The Intersection Of Politics And Theology

Due to its inherent subjectivity, conscience is capable of being a legitimate basis for a legal system, set of social values, or personal moral beliefs.  It is only because many prize their subjective desires that conscience is deemed anything other than a practically worthless epistemological tool.  As with all intellectual mistakes, this can have dramatic social consequences, which in this case take the form of arbitrary laws.  Laws should not reflect the conscience of either a particular person or of the general sentiments or preferences of a group; they should reflect actual moral obligations, and nothing more.

To have laws rooted in anything else is by necessity either unjust or meaningless.  If moral truths exist and laws do not align with them, then those laws are contrary to justice.  If moral truths do not exist, then all laws are without any significance and authority to begin with.  In either case, laws that correspond to conscience are of no value, and only the delusional look to them with approval.  Justice is the only legitimate objective of a legal system, and justice cannot be known via subjective impulses.

Thus, the human conscience can tell us nothing of any moral obligations that might exist.  Ethical truths are within the domain of theology, for the nonexistence of God and the existence of a God who does not possess a moral nature both necessitate the nonexistence of morality.  The laws of a given society can have no moral authority unless they match any actual moral truths rooted in God's nature.  However unpopular these moral obligations may be, no society is exempt from them.

Since moral obligations can only be metaphysically grounded in the nature of a deity, moral knowledge can only be given by a deity (this does not mean that the mere existence of God means that morality exists, as it is possible for God to not have any moral nature at all).  It follows that there is no such thing as a sound non-theonomist moral framework.  Because theonomy is inherently political, and since politics is not amoral if moral truths exist, the existence of moral truths always necessitates theonomist moral obligations, though this alone does not mean that Christian theonomy is the correct model.

Nevertheless, theonomy is the necessary intersection of politics and theology, for moral obligations can only exist within a theological context, and politics is not exempt from existing moral obligations.  However, there are those who wish to keep theology separate from politics, not realizing that to do so is to keep the only sound philosophical basis for legal systems away from politics.  The irrationality of such people impedes the ethical accuracy of the legal systems they live under.