Nice article by Josh Claybourn on Christianity and the (mercifully-failed-for-the-moment) FMA. The money quote:
Is the Christian faith more concerned with changing hearts or controlling actions?
If I can wax Biblical here for a moment (I promise, I won’t bite), the answer for Christians must be the former. Indeed, Paul is adamant on that point (and, as far as I can read, so is Jesus). The Law (religious law, that is) cannot lead to salvation, because nobody can perfectly adhere to it. Salvation is only possible through grace, and and adoption of belief in Jesus and his forgiving power. Becoming a follower of Jesus, in this model, causes you to be virtuous; being forced to be virtuous is not at all the same.
(Ironically, where Paul falls most short, at least for me, is where he gets this turned around, and starts imposing thou-shallts and thou-shan’ts. One might argue that adherence to God’s will would lead to behaviors X, Y, and Z, but that’s an outcome, an after-effect, not the motivator for trying to discern such adherence.)
That doesn’t mean that private and public virtue aren’t important, but that they must flow from belief and the heart, not the other way around.
You can certainly argue secular reasons for any law — indeed, that’s what you should argue. Because to impose a law as a moral prohibition, to try to legislate a “Godly nation,” seems to be strictly bass-ackwards from a Pauline perspective. Yes, good habits can promote a good heart, but calling on the state to dictate religious law as civil law not only flies in the face of orthodox Christian theology, but makes the Church dependent upon — indeed, subservient to — the State.
And that’s just what good Christians ought most to fear, no matter how attractive the idea of imposing their particular denominations values on the general population might be — in the short run. Because once you stop trying to change hearts, and go instead for controlling actions, you’re vulnerable to exactly the kind of restrictions you seek to place on others.
Thus Endeth the Lesson.
This appears to me to be a straw man. Neither Paul nor theonomists put lawkeeping (civil or religious) prior to regeneration. So, all the thou-shalt-nots you find in Paul presume regeneration. When Paul does have his lists, he reminds the reader that they are not living in keeping with their current state.
Note Paul in context:
9Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
[emphasis mine]
The cause was being justified, while the effect was less sinning. (Note: other parts of Scripture teach that even this difference in behavior is insufficient to save you. You still need grace as a believer.) So, Paul is agreeing with you.
Further, you confuse the role of the church with the role of the state. The state cannot save but it does have a limited role, namely to restrain evil (c.v. Rom. 13). It is limited by definition to only deal with behavior and even here only extreme cases. Calvin argues (effectively IMHO) in his Institutes of Christian Religion that the Christian civil magistrate is not bound to the particulars of the OT law, but rather to the “general equity” of them. This might be surprising to some given the goings on in Geneva, but Calvin wasn’t really in charge of the government there and Calvin may have written this part of his Institutes (the chapter on civil government was a late addition) as a result of the abuses in Geneva. Thus, a Christian civil magistrate need not ban homosexual behavior even though he might believe it to be sin and still be true to his faith.
So, yes, the only way for society to be redeeemed is to have the individuals to be redeemed. The multiplication of laws by the civil government marks a failure of the church to do her divinely ordained task. The state is merely filling a vacuum.
A quick clarification: I was disagreeing with Dave on the narrow issue of whether Paul’s lists put law before salvation. There is also a difference between on us on how we determine whether a law is appropriate though I think we end up in the same place on which laws are appropriate. Other than that, Dave, Josh, and I are on the same page. I don’t want a nit to be interpreted as a major critique.