The negative character of law I.

Many writers have drawn a connection between law as having a negative character, and liberty.

R.J. Rushdoony (Politics of Guilt and Pity) pointed to the negative character of law as a precondition of liberty. He wrote: "Law... is not the source of life but the condition of life, and, as such, there is an identity of liberty and law.... In brief, the purpose of any law is not to make men good; this law can never do, either for man or for society, for goodness is inner rather than outward restraint, else prisons would best produce morality. Law declares the standard, and the penalty for offense, protects society, undercuts man's moralism, and is a guide to the godly. Character and righteousness must come from a source other than law."

Emil Brunner wrote of the law as a framework within which positive ethical activity could occur, and thus as a structure enabling liberty.

Brunner: "Apart from customs and law (with the obedience to custom and law which this implies), apart from this provisional order, life is an impossibility for sinful human beings. We need this rude order as a framework for all the more refined and spiritual forms of life which are obedient to God. Even if the individual believer did not need it on his own account -- which is in itself a very rash statement contradicted at a thousand points by experience-- he would still need it for the sake of his life with those who have not been influenced by the Word of God, or who are either indifferent or hostile to it. If we were to wait until all men do right, from the spirit of obedience to God, in the meantime humanity would long ago have been ground to powder in ceaseless conflict of all against all, or rather: long ago either the most powerful, or the majority, would have instituted some kind of Lex, just as the actual Lex has arisen under such necessities and out of such needs." As an aside, this viewpoint echoes Stahl's Principles, p. 7f.

Brunner continues: "This Lex, however, is not only a necessity for life which we can see to be necessary. It is rather itself a possibility of life which is given by God; according to its function of creating positive order, of making life possible, it is the gift of God, and therefore -- on the basis of that which we have already seen -- it is the task given by God" (The Divine Imperative, p. 141-142).

What these writers have an inkling of, Stahl expounds with thoroughness: see Principles, §. 6, "The Boundaries of Law" (pp. 19ff.).

To be continued...