http://reformedlibertarians.com/023
Kerry:
This is episode TWENTY-THREE
And we’re discussing Calvin, Thomism, and a natural law of view of libertarianism. I’m Kerry Baldwin here with Gregory Baus. We’re interviewing Dr. Jonathan McIntosh about several of his presentations at the George Buchanan Forum. Dr. McIntosh speaks about his background, saying how he became Reformed and libertarian. We discuss errors in Calvin’s view of civil government, and we mention the God ordained check on tyranny. We then discuss Dr. Mcintosh’s outline of classical Thomist natural law tradition approach to libertarianism and his critique of the Aristotelian-Thomist view of politics. We also discuss the neglected figurative or typological character of Old Covenant civil law by scholastic thinkers. We conclude with information about the George Buchanan Forum and other articles from Dr. McIntosh.
Gregory:
Jonathan McIntosh has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Dallas. He’s published on Anselm, Tolkien, Aquinas, and libertarianism, including his book The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faerie (published in 2017). Dr. McIntosh is married and has four daughters. His article “Theonomy, General Equity, and Libertarianism” is published at our website. So be sure to check that out.
Kerry:
Dr. McIntosh, thanks for joining us. Would you tell us something about how you became Reformed and how you became libertarian? And feel free to include more about your personal life if you wish.
Jonathan:
Sure be glad to. And let me just say now, thank you for having me on your podcast. I’m excited to have this conversation. I actually grew up Seventh-Day Adventist and became Reformed through a Reformed campus ministry, about halfway through college while I was studying at University of Idaho. I was studying Mechanical Engineering. For those not already familiar, 7th Day Adventism is very not Reformed. It’s broadly Trinitarian, but very Arminian, “God-in-the-dock” theology. So going from that, a very low view of divine sovereignty, to Reformed theology created quite the intellectual worldview whiplash for me. So I lost interest in engineering. And I got interested in (as many new newly Reformed individuals, especially men do) apologetics, philosophy, theology and so I switched majors from engineering to philosophy. And I’ve been studying and teaching philosophy really ever since. So I think for me becoming Reformed was raising the question: why am I a believer, why am I a Christian, why do I believe and others don’t? There are lots of earthly, creational factors one could look at. I was raised in a Christian family and so forth. But at the end of the day, I said either the responsibility ultimately lies in God and his predestinating choice, or the answer lies in me. And I couldn’t see anything in me that indicated that I was smarter or just understood things better than anyone else. And even as an Adventist, I appreciated that I was sinful and I didn’t deserve any salvation. Not only did I not deserve it, nobody else did. So that removed from me the normal objections to God’s predestinating choice. God doesn’t have to save any of us. So in His mysterious will, should he have from all eternity chosen me for reasons not having anything to do with myself and my own goodness or any of that… That’s what I found compelling, apart from, obviously, ultimately Scripture seems to teach this, and who am I to object. So that’s briefly the story of how I became Reformed and the considerations that got purchased with me. Beyond that, I married a gal here from Moscow, Idaho. We’ve been married almost 24 years. We have four daughters and my eldest daughter is married. She and her husband have our first grandbaby on the way due in May. So that’s my more personal life. After graduating from University of Idaho with a bachelor’s in philosophy, I went on to study graduate school philosophy at the University of Dallas, which was a Roman Catholic liberal arts university. I went there as a card-carrying Vantillian presuppositionalist theonomist. (I picked up those things while I was still in college and newly Reformed.) Gradually, studying medieval scholasticism and Thomas Aquinas at a Catholic University —that was an acquired taste for me, and I really wrestled with the fact that my presuppositionalism is saying this while classical theism, natural theology, that whole tradition is saying this other thing… How do I reconcile these? A book that was really helpful in bridging the gap from my presuppositional and theonomic background to more classical theism, Thomism, and natural law ethics was a book by Josef Pieper, a 20th century German Thomist, who wrote a number of things, but the book that really made an impact on me was his book The Silence of Saint Thomas. For a Vantillian presuppositionalist, I’m always recommending that book because it really helps shed light on Aquinas where the things that are, I think, of most importance and ultimately of most value from a Vantillian presuppositional background. Pieper shows that’s already there in Thomas; in the classical tradition. So things like the Creator-creature distinction. The title of the book, The Silence of Saint Thomas, what he’s referring to is, he’s arguing that the doctrine of creation (in Vantillian terms, the Creator-creature distinction) is really the unsaid, the thing that’s silently present throughout all of Aquinas’ teaching, which if you read Van Til on Aquinas, is very much not Van Til’s reading of Aquinas. So that really began my transition, so to speak, into Thomism. Although, even so, I’m still very critical of Thomas on a lot of points, particularly political philosophy, even while I’m appreciative of him. And that’s probably somewhat of an indication of just how I think. Even though I no longer consider myself a presuppositionalist or a Vantillian, I’ve moved on, but I’m still appreciative of those thinkers even while I think they’re mistaken. I have the same kind of attitude towards Aquinas. So if somebody asked me, are you a Thomist? I would say yes, though there are many places where I disagree [with Thomas]. So, that’s where I went to do my graduate studies. I got a master’s degree and PhD in philosophy from the University of Dallas. I did my dissertation on Thomas Aquinas and JRR Tolkien. For those interested in that topic. I have a book on that that’s basically a condensation of my dissertation. It’s called The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faerie. Besides that work, I’ve done a fair amount in philosophical theology. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy on the work of Anselm. And then you ask how I became libertarian. I grew up in north North Idaho, around 30 miles from the Canadian border, the last town in Idaho before you hit Canada. A small town [of about] 2200 people. And I think libertarianism was already in my bones living up there, although I didn’t know it. I wouldn’t have known what libertarianism even was. But after graduate school, I started teaching Christian higher education in 2007. And we had the Great Recession 2008-2009, and realized I have no idea what a recession is. I don’t understand economics. And so through my investigation into what are the different theories of what a recession is, what causes it, I came across the Austrian School of Economics and their approach to economics. The whole praxeological approach really resonated with my scholastic training. It’s very deductive. You start with first principles and you deduce carefully, thoughtfully, methodically, your secondary principles from those first principles. The Austrian School approach to economics just fit with my scholastic training, even though [most] medieval scholastic Thomistic economics is very non-Austrian in terms of its skepticism of things like charging of interest, private property, stuff like that. I think Murray Rothbard is quite right that [nevertheless] the scholastic tradition laid down the intellectual foundation for what would later become the Austrian School. So through my studies of economics, I found the Austrian theory of the business cycle and recessions compelling. It made sense compared to other theories on offer. That led me to the Mises Institute. And of course they’re very libertarian and anarchist in their thinking. So that in a nutshell is how I became libertarian: really through economics. Although again I’ll say, I think I was already pretty libertarian growing up with my skepticism of government. My studies in economics, and then finally libertarian political philosophy, just sort of confirmed that.
Gregory:
There are three of your presentations at the George Buchanan Forum we’d like to discuss with you. They’re all worth listening to, of course, and would be of interest to Reformed libertarians. But the first two you presented and one of the more recent ones are particularly interesting. One of the 1st two is entitled “Evaluating Calvin: A Critique of On Civil Government” presented in January 2021 and, I believe, published on YouTube the following month in February. In this presentation you summarized Calvin’s chapter “On Civil Government,” which is Book 4, chapter 20 from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, and you offer several criticisms of what he says there. Would you summarize your main points of criticism?
Jonathan:
One of the claims that I make is: John Calvin is guilty of (what I call) theo-political fatalism. Calvinism is often accused of being fatalistic because of its doctrine of predestination. But if you define fatalism as the idea that God decrees the end regardless of the means, Calvinism proper in terms of its soteriology, its doctrine of salvation, is not fatalistic. God predestined the ends and the means. But I do think Calvin is guilty of a kind of fatalism in his political philosophy, and that is in his understanding of the duty of the Christian, or of any subject, to submit to their civil magistrate. He believes basically, at least as I read him, short of the magistrate commanding his subjects to sin, his subjects must obey. And on the question of who the magistrate is —who is the lawful magistrate, who is the individual or the institution that has the authority to issue those sweeping commands that must be obeyed so long as it’s not sinful— his answer is kind of a Hobbesian “might makes right.” I don’t know which section it is, but in a discussion of Nebuchadnezzar, Calvin raised the question how did the Judeans, the people of God, the Hebrews, know that they were to submit to Nebuchadnezzar. And his answer was, basically, he was the one with the power, he was the one that God gave the power to. And that’s to say that Nebuchadnezzar has a sort of right of rule and authority independent of how he acquired that authority. Now, of course, what I’m not disputing is that Nebuchadnezzar needed to be obeyed, but not for political, philosophical reasons. [Rather,] more or less, because of theological reasons, reasons unique to Israel’s, to Judah’s, specific moment in history. They had disobeyed God. They had been warned that if they don’t repent, they would be invaded and conquered. And they didn’t repent. And so God was giving them over to Nebuchadnezzar. And in Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar is referred to as God’s servant. So what’s interesting is, I think, most sensible readings and certainly most later Reformed readings of that passage, I’m thinking of Theodore Beza, George Buchanan, Samuel Rutherford, the way they would read Jeremiah is: that was a unique moment. And Calvin doesn’t do that. He universalizes that moment and wants to say that God gives authority just as a general principle, even without regard to how that authority, how that power at any rate, was acquired. And so that seems fatalistic. And that’s what I mean by “theo-political fatalism.” Calvin thinks that we need to submit to rulers just because they are God’s ordained rulers. And how do we know that they’re God ordained rulers? Well, are they the ones in power, and it doesn’t really matter how they acquired that. Overall, another one of my critiques is: I think what Calvin is trying to do is, early on in that work, trying to ground… This is the final chapter of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. I would emphasize that in that critique I make of Calvin, I am taking him, admittedly, a little out of historical context, but I think, in a way, the very genre that he’s writing invites that at some level. Now, to do a full responsible account of Calvin, you would need to take into account his historical context. But I’m not a historian, I’m a philosopher. And so there’s a level at which we’re able to take his ideas as though he was issuing them today. And I think that’s because Calvin himself wasn’t intending to just give us political advice for his moment. He’s writing political thought for the ages. And what I suggested in that presentation is: even though Calvin begins by trying to ground his political philosophy in natural law universal principles, in the end his political philosophy isn’t really that well grounded, it seems to me, in those principles.
Gregory:
Yes. And I’ve pointed out elsewhere that no moral obligation is actually derivable from circumstantial Providence. But effectively, I think that’s what Calvin is doing. Elsewhere in the Institutes, he makes a very strong distinction between Providence or the [Eternal] Decree, and God’s moral commands, and it’s somewhat curious to me that he doesn’t apply that in the political chapter. One has to wonder where the short circuit occurred (in my view). Well, we believe pointing out Calvin’s errors on this topic is especially instructive because, among other things, it helps “de-hagiogrify” Calvin and by extension, all other mere men —if anyone was tempted to idolatrously canonize fellow believers of the past. It’s also useful in making the point that the Reformed Churches’ secondary doctrinal standards are their official Confession of scriptural teaching, not any theologian’s writings. Further, the Reformed confessions contradict Calvin on his erroneous providential or fatalistic view of what God’s ordination of civil governance means. Do you have any speculation on why Calvin’s political fatalism or the providential misinterpretation of, for example, Romans 13, remains as popular as it is among Reformed believers, even though it’s contradicted by the Reformed confessions?
Jonathan:
I don’t know. I would be interested in hearing your own thoughts. The only thing that immediately comes to mind is there’s a kind of convenience —that’s not very charitable— but a kind of convenience to Calvin’s position, which is: you don’t have to think, you don’t have to disobey, you don’t have to make those decisions for yourself. You can just defer to the magistrate, as long as he’s not commanding you to sin. When I’ve taught Calvin to Reformed students in the past, I’ve suggested that I think Calvin at least partly explains, during COVID, why many Reformed churches I think, overly-capitulated, at least in my view, to mask mandates, vaccine requirements. Calvin says unless you’re being told to sin… Now, you could argue that maybe that’s sinful obeying, obeying those things. There’s a wiggle room there. But Calvin gives us a kind of theoretical justification, or tries to, for not having to stand out and stand forth on our own. So in times of when Christians need to put their foot down, say no, I’m not going to go along with this, that’s difficult, that’s hard to do, and it’s convenient when a valued teacher of the church from the past is telling you maybe you don’t need to do this.
Gregory:
Well, I’ll call that a legitimate psychological interpretation. And I think another factor involved, and I’ll call this a historical accounting of the issues, in the United States in any case, I believe starting with the Civil War and then ramping up again with WWI and repeated in WWII was a whole lot of government propaganda that really influenced the populace, Reformed Christians among them. That, coupled with the fact that in Reformed seminaries to this day —I mean, at some point it must have been, and then it deteriorated— the confessionally Reformed teaching on political resistance is not taught, it’s simply not taught. And so when you have graduates becoming pastors, and then whatever is available to elders, when they are faced with the issues and they go somewhere looking for answers, Calvin is conveniently in English and they don’t reach much beyond that to other sources to look for answers. So that’s my best guess.
Jonathan:
Yeah, we need names like Rutherford and Buchanan to be recovered. That’s why we named the Buchanan Forum, as we did.
Gregory:
Yes. And I’ll just mention to the audience again that we have the Reformed Political Resistance bibliography that we’ll link to in the show notes. That should be helpful.
Kerry:
Before we go on to ask about another of your presentations, we have a few thoughts on important correctives to Calvin’s errors on this topic. In your presentation you mentioned Calvin’s stupid (we’ll also say heinous) comments about wives and children submitting to a husbands and fathers abuse as an analogy to submitting to political tyranny. In addition to the Reformed confessional teaching that only opposition to lawful authority and the lawful exercise of authority is opposition to what God ordains, Calvin’s views are also directly contradicted by Althusius in Politica, who also appeals to Beza’s views. Rutherford in Lex Rex, among others, also clarifies a better view. He explains that except in the case of the special Old Covenant curse executed on Israel during the Exile, and Christ suffering in his work of redemption on our behalf, there is no obligation in Scripture, or general revelation, to submit to abuse or tyranny. There’s no command to suffer, but only when you do suffer to do so in a Godly way.
Gregory:
We believe diametrically contrary to Calvin’s frequent disposition, one distinction relevant here concerns how we should respond to rights-violations from authorities as opposed to rights-violations from, let’s say, equals or inferiors. Of course, there’s always pragmatic considerations, say, when a mugger has a gun to your head, you might give me your wallet, et cetera. While it’s sometimes most prudent, and conducive to peace and order, to overlook violations of our own rights from equals or inferiors, it’s terribly dangerous to do so from those who are supposed to be in authority. The principle of obsta principiis [applies here]; that’s “nip it in the bud,” a zero-tolerance attitude towards authority —despite the obligation to personally bear with the infirmities (according to [Westminster] Larger Catechism 127) of those who putatively hold authoritative office; considering too that they’re often equals or inferior in other respects outside their office. For the sake of honoring authority itself and its highly influential function, we must be strictly intolerant towards rights-violations, unlawful actions, abuse and tyranny, from authorities acting in their office. We believe non-compliance with, and resistance against, misuse of authority is the God-given check on any and every authority, revealed in creation and confirmed in Scripture, exemplified in Paul, the least of the apostles, publicly rebuking Peter, for example, in Galatians 2. Personally forgiving those who wronged you does not at all involve covering up abuse by authorities. But, rather, all such abuse must be publicly exposed, according to Ephesians 5, and tyrants held accountable.
Kerry:
So the second presentation we’d like to discuss is titled “Towards a Natural Law Libertarianism.” Like the one on Calvin, this was also presented in January 2021, and published on YouTube in February. Perhaps listeners will also find your presentation “Why We Need to Get Serious about Natural Rights” in Summer 2024 a good complement to this one. But in “Towards a natural law libertarianism,” you begin by saying some might initially think natural law and libertarianism, when combined, would produce an oxymoronic term. Can you explain the contradiction some might think is involved here?
Jonathan:
I guess maybe two responses. One is, in my experience, a lot of people confuse libertarianism with libertinism. That’s possibly because a lot of secular libertarians are rather libertine in their ethic. If someone thought of libertarianism as a “do whatever you want” ethic without constraints, and you have natural law, on the other hand, which is about moral constraints… How do these really fit together? So just on a very superficial level, you have law and libertarianism; a thing that’s restricting your freedom, and then this philosophy that ostensibly, or in the minds of some, is all about maximizing freedom. This sounds like an oxymoron. And then in more historical terms, of course, the natural law tradition… I make a distinction between natural law as a philosophy or as the concepts themselves versus the tradition that’s built up around this idea of natural law. So the Thomistic natural law tradition, that moral political tradition is not very libertarian. The thing I oppose libertarianism with, in my own work and teaching, has been Aristotelianism. Aristotle famously thought that man is not just a social animal by nature, but is a political animal. He forms political communities by nature, and these political communities are proper to his nature in that civil government and law is the principle means by which human beings are morally formed and achieve their nature as human beings. And so [in Aristotle’s view] we need government, we need political society, specifically in its political dimension, to make us properly human, to make us moral, to make us good, to make us achieve happiness, eudaemonia, this good-spiritedness. And so the natural law tradition in its political philosophy, especially as expressed by Thomas Aquinas, is basically a baptized version of Aristotle. Where in contrast, libertarianism or that view of civil government, is much more limited, much more restricted. We create governments for the purpose of protecting people and property, to protect their rights, not to make us good, but to protect us from other people who aren’t being good. So that’s just at the historical level. That’s a prima facie seeming incompatibility. How can you be a natural law libertarian? Natural law, historically, has been used to reject libertarianism.
Kerry:
That confusion between libertarianism and libertinism we often run into by people who think you can’t be broadly Christian and libertarian. So, would you mind giving us a brief summary of the main points of what you’ve called natural law libertarianism?
Jonathan:
So by that, broadly, I think libertarians should be natural law ethicists. The natural law tradition has a lot of great things to teach and to say in its moral philosophy. I just think it goes astray in some of its political applications of its moral principles. And I think libertarianism, understood as the political philosophy founded on the non-aggression principle, that use of coercion is only justified in response to some prior act of aggression, I really do think that is the most consistent application of natural law principles. And a lot of my own work, especially on Thomas Aquinas, in this area, has been in showing that the natural tradition… it’s treated as this monolithic, unified, coherent thing, and I think a very careful study of the natural law tradition, again, as particularly as expressed by Thomas Aquinas… there’s actually some deep incoherencies there, and some non-sequiturs between natural law moral principles and its Aristotelian political application. So by natural law libertarianism, I’m arguing that, I think libertarianism is actually the most consistent and coherent political outworking of natural law moral principles. And getting more into specifics, I think politics should be viewed as the science, the art of, the political community’s use of coercion, which raised from a natural law perspective should raise the question: What is the ethics of the use of coercion? And this is, I think, a huge blind spot of the natural law tradition. You read through Aquinas, in that tradition, it really doesn’t have a carefully worked out ethics of coercion. I think that’s a huge blind spot, especially for Christians. It makes sense that Aristotle may not have a well worked out ethic of coercion. Aristotle wasn’t a Christian. He didn’t believe in a fall. [But] Aquinas was a Christian and he believed that human beings are created upright, unfallen, by God, and meant to interact with each other cooperatively, harmoniously, without coercion. Coercion comes with the fall. And so that raises the question, what then… and I think there are post fall, their appropriate uses of coercion, but what are they? As Christians, we need to problematize coercion and see it as problematic, not as inherently evil, but as problematic: this requires justification. And I don’t think it’s really until the modern tradition with figures like John Locke… and I admire John Locke, I consider myself a Lockean, and I’m very appreciative of him. But he’s another one that I’m critical of. He jettisons some things from the natural law classical theistic tradition that should have been retained. But I think one of the things Locke gets right is he really presses the question of when is it right to use force. And I think he gives the right answer, and that is to protect rights. So what I’m trying to do in that presentation is just sketch —and I would like to do more work; I think more work needs to be done in this area— how the non-aggression principle really can be rooted in, and needs to be rooted in, a conception of natural law: that we as human beings, we have a nature, our nature is that of fundamentally being peaceful beings who move each other to action through persuasion. Fundamentally, that’s the way God made us. We are to move each other. We are to induce action in one another, but we’re to do it with our words, with our ideas, with our thoughts, with rhetoric. And so if that’s the case, that’s our nature, then when is it moral to overrule that and use force on somebody, to coerce somebody regardless of what their own thinking is? And I think the answer, on natural law grounds, is there has to be some kind of egregious violation of natural law that would then permit the response to that through coercive means. And I think the answer to that is aggression; somebody fails to recognize the fundamental humanity of another human person and that their own right, natural God-given right, of free determination is being overruled by somebody by forcing them, by forcing their body or forcing their property in some manner, that they’re no longer able to use their own will to direct themselves. That’s aggression. And then that’s what justifies use of coercion in response to that. So it’s really an effort to ground, again in a very preliminary kind of way, the non-aggression principle in the natural law [and to] suggest that it’s an appropriate application of the natural law; while at the same time speaking to libertarians, maybe indirectly, that I think the natural law gives a better grounding for the non-aggression principle than just utilitarianism that many secular libertarians might appeal to.
Gregory:
As you’ve defined or used it, is natural law basically synonymous with what has been called moral realism, by which I would say is meant that natural law is moral law revealed in created reality, so statements about such morality are statements about a feature of reality, particularly about human nature and human action; about something that really exists? Or in your mind, do you distinguish natural law and moral realism in that sense?
Jonathan:
As I understand it, I think natural laws may be broader, but I think moral realism, I would say natural law, moral theory is a moral realist theory. I think it’s saying more than that. It gets into metaphysics and anthropology. So I think there’s more going on with natural law than just moral realism. But I would be comfortable saying that natural law [theory] is a moral realist theory, if that makes sense.
Gregory:
Yes, and some further qualifications, if these aren’t included in moral realism, that I think you make about natural law: You say such moral reality and laws for it are objective in that they do not depend on humans’ experience or knowledge of them and that they can be known. I think you also say that as are other laws for reality, such more law is universal in that it applies in all particular cases of human action and nature, and such moral law is unchanging, the same in all times and places. Is that how you would characterize those qualifications of objective, universal and unchanging?
Jonathan:
Yeah, I think so. That’s true. But you can have other non-natural law theories, I guess, that held moral laws are… I’m thinking of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, perhaps… I’m not sure how moral realism is used entirely, but I could see somebody arguing that Kant, for example, is a moral realist because he thought that his categorical imperative, to always act on that principle, that you can will to become a universal law… it’s universal, it’s objective, it’s unchanging. But Kant, he wanted to divorce morality from, as I understand him, metaphysics, from the conception of human nature. His goal was to give us a moral theory that was completely independent of human nature. Nevertheless, what’s moral for us isn’t simply a function of these abstract moral truths that are just out there independent of our nature. Natural law would say God made us in a specific way, human beings in particular, and it’s compatible with everything else that he’s made.
Kerry:
One of the things that I noticed you mentioned in the presentation in relation to the non-aggression principle was the harm principle, and you didn’t draw a distinction between the two. We do draw a distinction between the two, in part because there’s a lot of libertarians who confuse the two. But what, if anything, did you have in mind by not distinguishing them in your presentation?
Jonathan:
That’s a good question. I probably should have distinguished them. It was me mainly “punting” on the question; knowing that there was a distinction between them and I just really hadn’t done my own homework and ferreting that out. And so I was really just punting. But I think I’ve done more thinking and reflecting on it. And I do think the distinction is important. It was more just at the moment thinking: OK, probably more of my audience may be familiar with the harm principle than the aggression, so I’ll lump it all together for purposes of that presentation. But I do think they’re making some important distinctions.
Gregory:
A further bit of technical hair splitting here. You mentioned coercion’s only legitimate use as a proportional responsive use against prior acts of initiatory-coercion, termed aggression, such aggression being always illegitimate. However, you say such legitimate responsive use of coercion involves a level of “ignoring someone else’s humanity.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? And how is that not at odds with loving one’s neighbor?
Jonathan:
There’s a sense in which using coercion in response to an aggressor, you are treating him as having the imago dei. You are loving him and respecting his humanity. So I think in absolute terms, that’s the disposition we should have. I think I still stand by my “ignoring”… ignoring might be maybe too strong of a word, but maybe abstracting. And what I mean by that is there’s a level at which if a [aggressive] threat’s coming at you… you see a blurry object, let’s say, that’s charging at your kid with intent to harm… and you have a gun, let’s say, or some other means of stopping, repelling that force… there’s a level at which it doesn’t matter whether the [aggressive] threat is human or non-human. It might be a wolf, might be a man. There’s a level at which you “don’t care,” and it’s at that level in which you are using force, but it’s almost accidental. I’m not using accidental in the colloquial sense of “oops, my bad,” but accidental in the technical scholastic sense that it’s incidental. So I’m if I’m shooting back… and this argument is made famous by Aquinas in his Doctrine Of Double Effect, where he says self-defense is justified, and it can even be lethal self-defense, lethal force is justified, but you can’t intend the lethality. You might know that it’s lethal. Somebody charging, and if I have a 45-auto and I hit him, it’s probably going to end him. That’s a large slug that’s going to hit that person. I might know this is going to kill him. But my intention, my primary intention, is just to stop the [aggressive] threat, but I’m not intending to kill him. And so that’s the mentality I was using there. You’re ignoring his humanity, not in the sense that you don’t care about it any longer. It’s just that his humanity is in a sense morally irrelevant because of his prior aggression, right? That’s the question. When can you ever, when is it, if ever, morally justified to ignore somebody’s humanity, when you’re using coercion? And I think the only answer is when there’s some kind of prior threat that justifies you backing up that level and abstracting out their humanity. So I agree with you that if the use of coercion is morally justified, you are in fact serving and benefiting your neighbor in that way. That, depending on the situation, could be the call and it would just be circumstance dependent. But many Christians go the other direction and say if somebody wants to take advantage of you the moral thing to do is always to respect their humanity by laying down. But, no, sometimes it’s that you force them to stop, that’s the most loving thing to do.
Kerry:
I’m wondering if you can reiterate for our audience the errors that you had listed of the classical natural law tradition, that view of politics?
Jonathan:
The one fundamental insight that I think the natural tradition brings to the realm of law, just generally, the thing that the natural law tradition is really good on, is their appreciation that civil law, when we form civil societies and those societies create laws, they’re not free to do whatever they want. The civil law has to legislate within the natural law. There are natural law parameters, boundaries. That’s the single greatest contribution of the natural law tradition to the political realm. I think that’s what they get right. What they don’t get right is that they don’t really chase that down. They don’t really nail that down. Basically, for the natural law tradition you have the natural law, and then within that civil law exists, as a kind of concentric circle within the broader natural law realm. There’s also an appreciation that civil law can’t metastasize and grow to exhaust natural law. That would be basically criminalizing all sin. Natural law speaks to every moral aspect in human life. Every sin is contrary to the natural law. That doesn’t mean that every sin should be criminalized. And so you have the natural law circle, and within it, the civil law circle. The question I think the natural law tradition fails fundamentally [to answer correctly]… I mean, I have lots of criticisms, but I think if I was to go to the jugular, it would be that boundary between civil law and the wider natural law… does the natural law itself tell us where that boundary is? And that’s where the natural law tradition, Aquinas included, goes all prudentialist. They want to say it’s ever-expanding, depends on the situation, the circumstance. It’s always flexing. It’s basically a wax nose we can bend. Civil law, civil magistrates can bend [law] whatever direction they want. And I think that’s just not good enough. Now, I think there are real natural law parameters to how much of the natural law that civil law can occupy and I think that’s what the non-aggression principle is trying to give us. I think that’s why you have Locke, for example, emerging when he does. I have all sorts of objections on his theology, his natural theology, his ethics, but it’s just this curious thing that at the very moment that he’s jettisoning those good aspects of the classical tradition, he’s really, I think, clarifying the question of the natural boundaries for the use of coercion. And I think that’s just where the natural law tradition has been weak. I think it moves in the right direction. I think you see, again, like the Spanish scholastics, late medieval, early modern, moving in that direction. I think figures like Locke are really consummating that tradition. And I think later thinkers like Frederic Bastiat and Murray Rothbard, the libertarian tradition, is doing it in an even clearer way than Locke is. But that would be my main criticism: they didn’t really follow that insight out, their own intuition carefully enough, to see that OK, if civil law needs to be within the natural law, but does the natural law actually teach us about what the limits on civil law are? And I think libertarianism is the proper inheritor and developer of that insight.
Gregory:
Before we move into the third and final presentation we’ll discuss, I’m gonna throw out a teaser for Herman Dooyeweerd’s perspective, and say that in addition to Scholasticism’s erroneous religiously neutral view of nature, or I should say view of nature as religiously neutral and natural reason, I think that perhaps the entire classical natural law tradition needs to be recast upon non-scholastic, non-”accommodated Aristotelian” metaphysics and epistemology. And Herman Dooyeweerd provides a good start to doing that. So that’s for the future.
The third and final presentation we’d like to discuss is titled, “Figuratively Speaking: The Old Testament, Natural Law, and Libertarianism,” which you presented at the January of this year, 2025, George Buchanan Forum, and it was also published on YouTube in February. Can you summarize the main points you make in that presentation?
Jonathan:
That was a place where I was once again pitting Aquinas against himself. We haven’t talked about theonomy, really, here. I mentioned earlier that I used to be a theonomist. The natural law tradition has rejected the theonomic option, saying that when God established the Old Testament civil order, He wasn’t giving us a once for all paradigm or pattern for all civil societies, but was doing two things there. One, the natural tradition, I think has recognized on the one hand that God was setting up a specific civil society for a specific time, specific place, and so was giving them judicial precepts, civil laws that were proper to their environment, their circumstance. And that’s the thing that every society needs to model. Look to what God has done and then model that in a different time in a different place. But that doesn’t mean mapping over the exact same laws one for one as the theonomist would suggest. So that’s generally what’s recognized by natural law theorists. But Aquinas makes a second qualification to the judicial precepts that I think doesn’t get highlighted as much and I think. It’s actually quite —I don’t know if devastating is the right word— but it really needs to change the nature of the debate and that is Aquinas recognizes that the judicial precepts, right? So we have the threefold, the classic threefold division. You see this in Westminster Confession and Aquinas was really one of the first to clearly articulate dividing up the Old Testament [Mosaic covenant] law into moral precepts, the judicial precepts and the ceremonial precepts, right? Basically all Christians agree ceremonial precepts aren’t binding today. Virtually everyone thinks the moral precepts are still binding, and then the theonomists are the ones who think the judicial precepts are still binding. And one of the things Aquinas says is that the judicial precepts are primarily judicial. They’re primarily civil. Their primary purpose was to regulate Hebrew old covenant civil order. Nevertheless, they were secondarily, he says they were secondarily figurative or symbolic, or you might say ceremonial. So this is Aquinas admitting that these three categories, moral, civil, judicial, they’re not actually all that watertight. Even the judicial precepts had a ceremonial or figurative dimension that also relativizes them. So, all of the natural law theorists, thinkers and folks in the natural law tradition would say we, yes, the judicial precepts are relativized by the fact that they’re judicial. They were for one civil order back then, and we have a different order, so we can still learn from them, but they don’t automatically apply. But when Aquinas says that they’re partly figurative, that means that there’s a second layer of relativization, which is you need to take into account the respect in which these judicial precepts weren’t just regulating them civically at a certain time, but there was a religious covenant or historical redemptive uniqueness to them. That means that even what they were trying to accomplish may not be the kind of thing that law generally, civil law, is supposed to achieve. An example here would be the requirement of the gleaning laws. I hesitate there because it’s not entirely clear to me whether those were judicial in the technical sense. We’re never told that there was a civil penalty associated with non-observance of the gleaning law. That’s like a fourth category altogether. You’re told to do something, it has certain civic dimensions or social dimensions, but there’s no penalty associated with it, is it really a judicial precept? According to Aquinas’ definition, no. A judicial precept comes with punishment. But anyway, let’s just treat it like a judicial precept. The theonomist wants to say, or at least a very wooden theonomist would say, “we had gleaning laws then, we should have them now.” That’s maybe not fair to all theonomists. Maybe they would have some kind of adjustment. But the natural law theorist would say no, we’re a different time and place. But nevertheless, the kind of generosity that the judicial precept of the cleaning law was trying to enforce shows us that that’s on the table as far as civil law goes. If you have a civil magistrate, he’s trying to think of how do I make my people generous with their land or their other property. Maybe he doesn’t enforce the gleaning laws, but he does something else. So the natural law tradition generally sets itself up for that kind of discretionary application of the gleaning law. And the application of my presentation there was to say, well, no, if we take Aquinas’ admission seriously that these were partly figurative, then the gleaning law, for example, doesn’t necessarily lend itself to that kind of application. That means God was doing something very unique with his people. And not only was it figurative, it maybe had a moral purpose to it. And just because it had a moral purpose doesn’t mean that civil laws today that come with the use of coercion can enforce that. So it was mainly just making the point that the natural law response to the theonomist is no, the judicial precepts are more complicated than that. Don’t be so childish and immature in your application. And I was basically doing to Aquinas in the natural law tradition what Aquinas in the natural law tradition we’re doing to the theonomists and saying no, you want to pick and choose and make prudential applications of these laws, but on Aquinas’ own terms, if these things are partly figurative, partly symbolic, it’s even more complicated than that. And the final application would be that it’s so complicated, that was God’s business. We’re not supposed to be doing those things. We need to be limiting our law to just protecting rights, using coercion in response to acts of aggression. So it’s ultimately making up that libertarian point.
Kerry:
One note of interest is that most theonomists, such as Gary North, are famously not economic theonomists. The way North deals with the “non- free market” character of old covenant law concerning property, for example the Jubilee law, is to say that basically it’s fulfilled in Christ. If theonomists had consistently and correctly applied that principle to all old covenant civil law, recognizing its figurative or typological character, then they wouldn’t be theonomists at all. In any case, you say that Aquinas takes Old Covenant civil law to be a specification of moral law, even though moral law has its own specifications. Can you say more about that?
Jonathan:
I think that’s important. This takes me back to some of what I think are some of the biggest critiques of Aquinas’ natural law doctrine more generally. They really parallel here. Because for Aquinas as natural law is the moral precepts, so civil law is to the judicial precepts. Backing up a little bit, and this is probably my second great critique of his overall natural law doctrine as he applies it politically. When Aquinas asked the question…. so he’s famous for developing and articulating these different kinds of law. There’s eternal law, God’s law for all of creation. There’s his natural law. That’s that subset of eternal law that applies to human beings specifically, it’s moral law. Then there’s human law, those laws that we humans make in human society, and those need to conform to natural law. And then finally there’s divine law, which is any law given in the Bible, whether it’s already revealed in general revelation or not, if it’s in the Bible, it’s divine law. And so when Aquinas is going through and enumerating these things, when you ask the question why do we need human law, he actually gives a very bad answer. He says, well because we need human law in order to specify natural law. That’s not why we need human law. Natural law already comes with its own specifications. Aquinas is very clear on this. There’s the first principles of natural law, and there’s all the things you derive from that. We don’t need human law because we need to further specify natural law. We do need to specify natural law, but that doesn’t make something a human law. Human law is what civil societies create and enforce on their subjects because they’re necessary for us to get along. So that’s a place where he should have seen coercion, red alert, that’s what differentiates it. And he completely misses it there. And it’s the same thing when he’s talking about the judicial precepts and the moral precepts. He says the judicial precepts provide a specification of the moral precepts. No, they don’t, even on his own principles. When he’s talking about the moral precepts, he himself gives a hierarchy of three different kinds. I’m not going to remember these exactly, but there’s a kind of big “E” on the eye chart; moral precepts like don’t murder, stuff like that. Then there’s the stuff that… they’re more downstream and you derive them. And then way downstream, these are moral precepts that take a long time, take the wise, take meditation. These are things like standing up before the hoary head, respecting your elders when they enter the room. These are moral precepts, but they’re not as obvious. And they take a lot of wisdom and thought and even time to work these things out. So that’s just Aquinas talking about the moral precepts. He himself recognized moral precepts come with their own specification. But then we turn to talk about judicial precepts again, he defines them as basically a specification of the moral precepts. No! On your own principles, Aquinas, that’s not what they are. That doesn’t sufficiently differentiate them. And elsewhere he’s clear what the judicial precepts are, they come with punishment. That’s a difference, that’s coercion. But it’s just this blind spot. Going back to our earlier discussion, why does he have that blind spot? It’s not exactly clear. But that’s what’s going on there. And I think it’s actually a really important point. And I think it’s really… it’s huge. I can’t overemphasize how bad it is that when you’re trying to differentiate human law from natural law or the judicial precepts from the moral precepts, that you can’t identify the very thing that makes that difference. That’s devastating. And I think it goes to the very heart of the whole natural law tradition. And I’m just kind of shocked at times that more natural theorists don’t recognize that. But I think that you have to be kind of a libertarian crank. Somebody who’s just sort of obsessed, rightly so, though, I think. Maybe libertarians don’t always figure it out, but to their credit, they have problematized this issue of coercion that no other, it seems to me, political moral tradition, even in the Christian tradition, has done, and I don’t think they’re given proper credit for it, and it’s important.
Gregory:
Concerning the establishment of religion, Aquinas takes the coercively enforced religious duties, so-called first table of the moral law in old covenant civil law, along with, perhaps, law of nations enforcement of external religion, I’m thinking, to be evidence that external elements of religion as Scripturally and creationally revealed moral law, should be civilly, coercively enforced. Is that basically what he’s doing? He sees in the old Covenant civil law the enforcement of first table [moral law] and sees it in the law of nations?
Jonathan:
That’s a good question. I can’t think of a place where he invokes it with the law of nations. I mean, it’s difficult because the law of nations is the thing that all nations have in common, but nations don’t have religion in common. So that’s one of my critiques of Calvin. Calvin makes that kind of argument like, well, we always see every society has enforced religion. Calvin says that’s one of the first primary duties of the civil magistrate. But on Calvin’s own principles, that’s also the first point where everybody needed to rebel against their government. So it’s a really weird argument for Calvin to say that he appeals to what every nation has always done, and yet on his own principles, that’s the first place where all of the subjects should have been rebelling against their nation. It seems like a really goofy argument. Now, I guess one could say, as part of the law of nations that, yeah, government gets to enforce religion… But then every nation has a different religion. I think, OK, you’re basically admitting that religion is not part of the law of nations because it’s not the thing we have in common, right? Every nation enforcing against, prohibiting murder, prohibiting theft, that’s a real law of nations. We agree. OK, you come over here and… that’s part of the original meaning of the law of nations for the Romans was this is the ius gentium, this is what we’re going to apply to other people that are here. We have a different set of laws for our own citizens, our own subjects. We have another set of laws for foreign residents or visitors. Well, it wouldn’t make sense to, if they’re aliens, if they’re from somewhere else, to enforce your religious laws on them.
Gregory:
Calvin and the Reformers, and Aquinas, we would say in requiring establishment of religion seemed to be making the same kind of double error in not adequately recognizing the unique typological, we would say, character of the old covenant civil law, first of all; and second of all, lacking the Scripturally and creationally revealed criterion for civil law, namely the non-aggression principle outside of the Old covenant. So would you say, in summary, this is the kind of mistake they’re making, not only lacking that criterion, but also not adequately recognizing the typological character of the civil law?
Jonathan:
I think so, yeah. That’s helpful. The way you set up Aquinas sounded more like maybe something the way Calvin treats it, as I said earlier. I do think to the extent that he’s doing that, Calvin and the Reformers, they are universalizing principles in the new covenant without giving, without sufficient argument, without establishing if it’s the case that this is proper to the nature of civil government. And you can’t just simply say that because these things were enforced or punished (blasphemy laws, heresy, whatever) in the old covenant, therefore that’s automatically part of God’s program for civil societies generally. Maybe it is, but an argument is required not just the fact that God did it in the old covenant. The further argument is needed. And yeah, I think they are failing to take into account the typological character, the unique redemptive status that Israel had in that situation.
Kerry:
As we’ve mentioned, these and other presentations were given at The George Buchanan Forum. We’ll link to Jeremy Bunch’s intro “George Buchanan and Scots Reformed Resistance Theory.” The forum website explains that George Buchanan was a late 16th century Scottish Reformed thinker who used scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyrants, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history. It was our pleasure to speak with you, Dr. McIntosh. Is there anything further you’d like to add about the Forum or your participation thus far? Or any other work you’d like to mention?
Jonathan:
If anyone’s interested in my work on Aquinas, I have a couple articles. One on the LCI website, so you can search for my name there. I also have an article in the Journal of Markets And Morality, by the Acton Institute. I have an article there on Aquinas, making some of the arguments that I made here in this presentation. I think that’s it.
Gregory:
Alright, we’ll find those and include those in the shownotes. Thanks so much, Dr. McIntosh, for interviewing with us about your work. And we encourage listeners to check out all the resources linked in the shownotes, and of course The George Buchanan Forum.
Jonathan:
Thanks for having me on the show. This was a lot of fun.
