I lied. This post will not be a continuation of the critique of Anthony Badger, which is on hiatus. Rather, I will be discussing this.
The short answer to "who do I think won" is Joel McDurmon, the reasoning for which is below. The short answer to who I agree with at this point is "neither, entirely". Each person failed to convince me of their thesis (which both participants had, as Hall was making a constructive argument as much as he was denying the affirmative). The issues at stake, to my mind (at least the ones addressed) were four-fold: 1) the issue of Scripture, 2) the issue of history, 3) the issue of confession, 4) the issue of Bahnsen. I will try to deal with each of them briefly here.
1) The issue of Scripture. This issue was affirmed to be the most important by both participants, and I wholeheartedly agree, but this issue is why I'm hesitant to say the exchange had a clear winner. The core of McDurmon's constructive was the notion of the civil law (and its accompanying penalties and sanctions) not being abrogated unless explicitly stated to be so in the New Testament. Insofar as this was based on McDurmon's simple affirmation that "if they were just then they are just now", this strikes at the heart of an unstated presupposition on the part of JD Hall, e.g., an assumption of key Baptistic notions of substantive distinction between the covenants. There is nothing wrong with JD Hall holding this axiom per se (he would be a rather shoddy Reformed Baptist without it), but McDurmon didn't allow it to stand unchallenged, which made it a good debate. Hall, to my mind, failed to prove this (largely silent) assertion from Scripture, and this was made glaring by Hall spending a large part of a rebuttal period affirming the glory, truth, holiness and justice of the Civil code of Israel, a fact which towards the end, McDurmon pointed out meant that Hall was seemingly moving from firm didactic opposition to the Code as "obligatory", to merely asserting that it was one of a number of good governmental options. As an additional example, Hall dismissed the notion of the Puritans executing a man for bestiality by saying "pssh, do we really need the Civil code to know that bestiality is wrong?". This strikes me as a canard. It is by means of the law that men are brought to the realization of their sinfulness (witness the postmodern soup of sexual deviancy our nation is slipping into divorced from God's standard), and without the Civil code, it could be argued that the ethics of bestiality remain largely a matter of public consensus, but the societal response to it does not. In short, I remained unconvinced by the meat and potatoes of Hall's exegetical case.
This does not let McDurmon off on this front however. In the midst of all the acontextual chicanery on what Joel called "the boogeyman quotes" from North and Rushdoony (more on that in a minute), JD landed on a solid argument, albeit one I would have advanced differently: what is the soteriological implication of transmission of Israel's "penalogy", whole cloth, into the New Covenant administration? McDurmon deeply disturbed me in not providing clear teaching from the Theonomic position, even in broad strokes on key questions here. Would a Theonomic state apply the penalogy of the Civil code only to nonbelievers, and how does this jive with Paul's admonition not to judge outside the Church? If the Civil code penalties are applied to Church members, even those making a credible profession, of what benefit are the merits of Christ to professors relative to the Old Covenant? Is the "libertarian" regime pushed by North and Rushdoony merely an excuse to slip Theocratic fascism binding the consciences of the unconverted in through the largest back door possible? And what exactly would the nature of doctrinal disagreement within such a state look like? To leave these questions unanswered means that I can't say Joel "won" in this arena any more than JD did.
Verdict: no clear winner.
2) Joel, in my opinion, wasted a lot of time after a valid point had already been made spending what amounted to his entire first cross-examination on naming hosts of persons who he believed supported his reading of the Westminster standards and on the law. Even if he could have shoehorned more compelling argument into the time allotted, however, his point was made. Opinions on the standards regarding this issue have not been clear-cut or historically monolithic, and the idea that the Theonomists' usage of "general equity" stretches the bounds of credulity, as JD would have it, was adequately demonstrated to me to be in error. On that note, I believe McDurmon came out ahead here (but see below).
Verdict: McDurmon.
3) Even if the historical positions on the standards regarding the nature of general equity are multifaceted, in my personal opinion, granted the language of "expired together with the State of that people', the Theonomic (big T) camp has some hard and serious questions to answer regarding the role of the movement within historic Presbyterianism. No matter how stretched the big tent of the phrase "general equity" gets, McDurmon failed to convince me that presbyteries would not be right to sanction ministers for denial of tenets of the standards if they refused to affirm the expiration of the judicial code. While it's true that Scripture is the final and infallible arbiter, for that to be a position to which McDurmon hastily fell back ceded the point Hall was making: that on a confessional level, McDurmon is being inconsistent.
Verdict: Hall.
4) A defining moment of the debate for me was Hall's claim in 1ACx that he would refuse to believe Bahnsen if he said he had a tripartite distinction in the law. Why defining? Because this was merely the most dramatic example of a consistent cascade of misrepresentation of the Theonomic source material by JD Hall. I firmly believe if you picked a Bahnsen work remotely touching the subject material of the debate, even at random, and began to read you would identify Hall as a caviller on the actual position of Bahnsen. Full disclosure being made, I am no real fan of Rushdoony and North as men and conversationalists. It could even be that there was fleeting occasional substance in some of the accusations leveled against them by Hall (specifically as touching the aforementioned soteriological issues). But to devote this much of an entire rebuttal to the litany of deliberately de-contextualized quotes designed to scare people into (among other things) the idea that Gary North doesn't believe regeneration enables law-keeping, that the Theonomists make the moral and civil law coterminous, or that Greg Bahnsen denied justification by faith(!), is patently absurd. If you start watching the debate, the reason you should finish it is that McDurmon is allowed time to respond to this, and he picks it apart, as he should. This area of the debate is the area that would have scored the most points if I were sitting at a judges' table, as I believe that McDurmon exposed direct abuse of contrived evidence by JD. Your mileage may vary, but I suggest you delve into the authors in question yourself.
Verdict: McDurmon.
In summary this was a great match-up between two men who came prepared and stuck to their guns, and like many great debates between brothers in Christ, it leaves as many good questions as it answers. I'm still in the in-between on the issue, but I can tell you that on points, this was a contest with a winner, albeit narrowly.
Winner: McDurmon by a half-stride.
In Christ,
~JS.
