Adam,
I really don't want to get into a long discussion on theonomy. My purpose in the thread is not to persuade you away from your convictions, but to address Jessica's (and other's) specific issues. And if I have to contradict your position to do it, well then she can see there are two sides to the matter.
I reject the idea--as something utterly unintended by the Westminster divines (in the main), or Calvin, or Rutherford--that you must find a specific NT warrant for ignoring a particular OT ordinance as LAW unto you. I think you need to find a moral reason for why a particular law MUST be law unto you, a complete inversion of the other principle.
Rev. Buchanan, is it a moral command to baptize your children? If so, where in the NT do you have a command to do so? If not, how can you teach anyone that God requires them to do so? Or do you not teach them this? Do you at all base your commands (if you don't call them that, that's fine; if you require it to be done as an act of obedience, it is a command) for members of your church to have their children baptized on the institution of circumcision? If so, isn't Paul's argument actually about circumcision in Galatians, and doesn't that make your congregants debtors to keep the whole law? If not, would you say that Calvin's arguments from circumcision to baptism are judaizing?
1) In what sense are you using the word "moral"? I believe giving the sign of the covenant is an ordinance belonging to the Covenant of Grace.
2) I appeal to Gen.17 for the positive injunction. The Law that came 430 later cannot disannul the promise, nor would it obviate attendant requirements regarding the continuing Covenant of Grace embedded therein. And, now the positive stipulations respecting the ordinance of the sign of the covenant have indeed been modified under the present administration, circumcision-->baptism.
3) We're talking about the Law given to Moses. You are conflating the Law of Moses and God's command to Abraham and making them one whole thing,
something I am not doing. Paul's argument in Galatians appeals to Abraham
against Moses (and please do not attack my use of the term "against"; I am using it advisedly and contextually).
Otherwise, you have not been freed from that "bondage." And as Rutherford said, if you obey even ONE of those laws as given by Moses because it was given to Moses, you have become a debtor to keep it whole and entire. This is the argument of the Apostle Paul in the book of Galatians, and I urge you, strenuously, to consider the wisdom of adopting the precept: that you need specific warrants to lay any of them aside.
I believe that it is irresponsible, at least, to say that assuming continuity in the laws is damnable (that is what you're saying by lumping it in with the Galatian heresy). Perhaps we could look at more quotations from some other of Rutherford's writings. For instance, when he asserted the rightness of executing sodomites, adulterers, seducers to idolatry, etc. Of course no one has to obey the Mosaic law because it was given to Moses. Rutherford explains elsewhere:
That which is moral, and cannot be determined by the wisdom and will of man, must be determined by the revealed will of God in his word; but the punishment of a seducing Prophet, that ruins the soul of our brother, and makes him twofold more the child of Satan than before, is moral and cannot be determined by the wisdom and will of man: Ergo, such a pun-ishing of a seducing Prophet, must be by the revealed will of God in his word. The proposition is proved 1. Because God only, not Moses, nor any other law-giver under him, takes on him to determine death to be the adulterer’s punishment, Lev. 20:10. And the same he determines to be the punishment of wilful murder, Exodus 21:12, of smiting of the Father or Mother, verse 15, of Man-stealing, verse 16, of Sorcery, Exodus 22:18, of Bestiality, verse 19, of sacrificing to a strange God, verse 10. And upon the same reason, God only, not any mortal man, must deter-mine the punishment due to such as seduce souls to eternal perdition. For what reason can be imagined, why God can be the only determiner of such a punishment of killing, and not for the ruining the soul and making him the child of perdition. Samuel Rutherford, A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience, p. 206
1) I won't disagree with Rutherford where he's arguing that the punishments dictated by God were as moral as anything else he ever commanded. I can't read him in context there, so I won't presume to agree or disagree with him on any other point.
2) If a modern magistrate dictates a death-penalty for any of the above offenses, you will not find me objecting to his action on some supposed moral high-ground. But it's one thing to defend some action as "moral" based on the Word of God. It's another thing entirely to propose that a different action is "immoral", imprudent, unjust, unfit, or unideal on the ground that it was not explicitly directed by the Word.
And I am in
complete agreement with Calvin on this point. And we've encountered already RJR's contemptuous assessment of Calvin on the same.
Do you believe that seducers to idolators, man-stealers, smiters of fathers and mothers, etc. ought to be executed? You ought to. And you ought to, not because Moses said so; not on human authority!!! No, but on God Almighty's authority. Furthermore, what did Rutherford mean by "judicial laws"?
Idolatry is to be punished by the judge, and that by the testimony of Job, who was obliged to observe no judicial law, but only the law moral and the law of nature.
Note that punishment for idolatry was NOT part of the judicial law, but part of the moral law. Therefore, if you'd like to re-read your quotation from Rutherford in light of his use of "judicial law" you may find that you are fighting a strawman, as no theonomist claims that nations must now obey these judicials, any further than the general equity may require. We don't require "lock, stock, and barrel". We require a presumption of continuity, which (lo and behold) means that "he who is punishable by death in the Old Covenant is punishable by death now" to quote from Gillespie and Piscator.
1) That I
ought to, implies that I
ought to accept the theonomic thesis that would lead to that conclusion. But while I consent to the morality of such penalties, and may even prefer them on just occasion, I do not accept that "no society is rightly ordered" that does not adopt the Law of Moses. Again, I am with Calvin on this.
2) Job 31:28 indicates that errors of religion are subject to judgment. Of course his social situation is largely unknown to us. So, when transferred to our own situation, does this mean that the church is a sufficient context? Perhaps Rutherford, living in a more theocratic context, had every right to expect the secular authority to take action against it.
One thing it doesn't say to that non-Israelite setting:
namely, what penalty the judge "ought" to impose in that situation.
3) I'm not at all convinced I've misread Rutherford regarding my quotation; he very clearly is speaking of Moses' judicial laws, and none other.
Rutherford:
He that will keep one judicial law, because judicial and given by Moses, becometh debtor to keep the whole judicial law under pain of God’s eternal wrath.
Here is a plain endorsement of a (tripartite) division of the Law, and a warning against receiving such as binding now on account of its character as
revelation.
And, I reject that overarching "principle of continuity," as if theonomy was a necessary entailment of Covenant Theology. It's not.
And please understand, this is not a knee-jerk rejection. I spent over 10 years reading extensively, absorbing, and generally accepting and adopting the theonomic thesis. And for the last decade I have been in increasing critical reassessment.
4) We must, at the very least, take both of Gillespie's statements, and note that he appears to make a far stronger statement in one place than he does in the other. So, either he grew bolder, or less bold; or else he was willing to be more diplomatic at one time over another.
And it also raises other questions: who were they trying to convince? and were they defending the status quo or seeking a new institution?
You already have the general precept that they have been swept aside wholesale. This is the Confession's teaching. The 10C remain, since they were always considered (even by Moses and Israel) as unique (Ex.34:28).
This is a serious issue. Do you want to wear that yoke?
I'm not sure how something having an ongoing obligation to obey its underlying equity is equivalent to something being "swept aside wholesale". Indeed, the ceremonial law has been "swept aside wholesale"; it has been abrogated. There is not "general equity" of the ceremonies. The same
cannot be said of the judicials.
1) I truly regret that you do not see the wholesale sweeping away of the Israelite social order. But I also understand your position, having made it mine with great confidence for a number of years.
2) The Confession states that the Judicial laws of Israel have "expired." Think of laws we have today that have "sunset provisions."
notional law: After Jan XX, 20XX, the law against X is no longer the law of the land. Do as you please.
But you STILL can't do X if it involves breaking some other law that remains in effect.
That "law that remains in effect" corresponds to "general equity." The moral law (the Confession's referent to "general equity") is present anywhere and everywhere, at any time. It never expires nor is abrogated. It's been in the hands of men and societies since the dawn of history.
) and another man wears one on his T-shirt. I say neither are in sin. Sure, one act might be wiser, but I think to say one man is more virtuous by this fact alone, is surely an act of human judgment. 
