I’ve been looking for the best representative I can find for the 2k theory. Given his training, I’d expect VanDrunen to make about as good a case for 2k theory as anyone. So let’s review his arguments:
http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=printfriendly&var1=Print&var2=93
The topic of natural law, however, is very large, and I can only touch on a few of the relevant issues. In what follows, I will be making a few assumptions that there is no space here to try to prove. Perhaps most importantly, I assume that we live in a religiously pluralistic world and that we will continue to do so until Christ returns. God has not established a theocracy in the world today, nor does he will that Christians try to set up a theocracy by their own efforts. Rather, Christians must live in a religiously pluralistic world and work within these constraints, as difficult as that may be.
i) It isn’t clear what he means by this. On the face of it, his statement is equivocal. Yes, the world as a whole is religiously pluralistic. But, of course, this doesn’t mean that individual countries are religiously pluralistic. At different times and places, there’s been a lot of religious homogeneity. So how is his sweeping generality relevant on a nation-by-nation basis?
Is he saying it would be okay to be theocratic as long as your own country happens to be religiously homogenous? Is it only out of bounds to be theocratic if your own country happens to be religiously heterogeneous?
ii) There are degrees of religious pluralism. For example, an evangelical might have no objection to a Catholic magistrate as long as he were a socially conservative Catholic—whereas he might find the prospect of a Mormon magistrate more objectionable, and take strenuous exception to the prospect of a Muslim magistrate.
iii) Is VanDrunen’s argument a merely pragmatic concession to practically necessity? Or does he have a principled objection to theocracy even if that enjoyed popular support?
iv) I assume he thinks there are limits to tolerable religious diversity at the public policy level. What if Muslims want to impose Sharia on Christians? Or what if Muslims what to carve out a Sharia zone for the Muslim minority? Then what?
v) Finally, there’s an obvious sense in which the law is inherently coercive. Clearly a lawbreaker doesn’t agree with the law. So it’s not as if the passage of a law is contingent on anything like unanimous consent.
In answering this question, we should not ask more of natural law than it can provide. Natural law certainly does not reveal to the conscience a detailed public policy. We would do better to begin by affirming that natural law teaches the basics of God's moral law, and hence provides a framework for thinking about law and public policy, from which framework people in the exercise of wisdom should develop particular laws and policies in response to particular situations.
Of course, this is one of the objections to natural law theory. Can it suffice as a freestanding alternative to Biblical ethics?
Natural law is the moral revelation that God gives in creation itself. Romans 1:18-32 speaks of things that may be known of God from creation, including a great deal of moral knowledge. Romans 2:14-15 speaks of the law of God being written on people's hearts, such that even those without access to the law revealed in Scripture are held accountable to God through their consciences.
His appeal to Rom 1:18-32 is more secure than his appeal to Rom 2:14-15, which a number of distinguished exegetes identify as Christian gentiles rather than pagan gentiles.
Here is one area in which natural law becomes a helpful resource. When appealing to natural law, believers need not feel that they are compromising their Christian convictions, for natural law is authoritative and true; it is part of God's own revelation, after all. Neither need Christians fear that they are appealing to a standard that is unknown or foreign to unbelievers; God has inscribed the natural law on the heart of every person (Rom. 2:14-15), and all people know the basic requirements of God's law, even if they suppress that knowledge (Rom. 1:19, 21, 32).
Bracketing his debatable appeal to Rom 2:14-15, I don’t object to this argument up to a point. But this doesn’t mean St. Paul regarded natural law as an adequate alternative to revealed law. In 1 Tim 1:9-10, for example, Paul applies some key provisions of the Mosaic law to unbelievers. (See commentaries by Towner and Liefeld.)
The fact that most unbelievers, though refusing to worship the true God, still to some significant extent acknowledge and live by the truth of his law as it is known by nature is something for which Christians can be very grateful. Because of this, societies generally retain some degree of order and justice. And it provides Christians with the opportunity to engage unbelievers in genuine moral dialogue on issues of public policy. But how exactly does one make arguments from natural law and thus put it to use in the public square?
Up to a point, I don’t object to common ground appeals. But public policy tends to be set by a social elite, not the man on the street. And elite opinion may be militantly anti-Christian.
There comes a point where almost nothing is out of bounds. Then what?
Most every unbeliever, in fact, accepts the truth of at least some aspects of the natural law. True, they do not accept it for what it really is, the revelation of the living and triune God. But most people, when pressed, would admit that acts such as murder, stealing, and lying are immoral, and they themselves generally avoid such actions. Most people would also claim that law and government exist to protect people against those who would kill, rob, or defraud them.
For Christians, it would seem most helpful to begin not with the feelings of sinful human beings, but with that which Scripture teaches is revealed in the natural law. A passage such as Romans 1:29-32 shows clearly that sins such as disobedience to parents, murder, adultery, theft, and lying are violations of natural law that all people, at some level, know. Christians may be confident that appealing to people's natural knowledge of these things is valid and legitimate, even when unbelievers deny these truths and when believers themselves do not know exactly how to turn such appeals into good arguments.
If unbelievers deny outright that acts such as murder and theft are wrong, there is very little Christians can do except note the utter impossibility of civil life under such assumptions. As noted above, however, most people do not deny this.
But sophisticated unbelievers don’t generally deny that theft and murder are wrong. Rather, they simply redefine certain actions. They don’t say abortion is murder, but deny that murder is wrong. Rather, they deny that abortion is murder.
I don’t see how VanDrunen would be able to argue down a secular ethicist like Peter Singer or Thomas Nagel.
It seems to me that one of the best ways for Christians to make natural law arguments is to begin with these general truths that most people would not dispute and then attempt to show, by use of wisdom and appeals to common sense, how more particular or controversial actions would or would not be consistent with these general moral truths. In other words, by arguing that particular actions are wrong because they tend to promote killing or stealing (which most people admit are bad things), or by arguing that particular actions are right because they tend to promote life or the protection of property (which most people admit are good things), one may construct natural law arguments that have a certain chance for effectiveness. I do not believe that there is any foolproof way of making persuasive natural law arguments, but if we do attempt to make such arguments in a careful and civil way, by God's grace we may make some progress toward moving society in a more just direction.
But a secular ethicist can appeal to common sense as well. One of the tacit assumptions in VanDrunen’s position seems to be that a natural law theorist is a deontologist. Hence, certain things are intrinsically right or wrong. You do your duty, as natural law dictates, irrespective of the consequences.
Yet I don’t see why a natural law theorist couldn’t equally be a utilitarian. There are situations in which utilitarian arguments enjoy a lot of popular appeal or intuitive appeal. Yet utilitarian ethics is also quite ruthless.
To his credit, VanDrunen tries to apply his theoretical construct to some real life issues:
As observed above, nearly everyone, at some level, believes that life is valuable and therefore that lethal violence against others should be prohibited by law. Most people would also agree that this applies, perhaps especially, to those who are weak and unable to defend themselves. Based upon such convictions, people today overwhelmingly condemn infanticide as a terrible crime. Beginning from this widespread acknowledgement of natural law truth, we could attempt to show how these proper moral sentiments are inconsistent with a pro-choice abortion position.
To do so, we might imagine a newborn infant and then begin moving the clock backwards on his young life. As we envision his life in reverse, an appropriate question to ask is at what point something radical happens to this child to change his status from one of personhood, deserving full legal protection of his life, to one of non-personhood, unprotected from the one who would snuff out his life. What we observe as the clock runs backwards is that the development of this child is continuous, without a drastic, radical event to distinguish clearly one stage of life from another...Based upon the social consensus that infanticide is immoral, then, a compelling argument can be made, based upon observation of the natural process of fetal development, that life should be protected from conception on.
There are two problems with this argument:
i) It would be easy for a utilitarian to justify infanticide. He might say there are situations in which this is a necessary form of population control. The alternative is mass starvation. It isn’t clear to me how a natural law theorist would argue him down.
ii) Another problem is that VanDrunen is trying to extrapolate from borderline cases. It’s an application of the sorities paradox. How many grains of wheat constitute a heap? Is there an exact threshold? No.
It’s true that fetal development ranges along a continuum. And so there’s no bright line between one stage of development and another. But that’s more intuitively persuasive when you compare one phase with the immediately preceding or succeeding phase. There’s more evident discontinuity if you compare and contrast earlier and later stages. The more so if you limit your analysis to the physical characteristics of human life. (A Cartesian dualist could ground personal identity in the soul.)
Take the light spectrum. That is also a seamless continuum. Red shades into orange, then yellow, then green, and so on. Does this mean there’s no discernable difference between red and blue? No.
Likewise, the fact that dawn and dusk are borderline conditions doesn’t mean that noonday and midnight are borderline conditions. We can still tell the difference between night and day. Just not around the edges. And we can still demarcate Monday from Friday.
Despite the assault on the nature of the family that arises from certain quarters of contemporary culture, most people still recognize the unique, natural, morally rich relationship that exists between parents and children. They acknowledge that parents have certain responsibilities to provide for and train their children, and that children have certain responsibilities to submit to their parents' authority. Most people also acknowledge the important, though clearly different, natural relationship between siblings. They acknowledge that siblings have moral obligations to love and respect each other, without a relationship of authority existing between them.
Beginning with these shared convictions, we might ask what sort of condition a person produced by cloning would find herself in. She would certainly have no normal identity as a daughter and sister. What relationship would she have with the woman from whom she was cloned? In a certain very real sense, she is her mother. Yet, in a strictly genetic sense, she is her identical twin, and therefore her sister. Is the cloned person to treat as a mother a person who is her sister genetically? Or is she to treat as a sister one who decided to bring her into existence by replicating herself? The scenario seems hopelessly confusing. The natural bonds of mother-daughter and sister-sibling (not to mention the troubling removal of any father from the picture), which most people today still recognize as vital for establishing a person's identity and stability in life, are twisted beyond ordinary recognition. One of the revolting aspects of incest is the possibility that a person could become simultaneously the parent and grandparent (or, father and uncle, etc.) of a child, with all of the tragedy and confusion that such a scenario creates for the parties involved, especially for the child. Human cloning produces a scenario even more bizarre.
There are a couple of problems with this argument as well:
i) Cloning is just an artificial form of twinning. It isn’t obvious why natural cloning is morally permissible, but artificial cloning is intrinsically evil.
ii) Who, exactly, is wronged in this procedure? The clone? But does this mean it would be better for the clone if he didn’t exist? If I were a healthy human clone, if I’d matured to adulthood, would I feel wronged because I’d been brought into existence by this method? Would I have been dealt an injustice? But apart from that process, I wouldn’t even exist.
VanDrunen makes a clone sound like an orphan. And there’s a tragic aspect to orphanhood. But even if the two are analogous, it’s better to be an orphan than a nonentity. And some orphans turn out better than some kids who were raised by their biological parents.
What about rape and incest? Rape and incest are evil. But the baby is not the injured party. The mother is.
Keep in mind that I’m not attempting to consider all the pros and cons of cloning, or stake out a personal position. I’m merely drawing attention to the fact that it’s easy to come up with common sense counterarguments to his common sense arguments.
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