E L Hebden Taylor (1925-2006)
I have recently begun The Christian Philosophy of Law, Politics and the State, by E.L. Hebden Taylor He wrote:
“One of the great tragedies of the Protestant Reformation was the failure of the great Reformers John Calvin and Martin Luther to develop a doctrine of law, politics and the sate upon truly reformed and biblical lines…[because] they were so involved in theological disputes, religious controversy and the very struggle for survival that they did not have time left in which to develop a reformed and biblical theory of politics and government.”
For this reason, Protestant Christians in the years following the Reformation relied on medieval and scholastic conceptions of society based on Natural Law, resulting in an inability to provide an explicitly biblical and Reformed view of politics, science, art, etc. Consequently, in the tidal wave of the Enlightenment forces, “protestant Christians were unable to withstand the onrush of the new secular humanist conceptions of law, politics and the state.” Taylor quotes James Hasting Nichols History Christianity 1650-1960:
“In the seventeenth century, for the first time in a thousand years in Western history, a deliberate attempt was made on a grand scale to organize a religiously neutral civilization…independent of Christianity.”
Tags: E. L. Hebden Taylor, government, law, Natural Law, Politics
Cranach law and grace woodcut
John Frame
John Frame is Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary, and author of numerous important works (the bolded titles below I have read and recommend – the others I have either not read or cannot recommend):
Van Til , the Theologian (1976)
The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (1987)
Medical Ethics (1988)
Perspectives on the Word of God (1990)
Evangelical Reunion (1991)
Apologetics to the Glory of God (1994)
Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of his Thought (1995)
Worship in Spirit and Truth (1996)
Contemporary Music: a Biblical Defense (1997)
The Doctrine of God (2002)
Salvation Belongs to the Lord (2006)
Frame has admirably battled what has become a popular theology in Reformed circles known as “Two Kingdoms” theology. Here is a link to a recent article that deals with both Natural Law theory of ethics and epistemology and the “Two Kingdoms” theology.
Here is another article by Frame taking on Michael Horton, another popularizer of the “Two Kingdoms” theology.
Tags: epistemology, ethics, John Frame, Natural Law, Two Kingdoms
