I have been laboring over the middle rubric of the POPLL agenda, namely persuasion, because it is much neglected and yet central to Christian social engagement in a democratic republic like the USA. I am also laboring over it because it is a lost art. In earlier periods of education, before the onset of the great darkness of our time, students were routinely educated in the basics of learning (which we may gather under the heading of grammar), the art and science of thinking clearly and well (logic), and the art of rhetoric and persuasion. The generations before mine were regularly made to memorize poetry in order to improve their rhetorical skills. By the time I reached school, those in charge of the educational establishment had begun to give up on memorization (thus gradually depriving students of any real opportunity to learn). Then they dropped the guillotine on phonics after I completed my sentence in public school but the end of reading was already under way. Because the they decided that experience was more important than what they invariably called “rote memorization,” they made a lot of us innumerate. I did not learn the Gnostic secret of memorization until I was 20, whereafter I promptly became a straight A student and a fixture on the Dean’s List.
Our culture no longer much values persuasion. Instead, it favors propaganda and power and too many Christians have followed suit by giving up on persuasion. Genuine persuasion, however, is not digital carpet bombing, gaslighting (manipulating people to disbelieve their own sense experience), or astroturfing (i.e., manipulating social media to create the illusion that two people are really thousands). It is the art of causing people to change their minds and thus their actions through rational and compelling (which includes the affect) communication.
In order for Christians to be persuasive in our post-Christian setting, it befits our message to distinguish between law and the gospel. This is a biblical distinction made by our Lord and his apostles. Our Lord himself was a preacher of both the law and the gospel. Beginning with Matthew 5:17, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus began to exposit the law: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (ESV). By these words, he did not intend, as the antinomians think, to do away with the moral law. Insofar as the moral law is a reflection of the very character of God, he can no more do away with the moral law than he can change his own character. God is what he is (Ex 3:14). That we, his image bearers, must love him with all our faculties and our neighbor as ourselves (Matt 22:37–40; Heidelberg 4) is immutable law.
Nor did our Lord articulate his moral law as part of a program for a new theocracy as the theonomists imagine.1 Rather, he was setting forth the right understanding of the moral (not judicial) law for the Kingdom of God, which is manifested chiefly in the visible church, the Christ-confessing covenant community.
Nevertheless, our Lord was intentionally and clearly preaching the law that we might thereby learn the greatness of our sin and misery (the pedagogical use) and, after turning to Christ, seek to order our lives by it. That is why he said, “Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:19; ESV).
In this section of the Sermon he applies the law, poking and probing our hearts and consciences. It is not enough to restrain our hands from murder but we owe to God and neighbor restraint of heart as well (Matt 5:21–26). For sinners, as holy and good as God’s law is, it is bad news (Rom 7:7–12). Our Lord was also a gospel preacher. He came announcing the good news of the Kingdom (Matt 4:23: Mark 1:14). In the nature of things, bad news and good news are two fundamentally different messages. When the physician enters a patient’s room to say, “the scan shows that the cancer has returned” that is bad news. When he says, “We got it all. You’re good to go.” That is good news. When our Lord Jesus said, “do this and live” (Luke 10:28) that was bad news. When said, “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16) that was good news.
The apostle Paul clearly distinguished law and gospel. When he wrote, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified” (Rom 2:13) he was preaching the law because “through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom 3:20). When he wrote that believers “are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom 3:24) he was preaching the gospel.
This is an ancient Christian distinction, which we see, in seed form, in Augustine’s great work against the Pelagians, On the Spirit and the Letter, where he distinguished between the law as the killing letter and the gospel as the life-giving Spirit. This distinction between law and gospel became one of the most fundamental convictions of all the Reformation (Lutheran and Reformed) churches.
To the world, the church preaches both the law, whereby we pray our neighbors will be convicted on the greatness of their sin and misery (Heidelberg 2) and the gospel whereby they will be drawn to free salvation in Christ through hearing the good news of free salvation by divine favor alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone (Rom 10:14–17; Heidelberg 19 and 65).
In secular civil life, however, as we Christians seek to do our participate in the American experiment in self-governance, we need to distinguish between those two words according to the sphere and the institution in which we are participating.
Both the law and the gospel are God’s Word to his creatures but the church, the Christ-confessing covenant community, is the divinely ordained institution and sphere in and through which the gospel is to be preached to the nations.
The state is not concerned with the gospel. It is only concerned with the law, specifically what Reformation theologians have called the civil use (usus civilis) of the law,2 the use of which is to prevent a “profuse outbreak of sin, to restrain sin, and to promote civic (not saving) righteousness.3The civic or political use of the moral law, as Berkhof explained, serves God’s “common grace” (emphasis added), not saving grace, “in the world at large.” Therefore it is not a “means of grace in the technical sense of the word.”
When we engage the broader secular sphere, in service to our neighbor, as we noted last time, we are seeking to address temporal matters and to advance the common good, which includes believers and non-believers.
The civil magistrate is a minister of the civil use of the law. His source book is nature, by which he knows the moral law sufficiently for the purposes of civil administration. He is specifically interested in and generally limited to what the churches describe as the “second table” of the moral law (Heidelberg 93), i.e., the last six commandments which address “the duties we owe to our neighbor.”
In Romans 13, Paul simply assumes that the civil magistrate, even a pagan like Nero, knows his duty. It is the Christian that he instructs to submit, to pay taxes, etc. As we Christians work together with our neighbors, whether on city council, or in a town committee, or on a state-commission, we are seeking to apply the law to our fellow citizens equitably and wisely.
Another way to put this is to say that the work of the state belongs to nature and the work of the visible church belongs to super nature, as it were or to redemptive grace. As we seek to persuade our neighbors to adopt laws and policies that benefit them and that conform to the natural pattern God has ordained for the world, our arguments will be more persuasive and our goals properly focused if we understand in what sphere and to what end we are working.
Our goal is to do our part toward the right use of the law for the whole community. This is over against utopians (whether or from the right or the left), whose eschatology tells them that, with the right policies and people, some sort of golden age can be achieved on earth. As Christians, we know that this age (Eph 1:21) and the age to come are two distinct things. We look forward to the new heavens and the new earth but we do not imagine that the secular magistrate can ussher in the age to come or the eschaton.
We can, however, work toward just laws that protect innocent human life (e.g., the unborn and others), respect divinely-given liberties, that seek a life together that conforms to the order that God has established. For example, both Canada and the United Kingdom are debating laws that would permit physician-assisted suicide. Christians and non-believers alike have an interest in opposing such laws, which contradict the very nature of the office of physician, which is to promote healing and, as much as lies within him, to prevent death. It is one thing to offer palliative care to the dying. It is quite another to say that life itself is no longer to be regarded as intrinsically valuable and God-given. No civilized society should sanction physician assisted suicide. At least some pagans (e.g., Plato and sometimes Aristotle) have recognized that suicide is wrong. There are natural arguments against suicide. E.g., the state has a compelling self-interest in preventing all murders, including self-murder. Just as the state may not sanction the unjust taking of the life of another, so too the state may not sanction the unjust taking of one’s own life. Contrary to the modern assumption, there are limits to autonomy. A state that permits its citizens to murder themselves will not long survive. It will foster the culture of death, which, over time, will destroy a society. Consider the effects of 50 years of abortion on demand in the USA. As recently in the 1990s Democratic politicians were advocating a policy of “safe, rare, and legal.” Now, voters across the country, when given the option to limit abortion, even in so-called Red States, have voted for relatively liberal access to abortifacients. Thirty years after “safe, rare, and legal” few seem to care about safety or frequency but only keeping abortion legal. We have a culture of death.
To what end are we trying to persuade our neighbors to align a culture’s laws and customs with the divinely ordained (natural) order? So that they will adopt those laws but what role might a Christian have in drafting and passing legislation? We will take up this issue in the next installment of the series.
Notes
- E.g., Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1984).
- “a. A usus politicus or civilis. The law serves the purpose of restraining sin and promoting righteousness. Considered from this point of view, the law presupposes sin and is necessary on account of sin. It serves the purpose of God’s common grace in the world at large. This means that from this point of view it cannot be regarded a means of grace in the technical sense of the word.” L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing co., 1938), 614.
- Vos speaks of: a) A usus politicus and civilis: a civil use. The law serves to prevent a profuse outbreak of sin. It is a restraint on sin, an aid to promote civil righteousness.b) A usus elenchticus sive paedagogicus: a convicting use, by which it serves as a disciplinarian, convicts man of his sin and inability so that he might go to Christ, who has fulfilled the law.c) A usus didacticus, normativus: a didactic, normative use for the believer. For him the law becomes a rule of life, according to which he orders his life out of true thankfulness. This is the so-called tertius usus legis, “the third use of the law,” about which conflict arose in the Lutheran church between Agricola and his opponents.”Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. and trans. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., vol. 5 (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2012–16), 84.
©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.
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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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Dr. Clark, we are in near-complete agreement on this: “By the time I reached school, those in charge of the educational establishment had begun to give up on memorization (thus gradually depriving students of any real opportunity to learn). Then they dropped the guillotine on phonics after I completed my sentence in public school but the end of reading was already under way. Because the they decided that experience was more important than what they invariably called ‘rote memorization,’ they made a lot of us innumerate. I did not learn the Gnostic secret of memorization until I was 20, whereafter I promptly became a straight A student and a fixture on the Dean’s List. Our culture no longer much values persuasion. Instead, it favors propaganda and power and too many Christians have followed suit by giving up on persuasion.”
But we also need to deal with the realities of politics.
We can’t persuade people using traditional methods when most conservative voters who are open to our views went to schools that simply did not teach American history or civics, let alone Greco-Roman classical models of civilization or European history.
The “lost tools of learning” phrase is too often identified with the people in Moscow, Idaho, but Doug Wilson is not wrong in using it.
Propaganda works when many or most voters don’t have a strong background in history and civics. Making a simple and basic point, and stating it loudly, and doing it over and over again via a 30-second TV ad, is the standard way modern American politics work. We’re a century and a half away from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and well over two centuries away from the Federalist Papers.
There are reasons why men like Ben Sasse were regarded in conservative Republican circles as being better suited for academia than practical politics. Men like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Rick Santorum are far from fools, but they need to use rhetoric that works outside elite Ivy League universities if they want to reach voters.
(Side point: the “humanistic” education methods you correctly criticize can work, but only with highly motivated and academically gifted students in an academic environment where that’s the norm and teachers don’t have to spend most of their time focusing on the lower half to lower third of their students in order to keep them from failing using educational methods that weren’t designed for the average student. I went to a junior high school and most of high school in what today would be called a magnet school within the public school system, intended to compete with the rapidly growing private schools of Grand Rapids since better students were fleeing poor teaching. My public school education gave me the ability to drop out and go to college without graduation, but that’s not the norm and I know it. Far too many people taught with those methods never learn how to learn because their teachers aren’t focused on time-tested methods that work, i.e., memory work, and have to re-teach things to slower students while those who do understand get bored with school, tune out their teachers, and decide that formal education is a waste of their time.)
The “Gnostic secret of memorization”!? Aw, c’mon! Tell me!
(Interestingly, I learned to “study” the beginning of my sophomore year; all but straight A’s followed.)