It’s Thursday evening.
The dishes are done. The kids are in bed. You sit down on the sofa, you pick up the remote, and you put the news on.
And the headline comes up. A court ruling: a Sikh man knifes a Christian Englishman, and the Englishman is arrested because his attacker accused him of racism. A new law prohibits Christians from praying within 100 metres of where women go to stop the beating hearts of their children.
Stories so obviously wrong that any half-decent man would throw up his hands in disgust. A story that, fifty years ago, ten different newspapers and twenty different politicians would have all said was wrong, together, without a second thought about it.
You wait for the outrage. You wait for someone, anyone, on the screen, to say “this is evil”.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead is a panel of clever people in suits explaining to you, in measured tones, why the obviously wrong thing is actually quite reasonable.
And you sit there. And something inside you dies.
Now. Van Drunen has told you something about that exact moment. He has told you that the public moral order, the law of the land, the courts, the marketplace, runs on something called natural law. Moral truths written on the conscience of every human being. Available, in principle, to all. Pagan, Muslim, Christian, atheist. Enough to keep a country running. Enough to govern your Thursday evening. Enough that the church doesn’t need to bring the Bible into civic life because everybody already knows.
So tell me. If natural law is enough, where do I go to find what it says? If the conscience of every man is wired by God to know right from wrong, why is the panel of clever people on the news telling you that black is pink and blue is orange? Why is the country sliding off the moral cliff when everyone knows the difference between right and wrong?
Why isn’t natural law catching us?
My name is Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk. And this is Exiles No More.
Tonight, we are going to ask one question. Is natural law a fast friend, or is it a thick fog?
Let’s go.
What this episode gives you
First. The claim. Van Drunen’s case for natural law as the law of the common kingdom. Stated fairly, in his own framing, because we have always represented the enemy accurately on this series.
Second. Romans 1, verse 18. Paul’s verdict on the very thing Van Drunen is resting his weight on. The verdict is not “sufficient”. The verdict is “suppressed”.
Third. Romans 2, verses 14 and 15. Van Drunen’s strongest text. We are going to read it carefully. And it is going to do way less than he needs it to do.
Fourth. The receipts of history. Two thousand years of pagans not agreeing on natural law. And the death of natural law as a secular theory in our own lifetime.
And by the end, you will have a picture in your head that will forever be burned into your brain. A picture of a witness with a hand around his throat. A witness being held under the water. A witness trying to tell the truth. And you will know what that picture means for your own beloved country.
The claim: Van Drunen’s case for natural law
Let me put Van Drunen’s case the way he would put it.
He says the common kingdom of Genesis 9, which we demolished last week, is governed by something called natural law.
Natural law. What does that mean?
It means moral norms, written on the human conscience by God Himself, available in principle to every man. Believer. Unbeliever. Atheist. Muslim. Pagan. All of them carry, inside them, a basic moral compass.
You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall honour your parents. Don’t bear false witness. Some basic decency. Some basic justice. Enough so that society ticks along nicely.
And his proof text is Romans chapter 2, verses 14 and 15.
“For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them.”
There you go. Paul himself. Gentiles, who don’t have the Mosaic law, doing the things in the law, by nature. The work of the law written on their hearts.
That is Van Drunen’s foundation. That is his epistemology. That is his ground for saying you don’t need the Bible to govern the public square.
Now if Romans 2:14 and 15 can carry that weight, then you really are bound to natural law in your civic life. Then you really can sit down at the courthouse next to a man who worships himself and reason your way together to a shared moral order. Then the Bible can stay safely in the church. And the country can run happily, fuelled by the moral conclusions of the conscience of every man.
That is what is on the table. You need to know it. Because that is the very air the modern Reformed seminarian breathes.
So now we have the claim. And we have one chapter of Romans.
But there’s another chapter of Romans. The one right before it. Surprisingly, Van Drunen never quotes it.
Let’s go and read it.
Romans 1 wrecks the sufficiency claim
If you did your homework from last week, you opened your Bible and read Romans chapter 1 and chapter 2 in one sitting. If you didn’t, I’m going to give you the verse you needed to see.
Romans chapter 1. Verse 18.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
Read that again with me. “Who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
The truth. About God. About right and wrong. Real. Available. Written. In every man. But being suppressed. Actively. Right now. By every unregenerate mind.
The Greek for “suppress” is katechō. It means to hold down. To restrain. To keep something from rising up.
Picture a man with both hands around the throat of another man, pushing him under water. That is what katechō means in Romans 1, verse 18. The unregenerate man knows the truth. The truth is real. The truth is trying to come up for air. And he is standing on top of it. Pressing down. With both hands.
And Paul tells you what happens next. Verse 22.
“Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed animals, and creeping things.”
Verse 25.
“Who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”
The mind that suppresses the truth does not stop thinking. It carries on thinking. But every thought it thinks is now warped. It calls foolishness wisdom. It calls the lie the truth. It calls the creature the Creator.
That is the mind Van Drunen is asking you to share a courthouse with. That is the mind he is asking you to reason with about natural law.
Now turn the page to Romans chapter 2. The very next chapter. The same Paul. The same letter. The same argument. He says the Gentiles have the work of the law written on their hearts. Yes. It’s true. It’s real. It’s there.
But what does the previous chapter say is happening to that witness? He’s being held under the water. By the very man Paul says is supposed to be reading him.
Now look at what Van Drunen has done. He has read Romans chapter 2. He has not quoted Romans chapter 1. He has made a doctrine out of a witness whose own testimony is being gagged by the man who carries it. He has built a civil order on the word of a witness that every juror has already agreed to silence.
You can’t do that. You can’t lift a witness out of one chapter, ignore what the chapter before says about him, and call the result a sufficient foundation for a kingdom.
The witness is there. The witness is real. But the witness is suppressed.
So natural law is not a sufficient governor of any public order. It is a real witness with a hand around his throat, attempting to drown out the witness of God’s truth in him. And the man with the hand on the throat is the same man you were planning to govern with, and be governed by.
Romans 2 is not a foundation for ethics
Now you might be thinking, “All right, Nathan. Romans 1 wrecks the sufficiency claim. Fine. But Romans 2 still says the Gentiles have the work of the law written on their hearts. Doesn’t that still give Van Drunen something?”
And the answer is yes. It gives him something. But it does not give him what he needs.
Here is where Willem Ouweneel is so helpful. Look very carefully at what Paul says in Romans 2, verse 15. Not the law. “The work of the law”. That is a measured and clinically precise phrase. It means moral awareness of specific commandments.
Pagans know murder is wrong. Pagans know theft is wrong. Pagans know you should honour your father and mother. That is real. That is in the verse.
But ask yourself. Is moral awareness of murder being wrong the same thing as a complete, universal, accessible moral code for civilisation? Is “the work of the law” the same as “the whole law of God in operational form”? Is conscience the same as Sinai?
No. It isn’t.
And here is the deeper problem. Read the verse in context. What is Paul doing in Romans chapter 2? Is he telling the Romans to go and build civil law on the basis of pagan moral awareness?
No. He is doing the exact opposite. He is condemning Jews and Gentiles together. The Jews by the law of Moses. The Gentiles by the law of conscience. So that every mouth would be stopped. So that all the world would be guilty before God. So that all flesh would need the gospel.
Paul’s point in Romans 2 is not “natural law is sufficient to run a country.” Paul’s point is “natural law is sufficient to damn a man.”
Those are very different things. A witness that is sufficient to convict you in the dock is not the same thing as a witness that is sufficient to build a courthouse.
Van Drunen has taken a passage whose point is condemnation, and used it as a foundation for ethics. He has read into Romans 2 a foundation that the text never offered him. Paul will tell you the pagan is without excuse. Paul will not tell you the pagan is a sufficient co-legislator. Those are not the same claim.
And the system Van Drunen has built on Romans 2 cannot be built upon Paul’s actual point in Romans 2.
Natural law has already collapsed
We’ve watched Romans 1 drown Van Drunen’s sufficiency claim. We’ve watched Romans 2 refuse to do his ethical work for him. But you might still be thinking that natural law has held up in real history. That across all cultures, people have agreed on the basics.
Let’s go and have a look. Because what you’ll find is the opposite.
Here is a simple test. If natural law is genuinely accessible to every human conscience, then across the centuries and across the continents, we should find pagans and Bible-believers broadly agreeing on the basics. Marriage. Property. Human life. Justice. Political authority.
Now go and check.
Marriage. Polygamy in some cultures. Polyandry in others. Same-sex unions celebrated in some. Child marriage in others. Lifelong monogamy with no escape in others again.
Property. Private property as theft in some traditions. Sacred ownership in others. Communal land in some. Royal land in others. Marxism. Feudalism. Capitalism. Tribute systems.
Human life. The Romans exposed unwanted infants on hillsides. The Aztecs cut hearts out by the thousand at temple festivals. The Indians burnt widows on funeral pyres. Modern liberal democracies kill the unborn at an industrial scale.
Justice. Retributive in some. Restorative in others. Revolutionary in others. Tribal vendetta in others.
Political authority. Divine right of kings. Soviet councils. Athenian democracy. Hindu caste. African chieftaincy. The American republic. The Chinese emperor.
Now you tell me. Does that look like agreement? Does that look like a moral compass that points the same way for everyone?
No. It looks like profound, civilisation-deep disagreement on the most basic questions a human society has to answer.
So whose natural law are we going to use? Whose conscience are we going to trust? The Aztec priest with the obsidian knife? The Soviet commissar with the list of dissidents to disappear? The Roman patrician on his way to the hillside with a baby in a sack? The Hindu building up the funeral pyre? The modern liberal who unalives the living baby in the womb?
The honest answer is this. When Van Drunen says “natural law”, what he actually means, whether he knows it or not, is mid-twentieth-century liberal democratic consensus. He means the natural law of John Locke. He means the natural law of mainline American Protestantism in 1955.
That is not universal natural law. That is a culturally specific moral inheritance. Which means natural law in practice means the law of whoever currently controls the cultural narrative about what “nature” requires.
That is Rushdoony’s point. That is Van Til’s point. There is no neutrality. Every law system reflects somebody’s god.
The death of a theory
And here is what should keep you up at night. Natural law as a serious philosophical project has already died. Gary North traces its history in Political Polytheism.
Natural law theory began as a Stoic stopgap. A pagan placeholder for a defunct Greek city-state moral order. When the polis collapsed and the gods of the polis went with it, the Stoics needed a foundation. They invented one. They called it nature.
It got rebranded by mediaeval scholastics into Thomism. Nature and grace. The lower storey and the upper storey. Aristotle in the basement and the Bible upstairs.
It got picked up again at the Enlightenment by John Locke. Social contract. Natural rights. Self-evident truths. The American founders built a republic in large measure on that foundation.
Then Darwin came. Darwin destroyed the foundation. If there is no fixed nature, there can be no natural moral norms. The thing is just the way it happens to be this century, in this species, on this planet. Wait long enough and the thing will be something else. Wait a bit longer and the species will be something else.
Then legal positivism came. The law is what the courts enforce. Not what reason discovers. Not what nature requires. Whatever the magistrate signs is law. Whatever the magistrate signs tomorrow is also law. There is no higher court of appeal.
By the late twentieth century, no serious secular academic was defending natural law theory. The humanists abandoned it. The Marxists never accepted it. Natural law is intellectually dead. It died in the secular university about sixty years ago. The body is in the ground. The headstone is covered with moss and lichen, no flowers adorn the grave.
And here is Van Drunen, in our generation, telling Christians to vacate the field of law and culture because it belongs to the “common kingdom” governed by the very theory that died decades ago.
That is the situation. That is the system being taught in Reformed seminaries. A theology of withdrawal grounded in a philosophy that the world has already discarded long ago as useless. The Reformed have fished it out of the trash and called it treasure.
The clergy hand the courthouse to a witness with a hand around his own throat. The pagan philosophers laugh, because the witness was their friend, and even they gave him up for dead. Meanwhile the country goes off the cliff and the panel of clever people on the news explains why it’s reasonable.
That is what comes of trusting natural law. That’s the cost of treasuring trash.
What you do this week
I’m not going to leave you with four chapters of demolition and no instructions. Four things. For this week.
Step one. Read Romans 1 in one sitting.
Open your Bible. Romans chapter 1. Read the whole thing. Pay especially close attention to verses 18 through 32.
Notice the structure. The truth is suppressed. The result is idolatry. The result of idolatry is moral collapse. The moral collapse is described in detail. And it sounds like the news.
That is not an accident. That is what unregenerate human nature does when natural law is the only thing in the room. It does exactly what Paul said it would do. Every time. In every century.
Step two. Memorise Romans 1, verse 18.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
Say it out loud in the car. Say it before the news comes on. Say it after hearing about the latest insanity from the courts. Say it to yourself in a meeting where the obvious wrong is being normalised.
Because that verse is the answer. The truth is real. The truth is being suppressed. You are not crazy. You are watching Romans 1 happen.
Step three. Find one place you’ve been waiting for natural law to win.
Don’t start with the news. Don’t start with the courts. Don’t start with the politicians.
Are you waiting for “the common decency of ordinary people” to fix something? In what domain are you assuming that “deep down everybody knows what’s right”? In which area of life have you been a quiet natural-law optimist in your own head?
Write it down. One place. And ask yourself: am I waiting for a self-drowning witness to climb out of the pond and rescue my country?
Because he isn’t going to. The country is going to be rescued by the Word of God, applied by the people of God, with the boldness of God. Or it is not going to be rescued at all.
Step four. Sit with the next question.
We’ve taken the covenantal pillar from Van Drunen in the last episode. We’ve taken the epistemological pillar from him today. But he still has one more. His exegetical pillar. The exile texts.
He says 1 Peter chapter 2 calls you a sojourner and an exile. He says Jeremiah 29 tells you to seek the welfare of Babylon and settle in. He says Hebrews 11 calls you a stranger looking for a better country. He says the New Testament posture is exile. Waiting. Not building.
That is a serious claim. Because if those texts mean what he says they mean, then the dominion-taking, Bible-applying man is being disobedient to the apostle Peter and the writer of Hebrews.
So this week, do this. Open your Bible to 1 Peter chapter 2. Read the whole chapter. And pay very close attention to verse 9. Before he calls you a sojourner, he calls you something else. A royal priesthood. A holy nation. A people for God’s own possession.
Sit with that. Because next we are going to find out what kind of exile carries a royal priesthood in his pocket.
Friend or fog?
Let me leave you with this.
Van Drunen says natural law is enough. Paul says natural law is being held under the water by every man who looks at it.
You cannot build a kingdom on a drowning witness. You cannot rescue a country with a corpse in a wig.
So pick up the Word of God and apply it to your life.
Or sit down. And let the country go to the dogs.