This article originally appeared at American Reformer on October 29, 2025. Reproduced with permission.
Why the West Was Never Meant to Be Governed by Law Alone
Back in the early nineties, I was in the candidate process for Undergraduate Pilot Training with the Texas Air National Guard, hoping to fly the F-16A for a unit in central Texas. In preparation, I obtained a “Dash 1”—the flight manual for the Block 10 and 15 versions of the Fighting Falcon. This wasn’t problematic, only arduous in the days before the internet.
I also found a “Dash 34,” the Nonnuclear Weapons Delivery Manual for the Viper (as fighter pilots called it). That was far harder to obtain and far more questionable to possess. I was motivated.
Yet no matter how much I studied those thousand-page binders, I was not a fighter pilot. To fly the F-16 required not just information but tacit knowledge—what the Greeks called phronēsis, practical wisdom. Had I stayed in the program beyond simulators (and accepted the offered C-130 slot), I would have been trained to be an officer and matured into a USAF pilot.
So it is with the Law of God and the maturation of man into the New Covenant of Christ.
No amount of General Dynamics “law” or USAF “doctrine” could make me a pilot. No amount of Law can make a man righteous. Knowledge is not wisdom; process is not rule. Yet the modern West worships process precisely because process scales. It assumes the fungibility of human beings and scoffs at Solomon. It scoffs at rule.
Law as Tutor, Not End
The West speaks often of its devotion to the “rule of law,” as though legality were the highest expression of civilization. Yet both Plato and Paul understood that law is not the summit of order but its tutor. Law restrains the immature; wisdom governs the mature. A civilization that confuses those stages mistakes discipline for virtue and bureaucracy for justice. Making Law supreme reverses the covenantal structure of Scripture.
Paul calls the law a paidagōgos—a tutor who supervises a child until he comes of age (Gal. 3:24–25). The law instructs, corrects, and limits, but it cannot give life. It belongs to humanity’s minority, the stage before sonship. For Plato, too, civic law was an educational device—external rules for souls not yet ruled by reason. Both saw law as a concession to immaturity. Neither imagined that the highest form of government would be a labyrinth of statutes.
The tragedy of the modern West is that it has enthroned its pedagogue. Having lost faith in the existence of wise men, it now calls the bureaucracy of process “virtue.” Law has become our substitute for sanctity. We are all thankful for our first-grade teachers (RIP Mrs. Baird), but few would suggest crowning one.
Plato and the Ordered Soul
Plato understood that the just city requires the just man—but his deeper teaching was that justice begins within. In The Republic, dikaiosynē first appears as order in the soul: reason governing passion through spirited resolve. Yet this order is not the end of virtue but its foundation. The disciplined soul becomes capable of friendship and of rule.
So too in the New Testament, the telos of the Spirit’s work is self-control—not as mere restraint but as the inner harmony that makes love and judgment possible. The man ruled by the Spirit mirrors Plato’s just man ruled by reason: both are free because they are ordered. Here, the Law is written on the heart.
For Paul, this order culminates not in contemplation alone but in covenant faithfulness—the relational justice that flows from a soul renewed by grace. What Plato glimpsed as harmony of parts, Paul reveals as communion of persons. Self-control is the training; covenant faithfulness, the fruit. The Trinity itself manifests this: a communion of persons in perfect dikaiosynē.
The Philosopher’s Limitation
From the Gentile perspective of Plato—outside the revelatory Covenant—it is the philosopher-king, beholding the Form of the Good, who can reproduce that harmony in the city. Yet because most cannot see the Good, law becomes the philosopher’s instrument of imitation: a second-best order enforcing from without what wisdom would achieve from within. And as Strauss observed, those who love wisdom generally hate the burden of ruling.
In The Laws, Plato later calls legislation “a device for making men good by compulsion.” Law is medicine, not health. It keeps disorder in check, but it cannot create virtue. His hierarchy is clear: wisdom above statute, vision above process. The more just a people becomes, the fewer laws it needs.
Plato’s limitation was not philosophical but anthropological. He could describe the ascent toward wisdom but not how humanity might achieve it. His philosopher-king remained an abstraction—an ideal ruler glimpsed but never embodied.
Paul and the Fulfillment of Wisdom
What Plato imagined, Paul declares realized. The philosopher sought contemplation of the Good; Paul announces that the Good has entered history. “The law was our tutor until Christ came,” he writes, “but now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.” In the Incarnation, the Logos that reason dimly grasped has become flesh. The order Plato discerned in vision now stands revealed as a Person.
This transformation is anthropological as much as theological. Through the Son, humanity comes of age. No longer a ward under guardians, man becomes a co-heir with Christ, sharing His authority over creation. Grace does not abolish law but fulfills it by forming mature persons who embody its intent. “Do you not know that the saints will judge angels?” (1 Cor. 6:3). The cosmos awaits administration by those who have grown up.
The Incarnation thus ends the reign of the pedagogue. Law restrains by command; wisdom rules by participation. In Christ, dikaiosynē—once civic harmony under reason—becomes righteousness as covenant faithfulness. It now names not moral symmetry but relational fidelity between God and His people, restored and embodied in the Son. This reflects the relational life of the Trinity itself, the divine perichōrēsis.
The law restrains from without; covenant faithfulness transforms from within. What the polis tried to secure by law and education, the gospel grants by grace: the ordered soul becoming the faithful heart, the harmony of reason transfigured into the obedience of love.
Thus, the ideal of justice moves from balance to belonging, from conformity to participation. The righteous man is not simply he who acts justly but he who, by union with Christ, lives faithfully within the covenant that renews all creation. Justice becomes relational, not procedural; fidelity replaces formalism. The city ordered by law matures into the kingdom ordered by love.
The Rebellion of the Immature
The refusal of this maturity is what Scripture calls the spirit of antichrist. John names it the denial that Jesus came in the flesh—the rejection of incarnational authority and the human vocation to rule through the Son. Paul’s “man of sin,” who exalts himself above God in the temple, is another type of the same rebellion: a man who refuses to live under the reign of the incarnate Man.
The Judaizers of Paul’s day exemplified this fear of freedom. They preferred the safety of Torah’s external code to the responsibility of the Spirit’s inner discipline—the messy rule of wise men. The same impulse animates every age that seeks refuge in systems instead of sanctification. The modern preference for procedure over personhood is not progress but relapse—the return of the pedagogue after the Son has come. Systems scale; sanctification transforms.
The Rule of the Wise
Biblical kingship shows the same hierarchy. Solomon’s judgment between the two mothers is not a legal formula but a revelation of the heart. His wisdom fulfills the law’s intent rather than applying its letter. Christ, on the Mount, completes this pattern: “You have heard it said…but I say to you.” Each antithesis moves from rule to reason, from restraint to renewal. The law forbids murder; wisdom roots out hatred. The law condemns adultery; wisdom purifies desire. The King governs by wisdom, not by code. The code trains the King; it does not sheathe his sword.
Both Solomon and Christ reveal that righteousness exceeds legality. The kingdom of God is not a bureaucracy of compliance but a commonwealth of discernment. It is ruled by those whose minds have been renewed, offering their logikē latreia—their rational service to God—in whom right judgment flows from true sight.
Bureaucracy and the Loss of Faith
The modern West, having forgotten this anthropology, mistakes moral exhaustion for order. It calls its decline “the rule of law.” Yet the multiplication of rules is always a sign of decay. Plato warned that where laws abound, justice is scarce. A virtuous people needs few regulations; a corrupt one needs many. A people capable of self-rule can sustain democracy; a people without wisdom demands a tyrant—whether a man or a legal code filling warehouses.
Bureaucracy is the institutionalization of immaturity. It is what a civilization builds when it no longer believes men can be trusted with judgment. Clerks replace kings; compliance replaces character. Each new regulation testifies to the disappearance of wisdom. Law becomes a surrogate for virtue, legality a mask for disorder. The mature man governs himself; the child requires supervision. A society of children becomes an empire of supervisors.
The Fulfillment of Justice
The transformation of dikaiosynē marks the hinge between Athens and Jerusalem. For Plato, it was the harmony of the soul rightly ordered toward the Good; for Paul, it is the harmony of the soul indwelt by the Good Himself. The Form of the Good has entered time and space. Justice is no longer an idea to be contemplated but a life to be lived.
This is why the gospel fulfills rather than abolishes the law. Civic harmony remains, but its foundation shifts from external command to internal communion. Without the Incarnation’s renewal of man, law becomes an empty shell—an elaborate procedure guarding a moral vacuum. The rule of law endures only so long as there remain men capable of ruling themselves.
Every political order rests upon an anthropology. Liberalism assumes man is too dangerous to be trusted with moral authority and therefore must be managed by procedure. Its institutions reflect this distrust: vast bureaucracies designed to prevent judgment. The administrative state is metaphysical pessimism made political.
Christian anthropology begins from the opposite premise: that man, renewed in Christ, can become wise. The aim of government is not endless regulation but the cultivation of rulers—magistrates and citizens capable of discerning justice rather than merely enforcing code. Law remains, but as formation, not finality. The end of politics is wisdom.
From Law to the Incarnate Rule
The Incarnation ends the age of the tutor. Christ’s kingship reveals divine law as divine life. To live under His rule is to share His wisdom, not merely obey His decrees. The spirit of antichrist longs for the safety of procedure; it prefers the shadow to the substance—the form of law without the life of grace. Every post-Christian order drifts toward this legalism even as it collapses into chaos, because it has lost both the wisdom to rule and the faith to be ruled.
The rule of the Man does not abolish law; it fulfills it. The saints who will judge angels are not anarchists but heirs. Their judgment is law perfected in wisdom—the maturity for which all creation waits.
The question before the West is not whether it will preserve the rule of law, but whether it will recover the rule of the Man. Law guards children; wisdom governs sons. The Incarnation calls humanity to graduate from the classroom of restraint to the kingdom of rule, from the letter to the spirit, from bureaucracy to dominion.
Plato glimpsed this order when he imagined a city ruled by the wise. Paul announced its arrival when he proclaimed the fulfillment of the law in Christ. Between them lies the great transformation of justice itself: from form to flesh, from restraint to participation, from the rule of law to the rule of the Incarnate Word.
Until the West believes again that men can be made wise—that humanity, renewed through the Incarnation, is capable of ruling under God—it will remain a civilization of minors, supervised by the pedagogue it mistakes for a king. The rule of law may preserve order for a time, but only the rule of the Man can renew the world.
Ronald Dodson is CEO and Portfolio Manager of Dallas North Capital Partners, a private fund management firm. He also frequently writes on geopolitical developments and global risk. He has worked with the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. His interests include the Noahic Covenant gentile believers in the ancient world, continental theology and coaching soccer. He is a deacon in the PCA.