There are five points to the citizenship program for which I have been arguing. The third point is persuasion. Last time we looked at some of the challenges we face in persuading our neighbors to support policies and politics that, “under the sun” (Eccl 1:3), conform to the nature of things as ordained by God. In order for us to persuade our neighbors to agree with us about these things, it will help us to make three distinctions: (1) the distinction between nature and grace, (2) the distinction between the temporal and the eternal, and (3) the distinction between law and gospel. These distinctions help to orient us, to point us in the right direction, and to set us on the right course. There are things that we can accomplish in civil life, and there are things for which the state and public life are incompetent. If we ask the state or public life to try to accomplish or to address matters in the realm of grace, gospel, and the eternal, we will certainly be frustrated. History tells us that we will corrupt those things that should remain pure.

Nature And Grace

Broadly everything in life can be assigned to nature (creation) or grace (redemption and eschatology). Football belongs to nature. This is why there is no sensible way to speak about Christian football. Either one is physically apt to play the game, is skilled, and plays within the rules and nature of the game, or one is not or does not. There are not two distinct games of football, one for Christians and one for pagans. Rather, both pagans and Christians live “under the sun,” in this world, and have to abide by nature as created by God.

To speak of nature is to speak of givens, things that are fixed, ordained, established in the course of things. A football does what it does according to its properties. When it hits the ground it might take an unexpected bounce. But if a punter is skilled and he hits the right part of the ball with the correct part of his foot, with the right speed, given certain wind conditions, the punt may sail quite far. That is in the nature of a football. This is true for Christians and non-Christians alike. We Christians interpret the significance of nature differently and we have a different explanation for why nature does what it does, but both Christians and non-Christians can see with their eyes and feel with their hands the nature of a football.

So it is in secular civil and public life. Nature imposes certain rules by which we must all, Christian and non-Christian alike, abide. That is all that civil life can achieve: to bring our common public life into a degree of conformity to nature. So, we are trying to tap into our neighbors’ sense of natural justice and encourage them to pursue it with us. For example, we might ask a state legislature to extend legal protections for unborn humans by pursuing this sort of argument: Do innocent human beings deserve protection from violence? Any rational person should say yes. Do children deserve protection from violence? Again, a rational person will say yes. Do they deserve protection at 3 years old? Yes. Two years old? Yes. At 1 year old? Yes. At 6 months? Yes. At 1 month? Yes. Anyone who answers no to these questions is tolerating infanticide and should become the object of public scorn and be challenged by a political opponent. To be sure, there are people who do wish to tolerate infanticide, and we need to persuade our neighbors of the evil of infanticide. Quite probably most Americans have never given serious thought to infanticide—it seems almost outside the realm of possibility for most of us. Likewise, remarkably, most Americans probably have not given serious thought to the status of humans before they leave the womb. But we can reason with them from nature to help them understand the development of human life. How many people in 2024 know the basics of human development from zygote to embryo (Greek for infant) to foetus (Latin for infant)? We may fairly suppose that most Americans, particularly those who are the product of the public school system, are mostly ignorant of the basics of human development.

This is just one example from one topic where, if we marshal the facts, educate, and reason with reasonable people, we might be able to make progress in civil life. Imagine the improvement of our shared common, public, secular life if a super-majority of voting citizens agreed about the nature and value of human life. Imagine what might be done by way of policy and in politics to prevent human trafficking. In this topic and in many others, we need the help of grace behind the scenes, as it were. Thus, we pray for our magistrates and our fellow citizens, that the Lord might move them to see a greater reality, to judge truly and justly. In the public sphere, however, arguments from nature are more than sufficient.

When, in pursuing public policy, in a shared secular sphere, we Christians appeal to Holy Scripture, we take a shortcut. Though it seems pious, such appeals in the civil realm are actually the result of impatience. We are not actually reasoning with them (and our non-Christian neighbors will likely see it that way) as much as we are appealing to authority. The problem is that though Scriptures are authoritative, non-Christians do not recognize them as such. Short of seeking to impose the Scriptures on our non-Christian neighbors by coercion (e.g., theocracy), which is the very failed past from which the American founders sought to free us, we must reason with our non-Christian friends.

Further, it is far from clear that, under the New Covenant, after the expiration of the national people of God and the national covenant, that the Scriptures intend to be a guide for secular, public life and policy. Insofar as they help us to see those principles that are natural and universal, as Johannes Wollebius (1589–1629) wrote, the Mosaic judicial laws witness to “general equity,” that is, natural law. When, however, we reason from nature with our non-Christian friends, though we might be said to be appealing to authority, it is a shared authority that does not depend upon special revelation (grace). There is no evidence, however, in the New Testament, that our Lord himself or his apostles sought to impose the Mosaic judicial laws upon the nations. There is no evidence that our Lord or his apostles sought to persuade any magistrate to impose Christianity as the state religion. They and the early post-apostolic Christians knew that the Israelite theocracy was intentionally temporary and that it expired with the death of Christ, never to be repeated or instituted again. The emperor Theodosius I (AD 380), however, thought differently and established Christianity as the state religion of the empire—but he did not ask Christ, nor did he establish his case for Christianity as a state-religion from the New Testament.

As distinct from the category nature, grace refers to the supernatural, to special revelation, redemption, and eschatology. The state does not administer the supernatural or grace. The secular and civil sphere administers nature. That is why the apostle Paul made no reference to special revelation or grace when describing the nature and office of the magistrate in Romans 13.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. (Rom 13: 1–7)

Who was the magistrate when Paul wrote Romans 13? It was Nero, whom Andrew Melville (1545–1622) might have called “God’s silly vassal.”¹ Even among the pagans Nero became notorious for his licentiousness and corruption. Nevertheless, Paul assumes Nero’s legitimacy. He assumes that Nero knows essentially what to do, and that to some degree, despite his corruption and wickedness, he could and would do it. In other words, unlike a lot of Christians, Paul had a category for nature. He appealed to it in Romans 1:26 and 2:14 and 11:14. He had no doubt that all reasonable people know, by sense experience, what nature is, how it operates, and what is and is not nature. Homosexuality among humans is patently contrary to nature. Paul knew it from nature, and he knew that the pagans knew it from nature. He knew that “nature itself teach[es] you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him.” He had a robust view of natural revelation, which might even shock those who have lost the category or who have been bamboozled by modern theologians (e.g., Karl Barth, 1886–1968) to give up Paul’s doctrine of nature, natural revelation, and natural law.⁵

The magistrate, according to Paul is a terror to those who do evil. Virtually everyone about whom Paul was writing, who knew the magistrate as a source of terror, were pagans. How did they know that the magistrate is a terror to evil doers? They knew it by nature, in their conscience and by experience. Their fellow evil doers had been arrested and they had seen the Romans punish them.

No one had to instruct even that evil reprobate Nero in the business of avenging the innocent, even though he himself injured and even murdered the innocent—Christians among them. Even as he suppressed basic natural, human knowledge of right and wrong in his pursuit of his own sexual perversion, he still knew what was right and wrong according to nature.

This is not a radical new argument. It was Abraham Kuyper’s argument and before him that of the Reformed orthodox.³ In Our Program he made the same argument, saying that he “consciously follows the tradition of our Reformed theologians, who held fast to this natural theology precisely for the sake of that which falls outside the kingdom of heaven.”⁴ He did so because the “natural knowledge of God, not the knowledge from revelation, has compelling force for every person. Certainty about the first kind of knowledge does not require what the second requires, namely, supernatural illumination.”⁵

Next time we will look at the second of the three distinctions as we learn how to persuade our neighbors to live according to natural revelation.

Notes

1. Melville used this phrase to describe James VI of Scotland (who was also James I of England).
2. On this see R. Scott Clark, “Calvin and the Lex Naturalis,” Stulos Theological Journal 6 (1998): 1–22. See also the resource page on natural law.
3. See R. Scott Clark, “Kuyper Contra Christian Nationalism.”
4. Abraham Kuyper, Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto, trans., ed. Harry Van Dyke. Quoted in R. Scott Clark, “Kuyper Contra Christian Nationalism.
5. Kuyper, Our Program. Quoted in R. Scott Clark, “Kuyper Contra Christian Nationalism.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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