engraved upon the minds of men. Consequently, the entire scheme of this equity of which we are now speaking has been prescribed in it. Hence, this equity alone must be the goal and rule and limit of all laws.3
Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, similarly wrote:
Although we do not hold to the forms of the Mosaic polity, yet when such judicial laws prescribe equity in judgments, which is part of the Decalogue, we, not being under obligation to them insofar as they were prescribed by Moses to only one people, are nevertheless bound to observe them to the extent that they embrace that general equity which should everywhere be in force…. Because it follows natural equity, and expounds that perpetual precept of the Decalogue, Thou shalt not steal, to this extent all are bound to fulfill them both.4
There is a problem with this line of explanation of the general equity principle, however. As we have seen, Reformed thinkers already recognized a distinction between those Mosaic precepts which were judicial in character and those that were purely moral. The fact, therefore, that a judicial precept happens to contain an enduring moral precept does not by itself explain why it should therefore also be a matter of civil law today, since there are many other moral precepts in the Mosaic law that are also not a matter of civil law.
Fortunately, the second way in which Reformed writers talk about the general equity principle is a little more helpful here and, as we shall see, even suggestive. We begin by noting that the term equity means something like justice, fairness, or impartiality, and the qualifier general is meant to distinguish general equity, justice, fairness, or impartiality from the idea of there being a particular equity, justice, fairness, or impartiality.
The idea conveyed by the expression general equity, accordingly, is the idea that while each political society typically has its own unique laws by which it strives to achieve justice and the common good, underlying these varying laws there is also body of laws that virtually every political society shares in common.
The classical Roman terminology used to refer to these two bodies of law is the ius gentium, or law of nations, on the one hand, the ius civile, or civil law, on the other. Thus, whereas a society’s unique body of civil law represented a particular equity, the law of nations that virtually all political societies hold in common represents a form of general equity. It is this universal law of nations, accordingly, that the Westminster divines seem to have had in view when they spoke of the Mosaic judicial precepts not applying except insofar as their “general equity” —that is to say, that which the judicial precepts have in common with the law of nations— requires.
Calvin reflects this line of thinking in the passage we cited earlier in which he characterizes theonomists as those “who deny than any commonwealth is rightly framed which neglects the law of Moses, and is ruled by the common law of nations.” Beza similarly seems to have the ius gentium in mind when he says that we are bound to observe the judicial precepts today only to the extent that “they have been ordained by nature upon the entire nation of men.”5 Finally, the Westminster divine George Gillespie speaks of civil magistrates today being “obliged to those things in the judicial law which are unchangeable, and common to all nations: but not to those things which are mutable, or proper to the Jewish Republic.”6
Thus, while it is not the case that Reformed writers always agreed with each other over which parts of the judicial precepts were part of the general equity, what there was a broad consensus over was on the principle of equity itself. The general equity principle meant that the Mosaic judicial precepts did not apply unless there were compelling moral reasons for believing that they applied, and more specifically, those moral reasons were informed by the law of nations accepted by virtually all political societies everywhere.
One development in the history of Reformed political theory that is particularly worth mentioning here, as it represents what I think might be classified as a significant change in understanding of the general equity principle, concerns the 1788 American revisions to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Although historically Reformed writers rejected theonomy itself, the tradition of Magisterial Protestantism nevertheless affirmed, as Calvin, for example, did, that the civil magistrate had the duty of enforcing both tables of the law, that is, both those parts of the Decalogue concerning man’s relationship to and worship of God, and man’s relationship to his fellow man. The Magisterial Protestants believed this because they believed it was part of the general equity of the Mosaic law, that is, that it was something that all civil societies everywhere did, even if the worship that their laws regulated was, paradoxically, pagan worship.
In 1787, however, at the same time that the Constitutional Convention was at work drafting a new Constitution for the American states, a Constitution in which there would be no established religion and no infringement of the free exercise of religion, the Presbyterian church in America was revising the Westminster Confession of Faith along closely related lines. The result was a version of the Westminster Confession of Faith that completely removed any references to the civil magistrate having duties concerning what we might call first table or religious matters.
Lee Irons describes what was going on here in terms of “the definiteness with which the American church wanted to express its rejection of the older theocratic views of the civil magistrate and its adoption of a fundamentally new understanding of the teaching of the Word of God on this subject.” He goes on to say this: “the position held both by modern theonomists and by the original Westminster divines (viz., that the civil magistrate is obligated to enforce in the civil arena the Decalogue’s prohibition of false worship), was formally and intentionally repudiated by the American Presbyterian church.”7 In other words, and as I’m suggesting here, by removing religious offenses from the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, the American Presbyterian revisions to the Westminster Confession of Faith involved an intentional narrowing of the general equity principle.
Libertarianism
We come now, finally, to libertarianism and how it might be seen to relate to these other Reformed ideas. While not of itself a uniquely Christian or Reformed political theory, libertarianism is nevertheless adhered to by many Christians in general and by many Reformed Christians in particular. Yet like theonomy, libertarianism is a term requiring careful definition and distinction. Many uses and senses of the term libertarian are admittedly incompatible with Christian doctrine. The sense in which most self-described Christian libertarians use the term, however, as well as the sense it carries in many philosophical discussions of political theory, typically have to do with some version of the Non-Aggression Principle.
Understood in this strict sense of the term, libertarianism is nothing more nor less than the political philosophy according to which the only moral use of coercion is in response to a prior act of aggression. For the use of coercion to be justified, according to libertarianism, the coercee must first be guilty of some act of violence, theft, or fraud. And although libertarianism is often paired today with various forms of utilitarianism, hedonism, and individualism, as I have argued elsewhere, Christian libertarianism may be best understood as a particular and, indeed, as the most consistent political application of the classical, natural law moral theory taught by the Apostle Paul, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, and C.S. Lewis.
Something else that Christian libertarianism holds in common with classical natural law theory is its recognition of the theologically and politically unique relationship that the ancient Israelites had with respect to God and hence with respect to each other and to the gentile nations around them. It is precisely because our political societies today and their rulers have not been specially established and authorized by God that we must make use, not only biblical law, but also a biblically interpreted natural law, to help determine when, in the absence of such special authorization, civil rulers are permitted to use coercive force.
More specifically, I believe one fair way to understand libertarianism in classical, natural law terms is to see it as an attempt to limit civil government’s use of coercion primarily to those areas regulated by the law of nations. As was alluded to before, classical natural law theory, including that of the Reformers, followed the ancient Romans in dividing human law into two major categories: the law of nations that virtually all political societies hold in common, and a body of “civil law” that is unique to each political society.
Although the Roman law of nations covered a wide range of topics, for later representative thinkers such as Aquinas, the law of nations was primarily understood as prohibiting acts of violence, theft, violations of sales agreements and contracts, and other behaviors making human society to be impossible. In other words, the law of nations was a libertarian law of non-aggression. As libertarian scholar George Smith comments, many of the classical works on the law of nations “provided the infrastructure for a libertarian theory of rights.”8
If so, then viewed in historical and classical natural law terms, what libertarianism essentially amounts to is the view that all coercive human law ought, as much as possible, to be limited to the law of non-aggression encoded within the law of nations that virtually all political societies recognize. For the libertarian, it is when political societies venture beyond the clear boundaries historically marked out by the law of nations, by creating coercive civil laws that are unique to their own special circumstances, that those political societies become guilty of using coercion in ways that are unjustified.
Conclusion
This brings us, in conclusion, to how we might understand libertarianism as relating to theonomy and to the historic Reformed principle of general equity. As we have seen, for the mainstream Reformed tradition, the Mosaic judicial precepts do not apply to civil societies today except so far as their “general equity” requires. As we have also seen, what that tradition meant by general equity is the law of nations: the judicial precepts apply to civil societies today only so far as they contain laws that God intended to be applied not just to the Israelites as a unique political community, but to all political communities without distinction.
But as I have just suggested, the law of nations that God intends for all political communities to observe has historically been recognized as, by and large, a libertarian law of non-aggression. Pulling all of these various strands together, we may tentatively conclude that a case stands to be made, on both historical and conceptual grounds, for associating the general equity principle of the Reformers with something like the libertarian principle of non-aggression.
This is not to say that this is what the Reformers themselves expressly had in view when they spoke of the general equity of the Mosaic law. This is because, beyond vague references to the moral law or to the law of nations, it is not clear that Reformed writers had anything expressly in mind when they spoke of the general equity of the Mosaic law. What I am saying, however, is that the Reformers believed that only those laws in the Mosaic code which are common to virtually every other suitably stable political community are in fact applicable to civil societies today, and that when we look at what that common or shared body of law is, it is practically indistinguishable from those laws of non-aggression which libertarians would have all political societies enforce exclusively.
In this respect, accordingly, Christian libertarianism might be viewed as a kind of hybrid between, on the one hand, the Reformers’ natural law and specifically law-of-nations general equity hermeneutic in applying the judicial precepts of the Mosaic law, and on the other hand, the theonomist’s regulative principle of the state, according to which political societies today are not to legislate beyond those matters expressly permitted them by biblical law. In sum, Christian libertarianism is the general equity principle of classical Reformed natural law theory, combined with theonomy’s regulative principle of the state, suggesting that if there were such a thing as “general equity theonomy,” libertarianism would have as good a claim to that title as any.
For a proper defense of these claims, of course, a much more thorough analysis of the relevant texts would be necessary. For the present, I have offered only a brief introduction to what is involved in the claims of theonomy, the historic Reformed rejection of theonomy in favor of the general equity principle, and libertarianism, an introduction that I hope may help frame future discussions of these important matters.
Notes
- Greg Bahnsen, “What is Theonomy?” https://www.bahnseninstitute.com/what-is-theonomy/. In another work Bahnsen stated the following as the sine qua non of theonomy: “all theonomists affirm (while non-theonomists deny) that we should presume that Old Testament criminal and penal commands for Israel as a nation (not specially revealed earlier) are a standard for all nations of the earth.” Bahnsen, No Other Standard (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics Tyler), 27-28 n18.
- Bahnsen, “What is Theonomy?” (emphasis original).
- Calvin, Institutes 4.20.15-16, emphasis added.
- Beza, De Haereticis a civili Magistratu puniendis Libellus (Geneva: Robert Stephanus, 1554), 222-23, emphasis added, cited in Tom Hicks, “Is ‘General Equity Theonomy’ a Confessional and Biblical Doctrine?” https://cbtseminary.org/is-general-equity-theonomy-a-confessional-and-biblical-doctrine/. William Perkins also wrote, “Judicial laws so far as they have in them the general or common equity of the law of nature are moral and therefore binding in conscience as the moral law” (A Discourse on Cases of Conscience in The Whole Works (London, 1631) 1.520, cited in Hicks.
- Beza, De Haereticis A Magistratu Puniendis Libellus, 222.
- Gillespie goes on to give a list of those things which are “immutable, and common to all nations,” namely “the laws concerning moral trespass, sins against the moral law, as murder, adultery, theft, enticing away from God, blasphemy, striking of parents. Now that the Christian Magistrate is bound to observe these judicial laws of Moses, which appoint the punishments of sins against the moral law, he proves by these reasons.” Gillespie, Wholesome Severity Reconciled With Christian Liberty. William Perkins speaks of general or common equity as pertaining to those judicial precepts that “bind the conscience not only of the Jews, but also of the Gentiles: for they were not given to the Jews as they were Jews, that is, a people received into the Covenant above all other nations… but they were given to them as they were mortal men subject to the order and laws of nature as all other nations are.” Perkins, A Discourse on Cases of Conscience.
- Lee Irons, “The 1788 American Revision of the Westminster Standards,” https://upper-register.com/papers/1788_revision.pdf
- George Smith, “Natural Rights and the Moral Foundations of Libertarianism, Part 2,” https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/natural-rights-moral-foundations-libertarianism-part-2.
Author
Jonathan McIntosh holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Dallas (2009), and has published on Anselm, Tolkien, Aquinas, and libertarianism.
