I do not recall the source of these notes, but they are a helpful summary of Jordan’s criticisms of theonomy. I have a couple of different versions here. These notes are based on Jordan’s lectures “A Theocratic Critique of Theonomy,” given in 1991.
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How to think about Biblical Law
Introduction
• When Christianity first came out of Rome, it was unable to take over the Empire and establish its own rule. It transformed people and relationships and slowly crept in. But when Constantine took power, he was ready and able to establish a Theocratic order in what had once been the Roman Empire. Christ was King, and the emperor was His servant.
• Christianity has always believed in Christian government, the transformation of every sphere of life, including the State.
• At the time of the reformation, Calvin at Geneva taught 200 sermons on Deuteronomy and made applications of it to Geneva at the time. The same model and vision was present with Knox and other churches of the Reformation as well.
• Around the 18th century, these things started to be lost because Christianity was losing its grip on Europe. Christianity moved into a more pietistic phase as the State was overcome by secular philosophy.
• There were previously Christian Social Theorists around the time of the Reformation. But philosophers of the enlightenment either were not (e.g., Thomas Hobbes) or simply kept their Christianity hidden (e.g., John Locke). Definitely a shift away from the theocratic view.
• Toward the beginning of the 1900s a man came from Scotland to Switzerland name Thomas Manton Robert Haldane. When he went to Switzerland he began to lecture on Rome (this became his Exposition of Romans). Under his influence there was a revival called Réveil.
• Two important people were converted under his influence: Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné and Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer.
• Van Prinsterer took the principles of Calvinism that he had recovered in Switzerland back to the Netherlands and was employed to be a historian. At the same time as he wrote a history of the Netherlands, he taught a course on Biblical principles. He was very concerned about the secular anti-Christian drift of society. The French Revolution had recently occurred and was very anti-religious. Van Prinsterer was reading Calvin and Edmund Burke, and Groen began a reformation in the Netherlands. He and his associates formed a political party to articulate Christian ideas and work against the secularization of the Dutch monarchy. His primary disciple was Abraham Kuyper.
• Kuyper extended and somewhat distorted Groen’s thought. Kuyper came up against the opportunity to have influence in the Netherlands. But to get that influence he had to compromise the principles of strong theocratic Christianity and make an alliance with the Catholics and conservative humanists.
o The idea is that we can agree on basic principles of government under Common Grace, and we don’t need to get into the particulars of theology in order to work in the political area.
o For a time he became the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. He never would have gotten that far if had stuck with the ideas of Van Prinsterer. Van Prinsterer would never have made this accommodation. He said we need a theocracy and Christ must be King, and the State must recognized Christianity as the Church of the Land. God’s law would be the law of the land. Kuyper said we don’t need to base things on the Bible so much, we can agree with others based on Common Grace.
o Kuyper was the leader of the Anti-Revolutionary party, but a generation later his followers had become the Semi-Revolutionary party because they weren’t as infused with Christian thought as Kuyper was and they were drifting away.
• Kuyper was critiqued by the next theologian in the Netherlands named Klaas Schilder (1890-1952). Schilder said that yeah, there’s some kind of Common Grace out there that keeps the unredeemed from being as bad as they could be – but that’s about all it does. You’ve got to base things on the Bible.
• Around the same time, Dutch theologian Cornelius van Til immigrated to the U.S and argued that neutrality is impossible in this world – in thinking, in family, and in government. That doesn’t mean the wicked are as always as bad as they can be and may appear somewhat netural, but ultimately as push comes to shove, neutrality is impossible.
o Coming from Van Til we have 1. no neutrality, and 2. government must be Bible-based
• Van Til’s disciple R J Rushdoony pushed Van Til’s thought into the political area and said that if neutrality is impossible, then political neutrality is impossible. He prettymuch singlehandedly revived the idea of theocracy. He was the first person to really think about it in three hundred years.
• Rushdoony worked in the areas of philosophy, science, politics, education. He showed neutrality is impossible and displaying the difference between non-Christian and Christian thought.
• All of this rose out of the tradition of Dutch Calvinism.
• Thus was born Christian Reconstructionism.
• In the late 1960s, Rushdoony turned his efforts to the philosophy of law. In 1973 his lectures were published as The Institutes of Biblical Law. He called the Christian community to reassess the practical value of Biblical Law. This was not controversial at the time. Christianity Today said it was the most important book of the decade. No one since Richard Baxter had commented on Biblical Law as Rushdoony did (1685), attempting to discover ways in which the Law would inform Christian life.
• In 1974, Gary North began to publish the Journal of Christian Reconstruction. North’s desire was to package this position and the position being espoused by Rushdoony. It had three theological tenants:
o Presuppositional critique of thought: the idea that there’s no neutrality.
o Theocratic view of society: Christ needs to be King and the Bible needs to be the law.
o Postmillenialism: the idea that Christianity needs to work out these things because Christian law is lasting and will permeate the earth. Christianity is powerful but the intrinsic contradictions within Paganism ensure its ultimate demise.
• In 1976, Greg Bahnsen’s book Theonomy and Christian Ethics was published. THIS became controversial.
o Instead of going through the Bible and considering how wonderful and wise the laws were that God gave to Israel (which is what Rushdoony did), Bahnsen said that when Jesus says not a jot or tiddle will pass away this means that there’s been no chance in the Mosaic law and penalties and we are bound to keep these even in the New Testament today.
o Because he was articulating this in the Southern Presbyterian context, which is extremely pietistic, it became a controversy.
o There was a reaction against this view. It didn’t help that Bahnsen was very inflexible and did not respond to the misgivings of his critics. The result was that the Theonomic position in its stricted sense was isolated and banned from discussion.
• Back to Kuyper. Another idea he came up with that’s important: there are three basic spheres of life: family, state, and church. The Bible refers to these three in different ways, for example, each has different powers in discipline:
o The state is given the power of capital punishment.
o The church is given the power of excommunication.
o The family is given the rod of correction.
• As time continues, we get new spheres, like Business and Education. So we have five spheres. Or we can point out the Business grows from the Family and Education flows from State, Church, and Family.
• Each of these spheres, said Kuyper, should be Christian. But how do you make them Christian? Well the law of the Church is the Bible. But what is the Law of the State? Do we force them to subscribe to the Bible? Well, if we say that, we’ll never get elected. So we say this is the State and involves both Christian and non-Christian, so we appeal to common ideas of justice and build on that.
• But now we can see that we don’t have common ideas. Some are pro-choice and others are pro-life. Objectively speaking, the law should define the “fetus” as a human being.
• But Kuyper said the State is under common grace and not so much under the Bible. Business relations, education, etc. are under Common Grace.
• This is the Kuyperian model. It’s wrong. It’s right superficially, but it’s wrong ultimately.
• It looks good. Three spheres looks natural. But if you look at this, the Church is Central. Will get back to that in a minute.
• Rushdoony said no to Common Grace taking care of it. He said the Bible must be over everything.
• During the 80s, the Christian Reconstruction paradigm fragmented between two positions:
o Ideological. Rushdoony. If you want to reform the State, you must get the Bible back into it as the law of the land. We can’t have a political movement to do that. We can’t just take up arms and revolt. Rushdoony said we must change civil society until it gets to the point that people want the Bible to be the law of the land.
This will happen via education. Christian schools will make kids smarter than other schools and its students will be the ones who rule the future society. This generation will have the answers and take over. The pagans will have to come to the Christians for answers.
The way to transform society is by information.
o Ecclesiastical. Tyler, TX. Yes, you must change the State, but Education is not the way to do it.
The Church is. In the Church you have not only the training of the mind through the Bible, but you have the re-patterning of life through ritual and the restructuring of life through church government. It is the nursery of the kingdom of God. In the church you learn about business by tithing, you learn about authority from the elders, your learn charity from the way God gives us the Lord’s supper as a gift. The Church restructures not just the mind but all of life. It creates new people in a new community. Historically, it’s when the church has been reformed and a new community been formed within it that a few generations later the State is changed.
This is why the Church is the Central institution of society. Not simply one among many. It’s the center of the kingdom. What goes on in the Church goes on everywhere else.
All the other Christian Reconstructionists said the Tylerites were not true CRs. Most of the Tylerites said okay fine, you can keep that term (viz., “Christian Reconstruction”). North is the only one who continued to call himself a Reconstructionist.
We could have a Theocracy come into play the day after tomorrow if the Church would be faithful today. If the Church would be faithful today, tomorrow we would experience a big persecution and the third day Nebechudnezzar/Pharaoh/Constantine would convert. This happened many times in history. In Acts it says great fear fell upon the city and no one dared add themselves to the disciples, and yet the Lord added to their numbers every day. The question is what does faithfulness look like? This is the question Tyler was asking, and it’s different from the ideological model that Rushdoony was using. The Tylerites advocated a Church-centered approach, not an Education-centered approach.
Questions:
• On education. Christian education is intellectually superior if measured one way, but what we were hearing 15 years ago is that if your kids are in Christian education they will have higher SAT scores, but it hasn’t seemed to pan out that way. People were holding up 4-year-olds that could read as much better off than those who learned at 6 years, but it seems like in seventh or eighth grade all that kind of stuff evens out. More important to education are concepts like the ability to think critically, the capacity for self-doubt (which seems to have disappeared from secular education entirely). These are tenets of Christian education, so it is (obviously) superior when measured that way.
• On the fragmented nature of the CR movement. There is also the factor in CR that almost all of the main leaders of CR are men who never served in the military and also never played in a band, sang in a choir, or been in any situation where they learned to subordinate their own will to a community of people that are doing something. If you don’t learn those kinds of things you have trouble getting along. There’s a lot of trouble getting along in the CRs. It is important that the church is an army and in the church there are lieutenants (elders) and a captain (pastor) and if people can’t live in that context they’ll have trouble getting along. There’s a special grace that comes through the church. We can open our Bibles at home, but there’s something sub-rational and transformational, and if people cannot live in the church or submit to discipline, then we’re not going to transform anything. To transform we must rebuild community, and this involves someone being in charge and everyone else going along. You don’t have to agree, you just have to go along. A lot of people refuse to go along with things they disagree with. You learn in the military to go along with an officer even if you disagree with him.
• On North’s thoughts on home schooling. Is North big on home schooling? No, because for most people there’s a variety of gifts and he would favor more finding the gifted people and having them teach the kids. He hasn’t done much in home school.
• On Pietism. JBJ’s sense of things is that Pietism arose because
o 1. The churches were teaching information but people were dying on the inside (“dead orthodoxy”). So a movement started that emphasized warm personal devotion with God.
o 2. At the same time, Christianity was tremendously losing ground in other parts of society, so part of it was a retreat back into “me and God” and a forsaking of much social concern. The extreme form is “quietism.”
o In many ways it was an extremely healthy movement. It kept Christianity going and the power the people got from drawing close to God meant they were doing a lot of good things in society. Hospitals were formed, slavery was stopped. But it was a retrenchment from the earlier theocratic idea.
• On Christocracy. God the Father will be pleased with nothing less than a Christocracy. If I gave my son to die for you and be your king, and all you did was go around and when talking about it you said “nah we don’t want to use words like Kingship of Christ over the State, we’d rather talk about Natural Law and Common Grace,” I probably wouldn’t be too happy about it. God the Father probably isn’t too happy about people refusing to talk about what His Son has done and His Kingship. All this Natural Law and Common Grace stuff is a Rhetorical Sellout. We should be going out there to the marketplace to say “God the Father has made JC King of King and Lord of Lords and He’s King of America right now and if you don’t please Him He’s going to judge America.” But if you try to say that a whole lot and it’s not getting through, you start to turn to other things. There’s a paper by Peter Leithart on Revivalism and Democracy that summarizes research that shows the revivalists and the destruction of the theocratic view of society was linked with the rise of a bad kind of democratic view in our society.
Theocracy, not Ecclesiocracy
What is a theocracy?
• Note: an ecclesiocracy is a rule of the church. In the history of Christianity there has never been a time when the church has ruled over the state government. There’s a pervasive myth taught in all kinds of circles that during the middle ages the church ran the state. No, it didn’t. The church never had much of any power over the state. During the middle ages, the Christian church exercised power over rulers of exactly the kind the Bible talks about. If those rulers did something horrible, the churches excommunicated them.
• Theocracy: rule by Christian principles as revealed in the Bible.
Who should rule in society? Pick who you’d rather have rule.
a. The person that hates God. And because humans are based in the image of God, he hates other people deep down inside. All unconverted people hate God. You don’t see that all the time because they’re not thinking about God all the time; they suppress it. They hate God and his image and when they see themselves in the mirror they hate themselves because they are made in his image. They are masochists. They love death. They also hate you. They hate all others because they are made in God’s image. Would you like for this person who hates God, himself, and other people, to be the ruler of your town?
b. The person that deep down inside has been changed to love God. He accepts himself in spite of his sins. He is told to love his neighbor even when he finds it hard.
You have a choice. Who should rule?
• It’s not a hard question to answer, but for some reason a lot of modern Christians do not want to answer this question. As one who loves his neighbor, would you see it as a good thing to put your neighbor under Christian government? I would think so. We would want to institute it so that only Christians can hold office. This won’t happen instantly, but this is ultimately what Christianity implies. Only people who love God and their neighbor are the ones who ought to rule. That’s at least what we should have in our minds when we go to the voting booth. And why if we love our neighbor would we work for anything less than that in society? That’s a question that points toward theocracy.
How should the world be ruled? Romans 13 tells us.
• The civil magistrate has been given the sword. The magistrate is supposed to be God’s servant to execute God’s justice on the earth.
Would you like to live in a society where homosexual rape goes unpunished but where families are fined for having more than one child? That’s not ruling by the law of God. Or would you rather be ruled in a society where homosexual rape is punished and where the government does not penalize you for having children nor force you to have an abortion?
What are the standards by which you shall rule? The Bible says that the governing authorities, whether good or bad, are established by God and their duty is to rule under His authority as a minister of God, avenging in terms of his rule. The church is a ministry of redemption, but the civil magistrate is to avenge wrongs. Who decides what’s wrong or right? Either the Bible or people who hate God. The standard in a theocracy will have to be the Bible. Historic Christianity, early church, reformers, puritans, agree with all this.
The standard must be the Bible. When we say we’d rather rule by Natural Law than the Bible we are spitting in the face of God. I think it’s a tremendous insult to God. When Jesus has come and bled and died and we say we don’t want to talk about Christ as King we are insulting God when we say we’d rather not talk about it. Common Grace doesn’t help anything either. Late at night, if you cry out “Common Grace I do not know what to do, please tell me!” you will not get a response. But if you open your Bible you will. Common Grace helps people from being bad as they could, but it doesn’t do all that much. What we want is the Bible.
II Tim. 3:16-17. “All Scripture…” everything from Genesis to Revelation. Includes Leviticus and Deuteronomy. “is inspired for teaching” we can read Leviticus and Dt. And we will have much more understanding. Yay. “and for reproof and correction and training in righteousness.” You mean those sacrifices in Lev. Are still profitable for training us in righteousness?? Yeah that’s what it says. “That the man of God may be equipped for every good work.” Does that include politics? Yeah, just as much as it includes playing the guitar. Deuteronomy is profitable for politics. Ecclesiastes is profitable for politics. Leviticus is profitable for worship in the church. Esther is profitable for musicians. You name it – every Book of the Bible is profitable for every work.
If we’re going to talk about politics we need to start with everything in the Bible.
Theocracy. The theocracy already exists. Jesus is already King. We don’t make Him King. We don’t go around telling people we need to make this a Christian nation. We must go out there and get people to bow the knee to the currently existing King. People out there are under Christ right now and if they don’t bow the knee and shape up they’re toast. Because we love them we must persuade them to bow the knee to the existing King. Christ is King already in the Church and King in the nations. His Kingship is expressed first in the Church, therefore if we’re going to reform society we must start with the reformation of the church, which is what Calvin, Luther, puritans, early church believed. We reform the church and work out the principles of theocratic living within the theocracy of the church, then we’ll have the wisdom to know how to live theocratically in the nation. The Tabernacle was set up and in existence for 400 years before the Kingdom was set up. God established patterns within the church before establishing large patterns of rule in the land. The question is how does His Kingship come from essence into manifest being? The theocratic answer of the historic church is first of all in the church and then in the nation as a result of the work of believers. We don’t make him King. We show others that he is.
• Who do we want to rule?
• How are we to rule, what’s the standard?
• How do we transform the society? By what method do we change things?
The church never exists for herself alone. She exists for the life of the world. God’s goal is the transformation of the nations. If we want to reform the church it’s not just so the church can be reformed. The church must be transformed so that everything else can be transformed.
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