Something worth chewing over.
Summary:
From Providing Your Children With the Will to Resist by Gary North
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Teenagers need guidance. They need role models. They need adult supervision from people who say, “Do as I say, just as I do.”
Here is a home school course on civics, or economics, or history. Or maybe a summer school course in between the junior and senior year. Do not send a student to college without this.
Week One: Morality
The basis of resistance is the knowledge of good and evil. Start the teenager with the first eight chapters of Proverbs. Spend time discussing them. This was aimed at young men. Use a document that has worked for 3,000 years.
Next, application. Assign the Book of Micah. The basics are there. Then assign Lamentations. There is a price to pay for national moral rebellion.
Week Two: Confrontation
The Book of Esther. It is the story of one woman’s resistance.
The Book of Acts. It is a story of community resistance.
Week Three: The Myth of Neutrality
C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. It is the fictional story of modern bureaucracy, backed by government money, to extend the power of scientific elites. There is a price to pay. There are risks in life. There is no neutrality. (Read page 283.)
Week Four: Nazi Resistance
Corrie Ten Boom [BOHM], The Hiding Place, the story of a family that resisted the Nazis. There is always a price to pay.
Week Five: Communist Resistance
Vladimir Bukovksy, To Build a Castle. Unless you can buy two used copies, this will cost $80 (for two). This is worth every penny.
Week Six: Economics
Frederic Bastiat, The Law. (http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html)
The Reader’s Digest version of F. A. Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom. (http://bit.ly/RoadRD)
Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy.
Week Seven: Economics
Mises, Planning for Freedom. (http://bit.ly/MisesPlanning)
Week Eight: Economics
Joel McDurmon, How to Argue With a Liberal . . . And Win.
Week Nine: Politics
The full version of The Road to Serfdom.
Weeks Ten-?: Theology and Tactics
If you want to go whole hog, selections from my two books:
Theology of Christian Resistance (http://GaryNorth.com/TheologyCR.pdf)
Tactics of Christian Resistance (http://GaryNorth.com/TacticsCR.pdf)
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To defeat the morally filthy enemy, we must resist.
Resist and break the evil within our own hearts, all that challenges and defy’s God rule. All those liars in our thoughts must have their fangs ripped out.
Resist and break the evil outside of our own hearts. This is going to be a much slower and difficult affair. But Christians must expand the Kingdom of God into the outer world, as Jesus commanded.
Resist what is evil.
Hold fast to what is good.
From our hearts to our families. From our families to our congregations. and our businesses. And our neighborhoods, counties, towns.
Then, after we have earned our stripes, to the cities, the states, the nation, the world.
Gary North has some good advice, for our children and even for ourselves.
Let’s take it!
From the Chalcedon article March to a Dumping Ground, by R. J. Rushdoony
Chalcedon Report No. 128, April 1976
In 1943, a novel, bitterly fought against by Western pro-communists, saw the crisis of civilization in the fact that its first faith, Christianity, was virtually gone, and the second, free thought or humanism, was also fading. “Nothing exists that can fill the chasm: there is no third faith!” wrote Mark Aldanov in The Fifth Seal. His character, Vermandois, observed, “Humanity is marching toward a dumping ground.” Men could resign themselves to it, or choose a fairy tale pleasing to themselves and use it to proclaim “that the dumping ground is in reality a crystal palace.” In any case, the future meant the dumping ground.Now a dumping ground, like every trash pile, has a characteristic feature: nothing has any relationship to anything around it. Things are simply dumped there, whether worthless or still usable, without any rule or any meaningful relationship to things next to them. Philosophically speaking, we can say that every dumping ground or trash pile gives us an excellent example of existentialism. Nothing derives meaning or significance from anything around it. There are no rules governing relationships or imposing an order. There is no philosophy governing all the facts in the dump. Each piece of junk must develop its own philosophy of existence or else have none.
Reminds me of Gehenna, where the garbage of Jerusalem was all tossed for burning.
In Defiance #1: A Radical Review (1970), one of the key declarations was simply this: “Good News! 2 and 2 no longer make 4.” The revolution, one writer held, had already occurred. He was right, of course. The principles of relativism, of existentialism, i.e., the philosophies of the dumping ground, have triumphed. When I cite the Defiance gospel to some, they are shocked: 2 and 2 do make 4, they insist. However, when pressed about God’s law, it is clear that they are existentialists about everything except a few practical items like arithmetic. Most twentieth-century men are to some degree existentialists; they object only when younger existentialists go a little further than they themselves are prepared to go.
It’s unfortunate that Christians did not stop these God-haters earlier: there would have been more to salvage, more to rebuild with.
But the Christians of earlier generations were quite faithless. Before the 1950s, ALL educated Christians had already bent the knee to Darwinism.
Things finally stated to shift when John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris who wrote The Genesis Flood (with Rushdoony’s support),and started to get the ball rolling away from
And where did that idiotic idea of ‘things making themselves’ come from? Certainly not from observation, or repeatable experimentation!
Anyways, it will take time to recover and rebuild from the era of total victory for the gnostics and their spiritual (read, not physical, not material, not historical,not real) resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And their profound hatred of the Law of God.
“Won’t You just… just shut up? Permanently?”
No. God will not die so evil men can rule.
(But really, men would just find different ways to die… it would be only a grinning serpent who would gain the final satisfaction, in the total destruction of the Image of God.)
Instead, God will live, and His people will live with him.
The enemies of God can go die – become totally irrelevant and powerless, tortured forever so they can’t think a single sinful thought – in the Lake of Fire.
Gone to the Second Death, with the snake whose word they placed above the Law-Word of God.
The dumping-ground future predicted by Aldanov’s Vermandois is increasingly apparent to more and more intellectuals and youths. Their answer is to look for that third faith. Hence the deep interest in Oriental religions, primitive faiths, magic, witchcraft, occultism, and much else. On all fronts, the religious interest is intense, but it is futile. All the “new” third faiths are simply variations on a common theme, humanism. I know very casually one such seeker, a brilliant and attractive woman, who regularly finds the great answer in some new form of this old faith, and then, before finding another, is suicidally pessimistic. For her, the one alternative never to be considered in her quest is Biblical faith. Not surprisingly, each new collapse drives her closer to suicide, to her own dumping ground.
Now, more than once civilization has turned itself into a dump heap by its adoption of some form of moral relativism, although never so drastically as in the twentieth century. There is a common consequence to every such event in history. Our Lord expressed it thus: “For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together” (Matt. 24:28). When civilization turns itself into a garbage dump, there the vultures will gather, and then too the vulture nations have an opportunity to gain ascendancy.
Certainly in our time, men seem determined to turn history into a dumping ground, and the vultures are not lacking on the scene. The second faith, humanism, is morally bankrupt: existentialism is simply its logical conclusion. There is no third faith, and there is too little left of the first faith to be a factor in the minds of vultures. The churches have virtually all succumbed to the influences of the second faith, humanism. But the first faith, Christianity, alone offers hope. Humanism has failed, because it has been applied and developed. Christianity has not failed; rather, it has been abandoned for humanism disguised sometimes as Christianity.
Humanism’s Christian disguise is dead.
If the dumping ground and the vultures, both products of humanism, are to be avoided, it will only be in terms of Biblical faith. Existentialism can only destroy and negate: it must deny all meanings and relationships in order to affirm the autonomy and the ultimacy of humanistic man. Dotson Rader, writing also in Defiance, stated it clearly: “to destroy all limits is, in a perverse sense, to be truly free. To destroy is to feel free.”
Marxists are really good at destroying, killing, stealing and lying.
Leaving a pile of ruins and a dying nation behind, as in Russia.
Or a vast uninhabitable, toxic wasteland, as in China. Turning the most populous nation into a world into a aging dead husk.
But the Marxists were merely leading-edge humanists. And their day is done.
Thank God for that!
And not the forever-failure Christian churches, always eager to compromise and negotiate and restrict the power of God and His Law-Word.
Eager, ready and willing to deeply connect and sympathize and understand and tolerate those who politely hate God and His Commandments. To their very bones and marrow.
The very essence of their being.
Reconstruction is only possible on radically alien terms, terms which make basic not man’s feelings or experience, but God’s atonement and God’s law. Churchmen who deny the validity of God’s law are humanists: they make man’s feelings and experience basic to the faith rather than Christ’s work and man’s required response of faith and obedience.
The only way that the vultures can be exorcised from civilization is by the road away from the dumping ground, from humanism or existentialism, to a full-orbed and militant Biblical faith.
Existentialist man can never be dominion man on his own terms. He has no world except himself, no meaning except his will, and no arena of operation except a vacuum. The will of existentialist man is to be god, but even Sartre, the foremost existentialist, saw this goal and man himself as a “futile passion.”
Godly reconstruction by dominion man has as its instrument Biblical law, God’s plan of conquest. It provides for the reordering of every area of life in terms of God’s sovereign word and purpose, and for the establishment of man as king, priest, and prophet in Christ over the earth.
Man has a “choice”: to be a pretended god and sovereign on a dump heap, surrounded by waiting vultures, or a dominion man in Christ over the earth. In either case, there is only one sovereign, God. That can never change: it is man who must.
It’s time for Christians to obey God, to do what God told us to do in the Bible.
It’s time for God’s people to win, and for God’s enemies to lose.
Now, and forever.
GetReligion recently published an article, The New Yorker profiles a pro-life ob-gyn student and the Twitter mobs descend by Julia Duin
Some good info here:
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When Emma Green announced she was leaving the religion beat at The Atlantic to cover cultural conflicts in academia for the New Yorker, many of us hoped that she could squeeze a bit of religion reporting into the mix.
I’ve got to say this about her first piece for the latter: One cannot accuse her of dodging controversy. This is the story of a pro-life obstetrics student in an occupation that is formidably bent in the other direction and what it’s like to get consistently slammed by one’s professional peers.
Green had no sooner posted the story on Twitter than a cascade of hateful responses sprung up.
In the past there have been many stories in the mainstream media about what aspiring pro-abortion-rights ob-gyns go through in terms of training — but this is the first one I’ve seen in a major publication about what the abortion opponents go through.
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Expect unpleasantness.
But victory must be gained, the price must be paid.
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The hatred shown toward such young professionals is almost pathological. There’s no middle ground here.
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Evil old people are evil old people.
They are not the future, regardless of their wealth and power and networks.
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As I made my way through the story, I felt a lot of ink was devoted to why Buskmiller could be wrong, with plenty of abortion advocates were given space in which to talk.
This story was way kinder to the opposing point of view than its opposite would have been, if the tables were turned. That is, the pro-life resident was forced to admit the validity of abortion in certain cases; a mirror image article about a pro-choice resident would have never given credence to the pro-life view.
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Christians are always invited to kneel and beg and waver before their contemptuous enemies.
Lots of Christians – pastors and priests and laymen alike – are desperately eager to kneel to who they truly fear, and win even a little drop of approval from the Right Sort.
Who you fear is who you truly worship.
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I’m glad the article noted the central role of billionaire Warren Buffett and his late wife, Susan, in abortion funding. We’re talking some $5 billion poured into abortion advocacy, think tanks; what some call the “abortion-industrial complex.”
Had this been a conservative effort, the media would have been all over it years ago but because it has to do with funding by the Left, few people -– unless you read Philanthropy Roundtable — know about the river of abortion funding from the Buffetts’ largesse.
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This sort of thing has been going on for quite a while.
You might want to ask Rockefeller about it.
Losers remain losers, though. Their time dwindles to nothingness. And their wealth is inherited by the righteous, who uphold the rule of God in their lives, public and private.
We win the future. For more than one reason…
…but, in truth, primarily by the mighty hand of God.
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Since so many pro-choice practitioners were mentioned, I am curious why someone the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists wasn’t quoted. Here you have a whole group of people who had to navigate their way through hostile residencies.
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Best that the commoner Christian trash be kept in ignorance, in the eyes of the New York Times.
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That said, it was radical for the New Yorker to cover this point of view at all. At the end of the piece, cast a glance at links on related topics and all of them are pro-abortion rights. And if you don’t think there’s a lot of hate out there toward abortion opponents, read the Twitter comments.
We know the Twitter universe is largely inhabited by the secular Left; mainly well-paid guys in their 20s and 30s, and the vicious replies to Green’s tweet shows it.
Obviously I hope she ignores the rancor, which shows the ire of people not used to hearing a different point of view in the pages of the New Yorker. As she plumbs other cultural divides, these folks had better get used to hearing different voices and that Green pushes ahead with her ability to showcase them. It’s called journalism.
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Nice to know the demographics of the Twitter yappers. I always thought that they were just a lot of women with time on their hand, but I am very wrong.
Imagine those vicious gossiping guys in their 40s and 50s: quite well paid, quite well connected, and the whole world has passed them by. Tailor-made for an era that no longer exists.
We need to stay young, stay flexible, get entrepreneurial, get self-disciplined (also seriously self-governing!), and work to build the future, rather than enjoy the pleasures of being part of a prosperous echo chamber.
The future calls.
Really, God calls.
We must answer, hear and obey.
An interesting headline, for a futurist (both senses!) postmillennial blog!
Anyways, to the question. Stemming from the article The CRC’s valiant stand and Calvin’s moment of truth by Steven Wedgeworth.
(Hat tip: Podcast: What happens at Calvin doesn’t stay at Calvin. True, so what now for LGBTQ wars? by Terry Mattingly)
Mr. Wedgeworth writes in his subtitle: “The denomination’s defense of moral orthodoxy gives its university a mandate to change course”
I Kings 18:21, ESV
And Elijah came near to all the people and said, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” And the people did not answer him a word.
Amazingly, a formally, officially Christian college chose to serve God rather than Baal.
I wrote these guys off long ago. But, if the Holy Spirit wants to see something different than I expected from Calvin College, then let’s get working on expanding God’s victory!
From The CRC’s valiant stand and Calvin’s moment of truth by Steven Wedgeworth, from the World website:
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Last week, the Christian Reformed Church in North America’s 2022 Synod overwhelmingly voted to uphold its historic confessional position that the Bible permits sexual activity only within a marriage between one man and one woman. Anything beyond those bounds was declared immoral and therefore condemned as sinful. This move came as a surprise to many outside the denomination, though a very welcome one. Several insiders, however, weren’t so happy.
Religion News Service was one of the first media outlets to report on the story, and its coverage was decidedly negative. While reporting the facts, the reporter also interviewed only those pastors and professors from the denomination’s university who dissented. Five unhappy individuals are quoted, and readers are warned that up to a third of the professors at Calvin University opposed the decision. By contrast, the vote at Synod was not close. The motion carried 123 to 53.
Calvin history professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez, described as a “star” faculty member, was quoted as issuing something of a threat: “Many people are polishing their CVs, starting to look at what else is out there and preparing themselves to leave.” In November 2021, Du Mez maintained an official position of neutrality, arguing that the debate should be mostly had within the confines of the CRC. But as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Denny Burk noted, her rhetorical framing and moral explanation indicated clear support for the revisionist position. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that Du Mez is now among those “many people … polishing their CVs.” The Jesus and John Wayne author had her initial bluff called. Now she stands in defiance of the denomination.
But what about the 30-plus percent of Calvin professors who could now leave their positions? Quite simply, Calvin and the CRC should let them go. This moment is a decisive one in the history of their ecclesiastical communion, and it could lead to great revival and retrieval at Calvin University. There are many more professors looking for work than there are suitable places for them to teach: Both older orthodox professors seeking refuge from the inhospitable confines of contemporary activist institutions and younger traditionally minded Reformed professors would be happy to fill the new vacancies. With the promise of renewed orthodoxy at Calvin and the CRC, they probably would be willing to make a few sacrifices along the way. New donors, or alienated former ones, would likely be interested as well.
This could also be an opportunity to lessen or reverse the consistent demographic decline at Calvin. The university’s enrollment has steadily dropped, even more so than similar Dutch-Reformed schools. Compared to nearby Hillsdale College, Calvin’s numbers look abysmal. Hillsdale is less expensive than Calvin but can be much more selective. And over the past few years, the same years of decline for so many, Hillsdale has experienced an enrollment boom. RNS’s reporting has it all wrong. Calvin is not looking at some new looming catastrophe. Its denomination, the CRC, has shown the way out of catastrophe.
There’s never been a better time for Calvin University to change course. In God’s providence, the school now has a mandate of confessional and Biblical fidelity behind such a shift. The school has a venerable tradition, and all those who love it should fight for its continued existence and success. They now have the potential for new life. Indeed, this could set the stage for an orthodox revival at Calvin. It just takes faith—and faithfulness.
There’s an old saying among lawyers that if the facts are on your side, you pound the facts. If the law is on your side, you pound the law. If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, you pound the table. That’s all that the negative coverage of the CRC’s Synod is doing. It’s noisy, but the argument is over. The delegates have made their voice clear. The church will not revise its confession. The morality of the Holy Scriptures concerning sexual activity is still the morality of the Christian Reformed Church in North America.
This is great news. The CRC has defended moral orthodoxy. Calvin University now has the responsibility, not merely to tolerate the confession of its church but to enthusiastically support and proclaim it. The church stood by the truth. Now it’s Calvin University’s turn to do the same.
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And a different march through the institutions begins.
“But what about the 30-plus percent of Calvin professors who could now leave their positions? Quite simply, Calvin and the CRC should let them go.”
About a generation late.
Even so, the fact that it will be the Compassionate Ones – more righteous than God Himself – who get to kindly buzz off is astonishing to my jaded eyes.
More work remains to be done. A lot of work.
I plan to remain outside of most institutions and guilds. Things don’t change from the inside out, but from the outside in. The revolution (franchise… culture shift…) kicks in on the boundaries of the Empire, and slowly works its way in.
Even so… it is pleasing when the gates of hell start crashing down.
Now, Du Mez — author of the groundbreaking “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” — is a superstar of the post-evangelical world. Her resume will soon, I would thnk, launch her into the Ivy League and, perhaps, a regular gig with The New York Times op-ed page.
Podcast: What happens at Calvin doesn’t stay at Calvin. True, so what now for LGBTQ wars?
I am sure that Du Mex will do quite well in the Right Circles.
Outside of Calvin College.
We have a lot of work to do, and a civilization to rebuild.
Time to get cracking, we and our children, and our grandchildren, for a thousand generations as God promised Moses… and all who keep His commandments.
(…or until the Second Coming and the Final Judgement. Whichever comes first.)
Stay tuned. I would expect elite-media coverage of the Calvin crisis this coming fall.
Podcast: What happens at Calvin doesn’t stay at Calvin. True, so what now for LGBTQ war
I expect Our Betters to be deeply displeased and disturbed by these recent events and shifts.
They can go roast in the flames.
It’s time for the Kingdom of God to expand, shattering all opposition with Christ’s Rod of Iron, and cutting off the future of His enemies with the piercing Sword of Truth coming out of His mouth.
It’s time to win.
From United Methodist conflict hits Bible Belt pews, while Tennessean report omits crucial facts by Terry Mattingly
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Meanwhile, UMC traditionalists — easy to find on social media — are complaining that establishment leaders have started efforts (while delaying a vote on the protocol) to punish conservatives and, thus, to hang on to major churches properties and assets.
This reality didn’t make it into the Tennessean story either, even though some of the hottest battles have been, and will continue to be, in the Southeast. For example, consider the full-page advertisement (posted above) that ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
This is not a new development. As a Christianity Today report noted last summer, concerning a battle in the largest church in the North Georgia Conference:
Regional leaders of the United Methodist Church (UMC) took control of an 8,000-member congregation in suburban Atlanta earlier this month after a lengthy conflict over who should pastor the church.
The North Georgia Conference seized assets of Mount Bethel United Methodist Church in Marietta on July 12, a move that has sparked tensions already roiling over the denomination’s ongoing conflict around same-sex marriage and LGBT ordination.
Back in April, North Georgia Bishop Sue Haupert-Johnson reassigned Mount Bethel’s conservative pastor, Jody Ray, to a role in the regional office involving racial reconciliation and said a new pastor would be sent to the church.
Ray turned down that assignment and left the denomination. …
Such a move by a regional conference “has never happened with a church of anywhere near this size or for this reason,” said Rob Renfroe, a UMC pastor in Texas and president of the Methodist publication Good News Magazine.
Need an update? Three weeks ago, the Journal-Constitution reported:
East Cobb’s Mt. Bethel United Methodist Church must pay $13.1 million to the Methodist denomination in order to leave and become an independent church, lawyers involved in the case confirmed.
The price tag for Mt. Bethel to disaffiliate from the UMC with its property and other assets intact is part of a settlement agreement that will resolve a high-profile legal battle between Mt. Bethel and the North Georgia Conference, a regional body which governs nearly 800 UMC churches.
Wait! How would this expensive, painful separation have been handled under the Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation protocol, assuming that a vote is ever allowed to occur on that compromise plan negotiated by liberal and conservative United Methodists?
The protocol wasn’t mentioned in that Journal-Constitution update, as was the case with the new Tennessean report.
Why are so many United Methodists in the Bible Belt, it would appear, assuming that it is hopeless to wait for an up-or-down vote on the protocol plan for a peaceful divorce? Is the establishment bleeding the traditionalist camp in order to kill the protocol?
You know, there may be a story there.
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The enemies of God despise obedience to God, but wants the material rewards of obedience.
It’s worth the effort to fight them. Thieves should be resisted.
But it may be that the enemies of God get their short-term victory, the victory of holding on to your stuff, and so ensure their comfortable lifestyle and retirement.
Make sure they don’t get your family, or your children. The future must belong to God, and His people.
If worst comes to worst, the stuff can be left to rot.
But souls, children, people, assemblies matter.
But if you can stop Esau from stealing the material inheritance, you should.
Bishop Jude Arogundade of the Ondo Diocese said these were painful words, especially since the attack occurred in a sanctuary built by Irish missionaries. The bishop wrote: “To suggest or make a connection between victims of terror and consequences of climate change is not only misleading but also exactly rubbing salt to the injuries of all who have suffered terrorism. … The victims of terrorism are of another category to which nothing can be compared!”
While these debates rage on, Rasche said Christians in Nigeria have continued to appeal for help, collecting thousands of photographs and videos as evidence for examination by government officials, business leaders, religious groups and nonprofit agencies.
The bloody realities on the ground in Nigeria “should not be news to anyone at the State Department, to anybody at the British Foreign Office, to anybody in the European Union,” he said. “These photos are easily available on social media, and one has to ask whether or not anyone is actually making an effort to look at the truth.”
The harsh reality is that Nigeria’s tradition of shared power between the Muslim North and the Christian South has broken down in recent years. This is crucial since the nation’s population of 216 million is almost equally divided between Muslims and Christians.
Nigerian officials blamed the St. Francis Church attack on the Islamic State Western Africa Province, which has ties to the terrorist group Boko Haram, while avoiding references to networks of politically powerful Fulani herdsmen.
In response, said Rasche, many Nigerian Christians simply “throw up their hands,” because they no longer trust their own government or the leaders of the United States and the European Union.
“They don’t look at us … as being serious about any of these things,” he said. “They are completely disillusioned that the U.S. government is going to have any kind of effective role to play. … They’ve just given up that anybody in the West is going to come to their aid.”
Reality on bloody ground: That Pentecost massacre in Nigeria wasn’t all that unusual
by Terry Mattingly
Nigerian Christians will have to push forward, on their own.
I pray that they will be guided by God.
I am far away, and take a foreign American perspective: It would be wise to set their own guard up, and organize their own defense – regardless if their government and Islamic neighbors don’t like it. Christian life, like Muslim life, has value. Perhaps a dual Christian/Islamic defense force may work…
A foreigner’s idea may or may not be the right thing to do: the locals on the spot must decide for themselves. Watch, pray, consider, act.
One thing I do know: there are no massacres of Muslims in their mosques, anywhere in Nigeria.
There are only massacres of Christians in their churches.
Some good news, though: the murders are not as completely suppressed and ignored as they were during the Soviet era, within Communist-ruled territories.
The “politically powerful Fulani herdsmen” fight alongside Satan, against the future.
Just like the Soviet commissars – or, for that matter, today’s Chinese CCP economic managers – did and do.
Kill, they can do. Build a future that matters, they cannot.
No unrepentant murderers will enter the Kingdom of God.
(Just a repost from the sci-fi site.
I decided to leave in the Traveller sci-fi role-playing elements, as they help illustrate certain ideas of politics and business. Even if you don’t get the full context, you’ll get the basic point.)
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The concerns of pre-Star Wars intellectual sci-fi — dehumanization and authoritarianism — were never my concerns. Certainly such evils exist, but I have always believe that in the end. The Machine Stops, one way or another.
All Empires Die, although it can take a while.
For the same reason why All Idols Fall: the Universe God just does not like them, and He will find a way to blow their foot off, so they can hobble off in pain, bleed out without hope, and die.
(Or blow their head off, and die far faster: as happened to more than one real-life empire, and even the Third Imperium!)
The governments of the Brave New World, and 1984 simply demand too many accurate decisions of their rulers, rulers who – even if they haven’t cut off the feedback mechanism of free human action, free speech, and noncompliance — just do not have the accurate information that prices relay: the problem of Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth is real, and faster computers with more information won’t solve it.
And seeing the kind of men who rise up to power in such cultures — outright psychopaths or bureaucratic rule-maniacs — I doubt if the Mighty Man would make the right call, even if he had the right information.
Correct knowledge, alone, cannot provide salvation.
All that being said, I assume such grim dystopias exist on various worlds in Traveller. Men really do choose hell over heaven, and slavery over liberty: and the crippling tyranny and/or sterile delusions can last for years or even decades.
(Centuries if you are talking about the Vilani, or other Collectivist cultures.)
Still: the problem of power fantasies is the increasing detachment from reality: and there are far too many military-minded Ruling Houses who would enjoy violently tearing apart such impoverished & ignorant tyrannies, displaying all that firepower and training the House have built up in a cause that the Imperial public approves — “Smash the stupid-evil local government!” — and adds more population and wealth for the Family to Responsibly Control.
The Corporate Nobles would rather cut a business deal, putting all those local drones to work and splitting the profits with the (inevitably corrupt) planetary Leader and Inner Party. The power of money has a way of degrading any tyranny, top to bottom, and bottom to top. All those delicious bribes, all those wonderful high-tech off-world goods, all that freedom to travel, gain new experiences, taste new foods, entertain dangerous new ideas …
Hell does exist, but the Universe God doesn’t like it. Hellish societies all fall apart in the end: but unfortunately, individual souls really can decide never to repent, and stay cut off from God forever.
Individual liberty cuts both ways, and God — unlike Our Betters — takes it seriously.
Still. Jesus commands His followers teach the nations – societies republican and monarchal – to obey Him and follow His ways. So at least one kind of hell, slavery, lie-network1, and brutal injustice can be driven to extinction.
That’s a rather good thing to work for.
Even in a fictional far future universe of aliens, psionics, and FTL drives!
1Lie-network: a network of mutually reinforcing lies.
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From:
Systematic Theology – Church
The Assembly or Congregation
R.J. Rushdoony
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Our scripture this morning is from 1 Peter 2:9-10., and our subject is The Assembly or Congregation. “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar (or purchased) people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light; which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.”
The most common word for the Christian community in the Bible, in the New Testament, is ecclesia. It means assembly, congregation, or, as it is most commonly translated, church. It comes from two Greek words, ek, meaning “out of,” and kesia, meaning “a calling.” So it means that one is called out of something into something else, out of the world to Christ.
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Out of the failing world of the First Adam, to the growing world of the Second Adam.
From a merciless world, to a merciful world.
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Now, the word ecclesia is used in politics throughout the world of Antiquity, a very common term. It describes the coming together of citizens to discuss the affairs of the city-state in a legal, empowered assembly. We have such a usage, for example, in Acts 19:39, where the town clerk says to the citizens who had been rioting and carrying on in an unlawful assembly, but if ye inquire anything concerning other matters, it shall be determined in a lawful assembly. Thus, the word we have in the English as church means an assembly, a gathering together of a legal body which is a governing body. This is very important to realize, because that same word ecclesia is used in the Septuagint, that is, the Greek version of the Old Testament, which was most commonly in use in our Lord’s day, to translate words that mean the people of Israel, the ecclesia, Israel as a nation, as an assembly, as an entity.
Now, the New Testament usage of ecclesia continues that usage that was common to the world of the day of Paul and of our Lord. It is a legal assembly. It is a group that comes together and has ruling functions. It is the congregation, the assembly of the people of God, the covenant community of the Messiah. One German scholar, Ethelbert Stouffer{?}, has said that the ecclesia is the most basic term in the New Testament to describe what the early church regarded itself as being. They saw themselves as God’s ruling assembly.
Moreover, they recognize that the assembly was not called together by men, but by God. An assembly is a called group. The calling is from God. Men do create covenants and assemblies, and have throughout history, but they create them in opposition to God saying, as did the builders of the Tower of Babel, “Go to now. Let us build us a city.” And we have, throughout history, what St. Augustine called The City of God on the one hand and the City of Man on the other, or we could say the assembly of God and the assembly of man.
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One of these assemblies have a future. The other does not.
Also, note that “church means an assembly, a gathering together of a legal body which is a governing body.”
As Stephen Perks would point out – Latin has a vast number of words that fits the mystery cultic worship, words that would not challenge the legal authority of Rome. But the writers of the New Testament carefully avoided those terms, and chose the word that would anger Rome.
The word that would imply that there was a more powerful legal authority than Rome. That there was a higher king than Caesar.
Of course these “Churches” are not what the New Testament means when it talks about the ecclesia. The institutional Churches are networks of mere Christian mystery cults, not communities of God’s people living as a Christian social order and discipling the nations by modelling to the world what true society should be. The word ecclesia is a political term, not a cultic term. There were words that could have been used in the first century to describe the meetings of Christians as essentially devotional mystery cults, which is what the Churches are today. But the Bible avoids these terms like the plague, and uses instead an intensely political term that was guaranteed to provoke the Roman political authorities like a red rag to a bull. The ecclesia is the assembly of the demos (the people) for political purposes, in other words it is the parliament of another political order, the kingdom of God.
The Church has become a second rate alternative to the kingdom of God, and Church planting a third rate alternative to the Great Commission to make Christian nations. Jesus never commanded us to make disciples of all nations. He commanded us to make all nations his disciples.
All men and nations must and one day will bow the knee to Jesus Christ and acknowledge him as the ruler of all nations. Our job, our Great Commission, is to seek and work for this now on earth. The Lord Jesus Christ will not return until all nations have submitted to him and this vision has become the reality of life on earth.
“Go therefore and make all the nations my disciples [i.e. disciple all the nations], baptizing them [i.e. all the nations] in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them [i.e. all the nations] to observe all things that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:18-20).
“And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).
This is the alpha and omega of eschatology.
* An Inquiry into the Original, Nature, Institution, Powers, Order, and Communion of Evangelical Churches in Works (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust [Goold Edition, 1850–53], 1965), Vol. XV, p. 224f.
Church Planting – Totally Cockeyed!
Stephen Perks
OK, back to Rushdoony, who uncovered this fundamental truth the institutional church worked diligently to corrupt and destroy, with its love of sacraments, magic, and unBiblical religious guilds.
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Isaiah speaks of this fact, and says that the ungodly say in effect, “We have made a covenant with death and with hell, are we at agreement,” Isaiah 28:15. God’s people are a called people, not a contracting people. They are called by God. They do not come together in terms of their own understanding. The covenant community, the assembly goes back to Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Israel, and the new assembly is the called people of Christ. We have repeated reminders of the meaning of this call throughout the Bible. For example, in Leviticus 26:11-13, God says, “And I set my tabernacle among you: and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people. I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.”
God says it is entirely my act. I took you out of slavery, out of a situation of bondage, and made you my people. The same statement is made by God in Ezekiel 37:26-27. “Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them: and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore. My tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” We meet with the same statement in Zechariah 8:7-8. Thus, the church is not only created by the act of God, by God’s covenant grace, but it is also protected and blessed by the covenant God. It moves out into the world with a power from beyond this world. It has a power that is more than man’s. It is the power of God in history, and this power is dependent upon faithfulness to the covenant God and his covenant law.
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A church that refuses to submit to God’s commandments, that deeply despises the Law of God, is a church that will most certainly be ground into the earth as tasteless, worthless salt.
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Now, the early church very early saw that this promise was fulfilled in itself. Paul declared this indeed to be the case in 2 Corinthians 6:16-18, saying, “And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.” But this is not all. As our text, 1 Peter 2:9-10 says, when God calls us, he not only frees us, who are slaves in bondage to sin, but he makes us a royal priesthood, a holy nation. He makes us royalty and he makes us priests.
Our idea of royalty today is a very poor one, because when we think of royalty in our modern world, we think of Great Britain, and we’re thinking then of a figurehead, someone who functions in a ceremonial manner, but has no great power. The idea of royalty has been cheapened in this age of democracy, but it was not so in Bible times. Royalty then had total power and wealth, whether in Greece or in Rome, or in the areas beyond the boundaries of the Empire. In Egypt, Partheon{?}, and elsewhere, royalty was all powerful.
Moreover, the Jewish concept of the king, of royalty, was equally great, if not greater, because their concept of royalty was associated with the Messiah, with supernatural powers, so that royalty for them represented not only all the power that men could have and exercise, but the power of God as well. Thus, Christians are a royalty. They are princes, our Lord says, “By the adoption of grace, ye are my friends,” he says, “if ye keep my commandments,” and the word friends, as we have seen previously can be translated either friends or princes, as royalty, by the adoption of grace. We are called to rule, we are told by Paul, in 1 Corinthians 6:1-10. He declares also in Romans 8:37 that we are more than conquerors. Thus, we are royalty called to rule, and the purpose of the assembly is to rule.
We are also priests. In paganism, as well as in scripture, the priest is a necessary person. IN fact, his personal holiness is a social necessity. We know of this in that, among the Romans, the vestal virgins had a priestly function, and for them to transgress in any way meant immediately the death penalty for that vestal virgin.
Now, in scripture, our great high priest is Jesus Christ. Our priestly work in him is the work of intercession, to intercede with God, to become intercessors for the whole world, and to bring before him all men, all peoples, and to plead for them with God, because as members of the royal family, we have the ear of the King of kings.
Moreover, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:13-15, our Lord says something which has a real echo of what the priestly function was. Our Lord declares, “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” Now here, two priestly functions are very clearly described. A priest has a preservative function. He holds society together by making intercession with the throne of God, and a priest has a light-giving function, in that he makes known the light of God, the word of God, to all men and peoples. So, we are given a preservative function, a light-bringing function, and a ruling function when we are called an assembly, and the assembly is God’s chosen generation, a royal priesthood.
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God expects of His people great things.
And with the Holy Spirit within us, we can be who God wants us to be.
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So, what this term means as it is used by the early church in the context they use it, is that in the midst of a dying world, God created an assembly, a ruling force, which throughout history, was to dominate the world. Now remember, I cited at the beginning Acts 19:39, assembly, ecclesia, or church, or congregation, is the terms applied to a ruling body, a civil government. So, when the church is called an ecclesia, when the epistles of Paul used this term, when our Lord uses it and says, “I will build my ecclesia upon this confession,” what is its meaning? Why, Rome did not misunderstand. If tomorrow you gathered together a group of people and called them the congress, it would have an immediate impact, would it not? And you would say this is the real congress, the real ruling body here in our midst. You had better believe that Washington would take notice as you began to form assemblies with governing functions all over the fifty states. Now, that is what it meant for the church to call itself an ecclesia. The early church saw that function.
St. John Chrysostom, one of the early church fathers said, “The church does not exist in its walls but in its rules. When attending church, do not go to the edifice but to the light. The church is not in the walls and robes{?}, but in the faith and life.” He went on to say that the government which the church represents is more important than the imperial government. Now, do you think the Roman Empire liked that kind of talk? He said, “What then is the government? More dignified than that of the Empire which they who enter here receive.” He said why, it begins with your salvation, your ability under God and by his Spirit to rule yourself, so that you go forth into the world as men of power, and he continued, “For what profit is there pray, in purple, and raiment wrought with gold, and a jeweled crown, when the soul is in captivity to the passions? What gain is there in outward freedom when the ruling element within us is reduced to a state of disgraceful and pitiable servitude?” They were called to rule. They were called to be an ecclesia, an assembly of those whom Christ governs, who are called to govern the earth under God.
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Christians are not to be a mere Roman mystery cult.
Christians are to bring the power and authority of God into the world, by our lives and our teaching.
Christians are to teach the nations of the world how to rule: by obeying Christ, and by upholding His Law and His authority.
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Now we saw how the church had, for centuries, at times losing it, at times gaining it, the structure of rule by elders, the hundred court and the Shire, the thousand court, the dean as one who was head over ten pastors, later ten monks and then ten university professors. The assembly, too, had powers. When the French Revolution took place, one of the things which the French assembly struck at immediately was the power of the assembly, the ecclesia, the church. What was the assembly in France? Why, it was the meeting of all the elders, the head of every family within the congregation. They met when they were called after the last mass on that particular Sunday, and what were the assembly’s legal powers? I quote a French historian, Albert Babo{?}. “They determined the sales, purchases, exchanges, and rentals of the commons. The repair of the church, the presbytery, the public buildings, the roads, the bridges. In addition to their syndics, they names their schoolmaster, their herdsman, their sergeant, their hayward, their tithe collectors, the assessors and collectors of the tale (that is, the rents or taxes). Sometimes, they fix the conditions of the wine harvest. In certain circumstances, they even set the rate of pay for day laborers and the prices of certain products.” The French Revolution did not bring in democracy. They destroyed it, and when a revolution broke out on the Vondee, it was among the very simple people who recognized that they were robbed of government when the assemblies were abolished.
Of course, in this country, we have the same kind of thing, did we not, in the Colonial town meetings in New England? You see, the assembly, the ecclesia, was a government, and what we have seen since and what the French Revolution did was to take power away from the assembly of the people, God’s people, and put it into a few hands, and in the Vondee, the peasants who rebelled said, “Power belongs now to a handful up there, away from us,” and they protested against it. Moreover, at the same time, the care of the poor was shifted from the pastor and the assembly to some remote civil authority.
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Just the way our then-Deist, now-Darwinian Government-God Betters like it.
Let’s not pretend that their rule is anything but lawless slavery, their promises anything but hollow lies, and their authority over us anything but a punishment for our own contempt for God and His Law-word.
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Now, this is not to say that the church or assembly is the cure-all for all problems. It can be as corrupt as a congress or a parliament, but it is God’s pattern, and when it is linked as Chrysostom made clear, with regeneration, with men who are elders who have their responsibility for their families and together come to be responsible for their communities, it creates a power, self-government under God, and whenever it has prevailed at any period in history, its effect has been remarkable.
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It is time to regain the liberty, the authority, and the dread of the Lord that we have lost.
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Thus, the word that we have, church, is in the New Testament, ecclesia. It signified government, government in terms of the whole word of God. To be a government under God, the church and its members must first of all be ruled by the governing law-word of God. Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that thou hast called us to be thy people, thy church, thine assembly. Give us grace step by step to move towards thine intended purpose, that we may indeed govern ourselves and extend thy government into one area of life after another, taking over again education, welfare, health, and every other ordained area, that the kingdoms of this world might indeed become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name. Amen.
Are there any questions now? Yes?
[Audience] It looks in the English as though dean and deacon come from the same root and maybe have a similar meaning. Is that the case?
[Rushdoony] No, they’re somewhat different. Deacon is another word which means literally “servant,” and deacon was someone you had in the house who took care of all the chores, and the deacons were called to take care of the needs of the Christian household, the needy members, and that’s the office of the deacon, very important office that has been neglected. Once it was a very significant office in that it was through the deacons that the welfare and other like needs in the community were met. Yes?
[Audience] {?} the church movement is very popular, and yet it doesn’t show any of the characteristics that we’ve been talking about. Is it, are some of its roots more in false democracy, or hope-ism, or what?
[Rushdoony] Yes, the local church doctrine has become very popular. Well, let me summarize it this way. There are three kinds of polity: Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregational. The local church doctrine, of course, is very prominent in the Congregational, or Baptist, element, because mostly Congregationalists today are Baptists. Congregationalists have surrendered their Congregationalism, to a great extent in most cases. Now, the pattern we see developing, let me just say this because we’re going to be returning to this subject at a later date, does show the centrality of the local assembly, very definitely, but what we have to see with that is the centrality of the function of every man as an elder, head of a household, and then elders of tens, and so on. But then, what we also have to recognize that the office of elder, which Presbyterianism has stressed, is very important, too. It’s basic to this pattern, basic to the local assembly, and it has been taken out of context and no longer has the function that scripture {?} for it. Then we can say that there is a great deal of truth to the Episcopal pattern, in that when you have the thousand Shire, for example, the Shire, or the thousand, you have an elder there over all those below, and an appeal to him, which is the Episcopal pattern. Each of these three has taken a fragment and developed it, and suppressed or downplayed the other.
Now, let me add a further word. The Church of England attempted to make the nation and the church identical. In other words, you were a member of the church because you were an Englishman, and you were a member of the English state because you were a member of the church. So when you joined the one you belonged to the other. Well, of course, what they were doing was to jump over the fact, as the Puritans saw clearly, of regeneration and the necessity for that, but they also saw that the assembly had to be a ruling body in both, that basic to the whole pattern was the eldership, but they eliminated that because they moved from the Shire pattern to the county plan, to centralizing things under the crown. So that the settlement that the Church of England represented, what was a royalist perversion of the biblical pattern. So, all these forms have taken one aspect of the biblical pattern and tended to drop the others. Any other questions? Yes?
[Audience] You mentioned that the Septuagint was the Old Testament, in common use in Christ’s time. Why was the Septuagint needed? Weren’t the rabbis in Jerusalem satisfied with the books and the writings they had?
[Rushdoony] Yes, why was the Septuagint used? Well, what had happened was that Hebrew had changed in the intertestamental period. It had become what is known as Aramaic. It was thus very difficult for the average person to follow the Hebrew. It was a little difficult, just as, let us say, Chaucerian English today would be difficult for the average American, both in the writing and in the pronunciation. For example, {?} you see? That’s English, but and what I was saying was, it was a part of a passage from Chaucer, “When the night had finished his story, all the group began to make merry.” Well, you can get something of the sense of Chaucer by looking at the original, but not much unless you have studied it. Well, thus it was with the Hebrew, perhaps not as much as with Chaucerian English, but still it was antiquated. It was not the natural every-day language of the people, and the language of business, the language of the Empire, the second language of almost all peoples was Greek. So that even the Roman Empire conducted its imperial business in Greek, to a great extent. So it was quite natural and logical to translate the Bible into the Greek that was a kind of international language. We don’t appreciate the fact that in many parts of the world, people quite naturally learn two or more languages, because those are so common to so many currents of peoples and businesses, government, and the like. As a result, in some parts of the world, people are more than bilingual. They’re trilingual, and they grow up with that, but because of the greatness of the United States geographically, we do not have that bilingual background, but it was common to the world then, and therefore, Greek was the natural language for a great many people.
[Audience] Why was it put together in Egypt? I think that’s the case, isn’t it?
[Rushdoony] Yes. Because there were a great many scholars there. You see, with the Babylonian captivity, sizable colonies thereafter began to develop. Hebrews throughout the Middle East, and in many areas they became very important as cultural centers. They became prosperous through trading and they developed centers of learning. So, there were many, many parts of the Empire with very important Jewish colonies. Any other questions or comments? Yes?
[Audience] When you read that long quote about the assembly that got together and made these rules, I don’t remember what country you said that was, but was it a separate civil government at that time?
[Rushdoony] Yes, there was, but the congregation, this was in France, or assembly, did most of the governing. The powers of the state were at a minimum. What the French Revolution did, of course, was to concentrate powers in the state. Since then, the powers of say, the French government, are such that they would have been undreamed of by Louis XIV. In the days of Louis XIV, one man, with a few advisors, could run the county. There wasn’t that much for him to do, and Louis XIV could go to mass daily, spend a great deal of the evenings with gambling or dancing, because they had the whole court there, all the nobility, and they entertained themselves in the evenings with all kinds of things. There wasn’t that much to civil government. Yes?
[Audience] Why then was there so much hatred, apparently, of the Marquis, that the Revolution could succeed? Were the people not starving?
[Rushdoony] The question is how could the Revolution succeed, and there be so much hatred if the power of the state was so small. Well, first of all, you had a tremendous concentration of people in Paris. When you have a disproportionate amount of people in one place, in an urban center, that center can govern the country, especially if someone seizes that center. It means, therefore, they control the army, the navy, the state, and so you had an element that worked to control Paris, to subvert all authority, and the king was unwilling to do anything about it. Louis XVI believed that, since he was a father to the people, it was wrong for a father to order troops to fire on anybody, any who were his children. So, he could have wiped out the Revolution very early. Paid mobs, hoodlums were paid to demonstrate and to carry on. However, behind that there was also a social fact which led to a great deal of bitterness and discontent among peoples so that they were ready to see something happen and sit by and do nothing while the country went from disaster to disaster, as a result of the rioting and demonstrations. That fact was inflation. Inflation had wiped out a lot of people. A paper money inflation, created by John Law of England. John Law, whose economics is now the reigning economics of every country in the world, a paper money economy, fractional reserve, banking, the whole works. Well, with that kind of a radical erosion of wealth and of property taking place as a result of inflation, there was a great deal of unrest in the country, a great deal of discontent and a hostility to the civil government, because Louis XV had been a playboy monarch who had turned over the authority to others, and the whole country had been eroded, destroyed in its prosperity by inflation.
Now, rarely in the history of this world has any civil government survived a radical inflation. So this should be a warning to us today. Inflation is what preceded the fall of the [Shah,] and that is something that no one has published. It was inflation that overthrew the [Shah.]
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Certainly, high levels of inflation can destroy a government, a nation, a way of life.
And often, that’s exactly what does.
“Just saying.”
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[Audience] Who paid these mobs in Paris?
[Rushdoony] There were various groups within the country who wanted power, and each in turn took it, had it for awhile, and then lost it. Various conspiracies, but once you start the forces of erosion, it’s difficult to stop them, and so it was that even the leader of all of these, Robespierre, wound up with his head on the guillotine. An excellent book going into this sort of thing is Otto Scott’s, Robespierre, The Voice of Reason, which is carried by Ross House Books and Otto Scott is one of our Chalcedon scholars. It’s eminently worth reading. Any other questions or comments?
Well, if not, let us bow our heads in prayer.
Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that thy word is truth, and that thy word provides us with the answer to all our needs and problems. Grant, O Lord, that in these days of inflation and unrest that we establish ourselves upon thy word, upon the Rock of Ages, Jesus Christ, and that we become thine assembly, the means to reconstruction, in an age of revolution. Grant us this, we beseech thee, in Jesus name. Amen.
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[Page 158]
If Christians obeyed God’s laws regarding theft, then they would possess a major competitive advantage in every society. If they were self-disciplined in not taking advantage of others, they would gain reputations of honesty that would increase the number of offers for joint ventures. This begins with self-government under God. Christians should be sufficiently afraid of the negative sanctions of God to persuade them to avoid cheating.
[Page 187]
If churches had not defected with respect to the preaching of the gospel and the preaching of the covenant, the once-Christian West would not be in the present disastrous situation in which it finds itself. The modern welfare state would not have come into existence. The bankruptcy-producing unfunded liabilities of the West’s national governments to fund old-age retirement plans and health care for the aged were voted into existence by politicians elected by Christians. If pastors had preached the laws of Christian economics, and if church members had believed them, this would not have happened. But the pastors did not preach this, so the welfare state gained support from the broad masses of Christians. From 1885 on, the idea of the welfare state began to gain support of pastors in the large northern Protestant denominations in the United States. This new theology was known as the social gospel. It was dominant in large Northern Protestant denominations by 1925.
[Page 192]
There are private forms of theft. People borrow, but they do not repay. Here is what the psalmist said: “The wicked borrows but does not pay back” (Psalm 37:21a). This is a widespread sin in Christian circles. If you agree to do something, do it. If you sign a contract, fulfill it.
[Page 204-205]
The refusal of Christians to challenge the expansion of the state in the area of education and old age security is evidence of the fact that Christians no longer believe the Bible offers the theological, moral, and judicial foundations of social theory. They have surrendered to the state in almost every area of life, because they do not believe that they are responsible, as Christians, to preach and then implement a system of institutional governments: family, church, and state. These are oath-bound institutions, and the stipulations of the respective oaths are presented in the Bible. Because Christians do not believe this, they have continually surrendered to rival systems of government with rival oaths and rival stipulations.
The legalization of abortion represents the most important assault against the Christian concept of the family in the modern world. God-hating pagans who refuse to accept responsibility for the children that their sexual activity produces are ready to kill their children. They want the benefits of sexual activity, but they do not want any of the liabilities. They have gone to the state and demanded that the state legalize their murder of their own children. Christians have generally accepted this development. There has been some resistance, but it has not been systematic. Christians have verbally identified abortion as murder, but they do not really believe this. On the one hand, they insist that the death penalty is mandated by the Bible for murder. On the other hand, they have refused to call for the execution of abortionists as murderers. They are schizophrenic: judicially, covenantally and intellectually. This surrender to the mass murderers of the modern world is representative of the widespread defection of political responsibility by Christians. They have accepted the doctrine of neutral civil government, despite the fact that neutral civil government authorizes the murder of the innocents. Until Christians steadfastly oppose the murder of the innocents, there is little hope that the city of man will face a serious threat from Christianity.
Christian Economics: Student’s Edition
Gary North
Christians don’t really believe in the authority of God.
Until we repent and actually obey God in their own lives, and in our own families and churches and businesses, we can expect to continue to face the (earned) contempt of the pagans.
When Christians get serious about obedience – personal, familial, in assembly & congregations, and in local government – then we will change their nations and the world.
But not a second before.
Jesus explicitly commanded us to teach the nations to observe and uphold the commandments of God. Justice, truth, and righteous, as defined by God, must shape every government in the world, including the covenantal governments: individual, family, religious, and civil.
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:18-20, ESV
Acrosss the Stars 