Few Christians today doubt that our relationship to our civil governments has gotten at least more complicated, if not outright harder, in recent years. Still, we often do not know how to navigate that challenge very effectively. We can be left thinking that we simply need the right person in office, which would then make everything snap together in a better way.

In The Crisis of Civil Law, Benjamin Saunders offers magnificent clarity concerning these issues to help us have more precise and manageable categories for Christians living within particular societies. He highlights how the main issue in this challenge is not so much government per se, but law. The legal code of any given society is the baseline—although enforced and applied by governments—for regulating life of citizens. Hence, we need a clearer understanding of law in order to find our footing as cultural values change, and we look for the ways forward.

The topic of law, especially civil law, can seem impenetrable to ordinary Christians. We understand the basics of how to live lawfully in our society. The bureaucracy of the entire legal system with all its intricacies is still frequently beyond us. At rock bottom, we want where we live to uphold and even to foster justice and godliness inasmuch as that is possible at the civic level. How that connects to the legal systems in which we live is another question.

The first strength of Saunders’ book is that it provides far more categories for understanding the law biblically and in civic terms. His discussion is probably the best concise explanation of the traditional distinction of the moral, ceremonial, and civil laws concerning the legal code under the Mosaic covenant. This distinction helps us understand why some laws from the Old Testament—particularly the Ten Commandments—still obligate us today in the New Testament. It also gives us a clearer perspective on why so many laws do not still bind us, at least not in the same way. Read more»

Harrison Perkins | “The Crisis of Civil Law: What the Bible Teaches about Law and What It Means Today” | May 20, 2025

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Post authored by:

• Harrison Perkins

  

  Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, associate online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction.

  More by Harrison Perkins ›