Law & Grace in Imago Dei - the Road to Emmaus

Law & Grace in Imago Dei
an Invitation to a Wedding
Foundations
for a Theology of Atonement
in Common Sense Christianity
F. Earle Fox

All Scripture quotations,
unless otherwise noted,
are taken from the
Revised Standard Version of the Bible
Published by
The Road to Emmaus
http://theRoadtoEmmaus.org
Edition 1.0
Last update: June 26, 2013 - 9:22 PM
Copyright 2013 - F. Earle Fox
ISBN 978-0-945778-07-03
Printed and distributed in the U. S. A., the U. K., & Australia
by Lightning Source, Inc.,
a subsidiary of Ingram Industries, Inc.

Table of Contents
Preface
A.
Why This Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
A-1. Judeo-Christian Failure, Recovery, & Continuing Reformation, . . . . . . . x
a.Worldview Foundations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
b.A List of Failures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
c.The Rise & Recovery of Truth-Seeking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvi
d.Freedom, Truth, Childhood, & Adulthood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
e.A Continuing Reformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
A-2. Invitation to a Wedding... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx
a. Heiros Gamos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx
b.The Biblical Wedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
c.The Two Required Stabilities & the “Space Between” . . . . . . . . . . . xxiv
A-3. Theological & Anthropological Concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxviii
a.Law & Grace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxviii
b.Open & Closed Circle Universes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxix
c.Being Myself..., a Good Idea? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxx
A-4. Standing (or not) on the Moral & Spiritual High Ground . . . . . . . . . . xxxi
a.The Continuing Reformation at Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi
b.The Importance of “Right” & “Wrong” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxii
c.The Man & Mystery of Lawlessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxiv
d.The Road to Emmaus Project -- Common Sense Christianity . . . . xxxiv
A-5. A House-Keeping Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxvii
Study Guide for Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxviii
Part I
Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
A. Preparing the Ground... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
A-1. The Problem - & its Four Defining Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
A-2. The “Relevant” Claim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
A-3. Two Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
A-4. Obligation & Obligations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
A-5. The Good & the Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
A-6. A Hostile Secular Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
A-7. Worldview & the Two Basic Stabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
B. Oughtness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
B-1. The Defining Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
B-2. Presuppositions of the Ethical Question: Truth & Freedom . . . . . . . . . 10
B-3. Who-I-Am vs. What-I-Do & the Relevant Source of Authority . . . . . . . 11
B-4. Definition of 'Oughtness' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
B-5. Alternative Views? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
B-6. The Golden Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
B-7. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
iii

iv
C. Love & Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
C-1. Relationship & Logical Consistency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
C-2. Agape Presupposed by Obligation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
C-3. Necessity of an Obligation to Love (Care) as the Primary Obligation. . 17
C-4. The “Is” upon which the “Ought” is Based... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
C-5. The Primary & Secondary Obligations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
C-6. The Wedding of the Good & the Right - the Sacred Marriage . . . . . . . . 20
C-7. Love as a command. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
C-8. Love as a flexible end with particular implications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
C-9. Psychology & Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
C-10. The “Discovery” of Human Nature & of Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
a.Human Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
b.Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
C-11. The Nature of Original Sin & of the Ultimate Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
C-12. Pre-Moral Obligations: Truth-Seeking & the Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
D. - Addendum - Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
D-1. Plato, Aristotle... & Objectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
D-2. Deriving the “Ought” from an “Is” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
D-3. The Ability vs. the Right to Command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
D-4. The Importance of Worldview & Ultimate Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
D-5. Eudaimonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
a.Happiness as a Goal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
b.Two Kinds of Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
D-6. Realism & Nominalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
D-7. The Place of Hellenic Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Study Guide for Part I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Part II
Biblical Theology
&
Pelagianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
A. The Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
A-1. Why This Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
A-2. Heiros Gamos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
A-3. Heaven & Salvation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
a.What is Heaven? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
b.What is Salvation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
B. Hebrew vs. Hellenic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
B-1. Natural Law: Abstract Greek vs. Particular Hebrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
B-2. But, Is Moral Language Necessary? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
B-3. Two Stabilities: of Being & of Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
C. Pelagius & Augustine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
D. Thomas Aquinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
D-1. A Theological & Anthropological Rat’s Nest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
a.Natural Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

.Happiness & Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
c.Freedom, Predestination, & the Infinite Regress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
d.God’s Omnipotence & Man’s Free Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
e.Sovereignty & Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
D-2. Unraveling the Rat’s Nest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
a.Predestination, Motivation, & Incentive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
b.Heaven as Good Relationship - Not Happiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
c.Psychology & Salvation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
d.The Resolution of Self-Hate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
E. Martin Luther . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
E-1. A Misleading Parable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
E-2. Righteousness versus Pleasing God? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
F. St. Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
F-1. We are Responsible for Knowing... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
F-2. Grace & Sacramental Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
G. Grace & Freedom - the Biblical Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
G-1. Righteousness vs. Love... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
a.Incentive to Obedience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
b.Our Fragile Human Nature.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
c.Obeying God.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
G-2. ...Righteousness as Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
G-3. The Graciousness of God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
G-4. St. John & William of Occam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
G-5. Two Judgements - by the Good & by the Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
H. Original Sin & Original Goodness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
H-1. What is Original Sin? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
H-2. The Case Against Original Sin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
H-3. Natural Man... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
H-4. ...& Original Goodness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
H-5. Jesus “becoming sin” -- How Relationship Transforms Substitutionary
Atonement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
a.The Collapse of Free Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
b.Grace & Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
c.The Pelagian Problem (again) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
d.Consequences Inherited, not Guilt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
e.What Price Paid? & to Whom? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
H-6. The Real Original Sin & Original Goodness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
I. Trust & Trustworthiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
I-1. Can God be Trusted? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
I-2. The Case for God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
I-3. Islam, Hinduism, & Atonement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
a.Arbitrary Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
b.Mysticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
I-4. The Available Atonement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Study Guide for Part II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
v

vi
Part III
Hieros Gamos - the Wedding of Law & Grace 106
A. Cosmology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
A-1. Sacred Marriage - It Depends on your Worldview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
A-2. Privatizing: first Religion & then Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
A-3. Values Clarification & Dialogue to Consensus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
A-4. Open- vs. Closed- Circle Universes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
A-5. Secular-Pagan vs. Biblical Universes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
a.Sex & Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
b.Domination by the “Original Stuff” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
A-6. A Tale of One City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
B. Morality... in the Trenches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
B-1. Western Collapse into “Positivism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
B-2. The Law of God, Positivist Law, ...& Force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
a.Secular/Pagan Positivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
b.Biblical Positivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
B-3. The Spiritual Castration of the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
a.The Spiritual War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
b.The Positivist Ax Falls on the Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
B-4. Lust - & the Collapse of Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
a.The Childhood Discovery of Metaphysical Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
b.Metaphysical Collapse & the Fall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
c.The Power of Lust vs. the Grace of God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
B-5. Truth-Seeking & Godly Pragmatism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
B-6. What Makes It Work? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
C. Recovery... Intellectual, Moral, Spiritual, et al in both Personal & Public Life... 133
C-1. Is Recovery Possible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
C-2. Intellectual Recovery & Four Complementaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
a.Reason & Revelation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
b.Abstract Athens or Particular Jerusalem? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
C-3. Moral Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
C-4. Gender Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
a.A Balanced Gender Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
b.The Passion of God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
c.Trustworthy Passion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
C-5. Political Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
a.Poloi & the Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
b.Pietistic Collapse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
c.The Bible & Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
C-6. Spiritual Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
a.Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
b.Grace, Mercy, & Gratitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
c.Is God Grateful? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
C-7. The Amazing Discipline of Grace & Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
a.Grace & Play - Serious Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
b.Law & Grace - the Rules of the Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

c.Godly Discipline Maximizes Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
d.Libertarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
e.Grace, Glory, & Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
f.Bi-Focal Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
g.The Great Equalizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
C-8. Spiritual Warfare: Law, Love, Light, & Unity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
a.What is Spiritual Warfare? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
b.Factions, Spiritual Warfare, & Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
c.The Man & Mystery of Lawlessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
C-9. So... Law, Grace, & the Best of All Possible Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
a. Common Sense Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
b.Calming the Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
c.The Best of All Possible... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Study Guide for Part III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
vii

viii

Dedicated
to those many who have struggled in their search
for atonement with God & fellow man
against legalism within Themselves
the Church, and the World
with a firm and prayerful hope for all the fullness
of our wonderful freedom in Christ.
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,
and a light unto my path.”
NOTE: You are reading a
work still in progress. The last
chapter is still being finished, as
well as the Index and Study
Guides. You may see occasional
red “change bars” as at
the left of this paragraph,
which indicate text that has
been changed. These will all
disappear in the final edition,
formatting will be finished, etc.
This is a full copy of the
available (and nearly finished)
text. When the book is published,
the available copy will
contain only selected sample
text for those who wish to consider
purchase of the book.
Any suggestions about possible
improvements would be
much appreciated. E. Fox
Send to
embus@theroadtoemmaus.org

Preface
A.
Why This Matters
A-1. Judeo-Christian Failure, Recovery,
& Continuing Reformation, (1)
a. Worldview Foundations
The law and the grace of God together govern the whole, without remainder,
of creation.
This essay is about how to explain the logical and empirical evidence for
that claim. But that will raise for some another question: Why appeal to logical
and empirical evidence at all? Is not reading the Bible enough?
No, it is not. We must read the Bible with common sense logic and concern
for fact, or we will continue in the massive confusion which we see today
across the Christian spectrum of denominations -- which, if their contradictions
against each other tell us anything, do not give much evidence of reading the
Bible reasonably.
In the Bible, to be God one must be both creator of all that is and sovereign
over all that is. This book, Law & Grace in Imago Dei (in the Image of God),
explains God as sovereign, placing this book along side of Personality, Empiricism,
& God (PEG), which, as the cosmological argument for God, explains
God as creator. All other aspects of the Image of God (reason, free will, lawgiver,
lover of souls, etc.) are implied or enabled by these two primary characteristics:
creator and sovereign.
PEG is volume I of A Personalist Cosmology in Imago Dei, a Three-Volume
Work on the Nature of Substance (PCID). ‘Substance’ refers to that in the
nature of the cosmos which is substantial, durable through time and change,
that which explains all other things. In the secular/pagan world, that
“substance” is inherently impersonal, either as material (in the secular world),
or as abstract and ethereal (in the pagan world). But substance in the Biblical
1. The reference to “Judeo-” Christian is meant to point to our Hebrew beginnings and underpinnings.
Much, if not most, of contemporary Judaism has been as thoroughly pseudo-modernized and pseudo-liberalized
- i.e., secularized, as has the Christian Church. But Christianity is 95% Hebrew, with roots firmly in
the Old Testament (where ‘Old’ means ‘ancient’ and ‘venerable’, not ‘out of date’). Genesis 1-3 is the foundation
of all Christian theology and spirituality.

Preface
xi
world is both personal and particular. God is a Somebody, not a Something,
the personal creator and sovereign over all.
Most of what I am contending for in this book will make no sense unless
the Biblical worldview explained in PEG is true, that the cosmos is created ex
nihilo by God who therefore owns it, lock, stock, and barrel, and who thus, as
sovereign, has the sole and total ability to give His creatures their reason for
existence. Showing that our reason for existence is the only possible foundation
for a moral order is the primary point of Part I of this essay.
A “worldview” is a general picture of the cosmos we inhabit, as if you
could stand aside and take a snapshot of it, so one could discern (with a little
imagination) its basic structure and significance for life. Worldview works in
partnership with what Christians call the “Good News” or “Gospel”, that is, the
assessment of the possibilities for life. Worldviews differ widely on the kinds
of “good news” they can offer for personal beings like ourselves. Some have a
good news for us personal inhabitants, others (pagan and secular) will not. In
both the secular and pagan worldviews, persons and personhood fair poorly.
We need to know the differences so that we can reason intelligently about what
we believe. Not all worlds are created equal.
The Biblical cosmos with an intelligent and loving Designer can offer
something like the Kingdom of Heaven, and salvation for those who have
alienated themselves from the King. The primary contender against the Biblical
cosmos, i.e., the pagan/secular cosmos, has no personal creator God, and
generates the conditions of life out of a usually unknowable mysterious origin
of all things, sometimes called “the Great Mother”, the Mother of all life. Everything
proceeds out of this womb of existence by random chance, which
leaves one wondering whether there is any stability at all, any direction, purpose,
or meaning, any possibility of a just and righteous society or government.
Or is it all left to chance and power struggle?
(The secular world, which has so fascinated modern folks, is the least stable
of the three choices because it is so impersonal, dry, and emotionally barren.
It’s primary fascination comes from the illusion that secular science can
give us sufficient control over it to produce the “good” life.)
So, if the reader is concerned about worldview issues (as we all ought to
be), may I suggest visiting The Road to Emmaus website, especially the
Worldview library, and if you are of a philosophical bent, get a copy of Personalty,
Empiricism, & God. PEG began as my doctoral thesis on science and religion,
but turned into a rewriting of the cosmological argument for God --
which has powerful implications for science and religion. (2)
That metaphysical argument provides the evidence that believing in a personal
God is not only reasonable, but intellectually almost mandatory -- that is,
if you think you live, or would like to live, in a rational world. I do not mean
an unfallen world, it might have indeed fallen into an irrational, self-destructive
state. I mean rather a world, fallen or not, that was and still is designed to
2. To purchase Personality, Empiricism, & God, see Bibliography.
For the worldview library, go to theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/WrldV/00Wvw.htm

xii
The Law & the Grace of God
be rational so that projects like nature, science, politics, or families could actually
make sense. (3)
The Bible gives us the revelation from God which is the Good News, but
although the Bible presents the Biblical worldview, it does not, and cannot,
prove that worldview to be true or that God in fact exists. The God of the Bible
makes sense only if we live in a cosmos where such a God would be a reasonable
assumption. Giving the evidence for that assumption is the task of natural
theology and the cosmological argument, as hinted at by St. Paul in Romans
1:18 ff. PEG purports to show that indeed a belief in God is a supremely reasonable
assumption, a very good idea, and that one would almost expect to find
something like a Bible, a testimony from that God as to His presence and His
purposes for us.
In the very dealing of the “creator” side of God, PEG thereby lays the
foundation for this book, which deals with the “sovereign” side of God, clarifying
what that means, and why God is sovereign. God can be sovereign if and
only if He is first creator, and therefore, as a logical fact, can define the reason
for the existence of the creation. Law & Grace in Imago Dei deals with moral
authority, showing how God, as creator, is the origin and source of all morality,
and hence all authority. If that were not so, He could not be sovereign as the
Bible understands, the sole arbiter of right and wrong, and the sole source of
moral (and therefore also of all political) authority.
So PEG and this present book are the basement level of the Emmaus
Project, which is to help rewrite Biblical theology as “common sense” Christianity,
standing toe to toe with anyone, anywhere, or in any circumstance. (4)
These two books are to help clarify the nature of the Imago Dei, the Image of
God -- creator and sovereign.
We pick up here in Law and Grace in Imago Dei to show how startlingly
unique that law and grace is, how solid it is, and to help iron out some of the
wrinkles which developed in Christian history regarding law and grace, mostly
revolving around the notorious “Pelagian” controversy, with which we deal in
Part II.
But we Christians have, for several centuries, created our own severe problems.
b. A List of Failures
Christianity has fallen out of favor in Western culture (which was created
under the Christian worldview), not, as almost universally supposed, because
of the over-powering onslaught of secular humanism, or by an inevitable evolution
of human culture upward out of the primitive darkness of religion. The
3. Personality, Empiricism, & God is an essay on the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God,
aimed at putting a clear intellectual, philosophical foundation under Biblical theology and the Gospel of
Jesus Christ. Go to theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/ShpMl/PEG/00PEG.htm and also
theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/WrldV/00Wvw.htm
See Bibliography for other items as well.
4. For more on the “common sense” idea, see below, “The Road to Emmaus Project --
Common Sense Christianity” on page xxxiv

Preface
xiii
secular case for its own beliefs has very little to support itself, intellectually,
morally, or spiritually -- which is becoming more evident as Christians continue
to recover their intellectual integrity. We Christians have done most of
the damage to ourselves. Western Christianity has fallen to this sad state due to
at least six primary failures of its own:
(1) Intellectual credibility: Beginning slowly in the late Middle Ages with
the rise of science, but especially over the 18th and 19th centuries and through
the 20th, Christians had lost their intellectual credibility by coming to treat reason
as opposed to revelation and science as opposed to faith. (5) People came to
see Christians, not as being truth-seekers, but rather as arbitrary “position-defenders”.
Western Christians alienated themselves from science and academic
integrity -- with just a few outstanding exceptions over the 20th century (such
as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer). Christians did not see
the “arbitrary” part of their behavior, and thought they were just doing the will
of God.
For the most part, Christians, including clergy, had lost their intellectual
confidence in God (and also therefore in themselves as witnesses), so that even
those above great minds were not able to rouse the Christian-in-the-street to a
serious re-engagement in public discussion of the Christian faith. Very, very
few went on the offensive to reclaim the public arena Whatever discussion
there was took place most often within church walls. And, worst of all, we
have “gotten used to it”, a kind of death, making little effort to change things.
(2) Politics: The pagan belief that in politics “might makes right” still
dominated much of post Constantine Christianity. Christians had not yet
learned how to put coercive force under the law and grace of God, or to wed
political authority and power with the way of the cross. Often lacking belief in
reasonable discourse and loving one’s neighbor as the way to resolve conflicts,
and believing still that coercive civil government should “unify” the people under
only one religion, coercive force became an all too common method for resolving
spiritual conflicts and controlling supposed threats.
That failure would include events during the 11th and 12th centuries of
crusading against the Muslims. (6) There was much that was honorable, but in
the end, it was a very sad state of affairs, leading to the near destruction of the
Byzantine (not the Muslim) empire, paving the way for Islam to force (not politely
convert) its way up into eastern Europe. Christians, who began a noble
enterprise (freeing the Holy Land for pilgrims to visit in safety from hostile
Muslims), were seduced into power struggle even against other Christians, into
sheer foolishness (the children’s crusade), crusades against the Jews, war
among themselves, and thus undermining public respect for the Christian community
-- especially the growing intelligensia.
The 30 Years War (1618-1648), the prime example of outrageous military
5. For the reasonableness of the Bible, see Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible in a Scientific Age.
6. On the crusades, see Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: the Case for the Crusades, and The Teaching
Company DVD series on the crusades, The Era of the Crusades, by Prof. Kenneth Harl (www.theteachingcompany.com).

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The Law & the Grace of God
carnage among Reformation and post-Reformation Christians, rightly left people
thinking, “If that is what having Jesus in your heart does for you, who
needs Jesus?” Jesus would have agreed.
Early, pre-Constantine Christians knew how to be unified -- truth-seeking
by the Way of the Cross. Post-Constantine Christians were often seduced into
power and coercion as the way to maintain Christen unity. Early Christians
knew how to deal with Caesar as their enemy, post-Constantine Christians often
did not know how to deal with Caesar as their friend, that is, how to integrate
the Way of the Cross with empire and politics. We hope here to assist the
return to Biblical society and politics. (7)
These tragic facts dominated much of Christian history until the slow development
began to mature of government limited by the law and grace of
God. (8) The political life of Western Europe did not do much to further the
cause of Jesus Christ until the Magna Carta in1215 foretold the successful submission
of coercive force to God in the English parliamentary system and then
the American democratic republic, both under God. (9) There were similar
movements in other parts of Europe. But with the secular/pagan French Revolution,
pagan/secular mindsets quickly reasserted themselves, and governments
over the 1800’s became increasingly centralized in a fascist/socialist/communist
format.
So, during the 1800’s, most positive gains toward a Biblical government,
limited for the freedom of the people were, probably everywhere in the West,
were being eroded and compromised. Government centralization was successfully
sold to the public as “the right thing to do” for the poor and down-trodden.
Government, which was supposed to be our referee, became our nannysavior.
(3) Morality: The political failure happened substantially because Christians
had lost their consensus on the very issues we will be working with in
these pages, Part I, the foundations of morality, and Part II, the meaning of salvation.
Christians no longer had a reasonably clear, single voice on any subject.
Morality has been “relativized”, stripped of its objectivity. The people behind
this change likely know perfectly well that morality cannot be relative.
But they want those who actually believe in morality to relativize their morality
so that the perpetrators and manipulators can insert their truth and morality
unopposed. The power-centered can control any country in which they destroy
the Biblical moral consensus.
Neither truth nor morality can be relative in the popular sense abroad.
That is a logical impossibility, and thus no one can actually live that way. But
7. This present Law & Grace in Imago Dei lays the theological foundations for The Theology of Civil Government:
Why Government Logically Requires God. If all morality stems from the law of God, then the only
source of civil government authority is that morality and law of God. See Bibliography.
8. See Bibliography for The Theology of Civil Government - Why Government Needs God, for more on the
development of Biblical government in the West.
9. See http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/Cnst/BlackstonLaw.htm on William Blackstone,
the preeminent English jurist at the time of the American revolution.

Preface
xv
relative truth has made a convincing bit of propaganda in the public arena by
which to get control of the levers influencing society. Again, he who controls
the moral high ground will control society. The immoral and murderous Communist
Party won support by convincing a gullible public that their central control
of the economy was the right and moral thing to do “for the poor”. But by
the mid-20th century, those very same centralized governments had killed a
greater percentage of the population than killed in any previous century. (10)
Mostly, of course, the poor. That does not stop the true believers. They still
think that centralized government is the “right” way to do things. Their “morality”
comes out of a gun barrel. Much, maybe most, of this killing was not in
wars between nations, but governments decimating their own people in
“peace” time. (11)
(4) Evolution or Creation? Christians during the 19th and 20th centuries
put forth little reasonable and convincing response to Darwin’s theory of genetic
evolution transmogrified into the secular cosmology replacement for the
Biblical doctrine of creation. (12) They often quoted the Bible to persons who
were no longer interested in or listening to the Bible. Without the doctrine of
creation, Biblical religion is dead in the water. We then do not live in a cosmos
in which a Bible or Biblical revelation can make sense -- but Sigmund Freud
(redefining human nature), Karl Marx (redefining economics and politics), and
John Dewey (redefining education) just might.
(5) Atonement: Christians have long been losing the battle to convince the
world that it even needs atonement and salvation, largely because Christians
themselves have been divided and fighting over their own theology of atonement
and salvation -- much of which is directly related to the in-house Christian
fight over Pelagianism (Part II below).
Theology of atonement has been battered and twisted all out of shape
among Christians, often leaving only traces of a Biblical understanding of the
matter. Law and grace were as often as not, treated as opposites, not wedded
partners. Spiritual and moral atonement came to be thought of by the increasingly
secular society as out of touch with reality. So, impressed with secularized
science, people have come to think, “We have psychology to heal our
mental ills, and medicine to heal our physical ills. Atonement and salvation?
-- what for? Who needs it?” Secular success is collapsing, but further downhill
back into paganism, not back to Biblical Christianity.
(6) Freedom: The Biblical message is built on a reasonable and ordered
freedom from beginning to end, including not only individual salvation but
Godly prosperity in the public arena as well, and is the only worldview which
can accomplish those ends. But much of Christian theology has sadly compro-
10. Go to www.hawaii.edu/powerkills for R. J. Rummel’s documentation of the murderous character of the
secularized 20th century. Also, read Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand (www.persecution.com),
which describes the horrendous evils from the very belly of the beast, but more important, the victory which
Christians can have even, maybe especially, in that belly.
11. R. J. Rummel’s website at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills tells the story.
12. Christians had a good response to the secularists, but were not acquainted with it. See Bibliography for
Personality, Empiricism, & God.

xvi
The Law & the Grace of God
mised freedom, not least in debates over the existence (even) of free will, and
the reasonable use of free will in the service of God.
c. The Rise & Recovery of Truth-Seeking
Ever since at least the Reformation, our testimony to the world has therefore
become more and more fractured and unconvincing. That is not to say
that the Reformation accomplished nothing important, but it is to say that it did
not lay a foundation capable of uniting Christians -- much of which was due to
the anti-intellectual attitude of (1) above.
Christians thus did more to surrender Western Civilization than did secular
humanists to win it. An intellectually, morally, and spiritually mature and credible
Judeo-Christian community is capable of standing its ground anywhere,
any time, with any opposition. (13) The gates of hell shall not prevail.
But when Christians lose their intellectual truth-seeking capacity, they
soon also lose their moral and spiritual credibility.
We thus need a new Reformation, dedicated to being truth-seekers before
being position-defenders -- the very message God was giving us from early
Biblical times right up through the rise of science. (14) But the post-Reformation
Christian community in large part ran from the challenge. Yet how could anything
less than truth-seeking lead to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the
Life? Only truth-seeking can lead to either a true theological position or to a
living relationship. Theology and life go together, united in truth, or they do
not go very far at all.
That is true partly because truth-seeking is not limited to academics and
philosophers. Truth-seeking is the foundation of all aspects of life, both in the
ivyed towers and out in the trenches of work-a-day life. We think we can “get
along” in the trenches with a rough and ready truth-seeking, by guess and by
golly, especially about spiritual matters, but it is in our family and other close
relationships and on our jobs, that paying attention to the truth of the matters at
hand yields the most powerful results.
That is true also because reason and revelation are wedded just like law
and grace. Neither one will survive without the other. Christians sometimes
fear reason because they think it will disprove faith and revelation, and/or
make us independent from God. Just the opposite is true, reason forces us to
face our dependency on God.
Science is simply common sense paying attention to the details, usually
more so than in the trenches, but folks in the trenches nevertheless greatly benefit
from those who do pay attention to those common sense details. (15) Our
lives have been raised up to new heights of comfort, safety, and adventure by
science, and by industry which relies upon new scientific developments. And
by theology, still the queen of sciences.
13. On Biblical intellectual integrity, see Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible in a Scientific World.
14. See, for example, I Kings 18:17 ff.; Isaiah 1:18; 43:8 ff.; Luke 7:18 ff.; 2 Cor. 4:2. And also The Bible &
Truth-Seeking at http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/12The/Bbl/Bible&TruthSeeking.htm
15. See below, “The Road to Emmaus Project -- Common Sense Christianity” on page xxxiv

Preface
xvii
d. Freedom, Truth, Childhood, & Adulthood
Nevertheless, it is in the daily round and the trivial tasks that most of the
great issues are learned and decided, in those first seven or so years where our
lives are formed as we learn how to relate to each other in our families. We do
not lay those foundations in lecture halls or laboratories. There, in our closest
family relationships, truth-seeking and truth-speaking are paramount in importance.
When neglected or violated, our lives deteriorate.
Freedom to be truth-seekers opens the world up to us, just so the sometimes
voracious curiosity of a small child. How can that happen except by that
honest dialogue with as much of life as we can gather before us? That is the
freedom of honest education which every tyrant seeks to corner and control.
Clarity always favors truth, and truth-seeking always favors freedom.
There is intellectual, moral, and spiritual truth which every parent is responsible
for conveying to their children, and living out with their neighbors,
that is, the common rules as given by the two great commandments to love
God and neighbor and the Decalogue. Any child who does not learn these
truths is unfit to engage in the public arena. He or she is not yet an adult man
or woman who can be trusted with either power or authority in commerce,
church, politics, nor education.
It is up to the growing person to demonstrate his/her adulthood, the public
is not obligated to assume it, most especially where the lives of others might be
deeply affected (as in spiritual leadership, or in the making or enforcing of
law). An immoral or incompetent citizenry will sooner or later bring upon itself
a tyranny. Only a spiritually mature people who understand the connection
between truth, righteousness, and freedom can successfully guard themselves
against unrighteous rulers. The public arena is not meant by God to be a moral
free-for-all, but a place of ordered freedom, uniquely given in the American
Declaration of Independence and Constitution. (16) The nature of that order
must be passed on from one generation to the next, or descend into chaos.
Nothing but the law and grace of God will do the job.
But the great majority of Christians in the West have lost control of their
own children’s education and pass on very little family tradition, if they have
any. Christians in many denominations lose approximately 85% of their children
to secularism or neo-paganism by the time they have left home for job or
marriage. (17) Most never come back to the faith of their parents. If salvation
has any meaning at all, that parental failure is child-abuse -- about which Jesus
has very hard words.
e. A Continuing Reformation
Truth and Religion: The West, and especially Western Christendom, thus
needs a new Reformation, one leading to a renewal of truth-seeking and of rec-
16. Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, has made available its standard course on the Declaration and
Constitution free of charge online. Go to www.Hillsdale.edu and do a search for “Constitution 101”.
17. See “Home Schooling Grows Up” at
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Ed/HmSch94%25.htm.

xviii
The Law & the Grace of God
onciliation with science (which is all about truth-seeking), and in family and
church life (which ought to be about truth-seeking). (18)
The core of newly emerging Western Civilization resided in
(a) the rise of universities in the high and late Middle Ages - with a freemarket
of ideas leading to the development of science;
(b the rise of freedom-centered politics and limited government;
(c the rise) of free-market economy, a rising middle class with entrepreneurship;
and
(d) the rise of freedom of religion.
These freedoms all began to sprout in the late middle ages, with roots going
back into Old Testament times. They could have arisen and flourished only
in the Biblical worldview under the tutelage of the Biblical God. The freedoms
require (1) personal-ontological stability and (2) moral stability, the two of
which define Biblical salvation, and which only the Biblical God can give
(about which we will have much to say).
But the secular and now pagan reformation have had the effect of dismantling
Biblical witness because the Biblical worldview itself had already been
undermined in large part (though unwittingly) by Newton with his cosmos of
hard, massy atoms bumping about in space -- the world-machine. (19)
George Berkeley, an Irish bishop of the 1700’s, said that Newton’s material
world-machine would replace God as the explanation of the cosmos, which is
exactly what happened -- giving us secular humanism. David Hume and Emmanuel
Kant had continued the worldview critique, allegedly showing how the
new “scientific” world made God unknowable, and thus irrelevant, if not unreal.
But Berkeley was not aiming at the subversion of the Biblical worldview,
rather he pointed directly to the God of the Bible as the only possible and realistic
explanation of nature and guarantor of scientific objectivity. Berkeley did
not argue against Newton’s mathematics, only against Newton’s metaphysics,
his explanation and description of what lay behind and brought reasonable order
to the sensory phenomena of life, namely the massy world-machine of inertial
forces. (20)
Content and Process: Reformation is not only about content, it is also
about process. Reformation is a continuing need. We think of the Reformation
as a one-time late- and post-medieval event, dealing with the content of theology
developed by the great reformers. But the real reformation did not cease
with the death of those reformers. It is a process which must continue on in every
age if the Church is to remain alive. It seldom does, so we find ourselves
18. Go to http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/LifHlth/Abrt/NewRef-ProLifeHiGd-Conf.htm for an
extended article on a New Reformation.
19. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, & God, especially Chapter I, on how Berkeley criticized
Newton’s mechanistic worldview which had this (unplanned) negative effect on Christian thinking.
20. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, & God on the cosmological argument for God, using the
insights of Berkeley.
Newton was a practicing, if a bit unorthodox, Christian, and not aware, apparently, of the possibility to
which Berkeley pointed.

Preface
xix
panting to catch up.
We must, that is, in every age, go back and mine the Bible yet again for
new insights to deal with the new problems which the world, the flesh, and the
devil (or the Hand of God) throw at us. If the revelation of God is worthy of its
name, then it will provide us with adequate support and foundation for the
Gospel of Jesus Christ in today’s world and every future age -- as well as in the
first century, the Middle Ages, and the Reformation.
The secularists of the last three centuries persuaded Christians that the
Biblical worldview was passe, so that we Christians had to mine the secular
worldview for our information about the objective world of science and the
public arena. But there is no rational possibility of (Schliermacher-wise)
pasting a privatized Biblical faith in Jesus Christ over a secular machine
world. (21) If the world is a machine in the manner of secularism, then God does
not exist and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a fairy tale.
Secularism is a Biblical heresy, which in its socialism/communism form,
at least, believes that we can make sense of history by taking charge of it ourselves.
That could probably never have happened if Christianity had not first
invented science with its fundamental concern for the world of space and time.
Christians and Jews understood that history has meaning because a rational
God is in charge of it. Secularists wanted to keep all of the space-time benefits
of Biblical civilization, but without God. They thought they could kick away
the Biblical ladder by which we had ascended into a world with science, technology,
and history without losing the enormous benefits of that climb.
But is not working. We are demonstrating that daily in the West as inherently
unstable secularism collapses back into paganism. As we lose the Biblical
worldview, we are also fast losing a limited government for a free people,
and, with government-controlled education, we are losing the education level
we had, including those skills to sustain a scientifically competent civilization.
Americans were warned in the mid 1980’s by government agencies that for the
first time American children would not receive an education better than that of
their parents. That situation has only gone down hill since.
The currently needed Reformation can be summed up as the recovery
among the people of our compromised Judeo-Christian intellectual, moral, and
spiritual credibility. We mus show that God holds the intellectual, moral, and
spiritual high ground, all three, and that indeed as Westerners practice it, science
arose, and could only have arisen, out of the Biblical worldview. So
Christians and Jews need neither apologize for nor hide their faith.
Personality, Empiricism, & God, deals with the worldview issues, with
this present book building on that foundation, explaining the moral and atonement
issues of our relation with God and one another. (22) Is there any possibility
of becoming at-one again with God? Or, if not God, then at least with one
another?
21. On Schliermacher, see below, Part III, “Privatizing: first Religion & then Morality” on page 107
22. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, & God.

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The Law & the Grace of God
The answer to the latter question is: no, there is no possibility of a significant
and stable unity among human beings if there is no possibility of unity
with God. Without God, there is no possibility of significant, enduring peace
on earth and goodwill among men. Human unity rests (a logical fact) on our
unity with God. Showing why that is so is part of the burden of this work. The
moral break with God which we commonly call “the Fall” renders significant
and sustained unity among men impossible. (23)
Atonement (at-one-ment, back to unity with God and each other) is God’s
answer to that problem, not only of our unity with Him, but also unity among
ourselves. It is sometimes called, the problem of the one and the many. That
is, how can society (government, the one) work together with the many (the
citizens) so as to maximize freedom, righteousness, and love? How can we
both rightly discipline ourselves as community citizens and at the same time
preserve our rightful individual freedoms?
It will seem to some an arrogant, and even dangerous, claim, but analysis
of worldview choices and of the foundation of ethics (as in Part I below) tells
us that ethical/moral principles logically depend on the Biblical deity, and that
those ethical/moral principles are necessarily the foundation of social unity and
cohesion.
The recovery of Western Civilization thus requires the recovery in the perception
of the public of that intellectual, moral, and spiritual integrity by the
Biblical community. And the best way to have the public perceive such is for
the Christian community to be in fact standing there, securely on the ground of
that integrity.
The issues addressed in the following pages can have a telling positive effect
on all of the above areas of failure.
A-2. Invitation to a Wedding...
a. Heiros Gamos
The subtitle to this book is not meant to imply a wedding about to happen,
but rather an invitation to behold a wedding which has been since eternity,
from ancient of days -- but which, for most, has been hidden from view. Yet it
has adequate testimony right in the Creation story:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness....” So God created
man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created
them. Genesis 1:26-28
This wedding can happen within any one of us, but only because it has already
and eternally been happening in our Creator/Sovereign as a moral union
in the very being of God. It can happen in us as we are completed in the Image
of God, male and female, father and mother, as we are born of the Spirit into
the family of God.
23. This question of the connection between between our union with God and with one another (social and
political unity) will be addressed, as well as briefly here, more fully in a coming book, The Theology of Civil
Government - Why Government Requires God. See Bibliography.

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xxi
The above passage implies a sameness, a correspondence between God
and Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are made in the Image of God. So, there
must be something in God of which Adam and Eve are the image. That is,
there must be a spiritual (not physical) gender (not sexual) distinction, which
could only be a fathering and a mothering aspect to God. (24)
World history is replete with frustrated attempts of peoples everywhere to
bring the masculine and feminine aspects of themselves into harmony. The
Christian world, sadly, has tended to be suspicious of sexuality as inherently
seductive and somehow getting in the way of true spirituality. That ever troublesome,
compulsive, addictive “flesh”.
That is not the view of the Hebrew foundations of Christian life and doctrine.
Sexual behavior was often enough abused, but rightly done, it was
thought of as a naturally healthy, good, and necessary part of human life, given
by God. (25) The depth and extent of destructive contemporary Christian prudishness
is indicated by the almost total absence of effective sex education given
by Christian parents to their children, leading often to behavior which will for
sure shock their prudish timidity, and often threaten the life of some about-tobe-newborn.
It is not clear just when monogamy became the practicing norm for Hebrew
religion, but it does seem true that monotheism moves a culture toward
monogamy and heterosexuality, while polytheism promiscuously celebrates a
polygamy, polyamory, and pansexuality of one sort or another. (26) It seems to
hang on one’s view of the nature of God. In the pagan world, sexual behaviors
were only tepidly moral, and tended to be judged more on propriety, taste, and
aesthetics. The pagan world had (and has) no basis for objective morality.
The word ‘sex’ comes from a Latin word, ‘secare’, meaning ‘to cut’, suggesting
that our sexual division comes from an original unity. We have been
“cut” apart and are compulsively driven to seek reunion. The pagan and secular
worlds have acted as though the unity could be reestablished by uninhibited
sexual union. Hence their frequent insistence on the right to uninhibited sexual
union.
In the Biblical world, gender unity comes from an original spiritual union
in God, in whose Image we are made, male and female. (27) Our human sexuality
is a division, the sexual union of which can reflect that original union only
when happening in the spiritual unity of a monogamous, faithful, and life-long
marriage.
The pagan world sought, and now the secular world still seeks, desper-
Mother
24. On gender in God, see Bibliography for Yahweh or the Great , and audio tape, Man and Woman
in the Image of God.
25. See Judaism’s Sexual Revolution... at
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/31JdXn/Jd/PragerJudaismOnHosx.htm
26. On “pansexuality”, see Bibliography for Homosexuality: Good & Right in the Eyes of God? and http://
www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/22SxSo/PnSx/00PnSx.htm.
27. See Bibliography for Yahweh or the Great Mother?, and for Man & Woman in the Image of God.

xxii
The Law & the Grace of God
ately, persistently, but ineffectively, to wed the masculine with the feminine.
Some scholars have called that attempted wedding the heiros gamos, the sacred
marriage. (28) The attempted union was enacted in countless pagan temples, on
hill tops, and in wooded glens where the priest and his consort, or priestess and
her consort, united sexually. It is reenacted daily in every culture and clime
where persons, often with equal desperation, seek to unite within themselves,
or with another, that mysterious, elusive, and divided thing called sex and/or
gender.
With no understanding of the sacred wedding within ourselves, the revolving
of human history around a probably near-universal addiction to sex is unexplainable,
and so will by many, if not most, be taken as normal and inevitable..
Only in the Biblical cosmos can we find a rational accounting of human
gender and sexual history. That is another bold counter-cultural claim, to
which we hope to give substance.
In the pagan and secular worlds, sexual attraction asserts itself as an arbitrary
and largely uncontrollable force -- it often being hard to know at any
given time whether for good or for evil. Not until sexual behavior was brought
under the law and grace of God did sex and gender begin to make reasonable
sense. (29)
The deep inner sense of personal contingency, instability, and insecurity
seems like it might find the answer to its quest for stability and meaning in this
heiros gamos.
And indeed, it will, but only under the law and grace of God.
In the fallen world, the elusive union and the sought-for sense of completeness
never took, it never held for more that a brief flash -- so that the participants
could not realistically find themselves whole and secure human beings.
The quest for sexual or gender salvation nevertheless continues apace, ever
focused on perseverance and intensity of good feelings. Physical sexual union
is the chosen sacrament of selfhood (very understandably, it turns out) for most
of the world’s population. Without God, what else is there? But the inner
union remains elusive, as does the sense of well-being and wholeness. The
pursuit of good feelings cannot be sustained. The longed-for eternal orgasm
dissolves into a phantasm, not at all the peace of God which passes all understanding.
Even contemporary grade B movies with noisy heroic adventures almost
always have the hero and his beloved finding their way to romance and family,
or some strong hint of that. Not much has changed since Homer, some 28 centuries
ago, wrote the Odyssey about the voyage and quest of Odysseus to return
to family, home, and hearth.
We human beings do have a discernible human nature which is best ex-
28. See, for example, The Origins & History of Consciousness (Bollingen Series XLII Princeton, 1954) and
The Great Mother (Bollingen Series XLVII Pantheon, 1963, 2nd edition) by Erich Neumann. See indices
for heiros gamos.
29. Again, for an excellent Jewish explanation of some of these issues, go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/31JdXn/Jd/PragerJudaismOnHosx.htm.

Preface
xxiii
plained by the Biblical view of creation, Fall, and restoration back into the
Kingdom. Gender and sex are an essential part of that story, not a pesky addon
from which in salvation we hope to divest ourselves.
b. The Biblical Wedding
The Biblical story, as one might expect, contains a wholly different answer
to that so often fruitless quest because the Biblical focus is not on good feelings,
but rather on good, stable, faithful relationships -- loving God and one another.
In the Biblical world, loving does not mean “having sex” with someone.
Stable good feelings come as a by-product of good relationships, not as sought
after for themselves. That stability cannot happen without the Biblical God.
That stability comes out of the Way of the Cross. We give up our good
feelings to focus on good relationships -- which then give us good feelings.
These are fundamental principles of Biblical morality, the logical foundations
of which we hope to describe below in Part I, a clarifying in Part II, and application
in Part III.
The Biblical foundations for this wedding are found in those verses noted
above, Genesis 1:26-28, where we learn that we are made in the Image of God,
male and female, implying something in God, a distinction, which is the original
of our earthly distinction, between masculine and feminine, male and female.
Our gender and sexual nature is a physical reflection of an objective
spiritual reality in God. We are made, both males and females, in His Image.
As noted, to be God in the Bible, one must be two things: Creator of all
things and Sovereign over all things.
The creating aspect of God, that which brings forth being and life and personal
stability, can be thought of as the mothering, feminine side of God. But
the Church has done little with such a thought, perhaps because the object of
pagan worship everywhere (even if in the background) was some version of
“the Great Mother”, mother earth, mother cosmos, as the source of our being.
Mother Earth represents the original chaos out of which all pagan and secular
cosmoi are birthed. It was feared perhaps that any reference to a feminine,
mothering side of God would compromise the Image of God in the pagan direction.
But that need not be. The pagans were right to seek the Sacred Marriage,
but did not live in the worldview in which alone that marriage could happen.
In the Biblical cosmos, femininity has to do with mothering, creating, giving
life, not with being a sex-pot. Women who do not understand their being
made in the Image of God as creator will likely either be used by men, or be seductively
controlling men. The feminine Great Mother is destructive to personal
life precisely because there can be no heiros gamos, no sacred wedding.
And that is because in the pagan world, there is no possible masculine figure
who can stand on equal terms with the Great Mother, they all being eternally
her children -- whom she eventually swallows.
The ruling, sovereign side of God can be thought of as the fathering, masculine
side. Christians are much more at ease with God as Father because He

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The Law & the Grace of God
is called ‘Father’ all through the Bible. Masculinity has to do with spiritual authority,
deciding the difference between right and wrong, not with being a stud
or a tough guy. Men who do not know, live, and administer the difference
given by God between right and wrong are at high risk of being a danger to society
through the misuse of their natural gift of spiritual authority.
The mothering side of God, the essence of femininity, is spiritual power,
the power, the ability, to be oneself with security and integrity, and to pass that
power on to others, to be distinguished, of course, from physical or military
power. The ability to be myself is quite different from, and much more powerful
than, military or other coercive power. (30)
The fathering side of God, the essence of masculinity, is spiritual authority,
the ability to give all created things their reason for existence, their calling
in life, their purpose, and thus, their own smaller realm of authority.
The true Heiros Gamos, then, is the divine, eternal wedding within God of
this spiritual power to spiritual authority. (31)
That wedding can happen among humans only in a cosmos created and
ruled by a creator God such as that of the Bible. (32) The pagan and secular
worlds cannot produce that wedding because they make up that fallen, dysfunctional,
and dying world into which the human race plunges itself when we
rebel against God, our Creator and Sovereign.
The Great Mother, the pagan/secular source of all time-and-space entities,
neither has nor can give any such inner marriage, only the yearning for it --
which tells us (living in the secular, absurd, meaningless world of Camus, Unamuno,
and other existentialist writers) that something deep and important
seems forever missing. (33)
c. The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”
A formative direct hint of the Heiros Gamos happened to me in the mid
1980’s when I asked a woman whom I was counseling whether she could express
affection appropriately with her husband when her children were present.
She lit up and replied, “Oh, yes! Whenever we give a hug, they say, ‘Aw, that’s
corny!’ and then all try to squeeze in between us.” I replied (to my surprise)
“Of course! The physical space between loving parents is heaven on earth to a
child.” (Young children do not yet understand relationships, they understand
physical connections.)
30. See Bibliography for Psychology, Salvation, & the Ordination of Women for an extended description of
the feminine role. Also Man & Woman in the Image of God.
31. For a compact description of this masculine-feminine relationship, see the booklet, Psychology, Salvation,
& the Ordination of Women, in the Bibliography. Also a cassette tape, Man & Woman in the Image of
God.
32. See Bibliography for Yahweh or the Great Mother? for discussion of the comparison between the Biblical
and pagan worldviews.
33. The world is absurd, Albert Camus said, not because of itself, but because the human heart cries out for
meaning and purpose -- which the world cannot provide. The world is absurd for us, not for itself, which
does not care. The world does not have us in mind -- so secular evolutionists insistently tell us.

Preface
xxv
The parents, being as God to the children, represent the source of their being
(mother) and the sense of moral direction (father), so parental spiritual
unity and love is essential to the successful growth of the children.
These two aspects, mothering and fathering in God, give us thus the two
primary stabilities needed for the security of any created (and therefore dependent/contingent)
personal being. We must have ontological stability, stability
of our being, our personhood, a gift first and mainly of our mothers; and we
must have moral stability, stability of purpose, meaning, and direction, the gift
mainly of our fathers (both do a little of their “other half’s” parenting.)
Parents who gracefully and authoritatively define the space between them
turn a house into a home. The children are just as much looking at how mother
and father relate to each other as they are looking at how parents relate to themselves,
the children. They know instinctively that parents who do not love each
other will have a hard time loving them. A war zone between mother and father
is a dangerous place to live.
These two stabilities, tied to our parenting, our mothering and fathering,
help explain why Jesus told Nicodemus that, in order to see the Kingdom of
God, he had to be, by adoption and grace, “born again” into the family of God,
to be parented, mothered and fathered, by God Himself, no longer by his own
parents or culture. (34)
This story is told in great detail in Yahweh or the Great Mother (Volume III
of this project: A Personalist Cosmology in Imago Dei). (35) God is not only
raising up families as the basic building blocks of society, He is within Himself
a family, which then is the model for human families, made in His Image.
We shall note at this point simply that the wedding sought for has been
since eternity in God, and that God desires to share that unity with His creatures.
The sacred marriage, which will be further developed as we proceed,
comes from the deep reaches of eternity in the wedding of Creator and Sovereign,
an essential consequence of which is the union between masculine law
and feminine grace, and between the masculine “right” and feminine “good” --
both key issues in the definition of ‘ought’ and ‘love’ in Part I, and in our longbattled
Augustinian-Pelagian controversy investigated in Part II below. (36)
In Christian history, the story of redemption began to be told in overwhelmingly
masculine terms of disobedience and guilt and the price paid for
forgiveness. Those are fundamental and legitimate concerns. But there is also
a legitimate concern for pain and brokenness, for which is needed healing,
nurturing, and comfort, stability of being. This feminine role in redemption
has been often not even recognized, let alone understood. Yet, much of Jesus’
ministry was spent in healing the sick and broken. He did not think of healing
as a wrongful “therapeutic mode”. He saw it as the love of God for His creatures
and evidence for who He really was.
34. John 3:1-15.
35. See Bibliography concerning Yahweh or the Great Mother and also, Man & Woman in the Image of God.
36. On the distinction between the “good” and the “right”, see below, Part I, section A-5, “The Good & the
Right” on page 5.

xxvi
The Law & the Grace of God
In modern times, the feminine role is being used to crowd out the masculine
role, as in the 1960’s “death of God” with corresponding resurgence of the
Great Mother, Mother Gaia. The so-called “therapeutic mentality” was in that
case indeed replacing, not aiding, masculine moral order. Moral order was
(and often still is) condemned as mean spirited. That was (and still is) a tragic
error on the part of misguided Christians and others, or worse, a conscious and
rebellious subversion of moral order.
But there is no successful heiros gamos in the pagan world. Gaia has no
real marriage with any masculine figure with whom she can stand on equal
terms. In the end, despite occasional successful masculine strategy and directed
force, she always dominates because she can pull the plug on our ability
to be ourselves. She swallows us in decay and death.
So it may be that Biblical theologians have been for these reasons wary of
allowing any feminine element into the Imago Dei -- with heavy consequences
for Western Christendom. That includes the Pelagian controversy, and the drift
toward the hyper-masculine Christian culture of the late Middle Ages -- concentration
on guilt, denying the goodness of the self, carrying heavy crosses,
flagellation of oneself, etc.
On the Biblical view, the resulting relations between men and women, between
masculine and feminine, are profoundly different from those relations in
the world of the Fall precisely because the world of the Fall is incapable of attaining
that union of masculine and feminine. (37) The two stabilities always, in
a fallen Godless culture, unravel -- a kind of spiritual “Murphy’s law” (if anything
can go wrong, it probably will), or a law of spiritual entropy (all order descends
into disorder, all energy concentrations dissipate into motionless equilibrium,
everything winds down to zero potential).
In the Biblical world, rightly lived, there is an inherent unity (eternally in
God) between masculine and feminine, which form something larger than the
sum of the two of them. They form family with a “space” between themselves,
that is illustrated by how we rest for ontological security on the Hand (or in the
arms, the bosom of Abraham) of God and listen to His Voice for our moral direction.
The space between mother (hands and arms) and father (face and
voice) in a loving family is that heaven on earth for the children of God. That
is the space where the children can grow and flourish as a tree planted by the
waters of life, reaching toward the heavens. The unity between one’s father
and mother reflects the original and cosmic unity between the masculine and
feminine in God.
But the Christian world, in large part subverted by its early and continuing
misunderstanding of the value of the Greek philosophical tradition, tended to
oscillate between the hyper-masculine (as in the late Middle Ages and Reformation
era) and the hyper-feminine (as in the middle to late 20th century collapse
of Father God in favor of Mother Gaia, a return to ancient paganism). (38)
37. See Dennis Prager’ magnificent article, Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality
at http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/31JdXn/Jd/PragerJudaismOnHosx.htm
38. On the value of Greek philosophy, see Part I, D, “- Addendum - Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.

Preface
xxvii
The early growing defensiveness of anti-Pelagian writers, trying to protect
grace from an imagined subversion by free will, helped lead to the rigid legalism
of the late Middle Ages, which the Reformation did little to correct. There
was little appreciation of the role of and need for ontological stability along
with the quite different but equally necessary moral responsibility.
It would not be until the late 1800’s that the West would begin to develop a
language for understanding this need for the feminine in the human soul, and
how mothering is the primary way it gets communicated (or not). (39) The discovery
was, unfortunately, done in terms of secular psychology, but it was not
difficult to see how this mothering stability of being would apply in our relation
to God far more readily than in a secular view of the matter. (40)
This discovery appears to have begun with persons investigating the dependency
of an infant on mother, that this was an “ontological’ dependency,
which could be either very nurturing or very damaging to the infant.
“Reparenting”, as it was called, might be needed to undo the damage. It was
not hard to see how this might relate to our relation to God, who is indeed the
Source of our being and of our moral order, the real Parent, and the only one
who in the end could do reparenting.
Because there had been not much appreciation for the feminine nurturing,
healing side of God, the problem of the Fall was seen almost entirely in terms
of law and obedience. But a fallen soul is not only unwilling to obey, it is unable,
and requires the healing, restoring power of the Holy Spirit, channeled
often through human comforting and ministry, to function as God requires. (41)
As well as sins forgiven, the ability to be ourselves before God and man must
be healed so that we can freely obey. We must learn how to “be” so that we
can “do” (salvation by grace), rather than struggle to “do” so that we can
“be” (salvation by works).
The failure of the union between masculine and feminine led either to the
mistaken Christian bind of putting man down in order to exalt God, or, in the
secular world, of putting God down to exalt man. The Biblical view does not
“put down” anyone because God wants to exalt all of us into His Kingdom.
We are the ones who put ourselves down and keep ourselves out by our brokenness,
irrational fears, ignorance, and rebellion. Hyper-masculinity leads to
self-hate, and hyper-femininity leads to meaningless, shallow frivolity, or an
evaporation of the self into the sea of cosmic consciousness -- none of which
leads to a cure, only to a hopelessly and forever pendulum-swinging world.
We will be reflecting occasionally back on these two stabilities and their
gender-nature which have so deeply divided Christian theology and witness.
Discovering and elucidating the gender nature in the Biblical God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob will, I think, greatly enhance our sense of personal relation-
39. For an example of this lack of appreciation of the feminine in God, see St. Augustine’s The City of God,
in The Basic Writings of St. Augustine, vol. 2, Random House 1948, Book 14, p. 239.
40. I have not been able to track down where I ran into this information, but my memory seems to remember
it as first beginning with Anna Frued, Sigmund Freud’s daughter.
41. On the inability to obey, see Romans 7:13-24.

xxviii
The Law & the Grace of God
ship with God and with one another, and will help to understand and stabilize
the fracturing gender picture in Western Civilization. And those good results
will greatly assist in the reunion of the many fractures in the Body of Christ.
A-3. Theological & Anthropological Concerns
a. Law & Grace
Law and grace have been typically thought of as contraries which must be
united by an extraordinary effort on the part of God. This has been true especially
since the debate between Augustine and Pelagius became fractious, the
sides hardening their positions, so that on the Augustinian side free will was
seen to be a subverter of grace and of the sovereignty and/or omnipotence of
God -- as follows:
God loves His creatures, but finds them deeply embedded in sin. He wants
to forgive them, but the requirements of His law say that they must die in order
to pay the penalty for their sin. Like King Darius who wanted to save Daniel,
but was faced with “the law of the Medes and the Persians which cannot be revoked”,
God is caught in what seems an intolerable and intractable no-win situation
because His law forbids His grace from acting in mercy. (42)
The answer to this implacable dilemma came to be understood as God offering
His only begotten Son to pay the horrendous price.
This (rather rough) summary of the atonement raises many questions, such
as:
(1) Is this law something which stands over God and obligates Him?
(2) If so, then is God Himself really sovereign? Does not a law over God
imply that there is some code of righteousness to which God must bow? From
where would such a code originate?
(3) Is the only alternative that the will of God, rather than something over
His will, is itself the definition of righteousness?
(4) And if so, and if God can choose whatever He wills for the standard of
righteousness, then is not righteousness somewhat arbitrary?
(5) Christians are challenged to make reasonable sense of a sacrifice for
sin, especially something as horrendous as God sacrificing His own Son. Under
God, child sacrifice was absolutely forbidden, something only pagans did.
How could the killing of the only innocent person help with the guilt of all the
rest? Why would not that just make matters infinitely worse?
All of these questions are intertwined with questions about free will as in
some sense undermining the sovereignty of God and doing an end-run around
the grace bestowed though the suffering of Jesus on the cross so that, by our
works, we could save ourselves.. (43)
42. On the law of the Medes and Persians, see Daniel 6.
43. Discussion of most of these ideas can be found in numerous resources available through The Road to
Emmaus. Go to http://theRoadtoEmmaus.org for audio and video tapes in the Shopping Mall. These
materials on the nature of salvation and atonement are being reformatted into CDs and DVDs.

Preface
xxix
And they are intertwined with questions concerning the goodness of the
“self” -- as illustrated by a conversation I had with an unhappy Christian who
was looking for another denomination in which, as he put it, one did not either
put oneself down when one lifted up God, or put God down when one lifted up
man or oneself.
It was a problem which raised strong echoes in my own soul. The Christianity
with which we had both grown up had given us the notion that God did
not want us to be fully alive and joyful, that we were supposed to cringe before
Him, even if only slightly, to be properly humble. Putting ourselves down
somehow made God happy. He might love us if we did that.
That is a misguided belief which paralyzes many an unhappy, ill-taught
Christian, and appears to issue out of the Pelagian controversy in which the
anti-Pelagian side felt it necessary to demean free will and selfhood as a threat
to the dignity and sovereignty of God and to the atonement accomplished by
Jesus in His life on earth. It is the kind of atonement theory which has rightly
deserved the castigation of secular people.
A glance forward will suggest the sea-change which occurred when Jesus
said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth.’ But I say to you, ‘Do not resist one who is evil. But if any strikes you on
the right cheek, turn to him the other also...’” (44) God was up to something
very few would have anticipated.
The Hebrew people had worked on a primarily juridical mode concerning
sin and retribution, but Jesus was changing their understanding to a personal
relationship mode. The high goal of God was not to “get even” with the sinner,
but rather to build, or rebuild, a good relationship with him. The foundations
of this sea-change go far back into Old Testament history, but it took the incarnate
Son of God to draw the clarity of the mind of God to the attention of His
people.
Nevertheless, Christians themselves kept sliding back into the juridical, legalistic
mode which Christ had rejected. We hope to show the resolution to
that dilemma which has plagued so much of Christian history.
b. Open & Closed Circle Universes
The whole complexity of possible universes or worldviews can, for simplicity
and clarity, be divided into two groups: those which are open circles and
those which are closed circles.
The watershed division is created by the Biblical doctrine of creation and
definition of ‘God’, which says that the cosmos is created by an active, purposive,
and rational Person. This active, purposeful, and rational Person is what
the Bible calls “God”, defined as the creator of, and therefore also sovereign
over, all that is. This kind of universe is an open circle because God exists outside
the universe, being its creator. Thus there is communication between inside
and outside. Those within the universe, the creatures, are not locked into
44. Matthew 5:38 ff.

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The Law & the Grace of God
whatever the world itself can provide. They have abundant resources in their
relationship with God outside the universe. (45) With a loving God, there can be
active communication between the outside and the inside.
Furthermore, the cosmos itself is rational because created by a rational,
reasonable Person, an Intelligent Designer. This Judeo-Christian Biblical picture
is unique in the world’s religious and philosophical life. God, from outside
the world, provides the two stabilities discussed above (46) necessary for
persons who are not self-sufficient, who are dependent for their welfare on resources
outside of themselves, and thus very vulnerable. God provides their
ontological stability, that is, their stability of being, of their personhood. And
God provides their moral stability, their sense of purpose, meaning, and direction.
The alternative kind of universe or worldview is that of both paganism and
secularism. The cosmos comes about by processes of random chance, not by
intelligent design. All things, everything and everyone, begin an accident, they
live an accident, and they die an accident. There is no objective meaning or
purpose to life or death, only what we can ourselves project onto the circumstances
of our lives.
This is a “closed circle” because there is nothing outside of the circle with
which to communicate, no God exists. The world happens all by itself, and has
only itself on which to depend for producing “the good life”. In such a world,
there is no possibility for individual persons of either ontological or moral stability.
What there is of ontological stability of personhood depends upon successful
power struggle, which in the end always loses. Everyone dies. And
morality is defined, as some have said, by the other end of a gun barrel. Personal
and moral stability in the closed circle are bad, and in the end, lethal imitations
of what God alone can provide in the created open circle cosmos. (47)
These differences will be foundational to our discussion of the wedding of
law and grace. The two stabilities are the parties to the wedding, a wedding
that can happen only in the Biblical world, not in the secular/pagan worlds.
c. Being Myself..., a Good Idea?
As suggested above, it has not always been clear in Christian history that
God wants us to be ourselves. Selfhood has often been suspect among Christians,
smacking too much of self-centeredness, and somehow an affront to the
sovereignty of God. To exalt God meant to diminish ourselves.
But the Way of the Cross was not meant by Jesus to imply that having a
strong, competant self was contrary to the will of God. Rather, Jesus wanted us
to be strongly, intelligently, and joyfully loyal to the law of God. We are to
love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbors
just like we love ourselves. There is a healthy self-love, without which we can-
45. For more information on worldview issues, go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/WrldV/00Wvw.htm
46. See “The Two Required Stabilities & the “Space Between”” on page xxiv.
47. Ibid.

Preface
xxxi
not obey the law of love. The Pentecost power of the Holy Spirit did not turn
the frightened disciples into even more frightened apostles. They went out,
with only the Gospel and without raising a sword, to conquer the mighty Roman
empire. Such an event had never happened before in human history.
And then, Constantine made Christianity an accepted and then the preferred
religion, and the world crept slowly into the Church. Christians began to
get soft and comfortable rather than in spiritual fighting form. So, over the
centuries, a pharasaic judgementalism resurfaced, a hyper-masculine imposition
of guilt. God was hardly seen as bestowing or redeeming our being with
love and joy, only our moral rectitude, only the second of the two fundamental
stabilities. (48)
Godly mothering is the healthy nurturing of selfhood, the feeding and
tending which draws forth the self into adult participation in life. The Godly
raising of children for the Kingdom requires both mothering for nuture and fathering
for discipline. But the Church was slow on the uptake regarding the
need for spiritual mothering as well as fathering. That lack of gender balance
often undermined the Good News message. The mothering message is there in
the Bible, but not nearly so clearly as the fathering messge. The two need to be
wedded.
The goodness of the self is implied by the very meaning of being a creature.
If God is the Creator of all that is, then existence, time, space, individuality,
and selfhood are all goods. The Cross Life, which was sometimes turned
into an attack on the self, was and is meant to be the salvation of selfhood, getting
us back to the Godly reason for the being of our selves, not at all to get rid
of ourselves.
God is a real person, the trinitarian model for what we are to be.
A-4. Standing (or not) on the Moral & Spiritual High Ground
a. The Continuing Reformation at Work
We need, as we have seen, three principles (at least) to be investigated and
applied in our continuing Reformation:
(1) the understanding and application of a truth-seeking spirit in all matters of
belief;
(2) an objective foundation for moral principles, and,
(3) an understanding and application of the gender nature of God and of ourselves
made in His Image. (49)
One wonders, of course, just what gender has to do with God and salvation.
Answering this question requires a major paradigm shift to the Biblical
48. See above, “The Two Required Stabilities & the “Space Between”” on page xxiv.
49. One might well wonder what gender has to do with the law and grace of God. The Biblical worldview is
an intensely personal affair, contrasted steadily with the pagan/secular alternative which is wholly and
disastrously impersonal and depersonalizing. The secular/pagan world emphasizes sex and gender also,
but in a radically different manner, which ends up depersonalizing, not personalizing, our lives. This will be
the subject of a coming work, The Expanding Circle of Mother & the Search for Father, an essay on how we
grow up into the family of God. See Bibliography.

xxxii
The Law & the Grace of God
understanding of sex and gender, which we hope to supply. Sex and gender are
not at all what the world has commonly convinced us that it is -- a universal entitlement
and a sacrament of selfhood (we “discover” ourselves).
The three above basic principles can help lead us then through the issues of
this book: a resolution of the conflicts in Christian atonement theology, free
will, grace, and the sovereignty of God.
b. The Importance of “Right” & “Wrong”
By any measurable standard, we humans have outdone ourselves in violence
and abuse of one another over the last (20th) century. (50) Despite (or due
to) the illusion of mighty and of noisy political efforts to increase good and
lessen evil, almost all by secular governmentsand other secular interests (their
being left no Biblical governments) , there is nothing to tell us that the problem
is getting smaller, let alone being solved. Terribly misguided political efforts
were instead a major part of the problem. And, political efforts are guided (or
at least publicly justified) by moral standards -- the existence of which is routinely
rejected by secular forces.
One author describes the importance of morality in drama and story telling.
But the same truths apply to real life:
After a spirited conversation about the existence of God, I shuffled back to my room. As I
sat in my room, a thought suddenly occurred to me: Regardless of whether or not someone
believes in God, without morality, there is no dramatic tension. And without dramatic tension,
there is no tragedy, no comedy, no great novels, nor any plays or films of consequence. (51)
As one jaded teenager remarked, “There is no right and wrong, there is
only fun and boring.” “Fun” sometimes means high-pitched, “in your face” rebellion
against authority, as with the two teen-aged murderers at Columbine
Colorado High school in 1999. Without morality, one has to find a “meaningful”,
i.e., “high-pitched” something-or-other to assert and entertain oneself, to
substitute for that missing dramatic tension. That is how to be a “somebody”
rather than a “nobody” -- as Hollywood so often teaches us. How many movie
posters show a hero, or group of heroes, standing with weapons at the ready,
looking intently, as it were, athwart the path of some unseen enemy.
Without morality, there is no meaning other than power struggle. That is
to say, as we shall see, there is no purpose for existence, the foundation of all
morality.
As Edmund Cherbonnier, the mentor who first led me into these issues,
told us, there is something in the human psyche which persistently seeks for
the distinction between what is right and good and what is wrong and evil. (52)
50. Visit R. J. Rummel’s website at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/, and see his book, Death by Government,
as well as other items by him.
51. Nick Hartman writing in Forward in Christ, Jan/Feb 2010, p. 11; www.forwardinfaith.com.
52. Edmund La B. Cherbonnier began teaching as the religion professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut,
during the middle 1950’s when I was a student there. Cherbonnier was the inspiration for my
career in Christian apologetics. See especially his Hardness of Heart, an excellent introduction to the
issues between Augustine and Pelagius. (It may be out of print, but second hand copies are possibly available
at www.amazon.com or other second-hand book sellers.)

Preface
xxxiii
Something in us says that some things really are right and others really are
wrong. Even those who deny the reality of moral principles often insist on doing
some things a certain way, not only for themselves, but for others as well.
So they at least look like they believe in a right and a wrong.
Those who relativize truth and morality (who must then run their lives by
how they feel rather than by clear thought) are often the most adamant about
having things their way, as though they had some objective truth or value to offer.
And every politician knows that he must persuade the voters that he is doing
it “the right way”, that he is doing “the right thing”, especially for those
deemed to be poor and under-privileged. Catering to the under-privileged is a
hugely successful political ploy.
Communism won, and under different flags and names, continues to win, a
large segment of the world, not because people devour Marx’s Das Kapital, but
rather because communists and socialists were (and are) so good at convincing
the masses that they were doing “the right thing”, especially for the poor and
down-trodden. They stood on the moral high ground, or rather, on the reputation
for holding it.
Christians have lost the moral and spiritual high ground reputation almost
all over the West, largely because they surrendered the intellectual high
ground. Having no good answers to the rising tide of the secular 19th century
Enlightenment which was bent on dispensing with God, they got run from the
public arena in the 20th. They are perceived as anti-scientific, that is, not truthseekers,
merely arbitrary position-defenders -- even though not being a truthseeker
is a primary offense in the eyes of God. (53)
And, on the practical side, if you cannot explain reasonably to people why
you believe what you believe, over time they will probably not pay you much
attention.
Nevertheless, although the notions of fairness, loving one’s neighbor, taking
care of those in need may not get much obedience, they still make good political
advertising.
Furthermore, it is still true that if you want to convince people that you are
standing on the moral high ground, the best way to do that is, again, to be in
fact standing there. And that requires that you know what it is, where it is, and
how to show others the way to it. We hope to help the reader do that.
This is an essay in ethics, the study of ethical or moral theory and language.
Ethical theory is probably boring to most persons, even though moral
issues are paramount in every culture, and especially in the West which is in
deep conflict over whether moral principles even exist. But moral language,
indicating a perceived objective difference between right and wrong, nevertheless
permeates probably every culture, and is an enduring part of the “interest”
drawn forth in viewers of art and drama, so we had best get on with discovering
how to make morality reasonable, logically consistent, and factually based.
53. See Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible in a Scientific Age. Also, see “The Bible & Truth-Seeking
at http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/12The/Bbl/Bible&TruthSeeking.htm

xxxiv
The Law & the Grace of God
Some will think that a tall order, and indeed it is. But if the Biblical worldview
is reality, and if one can start there from solid original premises, then it
just might turn out to be not the impossible task everywhere imagined. (54)
c. The Man & Mystery of Lawlessness
Until I had read Ascension Theology by Douglas Farrow, I paid little attention
to “end times” discussions, mostly because Jesus had told us that we will
not see it coming until it happens, and Christians have had a 100% consistent
pattern of failure in predicting that event for two millennia. (55) But Farrow’s
work, one of the best pieces of theological writing I have read, convinced me
that we need to pay attention to the workings of the dark side more than I had
thought, and to its at least possible relation to the end times.
Farrow expands the theme that evil has no creativity of its own, and must
therefore borrow good things by which it can do evil. It must copy the good
produced by God and by Godly people, but gives it a hidden twist which draws
the unsuspecting into its trap.
Secularism, for example, copies science, a specifically Biblical enterprise,
but secularizes it, claiming it to be the true science. It thereby has seduced millions
of Westerners into secularism and scientism -- on the false premise that
secularism holds the intellectual high ground. (56)
Farrow makes many references to the “man of lawlessness” and the “mystery
of lawlessness”, pointing to the end times. (2 Thess. 2:3, 7). Whether or
not we are nearing the end times, we are clearly in a place where “even the
elect” are being deceived (Matthew 24:24). So we will look further into Farrlow’s
work later on in Part III, The Heiros Gamos.
The deceptive and seductive power of evil cannot be countered by a
Church which is divided in its own atonement theology, as the present Church
is, to the point of becoming irrelevant to much of the world, especially a world
which prides itself on being intellectually in the forefront. Our hope is that
these present efforts will help to clarify the Bibical theology of atonement, and
that Biblical faith holds the intellectual, moral, and spiritual high ground. All
three. Only substantial and vigorous clarity can defeat substantial confusion
and propaganda. Hence we have...
d. The Road to Emmaus Project --
Common Sense Christianity
This Preface has provided some background material and tools for understanding
the problem about to be addressed. Our aims in this book will be to
show in Part I, Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’,
(1) that Biblical ethical theory has a logical and empirical foundation -- an “is”
54. For the logical metaphysical case for those “solid original premises” in the Biblical worldview, see bibliography
for A Personalist Cosmology in Imago Dei, especially Vol. I, Personality, Empiricism, & God.
55. See Bibliography for information on Ascenscion Theology.
56. For more on the Biblical foundations of science, go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Apl/00Apl.htm, and also to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/Sci/00Sci.htm

Preface
xxxv
upon which morality is based,
(2) that obligation is objective,
(3) that obligation does not cancel free will, and
(4) that the obligation has a clear claim on the freewill activity of the person
being obligated. Those are the issues by which the notion of “obligation” can
be realistically defined.
Part II, Pelagianism & Biblical Theology, will survey the seemingly intractable
argument begun between Pelagians and Augustinians, beginning about
400 AD, lasting down to the present. We will indicate certain faults, some on
both sides of the argument, and will propose a resolution which shows how
grace, free will, works, and the sovereignty and grace of God all operate in
union with each other, and are in no sense in conflict.
Part III, Heiros Gamos - the Wedding of Law & Grace, will apply the abstract
rules of ethical theory to the practical concerns of everyday trench life,
and draw some conclusions.
But, Law & Grace in Imago Dei is part of a much larger Christian apologetics
project on The Road to Emmaus, which might be called “Common
Sense Christianity”, something like C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. (57) Common
sense is what a liberal arts education used to be about, preparing the
young with a broad education on the basics of life, from which they could go
intelligently to pursue any career they wanted. But education has been splintered
into a thousand more or less isolated field and courses. There is no substantial
worldview which unites them. Secularism is inherently splintering because
it has no clear intellectual or moral unity, and neo-paganism, which now
predominates with “relative truth” sends us back to the more of the long history
of human defensiveness, cruelty, and strife. There is not much to choose between
secularism and neo-paganism -- they are both person-unfriendly.
In this present case a part of our interest is in epistemology, how we know
what we know, the basic principle for which is that to become a disciple of
Jesus, you must first be (or want to be) a truth-seeker. And that is done by following
the principles of honest debate and discussion, starting with the laws of
non-contradiction and of sufficient cause.
The object of the project is to provide first, a Biblical worldview, and second,
a Good News, a Gospel message, both of which are logically consistent,
and empirically, factually accurate and relevant.
The project thus ranges over metaphysics, cosmology, worldview, Biblical
theology, psychology, politics, and all other areas of human interest.
Personality, Empiricism, & God (volume I of A Personalist Cosmology in
Imago Dei), seeks to lay the metaphysical foundations for the Biblical worldview,
that is, provides a Biblical philosophy. On top of that metaphysical foun-
57. Go to www.theRoadtoEmmaus.org for several essays on Christian apologetics. See especially, the
Road Master Plans 1, 2, and 3.

xxxvi
The Law & the Grace of God
dation of God, the creator, we hope to build a whole worldview framework
with the details being painted in for the various other aspects of life. The next
level after the metaphysical is this present work on a theology of morality and
atonement -- giving us God the Sovereign. All other Biblical theology follows,
I think it can be said, from these two levels.
The notion of a “Biblical philosophy” will strike some as odd. But the
Biblical worldview can put to work the tools of philosophy with better success
than can any other worldview, that is, we can examine and assess the logical
presuppositions of the Biblical worldview and show them to be, again, logically
consistent, and empirically accurate and relevant.
The goodness and rationality of the empirical world was historically established
by, and logically presupposes, the Biblical worldview, not the secular. (58)
Natural science itself was established in late Medieval Europe because they
were the first to wed the logical expertise of the Greek philosophers with the
strong, positive empirical attitude of the Hebrews, as the two were inherited by
the Christians.
It is my experience and conviction that there is no serious issue in human
life in which doing it God’s way does not lead to clearly, evidently, and happily
-- better results. The Road to Emmaus Project builds from the ground up (logically
speaking), from the deep foundations of metaphysics, epistemology, and
a Biblical philosophy to atonement theology -- and then on to politics, education,
economics, and other everyday aspects of life.
Only in the Biblical worldview, so I believe, can that successfully be done.
I urge the reader to visit www.theRoadtoEmmaus.org for an introduction to a
possibly new way of looking at life: Biblically, logically, and empirically -- all
in one.
The Bibliography will indicate the range of issues covered, substantially, I
think, in most cases, not lightly. Only the Biblical worldview and Good News
can unite the cosmos and all personal life together in a living whole because
only the Biblical cosmos is essentially and inherently personal, with persons,
not things or abstractions, as the foundation of reality. (59)
That means, if one asks, “Well, what about science? How can the Bible
survive a scientific examination?” the answer is: The Bibllical worldview
(wedded to the Greek gift of logical and abstract thinking) not only was the
necessary foundation for science, the Bible is the foundation for Christian theology,
which rightly done, is still the “Queen of the sciences”, as was understood
in the Middle Ages. It is the Queen of the sciences because it alone can
establish itself as promoting a logically consistent and empirically relevant
worldview. As noted above, neither reason nor revelation can stand without the
other. They each imply the other. (60) If that is so, then the Biblical world and
58. For the case to support this claim, see Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, & God, Vol. I of
A Personalist Cosmology in Imago Dei.
59. Ibid.
60. See above, “The Rise & Recovery of Truth-Seeking” on page xvi.

Preface
xxxvii
its Good News comprises the only reasonable world there is. That is the message
of Common Sense Christianity.
References in the footnotes will often direct the reader to other facets of
this project for support of a point being made.
A-5. A House-Keeping Matter
Since we will be dealing with words and definitions, we will follow the
standard practice in such matters for the use of quotation marks.
We will use double quotes “...” in the normal way to highlight a word, or to
quote the word or sentence. We will use single quotes ‘...’ again as normally,
to indicate the name of a word.
Thus, “train” will refer to a train. But ‘train’ will refer to the word ‘train’.
So ‘train’ is the word which names the word spelled t-r-a-i-n. “Train” (or just
train) is a word which names a series of cars, usually on a track, or by analogy,
any series of items moving or standing in a clear sequence, such as “a train of
events...”.
Hence, “obligation” (or just plain obligation) will refer to those things
which bind us morally. And, ‘obligation’ will refer to the word which is
spelled o-b-l-i-g-a-t-i-o-n.

xxxviii
Study Guide for Preface
These chapter study guides can be used for individual
or group study to help the reader focus on
key issues. The reader who follows through with
each question will, chapter by chapter, build a
solid understanding of the issues.
I. Summary:
ties” adequately define salvation? and
In your own words, write a summary of Why?
the theme of this Preface, and make a
16. What is the best way for Christians
personal application as appropriate.
to convince the public that they have
intellectual integrity?
A-1. Failure, Recovery, & Continuing
Reformation
A-2. Invitation to a Wedding
17. How would you explain the “heiros
1. According to the author, who was
gamos” to someone?
the primary cause the current failure of
18. Under what conditions can the
Christianity in the West?
Eternal Wedding in God happen in
2. What does one have to be to be
human beings?
God?
19. What role does the “division” suggested
by the word ‘sex’ play in this sub-
3. What inherent contrast exists
between the Biblical vs. the secular and
ject?
pagan worldviews?
20. Why did pagan culture so compulsively
and promiscuously pursue sexual
4. What is the difference between
truth-seeking and position-defending?
union according to the author?
Can the two work together? Why and
21. Does the author believe the union
how so?
can be successfully accomplished?
5. Can you think of other reasons for
22. Can the secular or pagan worldview
produce such a union?
the failure besides the six given?
6. Give a summary of the six failures.
23. Why is the Biblical story on sex and
7. Do you see the author as dismal or
gender so different from the pagan
hopeful? and why?
story?
8. What is the new Reformation
24. Of what import is Genesis 1:26-28
needed by the Church? Is it realistic? Is
in this discussion?
it Biblical?
25. Why do secular and pagan people
9. In what sense is reformation about
tend to focus on good feelings rather
both content and process?
than good relationships?
10. Why cannot privatized Biblical religion
be pasted over a secular world-
26. What does the author see as making
up the Image of God in which we are
view?
made?
11. Science is “common sense paying
27. So you agree with the author’s
attention to...” what? What is the point of
notion of creating being feminine and
such an observation?
sovereignty being masculine?
12. Where is the most important locus
28. What does the author mean by
of truth-seeking?
“spiritual power”? Do you agree? and
13. What has been the impact of parents
losing control of their children’s edu-
why?
29. What has the Way of the Cross to
cation?
do with with sexual and gender unity?
14. Do you believe that the four freedoms
could have arisen and be sus-
30. Why are the two stabilities required
in the author’s view?
tained only in a Biblical worldview?
31. Describe the author’s “formative
15. Do you believe that the two “stabili-

xxxix
direct hint of the heiros gamos”.
32. Why does the author say that children
look as much at how their parents
treat each other as how the parents treat
them, the children?
33. Does the presented gender-nature
relation to God and one another make
sense to you? Why so?
34. What does the author want to add
to the legitimate concerns for disobedience,
guilt, and the price paid for forgiveness?
35. Why can there be no successful
Sacred Marriage in the resurgence of
Gaia worship?
36. Describe the “space” between the
mothering and fathering side of God?
37. What happened in the late 1800’s
which supposedly began the development
of a language for understanding
the need for the feminine in Biblical spirituality?
A-3. Theological & Anthropological
Concerns
38. Is the author’s description of
“God’s dilemma concerning law and
grace” accurate?
39. What does the author see as the
cause and origin of much of the opposition
between law and grace?
40. Would you add (or subtract) from
the list of five questions raised?
41. Does the dilemma of putting God
up and putting self down vs. putting self
up and God down ring bells with you?
Does it make sense? How would you
advise persons to deal with such a
dilemma?
42. Describe the differences between
open and closed-circle universes.
43. Is the Biblical worldview correctly
described as unique? Why so?
A-4. Standing on the Moral & Spiritual
High Ground
44. What three principles must be
investigated? and why?
45. Do you agree that there is something
in the human psyche which yearns
for a clear moral distinction? Why so?
46. Is the author’s low estimation correct
of secular efforts to control evil and
to establish good?
47. What do you think can explain the
almost universal belief in objective moral
standards?
48. What is the alternative to objective
moral values if indeed there are none to
be had?
49. Why do politicians almost always
represent themselves as doing the
“right” thing?
50. Is the author correct in his assertion
that Christians have lost the moral
high ground in the public arena, and why
that is so?
51. Looking ahead, do you see any
hope for the author’s attempt to relate
gender to the issues of law and grace?
Is there really a “marriage”?
Chapter Reflections:
In your own words, relate your new
insights from reading and meditating on
the information contained within this
Preface. What difference would it make
to you personally whether the claims and
assertions of this chapter were true or
not?

Part I
Defining
‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’
A. Preparing the Ground...
A-1. The Problem -
& its Four Defining Tests
The word ‘morality’ is often used
interchangeably with ‘ethics’, but
‘ethics’ tends to connote the more abstract
discipline of theory, whereas
‘morality’ points generally to the practical
application of theory.
“Oughtness” is that special quality
that makes a statement or claim a
moral statement or claim. It is thus by
nature abstract, and so also, seemingly,
illusive. It has been sought after
from the very beginnings of philosophy
and wisdom literature, but rarely,
I think, very successfully. Here is my
try at the matter.
This Part I of Law & Grace in
Imago Dei was originally written for a
religion class at Trinity College, Hartford,
Connecticut, my junior year
(1956), and then published in The
Journal of Religion, July, 1959 when I
was at the Episcopal General Theological
Seminary in NYC. It spells out
the case for asserting that the only objective
foundation for morality is the
will of God. It comes here updated,
but the principles remain unchanged.
Writing this paper was my introduction
to the power of the Biblical
worldview, its unique capacity for
combining intellectual, moral, and
spiritual integrity, propelling me into
my lifelong passion for apologetics --
explaining the Christian faith reasonably
and gracefully.
In his State of the Union address
in 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt
said:
There are those who believe that a new
modernity demands a new morality. What
they fail to consider is the harsh reality that
there is no such thing as a new morality.
There is only one morality. All else is immorality.
There is only true Christian ethics
over against which stands the whole of
paganism. If we are to fulfill our great destiny
as a people, then we must return to the
old morality, the sole morality.... All these
blatant sham reformers, in the name of a
new morality, preach the old vice of selfindulgence
which rotted out first the moral
fiber and then even the external greatness
of Greece and Rome.

2 The Law & the Grace of God
Teddy, known for being (unfortunately)
a “progressive”, i.e., socialist,
was here on target (61) . He saw the
uniqueness of the Biblical morality,
and even that early saw glimpses of
the moral disaster toward which Western
Civilization was steadily slouching
-- via secularism on the road to
neo-paganism.
Political authority depends on a
prior moral authority. Apart from the
distinction between right and wrong,
there is no authority at all, political or
otherwise, and so, there is no obligation
for citizens to obey their alleged
governments, nor for the alleged government
to honor the freedoms or
rights of the people. There is only
pragmatic or emotional persuasion,
power struggle, bribery, or mind-control.
Everybody wants to get their
way.
As Mao Tse Tung reportedly said:
“Morality comes out of the other end
of a gun barrel.” Might makes
enough of an illusion of right so that
the strong man can often get his way.
And pagan cultures typically indeed
thought that the strong had the right,
even the obligation, to rule the weak --
if only to keep some helpful order in
an inherently chaotic world. His tyrannical
order was better than no order.
But none of those pragmatic
methods of “persuasion” in any reasonable
sense obligate either a citizen
or a government because, if this essay
61. Early 1900’s Progressivism was socialism, the
belief that big government was the solution to our
social ills. Government centralization was not really
for the people, it was for government control of the
people, who were considered untrustworthy. It was
thus not progressive but regressive. But many
well-meaning people did not realize that until late in
the game, including myself... I was an unwitting
socialist until 1970.
is correct, the secular and pagan
worlds have nothing in them by which
a distinction between objective right
and wrong can be made. (62) Their
worlds are morally empty.
The case for Biblical moralitiy is,
I believe, logically locked in -- in the
sense that there are no competing theories
of ethics which can demonstrate
all four of the following, that the proposed
ethical system...
(1) is logically consistent and empirically relevant;
(2) has objective meaning;
(3) allows for free will; and
(4) provides a relevant claim on the free will
of persons designated as under its obligation.
All non-Biblical ethical theories
of which I am aware fail in one or
more of these four defining tests.
Let the reader decide.
A-2. The “Relevant” Claim
Morality issues from a command
which is directed at intentions, and intentions
are about actions and relationships.
Moral obligations stipulate that
we intend/choose to do certain things
which we could intend/choose to do
otherwise. Morality thus necessarily
involves free will.
Unless those stipulations emanate
from something like abstract Platonic
Ideas, they must emanate from a personal
being who is also an authority
figure. So far as I am aware, however,
no one has ever shown how Ideas,
62. See Bibliography for Yahweh or the Great
Mother?, (Volume III of A Personalist Cosmology in
Imago Dei), which compares and contrasts the Biblical
with the secular/pagan worldview. Only the
Biblical worldview contains that which can provide
grounds given in this present work for a distinction
between right and wrong, that is, a moral distinction.

even those of Plato, can stipulate anything
at all, being themselves passive,
not active, intentional, or causal entities.
The “stipulation” would have to
be some logical implication (rather
than a caused, intended, or spoken
event). But Plato himself very rightly
wonders how such a thing could happen.
(63)
An atheist might say that he can
provide his own “relevant claim” and
define his own “ought” by forbidding
the infliction of pain without a justifying
balance of pleasure, equal to or
greater than the pain.
One might give two responses.
First, any appeal to a “justifying”
balance of pleasure itself would be
smuggling in the “ought” -- because,
to make the argument work, the justifying
balance would have to be a
moral justifying, not only a pragmatic
justifying (it works for me...). Causing
pain would have to be shown to be
a moral issue, not just a “bad”, a contrary
to “good”. (64)
If “justifying” (i.e., giving an adequate
reason for...) is used in a moral
sense, that moral sense would need its
own explanation -- ad infinitum, until
it at last came to rest on an “is”, a
given fact, not just an abstract principle.
The Big Problem is finding that
“is”.
And secondly, #4 above, the “relevant
claim”, might seem to beg the
question, perhaps itself smuggling in
an undercover “ought” by the word
‘relevant’.
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 3
But the relevancy in item #4
above, is not a moral relevancy, it is
rather to indicate that there has to be
some kind of claim on the will/doing
of the person being obligated which is
the precondition for a moral claim.
That claim would have to be an intentional
act, that is, the commanding
person must intend something regarding
the intending-choosing-willingacting
of the morally targeted person.
A command is an intention for
someone else’s intentions. If for the
atheist there is no intentional act on
the part of the originator, the atheist
needs to explain the relevance at all of
the supposed obligation.
But having an intention from one
person toward another is only part of
the requirement. The intending person
must also be in an authority relationship
to the target. Many people might
want me to do things for them, but
only an authority in my life can morally
require that I do them.
Many persons can and do make
claims upon us. So, we need to decide
which of those are moral claims. The
four points above are the criteria for
making that distinction.
We will address this issue again
after having established the actual definition
of ‘ought’. (65)
A-3. Two Definitions
Offered here are definitions of
two ethical terms, ‘ought’ and ‘love’,
which are relevant to all human relationships.
We examine ‘ought’ in section
B, and ‘love’ in section C below.
But if examined in the context of
most philosophical systems, they turn
out to be either without cognitive sig-
63. See below, “The Importance of Worldview & Ultimate
Goals” on page 34
On Plato, see at end of Part I, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30
64. See below, section A5, “The Good & the Right”
on page 5, for the difference between the “good”
and the “right”. 65. See below, “Alternative Views?” on page 13

4 The Law & the Grace of God
nificance or are defined in such a way
as to make them, ironically, irrelevant
to ethics.
Obligation and love, moreover,
are often set at odds with one another.
Obligation becomes Wordsworth's
“Stern Daughter of the Voice
of God,” the thunder from the pulpit,
or the steel finger of authority in man's
inner being. Love, then, is romanticism,
sex, release to nirvana, mystic
union, and so on. These two will almost
inevitably find themselves in opposition,
not cooperation.
Love, it is imagined, rises above
ethics and cannot be made the object
of an obligation; i.e., it cannot be commanded.
If so, we might be confronted
by an imagined (but false)
cleavage between the Old Testament
of law and the New Testament of love.
The definitions offered here entail
that no such cleavage exists, that obligation
and love as agape (Greek word
for freely given concern and help for
another) do not stand over against
each other, and that either ethical
terms have objective, cognitive significance
or they have no ethical implications
at all.
Furthermore, if obligation and
love are in some way mutually exclusive,
then we have in practical fact
two sets of ethics, one of which then
must rule over the other.
The transcendent or mystical ethic
usually overrides what it calls “the
temporal distinction between good
and evil” under the pretext of replacing
it with something better, usually at
the expense of all cognitive distinctions.
We then find ourselves unable
to distinguish any worthwhile difference
between our new supra-legal
ethic and no ethic at all.
Emotivists, though opposed to
mysticism, also empty ethical categories
of their cognitive element. Ethical
terms become tools of emotional expression--
sounds without intellectual
meaning. They express approval
(Hurrah!), or disapproval (Shame!) by
the speaking subject but make no objective
statement about the character
of that behavior to which the subject is
referring. The expressions describe
the emotions of the speaker, not the
behavior pointed to -- says the theory.
The two words, ‘love’ and
‘ought’, are then only tools used to accomplish
or to express ends or feelings
arrived at on grounds other than
ethical. Ethical terms, in effect, become
irrelevant to ethics as the science
of ends.
A-4. Obligation & Obligations
We must distinguish between obligations
(plural) which are particular
acts (to do xyz, to love, and so on) and
obligation as the quality which makes
the particular obligations obligatory --
the “oughtness”. The former are terms
of an obligation, the particular acts
that are right or wrong, but it is the latter
we are trying to define. What is it
about certain acts that makes them obligations
for people? What does “I
ought...” mean? What is this nearly
universally recognized quality which
invests all ethical terms with significance?
Paradoxically, even though we
might not know the definition of
‘ought’, we almost always know what
people mean when they say, “You
ought to...” We generally have a sense
of how to react rationally to the statement.
We have a powerful clue about the
source of such authority when we realize
that “I ought to...” means that “I

am expected to...” The question is
why that expectation has a moral force
over me, and why it is “legitimate”
force. We can “feel” it in our bones,
almost pushing us in that direction.
How do we discern whether the expectation
is moral or just another of
the many irrelevant expectations that
come our way? The force of the “expectation”
depends largely on the person
doing the expecting, and his relation
to us. So, what is the nature of
this relationship which makes it feel
“legitimate”?
When young, we all experience
that with our parents. For the small
child, the “important” thing is what
mother or father wants. The “unimportant”
thing is what they let me decide
on my own. So “importance”
means what mother and father want.
That is the child’s first glimpse of the
power of moral authority.
Why do parents have this moral
force over us? It runs deeply and
takes years before we graduate beyond
that sense of obedience to our parents.
And to what do we graduate? We
shall return to these themes. (66)
This search for the meaning of obligation
is the problem with which Socrates
began his quest for the meaning
of life. (67) Without the Biblical worldview,
the problem is, I believe, insoluble.
But in the Biblical worldview, that
is not the case. The universality of an
obligation does not arise from its being
an Idea in Plato’s heaven, it arises
from being the purpose and command
66. See for example, below...“Pre-Moral Obligations:
Truth-Seeking & the Good” on page 29
Also, see Bibliography for The Expanding Circle
of Mother & the Search for Father.
67. See below, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 5
of Him who created all beings, and
therefore owns them all. He can thus
give them their reason for existence.
The basic moral commands of God
(e.g., the Decalogue) thus apply to all
creatures universally.
Showing that to be true is the burden
of this Part I, Defining ‘Oughtness’
& ‘Love’.
But first, some preparation.
A-5. The Good & the Right
The words ‘good’ and ‘right’ are
often used interchangeably, but I will
make here a necessary distinction between
the two which will be developed
as we proceed through these issues.
The idea of the “good” in these
pages will mean anything that promotes
and enhances the fullness of life
and of relationship. Most people will
agree that good food, clean air and water,
cars that run well, stable housing,
family, education, and friendship are
life-promoting things, and “to be desired”.
In normal usage, the “to be desired”
part implies at least a quasimoral
element, but the “good” as used
in these pages has no inherent morality
or obligation attached to it.
The opposite of the good (the lifepromoting)
will be the “evil” or the
“bad” (the life-and-relationship destroying).
Most people would agree
that war, famine, plague, hatred, etc.,
are life- and relationship-destroying,
and that they should be avoided where
at all possible.
The word ‘right’, on the other
hand, will mean that which is obligatory,
the “oughts”, those things which
we are obligated to do. The Ten Commandment
give us ten oughts. Every
civil law points toward an ought. We

6 The Law & the Grace of God
are obligated to do, or to refrain from
doing, those things -- whether or not
we want to.
The opposite of the right (the
obligatory) will be the “wrong” (the
forbidden). Most people will agree
that murder, stealing, lying, cheating,
etc., are wrong, and so rightly forbidden
by God.
Thus, in my usage, the “good”
and the “right” are not synonymous.
That which is good (life-promoting,
the desirable) is not necessarily right
(obligatory), though it could be; nor is
the evil (the life-destroying) necessarily
wrong (immoral, forbidden).
The “good” is on the feminine,
mothering end of the gender spectrum,
life and relationship producing. On
the other hand, the “right” is on the
masculine, fathering side, producing
moral order, an ordered, not a pampered
child, freedom, the freedom to
do rightly even at great cost. The
wedding of the two leads to healthy
selfhood and community, as we shall
explore.
We can wrongly contrast the attractiveness
of the good against the
perceived stern obligation of the right.
Obligation does have a sternness
about it, but it is a blessing nevertheless.
It holds its ground when that
ground needs to be held. We tend to
confuse the attractiveness of the good
with the obligation of the right. A
thing is not obligatory just because it
is supremely good or attractive.
Once one sees first the distinction,
and then the natural complementarity,
between the good and the right, and
their marriage, it all falls into place.
The point at which doubts might
arise is seeing that just the logical possibility
of God being less than loving
-- as would appear to be the case with
Islam -- suggests a disunity between
the good and the right. A deity who
commands violent attacks on others
merely for disagreeing with Islam cannot
be considered loving, at least not
towards the victims in such an event.
To call such a destructive and unloving
command “right” is counter-intuitive.
One seems forced to choose
between the good and the right -- an
intolerable choice. We will explore
this further. (68)
A-6. A Hostile
Secular Psychology
An understanding of the “good”
vs. “right” distinction would have
been helpful in responding, especially
in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, to the challenges
by secular psychologists to
Biblical moral standards.
Secular psychologists and psychiatrists
(e.g., Brock Chisholm) criticized
Biblical morality as damaging to
human growth by creating deep guilt
complexes which could gnaw and
chew on one’s sense of well being
through a whole lifetime. (69)
Their critiques were both badly
misplaced and at the same time on target.
The moral judgementalism with
which I grew up was part of that at
which such critiques were rightly
aimed. But then the opposite disaster
68. See below in Part II, “Arbitrary Authority” on
page 99.
69. See, for example, comments by Brock Chisholm
at http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/
Pl/PsyHlthCntrlCuddy.htm
The legitimate use of ‘liberal’ means, in my
vocabulary, the Jeffersonian kind, in which the aim
is to set people free with truth. I use the term
“pseudo-liberal” to refer to those who have given up
on truth, having declared truth “relative”, and thus
are left with “feeling-good” as their ultimate aim, a
terribly destructive way of life, both socially and personally.

was waiting in the wings -- moral relativity
and its attendant chaos. The
secular solution, abandoning morality,
was no solution, it was its own disaster.
The problem was not morality,
but misused morality.
“Liberalized” psychology thus focused
on the “desirable” aspects of life
and often saw the “ought” aspects as
an enemy to be eradicated.
But a healthy spirituality sets the
standards for a healthy psychology
with a wedding between the fathering
and mothering sides of life, the mandatory
and the desirable as given in
the Image of God. (70)
A-7. Worldview &
the Two Basic Stabilities
We will be making occasional references
to the Biblical vs. the secular/
pagan worldviews because these two
views differ sharply on just about every
issue there is, including the issues
of morality, ethics, and salvation. (71)
In the Biblical view, there is a
Creator God who calls the world into
being out of nothing. God is the absolute
Creator ex nihilo, and therefore
owner and sovereign over all that is.
In the secular and pagan worldviews,
all that is emerges and evolves
randomly and without design out of a
prior primitive and entirely impersonal
and unknowable substrate.
That means that these two worldviews
have exactly opposite understandings
of those two basic stabilities
(introduced in the Preface) human beings
must have: ontological and
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 7
moral. (72)
Ontological stability is the capacity
to be fully oneself in the circumstances
of life, and moral stability is
knowing what life is about, my own
personal value, the direction life is going,
and how (and whether) to join the
flow. A stable person knows who he
is and where he is going.
Accomplishing those two desirables
is a very different story in the
two opposing worldviews. So we will
be making occasional digressions to
explore those possibilities in the context
of worldview and ethical reality.
The following Section B, Oughtness,
of this Part I, will provide the
foundation for understanding the
moral “right” vs. “wrong” distinction,
the “ought” vs. “ought not” part of
life. The “right”” is the masculine
side, the obligatory, the law.
Section C, Law & Love, will then
focus on love in order to integrate love
with the “good” vs. “evil” distinction,
the desirable vs. undesirable part of
life. The “good” is the feminine,
mothering side of life, that which nurtures
and sustains us.
Part II, Biblical Theology & Pelagianism,
will apply these themes to
ironing out the contention between the
Pelagian and Augustinian views on
matters of law and grace.
And then, in Part III, Hieros Gamos,
we will discuss their union, the
marriage of law and grace, the right
and the good, and its effects on family,
community, and society, the relevance
of all that for Christian theology, and
implications for the public arena.
70. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing.
71. On worldview issues, see
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/
WrldV/00Wvw.htm
72. See Preface, “The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”” on page xxiv.

8 The Law & the Grace of God
B-1. The Defining Process
My dictionary does not define the
word ‘ought’ (some words stump even
dictionary writers), but rather offers
examples of how it is used: “(used to
express duty or moral obligation): Every
citizen ought to help.”
The word ‘ob-lig-ation’ is based
on the root ‘lig’, which comes from
the Latin ‘ligo’, meaning “to bind”, as
a lig-ament binds together our bones.
The word ‘religion’ comes from
the Latin ‘re-lig-io’, with the same
‘ligo’ root. Religion was that which
bound the society together.
The “religio” was the common
very public bond of belief, law, custom,
celebrations, worship, etc. In the
ancient world, religion was never considered
a private matter, it was among
the most public of things. Only in the
last two centuries has religion been
privatized -- a monumental disaster
leading to the Church of God being
run from the public arena.
Christians were persecuted in pagan
societies largely because they
could not participate in the “religio” of
the people. For pagans, it was more a
cultural unity than a spiritual matter.
For Christians it was primordially a
spiritual unity matter, which is why
Jesus prayed in John 17 for that profound
unity among His disciples.
Another dictionary offers the following
in its attempt to define
'obligation': 'The act of obligating or
binding oneself...agreement, promise,
contract, oath...any duty imposed by
law, promise, or contract, by the relations
of society...the binding power of
B. Oughtness
a promise, contract, oath...'
The dictionary uses terms that for
the most part presuppose in the definition
the very word being defined. We
are thus given not a definition but a
tautology, or, more politely, an example.
(73) But it does not explain that
“binding power”, the “ought” It just
asserts it.
If the definition of a word necessarily
involves the word itself or another
word which is dependent for its
own meaning on the word to be defined,
the definition is tautologous.
The definition runs in its own logical
circle and never gets out to make a
substantial connection between itself
as a member of a logical system and
some particular item in the existing,
empirical world.
For example, the statement
“'obligation': 'The act of obligating’"
(as above) begs the question in the use
of the word “obligating” in the predicate
which is virtually synonymous
with “obligation” in the subject. A
synonym is not a definition, it is an
example. A good definition takes
apart the meaning of the word to display
its logical construction.
The definition as a whole, but
never any individual word in it, should
equal “oblige”. Any one part of the
definition should be necessary to the
concept, but no part less than the
whole can be sufficient. One can define
the word ‘chair’ without referring
to the concept of chair. “Chairness” is
73. Tautology - a statement or definition which is circular
because it uses the subject of the sentence in
the predicate to define itself.

equivalent to the other concepts of
shape, dimension, purpose, and so on
as a unity, but to none of them separately.
The difficulty of defining ‘ought’,
and seemly having to use circular reasoning
to do so, would suggest the invalidity
of the concept of obligation.
Some problem of this logical sort
could be expected if obligation were
to refer to a unique category, such as
the free agent, which itself could not
be subsumed under any other category.
If there is to be a point of contact
between a system of definitions
and the rest of the real world of particular
facts, and if the concept of obligation
is to be validly defined, the contact
might very likely come via this
free agent. (74)
A valid definition of “obligation”
we thus might expect to be in terms of
freedom, will, purpose, and other volitional
terms, since volition is necessary
to obligation for its own significance.
If the definition of ‘obligation'
cannot be a tautology, neither can we
accept it as self-evident, for self-evidence
simply prejudges the question
and leaves no room for discussion.
The definition must be connected to
the existential world, partly because
the experience of obligation is rooted
in our experience of ongoing life in
the world. An assertion of obligation
should be verifiable in principle, or at
least falsifiable.
Thus it appears that the truth of
74. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God, an updating of the cosmological argument for
God, especially Chapter II, “The Concept of Substance”,
Section D, “‘Possible’, ‘Cause’, ‘Exist’, &
‘Perceive’” on the basic building blocks of meaning,
the intellectual “atoms” meaning; and Section F,
“The Meaning of ‘Explanation’”.
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 9
moral judgements and the validity of
obligations must depend directly on
that of the correlative metaphysics, on
the nature of existential reality, and,
more particularly, on the place of free
agents in this metaphysics. (75)
The problem of defining is not, in
fact, that of finding the proper meaning
for a word, as if sounds had intrinsic
meaning, but rather that of finding
the proper name or word for a given
concept.
Since definitions are conventions
arbitrarily set up for communication, a
good many entanglements can be
avoided if we here keep to the notion
of naming concepts, that is, attaching
the word (sound, spelling) to the given
concept, instead of finding and attaching
the concept to the given word. The
concept in real life precedes the name,
however vague or misconceived the
concept may be.
This brings into sharper focus the
problem of defining 'oughtness'. We
have a word or name already in use,
but with a somewhat confused and
confusing meaning, and are reversing
the natural process by looking for its
“real” meaning.
The best we can do under these
circumstances is
(1) try to get a general idea of what
people are driving at when they do use
the word,
(2) try to dig out the common presuppositions
of the various possible
meanings, and
(3) thereby deduce what people must
mean if their words are to have cognitive
significance in the relevant community
of discourse.
A public opinion poll will not suf-
75. For an extended discussion of such issues, see
Bibliography for Personalty, Empiricism, & God.

10 The Law & the Grace of God
fice, nor will the disagreement of all
the world constitute a proof or refutation.
For, though words may be defined
arbitrarily, or rather concepts
may be named arbitrarily, nevertheless,
the concepts, for which the words
are only shorthand, must be valid to
begin with, and, to form a language,
the names (the words) should be in
some kind of consistent relationship of
meaning and grammar to each other
with respect to the community.
The remainder of the paper will
take it for granted that the ethical
question “What ought I to do?” means
generally, “Are there any objective
constraints or implications for the direction
of my choosing?”
This formulation of the ethical
question corresponds to (1) a few
paragraphs above. 'Oughtness' will be
some objective means of singling out
one direction or goal from among the
field of possible goals. It shall be assumed
also that the possibilities are
real, i.e., that the subject has a free
will capable of choosing or rejecting
them.
By 'objective' I mean 'independent
of the will or desires of the subject'
(i.e., the individual on whom the obligation
falls). And by 'subjective' I
mean 'dependent upon the will of that
subject.'
B-2. Presuppositions
of the Ethical Question:
Truth & Freedom
Two presuppositions can be made
which we are using as criteria for the
definition of 'obligation': (1) a logically
consistent principle, and (2) a
will free to reject any possible reason
that can be offered for an obligation.
Or, stated another way, the nature
of an obligation involves two essentials:
(1) logically undeniable truth
value, but (2) deniability with respect
to loyalty or obedience.
The first, of course, is essential,
for if the obligation is logically absurd,
or simply does not follow from
the facts, it is no obligation.
The second essential is merely a
statement that man is free to choose.
The individual must be able to reject
the obligation without destroying its
objective truth. If he can refute its
claim over him by saying “I don't
care,” the obligation does not hold and
sinks to subjective preference.
If, on the other hand, he must follow
it, the word 'obligation' is merely
a duplication of the words 'necessity'
and 'compulsion'. To look for an obligation
that cannot be denied in any
sense is to look for a self-contradiction,
for the whole point of this discussion
presupposes freedom to decide.
The 'oughtness' must have a logical
and factual, but not a causal, basis; it
must be rational but not compulsive.
That is to say, there must be an obligation
for caring, an obligation for guiding
one’s purposes in a particular direction.
The two meanings of rejecting or
denying a true and valid obligation become
clearer if we see that the person
who does so is put in the position of
saying “Granted, I have an obligation”
(he cannot deny its truth value without
somewhere contradicting himself or
distorting known facts) “yet I choose
to ignore it” (but he can deny his loyalty/obedience
to the truth of the obligation
by ignoring it).
The crux is that the second kind of
denial does not undo the first, and,
therefore, the fact of not caring about
the obligation in no way reduces its

moral force on him.
'Obligation' thus does not mean
either 'that which I want' (subjectivism)
or 'that which I cannot resist'
(compulsion). The obligation must be
objective, coming from without the individual,
yet leaving him free. Just as
'I will...' cannot be meaningfully analyzed
into components of chance and
necessity/determinism, neither can 'I
ought...' be formulated by blending
components of preference and necessity.
Two more criteria must be added
to the first two: The standard, in addition
to
(1) being logically consistent, and
(2) allowing freedom,
must also be
(3) objective, and
(4) relevant to man's use of his freedom.
How does one make an objective
standard relevant? If the standard is
external to man's being, then its assertion
of a claim on man's aims must be
explained (“Why should I care?”).
If “oughtness” is internal to man's
will, then ethics resolves into an empirical
examination of what man in
fact wants, which provides no guide at
all, or into an attempt to tell man what
his inner self “really” wants. The latter
attempt simply negates man's freedom.
The trick is to show that the
source of authority is objective and yet
relevant by establishing an obligation
to care.
B-3. Who-I-Am vs. What-I-Do
&the Relevant Source
of Authority
Subjectively there is one way to
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 11
direct our actions, that is, by forming
purposes, by choosing one's own ends.
I can have a purpose by giving myself
some goal.
But I can also give purposes and
goals to things other than myself. Inanimate
objects have purposes only if
bestowed upon them by a purposive
agent. A knife has the purpose of cutting
because that is the purpose for
which people produce knives. A knife
formed accidentally has no purpose
because it is by definition accidental.
Thus, in the first case, purposive
agents have purposes in a way subjective
with respect to the agent, and, in
the second case, objects which cannot
create their own goals can have purposes
in an objective way (objective
with respect to the object, i.e., independently
of the object's desire).
Consider the third case of a being
that is both produced and who can also
make his own purposes, a free agent
created by another free agent who is
God. This third specimen would have
purposes in both of the previous
senses: subjectively and objectively --
i.e., both dependently and independently
of the person's desire.
Nothing he could do or say would
undo the fact of the Creator's purposes
for him. The purpose is independent
of his will, that for which he is made,
and constitutes the only basis for deciding
what human nature, one’s
being, is, so far as teleology is concerned.
The ethical quest for an objective
standard is therefore translated from
“Are there any objective constraints
for the direction of my choosing?” to
“Why do I exist? What purpose can
my existence have?”
The individual might choose his
own life-purposes and try to do with

12 The Law & the Grace of God
his existence whatever he wants, but
this would neither be an objective answer
nor an answer to the question,
“Why do I exist?” The individual can
choose purposes only for his behavior,
not for his being. My being is God’s
behavior, not mine. The distinction
between who-I-am and what-I-do is a
foundation stone of all Biblical psychology,
anthropology, and atonement
theology. (76)
There can be only one possible
source for the answer to this problem,
and that lies in the Being responsible
for the individual's existence. Thus, if
God is in fact man's Creator, then He,
and He alone, can give the reason why
He created man.
If man has no Creator, then the
ethical question receives no answer, or
only a negative answer. There is no
purpose without a purposer, and no teleology
without a Creator -- the problem
with which Socrates did not realize
he wrestled. (77)
Yet any free and purposive agent
can give purposes to an individual.
Suppose a Satan or a Hitler also has
designs on man. Which of these sets
of purposes would constitute the ethical
standard?
But again, only the Creator, because
of the creator-creature relationship,
can bestow man's purpose for existence.
All other purposes are arbitrary;
they in no sense “belong to” or
“are of” the individual. Satan, like
other persons, can give purposes only
for his own behavior, not for someone
else’s. Others can “own” me only if
they have created me. Hitler’s purposes
directed at me will have to be
76. See Bibliography for Law & Grace in Imago Dei.
77. See below, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30
enforced by coercion or seduction because
he has no moral authority over
me.
The purposes only of a Creator
have not merely a reason for being directed
at the individual (which can be
the case for anyone's purposes), but,
more importantly, a reason for being
accepted by the individual. The reason
is the existing fact of the relationship
between the Creator and the creature.
Herein lies the relevant source of
authority: To say that God is “above”
all other persons is to say that God is
one who can objectively, because of
His relationship, give purposes to all
other free agents. The Creator alone
can define our reason for existence --
because our existence, our being, is
the doing of the Creator.
B-4. Definition of 'Oughtness'
So, let us apply the meaning for
the word 'oughtness' which shows its
connection with purposiveness.
If we abstract the free agent away
from the relationship of Creator to
creature, what were formerly the objective
purposes of this free agent as
creature now become of no consequence.
The divinity then no longer
bestows purposes on the free agent,
for He could logically do so only as
Creator. Our now ex-creator might yet
have designs on the lesser person
(“lesser” now meaning “weaker”, not
“creature”), and have a spiritual enforcement
squad coerce his will, but
then “obligation” can be only a subjective
response of self-interest
against threat -- which is no obligation
at all.
The god can give no rational justification
for his designs as obligations,
and so is purely arbitrary in his en-

I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 13
forcement.
This indicates first that “obligation”
or “oughtness” is nothing by itself
as abstracted from the Creatorcreature
relationship, and, secondly,
suggests that obligation is that relationship
itself.
A definition for 'oughtness' in
view of the preceding discussion
would be:
that relationship between free agents in
which the first of the agents (Creator)
defines the purposes of existence for the
second (creature), this relationship being
viewed from the perspective of the second
agent.
The same relationship viewed
from the Creator's side would be authority
or sovereignty. The Creator is
the relevant source of authority.
This being so, then, the words 'obligation,'
'relationship', and their synonyms
must be meaningfully interchangeable
when put in their respective
grammatical forms.
'I (ought to), (am obliged to),
(should) do this,' must mean the same
as, 'I am ('relationed'), (put in a relation),
(created) to do this.'
And 'I have terms of an obligation
to perform' becomes 'I have terms of a
relationship as creature to perform.'
The question 'Why ought I do
this?' becomes 'Why am I relationed to
do this?' or 'Why am I created to do
this?'
And the answer remains the same:
'God relationed me for this', 'God wills
it,' or 'God created me for that.' He
created both the relationship and the
purposes. There is no third higher category,
no mystical, indefinable substance
or essence which pervades certain
ideas or actions and makes them
right or wrong. Content other than relationship
and purpose in the concept
'obligation' is emotive rather than cognitive.
The emotive content, to be justified,
must be supported by the
worldview framework.
Obligation with its terms is analogous
to the Greek notion of form and
matter. God's purposes are the actual
obligations created by combining the
form relationship of higher-lower,
Creator-creature, to the material content
of possibilities.
It might be added that this relationship
per se is quite concrete; for
purposes of ethics, however, it is only
formal. That is, by itself it decides no
obligations, but rather forms that general
class by which a creator can label
any specific possibility an obligation
merely by making the possibility an
actual purpose of the relationship.
Without God's actual purposes,
obligation is a null class so far as the
parties are concerned, an empty and
insignificant relationship. Only after
God has declared his purposes is obligation
a meaningful reality to be acted
upon. That is why St. Paul can say
that, “Apart from the law sin lies
dead” (Romans 7:8). If the Creator
has given no law, there is no standard
by which to judge either sin or righteousness.
B-5. Alternative Views?
When this linguistic symbol
‘ought’ is used in the way we normally
call “moral” or “ethical”, it must
refer to a Creator God or lose its significance.
But could some other definition
possibly also fit the four criteria? Let
us consider....
A purpose is a goal or end, one of
a plurality of possibilities, which a

14 The Law & the Grace of God
free agent has chosen for himself or
for another being.
A possibility becomes a purpose
only upon being chosen from a field of
possibilities. Thus there are no purposes
without purposers, i.e., without
choosers-of-possibilities. And thus, if
it is true that only a Creator's purposes
apply objectively to a created free
agent, there can be no valid teleological
system of ethics without a Creator.
Moreover, since ethics is to be an
objective and systematic guide for free
agents, whose essential characteristic
is that they are able to choose ends for
their own behavior, ethics must provide
a guide for the choosing of those
ends. Non-teleological ethics therefore
exclude themselves, since by definition
they have nothing to do with ends
or purposes, and consequently nothing
to do with directing free wills.
Definitions, therefore, not
founded on a purposive Creator will
either fail to be relevant if they are not
purposive, or fail to be authoritative if
they do not stem from a Creator.
We considered earlier an atheist
who thought he might provide his own
“relevant claim” by forbidding the imposition
of pain without a counter-balancing
amount of pleasure. (78) But the
atheist cannot in a moral sense “forbid”
something until he has first established
his authority to do so. To do
that, he must define ‘ought’, which is
not accomplished by arbitrarily assigning
to the word ‘ought’ any meaning
he might choose.
In the development given here, “I
ought to...” can be fully translated into
“God wants me to...” The challenge
to the atheist is that there does not
seem to be any sense in which he
78. See above, “The “Relevant” Claim” on page 2.
could give a definition of ‘ought’
which would yield a similar necessary-and-sufficient
replacement for “I
ought...” in the sentence, “I ought not
to inflict pain...” -- which would also
meet the four criteria.
Anyone, thus, who rejects the four
designing presuppositions given here,
so as to work from another set, is in
fact defining some other problem. The
only way to disprove the above definition
is to proceed with the same criteria
and show that an internal contradiction
is involved -- in effect, that
two mutually exclusive definitions can
be derived from the same four propositions.
B-6. The Golden Rule
The Golden Rule gives us a good
example of the difference between the
“right” and the “good”.
Many differing cultures, philosophies,
and religions have promoted
something like the Golden Rule, “Do
unto others as you would have them
do unto you”, which is similar to the
second Great Commandment, “You
shall love your neighbor as you love
yourself”.
Most people seem to have a builtin
sense of fairness. Small children
are quick to complain, “That’s not
fair!” both for themselves and for others.
In the quest for objectivity of obligation,
we tend to accept universality
as a prime indicator. As Emmanuel
Kant suggested, we will get closest to
the obligatory if we search for that
which could be considered good at all
times and for all persons.
And “fairness for all”, the principle
underlying the Golden Rule, seems
to have as much universality as any
thing we know.

But the objectivity of fairness as
an obligation is illusory. The objectivity
of fairness might be based on the
general goodness of love of other persons,
but love for others, with all of its
obvious goodness, does not create an
obligation on anyone to love me or on
me to love them. A good does not become
an obligation by being supergood.
It becomes an obligation only
by being commanded by the Creator.
So, in a Godless world, love is
just a matter of luck, not of obligation.
There is no principle of obligation,
however strongly one might hope for
one. No one is obligated to do anything
at all, let alone love. Until God
appointed love of neighbor as the second
highest commandment, love of
neighbor, or doing for him what I
would want him to do to me, was a
good, it would enhance life and relationship.
But it was not an obligation.
B-7. Summary
The translation of the ethical
statement, 'I ought to...', into 'I am created
to...' fits perfectly both into rules
of syntax and into the four logical presuppositions.
Reviewing, these we
find that the definition stands in each
case.
(1) It is valid as a definition, i.e., it
is neither circular nor self-contradictory,
and it gives the necessary-andsufficient
aspects of its meaning.
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 15
C. Love & Law
(2) It does not exclude freedom of
will.
(3) The objectivity of the definition
entails neither subjective agreement
by the individual under the obligation,
nor fear of punishment, nor expectaton
of reward. The binding
authority rests on something already
completed yet still in effect, the intentional
act of creation, not on something
that has yet to happen in the future,
such as reward or punishment.
(4) And yet the definition is, by
its very nature, tied up with the goals
of that individual -- the relevant claim
of ownership.
The first criterion, stated originally
as “undeniable truth value,” includes
more than the logical problem
of validity stated in (1) of the above
paragraphs. It entails also the practical
problem of discovering whether such
a Creator exists, and if so, what his
will might be.
However, nothing said here has
been meant to supply an answer to
these practical issues, only to give an
answer to the logical question: If there
is such a thing as obligation, what
does that entail?
The solution to the practical issue
is a search to see whether there is evidence
of a Creator who has revealed to
us His will.
C-1. Relationship
& Logical Consistency
In the development of the relations
between God as Creator and
creatures as free agents, apparent contradictions
between ethical commands
and Christian agape love resolve
into a harmonious and even necessary
relation. Judeo-Christian ideals
stand firmly rooted in reason rather

16 The Law & the Grace of God
than in arbitrary intuition, mysticism,
or subjective pragmatism as a basis for
resolving ethical contradictions -- yet
without sacrificing any of the “way of
life” quality to an abstract and personally
sterile logic.
That can be done only because the
Biblical cosmos has persons as the
fundamental entities of the cosmos,
beginning with God Himself. The
secular and pagan ways of life are fundamentally
impersonal in both origin
and ending, all determined by mechanistic
and unchangeable laws of the
cosmos.
Indeed, this “way of life” ethic is
just the one which can meet the test of
a rigid logical inspection. It is not philosophy,
science, or academics which
most fundamentally drive us to logical
consistency, it is our personal relationships.
When I live my relationships in
a contradictory manner, they disintegrate
because people cannot trust my
word. My word and promise must be
consistently spoken and lived.
God is called “faithful and true”
because people believe Him to be logically
consistent in both word and behavior.
Otherwise it would make no
sense that our primary relationship
with Him be “trust and obey”.
As John Macmurray said, “All
thought is for the sake of action, and
all action is for the sake of relationship.”
(79) The success of our relationships
requires consistent thinking so
that we can act and relate consistently.
And that then requires a healthy
consistency in our moral and ethical
principles.
C-2. Agape Presupposed
79. See his two books, Persons in Relation, and
The Self as Agent.
by Obligation
A distinction has been drawn between
the terms of an obligation, i.e.,
particular obligations, and the quality,
the oughtness that makes this obligation
an obligation. A person wills
God's will as a formal or general category
because of the abstract relationship,
whereas he wills God's will to
carry out particular terms of an obligation
because of the relationship and
because of the fact that God wills it.
Or to rephrase: He wills God's
will generally because God created
him, whereas he wills God's will to do
something in particular because God
created him for that purpose. God's
act of creation and God's expressed
will are the two essentials for a particular
duty.
A person might perform the terms
of duty for any one of a number of
motives, but he can perform them as
an obligation for only one reason.
Some Boy Scouts help ladies across
streets in hope of a tip; others because
it is right to help this particular old
lady who can't see very well. One person
pays debts to avoid jail or scandal;
another because he owes the money.
The latter in each case does the
act for its rightness, the former for
subjective reasons. The latter does it
because he ought to, which ultimately
means he does it because God wants
him to. He is the only person who can
meet an obligation as obligation,
which means not, as Kant says, with
no end in mind, but because of the relationship,
because God wills it.
Nevertheless, Kant was not entirely
wrong, for there is no more ulterior
concrete end behind “helping the
person” or “paying the debt”. Behind
the concrete there is only the general
end of doing God's will.

Doing something “to fulfill the
existent relationship,” doing it “to accomplish
the purposes of the other
party (God) in the relationship,” and
doing it “for the sake of the party being
helped,” all come to the same
thing.
If, then, a person chooses to accept
the relationship as presented to
him in the form of the particular obligation,
he has directed his will in a
way which implies concern for the
lawgiver -- the criteria set up in B-1,
“The Defining Process” on page 8 and
B-2, “Presuppositions of the Ethical
Question: Truth & Freedom” on
page 10 -- having excluded any question
of necessity or of subjective preference.
Though this is principally a
matter of adjusting abstract definitions,
the adjustment is not artificial,
for this appears to be the only workable
arrangement.
Thus, if agape is dedication to the
welfare of the other party of a relationship,
acting for his sake, then meeting
an obligation as obligation always presupposes
agape love in both the vertical
God-man relationship and in horizontal
human relations.
To fulfill an obligation ultimately
out of fear or subjective preference is
a self-contradiction. However good or
bad they might be otherwise, these
things, being subjective, have nothing
to do with oughtness. Fulfilling the
terms does not always imply fulfilling
the obligation as such. One might fulfill
the terms for subjective and arbitrary
reasons, and so not be fulfilling
the oughtness.
Actually the question of preference
is often irrelevantly raised. All
choices, by definition, are made “by
preference”. ‘Choice’ and ‘preference’
mean the same thing. One, by
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 17
the very nature of choice, is making a
preference when he makes a choice,
regardless of whether he does it to fulfill
and obligation or just to entertain
himself.
Our language has absorbed a great
many philosophical errors into its
structure. Strictly speaking, when we
say “He did it out of his own preference”
(as opposed to, “He did it out of
a sense of duty”), the significance of
our statement usually is, “He did it arbitrarily”
(as opposed to, “He did it
with a logical reason”).
The latter pair of statements, not
the former, state the situation clearly.
“Personal preference” is not a reason
for choosing; it is the choosing. “He
does God's will on the basis of personal
preference” is equivalent to “He
does God's will because he chooses
to.” The statement is nothing more
than a statement of free will, a psychological
statement. And though it may
be perfectly true, it does not give a
more ulterior reason behind “because
God says so” for doing anything.
The problem is one of asking the
right question: From whence the
oughtness? not From whence the
source of motivation? Motivation
must always be subjective (I motivate,
move, myself), but oughtness can
never be. It is objectively imposed.
C-3. Necessity of
an Obligation to Love (Care)
as the Primary Obligation.
If, then, Christian love is presupposed
in every fulfilled obligation, it
would appear necessary to establish a
blanket obligation for agape, at least in
the vertical relation, in order to bestow
oughtness on these individual duties.
The pragmatist's attempt to show

18 The Law & the Grace of God
that one has some duty or other illustrates
this chronic difficulty. Whenever
he tries to do so, one can ask,
“Why ought I do this?” The series of
“whys” and “because's” eventually reduces
to “Why should I care?” for
which the pragmatist has no “because”.
The pragmatist mistakenly presupposes
a non-existent unity of purpose,
that “this is what we all want to
do...”, or tries, as many have tried, to
tell us “what we really want” with a
consequent psychological loss of our
freedom.
Yet, even if this unity were to exist,
he could not establish an obligation,
since (unless the unity of purpose
itself has the proper oughtness about
it) it could be analyzed into some
combination of necessity and subjectivism.
It is the oughtness (as opposed
to the existence) of a unity of purpose
that establishes an ethic.
The pragmatist must appeal in the
last analysis to Aristotle's concept of
hypothetical necessity, usually disguised
as “hypothetical imperative”,
still presupposing unity of purpose.
Aristotle's example in the Physica
(ii. 9) says that if a saw is to cut, then
it must be hard. And likewise here, if
this unity of purpose is to be fulfilled,
then this act must necessarily be done,
but there is no imperative (implying
choice) about it.
Since absolute necessity cannot
be applied to purposes, which are the
concern of free agents, and since the
pragmatist cannot establish an objective
ground for unifying purposes, his
case for an ethic collapses.
The Biblical framework, placing
as it does a purposive Creator at the
apex, in no way impairs free will, yet
it provides in its inner structure an objectively
given standard, and finally
places at the peak of its laws, customs,
and commandments the necessary law
of love (caring): “You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all
your mind. This is the great and first
commandment” (Matt. 22:37-38).
The command to love addresses
use of the will at its most fundamental,
personal, and relational level. It addresses
any possible use of the will, so
there is no possible evasion.
Thus only in this primary imperative
to care (to love) is the fulfillment
of the terms of the obligation necessarily
identical with the fulfilling the
obligation as obligation, because only
the fulfillment of this term (by definition)
is always right, rightness being
conformity to the will of God, i.e., acting
in accordance with oughtness. (80)
If I orient my will to be in accord
with the will of God, then all my reasons,
ends, and purposes will at the
same time be God's. In particular my
reason for choosing God's ends will be
that He wills it, which, ipso facto, is
fulfilling all particular terms as obligations.
This is just the reason that one
cannot get behind the duty to care in
the way he can always get behind
pragmatic ethics, by asking a more
prior question, in effect, by pushing
the oughtness one more notch behind
the terms, as one can push a loose
metal plate away from a piece of paper
by poking his finger through the paper.
If the paper becomes the metal,
there is no poking holes in it.
C-4. The “Is” upon which the
80. (see “Agape Presupposed by Obligation” on
page 16)

I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 19
“Ought” is Based...
Or to shift metaphors, the very
means by which a skeptic can sidestep
the charging obligation which the
pragmatist puts in the field, by asking
“Why should I care?”, sidesteps him
into the waiting arms of the theistic
imperative, “Thou shalt care (love)...”
The fact that he should (that God
wants him to) care does not depend on
whether or not the person in fact cares.
The obligation is objective with respect
to the one obliged (one of our
four defining conditions). (81)
The nature of oughtness is of an
established fact, an existent relationship,
not a possibility which we
choose to bring into being. The particular
obligatory acts are possibilities
yet to be realized.
As long as anyone gives ends or
possibilities as justification for his
choices, another can come back with
the question, “Why should I want this
end?” But, when one finally justifies
his actions with an existent fact, “because
God wills it,” or “because you
were created for this, this is your reason
for being,” then the questions
“Why should I want this?” or “Why
should I choose to care, to love God?”
or “Why should I choose this relationship?”
no longer have relevance.
Aside from the linguistic difficulty
such questions pose when the
translation “God wants...” is substituted
for the word “should”, (82) one
does not choose the relationship as an
abstract entity, one does not choose
the relationship of creaturehood per se
at all; nor does one love or care in the
abstract. One is able to care for or
81. See above, “The Problem - & its Four Defining
Tests” on page 1.
82. See “Definition of 'Oughtness'” on page 12
choose as an end (which complies
with or ignores the relationship) only
possibilities that are particular and
concrete, not abstract or formal things,
and only goals that are still possibilities,
not accomplished facts. The believer
chooses possibilities because of
an accomplished fact, an “is”, and not
as a means to a yet further end.
The obligation to love is necessary,
for only it can relieve a person of
the responsibility, first, for defending
his choice any further than the given
fact, because the chain of reasoning
has its logical terminus there; and, secondly,
for submitting to the charge of
having made a choice arbitrarily, because
the ultimate possibility that he
chooses as an end has a concrete justification.
The skeptic cannot get around the
obligation, nor can the believer be
forced into arbitrary subjectivism in
justifying his choice, both for the
same reason. The skeptic stumbles
over the same objective fact on which
the believer supports himself.
The “is” is the objective relation
of ownership which a creator has over
his creation, the relevant claim on our
creaturely free will.
C-5. The Primary &
Secondary Obligations.
We can now distinguish between a
primary commandment -- i.e., the one
necessarily coming from the Creator
to orient one's life in accordance with
the Creator's will -- and secondary
commandments-- i.e., all other laws or
commands, such as from one human
to another, such as military, civil, or
moral law.
Judeo-Christian law provides that
man should care also for each one of

20 The Law & the Grace of God
his fellow men in each of his lesser relations:
“And a second is like it, You
shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments depend
all the law and the prophets” (Matt.
22:39-40 [R.S.V.]).
All secondary commandments or
obligations are invalid without the primary
because they presuppose the obligation
for a unity of purpose (“Why
should I care?”) which the primary
commandment provides.
The first commandment requires
our agreement with whatever purpose
God will have for our existence. Loving
God means, as Scripture is clear,
obedience: “If you love me, you will
keep my commandments.” John
14:15.
Loving is doing the “good” for
God and our fellow men, doing the desirable,
that which promotes life. Because
He has given us freedom of will,
we must submit our wills to Him of
our own accord. He owns them by
right of creation, but our freedom
gives us the capacity (not the right) to
say, “No”. So the “Yes” is required
for the freewill covenant which is the
Kingdom of God. That is the good we
can do for God.
The “good” (the life- and relationship-enhancing)
creates the content
for the meaning of agape love insofar
as we can empirically discern the
good. Loving means doing good,
working for the fullness of life for
someone, promoting those things
which enhance life (food, shelter,
friendship...). That was the Greek
meaning of ‘agape’, and thus used by
Christians to indicate their highest notion
of love, the kind of love expressed
by God in Christ toward us,
His creatures.
But agape, no matter how “good”,
is, by itself, not an obligation. It is
just a matter of good luck that anyone
gets loved. The pagan world might
have admired love in some limited circumstances,
but for the most part, they
thought it unrealistic and out of touch
with hard reality. (83)
But Jesus, in Matthew 22, when
asked the meaning of the law, responds
with the two Great Commandments,
to love God and to love our
neighbor, meaning to dedicate the
whole of ourselves -- our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor toward
doing good for them.
Most people, if their behavior is
any indication, still think agape love is
out of touch with reality. But Jesus
thought it was right at the core of reality.
By making love the two Great
Commandments, Jesus was saying
that a community rooted in love is indeed
the purpose of all existence, the
meaning of the cosmos. The fundamental
reason for existence of every
creature is to be a cooperative part of
that community, the Kingdom of
Heaven.
Only the Biblical worldview with
the Biblical God can make love a realistic
option. And even then, only at a
great price -- the Way of the Cross.
But the reward overshadows all, a
Kingdom of persons who are always
faithful, always loving, and always
hopeful, full of grace and truth. (84)
C-6. The Wedding of
83. A fascinating and telling example of this pagan
suspicion of love occurred after the successful
Julius Caesar declined to assassinate his rivals for
political control. He was applauded by many, but
then after he got control, he was assassinated by
those very persons whom he had spared.
In the pagan world, eat or eaten. Love is not a
workable primary obligation.
84. See I Corinthians 13:13 and John 1:14.

the Good & the Right -
the Sacred Marriage
Though it has hardly been recognized,
the two Great Commandments
forever transformed the possibilities
for ethical discussion. Second Commandment
weds the good (the desirable)
with the right (the obligatory)
because now, for the first time within
human history, the good (love) is authoritatively
declared a universal obligation,
the right. (85)
“On these two commandments depend
all the law and the prophets.”
That is, all other commandments
derive their meaning from and are particular
examples of these two primal
commandments.
This is the “Sacred Marriage”, or
in Greek, the “Heiros Gamos” which
we will explore more fully in Parts II
and III.
The notion had begun at least as
early as the Decalogue, which aimed
at promoting a community of love --
toward which the individual commandments
were pointers. “If you do
these kinds of things, you will be loving
God and your neighbor...” And,
the commandment to love one’s
neighbor as oneself appears in Leviticus
19:18.
But the principle was made explicitly
universal by Jesus. We are,
each and every person, commanded to
love each other. I can wake up in the
morning knowing that every human
being is commanded to love me, and I
them. I and my neighbor have an astonishingly
wonderful purpose in life.
Loving and being loved is then no
longer a matter of luck, it is a matter
of divine command -- at any cost to
85. See Matthew 22:34 ff.
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 21
ourselves. Love is tough, not pampering.
It calls us to our highest and best.
The more precisely we understand
caring and love, the more precisely we
understand the two Great Commandments.
But love and the good are, by
themselves, both susceptible to relativistic
interpretation. Hitler’s version
of the good for Jews was different
from the Jews’ version. The commandment
to love and the example of
God clarifies all that. We go by God’s
demonstrated meaning for ‘love’, so
we can know with great precision
what is the good for any and all persons.
Love then takes on a specific direction
which can be acted on -- loving
one’s neighbor becomes a part of
fulfilling one's obligation toward God
as expressed in the first commandment.
A workable definition of “agape”,
in line with the foregoing, is “desire to
help fulfill the Creator's purpose”.
The highest love for another is to aid
him in fulfilling his reason for existence.
Our love towards God means obedience,
fulfilling His purposes for us.
We give God the one thing He does
not have automatically by creation, the
consent of our wills. Our love towards
our neighbor means helping the
neighbor to fulfill his purposes from
God. In this way the two Biblical
commandments are met.
As remarked by one of the early
Church fathers, “Love, and do as you
will.” The purpose of God is to create
persons who are, again, always faithful,
always loving, and always hopeful
-- those three that endure.
Agape on the part of God towards

22 The Law & the Grace of God
86. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God, Vol. I of A Personalist Cosmology in Imago
Dei.
87. And this is the judgment, that the light has come
into the world, and men loved darkness rather than
light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone
who does evil hates the light, and does not come to
the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.
us also derives from His purpose as
“determination on the part of the Creator
to remain steadfast and loyal in
His good purposes for His creatures.”
God unfailingly works for our genuine
good, the substantial fullness of life,
the abundant life and relationship.
Agape, in other words, is a very special
kind of loyalty, mutually between
God and man -- faithful and true.
This wedding of the Good to the
Right has enormous consequences for
Biblical theology, and is fundamental
to the reconciliation between free will
and grace as fought out in the Augustinian
vs. Pelagian controversy (see
Part II).
It is no accident that Jesus chose
love as the content of these first and
fundamental commandments. He was
not being frothy and sentimental. In
all of creation, love is the highest
level of intelligent design. (86)
The very existence of a rational,
empirically detectable good, tells us
something about how God relates to
us, namely, rationally and in spacetime.
He gives us a clue as to His own
nature.
The existence of the good gives us
a yardstick by which to measure
whether we would do well for our own
selves to seek or avoid Him. Were
Adam and Eve wise to hide in the
bushes? Are we wise to do as in John
3:19? (87) Or is it wiser to live with
God, in the light?
St. Paul hints at the distinction between
the good and the right in Romans
1, where he informs us that there
are things about God and His nature
which we can know apart from revelation.
We can know the good by observing
what does and does not enhance
life and relationship, and by observing
the order in nature. But we
cannot know without revelation
whether the good is obligatory. Law
begins in earnest with Moses on
Mount Sinai and is capped with the
giving of the two Great Commandments
(Matthew 22).
C-7. Love as a command.
All particular obligations issue
from God's purposes and can be reduced
to imperatives -- “Thou shalt...”
A command or imperative is not
true or false -- because it is not a descriptive
statement. It is valid or invalid
depending on the lawgiver's authority
or relationship, and it is real or
unreal depending on whether such a
command has in fact been given. To
command is to make actual a potential
obligation. Any and every possible behavior
is a potential obligation, but
only those which the Creator commands
are actual obligations.
Therefore, if love means “being
concerned” or “directing purposes,”
then, contrary to the idea behind the
supposed dualism of the Old and New
Testaments that love cannot be commanded,
it is precisely love which
must be commanded before all else.
For God to command his creatures
to love is for God to say that love
is his purpose for his creatures, that
love is that for which they are created.
“Thou shalt...” is an expression of purpose
to be validated by the proper authority
relationship. The authority of
God is His relationship with us as Cre-

I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 23
ator, and all human authority, both
personal and political, derives from
alignment with His will. (88)
Human commands are nearly always
mixed, and perhaps justifiably
so, with threat. The word “command”
has run for so long on its acquired (but
logically irrelevant) emotive hint of
coercive reprisal unless obeyed, that
love has understandably but wrongly
been dissociated from command. Love
cannot be mechanically evoked or coerced,
but it can and must be commanded
if ethics is to be valid.
Command and enforcement are
two different things. The logical relation
between coercion and law is that
law commands coercion, coercion
does not make law or morality. Might
does not make right. The purpose of
civil government is to command the
use of coercive force so as to be under
the law and grace of God.
88. This political point was a commonly held belief
at the time of the American Revolution, as attested
by William Blackstone, the premiere English legal
scholar. See http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/
RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/Cnst/BlackstonLaw.htm.
For quote from Blackstone, see below, Part III,
“Western Collapse into “Positivism”” on page 117
C-8. Love as a flexible end with
particular implications.
Logically, the law of love precedes
all other laws and might therefore
seem to be merely the means to
other laws. In the Biblical scheme,
however, though the law of love is the
most prior, yet it is also the continuing
goal, the end. All the other ramifications
of law, the Ten Commandments,
political legislation, all the laws of the
church, and so on, are meant to turn
people back toward the law of love.
No particular law is of any importance
by itself as a directive to righteousness,
and it has secondary importance
only as it helps fill out the original law
of love.
We thus find Christian ethics in
accord with a living, dynamic society,
able to conceive specific purposes, to
apply, to fulfill, and to conceive again.
Love, after all, is about personal relationships,
not about abstractions.
Only when the law of love is subverted
as a standard of goodness by
some particular law, some concrete
end, when love is no longer the only
term whose fulfillment is always
good, when the loyalty of agape is accorded
to an idol instead of to God,
only then does freedom become
cramped in a sterile legalism. The law
of love is the continuing end of living
as well as the logical means to putting
an intellectual foundation under the
particular law.
God gives the Israelites the Decalogue
to point them toward his original
and over-arching purpose of loyalty.
Love is not a goal that is completed,
but is rather more like a
vehicle or lubricant on which the
world of creatures flows, without
which friction sets in, gears fail to
mesh, and chaos ensues. If we have
not love, we are nothing.
A meaningful ethic can thus be
expected to have a definite relation to
human nature as discovered empirically.
C-9. Psychology & Love
If the goal of the Christian is the
Kingdom of God, then the Biblical
law for psychology might be, “Thou
shalt not wrap thyself in neurosis in
order to escape from honest, responsible
relationship” -- a good Adlerian
principle. (89)

24 The Law & the Grace of God
89. Alfred Adler, student of Freud, went off in his
own direction, one which, though secular, was
largely compatible with the Biblical view. He understood
neurosis as the attempt to avoid honest relationship
responsibility.
90. See comment on Brock Chisholm above, “A Hostile
Secular Psychology” on page 6.
Empirical psychology is then
given a direction in which to function,
for by itself empirical psychology cannot
demonstrate anything morally
“wrong” with mental illness or that the
sick “ought” to be cured. The Oath of
Hippocrates requires the law of God
behind it because only the law of love
can make proper care morally mandatory.
Also, in this way, empirical facts
about human nature give the formal
law specific content. This Judeo-
Christian law, because of humanity's
failure en masse, is the Judeo-Christian
bad news, i.e., the law by which
we are judged sinners and failures.
The Gospel, the Good News, is
(1) that God will strengthen his creatures
so they need not throw up defense
mechanisms against loneliness,
hate, or brokenness, and (2) that those
who have ignored or violated God's
purpose may reclaim their moral
standing as offered by God. Both
priest and psychologist have their separate
but complementary callings in
the Communion of Saints.
Freudians have on occasion objected
to any theory of ethics on the
grounds that ethics creates more subconscious
guilt problems than it
solves, implying that all guilt is subjective
and that inhibition of “natural”
drives leads to neurosis. (90) Both the
hell-fire and prudishness of a decadent
Puritanism and the seemingly more rational
categorical imperative of the
Kantians come under the condemnation
of some psychologists. (91)
Nevertheless, one of the peculiarities
of ethical terms is that they have
rarely been given a concrete definition,
that is, the “ought” has seldom
been derived from a proper “is”, the
will of God -- with the psychological
consequence that these words have become
the empty room into which the
seven devils worse than the first have
found lodging -- or Poe’s “misty midregion
of Weir” where guilt, hostility,
and fear lurk behind a front of “indefinability”.
(92)
But, once a publicly verifiable
meaning is given and it is shown that
ethical standards depend on facts, subjectivism
can be dispersed so that psychology
and ethics can be allies. Ethics
no longer depends on an unknown,
for it is only when the facts are known
that an obligation exists.
Again, with enormous consequences
for Biblical theology.
C-10. The “Discovery” of
Human Nature & of Relationship
a. Human Nature
It appears that until the 1800’s
with the development of psychology
(literally the study of the soul), there
was only limited concern about our
human nature as an object of study. It
is not that previously nobody had any
such ideas. Philosophy, mythology,
and psychology were all part of the
same package in the pagan world.
Writers, poets, and troubadors would
philosophize on human nature, and
write poems and sagas about it, but
rarely, if ever, studied it empirically.
Philosophy, mythology, and psychol-
91. See again, for example, comments by Brock
Chisholm at http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/
RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/PsyHlthCntrlCuddy.htm, and
above at “A Hostile Secular Psychology” on page 6
92. From Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, Ulalume.

ogy were not understood as separate
disciplines, and there was little or no
scientific study of them in the modern
sense. But they did convey graphic
pictures of human nature.
In the late 1800’s, German professors
began developing ways of studying
the human being in what they
thought to be scientific, as with Freud,
a deterministic way. Alfred Adler,
who began as a pupil of Freud, was a
lonely but significant and secular opponent
of the deterministic view.
Christians and Jews, of course,
had a view of human nature, but it was
largely seen in moral terms, and not
much else. Christians thought about
human nature mostly with respect to
salvation, which they saw primarily as
a moral atonement issue.
There was little attempt to understand
human nature as something that
could be broken and in need of healing,
as well as sinful and in need of
forgiveness. The “therapeutic mode”
was considered a betrayal of the conservative
view of Christianity.
So, it was the secular people who
forced the healing issue to the front
because they thought that they could
resolve man’s inner strains better by
secular healing rather than by a forgiving
God. Guilt, thought men such as
Chisholm, was a pernicious product of
religion and morality, both of which
needed to be gotten rid of. (93)
The Christian failure to acknowledge
the feminine, mothering side of
life in spiritual concerns led to a hyper-masculine
spirituality, focusing almost
wholly on guilt, original sin, and
93. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Chisholm
Also see http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/
21PbAr/Pl/PsyHlthCntrlCuddy.htm; and above at
“A Hostile Secular Psychology” on page 6
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 25
on self-abusive forms of penance,
such as flagellation -- either physical
(as in the middle ages) or psychological
(through much of Christian history).
Other than in the healing miracles
of Jesus and the saints, the mothering,
nurturing, healing side of God
was little to be seen or heard in post
Constantine Christian discourse. St.
Francis seems to have been wrestling
with this dilemma when he rebelled
against the culture of his parents and
local church to found the Franciscan
friars.
Unfortunately, later, when Christians
at the “liberal” end of the spectrum
caught up with the need for healing,
they often thought (with Chisholm)
that they needed to eliminate
guilt by eliminating the concept of sin.
People like Chisholm saw a very significant
problem, but they did not understand
the cure. They thought that
they were being scientific -- when
they were just being secular. (94)
The truth is that we need both
healing of brokenness and forgiveness
of guilt. (95) We will not be effective
Christians until we understand the
complementary dual human nature
which God has given us. Human na-
94. Any reasonble reading of history shows, I
believe, that science emerged out of the creation by
Christians in the late Middle Ages of a beginning
freemarket of ideas, which led to the establishement
of the great universities in Cambridge, Oxford,
Paris, Rome, and other cities, which then spawned
science as Westerners know it.
Science emerged out of the uniquely Western
Christian synthesis of the Hellenic gift for abstract
rational thought, which had been reintroduced to
the West by the Crusades, with the personalist
worldview of the Bible which valued the historical
and the particular, the physical world of time and
space.
See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God, giving the Cosmological Argument for God as
the foundation for any rational, scientific world.
95. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing on
human nature in the Image of God.

26 The Law & the Grace of God
ture has, right at the foundation level,
both a masculine and a feminine side
made in His Image, grounded in the
creation story, Genesis 1:26-28, and
reflected all through Scripture.
b. Relationship
Along with human nature, the notion
of “relationship” does not seem to
have been clearly available to early
cultures as an object of study and of
life. Like “human nature”, relationship
seems to have come into its own
with the rise of secular psychology.
It took time, but both of these notions
played into the hands of alert
Christians who began to see that both
concepts were tailor-made for the Biblical
story. And, over the 20th century,
secular psychology itself began to focus
more on relationships than
drives. (96)
Secular therapists were, however,
hampered because they had no notion
of a cosmos in which relationships
could have ultimate, ontological
meaning, with the result that therapy,
getting whole, would often be inhibited
and stagnate.
The Biblical cosmos is inherently
personal, created by a personal God
who creates persons in His own Image.
Salvation is partly about those
divine resources of the universe taking
part in the healing of the soul.
Relationship as ontological and
constitutional reality, not merely fortuitous
and chance, works only in the
Biblical world, not the secular or pagan
worlds. Non-Biblical worlds are
96. Carol Mayhew from the Institute of Contemporary
Psychoanalysis, 10780 Santa Monica Blvd.,
Ste. 350, Los Angeles, CA 90025, spoke at Biola
University in La Mirada, CA, ca. 2007 or -08, on the
subject, From Freud to the Present, describing just
such a transition.
either neutral or hostile to the needs of
persons. There is nothing in their universes
which befriends them. As secular
people (sometimes mockingly)
like to tell believers, “The cosmos
does not have you in mind.”
God does, so that He, and He
alone, can do an adequate job of
reparenting His broken and rebellious
creatures.
C-11. The Nature of
Original Sin &
oftheUltimateChoice
The most prior ethical choice, fulfilling
an obligation as obligation, is
an alternative between fulfilling or ignoring
the Creator-creature relationship.
“Most prior” here does not refer
to any point in time (such as in the
Garden of Eden), but rather to the
most logically prior reason or justification
which is at least implicit in every
instance of an ethical choice. It is
this choice or “master sentiment”
which directs one to his ultimate destination.
“Original sin” takes on meaning
as logically, rather than as temporally,
the most prior. It appears as a negative
decision to the ultimate choice manifested
every day in particular acts.
Original sin is not mistaken
knowledge about one's abilities or reason
for being. Sin as well as goodness
presupposes some degree of correct
knowledge. There is no sin without
knowledge of the law. Original Sin
becomes the willingness to make one's
self rather than one’s Creator the arbiter
of his destiny, i.e., pride, the essence
of disloyalty and the surrogate
end replacing agape.
When we reach these final
choices, without God we are left ut-

terly on our own. Unless there is a
purposive Creator who harmonizes
existence, we find ourselves in a
meaningless, purposeless, and, at best,
indifferent (and probably hostile)
world. As Socrates and many others
have understood, man has no objective
reason for making his choices unless
he can find an ethic, a teleology, a purpose,
an intelligent design, (and hence
a Designer).
To give us a sense of direction,
without God, we have, at best, some
estimation of “the Good”. But one’s
own emotional and value assumptions
too strongly influence one’s view of
the Good to allow for consistently objective
judgement.
Without God, either alternative
(fulfilling or ignoring a perceived
duty) is one of personal preference--
an act of will. But, since the choice is
an ultimate one, it is not a case of either
one being more self-consistent
than the other. Both sin and righteousness
can be self-consistent, and thus
actually possible.
So, there is nothing within the nature
of either choice taken by itself
which recommends one over the other.
In the abstract there is no “intrinsic”
value in either choice. In an amoral
(Godless) universe, it would not be
logically “unreasonable” to commit
murder for pennies, rather than spare a
life. The life of a Socrates is not in abstract
logic intrinsically better than the
life of a pig. The two choices are simply
two possibilities, two ways of life,
either one equally attainable, either
one equally reasonable, i.e., consistent
within itself.
The alternative to Biblical ethics
is secular amoralism or the pagan
Hindu dance of Shiva in which the
life-giving and the destructive are all
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 27
whirled together.
In such a world, as our jaded teen
remarked, “There is no right and
wrong, there is only fun and boring.”
(97) A pseudo-morality is decided
by the intensity of good feeling, not by
objective moral rightness, and all is
ruled by the central yin-yang coincidence
of opposites, the union of selfcontradictions.
The deciding factor between the
two ultimate possibilities is that God
makes one of them the end for His creation.
The making of only the one
choice is completely reasonable,
therefore, not only being internally
consistent and actually possible, but
also being in accordance with the end
of human nature, that is, with the free
agent's teleological assignment.
As abstract possibilities, in the
strictly logical sense, both alternatives
are equally reasonable; but as a choice
only the morally correct alternative is
reasonable. A fully and rationally justifiable
choice therefore cannot be
morally wrong choice. The positive
ethical choice has an objective justification;
but the negative choice, though
not irrational, is subjective and arbitrary.
The “good”, that which enhances
life, is fundamental to a reasonable understanding
of the survival of any culture.
Medical practice, until morality
came to be considered less important
than feeling good, upheld that practice
with the principle -- “Do no harm”,
and with the Oath of Hippocrates.
For example, when a person is
warned of a certain kind of behavior
being self-destructive, and that person
ignores the danger, continuing the be-
97. On “...onlly fun and boring...” see Preface, “The
Importance of “Right” & “Wrong”” on page xxxii

28 The Law & the Grace of God
havior, such as ingesting drugs or promiscuous
sexual behavior, psychologists
deem that as evidence for an addiction.
The person is considered
unable to stop on his own.
In other words, rejection of the
“good”, that which promotes life, and
pursuit instead of something which
destroys life, is considered important
enough to be a sign of irrationality and
psychological pathology.
But when the moral base erodes,
then, the “good”, though it can still be
discerned, necessarily becomes more
slippery and subjective, leading to cultural
approval of choosing harm for
oneself and/or others. (98)
The decision, then, to comply
with God's will offers the one final
“reason why” that no other choice can
offer -- “because God created us for
that.” There the chain of ethical inquiry
ends.
“Why did God choose that possibility?”
One can always ask that question
of God Himself, but for ethical
theory the question is irrelevant.
Or, “So what if God chose that
98. A public example of such behavior happened in
the 1980’s and continues today.
When AIDS came on the scene in the early
‘80’s, homosexual persons were warned by people
in their own ranks as well as medical persons on
both sides of the homosexual issues, that if they
continued behavior in which body fluids were
exchanged, they would get AIDS and die, for there
was no known cure.
Homosexual persons typically replied, “You are
attacking my identity, not my behavior. Homosexual
is who I am, not what I do.”
There has been no evidence for homosexuality
being an identity, but tragically, the psychological
community has failed to judge the matter honestly,
betrayed the public, and allowed a terribly destructive
behavior to be disguised as an identity.
Whenever a person thinks of any behavior at all
as an identity, it will be nearly impossible to stop
because stopping will, of course, feel like suicide.
For more on this, see Bibliography for Homosexuality:
Good & Right in the Eyes of God?
possibility? What do I care?” We
must look to the original ethical question
and to the criteria to find out “so
what”. If the fact is that God did
choose it, then the fact is that we
ought (God wants us) to pursue it.
Value is purpose. Objective moral
value is a Creator's purpose.
The nature of ultimate alternatives
as ends which have no more ultimate
justification and which cannot be used
as means to something else helps explain
why few will be converted to
worshipping the Judeo-Christian God
by argument alone. One may be convinced
of the truth of facts, but argument
creates only intellectual acceptance:
“I believe that God exists,” not
“I believe in God”, or “I will trust and
obey God”.
Argument can bring a person to
the point of the two ultimate alternatives
and show that one of them is
what he ought to choose, but it rarely
does much to motivate him to choose.
That which wins the confidence of one
free agent is another free agent who is
steadfast in his purposes and whose
purposes do not conflict with the freedom
of either agent. Love can be
commanded, but it cannot be forced.
Trust or faith cannot be commanded;
they must be worked for and won by
being trustworthy and faithful. Faith
and trust are the fruit of someone’s
prior love. My faith will be earned,
intellectually justified, by reason, but
inspired by the trustworthy love of
God and of His people.
Faith finds its rightful place in
conjunction with love, meaning
“openness to the truth” as we pursue
our relationships. (99)
99. For an extended essay on the meaning of ‘faith’,
see Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible in a
Scientific Age.

Argument is an important preevangelism
activity because moral and
spiritual conversions can drop into
place when misunderstandings are
cleared up. One can discover that it
makes sense to pursue a relationship
with God, and thus no longer feel
apologetic or intellectually deficient
for his faith. So, apologetics and linear
argument can be a powerful preparation
for conversion by removing
misunderstandings and clarifying the
consequences of a choice for or
against God, or as in some cases, a
powerful affirmation of one’s faith
long after the faith has already become
real.
This is true especially in a culture
where disbelief is common and aggressive.
The effect is multiplied when the
apologist is one who loves, who is
steadfast in his purposes, who can win
another's faith, confidence, and trust.
The chief business lies in truth-seeking,
in living, in loyalty, in winsome
faith. Ethical and spiritual understanding
can be won by truthful argument,
ethical choices are won by truth spoken
and lived in love.
We will be saying more about
original sin in Part II-“Original Sin &
Original Goodness” on page 82.
C-12. Pre-Moral Obligations:
Truth-Seeking & the Good
St. Paul indicates in Romans 1:18
ff., that we are responsible even before
the law is given because through the
nature of creation God has already
shown us who He is. What one creates
will almost always show something
of the nature of the creator.
That assertion is supported by the
fact that both truth-seeking and the
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 29
“good” are pre-moral, that we can discern
that truth-seeking is the fundamental
good leading to understanding
all other goods, even before we know
the law-commands-obligations given
by God. (100)
Where there is no law, there can
be no sin -- because the law is that by
which sin must be judged. But the
will of one’s parents communicates a
kind of moral “oughtness”, especially
the will of the father. And coming to
understand the good is already a preparation
for that which will later be understood
as the two ultimate commands
-- to love (do good for) God
and one another.
Children begin to understand relationships
early on, mostly through the
lens of their dependency upon their
parents. Three-year olds will know
what parents want (the truth) when
they ask the child whether he has or
has not done a particular thing
(cleaned up his room, snitched a
cookie just before supper...). The
child knows the difference between
telling the truth or a falsehood.
Children begin to understand
“fairness” as a good, long before they
understand the Decalogue. “That’s
not fair!” is an often heard early retort
to disappointment. And they come to
know that that which is “important” is
that which parents require. So, their
moral structure is already being built
(or not) before they are likely to understand
God or His law.
Much depends upon parents who
themselves are spiritually mature, living
by the law and grace of God, creating
that heavenly growing space between
themselves as mother and fa-
100. See above “The Good & the Right” on page 5.

30 The Law & the Grace of God
ther. (101)
So truth-seeking and the good
tend to recommend themselves as obligations
early in our lives, even without
knowing of God.
D. - Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle
101. See Preface, “The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”” on page xxiv
An email correspondent wondered
why I do not think Aristotle
meets two of my criteria for undergirding
a morality -- the two criteria
being (1) that the moral obligation
must leave the person free to say “no”,
i.e., allow for free will; and, (2) the
moral obligation must be objective
with respect to the person, i.e., remain
morally binding whether or not the
person so obligated agreed or obeyed.
The following (considerably edited
and updated) was my critique on
Aristotle’s efforts to construct a morality.
D-1. Plato, Aristotle...
&Objectivity
Aristotle does meet the freewill
criterion, so far as I understand him. It
is the objectivity criterion which raises
the problem, i.e., whether his system
does in fact establish an objective obligation
on anyone. Aristotle’s ethical
system fails, I believe, in the contested
point, namely that his framework does
not supply an objective obligation -- in
part because he does not have a clear
distinction between the good and the
right as defined in this book.
A. H. Armstrong, in An Introduction
to Ancient Philosophy, notes that
for Aristotle, in ethics we reason to,
not from, first principles. In politics,
that would mean we reason from the
bottom up by constructing case law after
case law until we provide ourselves
with a hopefully coherent system of
law by which we can govern our generally
fractious populations. Moral
standards would likewise be derived
from our personal experience of what
“works” to provide an ethical system.
Plato, on the other hand, wanted
to reason from the top down, i.e., from
the Forms or Ideas, to the particular
applications. Aristotle parted company
with Plato on that point because
he thought (rightly) that Plato's Ideas
do not work. (102) So Aristotle is committed
to working from the bottom up,
not from the top down.
Aristotle. was correct, I think, in
rejecting Plato's topdown “Ideas”, but
wrong in wanting to derive ethics
from the bottom up. He had nothing
at the bottom to do what the Ideas at
the top were at least meant to accomplish.
That is, he has no bottom level
empirical principle by which to identify
those items which could be said to
be “moral” and therefore “obligatory”.
So Aristotle’s attempt from the bottom
up fails. His empirical attitude was
admirable, but -- for want of the Biblical
worldview -- fatally lacking. (No
self-respecting Greek would for a
minute entertain the Hebraic world-
102. Actually Plato well understood the problems
with his Ideas. See The Dialogues of Plato, “Parmenides”,
sections 133-4, Jowett trans., 4th ed.,
Oxford, 1953, p. 677-8.

view -- note Paul’s reception in Athens
-- Acts 17:16-33.)
Plato’s heavenly Ideas failed for a
quite different reason.
Plato’s Ideas, like Aristotle’s, did
not do what he wanted them to do, i.e.,
provide the sought-after justification
for our notions of obligation, justice,
righteousness, etc. There was no way
to show how an abstraction such as an
“Idea” could be the cause of anything
concrete and particular, that the heavenly
Idea of the Good caused goodness,
good things, or good behavior on
earth. Ideas offer no causal explanation.
If the Ideas are not the cause of
the particulars, what, then, is the relation
between the Ideas and the particular
physical objects on earth?
D-2. Deriving
the “Ought” from an “Is”
We hear from some philosophers
of ethics that one cannot derive an
‘ought’ from an ‘is’, i.e., that there is
no existing condition which implies an
ought.
If true, then ethical theory must
(1) be logically derived (logically necessary),
or (2) be inherently self-evident,
or (3) simply be arbitrary. The
fact that many people either have mutually
contradictory notions of ethical
values or deny their existence at all
tells us that we would do well to find
some “is” from which the “ought” can
be derived. Without the “is”, there
would seem to be no resolution to the
chaos in ethical theory. The lack of an
“is” leaves us with no anchor concept,
and thus defenseless against any, no
matter how foolish, proposal that
comes along.
If indeed there is no “is” from
which the “ought” can be derived,
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 31
then believers in ethical standards are
put in the same position as those who
deny the existence of an uncaused
cause, having then to explain the existence
of the contingent world by a prior
cause, which then itself must be explained
-- ad infinitum. (103)
Likewise, the defender of ethical/
moral standards must either make an
arbitrary assertion that one has authority
to impose an obligation, or the defender
must justify a given obligation
or authority by a yet more prior obligation
or authority -- again -- ad infinitum.
A statute enacted, for example, by
Congress gets its justification from the
Constitution. But one can ask from
where the Constitution gets it’s justification
and authority to command Congress.
Some respond, “from the will
of the people.” And from where do
the people get their authority to write a
Constitution that commands Congress,
which then commands the citizens?
We are cast in both cases into an infinite
regress, which means there is no
solid foundation in either case. The
solid foundation turns into a sink hole.
The Biblical answer, as understood
and acknowledged by the English
common law system upon which
American law was based, said that the
law of God was the foundation. (104)
If there is no “is”, an existing fact
such as an intending creator God, an
103. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God for the case for an uncaused cause, especially
chapter 2.
104. William Blackstone, for example, the preeminent
English juror during the time of the American
Revolution, wrote that no civil government could
contravene the law of God. Blackstone was one of
the first to compile English common law into a systematic
corpus, and was widely read on both sides
of the Atlantic.
See quote below, Part III, “Western Collapse
into “Positivism”” on page 117

32 The Law & the Grace of God
Intelligent Designer, then there is no
stopping point in the regress at which
the quest for ethical/moral base can be
ended. The base keeps descending ad
infinitum to ever more priorly distant
supposed bases, so that there is no
solid point from which to “bounce
back” to the questioner with a meaningful
response.
It should be said that the “ought”
here being defended is not derived
from a fact or an “is”; it is the fact.
The “ought” is not a truth different
from the relationship itself of creator
to creature.
The “is” which indeed can never
be the basis of the “ought” is the desire
or the behavior of the person on
whom the obligation falls, or the “is”
of cultural habit. No examination of a
person or an activity can specify what
it is for from among the many things
that it might be for, whether this examination
be a laboratory analysis, introspection,
or a public opinion poll. (105)
One can guess, but in the end, one
must ask the creator of the person, object,
or activity.
In any event, Aristotle impedes
himself by limiting his derivation to
being from the bottom up. One cannot
derive an ‘ought’ from either an empirical
investigation of the facts on the
105. Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist who, with deceitful
academics, underwrote the sexual revolution of the
1960’s, used this argument. “Everyone is ‘doing it’,
so it must be right.”
He was wrong on both counts. Everyone was
not “doing it”, and even if they did, that could not
make it right. But that was what people wanted to
hear.
Sadly, the Judeo-Christian community did not
have its intellectual, moral, or spiritual wits together
to mount an effective response -- resulting in millions
of lives and relationships being badly damaged.
See Bibliography for Homosexuality: Good &
Right in the Eyes of God? for a case study on the
sexualizing of the West.
ground, or from any history of our decisions
(supposedly legal or moral)
about those facts, as contemporary law
makers try to do with their so-called
“positivist” law systems. (106)
Empirically, from the bottom up,
we can discern the “good” (that which
promotes life), but not the “right”, (the
obligatory). The “right” must come
from the top down. But the source at
the top must be a person, not an abstraction.
That is, we can get authority
only from some person who has it and
bestows it, or we must already have it
inherently and originally ourselves.
But only a creator God can have it
originally -- by the very fact of being
creator.
Plato’s ideas were impotent to do
the job because ideas are static and inert.
The “is” upon which morality
must be based is directly related to the
“is” of God’s naming Himself at the
burning bush (Exodus 3) -- “I AM
WHO I AM”. (107) Only such an I AM
figure can be the active (not inert) creator
of all that is, and thus the foundation
of all moral order, giving the reason
for all that contingently is.
D-3. The Ability vs.
the Right to Command
At the top of the command chain
must be a creator, who alone can assign
a “reason for existence”. This
creator does not have a right to assign
this reason for existence, he rather has
106. On positivist law, see below, Part III, “Western
Collapse into “Positivism”” on page 117; “The Law
of God, Positivist Law, ...& Force” on page 119;
and, “The Positivist Ax Falls on the Church” on
page 122.
See also Index.
107. See Bibliography for Personality, Empericism, &
God, chapter II, D-3-a, I AM.

the ability to do so. If he had a moral
“right”, he too would have still to get
it from some next higher authority on
in the infinite regress -- until one
came, hopefully, to an “is”, an ability,
a fact.
His ability (not right) to assign a
reason for existence is the “is”, the
fact which ends the regress.
Others below him on the chain of
command have a right to command,
which they, down the chain, receive
from the one at the top.
So it is precisely a comparison between
Plato’s Ideas and the Hebrew
Yahweh which illustrates the need for
Yahweh, not the Ideas. Yahweh has
ideas, of course, but not in a Platonic
way. Only a person can give purposes
to another entity, such as a creature.
And only our purpose for existence
can qualify (by our four standards) as
a “moral” or “ethical” claim on our
human purposing. (108)
In the end, Aristotle's notion of
God (Unmoved Mover) was far closer
to Plato's notion of the divine than to
the Biblical God. (A good illustration
of why we do not know how to get
back to What we lost at the Fall without
revelation via the intervention of
Him Whom we lost.) God must introduce
(reveal) Himself to an otherwise,
it would seem, hopelessly ignorant human
race.
Armstrong notes that Socrates, et
al, were fond of craftsmen because
craftsmen were teleological, they
worked toward an end which they had
preconceived and understood. “The
carpenter understood his function as
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 33
carpenter: but no man, it seemed to
Socrates, understood his function as
man.”
Socrates began his quest for
knowledge exactly at the right place.
We know the “meaning” of carpenters,
truck drivers, teachers, fathers or
mothers, etc. Their activities are purposeful.
Those purposes define the
meaning of those kinds of persons, but
not of man or persons as such. Until
we know the answer to that, we still
have a fundamental moral mystery.
Or to push the query to its broadest
level, we look for the meaning of existence
as such. Why does anything at
all exist?
The Bible, I think, has the only
logically adequate answer to that
problem. But it was this problem
which concerned Socrates so deeply
(and so rightly) that he set off on his
quest for knowledge of the good life, a
quest continued by Plato and then Aristotle.
Still, no one of the Greeks of
whom I am aware had a clear distinction
between the “good” and the
“right” or of a God who created all
else ex nihilo. (109)
And thus they could not generate
a distinction between the ability and
the right to command. They could not
come up with an “is” to be the foundation
for the “ought”.
Aristotle assumes that there is
only one final end of man, but never
proves what that end is. Aristotle's notion
of “eudaimonia” or “wellbeing”
purports to be a notion of objective
goodness, but Aristotle is never able
to establish that that (never clearly defined)
state is indeed obligatory upon
anyone. He can show only that it
might be pragmatically a “good idea”
108. For the four standards, see above, “The Problem
- & its Four Defining Tests” on page 1, and
also, “Presuppositions of the Ethical Question:
Truth & Freedom” on page 10 109. See “The Good & the Right” on page 5.

34 The Law & the Grace of God
to pursue, if indeed, he could establish
what it really was.
Aristotle in the end relied upon
the reason and moral perception of the
educated Greek citizen to define wellbeing.
He was much more “democratic”
than Plato. Some might say
“bourgeoisie”. But Aristotle thinks
our highest capacities are in our intellect,
which tends to point him back toward
Plato's Ideas, or, at least, to his
own totally abstract and oblivious (of
anything outside of himself) Unmoved
Mover.
D-4. The Importance of
Worldview & Ultimate Goals
The Greek worldview with an abstract
ultimate realitiy has no concept
of a spiritual life which is a personal
relationship with a living, purposive
Creator God. So the idea of neither
the good nor the right can emanate
from that relationship. That worldview
is therefore always fatally lame.
Further, the Greek worldview had
no concept of Creator ex-nihilo, so it
could not have what Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle seemed all to be straining
for, a reason for existence, a teleology
of personhood -- which, as suggested
by their own “craftsman” logic,
only a giver of existence can provide.
They all understood teleology on
the human craftsman level, but they
were left empty handed when talking
about persons as such. They had no
adequate Craftsman who could give a
purpose for we humans.
My point about Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle, all three, is that none of
them can show that their “good” is in
fact obligatory on anyone, i.e., “right”.
They might very correctly “feel” an
obligation, but they cannot explain
from where it comes.
Because, in Aristotle's case, he
has limited himself to going from the
ground up, like building case law into
a system, he has the impossible task of
showing why, or in what sense, anyone
“ought” to do what he, himself, or
anyone else thinks is good for him.
So, he takes refuge in the well educated
Greek citizen as the best example.
Most of those “well educated”
Greek citizens seemed to think that
one half of their population should be
slave to the other half, and that women
(another “half”) should stay at home.
That left probably less than one quarter
of the population which might have
been both free and “well educated”.
Clearly, what anyone thinks is
“good” will be dependent upon what
is consistent with his ultimate goal, his
own sense of teleology.
So ultimate goals are all over the
map, almost all of them conflicting
with each other. As we have noted,
what Hitler thought was good for the
Jews differs from what God or the
Jews think is good for them.
In such a world, the military winner
chooses and defines what he wants
for the “good” as he sees fit, and dispenses
the worlds goods as he sees fit.
Might makes right.
The list of conflicting interpretations
of goods can go on and on. So,
pointing merely to a “good” does not
much help. The multiplicity of chosen
goods is the problem, not the solution.
We must be able to distinguish one
good from among the whole range of
possibilities that is special, i.e., the
right good, our obligation.
So there is a difference between
the empirically (more or less) deter-

minable “good” and the moral, obligatory
“right”, the latter being the quality
of obligation which can be attached
to the good so that people are in fact
obligated by a particular good.
I make the distinction by using
'good' versus 'right'. (110) ‘Good’ means
that which promotes life, which is partially
objective, but it has a strong subjective
element to it, depending on
who is making the decision.
‘Right’, on the other hand, refers
to that which is objectively obligatory.
It imposes an “ought” whether or not I
like it. We cannot derive an “ought”
simply from a “good”. They are two
separate things. We can derive an
“ought” only from a reason for existence
-- if we can find one.
When Jesus picked out the two
great commandments from 600+ laws
in the Old Testament, He forever
changed the shape of human existence.
He said that the highest good is
to love God, and the second highest is
to love our neighbor just like we love
ourselves.
He updated that, very importantly,
when He gave His disciples His “new”
commandment, to love each other, not
“as you love yourself”, but “as I have
loved you” (John 13:34). He defined
the quality of love by His own example.
How might I love my neighbor if
(as psychologists tell us) I hate myself?
The whole rest of the lesser law is
simply God's way of filling in the
spaces, pointing us to what loving
each other looks like in particular
practice.
Jesus gave a commandment. Being
the Creative Word, the Son of the
110. See “The Good & the Right” on page 5.
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 35
Father, His words are more than just
someone's “good idea”. They express
our reason for existence. What I am
arguing is that “reason for existence”
is the meaning of obligation. “My Creator
wants me to....” is the exact
meaning of “I ought to.....”
All of this, I think, is the answer
for which Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
were looking. They all valued the
image of the craftsman. But they did
not know of THE Craftsman. (Plato's
demiurge does not qualify because the
demiurge created out of the stuff that
was lying around, not ex-nihilo -- a
typical pagan idea.) So they could not
understand the meaning and force of
reason for existence. That was, and
still is, so far as I know, unique to the
Biblical worldview.
By specifying the two great commandments,
Jesus did what no other
person has ever done, wedded the
good with the right (though it was
clearly waiting in the wings of the Old
Testament). He made the good the top
obligation.
We are commanded to love God
and neighbor, not because God is bigger
and tougher, and will beat up on us
if we do not, but rather to conform to
our reason for existence, which is
union with the source of all life. God
commands the good and then defines
it, not with an essay, but with His life
lived in our presence.
Plato wanted to have top-down
Ideas, but they do not work and cannot
establish an obligation, because at his
top are only abstract possibilities,
which are inert and cannot command.
(111) There are at the top no per-
111. As above, Plato well understood the problems
with his Ideas. See The Dialogues of Plato, “Parmenides”,
sections 133-4, Jowett trans., 4th ed.,
Oxford, 1953, p. 677-8.

36 The Law & the Grace of God
sons, no freely willing and purposive
beings.
Aristotle wanted to build from the
bottom up, like most pagans (e.g., all
legal systems, such as the law code of
Hammurabi ca. 1790 BC). But that
also does not lead to an obligation,
only to a lot of conflicting wish lists,
some of which are enforced by men at
arms. A people had to be united by
coercion, it could not be united by
moral or spiritual consensus, as among
the Hebrews and then the Christians.
Plato was correct about coming
from the top down -- for the “right”,
but that works only if at the top is a
personal Creator, not abstract and inert
Ideas.
And Aristotle was right about
working from the bottom up, but only
to discern the good, not the right.
Only God can supply the needed
top-down principles which by their
very nature are obligatory, and which
single out from among all the possibilities,
the particular notion of “good”
which is why we are here at all. God,
and only God, can tell Socrates what
our function is as man.
He was profoundly on target in
the reason for his quest. But not all
worldviews are created equal.
Understanding this (assuming it
passes inspection) provides an extraordinarily
powerful apologetic tool.
Many secularists have already admitted
that the secular world provides no
objective values (“The cosmos does
not have you in mind...”).
But they cannot get into politics
(or any other serious relationship)
without at least pretending to stand on
the moral high ground. Believers must
be aggressive in stripping pretenders
of their pretenses and forcing them to
be consistent with their own a-moral
worldview.
Proving that only God can produce
a morality does not prove He exists,
but it does spark legitimate interest
in that debate and search for His
presence. So we ask: “Does anyone
know of evidence for God having revealed
Himself....?”
D-5. Eudaimonia
One participant in the above email
discussion had asked:
“If you understand what Aristotle says
about 'eudaimonia', (say, in sections 1-8 of
chapter 7 of Book 1 of the Nicomachean
Ethics: 1097a15-1097b21), and you think
that eudaimonia is not the ultimate good,
please explain why you think that.”
My response was as follows: (112)
a. Happiness as a Goal
I see problems with Aristotle's focus
on “happiness” as the ultimate
goal or end of man. Granted that eudaimonia
is not exactly happiness in
our modern sense, but it is precisely
the difference between the two that I
think Aristotle fails to make clear. He
wants to give a substantial, objective,
and obligatory character to eudaimonia
-- which is the point at issue.
If you take happiness as a concrete
end, a specific state of affairs
(other than a psychological state), then
it is not true that all men seek such a
state. There are people I know who are
terribly self-destructive. You might reply
that is what makes them happy.
And yes, in a sense that is true, but
only if happiness is emptied of all specific
content to mean in a general and
formal way “getting what I want”.
112. This issue of “happiness” will come up substantially
in Part II, Biblical Theology & Pelagianism.

But the “what I want” part is open
to including all kinds of possibly conflicting
elements. In other words, as
Aristotle himself points out, there are
all kinds of things that make people
happy, and many of them conflict with
each other. The search for power
might conflict with a search for peace
or justice or love.
Both Plato and Aristotle showed
their greatness by their humility -- a
willingness to admit the weak sides of
their own arguments.
So, it is indeed true that all men
want happiness, but only in an unspecified
general sense, not in any specific
sense. And with self-destructive people,
they are almost always terribly
conflicted within. What, in such a
case, is happiness for them? They are
not usually “happy” with the internal
conflict.
The problem is that if happiness is
a specific category, then it might be a
moral goal (a reason for existence),
but it would not then be necessarily
true that all persons aim for it. On the
other hand, if it is a general (to be
filled as you wish) category, then, yes,
everyone aims to fulfill his own
wishes, but the notion is tautologous,
true by definition, and morally contentless.
It has no moral content until
you pick the specific thing that pleases
you. But that specific thing could then
be (in any objective sense) either
moral or immoral.
So the sense in which happiness is
the highest goal is not very helpful. It
does not tell us anything about obligation
or “oughtness”. At best, it is only
about what we in fact do want, and
how we go about getting it. But it is
difficult to see how obligation has
anything to do with the matter, i.e.,
why I “should” pursue this kind of
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 37
happiness.
b. Two Kinds of Purpose
There are two different ways in
which we get purposes. I can pursue
my own purposes, I choose to follow
path x, y, or z. That is a subjective
choice, in the sense that it is dependent
on me, the subject, and that I can
change my mind.
Then there are purposes which are
assigned to me. My boss may assign
me a task. That is an objective purpose
since it is there whether or not I
choose it or like it. If I do not conform,
I will eventually get fired, go to
hell, etc.
My boss has a claim on my obedience
because of our employment
agreement. I owe him my obedience
in exchange for his paying me. But either
of us can break that agreement. I
can quit, he can fire me.
The case with God, who created
me, is different. My boss's claim on
me is very conditional. He does not
own me, he owns, at best and only
conditionally, some of my behavior,
i.e., labor.
The word ‘authority’ comes from
‘author’. A person with original authority
is a person with authorhood, a
person who stands in relation to me as
creator, my author.
God in that way owns me, lock,
stock, and barrel. God owns my existence,
not because of an agreement between
us, but because He is the creator
of my existence. Like our patent and
copyright laws -- he who creates
something has ownership over it, at
least for a time. He can decide how
that item will be used, its purpose for
existence. God has an eternal patent
and copyright on His creation. Because
He creates ex-nihilo, He owes

38 The Law & the Grace of God
nothing to anyone else.
So God owns me -- and thereby
my behavior. He can define my reason
for existence. And that, I believe,
is the only basis for talking about an
objective ethics or morality.
Aristotle's efforts cannot get beyond
the problems with happiness. A
non-Biblical notion of morality always
fails either to provide an objective
obligation, i.e., an objective claim
on my free will. Or it compromises
my free will by basing morality on
“what we all do”. If we “all do it” (in
a specific sense), where then is our
free choice?
If happiness is a general category,
I have no choice about wanting to be
happy. I will choose to be happy by
definition. But that tells us nothing
about my specific choices. If happiness
is a specific item and I have to
choose it, I have lost my free will. Or,
if it is a formal and general category to
be filled by my choice, the sense of
obligation fails, and the specific item I
choose might turn out itself to be either
good or evil.
D-6. Realism & Nominalism
The difference between abstract
‘obligation’ and concrete ‘obligations’
illustrates the debate between realists
and nominalists which arose during
the Middle Ages. (113) ‘Obligation’
points to a generalization, whereas
‘obligations’ points to particular obligations
of the sort that any one of us
might have on a specific occasion.
Obligation in the abstract is the
quality that makes particular obligations
obligatory, realists say.
Realists held that abstractions or
113. See “Obligation & Obligations” on page 4.
universals were necessarily real in order
to account for morality and the
spiritual life, that moral principles
were “universals”, those non-particular
items which made particular obligations
apply to all persons equally.
Nominalists, on the other hand,
said that universals, such as Platonic
“Ideas”, were only names, not actual
realities. “The good”, or the idea of
“horseness”, were not abstract heavenly
realities, but only names in our
own minds for concepts we use in
communication.
Without such universals, with
only particulars, realists feared, there
was no basis for moral or spiritual
principle. In what sense, for example,
could an obligation be universal for all
persons if obligation were only a
thought in some individual person’s
head? Morality would be reduced to
the the relativistic foolishness of today.
We could each have our own morality
-- which is logical nonsense.
That fear made sense in a Hellenic
world in which the highest realities
were abstractions, and in which particular
entities were of lesser ontological
status.
The Great Chain of Being (114) , as
realists often thought of the cosmos,
extended from the lowliest particular
physical item gradually up the ontological
scale through more and more
worthy particulars to abstractions, to
finally the highest of which was (for
some) The Good. The Good was the
highest moral obligation, not only the
practical (but non-obligatory) goodness
as in this essay. There was built
into itself an “ought”. It was the mor-
114. See The Great Chain of Being by Arthur O.
Lovejoy, a description of cosmology from the traditional
more or less Platonic view. Google “the great
chain of being” for much more information.

I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 39
ally supreme item in the universe, the
elusive Holy Grail of much of Hellenic
philosophy. (115)
But the Hebrew world had no
problem locating the origin of the
“ought” or the “right”. It was in God’s
“head”, not in the head of some creature
where it could not represent authority.
Being chosen by God, the
specific purpose for all creation was
its reason for existence, the basis of all
authority.
So, the right was literally and etymologically
“the victory of the will of
God” -- obligation derived explicitly
from this will of God, as we have elucidated
above. Its universality did not
derive from the abstract nature of
“oughtness”, rather the universal intentional
application of the commands
of God derived from the fact that God
is the universal intender and creator of
all things. We are all obligated to
obey the 10 Commandments because
the Creator of all of us commands
them.
Universality depends on whose
head the intentions are in, not on how
abstract they are.
A primary reason Platonic realism
failed was because it could not show
how an abstraction could be the cause
of anything.
115. See above, Part I, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.
The ontological argument for
God, who was the highest abstraction
of all (pure being), supposed that the
“essence” of God, that is, His definition
as the perfect good, logically implied
His existence. That was so because
the good, it was said, would not
be perfectly good without also existing.
So, it was concluded, God necessary
existed. His “essence” was identical
to his “existence”.
The Hebraic worldview does not
rely on essences or abstractions to
cause anything. It has the living God,
who, by very definition is a personal
and omnipotent causal agent who can
do anything that is logically possible
to do. And being the creator of all existing
things, He can define the purpose
for existence of all things --
which, in the Biblical worldview, is
the meaning of the “ought”. The Biblical
God is both creator and sovereign.
That is what make Him God.
This personal being is no total
mystery to us because we are made in
His image, like Him, with our own (albeit
limited) causal free will. We can
“do” things. We know in our own being
and doing what it means to cause.
And we can know about purpose for
existence because, as Socrates understood
about carpenters, we can understand
purposive behavior in God Creating
us. (116)
D-7. The Place of
Hellenic Philosophy
I have a deep respect for Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle. They were a part
of God's “fullness of time” plan, carrying
on the development of abstract,
rational thinking. But at the same
time, they were lacking the essential
element of the Biblical worldview, in
which alone (despite much contrary
academic and popular opinion), can a
union of rational and empirical thinking
come into its own.
Greek philosophy began the process
of rational thinking as a logical
116. See above, Part I, “The Ability vs.
the Right to Command” on page 32.

40 The Law & the Grace of God
process, which has since gone through
many permutations, trials, and tribulations.
Christians tried to pick up on
that with sometimes great success, but
often confused the Greek tools of rational
thinking with the Greek worldview,
thus importing Platonic philosophical
notions, and thereby creating
a serious case among Christians of
spiritual indigestion. (117)
Despite all the headaches which
virulently secular logical positivists, et
al, have caused Christians, I think they
did a noble job of freeing our intellectual
efforts from much of that unhappy
metaphysical baggage. They did the
work we Christians should have done
long ago, and might have, had especially
much of the post-Reformation
Christian community not held reason
117. Soon (hopefully by late-2013) to be published is
Personality, Empiricism, & God, which is Vol. I of a
three volume series to be called A Personalist Cosmology
in Imago Dei. See Bibliography for further
details.
PEG is my attempt to provide a refurbished
Cosmological Argument for the existence of God,
which will help get Biblical theology back into the
culture-war and so to reclaim its rightful place in the
public arena.
Theology is still rightfully the Queen of Sciences.
and science in such great suspicion.
“Sola Scriptura” for many Reformation
Christians came to mean “without
dependence on reason”, largely rejecting
what might be called the first budding
of Christian humanism with persons
such as Erasmus, to our great
hurt, I think.
But, we are getting to the point
where Christians can begin to use the
tools first being developed by that noble
triad, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, et
al, because we have (at long last)
come to the place where we are able to
take the tools out of the Platonic, Hellenic,
pagan, and more recently, secular,
worldviews, and apply them where
they belong, in the Biblical worldview.
We can wed reason to revelation,
welding them back to back,
forming the two edges of the Sword of
the Spirit -- a righteous and invincible
weapon for objective truth.
Seems to me that is exactly what
many of you folks are doing in the
evolution/creation skirmishes to develop
the case for intelligent design.
Gloria Dei!
(End of email.)

I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 41
Study Guide for Part I
Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’
I. Summary:
In your own words, write a summary of
the theme of this chapter, and make a
personal application as appropriate.
II. Questions on Part I:
A - Preparing the Ground...
1. In what way is the “moral high
ground” important to this discussion?
2. How would you define ‘oughtness’?
3. What relation does politics have to
morality according to the author? Do
you agree? and why?
4. What are the three defining tests?
5. How does the author see love and
obligation relating to each other in many,
if not most, pagan and secular philosophies?
6. How does the author see the mystical
ethical reality as either like or different
from emotivist ethics?
7. How are “obligations” different from
“obligation”?
8. How does this difference between
obligation and obligations illustrate the
nominalist vs. realist controversy, and
why does this controversy not have to
arise in the Biblical worldview?
9. How does the author distinguish the
“good” from the “right”?
10. Why were some secular psychologists
critical, even hostile, toward Christian
moral values?
11. What is the author’s opinion of their
judgements?
12. How does the author compare and
contrast the two worldviews and their
effect on the two basic stabilities of life?
B. Oughtness
13. How does the Latin root ‘lig’ operate
in this discussion of morality?
14. Describe some of the complexities
of the defining process.
15. What is the difference between a
definition and a synonym?
16. Why does the author reject “selfevidence”?
17. Why is the problem not that of finding
the proper meaning of the word
‘oughtness’?
18. How does the author propose to
solve the problem?
19. How does the author phrase the
question at issue?
20. What is the difference between
objective and subjective?
21. What are the two presuppositions
of the ethical question?
22. Describe the two kinds of deniability
and how they function in the ethical
situation.
23. How do the qualities of objectivity,
externality, relevance, and internality
appear to cause problems for ethical theory?
24. Describe subjective and objective
purposes.
25. Show how “purpose for existence”
does (or does not) satisfy the requirements
of objectivity and relevance.
26. Why cannot a creature define his
own reason for existence?
27. How does the author define ‘oughtness’?
28. What are the two complementary
poles of the obligation relationship?
29. Do you think that the author’s claim
is valid that the words ‘obligation’, relationship’,
and their synonyms can indeed
be used interchangeably in their respective
grammatical forms?
30. How is the moral relationship both
concrete and formal?
31. Does the author successfully
address the possibility of other ways of
defining ‘oughtness’?
32. Can an “ought” really be derived
from an “is”?

C. Love & Law
33. What drives the human race more
than anything else to logical consistency?
And why so?
34. Do you agree with John Macmurray’s
dictum?
35. Describe the importance of the distinction
between willing God’s will generally
and willing a particular command by
God.
36. Describe the ways in which one
does, or does not, meet an obligation
“with no end in mind”.
37. Do you agree that agape love is
logically presupposed by any objective
obligation? and why?
38. What happens to obligation if there
is no primary obligation to love (care)?
39. Does the command to care (love)
adequately address any possible use of
the will?
40. How does choosing obedience to a
command on the basis of an existing fact
free the obedient one from an endless
regress of “because’s”?
41. How does the New Testament
express all secondary commandments?
42. Why is the first Great Commandment
necessary for the second?
43. Why is agape love generally considered
unrealistic among non-Biblical
people?
44. Is it true that only the Biblical worldview
and God make love a realistic command?
And why so?
45. Explain how the two love commandments
forever transform all discussion
of morality.
46. What is the wedding of the “good”
to the “right”? And why is this important?
47. In what sense is love the highest
level of “intelligent design”?
48. Why is a command neither true nor
false? And if so, then what is it, and
why?
49. Why is love the very thing which
must be commanded?
50. How does the flexibility of love lead
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 42
to a dynamic society rather than kill it
under legalism?
51. How does the “ought” being
derived from an “is” help bridge the gap
between psychology and Judeo-Christian
faith?
52. What effect has the lack of proper
definition of ethical terms caused in the
psychological and spiritual realm?
53. What is the author’s understanding
of “original sin”?
54. Why is murder, or any anti-good
behavior, not inherently irrational in a
Godless world?
55. Why is it that a rationally justifiable
choice cannot be an immoral choice?
56. Why is the question “Why did God
choose xyz as His ultimate purpose?”
not relevant for ethical theory?
D. Addenda:
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle
57. How do Plato and Aristotle differ on
the up and down direction of their reasoning?
and why is that important?
58. What was Aristotle’s problem in his
reasoning from the bottom up?
59. What was Socrates’ quest, and
how might the Biblical worldview provide
an answer to his quest?
60. How does the distinction between
the good and the right apply in Aristotle’s
dilemma?
61. Why can these top three Greek
philosophers not show that the “good” is
obligatory?
62. Why is our each having our own
personal ultimate goals the problem, not
the solution?
63. What was the monumental effect of
Jesus making the two laws of love the
highest laws of the cosmos? And why, in
the Christian worldview, could only
Jesus do that?
64. In what way was Plato correct
about reasoning down from the top; and
Aristotle correct about reasoning up from
the bottom?
65. What are the two kinds of “happi-

ness” in this discussion?
66. In what sense do all men, as a matter
of logic, all want happiness?
67. In what sense of ‘happiness’ is it
not true that all men want happiness?
68. Describe the two ways we can
have purposes.
69. What moral issues do patent and
copyright laws illustrate?
70. How might Hellenistic (and other
non-Biblical) philosophy be a part of
I. Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ 43
God’s “fullness of time” in preparation for
the Incarnation?
Chapter Reflections:
In your own words, relate your new
insights from reading and meditating on
the information contained within this
chapter. What difference would it make
to you personally whether the claims and
assertions of this chapter were true or
not?

Part II
Biblical Theology
&
Pelagianism
A. The Problem
A-1. Why This Matters
Few problems have troubled
Christian theology more doggedly
than the rats nest issues of free will vs.
predestination, free will vs. the sovereignty
of God, and law vs. grace.
The “vs.” aspect of these issues
has been been a plague on Biblical
theology and the occasion for much
splintering in the Christian community.
It is the contention of this book
that none of the three above pairs
needs to exhibit an opposition between
themselves, and that the supposed
oppositions can be fully resolved.
My personal growing up experience
of these issues was of a pseudoconservative
Christianity which had
hardened into a neo-legalism, rigidly
and defensively opposing itself to a
expanding and mushy pseudo-liberalism.
By “pseudo-conservative”, I
mean those conservatives who believe
there is a real truth -- and that
they have it all, thus lacking intellectual
humility and the capacity to engage
in an open, honest discussion.
This legalism majored in trapping
people in their sense of guilt which
was used as an incentive to seek salvation
from a hyper-masculine, distant
Father-figure.
The hyper-masculine God gives a
law about reward and punishment, but
not at all about the healing and mending
of broken personhood, the stability
of selfhood, the ability to be myself.
All the pressure is on moral attainment
and obedience, with little thought, as
Paul queries, as to why we struggle so
to do the right (Romans 7). But the
problem is not only rebellion, it is also
inner brokenness. I cannot run the
race of life with a broken ability to be
myself. The spiritual life must include
that healing and restoration of which
Jesus did so much, and which God
promises continually through history.
That healing comes primarily

through personal presence and restoration
of basic trust relationships.
Hence the Incarnation and Holy Communion.
We need to be fed and healed
as well as directedl, disciplined, and
forgiven.
At the opposite pole from legalism,
hyper-feminine pseudo-liberalism
tries to set people free from the
nightmare of judgmentalism by discounting
both truth and moral standards,
eroding our intellectual integrity
and our moral responsibility -- the
indulgent Mother.
The hyper-feminine deity slides
off into intellectual and moral compromise,
relative truth and morality.
Hyper-feminine liberalism is often a
distorted response to hyper-masculine
legalism.
Pseudo-liberals distinguish themselves
by an incapacity to liberate, and
rather enslave with ever-increasing
control by centralized government.
Pseudo-liberals and pseudo-conservatives
will never communicate
with each other, and both do a great
disservice to all mankind by subverting
and confusing the search for
truth. (118)
I felt caught between the two in a
no-win situation which has taken most
of my life to exit -- toward a genuine
freedom in Christ. (119) All of this unhealthy
mix has been part of the
paralysis of the modern Church in the
public arena.
A true conservative is one who
wants to protect the truth which the
118. On subverting truth, see Romans 1:18 ff.
119. The journey into wholeness and holiness is
described in Biblical Inner Healing, which gives my
understanding of human nature, how we get broken,
and how God puts us back together. See Bibliography.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 45
human race has garnered over centuries.
A true liberal is one who liberates
with new, as yet undiscovered
truth. Both often at great cost The
two are part of the same reasonable
family, focusing on truth. Working together,
there is a powerful intellectual
freedom.
I wrote this Part II, Biblical Theology
& Pelagianism, while in seminary
a few years after Defining ‘Oughtness’
& ‘Love’ (Part I above), which had
been written earlier while in college --
during the mid 1950’s. They provided
me with my first glimpses of what a
theologically true Christianity (with
intellectual, moral, and spiritual integrity)
might look like -- should I actually
meet it.
The emotional and relational integration
was the painful, hard, and
lengthy part, unlearning all those bad
lessons which had been so deeply implanted
in my early life. It seemed I
had to unlearn just about everything I
had learned as a young Christian.
Secular psychologists railed (often
rightly I now realize) at contemporary
Christianity for its guilt-producing
qualities, to which conservative
Christians failed to respond with what
could and should have been very reasonable
objections to the dismantling
of our social and personal moral structure.
The reasoning part was greatly
lacking as the conservative movement
had done so little to integrate its own
intellect with its religious commitment.
It had, for the most part, chosen,
and gained itself the reputation
for, alienating itself from science and
reason in general. (120)
The emerging pseudo-liberal
120. On these issues see Bibliography for The
Authority of the Bible in a Scientific Age..

46 The Law & the Grace of God
Christian response more or less sided
with the secular objectors, holding
nevertheless in a relativistic way to the
trappings of the Christian faith. They
did not understand the importance of
intellectual credibility any more than
the pseudo-conservatives, but they
were much better at pretending.
The result has been a very sad picture
of a deeply fragmented Christian
community, only rarely able to manifest
either intellectual, moral, or spiritual
unity. This house divided was deservedly
ejected from the public arena,
with Christians on all sides unable to
mount an effective offensive to retake
lost ground.
As a result, the public square has
become essentially naked, devoid of
moral and spiritual consensus, with
the predictable result in public affairs
of intellectual, moral, political, and
spiritual chaos. Good is being called
bad, and bad good, with very few
ideas abroad on how to reestablish a
moral consensus.
In such a situation, power-struggle
fills the void, aided more recently,
by mind-control with the invention of
psychology in the late 1800’s.
Now, as we finish the first decade
of the 21st century, we are watching
the near total collapse of once-Judeo-
Christian Western civilization. Western
Civilization cannot survive without
the Biblical worldview upon
which it was founded -- a worldview
with a personal God who is both creator
of and sovereign over all things.
Where moral consensus is lost,
culture begins to drift into pleasureseeking
and power struggle, into selfabsorption
and self-destruction. The
unity it can produce is brought about
by having a common enemy (World
War II) or having some great project
(getting to the moon). Neither endure
for long.
Politicians are in search of such a
unity because, though a morally fractured
people are easily divided and
conquered, they also eventually become
ungovernable -- except by extreme
concentrations of police power.
In the absence of a moral consensus,
they are having to invent reasons for
pulling together. Inventing enemies is
becoming a preferred strategy, perhaps
because there is so little else from
which to choose.
I would suggest that over population,
global warming, and the increasing
demonization of Biblical Christianity
are typical examples of inventing
enemies at which to tilt. On their
side, however, they are correct in seeing
Judeo-Christians as their spiritual
and often politicl enemies. It is devoutly
to be hoped that Judeo-Christians
themselves will see the point as
well.
Jesus, if John 17 is any indication,
took the unity of His disciples seriously.
But He had a quite different,
and the only enduring, way of producing
that unity -- submission to the law
and grace of God. So if that law and
grace are in public disarray, that unity
will be impossible to achieve.
These issues are not intractable,
the terribly destructive contradictions
can be resolved, and our Judeo-Christian
heritage can be restored in a manner
which reveals a powerful unity
where there has been contradiction.
But to do so requires serious investigation
into our theological history,
and a reassessment of the language
we have used to describe the
sovereignty of God, atonement, grace,
and free will. No small part of our
disarray has been due to sometimes vi-

cious conflict within the Christian
body on just the issues which we are
here addressing.
The results, I think, will be encouraging.
The full substance of Biblical
witness and salvation can be preserved,
and legitimate objections of
the objectors fully and reasonably met.
Mushy “liberalism” is no more the answer
than petrified “conservatism”.
When Christians recover their intellectual
credibility, they will also
have a shot at recovering their moral
and spiritual credibility. The spirit of
truth-seeking and truth-speaking is the
foundation of all else, directly related
to the two-edged Sword of the Spirit..
Note that “intellectual credibility”
does not mean “academic prowess”.
It means simply a primal personal
commitment to being a truthseeker
at whatever level of life one is
engaged. (121)
Our progress here will rest on the
assumed success of Part I above in establishing
a solid basis for moral language.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 47
A-2. Heiros Gamos
121. See Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible
in a Scientific World for a discussion of faith and
reason.
122. See Preface, ‘Invitation to a Wedding...” on
page xx, and also, Part I, ‘The Wedding of
the Good & the Right - the Sacred Marriage” on
page 20.
The Sacred Marriage theme has
been introduced in both the Preface
and Part I. (122) The subject of this Part
II, the Augustinian vs. Pelagian controversy,
arose because a deep split
had emerged between law and grace.
The marriage performed by Jesus had
suffered at least a legal separation if
not a divorce. Theologians became increasingly
unable to put law and grace
comfortably together in the same sentence.
The two seemed to have developed
irresolvable conflicts.
It is our purpose here to show that
the conflicts are imaginary and bogus,
and that the marriage performed by
Jesus before the beginning of time still
flourishes. We will, in Part III, bring
the practical issues to a head.
A-3. Heaven & Salvation
a. What is Heaven?
The great Augustinian-Pelagian
controversy as to whether man is free
either to choose for God or to reject
Him, or whether the grace of God is
irresistible, predetermining our
choice, has been with us at least since
the controversy began ca. 400 AD.
Participants on both sides have often
assumed that grace is a kind of
power coming on one from without to
change him into something he was not
previously. (123) We are said by some to
receive this grace by election, and so
ask, quite reasonably, whether this
election takes away our freedom.
The problem centers about the effort
to preserve the sovereignty of God
and to show that the atoning work of
Christ was necessary for our salvation.
If we are free, it was assumed,
then we could do something that
would put God in our debt, which
would mean that we could claim
123. This article was printed originally in The Journal
of Religion, Vol. XLI, No. 3, July 1961. The author
is president of The Road to Emmaus, a school of
Christian apologetics accessible at www.theRoadtoEmmaus.org.
Dr. Fox also published, Defining
‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’ in the Journal of Religion, July
1959.
Both of these articles are available at The Road
to Emmaus website.

48 The Law & the Grace of God
heaven on our own merit rather than
on that of Christ. God then would
owe us a ticket to heaven -- regardless
of the work of Christ. We would have
earned our way.
First, it can be shown (see Part I
above) that it is meaningless to talk
about God owing anything to any
creature, for there is no higher standard
above God by which God can be
judged by a creature and called into
account. To try to do so would only invite
the infinite regress of “gods”, one
behind the other, to justify the voracious
need for a moral foundation.
The first God, if He is the Biblical
Self-existing Creator of heaven and
earth, the Yahweh of Exodus 3, will do
just fine.
Second, Christian theology has
greatly troubled itself by thinking of
heaven in Hellenic/pagan terms as an
individual state of blessed happiness,
instead of in Biblical terms as a community
of persons with a common loyalty
to God and each other.
When the goal is put in terms of
what happens to us, whether that be
union with the Godhead, happiness, or
the beatific vision, we naturally try to
do things that will make it happen -- in
an almost inevitably mechanistic way.
We want to control the situation -- salvation
by environment, rather than by
personal relationship.
Heaven then becomes a prize to
be possessed, and theological devices
must be erected to protect the dignity
of God and, for Christians, the meaning
of the Incarnation, Crucifixion,
and Resurrection.
Third, there was no clear distinction
between the “good” and the
“right”. (124)
124. See Part I, ‘The Good & the Right” on page 5.
Fourth, the problem of Pelagianism
would arise for a religion that was
mistaken as to where the true standard
of right and wrong lay. And, indeed,
the dispute often hangs on the assumption
that this standard is something
apart from God and that God, like
man, is subject to its judgement.
Only if this were the case could
man expect to earn his way into
heaven, i.e., by an appeal to a court
higher than God to which God is
obliged to submit. Otherwise expectation
of earning one’s way has no foundation.
But if, as the Bible assumes, God
Himself is the final legislator, judge,
and executive, then the problem of
free will is no problem, nor is man’s
freedom a threat to the sovereignty of
God or to the work of Christ in our
salvation. This problem does not arise
in straight forward Biblical theology.
If many Christian theologians did
not know where to look for this moral
standard, we must seek the reason for
this confusion in the forces of history
and culture, and not in an alleged unavoidable
paradox to which we are
driven by troublesome facts of life or
by Biblical (il)logic.
If the problem of Pelagianism
could arise only for a religion which
did not know where to look for a standard
of right and wrong, it could also
arise only for a religion such as Christianity,
which insisted that there was
one and only one Savior-God. It
would not arise for pagans who were
willing to incorporate into their pantheon
almost any deity who might
happen along.
Nor was this simply an accident.
For in the pagan world, a relation with
God, or the gods, was incidental, not
necessary to heaven. The gods were

125. Cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of
Being. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1953), esp. chaps. i and ii.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 49
worshipped because, for practical and
pragmatic reasons (wisdom, strength,
etc.) they might be willing and/or able
to assist the worshipper arrive at this
heavenly state of bliss. Heaven for
pagans is a state of existence, or a
very, very nice environment, not a personal
relationship, not a community.
Greek philosophy and much of
oriental mysticism took the further
step of identifying God with heaven.
God became Being Itself, Being qua
Being, which made God a kind of supernatural
environment with which
one was to fuse oneself.
Heaven was thus not a living, personal
relation but rather a non-individual
state of being. Nor was God a living
person, but rather the highest link
on the Chain of Being, again, more a
place or state than a person. (125)
Heaven was sought because our
life and environment on earth seemed
a vale of tears not suitable for a stable
and secure happiness. And so the environment
in which happiness was to
be found was sought beyond the
clouds. The nature and fertility religions
became the mystery religions,
or, in their sophisticated philosophical
forms, Platonism and Neo-Platonism.
On the other hand, for Biblical religion,
heaven is a community of people
who are the creatures of God,
never to be fused or confused with
God, however much we may talk of
dwelling in Him and He in us. The
distinction is always preserved, as is
the freedom of the creatures who live
under the Sovereign. The primary
hindrance to freedom was the Fall, not
salvation -- which restored and enhanced
our freedom of will. Sin is
self-destructive, obedience is self-fulfilling.
The problem of grace being contrary
to freedom never arises because
the attainment of heaven is something
which by its very nature cannot be attained
without the consent and good
will of both God and His creatures.
The “placeness” of heaven is incidental.
The relationship is central --
just the reverse of pagan religion and
philosophy where the quality of the
environment and the individual state
of being are the prime factors and the
relationship with the divinities or with
one another is incidental.
The Biblical heaven is then not a
place for which one can purchase a
ticket for entry, the price being one’s
good deeds. One cannot earn his way
into heaven. Rather, one builds
heaven with God and one another by
building good relationships. Heaven
is that good relationship -- which then
makes the place heavenly. It cannot
be bought, but it can be built and mutually
participated in.
b. What is Salvation?
This is so because only in the Biblical
cosmos with a Creator ex-nihilo
are our fundamental ontological and
moral stabilities necessarily dependent
upon God. The pagan gods are not
seen as our creators and therefore also
not seen as moral sovereigns. So we
do not depend upon them either for
our being or for our moral direction.
Our relationship to them is mutually
pragmatic -- with them holding all the
high cards.
The dividing line between paganism
and Biblical religion is the Biblical
doctrine of creation vs. the secular/
pagan understanding of some form of

50 The Law & the Grace of God
random/chance evolution -- which
cannot supply either ontological or
moral stability, or unite law with
grace.
In the Biblical cosmos, salvation
turns out to be not an environment,
however good, but a relationship restored,
the two stabilities restored. We
do not earn heaven, or construct a
heavenly place, we rather build a relationship
of trust and obedience. Having
in the Fall lost our ability both to
trust the provisions of God for our
lives and to obey His purpose for our
lives, we find them restored as we rebuild
with God our relationship of
trust and obedience.
Our task here in Part II is to show
how Christian theology can be set
free from apparent contradictions between
free will and grace, works and
sovereignty.
For example, Jesus’ giving of the
two Great Commandments in Matthew
22 should have protected the
Christian community from the mostly
fruitless opposition of the Pelagian
controversy because Jesus showed the
unity of law and grace.
But Christians instead often made
love into another legalism, the highest
law by which we fail most miserably
-- instead of freeing us from our bondage
to “earn” the love of God. So, in a
tragic self-defense against legalism,
we turned love into mush.
We need not be impaled upon the
horns of this human freedom vs. sovereignty
of God dilemma, or law vs.
grace dilemma. The marriage still
holds, and will, into eternity. And into
the public arena of politics, education,
commerce, welfare, and all other issues
of importance.
B. Hebrew vs. Hellenic
B-1. Natural Law:
Abstract Greek vs.
Particular Hebrew
Roman law spread over the Mediterranean
in the wake of the Roman legions.
On reaching Greece, it was enriched
by the Stoic concept of the
equality of all men underlying an apparent
diversity.
This fusion of the Stoic decrees of
Divine reason with the practical Roman
law, combined with the awesome
power of the Roman Empire, served to
elevate the ius gentium into a ius naturale.
The law of the people became
the law of nature, a revelation of divinity
through reason.
The Stoic concept itself had antecedents
in the Greek philosophers, in
the Antigone of Sophocles, and in the
idea of an absolute moral law discoverable
by reason -- the Good -- developed
in the ethics of Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and others. (126)
Pagan natural law was based entirely
on an analysis of the human being,
or nature, and made no appeal to a
divinity beyond man himself. This
was quite consistent with Stoicism,
since every man already had a spark of
divinity in him Man’s goal was to live
126. A. H. Armstrong, An Introduction to Ancient Philosophy
(Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1949),
chap. xi.
See Part I, ‘- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30, for more
discussion on the Greek philosophers.

in accordance with his spark of Absolute
Reason.
Thus Christians were among the
heirs to the Hellenic concept of natural
law, ius naturale, which evolved out
of the fusion of the Roman ius gentium,
the law of the peoples, with Stoicism.
When Christianity sallied forth to
challenge the pagan world, many gentile
ideas rubbed off -- one of these being
natural law.
The Hebrews had had no idea of a
law of nature or a law based solely on
human intellectual effort and skill.
For the Hebrews, righteousness was
doing the will of Yahweh, it was the
victory of Yahweh’s will and the preservation
of Yahweh’s community.
There was no attempt to derive the nature
of duty from the nature of man or
from nature by itself. It was understood
only in the context of the purpose
of God for His people and for the
whole of creation.
The Hebrews did not reason their
way to that conclusion, they were, by
their own testimony, told by God what
He wanted them to do. Revelation.
There are some things which cannot
be reasoned out, and which must be
told, such as the will of our Creator for
our existence. It cannot be reasoned
out, but, given free will which is necessary
for reason, it is nevertheless all
quite reasonable.
Because the Hebrews had not
thought out their theology in any abstract
pattern, indeed, they would
probably have thought any such attempt
pointless, and, because Christians
had to meet the accomplishments
of Greek philosophy with something,
Christians, as also Jews, simply absorbed
a great deal of Greek language
where they thought it expressed what
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 51
they were trying to put across. The
idea of an absolute duty seemed to aid,
not hinder, their own discussion of
morality. Paul thought pagan morality,
where it was constructive, to be
the result of a natural theology revealed
by God generally through creation.
So, Christians changed natural
law from a purely humanistic science
by relating it to the fulfillment of the
Kingdom of God.
Thus Augustine took the pagan
virtues of courage, temperance, wisdom,
and justice and related them to
the quest for the beatific vision. We
are made not only by God and for God
but toward God, ad Deum. The virtues
are not just the mean between two
inharmonious extremes of excess, but
have an integrity and identity of their
own, being directed toward a greater
purpose, integrating with an internal
harmony of the individual.
Internal harmony of the self “governs”
in the sense that God has designed
us for that harmony. So the
original will of God is, for Biblical
theology, the source of all distinction
between right and wrong.
Christians and Jews rightly
adopted the many intellectual tools for
truth-seeking and truth-testing developed
by Greek philosophers, but they
erred when they adopted aspects of the
Hellenic worldview which depersonalized
the nature of God, and therefore
also of man, made in that now depersonalized
Image of God. (127)
127. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God. Information available also at
www.theRoadtoEmmaus.org, e.g.,
www.theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/ShpMl/TheolOf-
CivGvt/MidClass&ID.htm; and,
www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/Cnst/
CntCoercVsLtdGvt.htm
See also, Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth.

52 The Law & the Grace of God
Free will, for instance, which is
the core of personality and personhood,
has a hard struggle to survive in
pagan cosmology because existence is
ruled by (emerges out of, and returns
to) impersonal and trans- or ir-rational
forces. The precisely opposite and
contradictory forces of fate (total determinism)
and chance (freewheeling
luck) combined to produce the pagan
world.
But the origin of things in the Biblical
world was a primordial Person, a
Someone who could freely, reasonably,
and intelligently plan a creation,
thus providing a rational explanation
for both natural and moral law. He
could also endow some of those creatures
themselves with rational free
will.
We talk about “rational” free will,
but free will must be rational by nature.
There is no meaning to irrational
freedom. It would be indistinguishable
from luck or chance.
B-2. But, Is Moral Language
Necessary?
A negative answer to the above
question would seem to cast us all into
total moral confusion. But the question
is meant to highlight the relation
between the “is” upon which moral
language is based (see Part I above)
and the way we use moral language.
If it is true that moral “ought” of
ethical theory can be reduced to the
“is” language of the will of God, then
we should (perhaps surprisingly) be
able to get along quite well without
the usual moral language at all (which
normally makes no reference to God),
and use only the God-language as described
in Part I above. We should,
that is, be able to dispense with words
such as ‘should’ and ‘ought’.
The Hebrews did have a moral
language, not only a God language.
As noted above, we hear Abraham lecturing
God about His approaching
confrontation with Sodom and Gomorrah,
“Shall not the Judge of all the
earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25) The
word ‘shall’ has the meaning of
‘should’, and the word ‘right’ signifies
that which is obligatory, a moral
judgement.
Given our present distinction between
the “good” and the “right”,
however, Abraham’s ‘right’ would
better be translated as our ‘good’, because,
given the logic of this essay,
God logically cannot do “right” -- because
that would require a standard
above God by which the behavior of
God could be judged morally right or
wrong.
But the will of God is the highest
standard for the right, the obligatory.
So, the issue is not whether the will of
God is “right”, but whether it is
“good” for His people. The two Great
Commandments ensure that it is, assuming
that God follows His own
commandments, as Abraham wants to
believe about God and Sodom.
But, Abraham feared that without
his advice, God might indeed violate
the “good” for Sodom and Gomorrah,
or in this case, the good for any righteous
persons in those cities, such as
(hopefully) Abraham’s nephew, Lot.
God might condemn the righteous
with the unrighteous, which would
mean that God did not love the righteous.
Abraham’s challenge might
read, “Shall not the Judge of all the
earth do good for the righteous?”
But the distinction between the
good and the right does not appear to
have been yet made by either the He-

128. See above, Part I, ‘The Good & the Right” on
page 5.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 53
brews or the Greeks. The good and
the right were both subsumed under
the same “moral” category.
In our present usage here, however,
the “good” is not a moral category,
it is a practical, pragmatic category,
a what-works-to-enhance-lifeand-relationship
category. (128) The
good can be discerned from the empirical
facts without revelation from God.
Revelation is required only to find out
whether or not the good is obligatory
upon us, that is, whether God wants us
to do the good for others.
If the world had not fallen, so that
people would not have lost touch with
the voice, will and purposes of God,
one can imagine that no separate
moral language might have ever developed.
The question would be simply,
“What has God in mind for us?”
which would be resolved as Adam and
Eve walked with God in the cool of
the evening. The availability of Godlanguage
and a God-relationship
would have made the development of
a separate moral language irrelevant
and pointless.
But when the world fell, the inhabitants
no longer could clearly, if at
all, discern the Voice of God. Yet they
might have, in their better moments,
felt a moral tug, an imperative, a sense
that the goods of the world “ought” to
be shared, that one’s family “ought” to
be fed, etc. So they developed a language
based on a mysterious and abstract
“ought” rather than the concrete
and revealed will of God. The
“ought” was based on their inner perception
of a constraint on their wills.
That perception, vague and culturally
bound, was nevertheless so commonly
felt by the human race that a
nearly universal language of morality
developed. But because there was no
commonly shared connection to God
who alone defines moral law, the results
were bound to be full of both logical
and cultural contradictions. The
common connection with God is essential
to a common moral consensus
because morality, the right (as distinct
from the good) is necessarily a matter
of revelation from whoever is the real
creator God.
Beginning at least as early as Socrates’
quest to find the meaning of
man as man and the meaning of justice,
people searched for the logical
foundation of ethics and morality. (129)
But, as time went on, philosophers became
increasingly disappointed with
their results in tracking down a definition
of justice and other moral terms.
The ‘ought’ remained illusive.
Many eventually, during the 19th
century, gave up. Ethics was “de-ontologized”,
that is, it was declared free
from ontological ties, and thus “existing
on its own”. It did not need an
“is” for a foundation, and hence no
need of creator for its origin.
That led, tragically, to the development
of positivist law. (130) It led to
logical absurdities such as the UN
Declaration of Human Rights. The
UN has no moral authority of its own,
so its declarations are morally meaningless,
regardless of how well-intentioned
they might be (and that is
somewhat problematic...).
129. See above, Part I, ‘- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30
130. For more on positivist law, see ‘The Law
of God, Positivist Law, ...& Force” on page 119.
Read also Joseph Story & the American Constitution,
by James McClellan on the development of
positivist law.

54 The Law & the Grace of God
The reason philosophers could not
find an “is” to undergird morality is
quite simple: in the secular/pagan
world there is no such “is”. There is
no possible moral principle in a cosmos
which by definition has no purpose.
So, although pagan people
could, and did, sense and perceive an
objective moral “ought”, they could
not explain from where it came.
What, then, does one do with a
ought founded upon no “is”?
The next, and inevitable, step was
for cultural anthropologists, scurrying
around the world in the late 1800’s
and early 1900’s, to declare morality
culturally relative. Each culture develops
its own moral structure. No
one culture’s morality has priority
over another’s. All moralities are created
equal.
And then in the next further step,
the relative truth of neo-paganism defined
morality by each individual, as
with “values clarification” and “dialogue
to consensus”. (131)
The disintegration is then complete,
having moved from being objective,
to being defined by the culture,
and now to being defined by each individual.
But that is the same thing as having
no morality at all. The individual
is now no longer governed by anything
but himself. With no objective
morality to challenge them, the powerful
are effectively in charge. Might
now (in our new/neo-paganism just as
in the old, pre-Christian paganism)
“makes right”.
Even the Supreme Court got into
the discussion with the early 1990’s
131. See below, ‘Values Clarification &
Dialogue to Consensus” on page 108, and also,
see Bibliography for Dialogue in Darkness.
pro-abortion Casey decision, asserting
that we have a “right” to define
our own meaning (i.e., purpose) to
life.
That is a logical impossibility because,
although any of us can define
the reasons for our behavior, not one
of us can define the reason for our
own existence. If the reason for our
existence is not given by our Creator,
then it is not given at all. We have
none. And therefore also no morality,
only, at best, a pragmatism defined inevitably
by the powerful, with whatever
of our own personal pragmatism
we can sneak in.
Morality has been destroyed, but
we are persuaded that if “we do what
we want”, we are being moral, that
moral rectitude is decided by our own
independent wills. That is logical idiocy,
the believing of which could be
done only by a population reduced by
their government schooling overseers
to gullibility and self-centeredness. (132)
New-Age neo-paganism, not the
word of God, now defines American
law. When such a process continues
unchecked, it will always be reined in
by tyrants to control a now morally
neutered population, with no common
sense of value or direction. A population
without a strong Biblical moral
consensus will be easy pickin’s for
government centralizers.
The marital union of the law and
the grace of God is the only way out.
132. This has been accomplished mostly through the
near destruction of the family and through a government-controlled
education system. Honest
morality will not survive the loss of a freemarket of
ideas, which itself requires freemarket education
responsible to the parents and students, not to civil
government.
See http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/
21PbAr/Pl/Cnst/Ed-FrMktVsWall.htm

B-3. Two Stabilities:
of Being & of Morality
Stability of our being and of our
doing, our moral status, define salvation.
(133) We are “saved” when we are
both ontologically and morally secure,
a status which only God, our creator
(gives us our being) and sovereign
(judges our doing), can give. We are
then the children of that wedding of
masculine and feminine, father and
mother, in God Himself. But our understanding
of both have been inhibited
in Christian doctrinal development
by importation of Hellenic concepts
into a Hebraic religion.
Problems with moral stability are
described in the above section, namely
that the Hellenic world did not have an
adequate explanation, no “is”, upon
which moral stability could be based.
Even though Greek citizens often
strove to live moral lives, they could
not tell us the meaning of moral stability
nor its source. (134) The idea of a
creator ex nihilo was not on their
minds.
A similar problem developed in
the Christian creeds with the equally
fundamental concept regarding the nature
of God, the Greek ‘ousia’ (i.e.,
‘being’) -- often in modern writing
translated (as by some in the Nicene
and Apostles’ creeds) by the word
‘substance’.
CHeck these Greek words...
133. On these two stabilities, see Preface, ‘The Two
Required Stabilities & the “Space Between”” on
page xxiv, and also, in Part I, ‘Worldview &
the Two Basic Stabilities” on page 7.
134. For the problems which the Greeks faced, see
Part I above, ‘- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 55
The Greek ousia, substance,
(along with ontos, being) is perhaps
the most abstract and non-empirical
concept in Hellenic philosophy. It is,
by itself, totally non-empirical, yet it
is at the same time that to which all
empirical aspects are attributed. Ousia
itself is totally abstract and nonparticular.
It was the word used in the
building of the Christian creeds to define
the deepest nature of God. God is
one in being (ousia) and three in selfexpression
(personae) The use of that
language led to a persistent gravitational
pull of Biblical theology downwards
into impersonalism.
So, just as there is nothing in
Greek philosophy upon which morality
can be adequately based, so also,
the abstract and inert ousia cannot act
as the explanation for the Hebrew God
who is a person, a concrete, self-existing,
self-aware doer, a creator of all
else that is. Ousia is not a doer, a creator.
It just is... eternally, but it is not
an adequate explanation, neither for
the being of a personal God, nor for an
empirical world in which persons are
the primary creatures. (135)
So the two primary concepts over
which perhaps all cultures have struggled
to make sense of life (being and
doing), and which give us the two primary
stabilities of life, were, in Christian
history, often badly compromised
by the drift toward depersonalization.
The wedding was fracturing.
Thus, the Christian salvation
Good News, especially after acceptance
by Emperor Constantine, often
had a hard time smiling. It often could
not very clearly tell us who we were
135. These issues are more fully dealt with in Personality,
Empiricism, & God. See Bibliography.

56 The Law & the Grace of God
(our being, identity) nor where we
were going (our right doing, our moral
security).
It behooves us, therefore, to get
the metaphysical anchor of the “is”
back into our understanding of moral
language, without which the charlatans
and control-minded will surely
continue to wreak moral havoc over
we, the people. Might will continue to
make right in their eyes.
In the end, there is no middle
ground. Either the secular/pagan
(A word of caution: I am looking
in these pages at several important
theologians for very specific issues,
which does not do justice to any of
them over the broad scope of their
writings. For getting acquainted with
these persons, one’s best option is to
read their works themselves.)
When Pelagius, an ascetic from
England, came upon the Roman scene
ca. 400 AD, he was troubled, on the
one hand by the rank immorality and,
on the other hand, by the theological
tone which seemed to take away from
man all responsibility. There is dispute
about what Pelagius actually said
because much of what we have is reported
by his critics and enemies. The
view generally attributed to Pelagius,
and that against which many tilted, is
as follows:
He is generally understood to
have been willing to grant that the
power of our action came from God,
but insisted that the will and realization
were our own doing. (136)
136. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New
York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 358.
worldview will win out and convince
us all to exclude God (effectively replaced
by centralized government), or
the Biblical worldview will win with
God acknowledged as Sovereign and
source of all obligation and freedom.
The secular/pagan view has nothing
with which to replace God, no principle
of moral origin, and so has only a
lame moral theory trapped in an infinite
regress pretending to find the
foundation of morality.
That is the story we must sort out.
C. Pelagius & Augustine
Pelagius did not withdraw man
out from under the sovereignty of
God, but rather said that God told man
what the law was and set before man
the prospects of reward and punishment.
He rejected the idea that man
has an intrinsic bias for evil as a result
of the Fall (i.e., man has no original
sin), and rejected also that God influences
man’s choice for the good by inner
action on the soul (which he no
doubt thought would compromise free
will).
Pelagius admitted that grace was
necessary, but by grace he meant
(1) free will, (2) revelation through
reason, and (3) since this concept of
grace had become obscured by an evil
society, the Mosaic law and example
of Jesus. (137)
Grace is thus a grace primarily of
teaching and knowledge. He followed
his own logic and said that man could,
if he wanted and persisted, observe a
137. The scholars are still working on what Pelagius
actually said as more of his writings have been discovered
in the last century. Wikipedia is a good
place to start research on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagius

sinless life. From his idea of grace, it
also followed that man might live a
sinless life without the example and
atoning (bringing together, at-onement)
action of Christ.
If this description is accurate, it
might be that Pelagius’s relation to
God was heavily intellectual, and that
he did not have a sense of deep personal
relationship with God in Christ
or a sense of our ontological dependency
as functioning persons. (138) He
seemed to have believed that man’s
freedom of will was autonomous, and
not tied to the success of relationships
outside of himself, such as parenting
and other dependency relationships.
Such a view of man’s autonomy is unrealistic,
but perhaps common in those
early Christian centuries.
But we here do not necessarily
need an accurate knowledge of Pelagius’
view of this particular matter
because the issues as discussed over
the centuries are clear.
For Augustine, grace anticipates
and inaugurates every stirring of
man’s will toward good, and, being
the expression of God’s will, it carries
all before it. (139)
138. For more on this, see Bibliography for Biblical
Inner Healing, which describes our nature as creatures
of God, how we get emotionally and relationally
broken, and how God heals our inner being.
139. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New
York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 367.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 57
Man’s will is free, but since it acts
on certain motives, some of these may
press irresistibly on the will, and the
range of live options is limited. Man,
theoretically free, in fact, opts only for
sinful objects. Grace thus heals man,
not so much by enlarging his area of
choice as by substituting a system of
good choices for bad ones. Grace is
irresistible, but it works through our
wills, the effect being that our wills
freely and spontaneously will what is
good.
Yet the dilemma remained, for if
grace overrides our evil wills in a way
which makes an evil choice impossible,
it is difficult to see how this can
be a free and spontaneous willing.
Semi-Pelagianism made an attempt
to resolve the conflict but failed
because it did not see where the real
knot lay, i.e., in the concept of what it
meant to be righteous and what
heaven was.
Both Pelagians and Augustinians
shared the same error (as often the
case in allegedly unavoidable paradoxes).
Implicitly, if not explicitly,
they put the standard of righteousness
outside of God, and pictured heaven
primarily in terms of a very pleasant
place or state of existence, rather than
as our relationship with God and one
another. This will become more clear
as we look at Aquinas, Luther, and
Paul.
D. Thomas Aquinas
D-1. A Theological &
Anthropological Rat’s Nest
a. Natural Law
The notion of natural law was developed
by Aquinas perhaps as far as
anyone in the Christian context.
The idea existing in God as the principle
of the universe and lying behind the governance
of things has the force of law.
Because naught in the divine reason is con-

58 The Law & the Grace of God
ceived in time, for the plan was set up from
eternity, and of old before the earth was
made, therefore is it called the eternal law.
The sharing of rational creatures in the
Eternal Law, which sets them towards their
due acts and end, is called Natural Law. (140)
The motion of human nature towards
happiness starts from the first principles of
reason, which are like the seeds of wisdom,
and the first principles of the Natural Law,
which are like the seeds of the moral virtues.
(141)
The first principle of the practical reason
is our ultimate end, or happiness; law is
chiefly concerned with planning for this.
Since each part is for its whole as imperfect
for perfect, and one individual is part of the
perfect community, law is engaged mainly
with the scheme of common happiness....
Every law is ordered to the common good,
and a precept has the force of law only
when it serves this community benefit. (142)
(Fox emphasis.)
This last statement from Aquinas
betrays a double source of obligation,
man as well as natural law.
As inherited from the Greeks, natural
law was derived completely from
the nature of man, and the gods entered
only incidentally insofar as they
might aid the human in the attainment
of his nature. But the gods did not
have anything to do with deciding the
content of the ultimate duty or obligation.
They might (in their better moments)
be exemplary of the Good, but
not the source or criteria for it, except
in the philosophies where God was the
impersonal Good.
And likewise, if, as Aquinas states
140. Aquinas, Theological Texts. Selected and
translated with notes and Introduction by Thomas
Gilby (London: Oxford University Press. 1951), p.
357 (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae. xci. 1). (Italics mine.)
141. Aquinas, Theological Texts, op. cit., p. 193
(Disputations, XIV de Veritate, 2)
142. Aquinas, Phil. Texts, op. cit., p. 354 (Sum.
Theol., 1a-2ae. xc. 2) (Italics mine.)
above, happiness is the final goal or
criterion, then man, again with his presumably
subjectively-chosen happiness,
rather than God, is the measure
of the Good.
Christians, in adopting the Greek
view, naturally wanted to baptize everything
by relating it to the will of
God. Natural law was therefore seen
as the result of God’s practical reason
which orders that things be done according
to just measure for the fulfillment
of ends. Knowledge of this law
did not depend, at least not directly, on
the revelation of God, since it was
thought to be self-evident in the nature
of things.
But there are ambiguities with
‘happiness’ which need to be resolved.
One can see in the language of
Aquinas how the suspicion against
free will is developing. In Aquinas’
second paragraph above, his reference
to the law which “sets them toward
their due acts and end” has a causal
flavor as much as an intentional flavor.
If grace and/or law are causal, then
free will would indeed seem to be negated.
b. Happiness & Motivation
The attempt to relate the whole of
ethics to God was hindered by two
things:
First, on one side, there had to be
something to motivate man to follow
this divine law rather than invent his
own and independent ultimate goal.
And secondly, on the other side, if he
did get so motivated, there had to be
something to keep man from making a
claim on God (“I am obeying You, now
You owe me...”).
After all, if man was to have this
motivation and was thus to be able to
fulfill the law, then something had to

e done about the Christian contention
that only in Christ was a man saved,
and that works of the law could not
save a man.
But the “works of the law” can
enable man to save himself if and only
if those laws were above God, laws to
which God was morally obliged to
submit. Only so could man use obedience
to those laws to oblige God to let
him into the blessings of heaven. In
such case, grace is not, from our human
point of view, a quality needed in
God. So, just as between Pelagius and
Augustine, free will had to be reconciled
with grace.
Aquinas tried to solve this problem
by making the universal desire for
happiness the motivating power
(everyone wants to be happy). (143)
But in doing so, he reverted the
Christian ethic back to the pagan
Greek style by making man, then, the
measure of his own fulfillment. If a
man’s subjectively chosen happiness
is his ultimate end, then it is unclear
why God need reveal any divine law,
except possibly to help man attain that
happiness -- by showing the way.
But then God indeed compromises
His sovereignty and becomes
man’s practical servant, as were the
Greek gods (occasionally) for the
Greeks.
Aquinas tried to counter this implication
by saying that...
the sharing of rational creatures in the Eternal
Law, which sets them toward their due
acts and end, is called Natural Law. (144)
In other words, it is because man partakes
of the divine reason that ethical
143. For previous discussion of “happiness”, see
above, Part I, ‘Eudaimonia” on page 36
144. Aquinas, Theol. Texts. op. cit. p. 146 (Sum.
Theol., 1a-2ae. xci. 2).
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 59
obligation applies to him.
Aquinas tried to combine the two
sources of ethics, man and God, into
one by relating man’s happiness with
divine reason. Man finds his true fulfillment
only when he obeys the divine
reason.
Thus he sought to avoid merely
subjective or private happiness on
man’s part as the fulfillment of the
Good. This reason in man is completed
by revelation and the divine
law.
But again, in the process, Aquinas
has taken liberties with the word ‘happiness’
-- which either leaves us in the
Greek camp with generalized happiness,
and with God as our servant, or
with a particular and appointed happiness
which takes away our freedom to
reject the will of God, i.e., to act sinfully.
We lose our freedom, for if it is
true that our genuine happiness must
lie with God, then it is meaningless to
say, “What if I do not care about
God?” If his true subjective happiness
necessarily lies with God, then he
must care about God. His choice is already
made. To say that one’s true
happiness lies in any particular goal is
to try to tell him what he “really”
wants -- impossible if man is in fact
free.
The ambiguity must be resolved
between ‘happiness’ as (1) attaining
generally “whatever I want”, and (2) a
particular end, such as a transcendent
state which alone can satisfy my needs
and unify my inner contradictions.
Happiness in general, rather than
any particular goal (such as God’s
heaven), can be understood as the fulfillment
of whatever goal I choose,
“getting my own way....,” whether that
be heaven or hell. Some people, it

60 The Law & the Grace of God
seems clear, are so hostile to God and
His heaven that hell, life without God,
is to them preferable. For such people,
heaven would be hell, not happiness.
That possibility is skillfully described
in The Great Divorce by C. S.
Lewis.
The universal desire for happiness
does not mean we are all aiming at the
same concrete and particular goal.
What makes a tyrant happy is probably
not what makes his subjects happy.
But that means that heaven then
cannot be posited as the catch-all motivator
to draw us to itself. If, as
Aquinas contends, happiness is to be
identified with some particular goal,
i.e., heaven, then this particular goal
must lose its motivating power. But
heaven was identified with happiness
precisely to get a motivating power,
because, after all (we assume), who
would not want heaven?
That helps to explain why artists
and preachers get so skilled at making
hell appear horribly painful. They
want a backup motivator for us to
choose heaven. If heaven does not yet
appear attractive, maybe hell can be
made repulsive.
Happiness, a state of personal
feeling and consciousness, can be a
motivator only if taken in the generalized
sense of “whatever I want....,” or
“whatever makes me feel good....” No
doubt everyone wants to fulfill their
goals and to feel good. But that is not
helpful because it does not tell us what
particular goal one might be choosing,
or what particular thing makes me feel
good. Particular goals can be motivators,
but only if we are free to choose
them contrary to the law of God.
So, either happiness has to do
with motivation and refers simply to
the general idea of fulfillment of my
goals (whatever they might be, perhaps
changing over time), or it refers
to a specific goal such as God’s
heaven but cannot itself provide the
universal motivation or incentive.
We cannot have it both ways.
Happiness as a source of motivation
cannot be the ground of natural law.
The two questions, “How can I get to
heaven? and “How can I be happy?”
are not necessarily the same question.
If I have free will, I can follow
my own choice about what makes me
happy.
What motivates a man toward any
particular goal will depend on his perception
of worldview, of himself as a
moral entity, what kind of capacities
he has, his level of intellectual, moral,
and spiritual wholeness and integrity
-- to name a few possibilities.
c. Freedom, Predestination,
& the Infinite Regress
Man’s freedom is necessary to his
functioning, and so he can be neither
irretrievably corrupt nor forced into
obedience.
Nevertheless, Thomas rightly
says, when you ask why an action was
performed (e.g., choosing heaven),
you cannot keep asking “Why?” and
answering “Because...” in an infinite
regress. Free will does not imply such
an infinite regress of “reasons why....”
You must stop somewhere. The stopping
point is the “is” upon which
moral authority is based. (145)
The infinite regress is the black
hole of philosophy. We meet it in the
cosmological argument for God in the
search for a first cause. If there is no
145. Go to Part I above, ‘Deriving
the “Ought” from an “Is”” on page 31 and ‘The Ability
vs. the Right to Command” on page 32.

146. Go to Part I above, ‘Deriving
the “Ought” from an “Is”” on page 31 and ‘The Ability
vs. the Right to Command” on page 32.
See also Exodus 3, Moses and God at the burning
bush, where God names Himself ‘Yahweh’ (‘He
Who Is’), standing astride the infinite regress.
See also the Bibliography for Personality,
Empiricism, & God, for the cosmological argument.
147. Aquinas, Theol. Texts, op. cit., p. 160 (I Quodlibets,
iv. 7, c. and ad 1, 2).
148. Ibid. p. 161. (III Contra Gentes, 160).
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 61
cause which exists by its own power
of being, i.e., God, Yahweh, “I AM
WHO I AM”, then the search for a
causal explanation of things falls into
the black hole of the infinite regress of
causes ever needed to explain the
present one. (146)
So, for Thomas, there must be an
outside cause, which, in the case of
works of grace, is God. There must be
some outside principle prompting
one’s reason to deliberate over what is
the right course. (147) That is, there
must be an obligation, a command.
So Aquinas affirms the principle
of a real and objective obligation.
But a man, though unable to acquire
or deserve grace of his own free
will, he believes, can nevertheless stop
himself from receiving it. (148) That is,
the granting of grace by God does not
force acceptance on the part of the
creature. So Aquinas agrees with the
principle of free will.
Thomas’ language alternates between
a defense of free will vs. an attempt
to preserve the sovereignty of
God by making grace supreme over
will. Most of the time he is careful to
guard against leaning too heavily to
one side or the other, but his inheritance
of a depersonalized Hellenic/pagan
concept of salvation and grace
eventually forces him onto one or the
other of the horns of the Pelagian
(freewill)-Augustinian (predestinarian)
dilemma.
Aquinas talks of grace in two
senses: first, those things which are
freely bestowed -- gifts such as prophecy,
wisdom, etc.
But secondly, and more importantly,
grace is that which renders a
man agreeable to God -- the gift of being
worthy.
Otherwise, if grace meant only divine
acceptance, a sinner might be said to be in
grace, for he may well be predestined to
heaven. (149) (Fox emphasis.)
This thought brings us to Thomas’
ideas of predestination, implying that
grace is a power which somehow converts
and remakes the sinner.
His idea of grace, however, is inadequate
in that his definition, “that
which makes the sinner agreeable to
God,” is completely in terms of what
the grace does, and tells us nothing
about what it is that effects this transformation.
It does not define grace, it
only states that such a process takes
place.
On predestination he states:
From all eternity some are preordained
and directed to heaven.... From all eternity,
too, it has been settled that others will not
be given grace, and these are called the
reprobate or rejected ones.
Divine Providence produces its effects
through secondary causes; therefore the
result of free will is also the result of predestination.
(150)
A hyper-Calvinist could hardly
have been more predestinarian than
this. The trouble is, of course, that Thomas
is not consistent on the point,
and so he can be defended on either
side of the issue. Our problem is to
149. Ibid., pp. 163-64 (Disputations, XXVII de Veritate,
1)
150. Ibid. p. 168 (III Contra Gentes, 164).

62 The Law & the Grace of God
find out why he was forced to hang
between the horns of this dilemma.
d. God’s Omnipotence
& Man’s Free Will
Why does grace, which means
something freely given by God, end
up being a control-mechanism on the
life of the recipient? Why do some
Christians say that any freewill contribution
by a sinner is a violation of either
the sovereignty or omnipotence of
God?
The truth is that the very significance
and meaning of something being
freely given by God requires that it
be also freely accepted by the recipient.
The reality of free will does not
threaten the omnipotence of God.
Omnipotence does not mean “I always
get my way.” Not even for God.
It means that God is able to do anything
whatsoever which is within the
realm of the logically possible. ‘Logically
possible’ is the definition for
what can exist, that is, for what is a
candidate for existence.
It is no slight on the omnipotence
of God that He “cannot do” the logically
impossible. Nonsense things are
not really “things” at all, and are thus
not candidates for existence. The assertion
that God can “do” them is
therefore a nonsense assertion; and
thus the denial of that statement does
not count against the reality or dignity
of God’s omnipotence.
Quite the opposite is true. To
deny that God can or should create
freewill persons, even if He wanted to,
is a limiting of the freewill choice and/
or omnipotence of God. The existence
of freewill persons is not an irrational
thought, and is thus within the realm
of pure possibility, which is precisely
the boundary which describes the omnipotence
of God. (151)
e. Sovereignty & Freedom
Trying to deal with the possibility
that the will of God might be thwarted
by someone’s going to hell, Aquinas
misses the issue by saying that it is the
antecedent will of God, not His effective
or consequent will, that is
thwarted.
Similarly, God antecedently wills all men
to be saved, but consequently wills some to
be damned, according to the requirements
of His justice. (152)
That is, what God would like to
have done is not accomplished, but
later, when all circumstances such as
sin are taken into account, His original
will is qualified to deal with these circumstances.
This may well be the case, but it
does not answer the original question
of how it is that God’s will can be
thwarted or qualified by a mere human
and God remain sovereign. We are
confronted by the same question:
“Can Christ be by passed?” in another
guise.
Thomas thus disagrees with Pelagius’
idea that there is no transmission
of original sin at conception on
the, I think, dubious grounds that that
would compromise the redemptive
work of Christ. (153)
The bare logic goes something
like this: Christ died for man, man
therefore must be a sinner. Man is
free, but, if so, he might choose not to
be a sinner. We must therefore snuff
out his freedom to prevent any by-
151. On the meaning of ‘omnipotence’, see Bibliography
for Personality, Empiricism, & God, Chapter
II-C-6-f, “Omni-potence”.
152. Ibid., p. 178 (Sum. Theol., 1a. xix. 6 obj. 1 and
resp.).
153. Ibid., p. 120 (Disputations, IV De Malo, 1).

passing of Christ by not being a sinner.
Such reasoning supports the notion,
“Sin that grace may
abound,” (154) and to the medieval
hymn sometimes sung at the blessing
of the paschal candle, “O happy fault!
that merited such and so great a Redeemer.”
(155)
But surely, if a man does not have
original sin, we do not glorify Christ
by pasting it upon him. A man is innocent
until proven guilty -- that is a
Biblical principle. Two or three witnesses
were required to convict of a
crime. A priori guilt is not a Biblical
principle. No one is guilty just for existing.
Ezekiel, for example, hears
from God....
What do you mean by repeating this
proverb concerning the land of Israel, “The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
children’s teeth are set on edge”? As I live,
says the Lord God, this proverb shall no
more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all
souls are mine, the soul of the father as well
as the soul of the son is mine: the soul that
sins shall die. (156) (Fox emphasis.)
The assertion of some Christian
mystics that “my own existence is a
sin....”, is not compatible with the
Biblical doctrine of creation.
One can imagine a scene in
heaven, as a man comes running pellmell
down the hallway, with Jesus in
hot pursuit. “Stop that man!” Jesus
yells. “What did he do?” a bystanding
angel asks. “He obeyed Me!”
Jesus angrily retorts.
That, of course, is an absurd bit of
fantasy -- but compatible nevertheless
154. See Romans 3:5 ff.
155. Aquinas, Theol. Texts, op. cit., p. 119 (Sum.
Theol., 3a. i. 3, ad 3).
156. Ezekiel 18:1 ff. See also Deuteronomy 24:16.
My italics.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 63
with the contention that being able to
obey Jesus is subversive of His sovereignty
-- to which Jesus might well
then object.
Do parents or employers get depressed
or angry when their children
or employees obey them? Commandments
are made to be obeyed, and
obedience to the Law of God is a matter
of rejoicing in heaven, not of fear
or complaint.
How, then, do we resolve these
apparent contradictions?
D-2. Unraveling the Rat’s Nest
a. Predestination,
Motivation, & Incentive
Predestination has the effect of
turning moral law, the arena of free
will, into natural law, the arena of mechanical
“obedience”. In whatever
sense a rock “obeys” the law of gravity,
that is the sense in which a predestined
man goes to heaven or hell. By
any reasonable assessment, the very
essence of free will, with the glory of
innocence or the shame of guilt, disappears.
How can a rock be “guilty” for
falling rather than rising?
We noted above, that, for Augustine...
Man’s will is free, but since it acts on certain
motives, some of these may press irresistibly
on the will, and the range of live options
is limited. (157)
What does “act on certain motives”
mean? How can a motive
“press irresistibly on the will”? And
then what, indeed, is a “motive”? If
the motive presses irresistibly, in what
reasonable sense am I “acting on it”?
Rather it is acting on me. The issue is
157. See above, ‘Pelagius & Augustine” on page 56
ff.

64 The Law & the Grace of God
incentive, not motive.
If a motive is external, as implied
by the quote above, then we are
“moved” in a mechanistic way. What
else would be an “irresistible press”.
If, on the other hand, we have
genuine free will, then what “moves”
me is my own choosing. I, not some
tempting object “out there”, am the efficient
cause of my own choosing.
What attracts me in a certain direction
may be an external “incentive”, that is,
a possibility which I see lining up with
a choice I have already made, or
which is strongly implied by choices I
have made.
But the very meaning of my free
will is that I, not the external incentive,
am the cause of my moving. I am
affirming the perceived possibility by
my moving -- although it may feel like
I am being “drawn” in that direction --
perhaps because my moving is inspired
by incentives and motives
which might have drifted into unconscious
regions. (158)
What then generates the first
movement in infancy? What can get
this process started in the beginning
before there are any implanted, unconscious
motives?
There must be some primitive
sense of a “self” and of the wellbeing
of that self. It may come from the uncomfortable
pain of hunger or dirty diapers,
from which I seek relief. It may
come from yearning for mother, who,
I discover, tends to these needs.
I am “motivated by” something
which appeals to an interest or desire
to which I have already agreed, or a
new desire which is awakened in me
by new circumstances and opportunties.
In any case, without desires,
hopes, being already within me, external
incentives or temptations will have
no effect. Inert beings cannot be
wooed, tempted, or promised -- only
those with hopes and desires.
The most difficult cases to help
with life’s issues are those persons
who have lost their inner motivation,
who have no desire for anything, who
have given up on life.
b. Heaven as Good Relationship -
Not Happiness
If there is an image of God in
man, we surely can see some of it in
man’s capacity for freedom. God is a
free and creative agent, and in man He
has created other free and creative
agents.
But Thomas spoke of natural man
as having need for the grace of God
even before the Fall, Original Justice,
as against Pelagius’ contention that
natural man was free to do the will of
God without anything extra, if only he
could just know the will of God.
But Thomas’ definition of natural
man is artificially constructed to fit his
view. He states:
In the supposition that he wills to create
things, it follows, with some show of right,
that they should be endowed with whatever
is needful for their integrity; if men are to be
produced, then they should be made reasonable.
(159)
He should have added, “...and they
should also be made free.” One cannot
be reasonable without being also
free. To reason at all, one must be free
to choose between truth and untruth.
158. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing, for
further information on the nature of the unconscious
and free will. The unconscious is that upon which
we rely (and can “forget” about) in order to attend
to something else. See chapter IV, The Warp in the
Unconscious. 159. Ibid., p. 176 (Disputations, VI de Veritate, 2)

Defining the nature of man so that
it falls just short of true freedom and
an ability to be righteous, and therefore
needs something extra from God,
is like defining an automobile but
omitting, say, the battery. The battery
is then added as the gift of the driver
to prevent credit being given to the automobile
for the fact that it can go.
Neither man nor God raises himself
by suppressing others. Such defining
is arbitrary and artificial.
Again, we have the pagan and
Greek misunderstanding of the gift
which creates that confusion in the understanding
of the need. If the gift is a
relationship rather than happiness,
then the question of a man’s fulfilling
his own need is beside the point. (160) I
cannot alone fulfill my own need for
relationship.
Aquinas has tried to preserve the
uniqueness of redemption in Christ by
saying that man always seeks his own
happiness, and that man’s happiness is
in Christ. (161) Thus he avoids the problem
of Pelagianism, that of possibly
making Christ irrelevant to happiness
or salvation.
But he does so at the expense of
our freedom and thus at the expense of
any meaning to the word ‘heaven’.
He has followed the Neo-Platonic line
of identifying God with the Good and
in effect turns God into either an abstraction
or a pleasant place or state to
be, in neither case a person.
In doing so, however, he has recognized
the danger of having a standard
of goodness which was outside of
160. See earlier discussion on “happiness” in Part I,
‘Eudaimonia” on page 36.
161. Aquinas, Phil. Texts, op. cit., p. 268-69 (Sum.
Theol., 1a-2ae. ii. 8, obj. and ad 2; also 1a--2ae. iii.
1). But also cf. p. 265 (1a-2ae. i. 7).
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 65
God and to which God was subject.
He was not able to solve the problem
of grace and freedom consistently,
for he felt that man’s freedom carried
to its logical consequences would undercut
the sovereignty of God. He
thought of that sovereignty as a de
facto accomplishment of the will of
God (God always gets His way) rather
than as the relationship of God to nature
as its Creator.
God is not sovereign over me because
I obey Him. I obey Him because
He is sovereign. If the obedience
is not freely given, it is not true,
from-the-heart obedience. God is sovereign
because, and only because, He
defines my reason for existence, the
foundational “is” of ethical theory. (162)
Aquinas had to make grace irresistible
or God would not appear to be
sovereign. But grace then becomes a
sort of power and control mechanism,
and degenerates into a substance you
can pour into the soul like gasoline
into a motor -- and thus loses its original
meaning of gratia (free gift, as in
‘gratuity’).
Aquinas did not see that it is freedom
of response that we must begin
with, not some idea of how having no
freedom glorifies God.
Had he understood heaven as the
fulfillment of the relationship of sovereign
to subject, Creator to creature,
instead of as happiness, grace would
not have been turned into an irresistible
substance. The standard of right
and wrong would not have been identified
with the being of God but with
His plans for His creation, the purpose
for existence. And God would not
have suffered the indignity of becom-
162. See in Part I, ‘The “Is” upon which the “Ought”
is Based...” on page 18

66 The Law & the Grace of God
ing an abstraction or an environment.
Happiness is a feeling of wellbeing
and of inner peace and unity. But
that feeling can be produced in different
persons by widely different, and
often contrary, circumstances and accomplishments.
A tyrant is made
happy by things which make his people
miserable. That is one reason why
happiness cannot be used as a final
goal.
But God has designed His creation
so that when we put truthful,
righteous, and loving relationships
first, that will then produce the lasting
happiness which does not cloy. Happiness
cannot be the purpose of life,
happiness can be substantial and dependable
only as the by-product of
that which Jesus chose as the purpose
of all life, love of God and of neighbor.
When a feeling, such as happiness
(rather than good relationships) is
made the goal of life, we end up destroying
both good feelings and good
relationships. When we put good relationships
first, both feelings and relationships
are preserved.
c. Psychology & Salvation
The problem of “grace versus free
will” could perhaps could find no resolution
into “grace and free will” until
the emergence of a language for personhood
and relationship, i.e., the development
of -- psychology (nevermind
its often unhappy and disastrous
secular rabbit trails). (163)
Despite its almost totally secular
late-19th-century beginnings, psychology
has helped to focus our attention
163. For some happy rabbit trails, see Biblical Inner
Healing, at www.EmmausMall.org or at Amazon.com.
on the nature of dependency relationships
between human beings, such as
between parents and children, which
can be readily applied to our dependency
relationship to God. (164)
And despite the secular beginnings
of psychology, as with Freud,
Jung, Adler, et al, therapists have
drifted over the last century strongly
toward working with healing personal
relationships rather than tinkering
with impersonal drives. Why so? Because
they were working, not with theoretical
abstractions, but with real
people who wanted to get well. (165)
The Biblical language was already
there. Both Jews and Christians
have considered themselves part of a
family of God, and we His children.
What secular psychology helped
add to the picture was an understanding
of how we human beings are first
nurtured (mothered) and then disciplined
(fathered) by our parents. Biblical
religion then adds how this is precisely
parallel to our salvation relationship
to God.
Heaven as relationship makes little
sense until we understand the ontological/dependency
and moral/obedience
character of our lives, those two
fundamental stabilities necessary for
the abundant life, that is, for salvation.
We are both mothered (ontological
stability) and fathered (moral stability)
by our parents, whom we as infants
relate to as though they were
God.
164. See Preface,
165. Carol Mayhew from the Institute of Contemporary
Psychoanalysis 10780 Santa Monica Blvd.,
Ste. 350, Los Angeles, CA 90025, spoke ca. 2007
or -08, on the subject, From Freud to the Present,
describing just such a transition.
For a Biblical psychology, see Bibliography for
Biblical Inner Healing.

We are ontologically dependent
beings, but have no permanent ontological
stability unless we spiritually
leave our parents and choose to be dependent
upon our Creator. We are
given, like it or not, a purpose for our
existence, and thereby can, as we are
obedient, have a moral stability.
So, “being myself” does not, as
often in the secular world, and especially
among teens, mean “doing what
I want”. Being and doing are very different
things. My being is a gift
(grace) from God, which then enables
me to be a doer.
Sin violates one’s right to exist,
and undermines one’s ability to exist
-- the two basic stabilities. To be successful
adults in the world, then, we
must first be successful children in
God, trusting for our being and obedient
in our doing. Trust and obey, for
there’s no other way to be happy in
Jesus, but to trust and obey....
So, our spiritual journey is moving
from the place to where mother
and father are God to where God is
our Father and Mother. We must, as
Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3, be
‘born again”. i.e., into the family of
God. And there is where we find the
fulfillment of our two fundamental
stabilities: ontological (mother) and
moral (father).
Only with a Father God can there
be a true morality, that is, only with a
Creator who has purposes for His creation
-- intelligent design. Intelligent
design is not only about cosmology
and natural law, it is about the purpose
for personal beings in community as
the pinnacle of that cosmos. Morality
is cosmic, not only personal.
Clearly, the solid loving marriage
relationship between Father and
Mother in God (Genesis 1:26-28) is
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 67
essential to the welfare of the adopted
children of God. We come to live in
the “space” between the two.
d. The Resolution of Self-Hate
The denigration of self into which
much of the confusion over grace and
free will can drop the Christian population
often descends into literal selfhate.
Self-hate is one of the most difficult
of sins/pathologies to forgive/
cure, leading at times to suicidal depression.
(166) Satan is not called “the
accuser of the brethren” for no reason.
The Second Great Commandment
clearly implies that we are to
love ourselves, that is, do good for
ourselves. We are to love our neighbor
just like we love ourselves. We are
no more to hate ourselves than our
neighbor. The most loving thing I can
do for myself is to obey the law of
God, following Jesus on the way of
the cross to heaven. My greatest gift
then to my neighbor is my own full
life in Christ, sharing that gift with
him or her.
That being the case, in any attack
on my being, God is always on my
side. It is never correct to condemn
my being, only (at times) my behavior.
I never am asked by God to repent of
being myself because it is always a
good idea to be myself. Repentance is
about behavior, not about being. Selfhatred,
or repenting of being myself, is
a slap in the face of God who is, after
all, responsible for my being.
Repenting of being myself only
gets in the way of true repentance --
i.e., of my behavior, reactions, attitudes,
etc. The person who hates himself
will have a hard time repenting of
166. This is, of course, that to which persons such as
Brock Chisholm rightly objected. Go to Part I, ‘A
Hostile Secular Psychology” on page 6.

68 The Law & the Grace of God
any behavior because it will feel like
suicide -- repentance not being clearly
distinguished from self-hate.
The distinction between who I am
and what I do is absolutely essential to
both emotional and spiritual health.
That resolution will be enormously
aided by a proper resolution of the Pelagian
discussion, because in that resolution,
the right (which directs my
“doing”) is seen to be joyfully wedded
E. Martin Luther
E-1. A Misleading Parable
Luther’s Babylonian Captivity offers
a parable to illustrate what Luther
meant by “faith”. (167)
If a rich man should bequeath his
estate to a beggar, and another were to
object that he does not deserve it, the
beggar could respond that he does not
accept it on his own merit, but “on the
score of another’s goodness.”
The bequest is analogous to the
promise of Christ, and the beggar’s acceptance
is analogous to the sinner’s
repentance and faith. There is nothing
in either case which either could do to
deserve the inheritance, that is, neither
could obligate the benefactor to do the
giving. And so both must rely completely
on the good will of the benefactor.
Luther, however, uses both the
words ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ ambiguously:
first to mean belief that something
is true, and second, to mean, or
at least connote, willing acceptance of
the truth, or, in this case, of a promise.
167. Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity”, in
Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press
1943), p. 155 ff.
to the good (which nurtures and sustains
my “being”).
START HERE.....
The parable of the inheritance unwittingly
loads the issue since we naturally
suppose that the beggar will want
this estate.
If, however, he was a free-lancer
who liked beggarhood (as St. Francis,
or some deliberately homeless persons),
the case falls through. For example,
when Luther says that we
ought “not to be ready to perform and
bring many works, but to believe and
receive all that is there promised”, the
words “believe and receive” are likely
to be blended into the one concept of
faith, even though believing does not
require receiving.
Like the Greek philosophers, he
cannot conceive of anyone believing
something to be good and yet not
wanting (receiving) it. There is a hidden
assumption that knowledge of a
good entails approval, that there is an
intrinsic incentive in the promise of
God which impels consent. We have
again the external motivation problem.
In another place he says, “We
ought to be grateful for benefits received.”
And again, this is what is
hidden in his idea of faith which give
plausibility to everything he says. He
assumes that we will all be grateful if

we understand and believe the promises
of God.
St. Francis knew that his earthly
father would leave him a handsome
bequest, but he had heard his heavenly
Father offer something else, beggarhood.
No doubt Francis’ family and
friends thought him insane for rejecting
an obvious good.
In the “Treatise on Christian Liberty”
Luther divides Scripture into two
parts: commands and promises. The
command teach us the things that are
right, i.e., presumably the things
which, if done, would make one righteous.
But it is only in the promises
that we find the power to fulfill the
commands. He says,
If you wish to fulfill the law, and not to
covet, as the law demands, come, believe in
Christ, in Whom... all things are promised
you. (Fox emphasis.)
And thus he betrays his need for a motivation.
However, he cannot take
Aquinas’ way out, by identifying happiness,
goodness, and God to solve his
motivation problem, for Platonic realism
had by the 1500’s yielded first
place to nominalism. He rather seems
to find the motivating power in the
promise.
Nevertheless, the principle is the
same. Something is needed to make
plausible the contention that Christ
died for us and that this is for our benefit.
He fails to see that, as with the
beggar, there is no guarantee that any
specific person will want to accept the
promise, even if he understood it to be
an honest and valid promise. Nothing
in the external promise can move the
inner will unless the inner will has already
a desire in that direction.
We can, of course, change our
minds, we can get converted to some
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 69
quite different way of life. But that
very conversion must appeal to a desire
within us, perhaps a new one
which now overrides our earlier sense
of direction.
E-2. Righteousness
versus
Pleasing God?
The commandments are the standard
for righteousness. Yet, Luther
talks of works done from faith...
...truly... the freest of works, done only to
please God and not to obtain righteousness...
(168) (Fox emphasis.)
Here is perplexity: on one hand
righteousness is based on the commandments
of God, and on the other
hand, there is a difference between
fulfilling these commandments and
pleasing God, as though God’s commandments
did not represent what
pleased Him -- when that is exactly
what they do represent.
Luther betrays that he did not really
think of the commandments of
God as being the standard of righteousness,
rather God commands them
because they are right on some other
grounds, i.e., by some standard above
God.
Here, surely, is irony: Man, first to
ensure that God does not make sport
with righteousness, and to keep it
from being the plaything of a cosmic
tyrant, makes righteousness independent
of, and supreme over, God.
Then, on the other hand, when
man finds that he, on his part, goes to
hell judged by any given standard of
righteousness, but that a loving God
has forgiven him, man straightway ex-
168. Luther, “Treatise on Christian Liberty,” in Three
Treatises, p. 257 (italics mine).

70 The Law & the Grace of God
alts God’s pleasure over what he now
calls the petrified forms of legalism --
known formerly as the divine standards
of righteousness.
We have God buffaloed coming
and going. The place of the Platonic
Good is now held by formal legalism,
which is spurned in favor of the forgiveness
of God.
This change is due partly to the
triumph of nominalism over Platonic
realism, but the confusion remains because
of the dichotomy drawn between
righteousness and pleasing
God. Neither Aquinas nor Luther had
a clear sense of the wedding of the
Good to the Right, or maybe not even
the distinction between the two.
Jesus declaration that the two
highest laws in the universe are those
to love God and one’s neighbor should
have told us immediately that in the
mind of God, grace (love) and law are
eternally wedded, not opposed.
In Luther’s parable of the beggar,
there is no notion of a transcendent
F-1. We are Responsible
for Knowing...
For the wrath of God is revealed from
heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness
of men who by their wickedness suppress
the truth. For what can be known
about God is plain to them, because God
has shown it to them. Ever since the creation
of the world, His invisible nature,
namely His eternal power and deity, has
been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made. So they are without
excuse. Romans 1:18 ff.
We cannot claim, “I did not
know...!” says Paul, because God has
given us the needed evidence for His
F. St. Paul
righteousness, the ledger books of
which must be balanced by God if He
is to be a righteous God. God ignores
the so-called “justice” lording it over
Him, and, as in the parable of the
“Eleventh Hour”, does with His own
whatever He wills. (169)
That does not make the law unjust,
rather it is another way stating
Jesus’ remark that the Sabbath (the
law) is made for man, not man for the
Sabbath. Persons, not laws, are of primary
value. (170) So any law at all,
short of the law of love, can only approximate
the original intent of God,
which is why love must be at the apex
of all law.
Only because love is at the apex
of the law, can the law be exactly what
pleases God. So then the supposed
opposition between law and grace
(love) dissolves and disappears.
169. Matthew 20:1 ff.
170. Mark 2:27
being and for His sovereignty.
One cannot expect primitive peoples
to have the cosmological argument
for God on the tips of their
tongues, but one might suspect that
even primitive persons who found
along the jungle path a bow and arrow
of the sort made by their neighboring
tribe would know enough to be on the
alert for members of that tribe nearby
-- a primitive form of the watch-maker
theory. Their lives and tribal survival
depended on that sort of knowledge,
recognizing the presence of potential
enemies. As every anthropological

digger knows, an artifact requires an
artificer. We use that sort of logic in
many facets of life, such as detective
work.
Atheist Bertrand Russell is credited
with responding to a query about
how he would reply, should he awaken
in an after life and find himself standing
before God who asked, “Bertrand,
why did you not believe in Me?”.
Russell indicated that he would challenge
God, “You did not give us
enough evidence.”
What God might respond to his
challenge will be for Russell to find
out. But he does not qualify as someone
who could not understand the cosmological
argument, or, at the very
least, that an artifact implies an artificer.
(171)
Reasoning from obvious design to
designer, the watch-maker argument,
as Paul senses, is indeed a legitimate
and compelling argument. The burden
of proof is on someone who denies its
relevance.
Paul, himself, recognizes that,
nevertheless, we need to send missionaries,
that we come to faith by hearing
(Gal. 3:2, 5), recognizing the need for
more than merely being alive in order,
from within a fallen state, to come to
know God. We must have an attitude
which does not subvert truth, but
which, if not actively searching for it,
is at least open to truth when it comes
by, by hearing or any other way.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 71
F-2. Grace &
Sacramental Presence
Much of the problem comes from
171. One hopes that Russell will be bold enough to
be honest with God, and even more so, to be bold
enough to want God to be honest with him. Scary
stuff.
seeing grace as legal mercy to the exclusion
of personal presence. Religion
and salvation then tend to become
harsh, hard, hyper-masculine,
and legalistic, with little feminine softness
and love. Only God can put the
two together -- the hieros gamos.
Paul makes reference to this sacramental
presence of the Holy Spirit
as a “guarantee” in 2 Corinthians 1:22
and 5:5; and then in Ephesians 1:14.
“Now faith is the assurance of
things hoped for, the conviction of
things not seen,” we read in Hebrews
11:1. Our spirit sees something which
the eyes cannot see. That requires our
spirit to be not subverting truth, but
open to that seeing, open to the possibility
of the spiritual world.
Beginning with the first early curiosity
of a child, openness to the truth
is the beginning of faith. (172) And the
first truth important to an infant is the
presence of mother.
So that would mean sensing the
presence of other persons, not merely
machine-like bodies, as secular people
imagine. We have metaphysical eyes
which can sense the presence of persons,
the sacramental world of the
spirit. (173)
That is why a mother can raise a
child in a manner that a machine cannot,
no matter how “properly” it is
programmed to “behave” toward the
172. See Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible
in a Scientific World for more on “faith”.
173. “Meta-physics” or “beyond the physical”.
‘Sacramental’ refers to the Biblical understanding
of a physical world which is an outward and visible
sign of an inward and not visible world. My
body is a sacrament of my soul or spirit. The bread
and wine of Holy Communion are sacraments of
the presence of Christ. The physical heavens
declare the glory of God (Psalm 19).
Metaphysical and sacramental imply each
other.

72 The Law & the Grace of God
infant. (174)
The child must sense that it is
wanted and cared for, a personal relationship,
or it is likely to give up and
die, no matter that it is, in a mechanical
way, warm, clean, and well fed.
This was discovered in a German orphanage
in the late 1800’s. Babies
were dying even though “scientifically”
(physically) well fed, warm,
and clean. Then they noticed that
those babies who were cuddled by a
visiting local woman did not die.
So, babies are better practicing
metaphysicians probably than most
philosophers. To be an adequate metaphysician,
forget about philosophy for
a while, and study little children who
would not have had metaphysics (a
perception of the personal, sacramental
world where the physical reveals
the spiritual) yet drummed out of
them.
Babies will not understand the reality
of God, but they know the spiritual
presence of mom and dad, who
are as God to the baby. They look for
persons, not machines. Infants can
174. See The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, by
Thomas Verney.
come to a sense of dependency, trust,
and later especially with father, obedience.
So, our knowledge of mother and
then father, if all goes well, will point
and lead into the family of God -- into
which one is born “again”. We become
children of, mothered and fathered
by, God Himself. We receive
our stability of being, and our moral
direction, from God Himself, no
longer from any created source. That
is the gift of baptism, making one’s
choice to follow Jesus Christ to the
throne of the Father, standing on the
ground of the Holy Spirit. (175)
And, if we experience the relation
between mother and father to be a
spiritual union of love, we will experience
also the relation of grace and law
to be one of a wedding, the hieros gamos.
And we will likely have considerably
less trouble recognizing God
when He shows up -- having aready
seen Him in the image of our parents.
G. Grace & Freedom - the Biblical Way
G-1. Righteousness vs. Love...
a. Incentive to Obedience
Supposing we take seriously
Jesus’ words:
Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness,
and all these things will be yours
as well. Matthew 6:33
I (and others I have known) grew
up thinking that this passage required
175. Go to Preface, ‘The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”” on page xxiv,
‘Worldview & the Two Basic Stabilities” on
page 7;
and, ‘Two Stabilities: of Being & of Morality” on
page 55.
a specifically legal, moral assent on
my part, i.e., to seek His Kingdom and
His righteousness. And that is, of
course, true. But it seemed arbitrary
and legalistic. Obedience would be
inspired more by a fear of punishment
rather than a joyfully cooperative will.
The consequence of failure would lead
to not “getting these things as well”,
an act of God holding back the blessing
because He was angry at me for

II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 73
not obeying.
When God is seen as giving us a
law which is only about reward and
punishment, then all the pressure is
then on moral attainment, obedience,
so as to merit, earn the good will of
the Law Giver. He will love me when
I obey Him. That would be a legalistically
masculine response.
It would have nothing to do with
the stability of selfhood, and would
give little thought to why we are unable
to obey God and why we struggle
with internal contradictions as Paul relates
in Romans 7.
Morality is indeed part of the reality.
But there is more -- the mothering,
feminine side. When the mothering,
supportive, healing, and nurturing
side is missing, the legal requirement
will inevitably seem arbitrary and legalistic.
The gaining (or not) of “these
things” is not due simply to the personal
reaction by God giving or refusing
to give. It is due also to the nature
of the laws themselves which, as Jesus
says, are made for our benefit (Mark
2:17).
In what sense are they made for
our benefit? They are made to produce
good results in our own personal
growth, maturing, and stabilization.
The laws themselves are made to bless
us, not to bind our wills so as to enslave
us. They set us more free by
protecting and enabling our very
breakable nature.
Laws are thus like an owner’s
manual to a car, given by the manufacturer.
The owner does not grumble at
the manual, if he has any sense he
reads it gladly.
Failure to follow the directions of
the manual does not lead to the manufacturer
coming out to punish you
(damage your car, sending you to hell,
etc.), on the grounds of your “disobedience”.
A disabling happens because
the car has a certain nature which can
be broken, damaged, or disabled as a
result of not following the directions.
The new owner of the car was not
made for the benefit of the directions,
the directions were made for the benefit
of the owner, so that he would not
damage his new car.
In that sense, our seeking His
Kingdom and His righteousness works
to build us up and keep us running
properly, whereas our disobedience
works to undermine and erode our
wholeness as well as our holiness. We
cease to function well. Obedience
feeds, strengthens, and matures, not
damages, our human nature.
The laws of God are intelligently
designed to cooperate with our health
and welfare. They are not a “control
mechanism” to lock down our freedom.
They are a blessing to set us
free. I am much more free with a car
that runs than with a broken car. Even
more so with a body that runs and a
soul which is at one with itself because
at one with God.
An “angry response” from the car
manufacturer would parallel the masculine,
legal, moral indignation of
God, punishing us by withholding His
blessings, or intervening with chastisements.
There may be times when that
kind of intervention from God is required,
when we obstinantly persist in
Kingdom-destructive behavior. But
the car itself will also intervene
against our bad behavior (break
down), or cooperate with our good behavior
(run smoothly).
On the Biblical view, there is a

74 The Law & the Grace of God
powerful incentive to obedience because
the law of God is so wonderfully
a “lamp to my feet and a light to
my path.” It does indeed direct us in a
good direction, good for our wellbeing
and happiness. (Psalm 119:105)
b. Our Fragile Human Nature....
Our inability (different from our
unwillingness) to obey the law (as described
in Romans 7) comes from
(1) our ignorance of the law, and/or
(2) a defective stability of our being.
If I am not put together right, my
will cannot function well. If I grow up
with inner brokenness, inner hurts
from parenting, loneliness, resentment,
etc., my will cannot function
with a single purpose. (176) I will be a
divided house, at conflict with myself.
Part of me will want to do what is
right, another part of me will feel,
“No, that is too dangerous!” or, “I am
unable...,” or a pouty “I don’t wanna!”
Biblical “being oneself” is not the
Platonic ascent up the “great chain of
being” from the low-level physical
world to the Platonic heaven of pure
abstract being, unalloyed by the impurities
of particularity, time, and space.
And it is not the secular successful
power struggle, the ability to get one’s
own way.
Freedom to be oneself comes
from standing on the Hand of God for
personal stability, and obeying the
Voice of God for one’s moral stability
-- the sources of our inner sacred marrige.
My moral direction cooperates
with my stability of being. The law is
made for us, not we for it. Going contrary
to the law is what undermines
176. For more on this theme, see Bibliography for
Biblical Inner Healing, especially chapter VII, Being
the Real “I”, and chapter VIII, Repentance, Forgiveness,
& the Healing of the Will.
our personal stability.
Our human nature without God
will, therefore, disintegrate. So obedience
to the law creates a material, not
only a moral, blessing, and disobedience
a material, not only a moral, brokenness.
Obeying the laws of God is one of
the best ways to love ourselves, to do
good for ourselves. Seek first His
Kingdom -- “Get here as fast as you
can,” says God, “Forget about earning
your way. That is irrelevant!
Build your love relationship with Me.”
So the existence of a human nature
which can be broken turns even
the punishments of God into loving
acts, training us to love ourselves by
cooperating with our own nature. The
laws of God are not morally arbitrary,
they really are for our good.
The “good” is that which enhances
life and relationship, the feminine,
mothering gift. The law is the
fathering, masculine loving of the
creature, mandating the order in which
persons not only survive best, but
flourish like a green bay tree.
So the laws of God enhance the
mothering gifts, and prepare us for a
life of service to God and one another.
When we obey God, then the world of
nature becomes a nurturing, sustaining
place for our human nature, where we
can each sit under our own fig tree. (177)
Heaven, then, is a relationship which
we build with God and one another,
not a place for which we can bargain
for entry -- righteousness and love, not
righteousness or love.
When heaven is seen as a relationship,
a kingdom of righteousness, i.e.,
a kingdom of persons loyal to God and
each other (the two Great Commandments),
then the question of earning
one’s way into heaven is rendered ir-

elevant. Far from any nonsense about
God making us “earn our way” into
His Kingdom, proving our worthiness,
we are commanded by God Himself to
get there with all haste.
But “getting there” means getting
into the right relationship with God,
not getting into a “place” for which we
can earn moral credit, or a “state of
existence” which we can create by immersing
ourselves in the correct gnosis.
Our relationship-building efforts,
so far from jeopardizing the sovereignty
of God or the saving work of
Christ, are necessary to both of them.
And that is why Jesus (and any rational
saint) rejoices, not frets, at our
obedience.
If our being is secure and our conscience
is educated and clear, then we
become free to do what God commands,
free to be obedient. The deficits
of Romans 7 are overcome, and
nothing in this freedom denigrates the
sovereignty or grace of God.
c. Obeying God....
There is no point to calling God
“sovereign” if we are mere robots under
the control of His mechanical
“grace”. Grace then becomes less
about ordered freedom and more
about control to protect the sovereignty
of God. Any sovereignty of
177. Mother nature is material nature.
The Latin ‘mater’, meaning ‘mother’, is cognate
to ‘materia’ meaning material. The “Great Mother”,
“Magna Mater” of the ancient world, was mother
earth or mother cosmos, the cosmos as an absolutely
self-sustaining power, both origin and end of
all things.
The mothering of the Biblical God, on the other
hand, is His work as creator of all things, notably
mother nature. God Himself alone is self-sufficient
and self-sustaining. Mother nature is a creature of
God, not the Great Mother of paganism.
See Bibliography for Yahweh or the Great
Mother? Gender roles in the Bible are understood
quite differently from those in the pagan world.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 75
God that needs protection from His
creatures is worth little. God is our
protector, not we His.
One might rightly wonder
whether protecting the sovereignty of
God was not more about protecting
the sovereignty of the clergy and of
the Church -- as suggested by the often
violent official rejection in the pre-
Reformation and Reformation eras of
translating the Bible into the local language,
and then later by a rejection of
scientific examination of Biblical faith
and of the Bible itself.
And, despite Paul’s very understandable
wrestling with the relation
between grace and works, there is no
evidence in the Gospels that Jesus
thought of man’s freedom as a threat
to His work. His mission was to build
in His disciples the two primary stabilities
of salvation, trust and obedience
-- so that they would follow Him
through His death and resurrection, all
in preparation for their coming ministry
made possible by their own spiritual
deaths and resurrections, as Paul
describes in Romans 6.
Jesus shows no problem with His
disciples in any degree successfully
obeying His commandments.
Luther, however, struggled to
keep the Crucifixion and Resurrection
from becoming irrelevant pieces of divine
drama. If man can save himself,
then the spectacle of the Son of God
hanging on a cross seemed to be pathetically
irrelevant. And if, on the
other hand, the meaning of the cross
entails the loss of human free will,
then the whole business loses all
moral and spiritual meaning.
Though Luther was on the right
track, he was ensnared in a false separation
of righteousness versus love,
i.e., loyalty to God. He apparently

76 The Law & the Grace of God
saw no necessary connection between
righteousness and love because righteousness
was understood merely as
conformity to a set of rules.
Luther, that is to say, did not understand
the wedding at which Jesus, a
whole eternity ago, had officiated between
the “right” and the “good”, between
law and love. (178)
The error was akin to the legalistic
perversion of Jewish law in which
the Torah as a set of directives and restrictions
was elevated, one might almost
say, above God and personal relations,
seeing man as made for the
law, not the law for man. (179) Yahweh
was even rumored to contemplate the
Torah in His spare time. Obedience to
the Torah was thus usable as leverage
to bargain with God.
It was also parallel with Hellenic
and other pagan cosmologies in which
the devotee would win his way into
heaven by performing whatever “righteous”
acts the god would demand, or
by an accumulation of merit which
would obligate the god to let him into
whatever heaven the god might control.
Since there was a separation between
the criterion of love (which lies
in the relationship with the god) and
the criterion of righteousness or obedience
(which lies in the Absolute Code,
etc.), there was also a separation between
a relation with the god and getting
to heaven. You might be righteous
without loving the god, or you
might love the god without being righteous.
178. See above, ‘The Wedding of the Good & the
Right - the Sacred Marriage” on page 20.
179. See Mark 2:27. Jesus was referring to the Sabbath,
but He was, surely, using the Sabbath to represent
the whole of the Law.
The mystery religions often separated
religion and ethics. Love was
not conceived as the real meaning of
righteousness, so there was no connection
between the three ideas of love,
righteousness, and loyalty. So long as
Luther would unwittingly accept the
common errors of paganism and legalism,
he could not help but run into the
contradiction.
G-2. ...Righteousness as Love
But if the connection is drawn between
love, righteousness, and loyalty,
then the question of doing God’s will
without the grace of God does not
arise. As we have said so often, it
makes no sense to talk about a right or
saving relationship with God in which
God is not participating. Righteousness
(loving and being loved by God
and neighbor) does not then become
the way to heaven, it is heaven.
To be sovereign in this view (as
per Part I above) is to be the person
who decides the reason for the existence
of another being. The answer to
the question, “Why do I exist?” can be
found only by having my Creator tell
me. He alone decides my purpose for
existence.
The question of whether He has
given freedom to some beings in the
creation so that they might choose not
to follow His purpose is irrelevant to
whether or not He is sovereign. He is
equally and fully sovereign no matter
how they choose.
If the creatures do not choose to
submit to the sovereignty of God, that
simply puts them in the wrong, it does
not change the status of God over
them. Sin is thus a refusal to be led by
the facts. God is a realist, and expects
us to be.

II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 77
What necessitates the reduction of
man’s free response in order to preserve
the dignity of God is the separation
of righteousness from the will of
God as though the standard of righteousness
were above Him. If the
standard for righteousness is something
above God, then there is no necessary
reason why man, given free
will, could not attain it by his own appeal
to that standard above God.
If, however, righteousness is loyalty
to the will of God, a relationship,
and thus directly dependent on God
for its meaning and fulfillment, then it
is evident that neither can we be righteous
without the word of God, as
Luther indeed insisted, nor can there
be any righteousness without our free
response, as Pelagius insisted. Grace
and freedom work as complementaries,
not contraries.
Heaven is a relationship of lived
trust and obedience: trust in the supply
from God of the Good, that which
supports personal wholeness -- which
is the necessary result of obedience to
His command to get into that relationship
with God asap. Again:
Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness,
and all these things will be yours
as well. Matthew 6:33
The commands of God are set up
to lead to both wholeness and holiness.
The law is made for man, not
man for the law. So equally are the
mothering gifts providing ontological
stability.
G-3. The Graciousness of God
Dr. Edmund Cherbonnier comments
in Hardness of Heart:
The Biblical alternative [to the Pelagian-
Augustinian dilemma] ... effectively establishes
the universality of sin without in any
way impugning the human nature which
God created. It does this at a single stroke
by putting to every man the simple question,
“Do you love God with all your heart
and soul and mind, and your neighbor as
yourself?” This question suffices to convict
the whole world. At this point, the Augustinian
might interject, “But suppose someone
answers, ‘Yes’. Then the whole argument
is wrecked.” If anyone does make such a
claim, then God knows whether he is telling
the truth. (180) [Fox emphasis.]
And if he were telling the truth,
Jesus would be the first to rejoice.
God is not dismayed at the prospect of
possibly meeting a person who has indeed
obeyed Him, and God needs no
protection from such a possibility.
His grace, His love, His sovereignty
are all intact. And the obedient one
would be the first to understand and
agree.
We have tragically misunderstood
the grace of God as being antithetical
to human freedom, causing incalculable
harm and pain to believers,
and to others who may have wanted to
be believers, thus giving God a reputation
for being irrational, arbitrary, and
mean. It is time to set the record
straight.
The cross is not a ledger book balancing
for the violation of an independent
code of righteousness. It is,
rather, the ultimate offering of forgiveness.
Luther writes in “The Babylonian
Captivity”:
Christ did not offer Himself to God the
Father, nor did He perform a good work on
180. P. 125.
Edmund La B. Cherbonnier began teaching as
the religion professor at Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut, during the middle 1950’s when I was a
student there. Cherbonnier was the inspiration for
my career in Christian apologetics. See especially
his Hardness of Heart, an excellent introduction to
the issues between Augustine and Pelagius. (Second
hand copies possibly available at www.amazon.com.)

78 The Law & the Grace of God
behalf of others, but He set this testament
before each of them... (181) [Fox emphasis.]
Christ, in other words, was not sacrificing
Himself to God the Father to
satisfy an “Absolute Righteousness”
above both of them, He sacrificed
Himself to us, to testify that He meant
it when He offered forgiveness and a
living, loving relationship.
Grace, on these terms, is not so
much that which renders a man agreeable
to God (as with Aquinas), nor the
sum of free will, revelation through
reason, with the examples of the Mosaic
Law and of Jesus (as with Pelagius).
And it is not a power overriding
our will. The grace of God becomes
His share in the relationship of
love for which He created us. It is His
offering of Himself, not some third
“substance” apart from the parties in
the relationship, with which one party
invests the others.
It would be more accurate to
speak of His graciousness rather than
His grace, it being an attribute of relationship
rather than a thing in itself.
The grace of God is God loving His
creatures, not an imputed moral credit
by which man is rendered agreeable to
God.
Grace is thus not something
which makes me do the will of God. It
is something which sets me free to do
the will of God -- God’s response to
Paul’s dilemma in Romans 7.
Every human being has an analogous
capacity for grace (graciousness),
that is, for offering himself in a
personal relationship. But alienated
from God, our graciousness is bound
in knots On the human level we see
the growth and the healing of souls
181. Luther, “Babylonian Captivity,” op. cit., p. 162.
My italics.
through human love. When a person
becomes aware of the presence of
God, we see an even more profound
growth and reforming. Psychotherapy
at its deepest and best is indeed soul
therapy. The gracefulness of God sets
us, His creatures, free to be graceful as
well. (182)
There is no heaven, no salvation
without God, not so much because we
are weak and He is strong (which is of
course true), but because the words
mean a relation with God. Just as
righteousness and salvation point to
the same thing, so too law and love,
and both because they depend for their
meaning on the purpose of God for
His creation. Wrote Thomas:
The entire purpose of the lawgiver is that
man may love God. (183)
God does not lose glory by our
free response, for God is glorified
when His will is done, and it is His
will that we freely respond. Indeed,
our free response is the glorifying of
God. A coerced response yields no
honor or glory.
As God created us so that He
might give His grace to us, so we are
created that we might give our grace
to Him and each other. Our giving requires
our trust and obedience to God,
but that is precisely what enlarges, not
constricts, our freedom.
The word ‘grace’ means free or
freely given, so in this mutual giving
and receiving, grace, and freedom --
far from being at odds -- are mutually
receptive. In our spiritual maturity,
grace is freely given and received on
both sides. Anything else is not
heaven.
182. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing.
183. Aquinas, Phil. Texts., op. cit. p. 357 (III Contra
Gentes, 111-16)

It is no accident that no religion
outside the Bible offers to deal with
people as free beings. No religion
outside the Bible can meet consistently
the problem of sin and the
meaning of life.
G-4. St. John &
William of Occam
Searching back again through history,
we stumble on confirmation for
our thesis from what may seem to be
two strangely incongruous corners of
Christendom: William of Occam and
the Gospel According to St. John.
In Occam we find agreement almost
point for point For example Frederick
Coppleston, in his History of
Philosophy series writes:
According to Ockham, the will is free to
will or not to will happiness, the last end; it
does not will it necessarily. This is clear in
regard to the last end considered in the concrete,
that is to say, God.
If the will is free to will or not will happiness,
it would scarcely be possible to analyze
the goodness of human acts in terms of
a relation to an end which is necessarily
desired. (184) [Fox emphasis.]
Thus he handles Aquinas’ problem.
And then:
A created free will is subject to moral
obligation. God is not, and cannot be,
under any obligation.... He [man] is morally
obliged to will what God orders him to will,
and not to will what God orders him not to
will. The ontological foundation of the moral
order is thus man’s dependence on God, as
creature on Creator; and the content of the
moral law is supplied by the divine precept.
(185)
Thus he handles Luther’s problem.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 79
Of the New Testament writings,
John is the least unsettled by conflict
between law and love. The problem
does not arise for John.
Here is none of the Pauline tussle
with legalism and the Judaizing controversy.
His regret was the failure to
receive the person of Jesus, not that
Jewish Christians wanted to import
the Mosaic Law. Around this Person,
without whom not anything was made,
John understood ethics to be founded.
Wrong is the rejection of Jesus, and
the right is belief in and loyalty to
Him.
This, I submit, is the reason why
John did not experience the Augustinian-Pelagian
conflict between love
and law, or between grace and freedom.
John saw that heaven is a relationship
with God in Christ, nothing
more, nothing less. Hell is being in
darkness, apart from God in Christ --
illustrated by C. S. Lewis in The Great
Divorce.
Its being pleasant or not is relevant
only as a side issue, and as the
by-product of the relationship, not a
criterion for rightness.
Thus there is no legalism in John
because man judges himself by his response
to the Christ. (186)
And this is the judgment, that the light
has come into the world, and men loved
darkness rather than light, because their
deeds were evil. For everyone who does
evil hates the light, and does not come to
the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.
John 3:19 ff.
Rejection of Christ is ipso facto
self-condemnation, cutting oneself off
from the only possible source of life
184. Frederick Coppleston, A History of Philosophy
(Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1959), vol. III,
p. 102 (italics mine).
185. Ibid. p. 103.
186. See C. H. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth
Gospel, Cambridge University Press1958. Esp. II-
7, Light, Glory, & Judgement; and III-B, The Book of
Signs.

80 The Law & the Grace of God
and meaning.
John’s magnificent insight into
the nature of judgement, heaven, and
hell frees him from the Pelagian conflict,
for all law is in terms of this personal
relationship. The moral law of
the universe is built into the nature of
personal relations. One cannot “have”
heaven and not be righteous, for the
two are synonymous. To be in a mutual
love relation with God is to be in
heaven; to love God is to be righteous
-- which is precisely what God has
commanded.
G-5. Two Judgements -
by the Good & by the Right
There might be a lingering suspicion
in the minds of a few, however,
that something is lacking, that the
judgement of God is not just my
judgement upon myself through my
choosing against God.
And indeed so.
The distinction between the
“good” and the “right” creates a corresponding
distinction between a judgement
by the good and a judgement by
the right -- as illustrated above by the
analogy of the car manual. (187)
The judgement by the right is the
moral judgement of the law of God,
our purpose for existence, which
stands in commandment over us.
The judgement by the good is the
pragmatic and practical judgement we
bring upon ourselves by self-destructive
sinful behavior -- or by healthy,
lawful behavior. We see this in Romans
1:18 ff., in which St. Paul describes
the effects of subverting the
truth. There are unavoidable collateral
damages to our souls.
187. Go to ‘Righteousness vs. Love...” on page 72
But, by design of God, the two
judgements work hand in hand.
When we clean our closets of
items for which we have no longer any
use, which, so far as we are concerned,
have lost their reason for existence, we
throw them away. When we disobey
our purpose for existence persistently
and deliberately, like the items in our
closet, we erode our own reason to exist.
The city dump outside Jerusalem
was called Gehenna. It was kept burning
to lower danger of pestilence. Its
ever-burning fires no doubt helped inspire
the adoption of the name Gehenna
for hell, which is -- the place
where God dumps things which have
lost their reason for existence and can
no longer be repaired.
God has chosen love of God and
love of neighbor as the two highest
laws of the whole cosmos, making
love the ultimate reason for any and
all things existing. When we reject
love as our own reason for doing
things, we thus compromise our own
reason for existence.
That is the moral judgement by
God.
But, since heaven is defined by
the two laws of love, when we refuse
love as our own ultimate desire, we
consign ourselves to life without God.
But life without God means life
without our reason for existence, not
only without our source of existence.
The two are inextricably tied together.
We get our reason for existence
from our source.
The Biblical heaven is a relationship,
not a place into which we can
earn our way, and not an environment
which is “heavenly” by virtue of providing
pleasant surroundings. Heaven

II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 81
as a place means salvation by change
of environment. We see heaven as a
very, very nice place into which we
want God admit us. Relationships, on
the other hand, are something we build
with God and other persons.
To put it another way, doing it
God’s way, we make other persons the
main focus for our environment, not
landscapes, houses, gardens -- as nice
as these can be. If our relationships
are fractured or dangerous, then gardens,
nice homes, and full bank accounts
are not sufficient to make
things heavenly.
C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce,
portrays how we go about choosing
our way to hell and its isolation. We
can build hell rather than heaven.
But hell is the defeat and final destruction
of selfhood. Heaven is the
ultimate success and fulfillment of
selfhood. (188)
Sin, deliberate rejection of the
will of God, and thus of our reason for
existence, leads therefore not only to
the judgement of God, but also to our
own self-judgement, self-defeat, and
self-destruction. We judge the “stupidity”
of a behavior generally on the
level of its being self-defeating and
self-destructive.
The wedding of the right to the
good, of law to grace, the making of
love the highest and universal obligation,
means that sin is not only wrong,
it is the most monumentally stupid
kind of behavior in which we can engage.
We are doing that which is most
unloving -- toward our own selves.
Again, God has designed His law
for our benefit. “The Sabbath is made
for man, not man for the Sabbath”,
188. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing on
the goodness of selfhood.
said Jesus (Mark 2:27). Laws have
importance only to help persons. The
laws are an act of God’s love, not of a
control-minded Potentate-in-the-
Sky. (189) The laws of God are designed
specifically to raise us up
strong, capable, wise, and free persons
-- pointing to the best of all possible
worlds. (190)
Jesus’ confrontations with the
Jewish leaders centered about this
truth. The leaders were interpreting
the law for their personal benefit, not
that of the people. Yet it led not only
to the hurt of the people, but to their
own self-destruction. Their sin, like
all sin, was cutting them off from the
source of their existence, and was thus
suicidal.
The “worldly”, therefore, do not
love themselves too much, but too, too
little.
We are commanded to love one
another just like we love ourselves.
The most loving thing we can do for
ourselves is to hasten to put ourselves
under the law and grace of God with
all possible speed -- that best of all
possible worlds. That is not because
God will then stop beating up on us
(He isn’t), but because we will stop
beating up on ourselves and one another
(we are).
One asks, If the law is so wonderful,
why has there been such a history
of legalism and misuse of the law?
189. This is a primary distinction between Biblical
religion and Islam. God, in Islam, does not hold
Himself accountable to either truth or righteousness,
which makes a reasonable moral and spiritual
relationship with God impossible.
For information on this, go to:
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/33Rlg/Islm/
00Islam.htm#Papal_Challenge_to_Islam_
190. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing on
how the moral law of God leads to the most free
and healthy of all persons.

82 The Law & the Grace of God
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,
and a light unto my path...” (Psalm
119:105 KJV)
“...and many nations shall come,
and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the
mountain of the LORD, to the house of
the God of Jacob; that he may teach
us his ways and we may walk in his
paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth
the law, and the word of the LORD
from Jerusalem.” (Micah 4:2)
H. Original Sin & Original Goodness
The ready answer is that law is about
control, and that control-minded persons
abound and head instinctively to
commandeer systems of law, whether
political or religious, for their own
compulsive and controlling ends. We
beat up on each other.
In any event, it must have been
glimpses of the goodness and graciousness
of the law of God, that led
psalmists and prophets to ponder:
H-1. What is Original Sin?
Perhaps the most contentious issue
in the Pelagianism discussion has
been the reality (or not) of original sin,
understood as the sinful state and condition
in which men are born. We are
said to inherit the state of sin and guilt
generated by the sins of Adam and
Eve. (191)
The contentiousness arises in the
consequences of original sin for free
will and the effect of that on our relation
with God.
It is “original” because it derives
from Adam’s sin at the chronological
beginning of the human race, it is
present in every person from birth, and
it is the root out of which springs all
other sin.
Man is thus considered (by some)
totally depraved with an innate sin nature,
irradicable without the grace of
God.
The depravity is not as total as it
sounds, however. It does not mean
that we can do no good things. We are
191. On original sin, see also above, Part I-C-11,
‘The Nature of Original Sin &
of the Ultimate Choice” on page 26
still capable of appreciating and doing
some goods.
It means, usually, that the corruption
of sin extends to all men, and to
all parts of all men, so that there is
nothing within the natural man that
can give him merit in the sight of God.
Everything is at least tainted, if not totally
corrupt.
The “earning of merit” is the key
issue.
It is the impression of this author
that the notion of original sin, if not
first generated by the Pelagian debate,
was at least hardened into indisposable
doctrine by the petrifying process
of the position-defending which over
the centuries ensued. It seemed to
those defending the sovereignty of
God against free will that such sovereignty
was at risk without that condemnation
of human nature and freedom,
making us incapable of obeying
the law. Being able to obey the law
seemed to enable man to earn his own
way into heaven by obligating God --
an unacceptable situation.
But if the fundamental points of
this essay are true, then we need to reconsider
the matter because none of

those presuppositions can be held
valid.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 83
H-2. The Case Against
Original Sin
Objectors to original sin assert
that there is no Biblical evidence to
support a notion of total depravity or
inherited guilt.
The primary objection lodged
against original sin is rejection of the
notion that the guilt of the original
party or parties can be imputed to
downstream parties which had no
sharing in the original sinful act -- imputed
simply on the grounds of their
being biological descendents of the
original party or parties. The guilt is
considered to be carried through generations,
like a genetic code.
The case against original sin as interpreted
above rests on several objections.
(1) Because of its obvious appearance
of being arbitrary and unfair,
there is probably no other example of
such an imputation of guilt to future
generations, not in legal theory nor in
moral code still commonly being used.
(2) The principle that a person is
innocent until proven guilty is a Biblical
principle. Two or three eye witnesses
were required in the Torah for
conviction of a crime. (192) That meant
that empirical evidence was required.
(3) Any reasonable interpretation
of ‘witness’ requires an empirical
gathering of the facts, not an apriori
conviction by definition of one’s being
or nature as fallen.
(4) There is reason to believe that
the theory for the imputation of original
sin was driven by a mistaken fear
that the employment of one’s free will
could render the grace of God irrelevant
to one’s salvation by earning
one’s merit from God, obligating Him
by one’s good deeds to allow one into
heaven. (193)
Sin is therefore imputed to natural
man, as noted above, “so that there is
nothing within the natural man that
can give him merit in the sight of
God.”
The “so that” is important. It implies
that the imputation of sin is made
“so that” man will not be able to work
his way out of being a sinner and thus
earn himself merit -- thereby threatening
the usefulness of the grace of God.
That is terrible logic, making it
look like we need to tailor our atonement
theology to protect God from our
God-given free will. Original sin is
then constructed to impede man -- in
order to protect God. So the legitimate
question as to whether original
sin is real is trumped by our theological
need to protect God from a particular
explanation of the atonement.
The common sense course would
be rather to ask whether an atonement
theory with such consequences might
not be itself flawed. There is in fact no
possible way in which the use of our
free will to successfully obey the law
of God could obligate God or challenge
His sovereignty.
As our foregoing pages have labored
to show, there is nothing in a
rightly understood relation between
law, grace, free will, and the sovereignty
of God which suggests that my
successful doing of the will of God
purchases me anything at all from
God. God owes me no more after I
192. See Deuteronomy 17:6-7, 19:15 193. See below,

84 The Law & the Grace of God
have obeyed Him than before.
If that be true, then the supposed
need to shackle our free will does not
exist. God intelligently designed our
free will with purpose aforethought,
and needs no protection from His free
will creatures. It is He who protects
us. The work of Christ to produce our
salvation is not in the least hindered
by the use of that gift which God
clearly gave us so that we could be
obedient to Him. Obedience means
nothing at all if we are not capable of a
free will rejection of that obedience.
My “yes” means nothing if I am not
able to say “no”. That is why there
were two trees in the Garden of Eden,
one approved for eating, the other forbidden.
Adam and Eve had a real
choice before them.
Even small children learn that
principle during their “terrible two’s”,
when they often become fascinated at
their ability to say “no” to those Godlike
figures, their parents. They are
learning the difference between “yes”
and “no”, which is essential to their
discovery of freewill. Again, the
“yes” of obedience is of no meaning
unless they are able to say “no”.
The logical but absurd consequence
of the common view of original
sin is that, if our use of free will to
be obedient undermines God, we do
better to disobey rather than obey
God.
One does not, in our fallen world,
typically think of the law as a gift of
grace, but rather as an unwelcome intrusion
and imposition. Yet some Hebrews
thought of the law as indeed
grace: “Thy word is a lamp unto my
feet, and a light unto my path...,” and
much of the rest of Psalm 119.
The law was meant right from the
beginning to be a gift to us, not an ungraceful
imposition. It seems an imposition
only if we have been badly
taught and do not understand it, or if
we have a rebellious spirit and do not
want it.
All that would have been abundantly
clear had we Christians understood
the implications of Jesus appointing
the two Great Commandments,
making love the highest law of
the universe. The law of God is about
good, life-giving relationships, not
about artificial imposition of will. It is
about -- the best of all possible worlds.
H-3. Natural Man...
The phrase “natural man” has
been a culprit in this tragic misunderstanding
of our Fall. “Natural man”
has come to mean, not man as he is by
Godly nature, but man as he is by
fallen nature. The effect of that has
been to plant the assumption that we
are now inherently fallen, and thus
fosters the excuse that “I can’t help
it....” Or, “the devil made me do it...”
And even deeper than that, the fear
that I will never be pleasing to God.
But the word ‘natural’ also means
‘normal’, or ‘the way it is supposed to
be’ -- as in “the natural way of riding a
bicycle...” ‘Natural’ does not, in such
a statement, imply ‘fallen’ -- just the
opposite. My nature may be fallen,
but that does not mean that my fallenness
is natural. We are damaged
goods, and that is not natural.
We would have done much better
to understand “natural” man as Godly
man, the way things are supposed to
be. Fallen man, then, is unnatural
man, an unnatural warping, an unnatural
brokenness.
The natural way of being human
is to do it God’s way, the way con-

forming to our reason for existence.
Any deviation from that is a fall -- an
error or a rebellion, and thus an unnatural
state of affairs -- from which we
need to be saved.
H-4. ...& Original Goodness
The above doctrine of original sin
has no direct confirmation in Scripture,
and is contrary to the Hebraic
healthy way of thinking about human
life. In Christian thinking, it has long
overshadowed original goodness or
original innocence -- which have clear
and abundant testimony, right in the
creation story. The refrain as God creates
the cosmos, five times, is “and
God saw that it was good.” Then, after
creating man and surveying it all,
“and God saw that it was very good.”
The undergirding theological
principle is that God creates only good
things. God does not create things
which naturally self-destruct, or which
war against other parts of His creation
-- a principle reaffirmed in passages as
the Peaceable Kingdom described in
Isaiah 11:1-9: “The wolf shall dwell
with the lamb, and the leopard shall
lie down with the kid...”
If any person exists, God is his
creator. We can continue to exist only
as God continues to hold us in existence.
So at the root of my being, my
original goodness continues, because,
like it or not, I rest ontologically on
the Hand of God. There will always
be that deep fundamental part of me
which is the foundation of all the rest
of my being, and which is always
good. It is that foundation which allows
us to say, despite our bad behavior,
attitudes, or relationships, “It is always
a good idea for me to be myself.
It is always a good thing for Earle Fox
to be Earle Fox. It is always a good
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 85
idea for you to be yourself.”
My behavior may not be good,
but my being is. The underlying foundation
of goodness and rightness is
what makes salvation possible. Original
sin, whatever it may be, cannot
outrun the potential to recover which
is necessarily embedded in original
goodness.
The goodness of my being can
(and will) end only if and when I have
so destroyed my relationship with God
that the spark of life in me no longer
exists. I then no longer have a spark
of free will which can repent. The
Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis describes
this dramatically.
Or in John 3:19:
And this is the judgement, that the Light
has come into the world, and men loved
darkness rather than light because their
deeds were evil.
Every choice I make moves me
either toward God or away from Him.
If I choose consistently against God, I
reach a point of distance from Him, a
point of no return where that shrinking,
waning spark of life can no longer
be sustained.
And then, as Lewis describes, a
grumbler is no longer a grumbler, he
has become only a spastic grumble.
There is no life left. No forgiveness is
possible because the intended recipient
has self-destructed. No repair is
possible. The goodness of God holding
me in existence has been nullified,
rendered of no effect. I, as a living being,
am no longer an effect of the causality
of God, which is the same as
saying that I have lost my personhood,
my individuality, my free will.
And then what is left is headed for
Gehenna, the cosmic dump where
things are deposited which, being unrepentant,
have lost their reason for

86 The Law & the Grace of God
194. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing.
195. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing,
especially chapter VIII, Repentance, Forgiveness,
& the Healing of the Will.
being.
And the fires are kept burning to
prevent pestilence.
But so long as there is life within,
so long as there is a spark of free will,
so long as I have not cut myself off irretrievably
from God, there is a way
back. I can repent, have my damaged
original goodness restored, and my
original innocence blossom again. A
renewed creature in Christ.
That return to both the possibility
and the reality of graceful living is
what the Biblical Good News is about.
As any competent Christian counselor
knows, there is as much healing
of brokenness needed as there is sin to
be forgiven. There are moral issues
and there are healing issues. The two
work together, not as contraries, as so
often imagined. (194) Therapy requires
repentance for its own helpfulness. (195)
In all of this, there is no possible
successful assault on the sovereignty
of God, there is no successful end-run
around His grace into the Kingdom,
and our free will needs in no way to be
artificially inhibited to protect God.
Our free will is inhibited only by our
own persistent rejection of Him Who
Is, by whose Hand we are sustained in
life.
Sin is suicide. Body, soul, and
spirit.
Original goodness, then, is not a
way of ignoring sin, or making repentance
unnecessary. My original goodness
calls me to repentance, not selfrighteousness.
And healing of our
brokenness is likewise not “therapeutic”
in some pernicious way sidetracking
sin from being dealt with. Repentance
and healing require and support
each other.
H-5. Jesus “becoming sin” --
How Relationship Transforms
Substitutionary Atonement
a. The Collapse of Free Will
St. Paul reflects (2 Cor. 5:21) that,
For our sake he made him to be sin who
knew no sin, so that in him we might
become the righteousness of God.
That is often taken literally, as
though Jesus Himself had become sinful
so that He could die for us such
that His death would pay for our sins.
But Jesus did not (indeed, could not)
Himself be sin. God logically cannot
become sinful because sin is the contradiction
of what He desires for the
world. Nevertheless, the Father was
thought to have to impute sin to Jesus
so that Jesus could pay the price for
us, meaning that the righteousness
taken from Jesus would be imputed to
us.
In this model of substitutionary
atonement, one can get a picture of the
Father desiring to be merciful to His
sinful creatures, but is prevented by an
obligation to administer justice. The
Father struggles to unite justice with
mercy, but cannot. So the Son offers
(or is asked by the Father) to sacrifice
Himself in the place of the sinful
world, thus satisfying the requirement
for justice.
But such a view, as already noted,
requires that God would Himself be
subject to a moral law higher than His
own will. That, however, is not consistent
with the Biblical doctrine of
creation and moral order. The highest
law is the will of God, not a yet higher
set of principles of justice to which the

II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 87
will of God is obligated.
It is replied by some that the law
was not over and above God, it was in
His nature. So, God cannot violate
justice because justice is inherently in
the being of God.
But doing justly is an act of will,
not an act programmed into one’s being.
That is the nature of all morality.
If a behavior emanates from one‘s being,
then it is pre-programmed, like
the falling of a rock. A rock cannot
rightly be praised for falling because it
cannot do otherwise. There is no
praiseworthy effort or decision on the
part of the rock. The attribution of an
inherent and un-violatable justice reflects
the abstract Hellenic way of understanding
God, not the Hebraic father
God of decision-making.
Check Hebrew ‘righteousness’
And, as noted, the Hebrew word
for ‘righteousness’ means ‘the victory
of God’s will’, and the word for ‘father’
(‘ab’, as in Ab-raham) means ‘he
who decides’. The Father is He who
decides the difference between right
and wrong, i.e., who decides our purpose
for existence.
Just as the freedom of the creature
is denied by an alleged irresistible
“power” of grace, so is the will of God
Himself frozen. God is denied the capacity
to be graceful. Both God and
man end up with a diminished, if not
extinguished, free will.
The meaning of ‘grace’ is violated
when grace becomes an irresistible
force, a less-than-intentional activity.
Grace is a gift freely chosen -- for both
giver and recipient.
b. Grace & Relationship
The notion of substitutionary
atonement has roots in the Old Testament
temple sacrificial system, notably
the “scape goat” sent off into the
desert carrying the sins of the people
(this would cover only accidental, unintended
sin, not deliberate sin, “with
a high hand”). (196) This substitution
would naturally have been seen by
first century Jewish Christians as carried
out by Jesus in the crucifixion.
But just as God had drawn the Hebrews
out of the pagan way of dealing
with their gods, He was now, in the
New Testament, perfecting a notion
already at work in the Old Testament,
especially among the prophets, that
salvation is about personal relationship,
not about legal tit-for-tat moral
retribution. The prophets tell us that
God was fed up with their sacrifices
because those sacrifices did not reflect
an honest repentance for their sins
against either God or their fellow Hebrews.
They were bartering with God,
not serving Him.
So then, salvation was coming to
be seen, not as only our having now a
more perfect high priest, as in Hebrews
9:11 ff., but also by our being
built into a living relationship with
God by that high priest, as in I Peter
2:4 ff. We are saved by having our
two fundamental stabilities restored --
ontological and moral. (197) The good
in us (our human nature) which was
made ineffective and incompetent by
our separation from God could be
healed (made whole again) and forgiven
-- by the grace (freely decided,
not pre-programmed) of God.
196. See Numbers 15:27-31.
197. See Preface, ‘The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”” on page xxiv

88 The Law & the Grace of God
c. The Pelagian Problem (again)
The turn away from salvation by
relationship back to a legalism seems
to have gotten entrenched as the Pelagian-Augustinian
debate on atonement
and free will gradually grew more defensive,
fractious, and “position-defending”
rather than truth-seeking --
from which grew the mistaken idea
that Jesus was substituting for us by
paying our moral debt on the heavenly
ledger books. Our sin was imputed to
Jesus so that His righteousness could
be imputed to us.
But the artificial white-washing of
such an arrangement speaks against it,
not least because it so often gets in the
way of understanding the healing necessary
for atonement.
And, free will, which is of the essence
of both the Biblical worldview
and of the Good News, was subverted
to protect God from the effects understood
to come from our free will. The
use of our free will to accept the offer
of forgiveness was taken to be a pernicious
use of free will, because then we
could say that we “did something” to
attain salvation.
If I had fallen into a deep pit and
then, because someone lowered a ladder
or rope, I climbed out of the pit, it
would be foolish and silly for me to
say that I had saved myself on the
grounds of the “works” of my climbing.
Rather I would thank the fellow
who lowered my means of salvation.
Just so, freely choosing to accept the
offer of salvation from God in no way
diminishes, demeans, or insults the
sovereignty and/or grace of God.
So the debt being paid was not of
that ledger book sort. God focuses on
where we are going, not where we
have been. Ezekiel (chapter 18) describes
the attitude of God He who
repents of his sin will live, and he who
does not repent will die. There is no
heavenly ledger book price to be paid.
God is not interested in payment, but
in restored relationship.
The offense was to the will of
God, not to a standard above God, the
honor of which God was obligated to
defend. God had Himself already,
from ancient of days, decided on the
law of love as that highest standard --
which seeks the good of the creature
as the second highest obligation.
But it took centuries of teaching
and conflict between God and His
people to draw them finally by the Incarnation
and coming of the Holy
Spirit so they could give up their old
ways and see the glory of God manifested
in the new way -- new to the
fallen race, not to God.
God obligates Himself to that
standard, no one and nothing else
other than God does or can obligate
God to let us into heaven. That means
that He is not bound by a tit-for-tat
sin-punishment regime.
Therefore God is satisfying justice,
but with mercy, i.e., by His own
chosen standard of justice, namely
love. God does the good, that which is
life and relationship enhancing for His
sinful neighbors. God is already obeying
the commandments which He
gives to His creatures.
The moral need for a retribution,
substitutionary or otherwise, never
rises because the Good and the Right
are wed.
And, in all of that, God is not
pampering the sinner, letting him “get
away with” his sin, God is requiring
the sinner to go through all the repentance,
relationship restoration and
building required by Kingdom reality.
That process is helpful, restor-

ative, and disciplinary in a way that
substitutionary debt paying cannot be.
God is interested in changed hearts,
not in balancing a ledger-book.
d. Consequences Inherited,
not Guilt
Jesus “became sin” in the sense
that He assumed, not the guilt of our
sin, but the consequences of our sin,
the consequences, not of paying a
debt, but of rebuilding the relationship
between God and the sinner, the consequences
of drawing us out of our
sinful behavior, patterns, and addictions
-- so that we could repent,
change our behavior, and thus become
indeed obedient and righteous in our
behavior before God.
The rebuilding of our relationship
with Him costs Him the crucifixion.
Our reasoning together with Him
leads to the crucifixion. As Paul describes,
Romans 8 is the answer to Romans
7. We live by grace, freely
given love and acceptance built on
honest repentance.
We are incapable of doing this for
ourselves. But in this process, our
broken wills are not only forgiven,
they are healed and redirected so that
they become able to repent and be
obedient. Freedom of will is restored
to our wills in bondage to sin. (198) The
law of God restores our innocence by
condemning and converting our bad
behavior, not by condemning our being,
our personhood. Our personhood
we ourselves destroy by the trashing
of our relationship with our Creator
198. On the issue of the goodness of the “self” and
of the will, see Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing,
a comprehensive study of Biblical psychology,
the nature of man as created by God. See especially
chapter VII, “Being the Real ‘I’”, and chapter
VIII, “Repentance, Forgiveness, & the Healing of
the Will”.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 89
and Sovereign -- the giver and ruler of
our being and behavior. The aim of
God is to save our personhood by destroying
our bad behavior.
Christians are often challenged as
to how an all-good, all-powerful, and
all-knowing God can be really good --
given the enormous pain we see and
often feel. A fundamental part of the
answer to that challenge is that -- in
order to make free will relationships
real, not pretend, we must live in a
universe where we are both free and
vulnerable to each other. We really
can and do hurt and damage each
other.
But it is also a universe in which
love can conquer those tragedies and
crimes against God and one another.
It is a cosmos in which God does not
isolate Himself from vulnerability, as
seems inherent to pagan philosophy.
And it is a universe in which God
can and will rescue any one of us from
the guilt and damage we cause -- if we
agree. God Himself remains vulnerable
to our sin and silliness. That is the
price He pays to each and every one of
us in our walk with Him.
Our free will is no threat to God, it
is drawn by the process of salvation to
being a ally of God, indeed, as Paul
says, the righteousness of God. The
glory of God is expressed most fully
in the free response of His creatures.
As Bishop Irenaeus said, The glory of
God is man fully alive -- not man
cringing. If one listens carefully, one
might hear God saying in certain circumstances,
“My children do not
cringe before Me. Stand up straight!
That’s an order!”
One can see that these traditional
models and analogies for understanding
atonement have emerged slowly
and often painfully over time as we

90 The Law & the Grace of God
struggled to understand the mysteries
of Biblical faith, and have been very
useful. But also they can be replaced
by more adequate models which do
not embody the anomalies of the prior
model.
If accepted, the model promoted
in these pages may one day likewise
be replaced by a yet more adequate
model. But, as it stands, it appear to
this writer to be logically consistent
and easily applicable to one’s spiritual
life without anomaly. I do not know
of any other currently given model
which can do that.
What must be preserved is the objectivity
of moral commandment and
our responsibility before God, the reality
of a final judgement, and the
building of a Kingdom through the
atonement process. The Biblical
worldview and Good News establish
all this on a freewill covenant.
e. What Price Paid? & to Whom?
Twice in the temptations, Satan
sneers at Jesus, “If you are the Son of
God...,” trying to tempt Jesus to
“prove Himself” (turn stones to bread,
jump off the Temple).
After the third temptation, Satan
departs “for a more opportune time” --
which arrives as Jesus is dying on the
cross. Passers by cast the same sneer,
“If you are the Son of God, come
down from the cross...” “Prove yourself.”
As noted, Bertrand Russell apparently
made a similar comment when
asked what he would reply if he woke
after death and met God who asked,
“Why did you not believe in me?” (199)
Russell replied to that he would tell
199. Go to section ‘We are Responsible
for Knowing...” on page 70.
God that God had not provided sufficient
evidence. “You did not prove
yourself.”
That request for evidence and
proof can be made in two different
ways, as a sneer, or as legitimately.
We often ask for such proof when
we are about to make an investment in
the character of someone, such as
loaning money, or entering into a vulnerable
situation. Many relationships
fail precisely because that question
was never raised. Gullibility is not
part of holiness.
In other words, God knows that
we must and should ask that question,
even of Himself, especially of Himself.
There are false gods roaming
around, some, like Satan, seeking
whom they may devour.
St. John tells us to “test the spirits
to see if they are of God” (I John 4:1).
So, asking for reliable evidence is a
practice which God respects. He
spends a great deal of time proving to
His people who He is, that He can
handle any need which they might
have, and that He is more than willing
to do so.
The evidence is there, but like
Russell, we complain and whine because
we do not want to risk the openness
and vulnerability.
Suppose I had badly offended a
very close friend who then wanted
nothing more to do with me, but that I
decided that I would do whatever it
took to restore that relationship. What
price would I have to pay? I would
have to pay the price of being vulnerable,
penitent, honest, and whatever
else it might take to convince him that
I was sincere. He might never believe
me, but I might nevertheless continue
until my (or his) dying day to restore
that relationship.

God did not offend us, we offended
Him, but in His grace and
mercy, He has committed Himself to
doing whatever needs to be done to
draw us back to Himself. God knows
that we need Him and is more committed
to our welfare than we are.
God has long anticipated and accepts
the challenge to prove Himself
to us. It is called “revelation”. It cost
Him the crucifixion. The price is, in
other words, God being absolutely
open, honest, and loving toward us,
living in the light with us as we continue
to reply out of darkness.
So, it is not only Satan and the
Pharisees who fling the challenge. We
all do. And we all should. It is a challenge
which God respects because He
knows that, in the midst of our fallen
moral and spiritual chaos, we need
reasons to believe Him.
What is the price Jesus paid?
Whatever it takes to bring us back to
Him in an honest and spiritually credible
way. Who demands the price? We
do.
However, getting to know God requires
of us that we open ourselves
also to vulnerability -- just as the disciples
did with Jesus. Relationship is
a two-way event, into which both parties
must learn to “live in the light”.
Living in the light with God and one
another is heaven.
But again as John 3:19 tells us,
“... and men loved darkness rather
than light because their deeds were
evil.”
Judgement and restoration by
light forces us to a choice -- to move
either toward or away from the Light.
There is no neutral ground, it is, in the
end, all or nothing.
That is the salvation price Jesus is
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 91
willing to pay for each of us. The
question is whether we are willing to
pay our part of that price -- repentance
and faithfulness. We are asking spiritual
and intellectual integrity of God.
He is asking that of us. That is the nature
of personal relationship and therefore
of the Kingdom.
Relationship building is costly, on
all sides. It will cost us the crucifixion
of our old self.
In all of that, God is not obligated
to us, we are obligated to Him. But
His mercy extends beyond any
thought of obligation to us. He loves
us. (200)
H-6. The Real Original Sin
& Original Goodness
There is, despite all said above, a
real original sin. But its origin is not
temporal, it is causal and metaphysical.
Original sin is that root sin which
attacks and erodes the Imago Dei in
us, working upward from the metaphysical
bottom (rather than from the
temporal past) to erode our original
goodness.
If the Image of God, which is the
bedrock of the Biblical worldview, is
composed of the creating power of
God and the sovereignty of God, and
if we are made in that image, male and
female, then it follows that any erosion
of ourselves in that Image will be
a fundamental erosion of our own nature.
And, just so, the two primary human
casualties of the Fall are our loss
200. For a series of sermons on atonement, dealing
with these issues, go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/12The/Xr/
00Xr.htm#SALVATION_SERIES

92 The Law & the Grace of God
of those two stabilities, the power of
being and the authority for the purpose
and direction of life, for our doing.
Our sins distance us from God so that
we can neither perceive nor experience
clearly His nature as loving Creator
and Sovereign.
And so we can no longer clearly
manifest those characteristics in or
among ourselves. Proudly trapped in
our own vulnerability and contingency,
we vainly assert our independency
and self-sufficiency. And die.
We have sufficient of our own empirically
evident personal guilt with
which to deal -- without apriori and artificially
adding more. We do not
need more sin or guilt tacked on all the
way from Adam and Eve to be in trouble
today with God and on the way to
hell.
What we inherit from the historical
fall is not guilt, but the collateral
damage, the brokenness and ignorance
which disable us from trust and obedience
to God. We are born and brought
into an already fallen world by already
fallen parents who cannot fully or
rightly manifest to us that Image of
God, the grace and the law of God --
which is their parental assignment.
Our expectations and capabilities
are warped and cut short by inadequate
and destructive parenting. We
learn to be defensive rather than open
and free. We learn not to trust, and
rather to suspect, if not refuse, obedience.
We are eroded by chronic brokenness
and impenetrable ignorance
which cannot be repaired other than
by God Himself, the true Parent. We
must be reparented, born again.
So we each have our own personal
original sin, our betrayal of our
ontological relation with God as creature,
and our betrayal of our moral relationship
to God as Sovereign. Some
of that is dumped by others upon us,
but we are in all cases responsible for
our cooperation with truth-seeking,
the pursuit of which leads to a God
who is already seeking us. Salvation
then means the restoration of those
two stabilities in the Imago Dei.
There is no possible evasion of
our own repentance, we must take personal
responsibility for our own actions,
reactions, and attitudes to cooperate
with the grace God is bestowing
upon us to help create that relationship
which is heaven.
And in that cooperation, there is
no “earning” of merit, no putting of
God in our debt, only the acceptance
of that which is offered, a renewed
chance and opportunity for life.
Life is, again, the choice to build
heaven with God, or to build hell all
by ourselves. It is all about relationship.
The law of God is not the enemy
of our freedom, it is a necessary stable
guarantee of our freedom. The offering
from God is always and at every
point -- sheer, amazing grace, the acceptance
of which always in the end
leads to the fullness of our freedom to
be real persons. The modern Western
world talks much about personal “authenticity”,
but does not know the way
there.
Our descent into the fallen world
does nothing at all to harm or destroy
God. God will be God with or without
us. We are the recipients of the harm,
our very being starts to erode along
with our moral compass.
But God is there, still holding us
in existence. Whether we know it or
not, or like it or not, we still in fact rest
on the Hand of God. There is no way
to get past or walk off the Hand of
God. The Hand of God is at the bot-

II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 93
tom of all things. (201) As we say, you
cannot fall off the floor.
That means that no matter how
fallen we are, so long as we exist, we
are still creatures of God, and that
there is still an ontological connection
between us and God -- no matter that
we have lost any perception of it. We
then live in a delusory world, in denial
of the most basic reality of our lives --
that we are still creatures of God.
That means that, no matter how
badly I behave, it is always a good
idea for me to be myself. My being is
good, regardless of my behavior.
There is a connection to which I can
return. There is a point remaining of
my original goodness.
That is what makes salvation possible.
I can renounce my original sin,
and embrace again my original goodness.
The ministry of Jesus is to bring
us to that decision. Until I pass that
point of no return where I have destroyed
my free will, where I have become
a spasm, no longer a person who
can choose to turn around -- I can still
repent, and return to my original
source and thus to my original goodness
and innocence. (202)
201. The metaphysical reality of this assertion is
described in Personality, Empiricism, & God, especially
chapter II. See Bibliography.
I. Trust & Trustworthiness
I-1. Can God be Trusted?
Everything we have discussed so
far, the nature of God as both Creator
and Sovereign, and the resolution of
the Pelagian conflict, will tell us
whether God can be trusted with our
welfare, whether God is both omnipotent
and loving. If God is not omnipotent,
then His ability is questionable.
If God is not loving, then His intentions
are questionable. The very foundations
of Christian faith are at risk in
these issues.
If God cannot be trusted with our
welfare, then we Christians are, as
Paul notes in another context, the most
to be pitied. (203) It would mean that
the “right” was commanding something
less than our good, that God thus
203. I Corinthians 15: 19.
202. This terrible state of personhood disinterated
beyond the point of no return is described in The
Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis.
did not really love us.
At that point we would be facing
an intolerable situation, having to
choose between the good and the
right, precisely what happens when
the law becomes “legalistic”, as with
the Pharisees of the New Testament,
not commanding the good, as does the
2nd Great Commandment, but subversively
commanding their own control.
But it resolves nothing to elevate
the “right” above God so as to insulate
it from His potential misuse of it. Do
we trust God only when He is not really
in charge?
For example, a “realist” objection
to what might seem the “nominalist”
way described here of understanding
the law and grace of God has been that
moral law seems to be left, as just described,
to an arbitrary decision by
God, with the consequence that a hu-

94 The Law & the Grace of God
man-friendly moral law commanding
the good could just as arbitrarily tomorrow
be changed to something not
so friendly. (204) The implication is that
God then is not to be trusted, that His
exercise of free will is just as dangerous
to our welfare as supposedly the
exercise of our own free will was to
His sovereignty.
But we cannot pick and choose
our God, we must accept the one, if
any, that is really there.. We might or
might not like the outcome. So, as
Elijah said, “If Baal be God....” (205)
Realists distrust personal deities
almost as much as secularists distrust
them. Realists dissolve particular
items, persons included, back into
their original non-particular state to
preserve the reliability of the moral
law. Secularists do so to preserve the
reliability of natural law. Both tend to
see free will as dangerous to the stability
of things.
Another central problem with
“universals” is that some one or group
of us, probably philosophically-ortheologically-minded
human beings,
must discern and choose from a long
list of possibilities as to which universals
constitute the acceptable moral
universals. That puts the matter right
back into somewhat less than infallible
human hands. There are only two
practical options as to who will do the
choosing: either God Himself or we
humans (gravitating always toward
centralized civil government). (206)
204. On realism and nominalism, see Part I, D-6,
‘Realism & Nominalism” on page 38
205. See I Kings 18:20 ff.
206. The issue of God and civil government will be
addressed in a coming book, The Theology of Civil
Government: Why Government Requires God.
See Bibliography. For the Biblical view of centralization
of government, see I Samuel 8.
Secularists get rid of God altogether,
but realists also do not give an
adequate alternative to a personal deity,
they only succeed in stopping the
cosmos into an eternal, timeless freeze
frame of abstraction -- because the difference
between ‘spiritual’ and ‘abstract’
is at least blurred. In the Biblical
view, an individual Person, not a
Platonic abstraction, is the primal objective
entity. (207)
Secularists wipe out free will in
favor of a “Newtonian” world machine,
but, in the process, destroy all
meaning. All living spirits are declared
non-existent, or at least only
offshoots of a prior physical stuff,
such as brain tissue, whether pagan
spirits of nature or Biblical freewill
creatures of God.
In doing so, however, secularists
thereby destroy themselves as intelligent
entities. There is no such thing as
knowing or asserting truth if one does
not have the free will to choose between
affirming the true versus the
false. One must recognize the difference
between true and false and freely
decide to assert the truth.
Medieval Christian realists believed
that there were, in a Platonic
sense, real universals, and that the
moral law was somehow composed of
such objective realities. God, then,
207. In order to distinguish between the modern
sense of ‘person’ as a unique free-standing individual
and the creedal three persons of the Trinity, I
use ‘person’ for God in His unity, and the original
Latin ‘persona’ (or plural ‘personae’) for the three
persons of the Trinity.
The definition of ‘persona’ has changed over the
centuries from indicating the mask worn by the
actors on a stage, where one actor might wear
three masks in a given play to represent three different
characters -- to mean a unique, free-standing
individual. Three of those would be tri-theism, not
mono-theism. So God is one person (monotheism),
but three personae (trinitarian).

formed His moral law on the basis of
those objective and eternal moral principles.
Christian nominalists, on the other
hand, who rejected the reality of objective
universals, generally took the
view of this essay, that the asserted
purpose of God was the highest standard
and original source of law and
morality, as given in Part I above.
The disagreement between realists
and nominalists was occasioned
chiefly by importation (along with the
very helpful Hellenic gift for logical
thinking) of the unhelpful Hellenic
worldview which slanted the Image of
God in the impersonal and abstract direction.
But with the development of a
genuinely personalist Biblical worldview,
the opposition between realism
and nominalism does not arise. (208)
Morality does not disappear, as realists
fear, if ultimate reality is indeed a
particular person. On the contrary,
that Person is the font of all morality.
(209)
But let us pursue the question:
Can God, with total control of the
moral order, be trusted?
Over time, the concern for moral
dependability shifted to concern for
natural law dependability as secularism
began to edge the Biblical view
off center stage. The physical order
208. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God, and also, Yahweh or the Great Mother? for
the foundations of a worldview unique to the BIble,
in which persons, not nominalist things and not
realist abstractions (both tending to be unfriendlyimpersonal),
are the primary and basic entities of
the cosmos.
On these issues of nominalism, realism, and our
Hellenic vs. Hebraic inheritance, Nancy Pearcey’s
book, Total Truth, can be very enlightening.
209. That, of course, is the primary point of Part I
above, Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 95
was thought to be more trustworthy
once it gained a totally mechanical
and impersonal “Newtonian” architecture.
It would keep out those pesky
and ever-changing pagan spiritual
forces, and also keep God Himself
from tampering with the reliability of
moral or natural law. Machines were
deemed to be more reliable than persons.
That assumption in natural law
is collapsing. (210) Is it still valid with
moral law?
If God chooses, then it is a matter
of whether we trust God to do this
fairly and with integrity. Some, no
doubt, will not trust God under any
conditions. If God is not to be trusted,
by what stretch of the imagination is
some human being or committee to be
trusted? Civil government ends up by
default doing the job of selecting our
moral values. But there is no track
record of civil government anywhere
to be found which suggests that it
should be the chooser of our moral
principles. (211) The secularization of
government does not make it scientific
and “neutral” (as it claims), it makes it
power-oriented. That is a dead-end option,
often quite literally.
That is because civil government
is logically incapable of choosing our
morality because it cannot give us our
reason for existence. So civil government
has only one live option, to be
submissive to God.
That means that those libertarians
who think of government as a necessary
evil are wrong. Government under
God is a necessary good. But they
are partly right, because government
without God means that the devil of
210. Ibid.
211. Go to www.hawaii.edu/powerkills for a lesson
on the” friendliness” of secularized government.

96 The Law & the Grace of God
power-hunger will continue to eat up
the hindmost in the power struggle,
working steadily toward the foremost.
As we become more capable of
exerting power ungoverned by God,
we approach the Twilight of the gods,
the Gotterdammerung EndGame of
mutual destruction.
I-2. The Case for God
There are, however, substantial
things which can be said in defense of
trusting God.
Trust, unlike love (which is a free
gift), is an earned item. We earn the
trust of other people, and they earn our
trust -- by a track record of being trustworthy.
So the question is: Has God
given us a trustworthy track record
such that it makes rational sense to put
the whole weight of our being and our
dependent natures, and the whole
weight of our obedience on God and
God alone? Have our investigations
into the nature of God and God’s own
self-revelation led to the conclusion of
a trustworthy God?
Some will view such a question as
impertinence toward God. What right
have we to question and examine
Him? Yet Abraham did as God (or angels)
was on His way to Sodom and
Gomorrah. (212) Because there are false
gods, God invites our questions so that
we know whom we are worshipping,
as in “Come, let us reason together...”
(Isaiah 1:18)
If there is no evidence of trustworthiness
given by God, as appears
to be the case in Islam where God
seems to view the giving of evidence
to us lower beings beneath His stature,
212. See above, section B-2, ‘But, Is Moral Language
Necessary?” on page 52 for this incident
between God and Abraham.
importance, and holiness, then we are
just stuck with an arbitrary, and maybe
very nasty, situation.
But the Biblical God does claim
to speak reasonably and in ways understood
of the people. The point of
revelation is that it reveals, not hides.
It makes known. The very Incarnation
of God was about making Himself
known to a people who were typically
ignorant, stubborn, and willful.
In the end, of course, that comes
down for each of us to a personal decision
and commitment. We may get a
running start in one direction or the
other because our first primary (usually
parental) models point that way
(or not). A friend related how the earliest
memory of his parents was of the
two most important people in his life
kneeling before Someone more important
-- a wonderful start (213) .
But sooner or later, circumstances
will challenge us to make our
own decision. Do we, ourselves, believe
God to be trustworthy? Has God
shown Himself to us to be so? Does
God allow us even to ask that question?
We can consult all the theological
and philosophical information available,
and that can tell us whether or
not it is reasonable to look for such a
God who is trustworthy. (214) But such
information cannot produce a living
relationship with God. That requires
meeting Him and discovering His personality
and intentions for ourselves,
face to face.
The author of Hebrews in the Bi-
213. That was a tidbit told by Terry Fullam, rector of
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Darien, CT, during
the 1980’s
214. That is the information produced by the Cosmological
Argument for God. See Bibliography for
Personality, Empiricism, & God.

le wrestled with this trust issue in
chapter 6:13 ff. He notes that when
God swore an oath to Abraham, He
swore by Himself, having nothing
higher than Himself by which to swear
(which coincides with our view that
God does not choose moral values
based on universals higher than Himself
to which He owes allegiance).
We might imagine God saying, “I
speak the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth...because I am
God.” God has no reason to lie and
cannot make a mistake. We ourselves
might tack on “...so help me God” if
we, knowing our own fallibility, really
do want to tell the truth. If we are
wrong, we want to know. We want to
be truth-seekers and truth-speakers before
being position-defenders.
One swears by another higher
than oneself because such an oath invokes
a reprisal, a judgement upon
oneself, if one fails to keep the oath.
A homing rocket targeted on oneself is
launched when one breaks his oath.
The children’s oath, “Cross my
heart and hope to die...” is usually
clipped, missing the “...if I do not keep
my promise...” part. One’s “higher
power” was that which was to launch
the judgement upon the promisebreaker.
Most children, no doubt,
have little awareness of this meaning.
But saying it sounds very impressive.
We do not take oaths or promises
very seriously in our morally challenged
Western culture, but this is the
principle behind “...so help me
God...” at the end of an oath. This
principle is why some of our founding
fathers commented that the making of
oaths in court or oaths of allegiance to
the American constitution by a newly
elected officer has no effect without
God to administer the punishment. (215)
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 97
Such oaths may sound impressive,
but they are meaningless -- secured
only by one’s own trustworthiness, not
by that of God. Yet the whole point of
an oath was, and ought to be still, precisely
to secure the promise by something
a bit more trustworthy than one’s
own word. If God exists and holds us
morally accountable, then swearing in
the name of God with one’s hand on
the Bible has consequences.
The author of Hebrews puts it,
So, when God desired to show more
convincingly to the heirs of the promise the
unchangeable character of His purpose, He
interposed with an oath, so that through two
unchangeable things, in which it is impossible
that God should prove false, we who
have fled for refuge might have strong
encouragement to seize the hope set
before us.
Both Old and New Testaments
understand God to be that kind of absolutely
trustworthy Creator and Sovereign.
The characteristics of ‘trustworthy’,
‘faithful’, and ‘true’ are commonly
applied to God all through the
Bible.
That does not prove that God is
trustworthy, but it does show that the
Biblical community has, in its testing,
found it to be so. The next step, of
course, is for anyone who is searching
to make that test for him- or herself.
In 1983, a film, The Day After,
was shown on TV. (216) It was the story
of an imaginary nuclear attack on a
city in central America, part of a horrendous
exchange of nuclear warheads
between America and the Soviet
Union, a tale of unrelenting carnage
and death. There were heroic survivors
who tried to minister to the
215. George Washington raised that issue.
216. The presentation is still available in some Video
stores, as of January 2010.

98 The Law & the Grace of God
wounded. But the radiation would
soon kill everyone anywhere near the
targeted cities. (217)
The presentation shook the nation,
still under the threat of just such an exchange
with the Soviets.
During the hour immediately after
The Day After, a panel of philosophers
and ethical experts was gathered to
discuss the moral consequences and
possibilities of such a catastrophic
event. At no point did they show any
clear sense of where to go with such
issues, no conviction and no hope.
The only religious scene in the
movie was of a clergyman with black
shirt and white clergy collar preaching
a demented sermon to an essentially
dead congregation. The panel did little
better.
But, one person did. The composer
of the musical score for the
video implanted into the background
the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
To the tune of Lyons attributed to
Haydn, the words of the hymn, How
Firm a Foundation, are sung in
churches all over the world. The tune
appears at points during the grim narrative.
The first and last verses of the
hymn read:
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the
Lord, is laid for your faith in His excellent
Word. What more can He say than to you
He hath said, to you that for refuge to Jesus
hath fled?
The soul that to Jesus hath fled for
repose, I will not, I will not desert to his foes:
that soul, though all hell shall endeavor to
shake, I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.
The secular experts in the story
and the secular experts in the panel
217. On The Day After, go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/31JdXn/
Christnty/SpWr/DayAfter-StLks10A17.htm
had no answers for the questions
thrown at them. But Jesus does. No
one but Jesus can bring meaning and
hope out of the Endgame of the world
against itself. He can be trusted.
Probably not one in ten thousand
viewers recognized the tune, but it
sounded a testimony to the power of
God and to the faithfulness of God
which come from a depth that no human
artifice can touch, not even
atomic weaponry. On that trust and
faith, even with all its faults, was
raised up the mightiest, most productive,
and most just civilization in history,
Christian civilization.
“What more can He say than to
you He hath said?...” In the words
and deeds of Jesus Christ, it has all
been done and said. The evidence for
the reasonableness of trust in God is
secured by the intentional commitment
and behavior of God toward us.
So it is then for us to choose. (218)
For those who endure the discipleship
and discipline, the Lord shows
up again and again to prove His truth
and faithfulness. The powerful testimony
continues to flow in from far
and wide from Christians who are put
the the most horrendous of tests. He
will continue to do so if we in the
West recover our trust in Him.
God can be trusted.
Or, can He? It does depend on
which deity you mean....
I-3. Islam, Hinduism,
& Atonement
A comparison of Christian atone-
218. See Bibliography for Fox, Personality, Empiricism,
& God, and also, The Authority of the Bible in
a Scientific World for evidence on the reasonableness
of faith.

ment with that of Islam and Hinduism
can bring into sharper focus the nature
of Christian atonement. Biblical
atonement is incompatible with the
other two.
a. Arbitrary Authority
The Biblical worldview gives us
the truths that God is our creator ex nihilo,
and therefore also our Sovereign.
The Gospel, on the other hand, tells us
what kind of God we have, His personality,
and His plans for us, how He
relates to us and we to Him. The Biblical
God really is Himself “Good
News” in a way that no other is or can
be.
We share with Islam the same
worldview, a deity who is both creator
and sovereign. But we do not share
the same Gospel because the personality
of the Muslim deity is quite different
from that as given in both Old and
New Testaments, leading to opposing
views of atonement.
Pope Benedict XVI spoke to a
German audience in 2006 at the
Regensburg, Germany university
where he had once taught, with references
to a debate which had occurred
in Byzantium during the late
1300’s. (219) The Byzantine emperor
had debated a Persian Muslim scholar
on the relative truth between Christianity
and Islam -- while the Muslims
were besieging Constantinople. There
was, the Pope says, a...
dialogue carried on-- perhaps in 1391 in the
winter barracks near Ankara-- by the erudite
Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus
and an educated Persian on the subject of
Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.
The emperor quite pointedly
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 99
219. See Pope’s address on the Muslim issue at
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/33Rlg/Islm/
00Islam.htm#Papal_Challenge_to_Islam_
raised the issue of whether God, in the
Muslim mind, held Himself accountable
to either truth or morality. The
emperor clearly did not think so.
The very name, ‘Islam’, tells the
story. Muslims believe that there is
one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his
prophet. That short sentence is the
Muslim creed. ‘Islam’ means ‘I submit’,
i.e., submit to Allah by agreeing
with his prophet, Mohammed.
The Muslim notion of Allah is,
one might say, somewhat distantly
akin to Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover”,
who was totally and infinitely removed
from the material world, not
even aware of us. The Muslim Allah is
not totally removed and not totally impersonal,
but emotionally, he is close
to it, like having a father from whom
one hears only occasionally, and that
by letter with “instructions” on what
to do that day. No loving, no cuddling,
no dandling on his knee.
That distance between Allah and
Muslims effectively puts all the authority
of Allah into the words of Mohammed.
Mohammed becomes necessarily
infallible, untestable, and arbitrary.
Because the Koran was dictated
allegedly in a cave by an angel to Mohammed
who was illiterate, and was
copied down in organized form only
after his death, and because, compared
to the Bible, there is in the Koran little
description either of the natural world
or of actual history, there is by comparison
little which scholars can test
for truth value. One either accepts the
text and its claims about what God has
said, or not. One submits, or not.
There does not appear to be any
evidence that the Muslim deity even
tries or desires to have the personality
which Jews and Christians ascribe to

100 The Law & the Grace of God
220. See Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible
in a Scientific World for a discussion of the unity of
faith and reason in the Bible, and the reasonable
place of the blind leap.
Yahweh. Rather, it appears that even
to ask for such a kindly personality
might be considered blasphemy.
There seems to be little or no possibility
of reasoning one’s way into Islam,
in which case, from an outsider’s
point of view, submission to Islam is
totally arbitrary, i.e., not reasonable.
If a Muslim asks his spiritual
leader whether he, the speaker, can
know whether he is saved, the leader
will likely answer with a shrug of the
shoulders. God, on that view, does not
supply answers to such questions.
One submits and hopes for the best.
Faith is always, then, a blind
leap. (220)
In some Muslim circles, there is
thought to be one sure way to find a
place in heaven -- die killing an infidel.
So the text of the Koran can be,
and is being, read to justify the killing
of innocent persons in the name of homicidal
and suicidal “jihad”.
The very fact that that is so means
that Muslims are attributing to God
behavior which in any rational society
would be considered criminal. One
wonders why such attribution to God
should not be called blasphemy.
None of this suggests that Pope
Benedict was wrong...
After the Pope made his speech
raising the issue of whether Muslims
believe God to hold Himself accountable
to reason and morality, some African
Muslims in retaliation killed
some nuns -- illustrating and supporting,
of course, the Pope’s point.
It appears that few Muslims are
ready to put their beliefs into open discussion
and debate to find out the truth
of the matter. They are convinced that
they have it all and have no need of
honest dialogue, giving them, many
believe, the right to use violence and
death to convert the infidel. That
seems to be an integral part of their
faith. Or, some maybe not so convinced,
but rather fearful, and therefore
hiding from open discussion.
Sadly, there are few Muslim
scholars who will debate Christians to
bring such questions and issues to
helpful public discussion. (221)
There are Muslims today who appear
to reject such violence, but history
tells us that they are late-comers,
and that Islam has indeed traditionally,
right from almost the very beginning,
supported and practiced violence.
One rightly says “almost” because in
the very beginning, before Mohammed
had power, he agreed that in religion
there is no coercion. But after
gaining power, coercion of any available
sort became routine.
One might expect that arbitrary
221. In 2011, I attended a two-session debate in
Orange County, California, between a Christian and
a Muslim scholar. The Christian did quite well, but
the Muslim was a disaster. A few Muslims came for
the first session, but were so embarrassed by their
champion’s behavior that they did not return for the
second session.
I asked those in charge of the debate, a Christian
group, why this was happening. They
responded that they had debated this Muslim
before and knew what he would do. But they asked
him to come anyhow because they hoped to shame
the real Muslim scholars into accepting the challenge
to let the world know that they can hold their
own ground.
But it is almost impossible, they said, to get real
Muslim scholars to get into such an arena. They
appear to be afraid that they cannot win an honest
contest of ideas.
One suspects that they feel totally out of their
league because they have no practice in truthseeking
and truth-testing. Their spiritual lives
appear to be dominated by blind faith decisions
under unquestionable authority.

and distant kind of deity to inspire a
deep resentment leading to such violence,
especially in men.
Because Mohammed was the
model for this sort of behavior, he being
the personal representative of Allah,
other Muslims follow that model
as authoritative, producing the barbarous
and cowardly behavior of men,
women, and even children murdering
innocent people -- so that they themselves
can go to heaven.
Muslims who support that kind of
jihad think of their behavior as obedient,
not barbarous or cowardly. But
their obedience is rooted in a fundamental
defeat of the soul -- the inability
or unwillingness to engage in the
truth-seeking process. When that is
done out of fear, it smacks of being
cowardly. A central aspect of Godly
masculinity is leading the community
in the pursuit of truth, wielding the
two-edged Sword of the Spirit.
Muslim scholars do not typically
join interfaith dialog or debate, apparently
because they are unskilled in
logical and empirical analysis. Or
worse, their view of God would not
inspire them even to pursue such abilities.
(222)
The God of the Bible inspired the
intellectual accomplishments of the
Jews, probably the most literate people
in the world, early surpassing most
other people groups in academic and
technological accomplishments.
Muslim cultures have a reputation
for not being able to run even their
own oil fields or hospitals, hiring
other nationalities to come and do it
for them.
The unified law and grace of the
222. See previous footnote.
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 101
Biblical God is totally at odds with the
Islamic nature of God, where whatever
grace there might be is arbitrary
and unpredictable.
The Biblical God also, like the
Muslim God, cannot be held accountable
by any of His creatures because
there is no authority over God by
which He can be called to account. As
Job notes:
For He is not a man, as I am, that I might
answer Him, that we should come to trial
together. There is no umpire between us,
who might lay his hand upon us both.
Job 9:32 ff.
There is no umpire governing both
God and Job, because God is the Ultimate
Umpire, which puts all the high
cards in His hand.
But Yahweh holds Himself accountable.
He is faithful and true. We
live by grace. God, at the end, tells
Job that he was right and his friends
were wrong. To what could that rightness
refer except to Job’s persistence
in talking to God about the matter, on
having an open and reasonable trial of
law and fact?
That requires a God who is...
humble.
For thus says the high and lofty One,
who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
“I dwell in the high and holy place, and also
with him who is of a contrite and humble
spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and
to revive the heart of the contrite. For I will
not contend for ever, nor will I always be
angry; for from me proceeds the Spirit, and I
have made the breath of life.”
Isaiah 57:15 ff.
And, God invites critique:
Come, let us reason together...
Isaiah 1:18
Let all the nations gather together, and
let the peoples assemble. Who among
them can declare this, and show us the

102 The Law & the Grace of God
former things? Let them bring their witnesses
to justify them.... Isaiah 43:9
Arise, plead your case before the mountains,
and let the hills hear your voice. Hear,
you mountains, the controversy of the Lord,
and you enduring foundations of the earth;
for the Lord has a controversy with His people,
and He will contend with Israel.
O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
Micah 6:1 ff
The theme of God meeting us reasonably,
not arbitrarily, runs throughout
Scripture. And in all of that, God
loses none of His omnipotence or sovereignty.
The Incarnation is the flesh and
blood demonstration of that. The God
who commands love has already committed
Himself to love at any cost to
Himself. What else could the cross
mean? And how could one improve
on the nature and personality of such a
God?
The only thing about which the
Biblical God is absolutely and deliberately
arbitrary is the highest of the
laws, the logically first command, that
we are to love Him and one another,
which is what He Himself is already
doing. But given that beginning of
law, all other law follows with rigorous
logic as applied to the varying circumstances
of our lives.
That beginning must be arbitrary
because their is no God above God to
give the command, and there is nothing
beneath Him in the world itself
which can give an original command.
God must do it Himself, or it will not,
because it cannot, be done. So the
highest law is arbitrary, but not irrational.
Its rationality is based on its total
support for the Good, that which sustains
and enhances life and relationship.
A loving God will produce a rational,
predictable cosmos, in which,
through which, and by which we can
have reasonable, consistent, and loving
inter-communion. The Bible is
full of such passages which have no
parallel in either pagan or secular history,
nor in Islam. (223)
God uses his arbitrary capacity to
be loving, an “executive decision” --
that is how it shall be..., faithful and
true at any cost to Himself. That is
what led to the “price paid” at calvary,
to enable and enliven His fallen people
to emulate Him. “Be like your Father
in heaven above...”
We can stubbornly correct and
second-guess God -- or, because in the
Bible and in our lives God has shown
Himself to be trustworthy and so
earned our trust, we can join His story
line into the best of all possible
worlds. God, not the human race or
any part of it, holds the original reasonable,
moral, and spiritual high
ground.
Islam has a creator God, and in
that sense is like Biblical religion. But
the creator of Muslim religion, being
so distant in principle, can have no
sense of grace -- which is a quality of
personal relationship.
The different personalities of Yahweh
and the Muslim Allah create
wholly different notions of atonement.
In Islam, there is no at-one-ment of a
personal sort, no heaven of deep and
intimate relationship with God and
one’s fellows, only, it would seem according
to Muslim testimony, a pleasure-filled
harem with at least questionable
moral structure. One does not
223. See Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible
in a Scientific Age, especially the chapter on “The
Reasonable Bible”.

get closer to God, only, it would seem,
more abjectly obedient to him. As in
suicide killings.
b. Mysticism
The Bagavad Gita, a Hindu classic,
some would say the Hindu classic,
tells the story of the warrior, Arjuna,
whose feelings reject the coming carnage,
fighting against some of his own
beloved kindred.
But Krishna, the supreme being
who accompanies him in his chariot,
tells Arjuna why he must go into battle.
It is not about winning, it is about
karma, fate, the wheel of life going on
and on and on..... until one exits the
wheel of life and all particular existence
into the unknowable transcendent.
Arjuna is of the warrior caste, and
so, in a paradoxical way, is meant to
fight this day. Paradoxical because in
Hinduism, there is no meaning in the
Biblical sense. Life in eastern mysticism
is not going anywhere other than
through the infinite circles of the eternal
return, until one reaches the
blessed state of the enlightened ones,
who exit and do not recycle one more
time up through the castes. The “enlightened
ones” exit the world of time,
space, and personhood to merge with
whatever it is that Krishna represents
in Hinduism.
Whatever that mystery is, like
eastern yoga, it is the denial, opposite,
and eradication of all for which the Bible
stands -- personal and living relationship
with God and one’s fellows.
It does not work to say that Arjuna
finally agrees with Krishna because
he finds “meaning” in his warrior
role. It is not about meaning, it is
about the evacuation of meaning, and
the “ascent” into meaninglessness, the
II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 103
conscious and studied denial of all
personal attachment.
A Christian fly-on-the-wall of Arjuna’s
chariot would have to conclude
that Arjuna had just had a revelation
from God, Yahweh, about the real
meaning of life, that his attachment to
his kindred was real and valuable in
the sight of God. Arjuna had a vision
of the “good”.
But Krishna persuades him otherwise,
that losing oneself in the fury of
the coming localized Gotterdammerung
was a part for him to play, and
for his supposed enemies also, in the
ascent beyond all relationship and attachment
-- another move up the ladder
of karma toward exit. The blur of
the bloody carnage, the release of self
into the slaughter of one’s relatives,
playing with death, would itself be a
movement away from personal attachment
into the blessed realm of not caring.
Arjuna would be deserting his
post if he chose for relationship. It
would be his “duty” to whip up the
frenzy of the battle to aid others in
their ascent.
A Christian might say that Arjuna
had had a vision of the good, the Biblical
second great commandment, but
that Krishna’s version of the right, the
ought, bent Arjuna back toward selfdestruction
-- literally, the willful, berserker-like
destruction of the self.
I-4. The Available Atonement
Ideas have consequences. Bad religious
ideas can have horrendous
consequences.
The only at-one-ment of relationship
and community available in a pagan
cosmos is the merging of selves
into something like a cosmic (un)consciousness,
or the unity constructed

104 The Law & the Grace of God
from victorious power struggle.
And in a secular cosmos, at-onement
reduces cosmic merging to a
“feeling” of unity, along with the glory
of power struggle, stamping one’s own
vision of unity on things, or for the
less aggressive, “eat, drink, and be
merry, for tomorrow we die”.
There is no atonement of relationship
or fellowship, of loving God or
one’s neighbor. It is the evacuation of
these. Not the Hebrew shalom, the
fullness of peace in a sacramental cosmos,
but the Hindu shantih, the evacuation
of all particular life into the
peace of non-existence -- or the secular
obsession to “feel good” rather
than relate well.
Where there is no creator God,
there is no meaning to life, only an
exit which, in the end, is indistinguishable
from death -- the pagan worldview
coincidence-of-opposites shows
no clear distinction from the secular
black hole of nothingness.
The End. (224)
The difference between the Biblical
world and the secular/pagan world
results in, as God warned Adam, the
difference between life and death.
The Biblical world rests on the secure
foundation of how truth-seeking affirms
the wedding of law and grace --
the Hieros Gamos....
This wedding of the Good and the
Right bears fruit in all aspects of human
life, not only one’s personal and
intimate relation with God, not only a
redeemed family life, and a redeemed
corporate life in healthy local
churches, but a redeemed political and
public arena life where moral freedom
and moral responsibility can be united
in a cooperative bond not seen anywhere
else on earth.
224. See Bibliography for the secular/pagan vs. Biblical
Worldview contrasts.

II. Biblical Theology & Pelagianism 105
Study Guide for Part II
Biblical Theology & Pelagianism
I. Summary:
In your own words, write a summary of
the theme of this chapter, and make a
personal application as appropriate.
II. Questions on Part II:
A. The Problem
1. What task does the author set himself
in the opening paragraphs?
2. What does the author mean by
“pseudo-conservative”? Does this
sound familiar to you?
3. How does “pseudo-conservatism”
contrast with “pseudo-liberalism”?
4. Why did secular psychologists “rail
at” contemporary Christians? Do you
think they had a valid point?
5. What was the “nakedness” of the
public square, and the consequences?
6. So you agree with the author that
Judeo-Christian civilization cannot continue
without a recovery of the Biblical
worldview? And why?
7. What is the dilemma for politicians
regarding the “unity” of the population?
And what might Jesus say about the
matter?
8. How does the “sword of the Spirit” fit
into this discussion?
9. Describe the issues of the “Pelagian”
controversy.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
B.
16.
17.
18.
C.
19.
20.
21.
D.
22.
23.
E.
24.
25.
26.
F.
27.
28.
29.
G.
30.
31.
H.
32.
33.
34.
35.
I.
Open & Closed Circles
36. Describe the essential differences
between the open-circle cosmos and the
closed-circle cosmos.
37.
Chapter Reflections:
In your own words, relate your new
insights from reading and meditating on
the information contained within this
chapter. What difference would it make
to you personally whether the claims and
assertions of this chapter were true or
not?

Part III
Hieros Gamos -
the Wedding of Law & Grace
A. Cosmology
A-1. Sacred Marriage -
It Depends on your Worldview
(Note: It might be helpful at this
point to review in the Preface the introductory
remarks about the hieros
gamos at “Invitation to a Wedding...”
on page xx.)
In Part III, we move from abstract
ethical theory to particular application.
What difference does Biblical ethical
and atonement theory make for life in
the trenches?
Morality is about intention, behavior,
and attitude -- the daily bread
of life in the trenches. Ethical theory
may be abstract, but the practice of
morality is not. And atonement theory
explains the nature of salvation, being
“saved”, that is, being safe in one’s
ontological and moral security --
standing on the Hand of God and
obeying His Voice.
Again, as John Macmurray, Scottish
philosopher of the late 1800’s,
said, “All thought is for the sake of action,
and all action is for the sake of
relationship.”
It behooves us then to see how
these rather abstract ethical thoughts
might effect our actions and relationships.
That will, in turn, help make
more concrete sense of the abstractions
themselves, and underline the
imperative for getting things straight.
Ideas have consequences.
And our cogitations may lead us
to a new and fruitful understanding of
the direction of Western Civilization, a
new Reformation in becoming truthseekers,
and how to respond to the late
20th century erosion of secularism and
the corresponding current resurgence
of paganism.
It all has to do with which worldview
we think to be true: the Biblical
vs. the secular/pagan. If we get the
worldview issues straight, the rest has
more than a good chance of coming to
make sense. (225) The Biblical worldview
is essentially personal, the secular/pagan
essentially impersonal.
The issues of the Sacred Marriage

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 107
rest on Genesis 1:26-28, where we
learn that we are created in the Image
of God, male and female, implying
that there is some spiritual quality in
God of which our physical sexual nature
is an image. (226)
The Image of God is the most stable
thing in all existence. There is no
circumstance or set of circumstances
which can disrupt the Image of God.
That being so, then our being made in
and living in that image will convey a
fairly hefty stability also. As indicated
by the preceding pages, our being
saved, our being rescued out of the
Fall and remade into that image by the
law and grace of God, means the recovery
of both ontological and moral
stability. What would be the effect of
a community of such persons circulating
in the Fallen world?
Most things said in this book are a
logical extension of living in such a
personalist cosmos and of being creatures
of a personal, living, and loving
God, made in His Image, male and female.
(227) Sorting out these gender issues
regarding law and grace greatly
enhances the personal and family nature
of the cosmos and of our relationship
with God.
That would have to have a profound
effect.
225. On worldview, see Bibliography for Personality,
Empiricism, & God. See also,
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/
WrldV/00Wvw.htm
226. On this Sacred Marriage, see Preface, “Invitation
to a Wedding...” on page xx.
227. Biblical Inner Healing is a work on human
nature, created in the Image of God, how we get
broken, how God heals us with His grace and
mercy. It is a Biblical answer to secular and pagan
psychology, written for college courses, personal
study, emotional healing, and spiritual growth.
Available at
http://www.emmausmall.org/BIH.html. See Bibliography
for more information.
A-2. Privatizing:
first Religion & then Morality
The topics of this essay, the foundations
of morality and their application
to the great themes of Christian
atonement theory, are generally
thought to apply to personal religion,
one’s own faith, one’s own salvation.
That private emphasis has increased in
modern times, becoming quite evident
in the early 1800’s with the thesis of
Schliermacher and others that religion
is essentially a personal matter, not
impinging on the public arena, and
thus (he wrongly thought) less accessible
to the corrosive effects of the
secularized “Enlightenment”. (228)
Schliermacher thought religion
important enough to rescue from those
corrosive effects. But his solution was
its own disaster, caving in to the false
notion that secular science holds the
high ground in truth-seeking, and that
Biblical faith has no intellectual credibility,
only (at best) religious feeling
credibility. And feelings came to be
understood as a private and subjective
mode, not dealing with objective realities.
Properly understood, however,
feelings are not about subjective
things. They are most importantly
about those “things” to which John
Macmurray pointed, personal relationships.
Relationships are fundamentally
objective because they are about
the basic objective entities of the cosmos,
persons. Feelings are, one might
say, perceptions of relationships. We
feel sad because someone died, or be-
228. ‘Enlightenment’ is put in sceptical quotes
because it was in fact an endarkenment, leading
the West into a spiral downhill, seeking to find its
way without God. All this was enabled by the failure
of Judeo-Christians to hold the intellectual,
moral, and spiritual high ground.

108 The Law & the Grace of God
trayed us. We feel joyful because
someone blessed us. Feelings are relationship
barometers. (229)
But the growing domination of
secularized science convinced people
that persons were not substantial, just
(like everything else) derivative by
random chance from inert matter, so
relationships between persons would
be of only passing interest because
persons were of only passing interest.
Freud set an example, disastrously
explaining psychology in terms of
“drives”, not relationships. So secularized
science itself became the final
arbiter of truth and falsehood, and the
spiritual life had no place in the public
arena.
It did not take long for privatizing
to seep from religion into morality as
well -- because the secular world cannot
sustain an objective morality any
more than it can sustain the worship of
God. Minus the law of God, morality
collapses. Or, it becomes “relative”,
which is the same as “every man doing
what is right in his own eyes...,’
which is the same as no morality at all.
The point of morality is to unify humanity
in the right way of doing
things, God’s way, where the right
commands doing the good. How can
one improve on that?
A-3. Values Clarification &
Dialogue to Consensus
The privatizing problem is illustrated
by the enormously successful
so-called “values clarification” process
which was introduced into American
(and perhaps most Western)
229. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing
which describes how feelings are fundamentally
perceptions of very objective relationships, especially
chapter II-C.
schools in the 1960’s and -70’s, and
continues tragically, effectively, and
unabated, often under other names.
Students were taught to “prize” their
values, that is, to choose and value
them. They were also taught not to
criticize anyone else’s values because
that was, well, not nice.
This process was passed off as an
exercise in morality. But it was nothing
of the sort. It was the slyly intended
destruction of morality so that
the perpetrators (those running the education
system) could redefine morality
away from God’s purposes to their
own ends. (230) They had their own design
for the world, namely, putting the
world under their control, the justification
of pleasure and power.
What the students were “prizing”
was their own personal values. That
is not in itself wrong or harmful. Clarifying
one’s values or “prizings” is a
good idea, not a bad one. But one’s
personal values do not constitute a
morality -- unless they are submitted
to a higher moral principle. That
higher moral principle, the law of
God, was the target of this subversion.
As would soon be discovered, of
course, personal values are of all sorts
and sizes, many contradictory to each
other (not mentioned, of course, in
values clarification.) Hitler and the
Jews disagreed about what was good
for the Jews or for Hitler. But under
the values clarification rules, the Jews
could not complain about Hitler’s
views, nor (to be consistent) could
Hitler complain about the Jews.
Hitler complained anyhow, of
course -- loudly and viciously. When
truth becomes relative, the victory
230. For the details on this subversion of morality,
see Bibliography for Dialogue in Darkness.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 109
goes to the one with the power, not the
one who is right. That is because that
nasty, guilt-creating “right and wrong”
have been factored out of the discussion
-- so as to be “nice” to each other.
The perpetrators were, and still are,
using the sheepskin of niceness to disguise
their lust for control.
It was asssumed that it would
make no difference if none of us acted
on our beliefs. No moral issues would
be raised, and truth would not much
matter. But we do act on them, and
understanding that is key to understanding
the evils of values (dis)clarification.
The alleged “relativity” and hence
the privatizing of truth, is specifically
one-sided, one directional. Privatizing
is a sham supposedly to “resolve” conflict.
If one proposes that his values
are objective, his view will not be considered
part of the acceptable “pluralism”
and will be dubbed with nasty
names (homophobic, black and white
thinking, rigid).
The views of the facilitators, however,
are not considered by themselves
to be relative, they really want their
control of the system -- which requires
objectivity, values for which they will
stand against contrary values. That is
arrant dishonesty, and should be
named for what it is, in public, on the
spot.
Personal values are manipulatively
touted as the solution when they
are in fact the problem. Personal values
are good things, not bad, the natural
product of rational free will. But
ungoverned, they create conflicts
which need some mediating principle
-- or we end up on the battlefield.
That mediator is what we call “morality”
(the law of God), which stands
over the mass of conflicting personal
values to judge whether they are good
or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral.
The manipulators want themselves
to be the arbitrators of the conflicting
decision, which is what “values
clarification” and “dialogue to
consensus” are aimed at producing.
Neither have any relationship to honest
discussion, other than to pervert
and control it.
Dialogue to consensus works
hand in glove with values clarification.
It gathers its victims to discuss
issues such as school curriculum or
homosexuality. But the aim is agreement,
consensus, not truth. The only
way that can be done is to aim for feeling
good about having this discussion,
not by seeking the truth.
So, using specific ground rules,
truth is factored out of the discussion.
(231) The opinions of others are
not open for debate because each persons’s
opinion is true for that person.
That is logically impossible. But the
victims are made to feel good about
having this discussion without having
to put difficult issues on the table. The
feel-good agreement does not last long
because it is not based on truth. But
very few know what to do about that
and so remain paralyzed victims of a
cleverly designed brain-washing process.
Once the victims become truthseekers
and truth-speakers, the jig is
up for the manipulators -- whose foundations
can be quickly demolished.
Moral rightness is a decision
which only our Creator can make, thus
revealing the whole point of values
231. See Bibliography for Dialogue to Consensus or
Scientific Debate? for a detailed discussion of the
ground rules.

110 The Law & the Grace of God
clarification: for those in rebellion to
destroy the power of Godly morality,
and thus put themselves in charge with
their morality. That is being accomplished
tin America hrough ever tightening
civil government control of education,
welfare, etc. in tandem with the
growing irrelevance of religion
through their brilliant campaign to
privatize the Church.
Given the American Declaration
of Independence and Constitution, that
amounts to rebellion and treason, the
destruction of the very instruments
which govern America -- both based
on the law and grace of God. (232)
It worked. In varying degrees it
has affected everyone in Western Civilization.
The moral consensus of the
West has effectively been destroyed,
leaving we, the people, at the mercy of
political mind-controllers and powercentralizers.
The reason it worked was less the
cleverness of those who had gained
control of education than it was the intellectual,
moral, and spiritual collapse
of most of so-called “conservative”
Christendom -- Christians having had
diminishing capacity to defend their
beliefs for over two hundred years.
Growing numbers of secularized
Westerners, especially on the European
Continent were already in the
1700’s proclaiming the Church to be
intellectually moribund. (233)
232. HIllsdale College in Hillsdale, MI, has put its
course on the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution online, to be taken for free by anyone.
Go to www.hillsdale.edu, and follow the steps.
There are 25 lectures (5 introduction and 20 of the
regular course), all well worth viewing. They
present a powerful, clear, and beautiful picture of
what America was meant to be, and what it can be
again -- if Judeo-Christian pulpits will learn to market
the law and the grace of God reasonably, gracefully,
and persistently.
The colonial attempt to establish a
“city on a hill” in America was a resurgence
of Godly life and politics,
which, despite its current near demise,
is still the only visible substantial hope
in the West. It laid the foundations for
developing a truly Biblical government,
which explains why it quickly
became the target of secularists with
their alleged “science” and positivist
law system. (234)
Secularists got control of the
moral high ground by subverting the
image of Biblical religion to appear as
an unhappy, killjoy, moralistic myth.
By subversion within, the enemies
of America have nearly accomplished
what expansionistic Japan, the Nazis,
and the Communists could not accomplish
militarily. The Church of God is
the only significant enemy of government
centralizing totalitarian forces.
If secularists and pagans lose their
reputation for holding the moral high
ground (which they do not really occupy)
they will lose also their broad
acceptance in the West and then the
world.
So the abstract ideas of morality
and atonement surveyed here have
powerful and particular consequences.
Christians everywhere, but particularly
in America, must recover their
intellectual, moral, and spiritual integrity.
Without the law and grace of
233. See, for example, Gotthold Lessing, “On the
Proof of the Spirit and of Power”, ca. 1777. Available
in Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. by
Henry Chadwick, Stanford U. Press, 1967.
Or, one can Google “On the Proof of the Spirit
and of Power Lessing”
234. For positivist law, see “Western Collapse
into “Positivism”” on page 117 and “The Law
of God, Positivist Law, ...& Force” on page 119.
See also Index.
Joseph Story & the American Constitution, by
James McClellan, is a history of the rise of positivist
law.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 111
God gracefully and reasonably expressed,
that recovery is not possible.
Hence our present efforts. But with
the law and grace of God aggressively
and gracefully expressed in public, especially
from the pulpits, Judeo-Christian
society can be revived, including
Biblical government. (235)
A-4. Open- vs. Closed-
Circle Universes
A helpful distinction needs to be
made. A closed-circle universe is one
in which there is no exchange of energy
or information, no personal communication
between within and without
the circle. An open-circle universe,
on the other hand, has such an
exchange and communication. (236)
The Biblical universe is an open
circle because there is constant exchange
and communication between
creatures in the created order and God
outside the created order.
But secular and pagan universes
have no creator God, nothing outside
of themselves and their cosmos, and
thus exist in and for themselves totally.
There is nothing outside with
which to communicate -- hence the
perfect closed system.
In such a closed system, the defining
entity is whatever might be the
original “stuff” out of which all else
could have evolved. This stuff at its
deepest level is totally impersonal, and
in the end, ineffable, unknowable.
In pagan literature, it is often
235. A coming title is The Theology of Civil Government:
Why Government Requires God. See Bibliography
for details.
236. Go to http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/
11Phl/WrldV/00Wvw.htm for a description of these
two major worldviews.
See also Isaiah 25:6-8.
called the Great Mother, the womb of
existence, that which gives being to all
else. In Greek mythology, she was
Gaia, in Mesopotamian mythology she
was Tiamat. (237) We typically give this
“entity” a feminine gender, but in fact
“she” (Gaia, Tiamat, the Great
Mother) is at bottom totally impersonal,
distant, and inaccessible to the
understanding of us mortals.
Secular thinkers have not yet, on
their part, figured what to do in their
worldview with that beginning of all
things, but imagine, perhaps, that they
will discover and describe it “scientifically”.
That hope is becoming less
and less tenable. (238) Most secular
cosmologists want to find a scientific/
mathematical formula, a “unified field
theory”, back at the beginning, not the
ineffable something-or-other of paganism,
and certainly not a personal
creator. But they have no logical way
of accounting for certain indispensable
and unavoidable aspects: the astonishingly
finely tuned cosmic constants
(or that there are cosmic constants
at all), a rational beginning, and
the nature of information, consciousness,
and cause -- troublesome, indeed
fatal, deficits. (239)
The old creation myths were not
orderly in their generation, and not always
consistent in the telling, nevertheless
generally speaking, in paganism,
the primal entity was a feminine
figure. But the first entity to emerge/
237. See Bibliography for Fox, Yahweh or the Great
Mother? -- a comparison of the Biblical with the
secular/pagan worldviews.
238. Go, for example, to www.commonsensescience.com,
which is challenging many of the
favorite doctrines of contemporary science.
239. A good resource for these issues is the Discovery
Institute (www.discovery.org), supporting the
Intelligent Design community. See also Bibliography
for Personality, Empiricism, & God. on the Cosmological
Argument for God.

112 The Law & the Grace of God
evolve from her into particular existence
was usually a masculine figure
who would become her consort.
They would then have offspring -- as
the Greek Gaia and Uranus had Chronos,
who then had a child, Zeus.
But these male figures would always
be children of (dependent on)
the Great Mother, never her equal.
For the Greeks, three female fates determined
everything. One spun the
thread of one’s life, the second measured
it, and the third snipped it off.
Your life was “fixed”. No appeal.
When Zeus was born, the three
fates ordained that one of his many
sons would slay (or castrate) him, as
he had his father, Chronos, and as
Chronos before him had slain Uranus.
The male principle was unavoidably
competitive, and power ruled
over morality. Only the Great Mother
herself was invulnerable because she
was pre-individual, the source of all
individuality, and that to which all individuality
returned -- not the Biblical
Yahweh, He who is, but “she who is
and is not”.
So, no equal and complementary
gender relationship could emerge as a
basis for the sought-for sacred marriage,
the hieros gamos. Pagan marriages
had an inherent instability
within them. The rising male ego
would try to dominate, but was always
susceptible to the fatal withdrawal of
the feminine power of being, or to say
the same thing, the return of persondestroying
chaos.
The Enuma Elish, the “creation
story” of ancient Mesopotamians, tells
of the original Great Mother, Tiamat
(meaning “void” or “chaos”), threatening
a return to avenge herself
against the rising masculine gods who
had “tamed” her, asserting their now
supposed adult independence from
“mother”. She rises as a tempestuous
ocean of chaotic waves right up to the
feet of the gods and goddesses who
were standing terrified with their
backs to a wall. And then mercifully
(or chaotically) backs off. (240)
So long as cultures were in need
of strong warrior types, males could
succeed (on the surface) in keeping
females submissive. But even so,
feminine wiles took their toll, as the
battle-of-the-sexes history illustrates.
Women are not “powerless”.
Physical power and strategy are not always
the deciders in gender contests.
And, in the end, the Great Mother,
who can withdraw the power of being
from the males, wins. We all die and
disappear into her maw.
When cultures mature in the sense
of outgrowing the need for warrior
types, as modern Western culture
struggles to imagine itself to have attained,
then male domination sinks beneath
the newfound power of, as we
now call it, feminism -- with catastrophic
results for men and women.
There can be no sacred marriage under
such conditions, only great numbers of
dispirited, kept males supervised by
240. ‘Tiamat’ is a Mesopotamian cognate of the
Hebrew ‘tehom’ which means ‘void’. We read in
Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the heavens
and the earth. The earth was without form and
void...”
Abraham would have inherited the ancient
Mesopotamian myths, but the effects of the revelation
of Yahweh on Hebrew thinking and imagination
was to transform their culture into a radically opposing
set of ideas and values. God is absolute sovereign
over chaos, and does with it what He wills.
That produces, uniquely among world religions, an
orderly cosmos.
Chaos for God is not a disability, it becomes
instead “pure possibility”, the logical state of being
non-contradictory. See Bibliography for Personality,
Empiricism, and God on the cosmological argument
for God, dealing with these issues on the
nature of basic and fundamental reality.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 113
now emotionally dominant, but increasingly
lonely and equally dispirited,
females -- a tragic role-reversed
situation.
The situation is in part saved because
in any culture, there seems to be
a small core of men and women whose
personal-relationship-reality-contact
rises above what the culture mandates,
and who have enough common sense
to just go ahead, marry, raise children,
and have gender-healthy families.
That means, most importantly, a
graceful union of spiritual power with
spiritual authority, an approach, at
least, to hieros gamos. (241)
Among persons whose spirits are
open to truth, even through our fallen
cultural dysfunctioning, the Imago Dei
asserts itself.
A-5. Secular-Pagan
vs. Biblical Universes
a. Sex & Gender
Hieros gamos is a term used in
some anthropological and mythological
studies to name the passionately
sought union of masculine and feminine
which dominates perhaps all pagan
religion and myth. (242) Fertility
cults of one sort or another abounded
among pagans -- not just for good
crops, but, in the mystery of sexual intercourse,
to “find oneself” (as we put
it today).
Yet their attempt to bring some
healthy and satisfying reconciliation
within and between the sexes and genders,
a unity which might be worthy of
modeling the Image of God, was a
monumental failure. The battle of the
sexes rages on unabated at almost every
level of society. And likewise
within ourselves also, our masculine
and feminine aspects war with each
other. (243)
The Bible tells of a fallen world in
which the gender union is warped and
twisted -- which is, of course, precisely
the pagan and secular worlds.
But despite the Fall of the world, in
God the eternal union of masculine
and feminine (as indicated in Genesis
1:26-28) is steadfast and sure, the
model for our own relations between
masculine and feminine.
If we are indeed made male and
female in the Image of God in order to
model and reflect those two most fundamental
spiritual aspects (masculine
sovereignty with feminine creating
and life-giving) of the divine nature,
and if the world has indeed fallen out
of knowledgeable and obedient relationship
with the God in whose Image
we are made, then one might expect
there could be no successful attempt to
reproduce in our human conditions the
unity and bountiful life of that Imago
Dei. (244)
Not that the pagans were not trying.
The following is attributed to
Homer, 8th century BC author of the
Iliad and the Odyssey:
There is nothing more admirable than
two people who see eye-to-eye keeping
241. For more on this union, see Bibliography for (1)
Yahweh or the Great Mother/ , (2) Man & Woman in
the Image of God, and (3) Psychology, Salvation, &
the Ordination of Women, especially on the notion
of spiritual power.
242. See Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of
Consciousness, Bollingen Series XLII, Princeton
University Press. Consult index.
243. For information on the Biblical view of sex and
gender, see Preface, “Invitation to a Wedding...” on
page xx. See also Bibliography for Yahweh or the
Great Mother? and for Psychology, Salvation, and
the Ordination of Women.
244. Ibid.

114 The Law & the Grace of God
245. See above discussion on the Greek philosophers
in Part I, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.
246. For Denis Prager’s article, Judaism's Sexual
Revolution: Why Judaism (and then Christianity)
Rejected Homosexuality, go to http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles2/PragerHomosexuality.shtml
house as man and wife, confounding their
enemies and delighting their friends.
The Odyssey has been interpreted
as Hellenic culture’s attempt to find
that sacred marriage with hearth and
home secure. Odysseus’ heroic struggle
to return from Troy to home, wife,
and children against the wiles of the
gods, bad weather, and bad luck was
poetically everyman’s struggle. The
Iliad and Odyssey became the prephilosophical
Bible for the Hellenic
attempt to create and define a stable
moral order. They intuitively (and
rightly) had nothing to offer on the human
level higher than a return to family,
home,.and hearth. Socrates picked
up on that same quest, leading to the
unsuccessful philosophical attempt to
define the ‘good’ (feminine) and the
‘right’ (masculine). (245)
And Cicero, 1st century BC:
The first bond of society is marriage.
According to Jewish writer Dennis
Prager, the Hebrews were the first
civilization to, as he said, put the sexual
genie into the marital bottle. That
moral discipline was carried on by
Judeo-Christians into the rest of the
world. (246)
Monotheism tends to lead to monogamy.
And, says Prager, the discipline
of monogamy helped set energies
free from self-centeredness and
self-absorption which helped fuel the
building of Western Civilization. I believe
he is correct. Godly sexual relations
are primarily about good and stable
(“‘til death do us part”) relationships,
not about intense pleasurable
feelings.
But, for much, perhaps most, of
the world, sex is about creating an intense,
pleasurable distraction from and
sugar-coating for the tragic failures of
our lives, our painful relationships
with God and one another. A successful
hieros gamos in such a world
might look/feel something like an
eternal orgasm -- if it were not the
chasing after a vacuous wind.
For faithful Biblical people, sex
and gender, made in the Imago Dei,
are about the creation of life-giving
family and community. It is about the
power-of-being and authority-for-doing,
those two fundamental stabilities
of all personal life. It is about healthy
mothering and fathering. It is about
nurturing and direction-giving in close
communion, like grace and law eternally
wedded. The “‘til death do us
part” in the Christian marriage vow is
the human reflection of that eternal
marriage in God.
b. Domination by
the “Original Stuff”
In the pagan and secular worlds,
all things are dominated by the original
and mystical “stuff” out of which
all else evolves, and to which it sooner
or later returns. That perhaps is why
probably all cultures have a creation
story. We want to understand ourselves
and our deep eternal foundations.
The pagan “stuff” is inherently
and overwhelmingly impersonal and
depersonalizing, with no future for individual
personal beings, and thus also
none for community. The death of
persons and cultures is the rise of
chaos for those entities. Everything
existing and individual dies, but not

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 115
the Great Mother herself. The rise of
chaos is the return of the Great
Mother, overwhelming and digesting
all individual entities.
Mother nature is material nature.
The Latin ‘mater’, meaning ‘mother’,
is cognate to ‘materia’ meaning material.
The “Great Mother”, “Magna
Mater” of the ancient world, was
mother earth or mother cosmos, an absolutely
self-sustaining power, both
the origin and end of all things, the Alpha
and the Omega.
The mothering of the Biblical
God, on the other hand, is the work of
God as creator of all things, notably of
mother nature herself. God alone is
self-sufficient and self-sustaining.
Mother nature is a creature of God,
not the Great Mother of paganism.
(247) The Biblical world is perhaps
the only logically consistent and empirically
relevant worldview there is,
and, perhaps uniquely, has a workable
notion of sex and gender. (248)
For the secular world, that original
stuff is raw physical matter, whatever
the latest version thereof might
be in secular cosmology -- as we try to
understand the newest “atom”. (249)
For the pagan world, the original
stuff is usually some version of the
Chinese “yin yang”, the coincidence
of opposites, the cosmic mind, etc. (250)
It is impossible for secular or pagan
worlds to accomplish the wedding
of masculine to feminine -- because
247. See Bibliography for Yahweh or the Great
Mother? Gender roles in the Bible are understood
quite differently from those in the pagan world.
248. See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God on the cosmological argument for God, and
the rationality of the Biblical worldview.
On sex and gender, look for Man & Woman in
the Image of God, and Psychology, Salvation, & the
Ordination of Women
there is no possibility of a masculine
(inherently individual) figure who can
stand on a par with the Great Mother,
the domineering figure in all pagan
and secular worlds. All males are forever
sons of the Great Mother, never
her equal. There can be males, but no
men, no spiritual authorities. There
can be no patriarchies (contrary to
popular opinion), only fratriarchies,
bands of brothers, male leaders who
dominate by male force and strategy,
not lead by manly moral authority.
That is so because neither the secular
nor the pagan worldviews have
creators ex nihilo, and so neither have
that “is” upon which a moral order can
be founded, a purpose for existence.
(251) Their worldviews are devoid
of moral order, and thus dependent
upon the power of the strong man, the
tyrant (with lots o’ luck), to bring a
semblance of civilized order out of
the-all-too-normal moral, political,
and physical chaos of life. (252)
This attempted moral order is
based on their largely guess-work approximation
of the “good” with enforcement
by coercion, not on the
“right” with enforcement by con-
249. One might say that the high point of secular
materialism and the secular “stuff” was the Newtonian
world of hard, massey atoms bumping about in
space to create the world we know. But that worldview
steadily eroded under the critiques of George
Berkeley, David Hume, and Emmanuel Kant -- and
more recently, under the strange power of relativity
and quantum mechanics.
See Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism, &
God, especially chapters I and II, for this story.
For a fascinating challenge to relativity and
quantum mechanics, visit www.commonsensescience.org.
250. See Bibliography for Yahweh or the Great
Mother?
251. See above, Part I, “The “Is” upon which the
“Ought” is Based...” on page 18.
252. See Bibliography for Reason, Revelation, &
Politics. Is Western culture Christian culture? And
if so, how do we get it back?

116 The Law & the Grace of God
science, the Voice of God. (253) It can
be a persuasive “look-alike ought”
when based on an honest assessment
of the good, but is nevertheless not a
moral order.
This is not to say that there were
no noble and morally committed persons
among secular and pagan peoples.
There have indeed been. But it
is true to say that they never were able
to explain from where their intuitions
came of the “ought” necessary to a
morality.
If Plato’s Myth of the Cave was
an only vaguely understood revelation
from the living God, as I suspect,
nevertheless, nothing within the secular
or pagan worldview tells their inhabitants
that some things are not only
objectively good or bad, but also objectively
right or wrong. In a world
which has no creator God, what could
have brought about such strong impressions
that some things were right
and some things wrong? It has to
come from some mysterious and unknowable
place outside the closed circle
of secular/pagan cosmology. But,
a creator God is not an option for the
closed circle cosmos.
Yet, a part of the answer to, “How
did they know there were moral values?”
lies in the fact that the “good”,
that which as a matter of practice, fosters
life and community, is an empirical
fact -- even within the closed circle
cosmos. It does not take much to discern
that famine is a “not good”, and
that adequate supplies of water and
food are a “good” -- unless you are
blockading a city and want to starve
the city into subjection. It will be perceived
as a “good” for yourself.
253. On the “good”, see above, “The Good & the
Right” on page 5.
Nevertheless, non-Biblical people
cannot show why or how the good
is obligatory. Obtaining the good remains
a matter of hard work and of
luck -- which as often as not get overridden
by sexual, economic, political,
or military pressure.
It can also be said, that the very
existence of the often strong commitment
to moral order among secular
and pagan folks is itself evidence for
the existence of a Creator God who
alone can produce that moral order. If
the intuition/revelation of a moral order
cannot come from within the
closed circle, then from where?
It suggests that the circle is not in
fact so closed as it appears. Maybe
Someone from out beyond is indeed
speaking to us? Maybe we need a
spiritual SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence) or SECI (Search
for Extra-Cosmic Intelligence).
A-6. A Tale of One City
As St. Augustine described in The
City of God, there are two cities with
which we have to deal: the City of
God and the City of the World. The
city of God is honest civilization, the
other is the semi-organized barbarism
of the fallen world.
The Greeks, who thought that
they were the “civilized” ones over
against the Persians and other barbaroi,
had invented the “polis” (citystate)
with perhaps the first peeps of
rational human freedom, all of which
served them (in comparison, at least,
to their neighbors) rather well until
they bumped into their inability, other
than by warfare, to adjudicate disputes
among their own Greek poloi. So they
self-destructed.
They never resolved the mystery

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 117
for which Socrates began his quest:
What is the meaning of man as
man? (254) So, they had no moral or political
authority higher than their poloi
by which to decide inter-polis friction.
Their attempt at democracy thus failed
for some of the very reasons the
America founding fathers said would
destroy any pure democracy.
From the Greek ‘polis’ meaning
‘city’, we get our word ‘politics’. The
Roman word for ‘city’ was ‘civis',
from which we get ‘civil’, as in civil
government, or ‘civilized’.
Augustine’s point was that there is
only one true civilization, the City of
God.
254. See Part I, D-3, “The Ability vs.
the Right to Command” on page 32
The Greeks, even with their newly
minted powers of reason and their poloi,
as all pagan and secular societies,
were still a whole worldview and Gospel
away from being able to leave barbarism
and establish a stable civilization
-- a City of God on earth. (255)
Nothing of that, over the intervening
years, has changed.
B. Morality... in the Trenches
B-1. Western Collapse
into “Positivism”
The collapse of Western Civilization
began long before the 1700’s -- if
one accepts that Western Civilization
is Christian Civilization. Secularization
had shown beginning signs of
eroding Judeo-Christian foundations
even by the late Middle Ages. (256)
But a major turning point was the
arrival of positivist law in the middle
1800’s, by legal scholars who rejected
the English common law tradition
based theologically on the Biblical
law of God, and philosophically on
Biblical metaphysical principles. (257)
256. See Bibliography, for example, for Notes for a
Conference on Art & Religion, by Emile Cammaerts,
with extended commentary by Earle Fox. Cammaerts
claims, rightly, I think, that secularization
began shortly after the high middle ages.
255. Gilbert Murray was not a Christian, but he did
describe this descent of Hellenic culture well in The
Five Stages of Greek Religion.
Rodney Stark describes the radical difference
between what Judeo-Christianity contributed to
human culture by creating Western Civilization and,
on the other hand, what paganism failed to contribute.
See
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/
Hst/Stark&Xty&Cultr.htm, and also
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/12The/Xr/
IfJssNvrBorn-SummitMin.htm
Both God and metaphysics were
denounced as fairy tales, and law was
now declared a “scientific” study,
meaning derived wholly from the empirical
world, from the growth of case
law as judges and legislators invented
it over time, hoping to formulate a
comprehensive and intelligible system
of governing. (258)
This was a “reinvention”, not an
original discovery, because prior to
Biblical law, all law was developed by
257. On Blackstone, see http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/Cnst/
BlackstonLaw.htm
258. See Joseph Story and the American Constitution,
by James McClellan (University of Oklahoma
Press, ISBN 0-8061-2290-0) for the development of
positivist law and the consequent erosion of the
American Constitution.
McClellan tells of Story’s only partially successful
attempt to rescue objective morality in law from
the corrosive effects of positivism.

118 The Law & the Grace of God
the “case law” method. There was no
other way. You experimented until
you found what “worked”, not what
had moral authority. God, being an
Intelligent Designer, knew how to design
a law which not only did have authority,
but also “worked” -- to actually
produce the ever elusive good society.
The rightly famous law code of
Hammurabi was derived on positivist
principles, “posited” by the power
elite as a way of governing. Where
the power elites had some sense of
compassion for their people, the law
code could turn out reasonably well --
compared, at least, to the ruling of the
typically compassionless power elite.
But again, it was still not a principled
obligation, only a pragmatic and problematic
bit of good luck.
Positivist law tries to work with
the “good” alone, as though that constituted
the “right”. But it does not.
Biblical religion was the first
“ethical monotheism”, the first religion
with a rational basis for obligation
and thus for civil law itself. It
was the first religion to tie morality
specifically to the will of God. The
term “ethical monotheism” was invented
to point out the uniquely moral
character of Hebrew religion.
The logical connection between
the Creator of heaven and earth and
the moral order of the cosmos was not
often drawn because the Hebrew mentality
did not run in abstract logical
channels, but rather in living relationship
channels -- which, of course, demanded
logical consistency.
But that logical connection was
not emphasized in either Hebrew or
early Christian thinking. Creation and
moral order were often mentioned in
the same sentence, as though there
were some intuitive knowledge of the
matter, but the logical connection was,
to my knowledge, not openly drawn,
that is, the origin in the creator-creature
relationship of “reason for being”
was not specified as the foundation of
morality.
See, for example, William Blackstone’s,
Commentaries on the Laws of
England, (1765-69), Section the second
- Of the Nature of Laws in General:
“Man, considered as a creature,
must necessarily be subject to the laws
of his creator, for he is entirely a dependent
being. A being, independent
of any other, has no rule to pursue, but
such as he prescribes to himself; but a
state of dependence will inevitably
oblige the inferior to take the will of
him, on whom he depends, as the rule
of his conduct: not indeed in every
particular, but in all those points
wherein his dependence consists....
And consequently as man depends absolutely
upon his maker for everything,
it is necessary that he should in
all points conform to his maker's
will.”
Blackstone’s analysis is intuitively
on target, connecting dependency
with moral order. But, to be
complete, it still requires the logic of
“reason for existence” and the connection
specifically with ontological dependency.
Not all kinds of dependencies
create a moral order. Lacking the
ontological dependency, we are still
stuck with coercion, not obligation or
conscience, as the basic “enforcer”.
Pagan religion, not having any
clear concept of a creator ex nihilo, did
not typically connect morality with
their divinities -- who in any case were
seldom good examples of good behavior.
They lived the dream-life of so

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 119
many teens, “I am old enough to do
what I want!” Pagan peoples could articulate
some sense of “the good”, that
which promoted life and community,
but they had no clear and separate articulation
of the “right”, of obligation
or from whence that originated. (259)
So the divinities (even with their
own bad behavior) might have demanded
good behavior from humans
(politicians do it all the time...), but
that is different from commanding
good behavior. A command can be
given only if founded on a reason for
existence, which pagan divinities
could not give.
The law code of Hammurabi was
derived by just such a collection of attempts
to codify the “good”, then enforced
by sword and spear. It was the
best they could do, but the illusion of
obligation depended on the sword, not
on objective obligation. In such a culture,
it is generally not obligation, but
survival, which motivates obedience,
not only personal survival under the
sword of the ruler, but cultural and social
survival in the midst of violently
competing societies.
In the world, the strong man has
the sword of steel, so he can “command-i.e.-coerce”.
With God, just the
opposite: He can command, so He has
the Sword of the Spirit.
In contrast to pagan law, the European
development of common law
was based on the Decalogue, not
merely on case law. The Godly development
of case law would lead toward
better and better ways of deploying
the Decalogue, but not to contrary
principles of law -- as we have today.
Different directions (such as ending
slavery), bringing law more consistently
in line with the law of God,
began to be applied as the logical implications
of the law of God became
more clear, and as people of lower and
lower social status began vigorously
to demand their application for their
benefit -- as well as for that of the rich.
It was largely foment from below
(the barons in this case) which led to
King John in 1215 at Runnymeade,
England, signing the Magna Cartal,
partly authored by Stephen Lancton,
Archbishop of Canterbury -- one of
the few examples in history to that
time of the arbitrary powers of a king
being effectively limited by the people
for the benefit of the people.
As William Blackstone wrote, no
legal system could supersede the law
of God. And the law of God demanded
freedom -- politics of, by, and
for the people, as John Wycliffe in the
14th century first proclaimed. (260)
B-2. The Law of God,
Positivist Law,
...& Force
a. Secular/Pagan Positivism
But with the collapse of metaphysics
and the growing inability of
theology to hold its own during the
1800’s, legal scholars had no place to
turn other than back to the old case
law method. Many, of course, were
delighted to do so because it put them,
the lawyers, in charge of what was
mistakenly (or seditiously) taken for
morality.
They decorated their new positivism
with the word ‘scientific’, which
259. See in Part I, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30
260. Go to http://thinkexist.com/quotes/
john_wycliffe/ for this and other quotes from Wycliffe.

120 The Law & the Grace of God
they might rightly have applied to the
empirically discoverable “good”, but
they had abandoned the “ought”, and
therefore lost all legitimacy and right
to command which comes only from
the “ought”. “Power to enforce” now
again substituted for “right to command”.
Or, Mao Tse Tung again, “Morality
comes out of the other end of a gun
barrel.” Might makes right. Might
does not really make right, but used by
civil government, it can be made a
persuasive look-alike, especially,
again, if the government has a reasonable
grip on the good.
But as the work of R. J. Rummel
suggests, when government loses its
submission to the Authority higher
than itself, the de facto core of coercive
force sooner or later takes over as
the de facto modus operandi. (261)
Those who control the power write the
history, so also they will define the
“good” to fit their own ends.
The “good” without the “ought” is
terminally lame because the ensuing
power struggle devoid of moral authority
always drifts toward centralized
government and tyranny.
As perceptive Russians described
it:
“Comes the Revolution, everyone
will have peaches and cream!”
“But Commissar, I don’t like peaches
and cream...”
“Comes the Revolution, everyone
will have peaches and cream!”
When we lose the law of God,
261. Rummel’s work, so far as I can see, does not
suggest that he is a Christian, and does not specifically
make the theological point. But when the
issue is raised, the logic is clear.
See Rummel’s website at
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/, or his book,
The Blue Book of Freedom.
there is no command principle left,
only force to coerce. The pretend
commands no longer have moral legitimacy.
The right reason for civil government
is to make coercion support, not
hinder, our reason for existence, that
is, to bring the use of coercion under
the law and grace of God. The primary
de facto aim of tyrannical government
control is not support of the
people going about their business, but
rather to exploit the people. Law and
force are not the same thing. Force
does not create law, rather law commands
force. The right to command
hangs on our reason for existence, our
objective morality.
Positivist law reversed that. Unchecked
force in the hand of civil government
pretends to create law -- an
arrangement which is the unsteady
ground of all tyranny.
The demise of the masculine
“ought” meant the demise also of the
marriage between law and grace, and
thus the control of force by amoral
governments in an amoral world.
There was no longer a masculine spiritual
principle of authority to be wed to
feminine grace, only the male power
and pleasure principles of force and
sex.
The collapse of moral authority in
the 19th century, led to the 20th, as
predicted by Friedrich Nietzche, the
most brutal in human history -- because
we had jettisoned the Word of
God, our moral compass. (262)
b. Biblical Positivism
Ironically, however, God also
gives us “positive” law. The difference
is that He and only He can do so.
Because God does not get His law
from an authority higher than Himself,

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 121
He must Himself posit His laws
through revelation. The positive law
of God becomes the obligation of all
creatures.
What human sources posit is only
their opinions, no more. Their opinions
might be backed up by force, but
that does nothing to give them moral
or legal authority. Human positing of
law is either naive ignorance or deliberate
rebellion against God.
B-3. The Spiritual Castration
of the West
a. The Spiritual War
Given that the core masculine gift
is spiritual, i.e., moral authority, it follows
that the collapse of moral authority
and its replacement by positivist
law in the courts, and by relativism on
the streets, would have a devastating
effect upon the ability of men to take
themselves seriously as spiritual leaders
in their families or cultures. The
West entered the 20th century with its
manhood already seriously compromised.
Castration can be not only a
physical, but even more importantly a
spiritual, event.
And indeed, that is just what has
happened. The problem was illustrated
sharply, but hardly recognized,
with the “Greatest Generation”, those
Americans who risked, many losing,
their lives to help defeat two major
tyrannies.
Manhood is not the same as
262. An interesting contrast: a certain magazine at
the end of the 19th century saw the victories of science,
and concluded the 20th was to be the “Christian”
century. The magazine changed its name to
rejoice in that coming triumph of Christian culture to
-- The Christian Century. Nietzsche said, no, not
so. We had killed God, and so it would be the most
brutal of centuries. The atheist predicted rightly, not
the Christian magazine.
swords, guns, or coercion, but when
you take an American man, put a gun
in his hand, and point him at a real enemy,
he becomes one of the finest soldiers
available, not only militarily, but
in terms of befriending non-combatants
among the enemy population --
commonly understood as loving one’s
neighbor. The American soldier on
the ground may be the best advertisement
that America currently has, better,
in many cases, than the largely pietistic
American Church. (263)
In the military, American men often
regain something of a serious
moral compass. Even in our post-Biblical
culture, there remains some bedrock
of moral foundation -- that somehow
good relationships, not coercing
one’s way, is the meaning of life.
But when the shooting war was
over and soldiers returned to an already
semi-emasculated society,
America thought that we, the good
folks, had won, and that we could relax
and enjoy the freedoms now protected
by our victories.
What we as a people, we as a
Christian community, and we as a
Church of God had long forgotten,
was that there is another war, the spiritual
war, going on all the time -- until
the King of kings returns, and that all
military war is just a subset of that
larger spiritual war.
The spiritual war targeted men
and boys, or more accurately, masculinity.
Masculinity was “sexist”, making
men tyrants over women, it was
said or implied. If that was masculin-
263. Yes, there are those who show an opposite and
degraded story, but they are the few. But I do not
have the same confidence for the upper military
echelons. One does not usually get to the top
today without playing the secular relative-truth,
power-politics game -- on the side of the Globalisst
government centralization enterprise.

122 The Law & the Grace of God
ity, no one seemed to be asking what
the corresponding femininity was.
The war against men and boys was
largely a war on the “ought”, obligation,
binding moral authority.
Nevermind that feminists, or at
least the “radical” sort, wanted to tyrannize
over men with their own very
strongly articulated “oughts”. And behind
it all was the yet-once-again reemerging
perennial Gaia, mother
earth, the Great Mother.
We still needed warriors, but the
candidates were mostly oblivious.
b. The Positivist Ax Falls
on the Church
We Western Christians hardly realize
that the Enemy had stolen a
march on us of well over a century by
commandeering the legal structure,
the media, the education system, and
thus the public mentality -- and that
the specific target was Biblical civilization,
with a consequent return to
amoral, try-hard-to-feel-good paganism.
One of the major causes of this
demise was an almost total ignorance
among Christians of the marriage connection
between the good and the
right, between grace and law, and of
the connection between personal
salvation and the welfare of the public
arena. Modern American Christians
have had next to no concept of Biblical
government, with the authority of
God over civil government. We had
already been positivized and secularized.
So civil government, which is instituted
by God to bring the use of coercive
force under His law and grace,
was being increasingly run by persons
not only ignorant of, but openly hostile
to, God, law, and grace.
The alleged spiritual renewal of
the 1950’s sported some well-filled
churches, but it was mostly show. (264)
Had there been a renewal of substance,
the moral and spiritual collapse
of the 1960’s could never have happened.
The ax fell openly and brazenly
with the 1962 Supreme Court decision,
Engel vs. Vitale, outlawing
prayer in government schools, followed
quickly by Abingdon vs.
Schempp in 1963 outlawing Bible
reading because -- reading or hearing
the Bible could be psychologically
harmful to children, the Supreme
Court was told by “experts”. Theological
ideas have political consequences.
And politics has theological
consequences.
Reading the Bible would be disastrous,
but for government centralizers,
not for the children. It was “outlawed”
to protect the politicians, not
the children.
The result since Engel vs. Vitale
has been open spiritual, moral, political,
and economic chaos. (265) The
chaos had been waiting in the wings,
but now the lid was off.
Judges hostile to the very God
who had given them their authority arbitrarily
declared in Engel vs. Vitale
264. I grew up in just such a church in Minnesota.
Even in my junior high school years, I knew that
something deep was missing, although then I had
no words to express it. I began to discover the
intellectual and moral power of the Christian faith
during my college career, especially during the writing
of Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’, Part I above,
in my junior year under the tutelage of Prof.
Edmond Cherbonnier.
Go to http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/
ShpMl/YorGM/00YorGM.htm for information about
Edmond Cherbonnier.
265. David Barton’s book, Original Intent, documents
the cultural collapse beginning in 1962. The downhill
slide continues apace into the 21st century. Go
to www.wallbuilders.com for Barton’s material.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 123
without (1962, for the first time in Supreme
Court history) a single legal
precedent to uphold their decision,
that prayer in government schools was
unconstitutional, and thus it was illegal
for students to talk to God, or God
to them.
Prayer was illegally outlawed.
How can it be legal to destroy legitimacy
and legality?.
The Court dismissed God from
His sovereignty, and took the divine
role of defining right and wrong (reason
for existence) for themselves and
their legal profession. That to which
lawyers had once been obedient, they
(not we, the people) now ruled over.
Positivist law was making war on
Biblical law, not by an open contest of
ideas in the public arena, but by subversive
and dishonest use of the legal
system in cahoots with the ignorance
of Christians about their own worldview
and the Biblical roots of their
government. The Supreme Court had
successfully gutted the Constitution of
its own legal foundation, the law of
God, and made up their own foundation,
whole cloth.
Beginning precisely with 1962,
the negative effect on America was
dramatic, with a sustained rise in criminal
activity, sexual misbehavior, and
divorce, and a steady and catastrophic
drop in education and SAT scores over
the next decades. (266)
But the American mind had been
already neutralized to worship “expertise”,
to believe that the experts in the
judicial system knew something that
we, the public, did not, and, being
mere citizens, could not, know. (267)
Astonishingly, the Court has been able
to hold its ground up to the present
(2013) despite the track record of its
unconstitutional legislating from the
bench. People who should know better
are frightened to challenge the
Court on this matter.
These were not ill educated persons,
and the fact that in producing
Engel vs. Vitale they could find not a
single precedent to cite, indicates that
they knew they were making up their
“legislating” from the bench. That is
betrayal.
Even street urchins discovered
that the lid was off. Morality was
“out”, and feel-good was “in”. Do
your own thing.
Men were told to make love, not
war, where love meant, usually, feelgood
sex with any chosen partner or
object, our new constitutional right.
And the feminist war on boys and
men became an acceptable fact of
life. (268) Man, the warrior, was now
out of date.
Or -- he needed to learn the meaning
of spiritual warfare.
The family was deteriorating because
it cannot stand if the masculinefeminine
relationship is subverted.
Divorce, which during the 1950’s had
been going down, not up, began, in
1962, to skyrocket. And then we were
introduced to “no-fault” divorce, effectively
de-legalizing Godly marriage.
The Biblical marriage covenant
now had no protection of law.
266. See David Barton, The Myth of Separation.
The book is now out of print, but old copies might
be found in second hand stores or on Amazon.
Original Intent is the replacement for Myth of
Separation, and contains most of the statistics on
cultural devastation in The Myth of Separation
267. Until about 1992, I was one of those ignoramuses.
My wake up, inspired by the works of
David Barton (www.wallbuilders.com) was electric.
268. See Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against
Boys.

124 The Law & the Grace of God
Family was an essential part of
the target because the family is the
smithy of the soul, the place where
healthy souls are forged who can take
their places as mature individuals in
society, the kinds of souls who, morally
and spiritually united, can hold a
central government firmly on a constitutional
tether.
It is quite reasonable to believe
that our education system is producing
what government centralizers want
produced, i.e., controllable, not educated,
citizens.
If so, then the chaos of the present
time was not an accident of history nor
part of the inevitable ups and downs of
history. It has been substantially
caused by those who hold the levers of
power. Only a renewed moral and
spiritual unity among we, the people,
can turn things around. (269)
When the “ought” disappears,
then the “good”, the feminine mothering,
power of being, and masculine
coercive power -- are all bereft of
moral order. The Great Mother of ancient
paganism is again in effective
control -- her chaotic nature tempered
only by coercion and the power of the
local strong man, the tyrant, whose
manhood now can be measured only
269. Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, has
made freely available their required course on the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
“Constitution 101 & 102” (with five introductory lectures
preceding the 20 regular lectures) is an
extraordinary course and extraordinary opportunity,
a work not only of intellect, but of beauty. It
can be downloaded and viewed at one’s leisure.
Anyone concerned about the fate of America is
urged to take advantage of this offer.
The course examines the Declaration and Constitution
for its heart and soul, and then shows how
the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early
20th century set out quite consciously and deliberately
to undermine the government God had given
us in 1776 (Declaration) and 1789 (Constitution).
Go to www.hillsdale.edu
by coercion and strategy, not by his
truthfulness or moral faithfulness to
God.
Any sense of morally responsibility
will wane, the collective will overwhelm
the individual, leading eventually
to Gotterdammerung, the Endgame
of man against himself. We now
have the technology to accomplish
that.
Real men and women will be followers
of Jesus on the Way of the
Cross, and thus possessors of the two
fundamental stabilities of being and of
doing. They will not fear to critique
the current culture (or Church) for its
abysmal failures, nor to discipline it
for its deliberate subversions.
B-4. Lust - & the Collapse
of Metaphysics
a. The Childhood Discovery of
Metaphysical Reality
In a healthy family and community,
the joyful give and take of parental
relationships ensures that, as we
enter life, we can be emotionally and
spiritual fed. A growing child need
not feel “I am on my own” because
there are healthy and loving relationships
open to that child. The child
walks into life with an expectancy of
more and more delights to come as the
flood of new relationship and information
moves forward.
In such a situation, one’s needs
are naturally met, and the child is able
to respond by learning to meet the
needs of others. Good feelings then
do not become compulsive and entrapping.
One can, even wants to, discipline
oneself to mutually helpful habits.
Feelings in a spiritually and emotionally
healthy situation are under-

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 125
stood as perceptions of relationships.
I feel good because someone blesses
or rewards me. I feel bad because
some relationship did not go well,
someone mistreats me, someone dies.
As noted above, feelings are relationship
information, relationship barometers.
(270) I can learn that it is possible
to heal my hurt, not by fixing the hurt,
but by fixing the relationship in which
the hurt occurs. (271) Healing the relationship,
both morally and emotionally,
then, as a by-product, heals the
bad feelings.
Infants begin life learning some of
these most profound of metaphysical
lessons because personal relationships
are by nature relations between
two metaphysical entities, two persons.
However physically embodied I
might be, I am most basically a metaphysical
entity.
First, the infant “sees” mother, not
a collection of sensory percepts which
he reasons is mother. Mother is seen
as a person right from the first connection
-- if mother is willing. A mother
who is emotionally distant, who does
not hug and cuddle a child, will almost
for sure emotionally lose that child.
The smallest infant is looking for
“mom”, not for a set of perceptions
which he can then reasonably conclude
is mom. The perception of a
person (something beyond any set of
data from the five senses to which the
secular world wants to limit us) is a
metaphysical event, from beyond or
behind the physical.
Then during the “terrible two’s”,
270. See above, “Privatizing: first Religion & then
Morality” on page 107.
271. On the relationship between feelings and relationships,
see Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing,
especially Chapter II, Section C, Decision II -
Dependency.
the child is learning (hopefully) how
to say “yes” and “no” gracefully and
appropriately. He is discovering that
he can say “no” to those God-like parental
figures, that he has a free will.
He can choose. Freedom is another
metaphysical event.
The same child, all going well,
will know by about three the difference
between true and false. Even
three and four year olds know what
mother wants when she asks little
Johnny, “Did you put your hand in the
cookie jar?” Mother wants the truth.
Truth is a metaphysical property, not a
bit of sense data.
So, furthermore, will the child
know the difference between right and
wrong. For the small child, the “important”
is what parents expect of me
(echoing the theme of Part I above,
that morality is based on the will of
my creator), and the “unimportant” is
what they let me choose for myself.
Personhood, free will, true vs.
false, right and wrong -- all of these
are metaphysical issues, truths that
cannot be derived from merely physical
circumstances by themselves. The
child is already sensing a metaphysical
“self” in mother and in him- or
herself. There is more to mother, father,
and self than merely machinelike
bodies. They love me and I can
love them. The sense data of sight,
sound, touch, smell, and taste are not
persons, and do not have you in mind.
Mom and dad are persons, and do
have you in mind.
The whole of St. Paul’s theology,
as discussed, for example, in Romans
7 and 8, about life in the Spirit versus
life in the flesh, is a metaphysical discussion.
These are all discoveries necessary
for a child to begin taking rational
part in relationships.

126 The Law & the Grace of God
272. On the rationally plausible, even compelling,
reality of persons as the fundamental entities in the
cosmos, see Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism,
and God, on the Cosmological Argument for
the existence of God.
So, if you want to study metaphysics,
begin, not with philosophers,
but with small children. We think of
metaphysics as the realm of accomplished
thinkers, but children are
deeply involved long before they can
think abstractly or read and write
books at all, let alone on metaphysics.
They are not thinking about thinking,
philosophy or metaphysics, but they
are unself-consciously doing metaphysics
in the most profound of ways.
It is we adults who mess it up --
because we never had, or have lost,
the Biblical worldview. Recovery of
the Biblical worldview within the Biblical
community, of all places, is of the
highest importance.
Metaphysics in the Biblical world
is not primarily about abstractions
such as “being” or “substance”, as in
most philosophical traditions, it is
about persons and personal relationships.
(272) Persons are the primary
metaphysical entities, beginning with
God, creator and sovereign. We commonly
use the world ‘spiritual’ rather
than ‘metaphysical’.
This is what many Christians call
a “sacramental” world, in which the
spiritual is manifested through the
physical: “The heavens declare the
glory of God, and the firmament declares
His handiwork...” The soul is
manifested through the body. The
presence of Christ is given through the
bread and wine of Holy Communion.
The ability and willingness to perceive
and welcome the presence of
other persons, notably God, determines
our capacity to grow into a mature
adult.
The more God-like the parents
are, of course, the more likely this process
will successfully raise a strong,
healthy, and Godly child into adulthood
and the Kingdom.
Recovering alcoholics sometimes
use the phrase to describe themselves:
“adult child of an alcoholic”. So long
as I am still receiving my being or my
moral compass from entities in the
world, I will still be a child of that entity,
not an adult. To be an adult in the
world, you must move your childhood
from things in the world to God, that
is, be “born again” of the Spirit.
b. Metaphysical Collapse
& the Fall
When the metaphysical/sacramental
processes for developing these
basic relationships gets derailed, then
the very ability of the child to have
healthy relationships is eroded. Instead
of living, breathing persons, the
child might see (or think he sees) depersonalized
entities who are of no inherent
value, just objects like any
other object, and thus dispensable.
Words like ‘autism’, ‘schizoid’, and
‘sociopath’ come to mind.
Instead, then, of love-building relationships,
the child will experience
feelings divorced from relationship.
He will not be able to fix the bad feelings
by fixing the relationship because
personal relationship is not even perceived,
or is too threatening, uncaring,
even hostile.
Good feelings turn into compulsive
lust because, not being able to fix
the bad feeling by fixing the relationship,
one has to try to fix the feeling
directly -- by the usual feel-good resources:
alcohol, drugs, power, popularity,
etc.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 127
Then, because the personal Creator
has disappeared from sight (the
Fall), we instead worship the world as
described in Romans 1:18-31, trapped
attempting to heal the unhealable with
a continual sugar-coating of pleasant
feelings.
Lust is entrapment in this feelgood
relationship (or non-relationship).
(273) The goal is then not good
relationship, but good feelings divorced
from good relationship, a dead
end of the spirit.
It comes from rejection of the vulnerability
in mutually responsible relationship
-- and therefore treating
other persons as simply the usable
means to my own ends. We “use” one
another -- at an emotional and spiritual
distance.
Mutually using one another
“works” until it (inevitably) gets out
of sync, so that one or the other begins
to sense the arrangement not working
for him- or herself. The unforgiveable
sin is now violating one’s “right” to
good feelings.
Hence the horrendous rate of divorce,
broken homes, single-parent
families, and... abortion.
The deep needs of the growing
child cry out for response. But disabled
in the conceiving of personal relationships,
the child will be unable to
relate and respond with the wholeness
of his or her own personhood. Defensive
walls are erected, behind which
there are no blessings of good relationships,
only loneliness and power
struggle -- such as the child can
mount.
273. On the relationship between feelings and relationships,
see Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing,
especially Chapter II, Section C, Decision II -
Dependency.
Failure of the above metaphysical
discoveries leaves the child to that degree
with only objects to use, not persons
to love. Pleasure, power, and
pride are seen as the options for survival
as a “somebody” rather than a
“nobody”.
This entrapment in lust can happen
due to bad parenting, accidental
circumstances which prevent good
parenting, sexual abuse, the choice of
the child itself to be self-centered -- or
any combination of the above. Life
then becomes necessarily laden with
power-struggle, and a compulsive
search for good feelings and comfortable
circumstances regardless of relationship
-- the royal road to chaos and
to hell.
c. The Power of Lust
vs. the Grace of God
The almost overwhelming selfjustification
of sexual pleasure (or
drugs, power, fame, etc.) wants to
overrule any “ought” which stands in
its way with a “no!”. Lust short-circuits
the perception of a metaphysical/
sacramental obedience relationship.
How can anything which feels so
good be wrong, we reason. Lust feels
so good when it successfully mimics
the Hieros Gamos, the union of our
selves with our “other half” -- the universally
sought for union of masculine
with feminine.
But it is our loyalty and obedience
to the oughts of God, the “right”,
which rescues us from the lies of the
deceptive and lethal feel-good, and
gets us back on track for the true
union, the real Hieros Gamos.
The law is given for our good,
made for us, not we for it.
The battle is not that imagined by
the Pelagian controversy (between the

128 The Law & the Grace of God
law and grace of God), but rather between
that law and grace wedded vs.
the absurd and hopeless substitutes
which are all the fallen world can conjure.
Whole secular and pagan philosophies
and religions are built around
one form or another of this metaphysical
depersonalization, such as Communism,
and most, if not all, other
government-centralizing philosophies,
eastern religions, and Islam.
Each attempts to provide an answer to
the depersonalized barrenness of a
world without a personally involved
Creator/Sovereign.
The descent into our current Western
self-destruction has happened because
the Christian population, the
visible Church, out of ignorance, cowardice,
and/or lust of their own have
been unwilling or unable to defend the
Biblical worldview and Gospel, unable
or unwilling in public to follow
Jesus on the Way of the Cross. Hopefully
this essay on law and grace will
assist in remedying that unhappy situation.
In Biblical religion alone is there
a metaphysical foundation based on a
living personal Creator who ensures a
law and grace made for man, not man
for it.
Ideas have metaphysical consequences,
and so does child-raising. (274)
B-5. Truth-Seeking &
Godly Pragmatism
A scene in The Day After showed
274. See Bibliography for a coming work: The
Expanding Circle of Mother & the Search for
Father, an essay on Godly child-raising, our spiritual
journey from our mother and father being God
to us to God being our mother and father, as we are
“born again” into the family of God (John 3:1 ff.).
a rather spoiled young lady, who was
to be married on, it turned out, the day
of the attack, arriving home early that
morning after an all night spree with
her intended. She was confronted by
her father when she sauntered in, as to
where she had been. She replied, in
good 1960’s fashion, “I don’t think it’s
any of your business.” (275)
As most men of his time and
since, he backed off. It would never
have occurred to him to respond, “My
daughter dear, it is your father’s business
to give you away to your intended
with a solid, Godly moral foundation
-- for the sake of yourself, your intended,
and your possible children --
and for the glory of God.”
Children, family, and mutually responsible
relationships do not seem to
be the center of many marriages in the
early 21st century, even less than the
1960’s -- though maybe not so noisily.
We are much more used to it, and do
not make much fuss about it -- until
our “rights” are denied. Life is about
my personal convenience and feelinggood
-- i.e., lust.
That scene was a key to the whole
Godless movie, indeed, about any society
which has no alternative to its
own mutually destructive Endgame.
Any society whose foundation has become
the Big “Sez Who?!” or,
“There is no right or wrong, only fun
and boring!” will, in the end, have no
principled alternative to pulling the
cord on everybody.
Was not the nuclear rocket exchange
between the Russians and the
Americans just the big boys “doing
their own thing” in good relative fash-
275. See above on The Day After, at “Can God be
Trusted?”, beginning on page 93, toward the end of
the section.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 129
ion? Or was there something really
wrong with it?
When the heroic doctor leading
hospital efforts to help the afflicted
was asked why he was sacrificing
himself so, he replied simply, ‘I don’t
know.” No reason for existence, no
ability to articulate even his own
strong and heroic moral code.
The successful legal take-over by
positivist law harnessed to public education
gave civil government almost
total control over American morality
(with a pacified Church in deep decline).
That is currently symbolized
by, as we call it, “Obamacare”, a government
program to impose its view of
health care on every citizen -- betrayal
of everything for which righteous
America stands.
But when God dies, government
is the only thing big, powerful, and
omni-present enough to look like it
can replace God. Government was not
always “omnipresent”. In the 1800’s,
you could live your whole life without
ever coming into contact with the federal
government.
The secular victory was sealed in
1962 by Engel vs. Vitale, dismissing
God as sovereign (forbidding Him to
speak to children in government
schools), then 1973 Roe v. Wade, defining
who is and is not a person.
Humanist Manifesto III tells the
story. Humanism and Its Aspirations
(subtitled Humanist Manifesto III), a
successor to the two earlier Humanist
Manifestos, was published in 2003 by
the American Humanist Association.
The newest one (#III) lists six primary
beliefs, echoing themes from its
predecessors:
Knowledge of the world is derived by
observation, experimentation, and rational
analysis.
Humans are an integral part of nature, the
result of unguided evolutionary change.
Ethical values are derived from human
need and interest as tested by experience.
Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual
participation in the service of humane ideals.
Humans are social by nature and find
meaning in relationships.
Working to benefit society maximizes individual
happiness. (276)
Few would quarrel with the first
principle.
The second principle above is illogical.
In a world fundamentally of
random chance, by definition, nothing
is “integral to” any thing at all. We are
not integral to nature other than that
we are “there”. But so what if we are
there? It has no meaning. All existence
and all relationships are external,
accidental, and random. There are no
internal, integral, communal relationships
to be seen -- other than what we
can ourselves temporarily force upon
the otherwise chaotic situation.
Secular people do not actually begin
with a fundamental (ontological)
chance -- which could and would produce
only a totally irrational cosmos.
They begin assuming a base of some
physical law, which from there operates
randomly. Their base cannot be
random without being also totally chaotic.
It must aat some level be fixed
and determined. But that changes the
whole nature of randomness. (277)
The third principle above is positivism
applied to moral values and to
law. What does “tested by experi-
276. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Humanist_Manifesto#Humanist_Manifesto_II
And also,
277. The Substance of Natural Science, which will
be Volume II of A Personalist Cosmology in Imago
Dei, will delve into this assertion about the nature of
randomness. See Bibliography for information.

130 The Law & the Grace of God
ence” mean? Persons test, not experience.
And persons have agendas, pesuppositions,
and biases. Without
God we make up moral values as we
go, by trial and error. What they are
describing is, at best, the “good”, not
the right, i.e., not morality. Because
the secular/pagan world has no moral
authority, only power, pride, and passion
(which are what moral authority
is meant to govern), it has to conflate
the good with the right, gutting morality,
sending us right back to powerstruggle
as the decider for government
policy.
The last three items are worthy as
they stand, but they are about the
“good”, not about obligation, the
“right”. There is no moral content to
Humanist Manifesto III.
It should be noted again that the
so-called “death of God” in the 1960’s
was not the death of God, but the
death specifically of Father God, and
hence of moral order. Mother Goddess
in the guise of Gaia and the New
Age movement was reviving, and all
the disabilities of the amoral pagan
worldview began to exhibit themselves.
(278) Chaos is lapping at our
feet.
Males generally soon find out
how to be males, but, in increasing
numbers, with no moral objectivity,
not how to be men. They seldom understand
spiritual authority, and are often
quite frightened by the thought --
on those rare occasions when anyone
dares to raise it.
As a consequence, probably for
the first time in human history, 1990’s
school boys started using deadly
278. For some of these disabilities, see above,
“Secular-Pagan vs. Biblical Universes”, beginning
on page 113. See also Bibliography for Yahweh or
the Great Mother?
weapons against their peers -- openly,
brazenly, and for fun -- to feel good.
And when men do not know how
to be men, women are not likely to
know how to be women either -- lifegivers
and life sustainers, and hence,
abortion. (279) So the mother’s womb,
the archetypal image of comfort and
safety, has become the most dangerous
place in America for a child to be --
with a one-fourth to one-third chance
of being slaughtered in running that
nine month gamut.
When truth, and therefore also
morality, become “relative”, life becomes
meaningless. There are no
great moral issues for which to fight,
such as ending slavery, which helped
transform a corrupt England (for a
while) into a more compassionate and
morally upright nation. (280)
And then flirting with death becomes
a sport, the greatest “act of
courage” being to see how far one can
lean out over the abyss of death without
falling in -- such as playing
“chicken” on the road. The rules of
engagement become the lethal and
perpetual Endgame of life-against-itself.
A precursor to that has been the
notion expressed by some politicians
that... “We need a new Pearl Harbor...,”
needed, that is, in order to reunite
the people. When a society’s
moral unity disintegrates because its
spiritual unity has disintegrated, the
people become ungovernable. So politicians
are forced to seek other ways
279. See Bibliography for Psychology, Salvation,
and the Ordination of Women.
We find stunningly beautiful women now being
fighter pilots -- a tragic and bizarre clash of images.
280. See the movie, Amazing Grace, the story of
William Wilberforce who led the campaign to end
slavery.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 131
281. Some of us believe that 9/11 cannot be
explained without our own government’s involvement.
Go to http://www.ae911truth.org/ and to
www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/9-
11TwinTwrsFall.htm A “new Pearl Harbor”?
282. See above, the beginning of this section.
to unite their people.
Without God, the only ways to
unify people are then coercion, brainwashing,
other forms of deceit, and a
bit o’ luck. So politicians go looking
for crises, an enemy to fight (hence,
“another Pearl Harbor”, or possibly
another 9-11 twin-towers event), or
some quest behind which to get the
people, such as getting a man on the
moon. (281)
But, unlike moral principle, none
of these is permanent, even when they
work. You have to keep reinventing
your communal glue.
An effective immune system for
any society stands on a commitment to
truth-seeking, truth-speaking, and
righteousness. Only that can cure our
wandering into intellectual, moral, and
spiritual chaos. Truth-seeking and
moral/spiritual leadership is the masculine,
manly “quest” par excellance,
symbolized by the Sword of the Spirit.
So when truth becomes relative,
the immune system turns in upon itself,
an auto-immune attack on truth,
with humanity thus eating itself. The
only glue that works is truth leading to
the law and grace of God.
The two 1999 Columbine, Colorado,
high school teen-terrorists
jumped right on into the deadly current.
And, for the most part, the wisemen
of 1999, and now of 2013 are doing
no better at a remedy than did the
wisemen of 1983 discussing The Day
After. (282) Americans were duly horrified,
and then got used to it.
An astonishing and beautiful exception
to that gross failure was Darryll
Scott, the father of Rachel Scott,
devout Christian student who was
murdered at Columbine high school.
Darryll Scott traveled around the
country with his son, both giving their
testimonies to the love of God in the
midst of the horror. (283) It seems
largely, maybe overwhelmingly, to be
serious Christians who rescue our
lives from terminal degradation.
We have a naked public square
rendered deliberately devoid of moral
or spiritual order by our contemporary
globalist power-elite. The Bible, spirituality,
and metaphysics have, by secular
positivists and behaviorists, been
declared not only irrelevant but dangerous
-- as with hate-crime laws
which, for instance, forbid honest (or
any other) critique of homosexuality.
The spiritual war continues.
Legitimate pragmatism is finding
the most efficient way to pursue the
“good”, to be loving. God is a pragmatist.
He knows the efficient and
sure way to get us from a fallen world
into His kingdom. So, if both logical
consistency and legitimate pragmatism
tell us anything, it is that secular
positivism and behaviorism do not
“work”. They do not lead to a kingdom
of heaven, not even a secular
heaven. However well-intended, they
are a disaster, reducing the good and
multiplying the bad -- long before
high school, beginning even with the
now hyper-vulnerable womb.
Biblical pragmatism tells us that
the deity who can keep his promises is
the true deity, because a false deity obviously
cannot.. With unerring logical
283. Go to http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/
bldarrellscott.htm and also to
www.columbineredemption.com/

132 The Law & the Grace of God
consistency, the God of the Bible puts
His case to us on those very practical
terms -- as in, “Come, let us reason together...”
(284)
Previous pagan cultures had not
the capacity to destroy themselves and
the rest of the world. Today’s Endgame
is potentially right around any
corner. Gotterdammerung, the twilight
of the gods. The return of chaos,
the Great Mother rising. (285)
The intellectual, moral, and spiritual
chaos is rising, closer and closer
to our own feet. (286) And we are not
gods and goddesses. Maybe we had
better see if Noah will take us on
board. But the Church, the supposedto-be
Ark of Salvation, seems, with a
few exceptions, to be running around
“Not in Service”. For an elucidation
of this catastrophic dereliction of the
Church, listen to “The Sin of Silence”
by Lutheran pastor, Dr. Laurence
White. (287)
The answer requires understanding
the marriage between the law and
the grace of God, the Right and the
Good.
B-6. What Makes It Work?
The union, the hieros gamos between
the masculine Right and the
feminine Good, is what makes ethical
obligation work. The Good and the
Right are no longer inherently at war
with each other as in the pagan and
secular worlds. They are in God, as it
284. Isaiah 1:18 or chapter 43. Or I Kings 18, Elijah
on Mount Carmel. Or Isaiah 43:8 ff.
285. See above, A-6-b, “Domination by
the “Original Stuff”” on page 114
286. On the return of chaos, see above, the end of
section A-1, “Open- vs. Closed- Circle Universes”
on page 111.
287. Go to http://www.calvarycch.org/
media_center.php?audio=1&p=GSX&s=387.
were, passionately in love.
Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness
and peace have kissed each
other. Psalm 85:10 (KJV)
It is a logical fact that only the Creator
God of the Bible can wed the Good
with the Right.
In the 2nd Great Commandment
we are told to love our neighbors as
ourselves, that is, to speak and work
for their good, for the enhancement of
their lives and their relationships.
Without that commandment, the Good
is not an obligation, only (and only
perhaps) someone’s “good idea”. Until
commanded by God, the “Golden
Rule” (Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you...) is only the
Golden Suggestion, or the Golden
Great Idea.
But the second Great Commandment
gives the Good the status of very
highest “reason for existence”, and in
doing so, weds also motivation with
moral duty, all without impugning human
freedom of will, or the grace and
sovereignty of God. (288)
In Muslim theology, we humans
are obligated to submit to Allah
through obedience to his prophet, Mohammed.
Yahweh, our Creator, of course,
can just as arbitrarily do that also, but
it would be a denial of the grace
shown by the Biblical God.
The graciousness of the Biblical
God lies precisely in His choosing to
unite Fathering with Mothering, thus
creating for us, His adopted children, a
viable marriage and family. The
Mothering, creating, nurturing, healing
side of God gives us our sense of
288. For a discussion of motivation, see Part I,
Defining “Oughtness’ & ‘Love”, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 133
secure being, which can then receive
the law, commandment, and obligation
with personal security and peace.
In Islam, there appears to be no
such foundational mothering, no divine
mothering element. In Eastern
religions, it is all mothering, absorption
into the Great Mother, and thus no
father standing equally by her side.
Our human mothers usher the
child into life, passing the hopefully
stable (well-mothered) child on to the
father.
Father has a “calling power” with
the child, he calls the child into life,
pointing the child on to God as Lord,
the decider of right and wrong. Children,
both boys and girls, increasingly
look to the father after about eight
years old for their understanding of
what is “important” in life. (289) Jesus
had that calling power with the disciples.
He fathered them.
The Godly effectiveness of obligation
relies not only upon the intellectual
recognition of obligation, but
upon the live perception of the relationship
one has with God as one’s
creator-sovereign. We “intuitively
feel” the obligation, the primary way
of knowing it even when we cannot
explain it.
That is why pagan and secular
people can be so sure that there is a
morality. They are right in feeling obligation,
even though they cannot explain
its source or its true content. (290)
One needs the law of God revealed to
make right use of the good, and thus
common sense of morality.
But morality begins with that
childhood “feeling” of mother and
then father being in charge.
C. Recovery...
Intellectual, Moral, Spiritual, et al
in both Personal & Public Life...
C-1. Is Recovery Possible?
Yes. That is the Good News.
There is nothing at all which the
world, the flesh, and/or the devil can
do to stop God from building His
kingdom with those of us who will
build with Him, who will pick up our
crosses daily and follow Him --
right here on earth, just as it is in
heaven. (291)
291. See Preface on theology for the trenches: “The
Rise & Recovery of Truth-Seeking” on page xvi ff.
289. On the role of the father regarding religion, see
The Truth about Men & the Church, at http://
www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/22SxSo/Fam/
Men&Ch.htm.
290. Again, see above, Part I, Defining ‘Oughtness’
& “Love”, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.
It will not be done perfectly before
the return of the King, but it can
be done substantially. It depends upon
the kind of unity which we Christians
will have among ourselves, not on
what the secular/pagan world does.
That unity must be intellectual (the
truth), moral (righteousness), political
(Godly government of the public
arena), and spiritual (good relationships
with God and among ourselves).
As Francis Schaeffer says over
and over in The Great Evangelical Disaster,
if we Christians will exhibit the

134 The Law & the Grace of God
kind of unity for which Jesus prayed
in John 17, the kind of unity which
will show the world that He came
from the Father, those who are open to
the truth of the matter will become followers
of Jesus -- as happened in pre-
Constantine Rome and in every spiritual
renewal since then. That happened
most widely before Christians
inherited the positions of power, an inheritance
which often seduced them
into governing by power struggle
rather than by the love and
righteousness of God.
Again, the primary purpose of
civil government is to bring the use of
coercive force under the law and grace
of God. Only Judeo-Christians can do
that, which means that Judeo-Christians
had better learn what Biblical
government is and how to administer
it. (292) Biblical government must be
founded on a solidly Biblical understanding
of law and grace, and that requires
believing the Biblical worldview.
The Christian community, has
been in its present theological predicament
from at least since the contention
over free will and grace arose between
Augustine and Pelagius, remaining
unresolved right up to the present
time. That contention divided the
Christian community at its heart -- our
theology of atonement.
The forces unleashed by both the
Reformation and the secularising of
science led not to unity among Christians,
but habitual and compulsive
splitting. The number of “Christian”
denominations is now in the thousands.
We ceased being truth-seekers,
as inspired by the Bible, by the Godgiven
rise of science, and by the best
of the Reformation, and we became
instead position-defenders.
We all have positions, and they
are necessary. But the only way to get
to the true position is to be a truthseeker
before being a position-defender.
Our positions have petrified with
little or no communication between
them. We have successfully closed
the circle against truth around ourselves
-- There is a truth, and we have
it all...., an attitude which has inevitably
fostered its own opposite and disastrous
sequel -- There are many
truths, and they are all relative to
those who believe them.
The closure of the cosmic circle
is, nevertheless, an illusion. (293) God
did not disappear from reality because
the human race rejected Him. The
closure-illusion is not so much around
the world as it is around ourselves, our
own awareness and consciousness.
And God does not disappear today
because globalist forces might
seem capable of dominating, perhaps
destroying, the world population.
They can seem to do that only because
the Church has, in the West at least, all
but lost its own integrity, with next to
no effective offense in the public
arena.
The recovery of a rationally consistent
and empirically realistic understanding
of atonement theology, as we
are seeking here, will go a long way
toward restoring unity (and thus an intellectual,
moral, political, and spiritual
offensive) to the Church of God,
and to a recovery of a solid sense of
292. See Bibliography for The Theology of Civil Government
-- Why Government Requires God.
293. On the “open or closed circle” cosmoi, see
above, “Open- vs. Closed- Circle Universes” on
page 111. See also Isaiah 25:6-8.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 135
Biblical government -- Jesus is Lord.
C-2. Intellectual Recovery
& Four Complementaries
a. Reason & Revelation
If we are not intellectually inclined,
or have become discouraged
and disgusted with the failure of intellectuals
to resolve our problems, we
may be inclined to reject intellectual
pursuit as irrelevant and unhelpful, especially
in the spiritual life.
Going all the way back to the occasional
early Church opposition to
Christian use of Hellenic philosophy
as a means of interpreting the Hebraic
Gospel of Jesus Christ, some Christians
have said that philosophy and intellectual
pursuit were irrelevant or
misleading. “Athens has nothing to do
with Jerusalem,” it was said. Or, in
more modern dress, “Reason has nothing
to do with revelation.” Or, “I
have the Bible, I need nothing else.
You can keep your reason.”
If one is going to pick only one
book as a spiritual resource, the Bible
is by far the best one to pick. But it
would also be a good idea to read the
Bible with reason. There is no other
way to come to a consistently helpful
result -- such as a true position about
the Bible.
In any event, the problem with
Athens was not its intellectual prowess
(ideas do have consequences, and
we need to understand them). The
problem was its depersonalized worldview
with some false and very destructive
presuppositions.
The gift rightly to be honored,
therefore, was the development among
the Greek philosophers of the tools of
abstract rational thought, notably how
to apply the law of non-contradiction.
The other rules of logic flow
from that beginning.
The union of law and grace,
which we have been studying, is dependent
upon that union between reason
and revelation. (294) The Greeks pioneered
in reason, the Hebrews in revelation.
It has been the difficult task
of Christian and other theologians to
resolve the apparent conflict between
the two.
That is another long story, but to
sum up, just as (1) law and grace are
logically bound together, so are
(2) reason and revelation. Without the
two complementaries, we could not
have a Biblical Gospel. The pairs are
logically, not merely accidentally,
bound. In each pair, one half will not
survive in any rational sense without
the other half. Furthermore, these two
pairs are intertwined with another,
pair: (3) masculine and feminine, to
which we have often referred. Law is
masculine and grace is feminine, both
are related to (4) mothering and fathering.
Mother and father form a
spiritual “space” between themselves
in which the child is able to grow and
flourish into his or her own adulthood.
(295)
These four complementaries work
together to bind the Biblical worldview
into a viable personal cosmos, in
which the primary entities are persons,
not things or abstractions.
But the Hellenic worldview, based
substantially on that of Plato, Aristotle,
and Plotinus, with impersonal abstractions,
e.g., Plato’s Ideas, as the
294. For more on reason and revelation, see Bibliography
for The Authority of the Bible in a Scientific
World, and also, Personalty, Empiricism, & God.
295. See Preface for thoughts on the “space
between” mother and father, at “The Two Required
Stabilities & the “Space Between”” on page xxiv.

136 The Law & the Grace of God
fundamental realities of life, subtilely
yet radically conflicted with the Hebrew
worldview in which persons and
personal relationships, not things or
ideas, were the fundamental realities.
(296)
The ontological reality for the Hebrews
was their ongoing personal and
corporate relationship with God, not
abstract “being as being”. But that
distinction between the faulty Hellenic
worldview and their valid intellectual
tools for the pursuit of truth was not
clearly understood.
The adoption of the Hellenic bent
toward abstractions as the fundamental
realities seemed to many a good
idea, especially for those who felt intellectually
inferior to the Hellenes. It
has plagued Biblical theology right
into our modern and post-modern eras,
creating difficulties in atonement theology,
morality, ecclesiology, and
probably every other major aspect of
the Christian faith. (297)
It is only when we take with
philosophical seriousness the interpersonal
nature of the Kingdom, accompanied
and undergirded by a Biblical
philosophy, that Biblical theology
can stabilize. (298)
“Biblical philosophy” might
sound like an oxymoron. But yes, the
Bible has its own philosophical presuppositions
and foundations which
can be discerned and philosophically
defended -- the Biblical worldview
based on the cosmological argument
for God. (299)
The above pages point, I believe,
to an intellectually adequate moral
philosophy which is at home in the
Biblical worldview and in no other.
That moral philosophy emerges logically
right out of the Biblical doctrine
of creation.
Those newly minted tools of reasoning
did not lead the Greeks to discover
the primary secrets of life for
which they sought, especially the
meaning of man as man, the meaning
of the good, and the meaning of justice
-- the great moral issues. (300) They
could not do that because they had a
mistaken view of ontology, the nature
of being -- as an abstraction, the Ideas
of Plato, or something akin to them.
Abstractions cannot produce
meaning or morality. Only a personal
Creator can do that. So, the tools of
logic are in fact tailor-made for use in
a personalist cosmos, such as we have
in the Bible, not for a world built on
abstract realities, and not for a secular
world made of random chance machine
parts. (301)
That is why the “rise of science”
began in the Christian late Middle
Ages with a Biblically inspired
freemarket of ideas, which was institutionalized
in universities more and
more dedicated to a level playing field
where ideas could be offered and critiqued.
For the first time in history, the
296. For these “fundamental realities”, see Bibliography
for Personality, Empiricism, & God, on the cosmological
argument for God.
297. See Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey, on this subject
of Hellenic philosophy being a problem for
Christian theology and spirituality.
298. See Bibliography for The Authority of the Bible
in a Scientific World.
299. For an extended work on a personalist worldview,
see Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism,
& God.
300. See above, Part I, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.
301. For an extended work on a personalist worldview,
see Bibliography for Personality, Empiricism,
& God.
And on the source of morality, see above, Part I,
Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 137
Hellenic gifts of abstract thinking
were successfully wedded to the Hebraic
appreciation for time, space, history,
and the particular -- most notably
to persons and personal relationships.
(302) That could be done only by
lifting the tools of abstract thought out
of the Hellenic worldview and putting
them to work in the Hebraic/Christian
worldview. History was God’s storyline,
and His creatures were invited
to rejoin Him in helping to write that
story, building the Kingdom of
heaven, concretely in history, not only
abstractly and theoretically.
The great achievements of the
West were founded on that wedding
between Hellenic and Biblical. Those
achievements are today under dire
threat because Westerners have abandoned
their Biblical (and thus also
their scientific) foundations, first for
secularism which fooled itself and the
rest of us into thinking that it owned
science, and then for the relativized
world of neo-paganism. (303)
Intellectual recovery does not require
everyone, or even a majority, to
be academics, teachers, writers, or
others with a specifically intellectual
vocation. Intellectual recovery means
first of all, being a truth-seeker at any
cost to oneself. Being a truth-seeker
takes place in any and all of life’s callings,
young or old.
Even three-year-olds know what
mother means when she asks whether
they put their hand in the cookie jar.
302. This successful wedding of the Hellenic with the
Hebraic came partly because of the success of
nominalism (which stressed the reality of particular
and individual items) over realism (which stressed
the reality of universals and abstractions). But the
supposed antagonism between nominalism and
realism was bogus -- it does not arise in the
Hebraic worldview.
303. Ibid.
They already know the meaning of
truth and the difference between true
and false (those metaphysical lessons...)
-- even though it will be yet
another five or so years before they
can begin to think about it abstractly
and intellectually.
Three-year olds can think, but
they do not yet know how to think
about thinking, i.e., to analyse their
own thought processes. (304) Early
earning of the rules of grammar is often
their first intentional introduction
to logic and the structure of meaning.
b. Abstract Athens or
Particular Jerusalem?
The meeting of Hebraic Christian
evangelists and theologians with Hellenic
philosophy had thus led to anomalies,
among some inspiring the
thought that “Jerusalem has no place
with Athens”. The depersonalising effect
of Greek thought on a Hebrew
Gospel was noticed and rejected by
some -- a problem which persisted
through the Middle Ages into the
present The thought of using Greek
logic in a Biblical context did not occur
to many. There was no idea of a
Biblical philosophy.
Those whose use of Greek
thought included their worldview explained
that the philosophical mode
was in some sense “going beyond” the
more personal and individual Hebraic
mode, and that the Hebraic mode was
God “speaking down” to a primitive
people. God “anthropomorphized”
Himself to communicate with them.
But then Greek philosophy came
along to show the way to the deeper
understanding of God -- by depersonalizing
(or demythologising) it. Pagan
304. See also above, “The Childhood Discovery of
Metaphysical Reality” on page 124

138 The Law & the Grace of God
abstract ruled over Hebraic particular.
But the rise of science helped set
at least the natural scientists significantly
free from the Hellenic influence
of logical depersonalization. They
were not dealing with theological issues
which seemed to some so heavily
to rely on Greek worldview categories
for their meaning. Reliance on the
Greek worldview stuck more firmly in
theology. But by at least the late 20th
century, theologians began to catch on
to the problem. (305)
The solution to the problem is not
an arbitrary rejection of Greek philosophy,
but rather providing a reasonable
alternative, a Biblical worldview
with adequate philosophical foundation
-- concerning which the Road to
Emmaus offers Personality, Empiricism,
& God, the cosmological argument
for God. (306)
The Biblical worldview has very
acceptable (an increasing number of
Christian apologists would say, compelling)
philosophical credentials.
The gifts of abstract thinking do not
need to depersonalize one’s worldview.
They can be used in their proper
place, to deal with abstract issues
without compromising the personal
nature of the Biblical worldview. The
Biblical doctrine of creation by a personal
Deity has ample philosophical
support.
C-3. Moral Recovery
If the argument above in Part I,
Defining ‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’, is
true, then there is no morality apart
from the will of a Biblical kind of Creator
God. Without God, the “good”
305. See Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey.
306. For Personality, Empiricism, & God, see Bibliography.
will be somewhat evident, but the
“right” will remain a mystery, as with
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. (307)
Apart from the Biblical God, life
is mostly power-struggle to control
available resources so as to survive the
power struggle and remain on top of
the power heap where alone it is safe.
It is not really safe, of course. Rulers
at the top regularly get voted out,
booted out by revolution, or assassinated.
But when you live at the hypervulnerable
bottom, it looks a lot safer
at the top. Hence the compulsive
struggle to get there.
In a world inherently based on
power-struggle, there is no safe place.
Other than for short spells, it does not
exist. It is then impossible to unite
fractious people other than by coercion,
deceit, common enemy, or common
task -- or some combination
thereof, something like a “new Pearl
Harbor...” (308)
Those are four inherently unstable
situations under which the masses of
the people often grievously suffer.
Human resources can create only tem-
307. See in Part I above, “The Good & the Right” on
page 5, and “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30 concerning
the “Greek problem”.
308. This notion of a “new Pearl Harbor” figures
strongly (in the background for obvious reasons) in
modern politics. Secular governments and societies
(just like the pagan societies and governments,
e.g., of ancient Greece and Rome) have no secure,
objective moral principle by which they can be
united. See above, Part I, “- Addendum -
Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on page 30.
So, reason some secular politicians, we must
construct an “enemy” against which to fight, if not a
“cause” under which to unite. But both are short
term provisions for creating social/moral unity, and
having an artificial enemy is inherently self-destructive.
But there was considerable discussion of this
New Pearl Harbor idea leading up to the 9-11-2000
Twin Towers disaster. See http://www.theroad-
toemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/9-
11TwinTwrsFall.htm

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 139
porarily mutual goals and no binding
obligations. God gives us obligatory
goals binding on all persons which
alone can lead to a genuine moral
combination of freedom and stability.
(309)
Only when there is a moral consensus
among the people, an agreement
on what is right and what is
wrong based on the will of an eternal
and friendly God, can society be stabilized
and the tyranny, either of my personal
sin or that of centralized government,
be held in check. (310) Only God
can supply that moral order by which
a moral consensus can be formed and
administered as law, or can supply the
undergirding power of the Holy Spirit
to enable us to actually obey that
law. (311)
But moral recovery will not happen
without intellectual integrity (as in
the above section) . When people are
not truth-seekers, neither morality nor
Godly spirituality will long survive.
Truth-seeking in a freemarket of ideas
and values is the only way to a truly
stabilized position, both in theory and
in practice.
Many Christians rejected the
freemarket of ideas because that was
what the secular “free-thinkers” said
they were espousing. So intellectual
309. See Bibliography for The Theology of Civil Government
-- Why Government Requires God.
310. The reference to a “friendly” God is meant specifically
to position the Biblical God in opposition to
the Islamic deity, who, as the Pope properly pointed
out, does not commit himself to either truth or
morality, necessarily making him arbitrary and
unloving. Go to:
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/33Rlg/Islm/
00Islam.htm#Papal_Challenge_to_Islam_
For more on this, see Bibliography for
The Theology of Civil Government -- Why Government
Requires God.
311. On the power of the Holy Spirit, see Bibliography
for Psychology, Salvation, & the Ordination of
Women.
freedom was seen as inherently secular.
That is a false notion which secular
people often promoted, but they
very, very wrong. It is precisely in
that freemarket of ideas that Biblical
religion wins, because only Biblical
people can wield the two-edged sword
of the Spirit, the union of revelation
with reason.
In any event, whoever wins, intellectual
credibility requires that Christians
engage in that freemarket, and
like Elijah on Mount Carmel (I Kings
18) trust God to show up and provide
the evidence. God is telling His people
to get up on their Mount Carmels,
to invite the opposition there, and then
to obey God as to how to provide the
evidence and handle the discussion.
Sometimes that means just set up the
stage, get out of the way, and let God
handle it Himself. The Bible is full of
events in which God is providing the
clear evidence for His case. We insult
God when we are not bold enough to
risk the outcome.
Being an honest truth-seeker is
the first step of being a disciple of
faith, willingness to risk the leap into
the light.
C-4. Gender Recovery
a. A Balanced
Gender Relationship
The whole of humanity struggles
with our sexual/gender nature, but not
very successfully -- if success is measured
as a whole community, or even a
small family, of persons attaining a
balanced, mutual appreciation and cooperation,
and an openness of spirit
between males and females. The sad
quest for the eternal orgasm tells us of
the difficulties we encounter, running
down fruitless and self-destructive

140 The Law & the Grace of God
rabbit trails and into rabbit holes of
disenchantment.
Both worldly religion and Biblical
religion could reflect that pathology,
being either hyper-feminine in the
world of the Great Mother, but by her
very presence, inspiring a countermovement
toward hyper-masculinity,
as with a warrior culture. The pagan
world had (and still has) no capacity to
find a true balance because the balance
is not (and cannot be) found in its
divinities.
But the Biblical world starts right
off revealing that balance in the most
stable and enduring of all possible
places -- in the Image of God. Genesis
1:26-28 points to an Image of God
which is to be the pattern for the image
of we human creatures. We are
made in the Image of God -- male and
female.
Among humans, there is that spiritual
space between mother and father
in which the children live, for better or
for worse, depending largely on how
the parents relate to each other, but depending
also on the reactions of the
children to what happens and choices
they make. (312)
b. The Passion of God
As we find out at the marriage of
Adam and Eve when the two are first
introduced, there is an attraction between
the two which we might legitimately
assume was, at the human
level, reasonably like that between the
Fathering and Mothering in God Himself.
That attraction, that passion,
takes place, we might also legitimately
assume, across that space between
Mothering and Fathering -- the place
312. See Preface, “The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”” on page xxiv
(so I believe) to which Jesus says to
the disciples that He is going to prepare
for us. (313)
If that space between a loving
mother and father for children here
and now is heaven on earth, all the
more will that space be, for the children
of God, heaven in heaven. (314)
It is the love flowing back and
forth between mother and father, grace
and law, which creates that powerful
attraction of the Heiros Gamos. It is
not sexy, but it is very loving. It is not
sexual energy, but it might rightly be
called a spiritual gender energy. (315)
The best the fallen world can do is
the illusory and fraudulent eternal orgasm,
the never-near-enough carrot on
the stick combined with power struggle
-- sex and war -- the very struggle
into which King David was seduced in
his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba
and his murder of Uriah, her husband
(2 Samuel 11).
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless
one is born anew, he cannot see the
Kingdom of God.” (John 3:3)
Heaven is a family, with a parental
gender (spiritual), not a sexual (physical),
relationship. But that cannot be
seen or experienced until those above
metaphysical lessons have been
learned, until we are born again into
that family -- from which we can see,
and live in, the Kingdom of God. (316)
We might see all those kingdoms
of this world which Satan showed
313. John 14:1-4.
314. See Preface, “The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”” on page xxiv.
315. For more on this, see Bibliography for audio
tape, Man & Woman in the Image of God. And
also,
316. On the “metaphysical lessons”, see above,
B-4-a, “The Childhood Discovery of
Metaphysical Reality” on page 124.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 141
Jesus -- Judea, Rome, Egypt, China,
America, Russia, but we will never
see the Kingdom of God until we are
born into the Hieros Gamos. (317)
c. Trustworthy Passion
It is this passion within God, each
for the “other half”, the passion of
God to be and do with the whole of
Himself, and the passion of God to
share that wholeness and holiness with
all of His creation, which resolves all
questions about whether God can be
trusted. (318) It is no longer just an intellectual
conclusion of logic (important
as that indeed is), it is rather
knowledge of personal meeting, living
in the reality of the passionate faithfulness
of God to His own integrity of
grace and law.
It was that passion to be true to
Himself which led the Father to affirm
the crucifixion and passion of Jesus in
the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus, being
the Self-expression of God, said,
“Yes!” with His whole being.
That is the truth which guarantees
our safety and salvation, that the law
is made for us, not we for the law.
God’s faithfulness to Himself is foundational
for the guarantee of His faithfulness
to us. That passion within,
ruled by reasonable choice, makes the
passage in the Book of Hebrews believable
about God swearing by Himself.
(319)
Consistent, reasonable, and passionate
choice is evidence of stability.
The passion is that of desire unalloyed
by even a hint of betrayal, the
passion of the Cross, the willingness
to put the whole of oneself at risk to
317. Matthew 4:8.
318. See above, I-1, “Can God be Trusted?” on
page 93.
319. See Part II, I-2, “The Case for God” on page 96
remain true to one’s promise.
That is why a Biblical principle
for telling a true from a false deity is
that the true God will be able to keep
His promises and the false God will
not. The false God will not have the
capacity to make such a decision, both
because a false God is not “He Who
Is”, only just another creature; and a
false God will never generate the passion
for the fullness of his own selfhood
apart from repenting and becoming
a born-again child of God.
He will instead assert his own
self-centeredness, not a dedicated love
of others. Apart from the law and
grace of God wedded, by nature in
Christ, or by adoption and grace in us,
he can do no other.
So, the “right” (as distinct from
the “good”) is not an imposition arbitrary
in any pernicious sense. It is the
reason for our existence reflecting the
union of mothering and fathering --
the passion of each for the other, the
right commanding the receptive good
to indeed be itself, the good.
The feminine good responds joyfully,
knowing that only under that
purpose for existence can the good itself
flourish -- just as the good in the
pagan world is unable to establish itself
securely without the “other half”
of the Sacred Marriage, the missing
Father. (320)
The masculine order cannot be its
blessing to the feminine good unless it
mandates that the good is to be sought
and shared by all -- the Second Great
Commandment. So the masculine
commandment to the feminine is not
denigrating (bossing) the feminine, it
is the fulfillment of it, the command to
320. See Bibliography for The Making of Love: the
Meaning & Purpose of Sexual Intercourse.

142 The Law & the Grace of God
be fully, wholly, and holy itself.
Such a deity of reason, passion,
and commend of love would be utter
nonsense in the pagan world, in both
mythology and philosophy.
So the 2nd Great Commandment
underlines that we are to love, not
denigrate, ourselves. As Paul notes:
“...no man hates his own flesh, but
nourishes and cherishes it...” (321)
As with God, we can love others
only as we first love ourselves, the
masculine law and feminine grace
sides of ourselves being passionately
in love. That passion for selfhood is
not self-centeredness, it is that which
makes love and self-giving possible.
One cannot productively give a self
that is not wanting to be whole.
That love and passion for being
one’s full self spills over into the marital
relationship, and then into the
world. In relationship to God, the love
of self comes full circle to the heiros
gamos,voiding the destructive competition
within ourselves between the
Good and the Right, uniting them in
the holy bond of the Image of God.
None of this makes sense in either
the secular or pagan worlds. But it
makes perfect sense in the Biblical
world which reflects and manifests the
Imago Dei.
C-5. Political Recovery
a. Poloi & the Kingdom
When thinking of “Church and
State”, we might recall the political
failures of the “Moral Majority” and
others who might have sought a political
solution to a spiritual problem.
But we would do well also to remember
the monumental political successes
of the Magna Carta, the British
parliamentary system with its
pagan-unheard of notion of a “loyal
opposition” (which made stable government
possible), and then the work
by stout Reformed divines, all leading
to the American experiment in freedom,
ordered by the law and grace of
God. Political development in the
West toward a limited government for
a free people was inspired overwhelmingly
by Biblical spiritual and moral
principles. (322) It did not happen in a
sustainable way anywhere else.
The American elections of 1800
were the first time there had been a
peaceful transfer of power from one
political party to another by popular
vote -- a product of the British “loyal
opposition”. The losing party was
sworn to work with the winning party,
presenting its case in that freemarket
of ideas demanded by the new Constitution.
The word ‘political’ comes from
the Greek word ‘polis’ (plural poloi),
meaning ‘city’. The Greeks developed
a form of city-state which served
them well for some decades, but they
fell to fighting among themselves and
self-destructed. They had no capacity
to imagine an overarching, cosmic
moral order under which all men are
accountable. So the beginnings of
freedom for which they (at least in
Athens) were rightly known, turned in
on themselves. They had no authority
higher than their competing poloi by
which to adjudicate their moral and
political differences.
At that point, might makes mutually
contradictory right among the po-
321. Ephesians 5:29.
322. Read, for example, Original Intent, by David
Barton, available at www.WallBuilders.com

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 143
loi, and so, eventually, self-destructs.
(323)
Roman success at administration,
first established with their more or less
democratic republic, and a virtually
unbeatable army, aided by the Stoic
idea of an equality of all men, gave the
appearance of a universal moral law.
But it was in practical fact grounded in
power struggle, not righteousness.
And, Rome chose to persecute the
Jews and Christians -- who alone
could have supplied them the necessary
moral order for a legitimate and
enduring political order. In his City of
God, St. Augustine chastises the pagan
Romans for refusing to honor God
and thereby save their own empire.
Those problems are endemic to all
secular and pagan thinking because
they have no Creator ex-nihilo. So,
the incorrigibility of particular and
concrete existence as seen through the
eyes of the Hellenic worldview locked
them into an anti-worldly attitude, opposing
good-spiritual against badworldly/temporal
-- as though the spiritual
were an enemy of, and savior
from, physical space and time.
The Fall for the pagan mind was
out of intellectual abstractions and
into temporal particularities. Salvation
was the trek back to the abstractions.
So, there was no possible passage
among the poloi from one party to another
by popular vote. The thisworldly
life of the Hellenic polis thus
became an internecine power struggle
with no hope of resolution other than
on the battle field. It was their hoplite
323. On the problems of the poloi and their lack of a
logical moral foundation, see above, Part I, “-
Addendum - Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on
page 30
armies which were the core of the Hellenic
sense of identity, just as it was
the mighty Roman legions which were
the foundation of Roman politics. (324)
But it was no resolution at all,
each battle was only a preparation for
the next -- just as the “war to end all
wars” of post World War I can never
happen. The only war to end all wars
will be at the return of the King. That
is why the pagan mindset so often
chose getting out of this world into the
supposedly tranquil realm of the mind.
They knew nothing of the King. (325)
Gautama, about 600 BC, had been
having similarly discouraging
thoughts about this world. As the
Budda, Gautama sought solace, not in
a polis, nor in Platonic Ideas, nor in
Roman legions, but in Nirvana, “the
place of no wind” -- the place of Nothing,
not even a puff, the total evaporation
of all distinction, particularity,
and personhood.
The Biblical world is neither
“spiritual” nor “temporal”. The Biblical
world is both, sacramental, the
unique wedding of the spirit with temporal
(flesh, time, space, individuality,
personhood, personal, communal),
to the extent, even, of an Incarnation.
And all this to create a
community of individual persons in
the deepest kind of mutual life-commitment
to their Creator and to one
another -- as mandated in the two
Great Commandments (Matthew
324. “Hoplite” refers to the shields (“hoplon”) used by
the Greeks, which helped interlock the ranks of soldiers
into a formidible line of both defense and
offense.
See Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu)
online course on The Western Heritage, lecture #3,
“The Greek Miracle”.
325. See discussion of these issues in Part I, “-
Addendum - Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle” on
page 30.

144 The Law & the Grace of God
22:34 ff.). God was resolving the
problem of the “one and the many”,
showing how the many can in fact be
truly one, under His law and grace, in
the most freely creative manner possible.
b. Pietistic Collapse
It was this distant vision of an
ideal community, the Kingdom of
Heaven, populated by persons all
equally made in the Image of God, all
equally loved by God, which led at
long last in Western Christendom to
the American constitutional republic
under God.
The Biblical doctrine of creation
does not allow any other conclusion
than that God rules over all things,
both personal and public -- whether
family, church, or state.
Nevertheless, a heresy commonly
abroad today among our very on-thedefensive
Christian denominations is
the separation of the physical world of
space and time from the spiritual
world of God -- a neo-gnosticism,
sometimes called “pietism”. The pietistic
churches see themselves as not
involved in “the world”, except to
pluck out souls from the fire of selfdestruction
for salvation in the Kingdom.
So they have little sense of obligation
to invade, challenge, and
change that fallen world.
That separation has come because
(yet one more time) the Christian
community had lost its intellectual
credibility, its moral integrity, and
its spiritual foundations. It did not any
longer know how to preach the Gospel
of Jesus Christ as though the Kingdom
of God was among us -- in our relationships,
including emphatically in
the public square.
Much of that disability was due to
the issues of this essay, not knowing
how to present the Good News of
atonement in a logically seamless,
non-contradictory, empirically relevant
fashion, standing substantially on
the moral high ground.
So science, politics, commerce,
and other public policy interests are
often considered by the preachers in
the pulpits too unspiritual to be of concern.
(Or, it might cost them their
501(c)3...) Hence a bogus “separation
of Church and State”, the behind-thescenes
aim of which was (and still is)
separation of God and State -- which
in turn means the supremacy, not of
God, but of the State over all things,
including, yes, over religion.
Exit ordered freedom, enter morally
and politically disordered tyranny.
c. The Bible & Freedom
The secular writers of that sad tale
are seldom knowledgeable about Biblical
religion, nor is their own tale logical
common sense. But the Church,
an object of their scorn, has run with
tail between its legs from the secular
enlightenment teachings of Darwin,
Freud, Marx, et al, and from a once
righteous Biblically-based, but now
secularized, power-oriented, and positivist-law-based
government on its
trek through secularism now into neopaganism.
Most secular and pagan persons
probably just want to get along with
their neighbors, as perhaps do most
Muslims. But when power gets centralized
and arbitrary, as in Islam and
increasingly in America, those addicted
to power flock like bees to grab
the government honey levers of control.
The masses are soon ensnared in
a tyranny, and now, with the tools of
mind-control through government-

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 145
326. For evidence on the mind-control entrenched in
government-controlled education, go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/
Ed/00Ed.htm
327. As already noted, the notion of civil government
being of, by, and for the people came directly out of
the Bible, originally through pre-Reformation John
Wycliffe, who was translating the Bible in to the vernacular
English. God does not teach us to centralize
government except to the minimum required for
a government efficiently to carry out the intentions
of God. That is the gift of the American democratic
republic under God.
controlled education and media, even
taught to like it. (326)
The common sense law of God requires
that all governments (personal,
family, church, civil) submit to Him
their efforts to guide His people.
Civil government is rightly about
control, and rightly has a near monopoly
on coercive force. But, to keep
control-by-coercion a righteous
project, civil government must submit
to both God and the people. (327)
If the primary purpose of civil
government is to bring the use of coercive
force under the law and grace of
God in a government of, by, and for
the people, then the secondary purpose
is to protect and guarantee the level
playing field, the equal opportunity for
anyone with any view to enter the
public discussion, especially in legislative
debate.
Pagan governments rarely had
such a submissive thought pass
through their minds, though some in
the Greek poloi and in the Roman republic
showed signs of wanting to go
in that direction.
But in a Godless world, power
will reign, not righteousness, still less,
love. And secular governments refuse
to entertain the thought of a deity existing
at all. Secular and pagan governments
routinely and inevitably drift
toward a centralized monopoly on coercive
force, and so will not willingly
submit anything of importance, neither
to a “higher power” nor to us, the
people.
Political revival must therefore include
the rediscovery by Judeo-Christians
of their own Biblical form of
government (already begun in the
Declaration of Independence and Constitution),
a democratic, constitutional
republic under God. (328)
Putting that to work requires a
strength provided only through the
moral consensus given by God, quite
independently of, and ruling over,
anything human government says or
does. Godly morality, as our founding
fathers understood, is the necessary
foundation for successful government.
C-6. Spiritual Recovery
a. Getting Started
Spiritual recovery means, in our
relationship to God, as with all our
other recoveries, recovery of the two
great stabilities: personal and
moral. (329) That can happen only as
God reaches out to us because we do
not know the way back to Him -- assuming
even that we know that such a
personal God exists. World history
does not provide much encouragement
in that direction. Such a religion happened
in durable and surviving mode
in only one tradition -- the Biblical.
And that is under constant and determined
attack. We still need warriors.
Spiritual integrity does not require
one to major in intellectual things, but
a religious community which does not
328. See Bibliography for The Theology of Civil Government
-- Why Government Requires God.
329. See Preface, “The Two Required Stabilities
& the “Space Between”” on page xxiv

146 The Law & the Grace of God
have a strong intellectual component
will not likely fare well against an opposing
unbelieving community which
does. Christians gifted in intellectual
pursuits must be encouraged and
taught how to serve their community
in that way.
We must have good theology to
give us a foundation for morality.
Spiritual integrity requires moral integrity
-- a respect for one’s reason for
being, i.e., the intelligent design of the
whole, within which one’s own life
fits.
Real men will “find themselves”
in sonship to God, armed with the
two-edged Sword of the Spirit. And
real women will “find themselves” in
daughterhood to God, ministering the
power of God which undergirds all
personhood. (330) Men do some mothering,
and women do some fathering,
but the most healthy and stable situation
is where we major in our specific
gender role. Gender cooperation
would have an enormous effect on the
good health of family life, and create
that space between mother and father
in which children flourish to become
leaders in the public arena.
330. Much is written about manhood, much less
about womanhood and what that means. See Bibliography
for Psychology, Salvation, & the Ordination
of Woman for a Biblical approach to femininity.
b. Grace, Mercy, & Gratitude
The wedding in God of law and
grace thus has enormous consequences.
It not only creates the family
bond which raises up healthy children,
it also helps provide a resolution to the
snarls of the Pelagian controversy by
removing any supposed opposition between
law and grace.
And, the wedding relieves free
will of any charge of inherently undermining
the grace or the sovereignty of
God. Only so can free will operate in
the normal common sense meaning
we attribute to free will as an ability to
make real choices. We really do have
alternatives before us and we are capable
of choosing one or another of them
“on our own”, without external or internal
compulsion or predetermination.
Within our creaturely limits,
there are real choices.
“On our own” does not mean that
God is irrelevant. We get that capacity
for freedom only from God. At every
step of our lives, the grace of God is
operating. So it is misguided to imagine
that our use of free will somehow
demeans God or makes Him irrelevant.
That free will is itself a gift of
grace for our benefit and His.
Though the Fall severely damages
our use of free will, nevertheless the
use of our free will, even in rebellion,
does nothing at all to compromise the
sovereignty of God or to bypass the
salvation offered by the work of Jesus
Christ. God remains fully sovereign
no matter how badly (or well) we behave.
And, because heaven is more a relationship
then a place, there is no
possibility of getting into heaven other
than by a relationship with God as He
reveals Himself in His own self-revelation,
Jesus Christ.
We are then no longer in the position
of having to put ourselves down
in order to exalt God, or putting God
down by recognizing the importance
of ourselves. Our importance comes
from God -- another gift of grace, not
earned. We no longer must, like the
medieval flagellants, have to hate ourselves
to be loved by God (as we
sometimes “learn” from human parents
and other authorities). We no

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 147
longer must agree with the mystic who
announced, “My own existence is a
sin...”
Only the forces of evil can benefit
by such principles.
In the Kingdom, God and being
ourselves are not in competition. Being
my real self is no threat to God,
but precisely the opposite -- that for
which God has created me. (331)
Grace and mercy are a free response
of love and forgiveness to an
offending situation. Gratitude is the
offender’s response for the mercy and
forgiveness.
As we ascend more fully into the
conditions of the Kingdom, we ourselves
grow in ability to respond
freely, graciously, and with gratitude
-- more and more as God already and
always does.
The word ‘eucharist’ comes from
the Greek word for ‘thanksgiving’.
The Eucharist (or Holy Communion),
the central act of worship for liturgical
churches, is an act of giving thanks to
God for His mercies as we receive
them. The Eucharist is a service of
gratitude.
We sometimes ask (as of Christmas
presents), “What can one give to
someone who already has everything?”
We cannot give God anything
other than our obedience, because He
already owns all of the world. God
owns our wills, also, but being free,
we still have to give them to Him. He
legally owns them, but does not
“hands-on” possess them until we lay
our God-given crowns down at His
feet, acknowledging His eternal sovereignty
over our limited sovereignty.
331. See Bibliography for Biblical Inner Healing, an
essay on the Biblical view of man, especially chapter
VII, “Being the Real Me”. S
Then God can use us, cooperating in
His building of the Kingdom.
The deepest level of gratitude
comes as a response to the graceful relationship
which God is offering.
Grace responds to grace.
c. Is God Grateful?
Gratitude is the central response
of a creature to our Creator -- for the
love which He shows us. We freely
(that is, gracefully) lay down our
crowns for God, set free by Himself
first laying down His for us (incarnation,
crucifixion). Because God is
graceful to us, we can then hardly not
respond back to Him gracefully.
Because there is thus a sense in
which we have freely given ourselves
to God, we can imagine God leaning
all the way down from heaven, putting
His arm around us, and saying,
“Thank you!” One can imagine an
earthly father leaning down with a hug
and a “Thank you...” to a child who
had done the right thing. We can
imagine God doing likewise.
In Luke 17:7-10, Jesus points out
to His disciples that a master of a
house does not thank his workers for
doing what he had commanded them,
after which He says:
So you also, when you have done all that
is commanded you, say, 'We are unworthy
servants; we have only done what was our
duty.'” Luke 17:10.
Jesus would seem to be saying
that we should not expect to hear God
say “thank you”. The Bible indeed
nowhere pictures God saying a literal
“thank you” to anyone.
But there is more.
We Christians often have a hard
time believing how much God cares
for us. We are wrong to imagine that
God is like a remote Budda, uncaring

148 The Law & the Grace of God
about the world of relationship, passively
observing, deliberately with no
emotional engagement. Or Aristotle’s
Unmoved Mover, not even aware of
the external world of time and space
because just being aware of the world
would taint his purity and disturb his
peace. (332)
God is constantly telling us that
when we do His will, He will reward
us with abundant life -- which sounds
very much like a grateful response.
The Biblical “abundant life” is not
even remotely like Nirvana or the
peace of the Unmoved Mover.
The Biblical peace of God which
passes all understanding comes from
the two great stabilities, stability of
personhood and of moral direction.
The Biblical peace comes from God
actively relating with His creatures,
the Hebrew shalom -- not remotely or
impersonally given like the Hindu
“shantih, shantih, shantih” ending T.
S. Eliot’s Wasteland. (333) And not like
the peace offered by the emotionally
distant deity of Islam. God can be
quite passionate about us, His children
-- as Zephaniah describes:
The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a
warrior who gives victory; He will rejoice
over you with gladness, He will renew you in
his love; He will exult over you with loud
singing as on a day of festival. Zeph. 3:17
God is like a father swooping up his
child and dancing joyfully around.
The issue in Luke 17:10 is, I believe,
that of a servant “claiming a
332. See above, “The Ability vs.
the Right to Command” on page 32 on the
Unmoved Mover.
333. The Hindu ‘Shantih’ is sometimes compared to
the Biblical “peace of God which passes all understanding”.
But the two are opposed. Biblical peace
can be full of life and movement. The Hebrew ‘shalom’
is the fullness of empirical substance, not the
Eastern emptiness of it.
right” from the master of the house, an
expectation, as though he had earned a
“thanks”. “You owe it to me...” But
the servant cannot earn a “thanks”
from his master by doing his duty.
Likewise, there is nothing any creature
can do to earn something from God.
God cannot be obligated at all by anyone,
that is a logical fact.
But God can be grateful, as when
He delightedly pours out His bounty
on those who love and obey Him. He
is not grateful because a “need” is
met, but because there is joy in a good
and righteous request being met.
Gratitude is a free gift, not earned, a
gratuity, gratis. Like a Christmas
present, it is not earned or deserved.
In the parable of the talents, the
master congratulates (says “Thank
you” to?) his servant:
His master said to him, “Well done, good
and faithful servant; you have been faithful
over a little, I will set you over much; enter
into the joy of you master.” Matthew 25:21
That is showing appreciation, and,
again, has the sound of a “thank you”.
Jesus tells His disciples
No longer do I call you servants, for the
servant does not know what his master is
doing; but I have called you friends, for all
that I have heard from my Father I have
made known to you. John 15:15
So, the disciples are no longer
treated as hired hands. They are
friends, persons to whom one might
well give thanks. They are privy to
the conversations between Jesus and
His Father. And, as we have probably
all heard, there is more joy in heaven
over one sinner who repents than over
ninety-nine who need no repentance.
God surely participates in and shares
that joy.
The God of the Bible is not a passive,
passionless, emotionless deity.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 149
The absolute independence and selfsufficiency
of God does not imply His
distance and uninvolvement as it
would in pagan religion.
For thus says the high and lofty One who
inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I
dwell in the high and holy place, and also
with him who is of a contrite and humble
spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and
to revive the heart of the contrite.”
Isaiah 57:15 (Fox emphasis.)
To be fully God, God does not
need any of us or our responses. But
the testimonies both of the Old Testament
and of the earthly life of the only
begotten Son of God tell us that He is
passionately interested in our welfare.
We are, St. Peter says, the living
stones of the Temple in which God
dwells. (334) He responds to our individual
and particular actions and
prayers.
So, even in the deep reaches of
eternity, the God of the Bible is not an
emotionless Budda contemplating
Nirvana, the state of non-being. He is
the living and relating God, very much
aware of us, our faults and our needs.
Giving thanks is a fundamental
way of acknowledging the value and
personhood of another, an appreciation
for their contribution to one’s life
-- the very kind of thing one might expect
from a loving Creator. God saying
“Thank you” deeply personalizes
our relationship to the Law Giver of
the cosmos.
Some think that God is “above”
being affected by our behavior, that
knowing all things, He never experiences
a change of emotions because of
our behavior. That might be good Platonism,
but it is not good Biblical theology.
The ability of God to see all
334. I Peter 2:5.
seeable things does not diminish His
ability to relate to us as individuals in
time and space.
So, the experience of our giving
thanks to God, and of God leaning
down with a hug and His own “thank
you” must be somewhere near the pinnacle
of our life in the Holy Trinity. If
the Kingdom is among us, so must be
the King. A God who, in the face of
the crucifixion, says, “Thank you” for
a friendly word (certainly the intent of
Jesus’ word to the friendly thief)
wipes out any fear of being rejected or
not being cared for. (335) A “thank you”
can sometimes tell us that better even
than a substantial gift. Those two
words tell us that we mean something
to someone.
Gratitude is then one of those
deep saving qualities of the humble
Imago Dei which we become free to
experience and emulate. The fearsome
stern law (the fear of the Lord is
the beginning of wisdom) and the
wonderfully inviting grace (perfect
love casts out fear) of God are seamlessly
wedded. (336) The wisdom literature
of the Bible describes the
“good”, that which is wise, that which
nurtures and enhances life and relationship
-- which is the subject, then,
of the command of God. We are commanded
to do the good for ourselves
and each other.
C-7. The Amazing Discipline
of Grace & Play
a. Grace & Play -
335. Luke 23:43. “And Jesus said unto him, Verily I
say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.”
336. See Psalm 111:10 and I John 4:18.

150 The Law & the Grace of God
Serious Business
We think of grace and play as in
some sense the opposite of discipline
and law. But they are not opposites in
the economy of God. A life of grace
requires enormous discipline. We
cannot do things freely, graciously unless
we have disciplined ourselves.
Grace is not the same as frivolity.
Play is like grace. They are both
about freedom, and they both require a
strong self-discipline.
We tend to think of play as frivolous,
but playing a piano, or playing a
sport require steady and determined
discipline. They require learning the
rules which make the event possible
and meaningful, and learning the skills
which mark the expert. Playing a
sport or musical instrument means
getting to the point where it looks
easy, where you can “play around”
with it, do things spontaneously, do
new things, improvise and compose.
Those are characteristics also of
life itself. We can learn to “play” life
as we can learn a sport or an instrument.
It might look easy because we
can improvise and compose, have fun
without being frivolous.
Play, in that sense, is the most serious
of all things, the very opposite of
frivolous. We play at things that are
important enough to us to do for their
own sake, not for the sake of something
else beyond. We work at things
for the sake of something else beyond.
Play is thus that which we do at the
top level of importance, for its own
sake. (337)
b. Law & Grace -
337. On work and play, see Bibliography for audio on
Work, Play, & Purpose in the Kingdom.
the Rules of the Game
Masculine law and feminine grace
are like that. Law is the rules of the
game. But the rules of God’s game
are both structured with grace and
meant to promote grace. Grace cannot
happen without the order provided by
law, that is, grace cannot be sustained
in either natural or moral chaos.
Moreover, grace and play, in their
Godly sense, severely root out pretenders
and the disobedient, as suggested
by Shelden Vanauken’s title,
A Severe Mercy -- or as a freemarket
economy roots out and disciplines bad
economic eggs with more accuracy
and justice than a bureaucratically
centralized government.
The highest laws of all are the two
laws of love. Love (graceful behavior)
being commanded therefore turns
the law itself into a good, that which
enhances life and relationship, rather
than constricting them. The law commands
the good -- the best and most
free of all possible worlds. Like a
free-market economy, a graceful
world has its own inner discipline.
So we have not only the amazing
discipline of grace (grace requires
self-discipline), but also, in reverse,
the amazing grace of discipline (selfdiscipline
makes us able to be graceful).
Grace and discipline need and
strengthen each other.
c. Godly Discipline
Maximizes Freedom
In the order of creation, mothering,
birth, love comes first, our ability
to be is given and stabilized to prepare
us for receiving the coming purpose
and law.
But in the order of redemption, fathering
and the law come first. The
chaotic world requires the establish-

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 151
ment of moral boundaries and law so
that the gracefulness and gifts of
mothering can survive. Love cannot
happen in chaos.
Thus, in the pagan and secular
worlds, the absence of an objective
moral order means that agape love,
sacrificial love, the essential mothering
gift, is unrealistic.
So, as in the order of creation,
mothering leads to fathering, in the order
of redemption, obedience to fathering
of God leads directly to the
mothering of God. God tells His people
over and over that if they will obey
Him, they will flourish in all ways.
The rules which God gives ensure
that the community in which we live
will have the maximum amount of
freedom to pursue our lives as we see
fit, constrained only by our love of
God and neighbor. It is God’s love for
us that maximizes our freedom, and
our love of neighbor which aids that
maximizing. Love, then, from our
neighbor does the same for us.
Again, the best of all possible
worlds. The law, plan, purpose of God
is the source of all our freedoms and
our abundance.
So, there is no way to create a sustainable
community of freedom apart
from the rules which God has given
us, summed up in the two Great Commandments.
Only ordered and structured
by the law of God can either
freedom or grace be sustained. Neither
freedom nor grace by themselves
have their own communal sustainability.
Sustainable and graceful community
freedom requires the self-discipline
of the law of God. Only with a
lawful and graceful God leading lawful
and graceful citizens can freedom
and gracefulness be sustained. Neither
love nor freedom can survive
without the law of God, creating that
space between them in which we as
children can then learn to play life like
Jascha Heifetz could play a violin. Effortlessly.
Sex is not the sacrament of salvation,
as pagan and secular people tend
to treat it, but gender is -- if engaged
in the way God has designed for us --
to become like Him. Human law and
grace, masculine and feminine, must
be wed as in the Image of God.
d. Libertarianism
This explains why libertarians
who want there to be no law, or who
see law as a nuisance, a bother, and an
impediment to true freedom, miss the
mark. Without the law of God there is
no reason for existence. Such libertarians
are left, then, with the good, but
no obligation to point man in the direction
of the good, and no moral consensus
because there is no morality
about which to have a consensus.
Libertarians might reply that they
can have a consensus founded on the
good. Getting that consensus with 7
billion freewill agents on global earth
is, one might think, somewhat problematic.
No society has even come
close. The best efforts have been done
by substantially Judeo-Christian people.
In other words, we cannot get
along with just the second Great Commandment
to love our neighbor because
without the first there is no commandment
at all. It is our obligation
to care about what God wants, implied
or stated, that binds us to all lower obligations.
Neither “doing what is right in my
own eyes” nor “relative” morality.are
the same as either grace or real morality.
They are antithetical to each other.

152 The Law & the Grace of God
With no moral order, a community
of freedom is just a matter of very
untrustworthy luck. We have seen the
results of that all through the millennia
of known history. Life for most in a
pagan society uninfluenced by Western
(Judeo-Christian) progress is
grinding poverty, little or no education,
science, industry, or raising up of
the poor in the tide of increasing
wealth generated by free enterprise
commerce and industry, no freedom in
civil government, controlled almost
necessarily by autocrats, and worst of
all, no objective personal worth. (338)
All these goods can be consistently
generated only under the law of
God. My objective personal worth
comes only with the love of God, and
by the command of God that everyone
else love me.
Secular and pagan historic track
records both tell us that in a Godless
cosmos, matched against power, love
will be considered unrealistic.
Until government is ruled by persons
who love their constituents, it
will tend to keep the ordinary man under
its coercive control, mostly for its
own ends, not the good of the people.
But expecting government officials
to love their people is a pipe
dream as the track record shows, and
no matter how good they are, nobody,
other than God Himself, can supply
those two stabilities -- ontological and
moral.
A rightful distaste for obligation
might come from its association with
arbitrary coercion, but that is the fault
of secular and pagan worlds, not the
338. For more on this terrible deficit see
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/
Hst/Stark&Xty&Cultr.htm,
and also http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/
12The/Xr/IfJssNvrBorn-SummitMin.htm.
fault of God’s world. Obligation as
reason for existence sets us free by
pointing to the good, it does not bind
us tyrannically. The law is made for
man, not man for the law. The law is
what rescues the good from self-destruction
-- by commanding love, a relationship,
not a feeling, however
pleasant.
Godly obligation honors, not demeans,
selfhood and community. Obligation
is part of the structure of both
selfhood and a genuinely free community,
not an enemy of them. In the
Kingdom, there will be obligation, but
it will perhaps hardly be noticed because
everyone will purposefully and
already be servants of God and of one
another.
Coercion is needed only to protect
the innocent and vulnerable from
predators. In heaven, there will be no
predators, but there will still be a purpose
for existence. The purpose for
existence will certainly be a fundamental
aspect of the heavenly “religio”.
(339) The difference between
heaven and the fallen world is that everyone
in heaven will already agree
with the law of love.
e. Grace, Glory, & Freedom
Our freewill means that, like God,
we each have a glory and a grace to
give. If we had no glory, we could not
glorify God. What is that glory but
the light of beauty which shines forth
when we freely open our hearts to the
love of God? We can thus make of
ourselves and of our behavior a free
gift to others.
So then, glorifying God is not
denigrating ourselves any more than
339. On ‘religio’, see B-1, “The Defining Process” on
page 8.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 153
God glorifying us is denigrating Himself.
He glorifies us by drawing us
more and more closely into His presence.
To glorify another is to freely
share oneself with the other. The
glory, the light, the joy spill over.
Glorifying another in that way requires
the freedom to be ourselves
rather than living under the condemnation
of either God or of ourselves.
And it requires the freedom to do that
which is loving toward others. Only
the law and grace of God wedded
within us can guide us toward that
blessed state.
f. Bi-Focal Vision
We have discussed several “pairs”
along the way: sex and gender, the
good and the right, masculine and
feminine, rights and obligations, the
one and the many, freedom and control,
being and doing, law and grace,
and the ability to and the right to. Perhaps
others as well. These pairs are
problematic for the fallen, closed-circle
world of paganism and seculaism
which, it seems, cannot unite them in
an integrated, living whole. The battle
of the sexes, for example, is irresolveable.
But in the personalist, open-circle
cosmos of the Bible we are given a bifocal
vision by the very pairs which
cause trouble in the fallen world. Instead
of blurred or skewed vision, we
see instead a clarity, depth, and perspective
not possible in the closed-circle
cosmos.
Law and grace, for example, are
seen as part of a larger whole, the sacred
marriage, rather than as mutually
contradictory principles.
This suggests that the fallen
world, in its very essence, is not a “living”
world. A cosmos which begins
in chaos, undifferentiated mystery,
which is inherently impersonal (rather
than one begun by an an Intelligent
Designer, a person in three personae)
has no principle of life, and drags
down into death those persons who
have fallen into it.
That, of course, is the Biblical
story. But few Christians today are
telling that story. Most of the Christian
community has been persuaded
that secularism, and now paganism, is
a legitimate alternative lifestye, with
status equal to that of Biblical religion.
But when truth becomes optional,
when truth gets relativized, truth will
soon become forbidden. Christians
must recover their intellectual credibility
and go on the offensive at all
levels of society, or Christian religion
will become the
g. The Great Equalizer
In the American wild west, a gun
was known as the “equalizer”. It
could make the weakest man, if he
knew how to use it, the equal of the
toughest.
But the real equalizer is the wedded
law and grace of God. The Godly
gift of the two primal stabilities, ontological
stability of one’s being (standing
on the hand of God) and moral stability
of one’s doing (obeying His
voice), creates a personal strength
which no power on earth can undo.
Persons who have sufficiently died to
their fallen self to let God, no longer
the world, be their source of strength
will be able to risk whatever they must
to speak the truth in the face of opposition.
That is the “power of the Holy
Spirit” promised and issued to the disciples
in Acts 1 and 2, power of being,

154 The Law & the Grace of God
the ability to be themselves wedded to
the commanding word of God so that
they could give bold and truthful testimony
across the world.
The equalizer is not a gun, but the
Sword of the Spirit -- irrepressibly
speaking the truth in love.
That equalizing, created by the
Godlike passion within, between my
masculine spiritual authority and my
feminine spiritual power of being,
shines forth with the glory and Image
of God. My dependency on God thus
makes me independent of the world.
That is the glory with which I can glorify
God and serve my fellow human
beings. That passion within myself, as
with God, is the guarantee to others of
my trustworthiness. I can be true to
others only as I am in that way true to
myself. That is the nature of all personhood.
C-8. Spiritual Warfare:
Law, Love,
Light, & Unity
The essence of spiritual warfare,
however is not fighting with demons,
it is fighting the war of light against
dark, of truth against falsehood.
Whether there are demonic forces at
work is a matter to be decided in each
individual case. But with or without
demons, the basic rules of engagement
are the same.
We have the spiritual armor to
which Paul refers in Ephesians 6. We
can “put on” the helmet of salvation.
But “putting on” does not mean getting
up in the morning and saying,
with appropriate gestures, “I put on
the helmet of salvation”. Symbolic
gestures can be helpful, but they must
point to the deeper reality -- being at
one with God (saved) and acting that
way. It is a way of life, not only a
symbolic gesture.
Only one offensive weapon is
mentioned by Paul, the Sword of the
Spirit, truth spoken in love. The Book
of Revelation portrays the sword as a
lethal two-edged weapon, deadly
against the deceits of the world, the
flesh, and the devil. (340)
Plain and simple truth is deadly,
lethal to those who are committed to
their own way against God. Rebels
against God know that they cannot
stay in power unless they control access
to truth, and hence they head immediately
to control the basic institutions
of truth: education, media, politics,
and most of all, family.
When truth-seeking begins to prevail
in the public arena, when the public
and their representatives in government
begin to be truth-seekers and
truth-speakers, the evil minded resort
to violence, and if that does not prevail,
they hide under the rocks and in
a. What is Spiritual Warfare?
Spiritual warfare is the struggle to
maintain the law and grace of God in
any given situation against whatever
would demean, defile, or disobey that
law and grace -- using the above
Godly equalizer.
All personal struggle, all political
or military warfare, is a subset of that
overarching and universal spiritual
war going on all the time until the return
of the King. Our secularized
minds have led us to believe that spiritual
warfare, Satan, demons, and all
that are passe. They can all be explained
psychologically, or some other
more modern and “rational” way, as
even many Christians have come to
believe.
340. 1:16; 2:12, 16; 19:15, 21.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 155
the caves -- as Satan, for a more opportune
time. They cannot stand to
live in the light.
The story of Whittaker Chambers,
told in his autobiography, Witness, is a
testimony to the power of living in the
light, and the lengths to which the
dark forces will go to subvert the truth
and extinguish the light (as in Romans
1:18).
The two edges of the sword are,
one might (and I would) say, revelation
and reason welded back to back,
which appears to be precisely the intention
of God in the raising up of science,
honing both reason and revelation
to a fine edge. Scientific discipline
(which can be employed in any
area of life, not just the natural sciences)
is a powerful way of forcing
the logic of truth when dark and
cloudy shadows are being cast by enemies
of truth. (341)
Science was given by God to His
people. But anyone can use it because
the techniques of science can be
learned by almost any culture. Science
is attractive because knowledge
gives power, and the lust for power
draws people, leaders especially, to
abandon previous cultural or religious
scruples against secular “modernity”.
Secularization leaves whole cultures
adrift in secular amorality. Science
used by cultures having no Biblical
base cannot become what God intended.
Scientific knowledge, meant
by God for good, can be transformed
into the tree of “the knowledge of
good and evil” by separating knowledge
from the law and grace of God.
The Hebrew phrase, “knowledge
of good and evil” is a way of saying
341. This theme will be discussed in full detail in Volume
III of this work, Science & Epistemology.
“universal knowledge”, as we might
say, “all the knowledge from A to Z”.
Hebrews said, “all the way from good
to evil”, meaning all knowledge.
Universal knowledge is impossible
for creatures to attain, but the
promise of it is terribly seductive for
anyone wanting to become independent
from God.
Godly spiritual warfare is about a
primal commitment (or not) to truth --
living in the light at any cost to oneself.
When a society begins to believe
and live that way, the forces of evil are
sharply curtailed.
b. Factions, Spiritual Warfare,
& Science
That commitment to truth, not
perfectly, but to a significant degree,
had taken hold in early America. The
Declaration and Constitution could
not have been written if it had not --
because the both documents were
written to undergird a truth-seeking
culture, notably in the political
realm. (342)
George Washington said: “There
is but one straight course, and that is
to seek truth and pursue it steadily.”
And Thomas Jefferson, a political rival,
believed that the only way to the
truth was to keep open the honest discussion
of volatile matters. None of
the founding fathers would have disagreed
with either.
The bogey man for the American
founding fathers was the rise of factions,
political groups who were more
interested in winning their way than in
finding the truth of a matter for the
common good.
342. For a solid and stunning teaching on the Declaration
of Independence and Constitution, go to
www.Hillsdale.edu for the free, online course, “Constitution
101”.

156 The Law & the Grace of God
The Declaration of Independence
and Constitution were written so as to
help ensure the reality of open, honest
debate, especially in politics and legislation,
which are typically hotbeds of
faction. The separation of powers and
federalism with checks and balances
had exactly that effect, the prevention
of tyranny. They understood that the
nature of tyranny is to control the public
debate which is what factions seek
to do, and that unchecked factions
would become the seedbed for a budding
tyranny. In a fallen world, Godly
politics is engagement in spiritual
warfare.
Spiritual warfare, at every level,
whether with demons, politicians, or
family members, begins with the subversion
of truth. (343) Differences can
be discussed with the most sharply divisive
of issues and vigorously opposing
of sides. But that is not spiritual
warfare until one side or the other begins
to subvert the truth-seeking process
in order to get its way.
Godly spiritual warfare presupposes
the same union of law and
grace, law and love, as proposed in
our above pages on obligation, salvation,
and atonement issues.
A positive personal or cultural exchange
can occur only to the extent
that the two sides love each other, i.e.,
are willing to give up their way sufficiently
to let the truth as seen by any
and all sides be spoken -- for the good
of an honest unity between them.
Each side of such a discussion must
care more about the open, honest relationship
between them and preservation
of the level playing field for truthseeking
than they do about winning
343. See Romans 1:18 ff. Subversion of truth is the
first step of the Fall.
their way. That means both sides
speaking the truth as they understand
it and mutually searching for ways toward
a common ground unity.
They know that if they lose the
debate, they will not be shot at dawn,
they will be able to come back another
day and present their (perhaps new
and improved) case again. Losing
does not unlevel the field.
Those are the terms upon which
God calls to us, “Come, let us reason
together...,” onto the level playing
field (Isaiah 1:18). The stakes are
high: we either build heaven with God
or we build hell all by ourselves.
God will give us all the knowledge
we can stuff into our heads. He
will teach us how to wield the sword
of the Spirit. Neither the world, the
flesh, nor the serpent can do that.
That primary issue was fought
and lost by our two most ancient ancestors.
But on the Way of the Cross,
we are offered another chance at it.
Science is the way of the cross for the
intellect: we give up our “right to be
right”, and to let the truth and the Lord
of Truth speak for themselves.
Without this radical mutual honesty,
there is no way to the unity for
which Jesus prayed in John 17. (344)
c. The Man & Mystery of
Lawlessness
St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2 refers
to a coming rebellion, a rising up
in the last days leading to the return of
the King. But prior to this Parousia or
Second Coming of Christ, Paul tells us
that there will appear a man of law-
344. The primary importance of truth-seeking in our
own maturing and emotional healing is a basic principle
of Godly psychology -- as taught in Biblical
Inner Healing. See Bibliography.

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 157
lessness, a Satanic figure who will
will exalt himself above all others.
The “mystery of lawlessness”, Paul
says, is already at work.
Douglas Farrow, in Ascension
Theology, writes extensively about
this man and mystery noting that evil
has no creative power, and therefore
must feed off the good caused by others.
That means, he points out, that
the more good that is done, whether
by God or by the servants of God, the
more lush is the garden upon which
Satan and other workers of iniquity
can feed.
That insight helps to explain why
the presence of evil is so intransigent
and difficult to overcome, and that it
will require a deep devotion to God
and His purposes and a commitment
to the way of the cross to even discern
the battle lines, let alone stand firm
wielding the Sword of the Spirit.
Farrow, in one of the finest pieces
of theological writing I have ever read,
lays out the challenge for Christians
with respect to recovery of our witness
in politics, commerce, education, and
every other area of the public arena,
including, yes, the Church. (345)
Satan feeds off the good by producing
a perverted-but-convincing
copy of it to delude the elect into
thinking they are choosing the real
thing, the kingdom of God.
Farrow points to the UN’s “Universal
Declaration of Human Rights”
as an example of this deception. (346)
345. Farrow was a Presbyterian, then Anglican, and
now Roman Catholic. One need not agree with
everything he writes to recognise the briliant light
he is shining on the contemporary problems of the
whole Christian body. The elect are indeed being
massively deceived by Satanic look-alikes. See
Matthew 22:22-24.
346. Go to http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
index.shtml for the UN Declaration.
The UN pretends to have (or is deluded
into thinking that it has) the
moral authority to decide the difference
between right and wrong, that it
can write its own laws apart from
God, which is to say that God is irrelevant.
Just so, the American government
has officially declared God to be irrelevant
(1962 Supreme Court decision,
Engel v. Vitale, illegally outlawing
prayer in government schools), and so
put itself in the place of God to decide
right and wrong, and who is and is not
a person (leading to Roe v. Wade).
The illusion that there is no authority
higher than civil government is
rarely contested today by Christians or
by Church leaders. Positivist law has
replaced the law of God. (347)
Because of the false secularization
everywhere of politics, most
Christians today cannot say out loud
that the UN is a pseudo-organization,
in imposter, just as are all other socalled
“liberal democracies” who
make the same claim to be able to
write their own laws in place of the
laws of God -- positivist law. (348)
C-9. So... Law, Grace,
&theBest
of All Possible Worlds
a. Common Sense Christianity
Do we have here a common sense
347. For the meaning of “positivist law”, go to “Western
Collapse into “Positivism”” on page 117 and
also to “The Law of God, Positivist Law, ...& Force”
on page 119.
For Biblical positivism, see “Biblical Positivism”
on page 120 above.
348. For the outline of a book to spell out the Biblical
view of politics and civil government, go to The
Theology of Civil Government at
www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/Cnst/
TheolOfCivilGovt-Outln.htm

158 The Law & the Grace of God
law and grace of God? (349) Does it
make logical sense, or are there irresolvable
contradictions? Is this notion
of law and grace empirically relevant
to the life experiences of ourselves
and others? Does our own experience
of law and grace look like it might be
better lived if we followed this interpretation
of Biblical atonement?
If the above argument holds firm,
then theology can again tell us that it
makes logical sense to look for a God
who Himself makes logical sense and
reveals Himself in a manner consistent
with our experience of life, our needs
and our hopes for wholeness and holiness.
Knowing about God can inspire
us in that direction, but only meeting
Him can itself seal the trust relationship.
When we have only the law, but
not a closeness to the law-giver, the
law will seem impersonal, a drudgery,
to avoid if possible, an infringement
on our freedom. But when we find
that the law is about enhancing community,
family, and personal relationship,
then the law takes on a life which
it could not without our live relationship
to the law giver. As Paul says,
the law is a tutor unto Christ, or a custodian
until the law giver Himself appears.
Then it all make sense.
Just so, we must personally meet
the reality of the Sacred Marriage as
well as think about it and hope for it.
We can do that only in that place
where Jesus goes to prepare for us
(John 14:1-4), one might suppose, the
space between the Fathering and the
Mothering of God, the place of the
adult children of God.
We can go there in heart and mind
349. See Preface, “The Road to Emmaus Project --
Common Sense Christianity” on page xxxiv.
before we ascend there in the resurrection,
and so begin to live that life here
and now on earth. “Thy will be done,
on earth as it already is in heaven...”
b. Calming the Sea
In the dry desert Hebrew culture,
the sea was a symbol of chaos, with
waves, storms, and monsters. But it
was not the sea as pictured often in pagan
mythology, the original state of
chaos (or mystical being) out of which
all things emerged, the symbol of the
Great Mother herself. The sea in the
Bible was just another part of the
fallen creation, under the ultimate control
of God.
In the Book of Revelation we read
first (4:6) that the sea was before the
throne of God, “...as it were, a sea of
glass, like crystal.” In the presence of
God, the sea was calm and friendly.
But then, as the story moves on, the
sea becomes also the place of mighty
judgements from God, just as the land,
with the evil side struggling to maintain
its independence and to crush the
people of God.
But in 21:1, we read, “Then I saw
a new heaven and a new earth; for the
first heaven and the first earth had
passed away, and the sea was no
more.”
Chaos was overcome and reality
was now again ruled wholly and completely
under the wedded law and
grace of God, the Sacred Marriage.
The two stabilities (ontological and
moral) lost at the Fall are restored by
our becoming children of that wedding.
The wedding had been betrayed
by Adam and Eve who could no
longer bear the Imago Dei between
themselves, and so could not pass that
gift on to their children. But now...
“...I saw the holy city, new Jerus-

III. Heiros Gamos: the Wedding of Law & Grace 159
alem, coming down out of heaven from
God, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband; and I heard a loud voice
from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the
dwelling of God is with men. He will
dwell with them, and they shall be his
people, and God himself will be with
them....’”
The holy city, the New Jerusalem,
is the Church, the Bride of Christ, the
restored community of God, long ago
planned in the Garden of Eden.
That being the case, there is no
hope of reestablishing an enduring,
reasonable, and common sense moral
or political order and set of customs in
America, the West, or anywhere else
in the world, without a deep spiritual
renewal within the Christian Church,
and then as a consequence, a deep
spiritual renewal throughout society,
from top to bottom. (350)
That renewal will encompass
three central issues:
(1) the Biblical worldview of a God
who is Sovereign over all aspects of
life because He is Creator of all of
them;
(2) the nature of that God, His attitude
toward His creatures, and how He expects
us to relate to Him (that is, revelation);
and,
(3) how we will respond to God and
His offer of the Kingdom.
Depending on our response, that
could be either very Good News or
very Bad News. It will have much to
do with how we view the matters of
this essay.
350. To see videos of spiritual renewal actually
affecting whole cities, even a whole nation, go to
http://www.glowtorch.org/
They have been producing such materials for
about 20 years. The press will not tell you of these
events, and sadly, the clergy seem hardly to know
or care. That must change.
A proper understanding of the law
and the grace of God is fundamental
and determinative for the renewal of
Biblical, Judeo-Christian unity and
hence of our civilization. These principles
undergird the whole of our spiritual
life. They determine how we
will understand salvation, atonement,
sanctification, and all other central aspects
of our faith. And they are the
principles which undergird both our
freedoms and our mutual responsibilities
in the public arena.
Augustine was right: there is only
one civilization, the City of God. All
the rest are barbaroi. With grace and
truth, Christians must learn how to say
that.
c. The Best of All Possible...
It is my hope that this discussion
will assist the Church in resolving
those tortuous issues of ethical meaning,
Pelagianism, freewill, and the
sovereignty and grace of God -- our
failure at resolution of which has been
a major contributor to the disintegration
of Christian unity and thus of
Western Civilization.
The Good News will always seem
like pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, unrealistic
-- unless we see and believe the
Biblical worldview, that there really is
a Creator of all things ex nihilo, and a
Sovereign who rules with tough love
over all things. Confidence in a Good
News for persons like ourselves requires
that the basic realities be persons
and good relationships, not
things, not pleasant states of existence,
not abstractions, not power or pleasure
-- all of which swallow up personhood.
The reality of persons as the fundamental
entities will seem at first
outlandish to our still Newtonian-

160 The Law & the Grace of God
trained ears, taught to see atoms
bumping around in space to create the
world as it is, then followed by the
collapse into the seeming irrationalities
of relativity and quantum physics,
which was taken by many to lend credence
to the relativity of truth, epistemology,
religion, morality, etc. (351)
We have made several references
to this blessed “best of all possible”
state of affairs. What can such an idea
mean?
It would mean a world of persons
dedicated to the wedded law and grace
of God, first for themselves, and then
for one another, at one with God and
each other. It would mean loving, doing
well for one another, mutually
supporting each other, a world where
we all were, like God, at any cost to
ourselves, always faithful, always loving,
always hopeful -- as St. Paul underlines
in I Corinthians 13:13. All
this issues under the authority of the
First Great Commandment, to love
(obey) God.
It would be a world in which the
wedding of law and grace was manifested
from where it was commanded,
the Word of God at the Very Top,
down to the Very Bottom -- the Hand
of God where it originated.
The Best of All Possible Worlds is
not pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by. It is the
reality for which God has intelligently
designed and aimed the whole of His
earthy, sacramental creation.
It is a world with none of the
built-in contradictions in which we
fallen ones so often find ourselves --
such as freedom vs. grace, or freedom
351. Go to www.commonsensescience.org
for a newly emerging understanding of science,
which seems about to turn much of relativity and
quantum mechanics on its head, in a common
sense sort of way.
vs. the law and sovereignty of God.
To the doubtful or scornful, one
must ask, “Please show us how you
would improve upon the character and
the plan of God...”
Sin will not be eradicated until the
King returns, but Satan ought to be
cringing in fear, not the Church and its
members.
When the disciples returned from
a mission on which Jesus had sent
them, He told them, “I saw Satan fall
like lightning from heaven...” (Luke
10:18) The disciples were learning
how effectively to fight the battle. We
can do the same.
End Note
This work is a basic foundation
block for the Emmaus “Common
Sense Christianity” project, providing
a common-sense understanding of
Biblical theology which can stand upright
in the public arena. (352) Along
with the 3-volume A Personalist Cosmology
in Imago Dei (PCID), this
present work is Emmaus’s foundation
offering for apologetics on the front
lines in the freemarket of ideas.
Thus, looking backwards to the
prior and deep metaphysical foundations
for these present thoughts on law
and grace, one might peruse especially
Personality, Empiricism, & God, and
Yahweh or the Great Mother? (volumes
I and III of PCID) to which we
have often made both text and footnote
reference. (353) The cosmological
argument of Vol. I gives us reasons to
believe that looking for such a God as
described by the Sacred Wedding is
not irrational and silly, but supremely
352. See “The Road to Emmaus Project --
Common Sense Christianity” on page xxxiv
353. See Bibliography for availability.

161 The Law & the Grace of God
rational and wise.
Looking forward to the downstream
consequences of having such a
God as in the Bible, though touched
on here, we have not discussed in
needed detail a matter which should
be at least noted in any extended essay
on the law of God, namely how the
law of God relates to the laws of man.
That will be given treatment in a coming
title, The Theology of Civil Government
- Why Government Requires
God. (354) That is a subject which must
be based on the principles of this current
essay, especially Part I, Defining
‘Oughtness’ & ‘Love’. Ideas have
consequences.
Further details on how these concepts
apply to both our personal salvation
and atonement theology, resolving
other apparent contradictions and
anomalies in both the personal and
public arenas, will be also the subject
of other works. (355)
* * *
Ending as we began:
the law and the grace of God together
govern the whole, without remainder,
of creation.
Q. E. D., et Deo gratia!
354. For the public arena and civil government, see
Bibliography for The Theology of Civil Government
-- Why Government Needs God.
For the public arena and also our personal salvation
and spiritual growth, peruse the Bibliography,
and visit www.theRoadtoEmmaus.org, a school of
Christian apologetics.
See especially, Biblical Inner Healing, on our
human nature, how we get broken and how God
makes us well -- at
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/ShpMl/BIH/
00BIH.htm -- and at
http://www.emmausmall.org/BIH.html.
And, Abortion, the Bible, and America at
http://www.emmausmall.org/AbortBbl&Amer.html
355. See Bibliography for such items, especially cassette
tapes (which are being remade into CDs).

162 The Law & the Grace of God
Study Guide for Part III
Hieros Gamos
the Wedding of Law & Grace
I. Summary:
In your own words, write a summary of
the theme of this chapter, and make a
personal application as appropriate.
II. Questions on Part III:
A. Cosmology -
1.
2.
3.
B. Morality in the Trenches -
C. Recovery... -
4. Describe the essential differences
between the open-circle cosmos and the
closed-circle cosmos.
5.
Chapter Reflections:
In your own words, relate your new
insights from reading and meditating on
the information contained within this
chapter. What difference would it make
to you personally whether the claims and
assertions of this chapter were true or
not?

Bibliography 163
Bibliography
The Road to Emmaus
The Road to Emmaus produces the following materials by Earle Fox, D. Phil., related to
the healing of the soul and other areas of Christian apologetics. They will be increasingly
available from the Emmaus website, www/theRoadtoEmmaus.org. (The old Shopping Mall
is at www.theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/ShpMl/00ShpMl.htm -- the new Shopping Mall at
www.EmmausMall.org. Items are being transferred as available to the new site.) Some will
be available at local or online bookstores. For current availability and prices, visit the website
shopping malls, or contact Emmaus Ministries via either website.
NOTE: Audio and video tapes are in the process of being reformatted to digital CD and
DVD.
See http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/Master-Plan1.htm for information on how to use
the School of Christian Theology being developed at the Road to Emmaus website.
There is also a growing number of excellent materials becoming available as other
Christians explore deeply the nature of our humanness, uniting reason and revelation into
the 2-edged Sword of the Spirit.
The following materials are suggested for study in their respective areas.
Healing
BASIC NEW TESTAMENT - (6-audio album)
On the meaning of the new birth, justification,
the crucifixion, and other topics.
BIBLICAL INNER HEALING (BIH) - (Paperback
Approx. 520 pp.) A Biblical understanding
of human nature made in the
Image of God, male and female, how we
get broken, and how God heals us back
to the wholeness of being made in His
Image. For use both in personal growth,
and as a course textbook. Study guides
for each chapter.
THE FALL & THE OLD TESTAMENT TURN-
AROUND - (7-audio album) On dependent
mankind trying to live selfsufficiently,
the devastation of the human
psyche and community, and beginnings
of redemption.
Foundations for a Biblical Psychology.
(9-audio album) Providing the fundamentals
of the Biblical view of human nature.
GOD & HEALING ALBUM -- 20-audio overview
of Biblical inner healing from the
above. Used for counselees to get basics
of Biblical inner healing.
HEALING THE INNER HURTS -- (5 1-hour
workshops on 3 audio/video cassettes) A
weekend conference on the healing of
memories.
INNER HEALING. (8-audio album) On the
basics of emotional healing and the healing
of memories.
JESUS & WHOLENESS. (10-audio album)
On God in Jesus reaching into our selfdestructive
circle to draw us to Himself.
THE SACRAMENT OF SELFHOOD -- (Video,
1 3/4 hr, 2 segments) The nature of the
self as an outward and visible sign of the
nature of God.
SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMERS. (4-audio
album) On moving from life in the flesh to
life in the Spirit.
Family, Sex, & Gender
BIBLICAL SEXUALITY & THE BATTLE FOR
SCIENCE -- (Paperback 208 pp.) Basic
text on dealing with the "new morality",
homosexuality, “inclusiveness”, science
and religion, pluralism, sex and gender
roles, the extraordinary failure of Kinseyan
sexology, and many other issues.
THE EXPANDING CIRCLE OF MOTHER &
THE SEARCH FOR FATHER -- (Audio
tape.) A charting of the course of a child
as the child grows from infancy with total
dependency on mother, to the discovery
of father who stands straight and tall,
independently of mother, a model for the
child’s own desire for independence from
mother. If all goes well, there follows a
continually more mature leaving of
mother and the continual discovery of a

164 The Law & the Graceof God
more mature vision of father, leading,
again if all goes well, to the discovery of
God who is both our mother and our
father. We become, by adoption and
grace, children of God. The story illustrates
the very substance of what we normally
call “salvation”.
HOMOSEXUALITY: DIALOGUE IN DARK-
NESS OR HONEST DEBATE? -- (4-audio
album) - 1. The Church Has AIDS (the
pan-sexual agenda); 2. Homosexuality,
the Bible, and Science (the overwhelming
negative evidence against the pro-homosexual
position); 3. Darkness or
Debate? (the mind control techniques
used by the pro-homosexual lobby to
control the public debate on the sexuality
issues); 4. The Prize of the Upward Call;
5. Where Now?
HOMOSEXUALITY: GOOD & RIGHT IN THE
EYES OF GOD? -- A comprehensive,
Biblical, and scientifically credible strategy
for winning the battle for sexual sanity.
1. The Biblical foundations of human
sexuality; 2. How the West got sexualized;
and 3. The evidence and the winning
strategy. Available at local and online
bookstores. ISBN 0-945778-01-5
HUMAN SEXUALITY: HETERO-, HOMO-,
OR PAN? -- (Paper, 40 pp. Sequel to Biblical
Sexuality above.) The pan-sexuality
of Alfred Kinsey compared with the
Judeo-Christian hetero-sexual view. Critique
of homosexuality.
HUMAN SEXUALITY: THE SECULAR DEBA-
CLE -- (Video, 1 hr 50 min, 2 segments)
The disastrous sexuality as fed through
SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, and Kinsey
Institute into our public schools.
THE MAKING OF LOVE: THE PURPOSE &
MEANING OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE
Internet article illustrating the sacramental
union between gender and sex at
www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/12The/
SxTh/SxIntcrsPurps.html.
MAN & WOMAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD --
(Video or audio tape, 1 hr 45 min, 2 segments)
Dr. Fox on the Biblical view of sex
and gender relations, building on YAH-
WEH OR THE GREAT MOTHER?
PSYCHOLOGY, SALVATION, & THE ORDI-
NATION OF WOMEN -- (Paper, 18 pp.)
The impact of the gender and ordination
issues on basic Christian theology of salvation.
Biblical theology of salvation necessarily
implies clear distinction of gender
roles.
A THEOLOGY OF HETERO-SEXUALITY --
(12-audio album) -- a basic understanding
of how we are made in the image of God -
male and female. ($47) Titles include:
1-2. Yahweh or the Great Mother - Biblical
cosmos -- Secular/pagan cosmos. 3.
Man and Woman in the Image of God.
4. The Sacrament of Selfhood. 5. The
Geography of the Soul. 6. The Expanding
Circle of Mother and the Search for
Father. 7. Nature - God's Womb for the
Soul. 8. The Inner Marriage. 9. Healing
the Sacrament of Marriage. 10. Sexual
Symbolism. 11. Pornography & the
Healing of Sexual Imagery. 12. Sex
Roles in the Body of Christ.
TWO KINDS OF PERSONHOOD -- (Paper,
16 pp.) Abortion -- he who sets the definitions
controls the debate. A response to
an embryologist's definition of 'personhood'
which makes infants disposable.
New Testament
The following four approximately 2-hour
audio tapes are a series on four vital New
Testament themes, helping to relate Biblical
theology with inner healing. There are over
50 audio tapes, some available on video,
dealing with various aspects of the healing
nature of the Christian faith.
BORN AGAIN -- (Audio) Faith and the restoration
of our self-image in God.
JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH -- (Audio) How
faith and justification bring healing.
WHY JESUS HAD TO DIE -- The connection
between the crucifixion and our own identity.
THE PRICE JESUS PAID -- (Audio) What
was the price? to whom was it paid?
and, what has that to do with our inner
healing?
WORK, PLAY, & PURPOSE IN THE KING-
DOM -- (Audio) How these activities are
radically different in the Kingdom from
those in the world -- a part of the salvation
package.

Theology/Apologetics
WORLDVIEW COMPARISON: Go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/
11Phl/WrldV/00Wvw.htm
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE IN A SCIEN-
TIFIC AGE. (Booklet - approx. 40 pp.)
Explaining the union of faith and reason,
science and religion, and why the Bible
reasonably can be called the “word of
God”. For the latest update, go to
http://www.theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/
12The/Bbl/AuthBbl01.htm
REASON, REVELATION, & POLITICS
(RR&P). (1) The historical impact of
Christianity on Western history, (2) why
Western history is essentially and fundamentally
Christian history, (3) why the
West lost its Christian worldview, (4) and
how to get it back.
RELIGION & FREUD: A PSYCHO-HISTORI-
CAL REALITY CHECK -- showing how
Freud (in The Future of an Illusion)
understood neither Biblical religion, historical
evidence, nor human psychology,
and why the reality evidence strongly
favors Biblical religion.
SPIRITUAL WARFARE IN THE 20TH CEN-
TURY -- (AUDIO ALBUM, 6 TALKS ON 4
TAPES, APPROX. 1 HR EACH) 1. TWO
WORLDVIEWS - THE BATTLE LINES. 2.
WHAT IS SPIRITUAL WARFARE? - WHO
OWNS THE WORLD? 3. UNSHEATHING THE
BIBLE - IN A SCIENTIFIC AGE. 4. POLITICAL
WARFARE. 5. EDUCATION WARFARE. 6.
EDUCATION: FOR LIFE OR DEATH? SPIRI-
TUAL WARFARE BEGINS IN PRAYER AND
SCRIPTURE STUDY, BUT IT MUST COME OUT
OF THE CLOSET TO ENGAGE THE ENEMY “IN
THE FLESH”.
Philosophical Theological
PERSONALITY, EMPIRICISM, & GOD (PEG) -
- Doctoral thesis, expected to be published
in early 2013, and will be available
at www.EmmausMall.org. The philosophical
case for saying that the Biblical doctrine
of creation is a logically necessary
foundation for empirical science and scientific
method. www.EmmausMall.org
will publish updates on publication
progress.
Bibliography 165
The unpublished text will be available
at www.theRoadToEmmaus.org in pdf format
until the book is published.
YAHWEH OR THE GREAT MOTHER?
(YORGM?) -- (2 videos, 4 hours, 6 sessions,
study guide) Essential background
on Biblical vs. pagan worldview. For dealing
with issues of sexuality, moral values,
and theology as encountered in “New
Age” and eastern philosophies and in
secular materialism.
1st cassette - Biblical view: “The Personhood
of God”, “The Tri-Personhood of
God”, and “When Everything Else
Fails....” 2nd cassette - secular/pagan
view: “The Cosmic Organism”, “Materialism”,
and “Spiritualism”.
This material will become Vol. II of A
Personalist Cosmology in Imago Dei Vol.
I, Personality, Empiricism, & God, is listed
above.
ASCENSION THEOLOGY -- Douglas Farrow,
T & T Clark. An extraordinary book on
spiritual warfare (though Farrow does not
seem to use that term), relating to the
decline in celebrating the festival of the
Ascension, which he rightly says is
essential to the meaning of the Resurrection
and Pentecost.
Farrow discusses how, because evil
has no creativity of its own, evil feeds off
the good, with the result that the more
good we do, the more lush the garden for
evil to feast on -- creating more problems
for the Christian community.
Sorting out atonement issues is one
important way of combating the proliferation
of evil.
Farrow is a Presbyterian become
Anglican become Roman Catholic, and
speaks well from that abroad background
to the vital issues of our day. One need
not stumble over his history, and will find
much of value.
Education
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERI-
CAN EDUCATION, by John Taylor Gatto
(available through The Odysseus Group,
New York City, 212 529-9397.
IS PUBLIC EDUCATION NECESSARY, and
NEA: TROJAN HORSE IN AMERICAN

166 The Law & the Graceof God
EDUCATION, by Samuel Blumenfeld;
CLONING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, by B. K.
Eakman;
INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION, by Thomas
Sowell;
LET MY CHILDREN GO, by E. Ray Moore.
SEX EDUCATION - TWO OPPOSING
PHILOSOPHIES -- (Paper, 10 pp.) Letter
to editor exchange between Dr. Fox and
Robert Selverstone, Ph. D., president of
SIECUS (Sex Information and Education
Council in the United States). Dr. Fox
points to morality as a necessary part of
academic freedom and responsible education.
EDUCATION: FOR LIFE OR FOR DEATH? --
(Audio, approx... 40 min.) On the two
precisely contrary philosophies of education
which emerge from the Biblical view
of objective truth vs. the secular/pagan
view of relative truth. (Flip side contains
DOING IT SOMEONE ELSE'S WAY on
the need for obedience. Included in Spiritual
Warfare album.)
EDUCATION WARFARE -- (Audio, approx. 1
hr) The spiritual warfare in occupying the
high ground in our educational systems.
(Flip side contains POLITICAL WARFARE.
Included in Spiritual Warfare album.)

Index 167
Index
For topics not found in normal alphabetical order, look under some other
general topic. The match in the text may not be a literal match with the indexed
word, but a similar theme, i.e., ‘secularized’ or ‘secularism’ might be
under ‘secular’, or, ‘myth’ may refer to ‘mythology’ or ‘mythic’ on the
indicated page.
A
apologetics 1
Aristotle 18, 30, 34–36,
38, 40, 50
atonement xv, xxviii, 46
B
bad 5, 17
Bible - see Biblical
Biblical 2, 21, 47–48, 77
commandments 21, 23
creation 63
family 66
God 33
guilt 63
heaven 49
morality 6, 38
religion xv, 66
theology 22, 24, 44–
45, 51
worldview xv, xxi, xxiii,
xxvi, xxxiv, 1, 7, 18,
20, 23, 30, 35, 39–
40, 72
C
Cherbonnier, Edmund
xxxii, 77
Christian xxxiii, 1, 15, 17,
23, 28, 40, 44–46,
48, 50–51, 57, 59,
63, 66, 79
failures x
Luther, Treatise on Christian
Liberty 69
sexuality xxi
witness xxvii
civilization
western xvi
civilization, western 2, 46
Communism xxxiii
contingency xxii
Coppleston, Frederick 79
creation 63
& authority 15–16, 20–
21
& freedom 76
doctrine of xv
ex nihilo 37
intelligent design 22, 27,
40, 51, 65–67, 78
cross xxviii, 75
& atonement 77
way of the xxiii, 20
D
Darwin, Charles xv
Das Kapital xxxiii
definitions xxviii, xxxvii, 3,
8
E
Enlightenment xxxiii
ethical - See ethics
ethics xxxiii, 1–2, 4, 7,
10–11, 13, 15, 18,
21, 23, 26–27, 30,
36, 38, 50, 58–59,
76, 79
evil xxxii, 4–5, 38, 56
F
feeling xxii, 4, 27
& happiness 66
& happiness 66
female xxiii
feminine xxi–xxiii, xxv
G
Gehenna 80
gender xxii
& salvation xxii
Genesis xxiii
good xxxii, 4, 20–21, 23,
27, 32, 34–36, 38,
46, 50, 56–59, 65–
66, 68–70, 76–77,
79
feelings xxii
feminine xxv
H
heaven 20, 48–49, 57,
59, 61, 63, 65, 69
as relationship 64, 66,
74, 76–80
Hebrew xxi, 50
Hellenic 39–40, 48, 50–
51, 61, 76
hieros gamos xx, xxiv
high ground
moral xxxiii, 36
History 79
history xxi, 21, 32, 46,
48, 79
I
image 35
Image of God xxiii, 7, 64
intellectual xiii, xxxiii, 1,
4, 23, 28, 34, 40,
44–45, 47, 51, 60
J
Journal of Religion 1
judgement 6, 9, 48, 80
two kinds 80
M
male xxiii
marriage xxi
sacred xxii, xxv
Marx, Karl xxxiii
masculine xxi, xxiii, xxv
moral high ground - see
high ground
moral highground xxxiii
O
ontological 79
stability xviii, xxv, 7, 57,
66
oughtness 1, 4, 7–10,
12–13, 16–19, 37,
45
P
pagan 1, 8, 20, 35
heaven 48–49, 65
moralitiy 51
morality 51, 59
neo 2
salvation 61
sexuality xxi, xxiv
worldview 7, 40, 76
Plato 30, 34, 36, 39–40,
49–50, 65, 70
politician - See politics
politics xviii, xxxii–xxxiii,
2, 23, 30, 36, 46
purpose 9–11, 13, 18, 23
for existence xxiv, 11–
13, 16, 18, 20–21,
23–24, 27–28, 34,
37, 51, 65–67, 76,
78, 80
two kinds 37
R
reason - see purpose
relationship xxiii, 3, 10,
12–13, 15–17, 19,
22, 26, 29, 34, 36,
49, 57, 64–66, 75–
79
relative truth xxxiii, 7, 21,
46
religion xv, 1, 48
& freedom 79
Biblical 49, 66, 79
definition 8
Hebrew xxi
pagan 49, 76
right xxxii, 2, 4, 13, 16,
18, 20–23, 27, 32,
34–35, 48, 51, 57,
61, 65–66, 69–70,
75, 77–79
righteous - See right
Roosevelt, Teddy 1
S
sacred marriage xxii, xxv
salvation xv, 47
& Christ 47–48
& ethics 7
& happiness 65
& legalism 44
& parenting 66
& psychology 66
& righteousness 78
& sex xxii
& stabilities 66, 75
language 47
pagan 61
without God 78
science xiii, xxxiii, 4, 40,
45, 51
secular xii, xxiv, xxxiii, 2,
6–7, 36, 40, 45, 66
sex xxi, xxiii, 4
& salvation xxii
sexual, sexuality - see sex
socialism xxxiii
Socrates 27, 30, 33–35,
39–40, 50
spiritual xxi, xxiii, xxxiii,
1, 7–8, 12, 29, 34,
40, 45, 47, 60, 67, 78
stabilities xviii, xxii–xxiv,
xxvi, 7, 66–67, 75

168 Vol. I - Personality, Empiricism, & God
T
theology xxvii, 44–45,
48, 50–51
atonement xv
Trinity College 1
truth xxxiii, 9–10, 15, 28,
44, 66, 68, 77
seeking xiii, xxxiii, 47,
51
W
wedding xx, xxiii, xxv, 7,
20, 22, 70, 76
worldview 13, 36, 60
Biblical xviii, xxxiv, 1,
20, 30, 35, 39–40
Greek 34
Hellenic 40, 51
pagan 7, 40
Platonic 40
secular 7, 40
stabilities 7
wrong xxxii–xxxiii, 2, 4,
13, 24, 27, 48, 51, 65
rejection of Jesus 79