God, Law & Liberty Podcast

Today David offers a Biblical touchstone for improving on the church-state problems that contributed to our law no longer having a Christian foundation. Demonstrative of those problems are two historical situations that may explain why the Danbury Baptists may have sided with the Enlightenment-influenced, Gospel-averse Thomas Jefferson for President. There is “blame” enough for every stripe of Protestant to share in and now it’s time to move forward.

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Who, in David’s terminology, are the neo-Baptists that he finds involved in politics and law? Is their engagement “better” than that of neo-Covenanters? Today, David discusses the distinction between Baptistic theology and that of the “old” Covenantors and how that theology worked itself in history. He explains how that led the Danbury Baptist Association to support Thomas Jefferson for President. Did the “old” Baptists help Jefferson lay the foundation for a “wall of separation” that the neo-Baptists of today decry?

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David takes today’s episode to develop a historical context for next week’s discussion of neo-Baptist engagement with law and politics. Without this context, the Gnostic nature of that form of engagement will be less clear. David uses the work of 18th-century Scottish theologian, Thomas Boston, and the Apostle Paul's first letter to Timothy to explain the role of law in non-Gnostic terms.

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Are you part of the neo-Covenantal tradition or the neo-Baptist tradition when it comes to law and politics? Today, David defines these two groups based on 30 years of dealing with Christians in the legal and policy spheres. In this episode, though, he explains why the neo-Covenanters are Gnostics and would have Calvin and Kuyper rolling in their graves.

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David begins his examination of what he considers the two predominate views among Christians on law and politics, those he calls the neo-Covenanters and neo-Baptists, with how he realized he read the Bible like the legal positivist, Jeremy Bentham, and why reading the Bible that way is gnostic, not Christian. Is being a heretic easier than ever before? The answer may surprise you.

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Common law authority William Blackstone said that man “must in all points conform to the will of his nature,” and this will was called the “natural law.” Today, David explains how he overlooked the most fundamental law of human nature because he read the Bible like a disciple of legal positivist Jeremy Bentham. From his experience, David offers a proposition about the state of evangelicalism in America.

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Evangelicals of all stripes want to live in a country that has righteous laws or, we might say, law in accord with God’s law. And to that end the debate rages among those voting for Trump because they are evangelicals and those not voting for Harris because they are evangelical. The recent comments of David French and the formation of “Evangelicals for Harris” and the evangelical rejoinder to them quickly come to mind. Today, David launches a short series that talks about the evangel of righteousness that seems to have been lost in the din of politics.

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This week David shares four statements by Jonathan Burnside, Professor of Biblical Law at the University of Bristol (England) Law School, about how the Bible presents “Biblical law” that came flooding back to his mind when, last week, he read a conversation God said Jeremiah would have with those of God’s people who did not like his prophecies. Would we, like them, say, “How have we forgotten your law?”

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At a recent gathering of political and legal advocates from around the nation, most of whom were Christians, these questions were asked: “What keeps you up at night?” and “What is most urgent to you?” David uses an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory, an excerpt from John Owen’s Christologia, and Hebrews Chapter 4, to provide insight into what the questions and the way they were framed says about our understanding of the Gospel.

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This week’s episode will spring from the relationship between Dionysius’s table depicted at the Olympics and common Christian wisdom about political engagement. David will apply thoughts drawn from observations made by Abraham Kuyper, John Owen, Jeff Shafer, Jason Farley, and the prophet Jeremiah to offer what he thinks should be the first step in a truly Christian response to the Republican Party’s Platform and future political engagement.

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