Thank you for joining us for another episode of God, Law, and Liberty with David Fowler,

President of the Family Action Council of Tennessee.

Every week, we are putting culture, politics, and law on a collision

course with the truth of God's episode of God, Law and Liberty.

And I pray that if today is especially helpful to you if that's the case, would you consider sharing

the episode with your friends? We don't have any advertising budget for the podcast, so you are the means that God would use to expand our reach

to others who might find it beneficial but with that sort of said as I was

thinking and praying about today's episode. I know I said

last week that I'd be looking at how we think about law in relation to the

first chapter of first Timothy and I do want to do that.

But what kept coming to my mind were the observations made by Professor Jonathan Burnside in his lecture at the Hale Institute about the nature of law as the Bible presents it to us, which is a strange way of even talking about law is how it's presented to us.

And even the way the Bible presents its administration of the law through judges, which is much like the common law tradition.

But more specifically, as you may recall from previous episodes, Burnside said that the word translated

law in the Old Testament is Torah or Torah and it means teaching or instruction and it would include the whole of the Bible. But he noted how we now

tend to read the Bible like legal positivist, more like Jeremy Bentham.

And I want to play a clip from his lecture on what this means when we read the Bible like legal positivist like Jeremy Benton. And you can find his two lectures.

Both are excellent on YouTube at the Hale Institute channel. I'd encourage you to

watch them or listen to them. But anyway, for today, here's what's important and here's

what he said. What we mean by law today in Western liberal democracies is something called legal positivism.

Now legal positivism is the idea that law is something that is posited by somebody else. Law is a command, a one-way projection of authority that is

universally applied, that's written down, and understood in semantic terms.

In other words, according to the meaning of the words that we find in the Rue.

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