Responding to Tom Hicks on Theonomy (1/16)

In his blog post, Why is Theonomy Unbiblical?, Pastor Tom Hicks sets out to provide a critique of the theonomic position. He defines this as “all civil governments are obliged to enforce Old Covenant judicial law, together with its penalties, but civil governments are not permitted to enforce any law not prescribed in the Old Covenant judicial code.” Hicks describes an application or result of the theonomic position, not its central thesis. This is like describing marriage as “legal sex.” Well, yeah, sort of. But that’s an application of marriage, not its definition. In the same way, Hicks fails to define theonomy by its central thesis. This prevents him from offering an adequate critique, which shows clearly in his first point.

To convince his reader of his argument, he provides 16 reasons theonomy is unbiblical. In his counter-thesis, Hicks denies the abiding validity of all law that has been given to the people of God by special revelation. Every bit of it. The whole kit and caboodle. The only thing that remains for the government of mankind is the law written on the heart, the Thomistic position. One of the central issues of his counter-thesis is that he not only denies the validity of Israel’s judicial laws, he denies the validity of the Ten Commandments except as they are revealed on the heart. This reduces God’s authority over mankind to man’s subjective experience of the law written on the heart, the motions of the conscience we might say. Without the Ten Commandments, we are left to wonder what this inner law is.  In the end, his position is something of a Dispensationalist-Covenant hybrid that embraces the natural law theory of the Roman Catholic, Thomas Aquinas. Nevertheless, the following will set out a brief response to each of Hicks’ 16 reasons.

Hicks’ first critique is that theonomy does not properly embrace or apply the hermeneutic of New Testament priority. According to him, theonomists read the Bible “improperly.” This is because “sound hermeneutical principles recognize that later revelation has interpretive priority over earlier revelation.” To apply this rule, the believer must “pay close attention to what the later texts say and allow them to explain and draw out implications of earlier Old Testament texts, making explicit what was only previously implicit. In his view, theonomists interpret the New Testament in light of the Old rather than his proper way.

Hicks’ assertion that theonomy doesn’t properly embrace or apply the hermeneutic of New Testament priority is false. One of the central expositions of the theonomic position is Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics. This tome is Bahnsen’s master’s thesis presented to Westminster Seminary in California. The central passage under consideration in his thesis is Matthew 5:17-19. I believe that’s in the New Testament. It is from this passage that Bahnsen builds his central argument: the Older Testament Law has abiding validity in exhaustive detail. Bahnsen reaches this conclusion because Jesus plainly stated, in the New Testament, that his ministry would not serve to destroy the Law or the Prophets in any of its miniscule detail. This assertion by our Lord teaches the Christian how he must understand the Scriptures previous to and after Jesus. If anyone teaches that a single detail of God’s Law is not to be observed, he will be “called least in the kingdom of heaven.” If Jesus spoke truthfully, this passage of Scripture controls how we interpret everything. This is the Rosetta Stone, as it were, of our interpretive approach to the Scriptures. Unlike Hicks’ position of “New Testament priority” as a “sound hermeneutical principle,” theonomists adopt their hermeneutic from Scripture. How do the Scriptures teach us to interpret them? That’s our central question. In Matthew 5:17-19, Jesus teaches us, in the New Testament, how to interpret His Word.

Strengthening this argument is the fact that Jesus taught that everything in the Law and the Prophets suspends from two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor (Matthew 22:37-39). This means the central ethic of the Older Testament is the central ethic of the New Testament. In both places this is explicitly taught (cf. Dt 6:5, Lev 19:18). What Jesus did is draw the line tight between both epochs of divine revelation.

This first critique illustrates a major challenge for studious Christians: we are content to read critiques of other positions, but we do not read the works of men who hold those positions. Because of that, we misrepresent these men and their positions. The theonomic position is founded upon the exegetical method Jesus taught us to use. Therefore, Hicks’ first critique is not only false, but it also shows he hasn’t studied the position fairly.